ONCE, WHEN DAD drank two beers at dinner, he insisted I’ve been writing poems since kindergarten. I have no memory of this. My first memory of writing is in fourth grade. While my classmates write expository sentences in cursive, I am writing a novel. Or that’s what I call it, anyway. A thinly veiled excuse to imagine myself caught in a love triangle with two of my real-life friends. We travel to a cabin in the Colorado mountains. The other girl goes missing. Finally, we’re alone. I have not yet been to the Colorado mountains, but imagine them steep, sloped, snowy, and thick with trees. I imagine they are dangerous. I show the novel to my teacher, my librarian, my friends, my parents. I offer all the handwritten pages, eager for their praise.
By my first year of high school, I start keeping a journal: a spiral notebook in which I write everything I can’t say out loud. I show it to no one; no one knows I write each night before I go to bed. The notebook stays secret for years, until Dad finds it left haphazardly in the basement. He hands the notebook over to my mother, who calls me into the bathroom. She grills me about the material, this smut, this garbage. I stay silent and nod or shake my head. She wants to know if I am a virgin. I swear that I am. This is a bold-faced lie. A year earlier I was raped by a drunk boy in my friend’s basement.
I don’t write that in my notebook.
I write about sneaking out of the house to get drunk, smoke pot, and have sex with boys who have already graduated from high school. I write about fucking a grown man on the golf course in the middle of the night. How his cock is so large it nearly splits me in two. I write about the man who dances me into a corner at a party and fucks me in the front seat of his car. I write about the college student who fucks me on the bottom bunk at a frat party, my head spinning from the alcohol, my friend passed out in the next room. I write about going to apartments to give head. In my notebook, it’s all I want, this fucking.
Mom stands in the bathroom, the notebook in one hand, her other hand on her hip. She’s angry but her voice is a whisper. What have you done? Sitting on the edge of the sink, I say, It’s fiction, Mom. My way of dealing. A lie, and she believes me. She gives me back the notebook and it never comes up again.
I’m cleaning my office when I stumble across a stack of my early poems stapled together, stuffed into a magazine file of my writing from college. I’m not even sure I want to read them, afraid I’ll find something new I’ve forgotten: a broken bone, a fist-sized bruise.
Instead, I find delicate, trite little verses about The Man I Live With: how his touch, his gaze, his whispers in my ear wake me from a dream I didn’t know I was having. In these poems, my love transforms me: it’s beautiful, transcendent, sublime. The poems are terrible, but I remember feeling so proud of them, folding copies into envelopes and submitting them to magazines, printing and stapling a whole packet and pushing it across a table toward a kind and generous teacher. I remember showing one poem to The Man I Live With, who grows so angry as he’s reading that he tears the page into pieces that fall to the floor. You don’t get to write about me, he insists.
There’s the story I have, and the story he has, and there is a story the police have in Evidence. There’s the story the journalist wrote for the paper. There’s the story The Female Officer filed in her report; her story is not my story. There’s the story he must have told his mother when he called her on the phone; there’s the story she must have told herself. There’s the story you’ll have after you put down this book. It’s an endless network of stories. This story tells me who I am. It gives me meaning. And I want to mean something so badly.
The first poem I ever publish appears in an undergraduate literary journal a few months after I graduate, after the kidnapping. I’m invited to read at the issue launch party, where a single microphone stands in a little clearing in the corner of a dark restaurant. Months earlier I sat at a table in this same spot, eating dinner with The Man I Live With, who was angry about one thing or another, calling me a cunt while I cried into my soup. I’m the second reader, or maybe the third, so nervous that the paper flutters like an animal in my hand. I’m standing under a spotlight, sweating through my shirt, my voice cracking every few syllables:
I can feel you
in the back of my throat.
In the place I begin
the word “god.”
I’ve practiced in front of the mirror at home every morning for weeks. My professors, teachers, My Good Friend, and an ex-lover sit in the audience, all of them veiled in shadow. It’s better that I can’t see their faces.
