bitch

Stranger than fiction, yet how much like it one’s life can be. A mirror image of a novel you once read (for in almost all novels, as any novelist will tell you, there is a seed of truth that sets the thing in motion).

Think of those timeless great classics – classics precisely because they are timeless because the truth (the Truth in the Platonic sense) is a truth we all know sometimes too well.

A friend tells me wisely that blaming someone for falling in love is akin to blaming someone for having a car accident and wrapping themselves around a pole and breaking their neck, this or even more akin to catching a cold. It would be absurd to blame one for such things and we would not and do not. He’s right, of course. Love happens. It happens accidentally, unexpectedly, and often times, inconveniently.

I’ve been on both sides of a flipped coin. I have been the mistress, I have been the wife… so here it comes, I have been the dreaded ‘other woman’ (quelle horreur!). What a disparaging and degrading term for one who has simply fallen in love. We’re not speaking here about a sordid affair or a cheap date or an ego validation, but true love. I never planned it: it happened to me and despite me. I fought it. I tried to give him up for Lent. I prayed. It didn’t work. Nothing worked. He likewise fought. Struggled, and this I know for I have, naturally, kept all correspondence – despite the fact of knowing that the best place for love letters is between the logs of a fire – one cannot part so easily with a whole shared history.

Let me ask you, a universal you, can you really blame me if your husband fell in love with me? Can you blame him for falling out of love with you and in love with someone else? Sure, blame him, blame me (if you must play the blame game, which is a stupid construction in the first place), but don’t think for a minute that your blame will be accepted for it won’t. Anyone with any intelligence and sense of self is smart enough to know that they simply cannot have the finger of blame pointed at them and will reject it, much as one rejects the labels tossed out at the degrading term “mistress” (how about “lover” for that is more apt? No, that hurts too much. The other party must degrade. Out of hurt and rage they must act out – but this rage if you examine further is self-rage directed outward. Self-rage for they know, be it man or woman, that there perhaps was nothing they could do, or perhaps there was and they simply failed to act.

People fall out of love for myriad reasons. I cannot say why my lover fell out of love, if indeed that is the case, but what I can say, what I can tell you, is why he fell in love with me. I made him happy: I made him laugh: I brought him joy: I brought him light where you offered darkness and a constant undermining (and here I speak of a specific case, for this does not apply to all, so bear this in mind before you jump all over me). You could be freaking perfect and yet… and yet he falls in love with someone else because they are, let’s just face it, in his eyes, more perfect for them.

Me: I am me in all of my complexity, my very human insecurity, my paradoxes, me with the blonde hair and freckles (that I hate), me with the green eyes, me the dancer in a Charlie Chaplin film, me the gamine mome. I am needy, I am difficult, I am brilliant, I am oftentimes not brilliant, I am mad, I am genius (as Oscar Lavante said, There is a fine line between madness and genius – I have erased that line). I am a woman, but yes, Dylan said it best – I break just like a little girl. I am I in all of my fuckupness and I never pretend to be anything other. This is me listening to the Wang Wang Blues and humming it all day long. This is me with him, luminous and beautiful in the moment for he makes me so. This is me in love.

I blow into his life without any intent and he falls, and he falls hard. Without intent on either of our parts we land squarely in love. Nothing could be more simple. People love. People fall out of love. Who knows, maybe he’ll fall out of love with me and that is something I must accept, but you can bet I won’t be on the other end of a phone wire shouting “Whore, whore, whore…” Love doesn’t mean you wear a Scarlet A like Hester Prynne. I ask myself, this Other, is she in thick with Father Dimsdale, for it would seem so. But given her, given her orthodox Catholic and catholic ways, then I would answer unequivocally with a resounding Yes. Her shoutings are no more than provincial shouts from a provincial woman who has histrionics in the living room because she simply cannot deal with the fact of who she is, who I am, and where he was or is, for one doesn’t fall out of love simply because someone else says so.

Sure, you can stand in the way. You can be the obstacle that stops a thing in motion – and we were two bodies in motion – you can do that. You can do that in a day with one swift kick to ‘the bitch’ or rather, as I was called, “the WASP bitch” (did I mention I’m half-Jewish? One must laugh in this situation. Certainly Michael Wex would. So – necktiker tog.) All I have to say is he is my hartsvatik, my ohev, and this other, this other remains no more than a nebechel. As the Beatles sang, I don’t want nobody, nobody, because baby, it's you. That won’t change. Level all of the names you want at me, but it doesn’t change the fact of who I am (nonny nonny boo boo! I’m rubber you’re glue, and etc. if we’re going to be relegated to the sandbox, that’s all I have to say).

How I have envied. A major sin to covet, no? How I have noted how the other never could see the way he moved with such grace. It is in the way he moves his hands and how they look. It is that his body is my body and we are one and the same. It is that he is as protean as I. It is a soul connection inexplicable. It that he has never met anybody like me. It is that I have never met anybody like him. It is the things you have taken for granted and fail to see where I would see them every day and love him for them, because I do and have and would. It is a fugue state one could do without but that exists regardless. It is an energy you can’t fight. It is the way I say his name, just as he likes it…

This pisses the other off to no end. This is not “supposed to be” yet it remains regardless. As I said, prevent us from seeing each other, but you’ll never change the fact of love and that must just kill you – so let it. I had someone threaten to literally slit my throat over such a thing. I had the same person tell me, and I am epileptic, that she hopes I die of a seizure. I ask myself, how could he possibly sit still for that? How could he ‘love’ someone like this, or is it more a feeling of oath and obligation – which are arbitrary rules established by religious institutions which frankly, are no more than corporations and most churches, temples, etc. have corporations that run them and that’s the truth. I know because I served at the church for many, many years (yes, me the whore wore a black bat-wing cassock and took confession – te absolvo – and read the evening vespers in the twilight every night). That was me on the high holy altar, sullying it with my scarlet A, leaving crimson trails wherever I walked.

Bullshit.

Throw the baby out with the bathwater, right? Another provincial way of thinking. A mistress, a lover, could never be a good person seems to be the general consensus. But that’s not what we’re talking about here, are we? We’re talking about two people who fell headlong in love and that is wholly different. I don’t make it a practice to fall in love, because one cannot make it practice – it happens. That’s life, life is pain sometimes. Get used to it. Yet life can be wonderfully surprising.

I’m sick and tired of being the Bitch, the Whore, the whatever name leveled at me because I reject all of it – so don’t for a minute believe that you have ever, or will ever, get to me by calling me such. You won’t. You won’t succeed in creating self-doubt about who I am because I know damn well who I am. I know it and I know that it is good. I know I am light – I know that with him I am luminous and beautiful in the moment and vice versa. Hey, I don’t blame anyone for not liking the fact of this. I really don’t. But don’t level your own projections at me, please, because that’s all it is. I must tell you, threaten to slit my throat again and we’ll see whose throat is slit. I wasn’t raised as the, and again I quote the rather ironic, “WASP bitch.” I was raised in the projects of Northeast London and hail from one of the poorest towns in Scotland. I am proud of my roots. I pretend to be nothing else.

I was raised a Socialist. I am a revolutionary. I’d like to see a real revolution not only of the way we run things, but a true revolution of the mind. I take no prisoners. Call me these things again and we have a fight on our hands and where I come from, we don’t play such bullshit intellectual games that you do in the provinces. America, America! Sorry to say, and I love this country, but let’s face it, it is the teenager of the world, young and growing and with some people sucking and whining like infants. A president who heads into other countries, the breadbasket of civilization and trying to Americanize them and all in the name of Democracy when we know it’s about oil. I don’t see anybody heading into Jerusalem with troops to help out the Palestinians or the Jews for that matter – not really. We may offer support to Israel every now and then, but that’s a strategic move in order to keep an ally in the Middle East should we need a place to set down our missiles – ready, aim, fire… much as the other sets down her missiles aimed at me and threatens me with what?

Ah, “exposure” as if it were not apparent already that there is an in loveness there already. It’s obvious and was obvious to anyone who witnessed, so would this really come as some great surprise and more, coming from some histrionic over the wire, this is hardly going to be believed or be taken seriously. But I tell you, nobody but nobody will ever hold something over my head because I do abide by rules. I don’t think I have been “forbidden” to do something – let alone see someone – since I was about five and even then, I was never “forbidden”. Warn all you want and I’ll take heed, but how dare anyone threaten or forbid you to do something. At the age I am now, as I said before, oh bullshit, bollocks.

This other is no more than a nar – narish – nebbish. The WASP bitch speaks Yiddish, go figure… Call me names, but at least be accurate. Call me a half-breed, a mongrel, but spare me the silver spoon because, baby, I wasn’t born with one and never pretended otherwise. That I may now be cultured, that I put myself through university, that I succeeded in my career is to my credit. Maybe the bitch should buy a silver spoon after all, and place it squarely on my tongue, where his tongue was, where we shared of same spoon (did you know?). It must drive the other crazy to think of the details: what happened and when and where. How did I look in the moment. What sounds did I make. All of those things you now torture yourself with; you deserve them all for being such a hostile bitch and threatening. If you had been civil, I would say otherwise, but if you want to play – then this is how we play. I’ll tell you this: for him I sang my Song of Solomon that nobody had ever before heard and that he brought forth from me and all around us the musk trees were in full-bloom.

So, she was right, maybe I am a Bitch with that capital B after all. Tant pis. In the words of Rimbaud, Enough of this, I have to piss.

Let me end with this poem then:

I am

I am the want that keeps you up; I am your morning hard-on.
I am she of curved spine you gently hold.
I am she who shares of honey.
I am she pink flushed and warm.
I am she with whom you walked with, loop-armed on the avenue.
I am she who whispered I love you to the wall and it echoed back.
I am she of the rush-hour kiss while the board flipped the time.
I am she you kissed deeply on the train.
I am she who you brace against the wall.
I am she of whom your gentle touch makes come.
I am she with whom you laugh; I am she whom you lovingly tease.
I am she who is other; I am she who is kindred.
I am she of whom you write.
I am she of whom you photograph.
I am she of Borgetto.
I am the she with whom you long to escape.
I am she on whose thin-ice you glide.
I am she whose opaled palm you hold.
I am she of summer afternoons and glistening skin.
I am she of the cherry-devil lips.
I am she whose mouth is honey.
I am she by no other name than which you call me.
I am she your confidante, your confessor.
I am she who smells of basillica insence and amber.
I am she of pen and poetry, long love letters.
I am she: I am that one.
You are other, you are the same.
Together we are two, yet the equation equals one.
This is me, this is you.

Comments

[paula]

Thanks for the recommendation to this. Like the other pieces it is really really honest. You have a way of just putting yourself out there. I read some interviews with you that are the same. You just callit like you see it. I love this line -

"In all of my fuckedupness, I am I and I never pretend to be anything different."

Too bad not everyone can say those same words. Brave and bold like so much of what you write. I have seen your other work on the Web too and really like your style of writing. Keep it up!!

Paula

[sadi ranson-polizzotti]

hey paula;

thanks, and i'm glad you read this piece as it goes with the other piece about "oaths" etc and another piece about how lovers split up and act like strangers (weird to me)... as i say in this piece, a label can only stick if you let it.. i refuse all definitions, as Dylan said, and refused to be defined by some "other" no matter how hard they may try. Mudslinging, name-calling etc. is just in the realm of childhood and frankly, is self-anger directed outward. Hey, it's not my issue if someone else failed in some way and hates me for being a source of greater happiness or whatever. I think more women need to, and men as well frankly, reject these bullshit stereotypes. Not all mistresses are whores, not all wives are madonnas, vice-versa, sometimes it is the wife who is the true whore, whoring herself on the altar of her insecurity...

don't let 'em get you down. I don't. I won't. I just refuse to yield or stop. Pedal to the metal, baby, and you can out-maneuver anything...

thanks for reading this and taking the time to comment...

be well, and hope to see you again,

s.r.p.
editorial director, tant mieux
senior cultural and political editor, cyrano

[chris]

One word: Brave. Another word: Bravo! Paula is right: you really put yourself out there in a way that most people never can or do. You do it maybe even to your own detriment but in ways that most people can relate to no matter which side of the fence they are on on this situation. I agree with you that some things you can't control and other things you can but love isn't one of those things. I don't know that I am this brave and most women especially don't have the gumption to write things like this. It's opening up to fire! That one line that Paula picked out is so honest, it almost hurts. These sentence stand out to me

I am a revolutionary. I’d like to see a real revolution not only of the way we run things, but a true revolution of the mind. I take no prisoners. Call me these things again and we have a fight on our hands and where I come from, we don’t play such bullshit intellectual games.


I believe you! Write more! Also I linked to you from my site.

[kristine]

omg, I can't believe you just wrote this like this and laid it out there. I'm married and would "hate" any other woman, but now that I read this I think I would be angry but you made a lot of good points and you are so human that I think I could even relate to you. It sounds like you've had a really tough time and I feel badly for you for that. I like that "love is like catching a cold" That is SO true. I never thought of it that way. THere is a difference between just "cheating" and true love and I never thought of it that way. I've read your site for a long time and subscribe and you're always so honest. I am not that brave, but you are and that's an amazing thing.

Kristine Sewell

[sadi ranson-polizzotti]

Hi Kristine: I never thought I would wake up and find a comment like this - like yours -. The intention was always that all people - both married and not - could/can relate to this piece. I've been, as i said in the piece, on both sides of that fipped coin and it's hard either way, but i can say honestly that i truly (by now anyway, not when i was younger) 'get it'. If someone falls in love with someone else, it's pretty hard to 'blame' them for it. i think you just mourn, sure, but ultimately, you must go on your way. i wouldn't want to stay with someone who didn't love me.... but that's just me. to keep someone by force (basically, forbidding is doing that, to try to force them to love you), is sadly, quite pathetic, i think. it's one thing if it's some sordid affair perhaps, but a real love that lasts over years etc. is wholly different.

i think it's wonderful that so many people have written to me privately as well about this piece (married and not) about how 'brave' it is. I wouldn't say that it's brave, or maybe so, or maybe it's stupid.... lol... i don't know. it doesn't matter. at the end of the day, i am a writer and that's it. i write. if that helps someone else, then tant mieux, right? i hope it does.... i'm glad it has already.

thanks so much for reading and be well,

s.r.p.

[s.r.p.]

HI Chris,

I just found your comment... thank you, and glad you like those lines that you picked... : ) It's a tough article to write and I'm not trying to "sell" anyone on my point of view, just try to show that there is oftentimes no "fault" to be ascribed that fault, like guilt, like Good, Bad, Right, Wrong are all so arbitrary and mean different things to different people and we are human, constantly fighting between reason and passion - that's what Plato said, and more, we never fully can resolve that fight within ourselves and if we did, we would find true "enlightenment" in the Buddhist sense and could just "be" but unfortunately, we are most of us, not empty vessels. We are all too human as we know... so we deal with that and do the best we can. I believe in acts of will, but i also believe that there are somem things that are predestined (tho no Calvinist, I), i still believe to some degree in fate - that some things are just going to happen because perhaps they are meant to be.... I'm not saying some bullshit about "God's will" when someone young dies or gets cancer (been to both of those places), b/c I don't believe in any god like that (or God). As G.B. Shaw said, Beware a man whose god is in the sky" right? I think that's true... This could go on forever as a philosphical debate, but i'm debating with myself again and you say all good things.

It's interesting that to both Kristine, Paula, and you, Chris, that you now see things differently after this piece and that makes me happy. My only goal was to tell the other side of the story... that's it... I've done that. I'm sure I'll do it again. I've been on both sides of this fence, and frankly, neither is great fun, but in the final account, I've taken responsibility for both roles - If you spouse strays from you or falls in love (which is really what I'm talking about), then I think you have to examine your marriage, NOT the other man/woman, but look deep within yourself and the two of you b/c that situation is flawed or something is missing if the other is "open" to falling in love. It is hardly as if someone can be "bewitched" (a term of the ignorant) or "cast a spell upon" (very film noir and total bullshit). To say so is to shirk responsibility....

Anyway.... enough! Arete! thanks for reading.... and thanks for such thoughtful comments,

s.