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A bag of shocking pink: occult imagery in contemporary American fiction by women

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A bag of shocking pink: occult imagery in contemporary American fiction by women

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Content 1 A BAG OF SHOCKING PINK: OCCULT IMAGERY IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION BY WOMEN By Lisa Locascio A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy (LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING) August 2016 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS I. A Bag Of Shocking Pink: Occult Imagery in Contemporary American Fiction By Women Introduction 6 “She made my soul happen”: Spiritual Wages, Psychic Weight, and Secret Places Chapter One 38 “An old lady writing about sex”: Mary Gaitskill, Veronica, and the (Gendered) Feminine Voice on the Page Chapter Two 84 “Something that could be attractive in either sex”: Judith Freeman, The Chinchilla Farm, Embodied and Inscribed (Western) Landscapes, Occult Whiteness, and the Hope Trope Conclusion 134 The Witch’s Pyramid II. Shut Down Hunt 163 Valentines 166 Hundred Mile House 183 Barri Gòtic 211 Consignment Maternity 235 21 Things Nobody Tells You About Blood Sludge 241 The White Room 260 Port Angeles 275 Spell For Making A Werewolf 296 Casa Del Something 302 Divination 303 Shut Down 310 3 Réunion 343 Bibliography 349 4 The point of this long-winded apology is to stress the metaphorical – that is, magical – and arbitrary nature of any taxonomic scheme. — Dale Pendell, Pharmako/Poeia I raised my hand up and held it before me as a sign. — Darcey Steinke, Easter Everywhere 5 A BAG OF SHOCKING PINK: OCCULT IMAGERY IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION BY WOMEN 6 INTRODUCTION “She made my soul happen”: Spiritual Wages, Psychic Weight, and Secret Places Joan Didion writes that we tell ourselves stories in order to live, but I write to keep going. I have come to believe that this is the same thing. Except for when it is not. A paradox, writing to finish, but also forward. I wish for both continuation and completion. I do more than wish. I desire, I insist, I make. Two oppositional wants expressed simultaneously, a habit of which women are always accused. Perhaps it makes sense that women writers put this supposed flaw to work in their literature. “My project seeks to define, historicize, and analyze a style of epiphany in fiction by late twentieth-century American women writers in which a character’s internal realizations are portrayed as surreal experiences,” begins the proposal I crafted to persuade my degree-granting institution and like patrons to provide me with money and space with and in which to pursue this project’s completion. I have termed these strange narrative happenings “occult imagery,” a name that uses the archaic secondary definition of “occult” (“secret; communicated only to the initiated”) to both challenge the conventional reading such scenes as whimsically “magical” and to signal the special function of these textual moments, which grant characters passage into a realm of prophesy and clairvoyance where female agency is textually inscribed. Writing this sentence took me the better part of a week, one of four in 2013 I spent at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where I had come to complete my novel. Early in that month, the call for fellowship applications arrived, its deadline before the end of my residency. And so I found myself once again navigating the perceived divide between the “critical” and the 7 “creative,” as went the shorthand in my department, an undertaking with a particularly wry environmental twist this time around, as I found myself literally using space reserved for “creative writing” to draft a “critical” document. That every communal meal seemed to end in a shouting match about the value of academe with other resident artists confirmed my suspicion that I was the living punchline of some cosmic joke. At twenty-eight, I had spent my life inside the academy, pursuing degrees and credentials in the fields of creative writing and literature. Four years earlier I had begun my doctoral coursework, quickly becoming acquainted with, and highly suspicious of, the ordering of privileged knowledges that held sway within my department, particularly that surrounding the discourse of literary theory, which my colleagues seemed to revere with a vaguely idolatrous intensity. How, and why, had I come to find myself fiercely defending this same hegemony of knowledge over desultory canola oil-rich meals a stone’s throw from Liberty University? Each night I returned to my studio frustrated, muttering under my breath, face red and hands sore from my gesticulatory defense of the ivory tower, and found still waiting for me there the daunting task of proposing my project. To describe the process of drafting the proposal I am tempted to rely on a panoply of comparisons to tasks I have never completed. Fine woodwork (the crafting of dollhouse furniture?), electrical engineering, the icing of a tiny, very important cake. Through these imaginary minute labors I seek to communicate the precision of focus required by the pursuit of clarity itself, an endeavor foreshadowing the arduous labor I could undertake only in that sacred diving bell of thought. Much of the success I had enjoyed as a student writer up to this point hinged on an ability to render feeling in image, a knack for lucidity honed through relentless editing. Yet as my education progressed I found the gulf between the two styles that had always 8 formed the complementary arms of my body of inquiry—the “creative” and the “critical”— widening rather than narrowing. The thrust of my artistic identity had become committed vulnerability, performed through direct statement. Yet in criticism this tactic felt awkwardly accurate, an unwelcome penetration of some veil. And so I became determined to force a confrontation between the two. Occult imagery is a feminist tool for unsettling the entrenched gendered dichotomy of public/domestic, which categorizes fiction by men as intrinsically worldly and external and fiction by women as innately personal and inconsequential. By identifying and exploring occult imagery in the work of three contemporary American authors, I aim to show how, by challenging the divide between interiority and exteriority, fiction can use an imagined impossible to reorder the real. That week at VCCA was just enough time to build a statement of how and why certain literatures had changed and shaped me, what place the combination had taken me, and what I understood of that alchemic combination of book and self. And yet in order to communicate I had to remove myself almost entirely. Cut back my “I” usage to a respectable rhetorical shadow. My strategy worked. I won the fellowship, and, later, further funds, with successive repurposed versions of the proposal. Nearly three years later, writing this introduction at another residency, I am inclined to rebel against the piece of writing that did me such good service. An author of fiction writing criticism, I created another fiction, one that erased me from my own inquiry, and in so doing became complicit in the gendering and classing of literary space that I had set out to illuminate, delimit, and explode. Fiction—the creation of a world and people imagined, at least in theory, as separate from oneself for the very reason that oneself is real and 9 one’s creations are not—is a fine and admirable goal, but my aim in these essays is distinct. Herein, alongside my close readings and analysis, I narrate for the reader the progression and shaping of my own readerly identity and critical praxis. For the story of this process has a main character. To tell it without her—without me—would be to lie, and falsehood obscures the focus I require in pursuit of clarity. When I was a teenage poet, I told the adults who praised my work and awarded me accolades that I liked to write poetry because it enabled me to lie and tell the truth at the same time. The marvel of my precocity formed the fundamental allure of my young literary career, and this statement was received as more of the whip-smart-assery that made me worthy of the judges’ attention. In this mode it served its purpose, but it was also the truest thing I could say about my writing. Then and now, I rely on “creative” discourses to shield and enshrine private revelations. Mine has been a winning ploy, but it frays when applied with a project concerned with even the illusory presentation of objectivity. After many attempts to fit my discourse to the parameters of the field, I have discovered, again, that my project rebels against such limitations. For better or worse, herein I endeavor to tell a truth about literature via the narration of my experience of it. And this truth starts with a fact, which is that my work is inseparable from my subjectivity. To understand either, you need to learn about both. The night before my oral qualifying exam, a curiously insistent series of words came unbidden into my mind as I sat watching television to calm my nerves. I recorded them quickly, in great loopy letters on a series of Post-It notes, afraid they would leave me before I could catch them. 10 Occult Imagery in Contemporary American Fiction. Not about imagery of the occult, but rather a signifier through which I signal the spiritual wages and psychic weight of affective language deployed as an interior-commenting device on authorial asides. The sentence has the tortured feel of someone trying to figure out what they mean, a mode with which, as a teacher, I have grown quite familiar. But I felt that I was on the brink of finally understanding what I had been trying for years to express in my critical work. The next day I passed my exams, my prospectus approved, but my real work had just begun. My PhD began with a seminar designed to function as an introduction to literary and cultural theory. Within the first month of the academic year, my way of reading—a glimmering, elaborate tool I envisioned as a jeweled lathe—had come to seem inadequate, pale, uninformed, incomplete, a kind of failure that I strove to conceal. As a first-year in a nearly decade-old “hybrid” department of Creative Writing and Literature, I found myself in a milieu populated by two seemingly diametrically opposed groups: the creative-track students, whose background in workshop-focused studio programs made them openly hostile to what I quickly learned to call, simply, “theory,” and the critical-track students studying in our sister English department, who loved and clung fiercely to theory, called books “texts,” and scoffed at any hesitance to embrace theoretical discourse. Pair a particularly confessional poet or market-minded novelist with one of the scholars moony over Deleuze and Guattari, and things got ugly quick. I felt misfit, intellectually equally misfit in both groups even as I forged strong friendships with my colleagues. “In faculty meetings, we always joke, what if this was honestly someone’s first time reading it?” the professor teaching our introductory class said, laughing, as she assigned a paper on Hamlet, delightedly unaware she was describing my own situation with 11 the melancholy Dane. And everyone else in the room laughed, and I laughed right along with them, ice in my veins. I seemed to be the only person in the room whose undergraduate degree was not in English. My undergraduate coursework had taken place primarily inside an individualized study program that had enabled me to bypass canonical 101s, a control I had first taken when as a sophomore in high school I successfully lobbied to be allowed to skip Honors English Literature by claiming, falsely, that I had already read every book taught in the class. I had done this in response to the failings of my high school English department, but also because, at sixteen, I knew that following my interest led to meaningful intellectual engagement. Before beginning the PhD, this conviction had made it possible for me to ecstatically discover texts on my own terms. But now it seemed that my clock was far behind. Noticing that I was struggling with the assignment, which required I unpack a “keyword” from the play in a critical essay, a new friend suggested I pick up Raymond Williams’s book to elucidate the necessary intellectual acrobatics. “It’s an easy read, you can do it this weekend,” he said. And then my copy of Keywords arrived in the mail. It was nearly four hundred pages long. An easy read, indeed. In that first semester I learned that there was a kind of knowledge that mattered and a kind of knowledge whose worth had to be proven. Conversations in our theory seminar had an all-or-nothing tone and often ended in ultimatums. The boundaries of our Balkanized cohort were constantly redrawn according to an infinite number of descriptors. Who had completed a master’s degree, and who had not; who had worked a straight job, and who had not; who had published, and who had not; who had lived in New York City, and who had not. Agitated and afraid, for much of that first semester, I anxiously declared to anyone who would listen that I “hated” theory, a statement as provocative as it was untrue. Crestfallen, I sought a modality of 12 scholarship that didn’t require an endless mathlike parsing of remote ideas floating unhinged through space, like so many beautiful, skybound kites, a way grounded in language, that invited in my own experience. For some years I flailed and ambled, trying to self-define. At some point I called myself a phenomenologist. It was recommended to me that I develop advanced fluency in four or five other languages, in the hopes of deepening my comprehension. But of what? I wondered, forcing my way through texts that I thought I understood—only to learn, in class discussions, that whatever I thought I understood I in fact did not. I spent a good six months trying to comprehend Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting, which had a spell-like impact; as soon as I neared the shores of clarity, hard-fought after pages and pages of dense untangling of ideas and words, I fell into a deep, coma-like sleep. When I listened to my colleagues unpack readings in class, I understood the ideas as they put them forth, and wanted badly to join the discussion. But I knew that connecting a presentation on modernism and waste to a story from my grandfather’s impoverished childhood in South Carolina would gain me only my classmates’ ire, and worse, my professors’ disdain. I tried to remember what had worked for me before, picking my way through another Hamlet paper with support from Julia Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater.” Sure, it was cheating a bit—I had read it for the first time as an undergraduate—but at least it was something I understood. Why did I feel I grokked Kristeva? It had to do with the weirdness of her prose, its instability. The author’s conviction that she not only saw what others had not but that in this vision lay illumination—value. Slowly I found theoretical texts that bridged the gap between experience and interpretation. No book has been more influential to my critical work than Avery Gordon’s 13 Ghostly Matters: Haunting And the Sociological Imagination, a work on the textual presence of the ghost, which, Gordon explains is one form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us, in its own way, of course. The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening. Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition. (8) I recognized Gordon’s as the type of criticism I wanted to produce. A hybrid text, interdisciplinary in scope and methodology, that explained how a certain style of writing drew me “affectively, sometimes against [my] will and always a bit magically.” I wanted to explain, in writing, why the process of understanding theory had been so painful for me, and to justify and embrace this pain, to memorialize it alongside my working-through of its meaning. The notion of interdisciplinarity had resonated with me for several years by the time I discovered Gordon’s book. In high school, my history teacher guided me towards my undergraduate institution in response to my frustration with the exclusionary nature of traditional majors. I wanted neither to study solely “English” nor “History”—the two most obvious choices for a student with my interests and liberal arts focus—because it was from the interstices between the two disciplines that I had gleaned the most meaningful insights of my secondary education. By my senior year, I had developed a highly individual curriculum of study that involved explorations of the work of writers from Mircea Eliade to Ralph Ellison and topics of inquiry 14 from tantric sex to the presidential campaign of Victoria Woodhull. I include these details to narrate the idiosyncratic path of study and interest that came, for me, to define meaningful intellectual inquiry. The name of the program to which my history teacher recommended I apply included the word “individualized” and offered the sort of student-directed curriculum often found at small liberal arts colleges within the infrastructure of a large private university. Once matriculated there, nearly every course I chose was what the program called an “interdisciplinary seminar,” core classes that crashed disciplines together and asked us to make sense of the blend. My history teacher’s hunch had been correct; these far-ranging inquiries directed and shaped the writing I did in the seminars themselves as well as my creative writing workshops. A year of learning this way convinced me that prose could be used to lie and tell the truth at the same time as ably as verse, and I switched my focus from poetry to fiction. These parallel tracks solidified into the path of mutual engagement in the worlds of creative and critical writing that I walk today. My residencies at artists’ colonies have taught me that my struggle to calibrate theoretical discourse and critical praxis with creative work is common. But perhaps my response to it is not. Unlike many of the artists I have met in these places, I do not in fact hate theory, something I discovered through all those passionate arguments with people who truly do. Theoretical discourse is an intrinsic part of the process of making my art because it offers a language to describe and interrogate that process. Becoming conversant in this tongue—advanced fluency may forever be beyond me, alas—has enabled me to develop the critical practice that informs that work. I do not merely accept my disorientation and fear as a necessary and exciting part of the process; I seek it. Getting lost to be found is my personal means of discernment, and I realized early in my doctorate that I would have to develop a project that furthered my 15 idiosyncratic method. But the further I go—the more I write, the deeper I think—I have come to believe that the language in question here is not static but a patois, syncretically shaped by the act of my tongue, speaking it. So perhaps my task in these pages is to provide a map, a key. My misfit provocateur’s impulse kicked into gear when faced with the task of devising the critical document I would complete as half of my dissertation, the other half being a book- length fiction. I initially envisioned this document—there was really no good term for it—as a series of pairings of modernist and contemporary novels by women, a structure designed with the hope of illuminating the ideological underpinnings that united each paired set of texts. The idea was to trace woman modernists’ impact on contemporary woman writers, and in so doing delineate and define an emerging canon by women which, while much praised by critics, remains almost totally absent from academic discourse—an emerging canon that I tried and failed to describe. Always doctrinally feminist in my perspective, even before I wholly understood what the term meant, I had become interested in the concepts of agency and mobility as they pertained to female characters and writers. More exactly, I had become attached to the use of the terms “agency” and “mobility” to describe a certain tendency in the books I most admired. Voice— almost always a woman’s voice—drove these stories, doing something I struggled to describe. The telling of lives—the manner in which a life was told—separated a book that grabbed my attention from one that did not. But what, exactly, did my grabbed attention signify about the text itself? And why did I want to write about it? To begin to answer this question, I turn here to a mostly-forgotten book, Katie Roiphe’s The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism, which was published in 1993 in response to an emerging national conversation about “date rape,” at that time a new colloquial term for sexual assault perpetrated by an acquaintance of the victim. Written while Roiphe was ostensibly at 16 work on a PhD in English at Princeton University, The Morning After is a polemic against the idea that date rape as a pervasive or even real problem. In its pages Roiphe dismisses the “date rape epidemic” as a product of cultural hysteria, writing, “Somebody is ‘finding’ this rape crisis, and finding it for a reason.” For Roiphe, “somebody” is, vaguely, “feminists,” for whom “rape is a natural trump card” that “can be used to sequester feminism in the teary province of trauma and crisis” (“Date Rape’s Other Victim”). The Morning After is comprised of foggy personal opinion masquerading as argument, nitpicked statistics, and a particularly cruel brand of doublespeak in which Roiphe deems date rape victims new incarnations of “that 50's ideal my mother and other women of her generation fought so hard to leave behind,” a feminine type defined by “her passivity, her wide-eyed innocence” and a tendency to be “perpetually offended by sexual innuendo.” Basically, Roiphe’s beef with rape victims is their failure to embody the type that Gillian Flynn would lampoon twenty years later in Gone Girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. (222) Roiphe’s conviction that victims of sexual assault must just not be chill enough to parse the rich landscape of masculine desire gives rise to an argument premised on her incredulous reaction to 17 the idea that women lose their ability to make choices, to move away from danger, in the context of a sexual encounter: One of the questions used to define rape was: “Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs.” The phrasing raises the issue of agency. Why aren't college women responsible for their own intake of alcohol or drugs? A man may give her drugs, but she herself decides to take them. If we assume that women are not all helpless and naive, then they should be held responsible for their choice to drink or take drugs. If a woman's "judgment is impaired" and she has sex, it isn't necessarily always the man's fault; it isn't necessarily always rape. (“Date Rape’s Other Victim”) The reason I revisit Roiphe’s book—perhaps best forgotten as a youthful lark that Katha Pollitt called “a careless and irresponsible performance, poorly argued and full of misrepresentations, slapdash research, and gossip” (221)—is her preoccupation with the “issue of agency.” What a chimeric beast, this issue, applying its fancies and deceits to only half of humanity. Imagine if an entire book were written refuting the experiences of male victims of sexual assault on the basis that men should be held responsible for the decisions that landed them in the situations in which they were assaulted. As outlandish as this scenario might seem—or not, sadly, given much precedent—such a book would still not have as its cornerstone a problem of gendered agency. “Men’s agency” is not a topic of debate; it is mere agency, a trait that exists. Why does women’s agency matter, beyond the material concerns of feminism, beyond the utilization of that agency in the everyday? And why is it always raised in discussions of sexual violence and culpability? Why is women’s agency other? One answer can be found in Mary Gaitskill’s essay “On Not Being a Victim: Sex, Rape, and the Trouble with Following 18 Rules,” which appeared in Harper’s six months after the publication of Roiphe’s book. In it, Gaitskill castigates the practice of imposing rules on children without explaining why they should be obeyed: When I was thirteen, I was told by my mother that I couldn't wear a short skirt because “nice girls don't wear skirts above the knee.” I countered, of course, by saying that my friend Patty wore skirts above the knee. “Patty is not a nice girl,” returned my mother. But Patty was nice. My mother is a very intelligent and sensitive person, but it didn't occur to her to define for me what she meant by “nice,” what “nice” had to do with skirt length, and how the two definitions might relate to what I had observed to be nice or not nice—and then let me decide for myself. It's true that most thirteen-year-olds aren't interested in, or much capable of, philosophical discourse, but that doesn't mean that adults can’t explain themselves more completely to children. Part of becoming responsible is learning how to make a choice about where you stand in respect to the social code and then holding yourself accountable for your choice. In contrast, many children who grew up in my milieu were given abstract absolutes that were placed before us as if our thoughts, feelings, and observations were irrelevant. (“On Not Being a Victim” 37) This practice of following rules against and beyond one’s own impulses, she argues, lead to feelings of confusion, anger, and the development of emotion-infused narratives that sometimes departed from or took great liberties with the actual in order to explain events in her own life whose meaning she apprehended only after they had taken place, including a sexual assault. 19 For some time afterward I described this event as “the time I was raped.” I knew when I said it that the statement wasn’t quite accurate, that I hadn’t, after all, said no. Yet it felt accurate to me. In spite of my ambiguous, even empathic feelings for my unchosen partner, […] I did feel violated by the experience. At times I even flat-out lied about what had happened, grossly exaggerating the violence and the threat—not out of shame or guilt, but because the pumped-up version was more congruent with my feelings of violation than the confusing facts. […] I want to stress that I would not have lied that way in court or in any other context that might have had practical consequences; it didn’t even occur to me to take my case to court. My lies were told not in revenge but in service of what I felt to be the metaphorical truth. (36) The experience Gaitskill describes—being “given abstract absolutes that were placed before us as if our thoughts, feelings, and observations were irrelevant”—and her response of creating a “metaphorical truth” is a process intrinsic to creative production by an othered subjectivity. Men’s agency is unquestioned because it is not men’s, only agency. But to be a woman and possess agency does not extend the same courtesy; the agency you get if you are female is a different variety, arguably off-brand: “women’s,” with its different packaging, sharper limitations, and more dangerous risks. If one writes—tells stories—in order to live, then a writing woman is always writing in reaction to the experience of female agency, which is first and foremost that of rules and regulations imposed on mobility. If the facts do not suit the emotional reality, fiction and the impossible become the necessary tools for conveying experience not only perceived through but also shaped by a subjectivity itself the product of influences and forces outside its bearer’s 20 control. Put simply, occult imagery—that phrase I doodled the night before my qualifying exam—is my way of exploring and explaining these metaphorical truths as they emerge in fiction—events simultaneously impossible and true. This project takes its title from a literal piece of emotional baggage, the alluring leather handbag that haunts Mary Gaitskill’s 2005 novel Veronica as a symbol of the protagonist’s trauma and fractured interiority. In Veronica, Gaitskill equates the achievement of holistic self- knowledge with agency, ending with a metaphysical catharsis that demonstrates occult imagery’s power to invoke and describe paths to mobility. “I thought I’d pick [the bag] up […] to see if it could be salvaged, but when I emerged, somebody else had gotten it” (251), the protagonist muses in a statement that doubles as a description of her broken emotional state and loss of ownership over her identity. The twin questions of desirability and autonomy are at the crux of my inquiry into the techniques used to aestheticize a woman’s subjectivity in these novels. If, for women, to be wanted has often meant to be valued, how do these characters and their authors dramatize the struggle for self-desire, and thus, self-ownership? Veronica and Judith Freeman’s 1989 novel The Chinchilla Farm, which forms the other half of this dyadic inquiry, can both broadly be said to be stories about a woman’s search for self-knowledge through physical journey. Yet despite their focus on personal development these novels resist classification as bildungsroman narratives. The protagonists are already adults, whose journeys start as escapes from determinative, prescribed lives and selves. Both are women without familial protection or inherited legacy, even though both are the products of complex and troubled families; whatever education they have has been hard won, and while they must work to survive, neither is able to access employment that provides a modicum of personal satisfaction, much less what the contemporary reader might recognize as a vocation. As 21 unaccompanied women moving through unknown and unconquered spaces, both constantly face the risk of assault, a possibility that threatens not only their safety but also their continued mobility. The threat of impaired mobility is the fear against which occult imagery functions as protective weapon; whenever her literal freedom of movement is limited, each character suffers a parallel loss of imaginative—occult—influence, and thus the ability to define and stipulate her subjective experience as communicated and fundamentally real. But, drafting my prospectus, I feared I was lapsing into foggy ideas about “craft” rather than illuminating sacred texts via the clarion precision of theoretical inquiry, or worse, succumbing to the intellectual confusion evinced in my own students’ strident requirement that they “connect” with a text. It wasn’t that I hadn’t observed patterns and shapes in the work that transfixed me. In the books that inspired my idea of occult imagery, strange things happen. Edith Pearlman’s story “Inbound” tells of a seven-year-old girl who wanders away from her family in a Boston subway station and receives a vivid vision of her future at a newsstand. In Judith Freeman’s novel Red Water, a pioneer Mormon child bride grows into a solitary traveler with a fluid gender identity and a telepathic link with animals. And in Gaitskill’s story “The Agonized Face,” I found the image most resonant with the aesthetic tendency I attempted to define: We kissed, and we entered a small place sealed away from every other place. In that place, my genitals were pierced by a ring attached to a light chain. [...] I became an animal and he led me by the chain. We entered into stunning emptiness; we emerged. [...] It was like entering an electrical current, passing first into a landscape of animate light, and then into pitch-darkness, warm with invisible life, the whispering voices, the dissolving, re-forming faces of ghosts and the excited unborn. (Don’t Cry 70) 22 What—where?—was the world Gaitskill invokes in this passage? How was I to read her description of “a small place sealed away from every other place”? Not literally, obviously— because in what place, even in the gritty and painful world of Gaitskill’s fiction, can genitals be “pierced by a ring attached to a light chain”? What is a “light chain”? In the patently surreal description of “pitch-darkness, warm with invisible life, the whispering voices, the dissolving, re-forming faces of ghosts and the excited unborn,” I felt the emotional presence of Gaitskill’s small sealed place even as I struggled to map it. It was a familiar landscape, haunted with Gordon’s ghosts, inscribed with agency and power. But how could I render and parse this recognition—so potentially and fatally close to that facile sense of “connection”—in the language of theoretical literary analysis? As I simultaneously struggled to write my own novel, I found myself drawn again and again to this passage and others like it in a grouping strung together by my need for a new language to reorder the gendered subject/object relationship. In this tongue, woman could supplant man as subject, could make man object. A woman’s desire-suffused voice became not only the driver of plot but also the plot itself. Revelation became event in landscapes of prophecy and magic. This voice was the tool of the agency and mobility I had written towards. What it assuredly was not was the magical realism my explanation of it seemed to invoke. As I labored to explain my project to a literary magazine editor at a bookstore where writers he had published were reading, he raised his hand, smiling as he fiddled with his long ponytail. “It sounds like some pretty dreamy out-there Aimee Bender-type stuff, for sure!” Once I had named my advisor, he had stopped listening—even after I explained that I rejected the twee reading of her books, which I wasn’t writing about, anyway. I was galled to see this sentiment basically reiterated in Jordan Larson’s essay “What The World Might Look Like,” published in 23 The Los Angeles Review of Books in 2013. Larson describes authors including Bender, Karen Russell, and Laura van den Berg as “fantastic realists,” who “borrow the tools of other genres— namely fairy tales and magical realism—and strip them of their political contexts.” While Larson, too, recognizes the shared “in-between space” evoked by the surreal elements of these authors’ fiction, she fails to identify its narrative purpose: It’s not clear to what end the writers of this genre are using these ideas. They don’t seem to be taking issue with a Western propensity for rationality, the frequent illegitimation of feminine narratives, or civilization’s destruction of the planet and its natural resources. Rather, they merely take advantage of the space these past movements have cleared. (Larson, “What The World Might Look Like”) Larson’s reading of these texts as fundamentally derivative overlooks their authors’ investment in positioning female protagonists as actors in exploratory or investigatory roles, as well as the impact of the moments in their texts when the real is peeled back to reveal something yet realer. If we read occult imagery not as imaginative flight of fancy but as a protagonist’s literal experience of reality, Larson’s neat explanation of the “in-between space” as reiterative of other, more politicized literature is exposed as pointedly rejecting this style of epiphany’s reordering of gendered literary tropes—a move that quite literally combats, to use Larson’s words, “the frequent illegitimation of feminine narratives”—evidencing the continued power of the dichotomy which classes these authors’ work as feminine, domestic, and unworthy of academic discourse. My inquiry, it became clear, was vital to understanding this repositioning of the contemporary literary subject, which I deemed a quietly radical act with dramatic implications for the production and interpretation of fiction. 24 I have confessed that the term “occult imagery” came to me not in a dream but from the meshes of my subconscious. It is an inadvertent insight that I intrinsically trusted, but it is not an unconsidered term. I use the word “occult” not for its common meaning as a byword for supernatural, mystical or magical beliefs, but to an archaic meaning: “secret, communicated only to the initiated” (“occult,” def. A.1.a.) Occult imagery references a communal body of knowledge and memory—an inner canon that haunts these texts, conceptually linked to notions of the rhizome, Butler’s idea of complex alliance, and Henri Lefebvre’s near order—into which readers are initiated and granted access. In these strange narrative happenings a character’s internal realizations are portrayed as surreal experiences, creating a literary synthesis of representation and event. How did these authors do this? Why did they do this? How did they succeed in doing it so successfully that the move not only served the book, but amplified it? I began my PhD delighted to take a definitive, linear next step in my training. Although I had from early childhood enjoyed the unusual luxury of self-defining as a writer, an identity in which I was nurtured and encouraged by my family, teachers, and the specifics of my privilege, I had never planned to be an academic or professor. My admiration for my teachers was monolithic, and I quailed to think I could rise to the task they had so ably performed. From the outside, teaching seemed to be a kind of gravity-defying alchemy, smashing seemingly impermeable disciplines and texts together to create fundamentally new understandings. And from this paragraph alone it is evident that I had little notion of how devalued the work of teaching can be in certain corners of the academy. I was surprised to meet fellow travelers whose commitment to their work as scholars and writers did not include an intersecting desire to 25 interact with students. For me, the dichotomy of teaching and writing is the foundation of critical inquiry, the two edges of the blade with which I have sought to penetrate the field. The teachers who honed my critical writing taught me a rigorous faith that became the backbone of my artistic praxis. Their pedagogical techniques were invariably based on the assumption that I would rise to the level of a text, no matter how difficult, esoteric, or age- inappropriate. In the honors World History class I took as a high school freshman, my first writing assignment required the application of Nietzsche’s theory of history as presented in The Birth of Tragedy to James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son.” I learned to read persistently forward, grasping for footholds in language that felt like fog. Occasionally the clouds cleared, offering an insight that sustained me until the next. In this way I eked out an understanding, tacking gleaned bits onto texts, one line at a time, one foot in front of the other. How could I be counted upon to broker such revelations for my students? The development of my own pedagogical strategies has formed a vital third leg in the creation of my scholarship, one that has proved frustratingly invisible in academic discussions of how to think and write. Struggling to comprehend Toril Moi’s translation of Luce Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One in my last semester of college, I decided to treat the text as poetry, or at least as I understood poetry, an often-opaque language spell, invoked by the author to conceal as much as it reveals. My style of reading required “experimenting on faith,” to echo the transfixing verse from the Book of Mormon that nearly converted me to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in that same year. When this readerly tactic was received with approval from my professor, I remembered my adolescent commitment to lying and telling the truth at the same time. Was it possible that the two acts were linked, arms of the same body? 26 I had already learned to discard the notion of objective truth, and with it, teleology, as sentimental yearnings for an imagined simplicity. The path to greater understanding of texts was through rigorous, relentless self-interrogation, I came to believe. The more personal and idiosyncratic my readings became, the stronger the insights they generated. It was all right if I did not understand everything, as long as I understood something. Eventually, with diligence and time, the proportion tilted, and I came to understand more than I did not. After the completion of my bachelor’s degree, I entered a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program, where the framing and stakes of reading took on a distinctly oxymoronic cast: rather than reading as an act of critical analysis, we were now studying literature in order to glean its “craft,” a pursuit one professor was apocryphally said to insist “had nothing to do with any of that English department stuff.” As MFA candidates, we were to put aside whatever critical praxis did or did not fetter us and read after an author’s strategy—how rather than why a given character or setting unfolded as it did—a way of understanding which rendered the how and why subservient to the goals of narrative verve and style. Perhaps intended to be liberating, the distinction wrought on me a kind of anxious confusion. As an undergraduate I had twice been assigned Edward Saïd’s Orientalism—first in a course on ancient Indian literature in my initial year of study, and again in my third, in a seminar called “The Body in the Arabic Tradition.” Saïd’s density flummoxed me. More than seeking a foothold, reading his first chapters gave me the sensation of swimming through silt-filled water, scanning desperately for any landmark by which to push myself forward and gauge my progress. I persisted, reading the book ten times, until I was certain I grasped its central premise. And when I did, the light came pouring in, revolutionizing the way I thought about not just literature, but everything—an experience I repeated, in college, with Thomas Laquer’s Making Sex, Michel 27 Foucault’s History of Sexuality Volume One, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, Irigaray, Julia Kristeva’s Stabat Mater, and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Armed with these texts, my world changed. Hegemonies were revealed, patterns of abstract thought that were not only projected onto but actually shaped material reality, a power move I couldn’t unsee. I had come to college feminist, anti-racist, devoutly liberal, identities in which my undergraduate discoveries further grounded me, but by the time I completed my first degree I felt I had only come to understand a fingernail of these ideologies. In my life the theoretical has always been intertwined with the literary and the personal. I was bidden into my interest in gender by a lifelong love affair with Orlando—first, Sally Potter’s 1992 film, and then, later, Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel. My childhood dream of becoming an Egyptologist took me into intellectual engagement with the literatures of the ancient non-western world, and from there to Saïd and Fanon. When I was an undergraduate, no one questioned these idiosyncratic linked paths. Indeed, for the purposes of bachelor’s-level discourse and everything that had come before it, these ways of knowing made me an unusually sharp student, capable of understanding both minute and grand textual concerns as well as the telescoping relationship between. But in my MFA coursework I was asked to disconnect the literary from the ideological, to somehow forget or at least look away from, for example, the wildly complex and troubling racial narratives within and influential upon Moby Dick and read it, instead, for the pleasures that readers might have sought upon its first publication. Such readings required an entirely new vocabulary, as I learned from the first of my craft teachers, E.L. Doctorow, who called Melville’s opus an “anatomy,” an attempt to contain all the world within its fictive universe. I liked the idea of reading for, reading around—but I didn’t see how it was possible. 28 My second craft teacher, Francine Prose, is the author of a text about restructuring the act of reading (Reading Like A Writer, 2006) and met me with a nuanced methodology for refiguring the textual encounter, a strategy she demonstrated on our first day of class, standing at attention at the head of the room with a photocopy of John Cheever’s “Goodbye, My Brother.” It was January 2009. I had first laid eyes on Prose four and a half years earlier, when I saw her read from her novel A Changed Man at the New York State Summer Writers Institute, where I was studying poetry under Henri Cole. Her shining dark hair was lovely as a raven’s wing, I remembered thinking on that first sight of her, flushing with shame at the obvious, sentimental simile. “ ‘We are a family,’” Prose read the first few words of the Cheever and stopped. “What’s that?” she asked the class, peering at us over her glasses. We stared at her. “What’s the meaning of those words? What do they tell you?” There was another silence, and then a hand was raised. “That this story is about a family.” Prose nodded, and continued reading. “ ‘We are a family that has always been very close in spirit.’ What’s that?” “They’re saying they get along well,” someone offered. She made a noncommittal noise. “ ‘Our father was drowned in a sailing accident when we were young—’ What’s that? What’s going on there?” Some of the students began to shift uneasily, the body language of doubt. “His father died,” one said. “His? Who? Do you know a man is telling this story?” 29 We did. We had all read it, as homework. Prose’s mouth twitched. “Do you know at this point, from what you have read thus far, who is telling the story? Do you know that it will shift into the singular first person, to the I from the collective we?” We had to admit that we did not. She nodded with a sharp intake of breath. “Okay, let’s keep going. ‘Our father was drowned in a sailing accident when we were young, and our mother has always stressed that our familial relationships have a kind of permanence that we will never meet with again.’ What’s that?” “Their father died, and their mother taught them to value family,” a student tried. “Okay.” Prose pivoted on her hips. “What else?” “The word ‘stressed’ suggests some kind of conflict, maybe?” “That doesn’t seem like a lesson that a mother should have to ‘stress’ to her children.” “ ‘A kind of permanence that we will never meet with again’—that’s heavy.” A smile eked its way across Prose’s face. “Yes, yes. But go back to the first sentence. ‘Our father was drowned’—what’s with that phrasing?” “Like they don’t know.” “Or someone did it to him.” “Or maybe he did it himself,” Prose gave herself away. “Maybe not. But maybe there’s some mystery there.” Over the course of the next hour she took us through every word in the story, revealing it to be a far darker and more sinister narrative than the one I had read. The night before, I had been struck by what I took as the story’s sweetness: the narrator’s insistence that his wife Helen, 30 donning her wedding gown for a costume party, looks as lovely as she did on the day of their wedding, the evident affection in the phrase “Diana is as pretty as Mother must have been.” This was a story about a family that has suffered hard losses but persevered, I thought. To learn—to not just be told but shown how to see—that it was in fact a curdled tale of hateful, broken people hiding their ugliness behind ragged vestiges of status and custom contradicted the innate perceptive strengths that had borne me thus far in my educational career. This close reading, this kind of closeness, rewarded and revolutionized the high stakes and personal involvement that had always characterized my act of reading. At the time—the beginning of that final semester of my MFA—I had recently finished applying to doctoral programs. The possibility that I might be admitted made me contemplate the decision to continue my schooling in a different light, as a career. Going to college had been an automatic decision, matriculating in the MFA only slightly less so—the challenge was gain admission at all, which, once done, constituted an accomplishment in its own right that had to be paid forward by completing the actual degree. Under Prose, Doctorow, and in revising my fiction with my thesis advisor, Lydia Davis, I felt for the first time the edge and flaw of the gifts that had carried me to this point, the necessity of challenging and nuancing them, breaking them down and putting them back together again. By the time I was awarded my MFA, a few weeks after the completion of Prose’s seminar and Davis’s approval of my thesis project, I believed I had broken through an invisible restraint into a new universe of meaning and intention, one I eagerly looked forward to navigating during my PhD coursework. Once advanced to candidacy, the anxiety of not having read so many canonical works lead me in the months following the approval of my prospectus to tackle writers I had eschewed as an adolescent for reasons I now recognize as internalized sexism. Foremost among this group 31 were the Brontës, and I am almost embarrassed to describe my preconceived notion that Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights would read as musty B-grade costume dramas, which was rebuked in the fevered month during which I ravenously consumed both. In Jane’s moments of metaphysical revelation and epiphany in the company of her cousin St. John, “motionless under my hierophant’s touch” in a “dim room full of visions,” where “The Impossible […] fast [becomes] the Possible […] Religion called – Angels beckoned – God commanded – life rolled together like a scroll, death’s gates opening, showed eternity beyond” (255), I recognized the roots of my idea of occult imagery, and came to understand and connect its function back, once again, to Avery Gordon’s notion of “complex personhood,” which it described, inscribed, and enabled. Complex personhood means that the stories people tell about themselves, about their troubles, about their social worlds, and about their society’s problems are entangled and weave between what is immediately available as a story and what their imaginations are reaching toward. (4) Occult imagery—that dream-notion dream-language that I endeavor to make flesh—illustrates and sustains communities of complex personhood. It is an aesthetic mode available for subject- object relationship reordering for any writer who has found themselves on the wrong side of that equation. Like these notions of mythic, magical, and othered modes of self-expression, occult imagery offers a space for individual agency and desire in which othered selves can express plots of desire through non-normative modes of realization. By naming the phenomenon and exploring some of its exemplars, I seek not only to contribute to our understanding of contemporary literature, but also to create a space for my idiosyncratic style of inquiry, one in which intuitive judgment and sense memory play as large a part as do the application of theory and textual 32 analysis. When I write about occult imagery, I am always writing about the negotiation of the self—a mirrored and paralleled process that twins the parsing of the text with my own understanding. Because this inquiry is internal, these essays contain discursions into the images, tensions, and forces that shape subjectivity—my own, and those contained in the texts examined below. For these reasons—and because the two authors who serve as the primary subjects of these essays are both inarguably white—an analysis of whiteness has formed a significant part of my investigation into occult imagery. Prior to the explosion of whiteness studies within academia, white identity was a category of negative definition, shaped by exclusion, in a similar fashion to the historical pattern of defining feminine identity by negative definition against masculine identity. Within the context of my project, examining texts that dramatize the hybridization of identity discourses through the lens of whiteness has both provided me with practical tools for eking out the boundaries of a gendered and othered literary style produced in shadow tandem to a perceived mainstream and proved the pervasive influence of occult imagery. One such text is Hilton Als’s collection of lyric essay and memoir White Girls (2013), in which the author, a queer black man who immigrated to New York from Barbados as a child and grew up to become the theater critic for The New Yorker, uses occult imagery techniques and motifs—here, pop culture references and juxtapositions sewn together by impossible happenings—to forge a mythic space for his subjectivity. “White girls” is a term Als uses to describe those figures whom he characterizes as belonging to and in his tautological definition of identity. “We hate white girls because we are white girls and that’s what white girls do” (79). That some of these white girls are in fact white women, and many are not, is beside the point. 33 Mirroring and desire are enmeshed in Als’s work. Sameness not difference animates his acts of love. “She made my soul happen” is Als’s description of his high school friendship with a girl named Marie who “wasn’t technically white—her mother was Puerto Rican and her father Jewish—but she looked the part: camellia-white skin and blonde hair” (80). Like that of Als himself, Marie’s whiteness—better and more accurate to call it white girlness—is self-made, chosen, an embrace of a certain kind of mobility and rejecting a certain variety of ignorance. Alone of her family, Marie’s ability to pass renders her capable of such feats of whiteness as “charg[ing] makeup at the family drugstore,” a privilege she employs to carve out a chameleonic identity which explicitly challenges her being read as white. Marie dons “ropes of white beads a Santeria had given her” and feels “every cell of her Jewishness and every cell of her Rican” at a fraught Passover celebration where “after someone opened the door for Elijah, Marie’s mother would serve a pork roast” (81). For Als Marie models how to have one’s identity cake and eat it too—how to use language as a fashioning tool to reject and dissolve categorization, freeing the self into Barthes’s notion of the interdisciplinary object—more accurately, an interdisciplinary subject--that belongs to no one. By offering a self that the young Als feels incapable of describing, much the less embodying—the queer “white girl” in collaboration not war with his black man’s body—Marie, enabled in the occult act by her ability to pass and thus open the capacious identity to which Als alone cannot gain entry—makes the author’s soul happen, but it is crucial to note that she does not author that soul; Marie is but one of the midwives and mediums Als meets on his path to self-apprehension. Not a white savior or, worse, an idol of white femininity with its attendant 34 allures and dangers to a black man, Marie is an early example of the friends and alliances Als will forge over the course of his pursuit of knowing himself through the culture that feeds him. The world of “white girls” is a communal space accessed through occult environments in which commonality can be recognized and transmitted, places real—such as Marie’s room of “flickering candles, prayers for the dead, Santeria-blessed waters” (81)—and felt, as in Als’s description of the friend he calls “Sir or Lady,” SL for short. “Once I was with SL, once we were a we, I wanted to house myself in SL’s thinking. It was so big and well lit, like a large house sitting solid on the bank of a river” (33, emphasis added). In such intimate geographies of communion and transcendence, iconoclastic selves are grown and nurtured outside the divide- and-conquer tactics of hegemonic identity categories. Occult imagery is the means by which such processes can be narrated, their transformative power transmitted in the occult act of their telling. In her review of White Girls, Andrea Battleground calls Als’s use of occult imagery “intentionally abrasive,” and I suppose that’s one way to describe the author’s project of penetrating and deflating the authorial delusions he diagnoses in his subjects, himself most of all. He castigates himself for his reliance on categories, calling out the ignoble motivations of his editors (“For them, a black writer is someone who can simplify what is endemic to him or her as a human being—race—and blow it up to cartoon proportions, thereby making the coon situation ‘clear’ to a white audience” (134), and poking angry fun at the confusion with which he and SL, “two colored men who were together and not lovers, not bums, not mad” are greeted. Sometimes I’d wonder aloud […] if we sounded like this to them: Ooogga booga. Wittgenstein. Mumbo jumbo ogga booga, too, Freud, Djuna Barnes, a hatchi! Mumbo lachinki jumbo Ishmael Reed and Audrey Hepburn. (33) 35 For Als, the task of looking inward is indissoluble from the outward work of analyzing and evaluating culture, two discourses joined in the pen of his own language of protest. After considering the “white girls” Michael Jackson, Flannery O’Connor, Truman Capote, and Eminem, the book concludes with two lengthy meditations on the life of Richard Pryor, the latter of which is an imagined account of Pryor’s (fictional) sister’s experiences in the entertainment industry. In an echo of Woolf’s reverie on the fate of Shakespeare’s sister in A Room of One’s Own, a female Pryor equally talented as her brother has found success only as a voiceover actress, overdubbing pornographic films. That her skill is used to voice the heteronormative fantasies of white men is an irony Als neither highlights nor overlooks. His “Pryoress” reads the pornos as meaningful statements on race and gender. She is not oblivious to the postmodern condition that has voided categories, rendering all boundaries invalid; she sees the crashing- together of high and low culture into a lawless arena where the only order is individual voice. In his Pryoress, the oracle-critic scrying a cultural landscape in which she is both complicit and against which she must rebel, Als gives his clearest vision of the world, and himself. Given the enormity of that double task, I have focused these essays as narrowly as possible, on two exemplary novels that see female authors and protagonists negotiating the demands of agency and self-representation in landscapes inscribed with the self. Although published nearly two decades apart and set in distinct locales these two novels have in common a woman-in-quest plot anchored by a narrator adrift amongst past, present, and future selves. Their most significant events take place at roughly the same time, in the final years of the 1980s, told in retrospective voice by protagonists at midlife, reflecting on the self-defining acts of their youth. Both narratives are structured through emotional resonance rather than linear progression, 36 told through groupings of memory written against the notion that event can be uncoupled from sensation and intuition. In my mind these things are connected: Easter, Mary Ann in her lavender dress; the death of the male chinchilla; and the way the snow was finally beginning to melt then, so that the very next week I could take my horse back up into the hills again and ride to my secret places, far from home and away from everything. (The Chinchilla Farm 261) By unpacking and exploring the constitutive elements of occult imagery as it is deployed in these linked but archly individual novels, I aim to demonstrate how this style of discovering and knowing enshrines and privileges styles of knowledge traditionally classed as private and, yes, feminine, enabling not only a reordering of the literary landscape but imbuing a new canon of literature with transformative political potential. This is a work of literary criticism, in which I will illuminate and plumb my close readings of these and other, linked texts, and it is also— simultaneously—something hybrid, something other, the story of my own path to understanding and defining this phenomenon. For the reasons given above (and below), these are indissoluble narratives, in whose joint telling I aspire to two parts that, taken together, are greater than their whole. Occult imagery is a validation of my method of going on faith from item to item in the texts I have dredged for meaning; it is also a means of validating the powerful use of language to reorder hegemonic categorizations of subjugated people. It requires and rewards partial understanding and produces definitions through careful grouping and discernment. To the uninitiated, it can sound like an untranslateable patois. But to those who listen carefully, who go on faith, who discern, it can explain how this literature does what it does, and why. By 37 acknowledging my own place in the discussion of occult imagery, a technique I use in my own fiction, I aim to further deconstruct the barrier separating the personal from the academic and scholarship from creative nonfiction. Like the authors whose occult imagery has transfixed, troubled, and seduced me, I aim to rewrite not only the answer to the question of literary subjectivity, but also the inquiry itself. I realize that I have asked the reader to make several metaphysical leaps, on faith, as it were. That my long search for theoretical cohesion would lead me to the conclusion that there must be a language that transmits on another level would seem an incredible coincidence, if I believed anymore that such things existed, if I believed it was an accident that these writers were the ones who made my soul happen. 38 Chapter One “An old lady writing about sex”: Mary Gaitskill, Veronica, and the (Gendered) Feminine Voice on the Page The year after I began MFA coursework, I ended the romantic relationship that had sustained me through my undergraduate years, the kind of devoted yet temporary partnership that describes many transitions into adulthood. My ex and I remained close, sometimes uncomfortably so, as he entered the same MFA program a year behind me. And so I found myself busy at work on my first book, negotiating melancholy near-daily encounters with my former partner, near to but moving beyond an old self, feeling the past in a present that rapidly became the future. In those days I participated more than ever before in that hallowed New York City tradition of weeping openly while walking the streets. During the dying days of my relationship the editorial assistant I had worked under as an intern at Farrar, Straus and Giroux in my last semester of college leant me her copy of Veronica by Mary Gaitskill. I was already an admirer of Gaitskill’s 1989 debut Bad Behavior, a collection of stories in which mostly female protagonists do things mostly considered outside the realm of good conduct: drugs, theft, prostitution, emotional violence. Veronica was just as vivid and unflinching as Bad Behavior—unflinching, a word that would become the clarion of my own artistic process—but even more powerfully intimate, a story about the body, about the inside of the body. Reading Veronica entered me into the sentient inside of the narrator’s body while mooring me simultaneously outside of it to observe. Not only the narrator’s body; the prose drew other, further bodies in visual language with occult flourishes. Fictive bodies and bodies I had known, united in a theatre of intimate language. In Veronica I found even my own body, invoked in the narrator’s insistent focus on corporeal subjectivity. 39 When he left, she told me she’d let him butt-fuck her. “Did you get on your elbows and knees?” I asked. “No!” she said. “That’s not the only way to do it— you lie on your back and he pushes your legs up.” Right away, I pictured it—her head raised a little so she could watch him, and her stomach sticking up in a mound. In my picture, her stomach was radiant in the same way as her greasy pink skin, with gold rays coming off it. (31) “Greasy pink skin, with gold rays coming off it” is an impossible and yet comprehensible description. In Veronica Gaitskill establishes the style that determined my concept of occult imagery, a way of being in prose that transfixes as much as it explains, in which language and image fuse into supercollided packages of feeling and shape that illuminate human containers and their contents. And in the world of Veronica, corporeality is endemic to this occult landscape. Bodies do not only belong to humans—“The bush outside is live and wet, a green lung for the sluicing wind and rain” (35)—nor are they discreet: We are a tangle of root, a young branch, a flower, a moldy spore. You want to say, This is me; this is who I am. But you don’t even know what it is, or what it’s for. Time parts its shabby curtain: There is my father, listening to his music hard enough to break his own heart. Trying to borrow shapes for his emotions so that he may hold them out to the world and the world might say, Yes, we see. We feel. We understand. I touch the hazelnut bush gently as I pass. (128) Having dissolved the boundaries between self and other, Gaitskill presses further, obviating those between sentience and insentience, between language and silence and beyond. And while in this novel of sex and the body she focuses on the vulnerabilities and glorious consummations of acts of communion, Gaitskill devotes equal attention to death not only in the plot’s 40 engagement with the cultural aura of the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York City, but also in her imagining of states beyond consciousness and human comprehension. My mind distends from me, groping the air in long fingers, looking for Veronica. […] I imagine Veronica lying on her couch, descending slowly into darkness, the electronic ribbon of television sound breaking into particles of codified appetites, the varied contexts of which must have been impossible to remember. […] I imagine Veronica drawing away from everything she had become on earth, withdrawing the spirit blood from what had been her self, allowing its limbs to blacken and fall off. I imagine Veronica’s spirit stripped to its skeleton, then stripped of all but its shocked, staring eyes […] I imagine a moving black coil with white shapes inside it disintegrating in a grind of dirt, roots, and bones. I look up. Before me is a small tree with delicate orangy skin, its limbs, with dull sparse clusters of leaves and buds, arrayed like static flame. It plants its roots in the bones and the dirt and it drinks. (217) Note the embodiment of the narrator’s mind, which grows “fingers” through the intensity of her desire to experience Veronica’s final moments; the lexiconic daredevilry behind invented mysterious-but-felt terms such as “spirit blood,” the attribution of “limbs” to Veronica’s “self,” a bodily grounding for the essential and ephemeral notion of self, mirroring the narrator’s mind- fingers; and the shift from the metaphysical photosynthesis—that “moving black coil”—to the “orangy” bone-rooted tree which, too, is limbed. In this passage, as occurs again and again in Veronica, the perceived distinctions that separate living things are lifted to reveal an exquisite interworking of energy and intent, an ecosystem as spiritual as it is corporeal that works to illustrate an impossible real, or as Gaitskill herself put it (albeit in a different context), a 41 metaphorical truth. Reading prose so ecstatic challenged me to aim higher in my own work, to push through embarrassment and fear—so many obstacles of self-consciousness separated me from the ability to truly represent that consciousness—to create a language in which it was possible to express apprehensions beyond words. The experience of reading Veronica was foundational and revelatory, one I discussed at length with my MFA cohort. One colleague asked to borrow the book and I happily handed it over, looking forward to discussing it with him. Newly single, I had noticed the young man to whom I leant Veronica. It could be said I held him in some regard I enjoyed the stories he workshopped and the conversations we had after class. I liked his lanky form and light, oft- shielded eyes. I did not see my loaning of Veronica as an act of seduction, but it was an exchange designed to foreshadow the more intimate conversation in which I hoped he and I might soon engage. One night just a week or two later—thankfully before the owner of this copy of Veronica might have noticed its lengthening absence from her shelf—my colleague returned the book. “Did you like it?” I asked. He looked down, half-smiling, a habit I would find charming just one more time. “Not really. I mean, I tried to get into it, but it’s just an old lady writing about sex.” To put aside the obvious—that “an old lady writing about sex” is not only the kind of thing I want to be reading, but also in my estimation exactly what this young man needed to study—this anecdote, with its distinct subjectivities (his, mine, Gaitskill’s) intersecting to mutual dissatisfaction leads us to the critical response to Gaitskill’s oeuvre, particularly as it pertains to Veronica, and the near-total silence on her work within academic discourse. For although she is much laureled and widely read, Gaitskill has yet to receive significant attention from the 42 academy. Only now, writing this, does it occur to me that my focus on her work and desire to analyze it may well be the result of my own hybrid identity as scholar and artist. But this idea of myself as an intersectional artist-scholar is secondary to the primary reason for Gaitskill’s prominence in these essays, which is that I first observed the compelling stylistic choices and resultant fictive magic that comprise occult imagery in her work. The discovery happened in 2012, while I was teaching writing at a summer camp that had been advertised as a gifted and talented program but turned out to be a kind of containment strategy for parents who feared that their children might be mediocre. I was on call from seven in the morning until eleven at night, teaching four sections of composition in the mornings and afternoons and supervising student activities the rest of the time. Every dawn I padded blindly into the communal bathroom to brush my teeth, having learned on the first to leave my eyeglasses in my bedroom to shield myself from the looks of horror my young charges made when I appeared in the steamed mirrors of their toilette. In one of my scant “free” half-hours, I learned that Gaitskill had published in an online magazine an excerpt from her novel-in-progress entitled “The Devil’s Treasure.” It is the story of a little girl named Ginger who “goes looking for Hell,” a quest that unfolds in curiously literal fashion. Her spirit rose off her and walked through the house. The furniture watched her kindly. The only thing that called her was the sugar bowl, from which she liked to sneak spoonfuls during the day. But her spirit didn’t stop even for that. She went straight to the backyard and found the trapdoor that lead to Hell. It wasn’t hard to open. (“The Devil’s Treasure”) By story’s end, Ginger has passed through a “corridor with black walls out of which protruded hundreds of human heads” and a room in which the “song that you could not quite hear was one 43 of mysterious, powerful joy translated as social beauty, personality, and bodily love,” and watched the face of the man she will one day love become “a rigid mask with a gaping mouth and eyes”: Light pleasure turned into anger, fear and despair—and then became a mute totem of those things. The mask became wooden, and then it became the face of a building, its stiff oblong mouth stretched to become a door, its stunned square eyes the windows. And then Ginger was inside the building. (“The Devil’s Treasure”) After I finished reading the story I had to sit down. That was where Gaitskill had taken me, too, inside the building, not just the obvious building that came to mind, Henry James’s “house of fiction,” but the more intimate structure, the space so familiar that I hardly felt it unless I thought to: the container of self, body and soul both, the reduction of subjectivity to its constitutive parts and feeble containers. By sensitizing her readers to this space of spaces, Gaitskill writes it into existence, continuing the work I first began to sense and feel in Veronica and saw further developed in the short story collection Don’t Cry (2009), in which the story “Mirror Ball” close- reads a sexual encounter between two young people so that Gaitskill can observe and assign intent and mobility to that slipperiest of actors, the soul. He touched between her legs; she opened her pelvis and recklessly unfurled her soul. He felt like a man in a small boat under which a huge sea creature has passed, causing the boat to pitch gently. Like a man in a boat, he could chase it or run from it, and he picked chase. If he felt it on her lips, he put his mouth on her lips. If he found it on the palm of her hand, he opened her hand and licked it up. Her soul darted here and there, sensitive as any creature, tipping her center of 44 balance back and forth as it oscillated. She liked this, and if she had any fear, she did not take it seriously. He liked it, too, so much that he could barely concentrate on the chase. Sensation nearly overwhelmed him; his will strained almost to the breaking point when he felt her soul gather its vastness in one small spot, pulling so hard that it yanked him off the boat. He felt her all about him in a tingling feminine myriad; out of this myriad appeared formless spirit that lived in the form of their bodies, touching their eyes, their mouths, their limbs, their genitals. The unknown rose up through their souls and became joined with the known in the form of feelings. Something hot and glowing flew from her. It was joined with Ardor, and it compelled him; it compelled the part of his soul that was joined with Hunger. (77) These two excerpts illustrate what I came to think of as, first, Gaitskill’s magic trick, and later, as the collected patterns of stylistic interweaving and dramatic alignment that constitute occult imagery. In each, the fundamentally impossible occurs within the framework of an otherwise realist story but does not rend or otherwise challenge that realist frame; instead, it deepens and sustains the quotidian emotional concerns whose exploration is the story’s purpose. I use “quotidian” here not to diminish these concerns but to highlight their commonplace quality, which is also what has traditionally classed them as at best lesser and at worst invisible in a literary canon disproportionately concerned with the exterior and public. This dichotomous gendered valuation of fictive space is the establishment to which occult imagery furiously responds with its revolutionary reordering of the presentation of narrative event. If we take occult imagery at its word—if the soul can be as determinative as the bodies that bear it—if a child’s dream-visions can accurately presage her future—then the undoing of this gendered space 45 and its hegemonic force, too, is possible, not just possible but underway, doing its work in the minds of untold readers. But the gospel of occult imagery is not without its detractors; indeed, it has been forged in the fire of their vocal disapproval, a particular brand of ire with which Gaitskill’s work has often been met. “I call for a permanent moratorium on men gassily discoursing on Mary Gaitskill,” begins Suzanne Rivecca’s 2013 essay, “What Men Talk About When They Talk About Mary Gaitskill.” Faced with Gaitskill, “the consummate chronicler of the cock-block,” she argues, male critics consistently respond with pedantic attempts to regulate women’s sexuality through charged, sexist critique of its literary portrayal. Or, as Rivecca puts it, “When men read Mary Gaitskill, their boners deflate.” When men talk about Mary Gaitskill’s depictions of sex, they tend to not only miss the point, but also unleash invective that is far more prurient, repulsive, and objectifying than the material they purport to be excoriating. James Wolcott of Vanity Fair, for example, described the female protagonists in Gaitskill’s first book, Bad Behavior, as “dishrags and dickwipes, cold little biscuits slapped across Daddy’s lap.” […] Ah, the paternalistic disingenuousness on display when a man tells women what’s good for them, what kind of sex they should and should not have, and how they should feel about it. […] It’s not “liberation” or “empowerment” or snide one-upmanship Gaitskill’s women are seeking through sexual expression; it’s something far less inanely recreational and celebratory, and far more complicated. It’s a kind of annihilation that burns away falsity and reveals a secret, tender kernel of essential selfhood; a kind of absolution of the 46 lingering guilt