supplicium post mortem

This afternoon we went on an outing to the Met, and to get there we walked through the park. (That would be the royal we of me, Casey and TL.) It was a warm, sunny gorgeous early-summer day. The park was full of tourists, school groups, and toddlers with nannies or moms. We walked up the east side of the park to the museum, which happened to take us through the route we used to take in the old days when we would take the dogs there early on Sunday mornings.

Pretty soon I was crying too much and had to sit down on a bench. I was not only longing for M, but also imagining him walking down the path towards me wearing baseball cap, navy blue chinos, white dress shirt rolled up to the elbows, black Church’s shoes, and then kissing me, putting his arm around me, having on his left hand his wedding ring (now on my right hand) and signet ring, being – oh, forget it.

And I felt literally demented because:

1. The periods of my life don’t feel joined up anymore; the past feels like a dream, and I can’t be entirely sure if it was as real as the people and characters in my mind, or less real.
2. I don’t seem capable of touching the outside world a lot of the time. Sitting on the park bench crying underneath my sunglasses, I felt like a visitor from another dimension: I could see all the passersby, but they couldn’t see me.
3. I was wandering (literally) around this city all by myself and without a plan, not knowing what was driving me from moment to moment. How did I even wind up at the museum today?

In fact, I was wandering around in a type of magical thinking fog, imagining I would encounter someone – him, the new person for my life, someone like M but alive and different in a way I can’t envision. The guys I look at are too young for me. I’m looking for someone in his 40s, but my eye notices guys who must be in their 20s. That’s the age I was the last time I looked. Note to self: we are no longer 26.

I did an experiment today and took my wedding ring off my left hand and put it on my right hand, next to where I wear M’s ring. I was curious if it would make any men notice me. Up to now I would say I seem to have on an invisibility cloak which renders me non-existent to anyone but kindly old ladies at church and girl friends. The ring experiment, in case you’re wondering, yielded nothing. But then, I have never been the kind of girl men go for. I’m reasonably pretty (if a bit overweight), sane (relatively speaking), solvent (for the moment), smart, full of heart, playful, churchgoing and devout, deeply kinky, imaginative, possessing of a cool apartment, two awesome dogs, a decent family, and a history of one relationship – a real marriage. Except for the fact that I’m 40 and not 22, the fact that I don’t have a model’s body, and the fact that I want more than anything to have my husband back and need to be drawn into this world again, except for that – I think I’m a good catch.

Where is the angler, out on an early summer fishing trip, kipping off school, lazy narcoleptic English summer by the river, stealing back before tea and evensong, summoned to the library before bed, falling asleep sore, sun-burnt, tired, and quite happy – except for the fact that he hasn’t had his life disturbed by me yet, hasn’t had his heart enlarged by me, his mind bent around my me, his world made infinitely bigger, better, more irritating, and all manner of means well by me? And so he, too, longs somewhere inside himself.

During Holy Week I had two big dreams about M both set in a garden. The second one (between Maundy Thursday and Good Friday) was set in my childhood bedroom, and there M had made me a garden. He wasn’t there any longer, but he had put a square of top soil – rich black soil – over the pink carpet, and in it planted blooming bulbs, hyacinth, daffodils, tulips. I was overwhelmed by its beauty and thought that only he could make something that beautiful. The idea was: I could sit in this garden next to the window in the rocking chair and think or read or write. This window is the one out of which I would stick my head, as a child, and long – for something I couldn’t name. I would long for my imagination to be real. I would smell the air and imagine it was a good night for running away from the orphanage to the wide world. I had a perfectly fine real life – great mom, dad, brother, sister, everything you’d want – yet I longed for an inchoate tgi world, something beyond myself. So M made me a garden to sit in by this window of longing.

Do other people long as I did as a child, and as I do again now? I imagine other people, men in particular, do not really long, but get on with their busy lives, distracted or occupied by cell phones, friends, messages, games, work, and – by age 40 – life and its many responsibilities. Is there someone at a window of his own – have been whacked, having wanked, satisfied and secure and yet perhaps not – longing, too, for some inchoate tgi world, his life not yet disrupted and dazzled by me?

