Face to Face Read online

  You can’t even leaf through a magazine, as in a doctor’s office, while you wait—you have to keep a keen ear for your category. Hearing the relentless data drone by might be borne if you could trust that eventually a category would turn up that suits your need. But it doesn’t. Your need is sui generis: either the Voice Mail daimon never thought of it, or else it was too singular to merit a slot. Uniqueness is gratifying, yet in this case it cannot mitigate despair. A despair not lost on the telecommunications experts: “I suppose,” one speculated in Gleick’s article, “in the future we could have devices on the lines that detect the caller’s stress level and, based on that, access a prerecorded library of celebrity personalities designed to achieve maximum rapport and manipulate the hell out of us.”

  Until that day arrives, you wait with mounting panic and frustration, hoping for a human being as a last resort. You place your waning faith in the kindness of strangers. But more and more, the human option is omitted. The litany is over; you face the auditory equivalent of a brick wall.

  Voice Mail is our latter-day Castle. Were Kafka alive he would write a book about it: The Phone Call, or more likely The Phone Kall, and the call would never go through. Like all evil empires, Voice Mail seeks to restrict and define the choices of the citizenry. The authoritarian spirit serves only itself; it sets the terms of discourse and proscribes dialogue. It shuns the ragged edges of the unclassifiable. It renders its victims impotent and passive, ultimately ensuring that there is no discourse, which is what happens when all we can do is obediently press buttons or hang up (flee the country). When all business, great and small, can be completed without any live interchange, when proliferating buttons supplant open-ended question and answer, then the dehumanization will be complete.

  Well before our age of wonders, the phone supplied adventures in automation, but they were never so unnerving. Quite the contrary. My childhood fun with phones included dialing a number to get the time (with the lovely exchange of Meridian) or the weather report. How delicious to hold the receiver without uttering a word and hear: “At the tone, the time will be … 1:45 A.M.” There couldn’t be a woman, could there, sitting by the phone day and night repeating that sentence? No, you could sense a shift in the air, a hollowness, before the time was announced, so that even as a child I knew it was a recording played till the crack of doom with only the number alive and changing, just as the moments on a wall clock tick by unvaryingly, but the lived quality of each has a fresh taste and texture. No longer can you get your time or weather pure, without a string of commercials. The spirit of free enterprise is alarmingly inventive and wriggly as a chameleon, finding its way into any vacant nook. It makes our opportunities for solitary phone adventure quite fantastic. Some years ago, the New York Times reported on the case of a Russian immigrant, alone and unable to afford English lessons (1-800-English), who spent hours every day calling 800 numbers, not only for language practice, but for whatever frail sense of connection they supplied. Happily, the article flushed out many volunteers willing to help him with simple English conversation.

  For more banal needs, the hours of movies, the real-estate listings and the help-wanted ads may be useful, but how bland compared to soap opera updates, tips on homework, crossword puzzle answers, abbreviated religious sermons and, last but not least, sex. Phone sex is safe sex in unsafe times, but I think it would have thrived in any case, in keeping with telecommunications’ shrewd ways of helping us avoid each other. Not that it’s brand-new. It’s probably been around ever since phones themselves, the crucial difference being that those who were so inclined were far from strangers engaged in a commercial transaction. Rather, they used the phone as a stopgap measure when they couldn’t meet. Or sought diversion. (I can’t picture the Forsytes or Hudson indulging, though, and as for Miss Mulcare, perish the thought.) I haven’t investigated commercial phone sex, partly out of inhibition but mostly because I have a strong feeling it would lead to junk mail. Anyway, if I must have sex without another person present, I prefer to have it with a book.

  Fun with the phone prompts the question of what you might do while on the phone. A question Miss Mulcare never broached, and for good reason: there wasn’t much you could do. (Unless you had that enviable Look-Ma-no-hands ability to tuck the receiver in your neck and hold it there with a raised shoulder, leaving both hands free. I never figured out what sort of neck—short or swanlike—worked best for this trick, but either way I lacked it. Nor was I built to use the arc-shaped plastic gadget that hooked onto the receiver and nestled on the shoulder.)

