the future of me is tori

I went to see Tori Amos and all I could see were a pair of hoof-like Christian Louboutin pumps attached to her ankles. All through the two hour set, while my ears took in the music, my eyes could only take in the telltale blood red soles of Tori’s black suede pumps, which glowed like menacing devil eyes as she shifted and spun spread-legged on her piano stool. I had a pang of feminist self-reproach: did I really have to reduce a female performer down to a disembodying object? But my guilt was short-lived, as I observed multiple women of various ages and sizes and hippie-dom concentrating upon that crucial inch between their eye and that of their cell-phones. The girls who were losing crucial seconds of Tori’s piano-playing and singing to focus on taking pictures with their cameras were no better and no worse than I: feminine objectification is not what it used to be. The memory-cards in those girls’ phones and my brain contain the same image: a woman bisected by a black block.

Tori and I have come a long way, baby. When she first became “Tori Amos” back in the early 90s, she used to perform in a black nylon swimsuit top and baggy faded Levi’s 501’s, frizzy hair tied back carelessly with a scrunchy. Now she’s in Louboutins. Back in 1992, I couldn’t even afford to go to her concerts. But now at my fourth Tori show, I’m paying $75 for excellent seats (Orchestra, Row E), feeling her voice vibrate through my YSL Besace bag that contained a worn copy of Marx/ Engles On Literature and Art. Yes, Tori and I now have different relationship to feminine objectification than we used to in our twenties.

After the concert, I drew out on paper this Tori in my brain and thought a lot about what it meant to be such a girl cut in two. I thought about a particular lyric of hers: “What if I’m a mermaid/ in these jeans of his with her name still on it” because lately, I’ve been strangely attracted to old Levi’s 501 jeans from the late 1970s to early 80s. With the specific late 70s/ early 80s sizing of 27X34, you get a very special fit. Inseamwise, they are definitely narrow tapering drainpipes, but the silhouette is tight without being skintight: they give you a bit of a wrinkle. They are like lo-fi skinny jeans: tight jeans before they started adding 2 percent or more elastine to every bolt of denim. I imagine these jeans as having the name of Tori still on them—the kind that she wore when she first started out. When I wear them now, some 20 years too late, they make me aware of my body in a weird way that I like. The crotch seam hugs my body way too tightly, so that from the back it looks as though my anus is devouring the seat of my pants. Or, as if I were being cut in two by my jeans.

Being split down the middle by the seam of my jeans forced me to arrange my body in a different way. The tightness of the groin area posed a radically more difficult problem: it was putting my genitalia in relief. When you wear hi-fi skinny jeans, the elastic element of the denim acts as a kind of bandage or girdle that pushes down your bump into a lovely smooth crotch. However, the faded, thinned-out 100 percent cotton of the old Levi’s has an idiosyncratic stretch that just molds around the cock, rather than putting to due submission. As a gal, it made me feel very self-conscious and made me want to start tucking like a true drag queen. But after a few adventurous outings in the jeans, I realized that if I just stick my ass out a wee bit in just such a way, the whole crotch moves backwards while the denim stays forward, creating a little concave in which to nestle the candy: ghetto tucking! It’s precarious jean-wearing, but it makes me walk like a homeless cat (a new amble I like), and the blade of the crotch-seam is a constant reminder of Tori cut in two.

Tori has always been bisected by a black laquered block stamped with gold letters that spell “Bösendorfer.” I’ve just never been close enough to the stage to see it clearly. But if the piano is the thing that produces the objectifying cutting of Tori’s bodily integrity, it is also the thing that has been most closely associated with her. It is the musical instrument of her choice. When we listen to her records, we hear the piano as a tool of virtuosity. But when we see her on stage, the piano is the black bar that comes out from nowhere and takes out the midsection and arms of her body. Then, we no longer see the piano as just an extension of Tori’s musical identity. Instead, we witness the unholy collaboration between two machines—female and piano—that we know colloquially as “Tori.” In being bisected/ objectified in this visual way, Tori does become objectified, as in less human, but I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing.

