Abandon Me Read online

  “What is love and what makes it worth it? What is heritage and family, and how does that define us? In Melissa Febos’s beautiful and heartbreaking memoir, she seeks to answer these most profound questions. I was completely captivated by this raw and, at times, brutally honest book.” —Julie Slavinsky, Warwick’s, La Jolla, CA

  “A relentless examination of desire, loneliness, love, and reading. Melissa Febos displays a remarkable emotional honesty, one that exposes her life, but also, as in the best confessional memoirs, casts light on the reader as well.” —Stephen Sparks, Green Apple Books, San Francisco, CA

  “Febos’s courage is astounding. I found resonance in her experience—and her craving to understand it all. Moreover, I relished the view into her passionate, uninhibited, and ever-so-slightly chaotic life. I took from it a comfort in my own—and a greater compassion for hers. It that sense, Abandon Me is an ideal memoir.” —Becky Dayton, Vermont Book Shop, Middlebury, VT

  ALSO BY MELISSA FEBOS

  Whip Smart: A Memoir

  FOR MY CAPTAIN

  CONTENTS

  The Book of Hours

  Leave Marks

  Call My Name

  Labyrinths

  All of Me

  Wunderkammer

  Girl at a Window

  Abandon Me

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author

  One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness visible.

  —Carl Jung

  It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found.

  —D. W. Winnicott

  I have destroyed everything: our hands, our arms, our tangled hair, the silence, the night.

  We parted, we waited for each other, we saw fear’s chasm open between us. If the thread of our waiting should break, we shall fall into the bowels of the earth.

  —Violette Leduc, Thérèse and Isabelle

  THE BOOK OF HOURS

  No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with

  tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god.

  —Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel”

  We had no television, no god, no family less than a day’s drive away, but we had stories.

  “Once upon a time in Spain,” read my sea captain father, “there was a little bull and his name was Ferdinand.” His back against the couch, me the fat baby on his chest, the curtain drifting over us as summer pushed through the open window. I mouthed every word he read, studied the shine of that cow mother’s eyes, the curve of Ferdinand’s eyelashes beneath the cork tree.

  It was a storybookish early life—my beautiful mother and her curly-haired captain, our town surrounded on three sides by the ocean. Out my bedroom window glittered a lake of murky depths. In my bedroom, a trove of stories. We were lucky and we were loved, which isn’t the same as happy, if you believe in such a thing.

  Today, my beloved and I drove from her desert home to a nearby city for a conference. Now, in the hotel bed, we read Hemingway’s The Dangerous Summer, in which he follows rival matadors Luis Miguel Dominguín and Antonio Ordóñez across Spain during the summer of 1959. The book is her selection—she has been to Spain, has seen a toreador lifted into the air by a horn in his thigh.

  “It was a good day for bulls at Aranjuez on May thirtieth,” she begins.

  The first time I heard her voice, I sat in a room full of people. The dark was thick with heat. All of us listening. I carried a story of my own into that room, but her voice silenced everything in me. There was a pool of light and in it she gripped the podium’s shoulders, Listen to me—and I did not remember myself until she let go.

  “The river was brown and swollen from the rains,” she continues. Cheek to her chest, I listen to more than the story. Her skin’s smell—salted honey, the smooth and muscle of our pressed thighs, the lull of sleep and our slowed pulses. They become one. Just as the desert and the sky’s hundred-houred layers of color and the mountains and the dry tongue of road and the dead rattlesnake we found in it this morning—scaly rope fat enough to dock a boat—and the wide open parts of my chest become one. Enormous.

  When the Captain was home from sea, he woke from nightmares, screaming. When he was gone, my brother and I did. We counted time in waves. My brother suffered terrible nightmares. I became a sleepwalker. In the silent hours, I rose from my bed, pajamas soaked with sweat. I walked the halls and climbed the furniture. I searched the empty spaces of our house. I haunted his side of my parents’ bed, opened cupboards and closets, boxes and drawers. My mother found me moonlit, straddling the back of the couch, staring out the window. Six years old and already a widow walker. She led me back to bed. In the morning, I woke salt-white.

