“I haven’t gotten broccoli.” She sounds emotional about this, in a ditsy way. “My children need to have vegetables.”
I don’t mention that there are excellent mustard greens, kale, and broccoli at the twenty-four-hour Korean market across the street from my house.
“You’re playing out something about them,” I say, “with me.” “Them” is what Gemma always calls her family when she plans our trysts. “They” won’t be there. I won’t have to be with “them.” She talks about the other three as though they were extraterrestrials she found herself living with, whom she couldn’t understand and who were quite possibly poisoning her kitchen.
Gemma is furious at the phrase playing out. “Don’t psychoanalyze me!” Then she says piously, “I’ve been neglecting my family. And many times lately with Ann, I haven’t been able to be fully present when I’m with her, because I was thinking about you.”
I don’t know how to begin to answer that one.
Gemma tries to make me understand. “I can’t justify doing stuff that’s just for myself this month. I will anyway, I need to, but —” Sex with me is just for her, I discover; it is like those small but rich desserts, marketed especially for women to consume alone.
It is strange to be competing with little girls for nutrients.
Then again, it’s what I’ve been doing all my life. I’ve never stopped competing with the non-golem children, with all the other little souls throughout the world, with my sisters and my father, for good nutrients.
It’s truly odd, though, to realize that Gemma wouldn’t dream of doing anything “for me” in common parlance—that is to say, on my behalf, or because of some allegiance to me, or for the primary purpose of fulfilling my needs. When she touches me, when she calls me, she’s not thinking of my needs at all. She’s doing it for her.
It is one thing to be teased. It’s quite another not to be given anything, for real.
So I break up with her.
I’ve broken up with a girlfriend once before, but she wasn’t someone I had really wanted. This feels like the first time to me.
Chapter 9
I told Gemma that I wanted to break up but that I wanted one more date with her before we did. So we had one. It was ceremonious—she brought red wine, Gemma wore a dazzling white man’s dress shirt and black pants for me, it was our best fucking ever. She hoisted my legs and arms around her and carried me into the bedroom like she was carrying me over a threshold. (Or like someone ferrying a sleepy child into bed.)
Two days earlier, my arms had become weird. I’d had my regular physical therapy that morning for a minor wrist problem that I’d had on and off for years, like I mentioned to you, honeybuns, nothing terrible. The specialist for this problemette, who was called a physiatrist, had sent me to a trio of phenomenally beautiful physical therapists. Now, physical therapists—I don’t know whether you know this, reader—are often uncommonly beautiful physical specimens who rather resemble—this is really true—goddesses. Like goddesses in the sexist classical tradition, some of them have no ethics in them.
That morning, the PTs were planning something new for me. The three gorgeous ones gave me a test that involved squeezing a series of heavy metal grips, then lifting some strange weights that looked like little hockey pucks. “This hurts,” I protested. But the young blonde therapist said: “We’re measuring strength, pain doesn’t matter in this test.”
I said, “I don’t think I should take this test.” The brunette made a tiny smile and said, “Everybody has to.” It was a policy of the Zwieback Rehabilitation Institute that everybody had to be tested at regular intervals, for Zwieback’s prestigious large-data study. The jet-black haired one just looked me in the eye and said, “Squeeze."
I squeezed. And there and then, in the twinkling of an eye, in Zwieback’s odd, white, plastic-Lego-looking complex in East South midtown, began something different, reader, than I’d ever known—at least directly, responsibly, consciously. A world of immediate pain and terror, irremediable, sharp, frumpy—sharp points not just at my wrists but going all the way through me, a cutting and smashing and burning I did not think I would ever be rid of.
What did I have? (What do I have, I should say, for certainly I have it still.)My problem is called Repetitive Strain Injury, which is a “musculoskeletal condition” people get from infelicitous repetitive endeavors of all kinds. Assembly-line workers, musicians, and chicken-pluckers are known to get it. In the digital era, secretaries and writers get it. I wonder if bad fiddlers get it, reader, from playing the same damn tune over and over?
