Waiting

“Just you wait, Henry Higgins, just you wait,” Eliza Doolittle says, advancing the threat of equality, or maybe even superiority, over her cranky mentor, Professor Higgins. Everyone I know is waiting, and almost everyone I know would like to rebut it, since it is slightly demeaning, reeks of helplessness and shows we are not fully in command ourselves. Of course, we are not. In his book on Jean Genet, Sartre says, “To Be is to belong to someone.” He was speaking in particular about Genet the orphan child, who felt he had never belonged and therefore never was. Orphans or not, the pain and seeming endlessness of waiting begins at the cradle, goes through many permutations, assumes various disguises but is as native to us as our breathing. Some do it discreetly, some do it actively, some keep so abreast of things that their determination not to wait is in itself a kind of latent waiting. One thing is sure, nobody is proud of it except perhaps Job.

There is the angry waiting, the plaintive waiting, the almost cheerful waiting in which we believe for certain that the phone call or the revelation will occur presently. All these states, of course, overlap and can bafflingly succeed and re-succeed each other in a matter of minutes. For sheer brutality, the telephone waiting, in my opinion, takes precedence insofar as it can (and does) ring at any moment. I think with no small degree of apprehension of the promised future when, thanks to the optic fiber in our computers, we will be able to see and, worse, be seen by the recalcitrant caller, and imagine how hard it will be to explain away the puffy eyes, the umbrage, the piled-up dishes, in short, the depression and inertia that attends waiting.

Is there anything good about it? Well, there are some fine moments of literature founded on excruciation. There is, toward the end of “Godot,” that wonderful exchange between the two characters:

“He didn’t come?” “No.” “And now it’s too late.” “Yes, now it’s night.”

And there are hordes of fictional heroines--I am thinking at this moment of those of Patrick White and Karen Blixen in outbacks waiting for the arrival of the promised one, and there is a scene in Zola’s “Nana” that to my mind surpasses all others in its depiction of that malady. A philandering count who suspects his wife of adultery stations himself outside the paramour’s window at 2 in the morning to watch the room, a room he has once visited so he knows every detail: furniture, hangings, the water jug and so on. With what tension Zola depicts it--the man waiting for a shadow to appear keeps thinking of the couple in bed, determining that at the first sight of a clue he will ring the bell, go upstairs despite the concierge’s protest, break down the door and strangle them. Then, in his musing, he sees a silhouette spring to life in the dimly lit room and wonders if it is his wife’s neck or a slightly thicker neck but cannot tell. Darkness again. Two o’clock, 3 o’clock, 4 o’clock, and guess what happens. In the end he grows weary and decides to go home and sleep for a while and, in fact, misses the moment of verification that he had so achingly and so ardently longed for. We mortals weary of our vigils, unlike the animals who wait in the most concentrated and flexed way until the prey is caught. They seem unperturbed, possibly because they know they are going to succeed, and therein lies the secret of the sickness or the non-sickness of waiting--the wait that is founded on hope and the wait that is founded on despair.

Do women wait more than men? I think women wait for men more than men wait for women and this despite the sisterly enjoinders that suppose that you can suppress instinct with statement. You cannot. We learn a few things as we go along, but we do not learn to love, to hate or to quarrel very differently. Men wait, too: They wait for the promotion, they wait for the kill, they wait for the prize, and one has only to watch the antics in Parliament or in the Senate to see with what libido each is waiting for his moment to rise and strike a blow that will vanquish his opponent. Very often this seems to me more impassioned than the very principle about which they are debating. Men wait for women, too, once they have decided this one is the one, but they wait more busily, and so the little atoms of dread are likely to be diffused and tossed up and down like a tennis ball or shuttlecock. Activity always leavens waiting, but now, of course, with a beeper connecting us to our own abodes, we can in some restaurant or gymnasium, as longing strikes, call our own number to discover whether or not our prayer has been answered.

Prayer itself is a form of waiting but fortified with a glimmer of faith--or do I mean hope? For those who pray or chant with great perseverance, there is the suggestion that their waiting has been converted into purposefulness. Of course, we do not just wait for love; we wait for money, we wait for the weather to get warmer, colder, we wait for the plumber to come and fix the washing machine (he doesn’t), we wait for a friend to give us the name of another plumber (she doesn’t), we wait for our hair to grow, we wait for our children outside school, we wait for their exam results, we wait for the letter that is going to reveal the secret Grail, we wait for Sunday, when we sleep in or have the extra piece of toast, we wait for the crocuses to come up, then the daffodils, we wait for the estranged friend to ring or write and say, “I have forgiven you,” we wait for our parents to love us even though they may be long since dead, we wait for the result of this or that medical test, we wait for the pain in the shoulder to ease, we wait for that sense of excitement that has gone underground but is not quite quenched, we wait for the novel that enthralls the way it happened when we first read “Jane Eyre” or “War and Peace,” we wait for the invitation to the country, and often when we are there, we wait for the bus or the car that will ferry us home to the city and our props, our own chairs, our own bed, our own habits. We wait for the parties we once gave and that somehow had a luster that parties we now give completely lack. We wait (at least I do) for new potatoes, failing to concede that there are new potatoes all the time, but the ones I am waiting for were the ones dug on the 29th of June in Ireland that tasted (or was it imagination?) like no others. We wait to go to sleep and maybe fog ourselves with pills or soothing tapes to lull us thither. We wait for dreams, then we wait to be hauled out of our dreams and wait for dawn, the postman, tea, coffee, the first ring of the telephone, the advancing day.

