Valerie

by Sara Stridsberg

  VALERIE: I’ll help you. Diagnosis: Fucking angry. Pissed off. Man-hating tigress. Hustler. All married women are whores. Are you married? Meat is murder. Sex is prostitution. Prostitution is murder. A piece of dead meat. Where’s Dr. Ruth Cooper?

  PSYCHIATRIC CLINIC: Tell me about Dorothy.

  VALERIE: I can tell you about my ass, if you like.

  PSYCHIATRIC CLINIC: Despite your energetic attempts to appear a hard, tough, and cynical misanthropist, you are in fact a terrified, depressed child. That’s my impression. A terrified little child. Dorothy didn’t look after you. There was no home to speak of. I would describe your early life as wretched and miserable. No money, no love, no caring to speak of, sexual abuse, assault. You’re just a child. Schizophrenic reaction of the paranoid type with deep depression and serious potential for destructive acts.

  VALERIE: Et cetera et cetera. Okay. Thanks very much. Cut. It’s very, very interesting, but we’ll cut it there. That’s it for today. Thank you and goodbye.

  It is stormy in the hospital garden. Dr. Ruth Cooper hurries through the trees to collect her things after office hours. You sit by the large window in the dining room and look at her bright summer jacket flailing ominously between the trees. From a distance she looks like a huge bird in distress. Everything you wish for now is connected with death. Cosmogirl, for example.

  CHELSEA HOTEL, FEBRUARY 1968

  Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press moves in to the Chelsea Hotel and you agree to meet in the hotel bar downstairs. You spread your texts out over the bar and smoke cigarettes in a black holder while you wait for Maurice.

  VALERIE: How’s it going for this little dive?

  BARTENDER: It’s going well, I guess, thanks.

  VALERIE: Things would improve if you stopped playing Muzak.

  BARTENDER: It’s not Muzak.

  VALERIE: Bullshit. Switch the Muzak off.

  BARTENDER: It’s not Muzak.

  VALERIE: Whatever you call it, turn it off.

  BARTENDER: It’s Sammy Davis.

  VALERIE: Muzak.

  BARTENDER: Sammy Davis is a great artist.

  VALERIE: Never heard of him. Muzak.

  BARTENDER: You can pick up your papers. This isn’t a garbage dump.

  VALERIE: It’s my peripatetic office.

  BARTENDER: Call it what you want. Take the office away.

  VALERIE: I’m waiting for someone. An important meeting. An important contact. A publisher. I’m a writer. You can put that in the little notebook of yours. W-R-I-T-E-R.

  BARTENDER: Pick your papers up.

  VALERIE: It’s an important meeting. I’m nervous. You ought to offer me a couple of long cocktails instead of standing here distracting me.

  BARTENDER: We don’t give away free drinks here.

  VALERIE: Maurice Girodias. Publisher from France. He’s advertised for new talent. I telephoned him immediately. You’ll regret it if you don’t give me a few drinks. SCUM will come after your ass.

  BARTENDER: Remove your papers now, madam.

  VALERIE (prods him in the chest with the mouth of her cigarette holder): If you remove the Muzak, sweetheart.

  BARTENDER: Okay, madam. What would you like to drink? A cocktail on the house for guests who are kind and take their papers away.

  VALERIE: Thanks. I’ll have vodka with ice and lemon. And you can turn that Muzak down a bit.

  Maurice is elegant and pinstriped and he kisses your cheeks with lips that are cool. He is full of politesse and pleasantries and smells strongly of cologne and deep pockets. It is quite obvious he is “your man.”

  MAURICE: I’m happy we could meet so soon.

  VALERIE: Me too.

  MAURICE: What would you like to drink?

  VALERIE: Spirits.

  MAURICE (to the bartender): A whisky for the lady.

  VALERIE: All right. If you’re having a whisky, I’ll have a vodka with ice and lemon.

  MAURICE (laughs): Okay. A vodka for Valerie Solanas and this lady has changed her mind and will have a glass of red wine instead. A Beaujolais nouveau.

  VALERIE (knocks back her vodka when it arrives and taps the empty glass on the bar): Very French.

  MAURICE: We’ll have another straightaway … Tell me about yourself, Valerie.

