I met my friends in San Francisco, and I felt safe. I kept thinking – so curiously! – that I hoped he was okay. How could someone be so angry at whoever loved him? How must it feel to hate being loved, and then to have the person that loved you run away in fear?

Conner Habib has an absolutely searing essay up at the Good Men Project called “If You Ever Did Write Anything About Me, I’d Want It To Be About Love.”

It’s about love and domestic abuse, and it’s really, really good.

Related Posts:

• “If You Ever Write About Me…”
• In the Ezo: Behind Closed Doors in Tbilisi
• Why You Can’t Take the “Porn” out of “Gay Porn”
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• Death of a Gay Porn Star

“Drink is included in the price,” Dato tells me, pressing his lips to my palm. He hands me an enormous plastic water container filled with wine the color of honey, wrung from the deflated grapes that shield the terrace from the sun. “If you are having a party, you must ask me, and I will bring you wine. Everybody knows me here. They know I am a good man.” He owns half the flats on the ezo—the shared courtyards Georgian inexplicably refer to as “Italian-style.” The other half belongs to relatives from the village. They know him, and soon, he hints, they will know me. As his lodger, I am under his patronage. Shopkeepers will warn me off the expired milk in the refrigerators, and young men will refrain from speaking to me in the street.

By midnight, I am his daughter. His wife Eka, an animated woman with a heart-shaped face, presses me to her breasts and coos blandishments into my hair. I am, as ever, the kargi gogo, the good girl, the American girl who studies hard and does not come home with strange boys, and who pays the rent three months in advance. She has a feeling about me, she tells me. She loves me as she loves her own daughter. When I am in the ezo, all is at peace in her soul. I am like the sun, radiating all manner of wonders, easing the ache in her bones—she works so hard! And of course I must come to her son Giga’s wedding next month.

I move in three weeks later. The washing machine shoots pernicious sparks into the sink and the Internet stops working by sunset, but I don’t mind. I am home. My window looks out over the Metekhi Church. From my terrace, I can see the Narikala Fortress, which at night is lit gold like a circus tent. Dato forces a bunch of balcony-picked grapes into my hands; it takes every ounce of my appropriated Englishness to glide smoothly into the kitchen before I frantically shake off the spiders. Eka brings me presents: a plastic rabbit, a jewelry box, a cured goatskin tapestry. Dato brings me more wine.

A few days after I arrive, an American couple moves out of the upstairs flat. They leave in the night, without warning, a wad of cash wedged underneath the door. I get the story through the black-market whisperings at the expat cafe: The heat didn’t work. Dato refused to fix it. There was a scene in the ezo. Things were said.

I tell myself that this will never happen to me. I am the kargi gogo, the adopted daughter. I sit with Eka at the kitchen table, eating her food and refusing her cigarettes. Over tea, I am effusive about the Georgian mountains, about the Black Sea, about the places I have gone or will go, about the marketplace I have discovered in the underpass beneath Pushkin Street, about the new French cafe hidden behind the synagogue. She complains to me about her daughter, Khatuna, brilliant but mulish, whose piercings and sitcom-English are at once a source of consternation and secret pride. I pay my rent three months in advance.

Their son gets married; we skin a goat. He and his new wife Anushka, nineteen and breathtaking, live at home. Eka cleans up after them. Anushka, she insists, must study for her exams. I leave briefly for England, subletting my flat to a Spanish journalist, and then return again, bringing gifts and sweets in my suitcase. This offends Dato. I am the guest, the daughter, the gogo. I do not bring gifts.

I visit Eka at nightfall. By now I am intelligible, if not conversant, in Georgian. In our blend of languages, I tell her about my research, about my travels. She tells me about her past. Once she was a professor of Iranian studies at the university. She still teaches sometimes, she says, but she holds down another part-time job with the electric company, a position that far from guarantees our own power supply. Like Dato, she started out as a refugee, an ethnic Georgian expelled from one of the breakaway regions on the border with the Northern Caucasus (he from Abkhazia, she from South Ossetia). They met in exile in Tbilisi; they married soon after.

“My mother did not want me to marry a Georgian man,” she tells me. But Dato kisses her hand at the kitchen table. They flirt, and Khatuna rolls her eyes. “My Khatuna is clever,” she tells me. “She is moving to Paris. She will not marry a Georgian man.”

I tell Eka that I am thinking of converting to the Orthodox Church. I ask her to be my godmother. She cries with joy and force-feeds me cake. In the absence of my own family, I become used to our routine, our evening teas. It is Eka who comforts me when I fail to win a scholarship I’d been counting on; it is Eka who strokes my hair when I have a telephone argument with my boyfriend. When my own mother and I fight—an inevitability even with five thousand miles between us—Eka makes me tea.

