My Daughter's Vagina, Part 3

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 published online, 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 w
as 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 impunity. 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.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.