What I didn’t expect: John, on the couch, his head very recently in his hands, saying, What about therapy. And if the sight of him, I think I do not exaggerate if I use the word devastated, if this provoked pain it also provoked anger. At his weakness. Provoked also disgust. I was stuck with myself wasn’t I, but here he was being given a chance to walk away and here he was squandering it.
Perhaps the conversation continued beyond my initial refusal. I mean my refusal to speak, so it was more of a monologue, John saying, Don’t you love me, and Shouldn’t we give ourselves a chance to fix this, and We were going to have a baby, and me not trusting myself to open my mouth. How animals, caught in a trap, will gnaw off their own limbs, maybe it was a little like that only I think the comparison gives me too much credit, it was John’s limb and I was the one chewing, him saying, I still think we can make this work, him saying, Here, do you want this leg, too.
Anyway if the conversation did continue I don’t remember any of it, what I remember is saying, I’m going now, what I remember is calling a cab and going to the airport, what I remember is buying a ticket to Los Angeles at the airport and how expensive it was.
* * *
—
I hadn’t called my parents ahead of time. I wasn’t ready to answer questions, and questions are more easily ignored in person than on the phone. Besides which I didn’t need to because the fact is that my parents are lovely people, really very nurturing. My father more notionally as in he’d love to be but mostly he isn’t around, my mother sloppier the later it gets, but well-intentioned, both of them, and kind. Gentle with me, eager to care for me, my mother especially, traits as unforgivable in a parent as in a lover.
So they’d welcomed me in and allowed me to ignore their questions and now it was two days later, early afternoon, and I was in the kitchen making myself a gin and tonic. My whole body, I should mention, abuzz with fury. Drinking an attempt to calm down. Furious with myself because by the time I got to Los Angeles I’d realized, I wasn’t stupid, that I’d done it all wrong.
The childhood fantasy of running away, we’re all familiar, yes? Similar in many respects to the childhood fantasy of being allowed to witness one’s own funeral, the difference is only in emphasis. The child who dreams of witnessing her own funeral dreams of being allowed to hear the unqualified praise that is due the dead; mere mention of her faults is, if only temporarily, if only publicly, banned. The child who dreams of running away knows that in so doing she provokes anger, that her action may in fact be an occasion for the dredging up and reexamination of wrongs committed. But what is this to her? Those wrongs, like the people she has wronged, lie in the past; she has given herself the chance to begin anew.
Of course there’s a reason this fantasy belongs to childhood. Starting over is difficult and painful and the past isn’t dead and buried it isn’t even, etc. And the fact is that starting over becomes more so—difficult and painful I mean—the older one gets, for the older one gets the more numerous the ties to the life one wishes to leave behind, the more ties therefore to cut. The more ties therefore, later, if one is possessed of what is sometimes called a weak ego and what is sometimes called a conscience, to mend.
What I mean is I’d waited too long. If I’d changed my life after leaving graduate school. If I’d changed my life after moving to Lincoln. But I’d waited too long; I’d waited long enough that a change in my life provoked also a change in the lives of others, a violent and unwanted change that I would eventually, I was aware of this, I was not so wholly without feeling that I did not care about this, have to, I think the term is deal with.
Let me try to explain this another way. As a child, my interests, if you could call them that, were the highly regimented activities at which I immediately excelled. The fact that I’m one dissertation away from a PhD in English, this is at least in part because I read easily and early and because grown-ups, teachers especially, do love to compliment a little girl with a big book. If homework can be a hobby it was, throughout elementary and middle and high school, primary among mine. What I wanted was direction and praise for following it. As a child these were easy to find. As an adult I learned that the only people who seemed inclined to give out both were my professors, married men, almost all of them. But you can’t marry your married professor. So instead I married John. John, who was so kind and so supportive and emotionally generous and a good listener, who was everything a liberated woman is supposed to want. But then there was no one to pat me on the head for making the right choice. There was only John, who was so kind. Who was so kind and who wanted me to have desires of my own. Really it was a mean trick that the only one I developed was the desire to leave him.
What I’m trying to say, the theorem that must be accepted as a premise if any of my behavior is ever to make any sense, is that I have been, that I continue to be, best at being a vessel for the desire of others. And that this has made me good at exactly two things, school and sex. Also that you’re not supposed to use people as means to an end, you’re only supposed to treat them as ends in and of themselves, a very smart and famous man by the name of Immanuel Kant says so. Only I did want to be used as a means, and mostly it made me miserable and was evil besides, and in an attempt to fix this fundamental problem with me as a person I’d used John as a means and that, not questions like What are you going to do for money, and How are you going to find a job, and Have you opened the e-mail from your manager in response to the e-mail in which you quit without notice, and Is it irony to quit without notice i.e. in a very inappropriate way when the job you’re quitting is in HR, the fact that I’d used John, that was what was eventually going to bother me, when I allowed myself to feel things again.
But the time when I allowed myself to feel things again, that time was not now. Now was early afternoon and I was fixing myself a gin and tonic and watching YouTube videos. In the spirit of Well certainly there must be people who are even more miserable and evil than me, the search terms I was using included the word violent and also the word marriage.
* * *
—
What I found first was a scene from Robert Altman’s 1973 film The Long Goodbye. This was one-and-a-half gin and tonics later. In the scene, a gangster breaks a Coke bottle across his girlfriend’s face. The attack is unprovoked. The girlfriend is wearing a peach-colored dress made of some gauze-like material, chiffon, possibly. The dress has modified bell sleeves that cinch at the wrist and are finished with ruffles. It has what appears to be a natural waist, likely elastic, though this is impossible to determine with any certainty because the waist is partially concealed by a loose, slightly asymmetrical panel that falls on top of and is constructed of the same material as the body of the dress. The panel floats on the left side to just below, and on the right side to just above, the elbow. The girlfriend’s name is Jo Ann Eggenweiler and she is played by an actress named Jo Ann Brody. Not an actress, a waitress who served Altman and two members of his cast during a break in the shooting of the only scene in which she appears. Onscreen, Jo Ann is mostly silent. She and her gangster boyfriend, Marty, are in Philip Marlowe’s apartment. Philip Marlowe is played by Elliott Gould. She sits, impassive, while Marty tells her how beautiful she is, how much he loves her. “I sleep with a lot of girls,” he says, “but I make love to you. Right?” She nods. A few moments later, he breaks the Coke bottle across her face. She screams. As the gangster’s henchmen hustle her offscreen, she utters two words: “Oh god!” “Now, that’s someone I love,” the gangster says to Marlowe. “And you I don’t even like.”