Abridged Until Further

You will have noticed the restaurant was my choice. Yours too, in a sense — you agreed to come, which is its own kind of selection — but the reservation, the table in the corner, the request for a booth rather than an open four-top, those were mine. I am particular about the conditions under which I humiliate myself. A professional habit. When you are going to cut a novel by two hundred pages, you want good lighting and a chair that doesn’t creak.

Yvette. It has been fifteen years. You look exactly as I expected you to look and nothing like what I remembered, which tells me something about the difference between expectation and memory that I am not yet prepared to examine. We will get there. Or I will. You are under no obligation to arrive anywhere tonight. You’ve come, you’ve sat down, you’ve ordered the wine without looking at me while you did it, and that is already more than I deserved and less than I hoped for, and if you detect in that sentence the rhythm of a woman who has spent thirty years adjusting clauses for a living, you are detecting something true.

I should tell you what I want. I want to confess. There — the word is out, and already it’s wrong, already it implies a shape this evening won’t have. I want to tell you what happened in Lisbon, in October 2011, in the office on Rua Augusta with the radiator that had not worked since September. You wore your coat at your desk. The green one, with the collar that folded wrong. I know that detail is not relevant. I have spent my career deciding what is relevant and cutting everything else, and tonight I am going to make a professional exception and leave things in. Indulge me. Or don’t. Your silence will serve either way.

I came to the Foundation in 1996. You arrived in 2003. By then I had already developed what I called, with the small private pride of the competent, my method. You understand what we did there — or perhaps you’ve forgotten, perhaps you’ve had the good sense to forget, which would make you healthier than I am by a margin I’d rather not calculate. We took novels. Published novels, some of them good, most of them simply long. And we condensed them. Removed what was — and here is where the professional vocabulary fails, or rather succeeds too well — what was inessential. The connecting tissue. Weather. Transit. The secondary character’s interior life that the author spent forty pages constructing and that we reduced to a sentence, or eliminated, because the abridged reader needed the plot the way a patient needs the diagnosis: quickly, with the extraneous symptoms removed.

It was respectable work. I need you to understand that. Not in the way people say respectable when they mean something else — I mean that I respected it. I had a method. I would read the novel once, the way a reader reads: on a train, in bed, in the bath, wherever the text caught me. And I would mark — not with a pen, not at first — I would mark in my body the moments where something happened. Not plot. Something beneath plot. A tightening in the shoulders. A held breath. The faint nausea of recognizing a sentence that knew something I had not admitted to myself. Those passages I kept. Everything between them was filler. The ordinary days. The weather that was only weather. I built the condensed edition from the moments of physical response and discarded the rest. And the result was a book that was all crisis, all nerve, all the moments your body reacts to, with none of the time between. A life composed entirely of the scenes that mattered and stripped of the scenes that merely happened.

That was October 2011. Or was it — no, October, I’m certain, because the radiator. I was certain. I am correcting a certainty and the correction is itself uncertain, and I am going to leave both of them in the text because tonight I am not editing.

The Lisbon project. I will tell it plainly, because I owe you plainness, and because the ornate version of this story is the one I’ve been carrying for fifteen years and I am tired of its upholstery.

The Foundation had commissioned a condensed Portuguese translation of a cycle of novels — I won’t name them, the author is alive and it doesn’t matter. You were assigned the project. You were better suited to it. Your Portuguese was native; mine was functional. You had a sensitivity to that literature that I did not possess. I was assigned to supervise, which in our office meant to manage the production schedule and sign the approvals.

You finished the first volume. It was the best condensed work I had ever read. Not merely competent — it had a quality of attention to what was cut, as though the cuts themselves were meaningful, as though the white space where the original used to be had its own charge. I read it in the office, late, after everyone had left.

And here is where — but wait. There was a moth. This is the thing I cannot account for in any system of relevance. There was a moth in the office that night. Late October, which is late for moths, and the lamp on my desk was the only light, and the moth came for it the way they do, not intelligently but with the commitment of something that cannot distinguish between desire and compulsion. I tried to wave it away. It landed on the manuscript — your manuscript, the pages you had typed — and when I brushed it off, it left something on the page. A smear. Not a stain, exactly. A powder. The dust from its wing. Fine and slightly greasy, the color of — I don’t have the color. Pale. The color of something that was alive and structural and is now residue.

