In one room of the museum a series of screens had been mounted. On one screen: a ballerina in pink and her male partner in black, his hands firm about her waist. In the eighteenth century, the ideal wife’s waist was no larger than the span of her husband’s hand. On another: two opera singers, one male, one female, mouths open, chests heaving. Bad luck if your husband had short fingers, diminutive palms. On yet another: a stage, a curtain, red velvet, drawn, and a woman, pacing, declaiming on the proscenium. At her heels, nipping and barking, a terrier, brown and white. Occasionally the terrier reared up on its hind legs and pawed at the tails of the woman’s button-front shirt. There were more screens—a man and a woman running hurdles on a track; what might have been a job interview, with a man, suited, behind a desk, if not for the woman before him, her hair shorn, her body encased in sackcloth—and, next to each, a pair of headphones.
Several years before, the Swedish video artist had divorced her husband. Her second husband, I am moved to say, in the spirit of pettiness. I am, myself, once married. The day I met my friend at the museum, I was not yet divorced. The Swedish video artist and her husband had two children together. During the divorce proceedings, the husband sued for full physical and legal custody of both children. He charged that his soon-to-be ex-wife was an unfit mother. The case went to court. Several videos by the Swedish video artist were entered into evidence. There she was, in a bathtub, naked, bleeding from between her legs: a miscarriage. In her hands, a copy of The Odyssey. She reads from Book Twenty-Two, the slaughter of the suitors. There she was, in chain mail, in the kitchen, preparing dinner. Beneath the chain mail—this is her husband’s lawyer—I will draw your attention to the fact that beneath the chain mail respondent is completely nude. She serves dinner—bowls of soapy water; a salad of unwashed weeds; uncooked spaghetti, halved, covered in motor oil—to a family of blow-up sex dolls. She goes into another room and retrieves a sword. With the sword she decapitates each sex doll. Then she sits down at the table and begins eating the dirt-covered weeds. In court, during the Swedish video artist’s testimony, the judge seemed unable or unwilling to look her in the face. Her husband, I should say, was American, as was his lawyer, as was the judge, and it was of course in America that this trial took place. In Connecticut. The Swedish video artist was granted supervised visitation: three hours, twice a week. She chose, in defiance of the custody agreement, to return to Sweden. To abandon her children. I am quoting contemporary press accounts, though it is always possible that I am quoting them inaccurately. The day I met my friend at the museum I, myself, did not yet have a child.
After the trial was over, the Swedish video artist obtained a transcript of her exchange with her ex-husband’s lawyer. She made copies of the exchange and distributed these to a handful of female artists she respected: a choreographer, a librettist, a playwright. There were others: a filmmaker, possibly also a poet, possibly also a rhythmic gymnast. She asked them to choose performers they themselves respected. And then she filmed the performances.
At the museum, at the far end of the room in which the screens had been mounted, above one closed door, wall text, the letters large, black, press-on, the font a sans serif: “The Story of the Children.” I tried the knob of the door and found it would not turn. Presumably this was a metaphor.
“It seems,” my friend said, “like cheating. They do all the work, and she gets the show.”
“It was her idea.”
“If she were a man, you’d call this exploitative.”
“But she’s not. Historical context. It matters.”
“The point of feminism,” my friend said, “isn’t to replicate existing power structures, only with women in control. Or it shouldn’t be.”
“How did you get here?”
“I called a car. You know public transportation here is—”
“And presumably you know that saying the words existing power structures doesn’t mean you’re not part of the problem?”
“How was I supposed to get here, then?”
I twirled one finger in imitation of a game-show wheel. “And the winner is . . . biking! One of very few ethical modes of transportation—provided of course that the bike was, when you purchased it, used. You should have biked.” Do my words sound cold, even cruel? Perhaps it helps to know that as I said this, I was smiling.
“And get my clothes all sweaty? No thank you.”
“Your choice.”
“How did you get here?”
“My car’s electric.”