from past, nonsexual humiliations; and, not least of all, a kind of inoculation against future hurt. Rivecca concludes that this boner deflation triggers a defensive response to Gaitskill’s knack for revealing the ugly messiness of human behavior and the complex ballet that specially characterizes intimate interaction between men and women—an ugly messiness, Rivecca concludes, that these critics misplace on the objects, bodies, and situations onto which Gaitskill chooses to cast the eye her detractors call “gimlet”: [William Deresiewicz] says Gaitskill is neurotically, sadistically fixated on bodily squalor. He points to a shameful perversity in the pinpoint acuity of her physical descriptions. Like a couch potato recoiling at the pore-riddled faces on HDTV, he complains that she’s seeing too clearly, and should have the common decency to smear Vaseline on her lens. He is especially chagrined by the repeated descriptions of male nostril-stroking, comparing Gaitskill to a locker-room bully who glimpses the self-soothing, dreamy ablutions of an unsuspecting man only to pounce and mockingly expose them with her “gimlet eye.” Her motivations, he implies, are baleful, her descriptions a series of mean petty thefts. She catalogues the vulnerabilities and oddities of her fellow man and, from a vantage point of “hooded, vengeful outsiderhood,” appropriates them. He seems to think he’s describing a succubus. What he’s actually describing, unbeknownst to him, is a fiction writer. That’s kind of what they do. For a certain type of man, there’s only one thing more discomfiting than a woman who notices everything, and that’s a woman who writes it down. 47 By seeing, and writing what is seen—what she herself has seen and what she imagines her characters to have seen, that seeing of sight—Gaitskill offends and is accused by critics such as Deresiewicz of attacking a world of fixed values in which people, objects, and events possess immutable virtues and objective truths that should be portrayed somehow straight (Perhaps inexact as an opposite corollary to “gimlet eye” I choose “straight” here for its manifold meanings) in pursuit of verisimilitude and, crucially, relatability, that stable vision of a known world my students seek in their desire for “connection” with a text. Really, what is on trial in the writing of Walcott, Deresiewicz, et al., is Gaitskill’s eye itself: the question of whether what she is rendering, and how, has any business as representation. If, as Rivecca writes, the worlds of Mary Gaitskill’s fiction strike these readers as antiutopic— Wolcott seemed to take offense at the very notion that women would voluntarily seek out, or even put up with, masochistic sex, claiming that Gaitskill promotes a dystopian ‘sexual Darwinism’ of female subservience to males. —then what end do these eschatological visions serve? Rivecca has a good time unpacking and finally obliterating this question and its presumptive layers of gender, sex, and writing, the larger implications of which I will return. But first, a review of the critical response to Veronica as litmus test. Do these reviews contain the critique against which Rivecca rebels? If so, can its authorship be linked so exactly to the gender—or gendered concerns—of the critic? And what connection does this phenomenon bear to the silence on Gaitskill within the academy? Reviews of Veronica are similar in their summary of plot, but diverge widely in diagnosing the motivation behind protagonist Alison’s aestheticized colliding experiences of time, memory, and body, as each critic struggles to describe what exactly is performed by the 48 book’s structure. Some commend. “Much of the narrative takes place on a single day in which a new middle-aged Alison reflects on her life via an onslaught of flashbacks,” wrote Eleanor J. Bader in Library Journal. “While this time frame stretches credibility, the novel is so well wrought that it barely matters.” In Publishers Weekly, Heidi Julavits called the book “a nonchronological recounting of [Alison’s] ‘bright and scalding’ past.” But in the Los Angeles Times, Richard Eder took issue with this slant chronology: Time sequences are a bothersome tangle in a novel whose insights cohere better than its structure. [...] Alison's life is a reverse ride up the medieval wheel of fortune: from its sundown tumble into decay and death back to its noontime glory and then to its early hopes and strivings. [...] Gaitskill's plotting is frail [...] a gimpy fable. […] the flashes seem to come from several different directions at once. They dramatically illuminate; at the same time, they often confuse. Kirkus Review took a clinical, somatic read of these “flashes,” explaining that Alison’s “Insomnia, the codeine she takes to relieve the chronic pain of her ruined rotator cuff and recurrent fevers (symptoms of advancing hepatitis-C) combine to transform her waking consciousness into a lush kaleidoscope of memory.” Attempting to crack this temporal displacement, the Memphis Flyer’s Mary Cashiola used mixed metaphors to frame a bald judgment on Alison: The story stretches over time and place, pulled taut by the juxtaposition of the present and past […] Events from different times in Alison's life are layered on top of the other, showing similarities but years apart. The only thing that changes is Alison, from a young, beautiful girl to a diseased, ugly woman. Gaitskill uses tiny, precise details, loading single phrases with arsenals of information about 49 relationships, places, and events. At its core, however, the story feels murky and almost dreamlike, as if Gaitskill is trying to keep the reader at a distance, wondering. [emphasis added] When the book was published in the United Kingdom in 2007, Veronica’s inscrutable relationship to teleology aggravated British critics, too. In her review the Observer’s Mary Fitzgerald calls the novel “not entirely free of clichés ('My ambition was to live like music,' Alison tells us)” and its theme “somewhat tired.” Writing in The Guardian, Joanna Briscoe took the critique a step further: Veronica has nothing of its predecessor's tautness and control […] its structure relies on a frenetic assemblage of vignettes flashing between the 80s and the present […] The protagonist, an insomniac on painkillers whose ‘focus sometimes slips’, speaks here of ‘the buzz of my own electricity loud and terrible in my head’ and indeed the narrative seems to suffer from static interference. […] an impressionistic novel that frequently reads as though it's been cut and pasted too many times. A diseased, ugly woman. An insomniac on painkillers. A gimpy fable. A gimlet eye. Whether they commend or castigate Gaitskill, the critical judgments herein feel personal, levied in reaction to an authorial refusal to present Alison’s experiences more legibly, less slant—more traditionally, less experimentally, more directly, less obscurely, more linearly, less circularly. Even admiring reviews comment on the novel’s daunting psychic weight. “The experience of reading it seems rather like biting into a nightmare-inducing, virally loaded madeleine,” Francine Prose writes in Slate, suggesting that “Gaitskill may be, among contemporary authors, the one best-suited to capture, on the page, a period when the marriage of 50 sex and death was such an extraordinarily close one.” Only Nate Lippens, in his The Stranger review, positively connects Veronica’s challenging style to Gaitskill’s larger body of work. “Alison bluntly distills the pain of living—lost loves, dead friends, squandered opportunities— into a style Gaitskill has been developing for years.” Whereas many read Veronica’s layered selves and times as a misstep, an acknowledged master of the short story’s (albeit second) attempt at a novel, Lippens suggests that this subjective, disoriented voice might be the novel’s purpose, a project as contradictory as the decision to write a book in the voice of a woman named Alison and call it Veronica. Veronica was garlanded with accolades, including a nomination for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. And yet in peer-reviewed journals very little has been written about the book, or about Gaitskill’s fiction at all. A scan of the available articles shows an investment in reading Gaitskill as an author of trauma narrative, of sadomashochism and its (invariably negative) aftereffects, some of which has appeared in psychology journals; there are also some considerations of her body of work in journals clearly labeled “for women,” and in those decidedly located within the MFA “craft” arm of the body of criticism. I attribute this general silence to the troubling intersectionality of Gaitskill’s work. Perhaps the problem—of interpretation and critical response; of reading Gaitskill at all—is that of readers confronted with a universe they struggle to navigate for the reason that it is not for them but of its author’s subjectivity. A metaphorical truth, told in occult image. But Veronica did not spring wholly formed from Gaitskill’s temple; it is a work in conversation with both its contemporaries and its author’s own oeuvre, and as proof of a larger stylistic movement, well accompanied. In Booklist, Donna Seaman placed Gaitskill in a canon “harmonizing with Jennifer Egan, Julie Hecht, and Amy Bloom.” Four years before the 51 publication of Veronica, Egan had published her own modeling-themed novel, Look At Me, which in its prodding of the connection between face and world presaged both the rise of social media and the September 11 attacks. That in the last years of the twentieth century two prominent female authors had chosen the model’s experience of her industry as their vehicle for exploring the fraught terrain of self reflects Egan and Gaitskill’s savvy apprehension of a category that had, by the 1990s, become a dominant postmodern atavistic modality for women. To write about models and modeling is to write about seeing and being seen, another point of entry into that oldest topic. Yet both books were dogged by a perception of modeling as subject as superficial, domestic, and minor—as fundamentally feminine. It appears even in a review of the novel with which Egan followed Look At Me, The Keep, by The A.V. Club’s Donna Bowman. Jennifer Egan should adopt a nom de plume—“J. Egan” would do quite well. […] a woman's name on the cover creates a certain expectation about what's inside. […] Her previous novels pigeonhole themselves in typical women's-fiction categories by their synopses (model finds self […] Let me be clear that I take issue not with the critique of what is commonly diminished as “chick lit,” a canon in which no thinking reader would place either Veronica nor Look At Me, nor with the necessity of criticizing literary marketing in general. As an author of book reviews, I pride myself on contextualizing my critical judgments in expansive considerations of the conditions that generate a text, and certainly Battleground, writing in 2006, could be said in the above excerpt to evince a fatigue of books with covers dominated by stylized engagement rings and champagne glasses. And yet. “Typical women’s-fiction” is doublespeak for banal, interior, and minor—hardly “double” at all, in fact. To call something “typical women’s” is to infantilize, 52 minimize, and contain it by speaking its contamination of proximity to the nonnormative subjectivity of the lesser sex, as Jonathan Franzen knows. Why am I bringing Jonathan Franzen into this conversation, writing about him at all? Because to read and understand Franzen is to parse the godhead of American literature’s old guard, a man so preternaturally retrograde in his attitudes and stances that he seems to have been born already middle-aged and nostalgic for a time in which he never lived. In the worshipful marketing and effusive praise that has branded Franzen the sole remaining standard-bearer of the Great American Novel I read another story, one about what is fearful to the powers that be and what power that fear might offer its objects—a story about who is to write and about what, and how importantly and for whom, and about what happens when those rules are not so much broken as they are revealed to have long since atrophied in their inessentiality. In his September 9, 2001 New York Times review of Franzen’s novel The Corrections, David Gates added his voice to an ecstatic choir, remarking that in contrast “an intricately, perfectly paranoid book like Pynchon's ‘Crying of Lot 49,’ [...] now seems as quaintly formalist as ‘The Waste Land.’ ” History smiled on Franzen when, two days later, the attacks of September 11 th occurred, an accident of proximity rendering his novel a major literary work. Egan’s Look At Me, also published just weeks before 9/11, contained a character whose transformational machinations almost exactly predicted the narratives of the perpetrators of the attacks, but it was Franzen’s big, broad portrait of an American family at millennium’s end that garnered accolades for its prescience. He was still being laureled as oracular as late as 2008, when Jennie Yabroff wrote in Newsweek that The Corrections “anticipates almost eerily the major concerns of the next seven years [following its 2001 publication]” and commended the book, which it should be noted once more was written prior to 2001, for not being “hamstrung by 53 the 9/11 problem.” The Corrections represented a significant stylistic shift for its author—“Simply to write a book that wasn't dressed up in a swashbuckling, Pynchon-sized megaplot was enormously difficult,” Franzen said in an interview with Donald Antrim. in the first of several noises made describing the book as purer for its realist style. Not only was it a departure from his previous, modestly characterized as “Pynchon-sized” fiction, Franzen went on. In inspiration, The Corrections was also personal. The most important experience of my life [...] is the experience of growing up in the Midwest with the particular parents I had. I feel as if they couldn’t fully speak for themselves, and I feel as if their experience—by which I mean their values, their experience of being alive, of being born at the beginning of the century and dying towards the end of it, that whole American experience they had—[is] part of me. One of my enterprises in the book is to memorialize that experience, to give it real life and form. (Antrim, “Jonathan Franzen”) The purpose, then, of this much-lauded novel was to memorialize and present the lost world of its creator’s upbringing, a task that provoked anxiety in the author over the state of his masculinity. The resistance manifested itself as shame. “No, I can’t be that straightforward and, no, I can’t drop that mantel of utter mastery of fact and total control of data, because then I’ll appear as this weak, puny boy, and not as the sort of striding, dadlike man that I wanted to be.” (Antrim, “Jonathan Franzen”) His terror of deserting his utter mastery and total control and becoming to be a “weak, puny boy” printed money and awards for Franzen. The Corrections was named a finalist for the National 54 Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Pen/Faulkner Award, and went on to win the National Book Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. British rights to the book were sold for a seven-figure sum. Fifteen years on, it continues to be praised as a great work of American literature, with a long-in-development rumored television adaptation. In 2009, Entertainment Weekly included the novel on its list of one hundred greatest culture products produced in the past decade, writing, “Forget all the Oprah hoo-ha: Franzen's 2001 doorstop of a domestic drama teaches that, yes, you can go home again. But you might not want to.” Oprah hoo-ha? This conversation is getting crowded with gendered doggerel, but I digress. As part of Franzen’s swell season, The Corrections was the September 2001 selection of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club. Franzen complained to the press in response. “I considered turning [the Book Club] down,” Franzen told the Oregonian, first spinning his reaction as that of an “independent writer” who wished to avoid having a “corporate logo” on his book cover, and then as a classist complaint against lowbrow taste: “I feel like I'm solidly in the high art literary tradition, but I like to read entertaining books and this maybe helps bridge that gap, but it also heightens these feelings of being misunderstood.” 1 The foundational nature of Franzen’s distaste for the Oprah Winfrey Book Club became clear during an interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air. It literally had never once crossed my mind that [The Corrections] might be an Oprah pick, [...] partly because she does choose a lot of female authors, and partly because as the reviewer in the New York Times said, this is too edgy to ever be an 1 The angst Franzen expresses at the possibility of his book’s popularity distancing him from “high art” is revealed as a straw man later in the same article, when he says happily of his material success: “It got a phenomenal response last December when we sent out the manuscript [...] That's when we knew it was going to be a big book. I remember my agent calling me up and telling me what the rights were going for in these countries and laughing.” 55 Oprah pick. [...] So much of reading is sustained in this country, I think, by the fact that women read while men are off golfing or watching football on TV or playing with their flight simulator...I continue to believe that, and now, I'm actually at the point with this book that I worry...I had some hope of actually reaching a male audience, and I've heard more than one reader in signing lines now in book stores that said, “If I hadn't heard you, I would have been put off by the fact that it is an Oprah pick. I figure those books are for women and I would never touch it.” Those are male readers speaking. Note Franzen’s pride in his regurgitated version of Gates’s statement, which he has repurposed into a compliment. 2 See him fake left with the opening complaint about men, as if his sentiment is egalitarian misanthropy, before settling on the true nature of his quarrel. Franzen’s cocktail of misogyny, nostalgia, and softheaded metonymy simultaneously self-soothes its speaker, secure in his concern for lost male readers, while also naming and condemning the un-“edgy” forces— read female and middle- or working-class—that would dismantle the world he mourns elsewhere in the interview, a nostalgic wonderland where “well-mannered people who dressed differently than children and [...] put their children's interests before their own, and all around, just were of a different class” (Gross, “Novelist Jonathan Franzen”). Franzen’s explanation of the wound inflicted upon him by his plebe femme readership makes it clear that Franzen yearns for a world of fixed values, an idealized mid-century past where the vaguely above-board values of “responsibility” and “adulthood” are gendered male and classed wealthy—a world that cannot and does not exist without the limited access to 2 In his review, Gates writes that The Corrections has “just enough novel-of-paranoia touches so Oprah won't assign it and ruin Franzen's street cred,” which neatly predicts the author’s complaint. 56 representation and self-expression that characterized the experience of women and other disenfranchised groups of the era. Despite the popularity of The Corrections, Franzen’s complaints about being included in the Oprah Winfrey Book Club became a public relations disaster. Winfrey’s viewers, as it turned out, did not take kindly to the suggestion that they lacked the anatomical and moral qualifications to read Franzen. His invitation to appear on Winfrey’s television show was revoked, provoking rapid backpedaling. In his National Book Award acceptance speech, Franzen thanked the talk show host for “her enthusiasm and advocacy on behalf of The Corrections,” an acknowledgement equal parts coerced and insincere. The September 11 attacks occurred two days after Gates’s laudatory review, refiguring the reading of the book, which is in its author’s own description a collage of regressive tableaux memorializing the imagined virtues of a lost time. Franzen’s novel was thus perfectly fitted to the moment of its cultural birth, reflective rather than predictive of the anxiety surrounding destabilizing and intervening with established narratives of American subjectivity. In this The Corrections was apiece and apace with the literary world’s rapacious appetite for repetition and nostalgia. In 2004 the judges of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, which purports to honor “the best work of fiction published by an American in a single calendar year,” chose to accord the prize to the John Updike collection The Early Stories, 1953-1975, which judge Ron Carlson gushily praised as “an astonishing display of what prose should be and what it can do. While there is no single galvanizing historical event, nevertheless Updike tells us what we were like as the 20th century bumped along” (“The Nation; Updike Wins PEN/Faukner Award”). 57 Certainly, Carlson’s willfully atemporal bending of the definition of the Award for Fiction and also time itself (by 2004, the twentieth century was firmly in the rearview) grants entrance to a landscape of “Pynchon-sized” proportions. The stakes of this nostalgia fever are most evident in the list of 2004 finalists, two of whom were at the time already established, like Updike, as great men of American letters (Frederick Barthelme and Tobias Wolff) and two of whom might have been classed at the time as emerging writers of color (ZZ Packer and Caryl Phillips, the former the only woman, the latter the only non-American). Barthelme, Wolff, Packer, and Phillips had all published new work in the award year; but Updike, the winner, won for work published, at latest and by definition in his book’s very title, in 1975. Not to gild the lily, but it bears mentioning that this author is the man who wrote, in the 1961 story “A&P” (included in the collection that won the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), “You never know for sure how girls' minds work (do you really think it's a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glassjar?)” “Nevertheless Updike tells us what we were like as the 20th century bumped along.” What we were like. A statement of exclusion and privilege so blithe that one might almost miss the violent insistence on stable categories, all these years later and three years after Franzen’s cries against the indignity of broad readership. If Carlson’s—and Franzen’s before him—was an unsurprising and well-trod move, it was also a timely one. As Marita Sturken has argued in Tourists of History, rather than respond to the aperture created by the attacks by coalescing communities of generative effort towards change, the United States instead embraced a cloak of innocence and nostalgia. Repetition and reenactment can work to foster certain kinds of banality […] This quality of repetition can be seen as an achievement of boredom. Thus, it could be 58 argued that kitschy souvenirs and the experience of reenactments, whether in souvenirs, photographic remakes, or architecture, can provide comfort in their familiarity, comfort that ultimately produces banality. […] Repetitions […] produce both a heightening and a flattening of emotion, a catharsis and a mundane sense of something familiar. This is the desire embedded in the snow globe, that it is a miniature world in which the chaos of being shaken up will predictably settle down. This is also the promise of the kitsch object: that the good feelings that come form acknowledging the pain and grief will make everything better, that innocence can be regained. […] What matters is what such gestures leave out. The past remains in the present. It is integrated into our lives, we live with it every day. How we choose to make sense of that integration makes all the difference. (Sturken 285) The post-September 11 cultural landscape craved banality, boredom, and comfort, largely negating the possibility of alliances of ideologically-opposed groups forming against state violence in the manner Judith Butler proposes in Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Jonathan Franzen’s attempts to reinforce the importance of gendered spheres in literary production and in the act of reading itself in the marketing of his kitsch product The Corrections—in the face of overwhelming adulation and newly crowned as a Great Author, no less—indicate the depth of his, and the critical establishment’s, investment in notions of voice, gender, and creativity that qualify the acts of reading and writing as intrinsically different for male and female readers and writers. As Rivecca has it: This is how certain men talk about writing by women. They inevitably praise the attention to detail: a schoolmasterly, head-patting compliment, as if they’re 59 talking about a particularly intricate piece of embroidery. Men’s work tends to be referred to as “sweeping” and “epic,” bold and fearless in its brushstrokes, grandly, joyously boundary-less as a frontier. It is also more often credited with selflessness and generosity, lauded as a crystal-clear reflection of reality, untainted by petty personal agenda. (Women don’t forget anything. Trust ’em to hold a grudge!) If men’s writing is an expansive mural, women’s writing is a fastidiously arranged diorama, every detail tiny and brittle and exact, a slavish replication of something larger and more vital, as fustily homely as a domestic craft, as claustrophobic and confining as a cell. These gendered assumptions have their roots in ancient modes of self-writing but are vibrantly alive in contemporary literary culture. They motivate the eagerness to demean novels about models as “typical women’s-fiction” and work like work universal, important, and meaningful, although his primary subject has always been that most domestic of tropes, the family. I present the story of Franzen and the Oprah Winfrey Book Club to define the terms of these essays, which aim to identify and interrogate the strategies through which authors have transformed the fraught landscapes of sex and identity into domains of personal autonomy and artistic self-governance. Occult imagery acts as a corrective weapon against the hegemonic structures that have sought to contain and produce female narrative. It is a tool devised for use against the very conditions that shaped and made necessary its existence. The dichotomies of interior/exterior, domestic/worldly, and personal/universal have long been gendered. To draw an analogy from medicine, where the labor of a doctor is gendered male and compensated accordingly, while the labor of a nurse is gendered female and thus less deserving of high pay because of the nurse’s presumed natural inclination to nurse, the work of a 60 female author is evaluated with an assumption of the natural and intrinsically private—almost involuntary—nature of the act of writing for a woman, a notion that positions women’s writing as the shadow of the archetype of the outward-looking, public work of the male writer. The resulting aesthetic has been influential in debates about the value of women’s writing, from what Francine Prose calls “history’s most heartfelt, expansive confession of gynobibliophobia” (“Scent of a Woman’s Ink”) in Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself— I have a terrible confession to make – I have nothing to say about any of the talented women who write today. [...] I do not seem able to read them [...] I can only say that the sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquille in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn. [...] A good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls. (Mailer 463) —to Hélène Cixous’s statement, in “The Laugh of the Medusa” that “Woman must write woman. And man, man” (Cixous 877). The omnipresent male-gendered normative must be evoked even in—especially in!—the creation of literary space for women, the imagination of which new, unknown world is irrevocably birthed in the shape and shadow of the old and known. Presumptions about the innately different nature of writing by women find their source in the question of “voice,” the ephemeral quality that defines a work’s intimate interaction with the reader. These gendered dichotomies have long guided critical thought about literature by women, equally influential to feminist theorists and misogynist critics. And for as long, female authors have used the act of writing as a means of navigating a world hostile to the female literary subject. 61 The Jesuit priest and academic Walter J. Ong, who began his career as the protégée of Marshall McLuhan, spent much of his long life considering the affect of communication on thought. Ong focused on the divide between orality and literacy, advancing the argument that human thought and action is formed directly by the presence, or absence, of literacy. Writing, Ong argued in Orality and Literacy, is a technology, the progenitor of a technological progression that later produced the printing press and computers, which reduces “dynamic sound to quiescent space” and separates “the word from the living present, where alone spoken words can exist” (81). In Orality and Literacy, Ong delivers an exquisite history of human consciousness through his analysis of literacy’s effect on thought, beginning with Plato’s argument, in Phaedrus, that writing weakens memory and therefore human intelligence. Ong’s characterization of writing as a technology is rooted in the act’s impact on memory, Plato’s claim that “those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources” indirectly affirms the value of memory (78). Writing, Ong argues, does not weaken memory but transforms it, remaking the process of recollection and commemoration. In his efficient telling of the development of oral culture into literate culture, Ong chronicles the transitional period in which dictation and rhetoric remained an important element of the writing process. The advent of what Ong terms “high literacy” created a final break from these oral remnants: “High literacy fosters truly written composition, in which the author composes a text which is precisely a text, puts his or her words together on paper. This gives thought different contours from those of orally sustained thought” (94). One consequence of high literacy was the writing of early female novelists, whose education was rooted not in rhetoric but in the everyday reading necessary for household management, and whose diaries, in 62 both eleventh-century Japan and seventeenth-century England, showed the first glimmerings of interiority through the intimacy of the epistolary form. In her Pillow Book (completed 1002 AD), Heian Japanese diarist Sei Shonagon included lists (“Elegant Things,” “Things That Should Be Large,” “Things That Should Be Short”) and gemlike descriptions of courtly life. During the Heian era, self-writing comprised one of many creative activities in which noblewomen were expected to engage (others notably included butterfly capturing, poetry-writing and moon-watching contests, and bestowing noble ranks and titles on domestic animals). Over the course of the Pillow Book’s great length, Shonagon achieved a nascent interiority through the regular recording of her daily activities, which gave her cause to probe the emotions underlying her reactions to life at court When I first went into waiting at Her Majesty's Court, so many different things embarrassed me that I could not even reckon them up and I was always on the verge of tears. As a result, I tried to avoid appearing before the Empress except at night, and even then I stayed behind a three-foot curtain of state. (Shonagon trans. Morris 186) Alongside its fictionalized counterpart, Lady Murasaki Shibiku’s The Tale of Genji, the Pillow Book is a window into the inner lives of women living during a brief window of near-equality between the sexes (a social situation enjoyed by only the tiny population of the imperial Japanese court). Its author’s willful collusion of real and created selfhood comprises the sole entry in this canon until nearly a half-millennium later, when, spurred on by a Protestant endorsement of self- writing and an emerging interest in personal spirituality, many Englishwomen began journals in the early modern period. 63 Spiritual accounting was the primary concern of self-writer Lady Margaret Hoby, whose diary was kept in the years 1599-1605. Her diary is a prayer ledger, neatly establishing what Hoby has done for God and what God owes her in return. Its matter-of-fact tone establishes Hoby as single-mindedly focused on routine and household accounting: After privatt praier I went downe and wrought with my maides before diner I praied and read of the bible after diner I went downe again and was busie tell 4 a clock then I wrought and hard Mr Rhodes read and after I went to private medetation and praier (Lay By Your Needles Ladies 71) Years of pious monotony yield an unexpected dividend: interiority, which begins to emerge here, too: As through corruption we use not the blessinge of peace as we ought so are we to expecte new temptations to humble us for our former necclegence and so I have been this day boffetted for better heed (Lay By Your Needles Ladies 73) Although the tone of Hoby’s reflection about corruption and temptation owes much to the religious rhetoric in which her life was steeped, the personal connection she draws emphasizes personal responsibility over blind obedience. Hoby’s Diary is striking for its colliding notions of the self as both devout believer and independent agent, a tension reaffirmed by other notable diaries of the period, such as those of Lady Anne Clifford and Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland. For these diarists, the act of writing became instrumental to the development idea of the writer’s self. Writing in the late seventeenth century, another English diarist, Elizabeth Bury, concluded: “…if it were not for her Diary, she would neither know what she was, or what she did, or what she had” (Bury qtd. in Botonaki 9). 64 My review of these diarists and of Ong’s work is intended to establish the ideological and literary trajectory in which the subjects of the essays are fellow travelers. For the authors I explore herein, the selfhood struggle is as real and troubling as it was for Shonagon and Hoby. Female authors’ access to the novel form is based in the early classification of self-writing as an intrinsically feminine activity—a way of looking inward that led inexorably to the act of observing and recording the world through the mimesis of fiction. Or as Charlotte Perkins Gilman put it in The Man-Made World, or Our Androcentric Culture (1911), “Life is discovered to be longer, wider, deeper, richer, than these monotonous players of one tune would have us believe” (Gilman 103). If life is longer, wider, deeper, and richer, then the memories that it generates too defy the containers the monotonous players have thrown on their pottery wheels. If not one but a multiplicity of experiences can be conveyed through the memory technology of writing and story, and if the act of recording can generate and shape subjectivity, then it stands to reason that that subjectivity can clap back and remake the technology in its own image. Not only that it can, but that, through the epiphanic stylistic acts of occult imagery, it does and will. Autotheory in Muir Woods I turn now to a vivisection of the interstices of Veronica’s most crucial setting and framing scene—a walk through a memory landscape imbued with the creative-cum-metaphysical qualities of the American West—and by flaying alive this intersection aim to offer some comments on Gaitskill’s deployment of occult imagery. Here I must confess some anxiety. This section’s title, “Autotheory in Muir Woods,” is premised upon an assumption—that the “grove of giant redwood trees [in] […] a canyon at the foot of a mountain” which Gaitskill describes as 65 “a dignity preserve for rich people” (119) is in fact Muir Woods National Monument. Nowhere does Gaitskill explicitly name this sacred landscape of “living green” (140) and “sick ocher tree[s]” (252). Only through parsing the otherwise surpassingly direct geographic specificity with which Gaitskill renders her novel’s setting does the inference emerge. Alison, the protagonist of Veronica, is a former fashion model and actress working as an office cleaner in San Rafael, California. The novel is set in Paris and suburban New Jersey, Manhattan and El Sereno, the oldest neighborhood in Los Angeles. But save for what I will hereafter term inferred-Muir—a word pairing whose cellar door-like assonance offers a hypnotic reassurance—all of the novel’s settings are evoked wholly within Alison’s interiority over the course of one day in which cleans her old agent’s office, visits a friend’s household of recovering addicts, and takes a bus to a place where “the wet pavement is lush as a stone sponge […] Through [the] skin [of giant trees] you feel the beat of their huge hearts from deep in the ground” (119). What is criticism and scholarship but the elaborate choreography of the superinformed guess? The words “Muir Woods” do not appear in Veronica. I can argue only for an understanding of this space as inferred-Muir, the setting in which Alison uses an imagined impossible to reorder the real. I want here to contextualize Veronica and inferred-Muir within the idea of the West as intrinsically restorative, a notion that has found expression in untold Western authors’ dances with the pathetic and mimetic fallacies and been intervened with by critics like Krista Comer, who terms the dream of this idealized, optimism-inscribed West “the hope trope.” Female writers’ engagement with the hope trope is one of the bridges between this essay and the one that follows, which considers Judith Freeman’s use of inscribed Western landscapes to portray heroic-scale aestheticizations of her protagonist’s agency. But it also functions to 66 highlight a significant divergence between these two foci of this monograph; while Freeman is undeniably a writer of the West, setting her fiction in the states where she has spent her life— Utah, California, and Idaho—Gaitskill’s work is rarely regionally identified. I want to claim Gaitskill’s work as part of the feminist canon of the American West, or perhaps simply claim it in order to disrupt the fact that Mary Gaitskill’s fiction has almost entirely escaped mention within academe and its multifarious discourses. While she is strongly associated with the East Coast and Midwest, Gaitskill has for many years split her life and work between New York State and Marin County—the latter of which contains both San Rafael and our inferred-Muir. So a reader can guess, and cross-reference between the author’s biography and fiction, and thus arrive at an inference—but here we must venture again into the realm of fiction, for it my apprehension of Gaitskill’s fictive space as inferred-Muir—even as the idea of Muir Woods if not the actual—itself constitutes a type of fiction. And this fictive space is in active conversation with both the actual Muir Woods and its imbricated readings, as well as the imagined restorative vistas that continue to shape and obscure our apprehension of the actual West. I draw your attention to my own experience of thinking and feeling my way through the questions raised in Veronica to highlight this section’s concern with the intersection of self and theoretical act. In Bodily Natures, her lightning-rod monograph about intimacy between humans and their environment, Stacy Alaimo writes, Imagining human corporeality as trans-corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world, underlines the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment.’ It makes 67 it difficult to pose nature as mere background […] for the exploits of the human since ‘nature’ is always as close as one’s own skin. (2) With its willful trees, green lungs, and grounded hearts, the universe of Veronica synthesizes and makes visible this intermeshing with the more-than-human, reflecting both a shift in our imagining of this relationship between verbally communicative and silent sentience and Gaitskill’s use of occult imagery as a tactic to dramatize the fraught terrain of her protagonist’s psychic struggle for bodily autonomy and assured mobility. It is not so much that Veronica is a text of trans-corporeality, consciously or not, but that aesthetics of trans-corporeality are the essential means through which occult imagery works within it to portray the stakes and experience of a woman’s interiority. “I’m always looking for terms that are not ‘memoir’ to describe autobiographical writing that exceeds the boundaries of the ‘personal.’ ” So the author and critic Maggie Nelson explained her use of the term “autotheory,” a word she sources in the work of the Spanish writer Paul Preciado, who defines it in his 2008 book Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic era, as “somato-political fiction, a theory of the self, a self-theory” (Preciado qtd. in “Bookforum Talks With Maggie Nelson”). Veronica models this selfsame self- preoccupied mode of inquiry, as Alison travels through time via not only her mind but also her body, returning circularly to a consideration of what Gaitskill terms “the liver place,” a somatic interiority that holds great reserves of pleasure and pain. (It bears mentioning here that both Nelson and Preciado work on the topic of queer and queered identities—another canon in which Gaitskill’s work can be placed.) Aptly for one preoccupied by “the liver place,” Alison suffers from Hepatitis C, a mark of her survival of the excess and death of Gaitskill’s 1980s New York City. By projecting this bodied universe, the inferred-Muir section of Veronica dramatizes the 68 task of the autotheorist and builds Western space as an amphitheater for the preoccupations, failings, and triumphs of the self. Gaitskill’s landscapes are active, with permeable boundaries through which the sublime constantly threatens to arrive. “Houses recede. The wind rises. The eyes and ears of God come down the walk,” Alison announces on her way to inferred-Muir. I should go home. I’m tired and weak. Above me, the treetops wave back and forth, full of shapes, like the ocean. Wild hair, great sopping fists, a rippling field, a huge wet plant with thousands of tiny flowers that open and close with the wind. Form recedes. All the smiling television faces blend to make a shimmering suit that might hold you. (96) Alison traverses a vividly drawn landscape shaped by emotional consciousness, in which all of nature—plant life, animals, and fellow humans alike—offers containment to and for the fraught self. On the bus, Alison watches a group of loud teenagers surround an elderly woman: “Their energy pours over her skin, into her blood, heart, spine, and brain. Watering the flowers of her brain” (113). The erotics of this universe seek coalescence and coherence through union. “The epiphanic narrative,” Alaimo writes, “[…] that this precarious sense of kinship between dirt and flesh may not only elevate dirt to the status of family member, but […] elevate the very substance of the self into something worthy of proper care and feeding” (12). In Veronica, the epiphany has several layers: Alison in epiphanic communion with herself; Alison as conduit for epiphanic communion with nature and environment; Alison as witness to epiphanic communion. Communion is the transcendent act, even when unwitting and unwilling; the forced confrontation and nonconsensual communion triggered by public encounters in locations such as the bus 69 contain the potential for transformation inaccessible to those isolated and protected by wealth and comfort, whom Gaitskill describes as “Locked in with privileges and pleasures, but also with pain” (113). In inferred-Muir, Alison’s self-protective shields—the physical, emotional, and psychic defenses she has constructed to hold herself separate from both a lost life of glamor and pain and the grief with which loss has freighted her—are assaulted, neutralized, and finally dissolved. She suffers the mind/body split with a taut cynical clarity. Drive the animal before you and never stop. Starve it, cut it, stuff silicone in it. Feed it until it’s too fat to think or feel. Then cut it open and suck the fat out. Sew it up and give it medication for pain. Make it run on the treadmill, faster, faster. […] Give it medication for pain. Dazzle its eyes with visions of beauty. […] Set it chasing a hot, rippling heaven from which illness and pain have been removed forever. Set it fleeing the silent darkness that is always at its heels. Suck it out. Sew it up. Run. When the dark comes, pray: I love my ass. (120) Alison’s disenchantment with her corpus is manifold; in addition to her ailments she contends with chronic pain resulting from a car accident and the more quotidian insults of ordinary aging, amplified by her past as a model, a worker of face and form. Suffering has long since dropped the scales of sentimentality from Alison’s eyes; she is both ghost and haunted, after Avery Gordon’s usage: If haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities, the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting is taking place. (8) 70 For some time now I have been transfixed and troubled by the many moments in Veronica when spirits and other impossible forces and images intervene with what Gordon calls “taken-for- granted realities,” as in the nightmare miniature that emerges through Alison’s contemplation of a small waterfall in inferred-Muir: “On the dark bottom of the ocean, a wicked girl is covered with black slime and snakes and surrounded by ugly creatures staring at her with hate in their eyes” (250). Or the reemergence of Veronica, the book’s namesake and Alison’s older friend long dead from AIDS, who appears in the woods brandishing a wand that “bursts into flame” and “arcs across a gray expanse and goes out” (170), curing Alison’s fever. These lines can be read as imagistic representations of Alison’s negotiation of her grief and pain; on a textual level they also direct the reader to details that vibrate above or below the mundane inputs and outputs of perception, and on a metatextual level they perform an the active sentience of inferred-Muir, suggesting that Alison’s walk itself is an autotheoretical act—to echo Preciado, “a somato-political fiction, a theory of the self, a self-theory.” Human corporeality, especially female corporeality, has been so strongly associated with nature in Western thought that it is not surprising that feminism has been haunted not only by the specter of nature as the repository of essentialism, but by, as Lynda Birke puts it, “the ghost of biology.” (Alaimo 5) Although Alison experiences a level of perception and general sensitivity that may stretch a reader’s understanding of the limits of human apprehension, she is not figured as supernaturally gifted or otherwise specially able, particularly and especially not for reasons of her gender. As I will show below, Gaitskill is particularly resistant to gendered readings of her work, which never privileges and/or packages femininity with magical or biologically-determined “gifts.” This writer can only speculate that this careful positioning is a further expression of the author’s 71 distaste for gendered, politicized readings, but occult imagery works—generally, and specifically in the work of Mary Gaitskill—to undo the gendering of literary space, not render it more wholly or foundationally feminine. Indeed, it is through the tactics of occult imagery that Veronica reveals what Alaimo calls “debased nature, which is associated with corporeality” and performs the move the theorist imagines, “for feminist theory to undertake the transformation of gendered dualisms—nature/culture, body/mind, object/subject, resource/agency, and others—that have been cultivated to denigrate and silence certain groups of human as well as nonhuman life” (5). If Alison has an intrinsically feminine quality, it is not her ability to feel and perceive the sentience of her environment, nor her function as a conduit to higher and greater levels of communion, but her gaze. Of the many texts that have shaped my notion and understanding of occult imagery, Anne Friedberg’s Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern has contributed most substantively to my understanding of the positionality of the woman in conversation with her surrounding. Building on Walter Benjamin’s notion of the flâneur, and answering the question of the flâneuse, Friedberg proposes that women were the beta testing ground for a “newly-conjoined mobilized and virtual gaze of the cinema [which] answered not only the desire for temporal and spatial mobility, but for gender mobility as well.” Here, theories of spectatorship which imply a one-to-one correspondence between the spectator position and gender, race, or sexual identity—as if identity were a constant, consistent continuum, unchallenged by the borrowed subjectivity of spectatorship—do not consider the pleasures of escaping this physically-bound subjectivity. Isn’t cinema spectatorship pleasurable precisely because new identities can be “worn” and discarded? This question appeals to a much larger debate about identification and spectator effect, but it is one that explores gender, 72 race, and sexual mobility, rather than one that fixes identity in spectator address. (185) In Veronica, these pleasures of escape are felt and exerted in every direction; over, within, and through the landscape, over, within, and through the body, over, within, and through the immaterial self. Soul, mind, heart; all see and feel the environment through which they travel, gazing and gazed upon by a chorused sentience that makes way for, first, the negotiation of trauma and death, and then, the acts of healing. All in the West, and Western; by portraying and interrogating the lacunae, disappearances, and unspeakable losses of the AIDS epidemic, Gaitskill evokes the old chestnut of the restorative vista anew by inscribing it on her protagonist’s interiority. Alison fears and is drawn to her “liver place” as an intimate terrain of terror, love, and recollection, but she encounters the landscape of inferred-Muir as transcendent and irresistible. Huge and calm, the landscape unfolds. Silent and still, it rings with force and hidden motion. The ringing strength is like blood singing in the body of the ground—passionate music you don’t hear with your ear, but feel just outside your senses. […] Tenderness seeps into and softens my fever. The unfolding deepens. (129) Gaitskill’s “unfolding” recalls to me the internalized landscapes of writers more readily claimed as Western, including Judith Freeman, who calls southern Utah’s “immense silence” “the currency of this land” (Red Water 149) and titled her second novel, set in a “motel nowhere” outside of Las Vegas, A Desert of Pure Feeling. And Natalie Diaz, whose poem, “The Clouds Are Buffalo Limping toward Jesus,” is five constellated words: weeping blooms 73 of white smoke. (39) Alison’s self-confrontation in this verdant cathedral evokes even and especially that most exceptional and held apart of women writers of the American West, Joan Didion, who writes in “On Morality” of “some underground pools […] over across the Nevada line” where sheriff’s deputies “have been diving for ten days but have found no bottom to the caves, no bodies and no trace of them, only the black 90° water going down and down and down, and a single translucent fish, not classified” (Didion 120). Like Gaitskill’s, these landscapes exteriorize the internal, performing a narrative realignment of concerns typically classed as private and feminine. By forcing the confrontation with masculine and public Western space mapped in blood and violence Gaitskill joins a canon that seeks to infuse marginalized insights into empowered spaces and in so doing dramatize the stakes of self-excavation. This is the work of occult imagery, its focus and magic. For it is the active nature of the Western landscape, more than any inherently restorative quality, that yields its travelers insight and, eventually, healing. “I take off my glove and stroke the tree trunk as I walk past. I wonder if it is diseased. Everyone knows they’re diseased,” Alison muses in inferred-Muir (159). “On both sides now, devil trees escort me. I hear her. The sun has come out. I hear him” (251). In conversation with another hiker, she remarks on the incredible color of the “ocher” trees, “There must be something really wrong with them to make them look like that. But they’re so beautiful—it seems funny the disease would make them beautiful.” The stranger explains that the trees are not diseased—they are madrones that shed their bark in winter. “But the color is so extreme; it’s amazing,” Alison replies. 74 “It’s not that bright usually,” the man tells her. “The wet brings it out” (252). In Landscapes of the New West, Comer writes, “By finding, risking, and embracing public visibility, women writers transform public spaces, make them more conducive to female subjectivity and political visions” (259). In this feminist, autotheoretic inquiry, I am moved to risk the inclusion of my own transformative Western vistas, felt and seen over the course of five years’ worth of attendance at the annual meeting of the Western Literature Association. The indomitable red curving down of the drive back from Prescott, the next year’s journey to Missoula’s silver river, coniferous heights, and the utterly windowless hotel interior impervious to wifi, and that trip’s mission to see the National Bison Range. Lubbock, the conference I skipped, imagined as dry and vast, winnowed by Election Night 2012, and the gentle isolation of the Berkeley Marina and its subpar, overpriced restaurants, that jaunt to Canada, where the deafening wind of the Juan de Fuca Strait fought the amplified overheard conversation between two fellow WLAers in front of me on the airport shuttle as they discussed in detail the logistics of traveling yearly from Wisconsin to New Mexico by car. I think of standing on the dais to receive an award and also of the night that I was presented in conversation to a man who is apparently quite the decorated scholar in his field, who was so displeased to be expected to interact with me that he insisted, “I can’t hear you,” over and over in an escalating tone in the quiet room as I fumbled with my determined graduate student pleasantries. In being taught and teaching myself to communicate in the lingua franca of academic discourse across my attendance at these five conferences as a graduate student, I too became expert in the task of exteriorizing the interior—a vein of Western autotheory in which all my writing, critical and creative alike, has come to reside. And always, when the time came to finally present the paper on which I had spent so much spit and blood, I was met by the 75 discordance of the soul entering the wider world. The sole comment or question I received after presenting a version of this reading of Veronica at the 2015 WLA conference—during the Q&A which in the hushed moments beforehand I am only mildly embarrassed to admit I thought might erupt into furious argument with shouted disavowals—was “Huh, I will definitely have to check out some books by female authors!” By the end of Veronica, Alison’s interior is indistinguishable from her exterior, her present caught up in—and to—her past. Just as she can recognize the beauty and strength of the trees she so recently believed diseased—first in spite of that perceived impediment, then because it, and finally despite its absence—so too can Alison recuperate her own past through the recognition of love: I sank down in darkness and lived among the demons for a long, long time. […] I was saved by another demon, who looked on me with pity and so became human again. And because I pitied her in turn, I was allowed to become human, too. (256) I am here moved to share a quotation from the namesake of inferred-Muir himself, John Muir’s 1895 essay “The Discovery of Glacier Bay, By Its Discoverer.” When his Indian guides, despairing of their mission’s success in inclement weather, are informed that Muir seeks only knowledge, one comments, “Muir must be a witch to seek knowledge in such a place as this” (11). Over the last half-decade, my experiences in this place have formed the basis of an inquiry into a body of occult knowledge, one that has most recently brought me into conversation with Mary Gaitskill herself. In response to my request for an interview—finally sent after four years of detective work tracking down her personal contact information—Gaitskill wrote, 76 I really dislike art of any kind being talked about in terms of gender; I think it creates distortion. I believe that all genuine fiction may create an ‘imagined impossible’ with the potential to ‘reorder the real,’ but I am absolutely not aiming to ‘intervene’ in academia in any way! This response echoes her reply to Rivecca, which appeared in The Rumpus in 2013: I don’t know why the three guys quoted by Rivecca got so bitched up about my writing, except that they’re critics and that means that sometimes they gotta bitch. But that’s got nothing to do with their being men, and regardless of my appreciation for Rivecca, I’d never hope that there be a “moratorium” on men speaking of my work or anything else. By granting the dignity of the body—imagined here, perhaps, as beyond gender, and into a landscape unto itself—to both subject and seen landscape in her fiction, Gaitskill casts a compelling spell over these dynamic and magic Wests. It is because it is not supposed to function in this way that it does. Autotheorists, writers, bitches, witches all, when the dark comes, let us all pray, I love my ass, and its impossible vistas, and the fellow seekers that accompany it there. My ass. Why do I linger on this Gaitskill line, one which a less enchanted reader might argue realizes the author’s oft-characterization as vulgar? Because when I write about Gaitskill— when I write about literature—when at all I write, I do so in my body, and when at all I read, I do so in my body, and it is the experience of life in that body that has given rise to my understanding of occult imagery, perceived through somatic reading. Allow me to explain. 77 In the spring of 2015 I was Daehler Visiting Lecturer of Creative Writing at Colorado College. On one of my last days in Colorado Springs, I had coffee with Thomas Lindblade, a professor in the College’s Theater Department with whom I had been connected by a colleague who noted we shared a mutual interest in the late Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. Over the course of my PhD, my quest to discover more about the cult writer so luridly mythologized in the press had given rise to my highest-profile publications to date. After attending a talk I gave on the subject, Lindblade invited me out to discuss his tantalizing idea that Bolaño’s writing was the product of the experience of liver failure—an idea that had risen out of his own somatic readership, for Lindblade was a recent survivor of a liver transplant. As he told it, Lindblade was in bed, convalescing from the procedure that would also have saved Bolaño’s life, had he not perished in 2003 while perched at the top of the European transplant list, when he decided to begin reading The Third Reich, the posthumously-recovered novel published in English by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2008. “And I began to think I was reading about myself,” the theater professor said, fixing me with his light eyes. “This guy [the novel’s protagonist, German strategy games enthusiast Dieter] doesn’t realize he’s a mess. With liver failure, you become self-obsessed, OCD, and can’t control it.” All of the behaviors and revelations aligned, Lindblade told me—slowly collapsing Bolaño’s characters into their creator, a move I couldn’t fault, as Bolaño himself did it regularly—Dieter’s circadian fluxuations, up all night and sleeping during the day, the exhaustion evident on Bolaño’s face in photographs, the encephalopathy symptoms evinced in the fiction and poetry, all of it was the direct result of living with liver failure. “You have confusion, a limited and less acute attention span. Daydreams to the point of illusion. The most important part of your day is your dreams. You make associative connections, one thing to 78 another. Leaps. The surety of a map appeals—you want to map things out. But you have no boundary. You become paranoid, withholding, suspecting there is much you haven’t been told. That line in ‘Last Evenings On Earth’ in which he says the awning ‘looks like a vein’? His veins are engorged and clotted.” “The very idea of the infrareal,” Lindblade said, invoking the name of the poetry movement that Bolaño cofounded as a teenager in Mexico City, “is the experience of liver disease, the biology of body disintegration and the concomitant psychology of anxiety and panic consistent with intermittent encephalopathic episodes. Life comes in snippets, fleeting moments of insight. A montage. I was in panic mode for fifteen years. How’s that for fragmentation of narrative?” The liver place, indeed. I wrote furiously in my notebook as he narrated the specifics of the downward spiral of liver function and the progressive measures taken to first hold off and then smoothly transition from the failing liver to a healthy transplant. “That’s why there’s that focus on maps,” Lindblade insisted, lit now, his white hair feathering into his face. “Meticulous mapping, a narrative only you, the sufferer, can understand.” And so will I begin the inelegant narrative only I can tell, that of my ass. I will try in its telling to not unnecessarily impugn or valuate my corpus. Who is to say it is inelegant, after all, at least right now, other than me? By “ass,” I here mean butt, but not just buttocks or the gluteus muscles that comprise them. I am speaking of the ass itself and also the ass in culture, which on a woman’s body includes the hips and pelvis, an entire below-waist region and topography about which much has been written and said. I have no especial memory of my ass prior to the changes that befell it at 79 puberty, and no particular recollection of those changes, either. Only after—which begs the prelapsarian question of what came before, for me at least unanswerable—these metamorphoses does my ass present itself as a topic. To myself, nominally, as I begin to fight with, but much more so does my ass present itself as a topic to the world. Starting when I am twelve years old, my attempts to contain my ass draw uninvited commentary. From these last years of middle school to the first of my PhD, my ass will rebel against the pants of the day, revealing the upper hemline of my underwear or the region I will learn through long practice to call “crack.” “Lisa, I can see your underwear,” a boy in my seventh-grade Social Studies class singsongs as we line up in the hall. It takes me a moment to realize the comment is about but not for me. It is for the entire class, for the line that forms slowly behind me. A line of eyes, trying to see what he saw. In high school the jeans grow lower-waisted. Although I lose weight by quitting swim team and chugging water until I am nauseous and cannot eat, which allows me to shed all of my muscle tone, my body still cannot fit the pants. My ass, really; everything else crams in okay. People I think of as friends have a way of bringing my ass up as an object of wonder and mystery. People I don’t know notice it too. Once, I am leaning over in the girls’ locker room after gym class and, hearing a snort of laughter behind me, turn to see two girls with whom I am not acquainted, plainly staring at the spot my ass once occupied. “You see? You see? I told you,” one says to the other. “She’s white but she has a black girl’s ass.” Race, a topic with which I was acquainted only in the deeply limited and fundamentally optimistic frame of my privileged Nineties upbringing in a suburb of Chicago, had begun to enter 80 the conversation about my ass. While it would take another decade and change before I could articulate the complex histories, hegemonies, and symbolism layered on top of the stranger girl’s statement—a landscape I still feel improperly grounded to wholly navigate, even in the pages of my dissertation—I felt in it the edge of sexualized, racialized diminishment, that to be white with a black girl’s ass was both a liability and an asset, rendering me vulnerable to a desiring gaze I hadn’t invited while also perhaps capable, unlike an actual black woman, of picking and choosing when I wanted to evoke that fraught symbol of exoticized othered female sexuality. Capable only in theory, I hasten to add. My experiences with my ass taught me first and foremost that I could pick and choose none of the reactions it generated from those who saw it. Not the joking nickname my mother coined for the seemingly uncontainable region commonly called the “muffin top,” a term she disliked and so replaced with “Lisa’s loaf”—“It’s shiny and soft like rising dough!”— quickly shortened to simply “the loaf” and adopted by my friends. Not the caricature my coeditors on the school literary magazine drew, a psychedelic loaf of bread with the words I Love Lisa’s Loaf swirling inside, and hung on the wall of the room in which we met to consider submissions to the magazine. Not the anxiety my boyfriend developed about the exposure of the loaf, which progressed into a tic of craning his neck to check my backside as we walked abreast, a tic he seemed incapable of turning off even when I was wearing a dress or other garment that forestalled the possibility of it being seen. A complex which escalated, at its highest point, to his frantic, wailed reprimand at an ATM terminal where I had waited for him to finish his transaction with my back pressed against a glass wall that faced the street: “These guys walked by and they didn’t see me and they just howled with laughter at your ass!” This event would repeat itself ad infinitum, in locations across the United States and the world. I’d be somewhere minding my business, forgetting just a little bit, in that tiny way even a 81 woman can, that I was a body, reducible, and then some laughter would filter in, fixing me in my skin, and I would remember that whatever else I was, I was to the world an ass, a loaf, and no amount of savvy outfits and belts and long t-shirts and even, briefly, men’s boxer shorts, could contain it. Whenever I heard laughter my hand floated reflexively to the small of my back to check, and normally I felt revealed skin, which meant I didn’t even have to look to see who was laughing—only to understand that laughter was the natural response a stranger had to my body existing in space. A woman who supervised my internship at a lifestyle publication waited until the very last week of my time at her company to take me aside and tell me I had spent all six months of my unpaid time there dressing inappropriately. This critique baffled me as I had begun my internship wearing suitlike outfits to the office until the young, predominantly female staff had prevailed upon me to wear jeans and t-shirts, to “dress normal,” they said. “Like we do!” I tried to explain this to my boss, horrified to think that I had, as she put it, “made those around you feel uncomfortable.” How, I wondered? “Well, you tend to wear quite low-cut jeans,” she said, clearly mortified to have to say it directly. For an instant my vision blacked in the madness of trying to explain my ass to her. The way that it seemed impossible to contain, no matter what I did. The way I had never wanted to wear quite low-cut jeans, at all, that low-cut was just what jeans became, on my body. That I had wished so ardently to be a member of the office community, to be like the lithe sylphs who downward-dogged at their desks in their shrunken t-shirts and fancy jeans. That I did not wish to dictate her own experience but I could hazard a guess from looking at her that whatever region of her own corpus caused her this pain, it was likely not her ass. Or maybe it was, and maybe that idea that this knowledge was my occult secret is a lie I tell to make myself feel better. 82 Dress codes have dogged me all my life. In high school I was sent home to change out of skirts whose length the disciplining officer admitted would not be a problem on a different body. My body was the problem, and also it was my body. My self. But if I wanted to be taken seriously, I learned that I could not be a body. I learned that I would have to discipline the parts of myself that wanted to be a body—to be bodied—into ephemerality. I learned that I would have to but not how. It was another lesson entirely that such discipline is neither possible nor required. If only I had been able to choose, I think now, writing in a time that has enshrined and elevated the ass. Is it this year or the last that was declared Year of the Ass? Middle schoolers debate the politics of the body on social media now, call each other out for picking and choosing which racialized attributes to highlight and pursue while disregarding the larger cultural responsibilities and implications of full lips and a persistently round posterior. Had I been able to pick and choose, I would have chosen none of these. I would have chosen to be invisible, which was how I felt every time someone raised my ass. Bad invisible, a thing attached to a thing. Writing, reading, I am good invisible, eyes burning through words, powered by a jet trail of subjectivity. But I am not a pair of eyes powered by a jet trail of subjectivity. I am a body, and an ass; and when I read Veronica I didn’t see an old lady writing about sex, I felt a body telling other bodies, and I found in that telling my magic, that knowledge available only to the initiated, an occult I could remake in my own image. Recently, I lost weight, achieving that silent goal I had held all my young life. After decades of fad diets (the snack of fifteen almonds dangling above me always, the Snack of Damocles), for the first time stress took away my appetite and I became smaller without will, shrinking and shrinking. My appetite and I wrestle now, and sometimes I pin it and force open its 83 maw and drop a sardine or fried slice of halloumi inside and watch with grim satisfaction the brief expression of pleasure that changes its face. But I have lost my voraciousness, that lusty pursuit of pleasure via taste, and my ass has significantly receded. It is disturbing how much better I am treated for having successfully reduced myself. At my physical three years running the doctor has remarked upon my size as if it is a credential or degree. My altered body is better fit to the world than the one in which I walked almost all of my life. It was all an accident, the weight loss, I want to protest—and then I am distracted by shining prizes and smiles and regard that tells me that I did it, made myself ephemeral, erased the bits that cumbersomely anchored. It is a light kind of happiness, on the edge of sick, to glory in my own disappearance. Haunting as joy: The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening. And so I remember, and here memorialize, and I am grateful to my ass for teaching me how to do a somatic reading by making me live one. 84 Chapter Two “Something that could be attractive in either sex”: Embodied and Inscribed (Western) Landscapes, Occult Whiteness, and the Hope Trope In the spring of 2010 I read Judith Freeman’s 1989 novel The Chinchilla Farm as part of a directed reading on women writers of the American West. The novel had been recommended to me by a professor familiar with both my fascination with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints and my desire to study what at that time I called “women’s mobility fictions,” an attempt to invoke the commonalities shared by the texts that most preoccupied me, in which women were impelled, compelled, or chose to effect self-actualization through exploration of and dominance over landscape—a dominance that took a distinctly different shape for these female protagonists than it did in similarly-plotted books with a male main character. Different in feel and tenor, in risks and ramifications, for women this dominance also required the marshaling of inner power, yielding victories as oft pyrrhic as they were liberatory. Freeman’s novel became indissoluble from this path of inquiry and the landscape that produced it; from both the intellectual questions that provoked its reading and the vistas that simultaneously remade my public and private engagements with space and self. In Freeman I found a voice unlike any that in my readerly history, a contemporary female protagonist seeking but steady, bereft of resources, fleeing the only community she has known, shaped by and rooted in the place that made her, the West, witch-land of reverent beauty and sublime reverie. 2010 was also my first full year in Los Angeles, and the beginning of my exploration of the state by car. All of my life in New York had occurred within a few square miles, with only occasional escapes to my childhood home near Chicago or my aunt’s house in Maryland. But in L.A. life was expansive as the city itself. 85 Upon my arrival I signed up for a driving lesson, scared that my experience navigating suburban Illinois was not up to California snuff. By the following week I had learned how to slide off and onto what I learned to call freeways instead of expressways. The route from my apartment to campus ran on a north-south street that changed names three times, hairpin-curved, and dead-ended twice before it got me there. My car took me to the grocery store, to the library, to Palm Springs and Big Sur and the Grand Canyon. In my first month of driving I suffered a regular terrible cramping at the base of my skull, a simmering, hourslong discomfort that on the occasion of orgasm exploded into a terrifying migraine. The only explanation the doctors and chiropractors I consulted could offer was that it had something to do with my body adjusting to the driver’s stance I had so rarely occupied, now the natural shape of so many hours. It seemed a reasonable cost for my freedom. I loved to look at the horizon, the terraced hills and skinny palms. I loved to go to Malibu on Sunset Boulevard, leaning into the big curves, and I loved it even more when it rained out there, the clouds a curtain of smoke over the silver water. Even after I nearly totaled my car by pulling out of a parking spot in Van Nuys without checking my rearview mirror first, even as I knew cars to be agents of environmental destruction, even given the high cost of gasoline, the time I spent behind the wheel felt like a promise kept after all of those years underground in New York, sweating in the yellow light of the subway, or stumbling into the fierce wind tunnels on east-west streets. I came to understand the famous section of Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays about Maria Wyeth’s driving habits. Once she was on the freeway and had maneuvered her way to a fast lane she turned on the radio at high volume and she drove. She drove the San Diego to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Hollywood, the Hollywood to the Golden State, the 86 Santa Monica, the Santa ana, the Venture. She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions, and just as a riverman feels the pull of the rapids in the lull between sleeping and waking, so Maria lay at night in the still of Beverly Hills and saw the great signs soar overhead at seventy miles an hour, Normandie ⅓ Vermont ¾ Harbor Fwy 1. Again and again she returned to an intricate stretch just south of the interchange where successful passage from the Hollywood onto the Harbor required a diagonal move across four lanes of traffic. On the afternoon she finally did it without once braking or once losing the beat on the radio she was exhilarated, and that night slept dreamlessly. (Play It As It Lays 15) When I read the book for the first time during my last year in New York, this passage had landed as a fantastic, poisoned envoy from another world. Now it was familiar, almost comforting. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull filled the news and my mind with apocalyptic visions, and in that shifting time the hypnotic pace of driving was succor. But then I began to suffer a curious problem. Driving home from school, northward on that changeable street, I liked to look at the Griffith Park Observatory, that pleasingly curvaceous white edifice up in the hills. Then, one day, a mushroom cloud appeared behind it and wouldn’t go away. Intellectually, I knew that the cloud wasn’t real, that the image itself had been imported in from some movie—of course I had never seen such a thing for real, in person—but knowing this did not make it go away, nor did it lessen my fear. Try to put it back in the movie, my therapist advised. Pull back and see that it’s all an illusion. But my vantage point was pretty wide. From the driver’s seat I could see everything, the 87 very edges of creation, it seemed to me in those long six o’clocks when I sat parked on the north- south street, pinning my eyes on everything but the horizon. One night I was almost all the way home before I noticed that every single street lamp was out and the road itself unusually littered with fallen palms. The Santa Anas had arrived, earthquake weather, migraine weather. Pull back, pull back, I thought, diving deeper in. In the opening pages of The Chinchilla Farm, Verna Flake—divorced from or divorcing nearly every constitutive element of her identity: her job, the faith in which she was raised and thus her large family, her hometown, her husband—looks in the mirror to see herself. I stared at myself until I became objective and could say, truthfully, You’re not exactly pretty. You’re like a man in some ways. But there’s something there that’s okay, that might even be better than being pretty—something that could be attractive in either sex. (11) In those apocalyptic days these lines became a koan I shared with others, proof of something I struggled to describe, that in conversations with my therapist I called “self-esteem.” In discussions with the professor under whose guidance I had undertaken my directed reading, I attempted a more exact phrasing, which he summarized in an email to Judith Freeman. Today I met with a graduate student in Creative Writing and Lit whom I’m doing an independent reading with, and she just read The Chinchilla Farm at my recommendation – and says it is the best book she has read in a very long time, that it had an almost spiritual impact on her – and that she’s been reading passages of it to anyone who’d listen. She found it so incredibly refreshing to read 88 a female protagonist whose odyssey is spurred on by a deep sense of her personal worth. (Handley) In response, Freeman wrote: I never imagined Verna even being conscious of her “personal worth” but as I read that phrase it seemed right to me, and that from the very first chapter, when her husband walks out on her, there was never a feeling of Verna as victim. She was a woman who was more interested in what she observes in the world than in the resolution of her own story. Where did that come from? I don’t know. The lovely thing about fiction is that so much of this kind of writing is a rather unconscious creative act. (Freeman, letter to William Handley) At this time I was twenty-five years old and much given to behavior of the sort described in my professor’s letter. A few years earlier, I had driven the members of my nuclear family to distraction by appearing at each communal mealtime of a vacation clutching Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, tears at the ready, asking, “Hey, do you guys mind if I just read you a little of this?” My relationship to the written word had always contained a fair amount of awe, but in those years I was so continually bowled over by what I read that I experienced an overwhelming desire to communicate it to others—to give and to show them what I had found. My belief that it was possible to transmit this kind of experience—for another reader to not only see but feel a text as I had—is the foundation of my critical and creative work. In Freeman, I encountered something new: a text that seemed to talk back. 89 “But there’s something there that’s okay.” In these words, a readjustment, a squinting into the mirror to take another look. Having already dispensed with the rose-tinted beer goggles of femininity, expectation, politesse, and self-delusion—“I stared at myself until I became objective and could say, truthfully, You’re not exactly pretty”—Freeman then topples gender, offhand, not her primary concern as she moves to ground and figure Verna. “You’re like a man in some ways.” This is not an empowered, flexible gendering, not Verna claiming for herself the facility over people and landscape that distinguishes the woman traveler’s experience from the man’s but it is an unsentimental statement of fact. If beauty has failed to serve its purported purpose, for a woman, of advancement and distinction, what is left? What I tried then to describe as worth. “But there’s something there that’s okay, that might even be better than being pretty— something that could be attractive in either sex.” This statement’s revolutionary potential is in its “okay,” quickly ratcheted-up to a potentially “even […] better” than the brass ring for the female subject, the fate that Veronica’s Alison navigates, “being pretty.” Many books deliver a seemingly objective statement of a female protagonist’s level of beauty as necessary information: how pretty is she, really? Verna’s attractiveness is never fixed; the reader sees her desired and desiring, seen and unseen, as wife, maiden, proto-crone and eventually, mother, but is never led to a stable notion of Verna’s appearance. Instead we see and feel with her the shifting nuances and valences of prettiness—as mobility, as power, as visibility and in-. In The Chinchilla Farm, there is power beyond prettiness, and it can upend gender and all its puppetry of selves and roles. It is fundamentally attractive, and in Verna’s life it functions as law, enabling her to dream, work towards, and finally access a life of her own making. 90 That this novel has a “happy” ending has consterned some readers, a subject to which I will return below. My concern is as to what, exactly, this attractive “something” is. I claim it as self-apprehension and recognition conveyed through occult imagery, akin to Alison’s ecstatic communion with inferred-Muir. But whereas Gaitskill’s heroine’s experience of occult imagery enables her to limn and interpret the events of her past and the souls of the lost, Freeman’s heroine’s engagement with the modality constitutes a taking of not just narrative power but plot in hand. Made capable and fluent in the manipulation of the fabric of her reality by the experiences of her early life, in The Chinchilla Farm Verna Flake gains a spatial knowledge that enables her to not only recognize but intervene in her own narrative. In so doing she joins the canon of women seeking knowledge of self and space in a landscape as eschatological as it is rejuvenative. Rites of the Western Heroine Nina Baym makes few arguments in her impressive 2011 survey Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927; rather, the book’s mission is the gradual accretion of a vast archive of synopses. The experience of reading it is somewhat like falling asleep to the sound of an elderly relative reciting the Book of Numbers, as Baym methodically lists frontier memoirs that begat pioneer novels and booster narratives that begat middling poetry about wildflowers. Over the course of this wise and dull book, however, a consistent character emerges, the Western heroine. She is sprightly and kind, polite and athletic, as poised on the back of a horse as she is taking tea on her piazza. About seventeen years old, likely blonde and tanned, by the close of Baym’s book she has asserted herself as the default protagonist of narratives by and about Western women. Baym critiques this half-drawn character and the lacunae her prominence 91 highlights, the erasure of and failure to represent the broad field of Western female subjects— desiring bodies, often non-white, who cannot or will not effortlessly mount a horse, cook dinner over an open flame, or suffer fools—but the frontier ingénue is a resilient and determinative prototype. The sprightly Western heroine embodies what might be the primary perceived requirement of Western womanhood, the ability to endure hardship nearly to oblivion, in service of some impossible goal, be it return to a beloved Eastern home or the cold comfort of having conquered the land. Yet mere survival has lost its cache for Freeman’s Verna, and for the protagonists of the works I will below explore. These women—mainly, but not all, second- or third-generation Westerners; mainly, but not all, living at some remove from the barest challenges of survival, almost to a one deflecting the crises of self onto the indomitable landscape—suffer the legacy of the idealized Western heroine. Their failures to be her, to embody one or more of her signal traits (beauty, youth, resourcefulness, sunny disposition, whiteness), come to define, through negative comparison, their own West. These women answer the challenge of the West by performing and suffusing their selves against and into the vastness of their setting. If the West is always defined in negative comparison to the East, if it remains fundamentally provincial and untamed even in these latter days, then the benefit of such obscure distance from the metropole is the destabilization of categories. There is no one West, no one way to be female within its confines, no path to self- knowledge but that of hard-won agency. For these women of the American West, the only way out is through. To understand Verna’s successful navigation of its landscape, let us briefly visit the travails of those who preceded her through it. 92 One of our most enduring images of the Western heroine is surely Willa Cather’s Ántonia Shimerda, the Czech immigrant whose shifting identity—from melancholy child to farm laborer to domestic servant to farm wife and mother—forms an allegory for her changing West. This traditional reading of My Ántonia (1918) is largely responsible for the book’s immense and enduring appeal and challenged by a newer interpretation that sees the book, like much of Cather’s work, as a record of submerged homoerotic desire, which Patricia Juliana Smith calls Cather’s “literary sex change” (83). Richard Powers’s 2006 novel The Echo Maker (set, like My Ántonia, in central Nebraska) makes light of this new reading of Cather in a scene where Cather’s novel is recommended to a convalescent character by a nurse, who tells him that it is “[A] very sexy story [...] About a young Nebraska country boy who has the hots for an older woman” (240). Smith argues that Ántonia engages in a performance of masculinity that refigures the politics of her encounter with Jim, the narrator: “Tony” engages in physical labor, often dressed in boy’s clothing, and gradually loses the refinement she once had, much to the chagrin of the narrator [...] To some extent, Jim is the more “feminized” of the two, lacking Ántonia’s physical and psychic strength. Indeed, he exhibits a certain sexual squeamishness... (85) Although Jim is prudish, and Ántonia’s brute strength formidable, Smith’s interpretation here is syllogistic in its equation of Jim’s childhood personality with femininity. Throughout the novel, Jim maintains dominance over landscape and Ántonia herself, as in the first lines of the book’s seventh chapter. Much as I liked Ántonia, I hated a superior tone that she sometimes took with me. She was four years older than I, to be sure, and had seen more of the world; but I 93 was a boy and she was a girl, and I resented her protecting manner. (34, emphasis added) This statement precedes a scene in which Jim and Ántonia come upon an enormous snake, which Ántonia reacts to by slipping back into her native tongue (“jabber[ing] Bohunk,” as Jim calls it) and running away while Jim kills the snake. After he is able to storytell their experience, while Ántonia can only exclaim, “You is just like big mans” (36). Throughout the novel, Jim maintains mastery over both narrative and landscape, even after his family moves to the town of Black Hawk and Ántonia remains in the countryside. A few years later Ántonia also comes to town, which she finds wrought with dangers amplified by her refusal to follow codes of feminine conduct. When she takes work in a household in which her employer is a known lech, Jim must once again intervene in order to rescue her from a sexual assault; later, on her one foray away from her community, Ántonia is taken advantage of by an ersatz fiancé and returns home unmarried and pregnant. She may “like to be like a man” (Cather 95), but Ántonia’s navigation of both nature and culture is strictly limited by her status as a poor woman, and her lifelong friendship with Jim is contingent on both characters’ gendered, classed roles in which he, the educated country gentleman, facilitates Ántonia’s finer faculties and knowledge of their shared environment, while attempting in vain to bring her out of her benighted (Catholic, foreign, uneducated, impoverished) milieu, a narrative control that extends even to the afterlife. When Ántonia wonders if her dead father’s spirit lingers on earth, Jim assures her that his spirit has returned to their homeland, leading Ántonia to exclaim, “Why didn’t you ever tell me that before? It makes me feel more sure for him” (155). 94 While the West offers her opportunities for financial and social advancement, Ántonia’s agency is limited by her foreignness and her gender; her mobility and sense of direction have been left behind in her Czech homeland, where, she tells Jim, “If I was put down there in the middle of the night, I could find my way all over that little town [...] I ain’t never forgot my own country” (155). But it is Jim, not Ántonia, who visits that town, prompting Ántonia’s self- definition by sending her photographs, a gift she responds to only with a list of her children’s names and ages. For ultimately Ántonia’s sole avenue of agency is motherhood, her primary contribution to her landscape her many children, whom she hopes will have “a grand chance” (220). On their last visit, she shows Jim the physical and emotional household she has constructed, proudly explaining that she planted “every tree” and never allows herself to be “down-hearted” (216, 217). The novel offers examples of women for whom labor takes forms other than house and farm work and who imagine lives for themselves outside of the possibilities of Black Hawk, Nebraska—characters like Lena Lingard and her friend Tiny Soderball, who tells Jim as an adult that Ántonia has not “done very well,” suggesting that Tiny has a different idea of what constitutes success (209). But Lena and Tiny have removed themselves to a series of large cities, first Lincoln, then Salt Lake City, and finally San Francisco, and Cather makes little case for the rural West as a place where women can win agency. Even the title suggests that Ántonia herself must remain under the protective management of a male figure, “My Ántonia” being the term of endearment passed to Jim by Ántonia’s father. In My Ántonia Jim’s West is fundamentally sentimental, an imagined arcadia where domestic work is fun and rewarding, hard physical labor and sacrifice always result in financial stability, and a young man’s patronizing preoccupation with his immigrant neighbor is free of 95 nefarious intentions. Not so in the West of Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio: From the Thirties. Although published more than a half-century after My Ántonia, in 1974, Olsen began her novel forty-two years earlier, as “A Note About This Book” reveals. This book, conceived primarily as a novel of the 1930’s, was begun in 1932 in Faribault, Minnesota, when the author was nineteen, and worked intermittently into 1936 or perhaps 1937 in Omaha, Stockton, Venice (Calif.), Los Angeles and San Francisco. Unfinished, it yet bespeaks the consciousness and roots of that decade, if not its events. (i) Olsen’s own peripatetic life is reflected in this accounting, and in the shape of the book itself, which makes frequent apology for its unfinished state. “Reader,” pleads the endnote, “it was not to have ended here [...] Only fragments [...] tell what might have been, and never will be now” (133). The circumstances that so limited Yonnondio are mimetically recreated within its brief, misery-ridden plot, which follows the Holbrook family across the West, to a Wyoming mining town, a South Dakota farm, and the urban slums of Omaha, in a Nebraska far from Cather’s. The novel is told from the highly imagistic point of view of six-and-a-half-year-old Mazie, whose world is shaped by entrenched notions of gender, class, and work. Her mother Anna is regularly beaten and raped by her father Jim, who sees childrearing as women’s only “earthly use” (2). Anna turns this violence on her children, hitting them “as if it were some devil she was exorcising” (7). If Anna allows any of the thoughts that creep “like worms” within her to develop into a goal, it is evident in her answer to Mazie’s question “What’s an edjication?” “An edjication is what you kids are going to get. It means your hands stay white and you read books and work in an office” (3). 96 In My Ántonia, as in many well-loved narratives of the West, landscape offers emotional succor and imagistic escape, but in Yonnondio, natural beauty is yet another painful and inaccessible luxury that taunts the Holbrook family. In Wyoming, the “one patch of green” to which Mazie can escape is located between “the outhouse and the garbage dump” where she lies on her back breathing in the “nauseating smell” of rotting food and repeating to herself affirmations which begin, “I am a-knowen things” (4). South Dakota contains bigger green spaces, replete with wildlife and flowers, but only as backdrop to a life of unremitting toil. Below lay the farms, uneven patches of brown and plowed black and transparent green, and far stretched the river, dull yellow in the sun, glinting crystal, where the wind stirred it. Tiny as a toy, a man was plowing a tin thread of black in the brown square of field immediately below them. (26) The South Dakota section of Yonnondio is rich with images of the countryside and the delights of childhood there, passages aesthetically similar to sections of My Ántonia, with lyrical description of the “drama of things growing,” “corn rippling like a girl’s skirt,” “a great glistening mesh” of rain (30, 31). Before dying and willing her his library, kindly neighbor Mr. Caldwell tells Mazie, “Whatever happens, remember, everything, the nourishment, the roots you need, are where you are now” (38). The advice sticks, but the literature does not. Mazie’s father Jim immediately sells all of Mr. Caldwell’s books for “half a dollar” (39). The bucolic idyll also soon ends with the family’s realization that they are still deeply in debt, another ill which natural beauty cannot cure. The Holbrooks then move to a tenement near the Omaha stockyards, where Jim works first in the sewers and then in a slaughterhouse and Mazie withdraws into fantasies about farm life. 97 While Cather writes the rolling landscapes of the Great Plains as democratizing, friendly, even paternal, Olsen’s distinctly materialist vantage point recognizes beauty and the leisure that enables its appreciation as simply another commodity out of reach of the poor. The dedication of Silences, her 1978 collection of essays on creativity, makes the stakes of the project clear—“For our silenced people, century after century their beings consumed in the hard, everyday essential work of maintaining human life”—as does the title essay, in which Olsen links deferred creativity to the destruction of the self. Denied full writing life, more may try to “nurse through night” (that part-time, part-self night) “the ethereal spark,” but it seems to me that there would almost have had to be “flame on flame” first; and time as needed, afterwards; and enough of the self, the capacities, undamaged for the rebeginnings on the frightful self. (Silences 21) Yonnondio ends with an enthusiastic self-affirmation, Maizie’s youngest sibling banging a jar lid on the floor. “Centuries of human drive work in her; human ecstasy of achievement; satisfaction deep and fundamental as sex: I can do it, I use my powers; I! I!” But for Olsen’s characters, true agency is only possible through unhoped-for liberation from capitalism. Anna’s final line suggests another hopeful deferment of happiness. “The air’s changin, Jim [...] I see for it to end tomorrow, at least get tolerable” (132). Tillie Olsen is artfully ambiguous on the question of whether or not this hope, to which she attributes the seeds of both creativity and suffering, is futile. Joan Didion does not believe that the storm will end tomorrow. In her 1970 novel Play It As It Lays and the nonfiction collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), The White Album (1979), and Where I Was From (2003), Didion’s terse, wide-eyed voice toys her lifelong 98 fascination with the American West, her home, and its impact on the American self—for Didion, always her American self. In her early work, the author is everywhere and nowhere. Sometimes Didion yields a fingernail of personal information—“It had rained in Los Angeles until the cliff was crumbling into the surf and I did not feel like getting dressed in the morning” (Collected Nonfiction 160); “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce” (Collected Nonfiction 277). But even when Didion is more forthcoming, in essays about her mental health, her family history, her fascination with the design of shopping malls, she exhibits a certain forbearance, which can be read as an inability to be transparent or a remarkable display of will. Didion’s stance on the personal, and on the issue of her own selfhood (as opposed to that of other women, on which she is loquacious), may be most evident in an aside from her much- despised essay “The Women’s Movement,” from The White Album. All one’s actual apprehension of what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it – that sense of living one’s deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death – could now be declared invalid, unnecessary, one never felt it at all. (Collected Nonfiction 262) Her work is relentlessly self-affirmative—a relentless affirmation of Didion’s work, but also of Joan Didion, specifically, herself, which yields a kind of literary alchemy, writing itself into being. To return once more to this problem of defining and delimiting the phenomenon and stylus of occult imagery, her defiant rejection of feminism’s categorical statements on life in a female body again invokes the subject of secret and secreted knowledges, witch ways, “one’s deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death,” yet another description of one writer’s fierce rejection of prewritten gendered voice, trope, style. 99 In Play It As It Lays, Los Angeles is figured as a site of female mobility but not agency as Maria Wyeth manically undertakes aimless drives and suffers the aphasic symptoms of an illness that may be the manifestation of her thwarted self. Maria hails from a corner of Nevada where the broken promises of development have left only absences, “a cattle ranch with no cattle and a ski resort picked up on somebody’s second mortgage and a motel that would have been advantageously situated at a freeway exit had the freeway been built” (Play It As It Lays 5). With her piercing, oracular visions of doom and emptiness, this protagonist is a product of the desert to which Didion returns across her work, that place where if one does “not keep moving at night [...] they will lose all reason,” in which nature’s depravity simply restates the human condition: They have been diving for ten days [in underground pools] but have found no bottom to the caves, no bodies and no trace of them, only the black 90° water going down and down and down, and a single translucent fish, not classified. (Collected Nonfiction 122) There may be no truer image of Didion herself in her work than that unclassifiable translucent fish, gliding through unknown Western darkness. Strange, mythic animal, her work anatomizes the West, a careerlong project that culminates in Didion’s “code of the West” in Where I Was From (2003). For Didion, writing over, around, and against the self is a way of responding to the great animating fear of the Western landscape, a gamble described by Maria Wyeth. “I was raised to believe that what came in on the next roll would always be better than what went out on the last. I no longer believe that, but I am telling you how it was” (Play It As It Lays 5). For the purposes of this inquiry, Didion bridges the embodied landscapes of Cather and Olsen to Verna’s self-inscription in The Chinchilla Farm. By and through writing herself as iconoclastic Western observing eye—something she has done from New York City for decades now—Didion expands 100 the readerly apprehension of the literary West from a realm of rejuvenative landscapes into a place where the failure of categories has birthed a context-of-no-context void into which Didion marshaled her considerable privilege to assert and claim literary space. In so doing her work highlights the highly identity-specific markers that demarcate this space—and opens the question of how less privileged voices might move within it. In Landscapes of the New West (1999), Krista Comer argues that Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1977 novel Ceremony, although representative of a “New West” where environmental and social trauma are reflected in a mashup of reservation landscapes, ancient Native rites and customs, and repurposed junk, essentially reinforces both the “wilderness ideal,” and the phenomenon Comer nicknames “the hope trope.” These two concepts, which frequently appear together in literature about the American West, comprise the persistent literary idea of the West as a site of restorative power—hope that is both inspired by and the product of natural beauty, personal freedom, and a narrative of progress. This dynamic, which Comer finds problematic in Ceremony, is handled with more nuance in “Yellow Woman,” perhaps Silko’s most widely anthologized piece of short fiction, which both confirms Comer’s assertion that “Silko’s landscapes are always storied landscapes; she makes no claim for a ‘natural’ or nondiscursive nature” (134) and refigures the “hope trope” as an interventionary narrative tool. Silko’s 1974 story “Yellow Woman” retells and intervenes with a Laguna Pueblo folktale. The protagonist of “Yellow Woman” is aware of the many narratives relevant to her situation; that is, she is consciously simultaneously herself and the mythic figure from which the story takes its name. This landscape is inscribed with desire; the details of the setting are inseparable from the details of the woman’s encounter with her captor, the physical realities of touch and texture are as determinative as weather, which is itself a kind of mood. “I had stopped 101 trying to pull away from him, because his hand felt cool and the sun was high, drying the river bed into alkali” (35). Silko’s revision of the folktale wrests control of the narrative for the female protagonist, for whom self-awareness functions as agency. The knowledge that she is inside a story enables her to engage with it to her own satisfaction, and to leave the folktale when it is no longer useful to her. The story ends with a reaffirmation of the woman’s control over both narrative and landscape. “I told myself, because I believe it, he will come back sometime and be waiting again by the river” (43). The landscapes of Louise Erdrich and Debra Magpie Earling’s novels The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001) and Perma Red (2002) are also desire-inflected. Erdrich’s book, which focuses on a centenarian priest who is secretly a woman, extends to its white characters the ephemeral dreamtime logic easily navigated by the Indian characters in all of Erdrich’s linked novels. In this subconscious realm, Erdrich divides the agency employed in the waking world from that at play in the world of slumber, privileging different mobilities. The priest may be a community pillar in waking life, albeit one subject to the requirements of his hidden body and the vagaries of life in early twentieth-century North Dakota (ample reference is made to soup made from horses’ hooves), but Mary Kashpaw, the church’s groundskeeper and ward, is the leader of the sleeping world. She is “the one who followed [the priest] in [to the other realm] to guide him back” (213). In this way, Erdrich spreads her landscapes and agencies across the vast population of her work, creating a separate-but-equal mysticism that has won her as many detractors as devotees. Earling’s novel is as relentlessly dark as Erdrich’s is hopeful; her desiring landscape is the abused body of her protagonist, Louise, an Indian woman wanted by three men but loved well by none. For these men, access to Louise’s body constitutes an agency that she herself 102 cannot access. Their visions of Louise are written in the language of pain and shadowed with jealousy towards the perpetrator of violence against the desired body: I saw the purple swell of blood above her left breast. I saw the black grip marks at the tops of her thighs, and I thought of Yellow Knife’s hands, the bruises to Louise’s hips where the imprint of his fist was so deep you could count the nipples. The smooth cups of her breasts were lavender-edged. I could see Yellow Knife’s work there too, the scar that puckered her left nipple. I wanted to kiss that nipple but I sat back to watch her. (235) These three different strategies for figuring the relationship between landscape and women’s selfhood are but a sampling of the narrative devices through which American Indian authors have tackled the double-bind of subjectivity that characterizes these female protagonists’ experience. While each text suggests different stakes for their characters’ ability to move freely through the landscape that others use to define them, the commonality between the authors’ illustration of this situation lies in a refiguring of the relationship between subject and landscape. For these authors, the project of selfhood is inextricably linked to the project of landscape—a connection that both limits and enhances these characters’ search for identity. Comer ends Landscapes of the New West with a critical takedown of the ending of The Chinchilla Farm, in which, in Comer’s reading, marriage to a wealthy man seems to function as both panacea and deus ex machina. The novel follows Verna’s escape from an unhappy marriage in Utah to a new life in Los Angeles and a dangerous road trip to Mexico. In the opening scene, Verna pictures her intractable husband as an inextricable part of the Utah field on which their income is contingent, an image she muses “chose” her (4); she is negotiating a prewritten landscape, one over which she has no narrative control. Over the course of the novel, Verna 103 sources agency via resettling in a dangerous neighborhood of Los Angeles, beginning a relationship, and undertaking the aforementioned road trip. As she finds herself in a setting that belongs only to her own experience, Verna’s agency steadily increases: she feels no threat in Macarthur Park, because she recognizes it as a place for “poorer people” like herself “trying to make things work out okay and just looking for places to pass time until that happened” (188). Here, self-definition enables empathy and, eventually, power. In a pivotal scene, Verna is taken swimming by the new man in her life, who must coax her into the ocean. In the water, she is surprised to find that “I felt safe with him there; I never would have gone into the ocean on my own, I was there only because of him, and I stayed right next to him” (183). But although Verna sources some of her newfound agency in her romantic relationship, the greater part of her mobility comes from her experiences navigating Los Angeles and Mexico. Through these travels Verna becomes sure of herself and capable of speaking her desires. By the end of the book Verna defines her landscape, not the other way around. “The Pacific is such a wide, fathomless ocean, and here we are, still on the rim” (308). The surety of her self-placement is the product of her now-established selfhood, developed through narrative trips into her memories and interiority that mirror her journeys across the West. In Judith Freeman’s work I see the fulfilled promise of the works discussed above, an evolution of the female voice against place, reaching a creative apex of self-making through agency enabled by mobility. While Freeman’s happy ending may seem neat, it is earned by the novel that precedes it, which suggests that a woman’s true Western mobility may lie in her ability to reform landscape into her own image—and in so doing effect dominance and definition over that landscape, making it in her own image. In Women Writers of the American West, 1833- 1927, Baym quotes Mae Van Norman Long’s 1926 novel The Canyon of the Stars: “California 104 has driven me quite mad with its beauty” (211). This line has stayed with me as I worked through this essay, suggesting the inimitable nature of the relationship between women writers and the American West, which seems to me now best described as an embarrassment of beauty, dreamed into being by stalwart wanderers, none more perplexingly exact a product of the landscape than the members of the Church of Jesus-Christ of Latter-day Saints. Impossible Bodies: Mormon Whiteness Incidental to this novel is a plentitude of facts more wonderful than fiction: that Mormons wear special underwear at all times, called “garments”; that people put clothes sprinkled for ironing into freezers to prevent mildew, and mayonnaise on houseplants. — John Updike’s New Yorker review of The Chinchilla Farm, November 13, 1989 Fascinated by its insight into Mormon culture, reviewers of The Chinchilla Farm painted it as an apostate exposé. But the Church has become considerably less exotic in the nearly quarter-century since Updike wrote of his unfamiliarity with housekeeping. To a contemporary reader who has gleaned anecdotal knowledge from the musical The Book of Mormon and Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, the temple garments and recommends in Freeman’s novel are quotidian, if unusual, details of a mainstream religion. As discussed above, Krista Comer criticizes the ending of Freeman’s book as hinged on what she calls the protagonist’s “simple dumb luck.” [Verna] acts in her own best interests (is not, that is, either self-destructive or a victim) but in the final analysis, none of these Jeffersonian efforts at American self-improvement secures her economic, physical, creative or emotional future so 105 much as does her serendipitous relationship with a rich and respectful man. So much for new feminist landscapes of westernness, right? (238) This judgment echoes Diane Johnson, who wrote in her review of the novel in The New York Review of Books, “In a sort of reverse pastoral, [Verna] has journeyed from innocence (Utah) to knowledge (the city) back to innocence (motherhood, which in fiction always restores innocence)” (“Back to Mormonism”). These readings suggest that Freeman’s ending somehow undoes the work that precedes it—that although Verna makes great strides towards self- determination, she ultimately disappointingly lapses into the comforting moral structure of her childhood. By categorizing Verna’s marriage as a sacrifice of mobility and individuality, Comer and Johnson miss that this marriage is the final manifestation and most concrete outcome of Verna’s mission of self-discernment. In a novel of alliances between disaffected people, this last alliance transcends its form, becoming an act of love whose creative potential is expressed in both Verna’s child and in her transformed self. The Chinchilla Farm is a road novel in which the West is a treacherous landscape of permeable boundaries, where Verna Flake is enabled to deconstruct and remake her identity. By learning to trust her epiphanic intuition, Verna transforms the Mormon virtues with which she was raised into means of self-reliance and escape from her prewritten role as an uneducated working-class woman. On her journey through the landlocked West to coastal California and Mexico, a region she calls the “Pacific Rim”—representative, Freeman has written, of “the rim between sacred and profane”—Verna names and disarms the power structures that have determined her identity. Her decision to marry and have a child is the result of her successful journey to self-governance. 106 If instances of occult imagery grant passage into a realm of prophecy and clairvoyance where women’s interiority is imbued with power over the narrative, The Chinchilla Farm—and its author—function as a knowing corollary to Veronica and Gaitskill’s protestations. Asked about the idea of occult imagery as it applies to her first novel, Freeman responded with recognition, describing instances when “[Verna] twists the received ideas and realizes, no, that’s not real, it’s surreal” (Interview with Judith Freeman). Verna’s calm demeanor and helpful nature led several critics to echo Johnson’s assertion that “Verna is that rare creature, a reliable female narrator, whose preoccupations are with what she sees and learns about the world instead of with the resolution of her own story” (“The Lost World of the Mormons”). While Verna is indeed remarkably reliable and perceptive, I disagree that she is uninterested in her own story. Verna’s project of selfhood encompasses the novel; her voice is its engine, her self-revelation its plot. For her, western selfhood represents not rugged individualism but thoughtful cooperation within a community of need—a kind of ad hoc social service triage that recreates the positive conditions of her Mormon childhood absent the Church’s negative qualities. Describing her novel, Freeman explains that an oppositional duality shaped the narrative. One of the most attractive things in Mormonism is a kind of empathy, a real goodness. But [the novel is] also about moments of epiphany and manifestation. Small moments of epiphany where Verna feels coming through her that impulse toward empathy, which really breaks down power structures. I think women have to find their way around those structures. (Interview with Judith Freeman) When we meet Verna, she is thirty-four years old. The daughter of a large and devout Mormon family, she has fallen away from the Church and is suffering the attrition of the vast 107 community in which she was raised. Her husband of seventeen years has left her for a former beauty queen, her beloved older brother Carl is long dead from cancer, and the elderly relatives whose care and regard has shaped Verna’s selfhood are fading fast. Yet Verna is strikingly secure in her identity, which remains strong and consistent despite the sudden precarity of her position, as shown in her above-discussed assertion, in the book’s first pages, that “there’s something there that’s okay, that might even be better than being pretty—something that could be attractive in either sex” (11). Even at this unhappy moment, Verna is equipped with the ability to dismiss her gender training, a skill she intrinsically possesses rather than acquires. A central theme in The Chinchilla Farm is perception as a tool of self-education. Throughout the novel, Freeman privileges Verna’s idiosyncratic experience over the codified knowledge dictated to her by the Church; the conversations Verna has with various outsider characters constitute her primary tool of self-education. In this respect, The Chinchilla Farm mirrors its author’s own experiences, which took Judith Freeman from an early marriage not unlike Verna’s to auditing classes at Macalester College as a dorm manager’s wife at age nineteen: a passage from one type of knowledge to another, from The Book of Mormon to Tess d’Urbervilles, as Freeman’s recollection illustrates. You could put a gun to my head and say, ‘Name a book you read in high school,’ and I’d probably have to say, ‘Go ahead and shoot me.’ […] But I had been allowed to develop a very inquiring mind. (Interview with Judith Freeman) The Chinchilla Farm contains ruminations on the exclusionary category of whiteness, which comes to preoccupy Verna’s intuitive evaluation of her identity. Whiteness is one of Verna’s few advantages; although she lacks education, wealth, and connections, as the descendant of a well-documented line of Mormon pioneers, Verna is unassailably white. While 108 she has ceased to practice the religion of her childhood, at the novel’s beginning Verna still struggles to conform to a Mormon notion of whiteness. Paradoxically, the moral sense trained into Verna by her religiously devout community is what enables her to reject this identity. In Playing In The Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison argues that representations of blackness in American literature function as negative definitions of whiteness, effectively delineating the boundaries of white American identity via contrast. Morrison describes the occurrence of “closed white images” (such as the massive white figure that appears at the end of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym) as symbols of the psychic weight of the sanctity and exclusivity of “pure” whiteness, an ideal which few can access but to which all must aspire in order to become truly American. The signal value of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is inextricable from its power as a beacon of white exceptionalism. As a Mormon, Verna has been raised in a world of closed white images. Early in the novel, she describes her polygamist “great-grandfather Flake,” who is followed “everywhere” by a “white bulldog” (38). She connects the all-white garments worn by church members (both sacramental underwear and ritual clothes worn inside the temple) with a general exclusionary feeling of being “exceptional.” Freeman frequently juxtaposes the visual and racial whiteness of Mormon culture with the vibrancy and color of the gentile world, cross-pollination between which, the book’s ending suggests, may offer a sustainable hybrid. On her way out of Utah, Verna picks up a hitchhiker named Duluth Wing, who is also fleeing familial disaster, an botched attempt to visit his daughter, now a Church member as a result of his ex-wife’s remarriage to a Mormon man. I come all the way up here to Utah to visit them […] hitchhiking in the cold. They knew I was coming. […] I was even hoping she might say she’d come over to the 109 station and pick me up. But she didn’t. I’d been hitchhiking for two days, so I had plenty of time to imagine the nice reception I was going to get, this nice reunion with my daughter, who I hadn’t seen for months. But instead, she said, “We can’t see you tonight because it’s family home evening.” (82) Duluth is barred from visiting on “family home evening” not only because he is not a Church member, but also because his poverty and lack of cultural mobility exclude him even from the family the Church nominally functions to protect: First we all prayed together, kneeling around their couch for so long that my knees started to burn. Then Melanie stood up, went to the piano, and sang a song. After that Walter read a poem, and finally Tiffany told a story about pioneer giving food to Indians and finished up by singing ‘Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam.’ I thought to myself, What is this? Then we played a game called Book of Mormon Trivia, where we drew cards from a deck that ask questions like, ‘What was the name of the spectacles Joseph Smith used to translate the golden plates?’ You can imagine how good I was at that. Hell, I bet you don’t even know that, do you?” “Urim and Tummim.” (83) Through her conversation with Duluth, Verna comes to recognize that the Church enforces a structural definition by contrast of respectability and, inferentially, of whiteness. Successive rereadings of The Chinchilla Farm made clear that I would need to more deeply investigate the category of Mormon whiteness in order to understand Verna’s departure and navigation of the liminal spaces that shape Mormon identity. Although I was relatively new to the task of assessing its place in the cosmology of Freeman’s novel, my engagement with the 110 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was by this point a well-worn groove—an unexpected path I had found myself walking a few years earlier, before I began my PhD. In my last semester of college, I found myself inexplicably drawn to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Not to any one congregation or adherent, but to the Church itself, and to its holy text, the Book of Mormon. I can’t pinpoint the source of my fixation any more precisely than to say that at some point in early 2007 I learned about the LDS belief in the eternal family, which holds that marriages sealed in the temple continue in the afterlife, uniting parents and children forever. My inspiration was quite possibly HBO’s massive marketing campaign for Big Love, which dominated my corner of the East Village that spring. Doctrinally assured reunion in heaven appealed intimately to me, the melancholy culturally Catholic but functionally agnostic child of lapsed Catholics. At twenty-two years old, I constantly missed my parents (alive and well but several states away) and the happy childhood over which they had presided. No one else seemed to suffer from the pervasive nostalgia I had begun to accept as inescapable. “As moderns, we are born into a tradition of disbelief,” writes Patricia Hampl. “The life of the spirit is not an assumption. It is a struggle. And the proof of its existence for a modern is not faith, but longing” (“Introduction”). My struggle was against logic, against the happily atheist peers aghast at my inclinations, against my own frantic attempts at adulthood. Religious longing didn’t have a place in my universe. I have been since childhood a secular humanist through and through, the kind of pain in the ass kid who liked to deconstruct contradictions between the Old and New Testaments to bother my CCD (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine) teachers. In fifth grade, I refused to begin the sacrament of confession (rebranded “Reconciliation” in a 1990s attempt at a kinder, friendlier Catholicism) because, as I patiently explained to the adults, I had no crimes to confess. I had done nothing wrong: I was ten years 111 old. My parents, wary of the iron-fisted morality that had warped their own upbringings, did not force the issue. I couldn’t articulate it then, but what I was rejecting was the habit of self-incrimination, of shame and self-punishment. I would not police my inner life. (I did finally go to confession in the seventh grade, at the urging of a CCD teacher who had converted from Judaism; the fact that she had chosen her faith rather than blindly followed it appealed to me. I told the priest I was mean to my sister sometimes, hoping for penance on the rosary. He told me to “think about it,” and with that quotidian advice and nary a Hail Mary or rosary ensured I would never return to the confessional booth, which wasn’t even a booth anymore, just a room with mauve carpet.) My parents taught me against the retrograde politics of Catholicism, even as they tried valiantly to initiate me into the mysticism of possibility that they believed the Church to represent. Before puberty I knew that homosexuality was no sin, that the Bible was simply a beautifully written book of some good ideas, and that a woman’s sovereignty over her body was absolute, even divinely ordained. I understood the symbiosis between faith and power, and learned not to take proscriptions too seriously. Yet even as I skirted religion’s pitfalls, I continued to yearn for both its rigor as well as its access to the divine. I devoured mythologies and carried totems. Determined to find real magic, like so many bookish suburbanites before me, I tried Wicca, sending away to Vermont for wands and constructing an altar of heirlooms in my bedroom. The candle smoke stains on my childhood bedroom's flowered wallpaper have long outlasted my commitment to polytheism, of which traces remain only in the syncretic prayer I involuntarily whisper in bad times. It begins “Hail Mary, Mother of God, Blessed art thou amongst women” and ends “Blessed be and let it harm none.” Even into adulthood, glimpses of Catholic Nuns and Buddhist monks in habit made 112 me smile. Mass, and the veneration of the idols at Hindu temples alike filled me with something I privately called “the Cathedral feeling.” I wanted a guide to my own world of sprits, even as I understood that such a thing was impossible, that the very composition of my interior world precluded it. And then I found myself drawn to LDS with an interest so intimate, so painful, that I couldn’t even consider its source without crying. I read everything I could about the Church, and finally, one Sunday in February, I attended services at the Union Square First Ward. I was received warmly and without reservation, despite the fact that I had shown up to the early meeting for families instead of the later one for single people. I stayed for both. The people I met that day were unfailingly kind and generous, and my father’s advance warning to “be careful” seemed preposterous. But even in my excited state I avoided the missionaries. Unlike many of my classmates, I took no pleasure in forcing an argument with a religious person on a dramatic social-issues topic, perhaps because I had always been so rigidly polite that it was difficult for me to correct the misspelling of my own name. From my reading I knew that if I spoke to the missionaries, they would want to visit me at home to continue the conversation. Intrigued as I was by LDS, I couldn’t think of anything more awkward than entertaining two earnest young men in the one-bedroom efficiency I shared with my boyfriend and male best friend, a bad situation that would be made worse by the uneasy knowledge that we were a bit older than the elders. When, several weeks prior, I’d ordered my free copy of the Book of Mormon, whose delivery virtually guaranteed a missionary visit, I had it delivered to my childhood home. (I figured my mother could handle it: back in the 1970s, a pair of missionaries sent to her by a converted friend visited weekly for six months. Rather than send them away, she 113 served them lemonade in her living room, passing week after week of pleasant hours, until they finally gave up.) As positive as that experience was in many ways, I did not continue my relationship with LDS. Yet even after I found that I fundamentally could not believe in many of the Church’s doctrines, I couldn’t shake my connection with a particular verse from the Book of Mormon, which promises that the challenge of faith is its guarantee: But behold, if ye will awake and arouse your faculties, even to an experiment upon my words, and exercise a particle of faith, yea, even if ye can no more than desire to believe, let this desire work in you, even until ye believe in a manner that ye can give place for a portion of my words. (Alma 32:27) For a long time, I kept these words pinned up above my desk, trying to divine what, exactly, moved me so deeply. I would not be a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, no matter how many episodes of Big Love left me misty and longing. The canon of literature about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is slim. Books about Mormonism fall overwhelmingly into one of two pulpy categories: evangelical Christian conversion narratives, lurid exposés like Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, Martha Beck’s Leaving the Saints, and the endless ghostwritten memoirs of escapees from polygamist compounds. Barring inspirational literature, there are few Mormon novels worth remarking: Halldór Laxness’s Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed), the fiction of Judith Freeman, and Walter Kirn’s Thumbsucker, in which an adrift teen careens through an Adderall prescription and an unhappy sexual awakening before finding something like balance via his family’s conversion to LDS. Kirn gets at a bit of the masculine anger inside the young Mormon 114 man — the sense of being somehow neutered, and yet umbilically attached to the Church, not to mention convinced separation from it guarantees one’s downfall. But Thumbsucker is a comic novel, and it ends with the narrator’s departure for New York City and thus the promise of secular resolution. Mormonism lacked a novel of the disaffected, the suffering and rage of the deserting and deserted—and because I couldn’t read this story, and because it was not my own, I got how little I understood: my latter Latter-day revelation. I thought that this passage from the Book of Alma was unique to LDS, which was what so beguiled me; the idea that this uniquely American religion promised to reward experimentation. But I have found its echo in a most un-Mormon source, the letters of Flannery O’Connor, who in 1955 wrote to her friend Elizabeth Hester: What one has a born Catholic is something given and accepted before it is experienced. I am only slowly coming to experience things that I have all along accepted. I suppose the fullest writing comes from what has been accepted and experienced both and that I have just not got that far yet all the time. Conviction without experience makes for harshness. (97) Conviction without experience has haunted me. What was I supposed to do with all my belief without something to believe in? In 2012 I went for the first time to Salt Lake City, where I was excited to see the many Church historical sites and museums. I toured Lion House and the Assembly, heard an organ concert at the Tabernacle, and admired the newlyweds taking photographs in front of the Temple. But by the end of the day I had had enough of missionaries, of their openhearted desire to bring me into their faith. No matter how many times I explained my respect for the church or 115 demonstrated my knowledge of the Book of Mormon, even quoted it from memory, they still kept trying to tell me that I didn’t know my own story, that their testimony was more meaningful than my own. I envied them their conviction. I pitied them their innocence. The faith itself would not explain its underpinnings of color. But culture might. After watching the finale of the second season of the television western Hell On Wheels, I was struck by how neatly the narrative of the perplexing and enigmatic Norwegian immigrant Thor Gundersen, nicknamed “The Swede,” aligns with Baldwin’s one-sentence summary of the genesis of American whiteness. In this episode, after committing murder and fomenting violence between the white workers, freed slaves, and Sioux who populate the makeshift railroad town from which the show takes its title, the Swede escapes execution by leaping off the bridge from which he is to be hung (“Blood Moon Rising”). I assumed that the character would be killed off between seasons, or, worse, become one of the gentle Swedes so common in our imagined Western past, as evidenced in the jolly quotation from 1958’s Terror in a Texas Town that begins the “Swedes” entry in The British Film Institute’s Companion to the Western: “Swedes in this country, they keep popping up like jack-rabbits” (Buscombe 432). But rather than die or be tamed, in the third season of Hell On Wheels the Swede becomes a bishop in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ( “Get Behind The Mule”). By joining a group whose presence, like that of Scandinavian immigrants—because of Scandinavian immigrants—transformed the American West, the Swede again aligns himself with the progression of American whiteness by becoming a progenitor of the subcategory of whiteness whose motifs and societal impact I set out to describe and analyze: Mormon Scandinavian whiteness. By bringing together the disparate histories and bodies of theoretical 116 work focused on whiteness and Scandinavian conversion and immigration within the LDS framework, it is my goal to define and offer some comments on the formulation of an American identity that, in challenging national identification and stimulating syncretic cultural combination, continues to shape our understanding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the West, and American subjectivity. On Hell On Wheels, The Swede’s characterization deconstructs the yumpin’ yiminy blockhead caricature of the nineteenth-century Scandinavian immigrant on the frontier while also functioning as Hell On Wheels’s walking and talking analysis of the fluid problematics of race. Thor Gundersen’s renaming as “Swede” (occasionally formalized to “Mr. Swede”) cannily comments on several layers of racial representation: first, the elision in nineteenth-century America of multiple Scandinavian nationalities into a flattened Swede; second, a postmodern nod to the popular Swede beta male figure in twentieth-century Western films; and third, metatextually, the creation and development of American whiteness. A liminal figure, the Swede straddles the boundary between mythologized homogenous national identity and mythologized pluralistic national identity. Over the course of Hell On Wheels’s four seasons, his Lutheran rectitude recedes in deference to a Loki-like propensity for inciting disorder, a character shift that demonstrates the destructive impact of ethnic white immigrants’ assimilation to the cultural norms of American whiteness. Despite the great diversity of the faith’s adherents—and, paradoxically, given the Church’s nineteenth-century characterization by hostile outsiders as racially impure and explicitly nonwhite—the culture of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints most often positions itself as a white culture, a subcategory of whiteness at large, set apart by the strictures of the faith and the strong sense of commonality among Saints. In defining a Mormon 117 Scandinavian whiteness, my aim is not to take potshots at Scandinavia or the Church. By naming and examining the syncretic marriage of these two cultures of white others, I seek to accomplish Richard Dyer’s dictum, in White, that “whiteness needs to be made strange” (10). Both familiar and strange, Mormon Scandinavian whiteness is a message written in invisible ink across American history. Decoding this story is an opportunity to deflate the myth of whiteness and, with it, the absurdity of racial categorization. Postwestern cinema works to complicate and deconstruct the idealized pioneer narrative enshrined in countless classic Western films and as illustrated in Guy Deel’s “Spirit of the West” mural at Los Angeles’s Gene Autry Museum of the American West, in which a blond family labeled “Scandinavian Immigrants” occupies the central place in a pantheon that also includes Davy Crockett and General Custer. In addition to erasing the other populations that inhabited and shaped the West, this mythic retelling of frontier settlement emphasizes the special kitsch archetype of the Scandinavian—perhaps best encapsulated in the now discontinued American Girl doll Kirsten Larson—in which immigrants from Nordic countries, like other northern Europeans, are rewarded for their toil with a brand new identity: American whiteness. In Landscapes of the New West, Krista Comer unpacks the resilience of this white-centric narrative, christening it the “hope trope,” a term derived from Wallace Stegner’s assertion that the American West is “hope’s native home.” Before the late 1980s, the “hope trope” is the logic underlying western criticism’s theoretical predispositions, its anti-modernism, its white-centeredness, and its ambivalence about feminism. […] The recurrent theme here […] is “incorrigible hope.” That hope was rallied over Stegner’s own career against such varied threats as environmental ruin, cultural breakdown, and human vulnerability. (44) 118 If the disparate films and television shows that populate the postwestern landscape have a uniting feature, it is their desire to reveal the violence and hatred underlying the “hope trope.” The postwestern films of the last twenty years have excelled at complicating and diversifying the imagined West: Takashi Miike’s 2007 Sukiyaki Western Django grafts a traditional plot onto a feudal Japanese setting, for example, while the barren landscape of the American West is indistinguishable from a wandering protagonist’s modernist anxieties in the existential westerns Dead Man (1996) and Meek’s Cutoff (2011). But postwestern cinema has rarely explicitly examined the evolution and requirements of whiteness (John Ford’s The Searchers being an early exception), a curious lacuna given that many American racial designations were cast in the crucible of the West. Like its predecessors, Hell On Wheels, which was created by Tony and Joe Gayton and debuted on the cable network AMC in 2011, challenges the hope trope’s “white-centeredness” via a diverse set of characters designed to present a more authentic imagined west. My paradoxical phrasing here is intentional, for Hell On Wheels’s Western space is a stylized representation that reflects contemporary discussions of race while simultaneously functioning as historical fiction. In this fraught environment, the Swede is both whiteness enforcer— determining and designating other characters’ access to whiteness—and doppelganger of the protagonist, demonstrating the wages of whiteness via his mirroring of Hell on Wheels’s ostensible hero, Cullen Bohannon, a Confederate veteran on a vendetta against his wife’s murderers. Set in the years immediately following the Civil War, the show begins in the titular town of Hell On Wheels, Nebraska, a mobile settlement that has sprung up around the construction site of the Union Pacific railroad as it attempts to complete a transcontinental route. The denizens 119 of Hell On Wheels comprise a kind of uneasy rainbow coalition designed to signal the unstable racial and social categories in the American West: Thomas Durant, archetypical robber baron and vice president of Union Pacific; a literate, half-white freed slave; an English cartographer widowed when her husband is murdered by the Sioux; a prostitute whose facial tattoo marks her as a former Indian captive; a Sioux convert to Christianity; a pair of enterprising illiterate Irish brothers; an alcoholic doomsday preacher; and, of course, The Swede. The character is portrayed by the Canadian actor Christopher Heyerdahl, a performer previously best known for playing vampires—apt casting, for The Swede is a monstrous and captivating pioneer. In the show’s first season, he enjoys a comfortable position as Durant’s head of security, appointed to, as he explains, “bring some order to the chaos out here” (“Immortal Mathematics”). His position as identity enforcer is evident from his first appearance, in which he explains his misnomer nickname to Bohannon: “I’m Norwegian. But no matter, we are all Americans now. Even you rebels, yes?” (“Immortal Mathematics”). The tone of split selves and confrontational self-identification established here persists throughout the show, as Bohannon struggles to deny the parallels the Swede draws between his own fraught immigrant whiteness and Bohannon’s conflicted identity as a former Confederate. Bohannon, an accomplished murderer and Southern gentleman, finds The Swede’s belief that the universe is essentially without order both toxic and attractive. By forcing the comparison between the two of them, The Swede calls attention to the illogic that classes both he and Bohannon as, simply, “white.” With the character of The Swede, the creators of Hell on Wheels cannily comment on a Western mainstay: the Scandinavian immigrant, whom Thor Gundersen embodies in a uniquely postmodern fashion. In his black hat and long coat, the Swede visually echoes both Bengt Ekerot 120 as Death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and the classic Western “black hat” villain, as well as a more irreverent character from the animated series Metalocalpyse: the Reverend Aslaug Wartooth, father of Norwegian guitarist Toki Wartooth, who appears in scenes illustrating the great silence, fear, and isolation of Toki’s upbringing in rural Norway. When Reverend Wartooth appears to retraumatize Toki, my husband, who was raised in northern Denmark, laughs in sympathetic recognition. Watching a scene from Hell On Wheels in which the Swede stabs a foe in the face with a fork, he cheered, “Yeah! That’s Scandi-style!” (“Revelations”). A hundred and fifty years after the era of Hell On Wheels, the Scandinavian immigrant I know best still feels the chilly reach of staunch Lutheranism and viscerally enjoys the powerful, duplicitous, and menacing Swede as a repudiation of the hapless, honorable, vaguely emasculated Scandinavian immigrant embroiled in frontier intrigues of which he wants no part. His reactions to these disparate representations of Scandinavians formed the impetus for this paper. The Reverend and the Swede are contemporary American caricatures of Scandinavian masculinity in productive conversation with the long history of filmic depictions of men from the North. “On screen, Swedish male bodies are […] doubly ‘impossible,’” Chris Holmlund writes in Impossible Bodies: Femininity and Masculinity at the Movies. “It is axiomatic that Swedish actors do not play Swedes and that Swedish characters be subordinate to Anglo-American leads” (93). But Hell On Wheels breaks this axiom: the Swede is played by a Norwegian, more or less (Heyerdahl is the Canadian son of Norwegian immigrants and the nephew of famous explorer Thor Heyerdahl); more importantly, the character consistently refuses compromise and actively seeks to destroy any harmony in his path, making the “impossible” (Scandinavian) male body possible by creating a space for ruthless ambition and malevolent intelligence where before stood 121 only a befuddled blockhead, swapping his Js for Ys. The Swede’s storylines make clear that his fierce resolve is fueled by his attachment to and desire to advance his newfound white identity. The American notion of whiteness is written into the nation’s founding documents, as Arne Lunde writes in Nordic Exposures: Scandinavian Identities in Classical Hollywood Cinema: “In 1790, the fledgling United States Congress ruled that being a ‘free white person’ was a condition for becoming an American citizen, thus naturalizing and legalizing the relationship between whiteness and citizenship” (19). As a Southern landowner, Bohannon has an ancestral claim on whiteness, but his access to this identity has been complicated by his membership in the Confederate States Army, which has cost him his family, property, and reputation. At the show’s outset he is in fact subordinate to the Swede, and not only because he enters the community of Hell on Wheels as an outsider and prisoner: from the perspective of prominent nineteenth-century racial theorists, The Swede’s Scandinavianness places him at what Lunde calls “the top of the racial hierarchy” while simultaneously drawing attention to its bizarre logic (37). In The History of White People, Nell Irving Painter argues that these theorists— Emerson in English Traits among them—idealized a Scandinavian type but struggled to connect their visions of tall Vikings with the realities of mid-nineteenth-century Scandinavia: Scandinavia might work as the ancestral home of northern whiteness, but Scandinavia of the 1850s created a dilemma: it was backward and really quite poor […] Scandinavia, [Emerson] surmises, lost its best men during the Dark Ages—lost them to England and never recovered. (Painter 168) By casting a Scandinavian character as the enforcer of racial categories, Hell On Wheels comments on both nineteenth-century theories of race and on the enduring filmic usage of Scandinavian actors and characters to signal an ur-text of whiteness. Quoting Holmlund, Lunde 122 describes the tendency to use “the Swedish male as ‘the hole at the heart of whiteness’ and as a figure who points ‘to the existence of frictions, contradictions, and restrictions within, and on, whiteness’” (7), an apt description of the motivations behind The Swede’s fractured personality and his transformation from diabolical bookkeeper to prairie god of chaos. The character’s narrative arc dramatizes the implicit violence of white identity. His origin story takes place not in Norway but in a Confederate military prison in Andersonville, Georgia, as he explains to Bohannon: Total chaos ruled. 30,000 prisoners, 40,000 dead. I weighed two hundred pounds when I went in and eighty-six when I come out. I just couldn’t make them numbers add up. I woke one night to one of my own men trying to eat the flesh from my arm. He thought I was dead. I realized that night that I have to control people like I control numbers, and I learned to practice a sort of immoral mathematics and I did some not so good things in Andersonville. In the end I found I was able to make them numbers add up. (“Immortal Mathematics”) Here, the metaphor of mathematics parallels The Swede’s careers as bookkeeper, quartermaster, and accountant with his symbolic role in Hell On Wheels, where the demands of the market economy are named as actors in the shaping of white American identity, a dynamic epitomized in a scene where The Swede referees a literal race conflict—a fistfight between Bohannon and a freed slave—in which an Irish character handicaps Bohannon and replies “Money is my only friend” when his brother questions his race loyalty (“Bread and Circuses”). The Swede often serves as referee or adjudicator for racial disputes he himself has incited—subtlety is not Hell On Wheels’s strong suit—the outcomes of which always function to further ossify the racial categorizations that shape daily life in the town. 123 At the end of Hell On Wheels’s first season, the townspeople, fed up with The Swede’s regulatory presence, tar and feather him (“God Of Chaos”). The second season introduces a vastly altered Swede, reduced to the role of rag picker and corpse collector (“Viva La Mexico”). His loss of power is mirrored by Bohannon’s similar fall from foreman to outlaw, as well as the concurrent rise of several secondary characters who ascend from marginal first season identities via newly unchallenged access to whiteness. As Bohannon works to reestablish his role in the town economy, the Swede takes a radical turn and becomes explicitly concerned with whiteness. The show positions this newfound attention to racial purity as ambiguous, suggesting the Swede’s primary motivation, as always, is self-interest. The Swede’s obsession with whiteness— which culminates in an elaborate scheme that involves his impersonation of a mythic figure from Sioux mythology named the White Spirit—grows in inverse relationship to his sinking social stature, and his preoccupation with imposing order through racial categorization metastasizes as his ability to control the requirements of whiteness diminishes (“The White Spirit”). He stokes fears of an impending race war in the unstable mind of the dipsomaniac Methodist preacher, encouraging the preacher to write a manifesto with chapter titles such as “The White Man’s Predilection for Racial Eradication.” In another nod to contemporary racial thought, The Swede brandishing a sabertooth tiger skull while holding forth on his racial theories; as Painter writes, “Skulls ruled the day in [nineteenth-century] American anthropology,” (“The Railroad Job”; Painter 191). During one of the many long conversations they share despite their mutual animosity, the Swede tells Bohannon, “The reason you hate me is that I am a constant reminder of the capacity for evil that resides within you” (“The White Spirit”), a rather on-the-nose cocktail of Jungian archetype theory and whiteness studies that encapsulates the Swede’s narrative function. His 124 forced twinship with Bohannon strips the latter’s treasured veneer of chivalry, revealing the primary means by which whiteness was earned and imposed in the American West: a fetish of self-interest hardened into a community of exclusion. By stoking conflicts between Hell on Wheels’s various ethnic communities, the Swede seeks to impose an order through violence, division, and fear while settling the score on his personal grudges; as he puts it, “Every new land demands blood” (“Slaughterhouse”). At the end of Hell On Wheels’ second season, The Swede shaves his head, denudes himself, and paints his naked body white, literally becoming the White Spirit. After setting into motion a Sioux attack on the town, he strangles Bohannon’s love interest and, as described above, escapes his execution by leaping into a river. He has attained total oblivion, the ineluctable endpoint of the whiteness trajectory (“Blood Moon Rising”), as Baldwin writes “Being ‘White’…And Other Lies”: “It is a terrible paradox, but those who believed that they could control and define Black people, divested themselves of the power to control and define themselves” (90). In a similar vein, Richard Dyer has argued that “writing about whiteness gives white people the go-ahead to write and talk about what in any case we have always talked about: ourselves” (10), an accusation I can hardly dodge. What drew me to this inquiry, however, was fascination not with self but with other: the way in which a particular strain of American whiteness has been set apart. In the gentile cultural imagination, the Mormon American remains indisputably exotic, despite—or, more likely, because of—his ubiquitous ordinariness, his pleasant accessibility, and the great lengths to which his Church has gone to defang the powerful otherness of his identity. Similarly, although the descendants of nineteenth-century Scandinavian immigrants have largely been folded into the broader category of American whiteness, the Scandinavian remains an 125 object of alien appeal. The long vogue for cultural exports from Nordic countries, with their oft- remarked clean lines, cerebral composition, and simplicity, echoes the enduring American fascination with a white otherness higher and purer than the fraught category of white identity which, despite rapidly changing demographics, continues to function in the popular imaginary as the normative American subject. To stretch a Biblical phrase, Mormon whiteness is in the broader category of whiteness but aspires to be not of it. Well-appointed homes, quiet reserve rooted in inner calm, adorable blonde children: in the presence of both Mormons and Scandinavians, those of us who are not of their number can feel loud, neurotic, mawkish, and disorganized—qualities which mark a failure to fully embody what Dyer calls the “compelling paradoxes [of white identity]”: a vividly corporeal cosmology that most values transcendence of the body; a notion of being at once a sort of race and the human race, an individual and a universal subject; a commitment to heterosexuality that, for whiteness to be affirmed, entails men fighting against sexual desires and women having none; a stress on the display of spirit while maintaining a position of invisibility; in short, a need always to be everything and nothing, literally overwhelmingly present and yet apparently absent, but alive and dead. (39) Could this passage not also be said to describe certain tendencies of the Saints? Perhaps Mormon Country, Wallace Stegner’s admiring 1942 treatise on the culture of the faith, more simply illustrates surface congruencies between the two identities. Mormon culture, Stegner writes, is “a curious mixture of provincialism, parochialism, and cosmopolitanism,” (20) a statement which aptly summarizes contemporary Scandinavian culture as well. 126 Whiteness is an intrinsic part of this Mormon culture, omnipresent in the Church’s visual signifiers, as this passage from The Chinchilla Farm describes: We take out the white clothes we’ve stowed in the suitcases. […] The men put on white shirts and pants, white socks and shoes, even white ties and belts, and the women wear white dresses, white nylons, white shoes. And of course, beneath these clothes, everyone will have on the white garments, thin and silky against the skin. White everything, head to toe. Like angels, really. White does that to people—makes them look pristine, ethereal, and ready for the Second Coming. […] To see a whole group dressed like this is like glimpsing the hosts of heaven. More white than you can imagine in one place. It looks holy, it really does. People seem pure with all that white on. […] How could you not feel exceptional? (22) Perhaps the most famous and controversial example of the Book Of Mormon’s preoccupation with whiteness occurs in the Second Book of Nephi, in which the Lamanite clan of ancient indigenous Americans becomes dark-skinned as a result of a curse that distances them from God. Contrary to popular belief, this bit of scripture is not deterministically responsible for the racial restriction policies which denied people of African ancestry participation in the Church’s lay priesthood and some temple ordinances until 1978, as Julie K. Allen has written: Although the Book of Mormon does mention the Lord’s cursing the Lamanites with “a skin of blackness” (2 Ne. 5:21), elsewhere “dark” or “darkness” is used (Jacob 3:9; Alma 3:6). […] The Book of Mormon also makes it clear that the “curse” of a dark skin can be removed, as is demonstrated by a group of Lamanites whose “skin became white like unto the Nephites” because of their righteousness (3 Ne. 2:15). (119) 127 The story of the Lamanites and Nephites meets Dyer’s description of white discourse, “implacably reducing the non-white subject to being a function of the white subject” (13). By casting the darkness of the Lamanites as an reflective device—their cursed appearance functions solely to highlight the good of the Nephites—the Book of Mormon’s visual universe is in line with contemporaneous works of American literature. In his exhaustive history Homeward to Zion: The Mormon Migration from Scandinavia, William Mulder places the Book of Mormon within the canon of works concerned with mythologizing an authentic origin story for America—and for American whiteness. A nation seized with a conviction of manifest destiny should have rejoiced in the book as symbol. […] It improved the American dream with scripture and endowed it with legend. More faithfully than the Prophet’s neighbors in New England and western New York ever realized, his revelation reflected their most cherished myth. Descendants of Puritans and Patriots should have recognized the doctrine. (ix) That opponents of the early Church instead waged a smear campaign targeting Church members as perpetrators of miscegenation who themselves threatened the racial purity of the United States illustrates the depth of the era’s investment in symbolic whiteness. As Emerson and other prominent intellectuals rhapsodized about the purity and phrenology of imagined Vikings, the rapid growth and international proselytizing of the Church brought a new influx of converts to the United States, where, guided by their holy text, they set out for Utah. Approximately thirty thousand Scandinavians immigrated to the United States as Mormon converts, “a movement as large as the Puritan migration of the 1630s” (x). 