A Good Woman by Lisa Appignanesi

Author:Lisa Appignanesi [Appignanesi, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Lisa Appignanesi
Published: 2012-12-12T05:00:00+00:00

At the bottom of the screen, Paul has written, ‘Is this accepted truth true in your experience? Comment please.’

I stare at the citation and don’t know how to comment. I read on, am increasingly aware as I read, that Paul has used this draft to talk to me in my absence. There are little notes dotted through the text, probing questions, asides. He is trying to understand - my behaviour, me. I am at once subtly flattered, touched and troubled. Mostly the last. I do not want to be laid bare, understood; but I want to be kind. Perhaps the greatest kindness would be for me to leave.

It is the end of the afternoon before I reach the end of the draft. I go back to the beginning and under the quotation from Aristotle, I write, ‘Pleasure is quick. Life is long. One man’s pleasure is another woman’s pain.’ I want to write more but a knock disrupts my thought.

‘Finishing off?’ Tanya Walker pokes her cropped head round the door.

‘Just about.’ I gesture her in, am pleased to see her, relieved that she isn’t Paul.

‘I wanted to hear about your trip.’

Tanya has taken to making abrupt incursions into my office. I suspect she’s lonely and even if I’m not the ideal female friend, or one she’s terribly interested in, I’m at least not a superior whom she has to impress. Then too, she has a kind of political zeal for Paul’s project: she’s afraid that we’ll make a hash of things, that we won’t situate women’s murdering acts against the appropriate background, that we’ll describe the perpetrators as exceptional monsters rather than typical women driven over the edge by men. She has lectured me any number of times on this score.

What I find extraordinary about her lectures and wonderfully contradictory is the way she can combine the high moral tone with a relish for gruesome detail. She is both fascinated and terrified by violence, which is always sexual violence, and her fascination means that there is potential terror everywhere. Like a talking tabloid she brings me stories about deranged men running over their wives at high speed, or immersing them in vats of acid; about serial killers stalking suburban streets in search of school girls, or jealous lovers trailing former girlfriends in order to hack them into pieces. When it is women who stab husbands or lovers, cut off or cut up their parts, there is a vengeful glee in her stories, as if here we were in the sphere of rational action.

Tanya reminds me of New York, where sexual violence is both fact and fantasy of every day life, one feeding off the other in an ever increasing spiral of fear and menace. Sitting with her, looking out over this sedately elegant Paris street, I am taken back to the incomprehension I felt in my first days in Manhattan when people would counsel me to beware: to beware of walking in the streets alone at night, of taking the subway, of strangers, of men in general.

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