Kate Angus contest winner MY CATALOG OF FAILURES In my early

THE SOUTHEAST REVIEW
Kate Angus
contest winner
MY CATALOG OF FAILURES
In my early twenties, a friend of a friend began writing a memoir
called My Catalog of Failures. She was angular and Russian—a former
heroin addict just starting law school. She lived with a boyfriend named
Ben whose best friend, also named Ben and whom she later married,
lived across the hall. Everyone fell in love with her immediately; even my
boyfriend asked me about her, barely trying to feign casualness.
What were her failures? When she told us about her project, I felt
hollow and then full of wet ash. It clogged my throat. Compared to her,
I was bovine, inelegant; her title should have been mine. Instead, I had
failed even at failing.
This was thirteen years ago. She and the second Ben have two
children and she works in the DA’s office. When I’m home, I have wept,
curled over, arms hugging knees as I try to compress smaller and smaller,
wet-faced and keening like a dying animal, at least once a day every day
for the last three months. I’m also apparently a thief.
I keep not wanting to write this essay. I walked the dog an extra
fifteen blocks and graded papers, writing detailed notes in the places
where my students’ analyses of Wallace Stevens derailed, rather than
chicken-scratching my usual checks and question marks. I scrubbed the
kitchen sink and countertops and steamed the last of the farmers’ market
broccoli slowly yellowing in the fridge. I took all my winter clothes out of
storage and hung them from the curtain rods and the top of the bookshelf
so now my living room is festooned like the world’s saddest party—a cup
of cold coffee on my table and rows of empty outfits arranged as if I’m
papering the walls with imaginary friends.
It’s easier to stay in the waiting room of “almost-ready.” Before
anything is set in motion, before you’ve even begun to walk across the
room, you can still believe the person you really will kiss, or at least talk
to, at the party will become your beloved and turn his beautiful oval face
to yours every morning radiant with delight. He hasn’t had a chance to
break your heart yet. He doesn’t have rancid latrine-breath in the morning
and you won’t ever listen in abject horror as he smears butter on his toast
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while casually telling you that ionized water cures cancer. Nor have you
forgotten to pluck the dark hairs around your nipples or disappointed
him because you don’t like David Foster Wallace and anyway you don’t
give head quite the way he likes it, the way his ex did. Nothing terrible
has happened yet and nothing banal; nothing that will—when the
memory surfaces like a pale bloated corpse from the stagnant depths of
your memory—make you stop short and draw in your breath, sudden as
if you’ve been gut-punched.
If you don’t do anything, nothing happens. You can’t be hurt or
trapped or known: you won’t ever see the loved face closing like you
reached the late night take-out window just a few moments too late and
even though you’re hungry and spouting I’m sorry’s and reaching for your
wallet, the counterman looks you straight in the eyes and nods, but he
still pulls the glass down and starts mopping up before he shuts off the
lights.
When I say you, of course I mean me.
I suppose this not-taking-action is why I felt ageless for so long
when, really, I was just immature or untouched. Or, if we each are a
Wunderkammer that experience must fill up, I let too many of my shelves
remain empty.
Reader, your life is different. You have skin like a polished stone and
years to toss down like cards on the table; every jackpot is waiting for you
to rake it in. Or you are lolling in your leather club chair with whiskey
glazing ice in a glass on the side table next to you, and your grandchildren
coming over for pot roast later. Or you’re on a merchant ship as the waves
and your future unroll like blue wrapping paper. Or you ride the subway
to a job you’ll quit for the Peace Corps or you’re in your favorite coffee
shop waiting for your boyfriend to arrive. How I envy you that skin,
those years, that whiskey and grandchildren, the ship, the twenty-seven
months in Mongolia, the espresso, that kiss.
Words bang around my skull like starlings nesting in the attic—soft
bumps of their wings against the eaves. A group of starlings is called a
chattering, an affliction, a murmuration. I want to open my mouth and
vomit them out like a long dark ribbon or have each letter I type release
a little black bird.
If I catalog my failures and their cumulation, I will have to go back
and revisit every moment I was stupid and arrogant and greedy. Not just
with what happened and what didn’t with C., but the larger regret of my
whole life. When the birds leave and my head’s quiet again, maybe I can
stop thinking about this and it will be finished. The door closed. Book
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shut. Box locked so I can throw it in the ocean to sink and be buried
under sand. All those clichés. Everything over; that part of my self done.
