Wreck and Order (3 page)

Women who write about the failure of feminism for glossy magazines would use my experience as proof of the depravity of hookup culture, which turns girls into desperate sluts and boys into ruthless ejaculating machines. Women who write about the triumphs of feminism for glossy magazines would use my experience as proof that free love depends upon reverence for the vagina, that I was dissatisfied by my hookups because the heartless boys were degrading my inner goddess. I suppose it would be a relief to have such ethical clarity. All I have are clear memories of strong feelings. Lust, rage, lust, rage.

“But they weren't
trying
to come in two minutes and not make you feel good,” Jared said when I explained this series of feelings to him. He had just come with no warning when I was most aroused, causing me to roll onto my stomach and mew into a pillow until he took me by the shoulders and told me I better explain what I was so upset about. “That's exactly what they were trying to do!” I protested. “I can only think of one guy who felt genuinely bad that he came quickly. The rest of them were so fucking relaxed afterward, it was like they weren't even in the room with me.”

“Well, most guys don't care about chicks until they find the one they want,” he said. He parted my legs roughly, licked me until I came and then came again. And so, gradually, my body stopped believing there was a finite amount of pleasure in the world, for which I had to fight like a wounded cat over a scrap of moldy bread, needing the scrap all the more for the knowledge that it would not heal my wounds. Jared didn't care about wounds or healing or scraps. He just gave and took. Sometimes they were the same thing, sometimes not.

After two years of ghostwriting obituaries, I started to worry that transcribing people's sloppily expressed memories at a small-town paper would become my life. In my calm moments, I told myself to accept the job as enough—work I enjoyed; who had that? But when my days were a mess because I got to the office hours late, spent on alcohol and sex with a man I knew I could not marry, then my job felt like one more shameful thing.

One night I was running down the middle of the street, away from some bad thing Drunk Jared had done: slapping a random girl's ass; telling another girl she had porcelain skin on a night when I had a raised, sore pimple on my chin; telling me such-and-such chick was totally into some seriously kinky shit; telling me I would look hot in lipstick; buying drinks for other girls and leaving me to buy my own—any of dozens of inanities I am pained to remember not because of any inherent cruelty on Jared's part but because of my willingness to be made heartsick and livid by the same scenario played out again and again with only minor variations. I planted my high-heel sandals in one square of yellow after another. I turned back and saw that Jared was no longer following me. He was bumming a cigarette from a woman on the sidewalk. Her earrings glittered against her long neck. I was seized by full-body panic, as if I were in acute physical danger. “Can you get me a cigarette, too, my love?” I called out, fingernails digging into my scalp. “You fucking prick!” The woman laughed nervously and headed into the bar. I sat down in the middle of the street. Jared exhaled smoke in a slow, even stream and started marching toward me, enjoying the clank of his boots on the concrete. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Get out of the goddamn road, woman.” I knew his face without seeing it: furrowed brow, downturned lips. He was a man in a play who is supposed to act put out and angry. One beer too many and he forgot that his actions had any effect; his only job was to distract the audience from the mediocrity unfolding. I was yelling words I didn't hear. Jared stepped off the sidewalk and walked toward me. I quieted. His hands were under my armpits, lifting me up. My breathing slowed. Tonight would be an okay night. A middle-aged couple shrunk into each other as they watched Jared pull me to a standing position. “He did this to me,” I called out. “He made me this way.” This wasn't untrue. But it was also true that I'd chosen him because he did this to me. He was my excuse.

I don't remember how we got back to my apartment, but once we did, his hand was around my neck and he was banging my head against the metal door. The clichéd depravity of the motion made sense to me. I liked it. He dropped his hand and walked toward the refrigerator. Despair pooled into the place in me that had opened at his touch.

“Just kill me,” I said. “I'm ready to go. I'm too much of a coward to do it myself, but you could do it so easily. Do it now. Come on.”

He pulled his upper body out of the fridge, took a long swig of my roommate's Miller Lite, walked toward me, his face following the stage direction:
Firm resolve tinged with sadness.

“You're sure now?” His hand rested on my throat. “Because I will do it.”

I nodded. He looked into my eyes and read out the lines, “Soon you shall suffer no more.” He tightened his grip. I counted to seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. My hands flew to his. I clawed at his wrist. He let go, walked back to his beer.

“I'm serious!” I stamped one foot. “I want you to do it.”

“Later,” he said, and belched so loudly and for so long that we both burst out laughing.

