Invisible Women

Women & the Dead 1

The woman down the hall is a replacement, and she is fine with this. We didn’t think she would be fine with it, and yet, somehow, she is. We thought that she of all women, being as spectacular as she is, would have difficulty accepting that she is simply a replacement, a place holder for the original.

But the woman down the hall has always been a replacement. She was conceived as a replacement, a new baby girl to make up for the mistakes her older sister had made, a better version perhaps, or simply another version to live in the space her sister used to occupy. The woman down the hall, when she got older, became the replacement lover. She slept with men whose wives’ vaginas would no longer whet with want. Sometimes, she would ask her lovers to call her by their wives’ names, but even asshole men can’t stoop to that low level so more often than not, they stuck a gag in her mouth. The woman down the hall didn’t mind that either. In her head, she would imagine these lovers moaning their wives’ names while fucking her, as if that could be a source for her pride, her benevolently loaning her body to salvage sexless marriages.

This is the way the woman down the hall lived for decades, maybe even centuries. She came to us as a replacement. She begged us to call her by the previous renter’s name, and so we did. We called her the woman down the hall, but now, suddenly, things are shifting with her. She’s no longer the same. We see her walking up the hall, and we say hello to her, this woman down the hall, and she looks perplexed. Her face wrinkles and frowns, and then, she says it. She tells us, “I’m in love,” and we don’t know what to do. For so long, this woman down the hall has lived off the discarded trash of others. We look at her, and we say, “Woman down the hall, what will you do?”

But the truth of it is that the woman down the hall is in love, but even in her love, she’s replacing someone else. She’s just another version of a woman her man already loves, and the woman down the hall, she doesn’t even know how to react. She’s been a replacement her entire life, and now, suddenly, she’s sick of it. She doesn’t want to be a replacement. She wants to be the woman this man loves. She wants to be the original, but she can’t change.

“From now on, I’ll describe the women to you,” Freud had said, “and in your journeys you will see if they exist.”

But the women visited by Lou Andreas-Salome were always different from those thought of by the doctor.

“And yet I have constructed in my mind a model woman from which all possible women can be deduced,” Freud said. “She contains everything corresponding to the norm. Since the women that exist diverge in varying degree from the norm, I need only foresee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probably combinations.”

“I have also thought of a model woman from which I deduce all the others,” Lou answered. “She is a woman made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, and contradictions. If such a woman is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we can increase the possibility that the woman really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the women who, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve women too probable to be real.”