Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (FSG Classics)

by Vivian Gornick

My relationship with my mother is not good, and as our lives accumulate it often seems to worsen.

“This is my daughter. She hates me.” Then she’ll turn to me and plead, “What did I do to you, you should hate me so?” I never answer. I know she’s burning and I’m glad to let her burn. Why not? I’m burning, too.

(It is only the present she hates; as soon as the present becomes the past, she immediately begins loving it.)

That’s the main thing, I guess, about being a few among the many: it silences you.

“That’s the first step, Ma,” I say softly. “The unhappiness has to be made alive before anything can happen.”

“I’m saying that nowadays love has to be earned. Even by mothers and sons.”

Nettie, it quickly developed, had no gift for mothering. Many women have no gift for it.

To be saved from meaninglessness, I knew, was everything. Largeness of meaning was redemption. It was an adolescent writer’s beginning: I had started to mythicize.

It was as though she had worked all day to earn the despair waiting faithfully for her at the end of her unwilling journey into daily life.

“You’re growing old together,” she said to me. “You and what frightens you.”

“You’ve tasted him, haven’t you,” she said, her voice flat with accusation and defeat. That was her favorite euphemism for intercourse: “You’ve tasted him, haven’t you.” The phrase never failed to shock. I felt it in my nerve endings.

Wasn’t my mother as good as saying with every breath she drew, “Life without a man is unlivable”? And wasn’t Nettie actually saying, “Men are scum but you gotta have one”? The message was not open to interpretation, a three-year-old could have repeated it: “If you don’t get a husband you’re stupid. If you get one and you lose him you’re inept.”

My mother said I needed love to experience life at a high level, but in fact mourning lost love was the highest level of life she had attained.

None of us knew how to discipline herself to the successful pursuit of an ideal, normal woman’s life. And indeed, none of us ever achieved it.

Three days later we fell into bed. “There’s a lot of things I can’t do,” Davey said, “but one thing I can do is fuck.” He was as good as his word. We went under together, and stayed under for six months.

The connection was immediate and primary. Without discussion or analysis we moved directly into the heart of the feeling. In a single fluid motion we had achieved both peace and excitement. “Home,” my body said to me, “I’m home.”

With Joe I was learning better something I already knew: that sex buys time. I saw that whenever we went to bed we were drawn into an exchange of feeling that repeatedly took us by surprise. The surprise kept us coming back for more. Thus, we remained locked in an embrace that caused each of us to look on occasion into the face of the other.

It was assumed by everyone I knew that Joe’s wife was the wife, and I the other woman, and Joe the prize slated to fall to one or the other of us, but such was not the case. Why, I thought, would I want him to leave his wife? What would I do then? Take him into my apartment? It’s too small. Besides, I may not like sleeping alone, but I like waking up alone. Yes, it’s painful when he leaves, but it’s not that painful. The situation suits me. And then again, it’s interesting.

We occupied a universe composed of one room in one season: my bedroom on weekday afternoons. As time went on, we occupied this universe more and more fully. Hunger multiplied on hunger, desire on desire. We couldn’t get enough. Because we didn’t get enough. I was always wanting more. “Not more,” a friend said evenly. “Enough. You want enough.” In a year or two I realized that it wasn’t exactly more I wanted, or even enough. It was a larger world for our feelings to walk about in.

The limits of exploration on the life of our feelings were set by Joe’s marriage, and those limits were close in. However deeply we might feel, our love could not make laws or map territory.

Every afternoon at four we burned and we drowned. It seemed during those dangerous days as though we were moving toward a climactic moment. In the evening, after he had left me, I would walk in the sweet hours of final daylight, fantasizing about us. Us together now, us together in the future, us walking, us in bed, us larking about. Us. It came sweeping up in me that week, all nervous excitement, melancholy sweetness, open longing.

Then one evening I felt stricken and bereft, frightened to be walking the streets alone, dreaming a life in my head about a man who was off elsewhere, and would always be off elsewhere. I shivered, and felt sick. My stomach ached. I went to bed early that night and woke out of a fitful sleep to find myself once again on the empty landscape.