128 Church leadership found the Scandinavians well suited to the demands of the burgeoning religion. After a Norwegian convert modestly declined his invitation to dinner, Mulder writes, Joseph Smith “told Apostle George A. Smith soon after that the Scandinavians would in time come to play a significant role in the church” (8). This prediction proved itself many times over in the intervening centuries, as Scandinavians proved able evangelists, and their close-knit communities took well to the industrious communalism of the Saints, transforming Utah, as Stegner writes, by “copying in the desert, under conditions vastly different from those of the old country, the angled and bisected and neatly-blocked landscape of their first home” (21). The dominant image of the Mormon pioneer remains that of the Scandinavian Mormon émigré and his descendants. In pastiche representations of the West such as Deel’s mural, the Scandinavian immigrant and the Mormon pioneer are flattened into a single archly white figure. The ideological weight of these images of Scandinavian whiteness requires the implicit participation of the viewer to recognize what Holmlund describes as “ ‘the space between visibility and invisibility’—i.e. ‘knowing that others will be oblivious to what is usually obvious to you’” (6). Such images have become inextricably intertwined with those of Mormon culture, the fundamental whiteness of which is anecdotally reflected today in the casts of films produced by and for Church members and in gentile commentary on Mormon culture such as last year’s Buzzfeed list “25 Things Mormon Girls Love” (“2. Baby Names, 6. Lacy Tank Tops, 19. The Romneys’ Marriage”). On Hell On Wheels, the story of the Swede’s conversion offers a final insight into this idea of Scandinavian Mormon whiteness. On the run under the assumed name Andersen, he comes upon and befriends a Mormon family traveling in a covered wagon (“Range War”). He responds to their kindness by becoming an eager convert. During his river baptism, the Swede 129 overpowers and drowns the parents (“One Less Mule”); he is later shown introducing himself to Mormon pioneers as the man he murdered (“Cholera”). The character then disappears from the show until the season’s last episode, in which Bohannon is brought to a Mormon fort to face trial for impregnating a young Church member. The bishop who appears before him is Thor Gundersen, called The Swede, alias Anderson, now Bishop Joseph Dutson, an identity stolen from his victim (“Get Behind The Mule”). His conversion and religious fervor are fueled by a fundamentally cynical desire for power. As Bishop Dutson, the Swede can continue his work regulating and defining whiteness at a time when a crucial new category of said whiteness will emerge, a whiteness culturally inflected by the disparate experiences represented by the Swede, a whiteness that informs our understanding of the culture of the American West to this day. In the show’s fourth season, the Swede’s much-reduced role takes the form of something resembling a buddy comedy with Brigham Young as his partner—a move that can be read as a further diminishment of the ferocious immigrant otherness that characterized his behavior in earlier seasons, or conversely as a suggestion for the quiet power the Swede, restored to his position as quartermaster, will yield from within the church. As television drama, this is all a bit over the top, but as dramatization of the history of white identity in the United States, the cynicism rings true. Hell On Wheels, a show whose mediocre nadirs prevent me from outright endorsement, has brought rare focus to an intersection in American history that has received scant attention from both popular culture and scholarly analysis. I can only account for this lacuna by suggesting that, as with most things that exist in plain sight, it can be difficult to see the cultural category I set out to describe and consider in this paper. By codifying a cult of whiteness—a religious system in which the inferential value of race endows greater access to the divine—the progenitors of Scandinavian Mormon whiteness, 130 purehearted or not, found greater agency in and structural control over restorative Western landscapes both real and imagined. Throughout The Chinchilla Farm Verna explicitly questions religious laws she once obeyed, recognizing their effect as regulators of sexuality, gender, race, and class which privilege white masculinity. These insights enable Verna to self-identify with the poor and disenfranchised in her Los Angeles neighborhood, MacArthur Park, whom she describes as “poorer people trying to make things work out okay and just looking for places to pass time until that happened” (188), a compassionate statement of commonality signaling Verna’s refiguring of her identity and notion of community. Verna’s understanding of whiteness as a category is intrinsically linked to the landscape of the American West, which she identifies as a fundamentally hybrid environment in which designations fail and boundaries are made pervious. In MacArthur Park, Verna sees A man who looked so much like my father I was startled, only he was Mexican. I thought about how westerners can look alike, how in certain parts of this country the whites and Indians and Mexicans dress and move so similarly that they can be mistaken for each other. […] From a certain distance, he could have been any race or nationality, just a man raised out in the West, where cultures had mixed for a few hundred years and the sun weathered everyone to the same brown color. (215) This endorsement of nonwhite fluidity could be read as an incarnation of the “hope trope.” But in The Chinchilla Farm, Verna’s narrative authority is the force that enables characters to escape limiting (white) identities via Western mobility. Her rejection of categories is transmitted to 131 those around her, as is evident in her relationship with the man who becomes her second husband, Vincent. Verna’s first home in Los Angeles is the opulent Beverly Hills house Vincent shares with his wife, Verna’s childhood friend Jolene. Vincent, a graduate student in music composition, plays in a community orchestra, and is “doing his dissertation on Schubert” (121). Vincent and Jolene’s high-end lifestyle, which is funded by Vincent’s inherited money, perplexes Verna, particularly the intricately designed lighting scheme in the room where she sleeps: There were a dozen lights, all different kinds: floor lamps and lights affixed to bookcases […] Little lights and big lights […] Cones of light and beams of light. Crazy! So many lights. (124) When Verna asks Vincent about the lighting, his answer is equally incomprehensible: “Light is very important to me, I suppose. All the different and subtle effects of light. It has a great effect on one’s mood, light. It seems nice to have a number of possibilities.” “I still didn’t get it,” Verna comments dryly to the reader (128), rejecting Vincent’s value system and affirming her own. When they are separated, Verna thinks of Vincent’s “whiteness” as a defining descriptor of his peculiar appeal (240). Vincent moves through Verna’s life as an unwitting closed white image, evincing privilege and an assumption of mastery that extends to not only lighting and classical music but also to Verna’s life and choices. Finding a book in her apartment, he asks, “Oh? On whose advice have you begun reading?” (174). Verna initially tolerates his condescension, disregarding his ignorance of her interiority and attempts to control her while still enjoying his company, until one night when she refuses to allow him to play classical music in her apartment, telling him: 132 I think you’d get sick of all those serious violins. Yayayayaya all the time, sawing away, you know, like it was the end of the world. At least this is a little upbeat— something with a little swing to it. (231) While Patsy Cline, Verna’s choice, plays, Vincent tells Verna that she is “ ‘Like a muse to me […] A guiding present. A source of inspiration.’ ‘Inspiration? For what?’ ” Verna asks, nonplussed by the sheaf of music Vincent claims to have written for her (233). Verna’s ambivalent handling of Vincent is another rejection of the closed world of whiteness. As an adult, she has become invested in the project of interrogating her own desires and does not want to be anyone’s muse. After hearing his narrative of unhappy childhood and a misguided attempt to find an identity as Jolene’s husband, Verna is able to categorize Vincent as, like herself and the diverse family she has assembled, a person fleeing a restrictive identity in search of self- knowledge. Having deconstructed the monolithic identification between the Church, her large nuclear family, and restrictive whiteness, at the end of The Chinchilla Farm Verna is able to reevaluate her relationships with members of her family as distinct individuals, rather than a faceless mass. Verna describes her dying father dressed in “colorful clothes, usually wearing his silver bola tie with its great turquoise stone” (307), suggesting that her attainment of agency and individuality has been transmitted through her family, with Verna functioning as catalyst. The Chinchilla Farm depicts a female narrator who rejects the codifying powers offered her by whiteness in favor of personal agency. Verna’s marriage to Vincent in the novel’s final chapter emphasizes the triumph of her mobility. Vincent explains the end of his marriage to Jolene by revealing that she has become pregnant by another man, violating an agreement they had: “no children, not ever, no exceptions,” but in the novel’s last scene Verna and Vincent have 133 had a child together. The presence of this child indicates that Verna’s success in renegotiating the terms of her life has continued. Freeman creates a new kind of happy ending, in which the benefits of whiteness are rejected in favor of mobility across narrative, landscape, and persona, as the author’s own response to the argument over her novel’s ending reveals. Many people have said to me, ‘Wow, I don’t know how she ended up with Vincent, I really don’t like him!” And I always say, “I don’t either!” You know, I didn’t find him all that terrific either. Two things that are in opposition to one another create a tremendous charge. I’m fascinated by the moment in which someone can reach inside you and cause you to doubt, to say, ‘Wow! What if I haven’t been right about this all along?’ I never intended for Verna to portray this traditional solution. I never thought of it that way! Who am I to say? People take away different things from books. (Interview with Judith Freeman) As for my own inscribed landscape, the mushroom cloud visions eventually ebbed and then ceased entirely. Oddly, I can’t recall now how long they lasted, or what event signaled their ending. The volcano stopped erupting, the oil stopped gushing. I got older. But I am inclined to interpret those months when I could only see destruction and the transformative moment when that destruction ceased somewhat differently. Something did end as I entered the second half of my twenties and this new phase of life on the other side of the country. A self died and a new one was born, into a life of embodiment that exceeded the specificities of my form. If everything I had learned up to this point taught me that the world determined my body, my life in Los Angeles was going to teach me that my body could not only determine the world but become it, a knowledge only I could access, hidden in plain view. 134 CONCLUSION The Witch’s Pyramid As I edited these essays in the waning days of my PhD, I was also navigating an implied future, the field that awaited me on the other side of graduation. For the penultimate year of my doctoral studies I served as a core faculty member in a new Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing at a small university in Los Angeles. Long in the practice of applying for any and every work opportunity for which I was even nominally qualified, I had found myself in this position after the professor interviewing me to teach an undergraduate-level literature seminar at the university flipped through my CV. “It seems like you should be teaching creative writing,” she remarked, and hired me to teach a course called Women In Quest, promising that I would be given an MFA-level course the following spring. The hire felt like kismet. A few years earlier, my proposal to teach a course also called Women In Quest at the honors college within the university where I was pursuing my PhD had been rejected on the grounds that no male undergraduate would register for it. Now I found myself teaching a version of that same course in a weekend format program in which the student body was overwhelmingly comprised of women of color balancing school with jobs and families. It was a wild and wonderful semester in which I often returned home from class aphasic, my capacities for thinking and talking exhausted by two days of lecturing and leading discussions. Sometimes the class’s witty, astute, and compassionate dynamic reduced me to helpless laughter, as on the afternoon that I my planned close reading of Kim Kardashian’s November 2014 “break the internet” Paper magazine cover coincided with my department chair’s observation visit. Other days, our conversations were sobering. One day a student appeared in class obviously unwell and confessed that she had recently been diagnosed with human papilloma 135 virus and undergone a colposcopy that morning. I told her that she should go home and rest, but she reminded me that her employer was openly hostile to her pursuit of her education and had scheduled her for night shifts directly preceding each class in an attempt to foil her. Coming to class straight from the hospital was a necessity as she had been granted a rare few hours off. The student seemed quite upset about the ramifications of her HPV diagnosis. In an attempt to comfort her, I shared that I too had been diagnosed with HPV—indeed, the CDC holds that “nearly all sexually active people will get human papillomavirus (HPV) at some time in their life” (“HPV and Men Fact Sheet”)—and that with proper medical care there was no reason for she or I to fear the virus would negatively impact our lives. “Thank you so much for telling me,” she said, wide-eyed, and explained that her mother had shamed her for the diagnosis. “She said I slept with too many guys, but Professor, it’s not so many, only two.” I was so struck by what she said that I forgot to correct her usage of “Professor,” as I normally did, insisting that the honorific be reserved for those who had been granted it as a job title in an attempt to foreground my status as a contingent academic laborer. Her response was so like my own upon my diagnosis, and in the baffling years of testing that followed, in which I found doctors’ demeanors to be contradictorily alarmist and blasé. Talking to my student I remembered the times I had heard HPV invoked in culture—on the HBO show Girls, the Comedy Central show Broad City, and most recently in the Natasha Rothwell episode of the Netflix original series The Characters—and felt again the affirmation and comfort of those messages, the sense that I was not alone, nor especially lascivious in my behavior. I, who had always sought the height of lascivity. I hugged my student and we went back to our discussion of Natalie Diaz. 136 One evening my husband, curious about the keyed-up state in which I returned to him from my weekends at the small university, asked if I might lecture him a bit as I did my students. After a few paragraphs of holding forth on the text we had discussed that day, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, with digressions into the pernicious fiction of race, how the color line had shaped American history, and the relationship between reality and representation, he raised his hand. “That’s a literature course, but it’s also some radical metaphysical phenomenology of the self,” he said. By that point I had been going on about the teaching of the humanities as liberation theology for the soul in my cover letter for a while. Now, according to him at least, I was modeling the same in my teaching. The idea filled me with pride and happiness.. Throughout my teaching career I have shared myself openly with my students, discussing mental health, sexuality, issues of class, money, and work, and relationships alongside the texts and writing assignments we undertook together. This openness has consistently been the right choice for me, a means through which I grow closer to my students and they in turn to me in an environment of mutual sharing and fundamental equality. As much as I enjoy making my students laugh or sharing my thoughts on a given issue, my primary aim in speaking about my HPV diagnosis—or my struggles with depression and anxiety, or my experience of sexism or my awareness of my privilege—is to strike a blow against the silence that is used to erase and control discourse surrounding these topics. Students like the ones I taught at the small university are most vulnerable to this silence, but I too have suffered it, and so I seek to turn my privilege as teacher and expert on its head, render it a tool for exposure, transparency, and honesty. The classroom is the environment that most requires these virtues and a rigorous ethics of personal disclosure. If we are not open and honest there, then where else will we see ourselves— and invite others to see us, and more importantly themselves—with appreciative clear eyes, as 137 Verna does in The Chinchilla Farm? Only through such self-apprehension and recognition of the intrinsic worth of one’s subjectivity can hegemonic structures of oppression be deconstructed. This is the work of occult imagery, and it is the work I have chosen as a teacher. While I believe I understand the motivations of the many colleagues who remark that they can’t get their students to stop writing about themselves, that they are uninterested in their students’ personal lives, that the only way to teach is to maintain a stiff disinterest in this direction, I could not disagree with this sentiment more deeply. Indeed, my resistance to it and faith in my discursive and divulging style has shaped not only my pedagogical strategy but also the path of critical inquiry that led to this dissertation. In my Women In Quest classroom I saw many of the nascent ideas that had shaped my notion of occult imagery coalesce into pedagogical tools. Beginning with The Awakening by Kate Chopin and ending with Veronica, with Kindred, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, and the poetry of Natalie Diaz in between, I saw my students recognize and experiment with the elision of self and space on display in these texts—first in their discussions and then in their critical writing, in which I encouraged them to disregard the fiction of self-erasure, to invoke the self, to write about what it was like to be themselves, thinking as they thought. During my last lecture on Veronica, I reread aloud the scene in which Alison imagines her friend’s death. I imagine Veronica lying on her couch, descending slowly into darkness, the electronic ribbon of television sound breaking into particles of codified appetites, the varied contexts of which must have been impossible to remember. […] I imagine Veronica drawing away from everything she had become on earth, withdrawing the spirit blood from what had been her self, allowing its limbs to blacken and fall off. I imagine Veronica’s spirit stripped to its skeleton, then 138 stripped of all but its shocked, staring eyes […][…] I imagine a moving black coil with white shapes inside it disintegrating in a grind of dirt, roots, and bones. (217) This passage, I explained to the class, recalled to me the ecstatic surprise ending of Edith Pearlman’s “Self-Reliance,” which imagines a similar and yet wholly distinct transit. She leaned back; her feet rose. She was horizontal now. She was born forward on an animal along a corridor toward a turning; the rounded walls of this corridor were sticky and pink. “Rest, rest,” said the unseen animal whose back was below her back—an ox, maybe, some sort of husband. They turned a corner with difficulty—she was too long, the ox was too big—but they managed; and now they entered a light-filled room of welcome or deportation, trestle tables laden with papers. […] It could not last. And now there was no one, no relative, no friend, no person, no animal, no plant, no water, no air. Cornelia was not alone, though; she was in the company of a hard semi-transparent sapphire substance, and as she watched, it flashed and then shattered, and shattered again, and again, all the while retaining its polyhedrality, seven sides exactly—she examined her palm to make sure, and it shattered there on her lifeline. Smaller and smaller, more numerous grew the components. Expanding in volume, they became a tumulus of stones, a mount of pebbles, a mountain of sand, a universe of dust, always retaining the blue color that itself was made up of royal and turquoise and white like first teeth. The stuff, finer still, churned, lifted her, tossed her, caressed her, entered her orifices, twirled and turned her, polished her with its grains. It rose into a spray that threw her aloft; it thickened into a spiral that caught her as she 139 fell. She lay quiet in its coil. Not tranquil, no; she was not subject to poetic calm. She was spent. She was elsewhere. (373) Both Pearlman and Gaitskill render death as a numinous climax—an explosion that yields a final, overwhelming communion that obviates that self, renders it null and void. Veronica and Cornelia, the protagonist of “Self-Reliance,” alike enter a space in which identity is washed away—the former “withdrawing the spirit blood from what had been her self, allowing its limbs to blacken and fall off,” the latter “in the company of a hard semi-transparent sapphire substance, [that] flashed and then shattered, and shattered again, and again”—until both women meet a “coil” which, in its final breaking-down of consciousness, offers a restful quietude that may be the afterlife or its prelude. Beautifully “spent” by all that has come before, for these characters death is a last actualization undertaken on their own idiosyncratic and transformative terms. I encouraged my students to contrast these death scenes with that of Edna Pontellier, which closes The Awakening. When she was there beside the sea, absolutely alone, she cast the unpleasant, pricking garments from her, and for the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air, at the mercy of the sun, the breeze that beat upon her, and the waves that invited her. How strange and awful it seemed to stand naked under the sky! how delicious! She felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known. […] The water was deep, but she lifted her white body and reached out with a long, sweeping stroke. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace. 140 She went on and on. She remembered the night she swam far out, and recalled the terror that seized her at the fear of being unable to regain the shore. She did not look back now, but went on and on, thinking of the blue-grass meadow that she had traversed when a little child, believing that it had no beginning and no end. Her arms and legs were growing tired. She thought of Leonce and the children. They were a part of her life. But they need not have thought that they could possess her, body and soul. How Mademoiselle Reisz would have laughed, perhaps sneered, if she knew! "And you call yourself an artist! What pretensions, Madame! The artist must possess the courageous soul that dares and defies." Exhaustion was pressing upon and overpowering her. She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again. Edna heard her father's voice and her sister Margaret's. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air. (128) In Chopin’s novel, Edna’s journey is demarcated and dictated by the needs and selves impressed upon her by others. Even in dying—by suicide, a chosen death, her greatest work of art and act of actualization—she is incapable of shucking the demands of intimate backseat drivers: her father and sister, her husband and children, and most woundingly the imagined voice of Mademoiselle Reisz, the spinster pianist whose artistry Edna so admires. At this moment of 141 ultimate self-realization—paradoxical but not surprising for a woman of the nineteenth century that this realization takes the form of self-dissolution—Edna is troubled by a fear that she remains an ineffectual amateur even at suicide. And yet the self asserts itself against doubt in the inarguable insights and asides of her body, “strange and naked under the sky,” bearing Edna into the sea’s “embrace,” an intimate encounter that contains the terrifying promise of agency. As always in moments of occult imagery, her body remembers. And in recollection this same vehicle that roamed the “blue-grass meadow” and longed for the officer, felt “the hum of bees,” and smelled “the musky odor of pinks” realizes a Promethean victory. Edna Pontellier goes guiltily and quietly into that good night so that, a century on, Veronica and Cornelia might go into it loud and proud. My project in these pages has been to show that the fetters and shackles of the self have not so much been dissolved by the intervening literature as remade into jewelry, fine adornments, and navigating tools. “What do these passages offer us?” I asked my class that day, restraining the urge to pace to the board and deflect the enormity of the moment with props. “Perhaps that humans are made to be used by the world, that it is our function to be expiated and dissolved into the act of living.” I raised my eyes and found they were brimming with tears. Were I writing this scene as fiction, the building that contained us would dissolve as all the bodies in that classroom melted, rendering us transcendent creatures of energy and light, out in the day swarming each other in hungry communion. That was how it felt to be there, feeling and felt, seen and seeing. On my journey through the realms of occult imagery, I had found my book of the dead, and it was alive, a room full of working minds. In the spring the small university gave me a MFA-level course, as promised, and for the next year I balanced my PhD work with my teaching position there, along with a rotating 142 assortment of other part-time and freelance work. The MFA courses met only six times, on non- consecutive Saturdays, for eight hours each. Always eager to draw comparisons to activities of which I have no experience, I came to think of each class as a kind of supercompressed rodeo or cheerleading competition. Would I make it, be able to workshop twenty pages of writing from four or five students and lecture on writerly craft while taking breaks for coffee, lunch, and midafternoon lethargy? For much of that year the challenge invigorated me, even as it stretched my capacity for production to its outer limit. As my responsibilities within the program grew—I advised thesis projects, designed and taught new courses, and was hired to develop a course plan that would produce a bilingual literary journal to be published both in print and online—so too did my class size, until I found myself teaching a short fiction workshop to twenty-three graduate students. That semester I also met the new program director, a hire resulting from a national search undertaken after the person who created the MFA program had left abruptly in its first week of operation. These events had taken place prior to my arrival at the small university, leaving a vacuum that shaped the autonomy and authority I enjoyed within the program. Walking back to my car from campus on those Saturdays, bathed in the shaky high of a day of good work, I could forget for a little while that my position was contracted, unsalaried, and without benefits. That I was paid per course, a flat sum well under four thousand dollars. What had begun as a clear-eyed desire to develop my teaching and earn money had become, over the course of that year, the familiar dilemma that so preoccupied my fellow graduate students, clogging our newsfeeds with Dickensian tales of elderly adjuncts living in cars or on the streets, trying for food stamps, and dropping dead on the manicured lawns of the universities that had scraped out every last drop of labor from them with a vigor that recalled to 143 me my preoccupation with accessing every bit of toothpaste in the tube before throwing it away. Over time it had become hard to argue with the colleagues who actively disdained teaching; at least their dislike of working with students seemed to protect them from the most egregious of abuses. As the demands of my position increased, I found myself rising ever earlier on class days to finish grading, until finally I was setting my alarm to go off at two-thirty or three in the morning. By autumn I understood that I had become that thing which I most feared and reviled, the good-girl adjunct spending her essence in purehearted pursuit of dream academe, a place where she will be recognized and exalted with the undreamt-of glories of health insurance, a livable wage, and some say in her course schedule. She was a figure I had come to disdain with as much critical élan as the cheerful Western heroine, but with less interest. I had written short stories in which some version of this maudlin ragdoll also-ran played sad second fiddle to a driven female protagonist, and I had raged against her type in diatribes that entertained my friends at conference happy hours, cruelties enabled by my conviction that I would never be her, that I was frankly smarter than that—a pernicious fiction required by anyone who hopes to make it through a doctorate without being driven mad by anxiety requires this pernicious fiction. But now I was that good girl. Her heart beat for my students in my chest. Their vibrant, fresh need vibrated in me, resonated my body into a great avenging bell. I would not, could not desert them. There was talk of converting the MFA into a hybrid program—not hybrid in the way my PhD program was hybrid, but hybrid as a byword for reduced classroom time, for half- online and half not. When I asked the director And besides, there was hope; unasked, the new director had promised to try to find a way to create a more stable position for me. “I can see how important you are here,” he said. 144 All these pages I have spent parsing fiction and rejecting prewritten narratives for women and still for so long I did not realize that I was living one. When the job was posted it was for a poet or playwright, two identities I cannot embody within academe, and I realized it had been written specifically to preclude me from applying for it. When I asked the director he replied that they had “decided to recruit where we didn’t have strength.” And suddenly I knew that I had to leave. My commitment to the small university had waylaid my progress on my PhD, on this very project, and I was coming up short everywhere. So I told the new director that I had to step back from teaching there, at least for the spring semester, in order to finish my degree. Never in my life had I quit a job, and I endeavored to do so in as politic and polite a manner as possible, assuring him that I would continue to work with my one remaining thesis advisee, who was due to graduate in the spring. The question of advisement was, and is, particularly relevant to these discussions—the one in which I tendered my resignation to the director, and my project in these pages. The small university’s MFA program was structured on the presumption of all-adjunct faculty (outside of the director, who had a tenure line) and adjuncts are not compensated for advisement work. How, then, was the program to function? Advisement is the pedagogical feature that most distinguishes a graduate degree from an undergraduate. The advisement relationship is the vehicle in which the student is shown the apparatus of critical inquiry and writerly task, a jalopy whose steering wheel, by program’s end, said student must take confidently in hand, under the guidance and encouragement of his or her advisor. That had been my experience, and it was the one I was determined to provide for my students, to my own peril. There was at the small university some promise of a flat fee, a kind of honorarium, that would be paid to the advisor upon the student’s graduation, not particularly motivational as students struggling to balance school with work and 145 family sometimes took the maximum of seven years to finish their degrees. In leaving the program but continuing to work with my advisee, I had for the sake of my own sanity decided to abstain from doing the math of how many hours of uncompensated labor I had provided the university, at what low, perhaps even negative rate. My advisee and I met diligently for over a year, tracking her progress on and revision of a collection of linked essays that together constituted a hybrid-format memoir. And then, in the week before the writing of these lines, I returned to the small university to chair her MFA thesis defense. I had at this point been on the receiving end of many questions, concerned comments, and complaints about the director—both about the direction in which he was taking the MFA program and about his personal demeanor. He seemed determined to shift the program to an online-only format, a move none of the students wanted, and regularly claimed to have said or not said things that impacted a given student’s degree progression. As it pertained directly to me, this habit of laconic gaslighting had taken the odd shape of his telling others (students and professors alike) that I had “abandoned” my students for a “fancy job in France.” I cannot account for this narrative other than that to note that I did mention having been offered a short- term residency in France in my resignation, but two weeks does not a fancy job make. Much worse, the director had told my advisee that she might need to “do her MFA over” as I had left her in the lurch by departing. And when I intervened to reassure him of my continued presence and investment, his response was characteristically disengaged. “If you are going to be present for the defense, then forget everything I said.” The defense began well and proceeded smoothly until about half an hour in, when I noticed that only my advisee and I had been speaking. Wishing to bring the director and the other professor present into the conversation, I put to them a question about the difficult balance my 146 student sought to strike between the mythic style of her favorite author, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the first-person essayists, including Joan Didion, whose work she emulated in the project’s design and format. This inquiry would be safe, I reasoned. “I don’t see that—the Tolkien,” the director began. “What I’d like to talk about is the manuscript’s lack of eroticism. There’s all these men the protagonist is involved with, and they’re indistinguishable, just one after another. I feel a lot more heat for that car.” He was referring to my student’s 1962 Buick Skylark Special convertible with red and white interior, which she had purchased upon her arrival in Los Angeles as a symbol of her agency and power. It appeared in an essay titled “Magic.” “That car,” the director said. “I could just see you waxing it with your breasts.” Time slows to a syrupy skid when I call back this recent memory. Why does recognition always come just a moment too late? I know this is standard, not my special flaw, but I cannot shake my frustration. I revise. I go back there in my mind and wish at this moment to stand from my desk, evoke my nonexistent power—I, defense chair, former adjunct employee of the small university—and walk out of the room with my student, a woman in her sixties whose project of higher education operates in inverse shape to my own. Whereas I have used my degrees to foster and hone and launch my relatively young self, she has claimed the process of reading and writing and ethically discerning as a way of shoring up and translating into acceptable parlance the knowledges and powers she has acquired and grown and sharpened within herself over the course of a lifetime spent working administrative roles within institutions. That neither she, nor I, nor the other professor responded to the director’s statement about her breasts—as fundamentally sophomoric in its apprehension of a woman’s sexuality in addition to its more pressing demerits—with anything other than nervous 147 laughter and averted eyes is as sterling a proof of the stakes of this project as any close reading or literary survey I could undertake in these pages. We need the tools of occult imagery to intervene with and rewrite narratives with which the present does not contain the possibility of intervention. We need it to order the work of recollection and representation—to recurate experience and make way for a real realer than the real. We need occult imagery because the moment itself is precarious and fraught, and only in revisiting can we revise. Wishing to recenter the conversation onto my student’s thesis, I raised to the director the long literary history of male authors rendering lists of female lovers indistinct, a barely human progression of orifices, Updike and his jarred bee, Bukowski for whom I had over the course of my PhD developed a surprising appreciation, fellow issue of my hometown Hemingway, whose The Garden of Eden I had read for the first time a few months previous. With its themes of twinning and twins amidst a portrayal of one relationship that folds into and seamlessly becomes another via the device of a poorly-managed ménage a trois, Hemingway’s posthumously discovered novel had proven surprisingly moving—proof, I opined, that perhaps at the end of his life the author had apprehended the cyclical nature of his own desire, the pitfalls of that cycle. All of which was to say, I explained, that a somewhat categorical treatment of a list of lovers—a flaw I did not believe my student’s work suffered—could be a stylistic choice, and the concerns of tenderness and feeling and yes, erotics, were never said to suffer in the works of those authors. The director turned to face me. “I’ve never understood how anyone can stand Bukowski,” he said. “He’s an absolutely vile misogynist, and disinteresting in his misogyny as compared to somewhat like, say, Henry Miller. Don’t get the cult. He’s not worth anyone’s time and energy, a terrible writer—and that holds for Bolaño, too.” 148 The gentle reader may recall that although it is not a topic of concern within these pages, I am an expert on the life and work of the late Chilean author Roberto Bolaño and the first (and to date only) Anglophone writer whom his widow Carolina López has granted an interview. This fact is not relevant to my purpose here, and it was not relevant at the defense, either. The director and I had never discussed my work on Bolaño. By raising it, he indicated the strength of his desire to insult me, and the depth of research he had undertaken in pursuit of an avenue in which to do so. Why am I writing in the conclusion to my dissertation about a personal attack I suffered at a student’s thesis defense? This section began with the comparative readings of three death scenes, and as I have so often during the years of my training, I wish that I could now return to the discreet and calm climes of literary analysis, a realm in which the pursuit of understanding has emerged as the sole stable value amidst the wreckage of failed categories. But perhaps what I am seeking is not so much a return to my readings as an illumination of the connective tissue that renders them indissoluble from the quotidian business of suffering a gendered attack from a man in a position of authority. In these pages I have engaged in a winking wordplay, terming my main idea occult imagery—a phrase with obvious echoes of magic and sorcery—calling back often to the figure of the witch, imbuing various textual attributes, characters, and authors with witchy properties. As I write, a film called The Witch is enjoying widespread success. Directed by Robert Eggers and set in 1630s New England (the title card bears the subtitle “A New-England Folktale”), it is the harrowing tale of a family cast out from their Puritan colony to live in the wilderness, where they are set upon by mysterious ills that slowly convince them that their eldest daughter Thomasin is in league with Satan. In the film’s last quarter, the family’s religious hysteria is 149 revealed to be grounded in reality, as one by one they are seduced, hypnotized, and devoured by the members of a local coven, who then welcome the wrongly accused Thomasin into their community. No matter that she was not a witch; accused of witchery, she becomes one, her accusers’ fantasy made flesh in real power as after watching the destruction of her family she signs a book offered her by a Satanic goat who asks, “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” The last scene has Thomasin levitating nude into the night sky above the witches’ fire, clavicle smeared with her mother’s blood—she has had to kill her, in self-defense—eyes closed in pleasure, laughing delightedly as she rises in her power. Leaving the theater, I could recall no happier ending. It is no accident that witches and the realm long termed occult—remember: hidden—are having a cultural moment as I write these words in the spring of 2016. As othered and oppressed voices continue to assert themselves in discourses inside and outside of the academy, new and old foes have massed, joining forces in an attempt at re-silencing. I am not being poetic when I write that I came to understand the red depth of impotency I suffered in the hours and days following my student’s defense as a link to the deepest vein of female rage, a muted scream connecting me to the genetic memory of millennia of the oppression and violent subjugation of women. When I call these strategies of self-assertion and aesthetic portrayal of interior experience as external event “occult,” I am honoring and calling down these burnt witches, inviting them back into the conversation from which they have been too long shut out. The older I get, the more pronounced these experiences have become—an idiosyncratic metric that suggests to me that even if a woman is to increase in power and influence as she matures, the opposition and attacks she suffers will multiply in tandem. 150 I cannot manipulate time and intervene with the director as I now wish I had, but I can do as the other professor present at the defense has herself done, and submit a formal complaint to the administration of the small university. Not will I write only my own complaint, but I will organize and encourage the students who have come to me with similar stories to do the same. And not only will I record these happenings here, in this performative hybrid text, monstrous marvelous chimera; also I will them into record as another realization in my quest to understand occult imagery, a phenomenon that made itself known to me as I struggled to make myself known to it. Peculiar Qualifications, my first fiction manuscript and MFA thesis, was my first attempt to solve the problem of the self—the problem of my self. The technique of “lying and telling the truth at the same time” that I describe in the introduction to these essays had become careworn and brittle by the time I found myself casting about for my first book-length project. I had spent the first year of my MFA writing what I now recognize as experiments in voice and style. A story from the point of view of a child being raised by a Michael Jackson-like celebrity recluse, a story about bad-idea love triangle, set in nineteenth-century Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, France, in a house that was also a giant, drivable wheel, a story about a secret order of thieves within a suburban high school. Each idea a snowglobe whose taut magic broke when I played with it too hard. I had fled writing what I “knew,” but the terror of the need to produce brought me ineluctably back to my own circumscribed experience. Not just terror; there was something else underlying the fear, a shadowy sentiment that only now I recognize as longing, of the kind Didion describes motivating her first novel, Run River, in her 2003 reconsideration of it in Where I Was From. 151 The story, the “plot” of the novel, was imagined, but the impulse that initially led me to imagine this story and not another was real: I was a year or two out of Berkeley, working for Vogue in New York, and experiencing a yearning for California so raw that night after night, on copy paper filched from my office and the Olivetti Lettera 22 I had bought in high school with the money I made stringing for The Sacramento Union […] I sat on one of my apartment’s two chairs and set the Olivetti on the other and wrote myself a California river. (1058) My own yearning was for the old trees and great Midwestern optimism of Chicago and its suburbs, but the impulse was the same. Removed from my context and immersed in one that at best doubted and at worst erased the knowledge I had gleaned from the place in which I was brought up, like Didion I set out to recreate it in fiction. Some years ago, my father asked me why I wrote. To express myself, or to connect with readers? I answered that the need to write feels deeply personal—at this point an almost involuntary urge to record the world as I have experienced it—but that the idea that my writing might resonate with another person was so enormously meaningful that if I let myself think about it too much, the responsibility implicit in the act of writing might either move or scare me so much that I wouldn’t be able to write at all. Revisiting his question now, it seems to me that while self-expression and the recognition of mutuality are both intrinsic elements of my writerly drive, they are also both beside the point. In writing Peculiar Qualifications I taught myself how to demarcate a fictive space and within its boundaries grow a world I had known. Since the completion of that manuscript, I have finished two others and started a few more. In every new fictive environment I gain a deeper apprehension of my powers of staging, and in each I am given the opportunity to prove myself anew, to show the world as I have seen it, 152 however slant. And because I have been privileged in this task—enabled, by luck, support, and determination to pursue it intensely and uninterruptedly for all these years of my young life—I have not only performed it but become aware of it, self-aware, and in that awareness found the root of this inquiry. What exactly was I doing, am I doing in my writing? Were there models available to me that might explain and make conscious what innate and dreamlike—texts that could model it, that might hone my abilities through close study? And as I considered these questions, the very texts I sought found me: Veronica and The Chinchilla Farm, as chronicled in these pages, but these two simply proved most ripe for excavation, the most exact examples of occult imagery I could find. As influential as the texts to which my attention was steered by my professors were those same professors’ own books. Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake I read before beginning my work with its author; William Handley’s Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West and Dana Johnson’s Elsewhere, California, after. Collectively, these three texts served as beacons and goalposts, assuring me that I had undertaken my quest in the right place at the right time and urging me forward, to yet greater heights of analytic and artistic thinking and writing. Lodestar is a word I’ve used often in these pages; these books and their authors showed me its meaning. That a text might perform the acts I hoped to master, I knew before beginning my PhD; that its writer might guide those attempts at mastery over years of my writing and revision is an understanding I have only gleaned through practice, one for which I am deeply grateful. Occult imagery offers a path through life and its representation, from erotic birth to uncompromising death. It points a way forward, to new inscribed and embodied landscapes of creativity, agency, and exchange—a landscape reachable through collaborative awareness of 153 haunting and haunted trans-corporeal realities, one currently being built at every cultural level. I want to explore this way forward with one last crashing together of high and low, personal and im-, with a consideration of the rise and fall of the pornographic film performer James Deen. I became aware of Deen in those fraught first years of my PhD, when he was cutting a wide and flamboyant swath through popular culture. Born Bryan Sevilla, he hailed from the San Fernando Valley, just over the hill from where I lived in Hollywood, which also happened to be the world capital of porn production. Presenting myself as an early Deen adopter requires admitting to consuming pornography, an admission another writer might leave gracefully implicit but which I want to make explicit, no pun intended. Like many people my age, I began consuming internet pornography in prepubescence. I can’t now remember how I first discovered him, but I know that it was before he gained mainstream recognition, and so I suspect I was led to his oeuvre through some internet resource. A blog. At the time Deen had a great deal to thank blogs for; he had become an internet darling and soon-to-be-crossover star due to his celebration on platforms such as Tumblr, where fans made and collected GIFs of favorite scenes in which he was featured. Long streams of these animated images were assembled and hashtagged for maximum searchability. Scrolling through, I began to realize that the authors of the posts were significantly younger than I—that in many cases they were girls in high school or even younger, whose own blogs assembled the Deen GIFs alongside moments from beloved animated films, sumptuous desserts, motivational quotations, and desired clothes and shoes. I spent a good six months down the rabbit hole of these Tumblrs, clicking through montages in which a close-up penetration was juxtaposed with a confectionlike pink prom dress, a dazzling photograph of chopped fruit, and a stylized drawing of swords. Normally, being online made me intensely grateful that social media and its ilk hadn’t existed 154 when I was a teenager, but faced with these heady Technicolor desire daydreams, I was almost jealous. How I would have loved to compile my own dirty vision board at twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old! I became curious about Deen himself. Did he know he was the subject of such adoring, unforeseen attention? His cult seemed to be spreading. One night at a party, a friend from my PhD program and I both made reference to him, clearly thinking the other would have no idea who or what we were talking about. And there it was again, that hidden space, available only to the initiated, this time with another initiate inside it. Deen’s blog was largely comprised of nude photographs of fellow performers and boasts of recently shot scenes. Occasionally the porn focus was broken with insights on fast food—he was partial to burritos—and even more occasionally, by statements that suggested Deen was an agoraphobe suffering an anxiety disorder. Piqued, I wrote to him, asking for an interview. To my surprise, he replied, putting me in touch with his representation. What came next is familiar to any freelancer. The PR agent asked what magazine I planned on profiling his client for. I told him and never heard from him again, although to this day I receive his pornographic press releases. But another writer, Amanda Hess, made it across the moat and got the profile. Published in April 2012 in GOOD Magazine, “What Women Want: Porn and the Frontier of Female Sexuality” succinctly summarized Deen’s appeal. If you’re interested in watching a young, heterosexual, nonrepulsive man engage in sex, James Deen is basically it. […] At 25, Deen is rounding eight years and a couple thousand titles, but he remains one of the youngest guys in the business. In a few years, his female peers will graduate to MILF roles, but Deen could spend 155 the rest of his career performing alongside freshly minted 18-year-olds. And his teenage fans can’t wait to watch him do it. Like me, Hess found those teenage fans to be the most compelling part of the Deen narrative. “There was just something about the way he moved,” Emily [“a seventeen year old with a blog focused on ‘Twilight and James Deen,’ ”] says of her first exposure to Deen. He seemed to be “speaking to the girl, but not with his mouth, with his hand over the girl’s throat, and with his eyes.” Emily’s statement of Deen’s appeal seemed to me, then and now, to be a line Gaitskill might have written—an apprehension of sex’s function as a language beyond language, a space available only to the initiated—communicated not by an artist or academic but an ordinary teenage girl. The initiated were everywhere, and secret knowledge emanated from the mouths of babes. Deen rose to greater prominence on the strength of Hess’s profile. He was cast alongside Lindsay Lohan in a film directed by Paul Schrader, given a sex advice column at the women’s- interest website The Frisky, and became the subject of untold articles which retold the now- familiar winking narrative that had coalesced around him. The porn star that women actually liked accompanied other contemporary pop conversations about women’s sexuality, linking Deen’s rise to the prominence of Stephenie Meyer’s vampire / deferred-gratification-fetish series Twilight and its wildly successful fan fiction, E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey in the same dumbfounded, whodathunkit tone. The Frontier of Female Sexuality, indeed. In November 2015, this (lopsided, overwhelmingly male-centric, unexamined) narrative was shattered when Deen’s ex-girlfriend and fellow pornographic performer Stoya wrote on Twitter, “That thing where you log in to the internet for a second and see people idolizing the 156 guy who raped you as a feminist. That thing sucks.” In short order, more women came forward with stories of abuse and rape, many of which allegedly occurred on film sets. Deen was fired by several production companies. Much condemnation was levied, but little changed; six months later, Deen may no longer have his column at The Frisky, but he is still a prodigious producer of and performer in pornography. (Deen has not been charged with or convicted of any crime.) I found this turn in the story of James Deen dispiriting, for the reasons I always find stories of sexual assault and abuse of power dispiriting, and also because like many others I had seen in Deen’s prominence a hopeful glimmer of potential sea change in the cultural discussion surrounding women and desire. At the height of his crossover appeal, Deen had represented a pop point of entry to the discourse I have worked for years to define—an aperture in which girls and women were performing and representing individual autonomous landscapes of desire. And now this aperture’s central figure had been revealed, like so many others, as a figure of at best ambiguous value and at worst a reminder of the death grip rape culture maintains over the popular imagination. But Hess, in her Slate piece “James Deen Was Never A Feminist Idol,” had a different take. James Deen has always been the least essential element of the James Deen phenomenon. […] Considerably more interesting was the crew of rebellious young women and teen girls who had led me to Deen’s door. […] They scanned the porn movies that were made to service their male peers, fixated on an actually-kinda-cute guy who wasn’t supposed to be the focus of the scene, and transported him to Tumblr, where they cut his movies down to the few tantalizing seconds that focused squarely on his body. They translated them into GIFs and set them on endless loops. […] It’s not that James Deen appeals to women—in the 157 face of extreme erotic scarcity, women molded Deen into someone who appealed to them. For many of them, Deen was little more than just a conduit for expressing their sexuality, or a key to an online erotic world that had previously been closed. […] Now, Deen’s fans are realizing that they were the ones who wrote James Deen into their fantasies, and they can write him out of them. Hess’s analysis of the relatively small part Deen himself played in the emergence of a visible framework for discussion of women and desire recalled to me Judith Butler’s 2009 book Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, in which Butler envisions a method through which traditionally opposed groups can form “alliances or convergences” against abusive hegemony. Coalition itself requires a rethinking of the subject as a dynamic set of social relations. Mobilizing alliances do not necessarily form between established and recognizable subjects, and neither do they depend on the brokering of identitarian claims. Instead, they may well be instigated by criticisms of arbitrary violence, the circumscription of the public sphere, the differential of powers enacted through prevalent notions of “culture,” and the instrumentalization of rights claims for resisting coercion and enfranchisement. Whether we expand our existing frameworks or allow them to be interrupted by new vocabularies will determine, in part, how well we consult both the past and the future for our present-day critical practices. (162) Several years ago now, a mentor offered comments on an early draft of the proposal for the project that became these essays. He advised that I pare back the more outlandish elements of my thesis, which at that time suggested that occult imagery might function as literal magic, granting passage to an invisible but real realm of shared secret knowledge. While I made his edits, this 158 project’s fundamentally optimistic investment in the possibility of this magic has continued to fuel its completion. A few weeks back, the deadline for resubmission of an article I had been solicited to contribute to a special issue of an academic journal approached and I realized with some ire that I had spent the nine months since receiving comments from two readers passively avoiding inputting their requested changes. Partially for the reasons that I have found attempting to publish in peer-reviewed journals to be a remarkably onerous endeavor—the comments contradicted one another and discursed into meaningless banalities—but largely because I felt willfully misunderstood, and tired of trying to explain myself to audiences that seemed determined not to hear me. So I decided to send a nearly identical version of the article back with the following note: You asked that I indicate clearly how I have responded to the reviewers' comments, and I should note that I found them to be fundamentally at odds with the nature and purpose of my essay and so have opted to preserve it in a form relatively near to the version I sent last year. The reasons for this decision are manifold. I anticipated pushback on what the reviewers term "personal comments" and "anecdotal content," but elected to preserve those elements of this article as a primary function of this piece--and of my stance as a scholar, writer, and academic--is to challenge the hermit kingdoms and balkanized bodies of knowledge enshrined within academe, a prejudice against interdisciplinarity and creative cross-pollination that has created an academic discourse which too often yields unreadable and irrelevant writing. I also write against the fiction of critical self-erasure, and seek to invoke my own body and those proximate to it and the 159 collective somatic awareness and knowledges gleaned through the parallel acts of life and study. Similarly, the critique that the paper relied too heavily on "stereotypes" struck me as a misreading as it is in fact an examination, often tongue-in-cheek in tone, of a stereotypical image rather than a historiography of Scandinavian migration. While it might be possible to edit this paper into the more normative format with which the commenters seemed more familiar and attuned, it would no longer inhabit the canon and style I've fought hard to develop over the course of my career. My presence in academe in general and at academic conferences specifically is often fraught because of my double identity as artist and scholar. Experiences in which I have been subject to others' definitive hegemonic typologies of knowledge have taught me that fealty to the ethics and ideals of my path of inquiry is the only way to continue my work. This concern has arisen in previous attempts to place my work in academic journals, and I understand if it is an issue here. Given the interdisciplinary and international nature of CRWS and your editorship, however, I think there is a place for this piece in this issue, and I hope that you are still willing to consider my piece for inclusion. Every colleague to whom I showed this note reacted with horror and suggested I had clearly burnt the bridge. The editor wrote back warmly, asking for image permissions. Late in my PhD I was approached by Frances F. Denny, a photographer with whom I had attended college, who asked me to write the afterword to her debut monograph, Let Virtue Be Your Guide, an exploration of New England matrilineage, femininity, and deacy. For several months we engaged in a collaboration that took the form of hours-long phone calls and poring 160 over each other’s work—she my words, I her images—which slowly gave rise to a lyric essay, “Primer,” which appears as the book’s afterword. In its first section I wrote about my own adolescent preoccupation with the Salem witch trials as it intersects with the aesthetics and purpose of needlework samplers made by young Puritan girls and women, ending with a line that surprised me: “The Puritans believed God could and would strike down a child for defying his will. What I believe is that Satan succeeded in his coup, and I am glad.” The idea of Satan and not God winning their war is hardly my own—in my first year of college, my intellectual friends and I liked to psych each other out with reminders that Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, a young-adult series we had all loved as children, was in fact a retelling of Paradise Lost in which the Devil won—but I can think of no better place to close my inquiry here. When the deck is stacked against you, magic becomes an acceptable weapon, blackened by the necessity of protecting and transmitting the hidden knowledge implicit in the very act of writing. “No matter what, no one can take your work away from you,” the professor who taught my cohort’s professionalization seminar told us. “Remember that.” It seemed cold comfort to me then. Now it seems like the highest truth gleaned in all my years of study. Today, I knelt to withdraw an item from a shelf and, standing, drove the bottom corner of the ajar cabinet door above into the top of my head, an event that sent me to the floor for several minutes of inconsolable tears. I had curated the day as best I could, rose early, exercised, ate a good meal, processed a heroic amount of laundry all while revising and putting the finishing touches on these pages. But my minor injury brought all the disappointments and indignities of my recent life to the fore, and I cried for not having been hired into any of the four tenure-track jobs for which I was one of two finalists; for not yet having a book on contract; for not knowing where 161 my income will come from after graduation; for the kindness and concern that had creased a friend’s face this past weekend as he spoke in measured tones about my desire to organize a complaint about the antics of the small university’s MFA director. “You really need to think long and hard about whether this is going to significantly improve your life and the lives of your students, and if it is, certainly, do it, but the truth is, these things so rarely do, and it’s quite likely the only outcome would be negative for you.” He was right, although I am far from settled on the question of what to do about the director. For all my visions of myself as avenging angel and incendiary interventionist—asked to describe my teaching style in an interview to teach a three-week writing class for fourth graders, I gave “incendiary,” which is maybe why they didn’t hire me—I am also a chimeric llorona, an weeper of epic proportions and regularity. I cry as easily as breathing. After all this time, the practice of crying may be the sole through-line in the story of my identity. Crying, and my work. Maybe crying is my work. Maybe the invention I have been compelled to make, the alchemy that has robbed me of sleep and shape, the sulphur in which I have burnt, the mercury that circulates my spirit blood, the craft that makes me witch—maybe all of it is a form of crying, out and forth, wailing inward and exhaling the noise in a great wave. Perhaps the voice I have sought has been issuing forth all along in the mysterious shape of tears. In imagining a universe of coalition and alliance, I call upon the past and the future. The burnt witches of Salem and the desiring teenage girls of Tumblr. The gendered and beyond gender bodies of Alison and Verna, the authorial brains that made them in the skulls of Gaitskill and Freeman. Everyone allied in my own apocalyptic landscape of glee and beauty, that place that drove me mad, that place that I couldn’t see until I saw it. 162 SHUT DOWN 163 HUNT Diana came To cool the naked beauty she hid from the world. - Ovid’s Metamorphoses, trans. Ted Hughes I hunt and kill and butcher with arrow and sword, hound and falcon, ear and arm. I sight and take aim. I shudder when the blood leaves your body and I weep as I pull off your skin. Your flesh is delicious in my mouth. I want you with me forever. When you disappear into me I am disconsolate. My animal nature and my human nature. They fight each other. I woke early and climbed the hill until the mist was so thick that I could no longer see my hands. I walked until I saw only the distant sea, not the ground, not the flowers, not rabbits or snakes or birds. I wanted to become more mist than woman. To lose myself. My body was a suit of meat. I wanted to be a spirit riding a bone bicycle. I wanted to want nothing. When I reached the top of the hill I recognized the yearling buck’s antlers silhouetted against the bluing fog. I believed that I had killed him. I moved through the clouds to where he stood at the entrance of a deep lapis cave, waiting for him to flee. Instead he came to me and inclined his head. I took his antler in my hand. He pulled me into the cave. Down we went. Shimmering corridors and gold-flecked tunnels. Districts of buried light. My birthdate written in stars on the cobalt wall. The buck’s body was warm beside me, his white clouds of breath uncoiling in the air before us, his fur soft under my trembling hands. He led me to the last chamber. The place I had changed him. Before us lay his lovely man’s body, sleeping out of time. The buck drew me to his man’s body. We knelt. He looked at me with eyes of loam. I held out my left palm. He bowed his head and rent it with the tip of his antler. Blood left me, 164 purple in the blue cave, and went to the man’s body. I felt no pain, only flow and fall. When I looked back at the buck, his eyes had changed from dirt to gold. I drank him with my eyes until there was no buck anymore. In his place stood a man with fire in his hands and golden loam eyes and deer fur for his hair. “Undress,” he told me. I gave him my javelin. My quiver, my arrows, my unstrung bow. My cord and staff. My dagger and sheath. My slingshot and small stones. My broadsword and my axe. When his arms were full of weapons, the man pivoted on his narrow hips. I waited to die. He leaned my killing tools against the far wall and turned back to me. “Undress,” he told me. I gave him my buffalo cape. My leather boots and my cotton socks. My deerskin leggings and my deerskin doublet. My nymph-woven shift of moonbeams and fog. I stood naked before him and waited again to die. He folded my clothing and laid it beside my weapons. Hand on his pointed hipbone, he cocked his head and put his hand to his chest. “Undress,” he told me. “But I have nothing left.” The man came to me and took my head in his hands and I waited for a third time to die. He undid my hair and combed it with his strong fingers. “You will not be able to untangle the knots,” I warned him. He smiled at me and closed his hand in my hair and tore each knot from my head. The pain was bright and alive. Half of my hair lay at our feet and the bare side of my head was slick with blood. I waited to die. He took me in his arms and held my rent hand against the side of my head, pushing the blood from my scalp back into my wound. We kissed and I bit him. In the taste of his blood I 165 found his last sight before his thousand-year sleep in the lapis cave: the faces of his beloved dogs, half-wolf Nape and ivory Leuca and starred Harpalus, as they ate him. Can you believe me when I say that I did not know that his hounds would kill him? I did not want his death. I thought the change a lesson only, not such a bad one: to become a deer, my most favored creature, the one I honored with blood. How many times I had wished the same for myself! For all my power I cannot change my form. I am elemental as stars and lapis. Bone and mist. I made love to the man I had killed. When it was over I watched him walk out of the cave, his body as beautiful as any buck I had taken. For one sentimental moment I wished I had never taken life. I lay on the floor of the cave, the lapis gold burning down at me, until my breath was my own again. Then I stood and stepped out of my skin and left it with my other tools. And I ambled back out into the hills a bear. Twenty razor claws on foot and hind. My jaw can break quartz. My hide is silver. 