In the winter of 2015, the film Carol came into wide release. Carol is based on the 1952 Patricia Highsmith novel The Price of Salt (later renamed Carol), which recounts the passion and torment of a love affair between Therese Belivet, a young and inexperienced shopgirl, and Carol Aird, a married woman with a child. The setting is midcentury New York and the affair is a dangerous one. Carol risks losing custody of her daughter to a vengeful and wounded ex-husband, and Therese, who has never loved a women before Carol, risks the end of security, the predictable future of a straight life.
Before I had the chance to see Carol I read all the criticism, listened to all the radio interviews. The mere existence of the film struck me as extraordinary—a Hollywood feature based on a book by a lesbian—and I loved all the press, and the buzz. I loved that the film was a queer endeavor: Carol’s screenplay was written by Phyllis Nagy, a lesbian playwright and friend of Patricia Highsmith, and the film was directed by Todd Haynes, a gay man.
Many of the articles I read referenced Highsmith’s struggle to publish The Price of Salt. Her publisher passed on the manuscript, and it was later published under a pseudonym by a different house. These articles depicted Highsmith’s publishing struggle as a tragic remnant of a distant past, as though bookstores were now chock-full of books about lesbians written by lesbians. As though even the well-read knew the name of any lesbian writer who was not Eileen Myles.
In the last week before the movie left town, Chris and I made a date to see it together in Amherst. We met there after work, in a bar across the street from the theater. This was what we did now that our children were older. We met each other in bars. We went on trips without the girls, spent nights in hotel rooms. Our daughters were eleven and eight years old. One of motherhood’s greatest myths is the supposed bittersweetness of the children’s aging. I have found it to be only sweet.
As the film began I indulged in the rare pleasure of deciding which member of the on-screen lesbian couple I most resembled. The last film that had given me the chance for this game was The Kids Are All Right, when after a few scenes I settled on the Julianne Moore character, right up until she has creepy bad sex with her sperm donor, at which point I decided I was a less uptight version of Annette Bening.
This time my alter ego was clear from the first moment. I was Therese Belivet, the young shopgirl, the seduced. The one who can’t quite believe what she wants, what she suddenly, absurdly, can’t live without. It was pleasing to watch her move across the camera’s dreamy Vaseline-smeared lens, both blurry and bright. She made me want to tame my hair and find my pearl earrings, buy a tweed skirt, order creamed spinach and eggs. She made me want to smoke.
I began to sour on the movie when Carol’s husband leaves town with their daughter, threatening Carol with a child custody suit if she doesn’t put a stop to her lesbian ways. This is a story line I detest: the woman who sacrifices motherhood at the altar of desire. I hate the story line because of my own telescopic and terrified response to it, which has always been: keep the child at all costs. As I watched, I thought, Oh, Carol. Just don’t. Go home, be quiet, keep secret. Have sex with your husband, tape up your marriage. What could matter more than your child?
But then soon enough Carol and Therese are on the road, they are in a hotel room, and Carol’s mouth is on Therese’s body. And in that moment of watching them I knew what could matter more than anything or anyone else. I knew just as well as they did. So I was Therese, but I was also Carol. I was the girl who can’t believe she wants it; I was the woman who will give up what she loves to keep it.
I had long kept my distance from the Carols of history, lesbians who lost everything to be themselves. I held them all at arm’s length, preferring to think of my love affair as singular and apolitical, removed from time and even from my own identity, as though Chris were the only woman I would ever desire, the narrative of my sexual identity complete in the narrative of our sex. Kelly and her politics, Chris at the statehouse protesting the protestors—I had wanted to keep my distance even from the struggles of those closest to me.
But there I was sitting next to my wife—the woman with whom I had two children and a life insurance policy—watching a spectacle of harm and loss that I could not push away. Those women were my history, my foremothers. My life was built on the lives of women like Carol; my children existed because their children were taken from them and they refused to go home and keep the secret.
But that wasn’t all. I watched the pained glances, the letter held too tightly, the phone receiver held too long. Carol’s anxiety while she waits, broken, chastened, for a supervised visit with her daughter. Carol wasn’t just my history. She wasn’t just the before. I had more in common with Carol than I had, for so long, wanted to admit.
All those years ago I walked into a basement chapel and tasted the divine. I swam in deep waters of belief. For a time I was known and loved and home, and I believed great things would come to me. But what came to me instead was another desire just as profound, and entirely irreconcilable. The world I was born into was fuller than Carol’s world but it was still broken.
Bit by bit I forged a new belief, and it was meaningful and complicated and real. But it wasn’t better than the one I might have had if I had been allowed to remain a Catholic. I would have liked to do that. I would still like to. I would like a wider life; I would like to move through the world and claim anything that moves me, anything that expands my experience of being human. I would like not to be the person who watches a movie in which a woman loses her child and feels a kinship with that woman.
And yet. Carol’s mouth on Therese’s body.
I have known since I was twenty-four that I couldn’t live without that. When I was a girl like Therese, a seed cracked in the fire of my wanting, and my whole life sprouted from it. It’s funny to think of my life this way, passionate and urgent, destined. Surely it doesn’t look it, here as a now forty-something woman with two children and a dog, a weedy garden, a mortgage. This is the life born of that fire? This life is essential and wild, the only possible life? Yes. Yes it is.
For years I was haunted by the shadow of the woman I thought I would become, the Catholic who crossed her children before they left for sleepaway camp, believing in the blessing and protection of her prayers, her sign. She was a second, impossible self, and she was maddening. But she’s dear to me now. I no longer see her impossibility as a result of my weakness, my lack of faith, of determination. She’s impossible because this world will not abide her, not yet. But I know her heart. I know what she believes.
On my office wall there is a photo of the Pantheon in Rome on Pentecost. In the photo countless blood-red rose petals are falling from the dome’s oculus. The petals are a symbol, a dramatic reenactment of the first Pentecost when the Holy Spirit arrived as fire, igniting the apostles with the ability to speak in tongues that the people around them heard, and understood, in their own varied and native languages. Pentecost is the miracle that built the Church. In the photo, robed priests and worshippers reach for the petals. A child lies on the marble floor as though in a field, a red and fragrant sea. I hung the photo because I’m planning to go to Rome for Pentecost someday. I will stand under the Pantheon’s domed ceiling, shoulder to shoulder with people of a faith that I love but can’t claim, and I will wait for the petals to fall.