The first problem is the neighbors: a young Georgian couple barely out of their teens. The walls between my flat and theirs are thin like ricepaper. I have a looming deadline; they have sex at four in the morning. There are fights—the smashing of furniture, the smack of flesh on flesh. There is a child, four years old at the most, who holds conversations with her teddy bear on the terrace. She speaks slowly, deliberately; she is the only one I can understand.

I complain to Eka about the noise, and she buries me under an avalanche of apologies. “Some people,” she sniffs. “They are not educated people, you know.” Eka is educated. She has art books on her coffee table. She holds a doctorate in Persian studies. She lets out one of the flats to an American lesbian, quietly enjoying the scandal it causes in the ezo, and effusively welcomes her Russian girlfriend, bringing them bowlfuls of potato soup and flushing at her own daring.

Soon we learn the whole story. Eka hears from a waiter at a nearby hotel that our neighbor is a prostitute, soliciting clients at the local bathhouses, sometimes bringing them home. Her putative husband is a gay man (“blue,” Eka calls him); they protect one another. When I come downstairs they are gone. “Think of Khatuna’s reputation,” Eka sighs.

There are new problems. By now, half the apartments on the ezo are empty—there have been too many departures—and, short of money, Eka grows frantic. I pay rent four months in advance; I circulate the flat details among my expat friends. But Dato’s method is swifter. He cuts a deal with local taxi-drivers serving the Ortachala bus station, where marshrutkas from Iran come in every morning. Groups of young men, come to Georgia for the licit gambling and the free-flowing wine, stay for a night or two or three, six to a room.

This offends Eka’s sense of propriety (“They are not educated people. Not like Georgians,” she says, expecting me to agree with her, and lights a cigarette) but she says nothing to Dato. He owns the building, after all, and when the whole courtyard is awakened by the shrieks of two prostitutes pounding frantically at the door, it is Eka who dries the blood, who throws away the broken furniture, who sends the guests away.

I come upstairs one night to find Eka weeping. The lights are off. Dato and Giga are out drinking. Khatuna is asleep; she has an exam in the morning. Eka hasn’t had the heart to ask her to help with the chores—she must focus on her studies, after all—and so she has been cleaning for the past six hours. She has cleaned until her fingers began to blister, and now she can do no more.

Dato is having an affair, she tells me, but she doesn’t mind. It comes as a relief to her. It means one less thing to deal with. Eka tells me about the man she loved before Dato—her true love, she said, the only man she’d ever loved. He was killed, like so many others, in a car crash in the mountains, where shrines to the dead mark every hairpin turn. In despair, she’d married Dato soon after.

“But he is a traditional Georgian man,” she says. I hold her hand and she sobs into my shoulder. “Did you know? The first time my mother came to our house, after we were married, she took one look at me and she started to cry. She saw me cleaning for him, and she cried, because she knew my life was over.”

She cannot regret it, she says. She has Khatuna, and Khatuna is her life. Khatuna will not marry a Georgian man—she is too clever for that. She has piercings and hair dyed an uncanny shade of red. She studies hard.

“You, genatsvale, are my daughter,” Eka says. “Ra kargi gogo!”

That night I believe her. I hold her in my arms and try to understand. For this, she does not forgive me.

Eka stops inviting me upstairs. She is unfailingly polite, even effusive, when we run into each other, when I pay the rent, but she no longer looks me in the eye. She knows that I know, now, and when Dato puts his arm around her she flushes, and I know that I have shamed her. She proffers a few halfhearted invitations—come for dinner next week, let me teach you to cook ajapsandali—but we both know the phone will never ring.

The heater stops working for hours on end. The water spits out of the faucet, intermittently at best and never on command. The terrace has become a storage facility for flea-ragged sofas, broken chairs, mildewing blankets.

The ezo remains a source of concern. Dato builds two more apartments and lets them, almost exclusively, to groups of young men. There are Armenians on the ground floor; ten Iraqis share the one-bedroom next to mine. They hold parties until dawn and leave the front door unlocked. Sometimes they stumble, drunkenly, against my window. They play music and invite girls downstairs. Sometimes I complain, to little avail. After one orgy, my neighbor comes over to apologize. His wife is coming on the train from Baku next week, he explains. Things will be quieter then.

At times I hear the sounds of violence—more slaps, more screams. My Georgian is insufficient for me to call the police, and nothing will happen if I do. I will only shame Eka. Word will get out that all is not well in the ezo. They will be the laughingstock of the neighborhood. People will think Khatuna was involved.

Eka declares that she has had enough. “We are educated people,” she insists. They are landowners, not slumlords. In any case, they have always let to Georgians—maybe an American or two, at most, but certainly not to Turks, Armenians, or Azeris. Even in Abanotubani, a neighborhood known for its diversity, our ezo has always been Georgian.

But Giga’s wife Anushka is pregnant, and Khatuna must go to graduate school, and Dato owns the land, and so the ezo is filled with cigarette-smoke, and none of us can sleep at night.

