by Sigrid Nunez
One day around the time David Foster Wallace killed himself, I asked the woman at the gym if she remembered that our first conversation had been about Infinite Jest. She did not, and she thought I’d made a mistake. She’d heard of the book, but she was pretty sure she hadn’t read it. I never read long books like that, she said. Who has the time?
IV
Women’s stories are often sad stories.
Like most people past the age of sixty, Woman A often thinks about growing old. At the same time, she often thinks back to those years when old age seemed a very distant thing, more like an option than a law of nature. After graduating from college, she had gone to live in a large city. In those days, rather than look for a husband, or even a steady boyfriend, she was happy to date several different men, and given that she was attractive, fun-loving, and not terribly choosy, this goal was not hard to achieve. Of course, this playing the field wasn’t going to last, it wasn’t supposed to last (remarkable, in fact, how fast it got old), and she had imagined herself, in due time, settling down with the One. But long before this could happen, now and then when she happened to see a certain type of couple—an elderly woman accompanied by some geezer with rounded shoulders and sparse white flyaway hair, his belt riding high on his ribs—she would feel a sort of ache for the old man she herself was going to end up with one far-off day. That man, as she saw him, though bereft of youth, would still have certain essential things. To begin with, thanks to a long and successful career, he’d have plenty of money to live on. He’d have a good heart, and in spite of the frailties of old age, he’d have his dignity. (It goes without saying he’d have all his marbles.) He and she would live a quiet but stimulating life together, a rich, elegant life, as she saw it: going to concerts and plays and movies, and traveling abroad, though never as part of any god-awful retirees’ group tour please. Past the age of passion, they would still be romantic, as anyone who saw them, as she did, against the backgrounds of those foreign cities and exotic landscapes could tell. As the years passed, the image of the old man began to appear to her more and more clearly, almost as if he were walking toward her. But as more time passed, his image began, as if walking backward, to recede. And now that she finds herself facing a different old age from the one she used to imagine, the question won’t leave her alone. It plays in her head, like something from an old song, or a poem she was forced to memorize in school: Where is the old man? Oh where is the kind, companionable old dear? Could somebody please tell her?
That kind of woman’s story.
* * *
—
Another story, this one set in Umbria.
. . . where, one summer, Woman B had rented an old farmhouse. Every morning, before it got too hot, she would go for a run in the hills. Most mornings, always at the crest of the same hill, near the remains of a medieval watchtower, she would see the same car parked by the side of the road and the old man to whom it belonged standing nearby, leaning on his cane. The man had a dog, a golden-haired spaniel, that would hurtle furiously barking in her direction whenever she approached. Each time this happened, the old man, failing to remember her from before, would call out, Signora! Ha paura dei cani? And each time she would assure him no, she was not afraid of dogs.
The first few mornings, out of courtesy as well as a sense that the old man would probably welcome a bit of attention, she stopped to chat. Her Italian wasn’t very good, but since he never remembered her, let alone the substance of their previous conversations, little Italian was needed. She gathered that he was some kind of retired workman and that he had lived all his life in those hills, the descendant of people who had once worked the land belonging to one of the region’s castles. She was never sure why he chose to drive always to this particular spot to walk his dog. He himself was too frail to take more than a few cautious steps at a time.
One day, when the air was much heavier than usual, the woman stripped off the long-sleeved shirt she always wore over her sports bra and tied it around her waist. Just as the old watchtower came into view, the dog came barking toward her. Ha paura dei cani? But as she approached she saw that something wasn’t right; the man was plainly agitated. She was afraid that maybe the heat had got to him. But a few steps closer and she understood. Indeed, the man made no effort to conceal his lust, eyes raking her half-naked torso, sighing, Ah, signoraaah, and lolling out his tongue as if in mimicry of the dog panting at their feet.
She was about to move on when, to her dismay, he let his cane clatter to the ground, and, seizing her bare arm with one hand, began energetically stroking it with his other. A stream of lascivious burbles and grunts poured from his lips. Taking care not to knock him off balance, she managed to wrench herself from his grasp and sprint away.
Easy enough to laugh off the incident, which had been, after all, more comical than anything else. (Like being caught by a satyr, as she would describe it to friends.) But there was also something lingeringly unsettling about it. That she had never felt in any real danger didn’t mean there hadn’t been an element of violence in his behavior. More troubling, perhaps, was something she saw in his face at the time but did not identify until later: far from being ashamed, the old goat had been proud of his arousal.
Even with the slump of age, he was several inches taller than her and, however weak, still carried considerable bulk. It wasn’t hard to see the powerfully built man he must once have been. Not hard at all to imagine a dangerous and virile young brute capable of seizing a helpless woman he happened to meet in a lonely spot and whom she’d have had no hope of escaping.
