House of Three Rooms

HOUSE OF THREE ROOMS

ROOM PIECE
When a room is needed, obtain a person instead
of a room.
Live on him.

(Yoko Ono. 1964. Grapefruit.)

first room

1. Think of the body as a house in night’s dark. The body may be barren, ramshackle, decrepit. The body may be trespassed upon, entered without will. A back door, a front door, a face flanked by windows. The body stands all by its lonesome, fixed in the heart of a broad wet lawn. The body swings the door open. On the lawn, a man is rubbing his palms in rapture, waiting the whole night through to enter. 
   
   
2. Come, sweet,
   I am a house with many rooms.
   There is no end.
   (Joy Harjo. 1990. “City of Fire.”In Mad Love and War.)
   
   
3. In the mid-1940s, Louise Bourgeois dreamt up the figures who would comprise her series of Femmes Maisons, feminine nudes fused with architecture. The Femme Maison does not have a face. Her skull is trapped inside a house, or a towering apartment building, her silly sumptuous legs dangling beneath the foundations. Or perhaps the house is the face itself, and the Femme Maison cannot see because she was given windows instead of sight. 
   
   
4. Once, I believed I was a structure fortified in Victorian virtue. I cloistered myself in worship of a pointless, sexist purity, kept my teenaged body frail. There were many things I feared, but most of all I feared being seen nude. In anxiety, I fixed myself towards vanity: I starved. How dearly I dreamed to embody a beautiful thing. How I cherished the dive of my spine, my pelvic wings. The gingerbread trim. Every useless architectural curve. 
   
   
5. The body flicks the lights on. A yellowing glow floods the interior, like a head full of nothing. The lights are on, goes the saying, but nobody’s home. My father says this about the dog too dumb to hunt. The body read feminine is a house whose shadows stretch upward, to the height of a dark manor. The inside of her is emptied, down to her bones. (She’s got great bones.) Not a fainting sofa in sight, nor any plush rug. Swing the door wide. Hold your candlesticks aloft—someone’s come inside and pilfered every lamp. Shout your spite down the length of her: fill the hallway up with sound. There’s nothing there to dampen it. 
   
   
6. But I was never a thing forged in exultant architecture. I was the tenement dreamt from the dark. A thatch of windows, every pane of glass warping the light that fell within. I was a house of many rooms.
   
   
   
   
   second room
   
   
7. At 22, I fell in love, sightless and empty-headed. This is the real ruin, the man at the door pressing night between his palms. I met A—, and a manic need filled every room in me. A flare detonated within. 
   
   
8. [ … ]  And you have made
   a fire in every room.
   Come.
   (Joy Harjo.)
   
   
9. In A—, I found someone unlike anyone I’d loved before: someone whose ambition broiled in them. In the room where we met, a classroom where I sat damp with the sun’s sweat, A— told me I was wrong to feel intimidated by my own dreams. I had never met a man who’d demanded so much, who cast his gaze with such ruthless scrutiny. The year I met him, I resolved myself to be perfect, a woman unimpeachable. 
   
   
10. In A—, I found the only man who could match my manner of vanity, my hatred for the bodies of others. How I hated the women descending the steps of the city bus, their hips hugged by black fabric. A misshapen smile, a belly that protrudes. Every useless architectural curve. How their faults mirrored a frailty in me.
    
    
11. The Femme Maison terrifies because her face replicates no humanity. Her flesh is nothing fleshlike: her skin is brick and stone. No nose to sniff you out, no lips to beckon you in. But within her, undoubtedly, is an animate soul, a woman pressed inside rooms of endless wood, kept unsensing, unseeing, mute.  
    
    
12. The first year I loved him, I drank coffee to keep myself slight; I skipped meals in his absence. I walked miles to campus, to his apartment, to work: I burned every calorie. I stayed up late in his company, watching him drink. I didn’t need sleep. I spun about him, burning. His vitriol filled every room, like tar. First the smell. Then the substance leaking in a low lick down the wall. 
    
    
13. Live with me, A— begged: I would live with you. I had known him only for a few months, and it would take me many more to realize he had wanted to live with me solely so I could confine him. He had never been faithful to any woman before me. Nor would he be to me. I wonder if he believed sincerely that I could have trapped him in fidelity, shuttered him within walls firm enough to cradle him. 
    
