Break.up

by Joanna Walsh

  And being at home, I’d thought I could work, but now I’m here I can’t think. The slow train rocks me. The only thought that hooks my mind is sex. I have not been connected that way with anyone for a while. I close my eyes and let the thought take me. I imagine you fucking me against a hard smooth surface (the train window?). I imagine you kissing me on the mouth; gently on the clitoris, your teeth grazing my nipples. I have imagined these things many times during my journey. Future anterior: I imagine saying, Again. Please. to something that has not happened yet.

  Reader, am I embarrassing you?

  At Brussels, I change trains, and the station is full of lovers leaving. They hang from each other’s bodies, and everything they do is slow motion. A boy pushes his girlfriend’s hair carefully back from her face. It takes aeons. I huddle under an electronic noticeboard, looking for the warmth of connectivity beneath the glow of a WiFi sign, but it’s another pay spot – the same all the way though Belgium, including on the train.

  Come to Prague. Do I regret not saying yes?

  On the Belgian train, I admire the tweed seats until the guard tells me I am in first class. I move to second which is identical, except the seats are covered in leatherette. The windows of both carriages are scrawled with graffiti.

  In Brussels the ticket hall was beneath the ground-level platforms, but somehow I have tunnelled under, pulling into Antwerp three levels down, ascending on escalators to the surface, which is a grand nineteenth-century palace sitting atop a void. I ask the guard behind a high mahogany counter for my connecting train in French. He smirks, switches sadistically to Flemish.

  Pulling through Rotterdam station, graffiti: LOVE IS A BATTLEFIELD

  and

  SOME GIRLS ROMANCE SOME GIRLS SLOW DANCE.

  (both, obligingly, in English).

  then, by the side of the line, a large new housing block supported by scaffolding, its interior entirely void.

  •••

  I arrive and it’s so much later than I thought. Unlike other cities, Amsterdam draws up to its points of departure, rather than encircling them: the port and the station are at the harsh cold summit on the city where it meets the sea. In front of the station, a car park, tram stops, a long cold open space for the city’s trapped wind. I cross it and do the usual: enter the lobby of the first smart hotel, pick up a city map, walk to where I’m staying. It’s already dark.

  My hosts are friends of a friend: a gay couple, nervous. They are going on holiday tomorrow – and planning is stressful, yes, but there is something else: something that makes me glad I am no longer a couple. One is German, the other Italian. We must go out to dinner. We must not eat Dutch. We must eat Korean. I am tired but they must provide me with a guide to their city where they have lived for years. They say they love Amsterdam but that I should not go to the red light district, which is trashy, nor to the inauthentic central, touristy areas. I should not go to the outer districts, which are not interesting. I should not go to the modern area by the docks, which is ugly. Where, then? They point out a hidden garden, a furniture designer’s shop by the Anne Frank House (into which I should not go, not unless I want to queue for hours). They both work for a Green charity: one in research, the other, PR. What do I do? I can hardly say. They are suspicious of my project, they are suspicious of my work – both, I think, for political reasons.

  Back at their flat, they pour me a small glass of cheap white wine, recork the bottle. The researcher goes off somewhere to do something, the PR shows me his sketchbook: canals, flower vases, café tables, ruined cottages, all the old standards. He apologises to me for his strong interest in something that, like writing, and romance, may not be directly relevant to Green politics. But he loves the things he draws. And he is sorry that he loves them perhaps more, or as much as he loves environmentalism or PR. I need to sleep but I cannot shut him up.

  Before breakfast they’re gone. I cling to my sheets as they pass and repass my couch-bed, pretend to sleep. As soon as they’re out I get up, try to work, but I have been travelling for too long. A walk to a café will wake me. Perhaps.

  I’m back in northern Europe and it’s cold. The sky is white. I am exhausted. My fingers are pale and waxy. There’s a swelling over my right eye. I find the café my hosts recommended. I don’t want to eat. I want only insubstantial things, things that are bad for me. I order: chocolate with cream – mit sahne – no, that’s German but Dutch is almost… well a move away from the latinate at least – yes – slagroom. No need to chew it, it dissolves. I’m too tired to bite, and I could eat warme chocolademelk met slagroom endlessly without getting full up, seeming to care neither for my outsides, nor my insides. I could even pull off the magic trick of eating sugar but remaining thin, if I eat nothing but. But appearance is a side-issue: most of the time right now, I don’t need, or want, anything else.