When Eka asks me for money she does so with downcast eyes. The fiction we maintain is that this is a loan, or else an advance towards the bills. The rent, after all goes to Dato directly. We both know this is a lie. She needs money to leave him. She needs five thousand dollars. I can afford one hundred. I don’t know what offends her more: that I can pay her so little, or that I pay her at all.

Within days of her departure, Dato rents out the master bedroom. Khatuna comes home from class to find a strange man sleeping in her bed. He refuses to let her take her schoolbooks from the shelf. He has paid for the room, he shouts, and that includes everything in it. She and Eka stay, briefly, with friends.

I run into Khatuna in the courtyard. “You know he beats her, right?” She lights a cigarette and throws her scarf over her shoulders. “Typical,” she snorts. “When I earn enough money, I’ll get us both a place.” She has two master’s degrees. She can’t find a job paying more than a hundred dollars a month. Paris is indefinitely postponed.

Of course, Eka returns. I learn through the gossip of the ezo that she had no choice. The house, the ezo, everything, is in Dato’s name. The lawyers wanted a hundred thousand dollars to challenge it. She appears one morning on the terrace, dressed in black, and greets me as if I don’t know where she has gone. She calls me a kargi gogo and offers me tea. I know enough to decline.

When the noise starts up again at four in the morning—the smashing of furniture, the echoing screams—I think at first that it is coming from downstairs, where a group of Iraqis have instated a makeshift speakeasy on the terrace. It is only once I’m outside that I realize the noise is coming from above.

Their fight lasts for hours. I can hear Eka scream. Anushka’s new baby starts crying; plates smash against walls. The wails are so long and loud that I consider, briefly, putting in earplugs. Immediately, I am ashamed. Khatuna, stoic and awake, posts pictures of cats on Facebook. We don’t contact one another. This happens every night for two weeks.

The night before I leave Tbilisi, I pack my bags. I can’t bring myself to knock on the door. I can hear the fighting from my room, and I don’t know what to say. I want to hold Eka in my arms, as I did the night she told me about her first love, to take her in, to repay her kindness with my own. I want to call the police, to physically wrest Dato off her. I know nothing would shame her more.

I do not say goodbye.

Georgia has new leaders now: the national Georgian Dream Party. The graffiti has started in my neighborhood: swastikas, racial slurs, warnings to immigrants, to my neighbors, Azeri and Armenian alike, that soon the violence will come. The Narikala Fortress is half-shadowed—the new regime, the rumour goes, wants to save electricity.

Anushka has dropped out of university. She helps Eka with the housework, now, and tends to the baby, whom Giga doesn’t see. She has lost her looks; she doesn’t need them. Giga stays out like his father does, going to see prostitutes at the bathhouse. Khatuna still can’t find a job.

Eka and I stay in touch. Sometimes she posts comments on Facebook, going into raptures over pictures of my boyfriend, our new house, our English life. She tells me how beautiful I look and reminds me how much she misses me, how much she loves me. “You are my daughter,” she writes. “Chemi kargi gogo.”

I write back, tell her I love her and I am thinking of her. It is not, and never will be, enough.

***

Listen to Tara read her essay:

***

Rumpus original art by Liam Golden.

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In a poignantly regretful tone, you said to me, “I don’t remember anything before the age of eleven.” I rested my cheek on the hot plastic of my phone and stared into the light gray of the pavement. I wanted you to know this:

Only I share the secrets of our mother’s womb. Only I can lay them near your restless soul. Only I can whisper just right and make your tears ease behind your blue eyes. I can reach you wherever you are and take you from your unrest.

Do you seek to recover the memories of your mind? Do you want your cloak now? The burden of memory has always been carried by me, your older sister, the brave hand that labored at the loom and weaved the brawny cloth that was to save your memory. I made it for you, hoping that it would keep the fear inside the amygdala of your brain from translating into long-term memory.

I cried with you at the front door. You were three years old. I was five. You scratched at the door, trying to attach your fragile claws into the grains of the wood. You spared no energy attempting to reach for the small octagon window. You wanted to see, maybe for the last time, a mother who told you she was never coming back. You wanted to witness the dark space between her and us as it slowly grew into the darkness where your childhood is stored.

I took your moist hand and led you to my loom. I pulled you from the crime scene, but the sadness had already begun to absorb into your tiny thalamus. I was not yet a master with the satin of a toddler’s mind. My own satin was still just as white.

I cried with you in the corner of your bedroom. You were five and I was seven. We were crouched down in the fetal position. I tried to become the wallpaper, but its dingy, pink flowers wilted as I plead with them. Your head turned toward the doorway when you heard her coming through. You screamed, “Please! I’ll never do it again! I promise!” I urged you not to look. I told you to bury your head as deeply into the blue carpet as possible, but you had to see what was coming. This time the darkness stalked you, bristled against your spine and pinched your chubby arm until it bruised.