    
14. What could be blunter than the Femme Maison, a woman made up of openings? A woman swallowed by the framework we expect her to make her only meaning inside. It is blunt the way assigning sea ships and rolling hills as feminine objects is blunt. I’d been loved by men before. I knew how to identify a particularly degrading cliche. None of it helped keep me safe. 
    
    
15. I did not live with him, but even so, I stopped going home. I had a room in a house on the east side of town, but in the morning I filled my backpack with books and clothing and stayed with A— for days at a time. I fit myself into the seams of his room, watched as coffee grounds accumulated on the countertop with time. My needs narrowed into the grooves between carpet fibers, the mirror propped against the wall. 
    
    
    
16. The body may be occupied: a house full of noise, teetering through the world on women’s legs. Once I’d let someone inside, I became occupied. My mind ran, overwarm. My heart lapsed into anger. I thought I might make my home there, in anger. I thought I might swallow it for the remainder of my life. 
    
    
    
17. It is implied that the Femme Maison was an image conjured from Bourgeois’s life, emerged from the years following her move from France to the United States. In New York, Bourgeois cared for her three young boys, whose small voices echoed along halls of brick and wood. She shopped for breakfast cereal. Scrubbed spoons in the kitchen sink. On the roof of her apartment building, she found scrap wood, and carved it into emaciated shapes. At night, the walls of the apartment pressed inward as Louise slept. 
    
    
18. In time, the body billows up with smoke, balloons. Flame licks the wallpaper black. Every length of glass in every wood-framed window swells with heat. The body is a shame, this way, bloating with fire. All she had wished for was one solitary flare.
    
    
19. Lie with me before the flame. 
    I will dream you a wolf
    and suckle you newborn. 
    (Joy Harjo.)
    
    
20. Flame is an easy metaphor. But it is true that as I loved him, I immolated. I left his side in my bed and crept to the kitchen, sleepless in hate. I drew cigarettes from the pocket of his winter coat, blew smoke into the frozen air from the steps outside the back door. I immolated. Hating him, hating every woman who had loved him before me. When I came back inside, I found that his smoke had slipped in, seeping into the kitchen as I’d opened the door to go back to him.  
    
    
21. I was no homekeeper. I could not cook for him, nor fit myself into any vessel that might gratify. I was not reared in homes where homekeeping held value. The house my father kept collected pink eraser shavings, soap scum, a film of gray that calcified in the kitchen sink. Every woman in my lineage had yearned to undomesticate, to dismantle their house from the inside out. Still, I held A—’s hands and dreamt of a home I could not keep. I imagined a wedding on the land his grandparents tended, in Iowa. I felt the ring close around my finger, pressing upwards to the bone. 
    
    
22. Of her Femme Maison, Bourgeois wrote: “She does not know that she is half naked, and she does not know that she is trying to hide. That is to say, she is totally self-defeating because she shows herself at the very moment that she thinks she’s hiding.” Which means the Femme is the only one who cannot see her own debasement, how her body immolates itself in shame. 
    
    
23. It was early on in our courtship when A— told me he’d once slammed a door on a girl he loved. Not figuratively, as in the expulsion of a lover from one’s home, but physically, upon her body. I already wanted to believe in his absolution, in a version of such violence that rendered his cruelty accidental. So? I said. You slammed a door. He touched a finger to the rim of his glass and said, I knew she was there. 
    
24. The man on the lawn, the one waiting for you all this time: he rubs his palms together, and the nails on his fingers are dark and tapered. His hands are like the hands of a cartoon wolf, because villainy is an easy thing to conjure. For years I had rendered him human, emphasizing his decency, the ineptitude of his cruelty, but a way in which I survive now is lending him the hands and teeth of an animal, a mouth that would rend anything apart. 
    
    
    
25. He may have matched my misogyny, my hatred for the women whose hips he traced in contempt or desire, but even I was unmatched for his possessiveness. Come here, he spoke through clenched teeth, hands grasping for my wrists. Come here. At a party, I had laughed too loudly at his friend’s dumb joke and ire erupted in him. He’s funny, isn’t he, he sneered. So fucking funny. The mouth I kissed a brew of chewed tobacco and beer. In his bed, I turned from him, pressed my brow against the wall. Come here. He pulled me back to face him. 
    