I touched it with my fingertip. The powder. I held my finger up to the lamp and the dust was there, barely visible, a substance that had no business outlasting the wing it came from but that did outlast it and that is still, in some sense I cannot defend logically but will defend with every nerve I have, on my fingertip now. Not a trace of it. Not a memory of it. It. The dust itself. Present, in the way only things that were never meant to persist can persist — by becoming impossible to wash off.

The act itself — the rewriting of your name, the replacement of it with mine — I remember as a series of practical decisions. I opened the file. I deleted the attribution line. I typed my name. I reformatted the title page. I saved it. I printed it. I placed the printed copy in the director’s inbox. Each of these steps was precise and reversible and I did not reverse any of them. There was no trembling. There was no pause. I want you to understand this because it is worse than the alternative: I did it the way I did my work. Competently. With good lighting. I applied the method to your career the way I applied it to a novel. I identified what I judged to be inessential — your name, your credit, your future at the Foundation — and I cut it. Cleanly. Without a scar.

And I have been trying for fifteen years to explain to myself why the detail I kept, the passage my body marked, was not the act itself but the moth. The dust of its wing on the typed text. On your words, which were about to become not yours, which in the morning would bear my name the way the page bore that residue: a fine, unwanted, inexplicable film.

You were let go in December. I did not speak. You knew what I had done — I could see that you knew, in the way you carried the box of your things past my desk, not looking at me with a precision that was its own kind of looking. And I did not speak. The sound I heard behind me was not laughter but the particular silence of a person carrying a box of their belongings past someone who has taken what was theirs. That silence was thirty seconds long and I have been composing this confession inside it ever since.

So. That is the account. Plainly told. Or told, at any rate, which is not the same as plainly, though I have aimed for plainness the way a marksman aims for the target and not the wall behind it. Whether I have hit the target or merely put a hole in the plaster, I leave to you. You have not reacted, which I choose to interpret as neither verdict nor indifference but as the specific restraint of a person who has been cut before and who will not provide the satisfaction of bleeding visibly. I respect that. It is a kind of editing. You are condensing your response to its most essential form, which is no response at all.

And now — here is where I discover the trouble, the trouble with having a method, the trouble I invited you here tonight to sit inside with me, though I did not know that when I made the reservation. I thought I was inviting you to hear a confession, to receive it the way a priest does, to absolve or to refuse and in refusing to at least give me a verdict I could carry instead of this — but the trouble is this:

I have applied the method to myself.

Not suddenly. Not as a decision. Over decades, the way a riverbed erodes — not any single rain but the accumulation of all rains, until the shape of the ground is not the ground’s shape but the water’s. I have been, for thirty years, reading my own life the way I read a manuscript. Once through, as a reader. Marking the passages that produced a physical response. Keeping those. Discarding the rest. And what I discarded was not the pain — pain produces a physical response, pain is always marked, pain survives every edit. What I discarded was the ordinary. The mornings. The commute along the river where the light hit the water at an angle I never noted because it was not a crisis, not a turning point, not a scene that advanced the plot. The afternoon I spent with a friend — I cannot name her, not because I am protecting her identity but because I have genuinely lost her name — an afternoon in a park where we ate bread and cheese and spoke about nothing consequential, and the afternoon was so unremarkable that when I came to it during my next self-edit I could not justify its inclusion. What did it contribute? Where did it lead? It led nowhere. It was a Wednesday. It was weather. I cut it.

And now there is a gap in me where that afternoon was. A gap I cannot fill because I do not have the material. I have kept the plot. I have lost the weather.

I can feel you not reacting. Your hands have not moved. You have not lifted your glass. I am speaking into something that began as the polite silence of a woman listening to another woman explain herself over dinner and has become — I don’t have the word for what it has become. Not a wall. Something that absorbs. Something that takes what I say and holds its shape the way a mold holds the shape of a hand after the hand has been withdrawn, except I cannot determine whether the hand was ever there, or whether the mold generated the shape on its own, and the silence is looking at me — forgive me, silence does not look, but yours does, yours has acquired a surface and behind the surface a depth and behind the depth something I cannot —

The method. I was telling you about the method, as applied to myself.

I have kept the scenes my body marked. Lisbon. The moth. The box you carried past my desk. My mother’s funeral, which happened in a church in Auxerre on a Tuesday in — but here is the cut. I have only the sentence “my mother’s funeral” and the word “Auxerre” and the season, which was autumn, which I believe because I remember leaves although I may be constructing leaves to fill the space where the actual memory of the season was before I cut it, and the funeral itself — the people who came, what was said, whether I cried, what I wore, who sat beside me, whether the wood of the pew was warm or cold under my legs — all of that is the connecting tissue. All of that is the weather between the crises. And I condensed it away, not in one gesture but over thirty years of selecting what to keep and letting the rest go, and the cuts were so clean that the tissue on either side healed together without a scar, and there is nothing to reopen.

