It's A Match

     Leo had led Salzman to the only clear place in the room, a table near a window that overlooked the lamp-lit city.  He seated himself at the matchmaker's side but facing him, attempting by an act of will to suppress the unpleasant tickle in his throat.  Salzman eagerly unstrapped his portfolio and removed a loose rubber band from a thin packet of much-handled cards.....When Leo's eyes fell upon the cards, he counted six spread out in Salzman's hand.
     "So few?" he asked in disappointment.
     "You wouldn't believe me how much cards I got in my office," Salzman replied.  "The drawers are already filled to the top, so I keep them now in a barrel, but is every girl good for a new rabbi?" 

     ---Bernard Malamud, "The Magic Barrel" in The Magic Barrel (1958)

In the title story of Bernard Malamud's National Book Award winning collection, a rabbinical student, Leo Finkle, secures the services of a "commercial cupid"--the marriage broker, Pinye Salzman.   Salzman cleverly limits his options, initially presenting him with the potential match of "Sophie P." a twenty-four year old widow; "Ruth K." a nineteen year old beauty with a lame foot; and "Lily H." a woman he insists is only twenty-nine (Leo's brief meeting with her confirms that but she is at least thirty-five and "aging rapidly"). Rattled by his date with Lily, who believes him to be a true man of God,  Leo gives up on the notion of an arranged marriage. At this point, Salzman offers his a packet of photographs of clients, which Leo leaves unopened for many months. Finally, in a miserable state, he examines the images, and falls in love with one very familiar image.  Rushing to Salzman, he asks him to arrange a meeting with this woman.  Salzman protests, insisting that this image was left in the packet only by accident.  Pressing him, Leo learns that this is a photo of Salzman's daughter--a woman of a very questionable past who is now "dead" to her father.  Suspecting that Salzman had been scheming to arrange this match all along, Leo nonetheless falls for the woman, seeing in her weary yet compelling face, his own salvation.  

This is a story of immigrant culture but also and more importantly of the nature of love. I am most drawn to the image of the "magic" barrel--referred to only as a barrel in the text, and one that exists only in the imagination.  The contrast of the  limitless possibilities of the barrel--the thing we think we want--and the slender options that Salzman strategically presents is the locus of fascination for me. The perfect match (people, objects, situations) always resides in the future of the distance---it is always unidentifiable, or inaccessible, or unobtainable.  Salzman cleverly creates a match that presents as the match--someone who suggests to Leo what love means: "he examined the face and found it good: good for Leo Finkle.  Only such a one could understand him and help him seek whatever he was seeking.  She might, perhaps, love him."

Facing It Part IV: Faith / Face

It was difficult to think of a title for today's installment of this series, "Facing It."  And so, at some point in the future, the title may be exchanged for something less dramatic.  Below are three quotes from Annie Dillard's  "Holy the Firm," an essay/story about a writer's quest to locate meaning in the tragic burning and disfigurement of a seven year old girl.  The narrator  conveys the extreme suffering of the child as well as her own agonizing quest to find an answer to a philosophical question: "What is God's relationship to the  substance and experiences of this world?"  If the question seems rather pedestrian, the sort of question on which people typically reflect (or worse, pontificate upon) in the aftermath of tragedy--the narrator's  insights prove less so.  She offers neither the voice of complete reassurance nor the voice of abjection.


The first quote links very closely to my two earlier entries, here and here, in which the role of the face is clearly a public one:

"How can people think that artists seek a name?  A name, like a face, is something you have when you're not alone."


And here is the second:

"You might as well be a nun.  You might as well be God's chaste bride, chased by plunderers to the high caves of solitude, to the hearthless rooms empty of voices, and of warm limbs hooking your heart to the world. Look how he loves you!  Are you bandaged now, or loose in a sterilized room?  Wait till they hand you a mirror, if you can hold one, and know what it means.  That skinlessness, that black shroud of flesh in strips on your skull, is your veil.  There are two kinds of nun, out of the cloister or in.  You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.  Forget whistling: you have no lips for that, or for kissing the face of a man or a child.  Learn Latin, and it please my Lord, learn the foolish downward look called Custody of the Eyes." 

And finally, in a last segment, the narrator imaginatively assumes the sacrificial role for the young girl:

"Julie Norwich; I know.  Surgeons will fix your face.  This will all be a dream, an anecdote, something to tell your husband one night: I was burned.  Or if you're scarred, you're scarred.  People love the good not much less than the beautiful, and the happy as well, or even just the living, for the world of it all, and heart's home. You'll dress your own children, sticking their arms through the sleeves.  Mornings you'll whistle, full of the pleasure of days, and afternoons this or that, and nights cry love.  So live.  I'll be the nun for you.  I am now." 