Was I ever married, or was it all a brief, tender, perfect dream that I woke up from a year ago, this hour?

He woke up as usual that morning. He hadn’t been feeling well for a few days – chest pains. We’d been to the ER four days previous, and they had cleared him on every count. He worked out 7 days a week. He looked fine, they said. It was probably costochondritis, a painful but harmless inflammation of chest cartilage that would go away on its own. He was frustrated at being restricted from full workouts by the pain. He was frustrated that it interfered with wanking while sitting up. He was cranky. That morning, I got up after he did and approached him in the kitchen, me groggy, he dressed for work. “Don’t be anxious,” he told me, putting his arms around me and embracing me. I felt his green scratchy sweater and smelled his aftershave. He was having lunch out, he told me, so he might not want much dinner. It was an annual lunch he had with two colleagues at which they celebrated their AA birthdays, the anniversaries of their sobriety. He was sixteen.

“All this,” he told me, meaning, I supposed, his general mood, “is just getting used to what can’t be changed.” I can’t remember his exact words, but that was approximately it. We kissed each other goodbye, and off he went to work.

I talked on the phone to my mother that morning, complaining about what a terrible patient he was, how you couldn’t tell him anything, how annoyed he got when you fussed over him. I was trying to detach.

I was expecting a student at noon. At 11:25 the phone rang. It was his gym. He’s passed out while exercising, they said. He was in an ambulance headed to the hospital. I hung up, called my student’s mother to cancel, said I thought it probably wasn’t serious. He had costochondritis, I told her. He’d over-done it exercising. I wasn’t having it any more.

The subway to the hospital took a long time. I got there around 12:30. There was a lot of confusion at the desk. He wasn’t there. Hadn’t been there. I eventually got the ambulance on the phone. They’d taken him to another hospital. I got in a cab and in a few minutes, was there.

Inside, they let me go right back, as if they knew who I was. A guy shook my hand and introduced himself, a social worker. He took me into a tiny room with two chairs and a side table. He told me to wait. My heart started to beat hard, deep, fast. Why would I be greeted by a social worker? That was bad, right? But it couldn’t be that bad.

The social worker came back, but he wouldn’t tell me what was going on. I asked if M was dead, and he didn’t give me a yes or no answer. Shortly, the surgeon came out, and after some verbiage describing what they’d tried, said, “I’m very sorry your husband has passed away.”

I wasn’t the kind of person whose husband passed away. I used, often, to fear he’d die, usually in a plane crash. Sometimes I’d dream he had died, but when I woke up, he was there, most merciful reprieve. Whenever I went out – to a friend’s play, to a party, to a family gathering – I always felt such relief that we had our life to come home to. This was the real reality – him and me and our dogs and our apartment and Casey and Mark and RP and TL and the others. The world was just so much noise, not a real thing. My family I loved, but this was the new family. We were making the new family. We were trying to have children, too. The old, sad, long life was over; the new life was underway. At our wedding, and in a print over our bed:

Rise up, my love, my fair one
And come away!
For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and done
The voice of the turtle is heard in the land

I had never dated. I would never have to date – thank God, I thought. I never wanted to date. He was flawed, terribly flawed, and so was I, but I didn’t want anyone else. When I would dream of the end of the world – a nuclear bomb, say – I would, in that dream, only want to get home to him, to be with him to the end.

Imagine a giant eraser wiping away the present and the future.

In the emergency room, he had a tube in his mouth, but he looked just like himself. He looked like he looked asleep beside me in bed. I’d never seen a dead body before. I touched him. He was still warm.

I wasn’t crying, not yet, but when I tried to dial the phone to call someone (the church, my mother, my sister), my fingers were trembling too much. This, I thought, was curious. Did I ask a nurse to dial for me? Or did I just redial until I managed it?

By 11pm that night, my whole family was in my apartment, some from as far away as California. My mother made toast and tried to get me to eat it. I took a bite, but it was like dust in my mouth. I sat on my dog’s bed with her and fed her the rest of the toast. My sister slept in my bed with me that night. I took one of M’s sleeping pills and crashed. In the morning, I got up before everyone else and walked the dogs, sobbing in the sunshine, praying with every breath for help. On the way home, part of the sidewalk had just been redone. Barely dry, some of it covered over, but right in the middle: Love from marky.