Alternately, if I don’t write this essay, if I put it off forever, I will never
die, static the same as eternal; the reverse of how, when you draw the
Death card in Tarot, it means change.
The idea bobbles inside me like a mooring buoy—round and fat. I
push it down under the dark water; it floats back. Or I am growing this
thought like a pregnancy or a tumor, something gestating at my pelvisroot and expanding out. I tell myself, This is the last thing I’ll write. Not
that I have a utopian fantasy that, once I’ve drained out the poison, I’ll
live on a sustainable farm and tend goats and harvest fennel and never
want to type anything other than cheery emails about my adventures in
beekeeping, but I’ll die: I’ll pull myself out of my skin. Or, weak, tumble
onto the subway tracks or, not looking, be hit by a car crossing 14th
Street or vanish like Obi-Wan on the Death Star in the first Star Wars
after Darth Vader light-sabers him in half—poof, he’s gone, leaving his
murderous former apprentice to kick the discarded husk of his clothes.
It’s the apprentice thing that kills me, the way the master is abandoned
and then later destroyed. It’s so much of why I keep weeping. First for
the initial betrayal and then the goddamn bullshit illusionary way they
become friends again once they’re both flickering blue Jedi ghosts at the
Rebels’ victory bonfire.
Once, I had a favorite student; now it’s time to begin.
When I was thirty-five and C. was twenty-two, he emailed to say he’d
be in New York visiting friends and wondered if I wanted to get coffee. I
hadn’t thought about him in years.
When C. was seventeen and I was thirty, I guest-taught at my old
boarding school for a semester. I had quit my job at the high school
where I was full-time faculty in New York and deferred beginning my
MFA program for a year. I boxed up most of my possessions and sublet
my apartment. I was in a strange liminal place where soon I would no
longer be a teacher but instead be a student again, and the students I was
teaching were young in the place where I had been young. They wore the
same uniform (light blue on top, navy below). They lived in the same
dorms. They looked like my friends and I had looked and spoke the way
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we did and groped at each other and snuck cigarettes in the woods in the
same places we’d smoked and groped. They wrote poems and short stories
and presented them to me with the same pride and vulnerability that I
remembered having. I lived on campus and sometimes when I walked
around, I felt unstapled from time.
C. sat directly across the seminar table from me every morning and
his eyes were huge brown bowls brimming over, round as record albums
spinning infatuation tunes. Once in class when I mentioned a male
friend of mine, he said, He’s not your friend, Kate and I thought, Oh, you
have a crush on me.
How does anyone know the right interpretation and how do we
recount the past correctly without justifying our weaknesses or glossing
over our errors and without scouring ourselves raw either because we
don’t know what or who else to blame? How do we live in this world
seems like the question underneath every book I’ve read, either because
I was asking by reading it or because the writer was asking the page. It
shouldn’t be so hard to be human and try to be happy and not harm
ourselves or other people too much along the way. Mostly what I wanted
in this life was both to be good and to be seen as good and for some
reason I thought if I did one, the other happened and vice versa, as if they
were just opposite sides of a clear sheet of glass I was holding, as if they
were the same thing.
For a while I had both and now I have only one or maybe neither.
When C. rang my buzzer, he was more solid than before. When
I taught him, he was a fiction writer: teenage, tall and gangly. Since
then, he’d added height and breadth and was about to finish a Masters
in Materials Engineering. It was disorienting, but then he looked at me
with the lantern eyes I remembered and the first thing he said was You
look exactly the same.
Protégé means one who is protected, from the French protéger, to
protect.
KATE ANGUS
***
Something is a friendship, something is an epistolary romance,
something is a long distance mentorship. If I’d had a son or a consistent
lover, this never would have happened. Instead I had an endless
conversation, texting back and forth from first waking in the morning
until I fell asleep so that he became the door that opened and closed my
days.
Sometimes a twenty-two-year-old you taught for a semester when he
was seventeen tells you he wants to sleep with you and it turns out you
want this too so you say the same things back, but mostly you just answer
questions, offer advice, and tell him he’ll be okay in his postgraduateschool world. Something is a kind of mothering. This goes on for a year
and a half or so until it stops. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth, you
think, as if you were Lear now in the silence. More than enough time to
have had my own damn child, but it’s a false equivalence because now that
it’s over you’re ashamed so you’re leaving out half the equation.