    
26. In every Femme Maison, there is some humiliating nakedness, a plump arm bent at an impossible angle, or a breast like some bruised apple. There is one Femme Maison in particular that haunts me, a woman-high-rise emerging from a grimy void. Her thick legs are bowed, the outline of her cunt visible in the dark. She has three human arms stretched to the sky. So many of her windows are illuminated, skinny licks of white in a broad gray face, but who would possibly dwell inside her? 
    
    
27. Make your home in me, I begged. Take occupancy of me, I intoned, in spite of every accumulative cruelty. Without you, I am half a thing, a shape shivering on bowed legs.
    
    
28. I could say that the man at the door grew monstrous only in time, that it was months before I’d glimpse more lucidly the bared teeth, the hands tapering to a pointed tip. It is true that it took years for me to find him fully horrid, or, at the least, a thing of pity. But what is also true is that I saw monstrosity in him from the very start. It bloomed in him as it bloomed in me.  
    
    
    
    
29. I will dream you the wind,
    taste salt air on my lips until 
    I take you apart raw. 
    Come here.
    (Joy Harjo.)
    
    
30. Come here. This is a story about glimpsing a wolf from the window and flicking every light in every room up-ticked and on. Spin the dimmer dial til it sticks. Illume the body; shed light on its most gruesome pockets. I spied the wolf at the door, pressed my hands against it and felt his breath brush the outside of the body. I turned the knob to let him in. I knew what he was. 
    
    
31. One night, he swung. Spun on one axis, one white fist raised. And struck the mirror. I would do anything for you, he said. The television. I’d throw it out for you. I don’t need it. He drew the window open, pushed the television from his desk through the gap of night. We’d never watched it. I hadn’t ever noticed it there before. I’d do anything for you. You bitch. In the morning, I knelt before the empty panel where the mirror had been, picking small bits of glass from the carpet with my bare hands. It would take months for me to leave. 
    
    
    
    
    third room
    
    
32. Once he was gone, I sank, sit bones settling into the futon in the room I made without him. I slept short fits on a bed without a frame, and when I could not sleep, I wept for him. I did everything but beg him back. I masked my phone number to call him, my throat pulling taut when he answered the unknown caller with anger. I paced to obviate compulsions. I ate to obviate compulsions. I was the consummate madwoman, dreaming how to burn herself down. 
    
    
33. Years before all of this, I was a teenager, whose mother took her to see a retrospective of Louise Bourgeois’s work. A few weeks before I would graduate high school, Louise would die. But first, I walked between the lance-long legs of one of Bourgeois’s spiders and looked up to see its belly. At home, I read about Bourgeois’s father, trying to uncover the core of her pain. I thought there must have been something more to it, beyond the betrayal of her father, the mistresses he kept as Louise’s mother approached death. I was younger then. I believed it took much more to fracture a whole heart. 
    
    
34. I kept my ear to the door. I listened for a soul that might have sidled its way forth, from the outside. I exited the body to fetch a package from the porch. I pulled the garbage cans up from the curb. Scrubbed spoons in the sink. I sprayed the windows with a gentle cleaning solution, so that the inside of the body might gleam. If I had craned my head, shouted anything of consequence over my shoulder, my voice would have bounced back, through rooms and corridors of empty air, to greet me. 
    
    
35. In the last summer I spent with him, in Munich, A— and I went to the Haus der Kunst at my urging: there was a show of Bourgeois’s Cells my mother had told me about. It was the first time I’d see “I Give Everything Away,” six works on paper made in the last year of Louise’s life. I am packing my bags, reads one, in pencil. I leave my home, says another. A month earlier, once A— had left for a summer program abroad, I thought sincerely that I might die. I had graduated from college, which was the marker I had set to keep from killing myself. I am packing my bags. I give every thing away. In the gallery, I cried for Louise, preparing to die, for the year I had spent wanting to. Are you crying? A— asked a few moments after. You psycho. 
    