I got up and wrote in my journal: “Love is a function of the passive feeling life, dependent on an ideal other for satisfactory resolution: the primitive position into which we are born. Work is a function of the active expressive life, and if it comes to nothing, one is still left with the strengthening knowledge of the acting self. Only when access to the imaginative life is denied does one go in for love in a big way.”

Mama worships at the shrine of Love but that lifelong boredom of hers is a dead giveaway.

I watched with tender amusement as he bent over backward not only to be reliable and loving each day but also to be continually thinking of how we might have more. Joe never felt he didn’t have enough, but he too wanted more and he was always conniving to get it. I didn’t think much about the conniving. It seemed natural that I simply let myself be carried along on the wave of bounty it delivered up to both of us.

I laid my hand on Joe’s arm and pleaded, “Let’s stay over the weekend. Call your wife and tell her you need another day or two for the boat.” Joe turned his head halfway toward me. I saw the frown forming on his forehead, and I saw his eyes narrow. “Sweetie, I’m not going back with you,” he said. “My wife is coming down this evening.” It was the tone of his voice I never forgot. The slightly puzzled irritation in it. As though he had, of course, already given me this information and he couldn’t understand how it was I had forgotten it. I remember afterward thinking: gaslight. “What?” I said. “What did you say?” “I said my wife’s coming down tonight. I told you that. I’m sure I did.” “How dare you,” I said. “How the fuck dare you.”

“Why?” he cried. “What’s so despicable? I wanted us to have a good time. I didn’t think we would if you knew we weren’t going back together. So what’s so terrible? We had a lovely time, didn’t we?” “You manipulated me. You held back information. Decided on your own it was more important we have a good time than that I know everything there was to know. The situation was more important to you than I was.” “That’s not true,” he said.

“Oh no you don’t. I’m not going to defend myself, and that’s that. I haven’t felt guilty toward my wife all these years, and I don’t feel guilty toward you. You and I have been falling to pieces for a long time now. As far as sex goes, I consider myself a free agent.”

“You’re such a fool,” Joe said softly. “With all you know, you still don’t know it’s an adversarial relation. There is no friendship in love.” “I refuse that definition,” I said. “I absolutely refuse it. If love is only romantic attachment, fuck it.”

“I guess it was inevitable,” I said, “that I, too, would become the deceived wife.” “Somebody always is,” Joe said. “Sometimes it’s even me.

I went reeling back over my life with men: Stefan, Davey, Joe. They had seemed so different, one from another, but I’d learned nothing from these attachments, I’d been hiding out with all of them. It was almost as though I chose men who would ensure I’d arrive back at this moment, depressed and paralyzed by the failure of love.

The truth. “I had an abortion with my legs up against the wall in an apartment on West Eighty-eighth Street, with Demerol injected into my veins by a doctor whose consulting room was the corner of Fifty-eighth Street and Tenth Avenue.” She nods at me as I speak, as though these details are familiar, even expected. Then she says, “I had mine in the basement of a Greenwich Village nightclub, for ten dollars, with a doctor who half the time when you woke up you were holding his penis in your hand.” I look at her in admiration. She has matched me clause for clause, and raised the ante with each one. We both burst out laughing at the same moment. Surprise.

As he spoke I saw myself lying on a bed in late afternoon, a man’s face buried in my neck, his hand moving slowly up my thigh over my hip, our bodies striped with bars of hot light coming through the window blinds. The image burned through me in seconds. I felt stunned by loss: the fun and sweetness of love, the deliciousness, the shimmer. I swallowed hard on empty air.

Life is difficult: a glory and a punishment. Ideas are excitement, glamorous company. Loneliness eats into me. When the balance between struggle and self-pity is maintained I feel myself one of the Odd Women—that is, I see myself on a continuum of that amazing two-hundred-year effort—and I am fortified, endowed with new spirit, new will. When the balance is lost I feel buried alive in failure and deprivation, without love or connection. Friendships are random, conflicts prevail, work is the sum of its disabilities.

My mother breaks the silence. In a voice remarkably free of emotion—a voice detached, curious, only wanting information—she says to me, “Why don’t you go already? Why don’t you walk away from my life? I’m not stopping you.” I see the light, I hear the street. I’m half in, half out. “I know you’re not, Ma.”