by Lucy Ellmann
tell me a bit about your husband, Jane?
Well, he’s very quiet. I can’t think of anything else
to say about him really.
What does he say about this problem? Have you
ever discussed it with him?
Yes. He just says it’s because we don’t talk enough.
Do you cuddle at all?
Sometimes he gives me a little pat, but if I try to
touch him, he’ll try to get away, like he’ll say he’s
busy or tired or sick or something.
My weeping made Brian’s solution inaudible.
A wine cellar must be kept scrupulously clean. No
rubbish should be left in it, no vegetables with a
strong odor (carrots, onions, cabbage, turnips), no
cheese, no barnyard animals.
I could hear Jeremy coming up the stairs, so I turned off the radio. He went straight into the front room to deposit the second-hand briefcase I’d bought him at a jumble sale and decorated with his initials in gold enamel paint back in the days when I loved his every bodily process.
He looked in on me.
‘Do you want a cup of coffee?’ he asked.
‘No, thanks, just had one.’
‘Everything okay? Must get on. A lot of papers to mark tonight.’
‘Uh, Jeremy, I’m sorry, but I just don’t know what I’m doing here.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, we never go out anymore, we hardly ever see each other. We go to bed at different times. I don’t know. You’re always in the front room …’ It was a half-hearted effort, like Samson’s first ‘je t’aime’ (Dalila urges him to say more; I shut up).
‘Look, could we possibly talk about this another time? I’ll be up all night if I don’t get started on this marking.’
I tried to be extra nice all evening after that, relieved that at least I hadn’t brought up the lack-of-sex issue. And when he came to bed at about 4.00, he woke me by putting a cold hand between my legs. He was soon fucking me (I didn’t attempt to get my cap for fear of his losing interest). Immediately afterwards, he got off me, turned on the light, opened a carton of yoghurt he’d brought with him, and a thriller. I went back to sleep slowly, feeling envious of the yoghurt.
At 10.00 p.m. Gwendoline thinks she sees a ghost and Gertrude thinks she sees a ghost.
What kind of ghost do you think Gwendoline sees and what kind of ghost do you think Gertrude sees? Which girl sees the nicest ghost?
The next day I felt much cheered by this nocturnal event, and to preserve the mood as long as possible thought it wise to be out of the house before Jeremy woke up and ignored me. I would go to the Library to pursue corroboration of my wacky notion of artistic aloofness. My body felt a bit like a ready-made itself, only partially under my control. I deposited it onto a bus, lugged it off again, heaved it towards the British Museum, tried to slide it discreetly across the foyer floor while locating its entry card, and finally plopped it down on a blue leather chair in front of some reserved books.
Before you skin the fish, kill it by banging its head hard against a stone.
‘Réponds, réponds à ma tendresse!’
Suspended Animation
How fast we go! The fields, the woods, the bridges seem to fly by so quickly. Soon we’ll pass through another strange town at full speed.
Our home town is a very pretty place. The new street-cars share the road with the many automobiles, and there’s lots of fine people living here.
Oxford 1970
Not only did the telephone-books look different. Like the end of childhood that it was, England turned out to be tawdry. Scones, lardy-cakes, eccles cakes, the rightly famous English reserve, their taste for the mundane, their pride in the postal system, the lingering memories of ration-books and their resigned acceptance of unhappy occurrences, did not give me confidence. I soon discovered that they pronounced controversy, Caribbean, Connecticut, Michigan and Chicago wrong, and decided to hold on to my American accent through thick and thin.
I, Suzy Schwarz, love and lover of Christopher Taft, sister of my sister, daughter of my father, have hereby decided to end my life and to, therefore, prepare my humble Will.
I was using the word, ‘therefore’, a lot at the time. I lay back, thought of England, and tried to die. I woke to find Franny reading my will.
Dear Suzy, I don’t want to hear any
more talk about killing yourself.
It would be a terrible loss to the
world, and to your family. Cheer up!
Make friends! Don’t be sad.
