She nodded, still looking at the Bible. The past is in the past, she said. I nodded, though the past was all around me, its yeasty breath hot on the back of my neck.
Jon grew bored when there were no more pictures of him and left to join the old woman, Pat, at the kitchen table. As I flipped through the remaining photos, a startling pair of eyes looked out at me—steady and bright as two small seas set in a serious face, the curved mouth dark with lipstick.
Who is this? I asked, holding out the photograph.
That’s Edith, said Joan. Your grandmother.
I squinted at the image. She had all the parts of me I’d never seen on anyone else. My small, strong shape; my narrow waist and green eyes. Most of all, that look. Something soft and hard at the same time—in her body, but most of all her face, that gaze so firm and sad. It was not a quality I considered, when I considered my own qualities, but I recognized it. She was young, early twenties. Already so weary, as if she knew something she couldn’t un-know. I remembered meeting her when she was dying, that wild rasp of death crawling up inside her.
The final photographs showed an older man with Joan as a girl. He had a broad face, still handsome at what must have been seventy. I saw where we all got that mouth, and our skin.
That’s Pop Lightman, said Joan. He was an Indian.
30
Four months into loving her, I cried. Once I started, I could not stop. It was not voluptuous. It was not ecstatic. It was not sweet, except in the way that a sweet thing is a siren, its call impossible to ignore. Except in the way that a sweet thing, a thing you cannot ignore, can ravage. If sweet means irresistible, then my tears were sweet. But they were not pretty and they did not taste good.
In the past, I rarely cried over lovers. I never fought with lovers. I never waited for lovers. And I never lost control. My worst fear was to be needy. When I thought about neediness, I felt like there were snakes on me. When I thought about asking for something that someone couldn’t or wouldn’t give me, I felt like I had stepped in shit. Women who obsessed over men who did not give them what they needed repelled me, as if need were a contagious disease. I looked at the brokenhearted, at the needy, at the unrequited, at women who waited like my mother had waited and I thought, never.
In Aesop’s fable of the fox and the grapes, the fox desires the grapes. The grapes, however, are out of his reach. So the fox tells himself he does not want the grapes. The grapes make him sick. He convinces himself.
When I was still a child, I had decided that grapes weren’t so sweet after all. I would rather have lived in a world without the sweetness of grapes than in this world, where grapes were often out of reach, and did not lower themselves no matter how hard I cried. At thirty-two, I bit Amaia’s lip. That sweet flooded my mouth and I remembered.
I often kidded about the voracious need that must be hiding deep inside me. I sat for hours in therapy sessions, searching for my feelings. I wanted to “get in touch with them.” I thought that when I finally found them it would be like a reunion with a childhood friend—emotional, surely, but also sweet—a reward for all my hard work. I did not think that I was leaving messages for a serial killer. I did not think that my feelings, receiving my invitation, would arrive on my doorstep like a cabal of madwomen and refuse to leave. I thought that the host of the party decided when it ended and her guests went home. But feelings have terrible manners—they are like children, or drunks. They are mad. They gorge as the starved will gorge, until they are sick, until their stomachs split. As you or I would, if we were exiled for thirty years. They do not leave when you want them to. They leave when they are finished.
31
Later, we took our own pictures in the kitchen. Joan and Jon stood on either side of me, and I couldn’t help leaning away from Jon. He felt like a burning thing: I wouldn’t reach for it unless I had to.
We sat back down at the table and I showed them the pictures. Joan raised a plastic inhaler and the lips she pressed against its plastic mouth were the same Cupid’s bow of my mouth, and Jon’s.
Jon had not aged well. His body bloated, skin jaundiced, eyes murky in the way of lifetime smokers and drinkers. Years of use build a scrim between the addict and the world. I only saw this after I got clean. A year sober, I ran into an old boyfriend who was still using and saw it for the first time, like a smudged window between us.
