To save money over the week, we cooked our food in the hotel bathroom on a hot plate. One day we drove to a Sport Chalet and bought a little tent to set up on the beach because the beachside cabanas cost too much money to rent. While you slept I ambled down to the beach and set up the tent, then tried to read Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love inside. But it was like a nylon sweat lodge in there, and neither I nor the four-month-old fetus could tolerate it. I had started showing, which was delightful. Maybe there would be a baby. One night we splurged in our sober way and had eight-dollar virgin strawberry daiquiris at the infinity pool, which was stocked with Europeans on cheap vacation packages. The air was hot and lavender with a night storm coming in. There was always a storm coming in. Frat brothers and sorority sisters thronged every fried fish joint on the boardwalk. The crowds were loud and repulsive and a little scary but we were protected by our force field. On our third day, we drove to the second-largest mall in the world and walked for hours, even though I was dizzy and exhausted from early pregnancy and the suffocating heat and you were just barely over the lip of the Vicodin. At the mall I went into Motherhood Maternity and tried on clothes with one of those gelatin strap-on bellies they have so you can see what you’ll look like as you grow big. Wearing the strap-on belly, I tried on a fuzzy white wool sweater with a bow at the sternum, the kind that makes your baby look like a present. I bought the sweater and ended up wearing it back at home all winter. You bought some loungy Adidas pants that look hot on you. Over and over again we emptied your drains into little Dixie cups and flushed the blood stuff down the hotel toilet. I’ve never loved you more than I did then, with your Kool-Aid drains, your bravery in going under the knife to live a better life, a life of wind on skin, your nodding off while propped up on a throne of hotel pillows, so as not to disturb your stitches. “The king’s sleep,” we called it, in homage to our first pay-per-view purchase of the week, The King’s Speech.
Later, from our Sheraton Sweet Sleeper® Bed, we ordered X-Men: First Class. Afterward we debated: assimilation vs. revolution. I’m no cheerleader for assimilation per se, but in the movie the assimilationists were advocating nonviolence and identification with the Other in that bastardized Buddhist way that gets me every time. You expressed sympathy for the revolutionaries, who argued, Stay freaky and blow ’em up before they come for you, because no matter what they say, the truth is they want you dead, and you’re fooling yourself if you think otherwise.
Professor: I can’t stop thinking about the others out there, all those minds that I touched. I could feel them, their isolation, their hopes, their ambitions. I tell you we can start something incredible, Erik. We can help them.
Erik Lehnsherr: Can we? Identification, that’s how it starts. And ends with being rounded up, experimented on and eliminated.
Professor: Listen to me very carefully, my friend: killing Shaw will not bring you peace.
Erik Lehnsherr: Peace was never an option.
We bantered good-naturedly, yet somehow allowed ourselves to get polarized into a needless binary. That’s what we both hate about fiction, or at least crappy fiction — it purports to provide occasions for thinking through complex issues, but really it has predetermined the positions, stuffed a narrative full of false choices, and hooked you on them, rendering you less able to see out, to get out.
While we talked we said words like nonviolence, assimilation, threats to survival, preserving the radical. But when I think about it now I hear only the background buzz of our trying to explain something to each other, to ourselves, about our lived experiences thus far on this peeled, endangered planet. As is so often the case, the intensity of our need to be understood distorted our positions, backed us further into the cage.
Do you want to be right or do you want to connect? ask couples’ therapists everywhere.
The aim is not to answer questions, it’s to get out, to get out of it.
Flipping channels on a different day, we landed on a reality TV show featuring a breast cancer patient recovering from a double mastectomy. It was uncanny to watch her performing the same actions we were performing — emptying her drains, waiting patiently for her unbinding — but with opposite emotions. You felt unburdened, euphoric, reborn; the woman on TV feared, wept, and grieved.
Our last night at the Sheraton, we have dinner at the astoundingly overpriced “casual Mexican” restaurant on the premises, Dos Caminos. You pass as a guy; I, as pregnant. Our waiter cheerfully tells us about his family, expresses delight in ours. On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more “male,” mine, more and more “female.” But that’s not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.
Many women describe the feeling of having a baby come out of their vagina as taking the biggest shit of their lives. This isn’t really a metaphor. The anal cavity and vaginal canal lean on each other; they, too, are the sex which is not one. Constipation is one of pregnancy’s principal features: the growing baby literally deforms and squeezes the lower intestines, changing the shape, flow, and plausibility of one’s feces. In late pregnancy, I was amazed to find that my shit, when it would finally emerge, had been deformed into Christmas tree ornament — type balls. Then, all through my labor, I could not shit at all, as it was keenly clear to me that letting go of the shit would mean the total disintegration of my perineum, anus, and vagina, all at once. I also knew that if, or when, I could let go of the shit, the baby would probably come out. But to do so would mean falling forever, going to pieces.
In perusing the Q&A sections of pregnancy magazines at my ob/gyn’s office before giving birth, I learned that a surprising number of women have a related but distinct concern about shit and labor (either that, or the magazine editors are making it up, as a kind of projective propaganda):
Q: If my husband watches me labor, how will he ever find me sexy again, now that he’s seen me involuntarily defecate, and my vagina accommodate a baby’s head?
This question confused me; its description of labor did not strike me as exceedingly distinct from what happens during sex, or at least some sex, or at least much of the sex I had heretofore taken to be good.
No one asked, How does one submit to falling forever, to going to pieces. A question from the inside.