  In the café window reflected colours vibrate and separate, orange and blue, like primitive film. There is a WiFi code but the internet does not work. I am blank. I notice nothing, write nothing, feel nothing. I go back to the flat and back to bed. It is midday.

  I wake in the evening and it’s dark again. I go out. Ten-foot windows of light hang framed on the sooty walls. Are they shops or interiors? They look like they must be selling what’s on show: the cushions, the books, the life. I have just left an apartment like this. I didn’t belong there, was on the wrong side of the glass. I walk through the red light district, where my hosts told me not to walk, not for safety but from a sense of aesthetic disgust. The head shops are full, but the sex shops are empty. It’s Saturday night, and the streets are full of stag parties. They wander, but they do not enter. The groups of men stick to the main drag. It’s in the side streets that I find the window girls – mostly Dutch-Asian, flesh crammed into tight dresses and shallow vitrines like shop dummies. As I pass they activate like movement-sensitive clockworks. Although it is dark I put on shades, still in my pocket from the Paris sun. I feel shame, but not for them, for me. I want to tell them I am not part of this looking. A man passes. One of the girls taps on her window, beckons, and suddenly she is on the outside and he is on the inside. He doesn’t go in. Transparent about sex, opaque about contact, Amsterdam is a city not for touching but for peeping.

  No, you never fucked me. Though we went to bed once or twice, you never replayed the physical jolt of what we did online. There was something sensual about the call and response of our emails, texts, Skype all at once, like breasts, cunt, clit, neck, mouth – so hot, so responsive, rhythmic, inventive, like sex. Well, almost… But there’s something about saying these words with my mouth that’s like sex again, that’s physical. I’m like that with words, have to let new ones live in me for a bit, use them, say them, feel them. It takes me time to understand them else.

  We will never have done with sensation. All rational systems will prove one day to be indefensible.

  Breton, Mad Love

  Why must our dialogue be erotic? I imagined there was a connection somewhere, that sex is what words lead to, but words are where the fuck stops, and visa versa, I mean sentences at least, I mean full ones. Some people say things during sex, verbs I think mainly, though I have fucked people who came out with full sentences like an instruction manual. Using dirty words too often tames them, like the Amsterdam storefronts. Pass them everyday and they’re no longer shocking, even the live girls in the windows. Sex lives at the edge of language. Like art, like religion, it dwells more comfortably in images, and in objects. As soon as words make sex comfortable it’s fucked. But, if we don’t have sex, there remains no end to what we can not say to one another.

  What doesn’t stop not being written.

  Jacques Lacan, Encore

  Is this a blow-job of a book, then, a book around a dick, around its absence? I want to fuck you through words, or fuck you up, fuck you over. The first is the only way you let me, the last two, all I’ll allow myself now. Words conjure fucking perhaps better than the bodies that, so often, can’t o
r won’t match them. How else will you let me ressentir (that’s French again: re-feel) re-evoke the physical? I took your hand, once.

  Of course I really have Dick to thank for this, because he gave me someone to write to.

  Kraus, interview, Artnet

  ‘Does that help?’ you asked.

  ‘It helps me.’

  You said nothing.

  Did I embarrass you? Am I embarrassing you now? Well, the men who fuck me are never the men who talk to me. I can’t stop talking about fucking, and nor can this city. Maybe from time to time it even does it.

  I never had sex with you – that’s why you’re so good at it. But I have imagined you when fucking other people, and this has made the sex I’ve had better than it might have been, for them as well as for me. Sex is its very own simultaneous pornography. And pornography – sex that remains potential – can never be finished with. Everyone watches porn now, it’s all over the net, and who could avoid its confusing promises? I got my early porn from words, looking up the dirty bits in books, where all I knew was that they were words about sex, so each felt sexual, each feeling prompted directly by the word’s unfolding because I had no images, no objects via which to connect them to my body. But sex on the net – porn, I mean – do I like it? Well, depends what it’s like. That’s the problem with porn. Sex never feels like anything else. It doesn’t even feel the same as watching it.

