Lately I have wondered if I am in fact crazy, or going crazy.
My young manfriend has still not contacted me in any way, shape, or form. “Looks like he disappeared,” Doc commented glibly, almost jocularly, on my voice mail over a week ago. At that moment (and every moment thereafter when I thought of it), I felt a flash of blinding and uncontrollable rage. I wanted to punch Doc in the face for that. I wanted to put my fist through a wall. Or, better, a window — to feel that sharp, searing jump of exposed nerves, to see the ribbons of blood striping my hand and arm. All at once the adolescent female phenomenon of “cutting” made sense to me: the overwhelming emotion is so fucking intolerable, you feel you need to bleed.
In lieu of violence against myself or others, my solution (so far) has been to drink every night. Isn’t that enlightened of me? Not hard liquor, mind you, I have such a wussy-ass system I can’t take Jack Daniels every day. And beer and red wines overrun my system with yeast. So I drink cheap white wine. Lots of it. It blunts the pain, and helps me go to sleep. I feel like warmed-over shit in the morning, but I do get some relief, at least for a little while.
I’ve also been watching back-to-back episodes of Six Feet Under, a show I turned Sam onto. Alan Ball, god bless him, knows rawness — he knows what happens when you get the lid ripped off all your seething emotions. I watched American Beauty again, too, and discovered that Lester Burnham’s fuck-you attitude matches my own. Instead of throwing a plate of asparagus at the wall, or calmly blackmailing my bosses, I’ve scandalized my conservative Christian family with over-the-top liberal sarcasm, and started refusing to pay my student loan payments. I’ve even more or less told Doc to fuck off, for the time being, for his insensitive comment. Every emotion, including my usually buried anger, is bubbling up to the surface, and I don’t give a damn.
**
Sam has communicated with Rob, but not with me. I found this out last week when a coworker asked both of us if we’d heard anything. I said no; Rob then told us where Sam was (what state) and what he was doing (training). It was a pretty humiliating moment. I would have liked to have had a convenient hole to crawl into.
I have really got to find another job. Or leave the state. Or leave the country. Or leave the fucking planet.
Just seeing Rob, now, every day, fills me with indescribable shame. I can’t look him in the eye. Much of the time, I simply want to find that hole to crawl into. I want to hide. I want to die. I imagine I read pity in the faces of the other guys who knew about us: Poor thing, he was just fucking her. (With Rob, it’s the same, only without the “poor thing.”)
Some days, walking through the dry leaves in the fall sunlight on the way to work, I feel almost okay, almost as if I can survive this just fine; but once I enter cube-land, under those fluorescent lights, and see Rob, and Sam’s former party-buddies, and am required to read coercive scripts for hours on end to hostile or argumentative strangers, all the while being judged on my now very spotty performance, I get the overwhelming urge to fellate a Smith & Wesson. (Now that would be a real blow job.)
I want to escape, to run far, far away, and try to recapture my former enthusiasm for living and writing abroad, but I feel trapped here by my chronic lack of funds and my need for this tedious, repetitive, nerve-wracking job in a depressed poverty economy.
Gerald Three Rivers says I deserve better. A heavyset middle-aged Native American Libertarian who was one of Sam’s closest friends and mentors, he’s been one of the few people to check in with me on a daily basis and to be concerned about my well-being. I’m grateful for that, even if his strenuous exhortations to “move on” make it sound like he has his own agenda. Which he may have. (If he says that to me one more time, actually, I may lose my shit on him too.) Gerry’s always had a thing for me, or at least talked that talk. I have no doubt he’d change his tune, however, if I were suddenly available, if I suddenly “got over” Sam, and decided to exercise the willful blindness indulging him would require. (I’m not talking about being shallow about appearances, either: I’ve seen Gerry’s obstinate streak, in abundance. He’ll simply stop listening to other people, and reiterate his point of view over and over and over again. Even I know that’s not a good sign.)
Some things look better, baby, to borrow from Elton John, just passing through.
**
Along those lines, I discovered another choice tidbit this week: my college boyfriend León, who “friended” several of my friends on my social network, has ignored my friend request — and blocked me.
