You feel as if there is a box you can open to find the answer, but with the lid closed the answer is all of these things, all at once.
Dream House at Newton’s Apple
Early in the summer, this guy drops you a line. When you first got to Iowa, he had flown into town and the two of you spent a weekend in bed together and it was a nice culmination of a few years of light internet flirtation. It turns out he’s in town for a conference for work, and he asks if you want to get dinner. You agree, even though you don’t really want to see him. You even agree to pick him up from his hotel—his request—although you don’t want to do that, either.
Even as you’re driving to his hotel, you’re thinking about how you’re just doing what he’s asking you, the same way you’d respond to the woman in the Dream House, even though he’s just this random guy. You think about that as you pull up under the awning, as you drive him to the restaurant. He is talking to you. Even as you’re responding to him, even as you’re ordering and making small talk, you’re marveling at the fact that his maleness—the generic fact of it—has as much pull as a carefully curated, long-term abusive relationship. It’s as if one scientist spent decades developing a downward-facing propulsion system to get an apple to descend to the ground and another one just used gravity. Same result, entirely different levels of effort.
You refuse to get a drink, pick at your meal. He insists on paying. You drive him back to the hotel. You pull in front of the entrance, and he smiles at you.
“Why don’t you park so we can say good-bye?” he asks.
You pull into the parking space around the corner.
“Why don’t you walk me inside?” he says. “There’s a gorgeous koi pond in the lobby.”
He’s not wrong. The soaring atrium is breathtaking. It’s nicer than any hotel you’ve ever stayed in. You bend over a bridge and look down at the koi, their muscular bodies the color of warning. You think about how much easier it would be to just sleep with him. He isn’t the worst guy in the world. The effort of resisting is exhausting.
“I should go,” you say. “I have a thing at eight.”
He makes a clucking sound in his throat, smiles.
“Why don’t you come on up?” he says.
“I have to go,” you say.
He walks you back to your car, and as you fish your keys out of your purse, he kisses you. He keeps kissing you; he grabs your arms, pushes his tongue in your mouth. Your body goes rigid. You don’t fight, but you don’t respond. You briefly float outside your body and see yourself, the almost comedy of your mismatched libidos. When he pulls away, he does not seem to notice that you can feel nothing at all. He gives you a key card, tells you his room number, in case you change your mind.
On the drive home you pull over near a parking garage and stumble out onto a patch of grass. You drop down into child’s pose and take deep, shuddering breaths as the car’s emergency signal ticks next to you. The grass catches the copper light: on and off and on again.
Dream House as Sex and Death
In June, you drive from Iowa to San Diego for a genre-writing workshop on the UCSD campus. On the way you stop in Berkeley, where you lived so long ago. You leave your things at a friend’s house and meet up with your ex-boyfriend for dinner.
After a few drinks, you tell him about her, about the Dream House. He listens intently, his eyes soft with kindness. It is so good to see him your heart aches. You realize you have missed him so much because what was wrong with you as a couple was so contained, so clear. Even the cosmic agony of his departure felt like a normal (if terrible) part of life, like a broken leg or being fired from a job.
As dinner winds to a close, you ask if he wants to go get a drink. But when you step out onto the street you remember how early things close around there.
“I’ve got a lot of booze back at my place,” he says. The sentence is careful but he’s smiling sidelong at you. Your heart and cunt twitch simultaneously. You text your friend, the one you’re staying with. I understand, she responds. Have fun. Breakfast tomorrow?
Your ex-boyfriend gestures to a car on the street; a comically tiny convertible. You laugh, genuinely pleased. “You have a convertible?” It comes out weirdly; you say it again and again, changing inflections. “You have a convertible? You have a convertible?” You might be a little tipsy already.
“Should I leave the roof down?” he asks.
“Um, yes,” you say. He starts the engine and you drop the seat back and watch Berkeley and then Oakland this way the whole drive back, the tips of buildings at the circumference of your vision, a sky streaked with clouds with stars in the gaps between them. The car is going so fast that you feel wild, you feel like you could die right now and it would be thrilling. You realize you are laughing, and he goes even faster.
In his apartment, you scratch his cat’s head hard with your fingernails. He makes you a drink. You sit down across from each other.
“I’ve missed you,” he says.
I’ve missed myself, you want to say, but you don’t. “I’ve missed you too,” you say. “I mean, I don’t miss men, but I did miss you. I’m glad we did this.”
You straddle him and kiss him and later, when you are standing in the bathroom doing your best to wash semen out of your hair, he says something from the other side of the door. “What?” you ask, and open it.
“It’s gonna be okay,” he says. “I mean, you’re gonna be okay.”
You call him a weirdo and then return to the sink, dunking half your head under the faucet. When you look back in the mirror, you are smiling a little.
You have breakfast with your friend; you tell her about the night before. You feel so good, you say. At peace, or something. The next day, her house burns to the ground. Your friend is fine, but one of her roommate’s houseguests is killed in the blaze. You are thinking about fire inspectors examining your hot bones among the cinders as you drive out of town and south through the Central Valley. The air is dry and the traffic terrible, but you can see orchards for miles. The light is gold.