I saved some more of your satin and took you back to my loom. I stole the redness from your round, apple cheeks and stained the loose, white satin that I pulled from your spinal cord. I left it to dry, but the lint of your pain gathered still.

I cried with you when dozens of brown stained underwear were discovered behind your bed. You were seven and I was nine. We were outside in the fall leaves playing a game of “ghosts in the graveyard” when we heard the witchy screech calling you inside. I tried to hide you in the middle, in the moldiest part of the heap of leaves, but you refused to stay. You lunged into the lowest bow of an oak tree and held your breath. You wanted to see the darkness coming. When she grabbed your soft, blond hair and pulled you from the tree, you cried out for me. You cried, “Sissy! Sissy! Help me! Please!” I followed you. I held your shirttail as she dragged you inside and up the long, narrow staircase.

While she rubbed your nose in the pile, I stole some soft satin from your medulla oblongata and I weaved some more, but the stench of shame had already traveled to your mind.

I cried with you when the police brought you home. You were nine and I was eleven. The detective said that you ran away with the neighbor girl. You made it all the way to the railroad tracks, at least a mile away from home, before the darkness found you again. I asked you to visit me in my looming room after she was gone, but you fell into a deep sleep after a long guttural cry.

I stole some more white strands from your pons, put them in boiling water with the redness of your cheeks and watched it soak all night long.

When you were ten and I was twelve, you told me that you were happy that I have no father. You called me a “bastard girl.” You laughed jovially and taunted me with your sinister half grins. I pulled you by the shirt and threw you up against the cement wall of the garage. You laughed and called for her help. I let you go and took my beating.

Later, when she couldn’t find her hairbrush, she dragged us into the dim living room and made us fight. I watched your tears stream down in slow motion over the supple skin of your round nose and I punched as lightly as I could. I was stronger. By far I was the stronger of us both. A ballerina’s punch could’ve broken your nose, but I held back. We danced around the room like two tiny sparrows pecking at a fresh worm. We swung into the darkness between us until we were too exhausted to move and you staggered backward into the coral cushion of the couch.

I stole some fragments from your cerebellum, as she continued to humiliate you. She called you a “loser” and “fat little fuck.” I looked into your eyes and grabbed what was left of your pride. I took it back to my loom and inserted the shiny, silver strands into the middle of your cloak.

I was with you when you cried at the front door. You were eleven and I was thirteen. The Christmas tree was laid on its side, the tiny lights blinking into the darkness of night. She said she was never coming back and you believed her. You begged her to stay. You screamed, “Mommy, I love you! I love you! I really do!” She told us that Christmas wasn’t coming this year. She told us that we ruined it all. As she slammed the door behind her, I told you, “Shut up! Stop crying! Its better that she goes and never comes back! I’ll take care of us now.”

During those few hours of peaceful night, I worked away at my loom with the last bits of your graying hypothalamus. I asked you to try it on, told you, “It’s ready for you now.” You turned away and asked me to cook you something for Christmas dinner.

When she threw the grapefruit at your head and you ran through the house screaming and sobbing, I pulled pieces from your parietal lobe to form the sash.

When she grabbed our heads and beat them together, I snatched a string of your occipital lobe so you wouldn’t see my large forehead rushing toward yours. I used this to connect the soft white satin and the red-stained thread together with the shiny silver fibers in the middle.

When she screamed at your teachers because you were failing fourth grade, I went back into the classroom and begged them not to fail you, told them that I would teach you what you couldn’t seem to learn.

When she held you down and bit into your back, I told her that whatever it was you had done wrong was all my fault.

When she laughed at you after you fell from the roof, I bandaged your knees.

When she punished you by telling you that you’d never see your father again, I cuddled with you until your body stopped quivering.

I read fairy tales to you.

I fought off your bullies at school.

I helped you practice for your school plays.

I pushed you around in my pink stroller and made you giggle.

I gave everyone a reason to hate me, so they would stop despising you.

I turned on the closet light when you were too scared of your childhood darkness.

Again and again, I returned to my looming room with the hope that you would someday wear the cloak I made for you. You kept growing out of it. Every year, you grew taller and meaner. You grew more careless and brutal. You lost your way in the darkness. Every year, you rejected my cloak, but I never stopped weaving for you.

When I left you with her, I was fourteen and you were twelve. I took the cloak to the detention home with me. I took it to my single cell and I stitched relentlessly. I sewed until my fingers were raw and peeling.

When I heard that you were living with a friend’s mother and you had been sleeping with her, I stretched your cloak from Aunt Jo’s house to where I imagined you living. I wanted you to feel the softness of my love for you, as the white satin caressed your teenaged face.

When I was in college, I found out that you quit high school and became a father at age seventeen. I borrowed the fabric from my own mind to make your cloak bigger, stronger and wider.