After this odd revelation (I thought we parted on good terms), I started searching for old crushes or flames of mine, and realized that almost every one would do the same. Most have already ignored my attempts at reconnecting. Tony would, for sure, even if he’s safe in Sweden now. Greg, without a doubt — he couldn’t get away from me fast enough. Max, oh yes, he barely even looked at me the last time we met, at a friend’s graduation. Eric, probably, especially after the letter I wrote him back in 2003. Definitely Damien Moreau. Oh, Lord, Damien Moreau! I sent him a gushy letter after his biggest independent film…he most definitely did NOT respond. Although after September 11, I sent him a brief email at his Web site to make sure he was alive and well in New York City — he sent me about six unpunctuated words in response (something like: okay tired helping out down there). He lives in Morocco now, with an accomplished French photographer who looks like Audrey Tautou, and their adorable blond daughter. (A high school friend sent me their Flickr link.)
What a stellar record. I never want to see you again. The freak, the crazy stalker, the abomination. Get thee behind me, Milton! At least Sonny kept me on as a “friend,” even though we never communicate anymore…not since I called him out on what I called him out on. (At some point, like I said, I stopped making endless excuses for Sonny. Maybe people actually respect you more when you do that.)
I recently had a very frank and revealing conversation with Drew, that good-looking astrology buff who had been trying to get me to date him. He openly admitted that if I suddenly changed my tune and were as interested in him as he fancies himself to be in me, he couldn’t get away fast enough. He blamed his “Leo” nature, his inability to take anything seriously, and his relish of the chase over the apprehending. (Be it noted that León, Eric, and Sonny are all Leos.) He agreed that things are better off with us the way they are — as an ongoing, good-humored flirtation, nothing more. This way we get to remain friends, and nobody gets hurt.
You see, dear readers, I don’t willingly chase heartbreak. I thought Sam, even given his age and station, was a far better bet than my past gambles. (And for a while, he was.) In the beginning I was actually worried that he was more “into” me than I was “into” him.
Silly me! That is never, ever the way it plays out. Now I actually find myself wondering: if I had loved Jonathan Goldman, who’s to say he wouldn’t have spurned me too? Who says I wouldn’t have been left sobbing and alone at prom to be comforted by my pink-taffeta-swathed girlfriends in the ladies’ room?
Maybe those high school peers should have voted me Most Likely to be Rejected and Abandoned. Wouldn’t that have made for a nice byline in the yearbook? At any rate, I should have a T-shirt made, like the shirts Sam used to give out as prizes, that would serve to alert all the men who think they’re interested in me: “I Look A Whole Lot Better At Arm’s Length.”
**
Sweet love, sweet thorn, when lightly to my heart
I took your thrust, whereby I since am slain,
And lie disheveled in the grass apart,
A sodden thing bedrenched by tears and rain,
While rainy evening drips to misty night,
And misty night to cloudy morning clears,
And clouds disperse across the gathering light,
And birds grow noisy, and the sun appears,
Had I bethought me then, sweet love, sweet thorn,
How sharp an anguish even at the best,
When all’s requited and the future sworn,
The happy hour can leave within the breast,
I had not so come running at the call
Of one who loves me little, if at all.
I’m reading Millay, Dickinson, Rilke, Rumi, seeking comfort, seeking understanding. Ultimately I find myself drawn to Carol Gilligan’s book, The Birth of Pleasure, yet again, to that age-old story of Cupid and Psyche, of men and women and the loss of love.
She speaks to me of trauma, and of that dissociation I’ve resisted (on Merton’s urging) since adolescence:
Trauma is the shock to the psyche that leads to dissociation: our ability to separate ourselves from parts of ourselves, to create a split within ourselves so that we can know and also not know what we know, feel and yet not feel our feelings. It is our ability, as Freud put it in Studies on Hysteria, to hold parts of of our experience not as a secret from others but as a “foreign body” within ourselves.
I’m not even sure I know what I know, anymore. I feel crazy, because the lover who promised, so tenderly, not to “disappear” has been completely eclipsed by other, conflicting versions of him: by Rob’s harder-edged party buddy, by the aloof stranger largely ignoring me in the office that last night, by the all too familiar story of rejection and abandonment that Gerry and Doc seem to embrace as the true narrative.
I stumble upon Gilligan’s definition of patriarchy again, which is very different from the charged interpretations my previous discussions of the term seem to have engendered:
Patriarchy, although frequently misinterpreted to mean the oppression of women by men, literally means a hierarchy — a rule of priests — in which the priest, the hieros, is a father. It describes an order of living that elevates fathers, separating fathers from sons (the men from the boys) and placing both sons and women under a father’s authority.
Both the women’s and the antiwar movements were antipatriarchal movements, according to Gilligan, because within the latter, the draftee “sons” of the new generation were starting to question the wisdom of the commanding “fathers.”