  When I didn’t sleepwalk, I counted all the dangers my father might meet: storms that turned the sea foaming, fanged, ravening for ships; two-hundred-ton beasts big enough to gulp a school bus, gulp my captain, our Jonah. And if so, what then? What god would compel the Captain coughed up onto the shore, to leave the sea for good? He didn’t believe in any god. He didn’t want to come home.

  I knew that pirates always kill the captain first. They slit his throat to show the crew they are not afraid to bloody the decks. The moonlight trapped my fears in its shadows, played them against the walls of my bedroom. The Captain had met such storms, had even fought such pirates. Didn’t real heroes eventually run out of happy endings?

  When he was at sea, I never cried. My brother and I never spoke of missing him. We crawled out from nightmares and into my mother’s bed. Read, I’d say. My mother never stuttered when she read, and never wept, and when my mother read, I believed her. Whether we knew what came next or not, we trusted those stories because we could not trust our own.

  Once upon a time, after one kiss and a month of letters, I flew across the country to meet an almost stranger, my future beloved. We spent two days together: all body, few words. But on the last night—before I left, before we knew when next we’d meet or as what—she got a call that her mother was ill.

  What’s wrong? I asked. At first, she would not or could not tell me. When she did, I said nothing. I had dreaded such a call all my life. I knew better than to tell her it would be okay. It might not have been. It is hard enough to accept comfort from those who know us and nearly impossible from those who don’t. Can I read to you? I finally asked. It was the only comfort I knew well enough to offer. Rilke? I asked, because I’d brought The Book of Hours in my suitcase.

  No, she said. It requires so much trust to accept another’s solution. We did not have enough.

  The Book of Hours is a book of love poems to God, though Rilke was in love with a married woman when he wrote them. So, I think it must also be a book about loving a woman. Maybe every desire is the desire to give ourselves away to some perfect keeper, to be known perfectly, as only a creator could know us. So many of the lines in his “Love Poems to God” are the promises we want from our lovers. Maybe The Book of Hours is about how love makes women into gods. Not the kind we seek in churches, but the Greek kind—the kind whom to love might scorch the human lover dead, or turn her into a different kind of animal. The kind we create, who are too human in their loving us.

  Like Rilke, I had fallen in love with a married woman. Across those 2,500 miles, she began the slow process of prying her life apart. Soon after our first weekend together, I sent her some of Rilke’s lines: “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror / Just keep going. No feeling is final / Don’t let yourself lose me.” I wanted to be strong for her, but it was already hard to see a happy ending across all those miles. I waited, as I had waited all my childhood, though it never got easier.

  I can’t do this, I whispered to myself in the morning shower.

  I can’t do this, I heard in love songs on the radio as I drove to work.

  I can’t do this, I told my friends after her wife called me on the phone.

  I can do this, I said in
to her hands, and then pressed that promise against my body, as if her touch could make it true.

  Uncertainty and distance are similar afflictions—even more irreconcilable problems than an incumbent wife. The mind—dumb, houndish thing—still tries to solve them. I was tireless and so tired. I became forgetful. I grew thin. I grew angry. Where are you? I kept asking, but she had no answers. I had to wait.

  Rilke, my beloved later told me, pushed his wife down the stairs. Or so she had heard. Yes, I thought, love can kill you, after all. Yes, I think now, love can be that selfish. It is hard to care rightly for someone you fear losing. It becomes possible to also hate them.

  When the Captain no longer came home to our house, but to a house in another part of town, my mother traded her tears for psychotherapy textbooks. From them, we learned how to name our feelings. Are you angry? my mother asked us. How about sad? I shook my head. My brother refused to sleep.