“Your car’s a hybrid. Excuse me, your husband’s car is a hybrid.”
“Same difference.” I would not call us, my friend and I, liars. Nor would I call us, in general, honest.
“Patently false.” Instead I would say that one of the premises of our friendship, a friendship that I have, in the years since our visit to the museum, let lapse, was that we were honest if with no one else then at least with each other. And that to force this honesty, we were compelled also to be cold, also to be cruel, to each other.
“Are you saying,” I asked, “that you’d rather I wasn’t here?” Also that this cruelty was, for us, a way to commune. A source, even, of joy.
“No,” my friend said. “Are you saying you’d rather I wasn’t here?”
Isn’t that the test of love? The test of intimacy? The willingness to be cruel and the belief that, the moment of cruelty passed, the love, the intimacy, remains, undamaged?
“No.” Yes, it is.
“Good.”
Or at least I have at times believed this to be the case.
“Good. Now. Do you want to tell me about your breakup.”
My words were phrased as, but in fact were not, a question. My friend rolled her eyes. Rather: she made the head motion—from left to right and then up a tick, her skull sketching the shape of an uppercase L—that I associated with her eye rolls, which were frequent. I could not see her eyes because she was still wearing sunglasses. “Well. What do you think happened.”
“He found out you were cheating on him.”
“Correct.”
Another of the premises of our friendship was that we loathed emotional intimacy even as we understood its necessity. Speaking with casual nonchalance about subjects that caused us great pain was our preferred workaround.
“If you were a man, I’d call you a cad.”
“Sure, if this were the nineteen fifties.”
“I’d be ethically obligated to take the wronged woman’s side.”
“If I were a gay man? Or a lesbian, for that matter. Or a straight man, but trans. Say I were nonbinary, or my partner was.”
“I’m just saying. The point of feminism isn’t to replicate existing power structures only with women in control.”
“You don’t say.”
“The fact that you’re a woman cheating on a man doesn’t make the cheating itself any less morally reprehensible.”
“Precisely what Paul told me this morning.”
“Really?”
“No. He said, Now I know why you never wanted to wear the ring.”
In another room, a number of enormous photographs, perhaps six feet across, twelve high, were displayed. A series of portraits of the Swedish video artist. There she was, wearing a mustache, a uniform, individual hairs glued to the swatch of flesh between the first and second knuckles of each finger. There she was, stooped, in a polo shirt, pale blue, on her head a gray cap, gripping a cane, tan slacks cinched tight above a prosthetic paunch, tendrils of white hair emerging from beneath her cap. And there she was, in a flannel shirt and jeans, bringing an axe down on a log, her hair short and dark and stiff with Brylcreem. Not Brylcreem. Brylcreem is British. Its Swedish equivalent. Next to each portrait, a smaller picture, also framed: snapshots of a man in the poses the Swedish video artist was replicating. Her father, the wall text revealed.
“Daddy issues,” my friend said.
“You or her?”
“That’s the name of this exhibit.”
“Funny.”
“Barely.”
Facing the photographs, along the opposite wall, a full, functional bar: bottles, tender, the whole nine. My friend and I approached.
“Eleven-thirty,” I said, checking my watch.
“A mimosa?”
“Two mimosas,” I said.
“I’m sorry, ma’am.” This was the bartender. “At the artist’s request, we have stocked a full bar but are only serving one drink: George Dickel, on the rocks. That’s a whiskey, ma’am. A particular favorite of the artist’s father.”
“I know Dickel’s a whiskey. And don’t call me ma’am.” To my friend: “Too early?”
“Never.”
“Two, please.”
We sipped our whiskeys. “Tell me,” I said, “how he found out.” Important to imagine us, here, backs to, elbows on, the bar. Not looking at each other.
“I used his computer to check my e-mail.” Staring, instead, at the photographs across the room.
“And you forgot to log out.” Staring straight ahead.
“Forgot. Sure, that works.”
