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Distance & Desire

This is a story about distance. The distance between people; and the distance between the way things are now, and the way they were then.

In the February of 2006, I heard, for the first time in five long and cold months, from my former best friend. (I’ll call her Marianne, after Jane Austen’s emotionally incontinent but lovable Dashwood sister.) Marianne re-opened communication with a text: ‘What do you think of Rufus Wainwright? He sings in this film, Brokeback Mountain. Come see it with me. I want you to!’

Marianne and I had been – that lovely word – ‘intimates’ for the best part of a decade. Our children moved as a pack; we took refuge in each other’s kitchens, swapped talents and baby clothes. We holidayed together, godparented for each other, talked on the phone at least once a day. When my husband smashed his knee in a fall, it was Marianne who baby-sat while I rushed to the hospital; when her childhood OCD flared up and made her too scared to move house, it was me who talked her through the door. I spoke proudly of her as ‘the sister I never had’; we even looked similar.

And then suddenly, the intimacy ceased. First, she said one of my children was ‘copying’ one of hers. Then she stopped answering the phone if I rang. After a month or so, I took round a birthday present for her daughter; though Marianne opened the door and accepted the present, she didn’t smile or invite me in. For reasons I couldn’t untangle, the friendship was over. It was like a death, and I had spent the months since in mourning.

Now here she was, demanding I see Ang Lee’s adaptation of an Annie Proulx short story about a pair of cowboys falling in love. I was wary. But when Marianne wanted something, she wanted it wholesale, consumingly. And I had missed her so. So along I went, and sat dutifully in a dark suburban cinema, watching two lonely young American men coping, or failing to cope, with their homosexuality. Rufus Wainwrig

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This is a story about distance. The distance between people; and the distance between the way things are now, and the way they were then.

