Fracture

by Andres Neuman

  In its early days, before I joined the newspaper, people like the economist Paul Sweezy used to contribute. The eternal candidate Norman Thomas. Upton Sinclair, James Baldwin, and other authors. The son of Ring Lardner, who was one of the office’s heroes. Activists like Ella Winter, Paul Robeson, and Bayard Rustin. Even the then-promising novelist Norman Mailer, who, against all evidence, was also young once.

  For my part, I did everything I could to meet my favorite authors in person. I got to interview Susan Sontag, who showed more interest in my hair than in my novice questions. Robin Morgan, one of the few autographs I’ve ever asked for. Kurt Vonnegut, who made it a condition that we talk in bare feet. And Mary McCarthy, who cooked me a meal and ended up getting me drunk.

  I remember we managed to publish two long interviews with Lennon (in particular about issues like the arrest of John Sinclair) and Bowie (about sex, drugs, and sex). Sadly, I didn’t get either of those assignments, even though I begged my boss. They were given to some guy who’d worked longer on the beat. That, and he had a big swinging dick.

  The Chronicle was valued for its coverage of international affairs and for our caustic reporting on the cultural scene. The idea was to bring to the mass media the brazen style of The East Village Other. Or, to a lesser extent, Rat, which I read with a mixture of admiration and frustration at what was so obviously porn for straight men. That is, until a bunch of female workers mutinied and took the office by storm.

  In national news, our focus was on the civil rights movement. We stood out because we went for what nowadays is called independent journalism. Which just means that we had more ideas than money. In addition to Vietnam (which, at the time, was the subtext of virtually everything we said, wrote, or thought), we opposed nuclear testing, much to Yoshie’s pleasant surprise.

  We also appeared to side with various anticolonial movements in Asia and Africa, though I’m not sure how deep our understanding was. We had a few veteran correspondents out there, who accepted less pay because no one else would publish their lengthy articles.

  As I was promoted within the paper, I witnessed the rise of the student movements, which I would have loved to have been part of during my time in college. These activists were attempting to construct a political space outside of the two-party system and the style of the old left. They believed more in taking to the streets than in institutions. I covered some of the cultural events they organized. My bosses thought this was important. They saw it as a way of converting the new generations into future readers of our paper.

  That made me feel vaguely guilty, as if somehow I was taking advantage of them. Well, I probably was. And I should add that none of these scruples prevented me from continuing to do so.

  When the next generation of female journalists came along, I noticed they no longer believed in peaceful feminism, or in the meritocracy. They were basically fed up with all that, as well as with those nice guys (our lovers, boyfriends, brothers) who claimed to support women’s lib while continuing to objectify us.

  Supposedly my job was to show these women the ropes, but in fact, I was the one learning from them. The paper soon started to publish occasional articles about the harassment of women in the workplace. We were proud when they caused quite the stir. Which was interesting, because at the Chronicle we’d had cases similar to the ones we were denouncing.

  * * *

  By then I had my independence and a chaotic lifestyle, which aroused a rather twisted interest in some men. They seemed to want to bring order into my life. When they discovered that I actually liked my chaos, they fled. My relationships were usually short-lived. That is, until I met Yoshie. I was surprised that I got along so well with a businessman, he wasn’t really my type. Maybe that’s why it worked. I had to reexamine the idea I had of myself. People like me (meaning those who have no money) were a great relief to him. He said we were the only ones who didn’t try to talk business with him.

  I’ve always been aware of an obvious truth, the one behind the lie. The myth that love has anything to do with fate. Couples are the product of chance. The man with whom you end up raising a family, buying a house, and celebrating your birthday isn’t someone you choose after a careful casting session. Most of the time he’s simply the guy who happens to be around, or who shows up when you’re thirtysomething and want some emotional stability.