  My options increased exponentially when I became the proud owner of a cordless phone. It took only a few hours to read the manual, and after a day or so I was adept. Within my four walls, I can take my phone anywhere I want, like a snuggly pet. Hugging it close, I gaze out the window at passersby, mute strangers whose physicality complements the disembodied voice addressing me. Now and then I have the feeling I’m trailing a long cord or leash behind me, but I expect that will pass. Most of the time I feel liberated, untethered.

  But always, new freedoms bring new dilemmas. Alone in our rooms, we claim all the rights of privacy and mobility, yet on the phone we’re engaged in a social act too, a form, however bastardized, of being with another. A few open-hearted souls will welcome us to any sort of intimacy. I called someone in Hawaii and heard the sound of rushing water in the background. “You sound like you’re near a waterfall,” I said. “I am,” he said. “I’m in the shower.” On the other hand, I can testify that while my friends—also cordless—might have felt shielded by solitude, I’ve heard the sounds of dishes being washed, food chopped and stirred, a pencil doodling and, yes, even the muted tapping of computer keys. Hey, I want to shout. Listen to me!

  Have we a right to expect someone’s complete attention, as we would over a cup of coffee? We haven’t set up an appointment (though some people do make dates for phone calls); we’ve rung up out of the blue with a demand for talk. I’m no better than anyone: I’ve hunted for lost objects, checked the contents of the fridge and scribbled shopping lists, as well as done things I’d rather not talk about. I don’t relish the day when videophones (or whatever they’ll be called) display us all on their little screens, like a come-as-you-are party.

  Cellular phones are still enough of a novelty to make us laugh at people ambling down the street all alone, chattering or arguing. You dismiss them as run-of-the-mill lunatics, until you catch sight of the small companion pressed to their ears. And they engender an obscure irritation. Walkers in the city should play their part in the street scene—strangers in a tacit community. But these defectors are both present and absent, split souls not giving themselves fully to either experience. Even more irritating are cell-phone addicts who insist on conducting their private lives in restaurants and department stores, or on trains and buses. Already, morning commuters on New York’s Long Island Railroad have complained that their seatmates’ ringing phones and intimate blather are disturbing their precious sleep. I myself have an ambivalent response. Who wants to know? I think when the diner at the next table assures the baby-sitter she’ll be home in fifteen minutes. On the other hand, when the half-dialogue I’m forced to overhear sounds intriguing—“Impossible. I buried it under a tree on the outskirts of Mexico City”—I feel I’ve earned the right to hear the other half.

  A cell phone must be a comfort on solitary drives through uncharted territory, and yet it’s a pity that the car, once one of the few places out of reach of the phone, couldn’t remain chaste. No purist myself, I’ve called people in their cars, in California, and felt a vicarious thrill, as if I were traveling with them. As in a metaphysical sense I was—ear to ear though we moved through different hours, under different stages of the sun.

  Suitable hours for calling were a key feature of Miss Mulcare’s phone etiquette. Perhaps she began her career in a hospital or reform school, for she warned us never to call anyone past nine o’clock in the evening. Life in general seemed to take pl
ace earlier back then; whenever the phone rang at ten-thirty at night my mother, yawning over her two-cents-a-day rental novel, would groan wearily, “There’s Uncle George again,” as if he were violating a curfew. Beyond knowing Uncle George’s propensities, though, she happened to have a near-infallible phone instinct, a kind of sonic ESP. “That’s your sister,” she’d inform my father at the first ring. Or, “Oh, good, it’s the plumber,” as if hearing his individual timbre (the opposite of today’s Ring Mate), or sensing incipient vibrations from a voice not yet dancing on the air.

