Old Wives' Tales Of Misogyny, Affairs, And Abandoned Women - Post-Feminist Male Vendetta

Laurence Fielding had not been exactly a model husband. His little bit on the side turned into a Saturday afternoon bacchanal with Lucinda from Accounting, a young woman half his age taken with her spinsterhood, his attention and sexual patience, and the tenor of the times.  Fidelity was overrated, overhyped, and certainly not in men's interest. 

'I don't want to break up your marriage', she said, but of  course that was exactly what she intended.  A farm girl from Iowa in Washington on an unpaid internship, hoping for one chance in a millions and settling for Fielding, an attractive man in late middle age who showed her consideration, then responsible interest, then clearly romantic intentions. 

Fielding was a Project Officer for the World Bank, a sinecure that offered a prince's salary, first class travel and accommodations, and status in the Washington world of who's who. A prime target for Lucinda Marsh who had been hounded by clerks, bank tellers, accountants, and lower-echelon federal employees until her head ached.  An affair with Fielding might actually turn out well. 

The match was a good one as December-May affairs often are.  A thirty-something, aspiring, maturing young woman and an older man for whom a sexual liaison with a younger woman was an early present under the Christmas tree, an existential prize, an unexpected delight.  They met every Saturday under pretense, 'those goddamn last minute proposals', drank Moet-Chandon until weak with desire, and spent the rest of the day in bed. 

Eventually of course, as she became more and more insistent that he leave his wife, he reconsidered.  He had had his existential moment - his reupping of his youthful vigor, the validating attention of a much younger woman, and more varieties of sexual union that he could have possibly imagined - and he was in no mood for serious sit-downs.  She knew he was married and would eventually return to his wife, so her Sturm und Drang was nothing but a bit of pique and disappointment in her own misjudgment. 

After an afternoon of full-bodied, desperately clingy and weeping sex, he said goodbye, and went home to his wife. 

Lucinda, however, was in no mood to let sleeping dogs lie, and she felt obliged on behalf of all women to take her pound of flesh for the deception, cruel, ironic seduction of this bullying prick.  She could have simply called his wife and told her everything, but that would have been too easy.  She wanted him to worry about the disclosure, what she might do rather than what she did.  A death by a thousand cuts, not the guillotine. 

Fielding had been through this before. There was Usha, the Palestinian woman he had met at 'Frivolity', the women's clothing shop at the Alexandria Hotel in Cairo she ran. Their affair had been protracted - that was the only way to describe a relationship that was tried by Islamic faith and his on-again-of-again, desultory interest.  Yet it persisted until her family, usually tolerant and supportive of their daughter's independence and higher class aspirations, got wind of the affair. 

Most Washington interns, a la Monica Lewinsky, would have paid no attention to the blandishments of parents.  Lewinsky's parents were secretly proud of their daughter's influence with the President, and while not exactly egging her on, made unimpeachable suggestions that she take the affair to another level.  Lucinda's mother and father, however, good Iowa Anglo-Saxon farmer stock warned her that this Fielding was up to no good. 

Hiram Marsh was a deacon at the Ames Church of the Redeemer, a fundamentalist church which hearkened back to Old Testament wisdom, a church of Biblical Sturm und Drang, divine vengeance, retribution and intolerance.  His God, so fed up with the immorality and venal pursuits of his Creation, decided to wipe it out and start over.  When God saw that Noah and the Flood were only a temporary hiatus in mankind's course of faithlessness, he struck again, incinerating heathen Sodom and Gomorrah. 

Lucinda, advised her father, should not let immorality, dishonesty, and deception go unpunished.  She should pursue, torment, and destroy this purveyor of deceit. 

Lucinda, despite her fundamentalist upbringing was not a vengeful woman, but urged on by her parents and encouraged by her feminist colleagues and friends, she decided to punish the male transgressor, the patriarchal, obsessive, misogynist predator, Laurence Fielding. 

Fielding had been sure of his lover, a woman of modest means and background, who he thought would never go rogue, blame him for leaving her, and take untoward revenge. 

