Bitch

by Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Obviously, the O.J.–Nicole story has both of these guilty notional crushes in it, beauty and violence, Fay Wray and King Kong, which explains the attraction to anyone who followed this trial, and perhaps explains the attraction to the players themselves. But while we like violence and beauty in their separate spheres, the O.J. Simpson case actually asked us to look upon a situation where the brutality was applied to a good-looking woman, and where the hero of the story was not rescuing her from her torturers and tormentors, but was in fact the very one. Even if you didn’t think that O.J. was the killer, it is clear that he certainly beat Nicole at least a few times—in fact, in her diaries, which were not admitted as evidence, she recorded sixty-one separate incidents of abuse—and yet somehow that element of their relationship was strangely sacrosanct, it was something no one seemed ready to assess honestly and shamelessly.

  The legal aspects of domestic violence—which was referred to in court as “domestic discord,” since the word “violence” was deemed prejudicial—created a rallying point for outraged feminists and social workers and women’s advocates to gather around and make some noise. It gave Denise Brown a good reason to avoid going to court. But none of the spousal abuse experts making their points on CNN or Geraldo Live had anything enlightening to say. Even though we all knew that there must have been some kind of strange dynamic going on between O.J. and Nicole, some insulated universe that they invented and they alone understood, some kind of closed system that they had entered long ago, none of the pundits wanted to touch it, to speculate on it. The fact that the crime of wife-beating had so long been overlooked—it was only in October 1984, in the U.S. District Court decision Thurman v. Torrington Police Department, that the legal code made known “a man is not allowed to physically abuse a woman merely because he is her husband”—meant that nuanced thinking about these relationships had to be suppressed.

  Meanwhile, as fired up as many people were getting about battered woman’s syndrome out here in the real world, inside the courtroom none of this was getting through. One juror, interviewed after the verdict, even declared all the spousal abuse evidence “a waste of time,” and left it at that. While this reaction was disingenuous and indicative of the jury’s overall stupidity, it was also an understandably impatient response to a monolithic, simplistic view of what it means when a man throws his fist at a woman. Because it means many things, just as both the words “yes” and “no” mean many things, and the human condition has always been and will forever be made more complicated, exciting, fun and difficult by the misunderstandings that dog us day after day, if not hour after hour or minute by minute. And this will always be the problem when the law gets mixed up with human affairs, particularly crimes of passion or mistakes of the heart: the legal system imposes a straightforward, Manichaean set of absolutes on crooked, twisted, multimotivated human behavior. In criminal court, one can never be sort-of guilty or kind-of innocent.

  And the official version of what goes on in a house of beatings has been made terrifically simple. In discussions during the trial, unless you could say that there is never a good reason for a man to raise his hand against a woman, that all domestic violence is the same as all other domestic violence, and throw in a bunch of words about “low self-esteem” and “poor self-image,” there would be nothing to say. There was no way to entertain the possibility that once in a while a perfectly good man loses his temper and gets violent, surprises everyone around him—surprises himself—with what he is capable of. He acts out as if in a trance; he has no idea where all this anger and hatred is coming from. But there may be some good reason.

  I mean, if you were Jackson Browne and you discovered that Daryl Hannah was leaving you for John F. Kennedy, Jr., wouldn’t you be more than a little annoyed? It seems to me that when the world found out that Ms. Hannah had sustained various wounds while trying to retrieve some of her stuff out of the house she shared with Browne in the canyons of Los Angeles so that she could settle into a new love and new life in New York, there was no reason to assume that the sensitive singer-songwriter was acting as anything other than the sensitive singer-songwriter: there was no need to conjure some Jekyll-and-Hyde scenario. Sometimes people just get mad and crazy, and men in particular express pain through their fists more than their tear ducts. That doesn’t make it okay or good—and that definitely does not mean that you should not leave, flee on your donkey at godspeed, if some guy tries to beat you up early in a relationship, when he has no reason to, when you have not yet dumped him for People’s “Sexiest Man Alive,” when you have not yet told him that he is the worst lay in the land, his dick is too small, his head is too big, his children from the first and second marriages are all ugly brats and his breath first thing in the morning smells worse than Secaucus, New Jersey.

