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  Face to Face

  A Reader in the World

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  Contents

  Only Connect?

  Absence Makes the Heart

  On Being Taken by Tom Victor

  Found in Translation

  The Spoils of War

  Help

  Drive, She Said

  Being There

  Two Fashion Statements

  The First Dress

  Brief Encounter

  Face to Face

  Listening to Powell

  At a Certain Age

  The Page Turner

  Credits

  Only Connect?

  IT WAS TALL, ERECT Miss Mulcare, in the seventh grade, who introduced me to the nuances of telephone etiquette. Lesson one: Never phone a friend and say, “Hello, is Claudia there?” Instead say, “This is Lynne. May I please speak to Claudia?” If we knew the parent answering, she enjoined with a flash of cerulean eyes, we must say, “Hello, Mrs. Jones. This is Lynne,” and perhaps even add, “How are you?” depending on our degree of acquaintance and of aplomb.

  Miss Mulcare was austere, and with age the rosy skin of her face had grown softly tufted, like certain pillows. Her hair was speckled gray and white. We, her students, were smooth of cheek, young enough to remember the aura of power and privilege attaching to the phone, the infantile thrill of burbling a few words and hearing, by magic, an answering voice. We had longed to grow big enough to dash for its ring, a prerogative of grown-ups.

  We had phone privileges now, but they came with obligations. Lesson two: Never, under any circumstances, open with, “Who is this?” The caller, the invader of privacy, rather than the callee, must declare herself. “Reach out and touch someone” was plainly not Miss Mulcare’s motto. In her civil code, the phone was an intrusion, and the person intruded upon was entitled, at the very least, to a smidgen of courtesy. She was so austere that she might have regarded any social overture as an intrusion.

  Today, a shamelessly mercenary promotional flyer urges, “Go ahead and talk, talk, talk.” I’ll give you a ring, a buzz, a call, we say, and do it on a whim. The evolution of this most casual gesture—picking up the phone or, nowadays, whipping it out—has been swift.

  In old movies, or new movies and TV shows that portray olden times, we see phones used in a cute, self-conscious manner, as vital elements of the story rather than as narrative aids of no interest per se. I’m thinking of the telephone that entered the lives of the young generation in the televised version of Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga. Or the telephone in Upstairs, Downstairs, handled with cautious deference by the impeccable butler, Hudson. These phones are clumsy affairs, a tubular receiver and a box-like speaker on the wall into which the characters shout: sweet campy objects that make us laugh. (Affectionate, condescending laughter at things never intended to be laughed at is the essence of camp.) The Forsytes hardly took their phone for granted; if it rang, both they and we knew something noteworthy was afoot.

  Later, yet not so long ago, the aim of the personal call was usually to arrange a meeting where, in the words of the smarmy slogan, we might indeed reach out and touch someone. The conversation itself might cover every topic under the sun, even ascend, or descend, to intimacy. Still, it was only a prelude, a snatch of delights to come if we signed on for the full experience, like a coming attraction for a movie. Nowadays the phone call is the visit, as though nothing essential or significant would be added were the speakers to meet.

  Physical presence, the sensory awareness of others, counts for little. What does count is abstracted—hearing a disembodied voice and receiving its data. It’s no accident that the phone call as a form of social life has flourished in an era of minimalism and conceptual art, when bare allusions are accepted substitutes for the real thing.

  With my obvious bias, how come I’m a devotee of radio, where people exist through voices alone? I have no yen to meet my radio friends, or even to know what they look like. I avoid any opportunity to see them on a screen or in the flesh. I’m not convinced they exist materially, off the radio, just as in school we couldn’t visualize lives for our teachers—certainly not for Miss Mulcare—outside of the classroom. They might as well have been locked in the metal closets at three o’clock and released the next morning.

  Radio is an art form that distills immediate presence into the voice—all gross matter purged away—and its best practitioners can make the voice, with its variables of tone, pitch, rhythm, and inflection, as rich a bearer of sensibility as silent dancers can make of the body. Just as speech would not enhance a ballerina’s performance, a radio voice needs no face or body.

