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Not too long ago, I received a message through the contact form on my website from a woman named Elena. “I work,” she wrote, “in digital safety for vulnerable populations and recently assisted on a project with ExpressVPN that created a guide for survivors of domestic violence…focus[ing] on how to secure devices, communications, and personal data when technology becomes part of the abuse.” Most of the messages I get through my contact form are either obvious spam or cleverly designed AI scams, so I was immediately suspicious when she asked if I’d be willing to include a link to the guide in a post I wrote about being a survivor of sexual violence. As it turned out, though—and I will admit to being pleasantly surprised by this—not only is ExpressVPN a legitimate digital privacy and cybersecurity company, but the guide, “Tech safety for survivors of domestic violence,” is well-written, thorough, and, in my inexpert opinion, deserving of serious attention. Linking to it—which I will do again here and also later on in this post—seems the least I can do.
I’ve written a great deal about how coming to terms with the childhood sexual violence I experienced has shaped my life, as a writer and as a man, but while I have written in an episodic way about my encounters with domestic violence, I have not yet tried to corral into a similar coherence the way it has been a thread—or perhaps it’s more accurate to call it a motif—running through my life. The closest I’ve come to attempting that kind of synthesis was in a poem called “Coitus Interruptus,” which appeared in The Silence of Men.
Coitus Interruptus
1.
Naked at the window, my wife calls me
as if someone is dying, and someone
almost is, pinned to the concrete face down
beneath the fists and feet and knees of three
policemen. I’m still hard from before she
jumped out of bed to answer the question
I was willing not to ask when the siren
stopped on our block, but now I’m here, and I see
the man is Black, and how can I not
bear witness? They’ve cuffed him,
but the uniforms continue to crowd our street,
and the blue-and-whites keep coming,
as if called to war, as if the lives
in all these darkened homes
were truly at stake, and that’s the thing—
who can tell from up here?—maybe
we’re watching our salvation
without knowing it. Above our heads,
a voice calls out Fucking pigs!
but the ones who didn’t drag the man
into a waiting car and drive off
refuse the bait. They talk quietly,
gathered beneath the streetlamp
in the pale circle of light
the man was beaten in, and then
a word we cannot hear is given
and the cops wave each other back
to their vehicles, the flash and sparkle
of their driving off
throwing onto the wall of our room
a shadow of the embrace
my wife and I have been clinging to.
When I was sixteen, Tommy
brought to my room before he left
the Simon and Garfunkel tape
I’d put the previous night
back among his things. He placed it
on the bookshelf near the door
he’d slammed shut two days earlier
when he was holding a butcher’s cleaver
to my mother’s life. I wanted
to run after him and smash it at his feet;
I wanted to grab him by the scruff of the neck
and crush it in his face, to dangle him
over the side of our building with one
ankle in my left hand and the Greatest Hits
in my right and ask him
which I should let drop.
But I didn’t, couldn’t really:
he was much too big,
and I was not a fighter,
and one of my best friends right now
lives with her son in the house
where her husband has already hit her
with a cast iron frying pan,
and so there is no reason to believe
she is not at this moment cringing
bruised and bleeding in a corner
of their bedroom, or that she is not,
with her boy and nothing else in her arms,
running the way my mother
didn’t have a chance to run,
and there’s nothing I can do
but look at the clock—Sunday,
11:11 PM—and remind myself
it’s too late to call, that my calls
have caused trouble for her already.
When they pushed Tommy in handcuffs
out the front door, past where my mother sat,
quiet, unmoving, and I did not know
from where inside my own rage and terror
to pull the comfort I should have offered her,
the officer making sure Tommy
didn’t trip or run winked at me, smiling
as if what had happened were suddenly
a secret between us, and this our signal
that everything was okay. I wondered
if his had been the voice, calm
and deep with male authority—Son,
are you sure your mother’s in there
against her will?—that when I called
forced me to find the more-than-yes
I can’t remember the words to
that convinced the cops they had to come.
2.
Sophomore year, walking the road
girdling the campus. Up ahead, a woman’s voice
pleading with a man’s shouting to stop.
A car door slamming, engine revving,
and then wheels digging hard into driveway dirt
that when I got there was a dust cloud
obscuring the blue vehicle’s rear plate.
The woman sprawled on the asphalt,
her black dress spread around her
like an open portal her upper body
emerged from. She pulled
the cloth away from her feet,
which were bleeding, and I drove
to where her spaghetti strap sandals
lay torn and twisted beyond repair.
She left them there. Then to her home,
two rooms in a neighborhood house,
and I helped her onto the bed
that was her only furniture, and filled
a warm-water basin to soak her feet,
and he had not hit her, so there was nothing
to report, but she said she was afraid
and would I sit with her a while.
