I leave work early to get my bimonthly shot in the eye. It’s cold and rainy as it has been all week, and the streetcar is fragrant with bodies cocooned in wet blankets.
The waiting room of the eye clinic is packed. When I’m finally called, the aide –as usual, someone I’ve never seen before, despite my frequent visits- tells me they had three people call out sick. She gives me drops and checks my eye pressure with a device the size of a pen, instead of the usual machine. She leads me to the room with the retina scanner but it’s in use so I sit outside while she leans against the wall of the narrow hallway. I ask if she’s a knitter, pointing to the tattoo on her forearm. “Socks, mostly,” she says. I try to make small talk but she’s unreceptive. It’s Friday, and we’re both tired.
When the room finally frees up, she has trouble adjusting the retina scanner properly. I’m so tired of all these machines, tired of this whole eye business. I’m tired of pretty much everything, really.
She leads me to the dreaded Small Waiting Room, where I sit crammed in with a bunch of elderly people. The guy next to me screams at his phone is what sounds like Croatian, but there are no other seats for me to move to. I take out the hundredth anniversary issue of the New Yorker from a few weeks ago. It’s surprisingly dull for such a notable occasion. There are a lot of congratulatory ads along with an article about the fiftieth anniversary of Saturday Night Live. I nod off occasionally. I wait for an hour and a half before my name is finally called by an aide who I may or may not have seen before. They are starting to blur together.
She leads me to another room and puts drops in my eyes and leaves, and a few minutes later Dr. Wang arrives and says the scan showed that the bump in my retina only looks slightly better, so he wants to start me on a stronger medicine. I ask if this is normal and he says it happens with seventy percent of his patients, but the insurance company requires him to try the weakest medicine first before it allows him to try stronger kinds. He leaves and the aide returns to have me fill out the forms for the new medicine, which require a lot of personal information, including my social security number.
She departs and Wang returns and gives me drops and asks if they burn, gives me more drops and asks if they burn, then gives me the shot with one sudden stab. It doesn’t hurt but I feel it slide in, which is unusual. He must notice my discomfort because he asks if I’m okay. If you would’ve told me a year ago that I’d be getting a shot in my eyeball every eight weeks, I would’ve freaked out, but at this point it’s just a minor annoyance. He says that the hope with the stronger medicine is that I should only need it occasionally.
Afterwards I head across town to the Tomorrow Theater to see if they can squeeze me in to the sold-out Miranda July event. I hadn’t planned on even trying but a coworker told me I should stop by. I was hoping they’d be working the door, but it’s a woman I’ve never met, though I know her face from the staff handbook. She grills me, asking me who told me I would be able to get in. I tell her and she looks suspicious. I say it’s no big deal and turn to go, and she tells me to wait until closer to show time and she’ll see what she can do. I feel embarrassed and stand in the corner of the tiny, crowded lobby, feeling awkward. I don’t like crowds, plus my sugar is low and on top of it my right eye is filled with floaters like a series of cat scratches. I’m surprised to see a bunch of people from work, including the head of the museum.
At last the woman at the door leads me in and seats me in the back by the sound board. The head of the museum is right in front of me. I sit down next to an attractive woman, perhaps a little younger than me, who asks me how I got a seat. I tell her and she says she saw that they were sold out but they told her they could get her in. We both talk about how much we love All Fours. She says she works as a somatic therapist who also makes steel sculptures. She seems really interesting (despite my doubts about the whole somatic therapy thing), but we don’t get to talk much before the lights go down and the director of the theater comes out to introduce Miranda July.
She comes out onto the low stage, looking exactly the way she looks in her movies and author photos; short curly hair, wide eyes that always look a little sad and bewildered. She wears what looks like a man’s red robe.
I dislike the theater director immensely, and once again she proves herself to be a twit. Happily, July tends to ramble on at great length after every idiotic question, and even happier, that rambling is interesting and entertaining. She comes across as less flaky than I had imagined judging on interviews I’d read; she’s smart and funny and everything she says seems propelled by anxiety, which I find charming and relatable.
After about an hour, the director opens things up to questions. July asks if she can try something; she wants to swap clothes with someone in the audience. She asks anyone who wants to do so to stand up, and she walks up and down the aisles trying to decide what outfit she feels drawn to. “Oh, I love that sweater, but… no. Sorry. This feels so cruel,” she says, and like with so much of what she does, it’s difficult to tell how much of it is an act. The artificially of her shtick always feels like there is an undercurrent of sincerity though, which keeps her from being too precious and annoying, though she always seems to step right up to that line. Her early work felt a little too cloying to me, but over the years she has mastered the high wire act.
. “I think maybe a man’s clothes,” she says after a few minutes of sadly turning people down.
“Oh, I’m wearing man’s clothes,” the woman next to me says, and leaps to her feet.
July finally picks a tall, well-dressed man to swap outfits with, and they duck behind a folding screen that has been set up on the stage. She keeps making little comments and cries of pleasure that seem like they could easily become sexual but never quite do. It feels uncomfortable and manipulative and playful and genuinely intimate.
The theater director keeps making comments like “I wish you all could hear the things I’m hearing!” and “See, this is the kind of experience we bring here at The Tomorrow Theater!” Until the museum bought it, the place was called The Oregon Theater, and showed nothing but pornography.
When they are done changing, July steps out from behind the screen –“No, wait, you can’t go first,” she scolds- in the man’s stylishly mismatched suit, and emerges in the flowing red robe. Everyone applauds, then she takes questions, occasionally pausing to preen and pose. “I wish I had a mirror!” she chirps.
There is a break, after which they are going to screen her film The Future, which I haven’t seen since its original run. The woman next to me is surprised; she didn’t know they were showing a film. My sugar is still really low so I go out to the lobby to get some popcorn. My neighbor follows me and when I get to the counter I ask if I can get her anything. I say casually, but I can tell by the way she declines that I have made her uncomfortable. I find I have this affect on women a lot, and I’m not sure why. Perhaps my desperation to be loved comes through without my meaning for it to, and they find this repulsive. Perhaps they can see through my friendly, jovial façade to see how deeply miserable I am.
I remember that the first time I watched the movie, I was initially irritated by it, but by the end it won me over. I watched it the woman I was seeing at the time; the first girlfriend I had in Portland. She lived upstairs from a man who claimed to be the inspiration for the male lead; the story of him pouring lighter fluid on his hand and setting it on fire was his. I was skeptical, but then we watched some Miranda July short films she had on tape and sure enough, the guy downstairs was in one of them.
This time I feel captivated all the way through. I had forgotten how steeped in loneliness it is, how the entire thing seems to be about much we need to connect with other people, and how difficult it is to do so. I think of the lovely, curly-haired sculptress beside me; the irony is not lost on me. Or maybe I’m just projecting.
When it’s over, the somatic therapist and I walk out together. I want to ask what she thought of the movie but I’m feeling overwhelmed by emotion.
I hold the door to the street for her and she says, “Bye.”
“It was great talking to you,” I say. She strides away without another word and I hobble off through the rainy darkness to wait for the bus to carry me across the river, from my lonely present into an even lonelier future.