  Phone conversations are not quite an art form yet, though they’re evolving in that direction. Someday soon we may label people as good on the phone, just as we call them good company or good listeners or good dancers or good in bed. In fact I label them so already. There are moments when—too surfeited with work, too restless to read a book—nothing will serve me so well as a long chummy talk, curled up in a chair, analyzing the day’s events with an absurd yet regenerating minuteness and concentration. That’s when I seek out friends who blossom on the phone. I can feel them settling in, summoning their resources of clarity and empathy, calling forth my own best flights too. (Other friends, equally dear, are no use at all on the phone; they hurry off, saving themselves for the reality of our next meeting.)

  So perhaps I’ve been hasty. Perhaps what phones offer is not so much a fraudulent and reduced version of human contact as a different kind or quality. After all, pen pals know each other only by letter and have rich connections, are even loath to meet for fear of disturbing the fragile bond so carefully nurtured. (E-mail is a whole other matter, on which I’m not ready to theorize.)

  Likewise, with certain friends who live too far away for a visit, we talk so well and so thoroughly on the phone that we don’t ever long to see them. If they do hit town periodically, we feel a discrepancy, a slight jolt when we meet. We’re so accustomed to the unfleshed voice that we have trouble compounding and compacting it with the body it issues from. By the time our neural circuits have wedded the voice and the body so that we can speak as naturally as on the phone, the visit may be over, the critical moment passed. We part looking forward to the next phone call; we go home unsatisfied, as if we haven’t really enjoyed the friend we know so well. Something was missing. What was missing was the physical absence, the fertile vacuum in which our friendship thrives, a vacuum that bathes our words in its delicate emptiness and suffuses them with a pure floating grace.

  If certain friendships are best cultivated over the phone, certain things are more easily said, too. Asking favors is easier over the phone. So is refusing them, especially for those who find it hard to say no; the phone removes the awkward sight of the other’s disappointment. (That kind of vicarious discomfort, of course, is less the sign of a kind heart than the dread of being the object of ill will.) Anger, a sharper way of saying no, is also easier over the phone, at least for the timid, who can hang up when the rising temperature begins to crackle the wires. (The brave and belligerent may relish the heat of confrontation.) The timid, again, profit by the phone when encountering someone for the first time, particularly someone in a position of power, a prospective employer, say. They can sit quaking and unkempt in their bathrobes, attending only to voice and words, heedless of facial expressions, gestures, and all the rest. Apologizing is easier over the phone, though without the sight of a forgiving face, one
tends to apologize for too long, hoping to make an abstract absolution palpable. A telephone encounter can be a great equalizer for those who for one reason or another feel unpresentable. (Unless pride makes them flaunt their appearance: Take me as I am or not at all.) And none of these maxims applies if you’re phonophobic, an ailment more widespread than is generally recognized; perhaps it will soon have its flurry of media attention and support groups, in which phoning fellow sufferers will be the first step in recovery.

  Finally, saying good-bye is easier over the phone.

  Easier. Easier to avoid the emotion that attends direct experience. One of phone culture’s many results—ominous or convenient, depending on your outlook—is to dilute strong emotion, often to the vanishing point. To make everything personal feel, to some degree, like business. The phone makes us businesslike; it makes us conduct our lives like cottage industries, with appointments, calendar juggling, quick jottings of memos, names, and numbers.

  In the world of business there are no interruptions. Or rather, interruption means business—action, transaction, goods and money flowing. A business with silent phones is on the path to doom. So with our lives, we want the phone to ring. It means we have a life, we’re in business. And the ways we conduct our little businesses—from hello to good-bye—illustrate what the late social philosopher Erving Goffman so happily termed the presentation of self in everyday life. Some people feel they must greet the world with a steeled formality. They pick up with an officious, off-putting “Hello,” then relax immediately into a colloquial tone.

  Others, never having known the likes of Miss Mulcare, dispense with “Hello” altogether and launch into breezy narrative, confident that they’re uppermost in my thoughts. How mistaken. Besides, though I have a good ear for music and speech rhythms, I can’t readily identify phone voices. More times than I care to remember, I’ve had to reply to an exuberant rush of anecdote—“So who do you think just resurfaced in my life? That guy from …”—by asking, “Yes, but who is this?” And certain eccentrics baldly adopt the business mode for personal life—“John Doe speaking”—and in the space of a breath reshape the borders of public and private.

