The Girls Who Deceive Themselves (574 words)

A Room with a View of Sex and the City of Philadelphia Story of Pride and Prejudice

Here comes our heroine, all suited up in her caustic wit and corsets, she comes out swinging, throwing punch after punch of dazzling repartee. She is a stunner, all eyes on her when she enters the room, a dead elegant force of nature. And oh, how they love her.

And she loves them back, yes, but not all the way, not with everything she's got. Oh Tracy Lord, Lucy Honeychurch, you beauties in The Philadelphia Story and A Room with a View, oh beloved Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, immune (but not really) to the glitter of wealth, oh Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City with your poor life choices that made me want to strangle you with a scrunchie. I was enraptured by you sexy girls in your sexy gilded cages, I ached for you to get, at long last, to the big ta-da of LOVE.

(Like watching Gone with the Wind with my friend’s sweet brother Carlos, who cried out at the TV set: “Tell her that you love her!”)

Tell him that you love him! But of course you don’t even know it—that knowledge is buried deep and frightened and safe like Bukowski’s bluebird hidden in the chest. And old Mr. Emerson asks: Why should they trust you, when you deceived everybody, including yourself?

You girls have such a hard time getting to love, but you always make it, right before the final credits. That’s the deliciousness of it.

But one can only watch Julian Sands scoop up Helena Bonham Carter in Florence, or swoon over Colin Firth diving into that pond, or ache when Jimmy Stewart cracks open Katharine Hepburn's heart in the moonlight—her feet are made of clay after all, it seems—one can only bask in vicarious fireworks for so long before they fizzle. The dialog has long since gone threadbare, every inflection of every line is memorized, even the supporting characters, plucky Ruth Hussey and Simon Callow the vicar, even Daniel Day Lewis stuffing himself into yet another tragically bloodless Englishman behind pince-nez. You can only watch Sarah Jessica Parker and her girlfriends swill their cosmos so many times until,

exhausted, you look around, full and hollow, just another self-deceiver who comes out swinging. And you realize maybe it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, throwing it all away with both hands, throwing away love over and over, touchable but untouched.

And you roll up your sleeves for the real work of this life, which is giving and receiving love—don’t scoff, it’s true, we ignore it at our peril. The day-in-day-out real work of attentiveness and small gestures, peeling away each rusted layer of defense so that you can get, not all-caps movie LOVE, but everyday love over the arc of a life. Love in the admin and the small hassles, love in picking up dinner, love in tiny moments of connection with strangers, love in plants and pets, love in the rain on your eyelashes. Deathbed love. And your own ta-da love—not a perfect beautiful statue, not a Big Darcy Dexter-Haven, but another messy human who sometimes bugs the shit out of you and hurts you without meaning to and sees you for who you really are and lifts you up and walks you home.

Oh you beloved heroines, self-deceivers, it’s a scary path to the stuff that makes life worth living. Be brave and gentle with yourselves. Be gentle.

---