  Even in adolescence I was a night person and broke Miss Mulcare’s rules. The day’s winding-down hours, ten to twelve, still feel like happy times for social phoning. This preference (maybe I share a gene with Uncle George) has naturally irked people who keep infantile hours, or infants. So I tend to favor friends who are willing to be phoned late at night—as sound a basis of affinity as any other: it means we’re sharing the same diurnal round.

  For much as we’d like to think of ourselves as a human family, brothers and sisters under the skin, the disparity in phoning hours points up what far-apart galaxies we inhabit. Lots of callers, for instance, feel that eight A.M., a savage hour, opens the official phoning day. And I must pick up, for what but disaster could seek me out so early? “So sorry, did I wake you?” they address my sleep-clogged voice. The proper reply is, “Oh no, it’s quite all right.” But it’s not all right. I’m still tangled in dreams, while they’ve dressed and had their coffee; their every cell is alert, carrying forward the affairs of the world. I can accept that this is true for Australians, but when it happens right across town my sense of community is shaken.

  Calls during working hours are problematic. Because the flow of work in offices, stores, and elsewhere is unpredictable and sporadic, businesses claim their employees’ entire days, as in the age of indentured servitude. And those who spend their days out in the great world receive a certain respect for the seriousness of their labors. That is, their friends hesitate before interrupting. Yet often there’s nothing to do at work except read, write letters, take care of personal business (on the phone), and generally try to appear busy. Personal calls can be a lifesaver, with the added advantage of leaving the evening free for more palpable pleasures.

  For people who work at home, the situation is different. The world, for its own murky reasons, does not believe anyone working at home is really working, and so friends have no qualms about interrupting. They’re even doing us a favor, or so they think, bringing welcome diversion. And, though I hate to expose a well-kept secret, they’re not far from the truth. Our first indignant thought on hearing the ring is, “Don’t they know I’m working?” The next instant, reaching out eagerly: “Thank God I can stop working for a while.”

  Making a long-distance call was once a major procedure, undertaken only in unusual circumstances—dire news or grand news. It meant placing yourself in the hands of a long-distance operator, specially trained like an intensive-care nurse, who appreciated the gravity of the act. She would patiently ask for data and offer a choice of treatment—collect, or maybe the more elite person-to-person.

  Depending on your temperament, getting a long-distance call was cause for either alarm or joy. (In my childhood household it was commonly alarm. “Long Distance calling. I have a call from so-and-so. Will you accept the charges?” My mother turned pale as she breathed an assent.) Apart from announcements of death or disaster, though, long-distance calls were a brief exotic treat, like some delicate morsel. And similarly expensive. You didn’t chat or loll but stuck to the matter at hand. Duration was not so important in any case. A small helping might be even better than a large, lest the richness begin to cloy. You made sure to savor every mouthful. That unique flavor seeped away, of course, with the advent of direct dialing, a treat in its own right. Even a small miracle—getting through all alone, no operator required! But very quickly it became commonplace.

  Not yet so commonplace is the international call, the only phone experience that can duplicate the savor and intensity of yesteryear’s long-distance. An international call requires planning and forethought. First of all, you have to figure out what time it is in another country, and the arithmetic can be daunting. (Why can I never remember time’s direction—backward to the west and forward to the east—but have to look it up with each call? It’s the same sort of riddle and ritual as the semiannual shift of the clock, and my resistance to both, I think, is a resistance to the artifice of turning time into numbers, as well as to the intractable fact that the earth moves, not the sun.)

  Patterns of life in other countries are mysterious, and of individual lives even more so: we don’t easily picture the daily routines, the comings and goings. Reaching a voice oceans away—hearing it live and palpitating—comes to seem a victory over nearly insuperable odds. Sometimes we don’t reach the voice directly but an operator, and find ourselves embroiled in bureaucracy in a foreign tongue. Or we reach a machine offering what must be the usual message. How odd it sounds in those foreign syllables, yet it gives a warm flush of recognition too: Aha! So their lives are like ours; this is what their friends hear all the time.