We talked about her home in Seoul,
the man her parents picked for her
that she ran to America to avoid marrying,
and here she laughed—first trickle
of spring water down a winter mountain—
So instead I take from Egypt! I so stupid!
Then: What you think? Can man and woman
sleep same bed without sex? I said yes.
So, please, tonight, you stay here? Maybe he coming back.
He fear white American like you. I was not a fighter,
but I stayed, and in the morning when I left,
she said kamsahamnida—thank you—
and she bowed low, and she did not
ask my name, nor I hers, and though
I sometimes looked for her on campus,
I never saw her again. Just like Tommy,
whom I forgot to say before was white.
Just like the Black woman who lived downstairs
before I got married, whose cries—Help!
Please! He’s killing me!—and the dead thud
of him, also Black, throwing her
against the wall, and his screaming—
Shut up, bitch! Fucking whore!—filled the space
till I was drowning. The desk sergeant
didn’t ask if I knew beyond a doubt
that she was being beaten,
but when she opened her front door
to the two men he sent, she shrieked
the way women shriek
in bad horror movies
when they know they’re going to die,
and I almost felt sorry for calling.
A few weeks later,
a voice on the phone: You know
what’s going on below you, right?
Please, tape a message to the door: “Mr. Peters
has been trying to reach you.” Nothing else.
And whatever you do, don’t sign it.
For a month all was quiet. Then,
coming home early from work
I walked upstairs past people moving furniture
out of her apartment. No one ever
wants to get involved, right? a thin white man
in shorts and a t-shirt whispered bitter
behind me. I kept walking
the way Tommy did when he saw me
trying to catch his eye: head down,
gaze nailed to the floor, and then he was gone,
and the questions I wanted to ask him
never became words. That tape
was all I had, till one day,
cleaning house, my mother
held it up:
Do you still want this?
I never play it.
Throw it out then.
So I did.
§§§
A poem, though, does not make the kind of sense an essay does. The experience a poem invites a reader into—even the experience it leads me through as I write it—is an emotional one; its logic is associative, not discursive. It creates what Susanne Langer calls in Feeling and Form, a “virtual experience,” by which she means that a poem, despite being made from discursive language—syntax, after all, is linear—presents the experience it contains as a whole to be encountered as irreducible to the sum of its parts. “Coitus Interruptus,” in other words, is not a report about my experience with domestic violence. Rather, it offers the reader an opportunity to feel what it was like for domestic violence to have been such an intimate part of my life.
Creating this experience necessarily meant leaving out some details of what actually happened, not because they were unimportant, but because they existed outside the emotional web of that intimacy. For example, not too long after “Mr. Peters” asked me to tape that note to my neighbor’s door, I was telling a friend about everything that had preceded my doing so as we sat talking in my living room after dinner. Suddenly, a male voice came up through the grate covering the space in the wall where my radiator was located. “So you’re the motherfucker who called the cops! You better not let me run into you. You won’t like what happens then.”
I am sure that every man reading this recognizes the ethic out of which that threat emerges. Not only had I violated another man’s “territory;” I had done so in a way that explicitly questioned his sovereignty within those boundaries. Similarly, I am sure that every man reading this, if he’s honest with himself, has experienced a moment when he either felt the need to defend his own version of that territory—a defense that I am going to assume was nonviolent, since I am also going to assume that no one reading this has committed an act of domestic violence—or that he has had to weigh the consequences of crossing uninvited into the territory of another man, whether a woman was involved or not.
I say this without judgment. The boundary men establish to define that territory—whether we are asserting it, crossing it, or defending it—is one of the currencies through which manhood is negotiated in a patriarchal culture. Even if you reject the very notion of that boundary, however, even if you have fashioned your life to be perfectly congruent with that rejection, if you were raised as a man in this culture, you know viscerally what the boundary means within the system that gives it form and substance—which means you understand as well the fear I felt when the man who was beating up the woman who lived downstairs from me threatened to re-establish his boundary on my body with who-knows-what level of violence.
I never did run into him, and I am grateful for that, but I also have no idea what happened either to him or to the woman he was beating. I don’t know if the people I saw cleaning out her apartment were doing so because he killed her or because she was able to disappear into one of the underground networks that existed, that still exist, to rescue women in her situation. I know what I hope—that he was held accountable; that she was able to escape and reclaim her life—but it’s also true that not knowing provides me with an oddly and ironically comforting distance. Like Schrödinger’s cat, which is simultaneously alive and dead, both what I want and what I don’t want for those two people are true and not true at the same time. More to the point, I can choose which truth I want to claim as mine. Sometimes, though, the distance making that choice possible doesn’t exist.
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