Valerie

by Sara Stridsberg

  VALERIE: I’m sure you would. The trouble is, how a man perceives his genitals couldn’t interest me less. In certain circumstances a turd appears to fulfill the same role as a penis. Et cetera. Et cetera. It’s simply more information than I require. The interesting issue continues to be: Can we regard the turd, like the penis, as having a strange little personality all its own? The onus really does seem to be on me to write my own book.

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH (laughs): Do that, Valerie. But watch out against the marginal. The relationship between the sexes. Biology and destiny. There’s nothing to be gleaned from it.

  VALERIE: Your attitude will change, you’ll see.

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: You’ll see that yours does. Tell Ann Duncan that we’d like to see her in the seminars again. Tell her I was asking after her mother.

  VALERIE: Do you have a dollar?

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: Of course. Here, have ten.

  Her eyes are black mirrors. Her heart is a bruise. At nights, in one of the parks, she keeps losing her bag with her keys and money and you will go and fetch her from some Washington suburb where she has been sitting on a sidewalk and has forgotten how to get home. She starts to carry a plastic bag for her lipstick, cash, and scientific journals, instead of a handbag, and she wears her leopard-skin coat in the middle of summer, but still she is cold. And whenever you stand in your clogs and lab coat in the bright fluorescent light, she appears and empties the contents of the bag onto the experiment and her voice sounds increasingly brittle and shrill.

  The Polaroid camera has to take the place of science; she is no longer working, she misses all the seminars, forgets her assignments in the laboratory, and loses her place in the department. And it makes no difference how many times you sit in front of the departmental board and beg, and it makes no difference how much she begs on her mother’s behalf, and how many Polaroid pictures of laboratory mice she sends to Elizabeth. Only the animals are her true friends, only the animals hate death as much as Cosmogirl.

  VALERIE: Put the camera away. I’m working.

  COSMO: You have to play with me, not work.

  VALERIE: Photograph some other animals.

  COSMO: I’m bored.

  VALERIE: Help me clean the cages instead. Have you spoken to Elizabeth?

  COSMO: California Mickey Mouse Jurisdiction. Finished, done, over and out. The end. Closing credits. Mayday fucking Mayday. Look at this little idiot. She doesn’t stand a chance against the males. It’s unbelievable that this system of violence doesn’t lead to eradication of the species. Quite the reverse, the males’ aggressiveness appears to contribute to its success.

  VALERIE: There are mouse girl-boys. There are shining exceptions. Auxiliaries.

  COSMO: The evaders, who stand outside it all … No sense of responsibility … What is it that makes some males rape and kill, and others glide into the glass walls like jellyfish?

  VALERIE: Did you call Elizabeth?

  COSMO: The constant rape by dolphin males of dolphin girls and dolphin youngsters is a system that works. The females don’t flee. They keep on breeding with sadists and terrorists, they surf toward their own destruction. And always with that goddamn dolphin smile.

  VALERIE: The lab director. The analyst. The seminar leader.

  COSMO: I know what I’m doing.

  (Silence.)

  COSMO: I do nothing unplanned.

  VALERIE: They were just metaphors. For destruction, for masochism, for self-imposed rape.

  COSMO: I’ve tried to get the mice to exhibit alternative behavior, to communicate desire or aggression or fear, for example. It doesn’t happen, or at least I’m not capable of interpreting it as language. Mice don’t use metaphors and yet the species still thrives. It’s not male violence that distinguishes us, species similarity is striking in that respect, it’s language that separates mouse boys from human males, metaphor, sublimation, translation, reinterpretation, transmission, comparison, lies.

  VALERIE: And the tendency among human girls toward self-destructive dolphin behavior?

  COSMO: There’s only one way to raise that research money. The desire for friendly pussy. The propensity to drown in their own passive flesh. I’ve nothing against research without funding, without credit and dog biscuits, without being a part of science. I have no wish to swan around in the sciences anymore.

  VALERIE: Kiss my ass.

  COSMO: You know I’d love to do that.

