I remember learning in a biological anthropology class that men, left without the law to subjugate their natures, would be inclined to rape every woman that crossed their paths. (This is a difficult notion to grasp in a world where many men are too timid to ask a woman for her phone number.) But if these theories about male aggression in an antediluvian age are almost quaintly cartoonish, the emotional violence of modern love, and the potential for it to be acted out in physical ways, is not charming at all. The fact that the person you love may at any point during the fifty days or fifty years you spend together turn out to really surprise you, show himself to be quite lousy and deceitful and dishonest, may at any time abandon you with nothing, fall in love with his secretary or run off with his boss, that even the surest things in love often turn out to be just temporary shelter—this is a fact of love that makes everyone uncomfortable, and it’s just too scary to contemplate. I have come to think of domestic violence as yet another of the many astonishments that may come our way, that may be a part of having chosen to love some particular man.
Just the same, this kind of fatalism comes quite close to naturalizing domestic violence, it is akin to saying that battery has its own ineluctable dynamic and because many couples in these tortured, brutal unions somehow stick together there must be a reason for it: that is the closest we come to employing Cartesian logic when explaining these relationships, and we thereby justify something bad just because it happens to be true. But how do we talk about observable uncomfortable facts—how do we talk about Nicole as responsible for her own life, and even for her death, because while she might have finally left him in the weeks leading up to the murder, for seventeen years she stayed? How do we say of an anonymous battered woman, a mere statistic, that she deserves the grief of her miserable marriage because she’s been in it for so long, and besides, every time she leaves we spend hours at my kitchen table with legal pads planning a whole new life for her, and then the next day she goes back anyway—and I have a bad day at work because I got no sleep? How do we say to this woman something about how trying it is to be a friend in all this, that it would be easier if she just got some good pancake makeup and some large Jackie O. sunglasses and resigned herself to a life of camouflage that could very well end in murder? And more to the point, if we forget about individuals or what it is like to be party to a particular domestic violence situation, and just think about wife-beating as a public policy issue, how do we come up with a reasonable view of these relationships that allows us to admit to the ambivalent resignation that is the guiding force in most lives, to assert that just the same it’s not okay to live with a man who beats you up, but still accept and understand that a woman living in this situation does not want to give up a sickness that is comfortable?
How do we simultaneously hold three states of mind that are philosophically reconcilable, but fall apart when there’s another night at the kitchen table, another call to the police, another trip to the emergency room and finally a gruesome arrival at the coroner’s office?
O.J. and Nicole got divorced in 1992, they attempted a reconciliation in 1993 and they split up once and for all shortly after Mother’s Day in 1994. Nicole’s thirty-fifth birthday was on May 19 of that year, and O.J. had presented her with a gift of diamond-drop earrings that were six carats apiece and an exquisite antique bracelet—a sparkling array of rows of diamonds and a row of sapphires in a platinum setting. By May 22, she had returned these ornaments, in an unusually scrupulous display of goodbye to all that, one that seems to have transformed a line drawn in the sand to one etched in stone. It was reported that O.J., in turn, passed his spurned offerings along to Paula Barbieri, who, in her aptly titled book The Other Woman, resignedly admits—echoing the words of Princess Diana in her BBC interview—that she had come to accept by that time that she “had entered a relationship not of two people, but of three.”
But while Nicole spit jewelry in O.J.’s face to end it, in 1993 she was the one who had sought the reunion, actively campaigning for it, undeterred by a reluctant O.J., who apparently told her that he was happy with Paula. A five-page handwritten letter she sent to O.J. in March of that year was omitted from the murder trial’s evidence—in what seemed a rare triumph for the prosecution—but it joined a massive pile of documents that appeared to be known to everyone but the jury. “I want to be with you!” Nicole wrote. “I want to wake up with you in the morning and hold you at night. I want to hug and kiss you every day. I want us to be the way we used to be. O.J., I want to come home.” She called him, and when he did not return her calls, she called again and again. She sent the videotapes of their wedding and of their children’s births. She sent another note on an index card, saying, “O.J., I understand that it’s probably too late but I have to do it for myself and the kids or I would never forgive myself.” Since he would not return her phone calls at all, she assured him that she would only call in an emergency, and for him to please take that seriously and get back to her immediately. After that she only called his secretary, Cathy Randa, to try to get through to him, and Cathy would tell her that he didn’t want to see her or talk to her, to just leave him alone. He told friends he liked his life without Nicole, he liked that there was no more screaming and yelling, he liked the way with Paula it wasn’t so crazy.
And then in May, they got back together and went on vacation in Mexico.
So let’s try saying these words again: no means no. Where did such a notion fit into the Brown-Simpson marriage? In a situation like theirs, when somebody ends up dead, it’s not much different from understanding that on the nineteenth-century American frontier, when two men willingly entered a duel, they understood that it was not a matter of if, only of who. Marriages that involve a protracted history of domestic violence are basically the Wild West of relationships.