Back at home I got in the shower and suddenly fell on the floor, water pounding over me with the realization: RP is dead, too. What about Casey? Funny how you don’t realize everything at once.

It’s 365 days later. They say a year brings relief. It’s an ancient prayer practice, the Year’s Mind. They say it’s easier, having lived through every day of the year without them.

It isn’t easier.

Was I ever married, or was it all just a wonderful dream I woke up from a year ago this day?

I dreamed Mark and Casey were curled up together under a sheet (like Cathy & Heathcliff) and someone was saying how they were made for each other.  Save me!

Later, M and I were in another country (Argentina?) and had been there for a long visit. The plane was going soon, very soon. We’d been apart for a while, but M was back and we were trying to get all our gear together. I took a last glance through the closet and found all his clothes there, most of them drying on the clothes horse. I pulled them out bunch by bunch and handed them to him, hoping he could fit them in his bag. I kept finding bits I hadn’t packed (chocolate, a frozen but un-refrigerated piece of meat, large, like a bag of firewood). My bag was small, like an overnight bag. I had to get my boots on. The tickets were buried in my bag… The stress of it all.

These dreams say the obvious: I miss Marky, and we were made for each other. I wasn’t packed or prepared for his death – our death. Neither of us was ready. His clothes are still in the closet. In the dream we were meant to go together on this trip, this return home, even though we’d been apart for a while at first. Traveling together was the plan.

Recently, driving upstate, I remembered the last time I drove that route – the weekend before he died.  He used to drive the car – our car – my car. Then I was remembering the month I spent with him in Englandland, before he moved to Gotham. Like the time we went to the movies in Staines and RP bought Casey a child price ticket. All that time there was pain – pain of uncertainty, pain of separation, pain of change – but all of it was within this enormous sea of love and good things and hope for life, of comfort at having found him of… – I don’t even know how to explain how life and the living of it changed just knowing he was in the world and that he loved me back. In some way it made anything seem possible.

Warning: self-pity within…!

I had a dream in which I was being called on to tutor a girl who had huge learning disabilities. She was borderline retarded, I was told. I agreed to meet her and see if I could help; they were desperate, and rich.

The dad was intense, worried, a little over-controlling. The girl, over-fixated upon but interesting, was not as dull as I expected. In fact, there was intelligence there. She seemed able to learn, but she said her memory was the problem. She could remember practically nothing. I probed this. Did she mean like Alzheimer’s, short and long term memory loss, like she wouldn’t remember this conversation? Or was it like she didn’t have a place to put information and so she couldn’t access it? Our session was short but we connected and I think she felt some hope.

When I came for session #2, her father told me gravely that Wayne had been. I was given to understand that “Wayne” was a brutal internal critic which had emerged from her consciousness and emotionally battered her for daring to have hope and imaging escaping her useless state. I understood at once, I thought, and went in to see how she was doing. She was shaken, and while we were talking, Wayne appeared in her. He was scary, sadistic, violent, and powerful. I told him/her that I knew exactly what was going on, that I knew what it was to be more than one person, that I wasn’t intimidated or confused. Wayne got violent and tried to tie me up with electrical wire, but I wrestled him/her to the bed and sat astride them. I’m more than one person, too! I yelled, You’ve messed with the wrong tutor! I was determined to help this girl by helping her defeat Wayne. But, she, as Wayne, was dangerous and even pulled a knife on me, albeit a paring knife. Was I underestimating Wayne? And was this actually severe MPD and not, as with me, a playful expression of different parts of the personality?

Later, I talked with her father, who was very disturbed at the violent turn. He was leaning towards institutionalizing her. Also, he was disturbed that I’d been so forceful with her. Wasn’t that abuse? he wondered. I tried to explain: 1) She was relieved by my forcefulness; 2) If I was forceful, it was with Wayne, not her.

