The Wrong Heaven Page 17
“So you’re an artist?”
“Yeah. I’m a sculptor.”
“Like, with clay?”
“Come. I’ll show you.”
He led me over to one of the plywood-paneled studios. Sketches were plastered against the walls, tools scattered all over the floor. And in the middle of the studio, standing nearly six feet tall, was a life-sized sculpture of a man, made out of purple sparkly plastic.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. “You made this?” I managed to ask.
“Yeah.”
“Where’d you get the material?”
“I found it.”
I decided not to press further. “So what is it, um, about?”
“Well, it’s hard to describe. But it’s sort of about the female gaze.”
“I’ve never heard that phrase before.”
“The male gaze is more popular. As a concept.”
“Oh.”
“So this is, you know, subverting that.”
“Oh.”
“What do you think?”
“Of your sculpture?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. I’m not an art critic or anything.”
He turned and looked at me. “But you’re a woman,” he said.
I couldn’t remember if anyone had ever called me a woman to my face before. Certainly no man ever had. Coming now from the sculptor’s lips, the word felt obscenely descriptive, almost biblical: here we were, a woman and a man, like Eve and Adam, just two warm-blooded creatures with one fundamental difference. My woman-parts flared into awareness of themselves.
I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. I kept staring at the sculpture. There was something about it that had been bothering me, something I couldn’t put my finger on, and now I realized what it was. The purple sparkly man had no penis—just a smooth bump, like a Ken doll.
I turned to face the sculptor and looked him straight in the eye. “You know,” I said, “I think I might have something you need.”
The sex I had with the sculptor, right there on the floor of his studio, was not value-neutral. It wasn’t mind-blowing, either; I didn’t writhe around screaming or invoking the names of deities. But I did feel something loosening, subtly yet surely: oh, I thought. So this is what all the fuss is about. Now I knew, and there was no way to un-know it.
I knew other things too. I knew that I would never see this man again. I knew that if I came back looking for him or for Sharon, I’d find no sign of either.
I knew that Mindy would probably hold another Goddess Night, and that Sharon would not come. We would discuss our complicated feelings about the word “queer,” the word “feminist,” the word “vagina,” the word “woman.” But it would feel tired and rote, like a middle-aged couple trying to make dinner conversation. Goddess Night would not be the same without an actual goddess.
I would feel separate, as I had before, but this time in a different way. I would smile thinly and secretly to myself, because now I knew what only Sharon had known before: maybe all women were goddesses, but we were also mortals—always already dying, always yet to be fully born.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my parents, Barkley Murray and Ken Bonnaffons, both gifted storytellers, who supported me unconditionally and taught me to take risks. My sister, Blythe, helped me learn how to make things up and became a wonderful friend.
Thank you to my brilliant agent, Henry Dunow; I couldn’t imagine a savvier advocate for my work. I’m grateful to Lee Boudreaux for her enthusiasm and for her smart, insightful editing of these stories, and to Jean Garnett for helping this book make its way into the world. Thanks to the team at Little, Brown, including Reagan Arthur, Carina Guiterman, Deborah P. Jacobs, Pamela Marshall, Julianna Lee, Pamela Brown, Carrie Neill, Elora Weil, Sabrina Callahan, and Craig Young.
I received wonderful mentorship from Jonathan Lethem, Darin Strauss, Irini Spanidou, Breyten Breytenbach, LeAnne Howe, and Reginald McKnight. Thank you to Deborah Landau at New York University, and to the University of Georgia Creative Writing Program for providing me with a nurturing community of writers.
Thank you to the producers of This American Life and the editors at Kenyon Review, The Sun, the Literary Review, Southampton Review, and Anderbo, for your edits and for sharing my work. Special thanks to Rick Rofihe. Thank you also to the MacDowell Colony, where some of this work was written.
Thank you to the readers who provided feedback on earlier versions of these stories, especially Axel Wilhite, Kseniya Melnik, Sativa January, Mariah Robbins, and all my other classmates at NYU and UGA. The inimitable Boris Fishman provided indispensable help with this collection, both creative and practical. I’m grateful for Helen Rubinstein’s wise, unsparing eye and for her writerly friendship. Thanks to Bari Weiss for supporting and sharing my work. David Busis is my first, most trusted, and most consistently waffled reader; I wouldn’t be a writer without him. To Steve, who understands both glow and dark sparkle: thank you.
Friends, extended family (blood and chosen): dear ones, you know who you are. I’m astonished at how lucky I am to be loved by you. My gratitude to you, individually and collectively, would fill another whole book if I tried to record it with all the specificity and depth it deserves.
About the Author
Amy Bonnaffon’s work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Kenyon Review, among other places, and has been read on NPR’s This American Life. She is a founding editor of 7x7.la, an online journal that publishes collaborations between writers and visual artists. She holds an MFA from NYU and currently lives in Athens, Georgia, where she is pursuing a PhD at the University of Georgia.
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