Sex and Death in the American Novel

by Martinez, Sarah

  I must have spent an hour on the couch looking out the window, feeling hollow, feeling full of something heavy, feeling both at once, before I went back to the study. I didn't want to be there. I didn't know where to be, or how to be anywhere. I looked around the room, then sat down in my desk chair, and stared some more. The feeling that nothing I decided to do would be right weighed me down. I hadn't been into my email for over a month. I opened the laptop and started it up.

  My inbox was indeed crowded. Much sympathy on the death of my brother. I made a folder in my email program and moved all of these in there.

  Eric sent me a dozen links to articles about what was going on around town, as well as links to a few songs he thought would cheer me up. This was what I needed—diversion. I finished sorting the emails and closed everything down. I called Eric and he came over an hour later.

  I drank and fucked my way through the next year. I was so tired of dragging Tristan's memory around with me, but I couldn't let him go either. I continued to write, caffeine- and nicotine-fueled sessions inspired by my nighttime antics. Of all the men from that year, not one can I say was especially memorable. In the end, neither sex, nor alcohol, nor even dancing pulled me out of the depths of my grief, or wiped away the hateful thoughts, the anxious dread, the knowledge that it was a matter of time before I also self-destructed. No man was big enough, or cocky enough, or mean enough to totally distract me from the voices in my head.

  What pulled me back to the land of the living was a goddam tabloid rag. I was standing in line at Safeway and saw the headline:

  Little girl Alice missing ten years, freed from life in a box.

  Read her horrifying story here!

  I bought a copy of the magazine and hurried home. It was a four-page article, complete with color photos of the room; a cheaply paneled affair with gray carpeting and bent blinds on the windows. There was a photo of the bed, messed up, a dark-blue blanket and white sheets with light-green flowers on them. Then there was the box itself, a long wooden rectangle with a screen placed in it a few inches from one end. Another photo showed the box opened, a thin strip of material lining the bottom.

  For a long time I stared at the magazine, stared at my book, Tropic of Cancer, open on the coffee table to hold my place, the brown and purple cover inset with a photo of couples dancing. I couldn't figure out what bothered me for the longest time. I flashed to all my random hookups and wondered if I'd ever come close to something like this myself. A sick part of me wondered if being kept as a slave would finally erase the guilt and tortured thoughts from my mind. Probably not. I would only have more time to think about how I failed my brother, and how I wasn't important enough to him for him to stick it out. Locked up tight under some stinky old man's bed. Now her mind was broken in places she was not even aware of.

  “Fuck me,” I said, low under my breath, satisfied by the way my voice sounded in the room. Something needed to be said, but words couldn't begin to cover it. I thought about the voice of the narrator—Ol’ Hank—I'd been reading. He would note the risk of police involvement, the responsibility of keeping a woman like that, especially challenging would be dealing with the “monthlies.” A different sort of energy came with making the connections, with turning my horror and hatred of this awful brutality toward Henry Miller himself, toward all the ways he talked about women, and I set aside the parts of him I admired, the free mind, the creative flow, the endless capacity for adventure, to stoke the fires of an emotion I didn't know I was capable of.

  In Henry Miller, in the Marquis de Sade, in various Victorian works, women existed only for the purposes of men's enjoyment. I related as a reader on some strange plane where I unhooked my own feelings and either put myself in the perpetrator's shoes, imagining the freedom that came with this power over another, or wondered if there wasn't a certain freedom in existing purely for the pleasure of another with no thought for one's own feeling as did Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. The context was escape, oblivion, release.

  Here, reading about this woman and how her life had been destroyed, and the endless seconds of fear, pain, terror, loneliness, hopelessness, I was angry. Why was this possible? Because men since forever believed they weren't accountable, their wants were more important and largely, with the exception of some hairy feminists poking their fingers in their faces, they were absolutely right.