In graduate school I begin trying, in earnest, to write. I write about anything but The Man I Used to Live With—the seasons, my mother and father, protofeminism in neglected epistolary novels from the early modern period, the Spanish Civil War—but it always comes back to him, to all that happened. I try to write about My First Husband who sleeps on the couch watching NASCAR while I sit at my desk blowing smoke out the window; instead I write about the dreams, the pills, the swarm of gnats mating outside the screen. It’s the only thing that pulls me out of bed: these poems that lie and misdirect, that circle and circle all the things I can’t say out loud. Each day I begin writing, I think, This is it. Today is the day. As if typing anything other than that unthinkable thing were a kind of breaking free. Each day, as I’m sitting at my computer, watching the words accumulate on the page, I feel elated, euphoric. Look at how far I’ve come, I think. How far these words can carry me.
After I graduate from that writing program and enter the prestigious one in Texas; after I write my dissertation and earn a PhD; after I have written and published my first book, I begin trying to write this one. The story I must tell.
I try to write in the daytime, sitting at my desk, or on the couch, or reclining in the bed, while my daughter is at school and my son naps in his crib. I try to write about The Man I Used to Live With, about all that happened, but instead I write about addiction, or my children, or the dreams. I say, I can’t write with all these distractions. All these interruptions make it impossible to think.
I try to write at night, while the children sleep in their beds, while their father sits beside me on the couch or reclines on the pillow next to mine, his own computer propped open on his lap; instead I shop for houses we can’t afford, clothes I will not buy, vacations we will not take. I say, Maybe if I could just get away for a while, if only I could have a little time and space to think, and I apply for an artist residency in upstate New York, where the windows of my studio look out to the green edge of a rolling mountain range, the tall grass licking at the trees.
The first day, the day I begin writing this book, I sit at the computer, in front of the window, my eyes on the grass, my fingers on the keys, and tears stream down my cheeks. I down whole glasses of scotch and crawl under the desk.
After dinner, I call home from my computer and watch the small lithe bodies of my children tangle over My Husband, who tries, in earnest, to talk about his day while they whine or cry or paw at him or the image they’re seeing of me. It’s past their bedtime and they need to go to sleep. I say, I love you. I miss you. And mean it. And they say, Please come home. I blow a kiss and My Husband mouths the words: Are you okay? And I say, No, not at all, actually. I want to come home. I want the tangle of their bodies in my lap. I need that. I need My Husband’s breath in my hair before I drift off to sleep. Their love is all that saves me from the dreams.
After we hang up, there is only silence. There’s only darkness lapping at the window. There’s only an empty page on the screen.
Only the story can bridge it.
The funny version of the story goes like this: a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away . . . I was kidnapped and raped by a man I used to live with. I’m kind of fucked up about it.
It’s not a joke I tell at parties.
Most of the time I don’t tell the story at all. Whole close friendships have come and gone or continue to this day and I haven’t breathed a word.
Other times it takes only one glass of wine and I’m spilling the beans to near strangers. Or it doesn’t take wine. Maybe it’s ten in the morning. A new friend tells me a secret. I tell mine. It’s usually the same reaction: first there’s shock, a hand over the mouth or to the chest, always I’m so sorry.
I’m the one who’s sorry. I’m sorry I keep telling this story.
Here is the shortest version: for five hours on July 5, 2000, I was held prisoner in a soundproof room in a basement apartment rented for the sole purpose of raping and killing me.
I could also say I lived with my kidnapper for two and a half years, and during all the time we lived together he didn’t call it rape but fucking. When I finally moved out, he thought it would take only a few days of good, hard fucking to convince me to come home. If I refused, he planned to shoot me in the cunt and then the head.
His words, not mine.
I’m afraid the story isn’t finished happening.
Sometimes I think there is no entirely true story I could tell. Because there are some things I just don’t know, and other things I just can’t say. Which is not a failure of memory but of language.
If people ask what my book is about I do not say it is about the time I was kidnapped and raped by a man I used to live with. That level of honesty borders on rude. It is against the rules of polite society to admit having been raped to a near stranger. I change the subject. I point to the sky and say, Oh look, a flock of turtles! Or I ask the near stranger whether he thinks the housing market has finally turned around. Should I buy stock now or wait until closer to retirement? This is usually enough to get him off the scent.
