Valerie

by Sara Stridsberg

DOROTHY: She died of an overdose, little Valerie. It’s so sad.

  VALERIE: I’m going to be a scientist.

  DOROTHY (the hint of a smile in her voice): Ah, Valerie …

  VALERIE: It means I’ve been selected. It means I’m going to do research.

  DOROTHY: Ooh! Are you a professor now, Valerie?

  VALERIE: No, I’m going to get a doctorate.

  DOROTHY (screams into the receiver): RED! DID YOU HEAR? RED! OUR VALERIE HAS BEEN MADE A PROFESSOR!

  VALERIE: I’m going to do my doc-tor-ate.

  DOROTHY: Ah. I haven’t read what you sent yet. The doc-u-ment.

  VALERIE: It’s called an essay.

  DOROTHY (in a sleeping-pill voice): Right, the essay. I decided not to read it. I don’t like reading those fluttery sheets of loose paper. But it looked very good. I have it around all the time. Show it to everyone who comes by. Mr. Emin, for example. I tell everybody what a genius you are.

  VALERIE (the receiver pressed hard to her ear): A doctorate. It’ll take four years. I got in. There were tons of applicants. Everyone who applied had a degree in psychology.

  DOROTHY (her mother-of-pearl nails pick at the receiver): Well, anyway, Miss Monroe was found dead in her bed. Beauty, success, and sudden death. I’ve been at the kitchen table here crying all morning. I’ve burned myself on the candles again. Damn candles.

  VALERIE: Forget Marilyn. I’m a scientist now.

  DOROTHY: Otherwise everything’s as usual. Mr. Emin has installed a super-aerial on the roof. Mrs. Drake saw a saucer when she was drunk. She’s in town now bragging about it. And as for me, Dolly, I’m not doing anything. A bit of fortune-telling. A bit of sewing … Sit arguing with Moran, drinking wine … Nothing’s changed. Apart from Marilyn.

  VALERIE: So what do you predict for the future?

  DOROTHY: I predict that you’ll do well. That you’ll be a professor. You’ll be what you want to be. Love is eternal, that’s what I predict. You still sew lucky threads into your petticoats, don’t you, Valerie?

  VALERIE: It’s the sixties. I don’t wear petticoats anymore. No one with any self-respect wears petticoats.

  DOROTHY: Well … Self-respect and the sixties …

  VALERIE: What are you sewing?

  DOROTHY (mumbles evasively):… a little dress for Valerie … a little professor’s hat for Valerie … a fox-fur handbag for Valerie … leopard-skin underpants for Valerie …

  VALERIE: That’s nice, Dorothy. I have to go now.

  DOROTHY: A little space-purse for Marilyn … a little doctoral cap … for Marilyn … and a degree for Marilyn Monroe …

  VALERIE: Goodbye, Dorothy.

  A HOTEL SOMEWHERE IN THE TENDERLOIN, WINTER 1987, ONE YEAR BEFORE YOUR DEATH

  On February 20, 1987, Andy admits himself to New York Hospital under the pseudonym Bob Roberts. He would like to register as Barbara, but is not allowed. Dr. Denton Cox operates on his gallbladder for hours. Andy keeps his wig on during the operation. The silver glints against his snow-white skin. And under the hospital gown beats his nervous, irregular heart.

  Andy is dreaming about you. The hospital smell has triggered dreams of you again. He dreams you are chasing him through the snow in Central Park. He dreams about his own funeral, about having to lie beside Mama Warhola in the deluxe grave in Pittsburgh. Between the heartbeats he dreams that guests drop muscle magazines and perfume bottles (preferably Estée Lauder) into his grave.

  Nurse Min Cho keeps an eye on him and on her knitting. Late during the night following the operation he suffers a cardiac arrest. Cause: a surge of adrenaline generated by fear. (Is he thinking of the calamitous year of 1968? Is he thinking of you? A memory of the hospital, the operating smell?) Afterward Min Cho fills two garbage bags with material soiled by sickness and death and she is later sued by the family for a failure in care. The hospital pays out three million dollars to the Warhol family in compensation for his death.