  I spent twenty minutes on a sloppy blog post asking my readers for opinions, then stared at the computer screen. I attached a link to the fund set up for Alice, to pay, partly no doubt for the astronomical therapy bills she was about to rack up. I also sent the link to Uncle Curtis, trusty trust officer, requesting he send a tidy sum as well. Tristan could afford it. I could afford it.

  I was not generally one to take pity on others, at least until now. Pity was for victims. This was different. Alice had no job skills, no life skills. All I saw for this woman in the coming years was sorrow. I couldn't imagine anyone fully recovering from something so horrific and here I was crying in my vodka over my brother who had everything going for him and still couldn't make life work.

  I wanted to scream at someone, to hurt someone, and with that an idea began to form. I wanted to put a man in a box and I wanted to dig into the mind of the sort of person who could pull that off. It would be incredibly novel and high-minded if I could also address the hypocrisy that said men, once privilege was stripped away, were any worse than women. Why couldn't a woman pull off something this awful?

  I finally fell asleep at three in the morning, waking again at six with the sun turning from grey to fuchsia. I scrawled notes in a notebook by the bed, the first images I had when I woke. Victorian England, costumes, grit, grime, grimacing faces. Late that day I fired off a ten-page short story called, Boy in a Box. In it, two people are talking; you don't know their sex for a while. They are talking like men, using words like tail, ass, comparing size, race, education level, personalities: the tall ones, the short ones, the ones that fuck around, the ones who look at you and you just know they want it. The story ends with the revelation that one of the women has lured a man to her home, drugged him, lobotomized him and put him in a box under the bed. I was on fire, the more I typed, the more I jotted down to add later, ideas tore through my mind and I had to work to keep up. After ten pages it seemed I could draw the story out easily past fifty thousand words.

  The next week I spent polishing that story like I hadn't done with anything else. I liked the angle of making the style somewhere between Machen's Great God Pan or Trocchi, like one of those old-school porn guys. I thought it was brilliant, and at the same time felt like I was trying to say something for once instead of just making up the most outrageous story I could. Here it became more important how I told the story, and I could hear Tristan's words in my head: “It's about the associations I want my readers to have, it's about context.”

  At this I typed straight into the document: FUCK YOU TRISTAN. I finally had something I could have talked to him about—something serious to express—and he was not there for me.

  A week later I sent the story to my editor at Rex's Cabin along with an outline so he would know I had an idea of how to fill in the rest of the words that would be necessary to make a whole book. He responded hours later and told me that instead of the usual e-book format, he would publish a print version; he liked the story that much. He sent the story back with electronic notes in the margins. In one place, before the reader knows that it was women talking, he wrote: “I want to feel what they feel when they talk about these crimes. Do they feel any guilt?”

  Guilt, an interesting idea. No, just like the grand Marquis, there would never be any guilt.

  I spent three months fleshing the whole thing out. I outlined, rearranged, I spent I don't know how many late nights up imagining the nude bodies chained to cinder block walls and giggling with a creepy lunatic edge when I imagined it. By and large, the victims in all those serial killer movies—I rolled the word over my tongue a few times, victims—were always
women. I fueled my creative burst with more articles that made me angry, loud music, and the worst porn I could find—greasy, aging old men with beady eyes, leering, stroking, and finally impaling overly made-up girls with fake boobs, and worse, black and white German stuff where you really couldn't tell if the pain inflicted was real or not. All these brought me right back to the feeling I first had sitting there eyeing Tropic of Cancer and reading over that article.

  Occasionally, when I was channeling a particularly strong sense of outrage, I would remember this ex-convict I dragged home a few times after Tristan died. Instead of the oblivion and diversion I craved, his kindness and inability to go along with my more base requests, constant requests for time and attention drained me, and reminded me how little feeling I had left. I hated myself for using him. As it was, I barely had energy to deal with my own pain.

  Sleep became an elusive lover. I had to stop working after dinner or I was unable to turn it off even for a few hours. I was high on ideas, imagery, and there was a momentum and electricity I got that went well beyond the usual sense of accomplishment at the completion of a story.