  VALERIE: I’m going to have that money. We deserve it. Your chances of getting research money from the lab director decrease with every blow job. The screwing machine won’t give us our money. If we’re lucky, we’ll get gonorrhea. If we’re very lucky, syphilis.

  COSMO: We’ll never get the money. Nobody’s going to let us do research on the extermination of male mice. It’s like asking for money to produce an execution machine for the president.

  VALERIE (laughs): You’re a genius, Cosmo. I’m just going to run and fetch the application forms. We’re going to be wading in money when the boss hears about this. An execution machine for the president. The good old sparky. The good old fellow. They’re going to love it … Tell me more about the execution machine.

  COSMO: I have nothing against being outside history. I’d rather take fuck-money than money from a state that’s trying to murder my mother.

  VALERIE: And what did Elizabeth say? Tell me.

  COSMO: She’s crocheting baby blankets. It’s like a mental illness. It’s disgusting. She’ll do anything to survive. A classic study in personality change. Borderline. I know how it would be diagnosed. Lunacy. The threat of execution results in a population of whores in there.

  VALERIE: And makes you a whore out here.

  COSMO: If I give money to you, what does it matter where it comes from?

  VALERIE: You’re starting to smell of war, my little idiot. One more reason I wish you only champagne and streamers and princess cake.

  COSMO: I’m so scared of dying. I know they’re killing her. My brain is an electric chair where innocent people are being executed all the time. What does it matter? I love you.

  VALERIE: Come on.

  And you drop the experiment and drop everything else, and you take her hand, remove her damp fur coat, and pull her up onto the workbench, and you stop her when she tries to sit up, and you put out her cigarettes when she tries to light them, and you hold on to her, and she smells of smoke and the netherworld, and Cosmogirl, the most beautiful girl, the most grotesque, becomes perfectly calm. She is just a little laboratory animal, easily soothed, broken by testing, insane.

  VALERIE: Come on, stupid.

  COSMO: There’s no future. There’s no God. She’s going to die, I know. All this is going to disappear.

  VALERIE: We’re here now.

  COSMO: And then it will all be gone.

  VALERIE: We exist now.

  COSMO: And then it will all be gone.

  VALERIE: Tell me something.

  COSMO: I have nothing to say.

  VALERIE: Tell me about Elizabeth.

  COSMO: She’s going to die. That’s all.

  VALERIE: It just makes me frightened, Cosmo, when you resort to the doe-eyed face, when you look like an injured animal all the time.

  COSMO: I love you.

  VALERIE: We’re going to do research, Bambi, not prostitution. We’re going to wash that fur coat and cover up your bruises. We’re going to stop taking drugs and take over instead.

  SWANNING AROUND IN THE SCIENCES II

  UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, 1966

  VALERIE: Nineteenth Amendment. The right to vote. Silence. World war. Activities ceased, the liberation movement went underground.

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: A new age is coming. You and Ann Duncan are part of the future.

  VALERIE: There’s nothing in it for us.

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: A new world is dawning outside the department. You have your brain, and I’ll see to it that you have a place, a budget, and a job in science. The only th
ing you need to provide is patience.

  VALERIE: Definitely not for us.

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: Ann Duncan has to come back to seminars. And you must start working within a scientific framework. Your current work can be regarded as non-work. It might as well be silence.

  VALERIE: A psychoanalytical perspective on all that silence. The function of projection and transference. James Dean. The war. Marilyn Monroe. The war as a super-projection onto a screen resembling the sky. Superpower. Superman.

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: I can’t watch, it makes me despair, when you distance yourself from science like this, especially when it applies to yourself.

  VALERIE: Margaret Mahler and Melanie Klein are sucking psychoanalytical cock in Brücke’s lab. It doesn’t matter how long you lie around relaxing and interpreting damp patches on the ceiling. This is not childhood, it’s an aberration. Childhood is the place assigned to women in the laboratory, the system of desire, the money system. Men’s childhood, perhaps, not women’s. In every man sits a masturbating little infant with extremely sadistic impulses. The role of psychoanalysis is to rehabilitate the sadistic man-child.