Later, she mentioned yet another person, Mrs. M-something alliterative. I was like, Oh brother. But then I realized, hey, this Mrs. M can maybe be called in to fight Wayne. The dream ended before we sorted out whether I was going to work with this girl, when, and for how much.

I recount this dream because it was toying with the border between play/the others and insanity. It reminded me how peculiar it is to maintain a living relationship with Casey when there is no one to play with her. And yet, I can’t exactly give it up and pretend that she doesn’t exists, or that she’s irrelevant and has no place in my life. But it’s pretty impossible to play with her on my own. I’ve actually taken to speaking out loud to her sometimes, as if she’s there beside me – not just talking to her in my head and saying, Casey go to bed! In December we were driving upstate, or rather I was driving, she was in the passenger seat, and the dogs were in the back. I told her, actually out loud, that if there was any possible way for me to deal with her, to put her across my knee and settle her down, I would. Believe me, I would! Plus, she had desperately needed That Thing for days (due to prescription Codine for shingles), but neither of us could quite face the whole shebang. It was just too grievous.

Will he really never ever come back and take care of her? No matter how long I wait and how much I apologize or cry or change or whatever it takes?? It’s a lie, obviously, that you can accomplish whatever you want if you want it hard enough and try hard enough. Even this wish, lodged in the heart of God, will never ever be answered. Nothing can bring people back from the grave. Even people who are part of you and are absolutely indispensable and who go without any warning much, much, much too soon. I don’t want to be this person, this bereaved person whose life is over, but it feels like there isn’t anything for me in this world, nothing real.

God, do you have any ideas for me, about me? I hope you’re working on them double time. Let me tell you, I do not want to be a slave – and by that I mean I someone who snatches bits of nourishment here and there while I fulfill my “purpose” which is to help others while having nothing worthwhile for myself. I want to be the protagonist and I want a good thing! And a really good thing, the real deal, like you gave me the first time, and now, soon, before I get old and defeated. And, Lord, if you can’t send someone to look after Casey, properly, then could you kill her, too, and take her away to be with you and Marky and RP and Uncle Maurice and M, who love her. But please, don’t take her because if you did, you’d take me, the heart of me, and I’d be this tedious shell of responsibility and grown-up-ness and reasonableness and I’d never write anything worthwhile again and I’d become really invisible and there would really be no purpose.

So, OK, I see that and I don’t really want you to take Casey away. But listen: Casey is orphaned, bereaved and orphaned, and she has only this pro tem guardian – me – who can’t do anything with her. Please send her the perfect person. Please have pity on us. Stat.

A half-awake dreamlet: Jeremy Northam, what if he dated me? He’s tall, quite tall. Would I fit under his arm? We might be there, hanging out, but with him a star and me just me, how could we really get to know one another? Maybe, I thought, we’d play a game, but there would have to be a wager, or a penalty to keep it interesting.

Giving or receiving?

What kind of penalty? he’d ask.

I’d give him an inscrutable look: A spanking.

His surprise in return: Giving or receiving?

Me, suppressing a grin: Winner’s choice.

Him: You’re on.

Ha ha ha, which would he choose? As we played the game, there would be the other playfulness of toying with each other, sending conflicting signals about what our preference would be. Ha ha! I wonder if IRL Jeremy Northam is any fun, or just a fairly tedious interview, flippant and narcissistic as most actors are and as he seems on youtube. Yet here is a man, if gossip sites are to be believed, who got into a relationship (or marriage) with a woman fans judged unworthy of him, a woman from Canada who is perported to be a former model/callgirl? If that is not, in fact, true, then he’s 40-whatever and never been married, despite being a movie star and cute, so he must be gay or seriously screwed up.

James McAvoy

Now, James McAvoy, I’d take him in a second except he’s married and probably (to judge by his remarks) devotedly so. He’s closer to M in physique and holding pattern, even in Scottishness, certainly in playfulness. Plus, he’s a way better actor than JN. He’s the real deal. He can show up in any stupid scene or movie and turn it on its head with his performance. This is one reason why I have cast him as the seductive bully in my book.

