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336 pages, Hardcover
First published June 8, 2021
We were all over each other. We kissed like animals. We knocked into my stupid liquor shelf and it wobbled and in particular I noticed the Rémy Martin on the shelf. It had belonged to my parents and I never touched it or let anyone else touch it. But in the near future, I would let him drink it. Afterward, we were practicing a few yoga positions together, downward dog into crow jumping back into chaturanga, when his cell phone rang. His breathing was heavy but he clipped it somehow: Hey, honey. Yeah, no, don’t sweat it. I’m gonna bring home a pizza. Yeah, coming right now. Okay, love you. He smiled as though nothing had happened. It wasn’t that he was cruel but that he was tipsy and the moment didn’t call for being strange or for acknowledgment. I followed his lead. We laughed some more about some things and he said, Well. And I said, Bye. And he said, Easy, girl. I’m going.
If someone asked me to describe myself in a single word, depraved is the one I would use. The depravation has been useful to me. Useful to what end, I couldn’t say. But I have survived the worst. Survivor is the second word I’d use . A dark death thing happened to me when I was a child. I will tell you all about it, but first I want to tell what followed the evening that changed the course of my life. I’ll do it this way so that you may withhold your sympathy. Or maybe you won’t have any sympathy at all. That’s fine with me. What’s more important is dispelling several misconceptions — about women, mostly. I don’t want you to continue the cycle of hate. I’ve been called a whore. I’ve been judged not only by the things I’ve done unto others but, cruelly, by the things that have happened to me. I envied the people who judged me. Those who lived their lives in a neat, predictable manner. The right college, the right house, the right time to move to a bigger one. The prescribed number of children, which sometimes is two and other times is three. I would bet that most of those people had not been through one percent of what I had. But what made me lose my mind was when those people called me a sociopath. Some even said it like it was a positive. I am someone who believes she knows which people should be dead and which should be alive. I am a lot of things. But I am not a sociopath.
After we returned to Italy, I worked as a waitress at this café on La Dogana beach in Maremma. Every day this bald man with one of those cartoon guts came in. Every day he ordered the linguine con vongole. They made it the best there. And every day this man, Carlo, would ask for extra parsley, but he wanted me to sprinkle it on top right there in front of him. Some days he was my only lunch table. He didn’t act untoward with me, unless you can count him wanting the parsley sprinkled tableside, and the way he would watch my hands. I used to apply clear polish every other day because I was conscious of Carlo watching my fingers. Joan, do you understand? There are rapes, and then there are the rapes we allow to happen, the ones we shower and get ready for. But that doesn’t mean the man does nothing.
I always knew the right way to deliver information. Everybody else did not.
I drove myself out of New York City where a man shot himself in front of me. He was a gluttonous man and when his blood came out it looked like the blood of a pig.
*
I can tell you a lot about sex with a man to whom you are not attracted. It becomes all about your own performance, your own body and how it looks on the outside, the way it moves above this man who, for you, is only a spectator.
While it was happening I wasn’t aware of how it was affecting me. I didn’t notice until several years later, when three showers a day were not enough.
*
If someone asked me to describe myself in a single word, depraved is the one I would use.
*
I’ve been called a whore. I’ve been judged not only by the things I’ve done unto others but, cruelly, by the things that have happened to me.
I envied the people who judged me.
*
When someone suffocates you with what they believe is love, even as you feel your air supply being cut off, you at least feel embraced.
*
I took the things that could come with only me, that could not be trusted to travel under anyone else’s care. My favorite scarf, my panama hat. My Diane Arbus. My mother and my father.
They were both in plastic baggies. It was the safest way I could think for them to travel.
*
The young man at the cash register noticed me and then didn’t take his eyes off of me. I was in a white nightgownish dress, thin as smoke. He was picking a pimple on his chin and staring at me. There are a hundred such small rapes a day.
*
The realtor, Kathi, spoke of him the way that a certain type of white woman speaks of a Black man who’s achieved fame.
*
I peeled the dress away from my body and it clung back down with the gum of my sweat. I would come to learn there was no respite from taking a shower in the Canyon.
*
What is it about moving into a new place that makes you want to kill yourself? I imagine this isn’t true for women with labeled boxes. Women who own flyswatters, who store their winter clothes for the summer. Me, I had my mother’s eyelash curler.
*
I … opened the door to two broad men in black shirts and denim shorts. I always thought, If I had to fuck one man in the room, to save my life. If I had to be ground down. Which would it be?
… The one with a neck tattoo looked like a man who lets a dog hump his leg until one day somebody sees, so he has to shoot the dog.
… I don’t know why these thoughts came to me, but I pictured myself being bent and raped by the one with the gold tooth over the shallow sink. I reasoned that I might then feel comfortable asking him to build my IKEA furniture.
*
One time on an island I swam in a green lagoon and saw through the clearness of the water the simple fact of my limbs.
… I can count moments like that on my hands. My dream is for you to have many such moments, so many that you notice only the times you slip into your own brain and recognize those instances for the traps that they are.
*
I thought, with some perverse relief, that if things got terrible anytime soon, if I couldn’t find work, I might perform blow jobs on the burgundy Ploum. I could sit the pizza deliveryman down, and the propane guy, separate their giant knees, and let them depress my head like a flush valve.