  In my twenties, in New York, my friends and I made punch lines of our abandonment issues. And in certain moments, in our therapists’ offices, we could glimpse their true size, like the dark length of a whale passing beneath a boat. It stole my breath—the shock of my own smallness, the strength of the unseen, how easy capsizing could be.

  Abandonment. What did that really mean? That I was left? That I had learned to leave my self. That I would retell the story until I found a different ending. Until I learned to stay.

  Rilke took his title from the book of hours, a popular Christian devotional text of the Middle Ages. At the university where I teach, the library’s special collection houses remnants of these prayer books. The oldest is from 1420 France. One afternoon, sick with longing, I washed my hands and sat at the long wooden table in that cloistered room and laid them out around me.

  The first books in creation were inked by hand on animal skins, and sitting with these pages under those soft lights, their textures—delicate as sloughed sheaths of faith—were enough to convince me that books were once bodies, that the bestial and the divine can reside in the same place.

  Fruit-laden vines bordered some pages, so precisely rendered that they still crept across those milky margins, blushing with pinks and reds six centuries faded. I squinted at the careful calligraphy inside, each letter drawn by the same slow hand—words opening like black buds across the leaves.

  Books of hours were among the first books possessed by women, and sometimes the prayers inside even held the name of the book’s owner. I traced those gold edges, the monogram engraved on a cover. How had it felt to touch these first pages? To carry these holy words home and read your name among them? Like being found, I thought.

  I had always searched for myself in stories, and Pippi Longstocking was a likely candidate. The nine-year-old daughter of a sea captain, she lived alone with her monkey and her horse, and repaired her own home when necessary. Pippi’s self-sufficiency was written as freedom. Pippi had spent years aboard her father’s ship and brimmed with tales of their adventures. Though her father had been lost at sea, she spun stories of his being made the king of a savage isle.

  These ought to have been my favorite stories. But Pippi held no special fascination for me, the actual nine-year-old daughter of a sea captain. Shouldn’t I have wanted superhuman strength? To need no one? To accompany the Captain on his seafaring adventures? Of course I did. But I knew better.

  That child reader wanted, as this writer does, to find my troubles on the page, and then, hopefully, to see them resolved. Pippi’s problems were already solved. If her self-sufficiency were hard won, it happened off the page. And she was a fool—I knew her father was dead.

  While my brother memorized stories of boy warriors—Hiawatha and Peter Pan—I preferred The Velveteen Rabbit, whose hero believes that love has made him Real, until he meets a living rabbit. O, the pain of discovering that a thing is not what you thought it was! Worst of all, to discover this about yourself. When his boy contracts scarlet fever, the rabbit is stuffed into a sack of things to be burned.

  My heart broke with the rabbit’s. To be found unlovable was a kind of death—the child’s animal wisdom knows they are tantamount. The rabbit’s despair is so great that he cries a real tear, summoning the nursery fairy, who finally makes him Real.

  The nursery fairy is a deus ex machina—she pops out of a flower to perform her magical solution and is nowhere else mentioned in the story—but that never bothered me. The rabbit’s pains were real. Like him, I wanted to be loved. Like him, I feared being found unworthy. What if the Captain’s absence was proof of this? In a terrifying wordless place, I harbored a suspicion that it proved I was not Real.

  When I learned to read, I read: to myself, to my menagerie of stuffed animals, to my little brother. I started with the familiar ones, the stories in which my parents’ voices first comforted me. Soon, the comfort of my own reading voice replaced theirs.

  Even without an audience, I read—the silent words vibrating my skull, filling the places where grief might have settled. I spent so many waking hours in stories that when I lifted my gaze the rooms of our house blurred, furniture and faces floating by me detached from context, like characters in a film whose plot I’d half forgotten.

  I was both looking for and leaving myself. Now, I remember the rabbit’s sadness better than my own. Memory renders the gray desolation of the moors in The Secret Garden more precisely than the sad New England sea of my own girlhood. Only by exiling my own grief to those foggy plains could I find and face it.

