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And so that was the first week, me trying to deny them this treat or that privilege and them complaining and me giving in immediately, buying them bomboloni in the morning and cornetti in the afternoon and them having no appetite for dinner at eight and demanding to stay up for the eleven-fifteen movie on Retequattro, the boys whining, So what that it’s rated red, which is how Tom and Teo fell asleep watching Basic Instinct, me thinking, Well surely it’s been edited for broadcast and certainly it’s been dubbed and really how much Italian can they actually understand, even with the fluent grandfather, the cognates. Like the language was the problem. I did keep my eye on my wine.
lmao
Finally, Artemisia sighed, one afternoon, I found him waiting for me outside my door. This was a weekday. The building was two stories. The front door opened onto a small landing and on the left side of that landing a hallway led to the door of the landlady’s apartment. On the right side were the stairs. Artemisia’s hands were moving as she spoke, sketching. He must have knocked on the front door and my landlady must have heard and let him in because that afternoon I found him sitting on the second floor. His head was bowed and his back was against the door to my apartment. I remember my cheeks were flushed. It was late March but still cold. I think my landlady let Virgilio in out of pity. She would not have wanted him to wait outside. Certainly that was why I let him in. By then it was clear to me that our relationship could not continue. I had not yet decided whether that meant it had to end or if its—its terms, the terms under which we were operating, if they might still be transformed. We had not had sex in months. Not since our first weeks in New York. By choice. By my choice. It wasn’t that he was controlling—that he was trying to be controlling. In the end this is not what bothered me. It was that his desire to control, she paused. This desire, it stemmed not from his power but from its lack. It was his desperation I despised.
i get it
[...] Artemisia looked at me then and our eyes met. She stubbed out her cigarette. The heat pulsing through my body, at that moment, I called it admiration. Admiration because Artemisia knew herself so well and I, at twenty-one, did not, had not yet settled on the governing narrative of my life. Had not yet realized the folly of governing narratives. The certainty of Artemisia’s voice, this is what I was responding to. It is what, remembering her story, remembering that summer, knowing that folly, I still, unwilling, respond to now.
Respond to but don’t trust. What I mean is that Artemisia seemed to know herself. Seemed because Artemisia was less master of her fate, captain of her soul, than she was a clever gardener. Sequestered in a domestic plot, she worked with the tools at her disposal. Trapped, yes, but in a hedge maze of her own careful design. How else to interpret her insistence that she had never wanted control? That she had, in her relationships with men, only ever wanted to be a child? How else to interpret her insisting all this to someone she barely knew, to someone who was still a child herself? Though sometimes I think in fact she did know herself. Sometimes I think one of the things she was trying to tell me was that she was unhappy in her marriage.
i kind of feel like the second para takes away from the insights of the first but i have to include both for accuracy
“Anyway. We told ourselves she must have known what she was getting herself into. We told ourselves she was an adult, and sure the rumors were widespread, sure they were widely believed, but they were also just that, rumors. The porn wars were over and porn had won and we were porn-positive, we were sex-positive, we probably wouldn’t have even called ourselves feminists. Who were we to judge.” The tenant walked over to the chair she’d been sitting in and began to lower herself, changed her mind, stood back up. “At first,” she said, “at first they seemed happy. He started going out a little bit less and she started going out a little bit more. Once a month, twice a month, we’d see them at a party together—she’d always be wearing something ridiculous. Once, this was in March or April, nowhere near Halloween, she came in a kind of—classy cowgirl costume, patterned dress, lace trim, hat and boots and a ribbon around her neck.” She shook her head. “But so anyway they’d show up, arm in arm, and she’d be wearing something ridiculous and she still wouldn’t drink, just sit on the couch and sip from a cup of tonic water all night while he took shots with former students. Now I tell my undergrads, told my undergrads, If a grad student wants to hang out with you, that’s a sign, a sign you should definitely not hang out with them, but back then”—she shook her head—“it didn’t occur to us, how inappropriate it was, this guy at parties with people a decade younger than he was, people whose grades he had recently been, in some cases still was, responsible for. We thought it meant we were—mature, sophisticated, I don’t know, adult.” She lit a fresh cigarette off the butt of the one she had finished, left the butt in a plastic cup to smolder. “Anyway, we thought it said something good about us, his being at our parties, rather than something evil about him. But okay this girl—so at parties she’d sit on the couch and she wouldn’t really talk to anyone, just sit and sip and watch, but also she didn’t seem unhappy. She had this smile like she was”—the tenant made air quotes with the hand that wasn’t holding the cigarette—“ ‘happy, with a secret.’ I heard that somewhere. I’ve always liked it. ‘Happy, with a secret.’ The safest way to be happy, if you think about it. If you keep it a secret, the happiness, it’s harder for someone else to, you know”—the tenant shrugged—“take it from you.”
What happened was my friend got divorced, and then, for a while, she went to live with my parents. She said, my friend, that she wanted to spend some time with people who liked her. I lived in California too, though up north. With my husband, though my friend did not ask if she could stay with us. I guess I was a little offended. Told myself she wanted to be tended to, knew I would not tend to her and knew my mother would. Though also I was relieved. Just then we were trying to have a baby. Baby books everywhere and me lying on my back, in bed, a thermometer in my vagina, trying to take my basal body temperature so I’d know when to fuck my husband, this, we’d been told, was the most natural way. My mind so filled with this one desire—baby, baby, baby—it might as well have been blank. Dutiful copulation. Tension and resentment packed into each of our small rooms like pudding into pudding cups. “Do you think,” my friend asked me, “that it’s ethical, right now, to have a baby. Considering where we are. In late capitalism, the life cycle of the planet.” I hung up. My husband and I did not end up having a baby, though not for ethical reasons. Later we also got a divorce. Having a baby, in any case, is never ethical. I don’t mean it’s not, just that’s the wrong scale.
yeah fair
Also that I’d started involuntarily imagining what it would be like to fuck every man I came into contact with. What it would be like if the power went out and everyone else in the room were raptured and we just had to do it right there on the conference room table for the sake of, you know, humanity, his hand in my hair, pulling, and me opening my mouth to protest, the words dying in my throat. Involuntarily, right. I was working in HR at this point, is that irony. I should know, that PhD I didn’t finish was in English lit. Probably this was connected to the fact that I’d started watching porn. Every morning, right after taking my basal body temperature, like putting a thermometer in my vagina gave me the idea. Like I couldn’t think about making a baby without thinking about making a baby. In retrospect I think I was mad at my husband. Is that too obvious? Remarkable how hard it is for women to admit they’re angry. Not annoyed or upset or irked or miffed or any sentiment that might be captured in a text message that ends in a series of exasperated question marks. Angry.
John was on a health kick, had been, and to spite him I’d been buying frozen pepperoni pizzas, Confetti Cupcake Pop-Tarts, going out for groceries and coming home with buckets of KFC. These were, to be clear, for me. They were to spite him, but they were for me. He’d open a can of soup, Amy’s Organic, while I picked a chicken wing clean with my teeth. As the soup heated, split pea maybe, barley vegetable, John would chop a head of kale. The night before I drove down to the city, the soup was black bean chili. The soup was heating and John was chopping his kale and I was mauling my wing and every so often I paused, a finger fishing for gristle between my teeth. “It’s not,” I said, “like it’s going to help.”
lol
I didn’t want a baby. But that must be obvious, what I mean is I had never wanted one. I moved to Lincoln and I got married and my husband got another job and we moved and my husband got a third job, tenure track, and we moved again. I worked in HR. I came home from my job in HR and I cooked dinner for my husband. I cooked dinner for my husband and for his professor friend and for his professor friend’s wife. If I was lucky, the wife wasn’t also in HR. And I wasn’t going to finish my dissertation, this was clear. I wasn’t going to finish my dissertation and publish it, I wasn’t going to be a professor, I wasn’t going to get tenure and go on sabbatical, I wasn’t going to spend three months in Barcelona perfecting my Spanish, doing archival research. (I spoke no Spanish, what research could I be doing in Barcelona, my area was seventeenth-century English plays.) I wasn’t ever even going to live alone. And that’s what I thought about when I thought about what I’d lost by abandoning grad school, by marrying young, by following John from job to job to job: I thought about living alone. I thought about sitting on a porch, on my porch, as evening fell, sitting there with a glass of wine and a book and empty hours ahead of me. So okay my life was going to be suburban, it was going to be upper-middle-class, it was going to be so far up normal’s ass that it came out the other end holding a white picket fence and an American flag. (John’s job was all wrong for this, Marin was all wrong for this, no matter, I was angry, I was on a roll.) So okay it was going to be not only normal but normative. And the normative thing to do, now that we were settled, now that John had accumulated professor friends who came with pregnant professors’ wives, now that every single one of my female coworkers had two at home and was trying for a third, the normative thing to do was have a kid. And I thought that maybe if I chose it, if I told myself I wanted it, if I made the baby an object not quite of desire but certainly of obsession, I might be able to trick myself into liking a life whose comfort I knew even then was so relatively excessive as to be almost criminal. So I told John I wanted a baby and we started trying and even now the part that most surprises me is how long it worked. Probably it was because we had so much trouble; nothing is more desirable than that which is being withheld.
So I booked a room at a midlevel chain and I drove down to the city. The room was standard issue. Thin carpet in a dull dun color that already looked dirty. That always already looked dirty. You can take the girl out of the grad school but you can’t take the grad school out of the—Anyway the carpet looked dirty and that was on purpose, that was so you couldn’t tell if it was. Also polyester bedspread in a floral pattern, hypoallergenic pillows with the tags to prove it, bars of soap no bigger than fun-size chocolates, thimblefuls of body wash and shampoo and conditioner. I dumped the clothes out of my suitcase and changed into a black dress, tighter on me now than it had been when I’d bought it, vulgar on top. I’d been lucky, the Pop-Tart weight had settled in my tits.
The plan was to walk south, toward Union Square, to walk until I found a hotel and a bar stool and someone on the bar stool next to me with a room key and none of the obvious markers for sociopathy. There’s always someone, or so I’d been led to believe: on business or in the doghouse or out on the proverbial prowl. That was the danger of being a woman, or one of them, vulnerability to advances, a danger I’d felt clever about turning, this once, to my advantage. Like I’d invented the art of getting hit on. The hotel bar, the hotel room, this was to avoid the more obvious dangers, those associated with getting into a car, going up to an apartment, following a man to a second location.
lmao
I don’t remember him sitting down. The door opened onto a hallway that opened onto a lobby, if I’d been turning to look every time I heard footsteps I wouldn’t have been able to drink my martinis so quickly. Besides which I didn’t want to seem too desperate. I mean more desperate than I already appeared, a woman sitting alone at a bar, not looking at a book, not thumbing at her phone. It was the situation we’d all, the girls of my generation, been warned against, been warned, specifically, against getting ourselves into. In my adolescence, this was the early nineties, the women who marched with Take Back the Night were still hysterical, consent wasn’t yet affirmative, and though no means no was the standard it was also understood that it wouldn’t protect you. And so we were told to keep to well-lighted streets. To carry pepper spray, a whistle. To keep keys between the second and third, the third and fourth, the fourth and fifth fingers of our dominant hands. No short skirts and watch your drink and tell a friend where you’re going and call her when you get there and again when you get home. When we thought about sex we thought mostly about ways to defend against what we didn’t want instead of ways to pursue what we did. So that now the way I thought to attract a man was to make myself vulnerable to attack: sitting alone, drinking too quickly, my legs bare and my shoes no good for running and the hem of my dress riding up. I’d made myself a sitting duck and deliberately because men were attracted not to predators but to prey, not to strength but to weakness, this is what I was thinking when I felt a hand on my upper arm, the grip gentle but the splay wide, the fingers thick, promising. “Is someone,” he asked, “sitting here,” another hand gesturing to the bar stool next to mine. I smiled and shook my head, bowed it to indicate, Please, yes, go ahead. Thinking, Better not to speak just yet, better first to figure out what it is you want me to say.