  Eric came over and read the whole mess twice, once after the first rewrite and again right before I sent it off.

  “Sweetie, I had no idea you were so twisted,” he said when he brought the stack of manuscript pages back to me. His eyes sparkled but his mouth was set in a hard line.

  I shrugged, worn out. I never thought I would spend that much time on anything in my life.

  When I mailed the finished version and they acknowledged receipt, it took them two long weeks to get back to me. I was insane during that time. I knew how long it took to review a manuscript, still this time I felt like I did when I wrote my first little stories, waiting for my brother or Eric to pass judgment. I occupied myself with reading the comments posted on my blog, posting more of my own and a real dialogue got going. A professor of Women's Studies got involved at one point. It was exciting to be at the center of a debate like this. I was tired of the role of victim for my gender. I was tired of propagating it in my own work, encouraging women to fantasize about being held down, subjugated, finding freedom in giving control of their lives to a man as the heroine did in The Story of O. I was outraged that it had taken me this long to decide to do something about it. I was tired of letting the memories of the men in my life continue to drag me down. I was outraged, tired of being tired, and finally elated to find that one more time I could count on my work to make my life make sense.

  Mother came over a few nights later and took me and Eric to dinner at The Brooklyn. I wore a sheer black top with a purple and white fur collar that tickled my ears and chin. Underneath I wore a lacy black bra. On my feet were strappy platform heels which would come off as soon as I hit the dance floor. My hair was pinned up with a black feather clip, and I slipped a sparkly black headband over the top of my head. My eyes were lined in heavy black liner, with glittery charcoal powder on the lids, and I complemented this with a deep burgundy shade over my lips. A bit much for The Brooklyn, but perfect for a night out with Eric afterward. I felt like getting in trouble this night.

  We sat at a booth in the bar; a wood-paneled, comfortable area with a view of a gray street and smooth concrete buildings outside. The atmosphere was like something out of a movie, all shiny paneling and brass, with a floor checkered in ancient black and white tiles.

  Mom was well-dressed too, in her usual pantsuit; her hair smooth and curled at the ends, resting on her shoulders. It was good to see her like this again.

  When we were settled, Mom said to Eric, “Tristan loved this place.” She gave me a sappy look and I felt I had to complete her sentence.

  I turned to Eric. “He liked sampling the bourbons with his oysters.”

  Eric didn't say anything, but took my mother's hand and squeezed it. She closed her eyes a moment and then brightened. “So how is your father, still traveling the world?”

  Eric took his hand back and said, “As always. Leaving me in charge probably isn't the smartest thing he ever did though.”

  Eric explained how since grad school he still found himself floundering, leaning on the senior workers at his father's office, knowing they didn't approve of the boss's son telling them what to do and he didn't blame them. Only recently had he stopped partying every night, deciding that he had nothing else to do with himself so he'd better take this job seriously or risk having nothing.

  She listened with that doting look she reserved only for my brother. “You'll do fine.” My mother gave him an encouraging nod, as if that were the end of things. “You two sure are dressed up this evening.”

  Eric turned to better face both of us, his leather pants squeaking and his pearlescent silk shirt absorbing and reflecting the low light in the restaurant, and said, “Vivi is publishing again. We are going to Neighbours to celebrate.”

  I told her about Boy in a Box, Rex's Cabin.

  “This is the one you thought of from that magazine article, right?” she asked.

  “That one,” I said, happy that she remembered the conversation I'd had with her about it. She was silent for a bit, her lips moved at the corners, her eyes sparkled, but she neither broke into a smile nor a frown.

  “This is real print this time. I know you think more of those than the ebooks.” The knot in my stomach held. Her expression was so hard to read, I had no idea how to behave without the routine about how once again I'd defamed the family name. Maybe she was finally past caring.

  “I'm still using my real name,” I said, pushing for a reaction from her.

  She pushed her plate out of the way and stroked the fur on my jacket. “I love this. I'm not brave enough to wear something like this. Even when I was young, I could have never pulled it off.” She looked from me to Eric and took a sip of her wine.