A friendship ended during that period — the years between your departure and my retirement. I know it ended because I have the sentence “we stopped speaking” and the month, which was March, and the city, which was either Paris or Brussels because I was traveling between the two that year for the Foundation’s northern office. I do not have the reason. I do not have the conversation, if there was a conversation, or the silence, if it ended the way things sometimes end, by not being continued. I have “March” and “we stopped speaking” and a faint sense that it was raining, which may be atmospheric reconstruction, the way a film score tells you what to feel.

There was a week in my twenties — I was twenty-three or twenty-four, this would have been in Lyon, or — no. I cannot retrieve the city. I cannot retrieve the week. What I have is the knowledge that a week existed and that I was in it and that something happened during it that at the time I judged to be the kind of passage a reader does not need in order to follow the story. I cut it. And now I can tell you that a week existed but I cannot tell you what it contained. The abridgment has replaced the text. There is no original in a drawer somewhere. There is no unabridged Solene that I can locate and restore and present to you tonight as evidence that I was once a complete novel. The condensed edition is all that was ever published, and the condensed edition — Yvette, are you listening? The condensed edition is

I said that wrong. I am going to leave it in.

What I am trying — what the confession was meant to — tonight I sat down across from you believing that if I could produce the full account, the definitive edition, the version with everything left in, I could close the file. An editor closes a file. That is what editors do. They bring a manuscript to its final form and they close the file and it goes to production and it exists in the world as a finished thing. I believed I could do that with us. With what happened. That I could restore the passages I had cut, put the weather back, give you the secondary character’s full interior life instead of the summarized version I’ve been carrying. But the passages are not in my drafts. They are not anywhere. I condensed myself before I was complete, and every version of myself I have offered to the world — to you, to the directors at the Foundation, to the man I lived with for six years whose departure I have reduced to the single sentence “he left on a Sunday” — all of that was cut and I have only the summary and the summary is all there ever was and the summary is

I can feel the moth. On my fingertip. The wing-dust. That was fifteen years ago, in the office on Rua Augusta, and it is also three weeks ago, in my apartment, when a moth — a different moth or the same moth, what is the difference between a moth you touched once and a moth you are remembering touching, is the dust on your finger now or then, and if you cannot determine when the sensation is occurring does the when matter or only the dust, only the fine greasy residue of something that was alive and structural and is now on your hand and will not wash off and is not a metaphor, I am not making the moth into a metaphor, the moth is a moth and the dust is dust and it is on my finger now and it was on the page then and the page had your words on it and in the morning the page had my name on it and the dust was still there, under my name, your words and the moth’s body and my lie all layered on the same surface and I cannot separate them any more than I can separate October 2011 from this restaurant from the morning three weeks ago when I woke and could not — for six seconds, Yvette, six counted seconds — could not remember which city I was in, and the not-remembering was not confusion but accuracy, the six seconds were the most accurate seconds of my life because in them I was not performing the abridged version, I was experiencing the condition of a person who has removed so much of herself that the remainder does not know where it is, and the six seconds were not frightening, that is what I want to tell you, I was not afraid, I was — the word is not relief and it is not peace and it is not dissolution though dissolution is closer, it was the sensation of a hand withdrawn from a glove and the glove holding the shape and the shape being empty and the emptiness being

You are sitting across from me and you are standing in the hallway in Lisbon with the box and you are twenty-seven and you are the age you are now and the moth is on the page and the dust is on my finger and the waiter is asking if we would like more water and I am saying yes to someone, I cannot determine to whom, and this is not a confession, this is what happens when you remove the editorial structure and the material underneath has no sequence of its own, no chronology, it is all happening at the same time because the ordinary days that kept the events apart — the weather, the transit, the Wednesday mornings when nothing happened — those were the structure and I cut them and without them the events collapse into each other, October 2011 and this evening and the week in Lyon or wherever it was that I lost and the morning three weeks ago and my mother’s funeral which is only the word Auxerre and the season which may not have been autumn and the leaves which I may have placed there to fill the gap the way you fill a lacuna in a manuscript with a bracketed guess

