Surviving Evidence

by Jean Roberta

Considering that I started writing stories as a child, I hope my writing has changed since then!

Here is the plot of a story I vaguely remember writing when I was about 7 or 8. (I also drew and colored the illustrations.)

A tough cowboy walks into a saloon, pounds his fist on the bar, and says, “Wine, please.” (I had seen my parents drinking wine, and they had taught me to say please when asking for something.)

An outlaw walks into the saloon. The cowboy sees him. They fight. The cowboy wins. The end.

I couldn’t understand why this saga of the Old West made my parents laugh so much. The rugged landscape of the television westerns I had watched, where cowboys rode past clumps of sagebrush and exposed rock, looked just like the landscape of southern Idaho, where I lived. If my parents could drink wine at their supper table within sight of the mountains that loomed beyond our picture windows, I didn’t see what was funny about my saloon scenario. I thought I was writing about the Real World of hard living and hard rocks.

For better or worse, I destroyed most of my childhood writing and drawing after it was all brought to me in several boxes by my two younger sisters in 2005. They had packed up everything in our parents’ house, to prepare the house for sale and our parents for their first “assisted-living” apartment in a residence for senior citizens. Our mother had faithfully saved everything that any of us produced. I was mortified that my sisters, who had already disapproved of me for many years, had seen my childish output in our parents’ attic.

I didn’t see what good purpose this material could ever serve. I was afraid it could be used as evidence against me, possibly to prove that I have always been emotionally immature, mentally ill, and out of touch with reality (the general opinion of my relatives). Ironically, I thought, my juvenilia could be used someday as evidence that I am too senile to take care of myself. I could imagine my sisters and my grown daughter saying that my age at the time of writing was no excuse. So I shredded page after yellowed page from my childhood, and stuffed it into the garbage bin behind my house.

I still have some poems and articles of mine that appeared in magazines in the 1970s (my twenties), but my fiction didn’t appear in public until the 1980s, so I’ll start there.

Egad. Here is the opening scene in a story I wrote in my early thirties:

“I’m sitting at my kitchen table, watching snowflakes drifting through the air outside my window. This whole house belongs to me since my husband Tom died five years ago. I wonder if that sounds heartless, or tragic. People die, and the living inherit what the dead no longer need. Everyone knows that, yet no one really thinks about death until they lose someone close to them, and then the survivors treat death like the villain in a movie. I thought of it that way myself. Black mustache, long cape and hollow laugh. I’m getting too old for such nonsense.

Next Thursday I’ll be sixty years old. I don’t expect this age to be a turning point in my life. Turning points only seem to exist in the past, never the present.”

- from “Snowflakes” (in More Saskatchewan Gold: 31 New Stories from the West, edited by Geoffrey Ursell, Coteau Books, 1984)

Reading this again, now that I am over 60, is both jarring and impressive. I’m not sure this story really deserved the award it won from the Saskatchewan Writers Guild, but I’m glad that my younger self was kind to the Older Woman I have since become.

I’ve never lost a current husband, but in 2006, I was contacted out of the blue by an old friend who told me that my ex-husband had passed away in another town, apparently without leaving any next-of-kin to make burial arrangements (the reason for the phone call). He died penniless, many years after I escaped from him. Unlike the woman in my story, I haven’t been much affected by the conventions of heterosexual marriage.

Like her, however, I have a grown child by my ex-husband, and she will forever be the link between me and him.

That marriage, and my much-longer phase of being a single mother, inspired much of my writing in those days. Here is the opening scene from “Yellow Roses,” a story told by a white American woman who knows she has a tiny amount of African blood. (I don’t actually know this about myself, but I know enough about my ancestry to think it possible.) She goes to London, England, where she meets an “African prince,” and brings him back to her current home in Canada:

I have heard the sound of Bow bells, in the city of my ancestors. I have seen the sagebrush of the American West, the Northern Lights in Canada, and the green hills of England.