  It may never be right for a man to strike at a woman, but it may be understandable, and the trouble that a media event like the O.J. Simpson trial creates is that just as it allows us to confront the meaning of aberrant, violent behavior, the exhaustion that everyone feels in mere anticipation of what would happen if we really tried to understand it—never mind our simple fear at discovering how great is the threat and the constancy of violence that lives in our society only very slightly below the surface of a very thin membrane—means that we categorize it, package it, put a nice big bow and some wrapping paper on it and promptly ignore it. We don’t see case by case. We deny individuals. Jackson Browne and O.J. Simpson are one and the same.

  In the Oresteia trilogy, the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus describes a process of intrafamilial bloodshed and retaliation so sanguinary that it nearly tears apart Athenian society. To ensure that dangerous and destructive emotions never again boil and erupt with all the force of Mount Etna after years of dormancy, Athena decides that negative feelings must be injected into normal life, incorporated into the workaday world. The subterranean urchin-goddesses known as the Furies are therefore given status aboveground, creating a permanent place for deities who represent revenge and rebellion within the civilized city of Athens. Renamed the Eumenides, the Furies immunize Greek society against its own violent impulses, and never again are household disputes a mere preamble to civil war.

  On the other hand, in the Soviet Union, where a reverse McCarthyism governed for seventy years and thought crime was always an inchoate insurrection, mental illness was used as a means to categorize subversives. Instead of incorporating negative feelings, the Soviets isolated them in a Gulag, sent them to a Siberia of the mind. Entire diseases were created around hating Stalin, you could be institutionalized for not being a part of the collective, personality variations were poison.

  In the United States, where we can think whatever we want, what we want is for it all to be nice and pat. Far from being motivated by totalitarian needs, our decision making tends to come down to sheer laziness: we are tempted to pathologize all behavior just to make life easier.

  While the O.J. trial brought domestic violence into the open, it may well have pushed the subtleties of personality—the simple idea that you can act as a person and not as a “syndrome”—dangerously out of view. Any curiosity about what made Nicole stay seventeen years in a relationship that was apparently violent from the start, what strange deal she’d made with the devil long ago—all that was discounted. There was never any suggestion that by documenting the abuse and leaving pictures of her injured self in her safe-deposit box—which the prosecution had to drill open as it searched for evidence—and telling her friends “O.J. is going to kill me and get away with it,” Nicole might have indicated not mere resignation to her fate but a strange acceptance of it. It was never okay to conjecture that she may have believed that it was somehow the proper denouement of her star-crossed romantic life to end up stabbed outside her home, throat slit so completely that she was almost decapitated, knife slashed right across her silicone-implanted breasts, let no necrophiliac ever feel her up. (“When we heard her breasts were slashed,” one friend told Sheila Weller, �
�we knew who killed her.”) There was never any thought that this bloody crime scene was as inevitable to her as William Holden floating in the pool at the beginning and the end of Sunset Boulevard, a great movie about characters who always knew it would come to this, who always knew that Oedipus was a fool to fight his destined disgrace: instead of resisting fate, they get drunk with doom. Any suggestion of this kind of complicity on Nicole’s part was absolutely verboten.

  Somehow it was only okay to say that Nicole suffered and was murdered—never that she may have courted death or at the very least been a passive partner in her own end. That is just a far too sickening thought after years of feminism have tried to show us otherwise. While it is almost at the point where we accept our fascination with male violence on the big screen or the playing field, what I think is a bit harder to see is how much we are titillated and turned on by sexual violence, by a man turning on a woman as an act of raw desire, lustful anger, justifiable rage, sick passion. And yet, it comes at us everywhere. And not just in action movies with multimillion-dollar budgets.

