by Alana Massey
What indignities the demure and attractive wife endured during their decades of marriage will likely remain unknown. Her silence makes it tempting to project ideas onto her as a calculating plotter, lying in wait for the right moment to walk off into the sunset with almost a half billion dollars, never to be heard from again. I consider the unbridled anger of a man like Mel Gibson as he took it out on individual reporters and police and entire racial and religious groups. I have doubts that such frothing rage can be so easily extinguished when crossing over the threshold of his home, rendering it a tranquil sanctuary.
When I witnessed Gibson’s humiliating encounters with law enforcement and his ex-wife when I was younger, I would think of the embarrassment of his seven children, several of whom are close in age to me. Today, I think of his silent, smiling wife Robyn. I don’t assume to know the heart of Robyn Moore, but I can imagine that it took an almost pathological commitment to forgiveness and patience to last as long as she did. She stood by for such events until at last they were too much. I wonder, too, what the weight of keeping Mel Gibson’s secrets costs her. Robyn’s particular brand of retribution goes mostly undetected by the crude radars presently policing women’s behaviors because it is so tremendously skilled. Were it detected, she might be among the most vilified of all the crazy exes because of the nature of what she walked away with.
The common thread that weaves throughout these stories spanning time and socioeconomic stations and even international borders is not that these women’s actions were crazy, even loosely defined. Their crimes were in committing actions and seizing assets that are considered the exclusive entitlements of men. These are the objects that are believed to transfer status and prosperity to men. When women take them into their own hands out of either destructive impulses or wills to power, they must be dismissed as insane. They violated the sacred and highly gendered order of things and must be dismissed as aberrations. Diana smashing china to bits with a hammer looks irrational only when a woman’s body performs the destructive deed. When men destroy property in a fit, it is considered an acceptable expression of male rage. Some even find it arousing. Lorena Bobbitt took perhaps the most literal entitlement from a man: his own penis, which doubled as a weapon in their relationship. She seized control of it and deflated its power by removing it from the source of its power. And though Aaliyah never famously feuded with R. Kelly, I still like to think that it was something of a slap in the face that she did not let his manipulation and control define her and went on to an all-too-brief but still brilliant career.
Lopes’s burning a house down was not just a subversion of the fact that most arsonists are men but was the destruction of property, that precious commodity that for so long was owned exclusively by men. She burned his birthright to the ground. Taylor Swift has no literally destructive impulses, but her active destabilization of the music industry expectation that women are to be pining and lovesick by being sneering and hell-bent on revenge is another kind of destruction. It certainly wounded the egos of men like John Mayer, who went crying to tabloids over Taylor’s betrayal; this from a man who famously called Jessica Simpson “sexual napalm” and wrote a song about Jennifer Love Hewitt’s anatomy. That Taylor has amassed far more wealth in the process is still another way she has gone insane, turning men into muses that profit her rather than the other way around. And then there are the strong, silent wives like Robyn whose hearts are the safe havens for the secrets of men who have likely done far more unspeakable wrongs than we could ever know. They sacrifice much by not exposing the terrors of these men, but they are handsomely rewarded with the massive fortunes that men have controlled and used to nurture their own power for centuries.
I think of these women often when a man calls a woman a crazy ex-girlfriend as an insult, unaware that identifying a woman this way elevates her to a rogue hero of her gender rather than a disgrace to it. This growing cohort of crazy exes have sacrificed much to get where they are and to be given what they are owed. Many of my personal heroes from this particular canon are no longer alive. May they rest in power. But I am hopeful, too, that as more baby girls come up in the world, they will accept the burden of power we deserve and nurture it well so that it becomes undeniably their own. And then when no one is expecting them to, they will crack it open and take everything they were owed from it. I want these baby girls to live in a world where they know that once “bitch” and “crazy” have been taken back into our custody for good, it is time to come for the world.
Emparadised
On Joan Didion and Personal Mythology as Survival
EMPARADISED” IS A WORD USED to describe how the deserts of Southern California were transformed into the lush tree-lined cities we know today by enterprising gardeners and city planners. I read it once on a gardening website I don’t know how I got to because I have never gardened, but I liked the word and kept it with me to describe the place I come from. Memories of my adolescence in San Diego were of people with good looks and bad politics, impossibly bronzed residents dotting a landscape of adobe tract houses, endless highways, and strip malls designed by people whose experience of Mexican architecture is limited to the “It’s a Small World” attraction at Disneyland. I used the word to describe Southern California when I was vowing never to return.
The first time I reconsidered this vow I was lying on the beach at Silver Sands State Park in Connecticut. I had checked out a stack of books by mystical poets and a selection of women writers whose only shared characteristics were tasteful aloofness and thinness that lingers at the border between elegance and illness. Joan Didion, the reigning queen of this literary class, naturally featured heavily in the stack. It was the summer between my first and second years as a graduate student at Yale Divinity School where I was pursuing a Master of Arts in Religion, but it was by accident that I selected Didion’s novel Play It as It Lays, a book whose primary tensions center on evil and nothingness. The decision to apply to and enroll in divinity school was one of many haphazard attempts to seek the substance of my own suffering in books, though exploring questions of evil was a secondary benefit to my expensive exercise in self-discovery. My roommate there had once told me that hell, that infernal holding cell for evil, is simply the absence of God. It is nothing. Play It as It Lays more or less corroborated this explanation. It satisfied me.