  The Village Voice calls you in the Tenderloin to inform you of the news. You have one year left to live and you answer in your lacy undies with your persistent cough, and as you reach for the telephone a mug of coffee falls to the floor. Being born is like being kidnapped and then being sold as a slave.

  ULTRA VIOLET: Valerie Solanas?

  VALERIE: Yes?

  ULTRA VIOLET: How’s life?

  VALERIE (laughs): Fine, thanks … sunny … Who’s speaking?

  ULTRA VIOLET: Ultra Violet at The Village Voice.

  VALERIE: Right.

  ULTRA VIOLET: Tell me about your life.

  VALERIE: I always walk on the sunny side. I always have lucky threads of gold and silver in my coats.

  ULTRA VIOLET: And how are things with SCUM? Anything going on?

  VALERIE: Not much.

  Not much. You are shooting heroin again, have covered every public wall with notes and jottings. SCUM never existed, never will. It was just you. It was not even you. It was a hypothesis, a dream, a fantasy; what does it matter now?

  ULTRA VIOLET: How many members do you have today?

  VALERIE: Don’t know.

  ULTRA VIOLET: Andy Warhol is dead.

  Faint sunshine through the window, smeary windows, the smell of smoke and sun. The smell of the ocean, maybe, and another time. Cigarette smoke in your hand.

  VALERIE: Oh …

  ULTRA VIOLET: What do you have to say about Andy Warhol?

  VALERIE: Not much … Pop artist … The Factory … Prints … I don’t want to talk about him … I’ve nothing to say …

  ULTRA VIOLET: He died during a routine operation. The Warhol family intends to sue the hospital.

  VALERIE: I have nothing to add.

  ULTRA VIOLET: What do you think of our president?

  VALERIE: Nothing. He doesn’t make much of an impression here. A ridiculous old B-list actor. A john like all the other presidents.

  ULTRA VIOLET: What about you?

  VALERIE: A lot of surfing and a lot of sun. Disco balls versus death. The ocean is cold, still cold, shark attacks are still being hushed up by the government. It’s all right, but it’s all wrong.

  ULTRA VIOLET: And what’s your opinion of the current women’s movement? Where does the American woman stand today?

  VALERIE: In the shit, I suspect.

  ULTRA VIOLET: And where do you stand?

  VALERIE: In the shit.

  (Silence.)

  (Shouts from the street, traffic, hum of porn music.)

  ULTRA VIOLET: What else is happening?

  VALERIE: Not much. Work. Money. Sun. I’ve got a visitor coming now … More work. I have to hang up.

  ULTRA VIOLET (quick tongued): Are you a prostitute? Do you still hate men? Do you ever think about Andy Warhol?

  The windowpane is streaked with dirt and exhaust fumes, the room is boiling and freezing, ice-blue and alien. Do you still hate men? Are you still a prostitute? Do you ever think about Andy Warhol? Is the president still an ass? Does the president still have hair in his ass?

  VALERIE: I need to get off the phone now. I have nothing to say … I’m an author. You can write that. I’m writing a book … Put that … Sex is a hang-up … You can write that too.

  You throw the receiver down and drag on your raincoat, no, your silver coat (the raincoat was so long ago, it was New York, the Factory, Manhattan, black raincoat, dark glasses, waiting for rain that never came) and put your scarf into your bag with an old plastic-wrapped sandwich, your hat, and your sunglasses. The sun rides the waves in the sky out there and you paint your lips deep pink and look at yourself in the cracked mirror. The prettiest nine-year-old in America. The fastest surfer in Alligator Reef. Star student from the University of Maryland. The woman who failed to kill Andy Warhol. In the distance the sound of sirens and unknown women screaming, blue lights flashing and camera bulbs, a still hand on your arm. The small, gloved hand of Officer William Schmalix, and a movement, light as a bird, shielding your head as you climb into the police car.

  UNIVERSITY OF MARYL
AND, 1963

  BETTY FRIEDAN PUBLISHES THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE

  It is warm and dark in the lab; the animals are sleeping or moving about slowly in their cages. You have been testing electricity on male mice since morning; everything ceases to exist around you when you are working—Cosmo, the department, hunger for money—but now your concentration is on its way out and Cosmo is on her way in. The windows are open to the night, teeming with insects and flowers that only open in the dark. Cosmo sweeps in on a scooter, her hair sparkling, with a box of sweets and a surprise packet, small and white, which you snort together. She hangs a garland round your neck, kissing you hard and, as ever, too long.