In these new pictures, the resemblance between our faces was obvious, though Jon was no longer the handsome man from those old photos. He didn’t look like my father. He just looked like a man with my mouth.
He seemed childlike. Simple. But underneath I sensed another Jon. A colder, more seeing Jon, someone searching. I remembered that my mother had once described him as smart like a fox. She had once described me in similar terms. It occurred to me that his facade might be intentional. Maybe he thought it was what I wanted, that I had come there looking for someone who was looking for me.
My mother, though wise in many ways, had retained a certain innocence. I had manipulated her easily when I was still a child, driven by my own desperations. She was a smart and perceptive woman, but one easily blinded by love and by her own wishes. When she met Jon, she was twenty-two. Of course she fell for that beautiful boy, so eager to say what she wanted to hear. But I was not a child. I saw the part of him that was capable of anything.
You look like your mom, he said. How is she?
She’s great, I said.
I remember when you were born, he said. At the cabin. Not far from here, on a lake.
I nodded, still staring at the photo we’d just taken.
You should take her there, said Joan, watching him. Seven years older, she had spent her life watching him, watching after him.
You were born on a shower curtain, he continued. A new one—we bought it just for you.
I laughed at this. I knew that the shower curtain had been tucked under a sheet, over a bed. He smiled, but distantly, like someone who doesn’t get the joke, or isn’t listening.
I cut the umbilical cord, he said. Your mother made me bury the placenta in the backyard.
Wow, I said. It seemed he’d been waiting all afternoon to say these things. His voice was gentle, like pulling acorns from his pocket.
I should get going, I said, and pushed back my chair. No one argued, but I felt something retract in him, sulky. I hugged Joan and Pat.
I’ll walk you out, he said.
In the driveway, he stared at me. My hand clutched the car door handle.
I’ve waited a long time for this day, he said. It sounded like a lie. Sometimes the hardest true things sound like lies when you say them, too. I can’t always tell the difference. I’d love to come visit you in the city, he said. I nodded.
Maybe sometime, I said. When I’m not so busy. I got in the car and drove away. In the rearview, I could see him standing in the middle of the street, waving until I turned.
Thirty minutes later, I could breathe. I called Amaia.
You are brave, she said. But I didn’t believe her. I had not even been able to look him in the eye.
They are sick, I told her, and described their faces, how they seemed buried inside themselves. I didn’t say, I am sick, too. I didn’t tell her, I have what they have. Only grace had stepped between me and that fate. Grace, and my mother. She had glimpsed that future, and driven our car in the other direction. She had been brave. She had had nothing, but she closed that door and painted over it. Jon had never come looking for me, had never called or sent a birthday card. She found me a better father. So what was I looking for?
32
Amaia’s wife requested that she never speak to me when they were both in their house. Amaia agreed. I didn’t like it, but I saw that it was fair. We had only been talking for a month, then. They had been together for eight years. I did not know how long they would continue living in the same house.
The wife was a teacher at their local elementary school. In the desert, a town is an island. The wife did not want t
o leave. She could not leave for at least the school year. When I tried to talk about this, Amaia went quiet. She said things like, there’s no place for us. I don’t know how this can work. I’m not right for you. She stopped answering the phone.
I cried. I curled on my bed in my now-empty apartment and cried like an animal. Humans are the only animals known to weep tears of emotion. When I say that I cried like an animal, I mean that I cried like a baby. My cries had no language, no thought, they consumed me like hunger, like sleep, like the one thing a baby knows—that love is the only thing keeping it alive. When the baby’s mother leaves the room, the baby remembers this and screams. Over time, the baby learns that the mother always returns. The baby learns to soothe itself, to trust that the mother will not let it die.
Colicky babies seem slower to learn this. Even the mother’s warmth cannot assuage the terror of their dependence. When I was a baby, my mother did not sleep. She had been a neglected child. She could not bear the sound of my cries. She came running every time. Finally, half-mad with exhaustion, armed with the wisdom of other mothers, she locked herself in the bathroom. I cried. I screamed the brilliant fury of the dying. In my tiny animal mind, I was dying. My mother turned on the shower, leaned her back against the bathroom door, and she cried, too.