    
36. Each room is a street to the next world. 
    (Joy Harjo.)
    
    
37. In the years after I loved him, my body took on weight. Hatred flooded in to fill the misformed shape I’d taken. My skin flared. I reddened. I felt as big as a house—the cold sort of phrase my father might say. I felt myself stretch to form the Femme Maison, fat legs treading an empty space.
    
    
38. Undoubtedly, a thing A— loved most in me was vanity. There were times I may have challenged his contempt for other women’s bodies—what does it matter to you if a girl wears something that fits too tight? I asked, though I should have asked, what does it mean to you?—but it was this same contempt within me that kept me underfed. Hours and hours I’d spend in the campus library, subsisting on a small bottle of juice, a granola bar. When I stood, my head sparked with static pain. I believe now that this is what A— loved in me: my commitment to soft self-annihilation. 
    
    
39. We will make a river,
    flood this city built of passion
    with fire,
    (Joy Harjo.)
    
    
40. In A—, I found someone capable of hating me with a purity not even my own heart could match. 
    
    
41. with a revolutionary fire.
    (Joy Harjo.)
    
    
42. One of the most recognizable of the Femmes Maisons was reproduced decades after Louise’s original paintings, in a series of prints in the 80s and 90s. This Femme Maison curves sharply inward at the waist, her upper body spilling into a multi-story home drawn in forced perspective. Two semi-circular lines, like eyes cast down in a child’s drawing, flank the doorway of her, as if her face had sunk into the center of her body. There is a trapezoid that might be a stairwell leading into the heart of her, but the rendering itself is so simple it feels foolish to analyze it this way, to map real architecture onto it. So often, I stared into the art I loved asking, where is your heart? Where is your pain located? How will I learn to exhibit my pain properly, to make sense of the body I have now? 
    
    
43. My love for him humiliated me. A chasm expands between the year I met A— and the year where I am now, but still I am humiliated. Then again, he is something more emboldened now. I could elaborate on the ways in which A—, in the wake of alienating so many women in the community where we once lived, has sought a new community of men, has wrenched power in the form of money, claimed the stature he has always believed himself to be owed. How he has become something at once unrecognizable and eminently predictable, the sort of man he was always shaping himself to be. But enough. I can no longer stand with my hands to the door. 
    
    
44. It is reductive to say that vanity compelled me to my love, but reduction has allowed me to see the most barbaric parts of that love. I have known many who survived their own bouts of barbaric love through absolution, consciously rooting out a pure and emphatic innocence, an innocence set soundly in opposition to their partners’ malice. I have never succeeded at finding my own innocence. I am infinitely cruel to my own heart, and I will never prescribe healing by way of self-cruelty. I am only saying that I have had to make my love a wolf to unveil him. And I, the woman who wanted to be a wolf. 
    
    
45. In time, the body proved itself empty. I drew my waiting and my palms back from the door. I pulled the fainting couch away from the wall to find the dust that had fallen in a soft, even layer upon the floor of the body beneath. My own strands of hair among the mess, dark spirals invisible from a distance. The body pressed inward as I slept, its walls swelling almost imperceptibly, lunglike. And exhaled. 
    
    
46. What was first true and what remains true is that what I saw first in the Femmes Maisons, before anything else, was their humor. I could fill many more pages with visions of their darkest aspects, all bleak and measured melodrama, but when I show the people I love now the Femmes Maisons, I recognize their cartoonishness. Their legs spill in absurd curves, hands miniature at the ends of ample arms. Even the few sculptural iterations of the Femme Maison, figurines shaped in white marble, are undeniably silly, the breasts oddly pointed, the feet lumps of bleached dough. Only recently have I been able to laugh in the face of this pain, this pain I cherished as mine.
    
    
47. Night surrounds the body like some snug blanket of stars. Every window within her is lit, and she can hardly see outside. Think of the opening scene in Scream, a kitchen filled with light and a night that cloaks a killer in the wings. Think the words my father might say: dumb as a doornail, built like a brick shithouse. The body is a house stood lonesome in the dark. Danger all around her. Danger at the front door, the back, the place where the floorboards creak with the wind. If you were to come inside, if the body swung itself wide to allow you in, you could stop at the foot of the entrance, face the hallway as it lengthens before you. If you kept your mouth shut, if for once you listened, you would hear laughter in the echo of your breath, nearly muffled in the silence.