Ollie made the introductions—and she didn’t recognize me!
My first thought was that this was more trickery—that they had conferred about the lentil-throwing incident and decided that to leave me like this, in a suspenseful limbo of non-identification, would be a fitting comic punishment. Then, as the two of them continued with their discussion—I’d taken a seat next to Ollie and was sort of trying to hide behind him—it became clear that my presence wasn’t a source of disturbance, or even of interest. This permitted me to conclude that, amazingly, who I was had not registered with Mrs. Ted Wilson; and when I paid attention to what they were talking about and understood that Ollie was sympathizing with her about her traumatic discovery, apparently made only a day or two before, that the rumors were true and there was indeed a second, Dubai-based Mrs. Ted Wilson (who was herself searching for Ted), I guessed that this Mrs. Ted Wilson was in that state of perceptual impairment that I personally know to be a symptom of vital confusion and distress. In those first several months of the Jenn-me split, more than once I stepped off a subway train at a perfectly familiar station only to find myself at a loss as to where I was, a lostness referable in part to my temporary insanity, in part to the real-world derangement that had placed me not only in an unforeseen Lincoln Tunnel luxury rental but in a life populated by a new and unwelcome dramatis personae, chief among them oneself. I am certain that Mrs. Ted Wilson must at some point that evening have asked herself, What am I doing here? Who the hell are these guys? How did it come to this?
I was meanwhile asking myself: How do I get out of here? By getting up and exiting Buddha-Bar, was the answer—and at most five minutes passed between my arrival at the table and (on the pretext of having to take a phone call) my departure. Outwardly, all was straightforward. Inwardly, things were complex. Among the thoughts and feelings that formed part, during those few minutes at Buddha-Bar, of the catastrophe known as my subjectivity, were: (1) I will be exposed. (2) What does [(1)] mean? What or who would be the content of the exposure? (3) Ollie and I are jackals feasting on another person’s suffering. (4) What has Mrs. Wilson done with her hair? She seems to have a Pre-Raphaelite thing going on. (5) If I stay, I’ll have to walk Mrs. Wilson home. And then …? (6) Might I be a little in love with Mrs. Wilson? (7) Wow, [(6)] is nuts. I’m really out of control. (8) Ollie is preying on Mrs. Wilson and helping her. Whereas I’m keeping my nose clean and being of no use. Paradox. (9) I ought to give my full attention to Mrs. Wilson in order to gain an understanding of her experience and offer her the empathy that is called for. Out of the question, as a practical matter. Must leave. (10) Who is Mrs. Wilson, anyway? And who is Mrs. Wilson II? (11) So is Ted Wilson alive or dead? (12) Buddha-Bar really, really is not my scene. (13) Is Ollie going to sleep with her? No. (14) Am I going to sleep with her? No. (15) I’d like to sleep with her/take her into my protection—it comes down to the same thing. Not. (16) She wouldn’t want me, in any case. (17) I have to go. Now. (18) Those are nice breasts, as far as one can tell. You never know until you know. Nice shoulders, definitely. Augurs well re everything else—although again, no necessary correlation. (19) Oh shit, did she just catch me looking? (20) Go, now. Go, Dog. Go! (21) Night after night, Maman read that book to me. When we moved to the States, I found it embarrassing to call her that. Mom, she became. Pardonne-moi, Maman. (22) OK, that’s it, now I’m going.
This is the kind of thing that passes for my moment-to-moment inner life. It’s discouraging.
On the walk back to The Situation, I initiated the following exchange of texts with Ollie:
Can’t do this. Pls convey my apologies.
?
Poor woman. Let her be.
??
He called me the next day. “You all right? What were those texts about?”
I told him the whole setup had made me feel uncomfortable. “Uncomfortable?” “Yeah, it did.” After quite a pause, he said, “Fair enough, mate.” The conversation pretty much ended there. I could tell he was hurt/pissed off by what he deemed, not wrongly, to be my holier-than-him stance. Of course, this wasn’t a subject for feelings-sharing. We handled the matter the way we handle all of our (very rare) disagreements: a week or two goes by, and then I phone him and ask to buy him lunch, and he assents. Or vice versa. I bought lunch, this time; we ate at the Lime Tree Café (the Jumeira branch); and no mention was made of our difference of opinion about the correctness of the evening out with Mrs. Ted Wilson. That’s what friends do: they forgive and forget. They let bygones be bygones. They move on.