166 VALENTINES RED HANDS The last time I was home visiting my parents, I drove my mother’s car to the grocery store, a large gray box set on an expansive parking lot. Glowing orange letters announced its name across its sturdy face all day and all night. I parked beside an elaborate empty hutch with a peaked roof loaded with snow. Shoppers were supposed to leave the carts beneath the hutch after they finished, but everyone abandoned their carts willy-nilly, often about two feet from their cars. A harried man with Down syndrome paced the lot, collecting them with red hands. I bought supplies to shore myself up against the freezing weather. Three bottles of wine, a bar of chocolate, a nail file, and a sack of lemons. As I was leaving, I wished I had used a cart instead of a basket, just for the satisfaction of returning it to the hutch under the man’s darting eyes. Back in the parking lot, a gray car had parked beside my mother’s car. I unlocked my door and put my purse and the groceries down on the passenger seat, keeping my eyes on my new neighbor. It was an old sedan, frostbitten and ugly. Sometimes I do this, stare at a meaningless thing while my hands do menial work. The gray sedan’s trunk was unlatched, its lid hovering an inch above the seam where it should have met the body of the car. I closed the door to my mother’s car, put her keys in my coat pocket, approached the sedan, and lifted the lid with my ungloved hand. The trunk was empty, upholstered in worn gray fabric. Without thinking much about it— or rather, while thinking “I’m not thinking much about this”—I climbed in, folded my knees so that I could lie in a straight line, and reached up. My hand found a lanyard tied to the inside of the lid. 167 How thoughtful, I thought, and slammed myself into darkness. Inside the closed truck, it was colder than I had expected, and less dark. The power of the light leaking in around the margins of the trunk surprised me. Illumination came from the seam where lid met car, and also from the edges of the taillights. I remembered a meme my mother’s neighbor had once posted on the internet: If you are ever trapped in the trunk of a car, punch out the taillights and thrust your hand out to flag someone down. This has saved lives!!! When I read that, I had thought: how easy could it be to punch out a taillight with one’s bare hands, particularly from a prone and uncomfortable position? Now I eyed the taillights, wondering. I wouldn’t try. I didn’t want to damage the car. It wasn’t mine, and besides, I had climbed in of my own free will. Time lengthened. I had left my cell phone inside my purse on the passenger seat of my mother’s car, and I had stopped wearing a watch years ago. There was no way to know how long I would be in there. What was most likely to happen, I figured, was that the car’s owner would return with his groceries, open the trunk, and find me there. I'd have some explaining to do. But I wasn’t worried. I am white and well educated. The primary lesson of my education has been how horribly invincible these qualities make me. It was unlikely I would be shot simply for being unexpectedly in the trunk of a stranger’s car. I lay in the dark, feeling relaxed, practicing yoga breathing, for what felt close to an hour but was likely more like fifteen minutes. Then I heard footsteps approaching the car, fast and sloppy, boots stumbling and slipping through slush. When the walker reached the car, he or she fumbled with the door, jangling keys in a cold, likely gloved hand. I cocked my head, making my position more otterlike—I lay on my back, arms curled up at my shoulders, knees stacked like clothes hangers in a cardboard box—and rubbed my cheek against the rough upholstery. The 168 fabric was gray, I reminded myself, not inky navy, as it looked in the dark. I hoped the car’s owner was okay. There was a click: the lock giving way as the car’s owner opened the door and sat in the driver seat. How well I could hear him now that he was inside, his heavy breathing and restless shifting inside his heavy winter clothes! He muttered “Fuck” under his breath, over and over. I couldn’t say for sure that he was a man, but I liked to think that he was. His voice was deep and the music he turned on—washed-out AM rock crunched in layers of static—struck me as manly. I saw the little building that housed his radio station, out in a deserted office park somewhere like Sugar Grove or Grayslake. Cinderblock and an ambitious antenna: it was enough to make me weep. But I wasn’t going to weep. I liked being in the trunk. CRAMMING There was a window in my life where I did unsafe things in moving cars. Never driving drunk or being driven by a drunk person, I’m far too neurotic for that. But on a few evenings in high school, I crammed myself into the back of a car that already held far too many people. Not for fun but because it seemed to us that necessity demanded it. We took no special thrill from riding eight or nine people in a mom’s Honda, although once crammed we all tended to titter nervously, as if we were breaking a law, which we were. We were so many and had to get somewhere, all of us at the same time. What were we supposed to do, walk? The reason we didn’t walk on those nights was not cold weather. I can only recall cramming on warm nights. One justification for cramming was that I knew that my parents would be angry if I walked instead of drove. If I spent all day on foot, walking miles around our suburb, and returned home whole and choate in the evening and my parents had no knowledge 169 that I had walked, that was fine. But if I told them I would walk five blocks to a common, well- known place, they reacted as if I had announced my intent to sell myself into sexual slavery. I don’t know why. Children were abducted, yes, but at that point I wasn’t much of a child. I think theirs was just lizard fear, the idea of their spawn exposed rather than concealed. The point is, even when we crammed, no one ever went in the trunk. Girls and boys sat at each other’s feet in the passenger-side well, draped across each other’s laps, curled into a knot on the rise between the two front seats. But who would suggest or volunteer for the trunk? It seemed a barbaric space, and everyone claimed some claustrophobia. I prided myself on my lack of the latter, a perceived strength based on a half-remembered MRI I had undergone at age six. All those nights (really, there weren’t more than four), I proudly announced, “Well, I’m not claustrophobic, so.” Then at twenty-three I had to have another MRI—nodes in my brain, or polyps, I can’t remember which—and I learned that I had only not been claustrophobic for the first MRI because my body was small and inconsequential compared to the vastness of the machine. Inside again, full-grown and flesh-spread, I was terrified. Like many common fears, claustrophobia was something I preferred to not suffer from. It was a convenient lie I told myself: that there were problems I didn’t have. At seven, I was trapped in a hospital elevator, a frightening experience, but not because of claustrophobia. When my parents disembarked I was too scared to follow, thinking the doors would close on my body. The doors closed and they disappeared and I burst into tears. Among those remaining on the elevator with me were two women whom I dimly recall as wearing some sort of uniform: candy stripers, or maybe just cafeteria workers, for they were manning a great wheeled cart, on which 170 stood a broad white-frosted cake, sloppily decorated with jam gels. They gave me a piece to eat as the elevator climbed into the sky. BLACK ICE So far, the trunk was not so bad. Now that we were moving quickly, air rushed through the seams at the lid and taillights, biting at my slices of exposed skin, neck, wrists, a hem of ankle where my sock had slipped down. Then my thighs began to ache and without thinking I tried to sit up, bumping my head nastily against the low padded ceiling. There it was, the flame- rush of claustrophobia, filling the room. The trunk-room. I kept my upper body very still, breathing deeply, summoning the years-old memory of the MRI tech’s voice. Hearing my hyperventilation over his headphones, he told me to close my eyes. When the test was done he touched my arm and said, “I hope you feel better.” I closed my eyes and I rearranged my legs to lie atop one another in the opposite direction. Air, I reminded myself, you have plenty of air. Then I wondered if it was actually true. There was no reason to think that air was in short supply. I had never understood why people buried alive lacked for air. Why wouldn’t there be air down there? Why did the air inside the coffin run out? Wasn’t air in everything, didn’t it rush down through the packed soil and infiltrating the tiny seams of the coffin? Of all the problems of being buried alive, wouldn’t a lack of air be the least of them? Don’t get me wrong. I want to make it very clear: at no point in the time I spent in the trunk of the stranger’s car did I begin to believe that being buried alive was not so bad. I was struggling with my own feelings about being locked of my own volition in the trunk of a car, not going soft on the general subject of entrapment in small, enclosed spaces. 171 My thighs already ached again. I grew colder and colder, amazed at how cold I could be. It was like lying in bed late at night, trying to sleep, and failing. The road thundered under me, the wheels catching on debris or unsettled pavement, skidding on black ice. I began to hear more. The voices of people in other cars flew at me from windows cracked because they were smoking or because they couldn’t stand the blunt boxing of car heat against their faces. I smelled their smoke and heard their music, each as individual and distinct as the driver’s sad, washed-out AM. The driver. I hadn’t thought about him in a few minutes; he had stopped repeating “Fuck” after the car warmed up. Or at least this was what I imagined; I didn’t know, of course, why he stopped saying “Fuck.” I pricked my ears to him—imagining the tips of my ears actually sharpening and pivoting toward him, as I always do when I think “I pricked my ears”—trying to tune out the road, the tires, the other cars. I could make out almost nothing above his music. Only a sound that might be breathing but could just as easily be a sub-road noise, a track of ice coughing up and down beneath us, and a tapping that I imagined was his fingers against the wheel but could have been the forgotten gas tank cover flying against the side of the car. I couldn’t remember if I had seen it open or not. What did the driver of the gray sedan look like? I pictured him as a man, not young but not white-haired either, with a deep voice and a clear line of sight. The kind of man who wore hats and tucked in his button-downs every day, as he had since his third year of high school. The world had changed around him but little had changed in him. He had some good labor that he worked at, which had rewarded him in the way men and some women of my parents’ generation were generally rewarded for that good labor. He had been born and schooled and gone to work in that peak of time when the linear idea of how things would work was hewn to. Things had gone 172 well for him, due to the powerful combination of his own ambition and skill and the general shapeliness of his world. He had eyebrows as bushy and well loved as small house pets. I grew still colder. I wished I knew which way we were going. I have always had difficulty relaxing. Late at night, when I couldn’t go to sleep after hours of trying, I masturbated. I had done this for as long as I could remember. It was different from the way I brought myself off in the morning or in the afternoon. It was different from the way I did it when I was a little girl. I had learned how to do it without hands, by just closing my eyes and pulsing internal muscles together. It helped to have something to hold onto. It helped to feel that I was gripping an edge that I might look over, to look down and see, with one hand affixed to something and the other dangling and everything churning inside me. I started doing it this way as a kind of rebuke or joke or challenge. I had heard that other women could do it but it seemed ridiculous. Or not ridiculous, the opposite: quotidian, boring. It was one thing or the other and I wanted to find out which. SECRET PASSAGEWAYS Eight or so years ago I was in love with a man who was my close friend. The complicating factor was that he was my boyfriend’s best friend. As things happen, my boyfriend ceased living with me and moved in with the man I loved. I wanted so badly to make love to this man that I once waited in the house he and my boyfriend shared with several other people, pretending to be asleep in my boyfriend’s bed, until they had all gone to work. If they thought of it at all, which they likely did not, the roommates were undoubtedly not disturbed by my presence; I was friend to them all, amiable and omnipresent. In their kitchen I often jovially cooked dinner for several people for whom I had 173 not planned to cook dinner. They lived in an old row house with a series of tiny rooms attached to larger bedrooms, a layout that baffled me until I noticed the nook, just below my boyfriend’s cramped loft bed, where a rod had once been installed, and I realized that my boyfriend’s bedroom had been a closet. That day I waited until they were all gone, counting the closings of the front door, and then I climbed down from the loft bed and jimmied open the door that separated my boyfriend’s room from the bedroom of the man that I loved. I crept in, upsetting the things on the bookcase he had pushed against the door between the two rooms, a blockade designed to create the illusion that the man I loved lived in a normal house with no secret passageways. The room was filled with yellow light from the windows, his bed unmade. I picked up a book called Fire In The Belly: On Being A Man and a photograph of the man I loved as a boy fell out. He stood in the woods, smiling wanly under a green baseball cap. His face filled me with foreboding. I replaced the photograph and closed the book. I was eager to learn something I should not know. I went to the man’s desk and ran my hand across its surface. It was warm from the sun. I leaned over until my cheek touched the warmth and inhaled, imagining his smell. Then I opened the top drawer. Inside was a large vial of prescription medicine. I took it from the drawer and turned it in my hand, considering the pros and cons of swallowing one of the oblong dark blue capsules inside. Then I read the name and description of the medicine and felt ashamed and put it back in the drawer. I turned to his unmade bed. I knew already that his mattress was not on a bed frame but instead unevenly propped on a collection of milk crates and cardboard boxes. It wriggled when you sat on it. The man had invited me into his bedroom once or twice, to show me a book or a poster, to talk to me about the three girls he loved in a cycle, one after another after another and 174 then back to the first, over and over, a cycle that never stopped to let anyone else in. I didn’t understand his bed situation, which seemed to be of the lowest possible quality. The man had a good job. He could afford a bed frame. And if I was missing something—if he couldn’t— shouldn’t he just put the mattress on the floor? I saw the man I loved swallowing a cobalt tablet and climbing, wobbly, into his unkempt and mournful bed. It was a tender image. Almost without thinking but of course not without thinking, I laid down on the man’s bed and fell asleep. THE RELEASE The car slowed and made several turns, but I didn’t know we were going to stop until we stopped. The driver uttered one final, resigned “Fuck,” and exited the car. I stretched as best I could, trying to feel if the temperature had risen, if he had parked inside. But it was cold as ever. Colder. I lay there for a long time, trying to use my muscles to have an orgasm. I have never been the sort of woman who is given sex easily. Love, yes. I’m lucky that way. But sex I have to chase. Most of the time, I don’t catch it. I lay morosely considering this general trend until I became truly uncomfortable, cold all over. I remembered a book I had read as a child, in which a little boy had to sit inside a box in the back of a van for hours in order to be smuggled into the United States. When he was finally freed from the box, his foot didn’t “work right” anymore. Could that happen to me? I began, tentatively, to tap at the roof of the trunk. The driver had long since left the car, but maybe he was still nearby. I tapped and tapped until my tapping became banging, but there 175 was no response, only the echoes of cars on nearby streets and sometimes the rattling of one driving close by. I started to cry. What if I never escaped? What if the driver never planned to open his trunk again? Would I starve to death? I was in that wizened state, curled up and crying, when a faint glow caught my eye. I wriggled toward it. An upside-down T of glow-in-the-dark plastic hung near the front of the trunk. I took it in my hand and brought it closer. Shapes had been cut out of it: an arrow pointing down, a car with an open trunk, an arcing arrow, a fleeing body. The release. Did I know these existed? I guess. Maybe not. The question was, had it been there all along? Had I seen it and willfully disregarded it? Had I thought, that’s not what I want, what I want is to be in the trunk? Or had I missed it entirely? It seemed an unlikely thing to miss, hanging there like that. Now that I had my escape, I wasn’t sure that I wanted it. It was cold, but not that cold. I had read, I remembered suddenly, that many car trunk deaths were due to heat, due to the fact that trunks overheated easily. What was wrong with me that I had chosen a cold trunk instead of a hot one? I wrapped my fingers around the release. It was light and cheap, just like every plastic toy I’ve ever had. I wanted to give it just a little tug, a test. I pulled and the trunk sprung open immediately. I sat like a passenger in the opened trunk, and a winter evening in the Chicago suburbs sprung up in front of me like the set of a play: an odd rectangle of orange sky bright from the snow and city lights, slumped boulders of muddy slush mounded at the curb, naked trees sketched against all the gray and black and auburn. The gray sedan was parked in front of a 176 nondescript brick bungalow on a street full of brick bungalows, the seemingly automatic dwelling for the towns and cities around Chicago, the place the car commercials called the Chicagoland area, a term my father always hated. “It should be ‘Chicagoland,’ simply,” he said. “Or ‘the Chicago area.’” I swung my legs around and dangled them off the back of the sedan, enjoying the stretch. It seemed clear to me that the driver had gone into the brick bungalow slightly behind the sedan, although in retrospect I recognize the total arbitrariness of this assessment. The wind lifted the collar of my coat and bit through my scarf. Inside my gloves my hands were cracked and dry, despite the fact that the gloves were goatskin and were supposed to coat my skin with “natural lanolin.” I thought of sitting there in the opened trunk all night like the patient audience at some hours-long art movie, waiting for the driver to emerge from his house. But after long moments of this I grew bored and a little scared. Inside the trunk no one could get at me, but out here, anything was possible. There is rarely any good or bad in our world. Often, it comes down to simply making a choice. I climbed out of the trunk and shook the wrinkles out of my coat. Or maybe I shook because I was cold. I looked into the trunk one last time, that no-place, that fuzzy and cold blotted-out gray, and I shut the lid and walked toward the house. The front door was unlocked. 177 MY FIRST IMPULSE Inside, the first thing I saw was a muted television’s blue light dancing off a purpled white wall. I stood in a small entryway, a coatrack overhung with several layers of dun coverings. The TV threw frantic shadows across the floor. I walked into another room, which turned out to be the kitchen. I didn’t want to startle the driver, which was what would happen if I followed my first impulse and walked into the blue-lit room and stood in front of the television. I wanted to slip in and out of his life like a figment. To make my way through like an unexpected guest in a children’s movie, tasting his food, washing with his soap, disappearing before first light. At this I was already failing. I had considered removing my boots at the front door but decided against it. What if I had to flee quickly? What if the driver woke and saw not me but my boots? What if their removal made noise? So I kept them on, tracking dirt and melting snow across a pale carpet and onto the red tiled floor of the kitchen. The house was neither nice nor not nice, a remainder of the middle-class world I’d grown up in, a place with mudrooms and basement play dens, everybody got up in colorful synthetics and teased hair, perms on the men. Now all of this was gone and I understood that my family had been wealthy where others were poor. Once I realized I hadn’t truly inhabited it, it was impossible to say if there had ever been a middle class. Whatever the reason, it was gone now. In the refrigerator were the remains of a six-pack, two cans still in their translucent holster, a foil-covered red casserole, a lone carrot, and a big black-lidded pot. I lifted the foil, revealing a gnawed leg of lamb, its bone jutting insistently out of a brown and purple muck. Under the pot’s heavy lid was a dense ruby liquid that smelled of nothing at all. I took a beer and 178 downed it quick as I could. The light feeling rose in me like wings, so I did the second can, too. I’d had nothing to eat that day and became immediately drunk. I let myself be borne on the tide of my own foolhardiness into the television room, ready for confrontation, invincible. But when I turned the couch was empty save for a cheap lavender throw, the ones always on sale, two-for-one. Looped in one curl of the throw was the remote control. I picked it up and turned off the television. For what came next, I needed to be able to hear. I went back to the hall and climbed the little cramped staircase. There were no family pictures on the walls, just smooth thick white paint. The only adornment I’d seen so far had been flowers on the kitchen counter, a thick bouquet of purple asters in a sawn-off two-liter soda bottle. The carpet stopped at the top of the stairs, and fine hardwood floors began. I faced three doors. The first turned out to be a closet, stuffed with more dull clothes; the second, a bathroom, large and well kept; the third, his bedroom. From the doorway I saw a large picture window decorated with the glimmering lights of the town, and beneath it, a large bed, with one sleeping body. There was a moment, I’ll admit, just before I went into his bedroom, when I worried about the legality of what I’d done, of what I was about to do. But then it left me, as these things do. I stepped inside, leaving the door open for the light, went to the bed, and sat on the edge, expecting the driver to wake. When he did not, I undid my boots. I wasn’t going to climb in bed with him with them on. 179 A MAN I ADMIRE When I was a teenager, newly initiated into the world of having sex, I thought there was nothing sexier in the world than waking a man with a sexual request. I tried it all the time with my boyfriend, a generally kind and even-keeled fellow teenager, with whom I had my happiest sexual relationship to date. (If someone had told me this at the time, I would have wept; but in retrospect, I had it good.) My boyfriend and I would be sleeping beside each other, and I would wake, or otherwise I had never really gone to sleep in the first place. Insomnia is a lifelong trial, and its severity rarely lessens with time. In any case, finding myself alone with his unconscious body, I would put my hand on his cock. With a little effort I could turn it into my favorite thing in the world: an erection felt through fabric. Over the years I’ve tried to explain this to people—how wonderful it is to feel a man’s hard-on like that, full of promise and excitement, a game of hide-and-seek— but no one has ever understood, including men whose erections were thus praised. I like to lay my hand fully over a penis, fingertips against the head, and see what happens. I used to think that this alone was enough to bring a man to tumescence, and it may be, but not in the case of men whose penises I’ve been interested in touching in the past decade. In any case, my move will rarely do the trick on a sleeping man, so it is time for the gentle encouragement, not quite a grip, more like a caress. One and two fingers moving up and down the length, urging up, friendly, discreet. A little of this could get my slumbering high school boyfriend going, no problem. But every time he woke—and I’ll admit I was a prurient mess at that point, panting some drivel like, “Your dick is so hard”—he was confused and tired. 180 “So?” he asked me once, as my hands were busy in his lap. At the very beginning of our relationship, when I was fifteen years old, he could be counted on to wake up and get to it. But by year three that was over. And men I’ve tried it with since have reacted with a combination of aggravation and fear. I get it. If the genders were reversed, I would understand that it was a not cool thing to do. But the genders are not reversed, and in my life that has made all of the difference. I lined up my boots by the edge of the bed. I took off my coat, stuffed my hat with my gloves and scarf and packed the yarn satchel into the sleeve of my coat and folded it nicely on the floor by the boots. I lay back and sought the driver’s face. He was an older man, as I had suspected, and boasted an impressive pair of eyebrows, as I’d hoped. His skin was smooth and his hair full and dark. It was impossible to tell how old he was. Older than me. Older than my father, maybe. He looked simply like himself, maybe that was why I couldn’t tell. Because I knew who he was. The man I lay beside was famous. A man I admire. Maybe famous is the wrong word; most people wouldn’t know who he was. But I did, because he did the thing I hoped to do, the thing I had whittled and pecked away at for all my short life. The fact that he was the driver in whose trunk I had stowed away seemed a comic assertion of the good will of the universe. I lay on my side, very still. He was on his side, too. If a second stranger had entered the room, from the doorway they would have seen only two bodies, facing each other: a couple. He wore a gray T-shirt. The duvet covered his bottom half. I peeled it back to see red plaid boxer shorts. I tried to keep track of his breathing but my thoughts drifted, to the lemons and wine and chocolate I had left in my mother’s car. Would they have frozen by now, sitting out in the 181 parking lot? Could wine freeze? I wondered what time it was. Was the grocery store closed? They stayed open until eleven, or at least they had the last time I checked. I found that so comforting when I was growing up: the grocery store, open late, just in case you needed an extra something. I crept my hand toward the man, stopped it, crept it again. I don’t know what I expected, creeping and stopping like that. Finally I draped my palm over the approximate location, a compromise. If this worked, then there was a certain order to things. ESCAPE The driver’s member did not respond to my hand. He slept on as if drugged. I can’t say I was surprised. I allowed myself one feel of his oddly thick hair, and then left his bed and flounced into his dingy bathroom. There was toothbrush, a round hairbrush matted with light brown hair, and in the cabinets an endless parade of hair products stacked neatly as if the cabinet were a store’s back inventory. They were in the shower, too, a small pharmacy of expensive shampoos: volumizing, “fullening,” growth-encouraging. Argan oil, Moroccan oil, other oils. On the edge of the sink sat a worn brown leather billfold. I opened it and found the driver’s driver’s license. He was the man I thought he was. I studied the photograph, obviously decades old, and then replaced it. I took all of his cash. He had a lot, four hundred dollars. I cast my own gray face a weary look as I turned to leave the bathroom. I would walk to the corner and find a phone, beg one off a gas station attendant, or ask a tired woman. I would call a cab and use his money to get back to the grocery store. I would unlock my mother’s car, put the bottle of wine between my legs to warm it, gnaw hunks from the lemons and chocolate. 182 But when I looked in the mirror to see myself, I saw my memory of the driver’s face instead, the way he had looked asleep beside me, prone and vulnerable. I remembered the feel of his hair in my hands, thick and lovely, surprising for a man of his age. A carefully curated illusion, a bit of theater. How it had felt, lying there beside him. He didn’t even know I was there. 183 HUNDRED MILE HOUSE Three months after Isobel’s husband stopped making love to her, she bought a bonnet. It was grand and black and white. Lined in matte cream linen with a grain of taupe thread, covered in opalescent pure black. It stood on its own, without support. Isobel suspected there was a hard shell beneath the fabric, but when she felt for a form—delicately, her thumb and index finger curved like pincers—the bonnet bent in her hands. In all light the bonnet shone darkly, like water at night. Its shape reminded Isobel of a covered wagon: a little Conestoga rolled right into her living room. Her childhood love of pioneers come back to her. Nestled among unlabeled CDs, neon paperclips, and the smiley face mug of pens on her messy desk, the bonnet looked judgmental and uncomfortable. Isobel adored it. The bonnet’s ties were not made of ribbon, as Isobel had originally thought, but from the same heavy fabric as the bonnet. At first she was disappointed: she had imagined two long, shining strands that she would leave loose, like tiny twin scarves. But when she felt the ties between her fingers, the rich fabric rebuked her. The bonnet has history, Isobel thought. What do I have? Every morning after her husband left she took the bonnet in her hands and stood with it in front of the bathroom mirror. “The purpose of the bonnet is to be Plain,” she said to her reflection. “It is not an item of beauty but necessity. “It will keep my face from the sun and hide my hair. 184 “In the bonnet, when I am hurt by unkindness, I can turn from the one who hurt me and be shielded from his eyes. “’The bonnet will remind me of the pitfalls of vanity, of earthly things. “Of the limitations of this world and of the flesh. “Of my flesh. “Of my husband’s flesh. “O God give me the power of this bonnet, let it come into me, let it guide my hand and my heart.” By the time she stopped speaking her reflection had become strange to her. She felt outside of it, somewhere else, able to look without sentimentality at the pear-shaped woman in the mirror. Thin curls of muddy hair and strange gray eyes. She was a body only, not pretty or un-. She had cribbed together her affirmation from things she found on the internet, where she had gone looking for information about the bonnet. She had wanted to know how old it was. Instead she found women who wore bonnets, women all over the United States and some overseas, who pulled bonnets over their hair every day and kept public diaries about bonnet life. She read these journals with a gnawing hunger behind her eyes. The bonneted women were different from the friends she followed online, whose news of babies and promotions hit Isobel in daggers of self-pity. They never complained, never posted needy, pouting photographs. Instead there were storybook pictures, simple, clean women in straw bonnets and gingham dresses, walking the borders of their property. They all owned property. Sometimes the women were pregnant beneath their old-fashioned dresses, and sometimes there were little girls in matching outfits. There were images of jarred fruit, needlework, intricate puzzles done on tables 185 as weekend recreation. The women were intelligent, educated. Isobel didn’t understand half of what they wrote, even though she thought herself pretty smart. From them she learned the difference between plain and Plain. From them she received the gift of a seed of faith, glowing inside her like a promise. Not faith in God—Isobel knew too much for that. God seemed as precious and unlikely as the angel she had prayed for when she was a little girl, a mauve-haired princess with rainbow wings who would appear in her bedroom and make her feel not safe but awed. That was what Isobel always wanted, not comfort but possibility. Magic. She had never had either. Now she was too far gone for God or angels. But Isobel believed in the bonnet, in the power it would give her. Isobel and her husband had been married for eight years. They lived in a house in the country, six miles down the road from the unincorporated town of Cazenovia, which had an estimated population of seventy-three souls. There was a big city three hours away where they never went. Both of them had grown up in other cities, and they had no fond memories. Her husband had found her at a community college in the exurbs of a decaying city in upstate New York. Successive financial crises had stripped the exurb of all but the barest infrastructure. The police department was shared with three other exurbs, the paramedics and firefighters were volunteers, and the dollar store was the only food source within a five-mile radius. Once, long ago, the city had been a bustling industrial hub; but then all of the companies left, taking most of the people with them. Those who stayed in the exurb looked as if they were slowly dying. The whites of their eyes were yellow, their hair and fingernails thin. Trails of 186 green slime hung beneath their children’s noses. Once, at the dollar store, Isobel watched a woman cough a viscous purple egg yolk into her palm, glare at it, and shake it to the floor. A lack of funding had closed all but one of the exurb’s public schools. Isobel passed the surviving school each morning on her two-mile walk to the bus stop. White trailers surrounded it; these, according to her husband, back when he was still her boyfriend, were “portable classrooms.” The school too had reminded her of pioneers, of wagons. It was the way the trailers were circled up, huddled protectively around the slumped brick building. A chilling, not comforting, resemblance. Children stood outside, waiting for the school to open. She never saw them play. They just stared at the road, little faces like closed windows. When she recalled her life in the exurb, Isobel remembered walking to the dollar store in driving gray sleet, wearing a flimsy coat on which she insisted because she believed it looked “sophisticated.” She walked against traffic, squinting into the fading light, a blind panic of sadness rising in her chest with every step. By the time she rounded the final corner and the strip mall appeared, windows gleaming yellow and warm, she was half-mad with anxiety and despair. It felt triumphant to march into the blinding fluorescence of the dollar store, to buy with limp fives milk, cocoa mix, cookies, and every single herbal tea that claimed relaxing properties. Survival tactics, Isobel thought as she dropped the items into her basket. Right now I am surviving. She brewed the teas and sipped them constantly, as if her red mug contained tincture of laudanum. She watched funny movies and slideshows of beautiful landscapes on her computer. She organized everything meticulously, resorting pens and sweaters in an elaborate cubby system made of cheap plywood. She tried to learn knitting, sous vide cooking, and Jazzercise, failing roundly at all three. She started making up songs and whistling them and snapping her 187 fingers as she walked, just to have something to listen to.. She knew she looked crazy. That was part of why she did it. Who would attack a woman shuffling along the side of the rural route, gesturing and jerking like the victim of an obscure palsy? The songs all had the same lyrics. Right now I am surviving. Survival tactics. And then, she met her husband. She knew who he was from the very beginning. He was her husband. He throbbed at the center of her life. His pink vitality lit every room. He was tall and wide, with milky skin, iron arms, and a teddy bear’s face. Best of all, he knew she was his wife. The knowledge of his love swelled into a cushion of hot air beneath Isobel’s feet. Beside him in bed she felt his blood moving in his body. She wanted to harness that velocity, follow it to his heart. For a long time after they found each other, Isobel was always a little wonderfully light-headed. They were married at City Hall a year to the day after they met. Isobel wore a yellow sundress, her husband khakis and a green plaid shirt. For the next five years they both worked two jobs. They lived together in one medium- sized room with a closetlike bathroom and no closets. She cooked all their meals on a hot plate on top of a miniature refrigerator. Often the only time they were home together was the middle of the night, so that was when she made dinner. Her husband’s favorite dish was spaghetti in meat sauce; hers was fried frozen potstickers with plum sauce. They kept a gallon jug of red wine on the floor next to the refrigerator and drank it with dinner at three, four, or five o’clock in the morning. After they went to bed and made love until dawn. Isobel was happy, even though she worked sixteen hours a day, even though she was often so tired that she had to set her phone’s alarm to make sure she didn’t sleep through her bus stop. 188 As soon as they were able, they packed everything into his truck and her sedan and moved west, where they had bought a house between two old trees on three acres off a rural highway. Inside, it had a stone hearth and lovely beamed ceilings in a state of dusty disrepair; outside, it was covered in hideous aluminum siding and a cheap mansard roof. Isobel and her husband planned renovations: the removal of the aluminum siding and restoration of the wood underneath, the addition of a third floor which would also take care of the mansard roof, bigger windows in all of the rooms. Isobel’s husband could do anything with his hands. And soon, they were sure, Isobel would find a job, too, and they could begin work on the house. At the beginning she even dreamed of a widow’s walk. Isobel’s husband was employed by a garage that ran a lucrative roadside assistance service. His specialty was solving mysteries; back in the exurb his friends had joked about it, called him the Car Whisperer. Often, his cell phone rang in the middle of the night, its lit green screen illuminating a tiny square of their bedroom wall, and Isobel’s husband rose good- naturedly to go help a stranger. When they first moved into the house, Isobel had welcomed these interruptions. She would pretend to be asleep as her husband stepped into his work clothes and zipped up his parka, waiting for the sound of him locking the front door. Once he was gone she sprang into action. She brushed her teeth and hair. She rubbed tinted balm into her chapped lips. She went to the kitchen and chopped gingerroot into paste. She poured whole milk from a glass bottle—they bought their milk, cheese, and eggs from the boutique dairy five miles away—into a red enameled cast iron pot. The thickness of the milk, its cream top and total opacity, never failed to thrill Isobel. She had spent the first two decades of her life drinking thin, bluish milk 189 that smelled chemical and unclean. The country milk was palpable evidence of the improvements she had made in her life through force of will alone. She added the ginger paste to the milk, along with a lump of candy sugar, four tablespoons of spun unfiltered honey, and two heaping scoops of cardamom-scented black tea, fine as dust, which she bought from a mail-order catalog and kept in a clay jar in the cupboard. She brought the mixture to a simmer slowly, beating it with a ball whisk, with the gas on the lowest setting. When steam rose from the surface of the milk, she doubled the intensity of her whisking, creating a foam two shades lighter than the liquid beneath. Isobel beat until the foam was thick enough to coat her finger, and then she covered the pot with its lid and turned off the heat. She went back to their dark bedroom and stepped out of her pajamas—sweatpants and a T-shirt from a retreat she had been forced to go on in her previous life in the exurb—and put on a negligee and a peignoir. She had three matching sets, one emerald, one sapphire, one diamond- white. They had been wedding gifts, items she had specifically requested when people asked her what she wanted. Her old friends in the exurb had made fun of her. “What is this,” they asked, “the nineteen-twenties?” Yes, she had thought but said nothing. Yes, that is when I want it to be. She hadn’t heard from any of them since the move. In the mirror in the dark, she was just a pale oval surrounded by a corona of coarse hair. Satisfied, she went back to the kitchen and microwaved two tall glass mugs with elaborately engraved handles. These, too, had been wedding presents. She turned off the light in the kitchen and waited for the sound of her husband’s truck scattering the pebbles in their driveway. When 190 the first scratching started, she ladled the hot glasses full of milk tea and brought them into the bedroom, putting one glass on each bedside table. He came in smelling of night and smoke, of gasoline, of the open road. No matter how recently he had shaved, his face was prickly against hers. She loved the feel of his rough skin against the silk negligee. She rarely let him take off his work clothes before it began; she liked how the fabric held the outside chill. The sensation of his cold hands against her warm body was exquisite, almost painful. Their mouths bled together, tasting of tea. In the chilly room she could see their breath meet the tea steam and the cloudy heat from their bodies. He was rough with her. He stripped off the peignoir and nosed away the straps of the negligee so that he could press his wet mouth into the dry hollows of her throat. He wrapped his arms around her torso and held tight, kissing and kissing. His erection pressed into her thigh and his hand shambled at her underwear. He hurt her. He fixed her. In the morning she was never tired, no matter how late they stayed awake after, drinking the lukewarm tea and laughing in the dark. The caffeine in the tea had no power over her. All she needed for sleep was his warm chest against her back, his slack penis nestled between their bodies. No other man had ever slept naked with her. All five of her previous lovers said they were scared of what would happen to their vulnerable genitals unprotected by underwear. She might roll over on their testicles, pinch their foreskins between stiff sheets. But Isobel’s husband wrapped his arms around her and fell immediately asleep, his cardamom breath rustling her hair. She opened her mouth to breathe it in. Their life was enough for Isobel, enough to distract her from her many failings, from their money problems, from the way she was sometimes nauseatingly, terrifyingly lonely. If she 191 couldn’t be happy in the life they had worked so hard for, she reasoned, then happiness was impossible for her. She was simply not made for it. This was a thought she could not bear. So she clutched at her happiness, wore it close, and was careful never to complain. It was like that for three years, middle-of-the-night tea, the joy of bodies in the dark, days spent in careful homemaking. Isobel had almost perfected the discipline of not thinking too much. She only called her mother once a month and was perfectly capable of not feeling guilty after. She took books out of the library, hard books, read them with athletic determination, and returned them on time. She went for daily walks. She experimented with new recipes. She rented the black-and-white comedies her husband liked and made herself like them, too. Then, one baking two A.M. in September, her husband came back from a call and climbed immediately into bed, ignoring the tea and her peignoir. He lay on the clean sheets, his work clothes breathing heat into the stagnant room. “Sweetie?” Isobel said. The diamond-white negligee, soaked with sweat, clung to her crotch. Then, to Isobel’s horror, her husband coughed out three great sobs. “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t.” When she touched him he flinched and turned away. Only after an hour had passed and her husband’s breathing had slowed did he tell Isobel some of what he had seen on the road. Since that night he had not laid a hand on her. Now, when she went to kiss him, he presented his sealed lips to her with a resolve that reminded her of a child bracing himself for an injection. 192 Isobel bought the bonnet from a Mennonite woman at a swap meet at the county fairgrounds. The woman’s goods were neatly spread on a card table covered with green felt. She wasn’t selling handicrafts, as Isobel had hoped, but cheap souvenirs, each embossed with a tiny “Made In China” stamp. Miniature snow globes mounted on the backs of leaping pink dolphins, light-up fairy wands with flashing stars and glowing hearts, hard plastic keychains printed Princess Comin’ Through! I’m A Freak, Touch Me! and World’s Greatest Dad...Until The Money Runs Out! There were a handful of plastic bas-relief puzzles, the kind that, as a child, Isobel had often received in birthday party “goodie bags,” thin cellophane bags stuffed full of cheap crap, distributed to a room of shrieking children by gray, exhausted mothers. That sort of thing was why she and her husband had left their cities in the first place. Not that she ever questioned their decision. It filled her heart with gladness every day. The bonnet stood on the far left corner of the Mennonite woman’s table. It had a long, stiff brim that extended out in a cone, like a megaphone—this was the part that reminded her of a covered wagon—and, in the back, a gathered bunch of the black fabric. This, Isobel figured, was where the wearer’s hair went. She looked at the woman behind the table. A small white disk was pinned to the back of her head. There were many Mennonites in their area. She saw them at the grocery store, at the movie theater (there was one in a mall, forty minutes’ drive from her house), and at the library. It was impossible not to notice the Mennonites, the women in their little white caps and long, colorful dresses, the men in overalls and straw hats. At first Isobel thought they were Amish, a word she knew from television. But then one day she left the grocery store at the same time as a family of these strange people: a woman in a deep purple dress and two little girls in gray, all 193 three of them wearing the white disks on the back of their hair (how did they get them to stay there?), and watched them climb into a car, not even an old car, but a new sedan that looked to be in better shape than her old station wagon. At home, she had excitedly told her husband that she had seen Amish people being naughty. “I wonder if maybe they’re trying to escape,” she said, hefting a pot of water onto the stove for his spaghetti. “Maybe they’ve gotten fed up with their cult and want out. Maybe they already escaped.” “Those aren’t Amish, Isobel,” he told her. “There aren’t any Amish settlements around here. The people you saw were Mennonites. They can drive cars. Sometimes they are the people I go help at night.” He told her everything he knew about them. Mennonites had certain things in common with the Amish but they were more liberal. They could have telephones, computers, televisions. They were Anabaptists like the Amish but less cloistered, less likely to speak English as a second language. Some of the men whose cars he had healed had been to places he and Isobel would only ever read about in books: Sri Lanka, Germany, Mexico. “There’s a lot work farms up in Canada, too. Sometimes they travel between there and here. They have simple lives, but everywhere they go, they go to help people,” he told her. He admired these Mennonites. She was embarrassed by her ignorance and hoped he would think her cheeks were red from the spaghetti pot’s steam. “That’s interesting,” she said, searching the cupboard for canned tomatoes. “They call themselves plain,” Isobel’s husband said. His eyes took on a dreamy look as he stroked his short beard. “Amish and Mennonite both. Plain.” 194 She thought it sounded stupid, affected. She had known women who took great, snotty pride in being unattractive. The thought of an entire community of such people made her shiver. Her husband came up behind her and kissed the top curve of her ear. His work clothes crunched against her back, releasing smells of motor oil and sweat. “I swear you smell different at night than during the day,” she said in a low voice. He laughed, a sound like the barking of a great friendly dog. Back then he had laughed all the time. After dinner Isobel’s husband took down his big atlas. He had bought it for a course at the community college and, Isobel thought, never looked at it again. She felt a weird jealousy as she watched him confidently page through the giant book, the biggest they owned. When had he had time to become so familiar with it? He opened to a map of western Canada. “I met a Mennonite man who came down from here,” he told her, pointing at a place called Red Deer. “He’d been all over, up to Edmonton, down to Lethbridge and Cranbrook. To Kamloops. Even up here, to Hundred Mile House.” On the map the name had a number in it—100 Mile House—but in her mind it was three words. He went on talking, but she got stuck on that place. A house one hundred miles long, full of people and doors. They walked from side to side, they walked all their lives, opening doors and going in, turning on lights, turning off lights. Up there in the north, with nothing else around, where plain people lived in a house one hundred miles long… The Mennonite woman at the swap meet wore an orange dress identical to the other Mennonite dresses Isobel had seen, full puffy sleeves that ended just below the elbow, a high 195 square neckline, and a thick waistband above an A-line skirt. And there, on the top of her head, was the little white cap with its dangling thin ties. But while her outfit was the same, the rest of her was subtly different from the other Mennonite women Isobel had seen. Her skin was darker, and her hair was densely curly. If not for the outfit Isobel would have taken her for a Jew, or maybe Greek. “Hello,” Isobel said just above the level of a whisper, half-hoping the woman wouldn’t hear. “Hi.” The Mennonite woman looked up sharply, revealing the large cell phone in her lap. She was texting with her thumbs. She typed a very long sentence, then looked up and covered the phone with the palm of her left hand. “Yes?” Isobel felt herself blush. “Sorry, I, well—” Too sensitive, she thought, you’re too sensitive. Why couldn’t the woman be a little nicer? She thought she might cry. She tried to remember her husband’s face, his voice. “You’re the customer,” he would have reminded her. “She wants to sell, right?” The woman’s green eyes moved over Isobel’s outfit—high brown leather boots, dark wash jeans, a purple T-shirt printed with silver lightning bolts under a gray jacket—and up to her face. Isobel had smudged shimmery beige eyeshadow above her eyelashes. Her hair was down, moving slightly in the breeze. “How much for the bonnet?” she asked, staring at it instead of the woman. The Mennonite woman put her cellphone on the table face down and leaned back in her seat. “This bonnet?” she asked, lifting it in her small hands. The black fabric caught the light. 196 Isobel was annoyed. There was no other bonnet at the swap meet. She had checked. “Yes.” The Mennonite woman turned the bonnet to and fro, considering. Finally she said, “A hundred.” Isobel bit her lip, sure now that she would cry. She had less than two hundred dollars in her bank account. Her husband made a good living, but she hadn’t been able to find another job since the dollar store in the next town had closed. She had worked there for two years, had even been assistant manager at the end, but since then it was as if she didn’t exist. Not even the Wal- Mart an hour away would hire her. Every week she posted new flyers at the library and post office, offering her services as a house cleaner, babysitter, tutor, cook, or home aide. No one ever called. Her husband said that it was fine, that they would manage. She hadn’t worked in over a year. They managed, just barely. Isobel had earned an associate’s degree in drug and substance abuse counseling at the community college where she had met her husband. Everyone at the community college had insisted it was a growth field. She was frequently told that she would never lack for a job. And while she lived in the exurb, she hadn’t. She had been employed as an intake counselor by both the government and a private life-coaching company. She spent her days asking unanswerable questions of twitchy, pale ghosts trying to dose themselves out of existence with opiates designed to mute the pain of dying. When did you begin abusing substances? What do you seek escape through an altered state? Tell me about your past. Is there anything that it troubles you to remember? What are your hopes and dreams for the future? 197 Isobel had been told over and over again that addiction to prescription drugs was a national epidemic. She had once planned to return to school for a bachelor’s degree, had even dreamt distantly of graduate school. She didn’t believe that she was capable of helping people, not for one instant, but she liked the idea of always having a job, of being able to steadily advance for the rest of her life. In one of her favorite fantasies, she was fifty years old, sitting behind a desk beneath a framed poster of encouraging aphorisms, in a well-appointed office with two facing green recliners. This was the dream of success that made her giddy and embarrassed: a client list, her own office, her own schedule. She did not know anyone for whom this dream had come true. Her mother, the only parent she had ever known, had worked a lifetime of service jobs, one after another, her uniforms of apron and hat replaced by a black polo shirt and matching baseball cap over and over again, back and forth, for Isobel’s entire memory. She was sixty now. Not one phone call passed without her reminding Isobel that she would never be able to retire. But while her husband had immediately found the same kind of work he had done in the exurb, Isobel’s only option had been the dollar store—another dollar store, after all her years of shopping for hopeful potions at the one in the exurb. There was only one counseling center near their house, seventy minutes’ drive away. Everyone on staff there had a master’s degree. They had accepted her résumé with a smile, but Isobel couldn’t shake the feeling the receptionist had shredded it as soon as she left. In the time she had been unemployed, Isobel had never asked her husband to put money in her bank account. Although she thought of him as a generous man, she feared it would anger him. But she did not admit this to herself; to herself she said she was ashamed. She did ask for cash to buy groceries, but that was different. Her husband always had a bundle of fives, tens, and 198 singles from the strangers he helped on the road. Being rescued made them generous and grateful. The cash was soft and limp as he counted it out into her palm. She always hoped he might give her a little extra, make a joke that she should buy herself something she liked—a hope that made her immediately guilty—but this never happened. The cash he gave her had been creased so many times that it no longer had edges. It wasn’t really money, Isobel told herself. Just tips. If she only ever spent tips, if she agreed to let her husband handle all of the bills, the balance in her account stayed the same. She checked it rarely, feeling like someone in remission receiving the results of a test when she did. “Can you come down? How about twenty?” she said, surprising herself. The Mennonite woman shook her head without even thinking about it. “This belonged to my husband’s great-grandma,” she told Isobel. “It used to be in the Mennonite Heritage Society Museum. When they closed, they gave it back to us. We had the opportunity to sell it to a big collection in Washington D.C., but we decided having a piece of family history was more important.” She put the bonnet down on the table, as if the matter was finished. Its ties fell over the edge. For a moment, Isobel feared it would fall. The thought was physically painful. “If family history’s so important, why are you selling it now?” She couldn’t believe herself. The Mennonite woman narrowed her eyes. But she looked impressed instead of offended. “Hard times,” she said. “You know.” 199 Isobel nodded. “Yes.” She thought about just taking the bonnet and running. But that was impossible; her car was parked far away, and she knew many of the people at the swap meet. Her neighbor the dairy farmer was at the next table, turning over an antique trivet in his hands. “I can give you thirty, but that’s it,” Isobel said. “I only have two hundred dollars in the bank. Not even. One ninety-four. Do you want to see my checkbook?” This was a tactic she hadn’t used in years, not since she was a teenager in the city. Once, on the bus, she had shown a beggar her empty wallet to make him stop bothering her. She was sixteen, on her way back from her afterschool daycare job. It did the job; he rolled his eyes at her and then moved on, glaring as if she had hurt his feelings. After the man got off the bus, two older women on the train had lectured Isobel about how vulnerable she had made herself. “That easily could have gone bad,” the woman in the business suit had told her. “You should be more careful,” added the one in the jogging suit. “You can’t go opening your pocketbook up to just anybody.” But Isobel had been proud, not afraid. “No, ma’am, I don’t want to see your checkbook,” the Mennonite woman said, looking at her evenly. Her cell phone beeped and vibrated against the felt and she cut her eyes at it longingly. “Give me seventy and we’ll call it a deal,” she said. “Fifty?” Isobel said. There was her little-girl voice again, her almost-whisper. The Mennonite woman lifted the bonnet, then looked around, as if to check if anyone was watching. “Fine, but do it quick,” she said. “Write a check. And put your driver license number on it so I can find you if it don’t clear.” 200 Isobel was too elated to be offended. The Mennonite woman dropped the bonnet into a green grocery bag and handed it over the table. Isobel scribbled out the check, tore it off, and dropped it, snatching the grocery bag. She walked quickly to her car, trying not to run. As soon as she was inside, she took the bonnet out of the bag and propped it on the passenger seat, its brim pointed out towards the road. It stayed there, perfectly still, until she got home. For the first week, Isobel just watched the bonnet on her desk. It looked serene, dignified. She liked to imagine it exuded a certain calm control over the entire house, that with its help she became more efficient, more patient. It had been hard for her to relax since her husband stopped wanting her. But with the bonnet in the house she was back to her old self. She began ironing their sheets again, something she hadn’t done since they moved. In their old life in the one-room apartment in the exurb it had seemed a necessary civilizing gesture, a small way to make their life a little better. The sheets were smoother if they had been ironed and felt softer under her body. She had stopped, first because she was too exhausted after her shifts at the dollar store, then because there didn’t seem to be any point. But now there was a point again. The bonnet infused Isobel with a thrumming nervous energy. One day she reorganized all of the cabinets and drawers. The next she culled the closet of unloved clothes and left the collected rejects on the front stoop of the Mennonite church in Cazenovia, confident they would be impressed by her anonymous generosity. She learned that the internet was full of useful cleaning tips and wiped down all of the baseboards with dryer sheets. She cleaned the tub with a paste made of baking soda, dish soap, and lavender oil. She cooked and froze three gallons of meat sauce for spaghetti, five pounds of cowboy beans, and six baggies of baked boneless skinless chicken breast for later use in casseroles and salads. Isobel 201 couldn’t stand the texture of frozen-then-thawed cooked meat, but her husband didn’t notice the difference, and he needed the protein. He worked all day in the garage, and at night he went out on calls, as he always had. The worst thing that could happen, Isobel thought, would be if her husband stayed this way forever. If one day he was simply kind, no longer in a mood, and nothing changed at all. The first thing her husband told her about what had happened out on the road didn’t make any sense. “He had green skin, Ibbie, green skin,” he said, voice breaking on the second “skin.” She rubbed his back through his jacket until he caught his breath enough to continue. He had been called out to fix an old truck that had broken down on a gravel road that ran between two farms. “It wasn’t a highway or even a rural route,” he said. “Just a stretch of rocks with some meaningless name. And the weirdest thing is I can’t even remember. Where it is, what it’s called.” It was unusual, but not unheard of, for Isobel’s husband to be summoned to work on elderly vehicles. The roadside assistance company was connected to several warranty plans, so he mainly saw cars that had been manufactured in the last five years, but on occasion the company would sell an individual policy to someone who had an old, broken-down car. It was expensive, but cheaper than buying a new car. When Isobel heard the beginning of the story, she thought it was about one of those people. But it wasn’t. He had arrived to find a man and his son in the cab of a 1968 Ford F100. He didn’t have any affiliation with the company at all. He was just desperate. 202 “The engine was smoking, and there was nothing I could do, really. I realized that right away. I didn’t have the parts. I don’t know who would. I knew that before I even opened her up. But then, while I was trying to figure out how to tell the guy that he would have to pay for a tow, I saw the kid. In the passenger seat, all wrapped up in Indian blankets. Even from outside I could tell he was panting.” It was a little boy, he told her, maybe nine years old. He was the one with green skin. Or it wasn’t green, exactly, more like a bleached-out gray. Not the right color for a little boy’s skin. He didn’t have much hair, and his facial features were “hazy,” her husband said. “Like somebody took their thumb and blurred out his face.” Isobel was surprised at this leap into intimate language. Her husband made it his business not to get too involved, not to get personal. “The dad was a farmer type,” her husband said. “Suspenders, hat, old clothes. He came out and asked me what we needed to do to get the truck going again. Then he saw me looking at the little boy. Up close it was even worse. He looked dead, honestly. The little boy, I mean. The dad just looked scared. ‘That’s my son,’ he told me. ‘He was in a fire when he was a little boy and now he has cancer.’” As he said these words, Isobel’s husband rolled over and showed her his face. She could make out the hollows of his eyes, the deep creases around his mouth, his cleft chin under the beard. The dark made these familiar shapes terrifying. He settled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. She, too, stared at the ceiling, trying to follow his words there. She wished that it was cold, that there were clouds of breath. “The dad had some kind of accent. I don’t know, maybe German or something. He told me that there was a fire in their barn and the little guy ran in before anyone could stop him. A 203 long time ago, not recently. He was four and wanted to save his cat. ‘The doctors didn’t think he would survive, but he did,’ the dad said. ‘Now they say the cancer is because of the burns.’” “Jesus,” Isobel said. Her husband blinked away tears that glittered in the dark. “What did you do?” “I called the garage and told that son of a bitch Jerry to come tow them. I said he had a choice: he could be a good person and do it free, or he could be asshole and charge me in hours. So he complained some, but then he came out there and got them. The last I saw, the dad was loading the little boy into the cab of Jerry’s tow. Picked him up like he weighed nothing at all.” She waited for him to say more, to tell her what had happened next, but he was just quiet after that, with a finality that chilled her. “I’m sorry, sweetie,” Isobel said, confused. She stroked the inside of her husband’s elbow through the sleeve of his jacket. “That sounds rough.” But did it, really? Why was he so upset? Her husband did not respond. They lay in the dark for a long time. Isobel searched her mind for a silver lining. “At least Jerry wasn’t an asshole, though, huh? For once.” Her husband gave a hoarse laugh. “Oh, no, he was. He charged me in hours. I have to work it off.” “But isn’t a tow really expensive? Especially in the middle of the night, for an old car like that?’ Her husband stiffened. “The age of the vehicle doesn’t matter, but yes, it is expensive. Like I said, I have to work it off.” 204 It was clear that he didn’t want to talk about how much. Would it eat his whole paycheck? More than one? Isobel tried and failed to remember an exact figure. She had never had her car towed. Her husband made sure it was always in the best working order. They lay in silence for another long time. An irritation grew inside Isobel’s tender regard for her husband’s sadness. He never had any sympathy for her when she was upset about something silly—that was what he always told her, that it was silly to be upset about things that had nothing to do with her. That happened to strangers. She kept trying to bend her mind to feel empathy for the burnt little boy, for his father, for the broken-down truck, but all she could think about was the rabbit she had hit with her car a few weeks earlier. It had run out from the tall grass on one side of the rode just as she was accelerating into a wide turn. Isobel didn’t like driving fast, but all afternoon other drivers had been honking at her for driving the speed limit, aggressively passing her. It was stupid, but it hurt her feelings, the noise, being the target of the obvious irritation of strangers. So, just after sunset, she turned up the radio and went fast, faster. Just as she began to feel comfortable at the speed, the little gray bunny darted into the middle of the road. She didn’t even try to brake, knowing it might cause an accident. There was a delay, and then she heard the bump. She hadn’t even told her husband about it because she knew what he would tell her. Silly. For a moment she thought she might talk about the bunny, might cry. This would annoy her husband. Then she had an idea. “Do you think they were Mennonites?” “What?” “I mean, you said the father was wearing suspenders and a hat. That he had a German accent. So maybe—” 205 “I know you’re obsessed with those people, but really, Isobel.” Isobel’s husband humped his body over so that his back was to her again. “Did you even hear what I told you?” She pulled her knees into her chest, trying to control her breathing. If she started crying now he would be furious. There would be no sleep that night for her. She would be on her own in the living room with the hideous overhead light and the internet full of grinning assholes. Those were the last words he spoke to her that day. Isobel’s husband slept in all his clothes, even though it had to be close to ninety degrees in their bedroom. “Do you think it bothered you so much because you’re worried about us having a child?” she asked in October, after several days of hyping herself brave. “Because I totally understand that. I mean, I know we haven’t really talked about it, but it scares me too. Babies. Being a parent. That makes sense. Completely.” Her husband looked at her like she had been lobotomized. “No.” In November she tried again. “Maybe it has something to do with your dad. I kind of think it’s about dads, you know?” He was across the room when she said this. He did not turn, just dropped his shoulders in disappointment and stood like that for a long moment, sinking his hands into his pockets. “Can we not talk about it?” he said finally, crossing to her. “Please. Not tonight.” Now it was December, the last week of the year. After Thanksgiving he had asked what she wanted for Christmas, and she had given him a list, cheap earrings, an old movie, a funny sweatshirt. She wanted to write “sex” at the end of the list, had even gotten out a green pen to make it funny, thinking she would draw big bubble letters like a teenage girl, something fun and 206 unserious, ha ha, how silly, SEX! But at the last minute she lost her nerve and drew a pine tree instead. On her eighth day with the bonnet, Isobel tried it on. She pulled her hair back into a bun, secured it with an elastic, and lowered the bonnet over her face. It didn’t look right. Her hair pushed forward and puffed out around her face. She took it off and brushed her hair back as hard as she could, then put the bonnet back on. That was better—the hair stayed out of the way—but it still wasn’t right. She blinked at the mirror, feeling desperate. She remembered a scene from a film she had been shown in grade school, a long time ago, a novitiate entering a convent. The other nuns cutting away her hair with sharp silver scissors. Isobel found her scissors—neither shining nor silver, simple black metal scissors with a red plastic handle—and took down her bun. She found a thick lock at the center of the back of her head and without hesitation snipped it off. But when she looked up into the mirror she was no better, not even with the (oddly lighter, hanging askew) bun reinstated and the bonnet pulled down. It was her clothes, gray sweatshorts and a ratty yellow undershirt. Of course. She undressed and went to the closet, trying to find something that would look right. Not jeans. Not pants at all. That left her three skirts and four dresses. All of them were old work clothes, nylon- spandex blends in tan and washed-out black, sprung in the seat and too tight in the thighs. No, she would not wear the bonnet with a knee-length khaki dress that had too much material around her bust and not enough at her waist. No, she would not wear the taupe pencil skirt, or the black A-line with a ruffle down the front. Isobel pushed disconsolately through her closet until a 207 stretch of cobalt fabric caught her eye. She pulled at it, puzzled, and out came an ankle-length dress with long sleeves and a high Peter Pan collar. Where had it come from? She turned the dress over in her hands, trying to remember. But Isobel couldn’t place it, couldn’t remember ever seeing it before. It was made of cheap jersey and unadorned, save for the collar. There was no label. She pulled it over her head and purposefully refrained from looking until she had secured the bonnet. Then Isobel turned around. In the mirror another woman waited. It was the feeling she got when she said her affirmation, amplified tenfold, the total strangeness of her own image. Isobel’s face was pale and serious under the bonnet, her body unappealing under the dress. She chewed a piece of dead skin on her bottom lip until it bled. Turning to see her profile, she noticed that the back of the bonnet was not appropriately inflated. It sagged around her small bun. She closed her eyes and remembered the Mennonite woman’s small headcovering. In the days since she’d bought the bonnet she had learned from the Internet that these were called kapps. As if in a trance Isobel went to the linen closet and withdrew a small white handtowel. Her husband liked to give himself spongebaths with these; he had a tendency to leave them, soiled and soaking wet, on the edge of the sink. She liked washing them, making them white again. Now the pleasure she took from this task made sense, as she cut the handtowel into a small circle perhaps six inches in diameter. Now every part of her felt like cogs clicking together, sinking into place, as she pinned the circle into place over her hair with black bobby pins. When she pulled the bonnet over, the back inflated like a little balloon. 208 For hours she paced her house happily, going about her business. She cleaned everything. She took a brick of frozen beans out of the freezer and put it into the sink to thaw. When there was nothing else that could be done in the house she went back to her computer and looked at picture after picture of Plain women. Mennonites, Amish, Old Order River Brethren, Conservative Quakers, Hasidic Jews, Orthodox Jews, Muslims, Shakers, the Nation of Islam, Russian and Ukrainian Baptists, Mormons, and the online congregation of the faithful who knew not the name of their order or god but were moved still to cover their hair, to disdain bright colors and fancy frills, to arm themselves against disappointment and pain with the sturdy vestments of the past, of the soul. Of the desired soul. Isobel was thrilled to return to her mirror, to repeat her affirmation over and over, until she was swept into an exhaustion so total that she had no choice but to go to the couch and sleep, bonnet. This is what it feels like to be denied sex by the person you love. It is not like the rejections of dating, or of drunken promiscuity, or even the rejection of your own body, refusing you orgasm as culmination of the act of masturbation. Those experiences are predictable, staid. They are always the same. But a sexless marriage is different. It is an act of travel. You are taken to another world, where sex is not a possibility. The only other human on your planet does not know it exists. While he may take you lovingly in his arms, or hold your hand for the better part of a block you walk together, or kiss you mutely on nonerogenous zones of your body, that is all. You will expect more, but it will not come. You will drape your nude body everywhere for the person you love to find it, and they will step over it politely, or lift it gently to crawl under, or simply walk around. 209 If you ask—if you say, please touch me, I am here, I want you to touch all of me, to notice my nakedness and pay it respect, I want your body to respond to the sight of my body—or if you force—if you take that loved person by the scruff of their neck and lift them to your face, or clamp your thighs around their waist and refuse to let go, or kiss and kiss and kiss them, dreaming what will come next—or if you ask to talk—if you sit on the couch and quite reasonably say, I wonder why this is happening, are we okay, is everything all right, do you want to try something new, can we schedule, can we pay more attention, can we make time, a conversation that will be one-sided and quickly degenerate into abject begging, please give yourself to me, please, please, you have promised me, do not withhold, do not deny me—if you do these things you will earn the sight of the person you love shriveling, recoiling, laughing nervously and then with real pain, stiffening, shrinking under your touch, refusing, refusing, saying no, maybe later, tomorrow, I promise, and you will never forget the look of utter disinterest on their face, their tired recognition of your stubborn enduring desire. If you do these things, the way they will get away from you is by opening your stomach with their hands, separating your body into parts, and passing through the new space. Isobel dreamt that her husband came to her. “Take off your clothes,” he said. Off came the dress, her wool socks, her ratty pink panties and washday bra. She could see her own face. She was wearing dark lipstick, deepest aubergine, almost black. Soon she was naked save for the bonnet. He put her on her hands and knees and moved behind her. She felt his erection and smiled, cracking the lipstick. He reached for her face and gripped her mouth like the muzzle of a dog, then pulled his hand roughly back, smearing the lipstick across her cheek, into 210 her eye. He ripped off the bonnet, tearing the ties, rent it in two, and threw the halves to the floor. He took giant scissors and cut away her headcovering, cut off her bun, leaving her with a monastic crop. She braced herself for what she knew would come next. The blades of the scissors entering her, opening her. When Isobel woke it was night. She squinted at the digital clock under the TV but could not read the numbers. She heard her husband in the kitchen, cooking. He was whistling, quite as he used to. For a moment she was sure this was how things would resolve. This would be the night when everything changed and they began to heal. Then she felt the bonnet’s absence. She looked around the room for it, but it was not on the table, or behind her on the couch, or on her desk, or on the bookshelf where they kept movies. She rose as quietly as possible, trying to muffle her footsteps, and went to look for it on the bedroom. In the kitchen, her husband’s whistling became more cheerful, louder. Isobel searched and searched, but the bonnet did not appear. She wanted to cry but shook instead. From the kitchen came the smell of potstickers in plum sauce. 211 BARRI GÒTIC For the spring break of her thirty-eighth year, Rebecca Park went to Barcelona in search of a fuck. That was her joke, anyway. She told it compulsively. “I’m going to Spain,” she said, smiling hopelessly. “To find a man with whom I can be unfaithful. Hopefully a Spaniard, but honestly, I’d even take a Canadian.” In response she received mirthless laughter, followed by delicate suggestions that avoided the subject of infidelity. Why Spain? Why cross the Atlantic for the five dismal mid-February days that Rebecca’s university chose for its spring break? Rebecca’s specialization was nineteenth-century women writers of the American West, but she had never seen the Pacific Ocean or Taos or Yosemite or Yellowstone. She should visit a place that made sense. If Europe was non-negotiable, better to choose some cold, dignified place, London, Edinburgh, Copenhagen if she wanted exotic. But Rebecca would not be moved. She wanted Barcelona. Ciutat Vella, the neighborhood was called. Old City. Gothic Quarter. The very heart, where the medieval streets ate themselves like snakes and veiny spires twisted into the lavender sky. A dream of the place had wedged in her brain like an ice pick. A lit square in front of an ancient church, silver glinting off pavement, cobblestones, moon, a man’s white teeth. “I think Spain’s a great idea,” said Pat, her husband. He squeezed her shoulders, one of his special squeezes, friendly, caring, the opposite of initiatory. “A little time alone will do you good.” “Yeah,” she said limply. 212 Pat turned her and kissed her temple. She leaned forward, wrapped her arms around him, and kissed him just beneath his left eye, where his freckles were densest. Rebecca loved their forever promise of youth. Hers had disappeared by her fifteenth birthday. Rebecca traced her husband’s frustrating beauty—light blue eyes set into a remnant of an epicanthic fold, broad heart-shaped face, the freckles covering his nose, cheeks, and shoulders— to his Korean paternal grandfather, the man who had given Pat, and thus her, his surname. She had seen plenty of photos of Pat’s grandfather in old age, a smiling grandpa in a plaid shirt and double-bridge glasses, but only one of him as a young man. He stood on a grassy knoll in a white collared shirt tucked into khaki pants, staring solemnly. Even under the old-fashioned clothes Rebecca could see the fine lines of his body. Behind him, his wife, in a print dress, white heels, and what looked like a black illusion veil, reached for him, but he didn’t see her. His face was as closed and lovely as a mask. Pat stepped out of her embrace and brushed himself off automatically, as he always did. He was wearing one of his work shirts. Why had it come home with him from school? At some point in the last five years—why hadn’t she marked the exact day?