(People get RSI of the feet, too, but I don’t know from what activities—pushing old-fashioned sewing machine treadles?)
It had been developing in me for months or even years, but the PTs' “test” had set it off.
RSI—that is the agreed-upon abbreviation for it (for the lingo is important here, I was told, this is a complicated matter)—affects nerves, tendons, ligaments, and muscles. (And maybe, I dunno, blood, bones, mind? What else could it possibly effect?) Actually, it has a new, scarier name that I find it incumbent upon me to share with you: CRPS—(can it possibly be pronounced “Crips”? I couldn't make this stuff up)—for Complex Regional Pain Syndrome.
The people who have it look normal, and our backs, and necks, and arms can even be quite well-shaped and comely. We are likely to be slender, the “Know Your RSI” books say, and model workers. Women are alleged to get it more than men, either because we have weaker muscles or because we work harder and longer for the Man, or both. Shy people get it more, some authors claim, because we neglect to set limits. Overall it seems to be a disease of the small, obedient, and cute, at least if you believe the literature.
Helpless and slender? Do exactly what you tell them? Sounds like golems to me. Perhaps it is fortunate that the RSI tribe is a hidden one, like Jews: you cannot tell us by looking. The “indications” of RSI are remarkably various, which is one reason some doctors think we’ve made it up. Just like those sex-drenched French feminists call women “the sex that is not one,” meaning, among other things, that we have many, many different sources of arousal, RSI is the illness that is not one. Its effects are entirely different in different people. It is mysterious. People can get it very mildly, or they can never brush their teeth again. They can lift their arms two inches, or three feet, or only diagonally, or stiffly one morning and ecstatically and supple-ly the next. The line separating the sick from the well floats unpredictably. What might cure it, and when and if it’ll get better, is extraordinarily unpredictable, too.
I was a little pissed off at the PTs right when it happened, but I couldn’t get too excited about it because I was obsessed with getting ready for my last date with Gemma.
By breaking up with her but asking for one more night of sex, I felt in control, reader, like a prostitute who finally establishes it that all the sex in her life happens on her cue.
I was still trying to ignore what had happened, even then. “I really wish you would kidnap me and lock me in your closet,” I whispered to Gemma. I’d seen the enormous wardrobe on her and Ann’s parlor floor, and it was black-lacquered and beautiful.
“Me, too,” sighed Gemma, peeling down my panties.
It was hard, actually, to comprehend that anything at all had changed. Gemma called the very next day to say that she had left her reading glasses in my apartment. “Go figure,” she said, softly laughing. “I needed some reason to come over.” This time, she brought as a chaperone her tiniest girl, whom I had never met. As I played with elfin, one-and-a-half year-old Cassima, Gemma played with my nipple. I should not have allowed her to—we were both very wrong to let her play with me in front of her daughter—but I let it happen anyway.
When exactly did what had happened to me dawn on me? From my desk calendar of that month—March of 2000—I can tell I got an emergency massage the following week from an expensive masseur, Lewis Fitzhugh LMT. And I canceled all my future appointments with the Zwieb
ack physical therapists. But there is nothing else in my records to register undue disquiet until three or four weeks later. Perhaps my strange ailment got much worse in the intervening weeks?
It was a strange ailment, reader. The next month, April, there are dozens of phone numbers scrawled on my calendar—dim acquaintances, friends so casual they may not have known that they were friends. People from my college I hadn’t socialized with in college, or since. The pain was making me want to be friends with everyone. I remember wanting to breathe on my writing students and somehow conjure them all into friends, like the ancient Greek guy who sows his dragons' teeth into warriors. I made a date with a sexy, plump, straight student, who was always writing about sexual abuse and her exciting, Hitlerish boyfriend, to buy hundreds of dollars worth of makeup at Bergdorf’s. I never wore makeup.
The pain made me want to do anything.
