One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me.
The set-up sounds clichéd: wife dumped by husband for younger woman is left alone to raise children, and obsessively contemplates what went wrong. But let me assure you, there is nothing conventional about Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment: not its subject matter—a deep, dark dive into the madness and deviance of Olga, the forsaken wife—and not its construction—lines of elegant, poetic-like prose braced against jarring, harsh profanity.
A long passage of life together, and you think he’s the only man you can be happy with, you credit him with countless critical virtues, and instead he’s just a reed that emits sounds of falsehood, you don’t know who he really is, he doesn’t know himself. We are occasions. We consummate life and lose it because in some long-ago time someone, in the desire to unload his cock inside us, was nice, chose us among women. We take for some sort of kindness addressed to us alone the banal desire for sex. We love his desire to fuck, we are so dazzled by it we think it’s the desire to fuck only us, us alone. Oh yes, he who is so special and who has recognized us as special. We give it a name, that desire of the cock, we personalize it, we call it my love. To hell with all that, that dazzlement, that unfounded titillation. Once he fucked me, now he fucks someone else, what claim do I have? Time passes, one goes, another arrives.
Elena Ferrante is one of Italy’s best-known, yet unknown writers. She wrote, “I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.” I wonder if her anonymity permits her to address the unconventional thoughts most women are afraid even to acknowledge? Like the strange intersection between being both a mother and a wife:
Sometimes Mario pasted himself against me, took me, holding me as I nearly slept, tired himself after work, without emotions. He did it persisting on my almost absent flesh that tasted of milk, cookies, cereal, with a desperation of his own that overlapped mine without his realizing it. I was the body of incest…I was the mother to be violated, not a lover…While I was taking care of the children, I was expecting from Mario a moment that never arrived, the moment when I would be again as I had been before my pregnancies, young, slender, energetic, shamelessly certain I could make of myself a memorable person.
As we follow Olga on her path from revenge to redemption, the novel ends where all marriages do:
What a complex foamy mixture a couple is. Even if the relationship shatters and ends, it continues to act in secret pathways, it doesn’t die, it doesn’t want to die.
*
When my marriage ended, I decided to move across the country with my two children. I packed what I could into a Pod and hired a bubbly woman to sell what remained. I left the house on the day of the estate sale, unable to stomach strangers walking around my home, fingering my wedding china, gawking at my husband’s closet and the rod of clanging, empty wire hangers.
*
I once read a quote that to consider adultery in literature is to consider literature itself. These past few weeks, the complexities of romantic relationships kept popping up again and again in books I read.
From Elisa Gabbert’s razor-sharp book of prose poetry, The Self Unstable:
Sexual tension must culminate or deteriorate; thus all passionate friendships end with resentment. Be careful what you do “with abandonment.” In fantasies of sudden death, one’s enemies are finally sorry; this only endears them to the fantasizer. Be careful what you wish for, in that it tells you what you want.
From the last line of Corey Van Landingham’s gorgeous poem “Valediction Lessons” in Antidote:
Tonight, love,
I am crying out your name into another man’s mouth.
From Peter Orner’s short story “At The Fairmont” in his collection Last Car Over The Sagamore Bridge in which an older woman reflects on an impromptu one-night-stand:
And now, even now, a hotel room in San Francisco in the morning light…Two men, two days, one bed. I’m a walking scandal! A private joke she told herself for years…A man named Anthony, his bony shoulders, his nimble probing fingers. And before, each time, he’s asked permission, “May I?” How long dead himself? You may.
From Chelsea Martin’s Even Though I Don’t Miss You:
You said, ‘This conversation has no basis in reality but I guess that’s because relationships are only interesting in concept,’ after I had said something like, ‘I’m not sure if you actually like me or if you’re just here,’ although what I meant to say was, ‘Please hold me because if you don’t I don’t know what I’ll do,’ but after I had said it I felt like you would interpret it more like, ‘I think neither of us could do any better but that’s not really a reason to stay,’ and that you were about to ask, ‘Do you ever visualize us together in the future and feel disappointed?’ and that the simple answer would be, ‘Yes’ but more specifically ‘Not even very far into the future.’
From the poem “semi-humorous paradox” by Mira Gonzalez and her book i will never be beautiful enough to make us beautiful together:
in my dream I watched you masturbate
while floating 5 inches above you
I was invisible until I kissed your mouth
will you let me do that tomorrow afternoon
I will text you
*
I still think about neighbors in that small Connecticut town snooping around my estate stale, flipping through the books I’d laid out on the dining room table for sale. Piecing together their version of my tragedy from what I was leaving behind (self-help manuals on divorce, mental illness, adultery). The truth is, the narratives of infidelity, the lines of blame, they aren’t always straightforward. I wonder if we aren’t all hiding pinholes from scarlet letters.
*
From James Hannaham’s funny, sincere novel God Says No in which a young black man struggles with every aspect of life (and himself): marriage, religion, sexuality, and weight:
…my life was truly Hell. I felt that I could not support my future wife and child, and the fight against my own desire for males dragged on…Suicide was a sin, I knew, but I was guilty of worse ones. I looked at the many tall signs along the highway advertising hotels and fast-food restaurants, wondering if I could climb one, leap off, and bring my suffering to an end.
It was typical of me that reading all those restaurant names made my suicidal thoughts fade into regular hunger. Pretty soon I pulled over at a Waffle House…
A man in a jumpsuit walked in and sat down in the next booth, facing me. He was white, but kind of dark and hairy, His eyebrows connected in the center and his face was thin. The guy kept his mouth still but he looked around a lot. The fact that we were facing one another in the nearly empty restaurant connected our loneliness in a way that embarrassed me…
He pulled back, put the coffee cup down, and peered at me like somebody trying to solve a math problem written on my forehead. He made the same gesture again, swallowed his coffee, got up, and walked stiffly to the restroom…
So I followed him without thinking too much about it. In order to do what I wanted, I always needed to tell myself a cover story. That way my desire could stay mysterious to my own self, like some kind of weird music coming from the far side of the hill. When I got over there, I’d be surprised to find out that the music was coming from inside my head all along.
*
Although complexities of romantic relationship keep popping up in the literature, I also read Yumi Sakugawa’s book on friend love and had the pleasure of meeting Yumi last week at a reading for LA Zine Fest.
Is it possible for an artist to be as wonderful in person as she is on paper? I’m here to tell you: Yes. Yes, it is. She is grounded and bright and so talented.
Because of all my recent reading, because of my personal experience—past and recent present—I’m beginning to embrace that friend-love is the purest form of love.
*
This book of poetry is what I’m reading next and then this story collection from a woman who has been writing for ten decades. And I’ll download this e-book from Rumpus contributor Micah Perks and Shebooks, an inspiring new press for women.
I will peruse this badass list for my next small press gems.
I plan to bring an extra suitcase to AWP next week to fill with novels, poetry books, literary magazines, whatever I can get my hands on at the book fair. If you’re attending, make sure to stop by The Rumpus (booth G2 and G3) and say hello. I’ll be volunteering there on Thursday (2/27) morning and Saturday (3/1) afternoon.
