Vladimir

by Julia May Jonas

I am depressed that they feel so guilty about their encounters with my husband that they have decided he was taking advantage of them. I want to throw them all a Slut Walk and let them know that when they’re sad, it’s probably not because of the sex they had, and more because they spend too much time on the internet, wondering what people think of them.

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.

When I was young I read without censure, including consuming endless women’s magazines and picking up “tips” that haunt me still. To this day I tense my ass at a red light and do calf raises while waiting in line at the grocery store, take the top piece of bread off my sandwiches, and destroy pictures that catch me in an unflattering light. My daily thrum of happiness depends on my number on a scale, as inane as I know that to be.

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.

I didn’t mind. I was too happy that we were speaking again to let her annoyance feel like anything other than the feeble blows that daughters lob against their mothers to make sure they’ll still be loved, even at their most peevish.

Straightness: the predictable container in which all possible outcomes seemed already etched into stone—happiness, unhappiness, complacency, strife—a life in which we were all operating inside of a story already told, even as we sought to live an authentic existence. Even as we tried to say to ourselves that it wasn’t who we mated with but the quality of the thoughts in our brain that made us radical, we knew that the patterns of our life were the patterns of our parents, were the patterns of all the dim, sorrel-chomping sheep living unexamined existences in all the homes all over this thoughtless, anti-intellectual country.

As long as whatever she chose, she wouldn’t have to take on the identity of the anxious woman who got dinner on the table while the men sat on the porch. As long as she didn’t have to act the part of the schoolmarm to a good-natured rascal of a partner who did whatever he liked and was loved more because of it. And if she did choose to cook or clean or worry, at least she could maybe do all those things for a woman who understood, not a man who, by virtue of being born with a thing between his legs, had absorbed from an early age that it was all right to sit back and enjoy being served.

When she noticed my half-eaten omelet, I admitted all the thoughts that I had heretofore pushed away. I realized I was completely and utterly lovesick. It was love. I had restricted my caloric intake nearly all my life, eating half portions, carving little lines around globs to delineate what must be left behind, even throwing food into the trash; but there was only one other period in my life when I left food on my plate without even thinking about it, which was when I fell in love with David.

There was a burning in my body, an extra level of excitement keeping part of me fed and running that required no sustenance. It was longing for the love of Vladimir Vladinski, junior professor and experimental novelist. Longing was energizing my muscles and organs and brain. Longing was replacing my blood with fizzy, expansive liquid. I loved him.

“I want you to have the life you want, Mom, not some compromise.” Always,

the touch of my daughter thrilled me. I still marveled at how cellular the love between a mother and child was—how little I had to think of it, how much I simply felt it.

You’re a force for good in this world,

However ridiculous it was for an older woman like me to lust after him, the force of my talent, the brilliance of my work, would blur my lines and firm my skin. It would be one night, maybe two, and then over, but there would be a crystal of connection formed between us. We would be linked for the rest of our lives. This fantasy floated alongside my expatriate fantasy, fantasies

But as he stood in front of me, vulnerable and wanting, I couldn’t tell him no, I didn’t love him. I felt wildly protective of that soft part of him that reached out for me like a child. John was usually pulled back and cynical. Dignified. In a departmental gathering or a faculty meeting I would sit back and admire how he could dominate all the whining, sputtering academics with his removed dignity.

But I hadn’t read the moment correctly. I had thought he’d melt and sweep me up jokingly, and I’d tell him that of course I loved him, that I’d consider coming to the hearing. Instead he looked at me sadly, shook his head as though I were responsible for all the tiredness in the world, and left. I sank into an armchair like a felled tree. I was angry at myself for creating my own trap. Now I felt as though I had done something wrong.

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. John was acting just like the women who accused him. He had been wronged, goddamnit. While there was a part of him, I knew, that understood I was suffering too, he still cherished the sense that he was the most drastically injured party. He grasped his being wronged like a precious gem in a velvet pouch. Yes, he was like all the rest of them, desperately holding on to his own pain.

I remember reading that Edna St. Vincent Millay gave instructions to her housekeeper not to interrupt her if they saw her standing still—that was the way she would compose poems, on two feet, staring into the middle distance, writing and rewriting lines in her head. I never had that organization of thought: my rapt pauses were all about conflicting feelings, images and memories running and bumping into each other—more like a chaotic battle scene than the unfurling of insight.

They had grown up with a constant stream of global warming and gun violence burbling on low from their parents’ radios as they were driven to and from soccer or clarinet. Their lives, for the most part (at least the majority of students who attended this liberal and very expensive college), were cloaked in the postmillennial blanket of peace and prosperity, while terrible threats loomed in the shadowy corners of the larger world. They were overpraised and overpressured. There were teenage billionaires, twelve-year-old YouTube stars, and no jobs for them once they graduated. Once Trump became president, the illusion, the one imparted to them comfortably from the driver’s seat of a minivan, the idea that the world would slowly get better, that “the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice,” was upended.