My hand is wet and I do not know if the glass is sweating or if I am. The tablecloth has a grain. I can feel it under my fingertips, the weave of it, each thread, and the sensation is either very ordinary or very terrible, I have lost the ability to distinguish between the two because the ability to distinguish between the ordinary and the terrible is an editorial function and I am not, tonight, editing, I am leaving everything in, and when you leave everything in the ordinary becomes exactly as heavy as the terrible and the terrible becomes exactly as ordinary and there is no hierarchy and no method and no body marking the passages that matter because they all matter or none of them matter and the feeling of the tablecloth under my finger is the feeling of the moth-dust on the manuscript is the feeling of the box passing my desk is the feeling of the pew in Auxerre where I sat at my mother’s funeral in a season I cannot verify and everything is residue, everything is the dust of something that was structural and alive and is now a smear on a surface

Yvette. I keep using your name because it is the last stable coordinate in this room. Your name and your silence. Your silence has changed. I do not mean you have spoken — you have not spoken, you have not moved, I am not certain you have blinked — but the silence has changed the way water changes when the temperature drops past a threshold you cannot see. Something in it has solidified. Something in it has become a surface I can press against and feel resistance, and I am pressing against it, that is what this is, this speaking, this — it is not confession any longer, I don’t know what it is, it is the sound a voice makes when it meets something it cannot penetrate and does not stop

You are the cockroach. I did not mean to say that. No. I mean that your silence is doing to me what — there is something in this room that is not human and it is not you, you are human, your hands on the table are human, but the silence between us has become a thing, a substance, it has the quality of something alive that is not alive in the way I am alive, it is alive the way the moth was alive, the way the dust was alive before it was dust, and I am pressing my language against it and my language is coming apart, you can hear it coming apart, the grammar is — I am losing the grammar the way I lost the week in Lyon, not all at once but in pieces, the connective tissue first, the transitions, the parts that tell you how one clause relates to another, and without those parts the clauses simply — they coexist, they are all present at the same time the way the moth and the manuscript and the hallway and the tablecloth and Auxerre and the six seconds are all present at the same time, and the mind that organized them into sequence was the editorial mind and the editorial mind is what is failing, here, now, in this booth I selected for its privacy and its good lighting

There is a hair on the tablecloth. Not mine. Not yours. A dark hair, slightly curved, and I do not know how long I have been looking at it. It is not relevant. Nothing about it advances what I have been trying to say. I would have cut it from any manuscript. And yet it is here, and I cannot stop looking at it, and the looking is doing something to the monologue, it is the first thing in this room that is not mine or yours or the moth’s or the Foundation’s, it belongs to no part of this confession, it is a detail from a stranger’s life that has fallen into the wrong text, and I cannot

I wanted to give you a finished version. I wanted to hand you the definitive text of what I did and who I was when I did it and what I have been in the fifteen years since. A text you could read once and understand, the way the condensed editions were designed to be understood: completely, on first reading, with no ambiguity and no passages that required you to stop and reread and wonder what had been cut. I wanted to give you the Reader’s Digest of my guilt — the irony has been noted, it was noted the moment I sat down and it has been noting itself continuously in the background the way a radiator that does not work still clicks — and instead I am giving you this, which is the unabridged version, except the unabridged version reveals that there was nothing to abridge, there was only the method, there was only the cutting, and the cutting did not remove material from a complete text, the cutting was the text, I was never writing I was only ever editing, I was never living I was only ever

And you. You are sitting there. You are the silence that my language cannot edit. I have cut and cut and what remains is you not speaking and me not stopping and the moth-dust on a page that no longer exists in an office that has been leased to a software company and the hallway where you carried the box that I have reduced to one image — green coat, folded collar — and even that image I am not certain is accurate, it may be a construction, the green coat may belong to another memory that I have cut and distributed across other memories to fill their lacunae, and if that is the case then even my account of your departure is a condensed edition of events that included material from other events, a composite, a text assembled from marked passages across multiple manuscripts, and the original — the original afternoon when you walked past my desk — the original is

The waiter has brought the water I do not remember requesting. The glass is full. The surface of the water catches the overhead light and the light moves when the table moves and the table moves because my hand is on it and my hand is trembling. I did not choose that. My hand is doing what my hand does when the method fails and the body that was marking passages all these years is left alone with its markings and no text around them, just the marks, just the tightened shoulders and the held breath and the nausea and the trembling, all the physical responses I kept without the life they were responses to, a body composed entirely of reactions to things it can no longer name, reaching across a tablecloth toward a silence it has mistaken for