“The foundational stories we tell about Western civilization are stories of trauma,” she writes. She talks about some of the great Greek tragedies, like Oedipas Rex and The Oresteia. “When we focus more closely on what actually happens,” says Gilligan, “we see that a father or husband’s authority is challenged.” In the end, of course, his (culturally sanctioned) version of order and rectitude must prevail.
Her starkest example is that of Iphigenia, the daughter king Agamemnon sacrifices in order to gain the winds that will carry the Greek army to Troy — all to avenge the honor of a husband (Menelaus). Iphigenia and her mother both plead with Agamemnon, trying to appeal to the bonds of parental love. “It’s Greece for which I much sacrifice you, whether I want to or not,” the king replies. This sacrifice must be made on behalf of the honor of men and nations. It must not be derailed by the emotional pleas of women.
Imagine the dissociation that Agamemnon, as a parent, must have forced upon himself to be able to kill his child.
Euripides’ female chorus has this to say when the shamefaced Iphigenia aligns herself with her father’s murderous wishes (saying “it’s more important for one single man to look upon the light than a thousand women”): “Your intention, young girl, is noble. But what is happening here..(is) sick.”
Asserts Gilligan, anything that establishes “hierarchy in the heart of intimacy, is inherently tragic, and like all trauma survivors, we keep telling the story we need to listen to and to understand.” Jung likewise recognized that such power-politics had no place in love. “Where love rules,” he famously observed, “there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking.” Just as Rilke spoke of a “more human love” than one that simply “flows from man to woman,” Gilligan says
If feminism is understood not as a battle in the war between the sexes but rather a movement to transform a world in which both men and women suffer losses that constrain their ability to love, then the story of Psyche and Cupid is a feminist tale.
Perhaps the bottom line is this: that what Ms. Gilligan calls “patriarchy” is, essentially, a form of dehumanizing dissociation that many cultures force upon its children; something that divides and separates us, and allows us to effectively detach from, exploit, and even, in extreme cases, kill one another.
**
The mix CD I made for Sam included, as its penultimate song, the quietly gorgeous Tom Waits classic Time, which always struck me as his exhortation to hard-luck, hard-drinking loners like himself to forego the unnecessarily tragic posturings of maleness (the boys just dive right off the cars and splash into the street), put down the bottle, and come in from the cold.
So put a candle in the window
And a kiss upon his lips
As the dish outside the window fills with rain
The band goes home, the bar closes down, it’s raining hammers and nails, and your woman is waiting for you at home.
And it’s time, time, time that you love
And it’s time, time, time.
**
“He’s just being a guy,” says my friend Theresa over breakfast scrambles at the vegetarian restaurant. “When men don’t know what to do with their emotions, they create distance.” Theresa has had many more relationships than I have, and has been married for the last eight years to the man she’s been with for eleven.
I don’t see her often, now that she has kids. Today she’s brought Rudy with her, the baby. He just turned one this month. I keep looking at him; he’s an adorable little boy. But it’s not just that. Something about the shape of his head, and his dark eyes, and those long eyelashes…I always thought Sam could have passed for Theresa’s brother, and now her child looks like the child that someone could have had with Sam. That I could have had with Sam.
When I pick him up, he clings to me like a koala cub. I melt. I kiss his soft-haired little head with a series of tiny pecks. He likes this, and gurgles. I have a lump in my throat. I never wanted babies, but I want this baby. I want to take him home. Again I feel that ineffable sense of bottomless loss.
**
Carol Gilligan reminds me of what I instinctively know: that love is pleasure, one of life’s most basic pleasures, and a shared one. This shared joy, communion, tenderness, bonding, sensuality, play — it renders us vulnerable, because we are responding from the core of who we are, like children.
I revisit our old friend Eileen, Gilligan’s client, and her intuition about her distancing husband Rick: “My hunch is that he really is connected with me, and he’s confused about that.” Later, talking about her young sons, Eileen speaks of “that tender piece of them that they sort of have to set aside to be what they think they are supposed to be.” Another client, Jude, talks about “the two Dans” she lives with, the man who will suddenly embrace and kiss her in the hallway, and the man who sits withdrawn and uncommunicative at the dinner table.
“When (Dan) closed himself off from her,” writes Gilligan, “(Jude) felt that he had slammed a door in her face, and she blamed herself, assuming that he had seen something in her that drove him away.”
Eileen and Jude, like me, ask endlessly: is it me? Am I, are my flaws, or my actions, to blame? Am I the girl Most Likely to Be Rejected and Abandoned?