  I’ve been told my “Hello” sounds a world-weary, “What now?” note—if not expecting the worst, then at least something pretty bad. This doesn’t surprise me. Our every gesture shows how we anticipate that the world will impinge on us—for impinge it must, and more and more often right at home, assaulting the open gate of the ear. The world’s approach, for me at any rate, is an interruption of the inner dialogue, at once fantastical and mundane, in which I’m forever absorbed. The call that summons me has about as much charm as a stranger bursting in on a rendezvous. Sometimes I even answer with an intimidating “Yes?,” trying uselessly to forestall whatever is about to be demanded. I wouldn’t want to be greeted by a “Hello” like mine, and luckily I’m not. The great majority, whose comfort in the universe I can barely imagine, pick up with a tone of merry preparedness: what delightful new event is about to befall me?

  Endings tell as much as beginnings. The conversation draws to its natural close, but some people cannot hang up. They cherish the long good-bye. Either they dread the silence awaiting them or, less pathetically, they can’t stop whatever they’re doing, whether pleasant or painful. The longer they’ve been doing it, the harder it is to switch gears. A long conversation becomes incrementally longer until the good-bye resembles the drawn-out conclusion of a Romantic symphony. I, on the other hand, am restless to move on once “Well, it’s been good talking to you” has been mutually sounded. I begin to hang up, but then I hear the dimming voice come from the lowered receiver. “Sorry, what was that?” Nothing, usually. Except in cases where the speaker leaves the most salient item, the real purpose of the call, for last—“I forgot to mention, I’m getting married and moving to Spain”—and what might that signify?

  The simple contraption into which Don Ameche—as Alexander Graham Bell—so memorably shouted has become a wildly complex global network whose evolution could fill volumes. And the more varied its options, the less human contact. In a New York Times Magazine article of a few years ago by James Gleick, “The Telephone Transformed—Into Almost Everything,” technical wizardry is amply documented and justly marveled at. Moreover, a Bell Communications Research representative is quoted as saying, “All this accumulated technology and accumulated vision is like a volcano waiting to erupt.” What effects will this volcano inevitably spew on the human spirit? On our ways of being with each other?

  One of the first jarring omens, which in our innocence we didn’t properly read, was losing our beautiful and evocative exchanges, our Butterfields, our Murray Hills, our Morningsides. Obliterated overnight as if by an act of God and replaced by digits. One may not feel attached to a social security number or a zip code, but Plaza, Riverside, and Chelsea were no mere syllables or clues to location on a map. They were treasured possessions, tokens of identity. Trafalgar, Cloverdale, and Esplanade conferred traces of their multisyllabic glamour on us all, but there is no glamour to living in the 468 neighborhood. Despite the monotheistic solidity of 1 or the Christian symbolism of 3, the architectural satisfaction of 4, the Satanic connotations of 6 and the fabled luck of 7, numbers will never have the poetry of letters, whose magic conjunction makes names—music on the tongue—and conjures the winds of association and memory.

  We accepted the deprivation meekly; we were taken aback, unprepared, unprovident. We should have seen the loss as political as well as aesthetic and fought for our exchanges, kept using them in nonviolent defiance. A handful of numbers in my address book are in fact still listed by their exchanges—sweet nostalgias, bitter reminders. Perhaps their owners have been tenacious, or else I never bothered to make the change. When I’m using state-of-the-art phones from which letters have been banished, I need to translate carefully, letter by luscious letter, into vapid numbers. Inconvenient, but a small price to pay. Total defeat would come only if every letter disappeared from every phone.

  And this, it appears, is not about to happen. Ironically, letters—of a different sort—are making an unforeseen comeback. In the present global village, or global mall, of 800 numbers, they’re replacing digits in part or entirely. Billboard and bus advertising teems with examples. To feel more at home in your chosen land, call 1-800-English. For help getting into college or graduate school, dial 1-800-Kap-Test. Trouble sleeping? 1-800-Mattres (sic). For therapy, 1-800-FEELING. Better still, to reshape your life and prospects, 1-800-55Blemish. The letters, presumably, are easier to remember. Thus the wheel, newly reinvented, comes round again.