—Pat had bought a score of cheap sherbet colored button-downs at Sears. Once he had taken some pride in his clothing, but now he hated to wake early. His solution was to adopt a daily uniform of pleated khakis and a t- shirt. When he arrived at campus, he just threw a work shirt on top. The ensemble looked frankly bizarre on his swimmer’s body, particularly because he always buttoned the work shirts all the way up. “I don’t want to be conscious for even a moment longer than necessary,” he told Rebecca when she asked. He let out a bark of laughter. “This just streamlines things.” 213 How had Pat become the kind of man for whom careful daily dressing is too heavy a burden? Like Rebecca, he had a PhD in English, but he had never even applied for a teaching position. He had followed her from Texas, where they had earned their degrees together, to her job in Ohio—the job she had then believed to be her launching pad—and taken an administrative position as an academic advisor to undergraduates at the university where Rebecca taught. The students revered Pat for his easygoing nature, effortless coolness (bourbon in the bottom desk drawer, framed Winograd print on the wall, portrait of Emerson tattooed on his right forearm), and obvious sexiness. Rebecca had seen postings online, female students cooing over her husband’s smile, his kindness, even the freckles Rebecca regarded as her own: Oh my god, whenever I go in to talk to him about whatever, I look into those baby blues and just forget everything. Dreamy isn’t the word. That particular comment had been liked two hundred and fifty-seven times. If she had ever received this kind of attention from her students, Rebecca was sure she would have long ago bedded some kid and been forced to leave the university in disgrace. Pat was strangely impervious to their lust. If anything, he was a little annoyed when his colleagues teased him about it, but Pat’s public annoyance was sunnier and more enjoyable than most people’s best moods. His coworkers loved him, too. They had special nicknames for him and gave him new bourbon for every birthday. If only they knew, Rebecca thought often, how little use he had for any of them, how thin a tether tied him to his desk. Pat hated his job. This had become his trump card in the argument they’d been having for thirteen years, the one where he announced that he was good for nothing, worthless, capable of only the most basic drone labor. No matter how fitfully Rebecca protested this—no matter how 214 many tears she cried, how many proofs of his brilliance she gave (hadn’t he won an award from the university, a commendation for excellence? Were his walls not papered with heartfelt student thank-yous? Had his salary not steadily grown?), no matter how many vacations they took together, palpably enjoying their combined income—Pat always threw his stupid, meaningless job in her face. “You’re a prof, and I’m just some pool boy for rich kids.” Rebecca wondered if he had worked on this phrase, written it down and tweaked the wording for maximum pain. “It’s impossible for you to understand.” The taunt stunned Rebecca, capsized her under a rogue wave of guilt. All she could do was blink her wet eyes in her hot face, take deep heaving breaths, and wait for him to calm down. Finally his eerie checked-out smile would blossom again and she could exhale and they returned to their routine. In a way she was grateful for the hated shirts. They reminded her not to feel what she automatically felt around Pat, what she had always felt: a glittering urge, a flowering dirty thought, a vivid image of fucking him. Her useless, ceaseless desire. Since the second year of their relationship they had had sex perhaps three times a year, only when he wanted it, only how he wanted it. Rebecca had done everything in her power to divine the problem and solve it. And she had failed and failed and failed. For years Rebecca had had a low-grade case of the flu, fevers, an on-and-off runny nose, a chronic ailment that could act up at a moment’s notice. Her back often hurt for no apparent reason, and her body was always spotted by a handful of inexplicable bruises that Pat never saw. In the early years of their marriage her strategy had been to traipse around the house nude, 215 forcing him to see her body. Once she had called him into the bathroom to examine her, hoping against hope. Pat had turned her body over and over in his hands like a veterinarian examining a horse, pivoted each of her thighs outwards without once glancing up into her crotch. “You’re all right,” he said, tousling her hair. It was the worst in the early years, right after Austin. Rebecca took a lectureship at a small college in the Bronx. They shared a narrow studio in Queens with a kitchenette at one end and a queen futon on the floor in the other. She was exhausted, teaching five or six courses a semester and earning less than her department’s receptionist. She snapped and cried easily, always needed soothing and holding. Pat hadn’t found any job at all, and was tutoring neighborhood kids for money that disappeared as soon as he made it. Ineffable tension hung in the air for weeks, thick and yellow. Queens was where Rebecca learned about the deep pits into which Pat often sank. His depressions lasted days, sometimes weeks. A haze seemed to have permanently descended on their studio. It took all of Rebecca’s strength to lift him out, hand over hand over hand. Their happiness became the two of them sitting on the edge above the pit, panting. But sometimes Pat wanted to stay in his pit for a while before she was allowed to pull him out. He fought her, swatting away her outstretched arm, his eyes wrinkling tears as he curled fetal into the futon. Those were the worst times. The things he would say to her. The apartment seemed to be on fire. She couldn’t breathe. She paced the narrow box of floor beside the stove, counting backwards. When she ran out of air, Rebecca fled the studio into the hall bathroom they shared with another tenant, pushed the stupid button lock, and curled into her own fetal position, 216 rocking back and forth, humming tunelessly and calling up a progression of bright happinesses from her childhood, frayed at the edges from overhandling. Thus, her joke about finding a lover was equal parts true and false, a mean stamp of desperation she would show anyone who looked. She repeated her husband’s encouragement, a final punchline. “He even wants me to go! He thinks it’s a great idea!” They listened politely, their eyes showing animal terror: let it not touch me, they thought. Her sadness. “You must be careful, my dear,” trilled Frederick Møller, a tiny spry queen jointly appointed in Gender Studies and Art History. “You might get what you wish for.” She made a reservation at Casa Lleó, a new hotel near the Plaça George Orwell. The photographs on the hotel website were appropriately sinister. Red brocade, black velvet, a long chrome case of objets d’art for sale. On the first leg of her journey Rebecca marveled at how well she was doing, not tired at all, which she attributed to her diligent sipping of water all the way across the Atlantic. The feeling of wellness ebbed in the Zurich airport. Rebecca had expected the very sight of Europe, even just an airport, to lift her spirits, to fill her. Instead she felt gnawingly hungry, greasy, heavy. She slept through the second flight and woke in a Spanish airport as high and white as an unfinished cathedral. The bad feeling eased somewhat as the airport bus pulled into a neighborhood of dignified apartment buildings, where fashionable locals pushed carts of babies and groceries past little trees growing in squares of dirt. Rebecca closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the bus had arrived at the Plaça de Catalunya. Here, indisputably, was her Europe, statues on towers, 217 tiny high shuttered windows, the fluting sounds of lives that had nothing in common with her own. Rebecca disembarked into a happy din, punctuated by buzzing scooters and widows muttering in Catalan. She lugged her little suitcase down the Rambla, pinning her floppy purse against her hip with her elbow. Her money, passport, and credit cards hung obediently around her neck in a fabric envelope. Barcelona is populated by very skilled professional thieves, the guidebook warned sternly on its first page. Guard your belongings. Be alert. Carry your purse in both hands. Use a money belt and leave your passport in your hotel safe. Rebecca had never been robbed, but she felt that it was likely, even unavoidable, that at least once in her life she would be someone’s victim. She wore a green sweater over a lavender shell and brown suede leggings tucked into pewter leather ankle boots. Everyone else on her flights, even the Europeans, had been dressed in some variant of pajamas, but Rebecca knew that an aging size fourteen with a Louise Brooks haircut had to be tailored at all times. Around her, gypsy men hocked whirring toys that flew high in the air. PUT ME IN YOUR MOUTH AND I WILL CHANGE YOUR VOICE, a handwritten sign promised. Casa Lleó, when she found it, was a dim box under a gothic overhang. She tripped over the threshold and fell, cursing. She had dabbed herself with tinted moisturizer in the airport bathroom, carefully patching ivory cream over her mottled pink neck. Her trip to Barcelona was supposed to be a time out of time in which she was beautiful all day every day. Not even one moment could be spent in sweaty disarray, or the spell would be broken. 218 “Are you all right, senyora?” It was a young man’s voice, effortlessly kind. Rebecca jumped. “Oh, I startle you. I’m sorry.” “I’m fine, thank you,” Rebecca said, not daring to look at him until she had collected herself. At least her suitcase and traveling bag matched; this should mark her as worthy, dignified. She shook her head so that her two front pieces of hair fell against her cheekbones, discreetly wiped under her eyes, and rose. Before her stood a bearded man perhaps an inch below her own height, dressed in a black cashmere sweater and dark green slacks. His hair was black, too—bits of it caught blue highlights from the gleam of a nearby lamp—and although he was young his hairline had begun to recede, giving the impression that the beard was a sort of consolation. Heavy black glasses framed his green eyes. “Hello,” he said. “I am Jordi Calix. Welcome to Casa Lleó.” “Rebecca Park,” she said, extending her hand. He ignored her hand and leaned towards her, his lips pursed. She was confused, then thrilled, and finally embarrassed. He was embracing her, he was kissing her, but it was not romantic. It was European. She held very still as Jordi Calix put his hands on her shoulders to give her the traditional greeting. He kissed her left cheek and then her right. She thought of Pat’s friendly squeeze with something like pain. Then she remembered to curve her body, to brush her lips softly against the soft fur of the stranger’s beard, as she had seen in films. Jordi checked her in and carried her bags up a small staircase, intermittently activating lights by tapping a series of white buttons with his right hand. When they reached number seven, her room, Jordi unlocked the door with a grand brass key. A double bed was made with plum velvet and silver satin pillowcases and lit by a cluster of filament light bulbs gathered in a great 219 glass globe. Jordi showed Rebecca how a bone-colored dial on the far wall turned these brighter or dimmer. He gestured to extra plum blankets and towels. He turned and stood facing her, his back to the door. “Please rest,” he said. “I know you are tired from your journey. And call me if you need anything, anything at all.” Incredibly, he reached for her, and they performed the embrace again. When he left Rebecca felt as guilty and thrilled as if she’d hired a gigolo. She plugged her music player into the little set of speakers provided for this purpose and chose a Joni Mitchell album. She had always hated Joni Mitchell, until six months ago, when suddenly Joni Mitchell became the only music she could stand. Rebecca and Pat met at a party given by Gina Marchand, a member of Rebecca’s doctoral cohort about whom Rebecca harbored mixed feelings. Gina’s kindness could be counted on—she always allowed Rebecca to use her copy code and sometimes surprised her with a coffee—but she was also everything Rebecca hoped not to be: demure, constitutionally shy, plain, sensible. Rebecca had come to graduate school to chase the flickering frontier dream that had haunted her since childhood; Gina had decided to pursue a PhD after many years of deliberation, in which time she had completed an MA while teaching second grade full time. Her specialty was the long eighteenth century. “But,” she confided to Rebecca near the close of their second year, “I think what I’m most interested in is composition and rhetoric.” Comp rhet. Only a practical, dreamless soul like Gina could be most interested in this most dire of topics, this most miserable of academic jobs, the business of theorizing and explaining why every successive class of freshmen was worse at writing and more resistant to instruction. Soon all new PhDs would labor at comp rhet, in an underclass segregated from the 220 tenured and the accomplished. There were enough special people, enough beautiful readings of canonical texts; everyone else had to get in line. This, Rebecca had learned in two years. So twenty-five year old Rebecca, still fresh from South Texas, published (in just three tiny magazines, but still) poet, went to Gina’s party wearing a new silver dress purchased guiltily, her hair in the reliable little chignon that she had convinced herself was Mary Austinesque. Privately, Rebecca believed herself thus coiffed to slightly resemble Austin in the photograph she had taken as a member of Blackburn College’s 1888 graduating class. It was a photograph of ten people, five women, five men. Austin stood to the far left of the frame, dressed in white, in a high-necked, long-sleeved fin de siècle gown. All the women were dressed similarly, but for Rebecca there was only one face in the image, Austin’s questioning, displeased expression. How Rebecca had pored over the photograph, sizing it up and down on her laptop screen, searching out the small details of the massive corsage that bloomed like a wound on Austin’s small chest. At first she had taken the two jagged white rectangles that jutted above Austin’s head for some sort of hair ornament, but then she saw that they were the panels of a screen, or perhaps the panes of a window, or maybe some kind of painting—anything but what they seemed to be. She printed the photograph on fine matte paper at the copy shop and hung it in a wooden frame on the wall above her desk for all to see. When she began her PhD, Rebecca decided to stop hiding her embarrassing fancies—after all, what was a PhD but a passion project, and what could keep her going better than a reminder of the world she was trying to enter, the dream she would wish into reality? In her mid-twenties, this insight had felt like adulthood; in her late thirties, it seemed cruelly stupid. 221 Why had she even bothered to dress up for Gina’s party? For whose benefit had she worn that slinking, clinging dress, ignoring the way it made her tummy look like a lamé dinner roll? She knew who would be there: Jack, the art history student with the sad curtain of bleached hair, always moping over Tamara de Lempicka. Emilie, the Dutch girl obsessed with the Gothics. Millerton, who did something with postmodernism that Rebecca didn’t want to understand. Bright friendly Gina, helpful and trapped, whose goodness was a kind of prison. Branden, with his waxy creep’s face and staring eyes. The usual damned. After Rebecca had collected her beer and handful of pita chips—after she had resigned herself to comforting Jack and trying not to envy Emilie, the purple-haired sylph—after she had neatly avoided Branden, whose fifteenth article had just been accepted for publication in an august feminist journal in which he was to be the first male author—then, there was Pat. Leaning in the corner, staring at his phone, wearing a studded leather motorcycle jacket, white undershirt, and cuffed white jeans. His hair was slicked up into a kind of pompadour, his blue eyes were dark and—was it possible?— almost Asian, and his lips were as plush and full as carved hand soaps. Rebecca stopped five feet in front of him and openly stared. It was so rare to find male beauty in their miserable, mincing little world. If he had never looked up—if he had only kept staring at his phone, unaware, or uninterested—Pat would have lived in Rebecca’s memory forever, an image to return to when she needed to escape into a frenzy of masturbation or the other necessary activities of dissociative desire that helped her to survive. If she had only ever just seen him standing there like that, right leg cocked against the wall, his shined green leather shoes perfect beneath the spotless white jeans. He would have still been with her forever. Sometimes, in her darkest 222 moments, Rebecca wondered if this was how it should have been. If she would have had more pleasure, less pain. But the beautiful man had looked up from his phone. At her. “Hi,” he said. “Where the hell did you come from?” “I could ask you the same question,” she said. “Well,” he said. “I’m from Minnesota. I mean, I was born in Montana, but Minnesota is where I grew up.” Rebecca had given him her difficult little life story, but stories didn’t matter until much, much later. Not until after they fled the party in under an hour, Rebecca giddily ignoring Gina’s hurt expression, not until after they spent three hours and too much money at the nice bars on South Congress, not until after she followed Pat up the rickety narrow stairs of the apartment he shared with a man who worked nights. Not until after, in his little bedroom, that monkish chamber with one lamp, a map on the wall, and a soft futon dressed in gold sheets, they wove their bodies together. Rebecca woke after dark. She shook her head to chase away the sadness, performed her complex ablutions of concealment and light direction, and went out into the city. Restaurant signs and clusters of skinny, smoking young people, many in strange saggy-crotched pants, lit the old streets. An absurd number of Australians yelled. Restaurants offered dubious paellas, hamburgers, grainy smoothies, waffles drenched in Nutella. Rebecca’s head pounded. Her heel caught on a cobblestone and her ankle turned out. If I fall again, she thought, my trip is ruined, and even after she righted herself she felt like crying. Where was the city’s secret heart, the quiet purple place? 223 Rebecca was headed to a restaurant her guidebook described as a hushed and sacred space, serving the freshest ingredients from the Mercat de La Boqueria in novel, charming combinations. She had studied her map before leaving. But after forty minutes of walking she was quite lost, and it was coming up on eleven-thirty. Spaniards ate dinner late, but how late? Restaurants were closing; all around her was the grating sound of metal awnings being pulled over storefronts. She made a final attempt, found herself in a deserted dark street that seemed to narrow as she followed it, and finally acquiesced to her pounding heart and crossed back into the well-lit square near the hotel. She slunk inside a reasonable-looking restaurant and waited for the maître d’. He appeared: slender, smiling, olive-skinned. “Hello,” he said, automatically in English. “For dinner?” Rebecca nodded, both annoyed by and grateful for this assumption. “Please wait for the rest of your party at the bar,” he said, already turning away. “It’s just me,” she said. “I’m alone.” “Oh,” he said. “Please wait while I find you table. At bar.” She went to the bar and mumbled “Copa de vino tinto, por favor,” at the bartender. He silently put a glass down in front of her. Rebecca cast her gaze around the dining room. She was probably the oldest person there and the only one alone. Her eyes settled on a girl at a table of eight people in the far corner of the room. She had wide brown eyes, a red-painted mouth, and a carefully arranged head of tawny hair. Two long corkscrews hung on either side of her oval face like sexy peyos. The rest lay down her back in a golden cape, the ends shaped into soft hooks. How long had it taken her to 224 arrange it? She spoke with gusto, gesturing animatedly, throwing back her head to emit a long, piercing laugh. The girl stood to make her way across the restaurant to the bathroom. She wore a tiny red satin dress and flesh-colored platform shoes, like tall hooves tied to her little feet. She was probably nineteen. Rebecca remembered nineteen. She had not felt young then. She had never, ever felt young. The girl passed Rebecca, calling back to her table, “I totally want to hear the end of that story, Professor Williams!” Her farm-flattened accent was chillingly familiar. Every table in the restaurant, she saw now, held these groupings: one old man—bespectacled, potbellied, white-bearded, utility- vested—surrounded by young girls, like a gathering of many-wived Biblical kings. Rebecca turned towards the girl’s table, trying to camouflage the movement, and recognized Ed Williams. Rebecca’s university ran a very profitable study abroad program in Barcelona. The Barcelona Faculty, as they were called, were a cadre of tenured gray-faced letches in white shirts and many- pocketed khaki vests and horn glasses. They gave good salty ex-pat sage, slinging basement Castellano and morsels of Hemingway and Orwell on blastingly hot walks around the Plaça d'Espanya, pontificating about Franco and Lorca over cheap rioja. Their knowledge of Spanish history and culture was anecdotal, but they could drink for hours without slurring. A handful of unhappy recent PhDs did all of the actual teaching and grading, clutching at the idea that one of the old bastards might finally die or retire to Portugal. They were perpetually trying another year on the job market that had rejected them three, four, five times, crossing fingers for a job at a South Korean startup university or in oil-rich Alberta or a hideous 225 Tennessee hamlet. They lived in the sad little suburbs north of Barcelona, rode the buses like vigilant ghosts, Skyped with distant fiancés every twelve hours, got by on credit card debt, and barely learned the names of the interchangeable students who shaded in and out every twelve weeks. In some jerk admin’s idea of Old World charm, they were called Apprentice Lecturers. Rebecca had met a handful of them on their perfunctory yearly visit to the university. “I just feel like there’s real potential here for immersive language instruction, for curriculum innovation, but our hands are tied,” confided a pear-shaped girl in a much-washed navy pantsuit. “I feel like I’m not facilitating a really life-changing overseas experience for the undergrads. That’s hard for me.” Rebecca hadn’t known whether to hug the girl or smack her. She had one of those names parents give daughters of whom they expect little: Deedee, maybe, or Tami. She was not at the restaurant. Despite, or more likely because of these pedagogical deficiencies, the Barcelona program was Rebecca’s university’s most popular study abroad. The classes were not hard. Barcelona offered plenty of cheap flights to other European capitals. At the end the semester the students returned to Ohio with a computer full of cute pictures and cool stories about sucking face with retired Israeli snipers at the disco. Everyone got an A. That she had wandered into their hangout so guilelessly seemed to Rebecca a sign of her own failure of imagination. She felt like crying, and would have, if the maître d’ had not fetched her to her table. “Where are you coming from, if I may ask?” She looked up at him, momentarily hopeful. “The States,” she said. 226 “No,” he said. “I think it is Sweden!” What was she supposed to do with that? On her walk back to Casa Lleó, Rebecca bought a beer from a frightened man in a blue- lit store. She held it against her body as she entered the hotel, not wanting Jordi to see, but the reception desk was empty. In her room, Rebecca dimmed the clustered lightbulbs to a glistening wince. Pat had responded to her short email. Hi Baby, Gr8 to hear you are there safe :-). Hope you have lots of fun. P He always wrote to her with the same weird salutation—he never called Rebecca “baby” aloud—and the same juvenile abbreviations. The smiley annoyed her, always. Hadn’t everyone else gotten rid of the hyphen nose? Rebecca pried off her outfit, put on the billowing silk pajamas Pat had given her a few Christmases ago, and popped the beer. It was a double-size, what she had once called a tallboy, back when she was an undergraduate at Trinity University with a lace-edged camisole for every night of the weekend. She drank, letting her mind drift, touching herself absently through her unsexy white cotton panties. She was horny, of course. She was always horny. Horny. The terrible little-boy word for the state in which she spent all her days. Men had engorged and tumescent, lush Latinate words. But women could only go so far before edging into slut territory. Horny, randy, hot for it. Dying for it. Longing. She could say that she was longing. Or wanting. Desiring. 227 In the full flush of it Rebecca didn’t need the suffix. She felt like desire itself. It settled pink in her limbs and face and lips and neck. She downed the rest of the beer, huffed a breath, spread her legs, and lay the fingers of her right hand across her labia. With her left she opened the website where her undergraduates spent all their time. For a long, long time, she had only masturbated to Pat, summoning up the tender intensity of the sex they had before their wedding. His refusals were made all the more painful by the fact that he was an astonishing lover, seemingly psychic. He knew exactly how to pry joy from her body and give it back with his mouth, hands, cock. For years she had simply conjured these encounters in her mind’s eye, refusing to be unfaithful even there. In the fifth year of her near-celibacy her husband’s imagined face had become too painful. So she had dreamt only his body, but this had backfired. Soon she couldn’t picture his face when she masturbated, only a black box. If she tried to peel it back, tears came. That bottomless kind of crying, no good. So she switched to actors, feeling cheesy. But there weren’t many who did the trick, and over the years she had watched those who did age out of her realm of interest. This worried her. Was she a version of the Barcelona Faculty after all, obsessed with young bodies and taut skin? No—it was just her husband she wanted, just Pat. Pat then, at Gina’s, or Pat now, any time, even in one of those damn shirts. But she couldn’t have him. So in the last year Rebecca had begun to do something that she thought both harmless and vaguely criminal: fixate on her students. On the one or two in particular who surprised and touched her with talent and assiduousness. Her current object was Bobby, a boy from a dairy farm near Stevens Point, Wisconsin. Bobby’s obsession with Bret Harte had led him to stay on at the university to complete a MA as her advisee. He was shy, 228 bright, and handsome in an unstudied way, with thick blond hair, wide green eyes, and a lanky, untaught body. A naïf. Rebecca could find Bobby so easily online. They all posted hundreds of photographs of themselves there. He was so touching in his simple cowboy enthusiasm for the West, had taken so many pictures of himself in hats and boots, of the summer he had spent working at a Wyoming dude ranch. Of the brand he had received on his right ass cheek, which he proudly displayed in a series of photographs taken in someone’s dorm room, his lively face turned over his red flannelled shoulder, the firm flatness of his ass swelling up below his lowered jeans. It would make more sense, Rebecca thought, if her fantasies about Bobby cast her in a dominant role, if she had dreamt of manipulating him. Forcing him. Come into my office, Bobby, I have something grave to discuss with you. Right here, under the photograph of Mary Austin. Or maybe not. She wasn’t a dummy, not after all that reading. She knew that fantasies of submission were simply a way of ventriloquizing her own forceful desire, making it palpable, translating it into the language of the patriarchy. The thought stopped her hand, and she swore out loud. It wasn’t the fucking patriarchy at all. At all. It was just her. Her, her, her. Her inescapable self. She had to think of it this way to think he would want her. That he would come into her office and close the door. That he would tell her that he knew, that he knew how she thought of him and why, that she had been doing it more and more, sometimes even in this very office, that she had been turning herself over to him in thought and body, and that now he would have it for himself. He knew, he knew. 229 The scenario dissolved into a collage of body and friction. He took her by the back of the neck and kissed her brutally, put a hand up her shirt like she was some seventeen-year-old, pinched her hard, not caring. He put the other hand up her skirt and felt and felt, sucking against her neck, reaching into her panties. He did it quick, entered her that way, her legs just barely parted, on the edge of her desk, both hands inside her bra now, biting her lips. Just as she was about to come, just as he was lowering her into the coffin of her own desire, ready to nail shut the lid and toss dirt on top, just as he was doing it piece by piece, locking her up, confining her there forever, he pulled back from her face and whispered nonsense to her, and this was what did it, what spread her all over the hotel room, into the sheets and the bedspread, head thrown back against the silken pillowcases, her soul floating out over the gathered lights in the far end of the room. They glared at her with slit eyes. Rebecca had tried, many times, to hold out in the fantasy, to stay there in her office with Bobby until he came too, maybe on her skirt, a mess she would have to clean up. But she couldn’t manage it. Her student had a disturbing tendency to morph into Pat at the moment of orgasm. To become her husband, smiling at her sadly from the chair behind her desk. If she had not felt like such a cliché—if she was a different person—Rebecca thought she would be genuinely moved by the fact that it was becoming harder and harder not to weep hard after these orgasms, too. She woke with a dull throbbing in her head. Hangover or jet lag or both? The clock told her that it was eleven in the morning. Rebecca felt the horrid childish guilt of having overslept. 230 She brought her hand to her face to brush her hair out of her mouth and smelled her own scent, like medium-rare filet mignon. For the next three days, she vowed in the shower, she would focus solely on being a tourist, would walk every neighborhood of the city, starting in the morning with the Rambla itself, pacing in concentric circles, to Park Güell in Gràcia, the shopping district in Eixample, Camp Nou in Les Corts, the Museu Maritimo and beaches in Barceloneta. She would buy beautiful clothes and take lovely photographs of the tall apartment buildings that stood flat- fronted on every corner, of the sail-shaped hotel on the man-made peninsula in the sea, of the hills that rose at the borders of her vision. She would save the two biggest draws—the Sagrada Familia and the Barri Gòtic itself—for her last full day. And so Rebecca set out sightseeing. She bought a metro pass and rode the subway warily, clutching her purse with both hands on top of her knees. The trains were full of young people of every color, lovely and unlovely, poor and rich, and Rebecca was jealous of all of them: of the man coated in dust, perhaps twenty, with dark, dark, skin and a rucksack full of counterfeit handbags, and of the woman he sat beside, a wavy-haired olive beauty in a camel trench with a new designer purse flung over her shoulder. They should have a conversation, Rebecca thought. They should get to know each other. Rebecca chastised herself for envying the young as she paced the fairytale landscape of the Parc, admiring mosaic after mosaic, imagining a life for herself in one of the cottages that marked the entrance. She wove her way through the many columns and bought an overpriced beer from a sweating man installed in a grotto. I’m not old, Rebecca thought, drinking. I’m not even forty yet. 231 The day was mercilessly hot but Rebecca decided to walk into Gràcia and shop. Her breasts felt heavy under her silk blouse, and she had sweat through the underarms. Nothing in any of the shops fit. Struggling with straps in the dressing room of a store called, simply, V, Rebecca reverted to her Marxist defense mechanisms. I don’t really want these clothes, she told herself. I want what they signify. Youth, ease, joy. Things I can’t buy. Pat always professed to love her body. He admired her in her new clothes and old. But he didn’t want her body, no matter how much he claimed to like it. She had dinner at a restaurant on an old square. Her hunger surprised her, and she ravenously consumed the saltless bread, a small asparagus salad, and a roasted sausage topped with a poached egg. Only when she had swallowed the last bite did she realize that she had been shaking. Back at Casa Lleó, Jordi was installed behind the low red desk. “Bona tarda, senyora,” he said as she entered, not looking up. His polite lack of interest hurt. “Please, call me Rebecca,” she said, slumping by. Jordi looked up. “Ah! It is you. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize. Rebecca, of course.” He stood, walked around his desk and embraced her again: that tiny, painful miracle. He insisted on hearing the details of her day. “Perhaps, if I can take the time off, I will show you around,” he said to Rebecca. He began to say something else, but the phone rang. He answered it immediately, trilling fast Catalan into the sleek black receiver. She went upstairs, not letting herself think she was special, that he remembered her. 232 The Maritime Museum’s main attraction was a giant reconstruction of a sixteenth-century galley, the Admirals of the Juan de Austria, which had been instrumental in defeating the Turkish navy. It filled an enormous medieval hall in which Spanish ships had once been built, Rebecca read. A space designed for one use, now dedicated to exhibiting reproductions of that lost use, Rebecca thought. Like me. The fact that Pat was such a wonderful lover made her resent him more. He had this thing he did with his cock, nudging against what she imagined to be the upper wall of her pussy; it was remarkable, on the order of what she imagined heroin might be like. But when they had sex now, it was quick and bad, a nasty thing she didn’t like to think about. Her on top, his hands automatically on her breasts, his eyes squeezed shut. Nothing would open them. He lashed her nipples with his tongue, whispered a few half-hearted nastinesses, and came with a choked grunt. She could, too, sometimes, if she hurried. The days spun by. Everywhere she went was full of lovely people who didn’t give a damn for her. She saw every wonder the city could offer, tried to cross town on the Avenida Diagonal, wandered bemused around Camp Nou wondering what the fuss was about, paced fine shops. Rebecca knew better than to think she would find anything to buy. She understood now that she was just walking around inside her own mind, reviewing. She spent money only on food and entrance fees. She almost forgot that she had wanted to find someone to make love to. Every evening at Casa Lleó, there was Jordi, promising future kindness. She didn’t believe in him anymore, either. 233 On the morning of her last day, Rebecca rose into a hallucinatory heat. She left her hotel without a set destination and got lost in the Barri Xinès. Prostitutes stood in front of every other apartment building, tall zaftig women in tight neon dresses and high white heels. Men in ikat shirts and white pants lurked behind them, eyeing Rebecca. Although she knew that these were the pimps, or something like it, she couldn’t imagine anyone forcing these women into sexual slavery. They were like Amazons from another planet, she thought, and was immediately embarrassed. Her lack of empathy was her own failing, she knew. Her fault. Eventually she wandered out and found her way to the Sagrada Familia. She stood in line with the other Americans for two hours, letting the crowd move her, trying not to think. The people around her went in and out of the McDonald’s across the street, buying ice creams and complaining. A man behind her watched a romantic comedy on his phone, broadcasting tepid dialogue into her ear, “Sondra said what about my business trip?” When it was time to enter the cathedral, they picked up their cameras and squared their shoulders, as if readying for a fight. The stone façade above the entrance was gnarled and frightening. For a moment Rebecca felt like a small child, afraid to enter the witch’s lair. But she let the crowd bear her forward, and then she was in the great high space. The walls were white but there was too much color to see. Rebecca walked in the rainbow lights from the stained glass windows, staring up. The white pillars looked like bones, like the remains of a race of giants. She didn’t try to decipher the stories embedded in the architecture. In the center of the grand room was a cordoned-off rectangle of several humble rows of folding chairs facing the altar. This was where she belonged. Rebecca sat and closed her eyes. 234 A memory came back to her, strong enough to taste and feel: her first communion at Saint Anne’s Church in Linn, Texas. Aunt Clara in the first row, beaming as Rebecca walked up the aisle in the white lace dress and the mantilla that had belonged to her great-grandmother Flora. The crunch of the host in her teeth, the bitter wash of wine. And then the smell of Aunt Clara’s Guerlain perfume as she crushed her in a hug: “My girl,” she said, “my girl.” Her girl, now saved forever, initiated into the secrets of the faith. No one would say those words to her again. No one would try. God, Rebecca prayed, please heal my marriage. Heal my husband. Bring him back to me, give me back his good days, his kind hands and his loving eye. Give him these happinesses and make him want to share them with me. Give me the touch that I have missed and longed for, that I have craved for so long. Please give him back to me, the man I met that night at Gina’s, the disaffected beauty whose price was higher than rubies. The man for whom I gave my happiness. She prayed herself into tears. Then, shivering, she turned to her flinty, pathetic desire. God, give me a dream of sex with a man who wants me above all, who dreams of me. For whom touching me is his own dream. Just the dream. Pat’s happiness and the dream. Was it too much? 235 CONSIGNMENT MATERNITY Odile had learned that a pregnant woman in need of cheap vestments had precious few options in Scotts Valley, California. On the dim shelf that the trailer’s owner called a “standing desk,” she made lists of the thrift stores and church charity shops that she forced herself to visit at least once a week, her only trip out. In Aptos, there was Jet Set Bohemian, but they didn’t have much for the third trimester. Capitola had a Clothes Cottage, a place called Wardrobe, and one of those expensive chains with the beat-a-dead-horse name Motherhood Maternity, the only place she hadn’t gone yet. Santa Cruz was Odile’s best chance at decent consignment maternity, but she would not go to Santa Cruz. Biff and Staci lived there. Every Tuesday, they brought her groceries from a health food store called Staff of Life. They did not ask for lists, preferring, she supposed, to choose the Spartan staples that fed their unborn grandchild themselves. Odile drove to Motherhood Maternity and ventured past the champagne-colored façade. A red-faced saleswoman rushed to meet her at the door, clutching the neck of her cream cashmere shell as if Odile was there to slit her throat. She was in her fifties, past fertility, Odile thought, although you never could tell these days. Awoman like her own mother, emaciated from a lifetime of dieting, her brown eyes frantic and sad under a frozen bronze dome of hair. She clutched the neck of her cream cashmere shell as if Odile was there to slit her throat. The saleswoman waited for Odile’s panting to quiet—now that she was in her seventh month, it never really stopped, but she could decrease the volume if she focused—before addressing the top yellow button of the fatigue green sack dress that was one of Odile’s two workable outfits. 236 “Can I help you? Maybe you’re looking for our outlet? The nearest one is in Milpitas.” She made a curious stabbing gesture. “I would be happy to print out a map for you.” In Odile’s old life, she would have wrapped the saleswoman in a banner of invective, unpacking the stupidity of her assumptions with verve and style. She would have enjoyed it. Odile had worn the sack dress in her old life, too. Back then it had been a lovely bell around her curvaceous body, the giant earwaxy buttons interesting in their high ugliness. She wore her hair in a thick black shock, high and tight like a victorious pilot. But her old life was over, her hair was a damp grayish knob at the base of her neck, and the sack dress’s buttons gapped all the way down, revealing mouthfuls of pink bulge. Odile opened her mouth. Her eyes drifted to a rack of flimsy jersey scarves, $49.95 each. She backed out of the store. She cursed the whole way back. Her voice was her only music now; the radio in Biff and Staci’s ancient Volvo, the one they called “our old clunker,” had finally given out two weeks earlier. She was only eight years older than the car, Odile realised as she turned onto 17 for the climb up into the mountains. They could be sisters. In her old life, Odile had had everything. An apartment in her favorite neighborhood of Brooklyn with exposed brick and a breakfast nook, a custom-built Italian bicycle slender and silver as cutlery, her dream job in the development department of a prestigious concert hall. At thirty-two, she had accomplished the material goals that had motivated her since childhood, a fact that made her laugh delightedly several times a day. The cherry-on-top was Brin, her boyfriend, who was tall and bespectacled and taught graphic design and held her in his arms every night as they fell asleep. Overflowing with happiness, Odile had decided to take a spiritual 237 vacation alone to recalibrate her sense of herself and generate a new set of goals. Brin had helped her pick the destination, White Valley Retreat, a spa in the glowing red canyons of southern Utah where Odile had ruined her life. It was January. The canyons wore doilies of snow and the sky graded from white to cerulean. Every day of her two-week trip was scheduled from sunrise to sunset. Odile rose at six and dressed in the hiking outfit Brin had given her for Christmas, each piece from a different, superlative source. Boots from Milan, pants from British Columbia, oilskin jacket from Dublin, button-down shirts from London, thermal undershirts handmade in Charlotte, a sportsbra from Los Angeles. The care with which Brin had assembled this kit strongly suggested an impending marriage proposal. She should be happy, Odile thought as she laced up her boots in the dark. The fact that she was not, or rather that she was neither happy nor unhappy, she judged an inconsistency to be cured by fourteen days of clean living and fresh air. The first half of the day was a group hike. Chad, the sturdy local guide, was a twenty- three year old father of four with a loud laugh and a childlike habit of asking inappropriate questions. Most of the other guests were wealthy, mildly delusional middle-aged women who delighted in Chad’s habit of constantly photographing them. There were a few worn-out husbands, and one other man, who glimmered among them like an animal glimpsed through brush. The Landscape Architect. He fell into step beside Odile on the return leg of their hikes. They ate their aggressively healthy box lunches together on roseate boulders. He reminded her of boys she had gone to college with, fine young fellows full of angst and joy. Guys who liked concerts and video games and studying and partying and talking. Guys who liked everything. At twenty-four, he was six months out of the five-year program that had granted him both bachelor’s and master’s degrees 238 in his field. He was from some town out in California, a place with a delicate Spanish name where Odile had never been. Massive trees older than the oldest civilisation grew there, he told her. There were mountain lions, and ghosts, and dense shady hollows set back in the trees, where anything went and everyone was free. When they returned to the Retreat each day, the Landscape Architect drifted from Odile without a final word, as if the morning had been a mirage. She became impatient with the massages and facials and meditation sessions, with all the hours that separated her from the next hike, the next return, the next lunch. On the fourth day, the Landscape Architect pushed his bare ankle against Odile’s as they sat together. She flinched as if he had burned her. On the seventh, he convinced her to sneak out for dinner at a custard place recommended by Chad. The only childless people there, they ate absolutely quietly, swallowed in the clamor of babies and young parents. When he invited her into his room that night, Odile went without question, drawn by an unshakeable vision of the Landscape Architect’s inappropriate hiking outfit – blue-and-white-striped Baja hoodie, black jeans ripped across the left thigh, sleek tan leather shoes, Giants cap pulled low over his eyes – strewn across the giant pale bed that White Valley Retreat furnished each guest. On the last day, the Landscape Architect told Odile to take care of herself, with what she thought might be tenderness. She thought happily of returning to Brin and commended herself on the completion of another goal, a passionate desert jaunt with a stranger. Back to my real life, she thought as she watched the red ground recede from her plane window. And back she had gone, back to Brooklyn and her job and lovely Brin. For ten days Odile lived with the miraculous feeling of having escaped a great calamity. Her sense of righteous success even withstood her period’s failure to appear. 239 Maybe, since Brin was so lovely, he would understand. It still amazed Odile: how quickly everything she had built had deserted her. Before her first trimester was up, she had become the uneasy ward of Biff and Staci, the Landscape Architect’s stunned parents, who had installed her in the Scotts Valley trailer. They were paying for it. They were paying for everything, for which Odile hadn’t asked but was grateful. She planned to hoard her severance until the baby came, when time would begin again. Until then she felt passive and still as a mosquito in amber. “You didn’t have to leave your job.” Her mother’s unhappiness leaked through the phone. “Even if you messed everything up with Brin.” How could Odile explain it to her? It was like standing in front of the trailer’s tiny closet—a cabinet, really, and a poorly built one at that—with all of her old clothes hanging there, taunting her. The colorful silk dresses she had worn to parties, the Scottish and Icelandic sweaters Brin had bought her for the tough winters, and her favorite green silk robe, the one she liked to wrap up in with coffee and a book on Sunday mornings, while Brin read the Times in the blue cotton yukata she had given him for his thirty-third birthday. She couldn’t even close the shitty little closet. She saw everything in there all the time, day and night. It was almost three when Odile returned from Capitola, giving her only a few minutes to freshen up. She hurried into the trailer, struggling with the sack dress’s buttons. The one that just barely closed over her stomach came off in her hand. Odile tore off the dress, screaming 240 expletives and lunging for her last dress, the filmy blue she always wore for Owen, the Landscape Architect’s seventeen-year-old brother. Odile yanked the dress down over her body, hearing her own heavy breathing as she turned to the thin, smudged mirror that hung beside the bed. She looked nothing like herself, but the blue dress hugged her distended parts in a way that helped her believe he might see them as beautiful. She rubbed her last tube of red-orange lipstick across her cracked mouth. Owen looked nothing like the Landscape Architect. He was muscular and broad- shouldered, and his pale curls reminded her of pencil shavings. He came to the trailer once a week, on Wednesdays, the day after his parents’ morose delivery of rye bread and apples and sustainably-caught canned tuna. Owen always wore the same thing to their meetings, too: plastic slip-on sandals, black soccer shorts, and a white V-neck. The Landscape Architect, it was believed, was in France. Or South Korea. He had a job, Biff and Staci said. It was the only thing they would tell her about him. But Odile and Owen didn’t talk about his brother. They barely spoke at all. Their routine was sacrosanct. He knocked and she let him in. He declined her offer of water and waited as she drew herself a mug from the tap. She settled on the bunk, he in the plastic folding chair. They pretended to talk for a few minutes before Owen asked, “Do you mind?” “No,” Odile said. “It’s okay.” He pressed his giant hand against her stomach, fingers outstretched. Odile felt him through the dress, her eyes caught on his delta of chest hair, as the new person between them stretched and opened her eyes. 241 21 THINGS NOBODY TELLS YOU ABOUT BLOOD SLUDGE HELLO, DOWNERS GROVE! All right, ladies! Woo! Are we having a good time? I can’t hear you, I’m sorry. ARE WE HAVING A GOOD TIME? Most of you still refuse to answer the question, which is a shame. But I did hear you back there on the far right! What’s your name, pretty lady? Jacquelyn? Thank you for committing to having a good time, Jacquelyn! Toby, head over there and give Jacquelyn a beer koozie, on me. That’s on me, Jacquelyn. Hope you enjoy. For the rest of you Sour Sallies and Debbie Downers—Debbie Downers Grove, AM I RIGHT? Ah, now I see that you’re alive. I can hear the blood in your veins when you laugh, ladies! Don’t let that blood stop flowing! Don’t push your foot on the heartbrake! Do you like that? That one’s not actually a joke. It’s the name of a song by one Catherine “Kate” Bush of Sidcup, Kent, England, United Kingdom. My entrance music, in fact, if you were wondering. A lot of people have asked if it’s “Tubular Bells,” you know, the theme from The Exorcist. I guess I can see how they sound alike, especially since Toby cuts it off before Kate starts singing in that one-of-a-kind voice of hers. Toby, you think maybe we could tweak that? Just let it play until Kate gives her first squeak? Thanks! You’re a doll. Ladies, I’m here today to tell you that keeping the blood moving through your veins is your number one imperative. Your absolutely numero uno responsibility to yourself. Because you are the most important person you know. Did you know that? No one else. Not your kids, not your ex, not your husband, not your friend Molly who’s always calling you in tears. Not your god-love-‘em spoiled-to-death pets! You put everybody else ahead of yourself, and then what do you get? You get blood sludge. 242 Can you say it with me? BLOOD SLUDGE! What is blood sludge? What does that feel like? Can anybody tell me? Okay, you there in the center—you, with the black bangs and flowy blue skirt. I love how it matches your fringed shawl. Cute! Look at you—you’re doing your best, aren’t you? And I appreciate it. What’s your name? Francie? Ladies, can we get a hand for Francie doing her best? THANK YOU. I’m sorry, I drifted. I get so distracted by all of your fabulousness! Francie, did you want to tell us about blood sludge? What is it? You look like you know. Uh-huh. Did everybody hear Francie? Did anybody hear Francie? Just kidding, darlin’. You know the drill, Toby, koozie for Francie, because she is absolutely right! Already done? You’re the best, Tobesters! Francie told us that blood sludge is a terrible feeling, ladies, but not a simple one. It’s not sadness, or depression, or anxiety, or anger, although it has elements of every member of that fearsome foursome! It’s a kind of emptiness, Francie said. A way of knowing there’s nothing left to know. The sense that your life has become a series of morose and repetitive routines whose meaninglessness becomes more pronounced with every go-round. That all of your future— everything it contains, every new friend, every professional accomplishment, every move, every new apartment or house or houseboat to live in, every possible child or grandchild, every vacation—will ultimately add up to less than a whole. A case of diminishing returns. A quiet crisis, for really, there is no crisis, is there? Nobody’s sick, unless they are, nobody’s dying, unless they do, etc. It’s not the same thing as losing your house or your baby’s life. That’s blood panic, blood pain. Blood sludge is different. But just as deadly. 243 Blood sludge kills, ladies. And BLOOD SLUDGE KILLS LADIES! It is a leading cause of lady-death in our great nation. Don’t believe me? Then why are so many women addicted to pain pills? What phantom hurt got them there in the first place? Blood sludge. Why have life expectancies for poor women with low rates of education sunk, despite the fact that we live in the wealthiest country on earth? I mean, aside from the fact that our nation is long overdue for an old-fashioned proletariat uprising? Don’t get any ideas, Toby, ha ha! Why, all over the country, are hardworking women in their thirties and forties and fifties just dying, dropping out of the lives of the people who love them, leaving an overworked lump- shaped hole in the hearts of their friends and family? How many of you have lost a friend to blood sludge? A sister, a mother? I see the cost on your faces, in your wet eyes and cheeks. Too many tears. Put your hands down, ladies. Let’s condemn it, not count it. Blood sludge: the silent killer. We count your casualties in our wrung hands, in our sore low backs and aching knees. We see your cruelty in our fear of our own lives. Poor women are the most vulnerable, but blood sludge doesn’t discriminate. The rich survive longer because they can soothe it away with various unguents, that’s all. Everyone has their own measure of the disease. It makes us revile and flee the greatest power we are given at birth. The right to joy and the talent to find it. I wish you away, blood sludge. I banish you. Why do men seem to relax as they get older, settle in like comfortable leather armchairs, while so many of us winnow out on angst and lettuce leaves or swell up on crap food and fury, anesthetized by costume dramas and handicrafts and cat videos? How come, if you’ve managed 244 to avoid the pills and the booze and the needle and the smoke (or not), do you hit midlife and still want something to get addicted to, still yearn for oblivion in substantive form? Why can’t you seem to get away from wanting? For how many of us—I’m going to whisper this, because it makes even me feel bad—for how many of us has shopping become the thing that fills the empty space and distracts us from our blood sludge? How many of us have been made textbook examples of the very midlife stereotypes we hoped to avoid? Maybe this tiniest joy was even part of your decision to come here today: the thrill of buying the tickets, planning to get here, staying in a hotel. I know several of you are joining us today from Wisconsin and Michigan—so sorry I couldn’t make it to your great states on this tour! Next time, I promise!—and maybe it was a flinty little draw for you, buying your way here. Taking a little trip. Treating yourself. Or maybe, if you’re lucky—after a fashion, I guess—it’s exercise. The gym, that place that sounds so much like prison. They keep telling you it’s going to get better, that you’re going to feel great! They keep saying that after this umpteenth rotation on the updated torture device, you’re going to break through into pure joy. The “runner’s high,” maybe you’ve heard of it? I don’t know, ladies. I’ve only ever heard of it, never felt it. When I sweat, I feel wet, that’s all— and not in the good way. But maybe the gym works for you, or shopping does, or both. I’m not judging you. Everybody deserves something to look forward to. I just know we all deserve much, much more. Why isn’t there any blood sludge in France? French women don’t get blood sludge! Actually, I actually came straight from St. Tropez to be with you today, and I can tell you for sure that French women definitely get blood sludge. Don’t even get me started on the Brits. They practically invented it. The Germans have a very pragmatic way of dealing with it. The Russians 245 try to blast it out of their system with various extreme behaviors. In Brazil and the Philippines, it is most often treated with body modification. Blood sludge is global. Everywhere in the world, you ask the average woman if she’s happy, truly happy, and she looks at you like you caught her with her tampon string hanging out of her bikini bottoms. Been there, ladies! It’s okay to laugh, or to cry, or both—I see a lot of both right now, and that makes me happy! Not your unhappiness—that makes me sad—but the fact that you are unhappy with me. Because there is a solution, my dears, and I brought it here to today to share it with you! You are not damned to blood sludge. It’s your blood, it runs in your veins, it powers the machine that is you. You have a choice. You have power. You do! And by the time we’re done here today, you’re going to leave with such an improved sense of your own power that you’ll be able to get a boy to drink it right out of your body. Your blood, I mean. It will flow into his mouth easy as guava nectar, right from the source, you pick which one, it doesn’t matter, and the sludge will be nowhere to be found. You will have become an inhospitable environment. You will have chased it out! Your blood is going to run through you like fawns in springtime. Who am I talking about, boys drinking your blood? Not vampires, that’s for sure. I’ll come right out and say it, this conference room is a vampire-free zone! We also don’t have any passive-aggressive billionaires masquerading as dungeon masters, abusive bosses whose psychotic antics are somehow sexy, or princes of any variety here. We’re talking about a much more common and delicious male type, a natural resource that’s all around you, just waiting, if you only know how to access it. And you will. Ladies, I am here today to tell you about your own power. I’m here to tell you that you have it! Yes you do, ladies. You have it in spades and droves and kittens and combs, that is abso- 246 fucking-lutely certain. What? Why do you look surprised? Did some man tell you he didn’t like it when you swore? Didja just want to say, Fuck you, Paul? I see a lot of nodding. Fuck you, Paul! Say it with me, say it proud. FUCK YOU, PAUL! Ladies, I have been there! Let’s remember that he doesn’t matter. Paul ain’t got shit. Because there is a species of man—of boy, we’re going to call them boys, don’t let me get off my own script, although I am of course engaged on the issue of getting off, me or you, ha ha— there is a species of boy who does not give one single flying fuck how many f-bombs you drop. There is a species of boy for whom your sweat is absolute motherfucking ambrosia. Because to him you are one. A goddess. You have that power. It’s inside you. You don’t need a makeover or vaginal rejuvenation surgery or new shoes or a goddamn cold-pressed juice fast to get at it. You have it right there with you, right now. In you. To access it you just need to learn a few things. Things I’m here to teach you. Ladies, I am a teacher and a leader. These roles are my path to fulfillment in this life. In my last go-round on this crazy orb, I may have been a humble Venetian cobbler, piecing together beautiful shoes for the illegitimate daughters of the Doge, sweet girls destined by cruel dint of their birth to become courtesans for his cronies. In the one before that, I may have been the Neolithic shamanness who alone could climb into the mammoth’s skull and become the voice of the Great Sky, who led my people across the ice bridge to the other place. In the life before that, I was a sage in a culture so long lost that it lives only in the memories of stones and water, but in this life I am a goddamn teacher and a motherfucking leader! It’s true! It’s all true. I am true. To you. No, no applause, but thank you, it does mean a lot to me. Thank you. 247 You guys! You’re the best. I am a teacher and leader only because I know two things that you will leave here knowing too, ladies. And those things are: how to find a boy, and how to keep him. I’m not talking about keeping a boy in the way some other less imaginative people talk about keeping a man. No ma’ams, plural! No, I mean keeping like you keep your kitties and puppies. I mean keeping him happy and safe so that he comes and eats right out of your hand. I mean bringing him to you and keeping him there because he doesn’t want to leave. But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, we need to establish what a boy is, how to recognize one, and all that magic jazz. Toby, can I get a cue to “All That Jazz”? Just kidding, Toby, don’t freak out, we’re still on plan. Play my next cue, will you? Okay, okay, ladies, anybody know that song? Are we sensing a theme here? That was “Moving,” also by the incredible Kate Bush, the first song off her 1978 debut The Kick Inside. Kate was nineteen years old when the album was released. She had been working on it since she was thirteen. Six years of adolescence! That’s precocious persistence, my lovelies. That’s how long it takes to make a work of art. I hope to inspire you to follow Kate’s lead and believe in your own interior voice and keep going. Towards your boy, who is going to make you feel as ecstatic as Kate sounds when she hits those high notes. Get your butt out here, Toby, it’s your time to shine! Ladies, please allow me to introduce Toby Green. Toby is not short for Tobias; his parents named him Toby, only. Toby hails from Tacoma, Washington, where his mom is a fourth-grade teacher and his dad is a police officer. He has a little sister, Becca, who’s still in high school, if you can even believe that. He went to a little college in California whose name I 248 always forget, where he majored in something called Media Studies. Don’t think that existed when I was in school, ladies! Toby’s from a different generation. He’s twenty-six years old but looks about nineteen, am I right? If you can believe it, he looked even younger when I first met him. He was twenty- two but looked about sixteen. I had never seen anyone quite so yummy. Don’t blush, Toby. Or do. It suits you. Look, ladies, I never bought into the whole cougar thing. I think the term’s bullshit, to be frankly honest. I don’t mean to offend any of you who might have found the idea liberating or fun, or used it to find some primed young man company for an evening or two. I don’t begrudge you any joy you find in this life. But the cougar thing? It’s dehumanizing, for one thing. Cougars are beautiful animals, but they’re animals. You are not. When you think the word, you don’t even see a stunning wild cat anymore, do you? You see a gussied-up Jill in her late fifties. Spray-tanned décolletage in a low-cut black jersey dress and cheap pumps. She does her own highlights with a kit from the drugstore and subsists on a diet of clementine segments and canned tuna packed in water, not oil. There she is at the bar, behind the girls in their twenties who at least want to be there, propping herself just so to catch the eye of some juiced-up weirdo beefcake named Derrick or Milt. Some handsome sad sack out for his own self, looking for a story to tell their borderline psychotic bros in the weight room, or a hetereoerotic cover to loosen them into their truer desires a little later, in the sauna. Oh, ladies! There I go again. I shouldn’t be so harsh on these imaginary cougar-seekers. Whatever frees their own blood is kosher, is it not, especially if Jill is happy, if she has a good time? Aren’t we all just humans on this crazy spinning blue globe, seeking a little succor before the hammer comes down? We only get one go-round, remember. But the thing that sticks in my 249 craw is that the cougar label has nothing to do with the woman to whom it is applied. If she chooses to embrace it and embody it, she’s still plugging into a storyline written without her specific needs in mind. She’s stepping into a generic space, learning lines and blocking scenes laid out by a man who had to twist his mind into a joke to imagine how an older woman could be sexy. That’s claptrap, as I imagine Kate Bush might say. Claptrap, my good man! Toby, is that funny? Aw, Toby. I love to hear you laugh. Your sexiness is in you, irremovable from your you-ness. It doesn’t degrade or ebb with age. What does recede, sadly, is too many ladies’ ability to feel and know their own appeal. But it doesn’t have to. It’s not natural. Nothing is natural. The notion of naturalness relies on teleology, and in this room we do not give into the weak-minded notion of a linear, teleological worldview. We believe something different. I’ll get back to that in a minute. Don’t let me forget! Toby, where did we meet? That’s right, the Reed College bookstore. I remember it like it was yesterday, the fluorescent lights, the stack of Noam Chomsky tomes. Noam tomes, ha ha, sorry! I had never been to Portland before and never have since. I was there for a kind of writing conference. I used to try to be a writer, before I figured out my purpose in this life, back when I worked in customer service for the phone company in a big red brick building in a suburb of Chicago just like this one. I took smoke breaks at eleven, two, and four every day. I put on my big black parka, the one I’d had for a million years, the one with salt stains on the bottom hem that got just a little bit more raggedy every winter, and struggled out into the miserable cold to watch beat-up cars navigate past the gray curb-boulders of frozen snow. I smoked hard, imagining the little lines taking shape around my mouth. I knew I wasn’t supposed to like the little lines, but I did. They 250 meant something was happening, at least, time was passing, and I was changing myself, even in a bad way, even in a way that made me less beautiful. I wanted those little lines. I thought of them as tiny knives, cutting up my face. Doing something, for chrissakes. Oh, the blood sludge, ladies. I had it bad. You have no idea. I had four pairs of pleated khakis and two blazers, one gray and one black, and, on the advice of my personal shopper, twelve wrinkle-resistant oxford shirts in fun colors. To brighten me up, she said. I had a knee-length black cocktail dress I wore to weddings, a sack with sleeves made of, yup, in my karmic retribution for being mean to imaginary Jill, you guessed it, jersey. I had a gray-and-green plaid sundress, a sack without sleeves, that I wore with a big floppy straw hat on those days in summer when I wanted to feel like the sun shone for me. But it never did. I tried it all, don’t think I didn’t! I joined the book club. I joined the garden club. I took a cooking class. I took a swimming class. I went to church. I went to five different motherfucking churches, and their singles events, too! I Jazzercised at the community center. I took bus trips to national parks and cruises to Alaska and the Caribbean. And all of it just stuffed me deeper down in my black garbage bag coat and held the cigarettes to my mouth like a third hand. My blood swelled and heaved in my veins. Soon I was going to be dead. I knew it. I felt it. They’d zip the bag up for good and slide my drawer into the wall and lock it. Just like that. That was how it would happen. I knew it. Everything I did was an attempt to not know it, to think that there was some point, some meaning. If I said I never thought about ending my life, I would be lying to you. The writing workshop at Reed was another attempt to make it all fall in line. To make it make sense. Listen, I was trying to do this the responsible way. I didn’t buy into the cougar claptrap, as I said. I had been divorced for seven years at this point. Maybe you’ve read about it 251 in the book, but I was married at twenty-four to a fine fellow named Hector. Toby, can we show the picture from the wedding? There it is. Hector was so handsome, wasn’t he? Me, meanwhile, yeesh. Why did we all think strapless gowns were the way to go? We had the reception at a banquet hall in Norridge. I hated the outside of the building—you might know it, it has a tiny leaning Tower of Pisa on top—but I fancied the inside almost Mediterranean. Wax grapes, jugs of Gallo red poured into discolored faux brass decanters, Jordan almonds in little net bags, etcetera. I bought into classical allusions back then. I thought my husband, a son of the Quad Cities, as fine and chivalrous and honorable as the son of Priam and Hecuba, and I wasn’t wrong. He was not a bad man. He was even what most would call a good husband, I think. But ultimately we were two people who made each other more unhappy than we did happy, which is a bitter thing to know. Like salted ice in the mouth. It took us seven years to learn it. To figure out the nasty taste on the back of the tongue. The whole time I was Hector’s wife, I believed that we were engaged in a meaningful quest to know more about one another, to grow closer in understanding. I believed that it was possible for two people to resolve the tension of initial attraction into an unbreakable golden bond, a marriage of agápē and érōs both. And perhaps this is possible, but not for Hector and me. He started working all the time, taking every out of town trip the tire dealership would give him. I had an indiscretion with the man who taught my writing for children workshop at the community center. Hector never found out, but still. One day in February, we couldn’t look away from it anymore. We were over. Our divorce left me feeling as exposed as a nomad in a torn tent. Hence the subsequent seven years of shitty board work. If I hadn’t met Toby, I think I would have gone to a sperm 252 bank next. Not because I did or didn’t want to be a mother. I had simply become convinced that motherhood might be the only emotionally deepening sensual experience left to me. But even that was freighted with fear, and sadness. I knew it wasn’t the right idea—having a baby just for the sake of it. I wasn’t even sure I could. I wanted to want something, but it didn’t seem that there was anything left to want. And then I went to Reed. I didn’t care much for the conference, which was the usual conglomeration of women like me looking for people to feign interest in their sadness. There was a bar that sold eight-dollar beers, and readings every night where people who had accomplished their dreams stemmed us out on hits of their own success, and a pack of young people writhing and climbing over each other for the chance at a few stolen moments of illicit fun. Most of them were so young that they didn’t yet understand how brief an interlude their youth would be, how quickly it would recede in deference to the great vacuum of tasks that is adult life. Oh, ladies, you can even hear it in my voice. How bad the blood sludge had gotten. Even now, removed from it, I can feel the ache, the way it made me stiff all over. Oh, Toby, you’re too sweet. Thank you. You see, my friends? The night was darkest before the dawn. If you had told me four years ago that I would be on stage in front of all of you now, with this handsome young man embracing me and handing me a mentholated tissue for my runny nose—well, I would have told you that you were nuts. But you’re not, and I’m not, and there is a way forward. A better way. When I first saw him, Toby was manning the register at the bookstore, carefully building a contraption out of folded paper, a kind of Rube Goldberg machine. A quarter dropped in the top tube underwent a series of charming little transitions through a pinwheel, a catapult, and so on. It was really quite clever. I stopped to watch it, forgetting whatever it was I wanted to buy or 253 ask. As the quarter went through its construction-paper maze, I thought of nothing other than the childlike excitement of what would happen next. It wasn’t until much, much later, when I was lying in Toby’s extra-long twin—oh yes, ladies, we are getting there, we will go there!—that I remembered this important first step. For us, it is the first rule. I know most of you have read the book and this will not come as a surprise, so maybe we should just all call it out at the same time. Toby’s ready with the Powerpoint, because he’s just the best. The first rule is REMOVAL FROM CONTEXT OR “MAGIC MOMENT.” That’s your first step, ladies. I didn’t know mine was coming. I had no idea. But happiness isn’t a football that hurtles at you. You can create it for yourself. All it takes is a step back. When you let go of all of the strain and hurt of your daily life, you can access beauty and meaning anywhere. My anywhere just happened to be a fanciful device constructed by a bright young man in the Reed College bookstore. And as I watched the quarter make its way through its unlikely physics-defying route, I felt genuine excitement, genuine interest—those precious gems of aliveness. Already the sludge was losing its grip on me. There’s no shortage of places the magic moment can occur, ladies. It can be a place you already love to go lose yourself, the museum, the movies, even the gym, but I encourage a departure from routine. It doesn’t have to be fancy. A bus you’ve never ridden before, a walk through a part of town with no sidewalks. Just take yourself out of your context and into the realm of the possible. Remember that the possible is real. It exists and breathes just as you do. When you feel yourself exist and breathe with it—when you feel your purpose as just those two things, and not any of the crap you’re normally freighted down with—then we’re really talking. Then it’s time for the second rule, which came as much of a surprise to me as the first. 254 In the Reed College bookstore, I looked up for the wondrous device of paper and quarter—the latter having made its final deposit into a large glass jar whose purpose remains obscure to me now as it was then—and into the friendly brown eyes of one Toby Green. I didn’t know his name yet, of course. Reed College is too iconoclastic to issue employee nametags. But I knew he was handsome and smiling, a combination that up until that moment seemed to be lost to me forever. When do we accept that, ladies? That feeling that beauty and desire are somehow not allowed anymore, not granted us? That a young man’s loveliness must somehow be measured against our own, squared, earned? Why? The second rule is QUICK RIGHT ACTION OR “JUST DO IT.” What did that mean for me and Toby? It meant I reached across the counter and took his slim wrist in my hand, just like that. Without even thinking I shut down the part of my brain that would restrict that action, I turned it off, and I reached and took Toby’s wrist in my hand where it hung there over the jar and his Goldberg machine and held onto it for dear life. I didn’t know why I was holding it, exactly. I only knew that I wasn’t about to let go. In that minute, dear ladies, I decided that I would let go of everything else, if need be. My burgundy 1999 Hyundai Sonata with the tan leather interior, my neo-Tuscan two-bedroom in Vernon Hills, my membership in the outdoor exploration meetup group, my Costco card, my yearly trip to visit my aunt Betsy in Destin, Florida. It doesn’t sound so great, does it? It wasn’t. I was right to want to chuck it all. Of course it wasn’t that simple. The car I recognized as a tool of my own agency, and so I kept it. The house took two and a half years to sell, and the people who bought it basically stole it from me— but what was I expecting? It had always been too big for me. I choose to think of it like this: the 255 universe compensated me for the portion of the house I truly occupied. The rest of it was lost to me, empty space, and so I was wrong to expect to be paid for rooms that would have held only my surfeit of things, a gallery of possessions I lazily defended by purchasing larger and larger spaces to in which to house it. Everything else could fall away. Everything else did fall away. I took Toby’s wrist in my hand, and what did I say, Toby? What did I say? I’m sorry, ladies, Toby is not miked. Why don’t we mike you, Toby? Another note for next time, let’s remember, cut intro music a few measures later, and mike Toby. Thank you, Toby—I know you don’t love being onstage like this. Thanks. You can go get the next cue set up while I share what you said with the ladies. Ladies, a hand for Toby! The lights are coming down, ladies. We’re sinking into darkness to watch Ms. Bush’s “Babooshka” video, which I like to screen at this point in the evening or afternoon or morning or whatever the hell time it is—two-forty-five? Who knew? AM or PM? Who cares?