by Natasha Bell
Marc was shaking his head.
“I know I will never have a relationship with them again,” I said. “You have no idea how much that hurts, but I honestly think I can be more to them as Amelia.”
“Jesus Christ, Al,” Marc said. “Even for you this is ridiculous. You’ve rationalized it beyond belief. My mum’s right about you.”
We held each other’s gaze.
“You should have told me,” he said.
I shook my head, scattering tears. “I couldn’t. It would have erased everything that went before.”
“And this hasn’t?”
“I saw my parents destroy everything that had ever been lovely about our family,” I said. “They became these miserable individuals living at opposite ends of the country, unable to mention the other’s name. We weren’t even left with our memories of the good times.”
“You think memories are what counts?” he shouted. “You think your daughters are better off with the memory of a mother than the real thing? I’ll give you a fucking memory. How about Lizzie holding a knife to her skin because she thinks her mum thinks it’s cool? How about Charlotte bawling her eyes out because I can’t tuck her in like you do? How about Christmas and holidays and birthdays where the only thing any of us wanted was yo—” Marc’s voice cracked.
I kept my face still, imagined playing statues with Char.
When he spoke again, it was so controlled and quiet that it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. “You left us so we could continue our perfect life without you, but did it not occur to you that everything in our lives would continue to be about you? That we’d never escape you?”
I closed my eyes. I couldn’t look at him.
“You weren’t sparing us, you know? You were sparing yourself. It would have been much kinder to tell us how crazy and selfish you were, but no, of course poor little Alex couldn’t stand the idea of someone being cross with her. Everyone had to like her and get on and remember her as a bloody saint. So what could she do? Make us think she was dead, of course. Ensure we all sobbed and wept so you could feel fully loved as you fucked off to your new life. Does that about cover it?”
I squeezed my eyes tighter as more tears rolled down my cheeks.
“Say something,” he said.
I heard him step toward me.
“You have to say something!”
“I feel awful,” I said, my eyes still closed. “About you and the girls. About everything.”
“You deserve to feel awful.”
I heard him take another step.
“I’ve thought about them every day, missed their silly smiles and the tiny ways they grow.” My knees were shaking. “But I couldn’t have stayed. As much as I love them and you, what I’m doing is better for all of us. It’s more important.”
“Than being a mother?” he yelled. The volume shocked me into opening my eyes. His face was red. A vein bulged across his forehead, tears streaked his cheeks.
I took a breath and forced myself to make eye contact. “They have you. I would never have left if I didn’t think they’d be okay without me. But I have a chance to do more than wipe their noses and hold them when they’re sad. Amelia has a platform, a responsibility to explore ideas, to challenge things. It started out as play, but it’s more significant now. It’s about far more than my or your or the girls’ comfort.”
Marc snorted. “So you had a social responsibility to leave?”
“To do something more than spend my days lecturing uninterested middle-class kids, stopping at the supermarket on the way home and slumping satisfiedly into my own over-privileged life.”
Marc’s jaw twitched. I felt like I’d slapped him.
“I wanted to send a note,” I said, “to tell you all not to worry, to get on with your lives, but that wouldn’t have worked. The number one rule in all of the books I read is to cut off completely. I made a donation to my search. It wasn’t enough to make me feel better, but I thought it might make up for wasting resources.”
Marc frowned, processing what I’d said. He’d felt grateful for that money. “Our life was a lie,” he said.
“No.” I stepped forward. We were a foot apart.
“It was a complete fiction,” he croaked.
“Every relationship is part fiction,” I said, kneeling at his feet. “Nothing between us was untrue. It was just not all that there was for me.”
I looked up, willing him to understand. He wiped his eyes.
“I know it’s not enough, but I’m sorry I hurt you.” My tears were falling on to my dress, forming irregular polka dots as they soaked into the fabric.
“I thought you were dead.” His Adam’s apple bobbed. “Or worse.”
“I’m sorry,” I repeated.
“Sorry?” I think he wanted his voice to be angry, but it came out more weary than furious. “How can you sit there and say sorry? You saw us on the news. You must have to make that donation. You saw how it affected us. How could you do it?”
“I had to.”
“Like that? We were friends, we knew each other. I’m not some horrible monster of a husband who made you sacrifice your dreams. You could have talked to me. You should have. You should have given me a chance. I deserved that much. Any man deserves to at least know if his wife wants to leave him.”
“But I didn’t want to leave you, that’s the whole point.” I looked him in the eye and his galloping horse of anger missed a step, stumbled and threatened to topple him to the ground.
“Now I’m utterly confused.” He threw his hands to the ceiling in melodramatic exasperation.
“I needed to leave because Amelia had to. But Alex never wanted to. So she—I—couldn’t have told you, couldn’t have made you understand, because it wasn’t what I was feeling when I was there with you. I was never a woman who wanted to lose her husband and children. I’m still not. But I was also not a woman who could have stayed. It’s more complicated than that. It always was.”
