APTWORDS by Nancy Chapple

I was helping an acquaintance—a slim, delicately built dancer—transport props between the theater where she had performed the previous evening and her home. Joanne, the dancer, said, “My husband doesn’t like it when my props clutter our apartment—I guess we’d better put the stuff in our basement storage.” As we drove through Berlin, she added apologetically, “My husband doesn’t think much of my dance performances.”

“But wait,” I said emphatically, though not loudly, since I hardly knew her. “I thought you always had rehearsals and performances going on … that must have been true when you met him as well, right? Haven’t you always been a performer?”

“Well,” Joanne said, even more softly, “maybe not with this intensity.” She wasn’t exactly conversing with me; it was more like she was brooding aloud. “I’ve been quite selfish recently, taking time for my own creative projects. My son is four now. And he’s really quite wonderful—maybe I should be spending more time with him?” She sighed. “Yeah, quite selfish …”

We were not holding a conversation. As a matter of fact, Joanne wasn’t even thinking out loud. She was repeating phrases her husband had said to her: scolding, impatient phrases he had deployed so that her behavior would conform to his wish for a smoothly functioning home. In his absence—on that weekend he was visiting his parents with their son—she was slipping into his role of “educating” her.

I recognize this because I’ve been in the same situation.

A while ago, I found scraps of paper with dates on them, scraps on which I’d written decades ago. My boyfriend and I were constantly arguing. His reproach was that I wasn’t taking his needs seriously, wasn’t really listening and modifying my behavior patterns in accordance with what had displeased him. So, in order to imprint his complaints in my head, as a gesture of respect towards him, I wrote them down:

• “June 6, 1988: I didn’t immediately want to make scrambled eggs.” – This is me admonishing myself, trying to internalize his disapproval.
• “July 18, 1988: I don’t like your constant, unending flow of incompetence in everything you do … you cover everything with excuses and apologies. You prepare for everything you do in a half-assed way.” – These were his words, taken down in the form of a dictation.
• “Jan. 30, 1989: I’ve been saying to myself: I’m moving out. But I don’t want that. And then I say to myself, I want to spend forty-eight hours somewhere alone in a room. With just a notebook and a book. And peace and quiet. And time. I’m going back to bed. If you don’t allow me to sleep in your arms, it’s over.” – My feelings, captured in emotional subtitles. Followed by a plea to him, one he would never hear or read.

Two of those three notes to myself were not in English, my mother tongue, but rather in German, Harald’s native language.

I’d moved in with him just months after we met. Initially, this was merely a stopgap measure when a neighbor violently objected to my practicing piano many hours a day. In the end, we spent six years in his one-room apartment, which he’d refurbished and set up for a fastidious law student to pursue his studies and hobbies. One and a half years previous, I’d shipped just six boxes to Berlin from New York. At Harald’s place, I squeezed my rented grand piano in, blocking the balcony door. He conceded a couple of drawers in the commode to me; we bought a second wardrobe, which filled the hallway. My book collection landed in the basement. I told myself that we Americans were downright spoiled—big cars, huge refrigerators, obese people—and that much of the world got by with much less.

I made myself smaller and smaller to fit into the box he seemed to want to confine me in. Take, for instance, our sex life: I disclosed that I’d had a number of sexual partners before him. Though he initially wanted me to tell him more, he soon changed his tack. “You’ve had your fun,” he started saying—though some of my experiences had been confusing, or overwhelming. Early on, he asked me not to let the rough bottoms of my feet touch his legs during sex because “it turns me off.” So I tried to remain aware of where my feet were during sex—hardly a recipe for ecstasy.

Outwardly I was a go-getter, an enterprising American abroad, educated as a classical musician, with a fair command of the German language. But because of the unacknowledged emotional chaos within me, I was susceptible to Harald. My beloved father had died of cancer five years before. When my mother remarried and sold the house I grew up in, I felt like an orphan, abandoned and on my own at the age of 19. And then there was my music; despite having practiced my way into and then out of two top music conservatories, I had no idea what to do with myself now.

In addition, I feared that my sexual abandon in the past truly meant I was a bad woman, that I had in fact hurt some men along the way. Maybe I had had my fun at others’ expense.

I never thought of leaving.

Over the years, I wasn’t able to hear it when my mother and sisters, my best friend from high school, new friends in Berlin said to me: “He’s not good for you. You change when you’re around him. He’s unpleasant to you, and it’s not right how he corrects you in public.”

Although a trained musician, I was deaf on the subject of Harald.

Eight years into the relationship, two encounters helped me realize what I was missing out on. I’d long since ceased teaching piano when I went out to dinner with a former student, and confessed that I’d always found him attractive. To my surprise, we spontaneously spent hours together in a hotel bed. I’d told myself that Harald, by then my husband, “owned” my sexual excitement. I’d been monogamous all those years. But after that night, desire and physical confidence started returning to me. Then I astounded a fellow participant at a company seminar by not being able to express anger in an exercise. Through the night I cried on that sympathetic man’s shoulder, finally admitting to myself that my marriage had left me utterly depleted.

After nine years, when I finally left Harald, I was tiny and couldn’t think a clear thought.

Only step by step was I able to rebuild the confident, sassy person that I used to be.

Joanne’s ruminations from the passenger seat resonated tremendously. I didn’t dare to speak to her about it—perhaps I was misunderstanding her situation, perhaps I was reading too much into it. I hardly knew her, after all.

I do hope Joanne the dancer is not squeezing herself into a box. It’s a pretty dangerous place for one’s soul.