When I bought my first car, I found out that you were discharged from the military for starting and finishing a bar brawl in Korea. I added a camouflage pattern and placed gold stars in each corner.

When I moved to Newark, Ohio for my first job out of college, I found out that you were going to prison for beating a man in his face with a 40-ounce bottle of Cobra. I went back to the loom and began mixing in some barbed wire.

When I bought my first home, I found out that your new girlfriend was pregnant with a baby girl, and you had been sent back to prison for possession of cocaine. I arranged for the cloak to be delivered to you in jail, but you told the guard to send it back.

When I started working on my Master’s degree, I found out that you broke a man’s nose and sent him driving in fear until he crashed into a tree. I sewed some steel wool along the edges and inside the seams.

Two years ago, I learned that you beat a woman in the face outside of a bar. All three of your small children were crying at the doorway when you were handcuffed and driven off to jail. From the front door, they stared into the darkness parting them from you and refused to look away. I began sewing for them, too.

You still hide from the police.

You still beat your wife and snort cocaine.

You still use your paycheck to party with other women.

You have two more children, one you’ve named after me.

You still cry for the love of a mother who told you she’s never coming back.

And when you tell me that you don’t remember anything before the age of eleven, dear brother, I weave for you.

One day, you’ll remember. One day, I’ll cloak you with your memories. I’ll stitch the strands of your brain back together again. The nerves in your mind will reattach in the middle, relax your frontal lobe. Your corpus callosum will reconnect with soft, white satin.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• In the Ezo: Behind Closed Doors in Tbilisi
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Since you are a half-a-wide-western country away, I will tell you what the red is like—it is like splotches of afterbirth on white hospital sheets. The blossoms bloom relentlessly with the brazenness usually found in the faces of those gripped by insanity—momentarily unstable or terminally ill—frightening onlookers, emotionally invested or not. It is not ironic, but fitting that there are only six roses. Half-assed, like a marriage proposal that never happened, like a joke where only you laugh, like a therapy session where only you talk. The arrangement contains an unusually substantial amount of the requisite baby’s breath. This bouquet has the showy buds of motel paintings, and those promising sketches of gardening catalogs. Gratuitous almost. So standard they negate their own importance. They are such roses that it is hard to find any subtext. Granted, this seems a little much to expect—that even a bouquet have a subtext. So it seems, but yet it is not.

On my program, Young and Restless, endless flower arrangements regale nearly every scene with nods to romance quite suitably unabashed. The staged settings of fictional circumstance are appropriate locales for the flourishing frivolity of kermit-green gerber daisies and explosions of champagne-colored dahlias. Most every office, boudoir/hotel room, hospital room and condo feature fresh arrangements ranging in luxury according to the hierarchy of the characters in the scene. Bachelor pads, dive bars, and the city jail are the exceptions. Though the more gentlemanly the bachelor, the more likely he will have an arrangement somewhere in his set. Rarely will you see a full-on bouquet of red roses. On Young and the Restless red roses have subtext. There’s subversion. The roses, and their appeal to tradition, matter when juxtaposed against the couple’s non-traditional situation. He is not the father of her baby, but how he will drink deeply the nectar of denial. She isn’t herself, but her sister, and yet, she loves the children just the same. The couple isn’t married to each other, but to other people, but their love is true. You and I? We are married to each other, and yet there’s no truth to tell about our love. The appeal to tradition is endearing when a couple is four children deep into a young, restless and homicidal love. Your roses don’t appeal to tradition. They don’t appeal. They adhere.

The red is like the carpet of our church, excuse me—my church—where I walked on the arm of my father on my wedding day down to meet you at the altar. I try to imagine someone sending such a bouquet with the right intentions. I can’t. I can’t imagine any person being so imbued with the cultural construct that they deserve nothing more than the banality of another bouquet of the quintessential red. Perhaps some do find them beautiful. Perhaps older people do. Irrelevant people. People who are just performing the state of personhood. Do you remember how no one came to our wedding? Do you remember the dark wooden emptiness of the church pews on that Sunday afternoon? Do you know how that comforts me now?

I’d like to say something about the thorns—but we both know that I abhor cliché, and so we can leave out the obvious points of pain. The blossoms caught your son’s eyes and held his attention, which is saying something for an eight week old. My father moved the flowers from the kitchen to a small table in front of the picture window. Here we look out upon a large oak and several feeders. My mother bought a songbird reference guide for my father, but bird-watching has been good for us all. Your son’s baby swing faces the window with the two velvet green chairs on either side. The chairs were in our bedroom when we lived downtown. One of those antique chair cushions was desecrated when you sat on a bowl of spaghetti. You were drunk, and suicidal. You berated me until I made you a bowl of spaghetti. I begged you not to spill. You sat on the bowl. A few months after you sat on the bowl of spaghetti, while I was staying with our friends Mandy and Robbie to get away from you, Robbie came home drunk in the middle of the night demanding to be fed. Mandy fixed him a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup while she cried. Then he dumped out the soup at the kitchen table, cursing the stupidity of Mandy, the filthiness of their home, and the depth of his depression. I wonder how many boys, tongues thick and unmanageable from liquor, come home on any given night to demand food from their children’s young and anxious mothers. The stupid slutty whores that unfortunately have born their damned-able and forgettable progeny? Do you remember those chairs?