“Thirteen years of marriage and two beautiful children and all you can come up with is ‘it’s complicated?’ ” Another man would have shouted those words, accompanied them with smashing crockery or a fist hurtling through a piece of plaster. But I knelt at Marc’s feet, our pupils glued together like they used to be when we were silly twenty-somethings marveling at how lucky we were to have found one another. His voice was a whisper, a plea. His horse had sped off without its jockey. Someone had unscrewed the cap and let the air out of his anger. I knew what he wanted was for me to say something that would make him forgive me, something that could make sense of the situation we were in. I wished I could find the words.
“Maybe I’d have sympathized,” he said softly. “Maybe we could have made it work. Maybe we could have moved to New York.”
“You really think so?” I said. “You think if I’d told you I’d been leading a secret life since we met, you’d have said, ‘Oh great, congratulations, let me just quit my job and move across the Atlantic to live in an overcrowded city I’m bound to hate?’ ”
He glared at me. He wanted to say yes, I might have, just to challenge my infuriating certainty.
“You understand,” I said. “I know you understand. Or you can if you try. I told you it was strange, being a different person with you. I never regretted leaving Chicago, never regretted moving in with you and marrying you, but I still missed the girl I used to be, the woman I might have become. And I don’t want our girls to grow up like that. Don’t you ever wonder what it would be like if you’d said, ‘Fuck responsibilities and salaries and mortgages, I’m going to write my novel?’ ”
I paused. He’d flinched at the mention of his lost ambition and I wondered if I’d gone too far. Of course I had. With everything, obviously, but in particular by bringing up what he hadn’t achieved while he was still trying to come to terms with wh
at I had.
“I’m sorry,” I said for the fortieth time. “I didn’t mean that. I was just trying to find a way to have it all: to be your perfect wife and the girls’ perfect mother without feeling like I’d lost a part of my core.”
He shook his head slowly from side to side. “If Lizzie and Charlotte had a perfect mother, she’d be with them right now.”
Before he finished that sentence, my torso crumpled. I buried my face in my hands and my back heaved with sobs as I absorbed, maybe for the first time, what I’d done to our daughters. I knew, of course. I’d thought about them every day, justified it all. I had academic, objective arguments—I still do—but seeing Marc there, hearing him say it, they suddenly meant nothing. Marc watched me sob, his own face running rivers of tears and snot. Maybe a part of him enjoyed watching me cry, wanted me to feel a little of what he’d felt over the past fourteen months. He’d have been justified in that. A line from a song has played over and over in my head since that day: You can cry me a river, cry me a river, I cried a river over you.
But my husband is stronger and more compassionate than I am. He felt his insides tear as he watched his wife, the woman he adored, break down before him. Without thinking it through or analyzing the complexities of the gesture in this convoluted set of circumstances, he reached down to touch my shoulder. He folded his limbs and sat opposite me on the floorboards.
I looked up at him. His hand rested awkwardly on my shoulder, our first touch in fourteen months. I imagined the heat of his skin unknotting something inside me. I wanted to feel whole again. To feel like Alex: Marc’s wife, his love, his flesh.
He removed his hand and reached for the chain around my neck. He lifted the silver pendant from my chest, fingering the tiny paper plane. Then he let it drop and I jerked my body forward. I pressed my lips to his. I kissed my husband when I’d thought I never would again. He tasted of salt and snot. His lips were fleshy and real. I felt him pull away. I held his shoulders, kissed him harder, insistently. I imagined we were regaining ground, remembering ourselves. This was not one of the kisses either of us had missed and imagined while lying in bed alone. It couldn’t make up for every hello and good-bye we’d skipped, every spontaneous display of emotion and predictable anniversary romance. I knew this was a kiss that could never be repeated. I felt we were sucking life out of each other, taking what we needed to be able to go on.
Marc turned his head and leant away from me. Without a word, he peeled my fingers from his shoulders and pushed my arms to my sides. I lost my balance on my knees and fell against the floorboards. He lurched to his feet and looked down at me.
I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. He reached for his rucksack and backed toward the door. He didn’t break our stare until he stepped into the hall and allowed the triple-bolt door to swing shut between us.
He left me there, littered on the floor with his scent still in my nostrils. I imagine he returned to his hotel. The next morning he may have allowed himself a quick fantasy that I might meet him at JFK, say I was coming home. But I didn’t know which flight he was on or even that he was returning that day. And, actually, that’s far too romantic a notion, because sometime between exiting my building and passing through passport control, the man I thought loved and cared for me picked up a telephone and dialed the number for Homeland Security. So when the immigration officers banged on my door, when they clipped handcuffs around my wrists and ushered me into the back of a patrol car to speed me through the city I’d thought my home, I was forced to understand that it was Marc who had finally abandoned me.