This was a few years shy of that period of Joan Didion mania, followed soon by fatigue, a time between 2013 and 2015 when several publications of note were overrun with material about the author that culminated in a review of her biography in the Atlantic, which momentarily entertained the grim idea that “for all her brilliance, she might be deemed too haughty to tolerate, the ultimate white girl.”1 We were suddenly bombarded with stories on the literary and societal significance of Joan, two biographies of her were released, a Kickstarter campaign for a documentary about her was funded in record time, and the octogenarian Joan herself starred in a campaign for the elite fashion line Céline. Haley Mlotek at the Hairpin described the campaign as the convergence of two “mental shortcuts”: Joan as the patron saint of well-read white women in their twenties and Céline as a signifier for a discerning aesthetic eye for minimalist design, if not a bank account for purchasing said designs. Mlotek wrote, “I didn’t feel trolled because Céline was mocking me, or us, but because I had been so thoroughly and effectively target marketed, an experience that is like being a deer in branded headlights. We’ve been seen! I panicked. They know too much!”2
But that day on the beach in 2011 was before all that, or at least before I knew it. Back then, adoring Joan Didion was a private devotion that I could indulge without the attendant self-consciousness that comes with being too caught up in a cultural moment to really enjoy it. And so I recklessly imbued her fiction with images of Joan herself. I imagined the protagonist Maria Wyeth as physically identical to her, inserting her into the scenes as an avatar inspired by the many photos of Joan where she is either leaning onto or out of a car. Though the
photos rarely indicate the actual climate, they have hints of the desert complemented by her disinterested expression that never quite becomes a scowl. She smokes cigarettes indoors in several, too, a tragically lost art I’ve dared to engage in only while drunk or alone. Her words are known to conjure strong emotions in her readers, but Joan herself remains inscrutable. Fusing the attractive fiction of Joan established in my mind with the interior life of Maria Wyeth as set out on the page made a superheroine to imitate so that I might replace the effusive, clumsily emotive woman I was.
In the story, California is a state that comprises not gated communities and spray tans but extramarital affairs between film producers and impressively ambivalent women. It is a state connected by battered highways guarded by wizened amphibians, and the sordid mysteries of a destination where everyone has come to escape from someplace else. I envied Maria her sparse but carefully chosen words; I coveted the remarks people made about her weighing too little and being standoffish to the point of pathology. Maria appeared to feel so little and I felt so very much. At ten o’clock each day, she would set out for long drives, with the highway a destination unto itself.
The novel starts with Maria’s narration, “What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask.” It is unclear if she is afraid to ask, if she already knows the answer, or if she doesn’t care. If it were not for this uncertainty about evil and the nervous breakdown that an abortion prompts in the story, one might assume Maria to be a sociopath. But even in the tumult of an unplanned pregnancy when she casually reports to her husband that she doesn’t know whose baby she’s carrying, she remains ice even in the desert. The story is littered with men attempting to police her emotions while forgiving their own undeveloped ones. She finds them tiresome. I liked this trait of hers then and I like it now, in no small part because I am so hopelessly drawn to such men. Her web of extramarital affairs with moneyed men and high stakes were not situations into which I could easily insert the characters in my own life, but it didn’t stop me from trying. From a very young age, I always wanted to find myself among the thinnest and most unceremoniously sad girls.
I read especially memorable passages aloud to my boyfriend Michael over the course of three days at the beach when I read the book. It was in the hope that his palpable lack of interest in me that summer would dissolve in the face of the precious but melancholy habit of wide-eyed girls reading sad stories out loud. When it did not work, I attempted to adopt the cool, unfeeling demeanor of my protagonist, who had affairs with the same thoughtlessness with which she might make toast, were she ever inclined to eat any. But try as I might, I could not beat Michael at ambivalence that summer. And so I retreated deeper into the desert landscape from whence I came to find shelter from his neglect.
I finished the book on July 4, 2011. I remember it because the beach was evacuated to look for a missing man and child. We went home when the evacuation went into its second hour. That night we fought on the way to the fireworks atop East Rock Park in New Haven and I watched the show in tears, standing next to him but not daring to touch him in a gesture of reconciliation. As Michael drove us down through winding roads out of the darkened woods of the park, a voice on the radio announced that earlier in the day, a man had tried to walk across the sandbar that stretched from the beach at Silver Sands to Charles Island but was swept away by a wave and drowned. The nine-year-old boy who was with him was rescued, thanks to the combined efforts of a lifeguard and a jet skier. The man who died was named Rocco. He was thirty-four years old.