It’s an affair in which you don’t touch, but talk often and casually
enough about it that sometimes you’re surprised to realize you never
kissed, let alone woke up with his body nestled around yours, his breath
tangling the hair at the nape of your neck, arm slung across your torso
to pull you closer while you slept. Or you’re only Internet ghosts to each
other, holograms who collude to build what feels like a safe room, a way
station where you salve past wounds from other people, the real ones who
were tangible parts of your lives. Someone cares too much or too little or
in the wrong way. It’s just a thing you do to kill time or it’s vampiric or
boundaries exist for a reason and your friends and his friends were both
right.
There aren’t the right words in our vocabulary for all the different
ways people need and hurt and use and comfort each other. We throw
these disparate ideas in a hat. We put the hat on even if it sits too high on
our forehead or doesn’t cover enough of our ears or falls down over our
eyes so we can’t see from underneath it. We wear this hat and walk out the
door and we call it love because we don’t know what else to do.
We had coffee at a place around the corner from my apartment and
I gave him advice about getting his ex-girlfriend back. They’d broken up
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over the summer and he was miserable. I said every common truth: give
her space, tell her you’ve changed and how much you love her, people
usually don’t come back, but sometimes they do and the things we think
we can’t live through? Somehow we manage. Then a friend came to
collect me for a book launch. I hugged C. goodbye on the street corner
and told Christine as we walked away, I love that kid; that he exists makes
me happy about the world.
A few days later he sent a text from Arizona that said Kate, my morbid
thoughts are starting to scare me. I walked outside the bar and called him
and stayed on the phone until his mother took over. The next day I
checked in to see how he was doing, and then pretty soon we were back
and forth for hours.
At first I was trying to help and then somehow our conversation was
the constant thread braiding bright through my days. So many other
things were going wrong: my unpublished manuscript, an unrequited
love affair, the neighbors upstairs with their plague of mice that burrowed
down into my walls to die.
Each day slid into the next for years and then one morning my face
in the mirror was creased and greasy, a fast food napkin to throw away.
I saw someone hit by the L train and pinned between the car and the
tracks: each night when I went to bed I could not stop seeing it.
So much easier to live inside words.
Once it ended, I had to return to living in my body. I looked around
and wondered, How long have I been this unhappy?
Over 80,000 messages the last time I remember checking. They’re
archived now, but someday I’ll want to reread them.
Memory is an archive too.
After a month of our texting, he told me he’d have skipped college
to marry me if I’d let him. Then there were more texts like that. At first,
I told him to go hit on girls his own age. But then I started flirting back.
Mostly he missed his ex and I kept promising he’d feel better. When
I had my heart broken in my twenties, I spent a year wishing a bus would
hit me or my plane would crash, anything to make it stop hurting. I
wanted to spare him that and couldn’t. I wanted to slice myself open to
make a room inside my chest where he’d be safe.
It bothers me to read what I’ve written. I wanted to protect him,
yes, but I also liked that he looked up to me. It was a warm bath, it was
cognac, it was waking up to thunderstorms and falling back asleep under
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blankets in a lover’s arms, to feel important, to know somebody believed
I hadn’t fucked my own life up so badly that I was the wrong person to
ask for help.
I want to think I cared more about him than I cared about feeling
flattered, but now it’s all so hard to parse out.
I finally told him I was attracted to him because he asked.
It surprises me I told the truth; I’m usually evasive. This whole essay
I’ve told the truth and that surprises me too.
I should have lied. When you admit desire, the terrain changes: every
road except two closes off. Either you go to bed and wear each other out
or you don’t sleep together, but everything that happens later is suffused
with knowing that you could.
After six months of our constant epistles, we saw each other at our
old boarding school’s fiftieth anniversary reunion. The first night he
drank too much scotch and kept asking me to join him in the woods. I
thought about it. I’d considered it enough before I drove up there that
I’d shaved and waxed and the only underwear I’d brought was black lace.
He was twenty-three by then and, for all I knew, had probably slept with
more people than I had. But a different former student was there too
who called me her mentor and was in love with C.—I didn’t want to step
inside her story. She trusted me and I didn’t want to be someone capable
of that kind of betrayal.