In the February of 2006, I heard, for the first time in five long and cold months, from my former best friend. (I’ll call her Marianne, after Jane Austen’s emotionally incontinent but lovable Dashwood sister.) Marianne re-opened communication with a text: ‘What do you think of Rufus Wainwright? He sings in this film, Brokeback Mountain. Come see it with me. I want you to!’ Marianne and I had been – that lovely word – ‘intimates’ for the best part of a decade. Our children moved as a pack; we took refuge in each other’s kitchens, swapped talents and baby clothes. We holidayed together, godparented for each other, talked on the phone at least once a day. When my husband smashed his knee in a fall, it was Marianne who baby-sat while I rushed to the hospital; when her childhood OCD flared up and made her too scared to move house, it was me who talked her through the door. I spoke proudly of her as ‘the sister I never had’; we even looked similar. And then suddenly, the intimacy ceased. First, she said one of my children was ‘copying’ one of hers. Then she stopped answering the phone if I rang. After a month or so, I took round a birthday present for her daughter; though Marianne opened the door and accepted the present, she didn’t smile or invite me in. For reasons I couldn’t untangle, the friendship was over. It was like a death, and I had spent the months since in mourning. Now here she was, demanding I see Ang Lee’s adaptation of an Annie Proulx short story about a pair of cowboys falling in love. I was wary. But when Marianne wanted something, she wanted it wholesale, consumingly. And I had missed her so. So along I went, and sat dutifully in a dark suburban cinema, watching two lonely young American men coping, or failing to cope, with their homosexuality. Rufus Wainwright sang a rather forgettable song on the soundtrack; two others were by his former lover, Teddy Thompson. The film was shot through with silence and yearning, and I thought the whole thing strange and plaintive. Marianne, though, was rapt; at the end she told me this was the eighth time she’d seen the film. Wasn’t Heath Ledger (who played one of the cowboys) beautiful? Wasn’t Rufus’s voice beautiful? Wasn’t it just the most beautiful thing? She didn’t say anything about our rupture, and I chose not to question her. Instead, and typically, I went away and read the book. Close Range collects eleven of Proulx’s short stories, all set at various points in the previous century on the ‘dangerous and indifferent ground’ of the author’s home state of Wyoming. It is a book echoing with the voices of hard-rolling, rusty-trucked ranching communities, inhabited by men and women who plod and plough and geld and herd for a living on isolated dots of farmsteads and in one-street towns. The characters don’t talk much, though occasionally they might talk too much: like a river in spate, this is when they tend to do most damage. In ‘The Half-Skinned Steer’, an elderly man drives back across America to his childhood home, remembering the night his father’s lover – a grey-plaited cowgirl with haunches like a horse – seduced him with a tall tale of a mythical bull. In ‘A Lonely Coast’ a waitress forcing herself to stay away from her unfaithful husband watches as three women in her crossroads town get burnt by love and the attempt to hold off middle age, ‘in their own desperate ways . . . disintegrating into drifts of ash’. Men in these stories jockey silently for status, sex or survival; women are hardened by work and lovelessness into ropey muscle; violence flares up like ball lightning and characters of all ages are liable to die without fanfare or to suffer less final catastrophes almost in passing. A subtle skein of black humour glitters deep, like iron pyrites in rock. Deeper still lies Proulx’s understanding of the very human need for connection, one that exists here despite a way of life that can’t afford to reward sentiment or allow much time for communication. The collection is called Close Range because what most of the characters long for, out on the plains under the vast empty skies, is closeness, intimacy. ‘Brokeback Mountain’, the final story, takes all these concerns and, like lovelorn Prufrock, rolls up their meaning into a ball. Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar, two young ranch hands in the Sixties, are hired to take a flock of sheep into the mountains for summer grazing. They have a horse, a tent and a gun each; one is meant to cook and ‘keep camp’, the other to ride out to the sheep each night to watch for coyotes. They are poorly educated, ineloquent, but have the hopeful good-naturedness of youth; they drink whiskey round the fire together, talk about their lives; with simple persistence Jack breeches the dam of Ennis’s loneliness and a few nights later they have brief, unlovely sex. What unfurls from this point is a story of almost pure romanticism. The two boys – shepherds, like the lovers of classic pastoral myths – spend the summer together in the ‘bitter, euphoric air’ of the mountain, untroubled by the dust and diesel fumes of life below, with Ennis so inflated by love he feels he could ‘paw the moon out of the sky’. But when the first snows of autumn threaten, the young men and their sheep have to return down the mountain, two angels expelled from paradise in a ‘slow-motion, but headlong, irreversible fall’. Jack’s jaw is bruised black and blue after a fight motored by reasons that initially are unclear; they separate in town, and as Jack’s pick-up pulls away Ennis retches with a grief he doesn’t yet seem able to name. There is more, though it is sketched out briefly, each episode in the rest of their lives – which they spend apart – taking no more than a page. Both marry and have children; both marriages fail; after a few years they reunite for a weekend and continue to meet once a year, though only ever for a few days, and always only in the mountains. (Different mountains. Significantly, they never return to Brokeback, the Eden with the maimed name.) Jack, the talker, is more than willing to set up home openly with Ennis, despite the very real risk that other ranchers would at best treat them as pariahs, at worst beat them to death. But silent Ennis never finds the courage either to admit what he really is or to allow Jack’s dream to be fulfilled until – as is the way with life – it’s too late and the distance between the men, between the past and the present, becomes irrevocable. The story ends with Ennis alone and middle-aged in a wind-scoured caravan, drinking cold coffee. Hanging on a nail by the door is Jack’s old shirt. The final sentence reads: ‘There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.’ It’s a typical Proulx moment: the rhythmic lyricism of the first phrase closed off with a snap of horse’s-mouth practicality. Whatever my circumstances, the book would have stayed with me. Proulx is a former journalist who’s won a Pulitzer for fiction; she has a feature-writer’s nose for the arc of a story, a dramatist’s ear for dialogue, and a knack for description of almost cinematographic clarity. (Two sisters wait in a car in the rain: ‘Clean arcs divided the windshield into a diptych, and their faces flared through the glass.’ No wonder Hollywood is always knocking on her door.) Plus, like many of the greatest writers, she never over-explains: there are always spaces for your imagination to work into. But this was one of those extra-curricular moments when a work of fiction goes off-piste and tumbles into your own life. It told me, at the most subterranean level, what had happened inside my friendship. There were facts, of course, I already knew. Marianne had spent the previous summer attempting, despite a long and apparently happy marriage, to initiate affairs with other men. Her eldest child had just turned 13 – the age Marianne was when her mother walked out on her family and went to live with her lover on the other side of the country. She didn’t take any of her three children with her, and she never returned. Instead, Marianne and her two siblings were left with an affectionate but self-absorbed and feckless father; Marianne developed an anorexia she barely survived before meeting her future husband and beginning a family of her own. Both she and I understood that in her increasingly desperate casting around for a lover she was acting out some internal psychodrama prompted by her early life. But, like Ennis and Jack, we didn’t talk about it. Not properly; if ever I tentatively started down that track, she’d shunt us straight off the territory. Until finally she closed down the conversation – the possibility of any conversation – for good. Proulx’s story was like a peephole through the wall Marianne had erected. What she’d found so ‘beautiful’ about the narrative was its unflinching loyalty to the oldest of romantic ideas: the insuperable barrier to love. Desire is heightened by distance. Without a separation, physical, emotional or temporal, a love story becomes simply domestic and mundane. In ‘Brokeback Mountain’ the barrier is homosexuality, one man feeling inescapable passion for another man in a time and place where such a way of being could barely be imagined, let alone tolerated. The long, slow scald of a lifelong yearning is Proulx’s theme, and in ‘Brokeback’, she had brought it to the boil. That’s why, I think now, Marianne insisted I watch the film. She couldn’t talk to me about her behaviour, it would have meant facing up to emotions too distressing to name. That was why she shoved me away in the first place: I was too close to her, and the truth. But at another level she wanted me to see what it was that was driving her to destroy everything that mattered most to her: her family, her marriage, her friendships. She yearned. She yearned for romance. She yearned to feel for herself the love so powerful that it had allowed her own mother to abandon her. What is the only love more intense than a mother’s love for her child? A child’s love for its mother. And how much yearning must there be in a child that is separated from that love, first by space and then by time? No love could ever match it; it would have to have distance and barriers forced into it. After I read Close Range, Marianne and I had a further six months of friendship. I remained circumspect, though; I couldn’t trust that she wouldn’t suddenly cut me off again. And, in due course, she did, just as abruptly as before. This time, I didn’t bother taking presents round, and when I mourned, it was more mildly, for a love that belonged to another time, not one I might reignite in the present. But I still think of her. When I do, I find myself wondering how two people can be so close and yet, in the end, have such an uncrossable space between them. As if a mountain stood in the way.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 50 © Liz Forsyth 2016

 

About the contributor

Liz Forsyth is a writer and editor based in London. She’s just started reading Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, but doesn’t, as yet, have any friends who’ve moved to Newfoundland.

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