  I had learned to wait for the Captain and feel nothing. This was different. Nine months in love with this woman, I waited: at baggage claim in the airport, for her to call me back, to end her marriage, to promise me that she would be there. There was no distraction. I could not read. I could not write. I could not sleep. I cried bottomless, ugly cries that no lover should see. It was a despair so furious that a friend and I named it “Bertha,” after the mad wife of Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester. My grief was a madwoman who had been locked for years in the attic. Finally freed, she set fires. She was an animal. She would not be locked away again. My therapist tells me to love her, I said. But I think I need to kill her.

  After ten months, my beloved said, enough. She said, I can’t do this anymore. She left and I could not stop her. I did not sleepwalk or search my night-swept house. She was not lost at sea, but she was lost to me. I had no story to make sense of it.

  The Captain doesn’t remember my abuela ever reading to him, though she claimed she did. And I have a really good memory, he says in a small voice.

  He was the middle of three sons. He was the altar boy, the one who carried a crumpled brown paper bag of toy soldiers everywhere. In the midst of any chaos, he could sit himself in a corner, open that bag, and disappear into the world of those plastic men. It was a lucky power, as my abuelo was a mean drunk. He tossed my abuela around their house like one of her religious figurines. Sometimes, she broke. Every morning, she said her prayers. She hid her bruises. She dressed her boys for school. My abuelo did not stop beating her until the day her middle son grew big enough to stop him. If you ever hurt her again, he said, I’ll kill you.

  The Captain needed stories, the sense they might have made of that life. At their best, that is what children’s stories do: force logic upon the gruesome facts of our lives. They mirror our troubles and submit them to a chain of causality. The heroes of children’s stories suffer, but for reward—even if their happy ending is only the restoration of order. Rumpelstiltskin’s queen keeps her first-born child. Hansel and Gretel kill the witch. The Velveteen Rabbit is made Real. Better still, the oldest stories written for children often offer retribution. In Grimm’s original, Rumpelstiltskin is so enraged at having lost that he tears his own body in half. Cinderella’s evil stepsisters cut off their feet, and doves peck out their eyes.

  Who knows what plots the young Captain built, row by row, for those miniature men. Maybe there was no story that could have made sense of that horror.

  The Captain co
uld not speak of my missing him, could not name or make sense of it. But many of my earliest memories are of his reading to me. His favorite was The Story of Ferdinand, and when I look at the drawings of that little bull under his cork tree, I understand why. Like Ferdinand, he was no fighter. The men from Madrid forced Ferdinand into the ring, and so a man forced my Captain. But when Ferdinand refused to fight, he was taken home. The Captain never had that choice; his home was the ring. And the story that saved him was the sea.

  My mother’s favorite story was C. S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. In volume five of the Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis transports the Pevensie children from a subway in London to the ship of Prince Caspian, with whom they voyage to the eastern edge of the world.

  My mother’s captain, her prince, was gone. She waited and waited for him. Eventually she left him, but leaving was never what she wanted. Maybe, if he had asked, my mother would have boarded that ship. If she could not be his greatest adventure, she’d have settled for sharing it.

  Our favorite stories can be like lovers. Make sense to me, we ask them. Make sense of me. Here, fix these hurting parts. And stories do, sometimes better than our lovers.

  When my beloved came back to me, nothing was easy. How could you leave me? I asked her again and again. There was no right answer. There was no way to prove that she would not leave again. She grew weary of trying. I grew weary of waiting. I began to understand how a woman could leave the captain she loved.

  Jorge Luis Borges wrote that “To be in love is to create a religion whose god is fallible.” Of course I was still wanting; love had not made me Real, which is to say it had not made me safe. I had believed in something perfect, and it had capsized me. In his Book of Hours, Rilke says, “To each of us you reveal yourself differently: to the ship as a coastline, to the shore as a ship.” That is, love doesn’t give us a god, unless we are also willing to become one.