“You wanted him to find out.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“You want to know a funny thing?”
“Always.”
“I wasn’t even cheating on him.”
“You mean technically? Like, you hadn’t had sex?”
“No, I mean it was all—” My friend made a shooing motion with her free hand. “The guy I told you about, the one I was cheating on Paul with. I made him up. I made it all up.”
“The e-mails that—”
“I wrote them. From a different address, of course. It was fun, actually. Thinking up a character, his job, the words he would use. Where would he suggest we get together. Did he prefer pussy or cunt.”
“And when you told me. That you were having an affair.”
“A lie. He preferred pussy, by the way. That’s when I knew it wouldn’t work out. Vile word.”
A slight increase in the effort involved in keeping my face still. My friend’s revelation had apparently pained me.
“Cunt is the better word, that’s true.” The revelation of the lie, I mean. Because beneath the first premise of our friendship was the understanding that we were, both of us, bad people. Or that we believed ourselves to be bad people. What’s that old line? Ah, yes, now I remember: Every adult in the Anthropocene who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows he’s a real piece of shit. We believed that, and the fact that many others did not, this was, wouldn’t you know it, a real barrier to intimacy. In a deliberately even tone: “Is it worth asking why.”
My friend shrugged. “I don’t know. Is it?”
“Okay. Why?” And if my friend had been hiding this from me, she might also have been hiding other things. And if she had been hiding this and also other things from me, it was perhaps because she thought I was not bad enough, felt I could not understand her most evil deeds. And if she thought that, well, our honesty had served no purpose, for in that case it was clear that she did not understand me at all.
“Bored, mostly.”
“Have you considered getting a job?” My friend had, has, family money.
“I have a job.” This was an argument we’d had before.
“You don’t.” The fact of my friend’s family money meant that I loathed her, just a little, for political reasons. Also that I let her pay for dinner.
“I volunteer.”
“Why not tell him?”
My friend shrugged again. “Boring. What time is it?”
I checked my watch. “Noon.”
“Another?”
“Why not.” To the bartender: “Two more, please.”
In a separate building, my friend and I entered a small gallery temporarily pressed into service as a changing room. We took off our clothes and put on bathing suits. Back in the building’s main gallery, we entered the swimming pool that had been installed at its center. It was a Monday, midafternoon, and the pool was otherwise empty. The bottom of the deep end was not tile or plastic or ceramic or stone. Instead it was a video screen. On the video screen the Swedish artist appeared naked, also in a pool. The perspective was such that her pool seemed to be located directly beneath ours. Such that it seemed almost possible to move from our pool into hers. I reached out with one hand. I touched screen. The Swedish video artist’s mouth was moving. She was saying something, I think, though it was impossible to hear her, to know even in what language she was speaking. Then my lungs were burning and I came to the surface. My friend rose, too. Her eyes, if they had been puffy before, now weren’t. The irises blinked green. I had, until that moment, forgotten the color of my friend’s eyes.
We exited the pool and dried off.
“What did you think?” I asked my friend.
“Nice tits,” she said.
“I mean the concept.”
“Did you notice the name?”
“I Have an Important Message.”
“Obvious, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” I agreed. “A little obvious.”
Los Angeles, 2011
My parents live in Los Angeles, in a shambling three-story in the Hollywood Hills. Inherited, my mother’s father’s mother a minor star, silent films, with what they used to call a Cupid’s-bow mouth and a smart bob, she bought the house with her first paycheck, financially savvy and good thing, too, didn’t survive the transition to talkies, or maybe it was giving birth to my grandfather, how the pregnancy changed her body, the softness around the middle she never lost. Don’t like it, them, my parents. Talking about them, I mean. Not being modest when I say shambling, my grandfather and my mother, both only children and too good for any kind of regular work, the house decaying and no money for repairs. There’s a picture on the wall along one of the staircases, not a picture, a page from an old tabloid, framed, newsprint, a shot of my great-grandmother, in low heels and a dress with no waist, on the arm of Rudolph Valentino. I have been, in my life, just close enough to wealth to touch the rotting lace of its hem. Another way to put this: my family has been, still is, richer than most.