  VALERIE: Your hair looks like a bird’s been in it. As though you’ve been struck by lightning.

  COSMO: You’re here, that’s why.

  VALERIE: You’ve got cocaine in your hair. Where did you sleep last night? With the Lab Rat?

  COSMO: Tell me about the experiment.

  VALERIE: A little rich girl dreamed of killing her younger brother. The dreams kept coming back. The younger brother sat on the beach building sandcastles that were always smashed by the waves. She had a recurring dream that he would be snatched by the waves and dragged out to sea. His subsequent drowning made her go insane. Illness as escape. Depressive obedience. Psychotic submission. Psychoanalysis, a correction facility for women. A penal colony.

  COSMO: Was it your little brother?

  VALERIE: When I was small I fixed a pipe in the river in Ventor, and into it I told all my secrets. The words flowed away, out into the Atlantic. I said I wanted a typewriter, that I wanted to write, I said Dorothy needed a new dress and a bit of survival instinct, I called out for someone like you.

  COSMO: The problem that has no name. The histories without history.

  VALERIE: At the mental hospital they permitted her family to bring a sandpit into the hospital grounds, so she could build sandcastles that would not be swallowed up by the sea. The other patients never went near the sand; they all knew the story about her younger brother. But every time there was a storm over the hospital park, she went crazy with fear and smashed all the sandcastles before the storm could swallow them up.

  COSMO: I dream about you at night, Valerie.

  VALERIE: The function of dreams. To fend off external or internal stimuli during sleep. To reinterpret an external threat. I daydream about our work all day long, Cosmo. I dream that we’re America’s first official intellectual whores.

  COSMO: I make myself ill thinking about you.

  VALERIE: Primary gain. Escape into illness. The sickness of pain. It’s not worth swanning around in the sciences. The death of psychoanalysis.

  COSMO: I’m talking about you and me, not about psychoanalysis.

  VALERIE: I’m in love. I’m not planning to fall out of love. I’m talking about torture and sadism and being in prison with no prison walls, imprisoned in psychoANALysis. I’m talking about being free from all that. Asylum. Artificial historiography. Anarchic kisses outside history. You and me, Cosmo. We are not part of history, not part of any story. No history, no destiny. World history is merely a criminal gang consisting of ape-men who like playing at being police, brain police and body police.

  And she lets go of your hand, takes her scooter, and leaves. She lights a cigarette, waves at you, and disappears into the darkness. You call after her.

  VALERIE: Where are you going now?

  COSMO: To get more cake and those infernal application forms.

  VALERIE: Are we going to apply for money, after all?

  COSMO: It’s not state money, so it’s okay. Good night.

  ELMHURST PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL, APRIL 1969

  All spring Dr. Ruth Cooper sits behind her white curtains, trying to concentrate on making diagnoses. Occasionally she loses her train of thought during your sessions and her cool hand touches you, and sometimes she takes off her doctor’s coat and sits in her blouse and trousers. The air-conditioning has been turned off indefinitely and she always returns to your childhood in the desert. You prefer to discuss America’s place in history, B-52s, napalm, Agent Orange, and to dwell a while longer on the subject of Men’s Flagrant Inferiority.

  Clouds contracting in a spasm of cramp outside the window, hospital noises, the sweet smell of shop-bought flowers obtrusive and nauseating, while you make a note of everything she says, working on your own diagnosis of Dr. Cooper, an account of her childhood, a health bulletin; things do not look very good at all for Dr. Cooper. Diagnosis as follows: Depressive obedience. Diminished desire impulse, diminished aggression impulse. Pathologically well-developed impulse control. Abnormally high predisposition toward playing Daddy’s Girl. Awareness of illness entirely lacking. The sufferer’s behavior tends to scare the shit out of other patients who feel ready to rule the universe.

