Invisible Women Read online

  Annotation

  Invisible Women is really two books entwined in one, a dialogue between psychoanalysts weaving through descriptions of luminous women. Told in a specific collective “we,” Hoang’s own voice becomes a compelling part of what’s being told. Just like Italo Calvino wrote of vast buildings constructed of words alone in Invisible Cities, Invisible Womenpresents complicated stories of feminine archetypes in the form of psychoanalytic case studies.

  *

  Lily Hoang ~

  Women & Memory 1

  Women & Memory 2

  Women & Desire 2

  Women & Memory 3

  Women & Desire 2

  Women & Signs 1

  Women & Memory 4

  Women & Desire 3

  Women & Signs 2

  Thin Women 1

  ~

  ~

  Women & Memory 5

  Women & Desire 4

  Women & Signs 3

  Thin Women 2

  Trading Women 1

  ~

  ~

  Women & Desire 5

  The Cold Outside

  The Little Bird That Could

  The Soundless, Bloody Whistle

  The Unanimous Decision

  Weeping Beauty

  The Little Bird that Couldn’t

  Promise

  The Returned Gift

  Ever After, Part I

  Ever After, Part II

  Ever After, Part III

  An Ending

  Women & Signs 4

  Thin Women 3

  Trading Women 2

  Women & Eyes 1

  ~

  4

  Women & Signs 5

  Thin Women 4

  Trading Women 3

  Women & Eyes 2

  Women & Names 1

  ~

  ~

  Thin Women 5

  Trading Women 4

  Women & Eyes 3

  Women & Names 2

  Women & the Dead 1

  ~

  Trading Women 5

  Women & Eyes 4

  Women & Names 3

  Women & the Dead 2

  Women & the Sky 1

  ~

  ~

  Women & Eyes 5

  Women & Names 4

  Women & the Dead 3

  Women & the Sky 2

  Continuous Women 1

  ~

  ~

  Women & Names 5

  Women & the Dead 4

  Women & the Sky 3

  Continuous Women 2

  Hidden Women 1

  ~

  9

  Women & the Dead 5

  Women & the Sky 4

  Continuous Women 3

  Hidden Women 2

  Women & the Sky 5

  Continuous Women 4

  Hidden Women 3

  Continuous Women 5

  Hidden Women 4

  Hidden Women 5

  ~

  About the Author

  *

  Lily Hoang

  Invisible Women

  ~

  Sigmund Freud does not necessarily believe everything Lou Andreas-Salome says when she describes the women she has seen in her endless expeditions, but the doctor nonetheless continues listening to this beautiful aging woman with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other friend of his. In the lives of psychoanalysts there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon — if we can overcome each small barrier — know and understand the truths of the human mind, but somehow there is still a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, when the odor of histories and presents appears in tangible forms, mocking us with their absent information, all the integral pieces withheld from us, and if only they had the knowledge to tell us, we would have had the fullest picture, the most complete understanding, but instead, we are left with this void that comes only when the sun sets and the fear of bullets and war and defeat rise. And yet, with this emptiness comes a firm acknowledgment of all we have done, of all we have helped, those women and men destined to their banal lives of obsession, who beseech our protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is in this desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our prescription, that the triumph over enemy minds has made us the heirs of their long undoing. Only in Lou Andreas’s accounts was Sigmund Freud able to discern, through the words and obsessions destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites’ gnawing.

  Women & Memory 1

  The woman down the hall isn’t dead, but her apartment is a mausoleum. If viewed aerially, it is clusters of polka dots. Flip it landscape and her apartment is filled with statues in her image, one for every year of her adult life. This is something she began decades ago, back when she still had dreams of being a student at some fancy art design school or another. Her creations are antipodal to originality — they’re mere facsimiles of herself — but she’s accurate. Each pore on her face is there, each vein along her leg, each thread of limping hair.

  The woman down the hall never made it into art school, but if she had, her senior thesis might have been a variant of this very project. Each year, on her birthday, she buys a large block of marble or wood or clay, large enough for her to stand in, wide enough. And so she begins with a chisel, a new version of herself, life-scaled and nude. She is always nude. It takes her three-quarters of the year to complete herself, and by the time it is finished, her body has already changed. Here there is this new abrasion, that new haircut, that new sag.

  Once a year, the woman down the hall invites us into her room for the unveiling of her new statue. We wind our way through all these manifestations, a garden of women, all paying some sort of homage to her, waiting for her to die so they alone can remain the original.

  Women & Memory 2

  The woman down the hall smears eyeliner over and around her lids, fluorescent like tropical fishies. It’s her trademark, her small way to ensure that she will float to the top of all men’s memories.

  Women & Desire 2

  The women down the hall are lovers. We don’t judge, but they are often loud in their affection, and they are new ones. We do not like it when their love infests our sleep, when we are roused by ghastly moans. We are so easily frightened, and by the time we distinguish pleasure from despair, we are unable to fall asleep again from too rapidly our thudding hearts. We are workers. We can’t spend our nights restless lest we become as inefficient with our time as those women down the hall.