—to emphasize my point. What Toby said just now—what I said to Toby back then—was, “Let’s get out of here.” And then: “Do you have a place we can go?” He had a place we could go, my friends. Roll film, Toby! Let’s take a little break and enjoy. That song just brings me to life! I hope you feel the same way, ladies. Maybe some of you are discovering Ms. Bush’s oeuvre for the first time today. If so, I’m so glad I could make the introduction! I hope you find her music useful. I certainly have. It’s hard to pick a favorite among her albums, and downright impossible to pick a favorite of her songs, but Never For Ever 256 is close. I show “Babooshka” here because it illustrates an important turning point in Kate’s career and in my message today. You see how sexy she is in that video, how free? That exotic costume like the glittering sails of a ship billowing on the mast of her body. For the casual Kate Bush fan, the success of “Babooshka” might be said to be her career highpoint, after her breakout success with “Wuthering Heights,” of course. “Babooshka” reached number five on the British singles chart, and the video established Kate as a bit of a sexy tart, which was a pleasant surprise to men who’d been baffled by her modern dance-heavy videos, all of her swishing about in scarves and bodysuits, none of which seemed to leave much room for them. The song was a creative turning point, but not because the video confirmed that Kate was a regulation hottie, as the lead character in a certain film from my youth might have said. No, “Babooshka” matters because Never For Ever was the last album before The Dreaming, the first that Kate produced by herself, which she called her “She’s gone mad” album. On The Dreaming, we go much deeper into a sonic realm of mythic feeling. It’s a very theatrical record. You descend into an emotional underworld with no assurance that you can return. It’s a lock-the-door-and-throw-away-the-key kind of album, one that demands you put your fear aside, take a deep breath, and dive under the water. And on the way there we get this delightful, deceptively light video in which Kate herself dramatizes the bifurcation of her identity between black-cloaked crone and resplendent succubus. Which brings me to my third and final rule, ladies. The last rule for keeping a boy. Perhaps the only one that truly matters. GO TO THE SECRET PLACE WITHIN AND RETRIEVE YOUR ACTING SELF. Discard my seminar, discard the Doubletree Downers Grove, forget your koozies beneath the seats. Toby will collect them. Do not buy my book, or do, or buy it and return it, or steal one 257 from the merch table; Miranda, my niece who runs it, has been instructed not to pursue obvious thieves. I want to free you, ladies. I want you to go into the world of your favorite song. I want you to flicker between identities like Kate in “Babooshka” there, and then I want you to leave this room feeling that flickering still within you and go into the streets and have your “She’s gone mad” album. Make it now. Your “She’s gone mad” album is your life. You’ve only got one, which causes me such pain. I don’t know how I manage it. I’m going to tell you what to do. I’m going to tell you how to get to the place where no one will disregard your pain again. I’m going to tell you how to make a man drink your sweat like wine. I’m going to tell you how to make him like it better than wine. I’m going to give you the power you already have inside you. But that’s only what worked for me. Maybe it won’t for you. Maybe it’s not a boy you need. Maybe that’s just what I think. What is a wizard? The principal of my elementary school used to ask. A wizard is someone who gives you something you already had, but you wouldn’t have known you had it unless the wizard gave it to you. This phrase never made any sense to me. Our mascot was the wizard, a friendly triangular line drawing of one, anyway, and I didn’t see how the drawing of a bearded man in a peaked cap could give me something I already had. I still don’t understand. I never came to understand how anyone else could save me. I only came to understand that it was possible to save myself. Or no. I’m lying. It is impossible to save yourself. It is impossible to save anyone, just as it is impossible to fly, or to make whole again with love that which has been rent by time and neglect and pain. All we have are our bodies and their memories, their memories of pain and 258 pleasure. Pleasure, body-joy. It may be the only true kindness humans can give one another. It may be the only place you can go together. Your acting self is the doer of quick right action. Your acting self is the self that takes your Toby’s wrist in hand and allows itself to be led back to his narrow dorm room. Your acting self is the one who lies on the tiny bed and braces herself for a pleasure she knows will pass. Your acting self closes her eyes and tells herself to memorize this. Your acting self sends away fear, sends away regret. Your acting self has power. Your acting self may have said she didn’t want to go swimming, but she still wanted to be tossed into the pool. Your acting self’s eyes well with tears at Toby’s gentle ministrations. He laps like a kitten between your acting self’s legs and you press your hand against the base of his skull. Your acting self remembers that she can swallow him like a venus flytrap swallows a fly, like a snake swallows a mouse, like the earth swallows a corpse. Your acting self remembers that she has the power also to do none of these things, to leave the beautiful young man as he is when he wishes her to leave him. Your acting self knows that people lie and desires change and colors fade, but she also knows that, just as pleasure may be the only kindness humans do each other, desire may be the only truth. Desire is of the moment and life is long. The conflict is implicit. You have to make a choice. I am telling you which choice to make. Do not disregard the pull of your desire and the succor of your pleasure. Be the succubus sailing on her mast of skin and bone. Find the young man whose body liquefies under your hands, whose nose runs and orifices squeak in his eagerness to get to you. Find the man whose submission to your desire comes in the form of aggressive lust. Seize on that sudden, delicious moment. Memorize it with your hands. Scratch it into Braille on your skin. 259 Find the pattern of touch that presses the blood in your veins out of sludge and into sluicing thin liquid, sweet and fine as currant juice. Watch him press his mouth to the source. I want to free you, ladies, but I don’t have all the answers. I can only tell you to fear the monsters, the blood sludge and the loss, and to look to the lights, Kate Bush and Toby’s Rube Goldberg machine and a foam covering to keep your can of beer cold, for if the beer stays cold until it’s gone, isn’t that answer enough? Isn’t that, after all, what we’re hoping for? In my favorite song, “Suspended in Gaffa.” Kate sings, “They've told us / Unless we can prove / That we're doing it / We can't have it all.” Can you prove it, ladies? Can you keep your very own boy? Can you have it all? You’ll have to excuse me, ladies. I get a bit winded when I’ve been wound up like that. A little teary. I am really just an old lady after all. Thank you for bringing the chair out, Toby, and for this wonderful coconut water. You really are such a dear. I hope you’ll forgive me if I stay seated from here on out, ladies. Close your eyes. We’re almost done. Toby’s going to bring the lights back down and cue up “How To Be Invisible” for you now, one of Kate’s newer songs, to help with your transition back to the outside world. Take her advice. There is a way. You can move toward your desires without anyone ever knowing. You and only you can keep the sludge from your blood. You are the wizard who can give yourself the boy you did not know you needed. You are the alchemist who can transform your body’s every fluid into something your boy cannot live without. Into the cure without which none of us—without which the world—cannot survive. You’ve been amazing, Downers Grove! Goodnight! 260 THE WHITE ROOM 1 The room is rented. It doesn’t belong to you. It is nicely anonymous, even luxurious, the kind of rustic that the internet has made famous: high, unadorned walls, a beamed ceiling with a triangular window well above anyone’s line of sight hung with a gauzy white curtain. Everything—the walls, the beams, even the hardwood floor—is immaculately white. There isn’t much furniture. A long empty table against one wall, a white door on white sawhorses. Against the other stands a tall white bed with a white iron frame, bars on the headboard, the bed made with ironed, much-washed sheets, four pillows in pillowcases, and a thick down comforter in a duvet cover. Beside, a tall white lamp. Sometimes the room is more like a hotel room, with a slim flatscreen mounted above the table and a small closet in one wall. Sometimes it’s messier, with piles of clothes and books of poetry, smudged half-empty cups of water on the floor, a pair of glasses lost under the bed. But the room stays white. A place made for staining. If there’s a door, you don’t know where it is. 2 Who is he? You couldn’t pick him out of a lineup, would struggle to describe him to another person. His height, his weight, even the shape of his body: unfixed. His face is blurry when you try to look at it. In shadow his skin is swarthy, blue-dark, but in the scanty light from the high window it rounds up rosy, pale, alabaster. His hair shades from black to pale, hangs in his face or disappears. Wet with sweat, it curls. 261 You try to urge the man into a familiar image, your friend, your coworker, your teacher, your student, your uncle’s best buddy, the guy at the gas station, the waiter who’s always nice to you, the produce clerk who leads you to the avocadoes at the grocery store, the tall foreigner with the impossibly fragrant cologne you once passed on the street, the college boy who helped teach you high school French, the grown man who paid you to tutor him for an important professional test, the kid who smiles at you in the bookstore, the friend’s son you watched grow from a waddling baby into a skinny, taunting adult. You could organize these men on a gradient, a timeline. Try to plot him on it. Sometimes he is one of these people. You can force him into that shape for a few minutes, half an hour, once. But then something distracts you, some feel takes you, and he is faceless again. Most of the time it doesn’t matter. You need his lips and tongue and eyes and nose. You don’t need to see them. Then over hours it creeps on you, that sense of being lost, of needing a referent. The horrible sensation from dreams of losing your sight. Your peripheral vision blacks first, and then you can’t see in front of you, as in ocular migraine. Waving your right hand in front of your face, trying to see. Like the recurring nightmare that comes just before waking in which you live in a tunnel, careening and blind, and the world hurtles past in mundane asteroids. You try to find his features. You can’t. But the white room is not a nightmare. The man’s blurriness is a sign of his acquiescence. Of your power. Who cares if his face is only dimly glimpsed? You are not there to look at each other. 262 3 You come here from elsewhere. A curtain of dense red velvet is drawn between your life and the white room. In your life you step out of your day clothes and into your nightclothes. You brush your hair back from your face, pin it at the nape of your neck, bow your head to clean your teeth and skin. You go to the bedroom and slip into bed. If it’s a cold night, you might sleep in a sweatshirt and pajama pants, or just a t-shirt and the pants. More often it’s just the t-shirt and a pair of underwear, or more often still no nightclothes at all, only your own sweet humming skin. You pull the covers up, tuck your hands between your thighs, and close your eyes. The lights are put out. Then you’re there on the edge of the tall white bed. The man found you, sought you out. He knew what to say to get you to the white room. He recognized a tendency in you, a habit of lingering, and spoke the unlocking words. A spell you don’t know, couldn’t repeat. 4 You sit beside him on the bed. Or maybe you stand facing him, next to the desk. You are nervous and casual, drumming fingers on the comforter, humming a little. There is no small talk in the white room. “I’ve noticed something about you,” he says. “Oh?” “I can tell that you think about it all the time.” There’s no point in asking what he’s talking about. “It’s fine. It’s normal. What, are you embarrassed?” 263 Maybe you blush. His hand floats to your face. “Why are you flushing?” “It’s involuntary,” you tell him. “Big word.” You’ve heard this before. Your face shows your lack of interest. He will have to try harder. “I don’t think it’s involuntary. I think you do it on purpose.” You lean in. “How would I do that? Why?” His hand goes to your neck, cups the curve there. “Because it looks good. C’mon.” 5 The first kiss is good. His tongue rubs yours, twists against it, triggers an adolescent memory. The first time you felt desire in your mouth, hot and hopeful. That’s what we lose, that’s what goes away, hope, mistakenly thought to be urgency. Excitement of the new. Joy at the idea it will continue. He breaks the kiss by taking a handful of your hair and drawing your head back. “No dark thoughts,” he says. You look at him. “Sex is dark thoughts.” “Not that kind of darkness.” He tightens his grip on your hair and everything inside you stops. He’s good. This is something he does, you think with relish. What you wanted. An expert. “Look,” he says. “I want to mess around. Okay?” “Okay.” You are aware of your shortened breath. The room swims. “You first.” 264 “What?” He releases your hair. You lunge to kiss again, but he pulls out of your reach. “You gotta tell me,” he says. “What we’re going to do.” You cock your head, a question. “What I’m going to do,” he says. You don’t blush this time. “Bite my neck,” you say. “Hickeys.” 6 He bends his head, takes a mouthful of your skin, and pulls it against his teeth with his tongue until a red spot grows behind your closed eyes. Hickeys. Love bites. Spit-swabbed wounds, impossible to cover or ignore. Has there ever been anything better than hickeys? The little throbbing wound left under your chin by teeth that want your blood. A wonderful tree of bruises bloomed into your life around your fifteenth birthday. By the time you were twenty-five they wilted on the vine. Other women tell you they hated them. Such a pain in the ass to cover the damn things with turtlenecks or awkwardly tied scarves or caked makeup. So inconsiderate. What did men think these other women were, teenagers? You loved them. Marks that said mine. The idea of being marked. You were the thing marked mine. Blood vessels burst under his sharp teeth, spreading an uneven purple cloud of bruise across your neck, beautiful and sore. You become just the skin in his mouth, your brain drifting beneath the surface of a pink sea. 265 Then he stops. You are used to sadness, but it surprises you every time: how quickly it rushes in to fill everything up. 7 “Put your hand on me,” he says. You put your hand on his shoulder, a warm round bone that fits into your palm, and he laughs. “Not there.” You are both clothed, but like his face the clothes are impossible to fix. You’re wearing whatever. The oxford shirt, jeans, and suede brogues you wear to work. A sundress and sandals. Black leggings, a black blouse, black shoes, and black eyeliner, what you put on when you need, desperately, to feel like yourself. It could be something overtly sexy, a backless dress or short- shorts, the kind of trashy teenage costume you love but rarely wear anywhere but your bedroom. But normally it isn’t, and why would it be? The white room isn’t a place where clothes stay on. What he wears matters even less. Pants and a shirt. Maybe jeans. A suit. He wants you to touch the delta of his crotch, where an erection strains against his fly. He hasn’t laid a hand on your body save for your face and neck and your waist, which he used to steady himself during the hickey, but now he invites you to grope the most obvious part of his own. He doesn’t have to ask twice. For what have you loved more than the feeling of an erection through pants? You have loved the fleshy bas-relief from your first initiation into the unsubtle charms of the hard penis. You loved it poking into your sixteen-year-old thigh as you love it now cupped under your left hand, warm and insistent. You lower your head and rub, nosing him, pushing the round end into 266 your cheek, feeling grateful. You can smell his loamy scent through his pants. Or maybe you can’t. Maybe it’s just sweat, or your own smell. You tongue the fabric. “Okay.” He lays his palm down on your neck. You search out the fly, bracing yourself against a childhood terror: teeth against zipper. “Not yet,” he says. You immediately sit back up, rigid as an ironing board. You don’t want to do anything he doesn’t want. You are well trained. You have learned through long and painful experience how badly this can go. Everything can change now. You can be lifted out of the room as you have so many others, a yanked puppet, and every single pleasure can be taken from you, locked away in a high cabinet, the key melted and remade into a bullet loaded into the gun that hangs on the wall above it. But you thought that this wouldn’t be an issue here in the white room, that you wouldn’t find yourself doing the same thing you always end up doing. Pleading with a man for sex. All of the tapes begin to play in your head at once. You’re not beautiful enough, not thin enough, not young enough, not interesting enough, you didn’t let him start the way he wanted, you should have tried watching porn first, he’s probably just tired, men always want sex in the morning but women want it in the evening (is it the evening? No way to tell in the white room), men like to be in control, give him his space, don’t be so pushy, just don’t think about it. So many people have told you: honestly, I think you just think about it too much. You lean back, away from him, as far away as you can get. You think about a door. None appears. Maybe the white room isn’t what you thought it was. Maybe it’s just normal. The world. You smell his hand before you feel it smooth your hair. Spit. 267 “It’s my turn,” he says. 8 He undresses you. He isn’t rough, or mean; he doesn’t strip you, or rip your clothes, as happens in certain ridiculous films (is that sexy? you always wonder, watching the actress peel off her torn cocktail dress). He is thorough and focused. Coolly brutal, if you will. It’s another thing you’ve been looking for: brutality. Too many men have confused this desire for a kind of limp masochism. You’ve never been disciplined enough to be a true masochist, or sadist, for that matter. But true masochism isn’t what your hapless lovers have expected; instead, they have fumbled for a kind of porno masochism. A woman in a not-too-tight headlock begging for it from behind, calling some blank-eyed penisbearer “Sir.” That’s not it, either. You can play at that, but it’s like crab stick in a California roll. It gets the job done, but you know the difference. What you’ve been after is what’s happening now. A man’s full attention. Nothing else behind his eyes but the sight of you. No tentativeness, no confusion. He takes off your clothes in the order you put them on, unbuttoning your shirt, undoing and unzipping your fly, until you stand before him in a bra and underwear. You stare at the white wall, trying to keep your breath. Something will go wrong now, you’re sure. You have learned to always temper excitement with caution. In darker moments you’ve considered finding a man for this very purpose. And it has been the very thing that has prevented you from doing so, because what man—what high school classmate, barfly, supervisor with boundary issues, shut-in neighbor—could be counted on to do what this man is now? To strip you bare and then just look for a second with wet eyes? 268 “On your knees,” he says. 9 Giving oral sex from a kneeling position is a banality you’ve elevated to sacred rite. You grind your kneecaps into the hard floor and unzip his fly, expecting every moment to be told to stop. But the command doesn’t come. He says nothing at all. You hear only his breathing, slow and steady. You reach in and pull out his cock. On the internet, you once found an amazing image: a bouquet of erect penises, thirty or forty all edited together, circumcised and not, every shade of skin at every possible angle. An image created for bachelorette parties and email pranks. But you found the dick bouquet deeply moving. You couldn’t find them funny, the cocks massed there like that. They were lovely and vulnerable. Some women, you realized, have actually seen that many. When you were younger you felt a certain pride at your relatively limited experience, but now it just seems like another failure. Your eye was drawn to the thick vein on the underside of each disembodied flower-cock, the squiggly line of pleasure you love to trace with your tongue. This penis is very nice, exactly the right size. Although there is obviously no right size. Aside from one lover, you’ve never taken issue with any man’s dimensions. All penises are strange and otherworldly. Each is touching in its way. Like holding someone’s heart in your hands. You got that from some book, long before you ever saw one: a cock in your palm is like holding somebody’s heart in your hand. You liked that. Said it to your first boyfriend when you did it for the first time. You don’t remember his reaction. 269 You close your mouth on him, feel him harden slightly, twitch. It makes you want to cry. You find the vein with your tongue. He puts his hand on the back of your head and holds you there, gently at first, then unyieldingly. You labor and labor under his hand, gasping for breath and repressing your gag reflex. You open wide and wider. His breathing deepens. Sometimes he readjusts your head or moves your hand, which you appreciate. Your favorite thing is just to suck and lick and bob. Your favorite thing is your job. This work. His hand is unrelenting. Your neck starts to hurt. White paint flakes up under your knees. Time is passing around the two of you. Close your eyes. Memorize this. Taste the salty musk. Swallow your spit. Inhale. 10 He pulls you off by your hair, puts his hand under your chin, and tilts your face up. You see his eyes in a blinking, rotating aura. Blue. “I wanna be nice to you for a while now. Make out with you and shit like that.” “Okay.” “Okay?” “Yes. I’d like that.” You stand, stretch, and sit on the bed. He takes your face in his hands and kisses you until there’s nothing left, his thumbs grinding into the red lace cups of your bra. He gropes everything, the doughy rise of your tummy, your flattened thighs, their white down. He jams one hand into the crease between your thigh and labia and just pushes, reminding you of the most wonderful 270 day when you were twenty and a boy touched you like that and you died and died again of good feeling. He puts his hand in your hair and closes it in a fist, pulling against your scalp. He takes your earlobe between his thumb and forefinger and presses hard until you see a purple spark. Then he twists it, hard. Before you can say it—I thought you were going to be nice—he thrusts his mouth and licks and licks and you’re fourteen again and a boy is showing you what his tongue can do to your ear. Between your legs you pulse and spurt. It’s fucking perfect. He pulls away from you, sniffs the air, rubs the hand against your crotch until it comes away damp. He raises the hand to his face and breathes. “Fucking perfect,” he hisses, pulling your hair. 11 The bra comes off easy. He hooks his thumbs into the waistband of your underwear and takes them down. He takes off whatever he’s wearing, drapes his jacket over a chair, unbuttons the dress shirt, slips the t-shirt over his head. Steps out of his pants. You see him briefly in his underwear—briefs boxer briefs boxers—and then they’re gone, too. You’re both in your flesh suits, and he’s on top of you. In the cosmic joke that is your sex life, or more accurately your lack thereof, you haven’t had a lover in years that didn’t prefer you to be on top. The world’s image of sex, of the sexual dynamic between men and women, is like a funhouse mirror of your reality. You are not dumb or uneducated. You know all about the forces 271 behind that image, who made it and why, who makes the money and where it goes. You know it’s bad. But sometimes that quotidian, problematic badness seems pretty appealing, if it means a man could want you, want to get on top of you. If it means that your man would. In the white room the man lies full-weight on top, breathing filth into your ear, licking your neck. His hand works between your legs. How you’ve missed it, this jumble of limbs and parts, the awkward back-and-forth between his hand and cock, your crotch battered by half- droplets of the stuff best called pre-come and your own slick moisture. “Spread your legs.” His hand lingers at your throat. You do, reaching to clear the tangled overgrown pubic hair, but his other hand stops your wrist. With a quick swipe of curled fingers he does it for you and moves inside. How you’ve missed it, that first sting of entry, the sense of being reorganized by his cock, the gentle bob of his balls against your perineum. Whenever this happens in movies it’s always soft-focus and stupid, some wide-eyed naïf opening her eyes even wider. As if every penetration is another iteration of deflowering. As if it’s always the same. It’s been a while, so it does hurt at first, but he handles himself well, pushing deeper and deeper each time, eyes steady on your face. He knows how to lean so that his pelvic bone presses against your clitoris. You imagine your insides as a quilted wall of pink diamonds. Again and again he enters you, and it never gets old. He holds your hands above your head. He turns you over and buries your face in the thick pillows. He takes you from the bed, sits you on the desk, and enters you that way, standing. You feel a wonderful fire. The head of his penis pulls at a swollen knob inside and unleashes the flame. You scream. You promised yourself that if you ever had the chance to scream at good sex again, you would, and loud. 272 You’re getting close. He holds you at the waist, biting your neck again. “Please,” you say. “Please.” A feeling like static electricity builds in your feet, your calves, your knees. You see stars. Close your eyes. Stars. “Say it.” You shake your head. His hand comes back to your throat. “Say it.” “I’m going to…” He quickens his pace, holding you tight at the hips, looking at you. You seek his face, but it’s not there. “Say it.” When you do, it’s straightforward, almost calm. “I’m going to come.” And just then, on the edge, glow shining a corona around your skull, he takes his right hand from your waist and slaps you hard across the face. He reaches immediately to catch you, his hand cupping the back of your head to protect your neck. Pain. Beautiful golden electric pain. Back to brutality. 12 The buzz lingers. The red shape of his hand is embossed onto your face. You are back on the bed. He kneels and licks at your sex. The hours upon hours of your life you have spent dreaming of this act. Oral sex. Cunnilingus. Eating pussy. Eating out. The most reverent and tender of the sex acts. The female genitals receive kisses better than any other human part. How many lovely folds to kiss and plumb, how many deeper depths to penetrate with tongue and finger. He eats until you are just the parts that touch his mouth. 273 This is what you wanted, all that time. To disappear. You walk on the rim of your mind, peering down at the two of you there on the bed in the white room. From above, washed of all color, his body and yours look like a famous photograph, a Western landscape, a study in light and dark, a meditation on light. Before, when he was fucking you, you felt light gather and adorn every bone. Now it’s different, now you’re filled with pain and electricity and joy. Power. Power. Power. He does what you always wanted but didn’t know how to ask for, turns you over and eats you that way, his nose tapping your wet asshole. You arch and moan and moan. When you are exhausted—when there is no more capacity for pleasure in your shot nerves—he turns you onto your side and lies facing you. Then, he reaches for you, kisses you, and enters a last time. The two of you bob on eachother, eyes slitted, until everything glows and explodes and deep inside you feel the warm liquid comfort of his ejaculate. When you start to cry, he returns to the space between your legs and licks you clean. The white room swirls shut. You are alone. Hands tucked between your legs. Prayer position. 13 A stab against darkness. That’s what it is. People think that darkness is in sex, and they’re right, but they don’t see the difference between the rejuvenative dark of the night sky, of the the thick purple Pacific, and the dull darkness of loss and hurt. You’ll never understand women who hate to be touched, who treat love as a chore. You bristle with jealousy at what they’ve got. The luxury of turning down touch, of rejecting coitus. 274 You cling to memories of summer days when you did it in the middle of the afternoon, the times you woke in the middle of the night to a map of desire in the shape of a man’s body, the early morning times when, barely waking, you ventured under the covers and met there. You limn these memories for their gold, the moment of your young husband drawing back the covers to the bed after a perfect evening, the way he opened his arms and drew you in. These things don’t last forever. No one will give them back to you again. When people complain or joke about sex—when they disapprove of varieties of it, when they are disgusted, when they are tired and turn away—you are moved almost to violence. You think, I would cut it away from you. I would take it. I would cut it away from you and have it for myself. You see it as you fall asleep, a knife of bone or tooth drawing a swift cut on the other body. Falling blood. Escape into the luminous wet night. Outside: another new place. 275 PORT ANGELES The red turret light at the baggage claim stood dumb and still. The conveyor belt had not yet begun to move. Chris and Catalina looked at each other’s feet. Hers were in green suede sandals, his in brand-new puffy white sneakers. How sweet, Catalina thought. Like a little boy. Her toenails bore a chipped layer of gold polish left over from summer. She felt his eyes and covered her left foot with her right, trying to balance, but fell out. Her hands flapped at her waist. Chris turned. “Are you okay, Professor Marino?” She coughed. “Please, Chris. I’ve asked you to call me Catalina so many times. Just Lina is fine, too.” “Sorry.” He dropped his head, his feet moving through a clumsy shuffle-ball-chain, what he always did when he was embarrassed. A little ghostdance to ward off shame. “It’s fine.” She forced her voice warm. “And I’m fine too, thanks very much for asking.” He nodded without looking up. “It’s just a sensitivity I have,” she said. “Because I’m not a professor. My problem. Sorry.” Catalina stared at the turret light with desperation. Chris gave her another short nod, still dancing softly. “You will be one soon,” he said. “I know you will.” His feet kept pedaling air. 276 “You make it sound like I’m up for tenure,” Catalina said, her voice high and happy. “Instead of nearing the end of a lectureship that might be extended for a year. At most.” “I know all that,” Chris said, louder. “I get it. But that doesn’t change anything.” He stopped dancing and carefully raised his head. His eyes were grayish, bloodshot. “You’ll be a professor soon. I know it.” On his last word the baggage alarm filled the low room. Catalina felt the bleating in her nerves. Her eyes went dull and distant. She saw poppies, smelled camphor. Chris turned away from her to watch the conveyor belt. The turret light flashed red on the side of his face. Catalina came back to herself. “Thanks,” she said in a low voice, almost a whisper. He inclined his chin in a gentle nod. Her head was full of curses. It was the wrong thing. In the spring, Catalina had been invited to present a selection from her manuscript-in- progress at a reading series held in a café near Seattle University. She had planned to decline. It wasn’t a particularly prestigious series, and it was far away, and she needed an assistant to project images onto her body as she read this particular series of poems. Her old friend Theresa had helped her do this once before, in a basement in Long Beach. The image sequence was complicated, precisely timed to the work and the hypnotic rhythm Catalina fell into as she read. Only Theresa was familiar enough with her work to run the sequence. But Theresa would not go to Seattle with Catalina. Although they lived less than five miles apart, they hadn’t seen each other for months. When they spoke occasionally on the phone, Catalina always felt that during the conversation Theresa was performing some important task related to her job as an account 277 executive, some business wizardry that Catalina would be incapable of understanding even if Theresa explained it to her, which she never had. The invitation to read was a real invitation engraved on heavy card stock, not an email. It had been addressed, touchingly, with a green calligraphy pen, and sealed with wax. Perhaps these were silly flounces, the extravagance of boredom, but they had spelled Catalina’s name correctly. It would be an honor, they had written, to have her. But she couldn’t go alone. The images were an intrinsic part of the poems. When the book was finally done, they would be printed on facing pages, or the book wouldn’t be published at all, she had decided. They had to be seen as she read. Besides, Catalina had never liked to travel alone. It made her feel terribly exposed. She had been sitting in her windowless office, mulling it over, when an email came in from Chris. Just checking to make sure you don’t need any help with copies or anything for next week! Let me know if I can help. Christopher McHenry was a junior English major, the best undergraduate Catalina had ever taught. Her favorite. When he had learned that she was a poet, Chris had bought and raced through her two published chapbooks, lavished her with praise, and asked for more. So she had sent him one heavy email with all of her manuscript files attached, including the images. His response constituted the only piece of fan mail she had ever received. Wow, I am so inspired when I read your work! It’s truly fascinating. It makes me feel things I didn’t know existed. She imagined him devouring her work ravenously, as if her cycles of verse were a perfect hamburger. 278 Chris was a major in the department. The trip could count as an educational experience for him, couldn’t it? When she asked him, Chris’s bright eagerness was as exquisite as a sunflower in bloom. “I’d be honored,” he told Catalina, swaying under the weight of his backpack. There was only one problem, she explained. She had already put in the funding request to the department. Two plane tickets, one hotel room. “Originally, I thought Theresa would come,” she told him. “And of course two old girlfriends don’t need separate rooms, ha ha!” But now it was too late to change things, and she still needed an assistant. “I hope that’s okay!” she said. “But if it’s not, if you’re uncomfortable, just let me know.” It helped to play the naïf, the folksy old maid teacher. He smiled. Of course it was okay. Of course it made more sense to stay two nights than one. Of course they could stay in the same room for those two nights. They were both adults. Weren’t they? What a good teacher she was, to take a student on such a nice educational trip. The last flight from Burbank arrived in Seattle just after sundown, crossing a whitish sky with a purpling center. With their luggage, Catalina and Chris followed the signs for the shuttle that would take them to their hotel. They passed an Alaska Lodge Restaurant full of pale travelers slurping chowder. “I think this is the right way,” Chris said, walking a little ahead of her. “I’m following you,” Catalina said. “This is your part of the country, after all!” 279 He shrugged, moving the backpack up and down. “Kind of.” “You’ve been in this airport before, right?” “Yeah. But I was like twelve.” She didn’t like it when she couldn’t see his face and his voice just came tumbling out at her, lazy, indolent. From behind, Chris could be any asshole kid who listened to her with only one ear and tossed out answers to shut her up. Don’t worry, Catalina thought. I don’t expect anything. Just you. They were the only passengers on the shuttle, a dark tunnel driven by a solemn man with a beautiful face. Catalina chose seats halfway back, Chris on the aisle, she at the window. They came into the darkening city: a great green-and-purple mouth of lit boats in blue twilight. Chris, checking his phone, was missing it. “That’s pretty,” she said in a little voice. She felt him turn, his shoulder pressing hers. “Lovely,” he said, like balm on her eyes. When Catalina remembered Chris as a stranger, it seemed that a great deal of time had passed since she began teaching at Harking, and that she was, in fact, a success. He had walked into her life on a rainy Thursday morning just before eight o’clock, the hideous hour of Introduction to Business Writing. It was her second time teaching the course, which satisfied a freshman requirement. “Christopher McHenry?” she called. He stood, oddly formal. “Just Chris, please, Professor,” he said. 280 “Not a professor,” she corrected him, automatically. Others allowed their students to use the title, but Catalina hated the discordance. She hadn’t earned it. “Just Catalina, or Lina, please.” “Sorry,” the boy said, looking down. He was lanky and wore a red flannel shirt open over a gray t-shirt, unremarkable jeans. A plastic lanyard bracelet was tied around his right wrist. Fluffy blond hair stuck out beneath the margin of his scuffed blue baseball cap, like hay. The first semester had been full of dull, earnest girls who took reams of meaningless notes, and jocks (Harking had, of all things, a fairly decent lacrosse team) whose sole sign of attention during her lectures was the pushed-up headphones resting on the upper curve of their ears. She had made Chris for one of these, another nineteen-year-old face wedged into an expression of exhausted boredom. But his first assignment, a letter of interest to an imaginary employer, was so elegantly composed that she suspected he had copied it from the Internet. Wearily ready to entrap, she asked him to her office hours. The last moments that Chris was unknown to Catalina were so clear in her memory. She sat in her office, reading about rain patterns in the South Pacific and staring at the large framed photograph of an ancient lime tree that she had recently hung to cope with the lack of windows. An email from the man she was seeing came in. There was a little rattling knock as she slid the mouse to open it. She looked up. Chris stood in the doorway, clutching his cap in both hands, smiling a little. Ghostdancing. What did it mean? The meeting, which was only supposed to last fifteen minutes, went to ninety. They never got to the assignment. Chris laid his life out in front of her as if he were giving directions on a map. He had been born and raised in Keene, Texas, where most people were, like his family, 281 devout Seventh-Day Adventists. Then, “the summer after first grade,” his parents announced that extensive Bible study had led them to the revelation that the Roman Catholic Church was the one true iteration of Christianity. Chris and his four siblings were then “basically airlifted” to a town near Medford, Oregon, where they were enrolled in Catholic schools. On weekends his parents, both certified nursing assistants, drove into Ashland to protest at the abortion clinic. In his new Catholic life, Chris attended Mass three times a week, on Wednesday mornings, Saturday evenings, and again on Sundays—an arduous schedule to which he happily acquiesced, because he could now eat hot dogs and pepperoni pizza and watch Saturday morning cartoons. “It seemed like a good trade-off to me,” he said. “Plus I really dug the rosary.” As a child he was fascinated by the intricacies of the faith, memorizing hundreds of Bible verses, seeking out archaic and unfashionable verses in the back of the hymnal and from elderly members of his congregation. He entered his teen years certain he would attend seminary after high school. He wanted to be a Jesuit. “I believed in all of it,” he said. “The Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, the Transubstantiation. Totally.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, I’m way off topic, we’re supposed to talk about the assignment. I probably sound crazy.” “No crazier than my grandfather,” Catalina told him. “He was from Positano, and I know he believed the very same thing. It scared me when I was a little girl.” “Your grandfather was from another country?” Chris said. “That is so cool.” His face fell, and he shook his head again. 282 “I actually thought that a cracker turned into human flesh in my mouth. That I could taste it. Righteous cannibalism.” He started coughing. When he caught his breath, there were tears in his eyes. She handed him a tissue, trying not to think about how enchanting he looked like that, so upset. “Then, in high school,” he said slowly, “I lost my faith.” He dabbed at his eyes. “I mean, how was I supposed to keep believing in that stuff? When the priest is an old asshole who falls asleep during confession? When these nice girls in my classes are telling me that what my parents do at the clinic is wrong and hateful? When the teachers all act like I’ve got some kind of disorder because I got special permission to skip sex ed?” Catalina’s heart skipped horribly at this. You’re disgusting, she told herself. Chris was at Harking on a full scholarship. He had come in as a business major, determined to make something of himself and gain independence from his family. His parents were distant, he said. Disappointed. When he went home to visit they did not to allow him too much unsupervised time with his younger brothers and sisters. “Maybe if I don’t need them as much,” he told Catalina, “they’ll respect me more.” With this, his bright naiveté—his hunger to learn, to really learn the old-fashioned way, by reading and reading and reading—peeked through his automatic facade of composure and fashionable sarcasm. When Catalina looked at him, she could see all the selves layered atop one another. This was what had endeared him so to her. He was a palimpsest that ran on pizza and slept in an extra-long twin size bed. Since their meeting, Catalina thought with some pride, they had been virtually inseparable. In the third week of Introduction to Business Writing, Chris changed his major to 283 English. He went on to take two more courses with her, Twentieth-Century American Literature and Intermediate Poetry Workshop. In the spring he would take his last, Advanced Poetry Workshop. When she looked at Chris, Catalina no longer saw him as he was, his goofy gait, experimental facial hair, and careless clothes. Instead she saw the man he would become in his late twenties, tall and slim, a casually stylish dresser in greys and blues that highlighted his strangely colored eyes. Oxford shirts under V-neck sweaters, skinny slate pants, polished pewter leather shoes. He would part his full golden hair on the side, leaving the heavy front to fall down over his forehead, a remnant of boyhood. The hotel was much nicer than Catalina expected, a shining chrome tower. Their room was on the thirtieth floor. They glided upwards in a shining black elevator. Every surface was slick. She sought her reflection, confirmed its coherence, and looked back at her feet. The golden polish again. How do I feel, she wondered with sudden terror, why do I not know how I feel? Chris’s presence filled her with a sort of nervousness, half-nice, half-not. Like trying to determine which direction a blind date would take, almost, but with the middle taken out, familiarity swapped in for the core of expectation. Was this an intuitive clue? It will come to me, she thought. In time. It has to. Beside her, Chris checked his phone, lifted his hat and pushed his hair back beneath it, swayed, danced. 284 The furniture in their room was made from dark smooth wood. Everything was built into the gray walls: desk, lamps, TV, beds. When she saw the two floating white mattresses protruding from the wall like great pills, Catalina felt a kind of burning. “Unfortunately we have a bit of a quick turnaround.” Catalina stared at the purple carpet. “I’ll just get changed.” “I know,” Chris said. He chose the bed closest to the window, leaving her the less desirable bathroom-adjacent one, and went back inside his phone. She removed her garment bag from her suitcase and took it with her into the bathroom, where she hastily undressed with her back to the mirror. She couldn’t afford the extra time it would take to talk herself into feeling better if she caught sight of her body before everything was properly organized, tamped down or fluffed up into a semblance of attractiveness. She pulled the white peplum dress over her head, pushed up her breasts, smoothed her panties, and turned around. The dress’s high neckline made her tiny breasts look dignified, and the ruffled peplum made sense of her nonexistent waist. Catalina began the long meditation of applying makeup, mixing concealer into the sixty-five dollar foundation that she always wore. On this trip she planned to wear it to bed. She painted an oblong patch of ivory over the birthmark under her right eye, the donut- shaped permanent bruise that she hid and felt guilty for hiding. She wore lipstick the exact color of the birthmark, in tribute. By the time she had finished painting her mouth, she looked like herself again. When she emerged, to her surprise, Chris had changed, too, into a stiff black dress shirt that hung above his jeans and ridiculous white sneakers like a grand bib. Adorably, he was ghostdancing, waiting for her. 285 She dreamed he would say that she looked nice, but he did not, which relieved her. It was a short walk to the café. They had practiced the timing of the images, so there was little to talk about. Before Catalina knew it they were there, in the far end of a long red-walled room. Chris set up his computer on a table in the back. She greeted the hosts and sat waiting until the room filled. Then she took out her sheaf and began to read. “Autumn and dying / I go to my bench / I take my curved glass needle and begin.” She filled with a bright orange feeling. A flame, reminding her of herself. After the happy end of the reading—after she had drunk four proffered glasses of weak white wine and noted approvingly that Chris did the same—after they stumbled back through the windy streets and up the slick black elevator and into the room—after all of this, there was the matter of going to bed. Catalina had chosen a silky black nightgown, sleeveless, with a conservative neckline. She changed into it in the bathroom, removing her lipstick but leaving on the rest of her makeup. She apologized to her skin, caressing her birthmark with her thumb. When she returned, Chris was stretched out on his bed in only his loose blue plaid boxer shorts. He was strangely shaped for a boy, with a bulbous curve at his hips, narrow shoulders, and little muscle tone. It was not what she expected. But there he was, prone, eyes closed, as if there was nothing wrong with her seeing him in his underwear. She nearly took off her nightgown, but stopped herself. Although it wasn’t late, not even midnight yet, he seemed to be sleeping. Catalina had imagined an hour or two of companionable silence in which she could answer student emails while Chris did whatever he did on his phone. Or perhaps they would watch a movie together, or 286 even order room service. She was hungry. But there was no way to suggest these things with him lying there bare and exposed as Christ himself. What was wrong with her, thinking like that? She peeled back the tightly tucked white coverlet, climbed inside, and turned off the light. Catalina lay absolutely awake, blinking into the dark, until she heard Chris make a guttural noise and climb under his own covers, giving her permission to sleep. They had agreed to drive to Port Angeles early the next morning (“A nice trip,” Catalina had promised. “It’s supposed to be beautiful, perhaps we can get some work done together!”), but Chris slept on for hours after Catalina woke at six-thirty. She showered, blow-dried her hair, dressed, removed and reapplied her makeup, packed, answered all of her frantic emails from students, played at revising a poem while casting incredulous glances at his slowly rising and falling chest. Of course she wouldn’t wake him. She tried to remember what it was like to sleep like that—to drop into the black cavern of nowhere and stay there, deliciously, until you returned to yourself again—but she could not. At eleven, when he finally roused himself, Chris didn’t seem embarrassed at all. He stretched, rolled out of bed, and strode past Catalina into the bathroom, his golden chest hair just inches from her face. It sounded like he was yodeling in the shower. “Ready?” he asked when he emerged, his hair a wet nest, as if it was she who had kept him waiting. Catalina wished that she did not thrill at Chris, at the way he climbed into their rental car, automatically taking the driving seat. His hand bumped her thigh reaching for the gearshift and he gave it a compensatory pat. How torn his cuticles were, ruined really. Just like her own. 287 Out of the city, the highway became just another highway. Catalina hoped for tall pines, or a wide silver body of water, but the windows were full of chain restaurants, gas stations, the occasional failing small business. After a few minutes she dropped her head and let her eyes focus and unfocus on her jeans, until all she saw was fuzzy blue against the fuzzy gray of the passenger seat. The silence became tense, prickling up her neck. “Oh look!” Chris said, thrusting his long golden arm. “What?” Catalina asked, not looking. “You missed it,” Chris said. After this the silence was worse, settling on Catalina like a raincoat of hair. “Want to hear a story?” she said. Chris’s face curved into a worn expression, a student recognizing that his teacher has singled him out for special treatment. “Sure!” he said. “I have a really old friend who I grew up with,” she began. “Right,” Chris said. “Theresa.” She felt stung. Had she bored him with all her stories? But how wonderful that he remembered. And even better that he was wrong. “Good memory, Chris, but no, not Theresa,” she said. “I met her in high school. Maggie is my friend from kindergarten. Literally my oldest friend.” Her voice arched up into a higher register, a sympathetic imitation of Chris’s cadence, of the way girls his age talked. “Oh. Okay.” And there it was again, the rigid edges of their relationship shaping his behavior. His automatic deference. What she loved. 288 His brow furrowed, but maybe it was just the road. “Maggie and I used to be really close, but at every crossroads we have gone in opposite directions. In high school she took the easiest classes, whereas I took all honors. She said she just didn’t see the point of being unhappy all the time, but I wasn’t unhappy, I was working hard. I was achieving.” The last syllable took an edge. Catalina worked her voice softer. “I went to college on a full scholarship.” Like you, Chris, she almost said, but stopped herself. “I finished in three years and went right into graduate school. Maggie took two courses at the community college, in film editing of all things, and then dropped out when she was offered the manager position at the pizza parlor where she had worked since middle school.” “Was that what she wanted?” Chris asked. “She was always really smart. She could have done more with her life. At twenty she married her boyfriend Joey, just this guy from our town, who she had always told me she didn’t even think was that great. She married Joey and they had a kid right away. And they named her—can you believe this, they named her Paislee. With two Es.” Chris snorted. “I know, right?” she said. “Look, I hope I don’t sound mean, it’s just that Maggie and I were so close when we were kids. We used to play this game in her mom’s sewing room. We took the really long needles and dared each other to put them under our fingernails. Not to hurt, not to pierce the skin. Just far enough so it looked like it did. I know that’s weird. But it was her idea. It wasn’t just me. The dare was, you had to do it and then see how long you could hold the needles under the nails of one hand like that, and then we switched. I had to let her hold the needles under my nails, and vice versa.” 289 “That’s crazy.” “Maybe, but it wasn’t. It was about trust.” Catalina said. “We played like that for hours. She never hurt me.” Chris chewed his bottom lip with his top right incisor, little white edge against pink. Catalina shut up, worried he was bored. “Isn’t that…?” Chris said finally. “Isn’t that where that line in your poem ‘Work No. 1’ comes from? The one about ‘putting it under and between me’? You know, ‘glass needles run on trust’?” Catalina resisted the urge to stomp. This was why she had wanted this trip. This was her vindication. “I’m very flattered you read my work so closely,” she said. “But not surprised. You’re a great reader. And a fine poet in your own right.” “Sorry, I interrupted you,” Chris said. “Go on.” “Okay, well all the stuff about our past doesn’t really matter, I don’t think,” Catalina said. “Fast forward to now. She and Joey have three kids.” “It’s nice that they’re still together,” Chris said. Catalina ignored him. “We don’t talk much, just mainly keep up online. That’s where I noticed that something weird was happening. A few months ago, she posted that she quit her job, so that she could work full-time at something she called her ‘totally awesome new career’! That piqued my interest, so I looked at her profile. She’s involved in something called Believe It! Body Wraps. Have you ever heard of this?” Chris did not respond. She liked how attentive he was to the road. He didn’t look away even to be polite. 290 “Well, basically, Maggie now sells these wraps—like a fabric patch that you apply to your stomach that’s supposed to shrink your body via some sort of mysterious and unverifiable ‘herbal extracts.’ Her profile is all about these wraps now. She posts constantly about them, and she has a lot of friends who are people like her, you know, no college education, had kids really young, and she’s selling the wraps to them.” “Okay,” Chris said. He was getting bored, she could tell. He didn’t get it. “She takes pictures of her kids with the wraps and calls them her “Sexy Li’l Helpers.’ Not ‘little,’ but ‘l’il.’ L-I-apostrophe-L.” Chris forced a laugh. She had to convince him. “But the thing is it’s a total scam! Any person with half a brain can see that! I mean, you can’t just walk into a store and buy one, or go online or anything—you have to buy them through a representative, and I think the only way to do that is to sign up to sell them yourself. And to sell them, you have to buy them. And they’re expensive, too, and all sorts of sleazy—they won’t even let you cancel, once you start buying them. I’ve read articles about it, online. “So now Maggie posts these lists of goals, and she’s tagged in other people’s lists, too. Photographs of handwritten lists on yellow legal pads, it’s terribly tragic. They all want the same things: a trip to Disney world, a new truck, a trip to the islands—what islands?—and then, a little further down, to pay off debt, or buy a house. Dead last is always ‘save for my kids college.’ And that’s how it’s spelled, too, with no apostrophe before the s. ‘My kids college.’ Those are their priorities.” Chris didn’t respond. “I found the whole thing really odd. So I did some investigation on Believe It! Body Wraps. Surprise surprise, it’s a multilevel marketing scheme. It preys on people who have only 291 ever worked these miserable minimum-wage jobs, sells them a fantasy of working from home only a few hours a day and making thousands of dollars a week. And it’s total bullshit! It’s impossible!” “Well, I don’t know,” Chris said. “My mom and my aunt do MLMs. If you build up your downlines carefully, you can make a lot of money.” Why hadn’t Catalina considered that Chris, with his transient childhood and his blue- collar religious fundamentalist parents, would know scam artists personally? He was her student. It was her job to teach him. “I just think it’s reprehensible. The only people who are very effective at selling the whole dream actually make any money. It’s not the product, but the idea that sells. The dream. And how many people are good at selling dreams? Only a few people, a handful at the top. Everyone else just goes into debt buying the stuff and trying to get rid of it. It’s just this vicious cycle. It really screws things up for people. I’ve read articles,” she said again. “Well, yeah,” Chris said. “That’s sales.” She had nothing to say to that. “I’m pretty sure my sister is a team leader for Believe It!, actually,” he said. Catalina slumped into her seat. Should she apologize? The sun was going down, the sky was going red. Everything was ending and nothing had gone as she’d planned. “My sister does okay,” Chris said. “But I’m like you. I don’t like selling people things. That was why I was so happy when I took your class and figured out what was really important to me. That was why I changed my major.” 292 Afterwards, Catalina couldn’t even remember straightening up. She had been back there, staring at the poppy-print wallpaper of Maggie’s mother’s sewing room, needles propped under the nails of both of her index fingers, willing herself not to look at Maggie, especially not at Maggie’s hands, which held the needles. Only at the poppies, the blooming purple poppies. Maybe the tips of Maggie’s straight brown hair. But then Chris spoke and her past dissipated, liberating her into the delicious present. She wasn’t a little girl from Saugus. She was an adult, a lecturer at a university. She had gone to another city to read from her book of poetry. The man who drove her car was her student, a beautiful young man who admired her, who was proud to say that he was like her, who would do what she said, who would be loyal to her, who had shown her his bare body. He would follow her beyond the trees and out to the place she had never been. He would sleep beside her again. In a separate bed, but still. They didn’t check into their new hotel until after nine o’clock in the evening. The drive took longer than Catalina expected and daylight was almost gone by the time they arrived. They had to hurry to see the sights. It seemed too early for sunset. She and Chris walked around the town, poking at hiking gear in potpourri-scented shops. Outside, they stared up at the forbidding mountains, which surrounded the port like monstrous sentinels. Were their snowcaps too small? She didn’t know, didn’t want to ask. It seemed something she should know. They ate dinner at a tiny French restaurant, an extravagantly expensive but not particularly satisfying meal. Chris ordered quail; she had beef bourguignon, coating her teeth in brown slime. They split a too-fine bottle of merlot. When the check came, he waved a handful of crumpled ten-dollar bills at her and then easily returned them to his pocket. 293 At dinner the thought of the mountains bothered Catalina. Dark high places with too much air, or not enough. She couldn’t recall. The wine had gone to her head. But it made her uneasy to imagine them up there in the dark, glaring down at her. She wondered that so many people considered them beautiful, the terrifying things. The drive to the hotel was awkward, for Catalina had made a grave miscalculation: at dinner she told Chris the story of her most recent relationship, an epileptic man in his fifties she had dated for several months, smug in the knowledge that she was using him for the unusually good sex. “Although,” she said, squinting at Chris over her wineglass, “I was always terrified he was going to have a seizure and die in bed.” But instead the epileptic had surprised her by leaving her for a pleasant fat woman he worked with. They were married now. Catalina had thought Chris would find the story funny, but he had just looked at her with sadness, and then down again. She looked under the table to see if he was ghostdancing and saw that he held his phone on his lap, tilting it towards the amber tealight he had pulled to his edge of the table. The Piaf recording skipped and Catalina thought she might vomit. And now they were back out in the dark with the mountains, older than anything, bored by her problems. Catalina had wanted something special from this trip, and last night she had felt close to it, seeing Chris spread prone there before her. But he wasn’t offering himself, at all. He had barely looked at her. It couldn’t all be a waste. Not when the department had refused to reimburse Chris’s plane ticket, sticking Catalina with the riddle of how she could refund the money to him without 294 letting on that it came from her and not the university, the finite resource that would soon run dry, when Harking declined to rehire her. She was sure of it now. They walked silently down the pine hallway of the inn she had thought would be quaint, generous, filled with their laughter. Chris unlocked the door. Their room had dark green walls, red ceramic lamps, and one king-size bed. They stared at it unhappily. “I’ll call the desk,” Catalina said, faking for the black phone between the lamps. “It’s fine,” Chris said, surprising her. “Chris,” she said. “I don’t want you sleeping on the floor. And actually I have a back problem, a disc, so I can’t—” He hoisted the suitcases, first hers, than his, onto the leather bench at the end of the bed, chivalrously unzipped them. She made for the phone again. He stopped her by placing his hand on her arm. His fine chewed-up hand, beaming warmth into her flaccid bicep. “I’m not going to sleep on the floor,” he said, taking Catalina’s shoulders in both hands. His strange eyes were clear and kind. Catalina felt dizzy, her nostrils full of the scent of camphor, of poppies. Chris turned her gently and led her to the bed. She slowly removed the black suede heels she had insisted on wearing all day, to lengthen her line. They had cut into her ankles, leaving bleeding smiles in the four creases of skin. She turned her ankles in her hands and looked up at Chris, expressionless. He ghostdanced for her. A smile moved her face. She had always been a weird lady, too sensitive, so needy, and now he was going to have to deal with more weirdness. It was all right. Only one more night, and then he would be back in Burbank, where a freshman named Jennie was desperate for his attention. For two days straight 295 she had sent him artful photographs of every part of her body. They arrived every hour on the hour. The last one was like a still from a nature documentary: the rosy bloom of her bared labia, the nice kind, tucked and neat. What a relief to know that Jennie didn’t have curtains of roast beef hanging down there, ruining everything. Chris looked at Catalina, dazed on the edge of the bed. What happened in the king size tonight was just another play in the grand strategy of his life, the story that had begun on that beautiful April day, the first Sunday he refused communion. 296 SPELL FOR MAKING A WEREWOLF The naked girl takes you into a small bathroom with a crowded yellowy marble vanity. Vials of hair oil, all-natural toothpaste, a bottle of cider vinegar, a stubby gray eyeliner from her old lover's mother. She makes a perfunctory show of tidying. Holds a wad of toilet paper under a blast of water from the swanning tap, wipes against the marble’s white streaks. Drops makeup into various pouches, asserts a hegemony of washes and creams. Then, with a bored look, she opens a small drawer—the bottom one, which is poorly installed and does not draw well—and withdraws a corded tool of light shiny plastic. The naked girl sets it up on the counter: a baby pink Lady Hygiene trimmer. You had the exact same one, until the blade rusted and you went back to waxing. She plugs the trimmer in. Moves her finger over the switch. When the buzzing starts you realize how quiet you’ve been, even holding your breath. Now the air is unbearably loud. You flush, but it feels more like a flash. You’re drenched. You fan. The naked girl pivots her pelvis to the sink and begins to shave her pubic hair in neat steady rows. Down and up, left to right. She watches intently in the mirror, sometimes thrusting to adjust the angle of her jut. Scattered hair falls in the sink, which is rimmed with streams of brown slime and traces of some manner of sand. “I can come to you,” the naked girl says without looking up. “Come into you. Enter you. Any time I want.” You want to ask her what she means, but the Lady Hygiene trimmer is nearing her labia majora, and you realize you’ve been holding your breath again. 297 “If you hold someone in your mind they will stay with you,” she says. “As long as you want.” Be careful, you want to yelp, but you are silent as she closes her eyes and moves the Lady Hygiene between her legs, spreading her lips with the fingers of her left hand, and presses it straight up against her body. Stare incredulously at her rosy, purple-veined eyelids. For a minute—for many—you’re certain she’s going to take the trimmer inside her body. That it will disappear into her and blood will seep ineluctably and you’ll have to call an ambulance. Where is your phone, anyway? You look for the door but can’t see it. You feel a headache coming on. Look and look for the door, turning in a small circle. The naked girl shaves blindly on. When your circle is complete, she has climbed up on the sink, spread eagle over the basin, as if inviting the faucet to penetrate her. Now her eyes are open, trained intently on the supple bloom of her minora, around which the Lady Hygiene traces a careful perimeter. “If you hold someone in your mind you can have them, is all I’m trying to say,” she tells you. “Have anything you want with them.” You want to ask what she wants but you can’t speak. She smirks, looking at you for the first time. “Hand me that mug,” she says. Suddenly the room is bigger. The Lady Hygiene trimmer has stopped buzzing. Without thinking you check and see she is done shaving. Then, horrified, you mumble an apology, which the naked girl ignores. The mug is on the vanity, not ceramic but a thick dull plastic in a shade of orange with which you have a difficult history. An orange from your animal time, from the meshes of earliest childhood. A shade of magic marker that made you want to vomit. You never saw it anywhere 298 else, and you wondered if that was what made the markers magic—that orange’s nausea. All the other colors washed from the side of your left hand, the one you dragged through every drawing, but the orange was stubborn as a curse. And then one day it blessedly disappeared. A different kind of magic. They don’t even seem to make that color anymore. You hand the naked girl the mug, repressing the desire to vomit. If you do, at least you’re in a bathroom, you think. She peers into the mug and holds it out so that you will peer into it, too. The bottom is covered in scattered patches of brown scum floating in yellowy water. The naked girl swipes her finger through the sink, scraping what it catches into the mug. Maybe an ounce of her golden hair, some of the sand stuff, and the sink slime, a different brown than the scum. “I keep my toothbrush in here,” the girl says, and takes a small carton of milk from the bottles assembled on the vanity. It’s the very same kind of milk carton that they served in your grade school cafeteria. How did you miss it before? Everyone whose parents had paid for milk was entitled to two little cartons from the oversize fridge in the room next to the gym. Also in the fridge were allergy medicines for children so afflicted, and hardened PB & Js for kids who forgot their lunches. By fourth grade you knew that you could take two milks even though your parents hadn’t paid, even though the reason they hadn’t was because you had told them that you didn’t like milk. You could go in that fridge and take as many milks as you wanted. Nobody kept track. You haven’t seen a carton like that since. And now, here it is, on the naked girl’s sink. Who is she again? How did you get here? When you try to remember, the curtains in your head slam shut. The naked girl pushes the carton’s snout open—the seal was already broken, it has been sitting on the counter like that, unrefrigerated, which can’t be healthy—and pours a few ounces of milk into the mug. Swishes it with one hand, splashing hair-milk over the edges. Then she 299 lowers it between her legs and you think she’s going to pee into it but instead she just scrapes in more hair shavings, giving you a feeling of perverse relief. Then she pees into it. Not a lot—you’re amazed by her control—only a shotglass worth of urine, you estimate. Some part of your consciousness is sparking, stuck. The naked girl is tilting her vomit- orange mug of hair-milk to your mouth. “Bottoms up,” she says. When you open your lips she tips it all in. The best thing you can think to say is that it doesn’t taste as bad as you imagined. But when you search your thoughts for what you imagined, there’s nothing there. “Swallow,” the naked girl says. “I want you to shave my neck.” Something claps and you find yourself on tiptoes behind her, trimming her nape with Lady Hygiene. There’s nothing in your mouth anymore. “Farther,” she says, pressing back into you. “Further.” When you’ve shaved up to the widest point of her skull, you think it prudent to stop, and do so without asking or even turning the Lady Hygiene off the right way. Just yank the pink plug right out of the wall. “Have you ever wanted to disappear? I can make you disappear,” the girl says without turning. “Lick my head.” When you open your mouth she backs her head into it. Lazily, as if it is not part of you, your tongue drags against her unevenly shaved scalp. Swallow more hair. “Good boy,” she purrs. 300 I’m not a boy, you want to protest, but she turns around, takes your shoulders in your hands, and sits you down on the open toilet. “Aren’t you, though?” She gazes between your legs. You remember that you, too, are naked. “Aren’t you?” The naked girl pivots back to the mirror over the sink, admiring her newly shorn parts. You don’t want to open your mouth for fear she will put something else in it. “You know why I shave part of my head? Why you shave it?” Something is not right with your vision. There’s a tear between the camera images of your two eyes. Her face jagged and unseeable. You shake your head. “To show you there’s no way out. There’s no way around it.” There are tracers in your vision now, flashing incandescent. Your tongue and nose pulse off-and-on numb. What are you talking about? you want to whisper, your head in your hands. How did it get there? “There’s no way around it,” the naked girl repeats, smiling sadly at you. “Me. You.” You’re crying now. You can barely see at all. The naked girl crouches and comes close. Holds a cool hand over your face. “Close your eyes,” she murmurs, and you do. You’re so grateful that you want to kiss her. But you haven’t the energy. “None of this is real,” she tells you. “Look, the mirror’s gone now. The toilet. The sink. The vanity. Even the milk carton. All that’s left is you and me.” You breathe, not looking because there is nothing to see. “That’s all.” She exhales. “That’s all there is. You understand now. Are you tired?” 301 You’re crying so hard you can’t breathe. “Close your eyes,” she coos again. “When you wake up, tell me your dreams.” 302 CASA DEL SOMETHING From my small apartment at the base of the Hollywood Hills, I walk up to the grand homes terraced behind explosions of bougainvillea to lose myself in twists and contours. To see stars. One spring evening, a light rain fell as the sun set, and I climbed higher, to a castle in dim mist. Yellow lights, purple face, a metal insignia inset into its gate: Casa del Something, where I found him. He limped, falsely. Quite thin, he was dressed with haphazard courtliness, the look most people in my neighborhood aim for, but real: shirtwaist, velvet vest, torn black jeans, white leather jacket. My eyes went to his reddish cloud of hair, to the freckles around the upside-down mouth in his very pale face. He looked at me shyly, half-smiling, as if he would speak. I turned away. My realm is full of beauty, and he was just one flower. Prince of the Casa del Something. But at home I saw him on my television, a lovesick teenager with a strange accent and a blood disease, mooning over a vampire, costumed and moving as at the Casa. Was he a star, or a captured man living in another dream? I read that he had strolled my neighborhood in character, had become lonely to play lonely. So I saw the teenager, not the prince. In the latest photos his eyes are terrified, his hands black, and he is dressed against his beauty, the russet stain of hair shorn into a sturdy orange hedge. Now, each night, I climb to the Casa del Something to view my face. In the gate’s polished brass knobs it is more like his than ever. I close my eyes to kiss the sweating metal. And then I walk home and watch my reflection in the black screen. 303 DIVINATION 1 The boy took one of the tree’s blossoms in his hands. “Yeah,” he said. “The cherries bloomed a few weeks back. But now it’s cold again.” It was around five. Near dawn, late and early both. They stood beside her rental car in the little courtyard roundabout. Behind them, draped in clouds, stood an invisible mountain. The edges of the sky blued. The woman gripped her hands in the pocket of her sweatshirt, wishing gloves. They were both smoking a slow-burning brand, and the boy was ill dressed for the weather, in jeans and a fine cotton button-down. She had given him a blue hoodie to wear, both wincing at and thrilled by the maternal action of marrying the zipper’s teeth and pulling it all the way up under his sharp chin. Were his hands cold? They didn’t look it, cupping flower and cigarette. She would remember that: how he held the blossom in the globe of space between his hands. It reminded her of the way he had looked at her a few hours earlier—she was at the door, ready to drive him home—and said, “Um. I like you?” “I feel like the trees bloomed overnight,” she had said when they came out to smoke. “I didn’t notice these before.” The branches were heavy with cream and pink and the shadow-color of leaves. She wanted to take his hand but understood that she shouldn’t. Soon she would actually have to take him home. “I’ll miss you,” he had said in the dark bedroom. “I won’t miss everyone. And I wouldn’t tell most people that I will miss that I’ll miss them.” 304 “I’ll miss you, too,” she had replied. “You don’t have to say it just because I said it to you,” the boy told the woman. 