Demonology (27 page)

A
rguing about Lacan’s late seminars, about the
petit objet a,
or about the theory of the
two lips,
about the expulsion of Irigary, I think that’s what it was, though I’m willing to bet most couples don’t argue about such
things, at least not after two or three margaritas, probably not under any circumstances at all, but then again we weren’t
really arguing about that, not about French psychoanalysis, not about the
petit objet a,
not about Irigary and that
sex which is not one,
but about some other subject altogether, it’s always something else, that’s what was making me so sad, how it was always
some other subject, a subject that was bumped aside, some isolate, hermeneutical matter that I couldn’t pin down in an Upper
West Side bar while he was assuming his particularly vehement boy expression, a kind of a
phallocratic
face, or a
carnophallogocentric
face, a
politics of face simulation,
a phallic politics of facial deformation, it should have been about
finances,
this argument, or about the economic
politics of sexuality, or about his inability to allow into debate the discussion of matrimony, which he always said was
a social construction of commitment, rather than a commitment itself,
and if I could agree with the liberating theory of contingency,
the contingency of committed relationships,
then I would see that this social construction of commitment was irrelevant, just something that magazines and television
programming tried to hard-sell me, and its not that I disagreed, at all, I understood that marriage had feudal origins and
was thus about bourgeois power and patrimony,
but I took issue with the fact that we could never even discuss the nuptial commitment, because if we did he said that I
was assuming a
fascist totalizing language, a feminine language in the becoming of male totalitarian language,
and then he would start to drink to excess and his face would flush and we couldn’t touch each other for a week or more,
well, maybe it was on this occasion that I did say it out loud as I too had drunk or was just plain fed up, maybe I
raised my voice a little,
admitted that he was a
phallocrat,
that despite his seminars in Marxist aesthetics, or whatever, Walter Benjamin, women disgusted him, that the way he required
the first and last word, the alpha and omega, was an oppressive thing, always the last word, always a dead stop, which was
when he got going on some nonsense, on algorithms of the unconscious, on
Borromean knots, those psychosexual and linguistic constructs that are essential to the conjunction of language and consciousness,
the gossamer moment of ontology, the knot that binds, the erotic, the feminine,
couldn’t be untangled, couldn’t be separated and formulated outside of feminine consciousness, these knots, a
girl thing, Borromean knots,
I don’t know, up until then we
might have found the spot where we agreed that we didn’t disagree, and we might have listed the things we agreed on, a history
that swept backward behind us, we agreed on being in that certain bar on the Upper West Side and, prior to that, we agreed
on certain jukebox selections, Tom Waits or Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell if available, and, prior to that, we agreed on
a sequence of semesters and vacations, ebbing and flowing, and prior to that, we agreed on moving in together, cohabiting,
and, prior to that, we agreed on a certain narrative of our meeting, a narrative which spun out its thread in this way: both
of us trapped on the subway one night when it rumbled to a stop between 96th St. and 72nd St., both of us reading, coincidentally,
The Lover
by Marguerite Duras, straphanging, talking and giggling during the quarter hour that the Number Two was hobbled in the express
tunnel, the injustice of collapsed trains, it was sweet, and I asked for his number, because he was too shy to do the asking,
or so we agreed later, and, in my black tights with the
provocative stylized tear,
he said, which was actually an accidental tear on the thigh, and in my gray miniskirt, which was only slightly racier than
office garb, I was the one who was
ready to move,
ready to yield to some
subliminal discourse of romantic love,
we agreed on this narrative and recounted it periodically, refining and improving,
concretizing or reifying its artifice,
and he occasionally included actual passages from the Duras, blunt short sentences, claimed to have read these to me, to
have read them aloud in the subway tunnel, as we hung on those straps, though there were no actual straps (it was a train
that had only poles and transverses), and though I was actually reading Djuna Barnes, and later anyhow he always said that
the romantic
was a destructive force,
responsible for all the worst poetry of the nineteenth century, responsible even
for the theory of Total War, because by extrapolation, there would be no war without the romance of the Empire, the romance
of nationalism, the romance of purity doctrines,
he even said that he no longer liked Duras, whose idea of upheaval was
decadent, alcoholic,
still we wrote this story together, shared the quill, about a time when we had been irresistible, when we used to burst into
one another’s apartments eager to fling off
layers of fashion,
when we used to cry out, making use of that philosophers stone of romantic mythology,
jouissance,
I admit it, that time was lost, and when in the singular precincts of our separate offices we tried to locate that time,
that fabulous unity, it was as part of our intimate folklore of abundance, rather than a part of
actual experience,
and that was maybe the real argument, the one we didn’t have in the Upper West Side bar, that was the
stiff breeze,
and our relationship was a Mylar balloon slipping out of a toddler’s fist, helixing around and around up into the elsewhere
of the musky New York City skies, landing distantly back in time, during the Sandinistas, during El Salvador, during Iran-Contra,
fogbound in the dim past, we had loosed our balloon, even if all this simply made him furious because he always said that
I
would not stay on a particular subject,
that was the problem, the culture of femininity asserted as its moral right a fuzziness with respect to meaning,
You’re a sloppy thinker!,
I arrived at a point, he said, through a kind of labial circulation,
a vicus recirculation,
as Joyce said, meaning probably both
vicious
and having to do with Vico, but maybe viscous, too, as in labial, viscous, heavy with a heavy menstrual fluidity,
You wont stay on the point, you
exceed and overflow,
he said, in the bar on the Upper West Side, in the seventh year of our entanglement, our Borromean knot, but I insisted that
staying on the point was his way of dictating the terms of the discussion like arguing about whether
oval table
or
rectangular table
