Vladimir by Julia May Jonas
For Adam
I ask this one thing:
let me go mad in my own way.
—SOPHOKLES, ELEKTRA
Prologue
When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me. They loved how eager I was to please them, how much I wanted them to think well of me. They would wink at me, and find me precocious. I would encounter them at church, and at family gatherings, and as friends of my friends’ parents. They were the husbands of my dance instructors, or my science or history teachers.
Their approval filled me with pleasure. When I remember my childhood I am wearing a white dress with a blue accent. Girls in white dresses—a song written by an old man. This is not what I wore but it is what I remember myself wearing, especially when I interacted with old men. I remember feeling like a classic young girl, and thinking that my goodness shone out of me. Goodness and intelligence radiated from my eyes, and the men recognized it, even the oldest and most cantankerous.
I still like many of the things old men tend to enjoy. Jazz music, folk music, the blues, guitar virtuosity. Long, well-researched histories. Existentialists and muscular writers. Depravity, and funny, violent criminals. Emotional rock ’n’ roll. Meanness. I like folksy stories of city life, or country life, or anecdotes about political history. I like clever jokes, and talking about the mechanics of jokes, and turns of phrase, and card games, and war stories.
What I like most about old men now, however, and the reason I often feel that perhaps I am an old man more than I am an oldish white woman in her late fifties (the identity I am burdened with publicly presenting, to my general embarrassment), is that old men are composed of desire. Everything about them is wanting. They have appetites for food, boats, vacations, entertainment. They want to be stimulated. They want to sleep. They are guided by desire—their world is made up of their desires. For the old men who I am thinking of (and perhaps I mean a certain kind of old man that I encountered and that has enshrined itself in my mind from youth), they do not know or cannot imagine a kind of world that is not completely and totally guided by a sense of wanting and getting. And of course, they desire the adoration of a sexual partner, even if only in their imaginations, through the blue light of their television screens.
* * *
I wrote the above words while looking at Vladimir and his tawny, well-formed head leaning against the wooden chair. His bold—you could call it protruding—forehead catches the light, illuminating the drum-tight skin atop the manly cranial bulges. At forty, he is the kind of man whose face will grow tighter before it softens. His grayish-blond hair rests like mussed hay, plentiful now, but with the threat of translucence and eventual absence in years to come. He is asleep in the chair, and the hair on his left arm (the one that I have not shackled) glows in the late-afternoon sun. The sight of that arm hair, ablaze in the sun, sends a sob down my spine. I run my fingers over its springy softness, as lightly as a tiny, courteous insect.
The chair is big, medieval-style, made of dark brown pine, the finish soft with use. It came from a junk shop, and before that a beer hall on Route 9 that went out of business. The wood is covered with gummy black carvings of names and initials, some pairings encircled by hearts, some with dates. When I’m trying to find inspiration, I will zero in on a set of initials: J. S. + R. B. 1987. I will make up names for the initials: Jehan Soon and Robert Black, let’s say, a gay couple who moved upstate from New York City, fleeing the horror of the AIDS crisis—architects, both of them—Jehan the son of immigrant Korean parents, born and raised in Flushing, Queens, and Robert Black, son of a Mayflower family, a blue-blooded black sheep, pun lightly intended. They buy a rambling Victorian and decorate it in obsessive style, finding antiques and oddities possible only in the age before the internet, before everyone understood what everything was worth, from Eames chairs to vintage sixties kitsch figurines. One night they venture out in their new town and stumble across a beer hall. It is a warm spring and they sit outside, romantically, beneath trees that are heavy and dripping with flower petals. Jehan becomes tipsy and affectionate, and Robert, frightened of the upstate town and the chunky groups of chunky men who, if not members of, at least draw aesthetic inspiration from Hells Angels, pushes him away. They quarrel, badly, and go home angry—Jehan feeling humiliated, Robert feeling helpless. Much later, after they have made up, Robert, on his own, comes to the beer hall and carves their initials into the chair and, on the first anniversary of their life in this upstate town, brings Jehan to sit in that chair and shows him the carving.
Then they spontaneously combust.
For example.
Vladimir snores lightly, a soft, soothing purr of a snore. It’s a sweet, even sound. If I lived with him, if I were his little wife, I would wrap myself around him and let that snore lull me to sleep, like the sound of a rushing ocean.
I could tidy the cabin—the limes from our drinks are squashed on the counter, our shoes in the mudroom point every which way. I could write more, work on my book, but instead I want to sit and stare at the light as it moves across him. I am aware of this moment as a perfect example of liminality. I am living in the reality before Vladimir wakes. I wish some of my students, who have a postadolescent passion for literary terms, were here. I am sure if they were, they could feel it. The no-place-ness and no-time-ness of now. The pulsing presence of this moment between moments.