  Porn looks like sex, and at the same time, not. The people on-screen are ‘actors’ – professionals whose job is to make us believe, though sometimes they’re called ‘amateurs’ which is a word that means they don’t get paid (though sometimes they do too), and which is also a word that (in French) means they ‘love it’, though they may only look like they love it, and though sometimes you know they’re also acting like they hate it to make you love it more. And sometimes, yes, they do act too, even the amateurs, dressed up as plumbers, secretaries, students (though some of them might also actually be these things too; how can anyone tell?). But what is always real is the fucking. When we see them doing it there’s no doubt: there they are, really fucking. The problem is they might be acting fucking all the time they are fucking too.

  The porn clips I’ve seen are the opposite of the sex I’ve read in books, which is built from words. In porn, the fucking happens like a silent film though, sometimes, a soundtrack covers the embarrassment of silence, as in a restaurant or a hairdresser’s. There is no soundtrack to the Amsterdam girls sitting in their soundproof tanks. There’s another one of them now, above her a sign: REAR ENTRANCE NOW OPEN. Hoho. Well, we are in the Nether Lands, and it may be the early hours of punday by now, but fucking is not a pun. Though everything around it is: the blow-ups, the push-ups, the teasers, the ticklers that mean the same as bodies, but are not the same, because, like puns, their extra meaning can be strapped on, stripped off. Fucking never means anything but itself, does not translate into its limp accessories. No, fucking is never a ‘thing’, not even here in the never-Netherlands.

  Here sex is not sex but nostalgia because it’s sold. At the point of sale, it’s rendered out of the spontaneous and into the past tense, its duty to simultaneously remind the buyers of what sex is like, even as it plays itself out in broderie anglaise, or transparent plastic, or edible ‘silk’ until sex is something to have and to hold (though they won’t be able to have it and eat it). No wonder its shell is pure kitsch, from the plastic frills lifting off the plastic bodies of shop dummies – a gap between the hard synthetics and their harder flesh – to the names we have made for all these things that fill the gap between a woman and what she is in fantasy: garter-belt, brassiere, thong. So alien, those intimate things that have to be specially applied: what a carry-on! They make me alien to my own skin, which, they inform me, should be smooth-surfaced as latex, or lycra. Looking into shop windows I don’t look like the dummies, so know I’m not a woman. And if that’s what men look for, what hope is there for them? Both sexes have failed, substituted for sex, sex objects, which, though lacking a pulse, look more like sex than the real thing, and up the ante with leather, or with lace, until what you buy is better than what you can get for free.

  Das sind die wahren Wunder der Technik, daß sie das, wofür sie entschädigt, auch ehrlich kaputt macht/This is the true miracle of technology, that it breaks that for which it compensates.

  Karl Kraus, Nachts

  Intercourse – that word that means talking and fucking – comes from the medieval French ‘entrecours’ or business, which means both sex n’ shopping. When goods leave the shop, they lose half their value at least. The only difference is, if objects survive long enough to become antiques, they accrue it again, or more, which can’t be said of us.

  Though I’m walking in the red light streets after midnight, I’m left alone. Women on the street here are not hassled. Like me, they are not cut from the same cloth as what’s on show in the shallow vitrines. Only one incident. On my way home past the design porn of the hanging windows, a man (a boy?) grabs my arm, shouts, HELLO GIRL! – a T-shirt slogan that shows he does not speak English, has no idea what he just said. I am shocked, not because of the sudden contact, but because he stops me as we’re crossing a busy street in opposite directions. ‘Sure,’ I snap, ‘but not in the middle of the road!’ He’s already gone. What he wanted was so non-specific, so unable to admit a reaction, that he has dismissed it already.

  Give me a word, you have taken the world I have! Well, we never had the same object in mind. I was only a virtual-girlfriend, a blow-up, a strap-on. If you wouldn’t fulfil your promise in the flesh, at least I knew you would write to me later. When you got home late, perhaps a little drunk, a last reflex before sleep: private talk, intercourse …

  Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.