He was wrong.  Dionyza, queen of Ephesus, jealous of Pericles' daughter, Marina more beautiful, charming, and desirable than her own, plots to kill her.  Tamora, Queen of the Goths, has her sons rape and mutilate the beautiful daughter of Titus Andronicus in spiteful revenge for his sacrifice or her son.  

Women were hellcats, bitches, vixens, and harridans, never to be trusted.  Othello, admitting his murder of Desdemona to the tribunal judging him, said that he had done them and all men a favor in eliminating one more treacherous woman. 

He should have known better, for Lucinda, although from rough-hewn peasant stock was no different from any woman.  'Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned' had always been a truism and a warning. 

She went after him with a vengeance, undaunted, unafraid, counselled by the feminist cabal of non-profit colleagues. 'Cut his balls off'. they advised, all victims of the war between the sexes, women left on the curb again and again by despicable, dishonest men. 

It was not retribution she feared, although Fielding could easily assemble a harem of lawyers to defend him against any legal suit she might bring.  It was self-esteem.  She did this to herself, nose wide open, stupidly myopic if not blind and she deserved a comeuppance. A kind of Christlike suffering and acceptance of the world's sins of which her father would approve. 

This was nothing compared to what Fielding was thinking.  Had Monica Lewinsky serviced any President other than Bill Clinton, he would have assured that if she talked, not only would she never work again but neither would her parents nor anybody within three generations.  Nixon would have had her killed and dropped in a dumpster.  Not that Nixon would have had a mistress or any sexual Oval Office encounters, but if he had...

At her first threatening word, Fielding worked his contacts at the Bank, and within a week she was called on the carpet and dismissed for incompetence and 'irregularities'.  It helped to have engineered a generous loan to Pakistan, one of the most corrupt regimes in the Bank's stable; for Pakistan's World Bank Country Director had implicating evidence on the Bank President and therefore carte blanche on Pennsylvania Avenue. 

In the old days when a Wooster Square Italian girl was impregnated by a Yale student, he would have been 'taken care of', seen and then never seen again regardless of his New England pedigree; and today if you knew what you were doing, the right strings could be pulled and the problem taken care of. Lucinda was history. 

Lucinda's feminist sisters howled at the medieval truncheons and summary dismissal of a good woman; yet the days of MeToo, female impunity, enter-at-your-peril posturing were over.  Men, even those who had bought into the Virgin Mary hands-off complex, were restive.  Enough! they shouted and heralded a new age of male supremacy.  Not that Fielding had done anything that his forbearers and brothers-in-arms would have done; but that he had eliminated 'neutralized' in Israeli terms, a Desdemona, and as Othello said, ridding all men of one more vixen. 
 

Selective Memory - Filtering Out The Wife, The Absolute Fiction of Remembering Anything

'How could you not remember?', Phil's wife said, incredulous that Phil had no recollection of the backyard barbecue at Aunt Tilly's.  'And the rainstorm where all had to huddle under the oak tree? And Bobby's...'. Here, flustered and exasperated she couldn't go on.  The insolence of the man, the deliberate indifference, the chutzpah...

 

But of course Phil didn't remember the event, and there was nothing deliberate about it.  So much of what his wife said had absolutely no relevance whatsoever to even the vaguest, dimmest corner of his life, and so it passed unregistered in his memory. 

'Only much storage space on the hard drive', he laughed; but his wife was of a different mind.  Everything a wife said to a husband, regardless of his particular mental sieve, was important ipso facto.  That was what marriage was all about, mutual respect.  Aunt Tilly had been her favorite aunt and that barbecue in the rainstorm was a summer thing, a yearly thing, an important thing.  It was insulting and demeaning that her husband couldn't even remember that it happened. 

'Sorry, sweetheart', Phil said, 'maybe it will come back to me', but it never would because it had never been imprinted on the cerebellum.  That and a hundred other stories his wife insisted on telling over dinner, a virtual tsunami of aunts, second cousins, Easter, deaths, births, birthdays, and trips to the Poconos.  

She had so many cousins that no one could keep them straight, let alone Phil who had never met them but thanks to his wife's retelling, was supposed to fit them into the pattern of his own life, bring them to life, make the children digging in the sand at Rehoboth real and relevant. 