To my acquaintances I say I’m writing about violence and memory and the body. Or I say it’s about violence and desire. I say I’m writing about a traumatic event in my past. Most people understand this as code for Think long and hard before asking more questions about this. Together we observe half a moment of silence before my acquaintance cocks his head back the slightest bit and opens his mouth to say, Ah . . . I see.
In the story I have, I am always escaping, always moving from one place to another, or standing still where there is nothing to do with my hands, and everywhere, in all of it, the walls are high, covered in thick blue Styrofoam, the ceiling out of reach. I might turn the corner and stumble into terror or love or loss. The story does have seasons. There’s the breeze of hands up Sunday’s dress, the bruise, the blue skirt I left. There’s the lure of infinite sleep. A sea route. A route down the river. The story I have is a map for this place, which has no actual location, no axes of orientation. In which direction do I travel today? Away and back. Away and back. Over and over. Am I not endlessly circling? Have I not been here before? This temple. This harbor. There is no outside, no inside. Am I not close to the center? Here is the forest. The fog. The last leaf slipping, the rub of my thumb and finger. And, like that: it’s gone.
I admit to My Husband that I’m afraid to post a schedule of my upcoming readings on my website. He sighs, closes his laptop, and turns to me. What do you think is going to happen? he asks. I think he’s going to show up and shoot me with a gun, I say. He sighs harder.
It’s not the only outcome I imagine. Sometimes I imagine he is dead. Or he is still alive, barely eking out a living in Venezuela. He loves another woman, I imagine. Or he has murdered her. Or he is not in Venezuela, but is lying low in the States, waiting for me to show him where to find me. And when he does, I imagine the ways I will struggle, how I will open the door to run. I imagine what I would give him in exchange for the lives of My Husband and our children.
There is nothing I would not give him.
The story becomes the mind’s protection. The story becomes the mind’s defense. An apology. A collection of excuses. A set of forgivable lies. As when my children come to me for affection and I give them something to eat. Or a fresh shirt. Or I busy myself with sweeping the floor and making the beds. I don’t have time for this, I say.
But I do have time. There’s nothing stopping me. Not really.
To My Husband I say, I’m too far gone. I don’t know how to love. We might be standing on opposite sides of the island in the kitchen. I might be pouring him a glass of wine or stirring a vegetable stew. I’m trapped on the other side of a wide, dark chasm, I say. I might break down in tears. He holds out his arms, but I cover my face, look down, turn away.
In this story, I’m always turning away.
My daughter asks what I do while she’s at school all day and I tell her anything but the truth. I’m working. I’m reading. I’m teaching, I say. But the truth is: sometimes I put my head against the table or the desk or the cool edge of the toilet. I puke, or scream, or pull my hair out in handfuls, and I weep. The blood rises to my face until it feels like his hand is here, right here, squeezing, squeezing. He is spitting into my face, kneeling on my chest, heavy as a pile of stones. He will kill me for this, I think.
But I don’t stop writing. I cover the screen and type without looking at the words. I crawl into my bed and pull the covers up over my body, over the computer, up over my head. This cave of making. It’s the last place he’d think to look.
By the time I pick my children up from school, I’ve cleaned the streaked mascara off my face and reapplied my lipstick. At home, I play with my son on the floor. I make dinner. Or if I do not make dinner, we order pizza and the four of us eat in the living room watching an animated movie. We take walks and work in the yard on the weekends. From the outside it all appears very normal.
My girlfriend asks how this book is going and I say, I’m sooooo ready to be done. It’s not fun to write this, you know. She picks at the tip of her straw, or fingers the arch of her eyebrow, and tells me that my children will someday feel lucky to have this book. We might be sitting on her porch or at a picnic table in the park or the only outside table at a restaurant. I say, This will be the last version of the story I ever tell. I know how ridiculous this sounds. How foolish. How naive. Because the truth is: I’m afraid of what will happen when it’s done. I’m trapped, I say. A prison I’ve built with this story. I don’t know how to escape it, I say.
But I do know.
The story is a trap, a puzzle, a paradox.
Ending it creates a door.