  A lot of women in my generation were convinced of the need to be unfaithful from time to time. That this was a perfectly reasonable way of being sure that we’d truly chosen our partner. That we weren’t just staying with them out of fear or repression, but because we really wanted to. If that was the case, then so much the better for us. And if not, it was high time we realized it. That was our way of thinking. I’m sure we had fun. And sadly, some of us ended up alone.

  Generally speaking, Yoshie was fairly well adapted to Western ways. After all, he’d lived in Europe. He’d had a relationship with a girl there, at an age when nothing was really serious and everything seemed way too important. A girl, so he said, who never wanted to come visit him after he’d left France.

  Every so often, he’d have these authoritarian outbursts that drove me nuts. If he tried to go samurai on me, I’d cut him off midsentence and walk out. For some reason, he found this fascinating. He didn’t quite believe I could do such a thing to him, and felt the need to have it repeated, just to make sure. I was flattered by his persistence. He must’ve been considerably attracted to me not to be put off by my behavior.

  Around that time, I objected to marriage and the contract of ownership it entails. I thought women were more enslaved by the institution of family than by capitalism. Personally, I was always against procreation. I’ve had enough with my nieces and nephews (and their kids after that) to satisfy my meager maternal instincts. Being a working woman was complicated enough, I didn’t even want to think about how it would feel to be a working mother. My girlfriends who had kids insisted I was wrong. That your children actually set you free. From yourself, your ego, your phantoms. My phantoms are my children, I’d tell them. I’ve been nurturing them my whole life.

  Yoshie and I agreed on that point. His experiences seemed to have shown him the recklessness (and also the terror) of continuing to populate the planet. As if he’d come to believe that every family, in one way or another, was close to extinction. All the same, I’d sometimes imagine myself with children. More precisely, with daughters. But I suspect this was just another form of narcissism. Those imaginary daughters were more or less myself as a child.

  I didn’t want to have a baby, and Yoshie didn’t want to get me pregnant. This gave me a kind of sexual freedom. A freedom that in turn left me feeling guilty. It’s hard not to feel guilty about the things you don’t want. The tyranny of procreation reared its head on all sides. In my family. At work. In my social circle. In the media. In biological theory. In art. And, of course, in my head. That’s why, after I reached a certain age, being happy without kids started to feel like a silent act of rebellion. I don’t know, or I can’t remember, to what extent Yoshie shared these beliefs, but in any case, we seemed pretty aligned.

  For example, we were both weary of couples who could talk only about their offspring. Of course, there are practical reasons for that. But often it was also a pretext for them to subject us to other forms of despotism. Moral pressure. Implying that we were missing out on something. Interestingly, this harassment never occurs the other way around. People without kids never try to impose their viewpoint on others, or to make themselves the example.

  Before hooking up with Yoshie, I tended to separate love and sex. I thought that mixing them might prove fatal. This was an ideological position, a defense mechanism, or possibly both. I got the impression that some men (alas, the ones who were more fun in bed) derived some twisted pleasure from my emotional unavailability. They found rejection exciting. As if space alone enabled them to feel uninhibited, to go further. I think I’m right in saying that they found it easier to sleep with us witho
ut the burden of emotions or responsibilities, to immerse themselves without thinking. Or maybe some of them got their kicks from wounded pride, from the sexual rage they felt at not being so terribly special to us.

  I’d had my share of flings, and at least where men were concerned, I preferred to get straight to the point. With the girls I was sometimes attracted to, the pace was different. Not that they were prudes or anything (they were usually more imaginative in bed), but with them, it was possible to mix affection and desire without getting hurt too badly. But I soon learned that with men, the important thing wasn’t really the sex itself so much as the possibility of it. You didn’t have to actually sleep with them to keep them interested. You just had to act like you might.

  I still have a clear memory of our first date, which was at my place. It was a few days after our bizarre encounter at the funeral. We’d already met for coffee (coffee and a tea, actually) to make sure that neither of us was as crazy as our behavior at the cemetery might’ve suggested. We both seemed nervous. When you meet someone for the first time, the lack of expectations lowers inhibitions and allows you to act recklessly. After all, you can’t spoil an image you don’t yet have.

