It’s not being radical to point out that people on the fringe have to be better than people in the mainstream, that they have twice as much to prove. In trying to get people to see your humanity, you reveal just that: your humanity. Your fundamentally problematic nature. All the unique and terrible ways in which people can, and do, fail. But people have trouble with this concept. It’s like how, after Finding Nemo, people who were ill equipped to take care of them rushed to buy clown fish and how the fish died. People love an idea, even if they don’t know what to do with it. Even if they only know how to do exactly the wrong thing.
51. Andre was tried for, and acquitted of, Mendieta’s death. In his 911 call, Andre told the operator, “My wife is an artist, and I’m an artist, and we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more, eh, exposed to the public than she was. And she went to the bedroom, and I went after her, and she went out the window.” Whenever Andre has an exhibition, protestors show up. They create outlines of bodies on the ground, as if someone has fallen from a great height. They leave animal viscera smeared on sidewalks. They ask, “¿Dondé está Ana Mendieta?”
Dream House as Cabin in the Woods
I went to Yaddo to write this book in full performance mode. I didn’t realize it until a few weeks in, when I was midlaugh middinner and, for the first time in ages, heard myself. As a teenager I would have given my eyeteeth for this sense of sureness. I performed as a witch, a socialite. I wore mermaid-cut skirts and silk jumpsuits and elegant, floor-length sequined dresses and faux-fur wraps and black frocks and glittering rhinestone earrings. I didn’t hold back on my opinions. I drank wine at dinner and took second helpings and strutted around the grounds. I slept mere feet from where I wrote, in a cabin in the trees. I played Pokémon Go on long walks and vied for control of the property’s single gym (located, abstractly, in a grand and elegant fountain at the base of the slope that dropped down from the mansion) with an avatar called “Hornbuckets.” It was autumn, and every day leaves and pine needles came down; I was forever picking detritus out of my bra. It got cold, and warm, and cold again. It snowed, but the snow melted the next day. I drove to southern Vermont for a reading on Halloween with a bunch of other writers and blew out a tire on a dark country road on the way home, and as we waited for AAA we sat in the car and told stories about our worst jobs.
In the mansion on the property, the furniture was gathered to the center of the room and draped in sheets. I saw a painting of the dead children, dressed in black. I thought I heard my name in a half whisper, but when I turned around there was no one. “Sound moves weirdly in here,” one of the residents explained. The rooms were, in turn, monastic, bombastic. I nursed a crush on a playwright and a nonfiction writer both, rolled my eyes at a sculptor, felt great fondness for badass visual artists who were breaking into the fine arts boys’ club before I was born. I talked about supplements with a painter and comforted a composer. Donald Trump was elected president. People cried at the dinner table. Toward the end, I told the story about the Dream House, the funny version: the version where the irony of my relationship with Val and the universality of shitty exes are at the forefront. I kept my eyes open: for deer, for ghosts.
Dream House as Prisoner’s Dilemma
Many years later, you stick a memory card into your SLR and find dozens of naked photos of the woman in the Dream House. You jerk involuntarily when the first image comes onto the preview screen.
You remember the afternoon so clearly: how the soft, indirect natural light filtered into the room; how she was naked and pale and lounging, and how her cunt was flushed maroon with blood. (It was either just before fucking or just afterward.) You got down between her knees and took dozens of photos, loving the ombre of her, from white to pink to purple. The memory is not sexual; it is distant and removed, as if you are watching a movie about someone else.
You sit there for a while, thinking about the photos. You could keep them, but there is no reason to, good or bad. You have no desire for blackmail or the kind of revenge they could make possible; you do not find them erotic anymore. (How quickly your desire curdled when you saw her for what she was, like the scene in The Shining when Jack Nicholson pulls away from a sexy woman to find a decomposing creature in her place.) They are simply a memory, and as you overwrite the data card, erasing them forever, you feel an irrational twinge of loss.
Dream House as Parallel Universe
You occasionally find yourself idly thinking about how it could have gone right. Or, maybe gone isn’t the best word, because it suggests that nothing was under anyone’s control; the outcome is merely fate, or chaos theory. But assuming she’d been normal, assuming she hadn’t homed in on your soft spots, assuming she’d not been shot through with that dark, smoky core of poison, what would have happened? Any number of things. Maybe you and she and Val would have stayed a threesome, a polyamory success story. Maybe you wouldn’t have stayed together but you would have remained dear friends, a trio growing old parallel to each other. Or maybe it would have been messy and sad. Sometimes you wish you’d had the chance to find out.
Dream House as Self-Help Best Seller
When it started, I believed I was special. It was a terrible thing to discover that I was common, that everything that happened to me—a crystalline, devastating landscape I navigated in my bare feet—was detailed in books and reports, in statistics. It was terrible because I wanted to believe that my love was unique and my pain was unique, as all of us do. (“Having now described the fiasco with the Professor at length,” Terry Castle writes, “I confess, I feel on the one hand a bit embarrassed by its sheer triteness: my own sitting-duckness, my seducer’s casebook callousness.”) But then I opened book after book about lesbian abuse and saw pseudonymed women regurgitating everything that happened to me. There is a pie chart that encompasses those years of my life. A pie chart!