It’s in this forward-leaning spirit that I’ve written off, perhaps I should say written down, the irrecoverable opportunity costs of time and happiness attributable to the unhappy Jenn years. As for her aggressive behavior in connection with the breakup, I don’t blame her. Note that this isn’t a case of forgiveness: I don’t hold her responsible, period, on the grounds that during this difficult time she was not herself. I’m not asserting crime passionnel: I assert that the “Jenn” behaving badly was not Jenn. This opens the question of who it was, exactly, who (lawfully but immorally) withdrew all the funds credited to our joint checking and savings accounts (72,000.98 USD and 244,346.17 USD respectively (incidentally, Jenn’s (much larger) salary, for a reason I must have forgotten, always went into an account in her sole name, whereas the money I earned went into our joint accounts and was used for our joint expenditures)) and left me with a net worth of 11,945.00 USD (the salary payment that I just managed to withdraw); who it was who took sole possession of the apartment and all of its furniture and threw into the garbage my family photographs, clothes, books (including my childhood books (including Go, Dog. Go!)); etc., etc. I take the view that these were the deeds of a not-Jenn, not Jenn, and that to a large extent I’m the Victor Frankenstein responsible for the bringing forth of the not- or un-Jenn who, as I realized too late and with an astonishment that has never quite left me, did not have my interests at heart. There remains the conundrum, in this analysis, of the whereabouts, during the time of wrongdoing, of Jenn herself, and of the nature of the relationship between submerged true Jenn and emergent false Jenn, in particular—persistent question—: How come true Jenn, when she resurfaced, as one must assume she in due course did, didn’t make good the damage to me done in her absence by her malfeasant alter ego? I’m not suggesting that she was responsible for the actions of the other Jenn, but I do note that it would have been the easiest thing in the world, as a practicality, for her to reimburse me. The matter can be put this way: X, a good person, is subject to episodes of somnambulism. During one of these episodes she unconsciously takes possession of an envelope belonging to V, her friend. X wakes up and finds the envelope. It is marked “V’s Life Savings,” and it contains 100,000 USD. V asks X for the return of the envelope. X—who is, incidentally, a rich woman with no financial obligations or ambitions that she cannot very easily satisfy, whereas V is hard up—refuses. She keeps V’s money. Question: Why would X, a good person, do this? Answer: I don’t know. It’s incomprehensible.
I can think of a few people who might say: Your hypothetical case, as stated, omits important facts. X’s behavior becomes highly explicable if you disclose that V was X’s long-term partner and (in X’s eyes) “dumped” her and “betrayed” her. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
With respect, this misses the point. Never mind that plenty of “scorned” women don’t get into a fury; or get into a fury but don’t want to destroy the “scorner”; or want to destroy the scorner but don’t, because it would be wrong. Never mind that the whole “hell hath no fury” racket (historically justifiable, I’m theorizing, as a way of granting profoundly oppressed womankind some measure of power and justice and psychological ventilation in epochs marked by the prevalence of crudely retributive ideas) in this day and age represents a tacit prolongation of the supposedly discontinued treatment of women as persons with less-developed moral and rational faculties akin to those we associate with young children and (in the inoffensiv
e technical sense) idiots, an act of gender condescension whose inherent unacceptability is moreover combined with an anachronistic dangerousness, by which I mean that the modern legal and social and economic power enjoyed by many women in Western societies (the female entitlement to which power is, I underline for the avoidance of doubt, of course absolutely beyond question or qualification and not for me or anyone else to allow or tolerate or oversee or bless), when exercised wrathfully pursuant to the outdated “hell hath no fury” license, is a dangerous weapon. To put it another way, it’s one thing for a helplessly vulnerable quasi-servant to be madder than hell; it’s something else if the infuriated party acting with impunity is a rich partner in a law firm who is practically one’s domestic and professional ruler. But, as I say, never mind. It’s all good. My point is that the Jenn I lived with, or next to, though by no means a saint (why should she have been? I certainly wasn’t), would not have done the things done by the non- or un-Jenn on the hellish fury basis. That’s why I can’t explain why she decided, in effect, to wear the latter’s bloodstained shoes.