I would learn at the end of the summer, just two days before signing a new lease with Michael, that he had spent the summer relapsed on a variety of opiates. We had met the year before when he was two weeks out of rehab, which was two more weeks of sobriety than I had. From the vantage point of a single day clean, his two weeks might as well have been a lifetime. It took another year and a half for things to end between us but not because of anything nearly so sexy as opiate dependence. It was the far more ordinary crisis of an apartment we were planning to rent falling through at the last minute due to credit issues Michael accrued while on heroin before he met me. All of our issues subsequently collapsed into the vacant space to which we now could not relocate. I moved out on my own and lost weight as an act of aggression. I still wonder if he ever realized that in addition to all of the heavy emotional lifting I did in that time and in all of our time together, I permanently dedicated thirty pounds of myself to him. Thanks to the breakup, I saw my lifelong goal of achieving worry-inducing thinness in a matter of months. Maria and I were getting closer.
In the summer of 2013, Michael asked if he could send me a birthday present. It was six months since we had broken up, and he’d asked as a gesture of his respect for my boundaries as we considered giving it another shot. I arrived home from my twenty-eighth birthday party to find a mailbox full of package notices for gifts from my family that I would have to go to the post office to fetch the following day and one small package from Michael. I was tired from a three-mile walk home following dinner with a small group of friends from whom I’d grown apart while I was away at Yale and never fully reconnected with upon my return to Brooklyn. The group grew noticeably smaller each year, as birthday parties become the private stuff one mourns with their inner circle rather than the public celebrations of our very existence they are in younger years.
I was happy to have at least Michael’s gift to open on my birthday and so I tore into the manila envelope with the shameless urgency of a child. It was a paperback copy of Play It as It Lays and a note recalling my fondness for Joan Didion and his near certainty that I hadn’t read this one, but that it sounded like something I might like. The cover featured a photograph of a thin woman sprawled out in a sleeveless white dress. The top half of her face is out of the frame, and her body is loose in a way that indicates the kind of lethargy induced by hard drugs rather than the rest of sleep. The gift was a sweet but unknowingly cruel gesture, a postcard from the isolated hell of that sticky and stinking summer cohabitating with a ghost I could not rouse back to life by pitifully reading book passages aloud. The realization that my vivid memories of reading this very book to him were not shared by him made me resolute in the decision not to rekindle the relationship. Anger that had mostly subsided reignited in the knowledge that even on those rare occasions that he would lie down by my side that summer, I had still actually been alone. It was too eerie a coincidence that the book title was a gambling reference while considering giving a chance to a man whose track record inspired so little confidence.
The next day I put the book on the top shelf of my bookcase, too high to see the title when I passed the shelf and remember all over again. Then I went to pick up the packages my family sent. Among them was a white tulle party dress from my sister. I did not realize it at the time, but it bore a remarkable similarity to the dress on the cover of Play It as It Lays. I was not yet looking for omens. Though I knew before I left that I would be overdressed, I wore it to a barbecue that my friend Tommy was having for his twenty-ninth birthday at his family home in Brooklyn. Had I noted the similarity earlier, I might have noticed more coincidences in the events and catastrophes to come.
At the party I sat stiffly on a patio chair and listened quietly while the men present spoke about the state of their industries and cooked with fire. I spoke when spoken to, except when I was politely offering to carry food items between the kitchen and the backyard, then back again as needed. My offer was always declined, and so I was subjected to pointed questions by Tommy’s well-meaning but prodding father, whom I knew from church. “Do you miss your family?” he asked when I reported that they were still in San Diego and that I visited rarely. “No,” I told him, failing to give even a moment’s pause to reflect on how heartless this truth would sound.
When the hosts disappeared inside and a silence briefly hovered over the patio, a young man with unkempt blond hair and smoke in his voice said, “What are you doing over there? You’re too prett
y to be sitting by yourself like that. Come here.” It was a moment that confirms the worst fears of a certain type of bitter and ordinary male: that their bad pickup lines are usually bad because the man saying them is ordinary. On the lips and in the throats of handsome men, they are a charm attack. I turned my eyes without turning my head and smiled with only half my mouth, a literary move from California in 1970 if one ever existed. The young man’s name was not James, but I will call him that here, just as I call everyone here by a different name. It was the first time of many that I would come to him when he called me.
Within the hour, James and I were snorting crushed Valium and Percocet in the basement of Tommy’s family home. He introduced the existence of his girlfriend by telling me that his instinct as I leaned over to snort lines was to hold back my hair but that his girlfriend wouldn’t like that. I said, “It’s just hair,” feigning the nonchalance I was perfecting more quickly now that I had been single for some time. I didn’t mean a word of the three words. We had unprotected sex pressed up against the bathroom counter as the song “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore throbbed on the porch above us.
By nightfall, we were with Tommy and two of their friends on the road to a cabin in the Hudson Valley, where the party would continue through the weekend. It was three days of sex on icy riverbanks, in the back of his truck, and, in an especially poor judgment call, in the parking lot of a gun supply store. The shelter of the deep woods made us candid. And just as Maria’s parents were reduced to a reckless gambling father and a mother crippled by neurosis, we, too, spoke of one-dimensional fathers whom we feared we disappointed and of mothers made almost entirely of love and poorly executed good intentions.