“The little girl’s sense of secrecy that developed at prepuberty only grows in importance. She closes herself up in a fierce solitude: she refuses to reveal to those around her the hidden self that she considers to be her real self and that is in fact an imaginary character: she plays at being a dancer like Tolstoy’s Natasha, or a saint like Marie Leneru, or simply the singular wonder that is herself. There is still an enormous difference between this heroine and the objective face that her parents and friends recognize in her. She is also convinced that she is misunderstood: her relationship with herself becomes even more passionate: she becomes intoxicated with her isolation, feels different, superior, exceptional: she promises that the future will take revenge on the mediocrity of her present life. From this narrow and petty existence she escapes by dreams.”

– Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“Being a woman, she still felt it necessary to pose conditions; to withdraw herself further into secrecy as this man encroached.”

– Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, Balthazar

I have this deviant little fantasy, this manipulative abstract scene that plays sometimes in my head. Someone is ruffling through piles of papers on a desk, they are searching for me but I’m sitting right in front of them. They’re throwing the papers around trying to get to the bottom of the piles, trying to arrange them in such a way that they make sense. They grow aggravated and they shout at me “Who are you?!” “Where are you?” “Why don’t you show yourself?” “Stop playing this game!” “You are here somewhere, you have to be!” “Tell me, what is the meaning of all this? I demand to know!”

I’m all those papers with scribbles and text and black and white prints piled high on every surface, lining the walls. But I’m also sitting in the middle of the room, starring blankly back at them with my big brown sloe eyes and a neutral appeasing grin. The idiotic pathetic grin of a check-out girl who just wants her shift to end and has resigned herself for the next few hours before she’s off the clock and can be her real self again, acknowledge her emotions again. You can’t penetrate the thick exterior she threw on like a uniformed cloak to get through those wasted hours that she trades for a handful of dimes. My grin makes them even more flustered and exasperated.

They desperately shake me and grab hold of my hands and pry my fingers open to find nothing, they open my eyelids wide and peer into my ears and look deep into my mouth and down my throat, they lift up my arms to see if I’m hiding anything under there and they glare at me and search my body over with their gaze hoping something will reveal itself.

Oh but how reality can be even stranger than fiction.

It almost happened to me exactly that way once. At a hotel restaurant in Palm Springs in August, having dinner. There where the desert is more than 100° during the day; and while most people escape there in the winter, he took me there to celebrate my birthday in the middle of the summer. We drove the two hours from Los Angeles in his vintage black Porsche, hardly saying a word — anyways I hate talking in cars and the windmills were so big and the temperature was so high that the air above the tarmac quivered before us on the wide open road and thus the scenery really required all of my attention — surely you can understand.

We took a room in a Spanish Colonial-style hotel built in the 1930s, around the corner from the art museum, he knew my tastes well. The walls and the floors were either stone or tiled with mosaics. He always liked me best in hotels, airports, train stations — every time we met it was in a hotel bar or train station lobby or short-rental apartment, always a transitory space. But that night the hotel restaurant wasn’t that of our hotel’s — even from our hotel we had to venture to another transitory place. Some nights we could go to three, even four different hotels in one evening. A glass of champagne there, a Negroni there, a few tumblers of choice whisky there, a nightcap from the mini-bar in his room later.

I digress, back to the Ace hotel restaurant in Palm Springs. I don’t like Ace hotels, they try too hard to be interesting, it only makes them unbearably banal.

We sat across from each other in the booth, like we had done so many times already that summer. I couldn’t think of anything to say, I probed every nook and cranny of my mind — nothing. I searched the room over for an original remark to make, I bit my lip, I hoped and prayed that something would surface. “Say something, what is wrong with you, why don’t you say anything, think of something — anything,” my mind barked orders at me. He was going on about something, something about his mother, his childhood, I listened attentively, like I always do. Perhaps not as attentively as I thought, because suddenly I looked up from my plate and the reprimands weren’t coming from the voice in my head anymore but the man in front me. Had I stayed silent for so long I had passed the threshold and finally gone mad? No, it was real, he was repeating the orders back at me — him sitting across from me, in flesh and blood.

He was there before me throwing the papers around the room, violently inspecting all my bits, “Where are you?” “Show yourself!” “Say something!” “Stop this now!” “You can’t go on like this!” But how can you stop the absence of something, which by its very nature isn’t there to begin with? Is the opposite of fire water, or is it the absence of fire? I don’t know, but I can tell you either way it doesn’t feel good to get burnt. It didn’t feel even a little bit good hear him say those things.

But it’s not about good or bad here, and my father once told me there’s nothing inherently wrong with being misunderstood. And the secrets and the solitude, do we hold onto them to preserve our sense of self, or to extinguish our flames and make ourselves smaller than we need to be? Whatever the reason, I know I’m not the only one. Why it’s a tale as old as identity itself, manifold myths and books and poems have been written about it.

It even rear’s its perplexing head in pop culture. The Zombies singing, “Well, let me tell you ’bout the way she looked / the way she’d act and the color of her hair / her voice was soft and cool / her eyes were clear and bright / but she’s not there / Please don’t bother tryin’ to find her / she’s not there.”

Cohen’s immortal melody, “There was a time you let me know / what’s really going on below / But now you never show it to me, do you?”