I can’t comment on the scent of the roses, because you couldn’t pay me to smell them. Their perfection is pedestrian and infuriating. I refuse to get close. When they came, I wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t proud. I wasn’t relieved. I tried to throw them away out in the garage, but my daughter, your step-daughter, your soon to be ex-step-daughter, caught and confronted me in just the way you would expect her to—she’s not your typical nine year old. How could she be after having to throw herself around and on top of me as protection from your harsh words? Hugging me, pushing my hair out my face, as I sat on the floor pressed against the washing machine, the legs of my pants covered in snot, while you yelled. Crazy. Psycho. Hate. Dead.  It isn’t so easy to avoid the thorns, I apologize. Do you remember how you told me you bought your ex-girlfriend flowers on Valentine’s Day while you were in bed with another girl?

The horrid flowers you sent suck up murky water rapaciously. I’m an ingrate. I don’t deny I’m selfish, angry, bitchy, depressed, annoying, and at times stupid. Red is violent, and this is fucking obvious. Someone refills the vase. It isn’t me. I make a daily effort not to lie, but I told my daughter I was putting the flowers in the garage to keep them cool. Cool really isn’t the word for a Midwestern February afternoon when the sky is clabbered over with clouds of coldness so fierce there is no way to describe it except cruel. I don’t want to kill them but I want them to die. My daughter believes we moved in with Grandma and Grandpa because of how much you work—how you’re never home. So that was partly true. Do you remember how the cat shot out of the bathroom, wet with imposed salvation, days after you and she were baptized?

Flowers aren’t cheap, but I’m sure they didn’t cost as much as an expensive dinner out in Santa Clarita or drinks at a club in Hollywood. It seems, from the bank statements, that you have been having quite a few of those. I knew the flowers were from you before I even knew they were roses. They are quality roses, and so I should appreciate that, but really, you just selected the type. The florist is the one who plucked each budding stem from the bucket and placed them with precision. The delivery guy is the one who made his way here. My father tipped the delivery guy a few bucks. It seems that my misguided love for you will never stop costing my parents money. Do you remember how your extended family looked at you, sitting around a too large table, squeezed against the walls in the upstairs room at the rehab center? Do you know that while you were in rehab I slept better than I’d ever slept before or after because I knew that you were safe? That I was safe? That my daughter was safe. That our cars were safe. That our money was safe. That our computer was safe. That my job was safe.

The only time I can stand the sight of the bouquet of bullshit is early in the morning, before I flip on the lights. In the dark their perfection is only imagined, not confirmed by sight. This eases the edges like a pain pill dulls the healing muscles around the site of my incision. Even my mother asks in exasperation, will they never die? We feel compelled to keep them for your soon to be ex-step-daughter’s sake. We want to hide our nausea because it could be catching like our anger. You said I could take a flower out and put it in my daughter’s room, but no one wants to touch them, or talk to too much about them. I can’t stand the thought of one of those pernicious stems lying in her daughter’s room, dying too slowly to be the harbinger that it should so poetically be. When the day comes that even the outermost edges of the petals finally give over to the faintest of juicy browns, hinting at the beginning of rancidness yet to come, I will throw out the whole bouquet—crystal vase, garish red bow, and bracken water. There won’t be any waiting. There will be no second chances. There will be no confusion. The flowers will be gone. Do you remember how I kicked at the plasterboard wall of our closet until it broke its connection to the ceiling? Do you remember every square inch, of every ceiling, of every room we have tried to share?

It’s a shame that the snow is melted. Not only am I emotionally unprepared for the mush and the saccharine sweetness of an Iowa spring, but I would have liked to have thrown the ruddy bouquet outside in the snow so I could see the roses flopped on the ground like bloody victims of pillage, muddied down where the smaller snowbirds and swallows pick at droppings from the feeders. Tossed out like garbage. Useless. Unable to be pawned for money. Disgusting. Frivolous. Your son wears diapers. Not roses. And again. Here I am with the thorns. A baby needing diapers. Home with the parents in Iowa. A baby in a swing. A cliché. A bird-watching, baby- nursing, heart-wrenching cliché.