'Bette Evans died', his wife said over pot roast and simmered carrots, and Phil knew that when death was brought up - an event that everyone was supposed to remember if only as a reminder of one's own frail existence - listening and remembering was called for. Yet he had no clue who Bette Evans was, not even a fragment, something that would reconstitute her, bring her to the table. 

'Don't tell me you don't remember Bette', his wife said sternly, accusingly. 'You were there!', she added, referring to some event where he must have met the woman, at least crossed paths, but nothing registered, not a glimmer, not one. 

Bob Tillman, a colleague of Phil's at the World Bank told him this story:

One day I got a call from a Susan Ballard who said that she was in town for a few days and would love to catch up.  I had no idea at all who she was, but because she went on with such fondness and even intimacy, I figured that it would come to me as soon as I saw here. 'So we'll meet in the B Lobby at noon next Thursday'. she said; but when the time came, when I got off the elevator and looked around the lobby and recognized no one, I assumed that I was early; but just then this modestly attractive women ran up to me, gave me a big hug, smiled, and said, 'It's been far too long'

I assumed that it would come to me and I would remember who she was yet over lunch despite everything nothing came back.  I tried everything, continents, work details, flights, colleagues, nothing. We chattered on about the new exhibit at the Renwick, family ('How're Mary and the kids', she asked), the foie gras in Antananarivo, and bullying.  Still nothing, and the longer the conversation went on, the more uncomfortable I felt. By the time coffee came I still had remembered nothing. 

'We must do this again', she said on K Street hailing a cab, and off she went.  I never did remember who she was or where I met her.  I have a good memory for most things. 

When Phil heard the story he, after so much caviling and hectoring by his wife about incidental people, he could quite easily understand how a woman - any woman - could have passed through Bob Tillman's life without notice.  Whatever happened in the past mattered to her not him.   There was no mnemonic theory of mutual resonance.  Being at the same time in the same moment and in the same place was not a fixture in both memories. Subjectivity. 

There had been a recent article in the Post about a drive-by shooting in broad daylight on a major thoroughfare of Washington.  All went according to plan - arrest, arraignment, and jury trial but the odd thing, the journalist noted, was that according to the defense lawyer after a mistrial was called, no bystander who had witnessed the event could agree on who did the shooting, what kind of car it was, who was driving, and who actually did it.  The defense deliberately brought one eyewitness to the stand after the other so that the jury could hear the 'evidence'.  

The shooting happened on a clear, sunny day, traffic was moving normally, and there was no way that the five bystanders who agreed to testify couldn't have seen the same thing, but they did. 

Writers Robert Browning and Lawrence Durrell and filmmaker Akira Kurosawa all wrote masterpieces about different people observing one event saw in different ways.  The Ring and the Book and The Alexandria Quartet were both visions of reality which only proved there was no such thing. 

Recent scientific research has shown that most memory is imagined, influenced by the accounts of others, events subsequent to the initial memory, and simple erosion. Professor Erika Hayasaki  of Duke summarized the conclusions:

Writers of memoir, history, and journalism yearn for specific details when combing through memories to tell true stories. But such work has always come with the caveat that human memory is fallible. Now, scientists have an idea of just how unreliable it actually can be. New research has found that even people with phenomenal memory are susceptible to having “false memories” suggesting that “memory distortions are basic and widespread in humans, and it may be unlikely that anyone is immune (The Atlantic 2.4.13)

Social psychologist Jill Neimark echoes  memorist Vladimir Nabokov  (Speak, Memory) in suggesting that ‘memory is the bedrock of the self’, but goes on to confirm that memory is very fallible:

Memory, it turns out, is both far more complex and more primitive than we knew. Ancient parts of the brain can record memory before it even reaches our senses--our sight and hearing, for instance. At the same time, there are between 200 and 400 billion neurons in the brain and each neuron has about 10,000 connections.  The parallel processing involved in memory is so complex we can't even begin to think how it works, The one thing that we can say for certain is that if memory is the bedrock of the self, then even though that self may seem coherent and unchanging, it is built on shifting sands.