Gilligan’s book reminds me that something else is at play — that we’re up against some deep-seated obstacles, created by this hierarchy-happy, martial power-culture inimical to feeling that punishes its boys and girls for being too human. These obstacles are so invisible and inherent, like the air we breathe, it’s no wonder I feel crazy trying to name them out loud. The responses I’ve generated just broaching the subject only make me feel that much more like some wild-haired Joan the Baptist crying out in the wilderness in an animal skin. But I know I’m far from alone in my experience.
**
Gilligan asks Jude, “Why would pleasure be followed by absence?” Neither woman directly answers the question. I wish someone would.
Cupid leaves Psyche at the moment when she falls in love with him. And Psyche falls in love with Cupid only when she has broken his injunction against seeing him or speaking about their love.
“When Psyche cannot see or speak about what she knows,” Gilligan says, “she has no way to frame her experience. And without framing it, she cannot tell her story, or counter the stories that others have told her.”
I find myself in an analogous position. I wasn’t supposed to let anything show at work after the director hassled Sam (Hush, hush/Keep it down down/Voices carry), I’m still not sure how much I should talk about us, and I have a feeling Sam wouldn’t be happy about my writings here, even with the anonymity. There is still all this secrecy and shame surrounding our relationship — especially now that it looks as if I’ve been summarily abandoned.
Now, the story seems to belong to Rob, if he wishes to tell it. He can tell the homeboy version, with a bunch of his wasted buddies, passing the bowl, talking smack. Yeah, he was just fucking her. You know, she’s, like, 40, or something. Cougar town, right? And I have nothing current or relevant to offer, to counter that more macho and thoroughly derisive version of reality.
Like Psyche, all I knew was the pleasure of feeling, intimacy, sensuality, love, all those delicious and vulnerable things, in our hours alone. Maybe all of that was supposed to stay in the proverbial cave in the dark. Maybe I was never supposed to have challenged Sam in any way, even regarding potentially self-destructive decisions. Maybe I was never supposed to write, or speak, about the relationship. I feel as if I’ve broken rules that (unlike Cupid’s rules) were never even clearly outlined for me.
Psyche, according to Gilligan, by disobeying Cupid’s orders and lighting a candle to look at him, “…had betrayed him, she was not the woman he thought she was, she was not the woman he loved.” He would punish her now “merely by leaving.”
If Sam felt that way, leaving was certainly punishment enough.
**
No area of human experience is so extensively provided with conventions as this one is: there are live-preservers of the most varied invention, boats and water wings; society has been able to create refuges of very sort, for since it preferred to take love-life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are. — Rilke
Whether or not any of these musings is even relevant, I’m sure of one thing: I’m tired of hearing it from people who talk to me as if this should have been cheap, safe, and sure, like a public amusement…and if it wasn’t, then I did something wrong. Or who try to sell me the equivalent of Arundhati Roy’s “Love Laws” from The God of Small Things: laws that lay down “who should be loved. And how. And how much.” Sam was too young. I was too serious. What did I expect. Blah blah blah. It’s time to “move on.” You move on. Shut the fuck up.
Granted, if you play your cards right, and don’t go overboard, you won’t ever be in this kind of pain.
But shit, people. I fucking loved Sam, goddamn it. Being with him was like starting to live, at last, after some forty-year exile in hungry-ghost purgatory. I have never been happier or more satisfied with anyone: not with an older man, not with a taller man, not with one who could have worked as a male model (or porn star). I finally received everything I had been afraid to even yearn for anymore — with a big red bow on it — and it wasn’t disappointing, the way your begged-for childhood Christmas gifts sometimes were when they turned out to be nothing like the Sears catalog. Lifelong recurrent dreams about frustration and privation simply ceased, and have not come back.
Sam changed me. He changed my whole way of seeing other people. I was starting to fear that maybe I was addicted to shiny, sexy surfaces like SFU‘s Brenda Chenowith, or possibly Sonny, and that I wouldn’t be able to love a real person with real imperfections.
And there’s no one else who can hold me and soothe me the way Sam’s embrace soothes me. I melted into his warm, familiar body. Hand in glove. Now I’ve been torn away from him, with jagged, bloody bits of me missing, but the shape of him is still here.
**
Do I have a point? I don’t even have a point. This week’s rambling thesis can meander all over creation, can wonder about men and dissociation, and whether or not I have a grip on reality, but it can’t solve the burning question Doc and Gerry (and probably Rob) seem to presume they have the answer to: Have you abandoned me, Sam?
Why have you abandoned me, Sam?
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