I’m sitting here thinking of you,
how I’d like to feel your soft warm
body against mine. I love you!
By the way, my parents say I
can’t come visit you next summer
because they haven’t got the money.
Oxford High School for Girls was a shock to both Franny and me. The British don’t like their children distracted from academic achievements by love (it can wait). Franny worked furiously, in order to get her exams over with as soon as possible and get to university. I had four years of sexless education in front of me, and went into a decline.
It was in Oxford that the secret eating began in earnest: I caught Franny hovering around the fridge with suspicious frequency and started to copy her. My hips soon seemed enormous in their circumference. It was all a great revenge on Daddy, fascinated as he was by his own repugnance towards Rubens’ women.
In Poussin’s ‘Rape of the Sabine Women’, as opposed to Rubens’ depiction of the same subject, the women are truly unwilling to be abducted. Poussin maintains the seriousness of the situation by surrounding the victims of the outrage with all the arguments against it: parents and children, homes and husbands.
I started sleeping in my school uniform, so as not to have to expend any energy on changing my clothes. Finding me thus clad one morning, Daddy woke me from then on by calling outside my door. At school, I wore a duffle-coat all day, hiding my body from inspection – a hot thing to do in summer, by which time I was also wearing a white woolen hat with two pompoms.
Gwendoline and Gertrude are buying
new umbrellas for their trip to England.
Which umbrella will Gwendoline
choose?
Which umbrella will Gertrude choose?
Which girl chooses the better umbrella?
It was still dark when I got up, gathered books together, and went downstairs to insert as much breakfast into myself without Daddy noticing as possible. No letters, as per usual. I hauled my strange bicycle with its tiny, wearisome wheels which I’d originally considered cute, the whole thing olive-green in memory of Chris’s olive-green bicycle (not one of its best features actually), out of the house and rode it down deserted alleyways. Fog or inner gloom obscured everything, as per usual.
I locked my bike in the bicycle shed with other bikes and walked into the school with other girls, but this was the limit of our togetherness. Unlike them, I went straight into Assembly, still wearing my coat and hat, as per usual, the teachers having searched in vain for a rule which forbade the incessant sporting of a hat and coat. During hymn-singing, to which I did not contribute, I noticed an ugly bug crossing the floor under several people’s feet. I reckoned its chances of survival, once everyone started filing out, as about nil, and did nothing. I felt blank, as per usual.
When you come to America I’m going to make you stay at our house, every night I’m going to sneak into your room and make love with you until dawn. We’ll get some hash and you’ll get so stoned you’re just lying on the bed saying ‘Love me do’. Later on, we’ll go downtown and meet Melanie who will otherwise beat me up for keeping you all to myself.
By the time I got back to Champaign-Urbana, Chris was distant. He tried at first to avoid me, and then to pretend he was merely a friend. Melanie said, ‘You have gotten fatter, haven’t you?’ They’d both been reading too many
of my letters. I flew to England a virgin yet again.
In our second year in Oxford, Daddy married Saskia, a fashion consultant. They thought highly of each other. She was noticeably gorgeous and clearly considered me a large blob on her horizon, as did I. Her kisses always landed somewhere in the air, while a few pointed finger-tips gingerly made contact with my shoulders. She was fortunately away a lot, deciding next year’s colors.
Saskia is here at the moment – life is almost unbearable. Tonight she was really giving us the routine. She said she was in the way (to which we could only reply to the contrary) and was going up to bed. We all had to yell for her to stay down with us and she said to me: ‘You go ahead and talk to your father.’ This was because I’d been talking to him and not her. So I had to say: ‘Oh, no. I want to talk to you too!’ So at last she came back into the room, and said: ‘Well, if you want so much to talk to me, I wish you’d tell me what you got so angry at Daddy about this evening.’ So I just said I couldn’t remember but it was either because Daddy had yelled himself, or simply because he’d made me angry. Of course it hadn’t been much of a quarrel at all, and Saskia’s saying that insulted me because at the moment I’m feeling better disposed towards him than ever and a week ago I would have felt her comment was justified but now wouldn’t and didn’t. Saskia went on to say how ‘isn’t it too bad’ that people get so angry all the time and sometimes hardly realize they might be hurting ‘others’. That over, she went on to compliment my clothing: ‘That’s a very nice skirt, Susan. Where does it come from?’
‘India.’
‘What, dear?’ Her hearing gets bad when she disapproves of something.
‘India.’
‘Oh, does it really? Very nice. But I don’t like that raggedy jumper. And I hate that old coat you wear.’ She was about to give it away to a charity shop last week. Anyway, then she said I’d wanted a talk with her and that’s what she’d given me.
Daddy didn’t seem to mind Saskia’s long absences. He was immersed in the aesthetic theories of Félibien (Poussiniste) and Roger de Piles (Rubéniste), and in learning to say ‘tomaatto’, ‘Edinbrah’, and ‘Sinjun’ (St John).
At the wedding reception, an old friend of Daddy’s asked me if I were happy in Oxford. Daddy piped up cheerfully, ‘Oh, Suzy will never be happy.’ That seemed to sum things up satisfactorily for the bridegroom. I mixed vodka and champagne and was pretty sick.
THE SINKIANG FAT-TAILED SHEEP
I was in the library at school and suddenly I threw over the table and went out the door that exits on to the roof. I didn’t know what to do and I was scared so I jumped off and killed myself on the pavement below. The girls inside were a bit startled but were beginning to settle down and when they heard that I was dead, a girl at the table I was sitting at said, ‘Well, I’m glad!’ – because I had knocked the inkwell on to her clothes when I overturned the table.
THE MUSK-DEER inhabits the
steep slopes of the Himalaya. He
lives an active but lonely life
and feeds on grass and lichens.
After two years of being denied decent parts in Shakespeare on account of my accent, I still had no idea what hydras, enclosures, logarithms, or O-Levels were, and succeeded in proving it, though I astounded my class-mates by passing English Language: they didn’t think Americans knew the English language. Meanwhile, I drew in pencil all over my bedroom walls in a way that convinced Franny, on one of the occasions when she was exercizing her Unlimited Borrowing Capacity, that I had artistic potential.
Franny is always stealing my underpants or taking my clothes and jewelry without my permission. She doesn’t want me to have an identity of my own. I have to hide things I really like when she’s at home.
She’s always telling me what to do with my life. Now she wants me to go to art school because she didn’t get to go. But I think she just doesn’t want me to go to university because that’s for her.
Franny was at the Courtauld, studying Art History. To make a little extra money, she started doing cleaning work. At a particularly grubby flat she caught scabies, and developed a staphylococcus infection in her hand. I caught the infection just by listening to her on the subject over the phone. We both made numerous trips to our respective hospitals to have our putrefying flesh dressed. But even though Franny claimed she rather enjoyed painting herself all over with the pink stuff which was its only cure, I resisted catching scabies.
Just occasionally, I took some control over my own life and did things Franny hadn’t done (I was the first to get my hair cut at Vidal Sassoon’s). One day, while awaiting my prescription for antibiotics at Boswell’s Drug Co., I wandered off to Boots and stole 36p’s-worth of make-up. I didn’t wear make-up – they were just good objects for practising shoplifting skills. I was taken to the police station where they photographed and finger-printed me, described my hair on a form as ‘mousy’, locked me in a cell after removing all my jewelry except the unnoticed toe-ring, and generally made the most of the fact that I was seventeen and therefore arrestable.
When I was delivered home in a certain amount of rehabilitative distress, Daddy told me he’d stolen things too as a boy, but had been lucky enough not to get caught. He collected my prescription and found me a solicitor, who charged £25 to get me off a £20 fine.
I got a two-year suspended sentence with probation and psychiatric care, because my lawyer had noticed I was depressed (especially about getting arrested). An Oxford boy of the same age got the same sentence the same week for knifing a fifteen-year-old.
My shrink, slumping puffily behind his sleek desk, asked me if I masturbated, and if I was going to shoplift again. I answered ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in appropriate places once a fortnight. The Probation Officer worked on my depression: she took me on rather long car-drives to scenic spots like Minster Lovell, and back.
Eros vs. Thanatos
West Hampstead 1982
Jeremy and I were trying to write a romantic novel, to make ends meet. I gave it up quite soon – the dialogue eluded me – but Jeremy ploughed on, inventing moonlit settings and glam characters late into the night.
With a piece of yellow Marzipan, roll out
five thin stamens. Now take some pale pink
Marzipan and make a narrow petal and fix
this on to a base. Three more petals are
made and fixed so that they interlock and
form a trumpet in the centre of which is
fixed the bunch of stamens.
In the early days after I’d moved in, Jeremy used to take me on walks around Hampstead, or the Heath, or through the cemetery behind Fortune Green. Mostly new graves. Through it we reached rather posh suburbia which I liked – wealth, quiet, the right to have trees growing along the streets. Jeremy scoffed at it all.
We generally split up on the way home. Jeremy liked to dawdle among the tomb-stones with an eye for a joke. His expression was almost lecherous when he discerned an unwitting faux-pas or a goofy prayer. I preferred to go home ahead of him and secretly eat something.
This burial ground needs Gardeners
to ensure that rampant growth does
not topple tombs.
At forty, Jack had a loving wife, three adjusted kids, and his research was considered brilliant. All these things had no effect, however, on what Jack called his ‘growing deadness’.
I started him on self-monitoring; he was to keep a graph of how depressed he was each day. This appealed to Jack’s scientific mind.
By the end of ten weeks, Jack’s problem was gone, and he stopped treatment. About a year and a half later, he telephoned me to say that occasionally he does get the feeling of deadness, but manages to bring it under control with monitoring.
1973
Franny had first met Jeremy when he was at the Courtauld doing an M. A. on Cézanne, though he was actually into sex, drugs and the Rolling Stones at the time (I always felt I’d missed his prime). They had a brief affair. Franny made her first joint
for him, and they were both sick for a week. She never smoked dope again. But he was most remembered for making her turn down a date for the opera with some dishy guy.
I never failed to trust Franny’s enthusiastic appraisals of her current boyfriends, and longed for these tried and tested specimens of male perfection myself, though by the time she broke up with them, they had usually turned out not to be the crème de la crème after all but had in fact wrecked her birthday, or her blender. Only occasionally would she hand one on without too much blackening of character.
She told me she’d been well-pleased with Pietro Fortuni whilst studying Italian under him in Florence. So when Daddy sent me to study Italian in Florence, Franny encouraged me to check Pietro Fortuni out. I found him still eager to take all compliant pubescent pupils to bed, so I gave him a call.
This is the joy of owning the world’s first porcelain and crystal bell. Impressively wedding the two artistic mediums most cherished by collectors.
And wonderfully affordable at just £48, payable in convenient monthly instalments.
I arrived at his villa in Fiesole, a little disheveled from the perpendicular climb. Pietro Fortuni filled a glass with Pernod on ice for me, and took a smaller one for himself (preserving his faculties). He showed me a glass case full of ugly little glass animals, including a miniscule pig with a visible litter of piglets inside it. He then took me out on to the verandah to show me the orchard of olive trees below. His arm around my shoulders was exciting. He declared that what he liked to do at this time of day (early evening) was to lie down out there on the verandah and watch all the birds flying overhead to the olive trees for the night: he was clearly dependent on a seduction scenario which had served him adequately in the past. So he went off to get the mat. He laid it down and told me to recline on it. I hesitated, thinking of the probable appearance of my fat thighs were I to do so.
‘Don’t be embarrassed,’ he said. ‘Here, I’ll show you.’ He lay down on the mat. I figured that seeing me from below was not going to be much more alluring than how I would look lying down, so I lay down. Pietro Fortuni extended an arm to cushion my head. I contemplated the proffered sky and commented that the birds weren’t flying homewards in the anticipated direction. Then we both turned our heads at right angles to our bodies and kissed.