So Nabokov’s prized past may be nothing more than a fictionalized composite of imperfectly-recalled experience, the recollection of others, and the additive ‘corrections’ of books, films, and drama.  We are not what we were, but what we think we were.

Every year Leona Patri had the whole family over for Easter dinner - uncles, brothers-in-law, cousins, maiden aunts, and old grandmothers - and after many bottles of Lambrusco and Asti Spumante the conversation became voluble, everybody putting in their two cents about what happened to old Harry Grillo when he backed the car into traffic, or to Faith O'Reilly when she ran afoul of Father Briganti, or the Tweedy twins, Zackin the optometrist, or the Petrucci brothers. 

All had been there for all of it and no one could agree on what exactly happened. Leona had to referee. 

Phil thought of all this while he listened to his wife go on about the Lewitzky brothers registering nothing at all. 'New Jersey...the Tappan Zee bridge...Harlem River Drive...Esta's burnt roast...Baby Jake's colic...' a kind of ebbing and flowing of a tide, washing over the sand leaving no trace, rearranging the pebbles. 

'What?  Don't tell me you don't remember the Lewitzky brothers', his wife said but alas his memory was vacant.  If they had ever passed through, they left no trace whatsoever. 

It was even more galling for Phil's wife that she not only remembered the details of her past but his.  She brought up memories of his life that he had either long forgotten or never bothered to remember.  Why did she have to be the family archivist?

The family needed no curator, Phil knew. What would be the purpose, filing incidental, never agreed upon bits and pieces, collected at random, assembled willy-nilly according to some fleeting recollection?

'You don't care about me', said his wife almost in tears; and perhaps a bit of that was true. He certainly didn't care about those remembered incidents she revived on a daily basis. 

Nabokov remarked that the present was only an event of milliseconds and the future only a realm of possibility. Only the past was real, defining, and the only validation of existence.  So perhaps Phil was being too dismissive.  Perhaps he should pay more attention, listen not tune out.  Yet the very next time she started in on Bea Tandon's arthroscopy and young Billy's hernia, he said, 'Sunken costs'. 

Arthurian Legend - Where Are Knights In Shining Armor And Fair Maidens When We Need Them?

Amanda Parker was not exactly looking for a knight in shining armor but she would be delighted if one came along.  Here she was still single and unpartnered, not unhappy but still missing that one piece which would complete her life. 

 

Yes, she was a liberated woman who did not need men and for whom children were an inconvenience; but still there was that nagging originalism, that sense that women are unique not by their intelligence, artistry, or competence but in their ability to bear children.  

The Catholic Church didn't help.  'Once a Catholic, always a Catholic' was the age-old refrain that still rang true. What Father Brophy preached about The Holy Family, the sanctity of marriage, the loneliness of marital exile, and the joy of children was still nagging at her, niggling, irritating, and there every morning when she put on her makeup.  'Get on with it, Amanda!', she shouted at herself in the mirror. 

At the same time, she refused to settle for second best - the men that her friends were marrying out of desperation were good providers, attentive, subscribers to the feminist canon, and all the rest but uninspiring to say the least, nothing to sweep you off your feet, make you swoon with desire, carry you away.  No, these men were pedestrian, uninspiring, and a sad commentary on men in general. 

Amanda had always loved to read about olden times, especially the days of Arthurian knights and their fair maidens, Rapunzel in the tower, jousting, a sprig of flowers, love poetry, and dashing good looks.  The women of knights' reams were virgins, innocent, still childlike but mature in their desire, stunningly beautiful, wealthy beyond measure, the prize for the best of the best. 

 

She remembered the story of Anastasia, princess of the north, beautiful beyond imagining who was promised to Sir Galahad who first had to travel to a foreign land to slay the dragon who threatened the land of their birth, whose hunger was insatiable and whose legions were strong.  Anastasia waited and waited as the months and years passed and refused the intentions of all other suitors who begged for her hand.  Galahad would return, she knew, for love conquers all. 

He did return, and knight and his fair lady were united in blissful matrimony and lived happily forever. 

Amanda thought that she had gotten rid of these childish fantasies when she locked all her princess outfits in a basement trunk, kept only one tiara as a memento, and moved on as an emerging talent in her own right.