  But this time, we sat on the couch not knowing what to say to each other, or how to initiate something that had previously required no preamble whatsoever. Yoshie stared at the ceiling and smiled at me out of the corner of his eye.

  As usual, I turned to music for help. I made sure not to choose anything too sensual, which would only have made us feel more awkward. The last thing we needed was a voice from the record player egging us on, like: Go ahead, young ’uns, go on and touch each other. In the end, I put on a record by Phil Ochs, my idol at the time. His ironic, combative voice gave me the courage to laugh at how scared I was.

  I guess some people might consider poor Ochs’s lyrics totally dated. Okay, how about this one? “I love Puerto Ricans and Negroes / as long as they don’t move next door…” Or this one? “Yes, it must have been another land / That couldn’t happen in the U.S.A.…” As for this last song, I prefer not to wonder whether he’s referring to our future. “Back to the good old days / God save the king!”

  Despite everything, I still believe some things could never happen here. He could never win, I’m sure of that. We’d never allow it. We’d never choose a wall in this land of immigrants, or a guy who believes that climate change was invented by the Chinese, who surrounds himself with deniers, and is in the pay of energy lobbyists. A guy who claims you can learn all you need to know about missiles in an hour and a half, and who just can’t wait to have access to the nuclear button.

  Anyway, while the music played, I went to get us some drinks. When I came back to the sofa, I found Yoshie with his shirt off. He looked very serious. And then I saw his scars.

  * * *

  Like most of my friends, I have more than a few operations under my belt. An appendectomy. A stent. That valve in my lung, after which my doctors insisted I lay off the cigarettes. Cervical cancer. Two abortions, neither of them with Yoshie. (He was convinced he was sterile, that his sperm had somehow been jinxed.) And that tumor in my breast, which changed how I perceive things, including pleasure. It no doubt affected my relationship with Yoshie.

  That happened a couple of years before we met. I had to have an operation for mastitis. I’m aware that this is a common condition among women who breastfeed, but I’d gotten it without having kids. I can’t help seeing the irony in that. They put me on antibiotics, which didn’t work, and that’s how I developed a big lump. I went to see my gynecologist. I didn’t want to worry anyone, or create drama for no reason. Actually, I had a date with a very good-looking journalist later that evening. I decided to keep it, not knowing what was going to happen. I felt that to cancel it would be to assume the worst.

  No sooner had the gynecologist examined me than she asked if there was anyone waiting for me outside. She made an urgent call to a colleague at a clinic and advised me to have a relative take me there. No way, I told her. I belong to one of those families that overreact to any sort of health scare by getting sicker than the patient. So I took a cab to the clinic instead. From there I made a brief call to my mother, as I did every day, without saying a word about the situation. I pretended to read while I waited. They performed a biopsy and it was painful. Then I left. I changed clothes, took another cab, stopped at a pharmacy to buy the drugs they’d prescribed. And then I went out to dinner with the good-looking journalist, who was not allowed to touch my left boob.

  I spent the next week with my mind elsewhere as people were talking to me. Besides the terror, there was also bewilderment. I felt I was the victim, not of a health scare, but of a serious misunderstanding, and that I was living someone else’s life.

  When they told me that it was only an infected mastitis with an abscess, and could be remedied with an easy operation, my relief was so overwhelming that I felt liberated from my own body. Now my body was more closely related to survival than to beauty. Or to the beauty of survival. The doctors warned me that my breast would suffer some damage from the operation. I replied that I earned my living with my brain, and then I signed the consent form.

  They made three small incisions in the lower part of my left breast. As soon as it healed, I went to see a plastic surgeon. The solution he offered was to scrape out the entire breast and replace it with silicone. To add insult to injury, he recommended I have both my breasts done if I wanted them to be symmetrical. I wasn’t interested. Not if it meant removing healthy tissue to insert a block of garbage.