I also didn’t want to be sober when he was drunk. We could both
be drunk or both sober, but I didn’t want to be the one responsible. And
I had been his teacher: I wanted him, but I was more afraid I’d hurt or
disappoint him somehow if he ever knew me as a body.
I went to bed early in the camper my sister and I shared. In some
ways, it was probably a relief to him too: I think he always liked me best
as an idea.
That was the only time the door was ever really open.
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***
I saw something in the cloud forest in Costa Rica called the
strangling ficus. A bird eats a fig and shits the seed out on a tree branch
where it germinates. The seedling grows its roots down and envelops its
host while it also grows upward to stretch its branches into the sunlight
zone. Eventually, the support tree is strangled and rots away, leaving the
ficus standing. The new tree is beautiful—a filigree, a hollow column of
wooden lace.
That’s one kind of story.
My therapist explains that needing, outgrowing, and then rejecting
the authority figure is a typical narrative arc for young men. That they
devour the fruit and cast away the rind. When I tell her I don’t think I
was ever much of an authority figure for him, she says, We never know
what role we play in other people’s heads.
In that story, whoever we put on a pedestal, we must eventually pull
down, and what a disappointment I must have been when he realized I’m
just as stupid and petty and flawed as everybody else.
But the young feed off us because they’re supposed to; when the old
feast on the young it’s because we’re vampires stealing their youth. In
another version I’m Miss Havisham with the clocks stopped or Norma
Desmond. The wedding cake of my lost youth mouldering in the attic;
the highlight reel of my early successes crumbling to powder in the metal
film cans. It’s true it had been a long time since I felt like I mattered to
someone so I flourished under his attention. It was the way, once you
accustom a stray dog to your presence, it needs to be petted and stops
remembering how not to be tame.
The Inuits abandoning their old and sick to die on ice floes is mostly
a legend; it really only happened in famines when resources were scarce
or as a kind of assisted suicide. I had already gone out to the glacier before
C. came and found me. For a while during our friendship, I returned
to the village where all the people live—families and lovers. I told him
hunting stories and taught him how to scrimshaw; I ate some meat and
warmed myself at the fire.
What makes me wish someone would smash my sternum so hard it
would shatter is the version of the story where I spent a long time telling
someone who looked up to me that he could trust me and then, when
my feelings were hurt, rattled off a list of everything he’d done wrong that
I’d never previously mentioned and ended with I’m disappointed in you.
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I wasn’t The Giving Tree or an idealized anything: just a real person who
needs things and lashes out and makes mistakes and that’s the version
that I don’t know how to live with. But maybe I also hold onto it because,
if it’s my fault, that means I could hurt him—he didn’t just get bored and
decide to turn off Kate TV.
Here’s a different version: for a while, our lonelinesses overlapped.
The one surprising pleasure in this thick depressive gloom is the
strange relief of learning how to give up. All I can do is wade through
the swamp every day. I don’t try to date anymore, I don’t even pretend.
I can’t be bothered. It’s not fair to the men or to me. And the two men I
went to bed with this summer I feel sorry for; I wish I could take it back.
I wasn’t a good partner; I wasn’t honest. It would have been kinder not
to have begun.
The ego is such a fragile thing. I think of how one of the summer men
told me he wasn’t sure what my boundaries were, when it’s so obvious if
you’re going down on a woman who is holding herself utterly still, it’s not
a question of boundaries: she just doesn’t want to be there. I tried harder
with the other: I told him I never get off the first time with someone
new so he shouldn’t worry, I was still enjoying myself. But neither of
us was. It can’t be pleasurable to fuck someone who keeps pulling away.
Now if someone asks me out, I say that I’m not in the right condition to
date right now, that I’m going through a difficult time. Sometimes, they
offer condolences and ask what the matter is and I never answer. If this
happens at a bar or a party, I look over his shoulder and pretend to see
someone I know so I can walk away.
I rarely get hungry and I take a little white pill every night to fall
asleep and I wake up consistently at seven for the first time in years.
I write and I work and I have charmed all my students. The Modern
Poetry students want to show me their Instagram pictures and, now that
we’re studying Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, they talk about friends
and family members who committed suicide. A woman in my poetry
workshop brings me chocolate from Brazil. Another former student texts
to say he loves learning Russian because now he can read untranslated
Pushkin.
