Vladimir

by Julia May Jonas

I remember feeling like a classic young girl, and thinking that my goodness shone out of me. Goodness and intelligence radiated from my eyes, and the men recognized it, even the oldest and most cantankerous.

Now, however, young women have apparently lost all agency in romantic entanglements. Now my husband was abusing his power, never mind that power is the reason they desired him in the first place. Whatever the current state of my marriage may be, I still can’t think about it all without my blood boiling. My anger is not so much directed toward the accusations as it is toward the lack of self-regard these women have—the lack of their own confidence. I wish they could see themselves not as little leaves swirled around by the wind of a world that does not belong to them, but as powerful, sexual women interested in engaging in a little bit of danger, a little bit of taboo, a little bit of fun.

No, my work was simply not enough—not loud enough, not forceful enough, not realistic enough, not poetic enough, not funny enough, not speculative enough, not good enough.

Oh, it was him, it was all because of him, I knew. Him and his book and his body, and the way he spread his legs and looked at me in the black glass of the window. It was him and his tragic wife and his sad yet triumphant story. I was writing to him. He who wasn’t the least bit interested in me—I was writing to explain myself to him. If I couldn’t have him—perhaps I didn’t even want him—I at least wanted him to know me. Who I was and how I felt.

The truth is, we did fall in love. Our hearts would bleat when the other was near. The realness of that early love is something I have returned to again and again as reassurance.

Vanity has always been my poorest quality. I hate it in myself, and yet am as plagued with it as I am with needing to sleep or eat or breathe. Despite my ability to read long texts quickly, to analyze them adroitly, to practice exegesis with precision, to publish articles and books on literary form, to write two novels, to raise a child, to be a mentor and friend to my students, still all the while I feel trapped in the prison of vanity.

Perhaps it was this idea of self-expression and this thought that if we were fully to release this sadness, or if we were to alter it too much—if we were to give up all the obsessions and anxieties that caused us pain—then we would become a kind of person we disdained, someone content with an abstract idea of the littleness of their lives. For our lives were, as writers, essentially little by nature. Writers have to lead little lives, otherwise you can’t find time for writing. Was depression simply a hanging on to grandeur?

You have to be willfully ignorant of certain truths to be successful, you just have to, and she seemed to me like the kind of woman who could not be ignorant of anything. The kind of mind that could paralyze itself.

It was always that—a man could always make me feel worse than anything any woman could ever say to me. He could always make me despise myself, make me feel fundamentally self-conscious about my idiotic femininity and my pathetic peevishness, make me understand I was no match for the real power he possessed.

(it is my experience that while women love clothes and fashion, there is no one as interested in the preservation of the like-new state of their vestments as a preening man).

Longing was energizing my muscles and organs and brain. Longing was replacing my blood with fizzy, expansive liquid. I loved him.

I was angry at myself for creating my own trap. Now I felt as though I had done something wrong. Now I felt as though I had to run after him. “I love you, baby, I love you.” What did I truly want from him? Did I want a day, a month, a year of domination? In which I could scream at him and mock him all I wanted with impunity? Did I want him to grovel at my feet? It wasn’t that, exactly. I wanted him to accept the role of the penitent. But you can’t ask someone who feels like a victim, as John most certainly did, to live apologetically. And there it was, that twisted logic. Even as we railed against victim mentality, against trauma as a weapon, we took the strength of our arguments from the internal sense of our own victimhood.

Compliments made you supplicant, equal, and master all at once. Supplicant because you are below, admiring; equal because you have the same taste; and master because you are bestowing your approval.

The anger of a gentle man is the most frightening kind of anger.

I felt petrified, and annoyed at myself. Could I be any more idiotic? For the first time in what felt like my life I was getting exactly what I wanted, what I had fantasized and dreamed about, and I was reacting like a frigid spinster.

And—this was the most embarrassing—I realized my fantasy had relied upon me being a sexy colleague, an attractive peer. I had imagined passion, something wordless and animal and back-brained. My feelings for Vladimir were beyond thought, and certainly beyond scenario. I had wanted him to allow me to forget who I was. I began to cry with disappointment, then laughed at myself for my tears. I had kidnapped him, essentially, I had drugged and deceived him, all because I wanted to satisfy my desire, and now I was finding fault with his perception of me. As if men who took advantage of women ever thought about how those women perceived them.

He should have seen it. He should have seen how young I was inside, how little I knew about what I wanted, about what was good for me. He should have thrown me out of his office, told me to take a cold shower, to grow up, to find friends or a boyfriend my own age. I was of age, but I was a child. He had complimented me, praised me, made me feel as though I had something to offer the world, but that was only courtship, I finally realized. I had taken it as truth.