On the mornings after our bad nights, I would wake up wet and swollen between my legs, my body begging us to fuck our way out of this dark, lonely rage. But if we reached for each other in the usual way—kissing on the mouth and grabbing each other's hips—the pattern of damage we were doing to ourselves through each other was too clear. So we had to approach each other in new ways—tonguing foreheads or pawing shoulder bones. Once we were aroused enough that arousal erased that other, all-consuming state, I came again and again, Jared giving me orgasms without seeming to notice. We had to leave each other alone with our sensations or else our personalities would rush back in.

After we had more orgasms than want or need prescribed, we went out for breakfast, locked in our private world of sex and hatred. I was afraid of the other diners, convinced they knew how we spent our time. I had been so certain the night before that my life could not bear any more contact with him. And then: We were making love and eating eggs, a little hungover, normal people raging against normalcy. “If you don't cut it out, you are not going to Melissa's party or any party, I swear to god,” a father said to his daughter at the table next to us. “Now, Herb,” the mother said. Jared and I were fighting because that's what humans did.

Alone in my apartment later, I would be tense and edgy, jumping at every noise, double-checking the locks on my windows and doors. There was no way to be safe.

My year in Paris had slaughtered me. I was still trying to come back to life. I had gone to France planning to stay—go to school there or become a translator or a bilingual tour guide at some great museum. I thought I was that smart and interesting. But Paris told me I was the same nothing as everyone else, with the same stupid dream of every aimless American who goes to Paris, thinking they can make it because they've read a couple of novels in French.

After I began studying French in seventh grade, I found myself repeating the new words in my head to calm myself before sleep or bolster myself against the inevitable embarrassments of gym class.
Au-dessus
meant above and
au-dessous
meant below? The class groaned. I placed my hand over my mouth to cover my smile, in love with the clarity of this absurdity: A word's meaning could be reversed by a centimeter's pucker of the lips.

My grade's dean in high school was also a French teacher, and he took an interest in me, reading aloud from my papers during class, gifting me with books that were not on the syllabus. During the first months of my senior year, girls whom I recall (impossibly) wearing nothing but khaki pants and pastel sweaters, jumped up and down in the hallways, hugging each other and shrieking, “I got in! I got in!” Mr. Samuels invited me to his office to talk about my college plans. I had nearly perfect scores on my SATs. I had straight As. I'd sent away for applications from schools I'd heard of—Yale, Stanford, UPenn, New York University, Haverford. I completed the applications quickly, carelessly, alone: a silly word game. One by one, I received envelopes stuffed with one sheet of paper regretting to inform me. Haverford put me on their waiting list, but I'd decided by then that the very idea of college was morally reprehensible. I was going to live in Paris. I'd googled “boardinghouse Bastille,” since that was the only neighborhood I knew, and found a place where I could have my own room and take my meals. My father would support me until I “figured things out.” He was proud of me for doing what I wanted to do instead of what everyone else was doing. When I told my mother the plan over the phone, she said, “Have you ever actually
met
a French person? They're the worst.” But she didn't try to dissuade me. She was busy with her new family by then.

When I explained my plan to Mr. Samuels, he came out from behind his desk and took the armchair next to mine. He was short and handsome. There were two photos on his desk in thin silver frames, one of Mr. Samuels and his wife hiking through fiery foliage, another of his wife in a hospital gown, beaming at the newborn in her arms. I imagined Mr. Samuels greeting his family when he got off work—giving his wife a long, close-mouthed kiss, opening his arms wide so his daughter could run into his embrace—while he talked about my potential and options and the faulty bureaucracy of college admissions offices. “I would be more than happy to write to Haverford on your behalf,” he said. “I have a friend in the French department there.” Did Mr. Samuels have many lovers before his wife, or was she his first? He was so small and pretty and good-natured that it was impossible to imagine his desire existing outside the careful circle of home. Was he grateful for his wife's presence every day—her mothering, her knowledge of his tastes, the constant accessibility of her body? Or did this accessibility disgust him in a way he couldn't acknowledge even to himself? “I think it's a blessing in disguise,” he was saying, “that you didn't get into any of the Ivies. I can really see you at Haverford.”

His office was too warm. I pressed my arms against my sides to hide the sweat marking my sweater. I had thought it through, I told Mr. Samuels. Now was the perfect time to travel. I could reapply to college next year. My voice grew loud. I would go to Paris and learn a skill and a way of life with ancient, eternal roots, not sit around trying to say smart things about Hegel to a roomful of students trying to say smart things about Hegel. As I was about to leave his office, Mr. Samuels said, “You should probably go ahead and get yourself a good French dictionary. Larousse is the best. Start using it now when you read instead of your French-English one. That's one of the best ways to really know a language.” He gave me a quick, close-mouthed smile.

I got to Paris in December. A constant cold drizzle fell on the sea of fitted black peacoats that clothed the city's stern residents. The room I was renting turned out to be the maid's quarters in the attic of a boardinghouse run by the only fat woman with a mullet I saw the whole time I was in France. I never found out whether her appearance had made her bitter or if bitterness had destroyed her appearance. The room was just big enough for a twin bed and a plywood board sitting upon four sticks. The only window was a small skylight. Anytime I thought I saw a ray of light, I would climb on the desk and squeeze my shoulders through the hole in the skylight, moving my face around and hoping for the feeling of warmth to fall on it.

A few weeks after I moved in, the mildly retarded Spanish housekeeper threw away my dirty clothes because she thought they were trash. I never mentioned the incident to the boardinghouse owner and I did not replace my socks and underwear until I returned to the States. I started wearing my remaining underwear right side out one day, wrong side out the next. I couldn't face the stylish department store clerks sneering at my pronunciation—or, far worse, responding in English—when I asked where to find the
sous-vêtements
.

For the first time, my love of Baudelaire and Maupassant was made to coexist with mundane communication, and I watched, helpless, as the words that had buoyed my private self rejected me in public. I could never have imagined how terrible it would feel to be unable to communicate in a language I thought I knew. When I couldn't conjure a word or tripped over my pronunciation so that a waiter or salesclerk responded in English, I was overcome by my own worthlessness; the entire world was wearied by my presence. Waiters left my table and never returned when I insisted, with the dreadful aggressiveness that tries to mask despair, on speaking my poorly accented French instead of resorting to the English culinary phrases they had mastered. Bouncers turned me away from clubs because I didn't have the right clothes. The U.S. started bombing Iraq and eating freedom fries with their hamburgers, and the métro was filled with anti-American graffiti that pained me all the more because I agreed with it. A man on the street grabbed my breast, then spit in my face when I gave him the finger. I ran into him again a few days later, his arm around a pretty girl's waist.

I had repeated nightmares that a naked, drooling, elfish, old man was chasing me through the boardinghouse with a knife and fork. I would make it into my bedroom and frantically shimmy up through the skylight. When I was halfway free, the cannibal caught up to me and grabbed my waist. I always woke up as he was dragging me back into my attic room, where I would be eaten alive.

The longest sustained conversation I had that year was with a lanky video-store clerk whom I met one night while drinking alone at a touristy bar in the Bastille. He asked where I was from, said he'd been to Boston once, stuck his fingers down my pants as I stood at the bar, ordering my fourth drink. The bartender poured my beer with a half smile, aware of the connection between the man pressed against my ass and the involuntary widening of my eyes. I was the slutty American girl they expected me to be. The man guided me outside and asked where I lived. It was all right to go home with him because I was drunk enough that French was easy; I'd finally be able to practice speaking. On the ride to my boardinghouse, he stared at my chest and ran his pulpy hands up and down my legs. I had no desire to have sex with him, but that didn't seem to matter particularly. There was nothing I could do with another person that would be worse than what I was doing all by myself. I clenched my jaw and blinked at the taxi's rain-streaked window. Soon afterward I was tiptoeing to my shared bathroom to wash semen off my back.

I found
Fifi
at a used bookstall along the Seine a few days later—long, lovely sentences written in a lovely foreign language, and I consumed all eight-hundred pages of them in three days without consulting a dictionary.
Fifi
was a monologue of unrequited love for cats, narrated by a forty-year-old bachelor who strolls the Parisian streets seeking out and caring for strays. The narrator's attentiveness to the vagaries of his obsession is tedious, but I found the tediousness moving. The narrator has nothing to cleave to but his feelings for small creatures who flit in and out of his life, concerned with the narrator only insofar as he furthers their survival, offering no hope of mutual understanding. It is not the cats but his feelings for them that are the narrator's only companions.

I went to the Bibliothèque Nationale, where I learned that
Fifi
was out of print and had never been translated. My aloneness suddenly had a purpose. Wrapped up in my translating project, I barely went outside for my remaining four months in Paris. I was forcing myself to stay until the following December; it would have been too shameful to run back to my father's house without spending at least a year there.

Without meaning to, I had abandoned the translation after I got back to the States. But when I woke up in a hungover panic one dawn, Jared snoring beside me, I scoured my email hoping for some distraction, and found the attachment I'd sent myself the day before I left France. I read through what I'd translated so far. Not bad. I had about two-thirds of the book left to get through. My mind fell inside the task, relieved to be put to use.