  At last the goal is reached. We speak. And until recently there would come that puzzling little time lag between our speech and the reply, the half second it took for each voice to stretch its way across the waters. We would speak, but every reply was preceded by a minuscule delay. The faraway person seemed to be hesitating ever so slightly, the sort of hesitation that in ordinary talk means disapproval or detachment or some ambiguous feeling barring the way to a willing response. The conversation had an awkwardness, moving as it did in tiny fits and starts. We felt our words were not being well received, or not being received in the way we intended them. We quickly grasped that this was an electronic, not a personal, lag, but the blight remained. And the feeling was surely mutual: our response never quite satisfying, our timing off.

  This small lag embodied the true and broad meaning of distance. However wonderful the magic of electronics, it hadn’t closed the gap entirely. Time and space were between us, claiming their reality. You may feel close, they told us, but you are not close. Now that small gap has been spanned, thanks to more efficient magic. At least I didn’t hear it while talking to Italy last week. I missed it. The artisans of Persian carpets, we’re told, left a small error in the weave to signify human imperfection. In the same spirit, it was good to be reminded of our separateness and of the uncrossable spaces, not merely between our bodies but between our voices and the words they tenderly, mutually, wistfully bear.

  Absence Makes the Heart

  A CLOSE FRIEND GOES AWAY. Someone important. Say your life is a soup, then she is a vital ingredient. The soup will still be nourishing, appetizing, but different. Something’s missing, you’d say if you tasted it. She too feels the loss: how will she manage without your conversations? she says. Still, she goes, for reasons of necessity. Quite far, to the other end of the earth. And she doesn’t write. Nothing but a card, that is, giving her address.

  You think of what it was like having her around. Around the corner, actually, so that often you’d run into her on the street, going to her car, maybe. A huge mustardy-green sedan, one of those ancient boat-like cars. She was very particular about having passengers fasten their seat belts even in the back seat, which was out of character—she wasn’t especially cautious or finicky. Or only in certain ways. She maneuvered the car through the city with deft grace, with moderate aggression. She was good with machines, though she seemed, deceptively, the sort of gentle, elegant, sometimes even ethereal person who wouldn’t be. She was one of the first people you knew to use a computer and used it with delight, long, long ago when it was a novelty; when you asked her what something typed on a computer would look like, she sent you a very brief letter that read, This is what it looks like, then signed her name. That was in character.

  You would sit in her fifth-floor apartment with the French doors open, the breeze blo
wing in. The living room was cool and airy and colorful. You sat on one of several second-hand couches covered with print throws in muted colors, amber, lemon, mustardy colors. The room was filled, though not cluttered, with odd and distinctive objects you find now, regrettably, you cannot recall one by one, as well as with piles of books and papers. On the verge of messiness but not quite. Neatly messy. And paintings she had painted herself, in chalky tones, of flat disingenuous figures in rooms with mirrors and double images.

  On a table in front of the couch she would set out neatly arranged snacks, wedges of cheese, crackers, small clusters of grapes. She would snip clusters of grapes off the bunch with a scissors—this you watched, sitting on a stool in her narrow kitchen while she prepared the snacks, poured the wine or made the tea. She was fussy about tea the way she was fussy about seat belts: the water had to be boiled. Very hot was not good enough, she said. It tasted right only if the water came to a boil. In restaurants, she said, she would ask specifically that the water be boiled, but could always tell when her request had not been honored.

  Back in the living room her gentle voice murmured sly, hilarious, bitter words. Your topics of conversation were men, children, work, books, clothing, food, travel, parents, money, politics, mutual friends, pretty much in that order. She spoke so softly that it took a moment to grasp how outrageous and rebellious her words were. There was this unexpectedness in her, the subversive words belying a compliant surface. Also, unexpectedly, she was often late. Not insultingly, just mildly late, but always unexpectedly because her precision and considerateness suggested the habit of promptness.