But JN likes to cook in his Norfolk house. *sigh* It’s possible he’s worthwhile in private. He’s certainly awesome in Emma. (Love the “badly done, Emma” scene! Just needs some domestic discipline to finish it off…) However, I don’t think JN is trying very hard in most of his roles. I wonder what he was like as Daniel Day Lewis’s called-forth understudy in Hamlet. I quite fancy a taller man…

3AM

The carbon monoxide detector just woke me the frack up because its battery is low. Those things are so fracking piercingly loud.

I was in the middle of a dream about accidentally outing myself to my family. In the dream, my RW father was here at the apartment (along with some other person or people). We were getting ready to go out for dinner or something, and he said that he’d meet me in the garage? Vestibule? Hall? On the way out, and there we’d discuss what had been happening (something I’d done that I shouldn’t?). He said discuss like RP, M et al used to say it, with a capital D. Except his wasn’t exactly capital, sort of a half-capital. I felt a flutter of panic and also a little excitement. The excitement (that he was maybe going to deal with casey) just outweighed the panic (that he knew about casey and tgi). Then, a minute later, he said basically we’d go to dinner after he’d given me my spanking, because then the air would be cleared and we could actually enjoy our food. Take previous emotions and ratchet them up about a thousand, with the panic part gaining ground.

We never got to a literal tgi confrontation, but later he, my sister, and I were more or less discussing it, and I was saying how I’d told her [not true RW!], but I hadn’t thought he’d find out. He was hurt and annoyed that I hadn’t told him, which he considered tantamount to lying to him. [RW he'd never think this! If he did find out, my guess is he'd just never mention it to me. Remind me to tell you about how I originally found a.s.s in 1995...] I was torn between feeling relieved and feeling that freak-out feeling that he knew; plus, who else knew?

Later, the person I’d told changed from my sister into my friend who I actually have told. [a writing friend I told in extremis of grief, a couple of days after M died, when I had zero filters and cared nothing for anything, including my own mortal life. This friend was actually unfazed (or seemed to be), bless her. Recently, when I confessed to blogging about tgi, she professed herself un-shocked and claimed that once her kids were in school she'd be "getting her phreak on" too. I think the waiting until they are in school is due to the fact that she's too fatally exhausted right now to get anything on.] So this friend was telling me the whole situation wasn’t a big deal.

Also in the dream (here’s the too much internets), I was twittering with tgi acquaintances, like Natty, Barrister, and Mija (whose tweets from the Shadow Lane event in Vegas I liked a lot), and there was a feature where you 1) shared del.ici.ous bookmarks and 2) had the equivalent of twitter wordwars, tweeting real time in teams about whatever topic you wanted and seeing which team could post the most words in a set time. I was trying to get the  hang of it all.

I must be really far gone if I dreamed my real father had decided to deal with casey and I wasn’t even squicked by it. Traditionally, when I dream that someone in my family knows about tgi, I’m freaked out and the dream takes on the quality of panicked nightmare. This time, it was only a little uncomfortable. Must be the effects of too much blogsphere and worrying about compromising myself with online exposure. But also, as I said, an unappealing sign of desperation. I really am tired of myself, and I don’t need a cranky carbon monoxide detector to show me that.

On the morning of inauguration day, I woke up from a stressful dream about finding squatters in the “storage closet” area on the third floor of the building. They started making some “rise up ye people of color” announcement over the “PA” in celebration of the Inauguration. They hid when I went in there, and I saw that they’d made alterations to what had once been an unfinished space with wonky floorboards. But it was also a storage room for my furniture and I saw against the wall lots of old furniture I’d forgotten, which I thought might contain old stuff of mine, even old jewelry. One of the squatters tried to show me how he’d fixed the place up. I confronted one of my tenants about it because they let the people run through their apartment. On and on it went. What would I do about this terribly entangled problem?