What happened was my friend got divorced, and then, for a while, she went to live with my parents. She said, my friend, that she wanted to spend some time with people who liked her. I lived in California too, though up north. With my husband, though my friend did not ask if she could stay with us. I guess I was a little offended. Told myself she wanted to be tended to, knew I would not tend to her and knew my mother would. Though also I was relieved. Just then we were trying to have a baby. Baby books everywhere and me lying on my back, in bed, a thermometer in my vagina, trying to take my basal body temperature so I’d know when to fuck my husband, this, we’d been told, was the most natural way. My mind so filled with this one desire—baby, baby, baby—it might as well have been blank. Dutiful copulation. Tension and resentment packed into each of our small rooms like pudding into pudding cups. “Do you think,” my friend asked me, “that it’s ethical, right now, to have a baby. Considering where we are. In late capitalism, the life cycle of the planet.” I hung up. My husband and I did not end up having a baby, though not for ethical reasons. Later we also got a divorce. Having a baby, in any case, is never ethical. I don’t mean it’s not, just that’s the wrong scale.
“How is she,” I asked my mother.
“Oh, a little brittle,” my mother said. I could hear the clink of ice, a gin and tonic I guessed, almost seven, a weeknight, would be her second. “And sad of course, but that’s normal, that’s only natural. You know we were talking, yesterday—the day before yesterday?—and I was telling her—” is where I stopped listening. My friend, you’ll remember her, Laura, thinks my parents like each other and this may also be true, but mostly they are just drunk enough not to be bothered.
I met Laura in graduate school, where I also met my husband. They were dating when I met them, Laura and my husband. My ex-husband. That�
��s not true. I did meet both Laura and my ex-husband in graduate school, but they weren’t dating. That would be a better story. I am often thinking of the better story because the actual story is so often boring. We were in the same cohort, and we became friends, the three of us. I was dating a professor at the time. Sleeping with. That sounds like a good story but it’s not, it’s been told too many times. He had a beard and a jacket with those elbow patches. I wish I were joking. Made good martinis, had hollow cheeks, explains the beard, hated his ex-wife. All pretty standard.
After grad school, my husband and I ended up in the same city. That makes it sound accidental. Actually I couldn’t get a job and the city where my husband, future then ex now, was moving because he could and did was also a city where I had some family. The city was Lincoln, Nebraska, I don’t know why I’m being so cagey. I mentioned this to my future then ex now and he said, “Come,” he said, “we’ll split a two-bedroom,” he said, “Do you even know how cheap rent is in Lincoln,” and I said, “Actually yes I do my uncle lives there.” We’d all gone to grad school straight out of undergrad so even five years later we were still pretty young. The reason I couldn’t get a job was I hadn’t finished my dissertation. Still haven’t. Anyway so I moved. That was when we started dating, me and the future then ex now. Not that it matters. Laura got a fellowship in Michigan and we moved to Lincoln and we fell in love. Who falls in love in Lincoln.
Laura met her husband in Mississippi. After grad school she got a fellowship in Michigan and after the fellowship in Michigan there were two years in Arkansas and then a spot opened up in Mississippi, Oxford, Ole Miss. Not an academic, the husband, but he ran a bookstore, managed it, was well read, which we cared about then, whether someone had read the same books we had, and which I try to, have to, care less about now. Hadn’t gone to college though, which made Laura’s choice unusual. Exotic, even. How she told me, breathless, on the phone, that he’d worked in construction, and not just during the summer for extra money between semesters but as a job, full-time, for years. They met and were married in nine months. And then some time passed and Laura’s contract was up and she got a new job, tenure track, in California, and her husband, his name was Dylan, he didn’t want to leave. Laura moved in with my parents right after she filed the paperwork.
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