as preliminary to
detente,
and if he was willing to let the point vacillate, then maybe he would know
what it was like to be on my side of the negotiating table,
to be me as I was perceiving him,
overcoming in a flutter of jubilant activity obstructions of support in order to hold him in my gaze,
perceiving that he didn’t care for me any longer, perceiving that we had come to the time in which it was probably right
for me to engage the services of a good realtor,
No,
he said we were existing in
segmentarity,
but I said if he would let go of the point, and
wear my skirt,
feel the constriction of tights for the purposes of being professional without being provocative, being an adjunct without
being a
castrating cunt,
as one guy in the department said of a colleague who didn’t try to be a little bit sexy, if he could wear my skirt, he would
understand how sad this was all making me, and this is why I was
on the verge of tears,
in the wood-paneled bar on the Upper West Side, though I refused to allow him to touch me as I cried, as I also refused to
use tears strategically, they were just how I felt and I would not conceal it, they were
a condensation and displacement,
sure, but they required no action, and I was, it’s true, a woman with a doctoral degree who
believed against all reasonable evidence that there must have been some justifiability to the Western tradition of marriage,
and who happened now to be crying, and who happened to be sad more often than not, who happened to have a striping of mascara
on her cheeks, okay, but this only made him madder still, and
there was a whole elegant spray of his logic about how
feminine language undoes the proper meaning of words, of nouns,
and that’s when I said that
he had no idea what it was like, would never know what it was like, that all of his bright, politically engaged, advanced-degreed
tenure-track friends would never know what it was like to be a woman, the fact of hips, cervical dilation, labia major and
minor, childbirth, breastfeeding, hot flashes, premenstrual rage, an outside that is an inside, circularity, collapse ofopposites,
it was something that he would never know about,
and basically, I went on in my tirade, he secretly really liked it when I cooked, the percussive clanging of pots and pans,
the poring over ancient texts like
The Joy of Cooking
or Julia Child, he liked to see me doing these things, and after I cooked there was always this stunning moment when the
meal was done and the dirty plates and cups and saucers were teetering in a stack around us, in our tiny roach-infested kitchenette,
there was this moment of arrest when he would feign a distracted expression, a scholarly absence, as if the life of the scholar
were so profound that practicalities didn’t enter into it, and it was then that I understood that I was supposed to do the
dishes myself, the dishes were my responsibility, even though I had done the cooking, the same was true on the days when he
climbed down from his
Olympian, woman-hating aerie
and deigned to broil a tasteless piece of fish, some bland fillet that he always overcooked, and I was still the one who
had to do everything else and had to sponge down the table afterward, and I was the one who ended up making the bed, and doing
the laundry most of the time, washing his fecund jogging clothes which I had to carry, reeking, to the Laundromat, and his
streaked BVDs, and I was the one who ended
up buying the toilet paper, and I was the one who remembered to call his mom on her birthday, and I was the one who wrote
the checks that paid the bills that placated the utilities who ensured that the electricity flowed into his word processor
and printer and modem, and, I told him, I had done this in the past because I loved him, but that I was thinking maybe that
I didn’t love him that much anymore, because I didn’t know how anyone could be so cruel as he was, cruel enough to cause me
to feel that I didn’t know what my point was, or that it was inappropriate of me to even attempt to have a point, and yet
as Irigary said,
The “elsewhere”of the feminine can only be found by crossing back through the threshold of the mirror,
so, I observed again,
the Dark Continent of the social order, you’ll never know it, you’ll never know the possible world of the possible universe
of womanhood, this Oriental city-state that exists parallel to your own stupid, unreachable, masculine world, you want to
tame it somehow and never will and you’ll die never having tamed it, femininity,
and the barmaid came around, and she was wearing very tight jeans and a T-shirt that was too short, purchased, I observed,
at Baby Gap, so that her pierced belly button saluted us provocatively, she was like some teenaged toy girl, Hasbro waitress,
she was the past of female sexual slavery, and in a moment of calculated witless-ness he
gave her the once-over,
paused dramatically to look at her breasts and her middle and the curve of her hips,
Another round, please,
and, of course, this was the thrust of his argument, as his argument always had a thrust to it, a veiled entelechy, namely,
that he was above domestication, couldn’t be bothered, still I had my teeth into him, and there could be no distraction, as
I would complete the argument,
and would be through with him or else have some other kind of resolve even if fluctuating,
Okay, then prove to me in any substantial way that you know what it
’
s like to be a woman and what our experience is like here where the legislature insists on control over how we use our bodies,
prove for one second that you have an idea about what I’m talking about because we are at an impasse here where you either
have to be intimate with me or lose me, the way I’m feeling about it, prove that I haven’t wasted years trying to have a conversation
with a total stranger,
at which point in a stunning delivery of high affect,
a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another,
on short notice, his own eyes began to brim with tears, as the next round of drinks came, even as he began to weep he checked
out the barmaids rear as she retreated from our booth, beginning with a theatrical sigh his story,
There’s something I haven’t told you about myself,
and I said,
You’re kidding, right, because we have lived together for a long time and I have read your IRS returns and I have typed portions
of your dissertation because you were too lazy to type them yourself and I have listened to you puking and cleaned the bathroom
after you puked and if there’s something more intimate than all that, some preserve of intimacy that I have not managed to
permeate yet I’m going to be a little upset about it,
with an expression of dreadful but stylized seriousness, his crewcut scalp furrowing slightly, from the brow upward, and
he admitted that it was true, that there
was