I am so anxious in general from the assaults of the world – they wake me up early in the morning. I often feel like I’m near the end of my rope without M to make me feel protected and calmed down. When I used to get scared like this, I would (or Casey would) run to him, and he’d make us know it was all right and that we were safe. I’m not big on the overuse of the word safe, but I feel enormously unsafe now. There are no arms and no voice to comfort me and calm me down. When I was single, I didn’t have as many responsibilities; I was younger, less experienced, and weaker, and still I didn’t get anxious in the same way.  If I could pitch a fit and say Not another day! I would. But who would I pitch a fit to? And who am I fooling imagining something good will rock into my life again? Where would it come from?

• How RP used to insist on giving Casey a hand spanking across his knee after administering any implement. This was to reinforce the closeness of the relationship and to overcome whatever false stoicism or independence the implement had caused.
• How, in the early days and even later, he would insist she sit on his knee after, especially when her instinct was to go and hide somewhere.
• After remembering 1 + 2, a vague sense of happiness came over me, or was it contentment? Security? Hope? It was  the feeling I used to get knowing M would be home soon from Englandland, home and able to take care of Casey as she so profoundly needed, and as no one else on the earth could propose to, or want to.
• Then, a breath later, the abyss – in fact, just as I realized the feeling of safety, it vanished, like every other awakening since last spring. When he was alive, I sometimes had nightmares that he was dying or dead, and I’d wake up to the most profound reprieve, and reach for him in the bed and weep with relief that it had only been a dream. Now that’s reversed. Is all hope now located in error? Can I only feel hope and goodness in mistakenly imagining he’s coming back, like all those dreams where he has come back? (He was only shipwrecked! He was only on a trip! We were only divorced! It’s not as though he was dead – )
• Then I physically longed – so powerfully – to put my arms around him and hold him. I’d never let him go again if he would only come back. Later, in the park with the dogs, I broke down sobbing. Was it the “O Salutaris Hostia” on my ipod? The “Ubi Caritas”? Oh, da robur! Fer auxillium!
• Earlier that night there had been a dream about a tgi liason with a guy I didn’t know, on the 11th floor of some big, modern building with complicated elevators. I don’t think I ever got there.
• And a dream fragment in which one of my RW students had the idea that I deserved the strap, and so gave it to me. It didn’t hurt, though, and several strokes outright missed. I almost laughed. When it came time for his punishment I said, You aren’t going to like this. I lined up the tawse to strike. This is actually going to hurt, so prepare yourself.

perfect dad, perfect lap

A dream I had before Christmas about the father in Ripping Yarns’s series of stories about the Aken family. The “In…” series…

It was like college, and I was living with roommates. Mr. Aken, the dad from Rip’s stories, turned up. He found some glass shards on the carpet, evidence of a broken light, and this was an expensive and important light in some way. He looked to me and I had to admit I’d known about it. It wasn’t clear if I’d actually been involved with breaking it, but I had known of it and done nothing, which was wrong. I was flooded with guilt when he looked at me.

He walked by me and touched my face with his finger (long, slender, feminine), under my right eye and then just below my eyebrow, as if tracing the contours of the black circles there. Then he was holding me on his lap and I was 7 or 8, like Dan in one of the stories. He was wearing a plaid flannel work shirt and so was I. Mine was over-sized and both were soft, and he was holding me in that hugely protective way, and I was weeping because it just felt so safe and so good on his lap, even though I was in trouble – especially because I was in trouble. He told me he’d be able to deal with this matter even though he couldn’t be everything to me that I needed and wanted. Still, I cried in his lap because at that moment it was perfect. Even though I wasn’t his son, and couldn’t be his son, he could treat me the same as his son for this brief time while I was on his lap and while he dealt with me for the broken light.

When I had this dream I had been tutoring Othello heavily, in particular Act V, Scene 2: “put out the light, and then put out the light,” (1) the first light being Othello’s candle, of course, and the second being Desdemona’s life. I may not have put out M’s light myself, but am I guilty, in my heart, in some way, for not catching it, for all the uncountable failures that preceded and maybe led to his death, for all the times I didn’t love him enough, for fighting about taxes, for all the forever left undone? How can I ever be truly forgiven all of that unless I can be allowed to have him back and redeem it, put it right with him, love him fully like I always really have? How can I truly and really redeem anything without him?

(1)

Put out the light, and then put out the light:
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me:–but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume.