Chicago Portrait no. 34: Zoe
He made his ex-girlfriend write erotica about the things she and he would do to my body.
Chicago Portrait no. 34: Zoe
He made his ex-girlfriend write erotica about the things she and he would do to my body.
I say “my body” and not “me” very deliberately, because that’s the role I was relegated to in all of her stories. I was always the buxom rag doll who’d been stripped of her bad attitude, the threat neutralized, the foe turned lover turned toy.
I can’t say I’m mad at her, for undressing me and positioning me with words, without my consent, to please an ex-boyfriend who was cheating on both of us. I still feel a tempest of confused, sad, longing emotions when I think about her, standing there at the keyboard at her work, writing about my body via google chat to titillate her ex, while I surreptitiously watched. Neither of them knew I was also logged into his account, reading the sex while it was typed, crying and rocking back and forth at my desk in my apartment.
It was my fault for letting his gmail sit open, waiting for the chat box to pop up while he was in statistics class and she was working at the front desk of the library. It was his fault for coming over to my house late at night and using my computer to send lurid messages and pictures to her, never even bothering to log out. It was my fault for being so curious, with twists of bile and dread and excitement in my stomach all gurgling together while I read. It was his fault for messaging her all the time with soft romantic words and hard horny ones, when she knew he had a girlfriend. Or whatever I was. It was my fault for knowing I was a side piece and letting myself be taken advantage of. It was his fault for lying to us. It was my fault for letting him into my apartment. It was his fault for climbing on top of me and thinking about her while he did whatever he wanted. It was her fault and my fault for not being strong. It was his fault for only feeling bad enough to cry in front of us and make him feel better about it.
He was in statistics class and I was supposed to be in statistics class, but I was skipping because I wanted to die. I spent a lot of time horizontal in bed with my fuzzy baby blue blanket draped up to my eyeballs. Sometimes the only way to make the unhappiness abate was to flood it out with something worse, like hatred. When you’re nauseated anything feels like a better feeling, and a respite can even be found in acute pain. It was like that. I kept hurting myself by reading their messages, but it was better than being horizontal and trapped in my own thoughts. I thought if I could witness their love firsthand and understand it, I might be moved to give him up.
I watched the whole chat play out, live before my eyes. She missed him and he missed her. She was thousands of miles away studying in Spokane. He was in Chicago not taking graduate school very seriously, seriously engaged in taking advantage of both of us. We were the same age, but I was farther ahead of her academically. We were the same age, but she was lither and prettier. We were always being compared. We could tell our disadvantages by the way he complimented us. I was smart and she was beautiful. I was hot but she was more compliant in bed. I challenged him but she and he had history. He was older than both of us and very much behind us academically morally and socially, yet he had both of us pinned under his thumb.
I could tell from how she was typing that she did not want to weave a whole elaborate role play scenario for him. She made excuses and then reassured him while she stood on the library floor. I knew she knew he was in class, and that I took that class with him.
Where is she? Zoe asked. She was asking about me.
She’s not here. He said. Tell me what you would do. If you were here right now.
She hesitated a little while he told her he loved her, and then she broke and the story unfolded. At first it was their usual fare, a lurid story about her being taken from behind and coming instantly. I was sitting in my office chair at home, wrapped up in the blanket with my knees to my chest. He called her a good girl and told her to go on. She went into lurid detail about his shape and size and how he felt. My head was foggy and I couldn’t bear to break away from the screen. I felt dead. I wanted to die more.
The chat went on like that for a while, then he said good girl again and asked her about me. They didn’t say my name but I knew it was me they were talking about. We were always talking about each other. Zoe never said my name and I rarely acknowledged hers, for the whole two years he cheated on us with each other. But I saw the words “her” on the screen and felt them quaver with caution and hate and desire, the same way my voice did when I tried and failed to speak about Zoe. I couldn’t seem to bring her up without crying. Zoe couldn’t seem to bring me up without being cajoled into sex that I was the subject of.
I shouldn’t know any of this, but I read all their chats, looked at their photos, absorbed all their memories. I poured over her Facebook and their text messages and the pictures and poems of and about her that slept on his hard drive. I did this until I knew their whole history, and what she’d meant to him, before he decided to come to Chicago and screw people in his graduate program.
I can only assume Zoe obsessed over me in the same way. She must have compared herself to me, found herself wanting in some domains but superior in others, wrecked herself with tears, held herself and stared at images of me and apologized and fantasized and tried to understand.
And it was traumatic for both of us, being lied to like that for so long, being threatened and forced, being so hurt inside and out. I think in this situation our peeping was justified even if it only served to fill out heads with worse images and feelings.
It was his fault for leaving his email open. It was his fault for doing this to us.
So I sat there for the whole duration of the class, leaning in closer and closer until her words on the screen were inches from my eyes, sad and electrified and feeling like somebody else’s ghost was passing through me over and over again. She told him that she and I would make out in front of him for a long time, and then I would lay down below them, her body on my face, him inside me, me pinned down and faceless and immobile and pleasure-giving while they held each other above me and kissed.
It’s a vision that has stayed with me for six goddamned years. It’s the most literally and figuratively objectifying thing a person has ever said about me. Though I suppose he did worse and more objectifying things, in physical reality. Six years later and it still gives me actual chills.
And I know she wrote that about me in order to overcome her insecurity, and to express the deep longing and sense of wrongness he’d made her feel. I know that image gave her power, in a situation where she’d been chronically powerless. I know she became attracted to me in hopes that the three of us could work things out, together. And I know I violated her privacy in dozens of equally creepy ways, and I’d be lying if I said the fraught situation we were in hadn’t pushed me to eroticize her, too. It was an act of emotional survival. It was a way to gather up all the dissonance and then make it disperse. I understand it. I understand her completely.
But still I’m given pause. The image comes to me in bursts, unpredictably, though these days it’s rare. I’ll be eating a sandwich or curled up with a book or I’ll meet some other woman with a thin face and buck teeth, or somebody else with her name. All of a sudden, it’s there. Me pinned below her and the man that tormented both of us, but I’m the one who’s writhing and screaming and she’s the one that’s on top, absorbing all my muffled sounds.
When I finally met her, I was shocked at how small and meek she was. She clutched her left forearm with her right hand, and stooped when she walked, so as to seem shorter. I towered over her in every way. She envied my breast size, the smoothness of my skin. She kept quiet and looked away all the time. She was just a girl, really; a sprite in yoga pants and a frown. We drank red wine from mugs on opposite ends of his bed. I tried to befriend her but she could barely speak. It felt like I was winning, then, until she got up for the bathroom. I caught him, “our” boyfriend, beaming at it all.
This is like my birthday, he said to me. All my favorite people are here. I’ve never been so happy.
And I knew he wanted to make real the story that she’d written. Strip us down, push us together, thrown me on the bed below them. But for the first time in a long time I had the power to say no to him. Not out of respect for myself, but because I knew she would acquiesce to anything, anything at all, and I couldn’t stand to traumatize her the way her words had traumatized me.
Originally published at erikadprice.tumblr.com.