  Moving back and watching me a moment she said, “I congratulate you,” and raised her glass and we all toasted a weird awkward toast, during which my stomach went from clenched and painful to nervous butterflies. “I want you to do something with me,” she said.

  Relief at not having to justify myself or argue I said too quickly, “Anything.”

  “Jasper Caldwell is in town promoting his new book. He is speaking at Benaroya Hall. I want you to come with me.”

  I sat back. “Really?” I didn't know what to say to her pleading look, but the thought of my brother's hero, and my villain, made my head ache and my shoulders go stiff and achy.

  I thought of Tristan standing there, expectant and hopeful in front of Jasper and stuffed it down. She didn't know any of this. She gazed at me. Her cheeks had filled in, she wore makeup and her blue eyes shone out from behind meticulously separated lashes. Her lips—even after the meal—shone with her signature cream lipstick. Finally out of her robe and off the island. I nodded and pasted an enthusiastic smile on my face.

  Mother drove us to the Hall and we got comfortable in the balcony seats she'd sprung for. I read through the program, rolled my eyes and kicked my feet in the air with exaggerated laughter reading his bio, and the list of his accomplishments. He had won awards for his short stories, essays; two of his three novels had been nominated for prestigious national awards.

  My body was there but my heart wasn't in it. Looking at the picture of his smug face in the program, I reveled in a hateful glee; like a common schoolyard bully, I wanted to make fun. “Look Mom,” I said. “He's been writing since he was seventeen! Honestly, how much experience can you gain holed up in your room typing. He hasn't lived; at least Tristan went out and had fun before he got serious. Isn't a writer supposed to live?”

  My mother stared at me. “Vivianna. Please lower your voice,” she said, looking around. People filed in at intervals from doorways below us. A few came in and sat behind us or farther down the aisle. Eric gave me a look that questioned my behavior, but didn't say anything.

  I threw up my hands. I wanted to tell her all about Jasper Caldwell and how he'd left Tristan standing there almost literally
with his dick in his hands, and then stood him up the next day to boot. The tense look on her face cooled that urge. She seemed to really want to hear him again—maybe relive the time, just for a few more hours, a time in both of our lives when we were still complete. The warring urges to be obnoxious and play the good girl twisted me up inside.

  Before I could answer my mother, the lights went down and a white-haired woman walked up to the podium and spoke for several long minutes about the importance of Jasper's work, and listed his credentials. It was college all over again, like we couldn't read the program. Most of the people here were probably as in love with him as my mother was and already knew this stuff anyway. A New Yorker article at nineteen. An O. Henry Award at twenty-three. Finalist for the National Book Award for his second novel at twenty-seven. Now this current one was getting the right reviews in the right publications.

  After several long minutes of introduction, the woman stretched an arm toward the side of the stage and Jasper emerged tipping his head back to look up into the rafters, shielding his eyes from the stage lights. Since I'd seen him, he'd cut his hair, and it seemed to have darkened. Gone was the puffy geek look. Here stood a tall, slender, dark-haired guy with compact black spectacles and a deep-gray button-down shirt.

  He took a full minute to remove his jacket, folding it over once. He bent to his bag, dug through it, removing several scattered pages and placed the jacket on top of the bag and stood. He looked around, adjusted the microphone, and ran his hand through his lightly feathered hair. He took the glass of water that sat on the podium, brought it to his lips, took a sip, placed the glass back down and slid it to the side of the podium with the backs of his fingers. His fingers wrapped around the sheets of paper in front of him, tapped them into a neat orderly pile, the sound echoing crisp in the silent anticipation of the audience. Finally he placed his feet apart and looked out on the crowd.

  “Jeez, he knocked five minutes off his talk time right there,” I said. Mother shot me a look with narrow eyes and placed her finger to her lips. She leaned toward me and said, “I want to see this. Your brother thought so highly of him, I want to listen more closely this time.”