Lily Hoang: Invisible Women

The woman down the hall believes in legacy. She tells us about her mother, who was a fine woman, and her grandmother, who was a complete tramp but lovely nonetheless. She tells us about her great-grandmother, who had broad shoulders, and her great-great-grandmother, who was practically a fairy tale princess.

So the woman down the hall tells us all this, and we’re interested. You see, we want to believe in happy endings, we want to believe in forever, but the fact of the matter is that we don’t. We don’t believe that just because her great-great-grandmother was practically a fairy tale princess that it means that she will have the same fate. We don’t believe in continuity. Instead, we believe she’ll die old and alone. That’s the fate we will all share.

Sigmund describes a woman who could be either his wife or his wife’s sister to Lou Andreas to see if she could differentiate between the two. One woman he refers to with tenderness; the other with patience. Lou does not respond quickly, but when she does, she tells him another story about a woman down the hall.

With frustration, the doctor says, “I’ve told you my rules! I will tell you about a woman and you will tell me if she exists, if my imaginings of woman are true to your experience.”

The Russian responds, “I can tell you about thousands of women, doctor, and each of them will be the very woman you have just described. I can tell you about hundreds of women, and in them, you will see none of your wives, none of the women you love, as a point of differentiation. I can tell you about myself or your wife or your daughter and I can give them different names, but they will only be as I tell them to you. You cannot create women of your own out of the pieces I give you.”

Freud says, “But tell me if they are real. Tell me if the women I speak about are real.”

“When you describe these women, you give me only their characteristics as reflections of yourself, and so yes, Freud, these women are real, given that you yourself are real enough to touch.”

SIGMUND: I don’t know when you have had time to visit all the women you describe to me. It seems to be you have never moved from my side.

LOU: Everything I see and do assumes meaning in a mental space where the same calm reigns as here, the same smoke and smells, the same silence streaked by the rustling of your wife. At the moment when I concentrate and reflect, I find myself again, always, in this room, at this hour of the evening, in your august presence, though I continue, without a moment’s pause, moving through room to room, speaking with women burdened with hysterics.

SIGMUND: I, too, am not sure I am here, sitting beside this fire or eating decadent foods, receiving awards or even speaking with you. I am unsure I stroll in the early evening and I constantly question if my sleep occurs with any regularity, or perhaps I am where my sons are, fighting in dirt with imaginary bullets that kill without reservation.

LOU: Perhaps this conversation exists only in the shadow of our lowered eyelids, and we have never stopped: you, from raising dust in the fields of internal battle; and I, from bargaining for sacks of pepper in distant bazaars. But each time we half-close our eyes, in the midst of the din and throng, we are allowed to withdraw here, dressed in our finest garbs, to ponder what we are seeing and living, to draw conclusions and understandings, to contemplate from a distance.

SIGMUND: Perhaps this dialogue of our is taking place between two hysterics named Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salome, as they sift in and out of rubbish heaps, piling up invisible flotsam, scrapes of imaginary nerves, screaming from repressed desires for their fathers and mothers, while drunk on a few sips of poor wine, they see in the distance all the treasure of calmness shine around them.

LOU: Perhaps all that is left of the world is a wasteland covered with rubbish heaps and this one room of Sigmund Freud’s where we sit. It is our eyelids that separate them, but we cannot know which is inside and which is outside.

SIGMUND: It is most clear to me that all of this could merely be transference and that these women you describe are manifestations of your homosexual desire for both self and, strangely, me.

LOU: All of this is irrelevant in the face of memory and reality, this accumulation of variations of self, and how you see it as a way for me to seduce you.

That cunt down the hall, we call her cunt. We say it without shame. We say it like it means vagina. And that cunt down the hall, when we call her cunt, her shoulders rise up and swallow her head, and after a little while, they fold back down and her face is all red. Her ears pulse. We could dance to their beat, but that would be rude. It is, after all, our fault that she is a cunt. Before we called her that, this never happened. We made her this way. We made her insecure.

When the woman down the hall lusts for a man, it is like his death. It isn’t her intention, but it can’t be helped. Only yesterday, the woman down the hall saw a man on a bicycle and surely he was attractive enough, but with senses as keen as a mongoose, she stuck her head to the full extension of neck out her window so many stories high to the clouds, and she sniffed. The woman down the hall from so high up caught the brief scent of his sweat, and it was as simple as that.

She memorized the texture of smell, the hint of the dinner he surely ate alone just last night, and when evening breached, the woman down the hall dressed in her most conservative black, and as she approached the restaurant, this man who was on his bicycle earlier that morning couldn’t stop himself. He couldn’t resist her charm, her simple laugh, the way she listened to his trivial stories with care, and before he could acknowledge it, he was caught in a love so easy that even breathing became a chore.

The woman down the hall is in love. We can tell that she is in love because her hair becomes branches that extend and entangle. When she is happiest, we can hear the whistle of wind move through her leaves. They sing a sweet melody that sounds like fairy tales.

The woman down the hall speaks in ellipses. It doesn’t seem possible, but she does. The woman down the hall never finishes a thought. She never finishes a sentence.

The woman down the hall is constantly hidden. Most often, her bulbous body exposes her, but she keeps her face obscured. She is not an unattractive woman so we cannot discern why she would hide. If she were ugly, that would be a different matter, but she is not. We cannot understand her.

She is a curious one, this woman down the hall. We often find her huddled in the corners of couches, her entire body lodged between cushions and frame, her eyes connected with a book.

But even though she seems too entranced in her envelopment to speak with us, she knows everything.

She is the Gossip Queen, the securer of truths and exaggerations, and although it is most difficult to find her, once we do, we are well rewarded for our diligence in sighting the cleverest chameleon.

LOU: …Perhaps this room and all we have discussed exist only in the continual expanse of our mind…

SIGMUND: …and however far our troubled enterprises as psychoanalysts and friends may take us, we both harbor within ourselves this silent shade, this conversation of pauses, this evening that is always the same.