Biography of X

by Catherine Lacey

Grief has a warring logic; it always wants something impossible, something worse and something better.

(How odd to remember the face of someone I hate, when so much else is lost to the mess of memory.)

I’d always thought of myself a rational person, but the moment she was gone I ceased to be whoever I thought I was.

Anyone who was ever fortunate enough to be a part of X’s life had to accept this hazard—she lived in a play without intermission in which she’d cast herself in every role. That was the first reason X refused to authorize a biography: it would necessarily be false, and this work of falsehood could only serve to enrich whatever writer was shallow enough to capitalize on her infamy.

All I wanted at first was to find out where my wife had been born, and I imagined I might publish my findings as an essay, an article, or perhaps a lawsuit, something to quickly discredit Mr. Smith. I did not know that by beginning this research I had doomed myself in a thousand ways, that once the box had been opened, it would refuse to be shut.

There is no such thing as privacy. There is no experience or quality or thought or pain that has not been felt by all the billions of living and dead.

“This cowardice, unknowingness in the face of my own feelings is why I betray those I love, verbally, when I refused to express my feelings for them … The world is cluttered with dead institutions.”

Now it is so clear to me that love is the opposite of deification, that it erodes persona down to its mortal root. She was always human, difficult as it was for me to admit that; I made so much trouble for myself by refusing to see it.

X, of course, was not her given name, and neither was Dorothy Eagle—the name on the ID she used when she first arrived in New York— and neither were the several other names she used at different times, for different purposes, from 1972 to 1981—Deena Stray, Clydelle, Bee Converse, Clyde Hill, Martina Riggio, Yarrow Hall, Věra, Cindy O, Cassandra Edwards, and others. Though she was occasionally accused of being deceptive, deception was never her intent; a single name simply failed to contain her.

X’s real name, Dave said, was Caroline Luanna Walker Vine. She was born in Byhalia, Mississippi, in 1945.

I have it on tape—this first moment I learned of my wife’s actual first marriage, and her pregnancy, but I don’t recall how I felt. Perhaps I was too overwhelmed already to be overwhelmed again; perhaps I just blocked it all out, had to do so in order to continue.

“Revolutions do not follow precedents nor furnish them,” she wrote to Ted Gold years later. “I do not want pity. I transfer to others the hate in my humiliated heart.”

They don’t know how to change, Nancy said, with an unusual nervousness. They don’t want to. It’s human, of course, to want to keep things familiar. Don’t you think it’s human?

Love is breakable, it can go away. But compulsions! They don’t go nowhere. Once you get one, that’s it. It’s you and your compulsion till death do you part.

When we analyze the Southern Territory from afar, we don’t stop to think that in the middle of this black hole—in this bleak, dark country where millions were imprisoned, tortured, killed—there were also children walking in the dark, hand in hand, intensely in love.

I had just left my husband to be with X, and my father had left my mother when I was a child, so I thought I knew a thing or two about abandonment. Of course I didn’t. Not really. Not then.

No one wants to admit that they, too, might live quite happily in a simulation, in a simulacrum of life. No one wants to believe that they are, at heart, more interested in comfort than in truth.

It was like a black hole or something, a gravity feeling, he said. You’re supposed to get clear on certain matters as you get old, but I never did feel clear about anything with her. I don’t understand. I just don’t understand it.

It’s not that the people of the ST who were oppressed for their gender, poverty, or race were duped—as so many in the North seem intent on believing—but rather that their ability to love a concept as large and appealing as God was used against them again and again.

She came by with some beers past midnight and climbed in my window on the second floor—I never knew how she did that—and anyway, she woke me up, said we had to talk, said she’d been changed by someone, that she’d never really been changed by someone before.

‘Beware of anything that you hear yourself saying too often.’

“I only know that I have to create a powerful monster, since I am such a weak one,” X wrote in the journal she kept while living with Connie.“I have to create a monster apart from me, someone who knows much more than I know, who has a world view, and does not get such simple words wrong.”

It seems that the more she loved someone, the more pain she wanted to dredge up, the more demanding she became, no matter the cost, no matter the damage.

Or perhaps it’s all much simpler than that: we cannot see the full and terrible truth of anyone with whom we closely live. Everything blurs when held too near.

Who loved her more? Who knew her better? There can only be one widow, I told myself as I took the elevator down. The rest are exes.

Other people’s memories of my wife had clouded my own by then, which perhaps had been the point all along—not to see her more clearly, but to understand I never knew her in full.

Anyway, I knew better—writers are a miserable lot. Literature isn’t written by the content. Why would I suffer to write when reading is so much more pleasurable?

I have broken every rule I ever set for myself. And now I am busy, so busy, day and night, ruining my life.

‘Men use myth, women don’t have the resources to create it. Women who have tried to do so endure so much stress … that their lives are cut short.’

Martina says, ‘A woman’s need for love was created by patriarchy to help men succeed in life. Women give love an independent value, while men give it an instrumental one.’ And, oh, she was yelling this part, I remember it, she said, ‘You are making the choice to give love an independent value, and you can choose to give love an instrumental value. Then you will be free of this nonsense, this pain you make for yourself. Don’t you see? Loving you makes my life more possible, but loving you is not my life!’

At the time I wanted to believe I still loved her, despite everything, and that I missed her terribly, and that the biography was a crucible for my grief, but already it had shifted into something else, something darker, something I knew to be doomed.

My only experience of such hatred was secondhand—the stories I’d heard from friends who were twice my age, or those who’d been born in other countries. But the illogical stance of another’s sexuality being cause for anger was still an abstraction to me, and it was not until I became the subject of Zebulon’s repulsion that I truly felt its warmth. When he slammed down the phone I felt as if I’d been rejected by my own child. I never heard from him again.

I figured that since all these people who’d been a part of X’s life seemed to be falling away in some kind of choreography—well, maybe it was my time. But I didn’t die. Not that year, or not exactly.

Prior to that moment, I may have identified as a rather meek person, a fearful person, someone who was terrified of pain, of difficulty and conflict. But here she was—this enormously powerful woman telling me that I possessed a rare strain of power. I accepted it completely. I immediately became a new creature, one who could accept—without worry or hesitation—that the most important person in her life would disappear for weeks at a time without explanation or assurance of her return.

Belief is nothing until it is strained. A person may hold a belief and become emotionally attached to it long before it’s ever put to the test. The same is true of promises and aspirations. Promises are made when they seem easy to accomplish. Aspirations, too. Few wed themselves to anything that seems impossible. And yet so many beliefs or goals are proven to be impossible. We are, I know not how, double within ourselves, and as a result we do not believe what we believe, and we cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.