My tears did not bring my Amaia running. She did not answer the phone. Please answer the phone, I texted her. I need you. I did not say, I feel like I am dying, though I did. She did not answer.
Maybe it is reductive to draw comparisons between these things. Maybe it is obvious. Psychologists have been comparing them for centuries. I had read the psychologists, just as I had read books about addiction while high on heroin. I had read books about bulimia while bingeing. All my life I have lamented the distance between what I know and what I do.
When we were together, she often adored me. She adored me with gifts, with love, with her mouth and hands. I went stupid with pleasure. I thought I had never felt so loved.
Your father was like that, my mother said, when I described it. You and he were so close when you were little. He adored you. I remembered. The Captain had written songs for me, had sung me to sleep and awake. Had spent hours listening to my stories, catching my baseballs, showering me with kisses. But when he was gone, said my mother, pausing to find the right words. It was like he was dead.
I never remember you crying, my mother said. Have I ever told you that?
I went to work, I met with friends, I ran laps around Prospect Park, but I only ever did one thing, and I never stopped: I waited.
I waited for her to call me back. I waited for her to come to New York. I waited for her wife to move out. I waited for some sign that she would stay. Each day, the waiting blotted out more of everything else. My memory went patchy. My hands went shaky. I texted her through entire meals with Amit. Through entire movies, classes, and six-hour drives. Every time I opened the apartment door, I wished for her to be on the other side of it.
Once, I walked out of a classroom in the middle of my own lecture to take her call.
Once, I crashed into a parked car while staring straight ahead, my mind gone.
She’s worth it, Amit said. You’re worth it. But increasingly, when I told Amit about the wife, how they still stayed in the same hotel room, went to church and family dinners together, she got a funny look. I knew what she was thinking: never. I would have thought the same thing.
33
My sweet wild girl,
You are off on your journey. My brave girl. My curious girl. My girl whose burning heart will not be satisfied by the easy thing. You, mi amor, are an unusual girl. I am grateful that you are rushing through my life right now.
This time, I stopped in downtown Brooklyn on my way out of town and bought three Nets T-shirts. Pat had devoured the truffles I’d brought, murmuring happily as she unwrapped them with her knotty hands, so I picked up some miniature cheesecakes at Junior’s.
My mother had explained that Pat was essentially the widow of my great aunt, Camille, whom they called Mina. In the interim between my visits, Joan had filled in the details. Pat and Mina had been childhood best friends in the 1930s until Pat’s family moved to another town. Both had married men in their twenties, then reunited when they coincidentally ended up employed by the same doorknob factory. They worked at that factory for the rest of their careers, and lived together for the rest of Mina’s life. Together, they had traveled the country, and, I gathered, been the emotional caretakers of Joan and Jon, whose father and mother were indisposed by alcoholism and anger, respectively.
Joan was a devout Baptist and she described Pat and Mina’s relationship in careful words. It must not have been easy to navigate that tacit acknowledgement in a way that honored her affection for them, her religious faith, and what I’m sure she already knew of my own sexual proclivities. As a younger woman, I might not have been capable of appreciating that complexity, or responding in language that mirrored hers. I knew little of my motivations for having sought her out, but I knew that they did not include challenging the delicate balance of her values. I was grateful to have already learned that opposing beliefs can rest in the minds of not a few, but most people, myself included.
Amaia’s family did not overtly acknowledge her relationship, though her wife was a part of her family and participated as such. They simply did not name it. Socialized in my mother’s post-sixties feminist worldview, I once would have found this outrageous. I had named my bisexuality before I ever kissed a girl. Luckily, experience had humbled me before I met Amaia.
