It is the worst feeling in the world when you are rejected by a man, any man, but when it is the love of your life. Well, the only one you would have chosen anyway, above any of them, and there were some, some of the most powerful, highly persuasive, well, it doesn’t matter anyway. Because in the end, he didn’t want me. He was very polite about it though. About telling me to leave him alone. All he had to say was this, that I looked like his daughter. Which meant I was too young, too unsuitable, too crazy, or too mad, whatever word you want to use in place of mental patient. I wanted them to leave me alone, and now they do. I only have myself to blame at the end of the day, or night, or in the early hours of the day.
Men want sex. They want to know it is available to them when you are in a relationship with them. Men want the sex-act. They don’t want to ask you questions. I don’t eat anyway. Restaurant dinners would be wasted on me. I don’t like to eat in public. I don’t like restaurants.
Don’t like to go to them. I don’t believe in all of that. The stuff of relationship-imagination that girlfriends want, and wives want even more. The date night. That’s foreplay for the girl, for the wife. She talks, and talks, and talks, and the man says nothing, what does he really do, what does he really want. He wants the evening to end, so he can make love to his wife, or his girlfriend. I on the other hand because of the medication cannot climax. I cannot reach orgasm.
I am a complete waste of time. What does a wife do best? Nag. Whine.
But she’s fertile. She gives him the sons, and the daughters that he wants. He worships his children, gives them everything, everything because he can. The men, besides being beautiful, and intellectual, and driven in their careers and all of that, the Orpheus Effect, oh, I said that. I said what I wanted to say. They are beautiful. All I want is the man. But I can’t. I can’t fall pregnant, do you understand.
What would I do with a child, a baby who will need me for the best part of eighteen years? I have no money. A woman alone, living in poverty, oh, I write. I write books for a living, but I don’t make much. It’s enough for me. But not for a family. Do you understand?
There’s no man, you see. Do you understand? There is no man. But there were. Oh, they’re all off now in the world. Leading everything.
Building empires. Leading filmmaker, leading researcher, leading companies, teaching, consulting. I was young. I’m not young anymore.
Maybe one day I’ll get lucky. I’ll get someone to marry me. But I’m a strange and bewildering woman. My books are full of it. If you read them, you will find that out about me. I’m not a woman. I’m an intellectual. Blame my father for that. He was lonely. He wanted someone to talk too. I was his companion. His best friend. His confidante. I don’t know how to be this woman, anyway. Lack of mother.
Lack of her intensity. So, I lack that kind of intensity within me.
You’re the therapist, here. Yes, I understand. I understand that you understand. Yes, it is a lonely life. I don’t have a father to shelter, or protect me anymore. The sky is a blue ribbon, so, so is my heart. What colour is yours? I’m a detective. If I investigate everything, write about everything, hold nothing back, what then the wife in the relationship with her husband. These books I write, oh, they sell. People read them. Men and women read them. My life, I, little me, make people curious. My life makes people curious. Not men.
Men know exactly what I am. The Jack Nicholson of women. Always left, always loved though, but men can’t stand to be around me say, for years. Maybe hours. Everybody wants me. It’s tiresome. Tiring.
The conversations are mentally exhausting. The love, I have enough love for the world of men. Creative men, highly intelligent men. For them, I am everything. I’m progressive thinker, I’m independent, I’m object of affection, and in return they love me. They can’t be with me; they can’t marry me. Marriage is out of the question. They made their choice years before, all these men. All my loves. Everyone can see this. So, I try to stay out of the man’s way. His space. Goodness knows how important a man’s personal space is to him. The wife ensconced in mansion, large house, with child, or, with children. They make it clear to me from the beginning that no mention must be made of the other women in their lives, their wives, their daughters.
Their other children, if the other children are sons. In the men I have chosen to live my days with, long afternoons. The men that I think of, that are there even when I close my eyes, and am utterly, utterly alone, they chose me, so that should be enough happiness for me, isn’t it? The sex act makes me sometimes, just sometimes uncomfortable. But I do, do I do it gladly, that is enough, isn’t it?
It makes the man in my life happy. That is enough for me. I get no pleasure. None whatsoever. Blame I guess the lack of the presence of a mother in my life. I was always gravitating to women, not to fall in love with them, no, no. I always, always preferred men. Blame my father. Blame me for being his confidante for his entire life.
Even near the end, I had to do everything for him. He was in a wheelchair at the end, in the autumn of his years, and I was still doing everything. A grown woman behaving like a child. Never able to settle down and run my own household affairs. I was a grown woman, bored, uneducated running my father’s household. Fixing breakfast for him, giving him his pills, reading to him from the Book of Psalms, after that we’d discuss what was read, he’d pray, I’d pray, then we’d talk and talk and talk. He was educated, an intellectual. Perhaps that is why I’m only attracted to heavily educated, intellectual men.
Childhood is strange. My childhood was strange. No mother, although there she was in the house. Elegant, always elegant.
Hair always done. She never spoke to me. She talked at me. She screamed at me. She shouted at me when she wanted something done. I could not, even when I the insomnia started, the nightmares as a child sleep in her bed. By then, my parents were sleeping in separate beds.
My childhood. You want me now to talk about my childhood. Not now.
Please not now. I don’t have that kind of time. Already I am mentally exhausted thinking about my father, thinking about all the men. They leave me alone now. Maybe it’s because I’m old now. Older. Isn’t it sad? All that time, all that love, all that potential wasted. Or, perhaps not wasted after all. I have written books. Some people even call me an artist. Note to self. Not novelist.
Not writer. They call me artist. Read it. Read them, if you want to. I know you won’t. You’re female. Not male. You have a female sensibility. You’re married. You have a husband, a daughter. I have none. These books you will either find amusing, or absurd. Perhaps you won’t be able to take my freedom. I’m free. You’re not. You’re tethered to community. I have no community on the other hand. If you read just a chapter, even open any of my books randomly, you will discover this for yourself. I don’t want you to hate me. It’s not your job to hate me. It was my mother’s job to hate me. My sister, she despised me all the way to Czechoslovakia. She lives in Prague now. If you read my books, you will know all the secrets of my heart.
All those men, but all that time they didn’t, or, couldn’t understand that I didn’t know how they loved me at all. They didn’t want talk.
They didn’t want communication eye-to-eye. Face-to-face talk. All they wanted, desired, was the sex-act. Even in my early twenties I didn’t know anything about the sex-act. Jean Rhys had called it ‘the sexual transaction’. Sorry, she was a novelist and short story writer.
Dominican. Feminist before her time. Writer, in the vein of the Russian men, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Pasternak, you know. Oh, you don’t know them either. Fine, I’ll continue. I had plenty of boyfriends.
Most of them, no, all of them, come to think of it, a good deal older than me. Do they still think of me, that is the question, with their careers and prosperity? Children at university. The only one I do care about, no, let me rather rephrase that.
The only one I love, love deeply, for who he is, and all of that. The kind of love that makes a woman in the end marry. He doesn’t love me anymore. He never loved me. All this time, I thought he did. After winter, must come spring, right? Right. Madly in love with me. Sadly, as it turns out I had believed in a dream all these years. In my youth I struggled. As a child I was hurt, wounded by my own mother. There’s the proof. I have life. I am an artist. I also have no life. To look at me I look as if I’m a married lady, with children. Not even children at university, young children. After all this time, years, and years, and years. My great love is still unmarried. He is still beautiful. He’s still older though, but even more beautiful.
We’re both a great deal older now, and of course I thought, anything can happen. Yes, yes, it was a mistake. But it was my mistake, you see. I take full ownership, and responsibility for that. I thought, well now. We can love each other now. We can fall in love now. But I am here. He is in America. He is in Los Angeles. He is also an artist.
I am an artist. All of these things we have in common. I contacted him. It was my mistake to make, you see. He did not speak to me. He spoke to me through his secretary. There was no love. Never. I could see that now, as I saw it when I was in my younger years. My early twenties. Or there was, and he was just doing what he always did, which is love, absolute love, unconditional love me, in any place.
He protected me, by not speaking to me. By not questioning me. He just said this. He told his secretary to say this to me. That I looked like his daughter. And all I thought to myself was this, asked myself, really, has so much, or, so little time passed that I still looked like his daughter. All this time I thought that change would eventually come. I thought I would marry. That the seeds would grow.
That I would marry the man I loved with my entire being, and that accepted my psychological framework. All this time it was out of the question. It was out of the question. My love was unacceptable. He had someone else in his life. A daughter, and we would never be together.
I look like her.
Remember, because I remember that cold and hard fact, bitterly sometimes. That he told his secretary these exact words. That I looked like his daughter. Which meant this, the very obvious. That he was always going to be old enough to be my father. I know, I know. Why do I hurt myself in this way? It’s all my fault. It’s always my fault.
They end it, always. They walk away. The men. All of them. When you are a gifted child, you carry that gift with you throughout your life.
Yes, it stays with you. No matter how old you become, you become wiser, also indifferent to the world. In a way, this gift arrests your youth, your development. You understand? No, you don’t. How do I explain it to you, then? You specialized in the field of psychiatry.
You should be explaining this to me. Not the other way around. You smile. So, so, we are friends. All this time I thought to myself that we weren’t. I was too forward-thinking, too artistic. You were mother.
Wife.