Dream House as Plot Twist
You spend the rest of your time in San Diego writing, drinking scotch, taking long walks down to the beach with your classmates, and pulling massive bullwhips of kelp out of the ocean. You and Val talk every other day. One day, she asks if she can accompany you on your way back to Iowa, when you’re done.
You pick her up in LA. She is windswept and beautiful, and the two of you bundle into the car and drive. You blast Beyoncé’s “Best Thing I Never Had” as you drive toward the Grand Canyon. You get there near sunset, and you lead her to the edge and you talk about the depth and ancientness of it all. The photo you take there is one of your favorites: Val staring out at the vast expanse of space, carved inch by inch by water and wind and time. Her mouth is hanging open, her dark curls blowing around her face.
A few days later, on a friend’s foldout couch in New Mexico, you reach out for each other in the dark. Val asks if she can kiss you, and you say yes.
Every day, you drive and talk about the woman in the Dream House. At night, you curl into each other.
You visit every tourist trap in Roswell, New Mexico. You sleep at a shady motel in southern Colorado, where an elderly couple next door smokes weed that pours through the flimsy shared wall, and signs warn about bears. You drive up a mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park, your tiny car winding up narrow paths and sharp switchbacks until you reach the peak. You visit your cousins and their new baby in Nebraska; the baby’s head is stained purple from gentian violet.
You talk about her, the woman in the Dream House, but you also talk about who you were before her, and who you are hoping to be after.
Eventually, you and Val will come to love each other outside this context. You will move in together, get engaged, get married. But in the beginning, this is what holds you together: the knowledge that the two of you are not alone.
V
Two or three things I know for sure and one of t
hem is that telling the story all the way through is an act of love.
—Dorothy Allison
Dream House as Nightmare on Elm Street
Seven years on and I still dream about it, even though I am four houses/three lovers/two states/one wife past the Dream House; and the dreams aren’t terribly unlike those I had when I was a kid, the ones in which I could hear the distant thumping footsteps of some unseen monster. The footsteps never sped up or slowed down but remained horribly, terribly even, and when I’d try to hide (because hiding was all I could do; there never seemed to be the possibility of opening the door and going out into the world beyond the house) there’d be creatures in my way: a skeleton under the bed, a ventriloquist’s dummy behind the shower curtain, a zombie in the closet. And while they were terrible, and I had the sense in that dream that I could not share a hiding space with them, I also recognized that they were hiding because they were scared, smaller monsters terrified of that large, unseen thing, and as I ran from room to room the steady footsteps of the oncoming thing never faltered. And so seven years on I am still terrified that if I force myself awake (as I learned to do as a child), she will step out of the dream and into the waking world where I am safe and so far away.
Dream House as Talisman
When Val and I started dating, I still had a year left in Iowa City. I saw the woman from the Dream House often; on the streets and at bookstores, making the town her own. I had not yet trained my body to resist the nauseated panic those sightings brought me, and so Val got me a vial of angelica root from a store in Salem, Massachusetts. It looked like wood chips, smelled funky and spicy. I bought a locket on a long, burnished chain and tapped the fragments of root into the pendant.
“I do not believe in this,” I said.
“Wear it,” she said. “Let it work.”
So I did. Who knows if it warded anyone off, but here’s what it definitely did do: tapped against my breastbone, smelled like bad incense. Every so often, the clasp loosened, and the fragments spilled down my front or into my bra. When I got undressed at night, I’d notice the chamber of it hanging open, waiting to be refilled. It reminded me that Val cared about me, and also that nothing can keep you safe.
Dream House as Myth
When you try to talk about the Dream House afterward, some people listen. Others politely nod while slowly closing the door behind their eyes; you might as well be a proselytizing Jehovah’s Witness or an encyclopedia peddler.49 Kind to you in person, what they say to others makes its way back to you: We don’t know for certain that it’s as bad as she says. The woman from the Dream House seems perfectly fine, even nice. Maybe things were bad, but it’s changed? Relationships are like that, right? Love is complicated.50 Maybe it was rough, but was it really abusive? What does that mean, anyway? Is that even possible?
You will never feel as desperate and fucked up and horrible as you do when you hear those things. Once, a woman drunkenly touches your elbow at a party and says, “I believe you,” in your ear, and you cry so hard you have to leave. You walk home in the dark over a footbridge and see a fat raccoon waddling up the riverbed.
The raccoon is a trickster; everyone knows that. He doesn’t look up, he doesn’t speak to you, he just keeps going. But keeping going is a way of speaking. You hear him. He’s saying you will fight this fight for the rest of your days.
49. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C423.3, Taboo: revealing experiences in other world.
50. “Experiencing the ordinary brutality of love does not make one a victim. It makes one an adult,” Maureen Dowd wrote of Joyce Maynard, when Maynard published a memoir about how a decades-older J. D. Salinger seduced, abused, and disposed of her when she was eighteen. What, I wonder, is Maureen’s definition of ordinary? Brutality? Love?