“The dancer combines with the floor to compose a machine under the perilous conditions of love and death,” write Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. And this is how I think of the “girl” that emerges from Tori and piano. This is no ordinary objectification-by-female-vivisection. Tori must allow her visual self to get cut up by the black bar of the Bösendorfer in order to make the music that fills a huge room. This cutting is the “perilous conditions of love and death” that is necessary for her to accomplish her creative combining with piano. The head provides opening for the voice and houses the brain that remembers lyric and melody; the legs mechanise the Louboutined feet that pedal the piano. If what we’re left with is an object, it is not a corpse, it’s not something that used to be human, but something that a human will be, a revolutionary statement of the contemporary body: all you need is a head and legs to be this kind of “girl.”

professional ex

Last week, on a well-lit evening the Friday before July 4, at a bar, I met a pleasant stranger. He was my ex-husband. My sister took this photograph of me and my ex-husband and I’ve been staring at it off and on every day. Immediately after we divorced two years ago this month, I took to staring at photos also, but in a very different way, for a very different function. I’d clutch and predictably tear-stain old photos (physical pictures that were seen and developed by strangers at the Rite-Aid photo lab—we didn’t have a digital camera during our marriage). Photos of both of us grinning like idiots at each other, or else one of us grinning into the camera held by the other. I was obsessed with the happiness of love that was no longer felt, only locked into these sheets. The photos allowed me to indulge not only in lost love, but lost wifehood. Because my romantic anthem has always been the militaristically feminine shouting of Emily Dickinson:

I'm "wife"—I've finished that—

That other state—

I'm Czar—I'm "Woman" now—

It's safer so—

How odd the Girl's life looks

Behind this soft Eclipse—

I think that Earth feels so

To folks in Heaven—now—

This being comfort—then

That other kind—was pain—

But why compare?

I'm "Wife"! Stop there!

(199)

I’m “Wife”! Stop there! To me, being a “Wife” was the same as being a czar, to the creator of a soft eclipse, leaving behind the pain of that hesitant pack of solitary years known as “Girl.” After being dumped (let’s be specific about the means of the divorce) I was once again cast behind the eclipse, back to that old familiar hurt that rendered me incapable of uttering exclamation points. I was drawn to the photos of happier wifey days like a pure addict. But soon enough, I reached a visceral threshold; I couldn’t look at the photos any more. I overloaded on memories, and the euphoria of hurt just became, hurt. The buzz flowed over the rim of my psyche, and I locked the pictures away.

The truth is, while our divorce was hurtful, it was not bitter. My ex-husband and I have met and talked since becoming strangers. We’ve even had some nice, amiable hanging out over drinks. But before last week, no one had ever documented such moments. Thank God for little sisters with brand new i-phones. I didn’t know I looked like this talking to my ex-husband. I imagined that I’d be stiffly distant, a hopelessly plastic smile tarped over my teeth. Trying hard to get over it. But in this photo, I look relaxed, I’m listening, slouch-postured as always, my hair falling towards that man with the beard, unafraid of intimacy. I don’t feel pain looking at this photo—and my ex’s new boyfriend is even in the picture! (His head looks like it’s going into my skull.) The shock of this photo: I recognize myself! I mean, I recognize the girl that I carry around in my head every day. Which is no longer “ ‘Wife’—Stop There!”

So I had been married for almost ten years before our divorce. Of course being homosexuals, we were never legally married, even though we were in San Francisco, having already been living together for a few years and wore wedding bands when Gavin Newsom started handing out marriage certificates to gay couples from City Hall. But by that time, the legal ceremony seemed to us boring, unnecessary, or too much effort for a lazy-ass couple with a comfy case of bed-death. Or perhaps we were protecting ourselves from our induction into the grand gay divorce statistic. Whatever the reason, I am no longer Wife, I am Ex-Wife, I am Ex, I am X that marks the spot. I am the girl who enjoys, rather than creates, soft eclipses. But with a difference: a girl who’s back from the vacation of marriage.

My enjoyment of the photo of me and my own ex makes me realize that I am ok being an ex. I guess the real test might be yet to come: will I cry a little this coming Monday if Tori Amos plays “Doughnut Song” during her set at the Oakland Paramount Theatre? Maybe, but if I do, big deal. That’s what Exes do. I will enjoy being an ex to the extent that I’ll embrace it as some sort of feminine identity. Yes, my ex- husband and I had our time in the sun and can never fall and be in love the way we used to be. That’s what a divorce means. But being an ex means that I can still think about these past ten years of my life—those years with him—as a part of my present. Because what significance did marriage have for us? What real role did it play in our lives? My idea of love is what the philosopher Félix Guattari abstracts from “homosexuality”: “a kind of collective set-up of enunciation, a collective way of perceiving everything that happens.” We saw things together, we spoke back together to those things we saw. And that kind of perceptive reaction to the world can’t be unlearned because your husband divorces you, and you become not only his, but simply an, ex.

Not the black widow. Not a runaway bride. Not a serial monogamist. Not a girl who needs to be married, but a girl who likes to carry the stain of marriage. Just a boy who was some guy’s wife for most of his twenties.