  I think the first crush I ever had on a literary character occurred when I read Wuthering Heights in high school and wondered why none of the boys in tenth grade seemed at all like Heathcliff. The insane, unfulfilled and desperate passion between Catherine and Heathcliff, one that was carried into the grave, felt like teenage angst, Brontë style. Heathcliff tended to say things like “He couldn’t love as much in eighty years as I could in a day,” while Catherine, lovesick and bedridden, pale and consumptive, would ask questions like “Why does my blood rush into a hell of tumult at a few words?” This book—a classic, no less—was full of hyperbole and hotheadedness, and was fueled by an emotional violence that eventually even became physical. Perhaps not intentionally, but at one point Heathcliff squeezes Catherine’s arm so tight that “on his letting go [there were] four distinct impressions left, blue in the colourless skin.”

  The message from this always seemed clear: for a man to claim ownership of you, for him to really assure you that he wants you for his possession, he must mark you, bruise you, squeeze and imprint you, brand you with his violence. In The Postman Always Rings Twice, probably my favorite James M. Cain novel, violence is part of the initiation that the two young murderers make into their deep, doomed love. In Bob Rafelson’s 1981 film adaptation, with Jessica Lange and Jack Nicholson, the ugly and forbidden nature of this coupling is acted out in a sexual initiation that smacks of forced entry like the kind where he’d be right to say she wanted it but that doesn’t mean she thought she’d get it, but it also doesn’t mean that the whole thing wasn’t her idea in the first place. This sex-scene-as-rape-fantasy goes down on a messy kitchen table, a dirty butcher knife lying around like a stab wound waiting to happen, with a lot of cries of no that we all know means yes and a lot of pelvic pulsating and hip-to-hip contact so tight and close that people were constantly speculating on the possibility that the actors had really done it. But in the book itself, published back in 1934, Mr. Cain keeps the rococo sex surprisingly spare. “Bite me! Bite me!” Cora screams as Frank smashes his lips against hers for the first time. “I bit her. I sunk my lips into her so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs.”

  There is something a little too appropriate about the name James. M. Cain, all his characters sinful, unrepentant outcasts and drifters, wandering nomads with the mark of Cain plainly upon them. In this pulp noir genre, I tend to think of Cain as Fitzgerald beside Jim Thompson’s Hemingway, the racetrack versus the rodeo, insurance crime instead of bank robbery, California compared to Texas. Of course, both of them operate in each other’s domains plenty, and both lovingly tell the story of the deep dark of the human heart, especially in sunny climates and respectable garb. In 1997, Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, his 1952 roman noir, was canonized and published as part of the Library of America, although with scenes like this one between a sheriff’s deputy and a local lady—not even ten pages into the book—it is unlikely to make it to any high school reading lists:

  “No, baby”—my lips drew back from my teeth. “I’m not going to hurt you. I wouldn’t think of hurting you. I’m just going to beat the ass plumb off of you.”

  I said it, and I meant it, and I damn near did.

  I jerked the jersey up over her face and tied the end in a knot. I threw her down on the bed, yanked off her sleeping shorts and tied her feet together with them.

  I took off my belt and raised it over my head.

  I don’t know how long it was before I stopped, before I came to my senses. All I know is my arm ached like hell and her rear end was one big bruise, and I was scared crazy—as scared as a man can get and go on living.

  I freed her feet and hands, and pulled the jersey off her head. I soaked a towel in cold water and bathed her with it. I poured coffee between her lips. All the time I was talking, begging her to forgive me, telling her how sorry I was.

  I got down on my knees by the bed, and begged and apologized …

  “Don’t talk.” She brushed her lips against mine. “Don’t say you’re sorry.”

  She kissed me again. She began fumbling at my tie, my shirt; starting to undress me after I’d almost skinned her alive.

  I went back the next day and the day after that. I kept going back. And it was like a wind had been turned on a dying fire …

  The great thing about beating someone up is that then you get to make nice afterward. You get to have a private little secret about your relationship that nobody knows, your girlfriends wouldn’t understand, your parents would kill you. It’s almost like adultery in the sense that secrecy heightens the romance, makes the whole world of necessity disappear during those few hours in that ground-floor motel efficiency, during the afternoon on the couch in the office conference room with the door locked, hoping nobody will actually need to have a meeting or something like that in there. It always struck me as rather apposite that John F. Kennedy, who seems to have mastered the art of adultery in the White House, with wife and Secret Service and B-52 bombers so nearby, was also the President who invented the covert operation, the secret military forays into Vietnam and wherever else the CIA was misbehaving at that point. It strikes me that fascination with cloak-and-dagger intrigue in world events is not so different than needing to indulge in forbidden love and lust in private life.

  But if you’re not married, if you just want to feel dirty, love that starts with maiming is love that will never be clean, that will always be dangerous. Sylvia Plath’s vampiric bite that draws blood from Ted Hughes’ cheek the first time she meets him at a Cambridge party, the fanged kiss that leaks blood from Cora’s lips in the first smooch of The Postman Always Rings Twice—these are pacts, promissory notes, pledges of allegiance. Because once you let someone do this to you without offering objection, you are showing yourself to be one of the wild ones, one of the willing ones: you have been initiated.

  This ritual is not incomparable to gang recruits getting tattooed with the crew’s emblem or puncturing a pulsing vein or somehow shedding blood as a mark of do-or-die commitment to the posse. It seems that in any situation that is a matter of life and death—and for the Crips, the Bloods and other LA street gangs that would be a fair assessment of the situation, whereas for most lovers it would not—loyalty is sealed not with a kiss, but with a fist. Suddenly the rather mundane nature of a couple’s love is transubstantiated into the realm of intense, life-threatening and life-sustaining when the melodramatic element of violence is injected into the situation, whether it’s appropriate or not. Since the couple in Postman were partners in murder, it actually made sense. For a wealthy couple with middle-class values living in Brentwood with a swimming pool and tennis court in the backyard and Michael Ovitz down the block, it makes no sense. For Nicole and O.J. it makes no sense—but it did create the intense do-or-die bond between them that could only be broken by death.

  In his book Pryor Convictions, blac
k comedian Richard Pryor—who seems to have exorcised these demons more effectively than O.J.—tells of precisely this effect in his marriage to white actress Jennifer Lee. “If you hit a woman she’ll either run like a banshee in the opposite direction, or she’s yours,” Pryor writes. “The sting of violence is like voodoo. A hex. A black spell. You’re possessed. Locked in a diabolic dance.”

  Violence in love is deeply instinctive, creating covalent bonds between sweetness and cruelty, it is the easiest way to portray intensity in romance, it is the most direct metaphor for complicated, crazy love, which is why it is used in art so much, which is why good feminists and old-fashioned moralists alike find themselves drawn into the meaning of its allure. Chrissie Hynde, the original riot grrrl, the strongest image I have of an independent punk rocker of the distaff sort, still was able to say on the first song on the Pretenders’ first album, “I like the way you bruise my hip ’cause I’m precious.” Later on the same album, in a song called “Tattooed Love Boys,” Hynde sings about a place where girls go seeking out sexual abuse, a place where “I shot my mouth off and you showed me what that hole was for.” Eventually I realized, through Chrissie Hynde’s example, that there was no inconsistency in a strong woman getting bashed around by her boyfriend: in Hynde’s world, girls didn’t get beaten up because they were weak; rather, they got it because they were tough enough and rough enough to take it. Of course, Billie Holiday, several decades before, already made it clear that being smacked and taking it like a (wo)man was the dignified course when she sang her plaintive “Ain’t Nobody’s Business But My Own.”