  Those women down the hall only moved in weeks ago, and already, they disrupt us all. We are not unkind here. We have tolerated many inconsiderate tenants, and we have reasoned our way with them, but those women down the hall, they don’t care about us. Those women, they are a nuisance. They arrive late in the night and their laughter festers our beds like fleas. Their joy is passionate, and their happiness is without wane.

  We do not know what to do about these women down the hall. We have altered their room to be alternately frigid and searing, but they easily combatted this by removing their clothes and creating friction with their skins. We have released opossum into their room, but they roasted the flesh for sustenance, the hide for hide, the tail for strap. We are quickly resorting to more drastic measures that we are ashamed to admit, so we do not admit to them, but every night, their love slaps us awake and we are tired. We are tired beyond morality.

  Women & Memory 3

  Although the woman down the hall is not old, she forgets everything. Yesterday,
she left her glasses in the foyer and unable to see, tumbled down two flights of stairs. She broke nearly six bones. Two weeks ago, it slipped her head to turn off her oven and her entire kitchen went ablaze. Then, poor dear, she forgot the number to the emergency fire department — nonemergency she had committed to memory, it’s true — so she dialed her pediatrician who promptly came to her rescue, not that there was much he could do to salvage the wreck of her apartment.

  We ask the woman down the hall why her memory is so shoddy.

  She says, “It is the way it needs to be. It is simply the way it needs to be.”

  We ask her what she means.

  She says, “Something, this is the better way.”

  Then, she turns and retreats into the burnt hole that is her home.

  Women & Desire 2

  The woman down the hall is desirous. She has the appearance of all women who are at once desirous and unfulfilled. Her skin is persistently blotched with flushed hives and her pants are so tight that she moans when she walks.

  Usually, she is a soft woman. She speaks and eats without opening her mouth. Every movement is delicate and graceful. She is a fallen operatic heroine.

  But the woman down the hall changes twice a year. She becomes a woman who desires desire for recreation.

  This woman who is generally subdued and generous, for these few days every six months is excitable and aggressive. Her accelerated speech is an extended onomatopoeia. There are no distinct words. Her gestures knock large abrasions into the wall. And her sex stinks of daffodils and pumpkin spice. It is a mixture she alone has created to catch a suitable fix. It is a technique that never fails.

  For centuries, the woman down the hall has been desirous, and for centuries, she has been fulfilled. She is beautiful in her satisfaction.

  Women & Signs 1

  For a while, we were concerned for her, this young woman down the hall. For a while, we thought she was too much a child to live alone — she could scarcely be a nymphet, if you believe in that sort of thing, which we personally prefer not to. For a while, we brought her food and drink, cobbler and casseroles, but then we saw that she was not so innocent. She is not so young either, this girl down the hall.

  One day, we saw marks on the meatiest part of her arms. The next day, we saw lines of dried blood along her wrists. The day thereafter she smiled and her front teeth held fissures.

  We grabbed her by her shoulders, a place where surely she had no pain but she winced all the same the same wince of struggle and harm, and we demanded to know who had caused her such violence, such deformation. We said we would make he who hurt her hurt forever. We would damage them permanently. We promised her this, twice we avowed. We told her that she need not be frightened, that we would help her.

  But she said nothing. She said nothing and slept for days and days, and when we saw her once again, she was changed, colors faded.

  Women & Memory 4

  If asked, the woman down the hall will tell you where she went to college, what her roommate’s name was, how they had the exact same majors and minor. She will tell you that she did not graduate at the top of her class, but she was a solid student all the same. She will tell you about all her sorority sisters, tri-delt! their wild parties, how at one of them she managed to kiss three boys she crushed on, in one night! She will tell you about her first college boyfriend, Ben, how she was such a bitch to him because he liked her more than she liked him. She will tell you about the asshole fratboy who raped her and then she will tell you how she’s never told anyone else about it, not even her best friend, her roommate. She will confess all this to you, and then she will tell you about her favorite Professor, how he wore mismatching socks and smoked a pipe as soon as he walked out of the classroom. She will tell you how this reminded her of her father, who also smokes a pipe, and maybe she will laugh and say how she doesn’t even like her father because he’s a jerk but no, don’t get the wrong idea. She loves her father, she really does. She’s not the type of girl to not love her own father! She will tell you that in all reality, she didn’t even like his class, that she can’t remember a single lecture he gave, that she doesn’t even know which department he taught in. If asked, the woman down the hall will tell you about all her college projects, study groups, late night writing sessions at the local diner, smoking way too many cigarettes and drinking enough coffee and eating enough addies to keep her awake for days. She will tell you about the crush, the one guy she never got. She’ll tell you his name was Josh and he had long curly brown hair and the longest eyelashes, like ever. She’ll go on about how he was Vice President of Feminist Voices and she was just a freshman and he was a junior and what happened when they happened to cross eyes, whew. She’ll tell you about the serenity in his eyes and how real it was and that made her happy and jealous and angry all at once. She’ll say this earnestly. She’ll say that everyone else around her had flustered and overwhelmed eyes but not Josh. Never. She’ll tell you about this time he wore a skirt into Stats. The woman down the hall will tell you how she was so shy that she’s never even had a whole conversation with Josh, she was always choking out words if she was talking to him. She will tell you that in the end, after all her anxiety and dreaming, he probably — to this very day — has no idea who she is, but she’ll tell you that she’s fine with it, that she’s happy now, that every few months she’ll check in on him on Facebook, never friending him, just taking a quick peek. If asked, the woman down the hall will tell you the most minute of details about all her memories of her college experience, her first time away from home, it changed her forever, just like in the movies, it’s the one place that’s made her who she is today, but all of her stories are lies. She never went to college.

