24. Invaders
What do those women have that I don't or didn't have in my 30s? What characteristic precludes them from partaking of the property of Targetness?
Another writer, my friend Francesca, reminds me in an email that she spent several years in an abusive relationship once. She’s a strongminded woman—opinionated, uncompromising, doesn’t suffer fools etc. We’re a bit alike in that way. I once confessed to her that there are times when she intimidates me. And Francesca said there were times when I scare the bejeezus out of her. Still, I remember this guy, and though I hadn’t realized that Francesca had stayed in the relationship that long, I know another woman he went out with who experienced the same thing. He was one of those guys who seem to like trying to make the women they’re with feel stupid. Francesca wrote in her email that friends and family couldn’t believe she’d put up with him as long as she had.
She was trying to make me feel better about Mr. New Yorker Writer.
Francesca is one of two friends I turned to when I was having trouble writing about the time he invited himself over to my apartment and I couldn’t seem to get rid of him. It’s a part of the story I’ve been reluctant to tell and probably—I realized finally—the reason I was dragging my feet over the 1990s timeline. The way I kept veering off in the direction of some other subject during the early part of this story, while Mr. New Yorker Writer and I were stuck in Florida, was only partly because I’m in love with the poetry of digression.
It was also legit because there were points about sexual harassment that I wanted to make. But there was more to it than that. You can tell from the way I kept jumping ahead and telling parts of this story out of sequence. I think on some level, without having thought it out, I sensed that the sooner I got us back to New York, the sooner I was going to have to deal with this humiliating incident, when I couldn’t say the things to Mr. New Yorker Writer that I wanted to say like “Why are you here?” and “Get the fuck out of my house.”
Something very similar once happened to me with a pigeon. This was in my apartment on West End Avenue. I found it sitting in my underwear drawer when I walked into the bedroom, and I just froze. I have no idea why, since I’ve never been afraid of birds or animals of any kind. And yet I was paralyzed with fear. I had next-door neighbors whose lives revolved around animals—rescuing them, healing them, housing them—and I knew that if I went to get Charlie and Jackie they would come right over and make much of the creature and check it for injuries and let it go if it was all right and if not nurse it back to health and make it part of their ménage. But that would have meant getting to the door, and I couldn’t seem to do that.
I described to another friend, Marion, how it was sort of like that with Mr. New Yorker Writer that day he showed up at my door. In both cases an alien presence had me stunned. It was as if the mere fact that each had invaded my private domain implied some authority they had to be there. By what right had either of them appeared? By some right, one had to figure, because—there they were!
I felt sure that Francesca or Marion would not have had any trouble getting rid of Mr. New Yorker Writer that day.
Francesca and Marion are at the top of my list of women I know to whom none of this would have happened—and here I have to cop to having been guilty of an over-simplification. I said earlier that there’s a certain kind of woman who tends to get targeted by sexual harassers and that it’s one who isn’t focused on some man the way he thinks she ought to be because she’s focused on something else.
I absolutely believe—no, I know that to be true. But it’s only part of the truth because, of course, there are plenty of women who are focused on “something else” who don’t get targeted by sexual harassers. So what’s up with that? What do those women have that I don’t or didn’t have in my 30s? What characteristic precludes them from partaking of the property of Targetness?
Francesca and Marion are very different. Marion—an actress, singer, and lyricist—is serene, soft-spoken, and Canadian. She’s strong-minded, too, but she has wiles or, rather, she gets a kick out of affecting to have wiles, whereas Francesca is more like me. We both prefer to be fierce.
I’d written to Francesca saying that I didn’t think either she or Marion would have gotten into the situation I was in with Mr. New Yorker Writer because they both have “sexual authority.” The point Francesca was making in her email was that she’d found herself in a situation I’d never have gotten into because I have intellectual authority, which she didn’t feel she had at the time.
Something else about Francesca and Marion: they both know how to do something I think of as “defensive flirting.” They know how to talk to men in a way that says, “Yes, I’m acknowledging you as a sexual being, but don’t let that give you any ideas.”
I’ve been watching Marion and Francesca do this for over 30 years, and occasionally I’ve wondered if at some point I should have asked one of them to instruct me in this skill. Because it seems as though it would have been a useful art to acquire. But there’s another part of me that wants to know why it should be my responsibility to make every assclown I come across feel noticed or appreciated.
Why should the path of my or another woman’s life be predicated on whether we know how to do that? I like the idea of knowing how to do all sorts of things. Flirting doesn’t happen to be one of them.
With Marion I went into greater detail about what had happened that day, and it was hard to do. I described how Mr. New Yorker Writer had called me up and suggested he come over for an afternoon tryst (my word; I don’t know or remember how he would have put it) and I’d laughed and said forget it, absolutely not. I’d reminded him that we’d agreed that what happened in Florida was to have been a one-time thing. But he wanted to bring over a bottle of wine. I said I had plans, and I added flippantly (I don’t know why) that I didn’t have any wineglasses anyway.
And I described to Marion how a little while later he’d shown up despite my having told him not to (he’d brought wine and wineglasses) and I’d felt caught out in a lie, because I hadn’t really had plans, and that was perfectly obvious. It was clear I was having a quiet day at home doing laundry and getting ready to go for a long run. And after that, I told Marion, whatever I said proved to be completely ineffectual.
“Like, if I said I wanted him to leave, he’d say that he wouldn’t stay long, why didn’t we just have a glass of wine? And if I said I didn’t want any wine, that I was going running, he’d just ignore me and start looking for my corkscrew.”
I was just trying to convey the dynamic, not necessarily what had happened or what had been said, because I couldn’t remember what had been said or what had happened or how we wound up in the bedroom with him disrobing, or starting to, and telling me things about his sexual problems that I didn’t want to know and things I really did not want to hear about how I was going to solve them. And I described how I hadn’t had to fend him off or anything as he’d never laid a hand on me, only on himself, and the question of consent had not so to speak arisen.
But looking back, what I found humiliating (I told Marion) was the way I’d veered between paralysis and abject passivity—just as with the pigeon. I hadn’t been able to assert myself or take charge of the situation, overcome as I was by some combination of irrational fear and shock.
“You know what it sounds like?” Marion said. “It sounds like what happens when you’re working with a bad improv partner.” She explained how in improv there’s something called “an offer,” which is the reality that the partner who speaks first proposes.
“Like, say your partner is sitting on a bench and you walk up and say, ‘Do you know what time the movie starts?’ and they say, ‘I’ve been waiting for this bus for ages!’ They’re not adopting the reality you proffered. They’re proposing a different reality, the one they’ve chosen and want to work with. It sounds like he was doing that—rejecting the reality you were proposing. He’d decided on a different reality, and whatever you said, you kept coming up against the wall of his intention.”
I loved “wall of intention” and I loved the idea of relating what had been going on that day to acting. But I remember coming up with another theatrical analogy at the time. It’s the one thing I do remember clearly. There was something completely unfamiliar about the way he kept undercutting me or finding a way of making it seem reasonable to ignore whatever I said. I remember feeling like some neo supercharged version of “the provok’d wife” and thinking: “God, This must be what it’s like to be married to a man who pays absolutely no attention to anything you say.”