--Annie Dillard, "Holy the Firm" (1977)

Facing It Part III: Concealment

Today's quote is taken from Nella Larsen's novel Passing, published in 1929.  The book focuses on the relationship between two light-skinned, racially mixed childhood acquaintances, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry.  Reunited after a number of years, Irene, a New Yorker,  learns that Clare is passing for white in Chicago and has married a racist white man who does not know of her past or her identity. He jokes that Clare is getting "darker and darker" and refers to her by the pet name of "Nig."  Clare lives in fear of being discovered yet keeps taking considerable risks to reunite with the African-American community she left behind.  In this scene, Irene describes the "polite insolence" as well as the mystery conveyed through Clare's unusual features:

"[...] she'd always had that pale gold hair, which, unsheared still, was drawn loosely back from a broad brow, partly hidden by the small close hat.  Her lips, painted a brilliant geranium-red, were sweet and sensitive and a little obstinate.  A tempting mouth.  The face across the forehead and cheeks was a trifle too wide, but the ivory skin had a peculiar soft lustre.  And the eyes were magnificent! dark, sometimes absolutely black, always luminous, and set in long, black lashes.  Arresting eyes, slow and mesmeric, and with, for all their warmth, something withdrawn and secret about them.
     Ah! Surely! They were Negro eyes!  mysterious and concealing.  And set in that ivory face under that bright hair, there was about them something exotic."

--Nella Larsen, Passing (1929)

Facing It Part II: Putting on a New Face

Today's quote comes from a New York Times article on the first U.S. face transplant that took place in December 2008 at the Cleveland Clinic. The exact date of the 23 hour surgery, the identity of the recipient and the donor, and the cause of the woman's facial injuries are not identified in this article.  However, it does offer surgeon Maria Sieminonow's matter-of-fact insight on the value of a face,  generally speaking:

"'You need a face to face the world.'"

Sieminonow's commentary seems almost too direct and too reductive when compared to the nuanced and elegant treatment of facial trauma as expressed in Lucy Grealy's account, which I wrote about in my last entry.  Nevertheless, her commentary proves interesting in that it suggests a gap between the identity of an individual and his/her face. So significant are the injuries of face transplant patients that a passable face--even one that bears little resemblance to the original face of the patient--is a prerequisite for "facing" others.    You need a face. The cadaveric face--a permanent mask of sorts-- is a prop for negotiating the world.

--Lawrence K. Altman, "First U.S. Face Transplant Described," New York Times, December 17, 2008

Facing It Part I: Mirror Image

In the first quote from this multi-part series on faces, writer Lucy Grealy describes the "habits of self-consciousness" to which she succumbs in the years following her lengthy bout with Ewing's sarcoma of the jaw.  Diagnosed at the age of nine, Grealy endures 2 1/2 years of chemotherapy, the removal of a third of her jaw,  and dozens of reconstructive surgeries--none of which prove successful.  In this scene, Grealy describes her surprise at seeing her own reflection in a mirror following one of her reconstructive surgeries--an image that immediately dismantles her false sense of confidence by confronting her with a reality that does not coincide with her own perceptions.  What is perhaps most remarkable about this quote is the way in which Grealy uses the mirror image to suggest exposure as opposed to reflection--the gap between how she imagines herself  and how she is seen.  The mirror offers only a temporary answer to the question: "What do other people see when they look at me?":

"Spending as much time as I did looking in the mirror, I thought I knew what I looked like.  So it came as a shock one afternoon toward the end of that summer when I went shopping with my mother for a new shirt and saw my face in the harsh fluorescent light of the fitting room.  Pulling the new shirt on over my head, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a mirror that was itself being reflected in a mirror opposite, reversing my face as I usually saw it.  I stood there motionless, the shirt only halfway on, my skin extra pale from the lighting, and saw how asymmetrical my face was.  How had that happened?  Walking up to the mirror, reaching up to touch the right side, where the graft had been put in only a year before, I saw clearly that nost of it had disappeared, melted away into nothing.  I felt distraught at the sight and even more distraught that it had taken so long to notice.  My eyes had been secretly working against me, making up for the asymmetry as it gradually reappeared.  This reversed image of myself was the true image, the way other people saw me...That unexpected revelation in the store's fitting room mirror marked a turning point in my life.  I began having overwhelming attacks of shame at unpredictable intervals" (185).

--Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face (1994)

Grealy granted Charlie Rose an interview in which she discusses her book.