EVERYDAY ETHICS EXAMINED: AMELIA HELDT’S EXHIBIT A
August 2015, The New York Times
It’s not unprecedented that an artist requires his or her viewer to possess approximately $1,000, a passport and 48 hours of traveling time to fully appreciate a piece of work, but Amelia Heldt’s Exhibit A does tick a number of other art-world firsts, not all of them comfortable. The line between art and life has been debated for centuries and many artists have deliberately crossed it, hoping to provoke a reaction. Consider Sophie Calle’s stalking of an unknown stranger in Address Book, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco’s trick on the American public in Couple in the Cage and Andy Warhol’s living-art Factory. But in an act that has sent moralists, critics, lawyers and artists around the globe into a frenzy, Heldt has blown the above out of the water.
Readers in the UK will know Heldt better as Alexandra Southwood, the wife, mother and University of York lecturer who went missing in February 2013. Her face was splashed across newspapers, on the sides of buses and in train stations up and down the UK. Her husband made regular appeals for people to come forward with information and the media had a field day with rumors about her murder, abduction and more.
In contrast, those au fait with the American performance and installation art scenes will be aware of Heldt as a rising star since 2004. A series of glowing reviews, grants and invitations from large galleries secured the name, if not the face, in the art-world psyche. Famously reclusive and thought by some to be the alter ego of another well-known artist (rumors ranged from Miranda July to the resurrected Andy Kaufman), she’s racked up awards and acclaim with unprecedented success.
Only a few months behind the authorities, it seems, we discover the two are one and the same. Southwood constructed Heldt’s identity while studying as an international student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Upon returning to England, she continued to secure legal documents for her imagined companion. While Southwood dropped out of her MFA course with one semester left to complete, she managed to make Heldt graduate even though she herself was in England for the final showcase and not a single professor could attest to having met the star student. In recent years, other SAIC alumni have spoken publicly of their close friendship with Heldt, creating buzz for a group labeled the Chicago Set. We now know, however, the leading figure and entire backbone of this set never actually existed.
The initial part of Southwood and Heldt’s combined story might make amusing reading, but it is the events from February 2013 onward that leave a sourer taste in one’s mouth. Southwood disappeared from York, England, on Thursday, February 21, 2013, after leaving work. Her belongings and her blood were found next to the River Ouse, but no body was ever discovered. The police unearthed few leads and Southwood’s husband and two daughters were left to accept she had joined the ranks of the some 250,000 people who go missing every year in the UK. The truth, we now learn, is that Southwood left the country using a passport in Heldt’s name and arrived in New York intending to adopt her fabricated identity full-time.
Heldt’s latest installation offers the contents of her missing person inquiry as art. She’s collected newspaper clippings, video footage, police reports and even recordings of her husband’s tearful pleas and signed her name to them as original pieces of creativity. Held simultaneously in York and New York, Exhibit A comprises two gallery spaces stuffed with the detritus of both Heldt’s lives. In the New York space, we find the remnants of her life in York: minutes from PTA meetings, shopping lists, family snapshots, practical shoes with worn-down soles, TV box sets, academic planners, art history tomes, and other pieces of evidence of a perfectly functioning, middle-class existence. Meanwhile, the gallery in York offers a completely different view of the same woman. The left side of the room is given to documenting Heldt’s artwork, dating back to 2002 and including her work with advertising agencies and such celebrated events as My Terms of Endearment, Be My Friend and Shot at Love. Meanwhile, the right side of the gallery is devoted to an explanation of her transition from Southwood to Heldt. With documents beginning in 1999, we learn that Heldt came into existence as a piece of coursework about immigration. As an international student curious about the treatment of “alien” citizens in the USA, Southwood researched methods of obtaining a Social Security number, applying through the correct, legal methods as well
as purchasing fake documentation on street corners and applying the “infant death” technique. It was in this way that Southwood created a fictitious roommate with a Social Security number and State of Illinois driver’s license. The exhibition claims her original plan was to present Heldt along with tax records for illegal immigrants in a piece about the corruption behind the IRS and the Social Security Service.
However, in the winter holidays before her graduation, she dropped out of her program to be with her future husband. Upon returning to England, she began to lead the life we see documented in the New York gallery, but in York we find traces of her gradual deception. Notes to her husband about visiting her elderly mother coincide with airline boarding passes and programs for gallery openings in Manhattan. Displayed in a glass case are copies of letters from Heldt to Southwood, seemingly the correspondence of old roommates about their divergent lives, but in fact one woman’s jottings about her schizophrenic existence.
The corner of the York gallery where viewers seem most drawn contains Heldt’s explanation of the past two years, detailing how she vanished from York and made her way to the US, abandoning her husband and two young daughters. As astonishing as this act is, it is perhaps more astonishing still that throughout the process, with no knowledge of how it would conclude, she had the foresight to imagine this piece and collect the documentation along the way. The brief artist’s statement says Exhibit A was intended to open in February 2023, a decade after her disappearance, but has been brought forward due to “unforeseen legal matters.”
The largest unforeseen matter, we learn, is that she was found. Marcus Southwood tracked his wife down in Greenwich Village and turned her in to the immigration authorities. The installation, however, had already been meticulously prepared on both sides of the pond. York gallery owner Don McGee explained that he received a phone call from the institution where Southwood was being held, telling him to access a locked storage facility on the edge of town where he would find all the materials and detailed written instructions to set up the installation.