  Anne Carson, ‘Tag’

  12 May

  Even in May, Amsterdam is dark, and cold, and sometimes it rains. I stay inside, but I don’t feel at home. I work from café to café, transcribing my notes, trying to find one where I’m comfortable. I sit in a café alongside an image of myself working in a café. I am working hard. Perhaps this is not the right café, but how quickly I become loyal to the latest place: the café with the hot chocolate this morning, the one I’m in now (finding the first one full) where I am drinking a beer. I sit at a table inside, and I decide I like it. From the speakers: something about cold and the month of May. It is May here. But not that kind of May. Denial. My temperature is still wrong: my blood has been heated by the sun. I look odd: I am wearing all my clean clothes at once.

  I wander. Or rather I walk because I need to keep warm, to have something to do. The cafés are small enough to look like domestic dining rooms and, through long windows, all the canal house dining rooms look like fashionable restaurants. Amsterdam is full of shops whose vitrines, between the long, shining uncurtained windows of the houses, showcase second-hand books and only-just-antique small domestic objects. ‘Perfect taste, not too ostentatious: that’s Amsterdam,’ my hosts told me. As I walk I realise I am looking for the hotel in which I spent my honeymoon weekend – so anxious that the little time and money we could spend be modestly tasteful – so many years ago. The hotel was chic enough: a black-faced canal-side building – I remember the approximate location – but we slept in a small bare room at the top floor back which we could afford, and which did not live up to the ground floor windows’ promise. I don’t find it – but then I’m not looking very hard.

  I find the flea market and the sun breaks through the low flat cloud. Leafing through a stall of second-hand books I find Daumier’s nineteenth-century cartoons, Scenes from Marriage: an art book, heavy and thick. I can’t afford it, couldn’t, in any case, drag its weight around with me.

  ‘Are you married?’ the vendor asks. (Muscular, fifties, moustache).

  I hesitate, before I say, ‘No.’

  ‘Ah the husband wife thing!’ he laughs. ‘I’ve been there.’

  Everything on sale here once belonged
to somebody else, and their ghosts are still hanging around in the way the heel of a shoe is worn down, the creases made in an old pair of jeans, the inscription worn wordless inside a second-hand ring. Disembodied bodies are everywhere. If none new are found to inhabit them, these things will return, unshaped, to their boxes for weeks, months, maybe years. Why buy second-hand? The charm of other people’s things gives us – what? – romance? – what? – gravitas?

  These abandoned objects are part-human through association. Eyeglasses, hairclips, belts and braces so intimately complete us. They also supply emotions. In all objects there is a promise, wordlessly spoken. Like the bodies in last night’s sex-shop windows that filled the latex bras and plastic lace, they are suggestive, hinting at the promises of flesh. I have memories of you but no remembrances: we exchanged no presents. We all need somewhere for our desire to sit. If we are lucky it will be in gewgaws, and our desires will be easily satisfied, drip by material drip. If we are less lucky it will be in people or ideas and, finally, in their absence, but every thing here is so promising that I’m glad, when things were promising with us (those plastic bodies are so light), we didn’t lean on them.

  My lord, I have remembrances of yours. That I have longed long to redeliver. I pray you now receive them.

  William Shakespeare, Hamlet

  The flea market sells mostly everyday objects, but not for their original purpose. They now exist to be looked at, but they carry a sillage of use, though we have forgotten what some of them were for. That’s normal: very little can be looked at without being judged for use – or maybe only art, which is why art causes such a kerfuffle. Use stops at the border of its frame – or velvet rope, if it’s unframable – and that’s why art makes people angry. The flea market objects suggest derelict uses without end-users. They’ve moved away from us in time more quickly than things that are so useful they break or wear out before they arrive on these tables: that’s the generation gap. No longer understanding what they’re for, we are invited to knot them, group them as they appear here thrown together – the whatnot by the lavaliere, the lorgnette by the pre-electric sewing machine – to invent scenarios for the chipped, the non-functioning, the incomplete. But, how to group what’s at hand into anything not unfinished, imperfect, wrong, how to make meanings from this broken-alphabet? After all these are the cast-offs of somebody’s life, the things someone wanted to get rid of.