Solstice Literary Magazine » Had They Learned About Jayne M
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Solstice Literary Magazine » Had They Learned about Jayne M... http://solsticelitmag.org/had-they-learned-about-jayne-mansfield... Click here to print. - Solstice Literary Magazine - http://solsticelitmag.org - Had They Learned about Jayne Mansfield? I couldn’t go to a movie with a friend because I had to go to my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend’s daughter’s wedding. The movie was about a serial killer but it was French so I knew it would be okay, unlike another serial killer movie I had seen, Felicia’s Journey. When I told my friend why I couldn’t go, she said, “Why do people get married anyway?” I didn’t know. Felicia’s Journey was before I understood I couldn’t watch violence and during the time when I was still going to men’s movies. I hadn’t yet analyzed the fact that wives went to Memento and The Blues Brothers, but husbands didn’t go to wedding movies like Pride and Prejudice or to other films that take place after the wedding. Men’s selfishness in movie choices was like the rest of life in which wives went to football games but husbands didn’t attend the deep-thinking plays their wives wanted to see, even though every Sunday magazine survey showed that men liked being married more than women and should therefore be more willing to compromise. But, no matter how many times they printed the surveys, the results were always new to the young women like the bride-to-be who didn’t believe the surveys were true. Soon after I realized I couldn’t watch violence, I was watching Pulp Fiction with my boyfriend and his ex-girlfriend, the mother of the bride-to-be. She had suggested a movie and in a burst of friendliness, I had agreed but shortly after the movie started, I heard music that meant bloodshed. Stumbling over my boyfriend and his ex-girlfriend, I ran down the stairs to the lobby. Because I couldn’t watch violence, I was willing to leave them together to watch what men thought was an exciting movie and what therefore might be an aphrodisiac for my boyfriend, leading to the possibility that he and his ex-girlfriend might get together again, but I didn’t care. Since Pulp Fiction, I carry a New Yorker in a correct-sized purse so I can stay in the lobby and read because, more and more, such scenes of violence have to be avoided. Sometimes, the lobby is freezing and to stay warm I pace back and forth on the dirty carpet with its popcorn-infested smell. Sometimes I go to another movie in the same megaplex. It doesn’t matter if I come in late because the movies are predictable and I can guess what went on before. Sometimes, a movie shows an uninteresting story and tries to make it interesting by telling it backward or repeating the same scene again and again. Memento was such a movie, popular especially with men, no doubt because of the continuous thuggery. A low life kills someone, forgets what he did, drives around, kills, forgets again, drives, kills. This was supposed to be interesting because it combined both questionable techniques – repeating the scene and telling the story backwards. My boyfriend can watch such inferior movies no matter how many times the same murder was committed by the same person. Our male ancestors must have scanned the horizon for moving images and the scanning genes are showing up in this way only now. When I met my boyfriend, I thought he 1 of 6 4/25/12 11:10 PM Solstice Literary Magazine » Had They Learned about Jayne M... http://solsticelitmag.org/had-they-learned-about-jayne-mansfield... had intellectual rigor and understood he couldn’t afford to spend his time in non-worthwhile movies or repeats of Dr. Who and Sherlock Holmes. It doesn’t matter, he says, the setting, camera angles, color, there’s always something to see. It is this that will make him wake up one day in five years and ask where his life has gone. The human race is lucky that moving images weren’t invented until the late nineteenth century, after other important items had been discovered, such as Bach cantatas, coffee, reading glasses, embalming, and romantic love. For centuries, this last had been classified as an illness for which it was thought that marriage was a remedy. You would think that being invited to a wedding was preferable to a movie about serial killers and I was glad the bride’s mother had invited me, although I knew she had invited me only because of my boyfriend. Living in a large city, I wasn’t part of any real community and I was grateful to be invited to be part of a fake community for a day. I had attended only a few weddings in my life, perhaps because I don’t have a community or maybe because my friends were smart enough not to marry. The first wedding was that of an eighteen year old friend. A year after the marriage, I met her and her husband for lunch at a café on the Mississippi River during the time when you could order only herbal tea, before my generation realized we couldn’t live on love and needed caffeine to rush to work and earn money, as well as to prevent migraines. The three of us ate avocado and sprout sandwiches on whole grain with soy mayonnaise, which was all the dressing that was allowed. The wanton divulging of unwanted information on Oprah wasn’t in fashion yet – also feminism was in a superb bloom – so I was shocked when her husband said, “I think my wife should emulate the Virgin Mary.” Who was his model? He didn’t say. What would come of a marriage where the man saw the Virgin as a model for his wife. What became of that marriage was, a few years later, the husband married his wife’s friend’s ex-husband. At the second wedding a beautiful twenty-two year old friend married her college sweetheart. It was a short-lived commitment but our friendship didn’t last either. The last time we talked, she wanted tips on how to talk to her now ex-boyfriend but what could you say when someone asked how to talk to a man? And her boyfriend was even worse about television than mine. I have called, sent letters and birthday cards, but she’s avoided me – it could be said to be more than “avoided” since we haven’t talked in eight years. Had I offended her by being honest? I said I had no idea how to talk to her boyfriend. Or maybe we simply had nothing to talk about anymore. My doctor said her friends don’t talk about work or kids or mates, only about The New Yorker. Knowing my doctor was up to date on her New Yorkers, I considered what that meant for my medical care but if my friend read The New Yorker, maybe she wouldn’t be a former friend. Even though evidence for short-lived marriages was everywhere, the young knew about marriage only as a gay issue. This was one of the differences between now and when I went to college. The others include pants hanging past the butt crack, global warming, carpal tunnel from overuse of the internet, florescent lights that cause cataracts, and migration from sensible midwestern places to the California playground where the dry light causes cataracts as well as skin cancer, jitteriness, and addiction to new age philosophies as an antidote to jitteriness. Did my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend’s daughter and her fiancée know about the oppression of women and the patriarchal legal structure? When they heard about the Defense of Marriage Act, didn’t they think, “I don’t want anything the federal government defends”? But they didn’t know because schools didn’t teach those things. “The younger generation commits to each other,” the bride’s mother said. “We married to get presents or because someone was too stoned to say no.” I referred her to Virginia Woolf. Nine out of ten people on the street, Woolf wrote, would say they wanted love, nothing but love, but, once married, women would say “This is not what we want; there is 2 of 6 4/25/12 11:10 PM Solstice Literary Magazine » Had They Learned about Jayne M... http://solsticelitmag.org/had-they-learned-about-jayne-mansfield... nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.” Here were two conflicting ideas that could give you a headache and had probably given one to Virginia Woolf. I hoped the bride’s mother had told her daughter what to do when marriage went bad and your dopamine receptors meshed with your mate’s and you couldn’t leave without a huge downer. Would my boyfriend’s ex secure the necessary dopamine and inject it so that the daughter’s endorphins didn’t die? I had attended only a handful of weddings in thirty years. Now there had been ten in the last four. Also many movies about serial killers. What did serial killers and weddings have in common? Maybe it was suspense about what came next. One event was so rosy and promising; the other wretched and hopeless. I wanted to know what parents and siblings thought. Many novels said how parents felt about their daughters’ weddings but no one explained what a mother and father thought about a serial killer son.