Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (FSG Classics)

by Vivian Gornick

“Listen to me,” I pleaded, “just listen to me.” He nodded at me, not taking his eyes from mine. “You don’t know me at all,” I said. “You think I’m this hot-shot loudmouthed liberated woman, as brash and self-confident as you, ready to walk across the world just like you, and that’s not who I am at all. It’s making me lonely now to make love with you, and you not know what my life is about.” He nodded again. I told him then how I had hungered for a life like his but that I hadn’t ever had it, that I’d always felt marginal, buried alive in obscurity, and that all the talk I manufactured couldn’t dissolve out the isolation. I told him how sometimes I wake spontaneously in the night and I sit up in bed and I’m alone in the middle of the world. “Where is everybody?” I say out loud, and I have to calm myself with “Mama’s in Chelsea, Marilyn’s on Seventy-third Street, my brother’s in Baltimore.” The list, I told him, is pathetic. I talked and talked. On and on I went, without pause or interruption. When I stopped I felt relieved (alone now but not lonely) and, very quickly, embarrassed. He was so silent. Oh, I thought, what a fool you are to have said these things. He doesn’t like any of this, not a bit of it, he doesn’t even know what you’re talking about. Then Joe said, “Darling, what a rich inner life you have.” My eyes widened. I took in the words. I laughed with delight. That he had such a sentence in him! That he had spoken the sentence he had in him. I loved him then. For ...