On Pettiness: About Those Flying Buttresses

“We think by feeling,” Theodore Roethke writes. “What is there to know?” A lot, it turns out. The periodic table. How to tie a tie. The distance from Mars to the sun. How far we are, generally, from our better selves.

When asked to muse on an awkward or difficult emotion, I think: Aren’t all emotions awkward? Isn’t feeling awkward? Eschewing the heavy hitters (pride, lust, joy, etc.), I choose pettiness. Petty cash, petty grievances, chief petty officer. And then I do my best to avoid it: being petty, writing about it.

I call my friend Sarah. She’s a therapist. I confide that I’m not keen on advertising how trivial I can be. I mean, in West Side Story, does Maria dance around a mirror, singing I feel petty?

Sarah is sympathetic and offers up examples of her own small-mindedness. “Use those!” she says.

What could be more unpetty?

I ask Francesca for ideas, for a way in, and she says, “What about characters in literature?”

“Great,” I say. “Like who?”

“Ask Razia,” she says.

So I ask Razia, the best reader I know.

“There are so many,” she says. “All those absurd women over sixty in Jane Austen novels.” It sounds like a category in Jeopardy: Jane Austen’s Absurd Sexagenarians for $200.

And then she asks: “Why pettiness? Why not obsession?”

“Is that even an emotion?” I ask. “Is pettiness?”

We agree that both are states of mind. States of mind driven by emotions—or by a desire to deflect from what one really feels. Maybe I chose pettiness because it’s a kind of  lite emotion, which maybe I prefer to the deep dive of primary emotions: love/hate, sadness/happiness, rage at losing at backgammon.

And my own pettiness? I went to Paris when I was nineteen to study petit fours and all things small and buttery, and because my brother and I prefer to bicker in person, he came to visit. We were walking around the Latin Quarter and he was using the S word—should—very freely, preceded by the Y  word—you. I was fuming. And as we passed the oldest Romanesque church in Paris, I thought that my brother, who loves architecture, would like to know about those flying buttresses, about Descartes’s tomb. But I said nothing. For forty-two years.

Maybe pettiness means not even giving what isn’t yours. And the half-life of pettiness? It may be the bismuth of emotions, the clusterfuck of them.

Most of my year in Paris was spent wandering around, and sometimes a man tucked into a deux-chevaux would slow down to lean out a window: “Tu travailles?” he’d ask. “Non,” I’d say. “Not working.” Sometimes I’d be standing dreamily on a corner and a woman would point and declare: “Moi, je travaille ici.”

I guess it was being mistaken (in jeans and sneakers) for a lady of the night (or mid-morning) that led me to stand at the dark of my fifth-floor window one night and pitch a dozen eggs at the woman who worked the corner across the street.

What I was aiming at was a world I didn’t understand. Also: I didn’t hit her. Or know what work was.

And I was only beginning to sort out that desire stuff, living in the seventeenth arrondissement, in the apartment/atelier of Mme. Mikol, a seamstress for L’Opéra and Folies Bergère. There was also the Brazilian financier who’d come by for fittings. It was a special suit Mme. Mikol was making for him. A bunny suit from which he could only be released by a willing accomplice.

Mme. Mikol was away on my twentieth birthday, a raw December Sunday, and my best friend Judy and I made omelettes and ate cake. We sang along to Lou Reed and Édith Piaf and broke into Mme. Mikol’s whiskey and chocolate cabinet. Nearing dusk, while Judy napped, I made my way up Avenue Wagram to the Arc de Triomphe and dashed across the traffic circle to lean back under that immense marble arch and listen to Simon & Garfunkel on my Sony Walkman: “A winter’s day, in a deep and dark December. I am alone.” Snow was falling. Boys were sword-playing with baguettes. And a woman I’d never tell I loved was busy dreaming.

Flash forward forty years. Razia asks: “What about your sixtieth birthday?”

“Paris,” I say.

So we’re back. We wander around the French and Russian paintings of the Morozov Collection. The Cézannes I love. A Machkov self-portrait that’s strange and beautiful. Lunch at Chez Georges. (No to the calf’s head, yes to the floating island.) And then, the reason we’re here. No dash across the Étoile. Instead, we follow the signs for the underground passage and emerge under the arch. On that cold stone bench, we sit close, each of us with an earbud. That same song. I’d forgotten the lyrics, and then: “I have my books and my poetry to protect me.”

The song, of course, is Paul Simon riffing on Donne: “I am a rock. I am an island. And a rock feels no pain. And an island never cries.”

A bookend of forty years. I tear up. Razia squeezes my hand.

Maybe pettiness is a reminder to be otherwise, to be Whitmanesque and contain multitudes. Maybe one opposite of pettiness is awe. Maybe a cautionary tale looks like this:

Last
gasp

for
five

thousand
miles.
—The End of Awe

Which brings to mind driving. And how, when I was about to turn fifty, I told my brother I’d bought myself a little two-seater convertible, what they call a roadster.

“Don’t you think you should wait until you have a job?” he asked.

“Who knows when that will be?”

The roadster isn’t the “goddamn big car” Robert Creeley wrote about. It’s snug and hugs the road, it rumbles when I shift gears, and summer days I hang a left onto Old County and head to Great Pond for two hours of laps across and back, across and back. It’s the pond where Tony Hoagland used to swim, and my dad, and where Tom Sleigh and I swim into each other and stop to laugh and dish on divas and prima donnas—but not too loudly because we know how sound travels over water.

Are we petty? I don’t think so. We share an aversion to pedestals and pomp, to blowhards and pretense. We love pricking balloons of hot air.

Sometimes we leave notes for each other, in sticks and pine cones, on the steps leading down to the pond, on the hoods of our cars. XX. SOS. And always, I motor home along the ocean, listening to Erik Satie, Gymnopédie No. 1. It’s about as high as I get, and as Creeley says, “the darkness sur-/rounds us,” so why not, inside that, offer up what light we can?