I don’t want to be detained further by this stuff, because life’s too short. YOLO. But one last item makes a demand on the attention. It will be noted that our famous maxim doesn’t go “Hell hath no fury like a woman in a state of severe romantic disappointment.” Rather, it makes express reference to an action attributed to her (ex-) partner—the one who is deemed to have committed an act of “scorning.” I have inputted “scorn” in the Free Dictionary. To scorn someone means to treat that person with disdain or contempt; to mock. I have looked up “disdain” in the Online Etymology Dictionary: it is negatively derived, as one might expect, from the Old French deignier, to deem worthy or fit, which in turn comes from the Latin dignus, worthy, proper, or fitting, which in turn is rooted (as is “decent,” I see) in the Proto-Indo-European (i.e., over-five-thousand-year-old) dek, to accept, receive, greet, be suitable. I’ve also looked up “mock.” Though it obviously arrives immediately from mocquer (Old French), beyond that it is of uncertain origin (though there is a suggestion that the word may have to do with the Vulgar Latin muccare, to blow the nose (in a gesture of derision), which is itself the offspring of mucus, slime or snot). These investigations confirm that the evocation of the figure of the “scorned woman” contains within it an automatic characterization of the male (or female: I am not aware that the “hell hath” maxim is of only heterosexual application) as actively snotty, derisive, and contemptuous. This blanket judgment, precisely because it is the nature of a judgment, in turn contains a grotesque rumor of the judicial—of a procedurally verified finding.
Was I a scorner? A looker-down? As I recall, this was a very lowly time for me, and I cannot think how I would have been able to look down on anyone, let alone high-up Jenn. Was I an oaf? Yes. Did I culpably cause damage? For sure. Did I fail her? Guilty as charged. It’s all somewhat foggy at this point, but certain memories are clear. Jenn had bravely done her bit—taken the follicle-stimulating hormones, gone every second day to follicle-measuring appointments, and above all taken on the chin the emotional agony that the dismal saga of artificial fertilization inflicts. All that remained, in order to try to make the baby we agreed we would try to have, was for me to do my part. The IVF calendar had produced an insemination date on which I’d be traveling for work, and this meant that I had to produce a semen sample in advance: the fluid would be frozen and used in my absence. I duly took myself to the clinic, or facility, which was in the basement of a brownstone in the East Twenties or Thirties. It was a strange little place. A sadness of masturbators, as I will collectively name them, sat around on gray chairs, each waiting his turn. A human voice was heard only when someone had dealings with the cheerful nurse-like woman who sat at a desk behind an open hatch. She gave me a form that required me, as I recall, to be specific about the number of days I’d been “abstinent.” I shamefully provided this and other information, and took a seat. The semen production took place in a separate area, the entrance to which was closed by a shut door. Once in a while, a guy went in and a guy came out. I did my best to not monitor the amount of time anybody took in there. Jenn texted,
Good luck.