  The truth of it is that the woman down the hall went away and her life was forever altered, just like she’d swear up and out, but she didn’t go to college, no matter how much she insists, because all of it, every single bit of it, is a lie that she embroidered into her memory, into fact.

  Women & Desire 3

  The woman down the hall is never home, and when she is, she pounds the wooden floors with her hammer shoes, galloping here and there in constant battle with some voice in her Bluetooth. We wish it didn’t sound like a carpenter’s shop up there when she is home, but we respect the reserved anger in her voice, the steady metronomic clop of her step.

  She is the woman that all women want to be. She is what they desire. She is strong and powerful. She is rich.

  She is lonely.

  Rather than sleep, she computes this or that argument until it rests itself resolved, but once this or that mess has been untangled, the woman down the hall finds some other flaw and starts pacing anew.

  Women & Signs 2

  The woman down the hall doesn’t have any wrinkles. She’s older than this very building and she doesn’t have a single wrinkle at all. Her hair is the same buoyant blonde that it was when she was seventeen. Her stomach is lined with muscular ripple. She’s a total babe, and we all wish she would stay like this forever.

  Thin Women 1

  The woman down the hall is a piece of silk. Rather than walk, she flutters in variable patterns. When there is wind, her bones become fluid and she stretches. Often, when we seek her most, she is difficult to see. We look for slight shifts in sunlight and shadow, and there, right there, we catch the arc of her back, and then, just like that, she has sifted away again.

  ~

  The Great Freud’s methods flourished, and although there were others who disagreed, his ideas moved their way into even the most remote provinces. As such, it was as though Freud possessed an entire envoy, who would return periodically, to the International Psychoanalytic Congress, to tell of their lessons and struggles, and in those cold halls of sterility Freud strolled, listening to their long reports. The ambassadors were Persians, Armenians, Germans, Syrians, Copts, Turkomans; the doctor is he who is a foreigner to each of his subjects, and only through those objective foreign eyes and ears could their
knowledge manifest existence to Freud. In languages incomprehensible to Freud, the envoys related information heard in languages incomprehensible to them: from this opaque, dense stridor emerged the histories of women and men, suffering with unknown ailments, forced to walk in patterns, bound by head and back aches, plagued with unrest. All of this, the Great Freud listened to with passing interest. But when Lou Andreas made her report, a different communication was established between herself and the doctor. Newly arrived but not totally ignorant of the language of psychoanalysis, Lou Andreas could express herself only with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder and of horror, animal barkings and hootings, or with objects she took from her purse — ostrich plumes, pea-shooters, quartzes — which she arranged in front of him like chessmen. Returning from the patients to which Freud had sent her, the ingenious Russian improvised pantomimes that the doctor had to interpret: one woman who would only allow keys to sit in doors in the vertical position, another who could not leave her home without powder smeared across her eyes, a third who could love but only with frigidity. The Great Freud deciphered the signs, but the connection between them and the women Andreas saw remained uncertain; he never knew whether his student wished to enact what her patient had experienced in reality, a dream designed through fantasy, their parents’ occupations, the prophecy of an astrologer, or a charade to indicate a name. But, obscure and obvious as it might be, everything Lou Andreas displayed had the power of emblems, which once seen, cannot be forgotten or confused. In Freud’s mind the empire was reflected in a desert of labile and interchangeable data, like grains of sand, from which there appeared, for each patient, the words evoked in Lou Andreas’s stories.

  As the seasons passed and her missions continued, Lou Andreas mastered the psychoanalytic language and the national idioms and tribal dialects. Now her accounts were the most precise and detailed that the Great Freud could wish and there was no questions or curiosity which they did not satisfy. And yet each piece of information about a patient recalled to the doctor’s mind that first gesture or object with which Andreas had designated the patient. The new fact received a meaning from that emblem and also added to the emblem a new meaning. Perhaps, Freud thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms.