My last breakup before this love showed traces of that blueprint. I still loved that girlfriend, but not the way she needed. I could not speak or even behold the end I had reached. Instead, I gave in to the mouth of my new love, whose touch opened something in me I hadn’t known was closed. Then, I wrote about it in my notebook. My girlfriend, for the first and only time, read that account. I brought a flame to the dynamite and plugged my ears. During one of the agonized conversations that followed, she shouted at me, No one knows you! People love you, but I dare you to let them see all of you. She was angry and hurt, but not wrong. She saw me perhaps more clearly than anyone has.
It is hard to reveal something you don’t understand. These records, then, are for me, too. I manifest my scars tangibly and set down my story in words because I fear that otherwise I could drift through my life like a ghost—driven by unseen motives. I could crash into walls without ever feeling a thing.
She touched my scars. Then she pressed her mouth against every bare place, perhaps wondering where she might mark me. Being reached for is a frightening thing, touch sometimes a painful revelation that one exists. What relief, though, to be seen, even in some small way. It is a gamble on whose odds I bet, however trembling.
The 1947 portrait of Billie, the one I will wear on my body for the rest of my life, is an image of a woman in her cups—an unlovely thing in many ways. It is also an image of opening: her head back, lips parted, throat flexed to the light. She is exposing herself, yes, surrendering to some greater power, but it is no passive act. Her surrender is a fight, and under those lights—that straining neck, those closed eyes, that open mouth—she blazes with it. If these scars are a way of remembering, are the marks of lessons learned, then this scar is a reminder to open. Of the strength it takes. Billie’s mouth never closes, and she reminds me to face that light, to bare my blazing throat. Let them see me.
WUNDERKAMMER
You look pretty, she said, her face in the computer’s window a glitter of pixels.
I squinted at my own image in the corner of the Skype screen, and laughed.
What? she asked.
I pointed out that everything I wore—from the wool houndstooth coat to my designer jeans, to my charm-laden necklace and matching gold watch, to my black leather boots and purse, to my underwear and socks—had been gifts from her.
You are a kept woman, she said. I take good care of you, don’t I?
You do, I agreed, though something clenched inside me.
Well, if we break up, at least you’ve got a new wardrobe.
If we break up, I said slowly. Everything you’ve given me will be ruined, transformed into shrouds of misery. I smiled.
I don’t know about that.
In the time since we met, she had gifted me many things. In this way, she is a generous woman, but especially to those she loves.
It can be difficult to accept the things you want, I’ve found. Sometimes, it is difficult even to admit them.
We first kissed one night in August after barely speaking and then retreated to our opposite sides of the country: my ocean, her desert. Two weeks later, her first gift arrived.
The “florist” veered around the corner in a Brooklyn delivery van mostly held together by duct tape. He had tracked me down by phone when I didn’t answer the doorbell and caught me approaching the C train in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The van screeched up to the curb and he flung the door open to offer me a basket of oranges crowned with a bouquet of matching lilies. On the C, I cradled the basket in my lap and breathed the flowers’ musky human scent, quietly swooning as the train shrieked along its track, dragging us under the East River.
I met a friend on the High Line and strolled the landscaped walkway, my arms beginning to ache under their bright burden. As we walked, it caught strangers’ eyes—lit first with orange, orange flower, my face, and then the thought: Someone is falling in love with this woman.
At the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea, the reception waif let me stash them under her desk while I watched Richard Phillips’s enormous videos of Lindsay Lohan and Sasha Grey—their towering beauty so radiant, so self-conscious, so crushable I could not look away.
Later, as I searched the far west side for a friend’s book party, the heel broke from my shoe. I tucked it into the basket with the oranges, whose glow warmed every alley I tripped down. The party was celebrating a book named after Andromeda. To avoid the awkwardness of arriving with flowers not for its author, I hid them in the entryway. As I mingled among partygoers I felt the chain that tied me to them, and to their giver. Like Andromeda, I knew already that fastening in me, but not which of us was rock or goddess or monster or rescue. In the elevator on my way down, I handed out oranges to fellow passengers. They smiled at me, their bright handfuls pulsing—like pieces of stars, of what small blazing thing was growing between us. It had a weight I could feel in my arms, when I hadn’t yet felt hers.
The second gift arrived near the end of September. A box of birthday presents, one for every day of that week, each wrapped in a new handkerchief. One day, three slim green notebooks; the next a CD of love songs, their titles listed in her elegant script. The morning of my birthday, the owner of a local bakery hand-delivered a red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting. My favorite.
A week later, she offered me a plane ticket to see her for only the second time. I had never done such a thing—flung myself across the country into a stranger’s arms—and I would not have done it without all the small anchors she had cast across the miles between us. Each one tied me to her, to the unlikely story of our love. Each object was a promise, something I could hold when I could barely remember her face. Stay, she asked with each one. Believe in this until you can believe in me.
Those first gifts were the easiest to receive. We knew so little of what we wanted. We had yet to ask anything from each other but possibility, and thus so little to lose.
My knees shook as I stepped off the plane. I found her waiting in cutoffs, hair falling dark over her shoulders. She stood and looked down at me, still a stranger, and we kissed for the second time. In the hotel, my hands shook as I lifted her shirt over her head and her hair spilled over my arms. Afternoon light shot through the closed blinds in streams, casting shadows across her shoulders, catching the silver scapular whose chain slid around her neck, so long it caught on the dark stars of her nipples.
What’s this? she asked about the tattoo on the back of my calf—a Virgin Mary with the word Abuela scripted beneath her. My grandmother had been Catholic, I explained, which was why her scapular made such an impression. I’d always loved the paper ones, I said, and she told me of how she’d worn them growing up.
Soon after I returned home, a smaller silver scapular arrived in the mail. I slid that metal thread around my neck, felt the small weight of its pendant against my chest, and pressed my hand over it. I did feel protected, and leaned into the pleasure as I could not have were she watching, were anyone.
I like to be cared for. But I’m uneasy with my desire for it. I fought it for years.
My first long-term boyfriend was a drug addict. I paid for everything. On each of my birthdays that I celebrated with him, I bought him an expensive pair of sneakers. It was a sad but safe arrangement. There was no expectation and therefore no disappointment.
In subsequent years, I learned to love people who could pay their own way, if not mine. The first time I remember being consciously disappointed was a birthday in my mid-twenties. That boyfriend, an unemployed graphic designer and anarchist, took me out for a vegan milkshake, and as we rode the train home, I felt a thick, unfamiliar sediment settle in my gut, distinct from the soy cream.
What’s wrong? he asked me.
I don’t know, I said, a preemptive wave of shame heating my face for what I said next. It might have been nice to get, like, a little something.
Like what?
Like a little token of your affection or something. I hated him in that moment, for making me utter this aloud.
Like what, diamonds? We were still in that phase when sneering at privilege amounted to political activism. Couched in this question was his clear judgment against my secret possession of the capitalist values he so loathed.
No, I said. Not diamonds.
Five months later, that boyfriend took me out for an Ayurvedic vegan dinner on Valentine’s Day. I gave him a button-down from Banana Republic, which he sorely needed for job interviews. He did not give me a gift. We split the bill and outside the restaurant I broke up with him.
I have a friend who’d say that I was shopping for oranges at the hardware store. It’s true. It was unreasonable to expect to be showered in gifts by someone I knew to be uniquely unqualified to do so. How often we set this trap for ourselves. I had learned to act as if I were the person I wished to be: an ascetically self-sufficient woman, a woman without needs, a woman immune to disappointment. And I found or urged myself to be attracted to the people whom only such a woman should love.
Partly, this inner conflict was the result of our culture’s conflicted relationship to gifts, and to women. I was not indoctrinated in an ideal of feminine dependency by my mother, a Buddhist psychotherapist. Our bookshelves held The Feminine Mystique; Our Bodies, Ourselves; and Women Who Run with the Wolves. I attended feminist marches in my stroller and protested at nuclear power plants during elementary school. I played with blocks on the floor during meetings of our local NOW chapter. My mother revised my children’s books with a black Sharpie to render Gretel less dependent on Hansel. In my version, she comes up with the breadcrumb strategy. My heroines did not just wait for princes to rescue them, and being loved was not always their goal. But no matter how adamantly my mother boycotted Barbie, she still could not protect me, or herself, from those lessons. I read the issues of Ms. that came in our mailbox, but I also coveted glossy issues of Teen. I saw women gasp at diamonds in television commercials and collapse into the arms of wealthy men. I still wanted to be a princess, and not for the political power.
When my lover called me a kept woman I felt the tug of this conflict. I wanted to be kept. That is, I wanted a love that felt like belonging. And I had learned as all girls do that material gifts were the easiest proof of this. But I also knew the bait and switch, the way power systems confuse us with shared terminology. That to be “kept” spoke as much of property as affection. Was her femaleness a loophole? I wanted it to be.
My father shipped out to sea for months at a time. There was no Skype. There was no e-mail. There were only letters and they were few and far between. During the rare phone call, his voice piped from so far away it took seconds for his words to reach us. I love you, we’d say. And then, Over, as if our phone were a walkie-talkie. For a few beats of silence, we waited for our words to cross the ocean. I love you, too, we’d finally hear back. And we’d keep waiting.
One year, he was home for my mother’s birthday. She made a big deal out of birthdays—baked special cakes, woke us with song, gave gifts that spoke directly to the whims of that particular moment. But on this birthday of hers, he had planned nothing.
Last minute, with no dinner reservation, he took us for a mediocre meal at a mediocre restaurant in town. My mother wept. I was old enough then to diagnose the problem. I learned to hide my wants. I learned to desire in secret.
My lover and I first shopped together at Bloomingdale’s. I touched a cashmere sweater, a tailored sheath dress. Try them on, she said. What do you think? she asked. I knew she meant, Do you want it? but I did not know how to say yes. To express a desire for her to buy them for me seemed impossibly vulnerable, and possibly crass.
Giving in to her gifts was a giddy, scary thing. But I got used to it. A delicate gold heart on a hair-thin chain, a tiny ruby embedded in its clasp. A diamond-studded anchor charm. An edition of Carl Jung’s illuminated manuscript of The Red Book. A pair of Gucci sunglasses. A stack of sand-smoothed stones. Designer purses. A complete Oxford English Dictionary. An afternoon’s worth of sea-glass shards. Head-to-toe running gear. A gold watch. Massages. Plane tickets. Hotel rooms. Many fine meals.
I could accept these gifts despite that, or maybe because, she failed to give me the one thing I needed: her, undivided. It didn’t matter that she claimed to sleep in a separate room from her ex-wife. I never slept. It was too much, but I never said that.
Loving her taught me to be a woman who wants proof of love. Maybe there is no other kind of woman. I struggle to feel loved in my lover’s absence. I suffer a kind of emotional object impermanence: out of sight, out of existence. And my beloved was almost always absent. And frequently unavailable. To say that it was painful is an understatement. To say that it was torment is dramatic, but not untrue.
“In many Germanic languages, ‘poison’ is named by a word equivalent to the English ‘gift.’” I heaved open the OED she had sent me in the mail and looked it up. I slid the circular magnifying glass down the delicate page and squinted. The entry mentions first, “payment for a wife.” It was tempting, during the time that we broke up, to recast her gifts in that unflattering light. As one friend said to me, You need presence, not presents. But I always knew that she loved me, that her gifts were an expression of that love, and of the intangibles she could not give, or tell me.
An unromantic, but not contrary way to view it is in terms of exchange. As Marcel Mauss found in his study of archaic societies’ gifting conventions (detailed in his seminal anthropological text The Gift): gifts are presented as voluntary acts of generosity that actually carry strict obligations for the recipient, both to receive and to reciprocate. Isn’t this usually so? At the least, we obligate the recipients of our gifts to reward us with their pleasure and gratitude. Often, we want more than that: love, forgiveness, loyalty, silence, sex, absolution—the gift becomes alms, collateral, bribe, and reward. As Mauss observed: “The obligation attached to a gift itself is not inert. Even when abandoned by the giver, it still forms a part of him. Through it he has a hold over the recipient.” Substitute “love” for “gift” and the statement holds. Neither act is wholly unselfish, and perhaps nothing is ever given without hope of some return. I do not think this is a cynical idea. Tenderness does not preclude expectation. And expectation does not preclude tenderness, or generosity.
I wanted to make up the distance, she later told me. My obligation, then, was patience. My obligation was to hold onto these parts of her that had a hold over me. All I had to do was hold onto love in her absence, a task for which I was uniquely unqualified.
My father loved my mother. And he loved me. And he is an exceptionally generous man. But he was a terrible gift-giver, partly due to his absence. A good gift relies on the giver’s knowledge of their subject. It answers desires that are only legible under close observation. My father was not there to observe us, and so his gifts were always thoughtful but inaccurate—a complete set of protective pads and a helmet, months after my fleeting infatuation with rollerblading had passed. He returned from sea with exotic treasures for my mother, but gold when she wore silver, big when she wore small. It was never a failure of generosity, but of vision.
My beloved gave good gifts. I don’t mean that she gave me beautiful things, though she did. The pleasure of receiving gifts has little to do with their beauty or material value. It is their mirroring. The perfect gift reflects the giver’s knowledge of our desires and so carries the precious proof of being known. She was a master of this. Every gift reflected my image in its dazzle and made not only her love but my self more real. Love is so often a wish to have our wants seen and met, without our having to ask.
The heart is a callous repo man. She may not have believed in the capacity of her gifts to become shrouds of misery, but I knew it for fact. One of the most merciless aspects of heartbreak is its reaping of love’s fruit. Ten months after we met, when my need became too great and she left me, I collected and filled a box with her gifts—the pictures, letters, ticket stubs, stones, jewelry, boarding passes, sea glass, and poems. Even the
hand lotion whose scent rung of her disappeared into that box. I learned that the anchor of materialized love has a converse power, too. Just as those objects tethered me to love, to myself, and became a way to close my hand around it, so they gave me something to put away and insisted that I do. I could not bear to look at them. As Mauss claimed, the gift’s power is not inert. It carries a part of the giver, as our hearts do. How much easier, sometimes, if we could also put our hearts away. But I could not. I still had my heart when she came back to me, and it still carried a part of her inside it.
My favorite gift was the wunderkammer. In Renaissance Europe, “cabinets of curiosities” were all the rage of the ruling classes. Often they were whole rooms populated with treasures and oddities of the natural world: gems and feathers, fossils and taxidermied animals. They were “regarded as a microcosm or theater of the world … a memory theater.”
On my thirty-third birthday, she presented me with a wooden, glass-lidded box, its interior divided into small compartments. In one of these a corked glass bottle of snake vertebrae. In another, a molded pewter human hand. Every curiosity in the cabinet was a totem, pulsing with meaning. To it, I added the shards of sea glass and the stones.
The best gifts are like these: beautiful and a little gruesome. Such gifts obligate us to see ourselves more fully, to see the many compartments of love, its bones and shards, all its hands and holdings. If the real value of a gift is being known, how can one exclude these darker parts? And it was in loving her that I discovered them.
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