Melody Nixon
Issue 14 · Issue 14
"She's gonna hate you," he says, all of a sudden. I'm twisted around, grappling with the zipper of my dress. "Wait, what? What do you mean?"
"She's gonna hate you." The word, the language he's chosen. He doesn't press his hands against the warm cotton on my back, pull up the zipper, rest a palm.
*
How do I capture in this tiny textual world the reality of a relationship between discrete people? How to capture the size of, and reach the edges of, the social contexts from which we originate? The girl in the club bathrooms the other night, who pressed her hands against me like she wanted to overcome time. The ex-lovers in New Zealand. The people I'm seeing regularly in New York City. And this man. We intersect with one another, we are Venn diagrams. We are separate backgrounds, and for a short or a long time, we are overlapping experience.
*
Claire Messud thinks that it's not possible to ever be completely, totally transparent with another person. "Any conversation is always partial and limited by the confusions and distortions within ourselves, and within the other person," she says. What happens to those distortions, that base-line subjectivity, when you overlay it with desire?
*
He is sitting next to me at an uptown bar, looking at me with clear eyes. His face is sweet, his expression open, our legs intercrossed. We're drinking variations on whiskey and bourbon, hazy liquid on ice, and in the half-light we're talking about what shape a potential relationship between us might take. "No matter what," I insist, "it has to be fluid, and open." An open relationship, non-monogamy, sounds pretty good to him, as it does to many New Yorkers. The point for me is actually to be free of a system that I feel hasn't been set up in my interest, male-driven monogamy—what I see as a means of ownership and control. The point for him, I kind of think, is to avoid commitment, but I don't say that. This is progress for me. Recently separated, I've been drinking myself away from myself and hooking up with a lot of random strangers. But now, I want to know somebody, cautiously. As his gaze meets mine, I want him to see me. I want him to see my eyes. Blue. Kiwi, Pakeha, Scottish, plus something slightly "other," that unclaimed part of my ancestry, the unknown part. His eyes are brown. They come from his Jamaican, and Southern African-American parentage.
*
"I think of subjectivity," says Claire Messud, "as if there's a puzzle and we're given sometimes half, at the most three-quarters of the puzzle pieces, and we have to fit them together and make a picture. We project the missing pieces to make the picture whole, that's how we understand what has gone on."
*
A few months later, and he and I are together in the middle of the night, reaching for one another over and over, and I notice an extra quality to our skin contact this time. A fluidity. There's something about getting through each other's edges. Of thinking of nothing else, and coming up against nothing else, but the skin border. And then, of moving through it, of wanting the skin border gone. Of finding it gone, in certain small moments; keeping those moments, letting them stay.
*
"It has always puzzled me," says hooks, "that women and men who spend a lifetime working to resist and oppose one form of domination can be systematically supporting another." See this in the cross-stitch of daily life. I'm a white feminist and I'm in a club dancing with a black man to a really misogynistic hip-hop track that exploits women, and I'm getting down. See me dating men who are in some cases activists, radicals, and see me falling the most for the ones who, to some extent, want to use me. "Are you my bitch?" they demand. The feminist inside won't let me say yes all the time, but I do sometimes.
*
On the nights when we're asleep together, his body jerks. I don't know, yet, what he has lived through, this person of New York City. I know a little bit, about murders. Race riots in the eighties. And the wound of the Twin Towers. The codes of the past are written through his skin; they are told by his sleep. Sometimes he shakes so strongly his mouth lips for help. That's when I wake him, and he goes silent. The answers to my questions stay in his muscles.
*
Is subjectivity heightened, when you add to its puzzle the meeting of two separate cultural backgrounds? Or is subjectivity somehow lessened, by not being able to read the usual social cues? Sometimes cultural misalignment actually short-circuits people's defenses. It's hard to act distant if you don't know when you're supposed to. If you haven't learned the history of how to act distant from one another.