I went to the Old Country whence my ancestors had fled their poverty. There I met a handsome foreign prince, or so he seemed. We danced to the music of his people, and he told me tales of the Olden Days before the Europeans had come to his country. Unlike me, he could trace his ancestry in an unbroken line back to African kings and queens whose bronze images now sit in European museums. My ancestors left no image but me, and I am not considered valuable enough for others to claim. Neither do I live behind glass.

- from The Old Dance: Love Stories of One Kind or Another, edited by Bonnie Burnard, Coteau Books, 1986)

Note that these two stories were published under my actual birth-name. “Jean Roberta” was born later, when I began writing lesbian stories, then plunged deeper into the abyss by writing erotica in various flavours.

Here is the beginning of an emotionally overheated but sex-free story about a messy triangle among lesbians. Marguerite, the narrator, has a crush on Daria, a woman who lives with Eileen, a sexy singer-songwriter who borrows a poem from Marguerite and turns it into a song. (If you have ever watched The L-Word, that marvelous TV soap opera about lesbians in Los Angeles, you can guess the rest.) From here, things get better, and worse:

Sometimes I feel as if I’m drowning in the deep water of my own feelings. Years ago, before I knew the nature of them, I began dreaming about oceanscapes. The tide would surge onto wet sand where I stood waiting, excited and afraid. Or a school of mermaids would flash onto the horizon, but I hesitated to swim out to them, fearing that I would never find my way back to shore. No help ever seemed available. I would wake up with a wet face.

- From “The Ballad of the Deep Blue Sea” (in Dykeversions: Lesbian Short Fiction, collectively edited, The Women’s Press, 1986)

At this time, I wasn’t writing about sex, exactly. I was writing about my actual, unrequited crush on a woman I knew who didn’t seem available. And then she left her partner of several years to move away with a woman she had met while organizing a feminist conference. Oh, the irony.

Since then, I think my writing has become less autobiographical on the surface. Or maybe I’ve learned to translate the feelings I’ve actually felt into the feelings of characters who look much different from me. Some conditions that I could only imagine in the past have become real: what it feels like to be a post-menopausal, silver-haired woman and an “out” lesbian for so long that I no longer argue with myself about whether I’m going through a phase. (If so, it will probably end at death.)

I became a published writer of erotica just before the end of the last century, and I’ve kept going since then. My publications fill a shelf in my office in the English Department of the local university. Why this material doesn’t embarrass me is hard to explain. This, too, could be used as evidence against me, but for some reason, I’ve never felt a compulsion to pile up all the paperbacks and burn them. Maybe it’s because all my sex stories were written by a consenting adult. Or maybe because I’ve been given much more approval than I could imagine before I survived the 1980s and came out on the other side.

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O Curse of Marriage

by Jean Roberta

In Othello, Shakespeare’s tragedy about the causes and results of jealousy, the provocateur who plants suspicion in the mind of General Othello that his new bride is unfaithful warns him:

“O! beware, my lord, of jealousy; it is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.”

Iago, the sly underling, resents Othello for reasons that are never clear enough. Iago might resent Othello for not giving him a promotion, or for rising so fast through the ranks of the army, despite his being an outsider in Venetian society. (Othello is a “Moor,” i.e. Moroccan, so he is visibly different from the Italians around him.) Iago also claims that his own wife Emilia has fooled around with Othello behind his back, though the audience never sees this. Jealousy, it seems, doesn’t need substantial evidence.

Iago’s warning about jealousy drips with irony. He, of all people, knows how it can destroy a life.

Othello is newly-married to Desdemona, a younger and whiter woman who fell in love with him when he told her about his military adventures, the battles he survived. He claims to love her because she admires and sympathizes with him, but he can’t trust her.