She abandoned - or so she thought - all thoughts of knights in shining armor, Mr. Right, and The Man of Her Dreams, and went on to star at Harvard, Berkeley, and Wall Street, a woman of agency.  She ate well, travelled well, was looked up to, congratulated, and paid handsomely, but she could never shake that virus, that insidious, bothersome, ineradicable sense of female destiny.  What was Senior Vice President of Lockhart, Finch & Ballard without a husband?

Not just any husband, mind you, but a stellar one, one who stood out, a Colossus who stood astride the world.  Here she hated herself for such thoughts.  It was bad enough that she was mired in this treacly, retrograde fantasy of wife and mother; but far worse that the man who would be part of the story would have to be a Sir Galahad. 'Goddamn it!', she said. 

 

There was Peter, a comer, a man on the rise, a financial talent if not genius who had made his millions before he was out of diapers, a man of confidence and sexual interest; but he was irritating, balky at the wrong times, prolix when the situation demanded few words, exuberant when it was time for reflection.  In short, for all his appeal, she was indifferent. 

Aidan was more emotionally settled.  He seemed to have balanced his professional career with a good sense of enjoyment and empathy; but this quality hid a sexual timidity and a kind of toadying that was off-putting at best. 

Roberto was a Latin lover out of fictional romance, a throwback to her princess in the tower days, but he was an empty suit, a cavalier for all intents and purposes, but an airy, insubstantial zero if you had the patience to look beyond the silver buttons. 

By this time she reminded herself of Portia, Shakespeare's heroine in The Merchant of Venice, a woman who laughed at the advances of one suitor after another, snickering over the pretentions and obtuseness, all the time waiting for her one true love to come forward and declare his love. 

She didn't like being Portia, too picky, too taken with herself to choose wisely and well; but she realized that was exactly who she was, so why fight it?

Yet, that's what womanhood was all about.  It still after all these millennia revolved around fidelity, prosperity, and security, a man who would be faithful, a good earner, and the guardian and protector of her and her children. 

Of course women had come a long way and were quite capable of all the above, but they were still the weaker sex, vulnerable especially during pregnancy, and given to hormonal demands that affected mood, manner, and outlook. 

Laura, the main character in Strindberg's The Father is either the prototypical feminist saga or a vixenish, hateful, and destructive woman.  She sows seeds of doubt in her husband, suggesting that he might not be the father of their child as she watches his descent into jealous madness.  Ibsen's women - Hedda Gabler, Rebekka West, and Hilde Wangel control men to such a degree that they unconsciously seek their death. 

Augusta was no Portia, Hedda, or Laura.  She was more like Rosalind and Viola who ran rings around their less than able, silly, and adolescent suitors - manipulating them in a playful but still dismissive way, but never with the devilish intent of Laura. 

'Where is he?', Augusta asked as the years wore on, her biological clock ticking, her patience fraying.  She was becoming a nitpicking old maid, saw it coming but was powerless to prevent it.  Perhaps as I mature, she thought, I will not settle for less but for accommodation - a man of stability, affection, courtesy, and good humor.  Not exactly a man to swoon over, a man who would climb the tower on the locks of my long, beautiful hair to ravish me but a man with whom I could be comfortable. 

'Comfortable! My God it's come to that', but there was still time, she was still youngish and not over the hill, plenty of time for ravishment and swooning before accommodation. 

'Have you thought of trying the other side of the aisle?', asked a friend; but Augusta had never once given that kind of sexual relationship a thought. If she was to have sex, it would have to be procreative or at least its possibility. Perhaps not a Lawrentian epiphanic sex, but something ying-yangy, not exactly Tantric but a good approximation. This meant men, and she was still looking. 

It would be nice to finish the story with '...and they lived happily ever after', but it was not in the cards.  If she couldn't have Prince Charming, Sir Galahad, or a knight in shining armor, then she would hole up by herself, make her own way. 

It would also be nice if there were such men in the world - men of grace, honor, courage, respect, and pure, unadulterated love - but perhaps they only existed in romance novels and never existed in the first place.  Too bad, for the world could certainly use more of them and the virginal, innocent, lovely and fair maidens they loved.