Lily Hoang: Invisible Women

The fortuneteller said nothing but closed her eyes. And the woman’s teeth grew back, each one as painful as the first emergence of bone drilling its way through all that fleshy, pink gum.

Lou Andreas-Salome did not think of narcissism as a self-obsession where one removes self from all others in an attempt to differentiate, to display superiority. Instead, she understood it to be the moment where a person — almost in confusion — sees a dissolution of self, when self dissolves into its surroundings, a simultaneity of self and everything else. This accounted for silent dialogues between herself and the doctor. This accounted for the way heroes believe they cannot be killed, the way all those boys went to war, cramming their bodies into trenches to allow themselves to sink fully into the mud.

Sigmund Freud had noticed that Lou Andreas’s women resembled one another, as if the passage from one to another involved not a journey but a change of elements. Now, from each woman Lou described to him, the Great Freud’s mind set out on its own, and after dismantling the woman piece by piece, he reconstructed her in other ways, substituting components, shifting them, inverting them.

Lou, meanwhile, continued reporting on these women who live down the hall, but the doctor was no longer listening.

Freud interrupted her: “From now on, I shall describe women and you will tell me if they exist and are as I have conceived them. I shall begin by asking you about a woman with perpetual hair, often exposed to painful sunlight, in a city without war. Now I shall list some of her wonders: glassine eyes with pupils as deep as cathedrals so people can imagine their lives through death in those vast dark spaces and return just as quickly as they became entrenched; fingers long as palm trees that can play the harp with their fronds in the wind; skin as taut as a marble tablecloth, set with foods and beverages also composed of marble.”

“Your mind, doctor, has been wandering,” Lou responds, or he imagines her responding. “This is precisely the woman I was telling you about before you interrupted me.”

“You know her? Who is she? What is her name?”

“She has neither name nor place. I shall repeat the reason why I was describing her to you: from the number of imaginable women we must exclude those whose elements are assembled without a connecting thread, an inner rule, a perspective, a discourse. With women, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Women, like dreams, are made of desires, and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”

“I have neither desires nor fears,” Freud declared, or imagined declaring, “and my dreams are composed either by my mind or by chance.”

“Women also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a woman’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer she gives to a question of yours.”

“Or the question she asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx.”

The woman down the hall is beautiful and she has been told so for as long as she can remember. She has been told that her beauty is mythic, is untouchable , is godly . The woman down the hall didn’t want to believe any of it.

The woman down the hall, when she was just a girl, was told that although she herself was not destined for greatness, the man she married would be.

She was told this many times a day, until she could time it to the setting and rising of the moon.

But the signs were all wrong for this woman down the hall. She never achieved greatness, nor did she ever marry, and so maybe her beauty isn’t as fatal as it once was. She will die alone, of this we are convinced.

The woman down the hall is a whore. At least we think she’s a whore. That is not meant to be an insult. It is simply her profession. She entertains men of all types at all hours. We hear her moans crack through our walls, her deep sighs.

She is a pretty woman, and we don’t know why she chooses to live her life this way. Surely she must be attractive enough to find herself a nice man to provide for her so that she wouldn’t have to do this anymore. Surely one of her Johns could fit that bill. Her Johns are not disgusting men. They all wear suits and ties, have styled hair, and trimmed nails. They never have slime under their nails. Most often, her Johns are good-looking men, and we wonder why she never has repeat customers. Surely she must be good because she has a steady stream of clientele, but they never come back. Or at least we believe that they never come back.

We try not to judge the woman down the hall, but it is hard. It’s impossible to understand why she lives this way, this woman who is never short on wealthy men with their clean-lined suits. All we can think of is that she must be a little thin on morals, that somehow, this is what she wants, this lonesome existence.

When we try to volley conversation with her, her voice is too hoarse from all that moaning and we resent that. We try our best not to judge her morality, if only she could find the decency to preserve her voice for us.

The woman down the hall runs a small shop of sorts. We aren’t sure what she sells, but we see all types come and go. We see them leave with little bags with her name stenciled on the side. Usually, there are lovely velvet ribbons that seal these bags with stitched kisses so that we cannot see what is inside.

But once, because we were bored, we bombarded one of her customers with affection until she dropped her little bag in surprise, but once we were safe from view, we could not bring ourselves to open it. Instead, we brought it down to the woman down the hall, and we knocked on her wooden door. We told her that the nice lady must have dropped it when she left, but the woman down the hall is not one to be conned. No, the woman down the hall saw through our tricks and schemes. She snatched up the bag and crumbled the ribbons and slammed that thick door without even saying thank you.

The woman down the hall is blind, and we’re not discriminators, no, we’re not haters. We like her blindness. It isn’t her blindness that bothers us. We try not to point it out, to showcase her difference, but this woman down the hall, she wears her blindness like beaten pride. She walks into the room and stumbles on chairs and tables. She trips over rugs that have been in the exact spot for decades. We’ve even made concessions not to move furniture to make it easier for her to remember, but she refuses. She continues to fall, each time more severe, first a simple shuffle, then a twist, until she has broken bones and bruised organs.

We wouldn’t mind so much if she were nicer, but she isn’t. She’s an old hag with a stained mud voice. She comes into a room and falls and yells at us. She accuses us of moving things around, and even after we insist that we haven’t, that we wouldn’t, she picks up anything she can reach and with strange accuracy, hits us repeatedly until we are the ones with broken bones and bruised organs.

The woman down the hall, the old bitch, we hope she dies. We hate her, and there are times when we want to move the couch just one centimeter to the left or right. We want to put metal spikes where rugs should be and blackberry bushes into the elevator. We want to see her suffer, but it isn’t right. We aren’t people to discriminate, even against insufferable old women, even if we do hate her. We don’t want to, you see. We don’t. It isn’t right, but she makes it more and more impossible every day.