A woman at the Center calls me back and I change my mind and never return her call. (I realize the costly sessions would be daily, I have not yet figured out the forty-minute drive, refuse to drive anywhere here, in fact.)
I wake up and read although Nietzsche says that’s foolish. A sort of narcotic, reading. I read with my hands down the front of my pants — my mode of reading is masturbatory. Sometimes I feel guilty about my lubed fingers all over library books.
Reading Anaïs Nin’s diaries and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in tandem makes me want to have affairs, despite, or maybe because of, the intensity of my love for John — how I once idealized the apparently open marriages of modernism, the triangulation of Anaïs, Henry and June, the free love of Bloomsbury, the Bowles who shared everything except their beds.
(In London, the temptation of an angel-faced philosophy student.)
I too want to have a sensual awakening outside of marrriage, like Emma Bovary or Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. Wifedom a possession. I don’t want to be possessed. I want to be free. Like Charlotte Brontë projecting onto her heroine Jane Eyre her desire for experience, as Virginia Woolf critiques in A Room of One’s Own—except instead of wanting to travel the world, reading these books I temporarily want to fuck the world — a literary nymphomania.
Because of the mythical lothario conjured up in Nin’s journals, I’ve always fantasized about having an affair with Henry Miller, horn-dog Henry Miller, who can’t keep his hands off me, who will back me over a couch and go at me, who will fuck me so I stay fucked.
In Paris during the second leg of the Bowles’ honeymoon, Jane goes out alone at night, prowling the streets, the lesbian bars. Jane Bowles who loved to slum like Baudelaire, like Vivien Leigh channeling Blanche DuBois. Outside of one club a homeless-looking man propositions her nightly. Some time later she sees the man’s picture in the books section of the newspaper. Her forgotten man in the back alley — Henry Miller.
I begin to compulsively read historical romances as research for a novel, featuring a housewife named Emma who inhales historical romances to numb herself. For days in a daze I can’t read anything except these romance novels. (I prefer Regency romances, costume dramas, like Jane Austen with fucking.) I suddenly become allergic to anything more highbrow. I watch TV on my computer during the day when I am supposed to be writing, my favorites are teen soap operas. I ghost fan forums endlessly analyzing character motivation as well as “shipping” certain characters, short for “relationshipping,” everyone so passionate about the characters they just know are destined to be together.
We are invited over to the house of two history professors for Thanksgiving. We can’t eat most of the food because of our vegan diet, and I’ve also been having terrible digestive problems. They have made four types of cranberry dressing. It’s the only thing we can eat and the hosts blink expectantly at us. One has tequila in it. I lick my spoon tremulously and think of Emma licking the bottom of her glass as Charles falls deep within it. There is a young man there, a jazz pianist with soulful eyes. I realize he might be their pot dealer. I find myself mildly flirting with him. My stomach cramps up. I am bowed over. He could be my Leon, I muse absentmindedly.
Did Tom foist Bertrand Russell on Vivien(ne), to give her something to do?
Here, I am the wife of. That is how I am introduced by others. Not a writer. A wife. (No one seems to care that I am a writer, awaiting the publication of a slim, nervous novella.) Everyone much more fascinated with John’s career. In his dungeon office John is surrounded by piles of leatherbound volumes, books that look burned, in several languages, a Babylon. Eliot studying languages while at Lloyd’s bank. I love seeing John fingering a book, reading its leaves, soothsaying it, speaking its secret history. He can lapse into the charming pedant so easily. My Professor X, as Woolf calls the patriarchs of higher learning in Room. Vivien(ne) sitting in on the Victorian literature classes Tom taught to working-class adults. Her expression rapt, worshipful. She sacrificed everything for him, for his eventual genius.
I am realizing you become a wife, despite the mutual attempt at an egalitarian partnership, once you agree to move for him. You are placed into the feminine role — you play the pawn. Once you let that tornado take you away into the self-abnegating state of wifedom. Which I did from the beginning, now almost a decade ago, quitting my job as an editor of an alt-weekly so we could live in London and he could attend a graduate program in the history of the book.
I write this book of shadow histories. These histories of books’ shadows.
Sylvia Plath was fascinated with the figure of the dybbuk, the wandering, disembodied soul in Jewish mythology. Usually the souls of suicides. “I am the ghost of a former suicide” —the beginning line of her poem “Electra on Azalea Path.” A doubling, the dybbuk.
Anne Sexton, who thought she was the reincarnation of Edna St. Vincent Millay.
“There are also reports of people who see, in their dreams, actual events in the lives of other people, both past and future.”
The mad wife’s journey from committed to committal.
“We are married. The sibylline parrots are protesting the sway of the first bobbed heads in the Biltmore paneled luxe.”—F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, “Show Mr. and Mrs. F to Number—”
Zelda’s words but a communal byline. He snatches up her bon mots, her odd phrasings, on little scraps of papers, backs of envelopes. Her diaries before she was married. A Mrs.
Vivien(ne)’s literary alter-ego Sibylla. The sibylline parrots. A pair of pretty birds. Zelda and Viv, the frenzied flappers who gave words to their writer husbands.
We are married. A definitive statement. A pronouncement.
That famous photograph of the Fitzes: sleek lions’ faces, features blending into each other. Both so stoic and self-absorbed. They are acting a role. They are the famous feuding Fitzgeralds. Almost incestuous.
Of Vivien(ne) and Tom, a biographer wrote: “Each felt a Narcissus-like spark of recognition in the other’s presence.”
Our delirious dyad. We are everything for each other, siblings, parents, intimates, lovers, enemies…
What do you really want to write? John asks me. We are at a bar in Bucktown in Chicago. We have just met. We have not yet spent the night together, but once we do for years we will never spend it apart. Me writing 2500 words a week for the alt-weekly tossing out witticisms in formulaic articles and essays like some chick-lit version of Dorothy Parker or Renata Adler. At the time John is the managing editor of a local literary magazine. By day he works in fundraising for a cultural organization. Once we begin dating I start penning a quippy personal column under the pseudonym Janey Smith (a nod to Kathy Acker’s anti-heroine), which he edits for me.
As soon as we met I made him a character.
What do I really want to write? I want to write novels. Because that is what one is supposed to write, right, if one writes. Ring Lardner’s quip: “Mr. Fitzgerald is a novelist and Mrs. Fitzgerald is a novelty.” I want to be taken seriously above all I want him to take me seriously.
(I met him before I was a mess of pages, and a wind or a word could tear me apart.)
Is it true when I met him I knew he was my editor? I am Hilda Doolittle looking to be renamed H.D., Imagiste, by Ezra Pound, Jean Rhys falling for Ford Madox Ford, Jane Bowles, all the rest. Tom’s marks on Viv’s notebooks and later officially at Faber & Faber, lording over Djuna. I am sleepwalking through the 1920s with my ink-stained hands and collection of cloche hats and brilliant fascist of a husband.