My Daughter’s Vagina, Part 3

August 26th, 2007 § 19

If you haven’t already, I urge you to read Part 1 and Part 2. (If you haven’t read Part 2, or haven’t read it in a while, you might want to read it before read­ing Part 3, if only because the last para­graph of Part 2 feeds very specif­i­cally into what Part 3 is about. I will also say that Part 3, more so than either 1 or 2, con­tains mate­r­ial that some peo­ple might find dis­turb­ing and/or trig­ger­ing. The issues raised by that mate­r­ial are resolved not in Part 3 itself, but later in the essay. I ask, there­fore, for your patience in that regard, and I also ask that you be patient if my response(s) to com­ments about that mate­r­ial ask you to wait until I get to those later parts of the essay.)

Part 3

Sit­ting on my bed with her back against the wall, Beth – who’s come to visit dur­ing my first year of grad­u­ate school – is telling me some­thing that I wish I could remem­ber. Indeed, in the first drafts of this essay, includ­ing the one that was , I wrote this pas­sage as if I did remem­ber. I had her telling me that she’d decided to study fine art, a deci­sion I’m pretty sure she actu­ally made around the time that what I am about tell you took place; and it may have been that her deci­sion was what we were talk­ing about. Beth had been strug­gling with how to give what she con­sid­ered legit­i­mate and pur­pose­ful expres­sion to the cre­ativ­ity that was in her for some time, but the fact is that I don’t remem­ber and to let you think that I do would be to cre­ate, if not a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion – because jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, while it was the first word that came to mind, is wrong for what I want to say – than a log­i­cal expla­na­tion for some­thing that I have in been try­ing unsuc­cess­fully to explain to myself for more than 20 years.

So, Beth is sit­ting on my bed and talk­ing, but I am sud­denly lis­ten­ing from a place so deep inside myself that the sounds leav­ing her mouth no longer coa­lesce into mean­ing­ful units. There is a moment of blank­ness and then, as if some­one else has taken con­trol of my brain, I am forced to watch a vision of myself get­ting up from the chair when I’ve been sit­ting, putting one hand around Beth’s throat, hold­ing her against the wall, and with my other hand slap­ping her back and forth until she is sense­less and bloody. I see myself scream­ing in her ear, let­ting her drop to the floor and kick­ing her in the stom­ach as hard as I can. In the vision, my mouth moves but no words come out.

Unaware that I’ve stopped hear­ing what she has to say, Beth con­tin­ues talk­ing, ges­tur­ing to empha­size the impor­tance of her words, implor­ing with her eyes for I-don’t-know-what, and then the vio­lence in my mind begins again. Real­iz­ing that my hands have clenched into fists, I excuse myself and move quickly to the bath­room. Lock­ing the door behind me, I take deep breaths and splash cold water on my face. When I’m sure the impulse to lash out has passed, I flush the toi­let and go back to the bed­room where, thank­fully, Beth notices it’s time for me to go to class, and she tells me she’ll fin­ish later. I grab my books, kiss her quickly on the cheek and, know­ing I will need some time alone to try to sort out what has just hap­pened, tell her that I have work to do in the library and there­fore won’t be back until just before we’re sup­posed to go out for dinner.

The after­noon sun is warm on my face, so I decide to walk to class instead of tak­ing the bus. Beth’s deci­sion to become an artist should make me happy. (I know I just wrote that I am not sure this deci­sion is what we were talk­ing about, but it was an issue in our rela­tion­ship at the time, and since I’ve men­tioned it, I don’t want to leave it hang­ing with­out at least some expla­na­tion.) Not only does it mean that she’s choos­ing to do what she really wants to do, but it also holds out the promise of a res­o­lu­tion to a ten­sion between us that I had given up being able to do any­thing about. More than once, Beth has told me she’s afraid I will become more com­mit­ted to my writ­ing than to her. Now that she has her own art to com­mit to, I’m hop­ing she’ll begin to see that the two com­mit­ments need not be mutu­ally exclusive.