  At first, the scars were quite obvious. Now they’re only really noticeable when I’m lying down. There’s a void, a void filled with meaning. No one has ever seemed to mind this asymmetry, but I realize I’m no oil painting. I guess my charms have aged better than my two tits. One and three-quarters tits, to be exact. Or maybe they liked my freakishness. Why not? Let’s call it my lefty charm.

  The largest scar, at the base of my breast, has become the most important part of my body. Like that old Cohen song: “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” The other day I read an article about Marilyn Monroe’s last photo shoot. The biggest diva of them all, and apparently even she had a scar on her belly from a gallbladder operation. So, even Marilyn had a gallbladder! The scar isn’t visible in those nude photos (which just goes to show, nude photos are never truly nude), and yet that was what distinguished her. Not her ass. Or her boobs, which were nothing special. But that incision. Her insignia.

  That first evening together, when I came back to the sofa carrying our drinks, I found Yoshie with his shirt off and he showed me his scars. A fine mesh covering his forearms and back. They looked like inner branches, as if he were carrying a tree. Then I showed him mine. He touched them. Kissed them. Blessed them. We felt light, a little ugly, and very beautiful.

  Later, in bed, when our breathing had calmed again, we examined the blemishes on our bodies. We gave each other a tour of all the parts of our bodies we were normally embarrassed about, and we recognized one another.

  Yoshie looked shorter lying down than standing up. His upper and lower body weren’t quite in proportion. He had a different kind of harmony.

  Another memory I have from that night is Yoshie learning to pronounce the word thigh, which he would confuse with tight. I joked that if he insisted on calling a thigh tight, then mine wasn’t a good example. He practiced the word, pressing his forefinger into my thigh. According to him, from that moment on he’d imagine my legs whenever he said it.

  Our eyelids growing heavy, and our legs entwined, I had the feeling that the mattress was expanding. As if it were breathing along with us.

  * * *

  I never understood how, despite being a smoker like me, he had such a keen sense of smell. Yoshie smelled between the lines. He could deduce bodies from their clothes, fruits from their peels. I wonder if this was related to our shared obsession with supermarkets, especially at night. He was crazy ab
out these stores and their contradictions of delicious and horrible smells, of filth and cleanliness.

  My palate was less discerning but I found that combination of sordidness, desire, and capitalism to be deeply erotic. To see all of the things you could take home with you, devour, and introduce into your body. I’ve always suspected that in supermarkets, it’s not the products you’re paying for, but that orgy of possibilities, that lustful illusion of freedom. If it weren’t for that seductive fantasy, consumerism would be easy to resist.

  We never did it in a supermarket. Our bashfulness got the better of us in the end. Instead, I had to be content with a few quick gropes between the aisles. I would clench my thighs until we got home, trying to hold on to that wonderful frisson. Some of it always got lost along the way. In the end, we couldn’t avoid feeling a little disappointed. That’s the second rule of consumerism.

  Yoshie was intrigued by my habit of painting my nails after I masturbated. For me, both things are part of the same impulse. Touching oneself is the opposite of being dirty. It cleans you, reboots you. Pleasuring yourself gives you a shine.

  Timid with strangers? Overly serious? Not at all. If anything, Yoshie was rather extroverted, which for some reason surprised me. Probably because of the stupid stereotypes we have about the Japanese. I can see how someone might misinterpret his initial silences. The truth was that he used this restraint to his advantage, winning the sympathy of people who were eventually amazed to discover his sociable side.

  Part of his charm was that ability to make each of us believe that we’d managed to get close to someone so hopelessly shy, which also allowed him to get along with people he had little in common with. Including my brother, Ralph, who developed an inexplicable affection for him, considering how radically different they were. He had disliked all my previous boyfriends, which wasn’t so strange. I always dated guys who were the antithesis of my family.