The first book about lesbian abuse was published the year I was born. Not the most ancient scholarship in the world, but old enough. Why did no one tell me? But who would have told me? I knew so few queer people, and most of them were my age, still figuring things out themselves. I imagine that, one day, I will invite young queers over for tea and cheese platters and advice, and I will be able to tell them: you can be hurt by people who look just like you. Not only can it happen, it probably will, because the world is full of hurt people who hurt people. Even if the dominant culture considers you an anomaly, that doesn’t mean you can’t be common, common as fucking dirt.
Dream House as Cliché
We think of clichés as boring and predictable, but they are actually one of the most dangerous things in the world. Your brain can’t engage a cliché, not properly—it skitters right over the phrase or sentence or idea without a second thought. To describe an abusive situation is almost certainly to deploy cliché: “If I can’t have you, no one can.” “Who will believe you?” “It was good, then it was bad, then it was good again.” “If I stayed, I would have died.” Awful and dehumanizing, and yet straight out of central casting. This triteness, this predictability, has a flattening effect, making singularly boring what is in fact a defining and terrible experience.
And so as I waded through account after account of queer domestic abuse, little details stood out. This is the one that stuck with me the most:
A woman named Anne Franklin wrote an essay about her own abuse in Gay Community News in 1984. Her blonde, femme lover—a healer who gave massages and did star charts; who had, before meeting her, almost become a nun—once stoned her on a beach in France. “I know it sounds incredible,” she wrote. “The image is cartoonish.” She swam out into the water to escape the stoning. (The stoning.52 This image has followed me for so long; what both has been and is a punishment for homosexuality, inflicted by the woman she loved. Swimming out into the ocean to get away. Stone. Stone butch. Stonewall. Queer history studded with stones, like jewelry.) “Later,” she wrote, “we both laughed about it.” Laughed about how she, Anne, was stoned on a beach in France.
How she ran deeper and deeper into the water, like D-Day in reverse.
52. I think about this because it gets at this question of the way that queer abuse feels like—is—homophobia, the same way abuse in heterosexual relationships feels like—is—sexism. I am doing this because I can get away with it; I can get away with it because you exist on some cultural margin, some societal periphery.
Dream House as Anechoic Chamber
During a visit to Iowa City, you go to an anechoic chamber deep in the earth. A friend comes with you, and as you are both led down the stairs it occurs to you that this is not unlike the opening of “The Cask of Amontillado.” Your guide ushers you inside and swings the heavy door shut behind you, and the two of you lie on your backs on a metal dock that hangs in the air.
Here, and only here, everything makes a sound. The thrum and rush of your blood, your liquid swallows. Even your tongue running along the upper ridge of your mouth, which sounds like a piece of furniture being dragged over a bed of gravel. Here, your body is exactly as grotesque as you know it to be. Here, you are not dead, but everything around you might as well be.
There are no hallucinations, exactly, except for a strange buzzing on the edge of your hearing, like, your friend observes, cicadas at the height of summer. The buzzing isn’t there, of course; your minds are simply imbuing the silence. You could go mad if you stay here too long, you think. Your mind would fill in the gaps and the blanks and God knows what it would fill them with.
What happens when there are no echoes, here in this underground crypt?
You clap and clap but nothing answers back.
Dream House as Generation Starship
Eventually, everyone forgets. That’s the worst part, maybe. It’s been so long since anyone’s seen Earth; so long since that first crew made their way shipward, leaving behind their beloved planet wreathed in smoke and ice. They had to get out—they knew it, everyone knew it, but they were lucky, and found a ship.
And they set course to Somewhere Else and settled down, and when they had children they told their children the story of where they used to live. They left out the worst parts, maybe, because even now, surrounded by chrome and glass and stars, the acute bite of the planet’s betrayal has lessened. And by the time they passed on, and the ship was still careening Away, the children of the children of the first crew had only the faintest wisps of understanding of what Used to Be. By the time they got to Somewhere Else (a beautiful planet, with singing stones and citrine trees and soil that smelled like cumin and water you could walk over), no one could even remember why they’d left Earth to begin with.
“I suppose it must have been terrible,” they said uncertainly. “We took so much effort to leave. It must have been the worst place.”
But that nagging sense of doubt was so profound they eventually gave it a name:
Nonstalgia (noun)
The unsettling sensation that you are never be able to fully access the past; that once you are departed from an event, some essential quality of it is lost forever.
A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to.
Dream House as L’esprit de L’escalier
When I was preparing to fly to Cuba with my brother to see our ancestral home, I discovered that Santa Clara, Cuba—the city where my grandfather was born and raised, where he was once forced to eat a soup made from his pet rooster—is the sister city of Bloomington, Indiana. How was this possible? Of all the cities in the world, how were these two connected by such an arbitrary umbilical cord?