I go out for dinners and cocktails with friends. Only once in a while
does one of them ask how much I’ve been drinking. I bum a cigarette
from Kimberly at our press’s fundraising party and then wake up every
day the next week with a bloody nose.
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When I go fishing in Sheepshead Bay, I catch a baby shark that I
unhook and throw back. Live free, little shark! I tell it, Grow up safely out
there in the ocean.
C. is a defense contractor, a rocket scientist, and we had a longrunning joke he’d someday kill me with his stable of shark assassins. For
a minute I think about texting the baby shark’s picture to him with the
message Child labor is against the law.
Why didn’t I pay attention to that joke every time he made it? So
many times, at least once a day, he said eventually he’d hurt me, that the
standard trope of all martial arts films was the apprentice murdering the
mentor. I remember trying to explain the joke to a friend, saying I found
it endearing that he had to elaborately deny how much I meant to him.
People are always telling us who they really are; we just don’t want to
listen. Sometimes I’m amazed at my own arrogance: I look at a promised
betrayal and find a way to call it love.
I’ve learned how to cook piirakka, a traditional Finnish pastry; rye
crust laden with rice porridge and fluted like a canoe. I’m reading Moby
Dick finally—sometimes I feel like Ahab with a crucifixion in my face.
I would chase that whale; I would let it kill me. Not for revenge, but
because I never know how to let go.
I took a sailing class. Almost everything I do lately involves the water.
It’s easy to write around things—to toe the circumference. I flail my
arms—windmills, wings. I know I have to say what happened; that’s how
narrative works. Inside this little circle, the place not yet shaded in: that’s
the place C. and I occupied. Outside the circle is the rest of my life.
I would so much rather be a compass: half that stands in the center,
the other half the pen that reaches out to circumscribe.
It’s not a circle or, if it was, it became an ouroboros: the snake that
devours itself.
A nest is a wicker circle built of twigs and dry grass: in it is a
delicate cluster, each ovoid its own enclosed space. The hatching is
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necessary—birds and serpents both have to eventually shatter the
eggshell’s vaulted embrace.
I can’t imagine now why I ever thought we’d manage to stay friends.
When he found a new girlfriend and moved back to Phoenix, instead
of talking every day, a week would go by. I left the country and he didn’t
notice. I spent a day going from one funeral to the next and texted him
but never heard back. I’d relied so long on his answering that this series of
no’s felt like punches in the face: I had forgotten how physical silence is.
Sometimes I wonder if I was jealous of his new girl or his new life,
and then I think, Yes, a little, but it’s more that I wanted him to still carry
me forward. Instead of entirely replacing me, I wanted to him to say,
Thank you; you still matter to me—not that I would own his whole heart,
but I’d know there was a corner room in it where I could always curl up
and be safe.
We forget about crutches once we can walk again. It would have
been more graceful if I’d faded out, but instead I tried to talk about it and
he waved off the discussion. After another week of silence, I severed our
connection, saying, When I told you I felt hurt, you didn’t try to fix it; I’ll
always think of you fondly, but I can’t have you in my life.
I see now what I was doing—it was like chain-smoking or drinking
too much after a break up when I was younger: if I was going to hurt, I
wanted it to be by my choice.
I wrote him a few times after I said our friendship was over. I saw
an old map illustrated with sea monsters I wanted to send to him and a
photography book of Lego sculptures. I missed him. I wanted to know
how he was doing; I wanted to tell him things.
I can understand why he doesn’t answer. He already has a mother
and now he has a girlfriend and friends where he lives. We were never
really lovers. Either he never cared that much or he did and I hurt him,
but either way I was a bad mentor: I kept promising there was a safe way
to love someone in this world, but, of course, there never is.
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C. lived in Arizona and then Colorado and now he’s back in Arizona.
Before this, we hadn’t talked for five years; now we don’t talk again.
Nothing really has changed.
I stare out my window where the taxis drive by, each one bright as
a sundress on the street. The vegan restaurant’s sign glows chlorine blue.
No one died, the landscape hasn’t altered. There was a hurricane last year,
but we didn’t even lose a tree, just leaves and a few branches, and power
for a handful of days.