I made a date to watch videos with another student, a beautiful twenty-two-year-old who was always writing about physical abuse and exciting sex with her Ripper-boyfriend. It was against my principles to be friends with students, but I did it anyway because I could see no other way out. I needed friends that badly and thought I would have an in with them because I was their writing teacher.
Because for the first time, my golem magic did not seem to be functioning very well, and I actually felt the pain, little one. I almost couldn’t comprehend what I was experiencing—it was that new to me.
Reader, I couldn’t do anything to make it stop hurting. I furiously researched who the best RSI doctors were, but neither of them could see me till a month later. Writing on the computer hurt so badly that I stopped doing it, and tried eking out words by longhand in a composition book, but that hurt almost as badly, and I would sit at a coffee bar and futilely try to scratch out a page, hurting in the wrists almost more than I could stand.
Next to that, not being able to take out the garbage or to carry groceries without pain seemed tiny losses. One of the Two Best Doctors, on the phone from a Paris conference, said I should just give up those activities. “Treat your hands like the royalty of all time,” she said. I tried kicking my garbage down the stairs and down the block and a half to the dumpster, and taking the New York Times out of its blue plastic envelope in the mornings with my feet.
I couldn’t read books, which felt crazy. They were now too heavy to hold. Cooking was hard because I couldn’t cut most raw foods, and many vegetables and fruits had become too heavy. Pots were too heavy, as though I’d gone down a rabbit hole to a place where I weighed one tenth my previous weight. I had to hoist each potato into the microwave. The few times I tried takeout it was agonizing just to try to get the leftovers off the table.
Concurrent to all this, I started seeing a repellent and unattractive woman named Nancy. I had begun checking her out before going out with Gemma—when I’d found her hot for some reason—but now, finding her butch in an unpleasant way and skeletal, with a mug like a death's-head, I wanted to have sex with her anyway. My idea, if I can reconstruct a plan that memory has mercifully spared me, was that this would further advance the personal sexual revolution I had apparently begun with Gemma.
Nancy was a tall, gaunt investment banker who liked to support the most dubious guerrillas all around the world. Her mouth tasted terrible, as though she had a large bacterial infection. Also, she had once killed a man in Greece, she told me, because he had been striding towards her about to do “something” to her, she “didn’t know what.” She had beaten the dude to death, I never found out with what
Before Nancy, I’d gone on several dates with Allia, an infuriatingly attractive Russian bisexual college student. Thankfully, I rejected her as polyamorous. Though I think if she’d seduced me I’d have let her. “I don’t ever want to be your wife,” she had grinned wolfishly me at the West 4th Street subway station, “but I might like to be your husband,” she said, staring at my breasts, meaning that she would have enjoyed having me as one of a stable of hundreds of nubile women and a few cranky Russian men. I don’t know how I was able to resist her—she was just like Gemma, only younger and even more of a jerk. In addition to Allia, I had had some hopes of my own young writing student, Hermione—why, I don’t know, since she was groaningly in love with her boyfriend. But the hint of a sexual something between us gave our friendship what to me was a comforting frisson; we watched sexy lesbian films on HBO together at my house and talked about sex a lot. Still, our friendship, and my risible hopes, went up in flames when we went to the movies together just a month into my troubles. It was raining and Hermione had become upset when I’d asked her to hold the umbrella for us for what turned out to be our entire walk from the subway. This was my first rain with RSI and I discovered I couldn’t hold an umbrella overhead without great pain for any amount of time whatsoever. I couldn’t hold the snacks we brought with us or our jackets, either. “You—you can’t do anything,” Hermione had stuttered in anger and frustration. “I—I have to hold the umbrella, and the snacks, and everything.” She was at the point of weeping. “Can’t...can’t you try to hold it a little?” she urged, meaning the umbrella. “No,” I’d said, and she made a grim moue. She didn’t want to hang again.