After we got there, we took an air-conditioned car from Havana to Varadero, then a hot, fragrant bus from Varadero to Santa Clara. I barely speak Spanish; my brother does and had also been there before, and he was sweet and supportive and vulnerable and took good care of me. As if my stomach sensed my stress, I got sick, very sick, and one morning spent four hours within twenty feet of my grandfather’s childhood home vomiting so hard I strained my diaphragm in the watery dawn light. Afterward, the owner of the casa particular did a spell on me; performed some sort of obscure prayer with a measuring tape, banished my indigestion (as she called it) to somewhere else. “It’s not me,” she said. “I am merely a conduit to God, praise God.” Then she made me drink an entire bottle of tonic water, which I’d never had without gin.
Walking around Santa Clara was beautiful and eerie, because I couldn’t stop thinking about my grandfather walking through these streets. I also kept imagining that we were walking around a parallel map in Bloomington, Indiana. That’s how sister cities should work: I could walk around both at the same time, separated by some thin, mystical scrim, and if I went to the right place at the right time I could peek into the other one. I could twitch a curtain next to a certain chicken and be staring at the Dream House, at the people who live there now.
The streets were filled with people and taxis drawn by bikes and horses and midcentury cars in varying states of disrepair. The famous hotel on the square was the same color scheme as my grandparents’ former house in Maryland.
We approached a school, where children in uniform were pouring out of the entrance. “That’s where Granddaddy went to school,” my brother said. “Right there.” He swung his finger to a nearby bank on the same square. “When I was here with Granddaddy,” he said, “he told me a story about how one day he was heading home from school when he got caught in a downpour, so he went under the roof of the bank to stay dry until it stopped. An expensive car pulled up and the window rolled down. It was a rich, white Cuban man. He summoned Granddaddy to the window.”
“What did he want?”
“I don’t know. But he probably thought, ‘Oh, I can summon this little brown kid out into the rain to do, I know, whatever, and he’ll do it.’ But Granddaddy refused, and the man kept gesturing, and eventually Granddaddy told him to go fuck himself.”
This was how my brother told the story. I can’t exactly imagine my grandfather—a funny, affable man who left Santa Clara and Cuba altogether, and loved Radio Shack and free pens and watches and tinkering with electronics and building birdhouses, who at that moment was back in the United States slipping down the embankment of dementia—telling anyone to go fuck himself, and yet I recognize this version of my grandfather all the same. He didn’t apologize, or sob, or beg.
My brother and I drank watery El Presidentes at a café near the bank underneath a tapestry of Che, and I let the phrase go fuck yourself roll around in my mouth; a satisfying response, years too late.
Dream House as Vaccine
When I was a kid, I learned that you develop immunity when an illness rages through your body. Your body is brilliant, even when you are not. It doesn’t just heal—it learns. It remembers. (All of this, of course, if the virus doesn’t kill you first.)
After the Dream House, I developed a sixth sense. It goes off at random times—meeting a new classmate or coworker, a friend’s new girlfriend, a stranger at a party. A physical revulsion that comes on the heels of nothing at all, something akin to the sour liquid rush of saliva that precedes vomiting. Inconvenient, irritating, but important: my brilliant body’s brilliant warning.
Dream House as Ending
That there’s a real ending to anything is, I’m pretty sure, the lie of all autobiographical writing. You have to choose to stop somewhere. You have to let the reader go.
Where to stop this story? Val’s and my wedding, on a hot day in June? Some narratively satisfying confrontation between the woman from the Dream House and me? If you grasp the story by the base and pull, will the ripping sound indicate the looseness of the roots? What is left behind in the soil?
Should I loop back to a memory from the Dream House? A lovely one? Will that work, a contrast between what could have been and what was? A memory of the two of us f
reshly returned from a local winery, sipping on a spicy Zinfandel and eating some kind of feta dip and telling a story?
One day the woman from the Dream House will die, and I will die, and Val will die, and John and Laura will die, and my brother will die, and my parents will die, and her parents will die, and everyone who ever knew any of us will die. Is that the end of the story? Time’s mindless, chattering advancement?
There is a Panamanian folktale that ends with: “My tale goes only to here; it ends, and the wind carries it off.” It’s the only true kind of ending.
Sometimes you have to tell a story, and somewhere, you have to stop.
Dream House as Epilogue
I wrote a large part of this book in rural eastern Oregon.53 I stayed in a cabin at the edge of a playa, a lake that had mostly dried up during the summer. That part of the world is high desert country; the weather was cold at night and hot during the day. The air was so bone-dry I drank water every hour but still felt unquenchably thirsty. One morning a drop of blood plopped wetly onto my desk, and I went to the bathroom and used toilet paper to stanch the nosebleed. When I walked back I realized I’d left a pat-pat-pat trail of blood across the floor.
In the Dream House Page 17