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: As I said, I wish you’d return to the case analysis. Whatever our differences, the whole point is not to turn away from the world, it’s always to go back to what we label reality.

  VALERIE: Don’t look at her childhood, look at her place in the system of desire, at her unhappy childhood among sadists and misogynists. No desire options in any shape or form. Thanks to truncated libido, sometimes truncated genitalia, truncated aggression. Everything stems from the allotted task, to be a screen for projections, for dreams of the Wild West. Couch, transference, and a gigantic transference neurosis. There’s nothing behind the screen. Marilyn Monroe, Doris Day. Truncated desire impulse, truncated aggression impulse, all American women. The death of psychoanalysis, Professor Robert.

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: Your method of thinking is like an injection of new blood for this department. If you drop your project with female mice, I’ll make sure you have funding for as long as you want.

  VALERIE: If you stop fucking people who are drowning, I’ll think about it.

  NEW YORK, SUMMER 1966

  The trees blossom late in New York and it is summer by the time the desert dragonflies invade the cities, where hairstyles are piled up and blond. Windows to the street are open and strangers wave from the balconies. You run through the crowds, holding Cosmogirl by your sweaty hand. The White House and Lyndon B. Johnson smolder in everyone’s thoughts. Everyone is there. Everyone has to buy the first version of the manifesto.

  Kay Clarenbach and Muriel Fox from the National Organization for Women speak into megaphones about sexual politics, about the tyranny of biology and the unhappy housewife. The unfortunate relationship between man and woman and their need for sexual love without martyrdom. They adore talking about men. Men are heartily welcomed into NOW (National Organization for Worms). You have your own movement, the Society for Cutting Up Men, and there is nothing you like more than amphetamines pumping through your head.

  You pull Cosmo by the hand through the protest march, both of you yelling and chanting: ALL MARRIED WOMEN ARE PROSTITUTES, ONLY REAL WHORES ARE REAL WOMEN. And to any girl who wants to know, you say: In just a few hours we could mobilize an army of man haters. In only a few weeks we could bring down the president, take over this country and everyone’s mind. The unwork force. The fuck-up force. Destroy this filthy state. The United States of Pimps and Balls. The United States of Nothing.

  At the corner of a street you kiss her, a wild animal howls inside your chest, breathless, fluttering moments of deepest pink, anarchic kisses outside history. Cosmo and you run hand in hand outside the women’s movement’s second wave, outside the New Left and women’s lib, far outside the feminine mystique, feminist glamour girls, the Vietnam movement. The American women’s movement is made of you and her, you are America’s first intellectual whores and you are the author of the only text worth reading, SCUM Manifesto.

  It is New York’s hottest summer and dead dragonflies lie in drifts on the sidewalks. You are wearing your white fur coat of silver fox, your nylon tights, your smelly high-heeled boots, and you take pride in always having lipstick on your teeth and gigantic mirrored sunglasses that Cosmo can see her reflection in as she layers on more makeup, more glitter, more cocaine. And every manifesto gets a lipstick kiss before you sell it for a dollar or a few cents. The sun blinds your eyes, oil drums and placards burn on street corners; and this is your time, a parenthesis of fast-igniting flames and sudden heat. Sparks of skin and flaring magnesium.

  BRISTOL HOTEL, APRIL 19, 1988

  NARRATOR: I keep thinking of your wild-animal language, of your time at the university. Then I think about New York and the Factory. Questions central to this novel. Why did you stop writing? Why did you leave Maryland? Why did you shoot Andy Warhol?

  VALERIE: Mirror, mirror on the wall. These are all the wrong questions. The right question is: Why did she carry on writing; why did anyone carry on writing? Why didn’t she leave the university; why did any girl stay in the faculty? Why didn’t she shoot; why did so many of her kind have no access to weapons? All her rights were under constant attack. Idle and beautiful, they walked around their gardens on Long Island. Why didn’t they just destroy their gardens? The feminine mystique.