The warmer it gets, the less I like seeing the birds eat. The more I sit bird-brooding instead of bird-watching.  What does it matter without the snow? There’s no desperation. It is gratuitous. I can’t stop thinking about gratuity. Disgusting. It’s like a boy crying after the loss of his rectitude. A boy slurring his words, staggering with drink, erupting with belches and promises of equal significance. A boy lying until the phone he’s using loses service because the weight of his falsehoods crash the whole network. It turns the stomach. Like a pregnant mother left alone on a mountain with no car. Like a baby pushed into the mind’s burgeoning genre collection of afterthought. Like a placenta fused unnaturally to a cervix. Like the wretched splitting of the mid-section. Like the sound of electric medical equipment sawing through flesh. Like the bloody floor after an emergency cesarean. Like a vase of red roses. Like red.

***

Rumpus original art by Paige Russell. 

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Do you know what you’re saying? Do you really?

You may think you’re joking. I want to believe you’re joking, because haha, a man putting his hands on you is so funny in the reality from where you are communicating. Clearly, we have different definitions of funny, but perhaps you truly do find it amusing to joke about domestic violence. I am not here to judge you.

I am afraid you’re not joking. I’m afraid you are quite serious.

You are saying you are willing to be abused; you are willing to sacrifice your dignity.

For what?

You are impressed by some combination of a young man’s music, charisma, dancing ability, and/or good looks. That is understandable. Everybody’s got their something. However. You are also saying that suffering Chris Brown’s abuse would be a fair exchange for his attention, however fleeting you must know that attention would be. When you look past the image, a celebrity is just a person you know nothing about. Ultimately, you are saying you are willing to be abused for the mirage of fame in the desert of your life.

For people who enjoy S/M, there’s this thing called consent, which should always exist in human interactions, but which is exceedingly important when you entrust your body and mind to someone else in such ways. You can say, “I want you to hurt me,” or “I want you to humiliate me,” or “I want you to dominate me,” and someone else will do so. But, and this is important, when you say, in some form or fashion, stop, the pain or humiliation or domination stops, no questions asked. That is a powerful, perfect moment. There is nothing better than knowing the suffering can stop, than knowing you must endure but if you no longer wish to do so, you don’t have to because it is safe to withdraw your consent. There is nothing better than knowing you have some control in a situation that feels so far beyond your control.

When you tell a man like Chris Brown, at least the man he has shown himself to be, to stop, he won’t. With abuse there is no stopping. There is no consent. There is only suffering that will begin and end as he sees fit. You will never have any control. You will never know how good it feels to endure by your choice because that choice does not belong to you and never will. Do you understand? Do you see that distinction?

I don’t know Chris Brown. I have never met him and probably never will. I know his music. Sometimes, it’s catchy. Mostly, to my ears, it’s contrived and overproduced. I’ve seen him dance—he can work with choreography. He is reasonably attractive. I don’t really get it, to be honest, but I don’t need to get it. You likely wouldn’t understand who I find attractive, either. What I do understand is that Chris Brown means something to you, that he arouses you physically or emotionally. He arouses you to such an extent you are willing to do whatever it takes to be within his incandescent sphere for even a little while.

Courtesy of BuzzFeed

Did you read the police report from the infamous incident where Chris Brown beat his then-girlfriend Rihanna? The details are disturbing and graphic and leave the distinct impression that what took place on that night three years ago was not an isolated incident. If you were to “get with” Chris Brown, there’s a good chance he would hurt you and not in a way you would like because time and again he has shown he cannot control his rage. He would hardly be concerned with you at all. This is the man he has shown himself to be.

I am sorry our culture has treated women so poorly for so long that suffering abuse to receive celebrity attention seems like a fair and reasonable trade. We have failed you, utterly.

We failed you when Chris Brown received a slap on the wrist for his crime and was subsequently allowed to perform at the 2012 Grammy’s not once but twice. We failed you when he was awarded R & B Album of the Year at that same ceremony. This is not to say he has no right to move on from his crime but he has demonstrated not one ounce of contrition. Instead, he has flagrantly reveled in his bad boy persona and taunted the public at every turn. He’s young and troubled but that’s an explanation for his behavior, not an excuse.

We failed you when Charlie Sheen was allowed and eagerly encouraged to continue to star in movies and have a hit television show that basically printed him money after he shot Kelly Preston “accidentally” and he hit a UCLA student in the head when she wouldn’t have sex with him and he threatened to kill his ex-wife Denise Richards and he held a knife to his ex-wife Brooke Mueller’s throat. We failed you when Roman Polanski received an Oscar even though he committed a crime so terrible he hasn’t been able to return to the United States for more than thirty years. We failed you when Sean Penn fought violently with Madonna and continued a successful, critically acclaimed career and also received an Oscar.

We fail you every single time a (famous) man treats a woman badly, without legal, professional, or personal consequence.

Over and over again we tell you it is acceptable for men—famous, infamous, or not at all famous—to abuse women. We look the other way. We make excuses. We reward these men for their bad behavior. We tell you that as a young woman, you have little value or place in this society. Clearly we have sent these messages with such alarming regularity and consistency we have encouraged you to willingly run toward something violent and terrible with your eyes and arms wide open

I am sorry.