*
When I'm not sleeping next to him, I imagine the space where his chest would be. I reach my hands out across my bed, and feel the mound of a projected physical chest. Then I push my pillow there and position my head on his chest–his imagined chest. I sleep curled at an awkward angle. I tell myself a projected body is as real as any body, if it's approached with the same feeling. That the abstract and the concrete can be brought close enough, through feeling, to be one and the same. To be inseparable.
*
As he and I meet, and meet again, cautiously, over months, I find there are people in my life who don't want this. Or more specifically, don't like us seeing each other, across our different races, and across our different ways of living. This isn't a unique situation, but it's the first time it's entered my world in this way. I didn't realize it could: That American history even holds a term for it, a term that was used to make the concept outside of the law. Miscegenation. A rule of law extinguished before my arrival here, but living on in the country's DNA. In the bloodlines run a set of ideas governing the plasticity of the human body – how skin ought to contact, how genes ought to merge, what two bodies ought to shape themselves into.
*
"Sensuality and abstraction are mutually dependent," says Susan Griffin. "In the mind," she says, "the capacities are inseparable." Her words feel like heavy sunblock to me. As I read them they soak in. They disappear, can't be washed off.
*
A new study shows that mice inherit trauma from their parents, and grandparents. "Trauma RNA" are passed on through male sperm. The behavioral changes in the mice born of traumatized parents are recklessness and depression. My recent reconnection with my recklessness, through my separation, has been comforting to me. In the familiarity of complete abandon I almost find a sense of home. The memory of the anxiety and release of my teenage years, when I tried to escape the rootlessness of my family in New Zealand, comes back to me. I remember all the tricks, rediscover all the warm vices. Slowly, slowly, I drink less often, but the night hours grow bigger and bigger like digits on a trading floor. Which part of the past is keeping me awake? And while I am awake, what past of his is making him shake in sleeping?
*
When he and I overlap, are seen by others to be overlapping, what living past is driving them to conclusions?
*
I'm not used to performing my whiteness like an American. I don't know how to, nor particularly want to release my Kiwi identity to a new one. But I perform a sort of whiteness – a particular foreigner whiteness, a whiteness of exemption. I'm the Other white person in this country. Not quite fully white, my cultural codes form a set different to those usually embodied in this skin tone. They're off-beat with the regular American rhythm – I walk in a kind of different way; messy footwear, my feet are sandy, my toes not manicured. I talk languages other than English, and my own English is strange. No one understands the Maori phrases. I speak slightly out of synch with those around me, waiting too long into conversations to interject.
*
In Venn diagrams the parts that overlap are usually smaller than the parts left floating, discrete. Outside of the connection, a circle of empty space.
*
In bed he and I are blue irises meeting brown. We are that: Irises. Colored circles, a feeling, a connection, the intersecting lines. We meet inside one another's chests. We make one another temporarily larger.
*
"Borders and barriers," writes Edward Said, "enclose us within the safety of familiar territory." At they same time, they can become prisons, "and are often defended beyond reason or necessity." In contrast the exile—a person living life outside of habitual order—is nomadic, decentered, contrapuntal. The exile dissolves boundaries.
*
Here we are, neither of us knowing what to call this. Here we are, neither of us in our skin.
*
Then, each time, there comes the morning. We're disentangling, rolling over, out of bed, and we're putting our feet on the floor. Here I am, struggling with my zipper. He's pulling on jeans, socks, and kicks. Taking a swig of soda. "Gross," I say, and he waves it in front of me. "Don't knock it. You want some." I take a sip. We're checking our texts. Our conversation is wandering, and we're talking about our acquaintances, and then we're talking about people who don't want us to date. We're talking about the friend who's going to hate me, if she sees that we're together, he says. We're not talking about all of ways we're too terrified to be together. Of all of the things that make stepping outside together hard.
*
Regard experiences, Said says, as if they are about to disappear.
*
Here he is, lips and beautiful irises. Here he is, a scent so subtle it goes consciously unnoticed.
*
Here I am, inside and outside of a dynamic that predates me, that is so large I can only understand it piece by piece; pull it apart with my mind as though with my own hands, notice its rough texture.