When she was growing up, wanting her to find her worth elsewhere, hating myself for my obsession with my appearance, I never once asked Sid how I looked, even as I longed for her praise.

“Nowhere.” Then he pulled his elbows behind him to stretch his chest, farted, and left the room. As a matter of habit he flicked off the light on his way out, stranding me in the dark.

When my daughter was young, and I noticed that something upsetting had happened to her, in school or on the playground, I would tell her that if she would only speak about it, the bad feelings would evaporate. It’s magic, I would say, talking is magic.

Without work she was completely adrift, all the running in the world couldn’t counteract the amount she was drinking and eating—she looked perpetually puffy, distended, and ill.

Awkward around most women, I had trained myself to notice something on their person I could compliment. 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. In my life I’ve been wounded more by compliments than I have by insults. (Once when I asked an acquaintance what they thought of my second novel they said, “I can tell you worked so hard on it.”)

I wanted to push her into the mud and kick up great puddles of splattering filth, defiling her face, her clothing, her stylish shoes. I also wanted to worship at her feet, have her tell me all her secrets and methods for living so completely and exactly as she wanted.

People want books to absorb them, but one could force attention upon a book. It would be back and forth for the first half hour, but if you meant it, you could rope your mind into sublime and single-pointed concentration.

And as I looked in the bathroom mirror at the webbing around my eyes, my frowning jowls, and the shriveled space between my clavicles, I felt desperation at the idea that I would never captivate anyone ever again. A man might make a concession for me based on mutual agreeability, shared crinkliness, but he wouldn’t, he couldn’t, be in my thrall.

“I actually don’t have the time or resources to care about this,” she said, and she lifted her hands, palms facing down, closed her eyes, and lowered them with an exhale, as though to press against the earth. “I just want to live in a world where I can pretend that stuff like this doesn’t exist. I have more important things to think about.”

His affairs were painful because they created an atmosphere in which some women were chosen and others weren’t. It was mostly through stories and lore—but it nevertheless turned all the female students of the English Department into candidates, to be selected, dismissed, or ignored.

How would I feel if Vladimir touched me? Would I lose myself completely? Would I dissolve? Become nothing but particles?

When I was a young and insecure teacher I decided that the greatest service I could do for my students was give them my focused attention. Kill them with care, was my motto. If you’re unsure of your brilliance, give your time. A student who feels seen by you is yours forever.

(Not too many years ago, you were unlikely to encounter a wine greater than 11 percent; somehow in the past decade we had internationally agreed we needed to get drunker faster and for less.)

Working for a nonprofit with her debt would have been utter drudgery—we ran the numbers together and we were shocked—and, well, I wanted to see her both happy and making a difference, of course I did. She wasn’t being selfish or lazy—and what else was my life for if not helping my one child do good for this world?

These were the only times he felt the burden of ambition lift from his chest, understanding himself to be an animal among animals, a miraculous, meaningless life-form that had grown from the earth only to be absorbed back into it.

“You live quite the designed life,” he said when I handed him his cup. “I’m just old,” I said. “I’ve had enough time to get the right things and get rid of the wrong ones.”

Their recycling clinked with glass bottles of hard liquor as she plummeted into a wrathful and impermeable depression.

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.

A tubby little raccoon waddled onto the porch. Its black doll-eyes stared at me. I held its gaze, wishing I could dissolve into a mammalian c...

Just like a man to believe a woman had to keep her behavior in line while also churning out a work of genius.

(money is energy, an investment banker once told me),

Electra spends the entirety of Sophocles’s play in a doorway, I say to my students, when we read his Theban trilogy in my Adaptations course. She is unable to return home and unable to venture into the world. Pay attention to doorways, to paths, to in-between spaces, I tell them, these are the places of transformation.

“You can’t think about it like that,” he says, his eyes dark and dismissive. “Getting away with something, not getting away with something, moral retribution. I don’t matter, you don’t matter. To think we do is just marketing. It’s this cult of personality. You know that.”

No, things work out because of the way they work out, because I open one door and then another, because I find that ease can be one of the greater forms of freedom.

We get along, we’re too frightened of what might happen if we didn’t.

We didn’t deserve to be treated so casually. Casually. That was the word. At an age when every moment was important, when we were forming our conceptions of who we were, we had been used and passed off without care.

Grace is a lifting out of yourself, shame is burrowing inside yourself. To place your attention fully on someone or something else is an act of grace and release. Shame is placing oneself fully at the center of the story, of the universe. Shame is fixed, grace is fluid. Grace can be faked, and shame is not the same as regret (which is useful), but real grace is the antidote for shame.