  You spend the afternoons in the hospital attic, where Dr. Cooper lets you borrow her white coat and listens without interruption, while you expound on a variety of matters, stuffed she-animals, dead creatures in formalin, and present facts about the mouse colony from Maryland. There was a time when your Sprague Dawleys lay asleep in the pocket of your lab coat, a time when Cosmo swept past in the dorm in high boots, wearing sunglasses the laboratory animals could see their reflections in. You illustrate on a dusty slate, while Dr. Cooper listens, deep in concentration, red blotches on her neck; it is all about mice, utopias, and memories, about laboratory production of mice and people, artificial thought embryos outside the tyranny of nature and the terrorism of biology. Listen to the doctor. Pregnancy is just a temporary and unfair deformation of the body. There are secret ways to escape biological destiny. We must take control of nature right now.

  When the sun dips into the treetops you go back to Dr. Ruth Cooper’s office, where you borrow her doctor’s coat; and Dr. Cooper, wearing her pink turtleneck, elegant gold chains, and dark, pressed trousers, lies on the analysis couch, shuts her eyes, and listens, forgetting to write notes in the medical record. A faint buzzing sound from the green-glowing desk lamp as Dr. Cooper closes her eyes; and the dying light gently brushing her face, her freckles, fluttering eyelashes, translucent skin. Your voice labors like a machine, a steel plant, empty factories, deserted industrial towns. Her face looks like a desert while she listens.

  You lose count of how many requests you have made to the hospital administration for permission to borrow and use a typewriter. All requests rejected, but Dr. Cooper allows you to borrow hers for short periods to write your life story. You write a short essay on her wonderful Continental.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: What do you think about Andy, now, Valerie?

  VALERIE: He’s in the hospital.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: What do you think he’s doing there?

  VALERIE: He’s in the hospital playing dead. He’s making a film about the hospital and a film about death, starring himself.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: Why do you think he’s in the hospital?

  VALERIE: Great artist. Great white backdrop.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: You’re immensely talented, Valerie.

  VALERIE: Thanks, Doctor, I know. The big question is whether it’s to my advantage or my disadvantage.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: Your sense of humor is fantastic. That’s the key to your survival.

  VALERIE: You’re not such a bore yourself, Dr. Obvious.

  (Silence.)

  VALERIE: You know men have no sense of humor?

  (Dr. Ruth Cooper smiling.)

  VALERIE: You know manhood is a deficiency disease?

  (Dr. Ruth Cooper beaming.)

  VALERIE: You’re okay, Doctor. I can see you know what I’m talking about.

  SWANNING AROUND IN THE SCIENCES I

  UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, 1965

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: You know we’re extremely pleased with your work in the department. You think like a scientist. Don’t waste your talent. You can go as far as you want to. But you must keep within the framework of accepted, recognized scientific methods and premises.
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  VALERIE: Thanks, but there’s no reason to let the male mice live. They’re not contributing to anything. We should be able to produce female mice only. I’d like to investigate what happens in a research station with just females. I’m sure they can reproduce without males. I need money to do the research.

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: We’re looking here at what happens to the males when they are implanted with cancer cells and other foreign cells. Cancer cells, human cells, cells from other species. Reference to females and offspring is interesting, but it isn’t central here.

  VALERIE: The mouse boys apparently can’t relate to the other mice. For some reason they seem to lack empathy. I want to know what happens if the mouse girls get to live on their own. All the results would change.

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: You need to have higher scientific requirements than that, my dear.

  VALERIE: The unmotivated upsurge of the world. If women and mouse girls don’t get their asses in gear fast, we’re all going to die. I spend the whole night in with the cages and I can only observe that the experiments are utterly pointless. The flagrant inferiority of the males. Why are they part of the experiments at all?

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: It’s not relevant, Valerie. Dismiss that thought. It’s leading you nowhere.

  VALERIE: I plan to write a book.

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: I think you should do that. You’re one of my best students. But you lack patience. You need to work on your patience. Research is about understanding, not about change.

  VALERIE: Work records, apricot cocktails, contemporary experimental psychology, I’m not interested in your empirical images, I’m not interested in endlessly dull case definitions and disorders. The place of the phallus in the theory of sexuality is laughable. Doppelganger, toy, doll, alter ego. A preliminary outline for his whole being.

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: If you could devote all that hyper-intelligence to the orthodox instead, i.e., the pathways of science already well worn and well lit, then there’s no limit to how far you can go. I’d be able to recommend you to whatever position you want.