The Waiting Room

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THE WAITING ROOM is based on the disjointed diary of the Forrestals which came into my hands many years ago. Susan Forrestal described this diary in one section as “her husband’s log book” but it would appear that she and possibly others were engaged in an art of fiction peculiar to themselves.

By fiction I do not mean to deny certain literal foundations but rather to affirm these absolutely as a mutual bank or living construction of events; those who collaborated accepted the enigma of such self-proportion and sought therefore to discover themselves concretely, as well as brokenly, in the mystery of a common vanishing life, day to day, year to year.

Susan suffered from an incurable complaint of the eyes and after three operations became almost totally blind at the age of forty. She was the mistress of a man who left her suddenly, it would appear, after a violent quarrel, and disappeared without trace. He remained nameless in the log book, though he may have, at one time, contributed certain entries which give details of his remarkable collection; ornaments and pieces of interest. Susan actually married someone else some time after this, who — from all that can be gleaned — was extremely solicitous for her well-being, but her original lover (with whom she obviously had had much in common) continued to haunt her (to put it in her own words) and to arouse within her a “living” crew or presence. And in fact “he” became — according to a peculiar entry in the diary—“hieroglyph and vessel of experience, the supreme positive fiction for me of nothingness.” By which she seemed to imply that a fiction which appears to grasp nothingness runs close to a freedom of reality which is somethingness.

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