She wasn’t the only one. Nancy came along at a time when several friends had extricated themselves from my life becausethe prospect of my needing help had just become too intense. Was I a demanding, needy,hard to deal withfriend? In almost all cases, reader, I believe I was. The estrangements came quite early on, in that first month or so, when my condition was most terrifying and it seemed quite likely that the pain would never leave me. Sonny, my close friend from Al-Anon, had called every day before RSI hit (and not just for “program” reasons, either). After, he announced he could no longer be in contact with me. He “just had too much going on,” he said. He looked uncomfortable when he passed me in the street.
Sonny was handsome and compassionate, a straight man who’d seemed a lot like a woman. I described him before as “moralistic and tight-ass,” but that was only about porn, really, and girls like Gemma. In other ways his ass was wide open. Sonny was a feminist who worked as some kind of fancy sound-recording engineer for a record label. The previous month I had been one of a handful of friends celebrating Sonny’s 50th birthday with him, in a smelly diner near Madison Square Garden that Sonny loved. Sonny was a fan of the New York Liberty, the women’s basketball team lesbians love, and of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, my favorite feminist TV show of all time. We used to talk for hours, often about how hard we both had to fight to resist the urge to obey. Sonny was a brother golem.
When I was terrified in the beginning of RSI I would call him, but he ditched me after about a week or so.
Nancy, with her unpleasant mouth smell and her Mafia haircut, helped to make my life comfortable and functional at a time when people were fleeing me seemingly by the thousands, like an especially brutal civil war. Trina, my brilliant Brit friend of forever, and Larry, with whom I’d watched heroic-fantasy TV for six years—six years of cheering on Xena: Warrior Princess as she fought the evil both within and outside herself—had both made it plain that I’d become an utterly unappealing friend.
Nancy didn’t mind pushing my glass to the edge of the table where I could reach it, didn’t react in horror, the way most people did, when she realized that I couldn’t pick up a sandwich.
I also had a few new friends—boring men and women I had courted in the first place because I’d hoped that boring people might be kinder. Certainly the ones I picked were. So the uninspired would come by and bag my trash, or bring me back a sack of food when they shopped at the coop. Laura and Ellen were a particularly kind, boring couple who were even shyer than me, and seemed to want to see me constantly. They were eager to buy me local veggies at the Saturday farmers’ market, and to have me over to their house to eat well-prepared fish and to look at Ellen’s paintings. Her moderately abstract art had sensual reds and blues and emotional, bleak whites; Iliked them. But oh sadly, reader, it was
dull to talk to her.
When she wasn’t as bland as Kraft slices, Ellen went quite grim; she worked investigating child abuse in foster care. She saved lives, I am certain, but she mostly talked about the badness of people, and how welfare actually encouraged moral turpitude. Laura, her partner, was a silent grad student in English who managed to be colorless and soporific even on the subjects of literature and feminism, her two main areas of interest. Neither of them ever talked personally. When I tried to sometimes, the two of them looked flattered but scared.Dinners with them were safe and calming and only occasionally awkward.
Maybe morally good people produced good art, I thought hopefully, looking at Ellen’s warm red trees, though I had never believed this before. Certainly I was feeling like I’d OD'd on the immoral after Gemma. But my new physical problems were making morally good people a sort of urgent fetish for me. I felt vaguely embarrassed about it, as though I had decided that I suddenly required illegal, unpasteurized French cheeses at $150 a pop and no other kind.
I forgot to mention that RSI can also make your body extremely sensitive, not just make it hurt. So I went to the hairdresser’s, normally somewhat painful anyhow from my old, familiar, mild RSI, and my head in the washer’s hands made me feel as though I were being flayed. Even having my hair cut hurt, from the pressure of the stylist’s hands on me, or the force with which she applied the scissors.
This is because the head was connected to the neck, which was connected to the arms and shoulders. RSI was a system, as many doctors, massage therapists, and healers have tried to explain to me.
The hair salon people were annoyed, as so many people were these days, when I asked for special gentleness. “What do you expect me to do?” the 20-year-old shampoo man asked, petulant. My sister Josie, whose hugs had always been on the crippling side, was now so frighteningly painful that I actually askedher to go lighter.
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