  NARRATOR: In an interview with Howard Smith in The Village Voice in 1977 you say … It’s after the women’s prison, after the mental hospitals, and you’ve just published the manifesto yourself—

  VALERIE: —Thanks. If you want to give a lecture about my life, then maybe I’m the wrong audience. I’m not terribly interested. I fucked everything up, that’s the answer to all your questions. I couldn’t take living like a lobotomized brood cow, and the world around me couldn’t take that.

  NARRATOR: In the interview with Howard Smith—

  VALERIE: Imbecile. Infantile. Irritating. I remember he volunteered himself for a blow job after the interview.

  NARRATOR: —you say of the manifesto that it’s hypothetical. Later you retract that. I’d like to know what you mean by hypothetical. You also say that SCUM was a literary device, that there is no organization called SCUM.

  VALERIE: There was only me. I don’t like arithmetic.

  NARRATOR: In my novel—

  VALERIE: —You and your little novel will have to excuse me now, because I’ve got work to do.

  NARRATOR: I have money.

  VALERIE: How nice for you.

  NARRATOR: I mean, I have money in case you need some, so you don’t have to …

  VALERIE: Don’t have to what?

  NARRATOR: I’m just saying, I have money if you need some.

  VALERIE: Don’t have to what?

  NARRATOR: Sell your body. Be a prostitute. Capitalize on intimacy. I don’t know what to call it.

  VALERIE: Sexual politics. Organization of so-called love, i.e., rape. Red-light district. Special areas of the city sprang up, the women were summoned for government-funded tests every week to keep their clients, the johns, the boys, free from disease. Take everything from me. Do it. That’s what I want.

  NARRATOR: It reduces to something deeply tragic if you hate men and are forced to sell yourself to them all your life.

  VALERIE: Charge for rape. Organized rape. Systematized rape. Rape that can be preplanned. Structured sucking-off. Formalized fucking. Charging for rape. Rape isn’t free. It’s impossible to rape someone who does it of her own free will. All married women are prostitutes. Only real whores are real women and revolutionaries. I don’t sell my heart, I don’t sell my brain, I sell a few minutes and a part of my body that isn’t mine.

  THE FACTORY

  ELMHURST PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL, MAY 14, 1969

  Dr. Cooper does not tire of getting beaten at poker. Her losses accumulate and it is lucky for her that you are not playing for money. She is far too distracted to stand a chance, and it is obvious she imagines t
he game of cards will lead to a mini-discourse from you on your unhappy childhood. She is obsessed with childhood and seems as devoid of tactics as she is of natural competitive instinct.

  VALERIE: Do you want to get your own childhood back, Doctor?

  DR. RUTH COOPER: I want you to tell me more about yours.

  VALERIE: It was my childhood that made me into a feral creature.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: And the relationship with your father?

  VALERIE: And into a devil at poker.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: And the relationship with your father?

  VALERIE: I don’t have a father.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: And the relationship with your mother?

  VALERIE: I chased after our kites across the desert. We were young and wild and free. I’m sorry, Dr. Cooper, but I have to fuck up your theories. Dorothy was a light bulb, a shiny piece of mica.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: And your childhood?

  VALERIE: I counted roses on the swing seat cover. I dreamed of a typewriter. I pissed in a nasty boy’s juice.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: Your upbringing has been described as loveless and violent. Your language and your attitude are characterized by a strong sense of abandonment.

  VALERIE: Motherhood is potential for social change. Everything of value has been built by mothers. Dorothy built a house without money. She gave me food for fifteen years. And sunshine and blood.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: The ability to love is directly linked to the ability of the small child to rouse tender feelings in the mother.

  VALERIE: Hey, hey, Cooper! What do you know about love?

  DR. RUTH COOPER: I am not the patient.

  VALERIE: Cosmogirl has gone for good. That’s all I know.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: I know you’re feeling despair.

  VALERIE: Why do you always wear those ugly glasses?