A different nurse-like worker entered the waiting room. She called out a name that did not sound like a name at all. Everybody looked around. She tried again, with a different articulation. I realized she was trying to summon me, by my first, horrifying name. When I stood up, everyone looked at me with, I’m sure, a kind of revulsion. In I went. A short corridor gave on to the two chambers where masturbation happened. I entered one of these, on my own naturally, though I recall that I was nonetheless taken aback to find myself alone in this little room. There was a surprisingly cheap armchair—maybe I’d been half-expecting some kind of special custom-made jack-off lounger—a few worn pornographic magazines, and a tiny piece-of-shit non-flat-screen TV that must have been about twenty years old. Onan himself would have found the setup a challenge. I studied the laminated instruction card and wrote my name on the receptacle label and stuck the label on the receptacle. I activated the shit TV. There was a scene of a male repetitively fucking some featureless moaning blonde. I hit Fast Forward. Now some other dude was banging a woman from behind while she gave his or her buddy head. I watched for a few more seconds, hoping for some contagious performance of desire on the part of the woman actor, because surely that is the core fantasy—that one is desired. I was already distracted about how much time this was taking. What was normal? Five minutes? Ten? The question of volume worried me, too: I wanted audio, but I didn’t want it to be overheard by anyone. Fuck it, just do it, I said to myself. I dropped my pants and got started—standing up, because there was no way I was going to sit on that chair. A minute or two passed. My dick was inert as a sock. I turned off the TV and tried with closed eyes. When that didn’t work, I turned off the light, which was a bad idea, because I needed to capture the ejaculate in the receptacle and I couldn’t see a damn thing. I tried to relax; I breathed deeply; I recalled certain erotic triumphs of my youth; and I began to get a response. But every time I thought I might be getting close to producing something, the climactic sensation dissipated. I kept working at it. By the time I finally gave up, half an hour had passed, and the guys out there were surely wondering what the hell I was up to. “I’m having a problem,” I said to the nurse, actually hanging my head. She looked at my information sheet. “You live nearby, right?” I said I did. She said, “Why don’t you take the vessel home with you, honey, and then just bring it back here right away when you’re done.”
Meanwhile, another text from Jenn:
Done?
I was done, all right—as of that moment. I walked to the rent-stabilized one-bedroom in a chill of nausea. I waited there. When she came through the door, I told her I needed to talk to her. She went off into the bedroom, and when eventually I went in there after her, she went back out into the living room. “Could you please stop moving around?” I said. “I want to say something.”
“I’m really, really tired.”
I was very clear in my mind what I wanted to say. I did not want to start a discussion. The time for discussion had come and gone. I made sure to use very plain sentences. I told her I’d tried and failed to produce a semen sample. I told her I did not intend to try again.
She said, “You mean you’re breaking up with me?” As usual, she’d gone straight to the pith.
I expressed no disagreement.
Next, I remember, she said, “I need a drink.” Later she said, “OK, this isn’t happening. Let’s just go to bed and see where we are tomorrow.” Later still, in tears, she said, “You can’t do this to me. I want a baby—you give me a baby! You owe me. You owe me my baby!” At some other point she said, “You can’t back out now. It’s not right. It’s not fair. What am I supposed to do? Start dating? Find someone else? I’m thirty-five years old!” She made further statements, including the statement that I was the murderer of her marriage. She said,
“OK, look, just give me the sperm. I’ll have the baby myself. I’ll take care of the baby. I don’t need you. I can do this. I’m strong.” And, “I’m going to be a laughingstock.” And, “You wait until I’m having fertility treatment, and then you quit? Oh, boy. It’s like you’ve done this on purpose. Is that it? I’m right, aren’t I? You’ve done this on purpose.” And, “My God. You’re a monster. A monster. A narcissistic psychopath. My God. That’s it. That explains everything.” She tore off her clothes and bent over and spread her ass cheeks, and said, “Fuck me! Go on! Fuck me! Can you do that? Get your cock out like a man! You fucking asshole! You coward! You had to wait until now? What’s the matter? You don’t like pussy? You fucking psychopathic asshole.” This was when she went for me, when she was naked, lunging at me with a terrible scream and clawing at my crotch and face. I fended her off and ran to my usual retreat, the bathroom, and locked the door. Leave me alone, I said. Please leave me alone. She started to punch and kick the door, which she had never done before, and there was the terrifying new sound of wood splitting. “Open up. Let me in, you coward,” she said. “Be a man. Face up to what you’ve done.” I stayed where I was, leaning against the door, panting. A very long time went by, as I experienced it, in which I stayed in the bathroom and she stood at the door and screamed obscenities and threats. Then she began weeping loudly, and the barrier I’d rightly or wrongly put up to defend myself against her agony crumbled, and as she sobbed I opened the door, hoping maybe to be of some comfort or at least to bear witness to her pain, of which I was the cause. I’d opened the door no more than three inches when I felt the crash as she tried, with another terrible cry, to push her way into the bathroom. The sobbing had been a ruse. I was only just able to heave back and lock the door once more.
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