I’m start­ing to feel a lit­tle bet­ter, more in con­trol of myself, but I begin to real­ize that I will never be able to sit through class. I need some­where quiet, where I can sit by myself and really think about what hap­pened this morning.

I head to the library.

My idea as I set­tle into one of the chairs on the sec­ond floor is to  write out what I’m feel­ing in a let­ter to myself, a strat­egy I’ve used before when I don’t know what’s going on inside me. As soon as I put my pen to the page, though, what comes out does not begin Dear Richard. Instead, it is the begin­ning of a poem:

 I want a bearded man, shirt­less, in faded jeans,

to come one bare­foot night and take me in his mouth.

 

I don’t know where the words come from, but the shock of recog­ni­tion when I read them is imme­di­ate and fright­en­ing, and I know there is a clar­ity in them that I am not fully able to see. Star­ing at the page, unable to write another word, I won­der if I’m try­ing to tell myself that I’m gay and that the prob­lem I have with Beth is that I should be going out with a boy instead. I remem­ber Brian and how we became friends in our senior year of high school, watch­ing a team­mate strike out try­ing too hard to hit the ball over the fence dur­ing a gym-class soft­ball game.

“I don’t get it,” Brian said to no one in par­tic­u­lar, shak­ing his head from side to side as the other boy slammed his bat to the ground, threat­ened to beat the shit out of the pitcher, and stormed off the field as if he’d failed to make a team he’d ded­i­cated his life to mak­ing. “I just don’t get it.”

“Get what?” I asked.

We’d been stand­ing next to each other through most of the class, but Brian looked at me as if he were see­ing me for the first time. “What’s the big deal? I mean, it’s not like he’s going to fail for strik­ing out.”

“You’re right,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Brian’s face lit up as if he were vis­it­ing from another coun­try and had at last found some­one who could speak his lan­guage. Then his eyes nar­rowed a lit­tle, “Yeah, but at least you can hit the ball.” It was a test; he was not much of an athlete.

“So I can hit the ball,” I responded. “So what?”

And we were friends; and we quickly became best friends. Sadly, though, what I remem­ber most about our friend­ship is the day it began to end. “You’re just dif­fer­ent,” he told me. We  were sit­ting in my room. “I’ve never met any­one like you, and they just can’t accept that.”

“I’ve never met any­one like you before either,” I said, not even both­er­ing to ask him who they were.

“But they’re say­ing we’re closer than we should be, that we’re not, you know, normal.”

“So? When has either of us ever really cared about what they have to say?”

Brian looked so grate­ful for these words that I thought he was going to cry, and his eyes did start to grow big with a feel­ing that welled up in him, but then he looked away and almost whis­pered, “Maybe they’re right. Maybe we are closer than we should be.”

I tried to con­vince him that he was wrong, but it didn’t work. He started – or at least in mem­ory, he started bring­ing female friends along when­ever we went out, and – again, as I remem­ber it – col­lege appli­ca­tions, year­book com­mit­tee meet­ings and other graduation-related work sud­denly kept him so busy that he had less and less time to see me. The sum­mer after grad­u­a­tion, while I was work­ing at a sleep-away camp in Mass­a­chu­setts
, we wrote let­ters, but when I came home, he was gone, off to his fresh­man year at Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity. I prob­a­bly had his phone num­ber and address, but I don’t think I ever used them, and I don’t remem­ber receiv­ing either mail or phone calls from him. We did try once to recon­nect dur­ing the win­ter break of our fresh­man year, meet­ing for a drink at one of the bars we’d hung out at when we were still close. He brought his girl­friend, a dark woman I remem­ber sit­ting silently in the cor­ner of the booth while Brian and I strug­gled to find things to say to each other. The con­ver­sa­tion is lost to me now, but I can still feel the final­ity of our good-byes, nei­ther of us even pre­tend­ing we’d try to see each other again.

At the end of the aca­d­e­mic year, while I waited on line to reg­is­ter for my sopho­more classes, I met the woman who’d sat next to me in twelfth-grade Eng­lish. “What­ever hap­pened to your friend Brian?” she asked.

“He’s at Cor­nell,” I answered, “but I haven’t heard from him in a while.”

“You know,” she said, “every­one thought the two of you were gay.”

“I know.”

“Were you?”

“No.”

With cin­e­matic tim­ing my turn to reg­is­ter came next, and I gave her a small, silent wave as I walked to the registrar’s win­dow. I have con­tin­ued through­out all these years, how­ever, to won­der about my answer. It was the answer I think Brian would have wanted me to give, and I gave it with­out a sec­ond thought. Despite its lit­eral truth, how­ever, or, rather, its truth given that what the woman prob­a­bly wanted to know was whether Brian and I had been hav­ing sex, the word “no” has felt dis­hon­est to me for a long time, as if what I had done was to deny the emo­tional con­tent of our friend­ship, not char­ac­ter­ize its phys­i­cal nature.

When I think about Brian now, I often wish to have back that moment when he decided “they” were right and we were wrong. Not because I think I could have done any­thing dif­fer­ently to change his mind, but because envi­sion­ing how things might have been dif­fer­ent is a ges­ture of defi­ance I wish I had made a long time ago, a way to begin fig­ur­ing out the answer I ought to have given to the woman from my Eng­lish class, and of under­stand­ing why I responded with a homo­erotic poem to the vio­lence I imag­ined years later doing to Beth. We ended up not going to din­ner that night. After I wrote those two lines, I felt bet­ter, calmer, more at peace with myself, and so I was able to tell her about the vision my imag­i­na­tion had con­jured for me. We spent the night try­ing to fig­ure out where in our rela­tion­ship my anger came from, but our only suc­cess – at least from my point of view, since it left me bent over, laugh­ing with hys­ter­i­cal relief – was that I found the courage to scream what I was really feel­ing, and they were words I regret even now, “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!”

Beth, of course, was hor­ri­fied and deeply, deeply hurt, but instead of break­ing up with me, or at least putting some dis­tance between us while I tried to fig­ure out where my rage was com­ing from, she stayed with me for the rest of the week­end, a deci­sion I can only describe as coura­geous and lov­ing, and we talked and talked our way into the feel­ing that we could stay together, which we did for five more years. I was immensely grate­ful to her for that, though I don’t think I ever expressed that grat­i­tude sufficiently.

What dis­turbed me at the time – aside from the con­tent of what I imag­ined – and what con­tin­ues to haunt me when­ever I think about it, is that I didn’t even know I was so angry. There were ten­sions in my rela­tion­ship with Beth, as there are in any rela­tion­ship, but noth­ing of a mag­ni­tude, or at least noth­ing I expe­ri­enced as of a mag­ni­tude, that cor­re­sponded even a lit­tle to the vio­lence I’d imag­ined myself doing. Even now, more than two decades later – and in all that time I’ve had noth­ing even remotely resem­bling the expe­ri­ence I’ve just described – I find myself won­der­ing what I don’t know about the sub­ter­ranean work­ings of my psy­che. I am an angry man – though I am now a much less angry man than I was when I first wrote this essay – and I know that much of my anger is sex­ual, and if there is any­thing that being a man is sup­posed to give you license to do, and I am talk­ing here about deeply held cul­tural val­ues, not the laws of any given coun­try, or the eth­i­cal or moral prin­ci­ples taught by reli­gion, it is to take your sex­ual anger out on the bod­ies of oth­ers, usu­ally women, and to do so with rel­a­tive impun­tiy. I have, as you will see, good rea­son to be angry. Part of what writ­ing and rewrit­ing this essay has been about, for me, has been learn­ing to stop being afraid of my anger and, there­fore, of myself.

§ 19 Responses to “My Daughter’s Vagina, Part 3”

What's this?

You are currently reading My Daughter’s Vagina, Part 3 at Richard Jeffrey Newman.

meta