2 Earlier that day—yesterday, now, twelve clicks back on the pale wheel of hours—the woman had reached the front of the line at the post office and realized she had not addressed her box. The man behind the counter gave her a label for free and told her to return to him rather than reentering the line, a beneficence she knew she was supposed to repay with quick, neat compliance. Then she addressed the label both to and from herself, a Moebius strip of correspondence. Her eyes filled with tears. When the kindly postal worker disappeared into the back, she ran for the door and drove her rental across the small Western downtown. Parked and pulled up a meditation on her phone. She lotus-sat naked on a golden bench in a magenta room hung with gold roses, a cat purring beside her gleaming strong body. Before her lay a book with gilded rough-edged pages, her name on the spine. In the threshold stood a man’s silhouette. She extended her left hand, smiling. The cat yawned and rolled over, showing its tummy. Over dinner, she told the boy about crying at the post office, leaving out the emergency meditation and costume change that had made her late. All day she had run errands in her favorite exercise tights, dodging man after man who remarked that he had never seen pants like that before. She had shed the tights into the morass of dirty underwear lumped on her bedroom floor, the first thing the boy saw when she brought him inside six hours later. Across the table he formed and unformed. “Can I see your rings?” 305 She dangled her hands as if he was a manicurist. He applied his gentle attention to all but the two on her left ring finger. 3 Later, the woman dreamed twice of her apartment under the mountain, on consecutive mornings when she woke at dawn and curled a smooth white stone into her hand to urge sleep’s return. In the first she sought another person amongst revelers assembled for a festival. Significant chunks of the Western downtown had become yawning brown lots pitted with leftover snow. She did not find him. In the second she stood in her apartment with her husband, surveying the belongings that had multiplied to fill every shelf and drawer, ludicrous and bright, mostly ceramic. Crude, as if shaped by a child, or a disingenuous outsider artist. One day the woman, then a girl, had gone with her lover and his father to the cramped house of an elderly couple who collected this stuff. The wife, in white pumps, offered the girl’s lover’s father a single glass of water before he spent hours hanging art they had acquired seemingly at random, good and bad and in such great quantity that excess pieces lay all about in tall horizontal stacks. But they had had a lifetime, the woman a month. How had she accumulated so much? She realized with great relief that she would never make her flight out of the mountain town, only two hours hence. No way could all her garish altars of baked clay be made to fit in one box. She remembered smiling. She woke up. Actually there hadn’t been much to pack. She had cut the seams of the cardboard box to close it smaller. It was gone already by the time the woman brought another person into her 306 apartment and showed him her kitchen. Her bathroom and nook. Her chair and desk, the stones arrayed on top. Shed her rings and bracelets into a jangling pile. 4 Oh oh. A song the woman liked to hear when she drove her rental car through the mountain town hinged on those sounds. She had other totem songs. One with clapping. One synth-heavy happiness right out of her childhood. One in which the singer stretched three words into a lascivious repeated complaint. The songs sustained her through the days she roamed the wide boulevards and drove the downtown and had meetings, helplessly blinking tears for hours. Those moans and sighs, promises she couldn’t imagine. Oh oh. Often the woman got lost or missed her onramp and barreled instead some new way in this place where she did not live save for these handful of weeks, the rental car gliding past industrial forts and neon marquees done up as faces and lonely streets across which the wind tugged actual tumbleweeds. Then the hook resumed, or a guitar crunched a mouthful of tremolo, or a vocal wrapped her, and again the woman was saved. Never more than on her final drive to the airport, when on an hour of sleep she sped through snow-dusted high desert spun from threads of gold and silver. Oh, oh. How stunningly quick the difficult could become easy when knowledge filled its lack. At dinner the boy offered her his own food. Watched her raise it to her mouth. Drove with her after for hours, demurred when she asked his plans. But all his lingering was lost on the woman until her bedroom, where the boy stopped her beside the pile of her underthings—an homage, she wondered now, to the real mountain, outside?—and turned on his pretty eyes. Closed the space between them. It was hard to say what was better: feeling her body become a door, or the boy, opening it. 307 5 “In your future, the decision has already been made,” a seer had told the woman. “You can set the intention for it to happen without pain.” What did she want it to look like, her future? A house of white rooms. Light and lush botanics. A spare chamber, hushed as a church, dominated by a tall iron sleigh bed. Flowers on a long table. Fish soup, salad with oranges. How bourgeois. Who lived in this inspiration board? She could no more picture her husband in the white rooms than she could the boy. Perhaps pain was the only sure inhabitant. The woman believed in a gate beyond pain, but all she felt was vertiginous degeneration. Drop foot of the heart, sending her soul forward. It felt better to send it back, to exercise her supernatural ability to capture. Net minnows and requeue their swimmy spin at her convenience. At some bed crux, for example, the boy had paused his kisses to slide his right index finger into the corner of his mouth. Moved it against the thick curtain of membrane, recalling that dental moment when the hygienist hooked the suction straw into the same spot and said, “Close.” He withdrew and wove the finger between her legs and embraced her anew. Later, the boy’s arm bent over her head and his thumb alit near her mouth. Greedily the woman sucked, holding it in her teeth. Pressed her fingers over her face, blindfolding herself, the tips meeting over her third eye. Smiled at the inverted V between her palms, a shape that made her think of wings. I can’t see, the woman thought happily. I can’t see. 308 In the escapade aftermath she resolved to divine and scry every morning. Peer at where she would be in one year. Two. 6 For the woman, the bedroom was a cathedral, and her body the host, and the one who ate and drank her supplicant and clergy both. And the thurible was her soul, breathing frankincense, dowsing holy fluid. The woman always came with her soul, and when she came, she warned the boy, she would shake. At his first touch, she armored herself. Her soul was a slippery mollusk thing that loved to be held and would follow the boy home if she let it. A hungry woman of bottomless memory and intermediate clairvoyance, she was nostalgic already by the second kiss. When she bowed her head to the boy’s long foot, its hand closed around his ankle: armor or amor, her soul was going with him. It was vital to recall the stars that did not hang in the apse. The unpolished gems that she could push up inside her body. That the boy was frankly smooth—how he turned her, drew her— and serious, and kind, reassured. Maybe her soul could ride along. Like friends they took breaks, sought his shoe size, laughing, went for water. When she started at the lamp’s silhouette, he drew her close, asking, “What?” She bade him to kneel. Set her mouth and ran her hands on his dear body. When you are raised Catholic, what male odalisque is not plotted on that crucified axis of comfort and dis-? Oh. She couldn’t really get out of church, and she was a glutton. Why not summon his mouth as proof of God? With it he called her familiar to him. Said that he liked her shaking. That it was sexy. 309 Rich with this heady music, her temple filled the woman long after another person no longer did. 7 Later she wished she had given him a disclaimer. You who saw and fed and held my most lonesome self I keep forever in my sacred heart, as is my curse and my power. More than a little morbid, likely to terrify, and anyway she could lay no claim. This was the cost, along with the bit of her soul that had disappeared with him as she waited in the idling rental to make sure he got inside all right. Giddy, rich with happiness, aware how quickly she could keel to despair. As they drove she took the boy’s hand. He held it quite naturally in the well between the passenger seat and center console, interlacing their fingers, a sweetness that would never leave her. When she parked they kissed as if the world was ending, which this one was. In the apartment, the woman gathered in a metal bowl two colorful wrappers that had held herb mixtures called Road Opener and Come To Me—these had produced a gallon of pungent deep-magenta tea she infused into her bathwater to treat her sadness—and a slip of paper on which she had written her intentions. Each she ripped to shreds. It had begun to snow. The woman carried the bowl out into the thin dawn, dropped lit match after lit match onto the paper. When almost all was burned she ran barefoot across the wet lawn to cast her ashes at the mountain’s face. The wind blew them into her eyes instead. She made her wish, feet screaming. Inside she drew a boiling bath and sat, releasing the last of the vehicle in which the boy had sent his soul inside her. In the future she would sleep for one hour. Pack. Drive to the airport playing her song, back arched and arms thrust. Lift her hand in front of her, a sign. Oh! Oh! 310 SHUT DOWN 1 Yesterday my handsomest colleague drove me home from work. We had been held over at the office, and the late summer sun was setting orangely as we left. I waited with my back turned as he locked the front door, surprised that he had the key. When he offered the ride, I was happy to accept. I had taken the train that morning but over the course of the day acquired two cloth tote bags of books. It would not have been terrible to take the train back, but I did not look forward to the weight-slowed walk home from the station, which passed under several tall, dark freeway overpasses whose shadows always lasted longer than I believed they should. “Thank you so much for doing this,” I told my handsomest colleague. “Of course!” He said. “And now it will be fun. We can talk.” We crossed a pedestrian walkway full of children in uniforms. It was late for them to be leaving school. I remarked that perhaps there had been some assembly. My colleague told me that he has always appreciated our office’s proximity to the school. He found the spontaneity and vibrancy of the children stimulating, he explained, gesturing to three boys about fourteen years old, who had formed a makeshift drum circle in a corner of the walkway. “It’s rejuvenating to be around the students, I think.”The boys’ uniforms were adorned with strings of Mardi Gras beads in the shape of cannabis leaves crossed over their chests like belts of bullets. “Where else will I see things like this, just happening?” My colleague smiled at the boys, one of whom took a cabasa from his backpack and began to shake it. 311 “I like being around them too,” I said. “You can tell so much about them just by watching.” “Yes,” my colleague said, looking into my face. “And I like to know things about them,” I told him. “Because I’m kind of a perv that way. Personal disclosure is my crack.” I was talking about the eldest boys, the tall ones on the swim and track teams, who walk around in rolled-up sweatpants and aviator sunglasses and little else. From their slim, bendy torsos, I know almost everything about them and their lives, their revolving cycles of exercise, meals, and sleep. Their friends. Everything else—school, their families, girls—exists in a dim margin on which the bright light of the boys’ attention only occasionally falls. What I meant was that I like to think about these boys. We reached my colleague’s car, a modest silver hybrid, and he automatically opened the passenger door for me. He waited until I had clicked my seatbelt, closed the door, and made his way past the front of the car. I watched him cross the windshield, a single moment of thoughtless movement. When he started the engine, NPR blasted through the speakers, and he apologized. “I’m normally alone in here,” he said. “It’s fine,” I said. “It’s the same in my car.” He drove and we spoke about our work and people we knew through it, about nearby places to visit on weekend trips. He was a good driver. He waited until the last possible moment to turn. I wouldn’t have taken a ride home from most of my colleagues, although I like almost all of them just fine. I like being alone on the train more, though, to read, or simply stare into space 312 and listen to music on my headphones, half-watching the other passengers and marveling at the passage of time. I like walking up the hill to my apartment, a form of necessary exercise. But I like this colleague better than all of these things. I don’t think about my colleague much when I’m not around him. We are, I think, friends. He knows my husband and inquired about him as he drove. My husband and I even have a little joke about this man, an affectionate observation: he is very well dressed, in a distinctly unfussy and unstudied way. His plaid shirts are always perfectly cuffed just above the elbow, a two-inch-wide roll of fabric that is absolutely neat and flat. We have no idea how he does this, and when we have seen him, we always compare notes on his outfit. My husband says my handsomest colleague has the best shoes of any man he has ever met. A crush requires regular thoughts, developed fantasies, behavioral fetishes, for me at least. It’s a lifestyle change, a problem. I wouldn’t say I have a crush on my colleague. A married couple admires a single man’s haberdashery, and, slightly ashamed of their sartorial sense in comparison, gently mocks him in private. Hardly a ménage a trois. But as we drove, talking, I noticed and remembered all the other things I like about my colleague. He has black hair and is slightly balding with a short beard. His body is neat and small, which is perhaps why his clothes fit him so well. He is shorter than me. He has dexterous, simple hands with clean fingernails. I can’t seem to keep my fingernails clean, no matter what I do. He has a handsome, vaguely exotic face. A high forehead. Nice lips. What does it even mean for lips to be “nice”? My colleague’s handsomeness does not photograph well. I have gone through images of him, trying to discern it, but it isn’t in the pictures. It is in his atmosphere, I think. His way of 313 being kind, quiet, and calm. If we knew each other better, maybe I would dislike these traits, would come to understand what they patch. I am glad I do not know him better. He was driving me home, being kind, speaking in his low, measured tones about the things we both did with our time, about the struggles in those things, and all the while I was thinking about what I could say or do to make him feel that I was sexually available to him. I didn’t plan on seducing him. I just wanted to flash my little glinting shard of appeal. To show it to him like the pale underside of my arm. To catch his eye and make him see it. That I was there next to him, and I liked it. I haven’t figured out a better method for making a man understand than the one I developed as a teenager. 1. Pass dramatically categorical and slightly insane judgments on neutral topics. 2. Hint at a dark interior life riddled with unfulfilled sexual deviancies. 3. Become transparently vulnerable. 4. Complain about an existential problem. 5. Provoke. “Don’t you think that people who treat their pets like children are fucking insane?” I asked him. “They’re the worst. God, I couldn’t get any sleep at all last night. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. My anxiety’s been bad. Sometimes when it’s this bad I will just cry and cry without even knowing why. Like, I go to the store and some lady cuts in front of me with her cart and I’m just in tears, inconsolable.” I reached over and stroked his wrist with my thumb for a fraction of a second. “God, what am I talking about? I’m the worst. Me.” 314 My colleague responded to all of this with more kindness. He is fundamentally kind. But I couldn’t tell whether or not he was engaged by what I was saying. Whether he was taking the bait. I don’t even know what taking the bait would mean, here. He wasn’t going to turn the car around and take me home with him, even though that is what I fantasized about later, in bed, after my husband had gone to sleep. We were close to my house. He was my friend, my colleague. He wasn’t thinking these things. I was only hoping that he was. We turned onto the street that intersects mine. There were only a few more minutes left, so I shut up and tried to enjoy being in an enclosed space with him. He smelled wonderful. I wasn’t actually close enough to smell him, but I knew he smelled wonderful, like leather or sage. He is the kind of man who undoubtedly smells fucking great. I rolled my window down and looked out as we passed the cluster of bars and restaurants a few blocks from where I live. Valet stands had been pushed out into the street. Black-jacketed men jumped into the path of my colleague’s car, trying to get him to let them park it. But my colleague drove on, steady. He didn’t seem to notice the glittering attractions or the many young women waiting to get into the bars. I leaned my head against the car door, pretending we were out on a date. Then I saw my husband walking down the street. He was wearing blue jeans and a collared shirt buttoned all the way up, despite the fact that it was quite hot. He had recently cut his hair very short. He wore an expression that I knew meant he was overheated. It raised in me the same feelings I experience every night in our home, longing for his fine features to smooth, exhaustion. He looked both familiar and like a stranger. 315 I knew I should call out to him, but I did not. I wanted my last moments with my handsome colleague. I let my husband walk on in the opposite direction. My colleague pulled up in front of my apartment. It had been nice to “catch up,” he said. My husband and I, he said—he used my husband’s name—should call him sometime, if we wanted to get a beer. During the ride’s delirious heights I had considered kissing him goodbye on the cheek, but I settled for a half hug against his compact seatbelted chest. Not calling out to my husband already bothered me, even before I saw him again, even before he returned home. It bothered me as I let myself into the apartment. It bothered me for the rest of the night, as we had dinner with friends and then sat on the floor, sweating. It bothered and bothered me. But it didn’t stop me from doing what I’ve done too many nights this month, bringing my computer into the bedroom to watch something with my husband, and then, after he fell asleep, watching muted pornography alone. I worked up a modified scenario. My colleague and I drove, talking. At some vital conversational intersection we both fell silent. Then I laid it out for him, telling him that I was frankly attracted to him. That if it was all right with him, nothing would make me happier than some straightforward sexual congress between our two corporeal bodies. He turned the car around and drove me to his apartment. We didn’t speak. When he parked, he calmly, quietly, kindly unbuckled his seatbelt and leaned over and kissed me with astonishing force, his hand sliding down into the collar of my shirt. In bed, I couldn’t sustain the fantasy. When the porn was on, I focused on the scenario, flamed for it. Between videos, my mind wandered to my colleague. I saw him undress me, saw his fine little body under those neat clothes. I saw myself making a sexy joke about his cuffed 316 sleeves. But when I turned off the computer and rolled onto my stomach, I dried up. I was tired. I couldn’t find my foothold. My husband slept beside me. After long minutes in the dark, I raised my head and looked at his back, at the place where the flesh of his neck meets his shoulders, at the gentle curve of his hairline against the back of his skull. I looked at his skin and his moles and his ears. I pressed myself against his back, careful to keep a fold of duvet between us. I wrapped my arm around his torso and squeezed my eyes shut until the tears left me. I told him I loved him. He was asleep. I told him again that I loved him. He did not wake. I curled against him and cried into his skin. “I love you, I love you,” I mouthed, afraid my whisper would wake him. He did not wake. I was still awake when the closeness became uncomfortable and I had to roll away from him to air my wet chest. I spoke his name in the dark room. He did not wake. I had seen him and not called his name. 2 Last night there was nothing good on television. We watched a handful of last-choice shows, and then descended into a sleepy stupor in front of a funny news show. All of the news has been bad recently, so the show was not very funny. After it ended, I noticed my husband half asleep beside me, not caring. We’ve developed a nightly routine. Make dinner, get stoned, eat, all while watching television or movies. It’s not such a bad thing. For a long time it has helped us, I think. Taking that time away from everything else. Not thinking too much. Not worrying. It is a salve on the problems we can’t solve quickly. Lack of money to go out and do things (once I believed that adulthood meant eating a delicious restaurant meal on most nights), 317 personality differences (my husband does not like to go out as much as I do, although now that we have been together for some time I think I have become more like him, or perhaps simply this is how I too have aged), and the myriad personal problems that emerged in the first months that we lived together. At the beginning of our marriage we used to eat dinner at the dining room table. We sat across from each other under the overhead light from the fan, the table set with placemats, plates, knifes, forks, napkins, glasses of water and wine. Something was not right. The light was glaring, too yellow. We didn’t have much to say; often, even at restaurants, we ate in silence, unless there was a pointed topic to discuss. And, to my great surprise, after we had shared a few meals together as married people my husband said that I chewed very loudly, with my mouth slightly open, something he found disgusting. No one had ever told me this before. I couldn’t imagine that it was true, and if it was true, I couldn’t imagine that it was such a big deal. But between us it became a big deal. He began to chastise me, in a way he thought gentle and I did not. I began to cry. My husband has a bad reaction to women weeping, I think from his mother. The sight of my crying face does not signal him to embrace and soothe me. It makes him feel furious and manipulated. So we solved the problem by eating stoned in front of the television, many layers of aural padding between our bodies. I think I learned to close my mouth, too. This story makes my husband sound horrible. I told it at a party recently, the first time I’ve done so, and everyone was aghast. I’ll admit I enjoyed their reaction. My husband, who was there, felt hurt, and while I felt vindicated, I understood, too. This was only my side. I left out a lot. He is sensitive. He moved here from far away to be with me. In his family people are extremely quiet and prompt and consider these the lodestars of courtesy. 318 Sometimes when there is nothing good on television and it is very hot and my husband is dozing beside me I become quite aggravated. There are things we could be doing in the evenings. I don’t really care about going out because it costs money and I want to save our money, I want to hoard it up like the dried beans and canned goods I stockpile in our pantry. Sometimes I wish we could see friends but we do that, sometimes. Sometimes I think I should work later in the evening but I see the logic of stopping, of having an endpoint in the day, and I am probably the better for it. Every night I wish we had sex. I wish we had sex every night. When it is the woman whose desire is absent, the advice is always to simply submit to the man. Often, she is told, the woman will find that she enjoys the sexual act once it has begun. Her initial reticence is the problem and its shucking will bring them back together. No one ever gives men this advice. It wouldn’t work. Blood must flood the male genitals for penetrational intercourse to occur. But more than brutal biological fact, I think there exists a real concern that telling a man to go along with it until he gets into it would somehow offend him. To submit, like that. This advice is also never given to men because this discussion never occurs. Erectile dysfunction, yes. Lack of desire because a wife has gained weight, yes. Alcoholism-induced mutual withdrawal, yes. Sexual disinterest yawning and vast as an empty hangar? No. Every night I ask my husband if he would like to have sex. No, he says every night. Well, not always—we did a month ago. Before that it was two months. Before that, two more. Before that, I don’t even like to think about it, but it was four. I think four months is the longest we have gone. Maybe it is six. Six months. 319 When I ask my husband if he would like to have sex, I try to sound cute. Casual. “Do you want to mess around?” “Want to make love?” “Hey, let’s do it!” I try to be goofy, light, immature, unthreatening. I know that he is threatened by my desire, because that’s what he throws at me when I push the subject: “I know it’s all you think about, all the time.” In a different context this could be a sexy taunt. But it wounds me, here. My husband slept beside me. The variety show ended, loudly. “This sucks,” I said. “Let’s go to bed.” He checked the locks on the door. I refilled the water pitcher and took it to the refrigerator. We brushed our teeth, washed our faces, peed. He does this thing when he’s done with the sink in which he wipes his wet hands on my belly. I think this is a gesture of love but it makes me squirm. It has nothing to do with sexual appreciation; it’s a childish little friendly move. He wets my skin and then he’s out of the bathroom, in bed. Earlier, as he dozed next to me on the couch, I trolled casual sex classifieds and watched pornography on mute. I have to stop that. Eating my sex junk food. I finished and went into the dark to lie down beside him and tried to find the right position to touch myself as I went to sleep. I had a fantasy about a colleague that I wanted to use. I rolled onto on my stomach, tucked my right hand between my legs. My husband put his hand on my arm. Held it, despite the heat. Recently he’s been doing this more. Touching me as we go to bed. I don’t know if it’s conscious or not, but I feel that it’s 320 designed to make up for the lack of sex. He struggles to show me that he loves me the way I want him to. Then—strange miracle! I swear we made out as I always want to. Making out, high on the list of my favorite sexual acts. Kissing and kissing with tongue, groping each other, long prostrate bodies pressing together. How I love it. My husband made out with me, I was sure! But in the morning the memory seemed odd, fractured. I asked him if it had happened. He couldn’t remember, either. “Maybe,” he said. He has, in the past, groped me in his sleep, as a prelude to sex. I always wake so happily, feel the erection, press myself into his hands. But he is asleep. Not there for me. Maybe something like that happened, with the making out. More likely I simply dreamed it. 3 The problem with fantasizing about people I know is that, eventually, I see the person again, or maybe I even see them regularly, and what I made them do in my fantasy embarrasses me. I’m not embarrassed by the fantasy itself, please understand. I personally believe my fantasies to be fan-fucking-tastic. But my gentle handsomest colleague does not need to be dragged into what is effectively a recitation of my sexual subconscious. Except for the fact that he does, because I can’t fantasize about celebrities anymore. It’s too bleak. As the gulf between me and these people has widened, as I have become less believably a very young pretty girl, the idea of sleeping with some man whose entire life is exercise and diet has become ridiculous and sad. I suppose that’s my problem. What does it matter who I fantasize about? 321 It matters because a few nights ago I was sitting across a dinner table from my colleague, watching him drink a beer and smile affably at conversation. He talked about a nearby neighborhood with excellent Lebanese food. He described an article he had read which argued that all private schools should be closed in order to improve the quality of public schools. He wore a red sweater over a blue t-shirt, jeans. He is a lovely person with pleasant ideas and charming notions, someone I am happy to know. The night before we had dinner—my husband was there, too, and other friends—I had snuck out of bed and into the bathroom to masturbate. My attempts at masturbating in bed beside my sleeping husband had not been successful. I am too nervous that my movements will wake him, and the surest way for me to orgasm is to assume the seated rocking position that I’ve cultivated since early childhood. I can’t do that in bed. So I went into the bathroom and sat Indian-style, facing a white wall. I thought of being alone with my colleague. I saw us in some scenario that inevitably led to being alone. And then, of course, he kissed me, we pawed at each other, we did all the things I miss and don’t know if I will get to do again. I hope I will. I think I will. It’s just hard to know. I trust that I will have sex again, that my husband and I will make love again. But things like making out, being groped through my clothes, the idea of it happening anywhere—on the couch, in the kitchen, in the car, as it once did—I can see these things never happening again. When I think in this I begin to believe that if there was an opportunity to make love to another man, if there was a way to have that sort of passionate entanglement with some man who wanted me, that I would have to go for it, automatically. 322 But then I remember that I am not that type of person, that the love I feel for my husband grows deeper every day, that his sweetness and kindness and care for me would be destroyed by this act. I do not think I could really keep it a secret. That’s part of the fantasy—the idea that I could keep it a secret. I do not want to be one of those casualties of life who uses phrases like “passionate entanglement” and thinks something poetic is going on when it’s not. When in fact the situation is two primed and throbbing sets of genitals, out for each other. Not that that is not poetic. My fantasy progressed to a scene of sex in which I was on top and my colleague held my hips and we ground against each other. It surprised me; this is my husband’s favorite sexual position, so common in our occasional sex life that I have come to almost dislike it. But there it was, in the fantasy. In these scenarios we are always just desperate in lust, me and whoever I’m fucking. That’s the most important part—the breathless sense that this assignation must occur now, or we both might die of want. I pressed down on him. He held me tightly. Then he reached up and slapped me across the face, as hard as he could. It is strange to me that this is a necessary ingredient of these fantasies, my colleague slapping me. My gentle and kind colleague, a head shorter than I, who speaks softly and hates to be the center of attention. How I love the idea of it. The hard rebuke of his palm against my face. The sting, after. 323 4 This morning, in the car, my husband—he was driving me to work, a kind thing he does, a sign of love—said that he tried to make love to me in the night but I wouldn’t wake up. “What?” I was immediately filled with a great sense of loss. “Well, it was strange,” he said. “I woke up this morning without my underwear on, and I thought, why is that? But then I remembered that at some point in the night I woke up feeling very amorous, and I tried to see if you were interested. I touched you, and I took off my underwear. But you were fast asleep.” He didn’t say it in an angry or disappointed way. It was just what happened. And as he described it, I began to think that I remembered this event, somehow, a buried sleep memory of an erection. Because, as I said, it has happened before—because in the past my husband has unconsciously groped me, or sought me sexually in his sleep—it did not surprise me, although it was unusual for him to remember. “I thought it was a dream,” I told him. “Yeah, I can see how you would think that.” He made a happy-sad face. “That it would only happen in a dream.” When he is feeling gentle and calm these are the kinds of conversations we can have about the problem. These are the kinds of feelings we can explore. We never get to why. He says he’s working on why. We understand a little bit of it. It has to do with a sense of control and a terror of intimacy as vulnerability, as openness. It has to do with how, as he says, it is more difficult to have sex with someone you love and have known for a very long time. More difficult for him. 324 What does it say about me that even this melancholy conversation felt to me like progress, felt good, felt freeing? My husband admits to me a botched middle-of-the-night assignation with my unconscious body and I rise on wings of hope. 5 I’m sitting in a computer lab at my company. I like to come here because it is quiet and largely empty. I sign in with my work ID and they give me a little card for the computer, which entitles me to a desk with a monitor and tower drive, a row of power outlets, and heavy black headphones. I come here to work, but I rarely do. Something about the impersonality of the place makes it difficult, although it should be just the opposite. The something may be me; I’m so pleased to be in a clean, blank space that it feels more like respite than work, and I busy myself doing as I like. Reading advice columns and short stories and articles about strange happenings. Using the internet to stare into the lives of people I don’t particularly like, or teenage girls I find oddly fascinating, or those I truly dislike, whom I silently mock. Hours of this seems wonderful in the abstract, but is just mildly diverting in the actual, and afterwards I feel quite useless. Because I have not fully committed to my diversion, and so I am half-awake in my awareness that what I am doing is wrong, or at least wasteful. Afterwards I feel a sense of failure and loss. Sometimes this feeling rises in me before my time in the lab is done, and then I feel doubly bad. Ashamed. I am almost always hungry, but in a way that doesn’t feel like hunger. I eat too much food at night and then none during the day. Twice in the last week I have gorged myself on some innocuous item—dried apricots, beer, ice cream, perhaps the latter two are not 325 innocuous—and woken early with diarrhea and a deep, unshakeable sadness. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I know some of the problems I have, and I know about my husband’s problems, but I want always to avoid blaming my problems on his problems. Because if it is that simple of an equation, then I could solve all of my problems by leaving my husband, and I know this is not true. I do not want it to be true. I love my husband and want to be with him. So the other thing I do in the computer lab when I am here, waiting to not be waiting anymore, is masturbate. For most of my life I could only masturbate by sitting on the floor with my legs crossed and rocking my mons pubis into my right heel. I did this from infancy forward with great success. As a small child I was able to do it in school before the teacher realized what was going on. I still masturbate this way, but obviously I can no longer do it in public. In the last year or two I’ve discovered a certain stiffness beginning to form in my legs, which further limits this method. But about five years ago I discovered that I could masturbate covertly anywhere by simply sitting and squeezing a certain muscle, the same one that I do Kegel exercises with. I suppose that makes it the Kegel muscle. If I sit straight and squeeze it and focus, rocking back and forth a bit, I can come within a number of minutes. I’ve done this many places now, and it seems to be becoming a habit during the hours I spend in the computer lab. I have so many questions about it. Does masturbating in the lab make me a bad person, foisting my sexuality on all these blameless strangers? I’ve never seen any evidence that anyone notices, but maybe they do. Maybe it’s a thing they know about me, the guard who checks out the computers: “Oh, here’s the woman who masturbates at her desk.” 326 I’m sure that’s not the case. I would get into trouble, be asked to leave. Right? This method brings on a strange orgasm. I have no room or space to invoke a particular fantasy. I just focus on making it happen, and maybe there are a few images that help me along. Today I thought about my husband’s naked body from behind, about the way it would look to watch him thrust into me—and I thought about the feeling of that, of the head of his penis touching the back wall of my vagina. My cervix, or whatever is there, exactly. I should know, but I don’t. 6 Every night when I go to sleep I try to lucid dream of sex. It rarely works, but a few days ago I had the most vivid dream just before waking. The setup was elaborate: I was staying the home of a Russian family, in Russia. They were wealthy in the way that Tolstoy characters are wealthy, but it seemed to be the present day. In any case I was not uncomfortable. There were two or three adult daughters, very beautiful, with dark hair and eyes. I was a visitor, or perhaps some kind of paid lady’s companion. The parents noticed that the daughters liked me and invited me to stay. The parents had split up, but were still living together. The mother was very cosmopolitan and exciting, a swirl of long and expensive scarves who tromped in several times a day to take me from whatever I was doing with gossip and interesting drinks. The father was taciturn but kind. He smiled sometimes. I lived in this family’s life for many pleasant days, eating salads of grated carrot, drinking icy vodka. And then the dream came to its purpose. When it was time one night, I was told that I 327 was to share the father’s bed. No one thought anything about this arrangement odd. I climbed into bed with the father and he made love to me. What thrilled me, in the dream and now, was the way he did it. It was workmanlike lovemaking, in the best way. He found a young woman in his bed and took me in his arms and set to his task. He was virile, intense. He overwhelmed me in the way that I wanted him to. In the morning, at breakfast, my friends his daughters and ex-wife were as friendly and normal as ever. Waking, I tried to remember his face. Made him every famous Russian I could see. I try still. 7 This morning the internet is plastered with images of a beautiful man. The internet is always full of images of beautiful people, and the corners of it that I frequent are probably more likely to be plastered with more beautiful men than women, because I try to limit my exposure to idealized images of women, which make me too sad. It’s too easy to draw the connection between my own sexless state and their implied surfeit of sexual happiness, or at least attention, to start making the lazy connections the brain perfects in adolescence, creating the sense that I am ugly, or undesirable, or have simply somehow missed a window in which my beauty and libido were equalized against men’s and my chances of happy regular sex were high. So I don’t look at too many beautiful women, although they are everywhere. The world does not lack for female beauty. But it does lack for male beauty, which is persnickety and idiosyncratic—what shines my knob is not what shines the knob of the lady beside me. Most 328 men deemed attractive by whatever governing body makes these designations do nothing for me at all. I’m trying to explain why it seems like a worthy endeavor, looking. And why I was surprised that the man whose face and body are everywhere on the internet today, a man who I have consistently regarded as desirable, has been cast as the lead in the film adaptation of a book the claims to explore the subject of feminine desire. I haven’t read the book. It is widely regarded as poorly written, and as I understand it the plot contains nothing novel or incendiary, only a barrage of endless heightened description of extremely mild bondage and submission. I don’t begrudge anyone else the pleasure this book might bring. In fact, the idea makes me happy—that a book can bring on sexual happiness in the mind of a reader. But the book has nothing to do with what those photographs did to me. They were black and white, high contrast; the man had begun his career as an underwear model. So some were of his bare oiled torso, and others of his face. I prefer faces to torsos, but I looked at both. And then, when I looked away, I found I wanted to look again. And I did. I don’t pretend there is anything remarkable in any of this. What struck me was how immediately I felt the urge to fantasize about the man. Which is, I’m sure, what the producers of the film are hoping for. There is nothing wrong with fantasy, but in the last ten years of my life it has become a daily companion, each year more prominent. It seems to me that it should be the other way around, that as I move from adolescence into adulthood I should find myself spending less time fantasizing about sex and more time having it. Because as I imagined myself there with the actor—the beautiful man whose beauty is his job, whose whole self must be twisted up in the maintenance of that beauty—I realized 329 immediately how absurd the pairing was. It’s one thing to picture yourself with a friend, or a neighbor, someone whose beauty is not celebrated by the masses. It’s quite another to envision yourself undressing a celebrity. Someone whose job is to be pretty. The difficulty my fantasies have begun to present has made me feel more than ever like a man. It’s something my husband first pointed out to me, an insight from his analyst. I have a strong animus, he a strong anima. My shadow man-self, looming over my shoulder, dominant, leering at his shadow woman-self, demure. He didn’t elaborate, but the analysis continued apace in my mind. The sexual conflict between us would be the epitome of traditional marital discord, were I a man and he a woman. What a trope of advice columns, that! Just this morning I saw that my situation is not absent from the minds of the nation’s advice columnists. Dear Amy: "Wondering (but not Wandering) Wife" is in a sexless marriage. So am I. My husband and I have been through therapy, read self-help books and so forth. But he simply never wants to do it. The time is never right for him. We have not had sex in years and probably never will again. This makes me so sad. — Not Wandering Dear Not: I have heard from dozens of women in the same boat. What are we supposed to do with that, Amy? The whole of your response is that there are more of us. Dozens, even. What cold comfort. But I’ll admit it made me feel better. I want to feel sympathy for men. Men, whose sexual need has been magnified to a social concern. Men, who claim that women deny them comfort and release. Men, who have denied me and denied me and denied me. 330 8 When I fantasize, the scenario always starts the same, with the dance and rituals of sex. Foreplay, I guess. Taking off each other’s clothes, kissing, touching. In real life it wouldn’t have to go that way, if it went that way a good number of times beforehand. What I mean to say is that I could get down to it pronto, without any preheating of the oven, so to speak, if in my life I had ever had my share of preheating. If the man in my fantasy is someone I know, then the fantasy includes the revelation of our mutual attraction, the flimsy reasoning that takes us from clothed colleagues to bedmates. I will never be free of fantasy. I am shackled to it. It is the scenario that unfolds automatically in front of me. But increasingly fantasy depresses me, and not only because of the contrast between my sex-stuffed inner life and my sex-starved real life. When I fantasize I understand something fundamental about men. The way that their brains allow them to slot themselves in next to a swimsuit model or a movie star. The reason why the body is so important. To be good at sex, you do not have to be smart or kind or beautiful, although these things help. You just have to be willing and interested, the two qualities most impossible to invoke in another person. The body—its idealized image—is only a shorthand for willing interest. In fantasies beauty is just a way of saying, “Yes.” I have simply begun to feel silly when I put myself in a bedroom with an imagined man, because I know I am not there with him. I know that he did not choose me. That’s what I miss. Choice. In my fantasies, I am lying down with these men. I kiss them, am kissed by them. By now, my fantasy life is ten times longer and more diverse than the one I have lived. 331 9 In the last few months, a man I went to high school with has begun showing a greater interest in me online. He’s not someone I ever knew well, but I watched him carefully and with great interest during a concentrated period of my life, when I was thirteen years old and everything felt monumental and grand and every pang of desire held simultaneous threat and promise. We were in the seventh grade. We didn’t go to the same school, which was good; at school I was a hopeless pariah. No boy would have had me in the way boys had girls in those innocent days. The lucky girls got to hold a boy’s hand, get pizza or hot dogs together, and kiss in discreet closed-mouth pecks meted out like medication. I wanted that medication. I wanted sex, too—the sex I had read about in books and saw in movies—but I was certain that I was the only one who did. Certainly the only girl. I knew even then that what I wanted was different from whatever that handful of boys may have been thinking, too, far and away from whatever they were jerking off to in the shaded privacy of their bedrooms. It fills me with tenderness, to think about it. The boys who frightened and enticed me, who seemed unfathomably cool, seated on the edges of twin beds in their little bedrooms, playing with their erections. Did they look at pictures? Conjure the face of a girl from school, the sexy friend of an older sister? Did they do as I did and get there through books? Or am I as out of the loop as ever? Were they all fucking each other in those modest little chambers, spreading flexible thirteen-year-old legs across plaid flannel coverlets? Probably not. Then, as now, I lived in a prison of my own desire. I could see things they couldn’t. I wanted things that they didn’t. 332 I met him in CCD, which we called “Catholic class,” an evening course in Catholic doctrine and theology. It met on Wednesday nights in classrooms at a parochial school I did not attend. We were a group of about ten students, mostly girls, passively receiving a volunteer teacher’s attempt to impress the Church upon us via a workbook illustrated with ugly line drawings of virtues and values, quizzes on the sacraments and benedictions, a lot of filling in the blank. My parents had ruined any chance of me liking the class by raising me to be open-minded, thoughtful, and discerning. But they wanted me to go to CCD so that I could be confirmed and I acquiesced, holding on for hope of learning a path to magic. And after the hell of sixth grade, in which all of my friends had turned against me, one by one, the opportunity to meet people my age outside of school appealed. My attention fell on him right away, as soon as seventh grade CCD started. He was short—most boys were short then, and the ones I liked could be counted on to be at least a head below me in height—and wore a white canvas boat hat. Now I recognize it as the whim of a child trying to figure out self-presentation, but at the time wearing a hat to CCD was a mild act of rebellion. We couldn’t wear them in school, after all. He was the only boy who spoke and listened to me, as if he had noticed that I was intelligent and his interest was piqued by this intelligence. I didn’t think this then. It’s my guess now. He was slight, with olive skin and curly black hair, a strong nose. But he wasn’t the boy I had a crush on. That boy had a first name I’d never heard before—Seamus—and perpetually sleepy eyes. I sat next to Seamus on a van ride back from a day of service at a soup kitchen and regaled him with stories about my oddness. I was in the early stages of developing my tactic of charming a stranger with a running self-deprecating commentary on myself. I told him about my love of nature, that I identified as Wiccan. 333 “Is that one of those weird Japanese things?” he asked, and I, thrilled, assured him it was not. After the van ride, we had several thrilling exchanges of instant messages, so it seemed reasonable to me to have a thirty-seven dollar bouquet of flowers delivered to his house on Valentine’s Day with my email address written on the card. This was before he could easily use this information to figure out who I was. Seamus wrote me a confused email. I did not reply, but continued to flirt with him on instant message. Then, just as it seemed we were hurtling towards each other—towards a shared revelation—the collision I had plotted for us fell apart. He told me, in an instant message conversation in which I had crept closer and closer to revealing myself as the origin of the flowers, that he thought I was a little weird. I made up a ridiculous story about some imaginary homeschooled friend being behind the entire thing—not only the bouquet but also our whole correspondence, as if I was only a proxy, the conduit through which the disembodied desire of this undersocialized and invisible soul traveled. Seamus seemed disinterested or disbelieving, I couldn’t figure out which. Perhaps a gutting tonic of the two. Insult was added to injury when another girl told me that she had gone to a movie with Seamus and another girl, whom she described as “pretty cozy” with Seamus. Pretty cozy. So the short boy in the hat was just my friend. Not even. I had a crush on him, smaller than the one I had on Seamus. And unlike Seamus, this hatted boy and I went to high school together. (Seamus, I believe, went to a Catholic boys’ school. Years and years later, I contacted him again, trying to sort out what had happened. “It was really nice of you to do, but I just didn’t know you,” he told me. Story of my life.) 334 The hatted boy grew taller but remained small for a man. He no longer wore his hat. Sophomore year of high school we had American history together. By that time I had a boyfriend, the last man I loved who had an uncomplicated relationship to sex. I didn’t need the hatted boy anymore, and I didn’t think he particularly needed me, either, which was why I was baffled and honored when, one spring night during my senior year, he told me that he spent most of sophomore year fantasizing about fucking me. We were almost done with high school, back on instant messenger. He came online, surprising me, and I said hi, reminding him who I was. He didn’t need reminding. He may have been a little drunk. He told me that he had watched me fall asleep in our history class every morning right as the teacher began his lecture. I reminded him that I was always able to answer questions correctly when the teacher woke me. I always wanted to have sex with you, he replied. To touch your big breasts. It was juvenile and honest. It thrilled me. But I had a boyfriend. I don’t remember exactly how I said it, but in that conversation I promised him that he could see my breasts before graduation, an offer that never came to fruition. I only remember making it because I drunkenly trotted it out for another friend, later, a boy I also had feelings for, a man who had difficulty with vulnerability and intimacy, like all of the men I would love after my high school boyfriend. “What am I going to do?” I remember drunkenly moaning to my friend on somebody’s porch. “Well, I don’t know,” he said. I was worried you wouldn’t be okay with just sex. That you’d want a relationship, the hatless hatted boy wrote, that night when we were seniors. 335 He was right. Then, I wouldn’t have been okay with that. Then, I believed that my boyfriend and I would be together forever. Not in a facile or easy way. I wanted this future for its difficulty. It was not romantic. But now. Now I could do it. And I wonder, when he is suddenly so friendly to me, online. The hatted boy grew up into a scientist. He participates in a startling number of athletic activities. And now he is writing to me again. Could I do it? I wonder. He will visit his parents at Christmas, as will I, with my husband. We could all grab a beer. Or I could beg off with an excuse and go alone. That would be suspicious. The hatted boy has seen photographs of my husband. Liked them. But I allow myself the thought, let it spread out in front of me. Us, alone in bar. There’s a variant, in which my husband is there and politely steps out when it becomes clear where things are heading, but I don’t care for it. It’s impossible and too sad. So it’s just the former boy in the hat and me, seated at a little brown table, looking at each other over two beers. I wonder what I would wear. A dress, maybe, but it would be winter, so maybe a sweater. Jeans. Something carefully chosen but not too, something sexy but not too. I wouldn’t want to signal my intentions to him, although maybe I would. In the decade since I’ve seen him, his hairline has begun to recede. His face is long, his skin still olive, his nose still prominent. He is fit and wiry. Attraction to him does not come naturally, but I can will it on. Imagine getting drunker and drunker, or better yet, stoned. Feeling the proximity of his desire like a wonderful rash. That’s what I’m banking on. Him still wanting me. When I consider the possibility that he might not, that he might be baffled by my husband’s absence and horrified by my lascivious assumption, everything curdles and turns. 336 But let me pretend. We drink beer after beer. Our catchup conversation circles more private subjects. I lay my wrist on the table, underside exposed. Eventually he touches it. First by accident, then in mute sympathy, as I tell some story. We both realize his hand a few moments too late. We make no effort to stop touching. Do I imagine him sliding into the booth beside me? Or do we stay separate, discuss in low tones what comes next, as if someone might overhear and tell? I don’t know. I don’t know where what happens next happens, only that it does. His hands over my clothes, feeling me, as he has wanted to for so long. My breath catching, that idea that I am wanted, that access to me is desired, that my own desire, sturdy and full, can meet another. I have pictured various positions, naked scenarios, the crowd of his balding head tucked between my legs. I think of him kissing my neck, my hand, my arm, my face. My back. In another life I loved to have my back kissed. I thought it was the most wonderful feeling in the world. I can’t even recall that feeling. Intellectually, I remember it, but my senses do not. And yet I struggle with the hatted boy, although it seems to me that he should be a flexible enough object of fantasy. Is it because I am still not as attracted to him as I am to someone else, just as it was years ago? Seamus then, my husband now. I want their attention first, before him. This is the explanation that makes the most sense, but I try still. I imagine his hand on my wrist. The first kiss—long and deep, please God let it be something he has wanted— and then what comes after. That feeling of being filled, of being full. 10 In December it did actually happen, the hatless boy contacted me and suggested that we get coffee. He was in fact home visiting his family, quelle surprise. It is the week after 337 Christmas, after the night of Christmas itself, on which my husband and I had the most terrible sexual encounter of our marriage. It had been a nice day. We cooked and unwrapped presents. We drank, heavily. And then we went to bed, calmly, without expectation of sex on my part. I was content to lie in the dark with my head against my husband’s chest, hearing the resonance of his heartbeat through the organ’s covering of viscera and bone and muscle and skin and hair. I love him. Sometimes this makes it easier, sometimes harder. The lights were out and we were drifting to sleep when to my great and delighted surprise he made an overture to me. He took my hand and put it on his hard cock. I pulled down his pants and put my mouth on him. I was so happy to be wanted. We slipped easily into sex, the automatic kind that holds with our routine—squelching my hopes of something different, but not bad, not bad at all. I sat atop him, trying to breathe past the burn. It had been two months since our last encounter, and I have learned that my body does not wait as I do. It closes up shop. It takes a few minutes, when I am afforded the rare opportunity, to be able to fully join. When I finally access the thing I so dearly want, it is painful to me. It hurts. The feeling will pass. But I need a minute. On Christmas I did not get a minute. I got my husband’s quick ejaculation, and immediate return to sleep. “Hey,” I said. “I didn’t…” He was in fact already asleep. He may never have woken. I woke him, gently. He shook me off. “I’m tired.” I lay as far away from him as possible, crying silently. I don’t care for crying silently, or crying in the bathroom, or in the closet, or under my desk, which is the latest place my crying 338 habits have taken me. I need to cry because of my husband but I cannot cry because of my husband so my solution is to find the places that my husband will not know I am crying and go to them to cry. The bathroom is my mainstay, that quiet chamber of tiles. In a pinch a closet will do. Recently I have taken to crawling into the box of available space beneath my desk to crouch and pinch my arms and bite my lips as I sob. When he is asleep I can cry without hiding, but silently. The bedroom was hot, but outside was cold, freezing cold. Everything dusted in snow and ice. In the forest preserve a few blocks west of my parents’ house the river had iced over and deer had either died or ventured deeper into the woods to survive. Animal carcasses everywhere, frozen in whatever state of rot. Soon I might join them. Be among them. Ten years of life without sex on my terms had passed in one movement of some man’s hand. My own death would find me, my face wrinkled and worn as I too eagerly ate the food at business meetings, starving for pleasure, and wiped my greasy hands on my cheap pants before stumbling back home. Eventually I accomplished something like sleep. In the morning, I made plans to see my old friend the hatted boy, or whatever he was then or is to me now. He even offered to pick me up. I accepted, and soon I was in an older car on a snowy day, hurtling towards the coffee shop where I had spent many hours in my first year of high school, when it seemed the most cheerful and promising place on Earth. One night almost fifteen years to the day before I visited the coffee shop with the former boy in the hat, my first boyfriend’s band played a terrible show at this coffee shop. The turnout was good because they were opening for Someday Soon, a Christian prog-rock band with a big local following. My first boyfriend limped through his weak set, playing a lot of instruments and 339 then stalking off the stage, glaring at the crowd of Someday Soon fans massed outside. No matter how bad his music was it was rude of them to wait out his set instead of coming in to listen. I thought that then and I think it now. He yelled at me on his way to his friend’s car to smoke pot. “You don’t get it.” I tried to hug him but he wouldn’t let me. “This is what Jamie and I were talking about when we said we don’t rock anymore. You don't get it at all.” Jamie was my first boyfriend’s friend, a petulant middle-aged man in the body of a chubby sixteen-year-old boy. I hadn’t been privy to their conversation about rocking out, so I guess he was right. I didn’t get it. I tried to hug him again and he turned away. Later, in the backseat of my mom’s car, my best friend asked me what she could do to get me to stop crying and I said, “Just hold me.” Every time I go to the coffee shop, the part of me I left there when I was fifteen flickers on, lights up in proximity to the rest of me. I feel it hanging there among the colorful art by untrained painters that lines the walls. Later I staged a poetry reading at this coffee shop, right after my graduation from high school, to an audience of two, my history teacher and a boy I had never laid eyes on before, who laughed long and low after each poem, as if they were funny. They weren’t, at least not to me. What more fantastic place could there be to begin an assignation? I ordered the giant iced coffee topped with whipped cream I had favored in another life. The hatless boy settled across from me. In the V of his dark sweater, I saw layers, collared plaid shirt, long underwear of waffled cotton, clean white t-shirt. We smiled at each other. He ordered a green tea. We sipped. 340 We began to talk and I turned on my method. Laid out the innuendo in tracks. Baited the trap with an embarrassing revelation. Touched his arm, briefly. The hatless boy barreled past it, sturdy and indomitable. He told me about his hobbies, his love for the little provincial city where he worked, his interest in writing. He said he would like to meet my husband. “I’m sure you’d get along,” I told him. We parted with a hug. 11 Before you ask: yes, I have considered suggesting to my husband that I be allowed to seek sex outside of our marriage. But I can’t imagine actually making that proposal, much less following through on it. All my life I have sought committed relationships and thrust my energy into keeping them strong. I would not find it simple to find a stranger to sleep with, or to sleep with a stranger. Undoubtedly I am trapped by my own romanticism; without an initial impression, a moment of chemistry, why would I want to have sex with some person I don’t know? Until such a moment occurs, or my husband recovers his desire, I have chosen to be free. Free is not how I feel, most of the time. Most of the time I feel pain. Unfulfilled desire. Last week it was the worst it had ever been. I was left home alone and took the opportunity to masturbate as I rarely do now, naked, on my bed. I brushed the top of something with my fingertips and with the fingertips of my feeling. On the bed where I sleep chastely with my husband, night after night, I opened my skin like that. But opening broke something inside me. This has happened before and will happen again but I never expect it. I feel pleasure and I 341 break. After I scrambled to the high left corner of the bed and crouched there like a hurt animal, my eyes tracking alert across the room. It was some time before I could resume human behavior. And then I could do nothing for the rest of the day. I tried to busy myself with chores but found myself doubled over beside the laundry, heaving, and then I was sobbing on all fours on the floor, my knees grinding into the wood. I thought, now that part of your life is over, it is gone to you now. Now you are older, and everyone you know is older, and the stability and security you fought against a tide so hard for as a young woman, now it is yours. If you escape it there will be no one waiting for you outside it. To escape you must take a great risk you cannot come back from. And you are not brave, you have never been brave in that way, you have only been brave when it requires you to sacrifice, and so here you are poised between two sacrifices. It’s over, it’s gone from you now, you made the choice to be with the man who did not want it, and although you did not know you were making that choice and have parsed it in arguments where he bellows at you that he hates sex, that it repulses him, that before he met you it was a beautiful language all its own and now it is only the vile sound and smell of his own suffering, that you have made him speak to strangers about it and this has hurt him deeply, how much he despises it, how much—you cannot help but thinking—he despises you, and this is where you are, and this is where you live. All day I was helpless against my sadness, could do nothing against it. When my husband came home, he was annoyed that I was depressed. I could not lift myself even to please him. “You seem like you’re ready to die,” he said. I went to sleep in a haze, panting, seeing that shoreline fade behind me, gone, gone. But sometimes there are times like last night, when I feel better, hopeful. I do not know why. 342 I am beginning to believe it is grace. My charism. Last night my husband arrived home from work and asked if I had bought a bottle of wine to drink with dinner. I had not. I volunteered to go out and pick one up. I left the apartment in the soft clothes I had worn all day to work inside. When I was younger, I would not have gone out like this. But now, I don’t care. I live in a city where such things are not particularly important. The climate is clement. The walk to the store to buy the wine took me past a commercial strip of bars, restaurants, and shops, where young people sit outside and eat dinner with their friends. It is never absent beautiful women, their hair and makeup just so. Women who look as I never will, spindly poles with intricate faces and incredible shoes. The warm yellow light of the restaurants, the din of the bars. I passed all of it happily. Seeing the beautiful women and feeling the hot air on my face, I think I know what it is to be a man. To want and not receive. To be asked and to deny. I feel my man-self inside me, stretching and growing. His strength and his brutality. His power of choice. Walking calmly past the market, past all of the wares on display. Appreciating beauty for beauty. Buying my wine. Thinking again and again in the warm night, I am free. I think that if someone I loved saw me and chose not to call my name, I would not be hurt. Even if it is an illusion, even if it belongs only to this night, I ride in my man’s body. Feel his breath in my nose, his blood beating in my veins. His life hard and alive against his belly. He takes me in his arms. I fall into his open mouth, lost, free. 343 RÉUNION My fangs break wolf fish. I bathe in purple ice floes. Seal my body with a grand callus and sleep from freeze to thaw. None can oppose me. Even as salmon dwindle to meal and winter shrinks to a single night, it is better to be a bear than a woman. My woman body had friendly henlike breasts, a high broad ass, slim working fingers. All of it cauled in warm linen and never understood. I shot stars down upon beasts in the field. Fileted carcasses with a bone knife. Stoked flames, spat into them from between my legs. The one I desired tasted blood—beast and mine in twain, for love I rent the walls of my mouth—and fled, thinking I wanted to eat him. The elm gruel of his cowardice cured me of my pretty little form. Bearskin I am rough. Silverback black-eyed. Bearskin, when I want to fuck, the bear comes sniffing and presses his nose into my shit. Assumes I want to eat him. He wants to eat me, too. Bearskin, with another bear in the grass or the cave or the trees or the river: I thought I’d never tire of it. But my mother rings in me, Remember daughter your twin, your other self, your twin remember him. Her bell dulls my hide, rubs my vow into a lie. I pull the failsafe from the cave floor. Break the glass. Free the vole, watch it run. Air Austral does not take passengers of the ursine persuasion. My green pod is loaded into the bowels of the container ship Axel Maersk. Together we slumber across the Pacific. Skirt Hawaii, hang left over the Philippines, low past the Spratly and Riau Islands. Finger the Malacca Strait with the enthusiasm of a fifteen-year-old human. Bend across the Indian Ocean and land at Antsiranana. Helicopter transport to Le Port, dangling below the whirlybird: at forty days it seems a bargain. 344 I shuck my plug. Sit up to see. Green pillars, black knuckles tumbling into Pleistocene beaches, giant sperm rivers, buttery Creole architecture dotted in. That telltale volcano lushness. A place that can go at any moment. A Portuguese christened the island after his cherished Saint Apollonia, whom he believed to have been a virgin deaconess martyred in Roman Egypt. Before the mob burnt her, they yanked out and shattered her teeth, rendering Apollonia the patroness of dentistry. A tooth is in reliquary in Porto cathedral, a piazza is named for her in Rome, and in fifty-two rood screens in Devon and East Anglia Apollonia appears clutching an oversized pincers. Around the time her story came together, priests sold corpse teeth as a headache cure. The name didn’t last. Another Portuguese named another island for Apollonia, and that didn’t last either. The French showed, chose their own nonsensical moniker. Stole local children and sent them to continental servitude. Recently there was a chikungunya outbreak. Joint pain, insomnia, fever, swelling, stiffness, rash. Headache. No vaccine, no medicine. Prevention via mosquito death. The symptoms linger after the virus leaves the body. The longer I live, the more wearying these human discoveries become. Apollonia was a priestess, not a deaconess, and not a virgin. Betrayed by her lover. She’d appreciate the canonization. I do, because she was named for me. They did that, in the first years of the church. Folded me into my twin, made us the same. Let out my power like yolk from a pinhole in an egg’s fat end. The ridiculous idea that the Portuguese was honoring a saint. We summered here as children. Where did the sailor think his idea came from? Those poor humans headaching all 345 night in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Paying for what was done to her. To me. Porto should send the Réunionnais the tooth. The pincers are a nice touch, I will allow. The humans grow lentils, embroider, build temples, speak a decorative and exclusionary patois. Butchers work fat and blood into sausage. Fog wreathes peaks and sea. The largest land animal remains my friend the panther chameleon. Lava flows. It is not so difficult, here, to remember my childhood. Lithe, burnt, my twin and I dove from beaches into shark-rich shallows, from mangroves into streams set with jeweled fish. At night I shouted stories from the caldera pit and he paced the rim, measuring the sky. We slept on the beach, in the trees, in the deep hollows separating the alpen knuckles. Breakfast was when fruit fell heavy on our faces. Moss beneath us, breath our blanket. For our meeting, my twin fashions himself a clever man, discreet and contained, masterful. Indistinctly foreign, prone to squint. The kind of human to whom the delivery of a massive pod with heartshaped air holes is, if not expected, unquestioned. The hotel he has taken for us is old, not by any means the island’s finest. They leave the pod in an oblong ballroom painted a maudlin, badly flaking pink. But there is a real wood floor, no laminate here, and seeing it I understand. Lover of form and discipline, my twin. Creating ballet in his image, the pretender only paid tribute to the real sun king. When he enters I want to destroy the pod. Charge him, force my wet nose into his mouth. But my twin wants to free me, and feeling his desire, I demur. 346 In no body have I talent for dancing, although I have tried long to learn. My best teacher, a haze of fabric, told me that my elemental gestures, now jerky now languid, proved my essence. I liked that. Then a spoke caught one of her long scarves, strangling her, and my education ended. Learning did not mean what I thought it did. I tried to cram, staring at words and figures and movements until I lost consciousness. Only then, as my mind unwound and replayed the shapes before the flickering light of dream, did I learn. When I was young I saw that desire bound the humans, and their want became hatred. So I cloaked myself in moonlight and took to the woods. Occasionally I had to kill one who pursued me there. Good nymphs were hard to find. Like everything else, it became difficult—the role, the pledge to be pure and even half good. So I went out a crone and found a world wrapped in illness and pain, and this ugliness comforted me. Eventually the world healed its wound by opening manifold others, and humans saw me again. I gave lifetimes over to telling stories. Chisel, quill, blade, ink, blood. I told of a man who lives forever and becomes a woman and ended myself in a river. I told it again, adding a child and an angel before cancer took me. Always some variant on a beautiful woman who stood on a stage telling a pretty story into a stiff black eye. It was easy to be her. The story dazzled them into children, confused and sleepy. Still I was not understood. Elm gruel. So I found that stupid hunter and made him turn me bear. 347 The lid is lifted and I see him for the first time in a thousand years. In one of his abominable perfect shirts, cuffs bound with coins of my face. I smile, which is disconcerting on a bear. He raises an implement. Pincers. Always with the theatrics. My twin! I round and nuzzle him. He is my half, but he is also a man confronted by a bear. His fear moves me. Under his ear I find that musk that is more his face than his face. His true shape flickers silver-white, thrusts me back into our body. One before it was two. We go to the long low window and stand, not touching. Twin, I hear him think. Twin. The rainforest holds its lungs. Mist gives itself to the mountain. The room dissolves to skylight, a rectangle of breath. A cloud comes to queer the crater. In my life I have had three resilient fantasies. In the first a man tells me to give him my underwear and I do, grinning, bound. In the second, after he comes inside me, I ask him to drink himself from my body. He does, grinning, bound. In the third he rises from between my legs and feeds the solution back to me in a kiss. Bound, we can’t grin. I have had a fantasy of fantasies. That in their realization I would find release. The man you betray will come with a flamethrower, my twin said once. And you’ll stand behind the burning house, smelling your pussy hands. Smiling, I told him. 348 Send out, soul. It spreads itself against day and night, a sweet patina culling at the edges. At treetop in the knuckle I am the flower that opens at the sun. When we were children he loved to hear me. I teethe his ear, limn its seashell edge. After, I am shy. After that, I am proud. When I am a woman I remember so many wonderful things. Make me the skinned human I saw once in a museum. Muscle and nerve frozen with plastic, bare of epidermis save for the tabs of her labia. Bent over, presented forever. 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Americans abroad and not Constantinople

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Negrolands: anticolonial aesthetics for the lands of the Blacks

Asset Metadata

Creator Locascio, Lisa (author)

Core Title A bag of shocking pink: occult imagery in contemporary American fiction by women

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Publication Date 08/15/2018

Defense Date 05/04/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag America,creative writing,Edith Pearlman,feminism,hybrid writing,Judith Freeman,Literature,Mary Gaitskill,memoir,OAI-PMH Harvest,twentieth-century

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Handley, William (committee chair), Bender, Aimee (committee member), Deverell, William (committee member), Johnson, Dana (committee member)

Creator Email lisa.locascio@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-301921

Unique identifier UC11280275

Identifier etd-LocascioLi-4775.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-301921 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-LocascioLi-4775.pdf

Dmrecord 301921

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Locascio, Lisa

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA