The Argonauts (14 page)

I have always hated Hamlet—the character—for his misogynistic moping around after his mother’s remarriage. And yet I know I carry a kernel of Hamlet within me. In fact, I have proof: a childhood diary, in which I swore to one day exact revenge on my mother and stepfather for their affair, which broke up my parents’ marriage. (My father’s untimely death unfortunately occurred shortly thereafter.) I swore in my diary that my sister and I would stand forever with the ghost of our dead father, who now looked down upon us, betrayed and heartbroken, from heaven.

Also like Hamlet, I was angrier at my mother than at my stepfather, who was essentially a stranger. He had been the young housepainter in white pants who would sometimes stay late into the evening when my father was out of town on a business trip. On such nights, my sister and I would put on skits or dances for him and my mother: jesters for the queen and ersatz king. Not long after, he and my mother were walking down the aisle. When the reverend asked us to bend our heads in prayer, I kept my chin up, a sentinel.

For the duration of her marriage to my stepfather, my mother’s maternal body seemed to me supplanted by her desiring body. For I knew that my stepfather wasn’t just the object of her desire. I knew she believed him to
be
her desire, incarnate. Such thinking set her up for a bitter fall when he left her, twenty-odd years later, confessing all kinds of infidelities on his way out the door.

I hated him for crushing her. I hated her for being crushed.

When I was a teenager, my mother tried to explain her reasons for leaving my father in more adult terms. But even at thirteen I didn’t know what to do with the notion that she needed to leave him “to have a chance at joy.” My father seemed to me the vessel of all earthly joy; his death had but deepened this impression.

Why wasn’t he good enough?
He told me that I could work outside the home if I wanted to, so long as his shirts still got ironed and were ready for work the next day
, my mother told me. The feminist in me was unmoved.
Couldn’t you have told him you didn’t want to iron his shirts, and taken it from there?

When my stepfather finally left, my sister and I felt as much relief as grief. The intruder had finally been expelled. The sodomitical mother would melt away, and the maternal body would be ours, at last.

No wonder, then, that our mother’s announcement that she was getting married again caught us off guard, just a few years later. As she and her husband-to-be told us the news at a dinner party orchestrated, to our surprise, for just that purpose, I watched my sister turn a furious red, then lunge around for a vine that could hold her.
Well, if the wedding is in June, I’m not going
, she sputtered.
It’s way too hot in June for anyone to get married. If it’s in June I’m
not going
. She was ruining the moment, and I loved her for it.

But this time, so far as I can tell, my mother has not made her husband her desire incarnate, though she does love him very much. And for his part, so far as I can tell, he doesn’t try to talk her out of her self-deprecation, nor does he abet it. He simply loves her. I am learning from him.

About twenty-four hours after I gave birth to Iggy, the nice woman at the hospital who tested his hearing gave me a wide white elastic band for my postpartum belly, basically a giant Ace bandage with a Velcro waist. I was grateful for it, as my middle felt like it was about to slide off me and onto the floor.

Falling forever, falling to pieces
. Maybe this belt would keep it, me, together. When she handed it to me, she winked and said,
Thanks for doing your part to keep America beautiful
.

I stumbled back to my hospital room, newly corseted, my gratitude now speckled with bewilderment.
What’s my part? Having a baby? Taking measures to stop the spread? Not falling to pieces?

It is unnerving, though, this melting. This pizza-dough-like flesh hanging down in folds where there used to be a pregnant tautness.

Don’t think of it as, You’ve lost your body
, one postpartum website counseled.
Think of it as, You gave your body to your baby
.

I gave my body to my baby. I gave my body to my baby
. I’m not sure I want it back, or in what sense I could ever have it.

Throughout my postpartum delirium, I found myself lazily clicking on articles on my AOL home page (yes, AOL) about how certain celebrities got back into shape or into being sexual after babies. It’s humdrum but relentless: the obsession with who’s pregnant and who’s showing and who’s life is transforming due to the imminent arrival of the all-miraculous, all-coveted BABY—all of which flips, in the blink of an eye, into an obsession with how soon all signs of bearing the life-transforming BABY can evaporate, how soon the mother’s career, sex life, weight can be restored,
as if nothing ever happened here at all
.

Who cares what SHE feels like doing? It’s her conjugal duty to get over a massive physical event that has literally rearranged her organs and stretched her parts beyond comprehension and brought her through a life-or-death portal as soon as humanly possible. As in this post by a woman on Marriage Missions, a Christian website that hopes “to help those who are married and those preparing for marriage to be PRO-ACTIVE in helping to save marriage from divorce”: “I felt what I did all day was meet other people’s needs. Whether it was caring for my children, working in ministry, or washing my husband’s clothes, by the end of the day I wanted to be done need-meeting. I wanted my pillow and a magazine. But God prompted me: Are the “needs” you meet for your husband the needs he wants met?’” The answer of course is NO! No less than GOD says she needs to put aside the sanity-producing magazine and pillow and start fucking her husband! Get over yourself and start fucking! God says, get GGG!

GGG: Good, Giving, and Game. That’s sex-advice columnist Dan Savage’s acronym, meaning “good in bed,” “giving equal time and equal pleasure,” and “game for anything—within reason.” “If you are expected to be monogamous and have one person be all things sexually for you, then you have to be whores for each other,” Savage says. “You have to be up for anything.”

These are solid guidelines to which I have long aspired. But now I think we have a right to our kink and our fatigue, both.

In an age all too happy to collapse the sodomitical mother into the MILF, how can rampant, “deviant” sexual activity remain the marker of radicality? What sense does it make to align “queer” with “sexual deviance,” when the ostensibly straight world is having no trouble keeping pace? Who, in the straight world, besides some diehard religious conservatives, truly experiences sexual pleasure as inextricably linked to reproductive function? Has anyone looked at the endless list of fetishes on a “straight” porn website recently? Have you read, as I did this morning, about the trial of Officer Gilberto Valle? If queerness is about disturbing normative sexual assumptions and practices, isn’t one of these that sex is the be-all and end-all? What if Beatriz Preciado is right—what if we’ve entered a new, post-Fordist era of capitalism that Preciado calls the “pharma-copornographic era,” whose principal economic resource is nothing other than “the insatiable bodies of the multitudes—their cocks, clitorises, anuses, hormones, and neurosexual synapses … [our] desire, excitement, sexuality, seduction, and … pleasure”?

Faced with the warp speed of this “new kind of hot, psychotropic, punk capitalism,” especially from my station of fatigue, exchanging horniness for exhaustion grows in allure. Unable to fight my station, at least for the time being, I try to learn from it; another self, stripped.

I first met Sedgwick in a graduate seminar titled Non-Oedipal Models of Psychology. By way of introduction, she announced that she had started going to therapy because she wanted to be happier. To hear a scary theoretical heavyweight admit such a thing changed my life. Then, without missing a beat, she said she wanted to play a quick get-to-know-you game involving totem animals.

Totem animals?
How could it be that I had fled the spacey Haight-Ashbury of my youth for hard-core, intellectual New York, explicitly to escape games involving totem animals, only to find myself in the middle of one in a doctoral classroom? The game placed an icy finger on my identity phobia: it was but a short leap from here, I felt, to the index card, Sharpie, and lapel pin.

Perhaps anticipating this horror, Sedgwick explained to us that the game had a kind of out. She said that we were free to offer up a fake animal, a kind of decoy identification, if we so desired—if, for example, we had a “real” totem animal that we would prefer to keep to ourselves.

I didn’t have a real or fake animal, and so I just sweated as we went around the room. When it got to me, I burped out
otter
. Which was a form of true. It was important to me back then to feel, to be wily. To feel small, slick, quick, amphibious, dexterous, capable. I didn’t know then Barthes’s book
The Neutral
, but if I had, it would have been my anthem—the Neutral being that which, in the face of dogmatism, the menacing pressure to take sides, offers novel responses: to flee, to escape, to demur, to shift or refuse terms, to disengage, to turn away. The otter was thus a complex sort of stand-in, or fake-out, another identity I felt sure I could shimmy out of.

But whatever I am, or have since become, I know now that slipperiness isn’t all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.

“Many people doing all kinds of work are able to take pleasure in aspects of their work,” Sedgwick once wrote, “but something different happens when the pleasure is not only taken but openly displayed. I like to make that different thing happen.”

One happy thing that can happen, according to Sedgwick, is that pleasure becomes accretive as well as autotelic: the more it’s felt and displayed, the more proliferative, the more possible, the more habitual, it becomes.

But, as Sedgwick knew well, there are other, more sinister models. A famous example from Sedgwick’s own life makes this clear. In 1991, the year Sedgwick was first diagnosed with breast cancer, Sedgwick’s essay “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” was made notorious by right-wing culture warriors before Sedgwick had even written it. (They found the title in a Modern Language Association program and went to town from there.) About learning she was ill just as the “journalistic hologram bearing [her] name” became the object of ugly vitriol, she writes: “I don’t know a gentler way to say it than that at a time when I’ve needed to make especially deep draughts on the reservoir of a desire to live and thrive, that resource has shown the cumulative effects of my culture’s wasting depletion of it.” She then names a few of the “thousand things [that] make it impossible to mistake the verdict on queer lives and on women’s lives, as on the lives of those who are poor or are not white.” This verdict can become a chorus of voices in our heads, standing by to inhibit our capacity to contend with illness, dread, and devaluation. “[These voices] speak to us,” Sedgwick says. “They have an amazing clarity.”

The way Sedgwick interprets it, it wasn’t just her linking of a canonical writer with the filthy specter of self-pleasuring that struck her critics as depraved. More galling was the spectacle of a writer or thinker—be it Sedgwick or Austen—who finds her work happy-making, and who celebrates it publicly as such. Worse still, in a culture committed to bleeding the humanities to death, along with any other labors of love that don’t serve the God of capital: the spectacle of someone who likes her pointless, perverse work and gets paid—even paid well—for it.

Most writers I know nurse persistent fantasies about the horrible things—or
the
horrible thing—that will happen to them if and when they express themselves as they desire. (Everywhere I go as a writer—especially if I’m in drag as a “memoirist”—such fears seem to be first and foremost on people’s minds. People seem hungry, above all else, for permission, and a guarantee against bad consequences. The first, I try to give; the second is beyond my power.) When I published my book
Jane: A Murder
—a book that took as its subject the 1969 murder of my mother’s younger sister—I too nursed terrible fears: namely, that I would be murdered as Jane was, as punishment for my writerly transgressions. It took the writing of not only that book, but also an unintended sequel, for me to undo this knot, and hand its strands to the wind.

Now, this story is old news, especially for me. The reason I’m bringing it up again is that, in the months directly preceding Iggy’s conception, I was interrupted for a spell by a stalker of sorts—a man obsessed with Jane’s murder, and with me as someone who had written about it. It started with a message on my voice mail at work: a man called to say my aunt “got what she deserved,” and called her a name. Specifically, he called her a “stupidhead.” (Clearly “cunt” or “bitch” would have had its own spice, but “stupidhead,” and the childish intonation in which it was delivered, generated its own species of alarm.)

I’ve worked in and around this subject long enough to know not to sit alone with such things, so I beelined down to the Valencia sheriff’s office, Harry by my side. The minute we opened the door, our spirits sank. The chubby white suburban teenagers impersonating cops were precisely the kind of men to whom we would have preferred
not
to unload this story. Nonetheless, I told the cop at the desk the briefest version I could manage, which spanned my aunt’s 1969 murder to the writing of my two books to the voice mail left at my work that morning. He listened to me blankly, then pulled off a shelf a binder thick as a phone book, which he began pawing through at a glacial pace. After about five minutes, his face lit up. “Here it is,” he said. “
Annoying phone call
.” He proceeded to write out these three words in painstaking capital letters on a form. As he labored, another young cop ambled over.
What seems to be the problem here?
he said. I repeated the tale. He had me call my voice mail and play him the message, after which he looked up with theatrical indignation and said, “Now, what would someone go and say a thing like that for?”