Waiting in a theater bar in a London interval to secure a drink is galling, convinced as I am that the ladies behind the counter are congenital teetotalers. Waiting in the post office in any city large or small sends me into a tizz. Waiting in one’s place in the hairdresser’s is another scenario devised to oust any semblance of grace or good manners, and hairdressers, if they are good at all, tend to cultivate suspense. How many times has one not sat on a stool along with other enraged victims fuming while the stylist lingered over a long head of hair as if he had just proposed to it?

While indoors, waiting has a touch of masochism, outdoors it takes on a martial turn. Out in the street we join the army of waiting people, to cross the road or not to cross the road, to catch the bus, to skewer some obstreperous mortal with the ferrule of an umbrella! Waiting for a taxi shows us in splendid pugilistic style. In New York one evening late, I waited and waited--it was that fallow hour between 5 and 6--and eventually sighted a free taxi and hopped in only to find three gentlemen had got in by the other door, claiming they were first, refusing to get out, giving me, as it seemed, threatening Gallic looks--they were Spanish--while a driver with a vexing combination of ennui and insolence asked where it was we wished him to go. I refused to leave the taxi, they refused, and as we set out for a destinationless spot, it occurred to me that this somewhat risk to my person was preferable to having to get out onto the street and wait again.

Logic and waiting, at least to our Western sensibilities, are not great bedfellows. It ended happily; they dropped me on East 64th Street, refused money and even suggested a drink later on.

To wait for a taxi is one thing, but to wait for a friend is quite another, and as we know, there are those friends who are always late, because they cannot help it, or because they are so busy, or because time is not a factor that matters to them. One wonders what does matter. I used to endure it, but I no longer can. Ten minutes and I feel the implosion, 20 minutes and it’s an explosion. One thinks of things that one could do. Knitting. Crocheting. One can neither knit nor crochet in the street. Tai chi. Except that I have not learned tai chi. Memorizing a poem or passage from Shakespeare. Except that I have not brought Shakespeare with me. No. The exasperation mounts, and by the time the friend arrives, the lurking umbrage for each and every wrong is unleashed and a happy evening endangered.

It may be my race or my trade or it may be my childhood, but I seem to think that writers are worse at waiting than other breeds. As an aside, I think that fishermen are best. You see them on riverbanks, perched on their little stools, rod and line apparently motionless in the water, and they have the contemplativeness of cows chewing the cud. Not so writers, who, from their diaries, their confessions, their essays about their crack-ups, have less aptitude for it than others, which seems a contradiction since to write and rewrite requires infinite patience. I think it may be that unlike actors, brain surgeons or animal tamers, writers never really feel that they matter. The book is finished, it is sent away, the publication day is nine months hence, and on publication day one may or one may not receive a telegram or a bunch of flowers. Reviews trickle in but there is no palpable connection between the doer and the doing. The writer in that sense is a kind of perpetual exile from himself or herself.

To train myself in the art of waiting, I sometimes think of insufferable situations--I think of people in prison having to fill up the hours, I think of people in hospitals or in asylums. I think of the Portuguese nun writing her dirges or that other nun, Heloise, who, after her lover, Peter Abelard, was castrated, went to a convent where, indeed, she still hoped that he might come for her, and I think of the last Empress of China as described by Sterling Seagrave in “Dragon Lady,” this woman who had been chosen as a concubine at a very young age, left a widow, still at a very young age, spending the rest of her life inside the walls of the Forbidden City, her day starting with her toilet and then being dressed, flowers put in her hair, her breakfast of porridge and lotus leaves, gift baskets arriving, bolts of silks sent by courtiers, playing with her dogs, twisting blades of grass into the shapes of rabbits or birds, tending her flowers, a eunuch reading perhaps a piece of history or lore to her, playing a board game or painting onto silk, meals, the tiny dishes on little saucers that she mostly declined, and thinking of it I thank my stars that I was born in the West of Ireland in relative hardship and not in Imperial China.

This brings me to either the value or the futility of waiting, and I think one must distinguish between the two. The telephone waiting, the waiting for the miracle--these seem in their way to be both crushing and ridiculous, because we all know that things do not happen when we wait too keenly. They happen when we least expect it. There is, however, a fertile kind of waiting that was brought to my attention by a piece written by Vaclav Havel that was called “Planting Watering and Waiting.” He spoke of his own impatience while he was president of Czechoslovakia. He had wanted to achieve something visible and tangible, and it was hard for him to resign himself to the idea that politics, like history, is an emerging process. He was succumbing to a kind of impatience, thinking that he alone could find a solution to the problem. He thought he could but saw with enforced patience that the world and history are ruled by a time of their own, as are our lives, in which we can creatively intervene but never achieve complete control. He ended his piece with the beautiful image of planting something, of putting the seed in, of watering the earth and of giving the plant the time that is essential to it. One cannot fool a plant any more than one can fool history, was how he put it. I suppose the same is true for ourselves. One cannot force the hearts or minds of other people, or get them to do what we want them to do at the precise moment we want it. We can only wait and, perhaps like the Portuguese nun, convert our tribulation into lambent prose.