  VALERIE: Will I get a dollar if I tell you something really disgusting?

  MAURICE: Of course.

  VALERIE: Okay … M-E-N.

  MAURICE: What did you say?

  VALERIE: Give me a dollar.

  MAURICE: Let’s hear it then …

  VALERIE: Thanks. Nice handkerchief, by the way. Is it for blowing your nose into?

  MAURICE: It’s not that sort of handkerchief. Tell me now, or there won’t be any money.

  VALERIE: I’ve already said it. You’ll have to give me another dollar if you want to hear it again.

  MAURICE (takes a dollar bill out of his breast pocket): Here you are.

  VALERIE: M-E-N.

  (After a moment’s thought, Maurice laughs.)

  MAURICE: Tell me about yourself.

  VALERIE: Man hater. Writer. Scientist. Surfer.

  MAURICE: Interesting. What have you written?

  VALERIE: A play. Up Your Ass. A manifesto. SCUM. Society for Cutting Up Men. And other works in progress.

  MAURICE: Interesting. What sort of play?

  VALERIE: About Bongi. About a man-hating tigress who plays around with everything and everybody. A rescue mission for world literature and world drama.

  MAURICE: And the manifesto?

  VALERIE: Man haters’ manifesto. The only book worth buying.

  MAURICE: Interesting. Tell me, why do you write?

  VALERIE: Men’s flagrant inferiority. Nature’s true order. We need an agenda for Eternity and Utopia.

  MAURICE: And men?

  VALERIE: Creeps and masochists. You ride the waves to your own demise.

  MAURICE: I mean—may I read the things you’ve written?

  VALERIE: You shall read them. Give me another of those brown cigarettes and a few dollars and you can read straight out of my ass if you like.

  MAURICE: What did you say the play was called?

  VALERIE: Up Your Ass.

  Maurice, Bongi, and you dance to the wonderful disco music of the Chelsea bar. In the music you hear the sound of plane after plane taking off. Maurice has given you an advance of six hundred dollars to write a novel based on the manifesto.

  MAURICE: Where do you live?

  VALERIE: Nowhere.

  MAURICE: Where do you come from?

  VALERIE: The desert.

  ELMHURST PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL, JUNE 1969

  THE PATIENTS ARE EXHAUSTED WITH THE HEAT, THE TRIAL APPROACHES, ANDY HAS DECIDED NOT TO TESTIFY

  Sister White keeps you company in the corridor outside Dr. Cooper’s consulting room, where the notice on the door will remain the same for the rest of the summer: BACK SOON. PLEASE BE SEATED WHILE YOU WAIT. Sister White appears to have the power to walk through walls and suddenly she is there beside you; she is unlike anyone else on the staff of the hospital, the only one who is not obsessed with Andy Warhol’s medical condition and the only one dressed in white who is gentle as well.

  Waves of freckles swarm across her arms; she listens without interrupting and she offers you mints and ice-cold water in small white paper cups.

  For the time being it is not clear whether she is an angel or a nurse, but equally, for the time being, that does not matter. There is so much that is unclear right now. All you know is that the trees have huge wounds on their trunks, and if someone asks you where you come from, the answer is that you come from your mother’s hands.

  VALERIE: I. Will. Only. Talk. To. Dr. Ruth. Cooper.

  SISTER WHITE: Dr. Ruth Cooper isn’t here at the moment, but she’s written a report about you that’s going to be used at the trial. A very nice report. Would you like me to read it to you?

  VALERIE: You can read whatever you want. While you’re at it, please read somethin
g out of the hospital administration’s policy for confiscation of personal belongings and the psychiatrists’ action plan for hypothetical emergencies of an acute and—from the patient’s point of view—incomprehensible nature.

  SISTER WHITE: Dr. Ruth Cooper writes: “Valerie Solanas is fantastic. Valerie Solanas has a fabulous use of words. Valerie Solanas has a magnificent sense of humor, black as night and idiosyncratic. Valerie Solanas is obsessed with sex. Valerie Solanas is brilliantly intelligent. Valerie Solanas turns all conversation to her favorite topic, Men’s Flagrant Inferiority.”

  (Silence.)

  SISTER WHITE: You’ve made quite an impression on Dr. Ruth Cooper.