Here Othello makes it clear that husbands in general can’t afford to trust their wives:

“O curse of marriage, that we can call these delicate creatures ours, and not their appetites! I had rather be a toad, and live upon the vapour of a dungeon, than keep a corner in the thing I love for others’ uses.”

Othello is so much more to me than a dusty Renaissance play that many English majors have studied in university. As a student of literature and new bride in my twenties, I studied this plot AND lived it. As my desperate, ambitious, hard-drinking Nigerian husband grew angrier on alien turf (I had brought him to Canada from England, where we met), I racked my brains to find explanations and solutions. Why was he so upset that I had had other boyfriends before him, even though he knew that when he proposed to me? Why was he so convinced that I was a nympho who had random hookups with men, and when did he think I was doing all this? Was there an Iago among our friends?

Could I possibly prove my loyalty, even while my husband’s behaviour made me so hurt, angry and afraid that I didn’t see how I could stay with him much longer?

This was the most urgent question: Was he going to kill me, as Othello kills Desdemona?

Luckily for me, I was able to escape, continue my education and raise our daughter with no further violence. (Not that any of that was easy.) My ex-husband tried to persuade my parents to kick me and my baby out of their house on grounds that I was obviously a cheating wife -- otherwise I would never have left my home & husband. When his plan didn’t succeed, he went on to marry another young white Canadian whose parents seemed able and willing (at first) to support him financially. That relationship collapsed as well, and my ex-husband moved to another part of Canada, presumably to find a good job (not to mention a relatively well-off family with a daughter).

Like Othello, my ex eventually died in despair, though his life seems to have declined for years before then. On New Year’s Eve 2006, I learned in a surprise phone call that he had died of a heart attack in a town where he was alone except for the patient friend who phoned me because the hospital was asking for a next-of-kin. The reasons for my ex's isolation weren't hard to guess, and I got lurid bits of information on the day of his funeral: apparently he had gone to the local hospital several times with complaints about plots against him and evil spirits in his apartment. He had been diagnosed with a mental illness. (But my opinion of the “mental health” establishment is a whole other post.)

My current female spouse (a better choice!) usually answers my lingering questions about the drama of my first marriage with this line: “You have to remember he was mentally ill.” Case closed.

This epitaph doesn’t resolve anything to my satisfaction, and my own Othello is no longer able to speak for himself. He was definitely the most jealous man I ever met, but he wasn’t alone.

During the “sexual revolution” of the 1970s, I kept meeting guys who expected me to go with the flow and live for the moment by having unprotected sex with them, but none of them seemed to want a relationship with a sexually-experienced woman. Even in theoretical discussions about dating relationships, one guy after another paraphrased Othello’s “O curse of marriage” speech. They hated the fickle nature of women, as they saw it, and their own inability to put a chastity belt on the mind of any woman they had claimed as “theirs.”

This irrational value system has been called the Double Standard, and it seems incredibly long-lived. Trying to argue it away just doesn’t work. Trust me, I’ve tried that. Writing off every jealous heterosexual man as “mentally ill” seems parallel to summing up women in general as “weak-minded” and therefore prone to go to the Dark Side.

There has to be a way to analyze this monster, this curse or this epidemic without resorting to shallow insults.

Like Giselle, I’ve experienced some disturbing little outbreaks of jealousy in my long-term lesbian relationship. Sometimes I wonder about her real motives for being with me; love can be asserted, but never proved beyond a doubt. More often, I think I see jealousy in her eyes. (I have a much more secure job than she does -- with shorter working hours, higher pay, and no crazy-making office politics. Do I deserve all this? Doesn’t she? Who knows?) But then, I can never be sure if I am seeing and hearing her clearly, or overreacting because of the Shakespearean tragedy of my past. It’s complicated.

I’m convinced that no one is immune from jealousy, or the messy soup of feelings that are described that way. The only way I know of to minimize the damage is to think before I speak or act, and not to blurt out the first words that come to my mind.

Respect (for oneself and others) is probably the best antidote.

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