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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.
“Why,” I said, sipping his scotch, “are you here.”
“I’m here,” he said. He closed his eyes. “I’m here because”—he smiled—“because every so often I need.” His hands clenching and unclenching, “Every so often it becomes important,” his hands under the bathrobe, moving up my thighs, “to be someone else,” his hands at my hips, pulling, “someone other than myself,” his eyes opening, the smile becoming a grin.
I stepped back and after a moment his grip loosened, his hands fell away. I handed him his glass of scotch. “Who do you want to be?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Just, not myself.”
Perhaps the conversation continued beyond my initial refusal. I mean my refusal to speak, so it was more of a monologue, John saying, Don’t you love me, and Shouldn’t we give ourselves a chance to fix this, and We were going to have a baby, and me not trusting myself to open my mouth. How animals, caught in a trap, will gnaw off their own limbs, maybe it was a little like that only I think the comparison gives me too much credit, it was John’s limb and I was the one chewing, him saying, I still think we can make this work, him saying, Here, do you want this leg, too.
Let me try to explain this another way. As a child, my interests, if you could call them that, were the highly regimented activities at which I immediately excelled. The fact that I’m one dissertation away from a PhD in English, this is at least in part because I read easily and early and because grown-ups, teachers especially, do love to compliment a little girl with a big book. If homework can be a hobby it was, throughout elementary and middle and high school, primary among mine. What I wanted was direction and praise for following it. As a child these were easy to find. As an adult I learned that the only people who seemed inclined to give out both were my professors, married men, almost all of them. But you can’t marry your married professor. So instead I married John. John, who was so kind and so supportive and emotionally generous and a good listener, who was everything a liberated woman is supposed to want. But then there was no one to pat me on the head for making the right choice. There was only John, who was so kind. Who was so kind and who wanted me to have desires of my own. Really it was a mean trick that the only one I developed was the desire to leave him.
What I’m trying to say, the theorem that must be accepted as a premise if any of my behavior is ever to make any sense, is that I have been, that I continue to be, best at being a vessel for the desire of others. And that this has made me good at exactly two things, school and sex. Also that you’re not supposed to use people as means to an end, you’re only supposed to treat them as ends in and of themselves, a very smart and famous man by the name of Immanuel Kant says so. Only I did want to be used as a means, and mostly it made me miserable and was evil besides, and in an attempt to fix this fundamental problem with me as a person I’d used John as a means and that, not questions like What are you going to do for money, and How are you going to find a job, and Have you opened the e-mail from your manager in response to the e-mail in which you quit without notice, and Is it irony to quit without notice i.e. in a very inappropriate way when the job you’re quitting is in HR, the fact that I’d used John, that was what was eventually going to bother me, when I allowed myself to feel things again.
ahhh
[...] And in line, in front of me, there’s this couple. A boy and a girl. I close my eyes and I can still see the backs of their heads at the moment I become aware of them. Two normal heads with normal hair, totally unremarkable. Kids, both of them. Well, kids to me, in fact they were probably in their early twenties. She has her arm around his waist and her head on his shoulder and she’s leaning into him like she’s trying to get every part of her body as close to every part of his body as she can. This kind of physical intimacy, that’s how I can tell they’re young. I mean, there’s the clothes and the pimples on his chin that he keeps poking at with his finger, and how smooth her skin is, but the thing I notice first is how she’s leaning into him, and only kids do that in public, little kids with their parents, wrapping their bodies around mommy’s leg, and big kids with their boyfriends and their girlfriends. Like if they’re together, doesn’t matter where, they’re not going to waste that time, that precious time, being even inches apart. It’s a little—I mean it’s a lot, sometimes, to look at, that kind of need, in public. It can be—well, it can be disgusting. Especially if they’re also kissing and usually they are. But there’s something, or, looking at these kids I felt also there was something, sacred isn’t the word, but they were treating this mundane moment, Sunday afternoon in a crowded Home Depot, waiting in line to check out, they were respecting this moment, they were insisting it was too good and special a moment not to honor with this display. There was a kind of, I don’t know, reverence to it. Gross as it also was. A kind of honesty.”
But the dating problem. My mother, it should by now be clear, chooses men poorly, and so do I, and this is why I was not dating, do not date. What was happening to me then, at the time when I sat in my mother’s kitchen and turned my sweating glass of lemonade on a damp coaster, was not unlike the problem that had driven my mother to analysis, to her analyst. I’ve said that I did want to date and that there was a problem preventing me, but this, too, is not quite accurate. The truth is I wanted to date and for a time I did, I went on dates with lovely men, men with advanced degrees and wit to spare and working definitions of the word feminism and shoulders just as broad as my mother’s GI turned analyst. And when they bent down to kiss me my entire body recoiled. Their lips fell on mine and it was as if every cell in my body began immediately trying to pull away. I could feel my pores shrink, the little hairs on my arms retract, anything my body could do to put even a negligible, an imaginary distance between itself, between myself, and these men. I mean, anything besides actually pulling away. Meanwhile at work, alone in an office with the oldest, the sweatiest, the baldest of our lawyers, I found myself blushing, found my knees growing weak, found myself backing toward the door, trying again to put as much distance between me and the decaying specimen before me—but this time it was to stop myself from jumping him. It was like I was being reminded that I could feel desire. But then also that desire was purposely being misdirected so that I wouldn’t have sex. And I didn’t know what to do with that. With my body telling me, You don’t want to fuck these men that you are—that you should be—attracted to. With my body telling me, You do want to fuck this eighty-five-year-old lawyer who thinks corporations should have the same rights as individuals and whose youngest granddaughter is just about your age. I didn’t know what to do with my body telling me You don’t want what you want.
lmao
The reader senses that the man’s promiscuity, his faithlessness, is to blame for his being repeatedly rejected. But this sense is overridden, and deliberately, by the anger the reader also feels toward the women he has called. He has driven so far. He’s been driving for days. Can one of these women not offer him a meal, a bed, the comforts of her flesh, if only for one night? I read once that violence onscreen, even if it is designed to appall, argues, inevitably, for itself. That the viewer is always inherently intrigued and therefore aroused by it. That the visual fact of violence is titillating, even if the intent is to disgust. And so one feels not disgust but pity for the lone driver. The writer who depicts an abhorrent male character still demands that the reader pay the abhorrent man his attention.
ahhh to be a hideous man
When I bought the house I did so in part because I had a romantic notion about the turn my life might take in such a town, so small and dead-ended. I imagined myself working at a diner, a diner frequented by truckers. I imagined one of them, kindhearted, modifying his routes so he could see me more often. Never staying longer than the time it took to drink two cups of coffee and eat a grilled cheese, but nevertheless, an understanding growing between us. I imagined myself in a long dress, in a backyard, hanging my sheets out to dry on a clothesline. Shielding my eyes from the sun. Instead I pay a woman to care for my son while I work as a legal secretary. All my skirts hit just below the knee. To clean these clothes, I use a washing machine and a dryer, both located in the basement. In the short story I read, the protagonist has a son, a son whom he leaves, with his wife, on the Eastern Seaboard. The author, the jeans-wearer, had a number of children. They are scattered about the country with the women who bore them. And though yes, it is true that the author never got sober, perhaps all this time I have been wrong about the story’s protagonist, the man who runs out of road. Because he hasn’t, not really. I mean, he can drive into the ocean. He can always decide to turn around.