  VALERIE: It’s fantastic of Dr. Ruth Cooper to have produced this piece of paper. I myself have been working on my report about Dr. Ruth Cooper all summer. If you take out the shorthand book, Sister White, perhaps we can put this in the trial too.

  SISTER WHITE: I’d like to hear your report.

  VALERIE: Out with the notebook … keep up, Sister White … Valerie is fantastic. Dr. Ruth Cooper kills time in the tedium of the psychiatric clinic. Valerie has a fabulous use of words. Dr. Ruth Cooper makes notes in the medical record and believes that one day they will become a novel or a collection of poetry. Foundation course in psychiatry. All psychiatrists are failed psychopaths and mental patients. Valerie has a magnificent sense of humor. Dr. Ruth Cooper should have paid for a ticket. Besides, she has a serious tendency to mistake tears for laughter. Foundation course in psychiatry and linguistics. Laughing is a substitute for weeping in the same way that words are a substitute for screams. Valerie is obsessed with sex. Dr. Ruth Cooper is obsessed with Valerie. She is obsessed with the idea there are two separate biologically based genders that determine everything from the weather to childhood. She has so much to learn. A space rocket is ready for Dr. Ruth Cooper, destination next century. Foundation course in bedside manner. Most patients prefer to project themselves toward the future, rather than their dirty, piss-soaked past. Valerie turns all conversation to her favorite topic, Men’s Flagrant Inferiority. Dr. Ruth Cooper uses her working hours to improve her skills at the patient’s expense. The patient will eventually send a bill, but at the moment lacks a current address for Dr. Ruth Cooper. The hospital administration will not cooperate. And the trees outside her window bleed to death.

  SISTER WHITE: I understand you miss having a doctor.

  VALERIE: No. Incidentally, forget that last part, cross out the part about the trees. It’s possible they’ve stopped bleeding by now, it’s a while since I looked out. I don’t need a doctor; I need a decent life.

  SISTER WHITE: When you arrived at Elmhurst your face was white and you were having epileptic fits. You said: Well, if they could put one man on the moon, why not all of them? I laughed and let you smoke indoors. You were electric and epileptic. You returned continually to man’s flagrant inferiority.

  VALERIE: I lost my way in America. I never found the road home. It was all cold, blue sharks. I was a sick child. I longed for Louis. I longed for the electricity, the tingling sensation in my legs and arms. It was impossible to love me. I raced across the desert. It was bright and white and lonely and I took my things and left. Everything inside me screamed, my heart, Dorothy, the flickering light. The soup bowls and bottles from the night before were still on the table, wine stains, a filthy cloth, Dorothy’s pink letters, the insects chasing each other across the plastic tablecloth. It smelled of rain and water and gasoline and old wine. There was sun. Ventor. Desert animals. Dorothy. A lizard was standing in Moran’s old whisky glass, looking at me. It was windy that day. I put the lizard inside my jumper and ran.

  SISTER WHITE: I think you should sleep for a while.

  VALERIE: I laughed and flew straight into the light. I’m a suicidal goddamn whore. Is this story almost over? Is Dr. Ruth Cooper coming back soon? Cosmogirl? Dorothy? Andy Warhol, is he still in the hospital, playing dead?

  SISTER WHITE: It’s nighttime, Valerie. You’re tired. I’ll hold your hand while you fall asleep.

  VALERIE: I don’t intend to sleep. Remember, I’m the only sane woman here.

  BRISTOL HOTEL, APRIL 21, 1988

  VALERIE: I think I’ve wet myself again.

  NARRATOR: Then it’s lucky I’m here.

  VALERIE: Will you hold my hand when I go?

  NARRATOR: I’ll hold your hand.

  (Silence.)

  NARRATOR: What are you thinking about?

  VALERIE: Blood oaks. Sugar maples. I dream about enormous American trees. I dream I’m under the huge blood oaks doing some target practice with Cosmogirl. I dream about her laugh.

  NARRATOR: Look at the one you love. Smell her. Talk to her. Soon she’ll be gone.

  VALERIE: I don’t want there to be any story.

  NARRATOR: I’ll hold your hand. There is a story.

  VALERIE: What does it mean when I say there isn’t a story?

  NARRATOR: I don’t know.

  VALERIE: It means there is a story.

  NEW YORK–COLLEGE PARK, MARCH 1968

  The Philadelphia train is cold and miserable and outside there are only lifeless fields, lifeless slip roads, lifeless birds’ nests in the bare trees, and the sky has never been as vast as this. You do not weep, because you are afraid of weeping, and because you are afraid of someone seeing you weep, and because you are concentrating on the countryside and the sky outside and the walls of water that will crash over the train and drown you.

  The train to Washington is even colder, the sky vaster, the light harsher, and if only there were some shade around you; and you have to masturbate in one of the toilets to stop yourself vanishing into the light. Cosmogirl walking through Manhattan with her fair hair, orgasm. Moving across the ocean, desert, and cities, orgasm. Her brain still functioning, orgasm, still with her place at the university, orgasm, still working on your agenda for Eternity and Utopia, orgasm—

  The glacial skies outside the bathroom window are all the occasions you were going to fetch her from Maryland, after, later, in a while, in the future; the miles of farmland are all the times you were going to buy train tickets and never did, the rhythm of the train the phone calls you did not make, the other passengers the letters you did not write. New York is oblivion and America is your habit of always forgetting to say goodbye. If you forgave her, why did you not go to see her? When they have taken what they want, they never want it again. What is the point of forgiveness, if death treads on its heels?

  At the university, Robert Brush has destroyed his desk and all the pretty formaldehyde jars. A havoc of water-stained papers and overturned bookcases and Robert Brush with the window open and his shirt undone. When Elizabeth went, Cosmo wrecked people’s backyards, overturned garden gnomes and birdbaths and drove stolen cars across their suburban lives. Perhaps it is she, and not Robert, who has made sure the floor is covered with human embryos and Siamese calf twins.

  VALERIE: Your goddamn cock.

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: Hello, Valerie. I’m so sorry.

  VALERIE: You have to give me the money. It’s my money. It was her money.

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: What can I do for you?

  VALERIE: She’s dead. She doesn’t need money anymore.

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: I’m as sad as you are.

  VALERIE: I need money. She doesn’t need money. Not now, at any rate.

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: I didn’t realize she was so unhappy. I could see she was unhappy, but not to what extent.

  VALERIE: I don’t know why I should listen to you. You’re the supervisor of a gang of incarcerated mice. Cosmogirl has gone. I’ve nothing left. I don’t care about science any longer. Give me Cosmo back. If you can’t give her back, give me the money.

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: What happened?

  VALERIE: She’s dead now. She’s not always going to be dead. She’s going to carry on doing research.

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: Sit down, Valerie. Would you like something to drink?

>   VALERIE: There’s something wrong. Her name is light as a feather. I noticed it as soon as I realized the word Cosmo doesn’t work with the word dead. The weight of the words is completely different. They don’t go together. It’s wrong. It’s a conspiracy. She’ll come back. Cosmo always comes back.

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BRUSH: Will you tell me what happened?

  VALERIE: Only that every night she begs me to go down to the beach and hang myself in a tree. Only that I can’t bear to see your crocodile tears.

                  Valerie.

                              I’ve changed my mind.

                  I want to come back.

      There are no happy endings.

                  Elizabeth died alone in San Quentin.

      She didn’t recognize me in the end.

      I asked you to stay.

                  The last thing I said to you was, don’t leave me here.

  The grass doubles over toward the ground, as if waiting for a storm. Cosmo has disappeared into the underworld. Her eyes are an eclipse of the sun, a black sheet pulled down over the blue. You walk away from the university buildings, the psychology department, Shiver Laboratory, the university grounds, and College Park. Robert Brush shouts after you through his open window; he wants you to stay, give him your blessing, free him from possible IOU demands from the underworld. You have your own IOUs, long and dark and impossible to honor right now.

  Hordes of students cross the park, a girl who looks like Cosmo touches your arm as you pass. Over there are the trees where she kissed you the first time. There, her last call to New York. At the bottom of your coat pocket, the telephone message you forgot. There, the days she no longer called and you no longer noticed. And there, Cosmo alone in the laboratory at night, and the first snow falling outside the window (the last snow), where she talks to herself and the blackboard.