Leonard walks in his nightgown, I said. Men walk in rhythms that sound like restless waves. They walk with heavy boots.
Leonard walks in his nightgown, I said. It is Tuesday¾he has picked the nightgown Thomas brought him from the Left Bank . The one he bought from perfumed women on the Rue de Bac. Silk pheasants sewn in gold on its sleeves seem to squawk at me. I hide in my study on Tuesdays.
Leonard walks in his nightgown, I said. He walks as if he wants me to think he’s going to the library. He rustles his nightgown with a literary flourish. Books do not change the world; they change the way a person walks down the hall.
Leonard walks in his nightgown, I said. A nightgown indicates the kind of man a man wishes he could be. My nightgown sags. I look at my nightgown languishing in the black of my closet, shy, like a timid girl at a party. I looked at it last Wednesday. This is not me, I told myself. I am not my nightgown.
Leonard walks in his nightgown, I said. He wishes I would run from my study and stand dumfounded before his pheasants. He wishes I’d proclaim the sanctity of golden squawking silk. Should I do what he secretly desires? I sit. I sit in my thoughts. I deny Leonard the praise of pheasants. I sit in my thoughts and refuse the proclamation of nightgowns.
Leonard walks in his nightgown, I said. He walks, and the world becomes his hem and pockets. I walk, and my hem and pockets are just my hem and pockets. I have no pheasants. I have no sanctity and silk. How strange that people should have nightgowns. That they should proceed to their closets in the evenings and seek hanging garments of cotton or silk.
Leonard walks in his nightgown. He walks on puffs of sedentary prose. I do not puff like him. I cannot puff. His nightgown clomps across the hall as though it were apart from him, as though it walked itself and the man inside were hardly necessary. I am not like that. If I had pheasants, I would want us to be interchangeable. I would want you to say pheasant and I would have heard St. Adeline; or, St. Adeline, and I’d be the bird. You and I, I and you; this sweet confusion and identity is the dark sea he doesn’t understand. Leonard knows he is not his pheasants; this is why he’s a man.
Leonard’s nightgown thinks I am mad. It thinks I am not tangible like it. I feel even through the walls its scorn. I was not bought by Thomas in the Left Bank . I wasn’t praised by the perfumed women on the Rue de Bac. It was not me who was displayed at the dinner party and ogled over. I cannot claim these rights. I am like a tree that sinks its roots into darkness and is what it is but cannot say what it is. For this I am mad.
I dreamt of nightgowns. They had replaced the stars and a committee was formed to determine the effects of nightgowns hanging from the sky. I was called against my will to testify, and two undistinguished fowl accompanied me, locking me to the ankle of the judge. Thrown scraps of bread, I wept and could not eat. Tears are my blood and birth, I thought, the sky above me and the earth below, my name and laughter. I wept and thought, All I am is tears. I have been tears since before I received a name. Thus I will not be ashamed by my weeping. I will turn my weeping into words. A sombre anaconda stood and proclaimed, The verdict is unanimous. She is guilty of madness, guilty of words, guilty of being a woman. The sentence is death.
I am not ashamed of my nightgown. I have seen that it could maybe hold the world. I open my closet. It smells of fear and night. It smells of the weight of decisions. It does not smell like trees. I reach for my nightgown and put it on. I remember dinner parties and eternities of privilege. I walk toward the door and grip the key.
Arise, women. It is time for us to walk in our nightgowns. Time for us to define the world’s sad curves. For us to push a little further against the darkness. To carve the future from our spirits. Sing the rhythms of ourselves.
I met Leonard walking in his nightgown and I said, I am not mad. And if I am, it be the madness of life and I would forsake life before I let it go. I writhe. I am torn on my bed of birthing lunacy. I risk my world to birth a world. I give my heart to madness. I take my heart and present it in pretty slices for the world’s hunger. And what hunger! I feed you something—myself; myself in thin sharp slices like proscuitto. I combine the vision and courage of a man with the plurality and interiority of a woman. No one has done this before. Has anyone done it since? For this singular contribution to the evolution of art, for restlessly seeking new forms, for exploring lands untouched by human words, for stretching the boundaries of the world past the past’s imagination, for traveling the path of creation even unto death, the Council of I elevated me to sainthood on October 13 1962, where I sit at the right hand of the ambivalence of the body and speak to myself of death’s soft waves.
Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.