I’m not shocked by your willingness to suffer for nothing in return without the right to consent. That may be the saddest thing of all.

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I can’t decide what’s more messed up about this story–that the county stopped prosecuting these cases, that the city is considering repealing part of the code, or that domestic violence cases are misdemeanors (which is the reason the county gave for stopping the prosecutions).

At the heart of the controversy is budget cuts brought on by the unwillingness of state officials to raise taxes to fund important services, like, you know, law enforcement. I suspect that if a member of the Topeka political establishment found themselves on the bad side of a beatdown, their attacker would feel the full extent of a prosecutor’s wrath, but if you’re just an average, unconnected person whose significant other likes to go a couple of rounds on your body, you may just be out of luck.

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Conner Habib writes a beautiful blog entry on the complexities of a past love and domestic violence.

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While reading Joshua Mohr’s second novel, Termite Parade, I kept thinking—for reasons that are now apparent to me—of a scene from the film version of The African Queen in which missionary Rose Sayer, played by Katherine Hepburn, admonishes the hard-living Charlie Allnut for his amoral, gin-drinking ways. By way of explanation, Allnut, played by Humphrey Bogart, says matter-of-factly that his behavior is “only human nature.” Hepburn counters, “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in the world to rise above.” Soon after, in the wilds of East Africa, Hepburn goes slumming, and she and Bogey use their boat to score a small victory for the Allies.

Although no Germans are defeated in Mohr’s fiction, there are destructive natures to overcome and plenty of drinking and sordid behavior to compensate for the absence of military heroics. His first novel, Some Things That Meant the World to Me, was nothing if not a well-told tale of redemption with chimerical elements. In that strange tale, the primary wayward boozer—a man who had named himself Rhonda—suffered from the mental affliction depersonalization, and his bizarre fantasy world included a child named Little Rhonda who led the protagonist through the bottom of a Dumpster to a place that offered insight into painful childhood memories. Like many readers, I’d have little patience for a novel in which the real-world action consists solely of sodden misanthropes mining personal failure for an elusive shot at… something. But Some Things was more than that. It also didn’t hurt that Little Rhonda was an entertaining, comical character and that Mohr’s energetic, almost frenetic prose grabbed readers by the shirt and didn’t let go—as it does once again in Termite Parade.

Mohr works a similarly vulgar milieu here, with reprobate characters who aspire to abandon their animalism—present-day Bukowskis with heart—although this time around his explorations of decency, guilt, and redemption are a soberer take. The novel features three main characters: Derek, a San Francisco auto mechanic—self-aware, abuser of alcohol, willing but unable to change; Mired, Derek’s drunken and conflicted girlfriend, who describes herself as “the bastard daughter of a ménage a trois between Fyodor Dostoevsky, Sylvia Plath, and Eyeore”; and Frank, Derek’s twin brother, an equally-damaged provocateur and aspiring avant-garde filmmaker who has settled reluctantly into a career making corporate videos. The story centers on a violent incident between Derek and Mired, which Mired, the blacked-out victim, barely recalls, though Frank knows the grisly truth about Derek’s actions. Derek’s conscience, Mired’s hazy memories, and Frank’s threat to reveal the facts propel the action, as Mohr rotates the point of view to tell the story in alternating chapters of first-person narration.

Joshua Mohr

Frank’s plan for personal artistic glory hinges on “The Unveiled Animal,” a new kind of cinema that he says must evolve beyond “actors, scripts, contrived scenes and happy endings” to achieve “a convergence between mainstream filmmaking and documentaries.” In other words, Frank, a grown-up still speaking the language of a second-year film student, wants to create what seems to be an offshoot of cinéma vérité, or perhaps reality television. Eventually, his Unveiled Animal project dovetails with Derek and Mired’s tawdry conflict, just as Derek, returning from a brief escape to Reno, confesses his sins to his beloved. Mohr stages this important scene as a spectacle, an absurdity; if I were to recount the action—and I don’t want to give it away—my description might seem ludicrous. And yet the scene succeeds, reinforcing the impression of Mohr as a writer who keeps readers engaged and entertained, delivering what they might doubt, mid-story, is possible.

Still, Termite Parade’s occasional flaws are not insignificant: scenes that skirt dangerously close to the mawkish, a build-up to Derek’s penultimate confession that seems repetitive at times, sentimental attempts to elicit empathy for the characters. Mohr clearly hopes readers will root for them to become better people—even the reprehensible Derek, who near the end of the novel begrudgingly accepts Frank’s brainless theory that “there’s only one kind of person,” while trying to convince Mired that we’re just animals after all (echoing Charlie Allnut in The African Queen). But Mired will have none of it. “Derek was wrong and so was his deranged brother, who I was nothing like,” she tells the reader. “We weren’t all the same, weren’t animals. We were humans and we could learn. We could figure things out, if you gave us enough time.”

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