Dream House as Death Wish
Afterward—when she will not stop trying to talk to you or emailing you with flowery apologies on Yom Kippur, and when people do not believe what you tell them about her and the Dream House—you’ll wish she had hit you. Hit you hard enough that you’d have bruised in grotesque and obvious ways, hard enough that you took photos, hard enough that you went to the cops, hard enough that you could have gotten the restraining order you wanted. Hard enough that the common sense that evaded you for the entirety of your time in the Dream House had been knocked into you. You have this fantasy, this fucked-up fantasy, of being able to whip out your phone and pull up some awful photo of yourself, looking glazed and disinterested and half your face is covered in a pulsing star. This is, as you said, fucked up: there are probably millions of people on the blunt end of a lover’s fist who pray for the opposite, daily or even hourly, and to put that sort of wish into the universe is demented in the extreme.
You will wish for it anyway. Clarity is an intoxicating drug, and you spent almost two years without it, believing you were losing your mind, believing you were the monster, and you want something black and white more than you’ve ever wanted anything in this world.
Dream House as Proof
So many cells in my body have died and regenerated since the days of the Dream House. My blood and taste buds and skin have long since re-created themselves. My fat still remembers, but just barely—within a few years, it will have turned itself over completely. My bones too.
But my nervous system remembers. The lenses of my eyes. My cerebral cortex, with its memory and language and consciousness. They will last forever, or at least as long as I do. They can still climb onto the witness stand. My memory has something to say about the way trauma has altered my body’s DNA, like an ancient virus.
I think a lot about what evidence, had it been measured or recorded or kept, would help make my case. Not in a court of law, exactly, because there are many things that happen to us that are beyond the purview of even a perfectly executed legal system. But the court of other people, the court of the body, the court of queer history.
In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, José Esteban Muñoz writes, “The key to queering evidence, and by that I mean the ways in which we prove queerness and read queerness, is by suturing it to the concept of ephemera. Think of ephemera as a trace, the remains, the things that are left, hanging in the air like a rumor.”
That ephemera: The recorded sound waves of her speech on one axis and a precise measurement of the flood of adrenaline and cortisol in my body on the other. Witness statements from the strangers who anxiously looked at us sideways in public places. A photograph of her grip on my arm in Florida, with measurements of the shadows to indicate depth of indentation; an equation to represent the likely pressure. A wire looped through my hair, ready to record her hiss. The rancid smell of anger. The metal tang of fear in the back of my throat.
None of these things exist. You have no reason to believe me.
“Ephemeral evidence is rarely obvious,” Muñoz says, “because it is needed to stand against the harsh lights of mainstream visibility and the potential tyranny of the fact.”
What is the value of proof? What does it mean for something to be true? If a tree falls in the woods and pins a wood thrush to the earth, and she shrieks and shrieks but no one hears her, did she make a sound? Did she suffer? Who’s to say?
Dream House as Public Relations
And haven’t men been gaslighting women, abusing their lovers, harassing their girlfriends, murdering their wives for as long as human history has existed? And isn’t their violence always a footnote, an acceptable causality? David Foster Wallace threw a coffee table at Mary Karr and pushed her out of a moving car, but no one ever really talks about it. Carl Andre almost certainly shoved Ana Mendieta out the thirty-fourth-story window of their Greenwich Village apartment and got away with it.51 In Mexico, William Burroughs shot Joan Vollmer in the head; her death, he said later, made him into a writer. These stories are so common that they are no longer shocking in any meaningful sense; it is more surprising when there is no evidence of a talented man having hurt someone at all. (I con
fess, I never quite believe it; I just assume those men are better at hiding than most.)
I have spent years struggling to find examples of my own experience in history’s queer women. I tore through book after book about the queer women of the past, pen poised over paper, wondering what would happen if they had let the world know they were unmade by someone with just as little power as they. Did Susan B. Anthony’s womanizing extend to psychological torment? What did Elizabeth Bishop really say to Lota de Macedo Soares when she’d been drinking heavily? Did their voices crawl with jealousy? Did they hurl inkwells and figurines? Did any of them gingerly touch their bruises and know that explaining would be too complicated? Did any of them wonder if what had happened to them had any name at all?
I’ll never forget the gut punch I felt when one of the first lesbian couples married in Massachusetts got divorced five years later—a kind of embarrassed panic. I was recently graduated, newly out, trying to date women in Berkeley. I remember feeling dread, as though divorces weren’t the kind of thing happening all around me at every moment, as if they weren’t a complete nonentity. But that’s the minority anxiety, right? That if you’re not careful, someone will see you—or people who share your identity—doing something human and use it against you. The irony, of course, is that queer folks need that good PR; to fight for rights we don’t have, to retain the ones we do. But haven’t we been trying to say, this whole time, that we’re just like you?
In the Dream House Page 16