  In those days of Axminster, Baring, and Shore Road, my parents’ friends would unexpectedly ring the doorbell—“We were just passing by”—and be invited in for coffee. The hour might be inopportune, but these were friends, after all, and they were made welcome. With scheduled appointments the order of our day, doorbells are silent but phones clamor. You’re settling into the tub after worrying all day about a loved one who’s sick or in trouble. What will the blood tests reveal? Will he get the job he needs so badly? The phone rings. You could let the machine take it but no, love propels you, dripping, toward the news. Hello? you pant. It’s Planned Parenthood and they need your help.

  The dinner hour has become a free-for-all. (“Courtesy calls”!) Hosts of strangers prod us to become a charitable point of light. Or to take out a new credit card. Or invest in land in Texas. (During the recent phone wars, competing firms called not to beg but to offer money, in exchange for your naming names, that is, suggesting future customers, as in the witchhunts of the fifties. If the good-cause callers are irritating, these glad-handed ones are sinister.)

  The voices give them away: unctuous, bright, a tad edgy, prepared for your hostility. Naturally they do all they can to avert it, and the worst thing they do—reading from their scripts—is greet you by name and ask how you are. For me, that “How are you this evening?” is the clincher. I don’t do phone solicitatio
ns, I reply in the flat tone cleaning women use to say they don’t do windows, or prostitutes that they don’t do cuffs and chains. It usually suffices for all but the most avid. “I understand, but just let me tell you how worthy our cause is, and how dire our need.”

  Hanging up is the only solution. But hanging up, like breaking up, is hard to do—almost as hard as slamming the door in someone’s face. I know people who’ll hear out the whole script before saying no. True, there’ve been complaints about telemarketing, and yes, there are ways to keep your name off the lists. But since being a good citizen has come to mean being a good consumer, I shouldn’t wonder that such cruel and unusual practices are by and large accepted passively. (Though they have their occasional uses. A recently divorced friend developed a warm long-distance relationship with a charming real-estate salesman. Good practice, no strings attached. She enjoyed the distraction and solicitude, along with the power to say no endlessly without discouraging her suitor.)

  One step beyond the hypocrites who pretend to care how we are leads to a twilight zone: calls from no one. You’re expecting your mate just stepping off the plane, and instead a voice severed from its owner says, You are the winner of a three-foot rubber raft, suitable for water sports. Or, This is the principal’s office at Urban High School. Are you aware that your child did not attend classes today? Or, This is your telephone company. Press one if you still need service, two if the serviceman has already visited, three if the problem has disappeared. … (Don’t they know?) Those virtual voices intoning virtual sentences jar our notions of what qualifies as talk. Is there perhaps something barbarous about using precious ordinary language—and extraordinary technology—to mimic actual communication? Maybe this other, profoundly offensive thing should have a different name.

  I can’t imagine ever being pleased to be addressed by a virtual voice. (My ear still holds an eerie echo of the voice in the Atlanta airport tram warning that the doors are closing. How does she know? She’s not there. She’s not anywhere.) Yet there are times, lonesome or bored or worse, when a stranger’s live voice does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. We cannot interrupt ourselves, we are too much with us. I remember fondly a nuisance call that transcended nuisance-dom, on one eternal Sunday afternoon when isolation gripped me like a clamp. Release came through the voice of a cordial, motherly woman conducting a survey about insurance companies. Would I participate? What I might have resented on a good day became a link to the glistening world beyond. Sure! Ask me anything! Okay, how would I rate the probity of the following firms on a scale of one to ten? Which of the following words or images would I use to describe each? A good game, even though, as I freely confessed, I knew nothing about insurance companies. My caller didn’t care. Maybe ignorance made me a better subject. It was a long survey, lots of questions. I made it even longer with little comments and jokes that she seemed to appreciate. I hated to part with her. I imagined going out and meeting her for coffee, but I was not so far gone as to suggest that; anyhow, she was probably miles away, a different time zone, different weather. Sadly for me, it ended. But I was not so sad as when it began. I had been stirred from torpor and enlisted in the affairs of the world, no matter how inane. From that factitious dialogue I might make the leap to real dialogue. I could see a future.