It does not matter that O.J. killed Nicole after she left, or that when a violent marriage ends in femicide, 75 percent of these murders occur after she has really severed ties: WHAT MATTERS IS THAT SHE STAYED. Blame it on battered wife syndrome, on her friends, her family, Southern California in general or Brentwood in particular: it doesn’t matter. There are women who walk out on a man who punches them, and there are women who stay: that’s the main difference between people who get killed and people who don’t. Seventeen years later it’s too late.
Nicole knew this: she wrote her will on May 8 and she was dead by June 12.
Please don’t mistake any of this for a lack of sympathy for women in Nicole’s situation. I’m just not sure what anyone can do besides feel bad. Feel bad and raise their own daughters as if it’s possible that they will grow up to be President of the United States or CEO of Microsoft or the doctor who finds a cure for AIDS or the economist who discovers a way to end the inversely proportionate relationship between unemployment and inflation. Raise your daughters to laugh at any man who even thinks about throwing a punch, and raise them to be people with Filofaxes full of activities that are too fun and important and fascinating to be disturbed by a blow to the right eye. Raise your daughters to always think that any unpleasant situation—be it with a man or a manager or any of the expendable and fruitless annoyances that ruin our lives—just isn’t worth it. Nobody needs this, / don’t want it, I’m outta here, there are better things to do, anyone who disagrees can fuck off and die.
It’s not easy to act this way, especially when it comes to love. The sanest women can become zany dingbats whenever a man shows up. I don’t fancy myself to be terribly level, but I’d like to think that I would walk away from someone I loved who broke my arm, who tore at my skin, who made my eye so swollen I could not see through it. I think I would. But I know I might not. If someone came along and seemed to really understand me, to be able to touch my loneliness, to reach into me and find that very empty place and be able to make contact, to make me feel alive and loving and loved—well, I don’t know how easy that would be to walk away from. And I think the violence, with its implied intensity and rawness, would be pa
rt of my belief in the strength of our connection. It is no wonder that women can find men who are violent compelling—in a world in which most of us are cut off from our physicality and willing to some extent to reason things out at times of conflict, men of fists and fisticuffs embody an urge to be done with all that chatter, to break through all the complexity and go to the raw, deep, hard emotions. Violent men can easily be romanticized and seen as frustrated, wanting to say so much but being hindered not just by the limitations of language, but also by some desire to be efficient and true, to go for immediacy and dispense with civility.
If a picture speaks a thousand words, it is easy to believe that a fist applied hard and fast to the eye, the cheek or the jaw may speak many thousand more. It is easy to forget that the only significant words in that manually made thought are probably I hate you, that the thousands of other unraveling ideas are too incoherent and deformed to be worth it. It is easy to forget so much about the simple diseased quality of male violence against women because it is exciting, because most of us are too numb to find very many things we especially want to argue constructively about, much less break things over.
But here is one thing I’d like to bring to any decision to stay: I’d like to accept my fate. I hope I would be able to realize that if I were choosing to believe that someone who hurt me badly could also love me, then I have accepted this dance, I have agreed to take the waltz, I am willing to engage in the games of manipulation and fear and injury that I will call love. I will accept the risk. I will sustain physical damage and I may die. But it is worth it. I finally have my Heathcliff, I finally have my mad love, my movie plot, my Tennessee Williams drama. I need this and want this, I may be sick as far as the rest of the world is concerned, but who are those people really, who are the ones who would wish to judge me? They—those people who go to couples therapy and out to dinner on double dates, they who buy food processors and ice cream makers and bread bakers and learn how to use them, they who buy the Sunday New York Times on Saturday night and get the puzzle done before going to sleep, they who bring picnic baskets to concerts in the park, those people who unpack everything on the day that they move and don’t live surrounded by and stumbling over boxes and crates for weeks and months as if they may leave anytime, they who live in the light of day, who live always knowing, with everything around them obvious and clear: well, they don’t know what love is. They don’t know what I know.
I bet that’s exactly what Nicole thought about life with O.J. I bet she accepted her fate and her doom—her second thoughts only surfaced and solidified at the very end. I bet she left a safe-deposit box with pictures of her bruised face in it and the diary with its record of sixty-one instances of abuse, and I bet she told her friends over and over again, “O.J.’s going to kill me,” not because she was afraid it was so or that she was even trying to prevent it—I think she said it because she knew it was so. She was forecasting the weather, knowing full well that there’s nothing you can do to stop a hurricane. Nicole did not even run for cover: she continued to live in the same neighborhood as O.J.—though she was planning a move to Malibu—and she was involved with him almost until the end. “You don’t have dinner and live down the street from someone that you think is going to kill you,” said one of the correspondents whose letter was included in I Want to Tell You, and you’ve got to concede the point. Even worse, for a couple of years preceding her death, Nicole had an on-and-off affair with Marcus Allen, one of O.J.’s best friends, another Heisman Trophy recipient, whom many consider the Juice’s natural heir. She did this even though Marcus had gotten married in the backyard at Rockingham, she did this even though O.J.’s jealousy extended to all men walking the planet, but no one so much as this close friend and mighty symbol of who he had once been. She did this even though she knew O.J. was tailing her in his Bronco when she went to the market, the shoe store, the frame shop, everywhere (in fact, she was so aware of O.J. driving just behind her that she would wait until the last second to signal and make a turn, “just to fuck with him”). She did this even though she found O.J. hiding in the bushes outside her house. She did this in plain sight, allowing Marcus to park his car in her driveway, knowing perfectly well that O.J. was stalking her and would most certainly recognize it.
She did this, according to Faye Resnick, even after O.J. threatened to kill her if it continued, and even after numerous remonstrations from friends. “[Y]ou may be signing your death warrant,” Ms. Resnick recalls telling Nicole. “How do you think this can lead to anything but O.J. blowing up and maybe carrying out his threat? Nicole, even if he doesn’t kill you, what do you think he is going to do? This is even worse than before, if that’s possible. Marcus just got married to Kathryn, what, six months ago?… Look, I’m not your mother, but you’re doing something really off the wall here.”
Good advice, but Nicole had become part of this pact at age seventeen, just out of high school, when she was too young to consent in any sane and reasoned manner to the life she chose—but that’s the way it goes. She told people that O.J. had “molded” and “sculpted” her, that she was “his creation,” a “product” of his design and desires. Indeed, her belief that O.J. breathed the life force into the blob of clay she had once been is revealed when Nicole explains her need to keep trying with O.J. in terms of oxygen: “I’m afraid I might suffocate,” she told Faye, unaware of the perversity of this metaphor, that usually one is strangled and smothered by a person’s presence, not by his absence. For this woman the scary thing was not death by O.J.—it was death without him.
And their mutual obsession was completely Shakespearean in that their emotional lives, which should have remained essentially private, actually fueled drama and created activity around them, invited spectacle, demanded that others take sides, become accomplices. Faye Resnick makes it seem that minding this pair had become her full-time job. If theater seems more interesting to you than life, this is your kind of relationship. That somewhere in between all the craziness they managed to have children, be photographed for Christmas cards, make Hertz commercials, play golf, snort cocaine, go running, remodel a home, have Scrabble parties (my guess is that O.J. did not participate), have sex as many as five times a day and even exit a gathering at their own house, with Nicole saying by way of explanation (according to Faye), “Excuse us, please—we’re going to the bedroom and fuck now”: that they got anything done amid so much mess must indicate real resilience.
At times they must have believed that they could go on, back and forth, on and on like this forever. They could have continued the madness even if they remained divorced. They could have been like Burton and Taylor or Olivier and Leigh: I love you I hate you Please go No stay. With these couples, it’s never really over. Vivien Leigh was too depressed and difficult for Laurence Olivier, they of course divorced, he even remarried. And still you know that she was the great love of his life, that he never got over her, that he died in her thrall, but the relationship was just impossible day by day. Same with Burton and Taylor, who surely never replaced each other—he ended with some schoolmarmish Englishwoman with all the glamour and sensuality of a scone; and Ms. Taylor, well, God knows she tried—but just the same, what they had together was completely dysfunctional.
Perhaps if it weren’t for the abrupt stop to the madness that was mandated by the stab wounds that one of them inflicted on the other, O.J. and Nicole could have been like those famous theatrical couples. They might well have aged into a situation that found them thwarting the temptation to try again, however melancholy that resignation may be, no matter how sad it is to admit that love can be corrosive like lye. “It ate their future complete it waited for them / Staring and starving,” writes Ted Hughes, in “The Lovepet,” another Crow poem. “They gave it screams it had gone too far / It ate into their brains / It ate the roof / It ate lonely stone it ate wind crying famine / It went furiously off / They wept they called it back it could have everything.” The brilliance of this poem—well, one of many suc
h aspects—is that it tells of a couple whose strife and intensity is mutually annihilating, whose love for each other is wearing when it should be fortifying; and yet, the two people who are destroying each other are presented as a unified front: they are fighting against love, they are fighting to save love, mostly they are mistaking a mess for a mission. They are very much in it together, it is their feelings that are the enemy—as if their love and all its attendant emotions were an external force, an interloper, even a marauding army. The one constant in all destructive relationships—for men and women both—is a tendency to privilege the couple above the individual, a style of relating which allows even people as bright and gifted as Plath and Hughes to forget that a couple is made of two separate people. A couple desperate to stay in their sick dynamic can blame the whole wide world for tearing them apart, they can point to El Niño, to a butterfly who flapped her wings in Japan and sent a breeze their way, they can feel under siege, as if they’ve been thrown into a centrifuge that’s pulling at them, taking them limb for limb, turning them into amputees, diminished though they are, they are still together.
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