Pat’s story moved me. And Joan’s ability to accept and even revere their love moved me. It was easy to be curious about them, to access empathy for their lives and limitations. Their vulnerabilities did not repel me, as Jon’s did. Speeding down Interstate 95 that gray morning, I already dreaded his close smell, braced myself for the soft scalpel of his gaze. His effect on me was shocking. Though it discomfited me, the strength of it was also magnetic. I have long known that loathing is nearly always a symptom of self-recognition. And I knew even then that I was not looking for him so much as myself.
34
In my last year of college, I took a job as a dominatrix. At work, I dressed in nurse uniforms, in police uniforms, in fishnets and corsets like a saloon prostitute in an old western. Men paid me to be a mother, a maid, a customs officer, a nurse, a sadist. Sometimes, they paid to hurt me. They paid to want. Doctors, lawyers, janitors, teachers, politicians, husbands, soldiers, holy men and criminals, they brought it to me. They begged. They crawled across floors. They wept. They grasped at my ankles and howled with hunger. They were ecstatic with want, sainted with want, bodies writhing and cringing, burning up on pyres of want, grasping at the wet wick of my body.
When I was twenty-two, I saw a woman suspended from a ceiling by hooks dug through the flesh of her back. We were at a party in Manhattan. She went by the name Lola, and I Justine—my namesake the Marquis de Sade’s famous submissive heroine. In a rubber dress and stilettos, I stood on a staircase of a warehouse in Chelsea and tilted my head back. Lola’s eyes at half-mast, her face was beatific, body glittering with makeup and pearly sweat. The stainless steel hooks gathered and lifted the skin over her shoulder blades in two mounds. All 120 pounds of her hung from those two handfuls of flesh. The puncture wounds wept, but Lola did not. Her body glowed with the pain, as if electrified—as if Electra, brilliant with relief, with glory, with revenge, with kathartikos. She was beautiful. I looked up at her and imagined my younger self, at eleven or twelve years old, standing beside me on that staircase, all those leathered bodies writhing below us. Look, I imagined saying to that girl.
Later, when I remembered this, I understood it as a desire to annihilate my own innocence. I had conjured the child in me at her most hurting age and I showed her something shocking, incomprehensible. I wanted to break that innocence, so that she would never be shocked again.
Now, I think different. It was a tender impulse, not a violent one,
and what I showed her was not incomprehensible. I don’t know what hoisted Lola up to those rafters, but I know she chose it. I know that she glowed like a planet, radiated light and gravity, colors like cosmic gases colliding, her body ringed as Saturn. When they lowered her, she was just a woman. Her face, slick with sweat, was softer than I had ever seen it, as if she’d just been born. Black hair wet against her forehead, she smiled at me, touched my face with her hot hand.
The Catholic monks of Opus Dei, like their thirteenth-century predecessors, practice self-flagellation in prayer. In India, Pakistan, Iraq, and Iran, some Shiites march in parades, practicing their versions—zanjeer zani and tatbir—sometimes with knives, blades, and chains. In Chinese medicine, coins are dragged across the body until blood rises to the surface in great striping hickeys. This treatment, cao gio, literally translates to “catch the wind,” and is believed to treat “wind illness” and restore the body’s balance. In this country, some teenage girls cut themselves with knives and scissors and few of them describe the urge as one to punish.
By the time I looked up at Lola, I had spent hours under tattoo guns, had slid poison needles into my arms, had shoved my own hand down my throat, had flung my body at so many perilous things, but I had never wanted to die. I was not a masochist. What I mean is, the difference between what is holy and what is pathological is sometimes a matter of fashion. What I mean is, maybe I already knew that my own healing would never look like a laying of hands, not the gentle kind. Maybe I wanted to spare that girl the extra hell of believing she was broken. We are all broken. And repair often hurts. And the ways we find to fix ourselves do not always look like fixing. Sometimes they fail, but they are never wrong.
Abandon Me Page 16
