estrogen receptor
sexual development and reproductive function
People should be more careful with their language. People shouldn’t infect innocent bystanders with their drama.
There’s a man I hardly know, an academic. He began sleeping with a graduate student when his wife was pregnant, but everything was cool because, you know, everyone involved reads criticism and all three of them want to test the bounds of just how much that shit can hurt.
I imagine that shit can hurt a whole lot.
I know a lot of professors who fuck their students, graduate and undergraduate. Every time I hear about another professor with a student I think, Wow, that professor I know is way more messed up than I ever thought. Stealing confidence from eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-year-olds.
Nasty. Vampires.
This professor, he cleared the fucking of the graduate student with his pregnant wife, and for reasons I don’t understand yet, the wife allowed him to dabble in younger, unwed women while she gestated their child, while her blood and bones were sucked from her body into their fetus.
Though the wife is an interesting part of this triangle, it’s neither she nor the husband I’m thinking of here in bed while Sam bleeds out his last drop of life on our living room floor. I’m thinking of the poor, stupid graduate student.
She and the academic attended a lecture together one night. Though it is a city, almost every person there who identifies as “academic” knows every other person there who identifies as “academic.” The city becomes small by types. The academic and the grad student attended a lecture and a party afterward. She was in the insecure position of being a student among people who were done being students. And though everyone was staring at her—they knew the wife—no one wanted to talk to her or welcome the grad student into the land of scholars.
This was not acceptable. She likes attention. She likes performance. She cleared her throat and the noise from the room as if readying for a toast. She stood on the low coffee table. Everyone stopped drinking. Everyone left cigarettes burning. In a loud, clear voice that must still reverberate in her ears, she said, “You’re just angry because of what I do with my queer vagina.”
On my living room wall I keep a photo of my Victorian great-grandmother engaged in a game of cards with three of her sisters. These women maintained a highly flirtatious relationship with language. “Queer” once meant strange. “Queer” once meant homosexual. “Queer” now means opposition to binary thinking. I experience a melancholy pause when meaning is lost, when words drift like runaways far from home. How did “queer” ever come to mean a philandering penis and vagina in a roomful of bookish, egotistical people? How did common, old, vanilla adultery ever become queer?
I feel the grad student’s late-blooming humiliation. How she came to realize, or will one day soon, that her words were foolish, creating an unwanted idea of an organ, her organ, that, like all our organs, is both extraordinary and totally plain. Some flaps of loose skin, some hair, some blood, but outside the daily fact of its total magnificence, it is really not queer at all.
CYP17
cytochrome P450 17A1
a key enzyme in the steroidogenic pathway that produces progestins, mineralocorticoids, glucocorticoids, androgens, and estrogens
A once-beautiful woman, who married for money, is mean as a mad dog. She sometimes calls salesgirls cunts. She has a couple of kids. She might remember a few good years, but now she hates her husband. She hates her husband’s parents, too. She didn’t grow up with money and nannies, and now that she’s wealthy, she can’t believe how much the rich just phone that shit in. She’s also mad because, by now, she’s been rich so long that she’s completely dumb. She doesn’t know how to do anything anymore. All those years spent hiring people to do everything for her. She’s mad because her husband, an ugly troll who thinks women make really good holes for his cash and his dick, uses a high-end escort to take care of certain desires he’s never had the courage to discuss with her, his wife.
Let that mess brew for a few years.
The woman bought a summerhouse by the beach because it was the most expensive place and she wants her husband to pay a lot. She takes the kids there from June to the end of August. That way she’s not responsible for any wife duties: cooking, laundry, pleasantness, napkin folding, buying of gifts, wrapping up gifts, tipping garbagemen, scrubbing under the rim (not that she would ever do this), making the bed, dressing the children, doing the homework, fucking and sucking, making the lunches, making the coffee. Each summer now she finds herself at the beach, right at the beach, face-to-face with the ocean that, despite having no mercy, is full of judgment. “You married him for shiny things and new cars,” it says.
“So.”
“At least he was once in love. You’re the worst. Shriveled, frigid.” The ocean doesn’t really speak like an angry Irishman, but she hears it anyway, the way it just keeps rolling and rolling, judging her.
Imagine if even the ocean didn’t want you. That would feel very bad. Imagine the ocean refused you entry.
A few hours ago a Volvo or a Land Cruiser driven by a teenager came and stole her children away. “Going out, Mom.”
“Where?”
“Out.”
She considers the places her children might hide: a drunk house party with no parents, a private dune. She doesn’t think ice cream parlor or skinny-dipping. She knows her children are too awful to enjoy something so innocent.
She’s alone in the house. The kitchen is in order. Tomorrow the Colombian girl will do the laundry. There is no purpose to her life. No one needs her. Nothing to be done. She hears the waves. She hears her son’s electronic devices processing distant communications. She drinks more wine, worrying it will make her fat and fatness will cause her entire world to come tumbling down. Then she hears someone laughing.
Next door to her summer home, a civic-minded body of locals, old hippies, collected funds to install four benches looking out to sea. The benches were built by people who live by this beach year-round, an unimaginable position. They got permission in the off-season, as locals will, to place their public benches within clear-sounding distance of her private property.