It was doubtful that the old man remembered this encounter any better than he’d remembered any previous one. In any case, after that morning she never stopped to speak with him again. Each time she saw him, though, she was struck by the same thought. Here he was, in his eighties at least. No memory, no legs, no wind—yet how the mere sight of a bit of female flesh could knock him off his perch. Surely it had been a while since he’d been capable of fucking. But still. He wanted. He lusted. Even at the risk of falling and breaking a hip—the catastrophe that spells the end for so many old folks—he just had to cop a feel. The wildness in his rheumy eyes, the panting, the crude guttural noises—it was as if there among those ancient sunstruck green hills she had been confronted not by a fellow human being but by some uncontrollable force.
V
There was only one hope she didn’t and wouldn’t allow herself to hold on to: that if, in almost thirty years, she hadn’t found a man, not a single one, who was exclusively significant for her, who had become inevitable to her, someone who was strong and brought her the mystery she had been waiting for, not a single one who was really a man and not an eccentric, a weakling or one of the needy the world was full of—then the man simply didn’t exist, and as long as this New Man did not exist, one could only be friendly and kind to one another, for a while. There was nothing more to make of it, and it would be best if women and men kept their distance and had nothing to do with each other until both had found their way out of the tangle and confusion, the discrepancy inherent in all relationships. Perhaps one day something else might come along but only then, and it would be strong and mysterious and have real greatness, something to which each could once again submit.
Perhaps one day. But since these words were written, almost a half century ago, in an autobiographical story by Ingeborg Bachmann, men and women have become only more divided.
The tangle is tighter, the confusion deeper, the discrepancies starker. Red states and blue states. And forget friendly and kind.
A construction worker on-site accidentally backs into a woman on the sidewalk and says, Sorry. She snarls something I don’t catch and he responds, I said sorry. She gives him the finger and keeps walking. He calls after her: I said sorry! Without turning around she screams, It’s too fucking late to be sorry. Fine, he screams. I take it back. I’m not fucking sorry.
What a mess
.
An argument with a tableful of women, one of whom tells the story of a woman who, in response to catcalling by a pair of men, dug into her pants, pulled out her tampon, and threw it at them.
I was the only one who thought she should not have done that.
She had a right to defend herself, the others said.
According to Bachmann, fascism is the primary element in the relation between a man and a woman.
Overstated.
Like Angela Carter’s assertion that, while behind every great man is a woman dedicated to his greatness, behind every great woman is a man dedicated to bringing her down.
Still.
You write ladies’ novels, correct? said the novelist to his female colleague.
Oh what dark neck of the woods have we entered here.
The Bachmann story, “Three Paths to the Lake,” appears in her collection Three Paths to the Lake (the original German title was Simultan), which was published in 1972, a year before she died of burns suffered in a fire. Five stories. Five women, each one suffering from some form of emotional turmoil, each one feeling trapped, isolated, anxious, and confused about her place in patriarchal society, and struggling for a language to express what she’s going through.
George Balanchine said, If you put a group of men on the stage, you have a group of men, but if you put a group of women on the stage you have the whole world.
If you put a group of women in a book, you have “women’s fiction.” To be shunned by almost all male readers and no few female ones as well.
When Bachmann, who from an early age had been renowned for her poetry, began publishing stories, they were dismissed by critics as Frauengeschichten, meaning stories about banal and insignificant matters, female concerns of possible interest only to other women. (Bachmann herself first imagined the book as a kind of homage to the women of her native Austria.)
Around the same time that Bachmann’s collection was published, in a novel in progress Elizabeth Hardwick wrote: Do you know a happy woman?
The catcalling men turned out to be plainclothes cops. They arrested the woman. I forget how her story ends.
* * *
—
I have learned that there exists a word, onsra, in Bodo, a language spoken by the Bodo people in parts of northeastern India, that is used to describe the poignant emotion a person experiences when that person realizes that the love they have been sharing with another is destined not to endure. This word, which has no equivalent in English, has been translated as “to love for the last time.” Misleading. Most English-speaking people would probably take “to love for the last time” to mean to have at long last found one’s true, enduring love. For example, in a song composed by Carole King called “Love for the Last Time.” But when I first learned this translation of onsra I thought it meant something else entirely. I thought it meant to have experienced a love so overwhelming, so fierce and deep, that you could never ever ever love again.
* * *
—
I’ve never liked the genre of women’s fiction known as romance, but I am fascinated by stories of women in love, especially when the love is in some way unconventional or especially difficult, hopeless even, or frankly insane.
Women in Strange Love might be the title of a collection of such stories.
Take, for example, the love of the painter Dora Carrington for the writer Lytton Strachey. No matter that she knew he was gay (no matter that he once proposed marriage to Virginia Woolf), or that he was thirteen years older than her. A scandal from the start, theirs became a legendary story. Indeed, it is not for her painting but for her endless, hopeless love of Strachey, how it shaped her life, how it caused her death, that Carrington is known (that kind of woman’s story). For seventeen years, she was devoted to him. Not even her marriage to another man could separate them; all three had to live together. But then the man she married was not her but his object of desire. Having agreed to the marriage, she wrote a poignant letter to Strachey, lamenting the fate that made it impossible for the two of them to become man and wife. Then all three went to Venice on honeymoon together.
When Strachey died, of stomach cancer, Carrington survived less than two months before shooting herself. In the stomach. She was just shy of thirty-nine. Not her first suicide attempt. “There is nothing left for me to do,” she had told the Woolfs the day before. “I did everything for Lytton.”
She didn’t have a gun in the house so she went next door and borrowed one, like a cup of sugar. A rabbit gun. (“Like some small animal left” had been Virginia Woolf’s parting impression of her.) The wrong weapon for the job, it seems: meaning a long, slow, painful dying.
D. H. Lawrence, so obsessed with the subject—and so confident in his authority on it—that he wrote a whole novel called Women in Love, accused Carrington of hating “real” men. One of the novel’s women in love is a caricature: pretty, deceptively innocent-looking Minette Darrington is really a deep-down lascivious pervert. And not an artist as Carrington was, but (twist of the knife) an artist’s model.
In a short story written many years later, another caricature that Lawrence appears to have based on Carrington is gang-raped and she commits suicide.
VI
I went again to visit my friend. The treatments had failed. The tumors had spread. She was back in the hospital.
I booked the same room where I’d stayed before.
As you’ll see, my host texted me, our household has a new member!
A young cat, eyes the color of bourbon, silver gray and sleek as a seal.
I shouldn’t have let the grandkids name him, she said. Now he’s stuck with Booger.
A rescue cat. They found him trapped in a dumpster, she said. Badly dehydrated and just skin and bones. They didn’t think he’d survive. But look at him now!
Nine lives, I said, thinking of my friend. Badly dehydrated. Just skin and bones.
She was angry, my friend. She was very angry, she wanted to smash everything in sight, she said. Not at God. She wasn’t angry at God, of course not, she didn’t believe in God, she said. And certainly not at her doctor, she adored her oncologist, her whole medical team, she said, they had done everything they possibly could for her, and they had been kind. At whom, then? At herself, she said. My first instinct was right, she said. I should have obeyed it. I should never have put myself through all that torture, the vomiting, the diarrhea, the fatigue—horrific, horrific—and, in the end—
False hope, she said. I should never have given in to false hope. I can never forgive myself for that, she said. Pause. Never: as if that could still mean a long time.
And now here we are, she said. And what have I got? Months, maybe. At most a year. But probably not that long.
I’m trying not to panic, she said. I’m trying to keep my head. I don’t want to go out kicking and screaming. Oh no, not me! Not me! Lashing out in rage, drowning in self-pity. Who wants to die like that? Half-demented with fear.
On the other hand, make no mistake, she said: she was no stoic. She did not want to go through excruciating pain. Pain was something that did terrify her. Pain was the thing that terrified her most. Because you can’t be self-possessed if you’re in agony, she said. In that kind of pain you can’t think straight, you’re a desperate animal, you can think of only one thing.
It wasn’t as though she were old and frail, she said. All her life she’d taken care of her health, and now she was thinking that all that care, all that regular exercise and healthful eating, would only make things harder. My heart is strong my doctor said, she said. What if that means that my body will keep trying to fight, that I’ll have to suffer and suffer up to my last breath.
Like her father, she said. The doctors had given him days but it turned out to be weeks, he had hung on and on, by the time he died he was completely insane. A terrible death, she said. Barbaric. Nobody should
have to die like that.
How should a person die, she said. Get her the dummies’ guide. Oh but forget books, she didn’t want to read anything, she didn’t want to do research, she said. It was funny, she said, for a while that is what I wanted, or thought I wanted, to educate myself, the way I did about the cancer itself, to find out as much as I could, and God knows I learned a ton, much of it quite interesting, even fascinating, she said, I sank into it, and reading about it I forgot what I was reading, if that makes any sense, I mean at times I was so absorbed in the material I forgot why I was studying it, and isn’t that the wonderful thing about reading, how it takes you out of yourself. But all that’s changed, she said. I have no desire to read about dying, or death, what the great minds, what the philosophers had to say about it, you could tell me that the smartest person in the world had just written the most brilliant book on the subject and I wouldn’t touch it. I don’t care. Just as I have no desire to write about what I’m going through. I don’t want to spend my last days in the same struggle, the struggle to find the right words—curse of my life, when I think about it. Which surprised me, she said, because at first I thought of course I should write about it, and I would write about it, my last book about last things, or the thing, the distinguished thing, I should say, she said, quoting Henry James. Wouldn’t it be impossible not to write about it I thought, my friend said. But very soon I changed my mind. I changed my mind, my friend said again, and I know I won’t change it back. The idea of writing about what I’m going through makes me sick, she said. Not that I’m not already sick, literally, sick to death, quite literally, what a thought, she said, laughing. You see, there I go again with the fucking words. But what I mean, she said, is that I’ve had it. I’ve done enough languaging. I’m sick of writing, sick of word searching. I’ve said enough—I’ve said too much. I wish— Am I making any sense?
