All Fours

“By morning the idea had taken hold. Why fly to New York when I could drive and finally become the sort of chill, grounded woman I’d always wanted to be? This could be the turning point of my life. If I lived to be ninety I was halfway through. Or if you thought of it as two lives, then I was at the very start of my second life. I imagined a vision quest-style journey involving a cave, a cliff, a crystal, maybe a labyrinth and a golden ring.”

The cross-country trip to New York affords the narrator an opportunity to discover herself and pursue personal freedom. However, her fantastical, mythical regard for the adventure foreshadows the ways in which her expectations fail to align with reality once she begins the drive, thematically introducing her Journey Toward Self-Discovery.

“After Sam fell asleep I forced myself to walk into Harris’s bedroom in nothing but high heels. The heels help me just do it, like ripping off a Band-Aid. Once I mutated (from intrinsically and eternally alone to sucking on another person’s body), our weekly sex felt great, and by the time Harris was giving me my fourth orgasm I was sex’s biggest fan, a total convert—sex is essential for a healthy relationship! But after the afterglow I withdrew into my native state and got started on dreading the next time—which wouldn’t be for two and a half weeks.”

The narrator’s controlled manner of engaging in sexual intimacy with her husband conveys her unrealized desire for sexual exploration, experimentation, and freedom. She finds little joy in sex with Harris because it’s as planned and orderly as the rest of their predictable marital life together.

“For me lying created just the right amount of problems and what you saw was just one of my four or five faces—each real, each with different needs. The only dangerous lie was one that asked me to compress myself down into a single convenient entity that one person could understand. I was a kaleidoscope, each glittering piece of glass changing as I turned.”

The use of descriptive and figurative language to describe herself illustrates the narrator’s multivalent nature and expansive character traits. She can’t access or engage with her many iterations of self in her relationship with Harris, because she fears that revealing her true self to him will threaten their dynamic. By comparing herself to a kaleidoscope, she’s trying to convey her colorful and ever-changing spirit.

“For the record: on the evening of the fourth day—the first day of renovation—the pain was so sharp I briefly considered driving home and telling the whole thing like a funny story. If I had actually been driving across the country the pain wouldn’t be this bad; what made it excruciating was how innocently Sam and Harris were going about their lives, unaware of my nearness. Why do such a thing? What kind of monster makes a big show of going away and then hides out right nearby? But this was no good, this line of thought.”

The impulsive stay in Monrovia challenges how the narrator sees herself. At times, she feels guilty for lying to Harris and Sam about holing up 30 minutes away instead of traveling to New York. However, her guilt is a symptom of her confining domestic life. She tries to dismiss this guilt, because she wants to liberate herself from stifling societal expectations of who she should be and what she should be doing.

“It didn’t last. No. On or around May thirty-first Sam achieved a very basic milestone—bringing their small fists near their mouth or something—that was cause for celebration. We began, on this day, to think Sam might be basically okay, and so with no acknowledgement or goodbye, we returned to our posts. Harris, relieved, became calm and composed again and I, though also relieved, kept one hand on the fire alarm and missed my wartime lover.”

The narrator’s relationship with Harris is most functional when they’re facing a common catastrophe. Trying experiences like Sam’s birth bring them together because they give the couple something exciting and high stakes to combat. They don’t feel this same energy daily since their lifestyle is predictable and controlled.

“Without knowing it, without really understanding it, I had been a body for other people but I had not gotten to have one myself. I had not participated in the infuriating pleasure of wanting a real and specific body on Earth. I lay in the center of the bed, unblinking. Wanting a body had a seriousness to it. When you said you might never recover, you really meant it. This kind of desire made a wound you just had to carry with you for the rest of your life. But this was still better than never knowing. Or I hoped it was.”

The narrator’s attraction to Davey Boutrous awakens unexplored sexual desires and needs in her. She realizes that she’s at a place in her life where she may not be able to exercise her agency and autonomy over her body in the ways she wants. This moment marks a turning point in her character arc and thematically develops her Pursuit of Personal and Sexual Freedom.

“I didn’t want him to embarrass himself in front of me. But he wasn’t embarrassed—he was airborne. He was in a reverie, moving around the room with an impossible buoyancy that made it seem as if he were slowly flying. He touched the floor only once in a while, and each tap of his foot propelled him as if he were lighter than air. It dimly occurred to me that this was the first time I’d seen him dance—last time I’d been too busy protecting him from humiliation; or maybe I’d seen and been afraid. Because in a million years no one would ever call this guy second-rate. Dance was his calling.”

Davey’s dancing teaches the narrator a new form of intimacy and a new way of communicating. Her descriptive language and elliptical sentences in this passage enact the beauty and emotion of the dance, conveying its impact on her psyche.

“Everything would be fine. My last few days would be incredible days and then I would go home and have my meeting with Arkanda. I’d text the picture of us to Davey. Maybe she would hire him as a dancer or maybe I wouldn’t even bring that up. My life was going to keep changing and expanding. […] And it’s not just that Davey would stop mattering, it’s just that all of my life would be one long ride of new experiences so I would have had my fill by the time I finally came home; I’d be glad to land.”

The narrator tries to overwrite her desire and longing by focusing on her artistic and vocational future. However, this passage reveals her need to merge her creative and corporeal experiences to engage in life authentically, which thematically develops The Intersection of Life and Art.

“I packed. It was surreal, pulling out my familiar suitcases from under the bed and taking my clothes off the gilded hangers. Were the hangers mine, too? Yes, technically I could take everything in this room. The porcelain trash can, the towels, the bedspread; I had paid for all of it. But if I piled everything into my car then it wouldn’t be here to come back to.”

The narrator’s inability to pack up Room 321 illustrates her reliance on fantasy for survival. She wants to leave the room intact because she knows that she needs a dreamlike refuge to escape her stifling home life. This passage thus underscores the narrator’s deep connection with the room and foreshadows its continued significance to her in subsequent chapters.

“I was immobile, stricken. The transition was simply not possible for me. Someone got a glass of water from the faucet. The toilet was flushed, loud in the pipes. Harris called out my name. Sam shouted, Where’s my big spoon? They knew I was home, but where was I? How much longer could I stay down here without it being hard to explain? Not much longer. I was crouched between my suitcases and a mini trampoline on its side. I wasn’t dead, but I was too much a soul.”

Thematically complicating the narrator’s Pursuit of Personal and Sexual Freedom is her struggle to readjust to life in Los Angeles after Monrovia. Returning home augments her alienation and suffocation in her conventional, domestic sphere and underscores her need for self-liberation.

“Each night I came in from the garage as late as possible, the evening hours with Harris and Sam being the most treacherous as I mimed my way through interactions that should have been second nature, a perpetual houseguest nervously trying to demonstrate how at ease she felt. And then it was the dead of night again and I understood how truly forsaken I was, having lost my bond to my actual family and formed an alliance with someone who might as well be fictional.”

The narrator’s inner turmoil stems from her inability to reconcile her creative and home lives, thematically alluding to The Intersection of Life and Art. She locks herself in her studio because she has learned to compartmentalize her art from her family. However, separating these two spheres worsens her internal unrest.

“At first glance the list seemed to describe a horrible disease, possibly fatal, but reading through it again I realized most of these symptoms were already familiar, they regularly came and went and came back again. So, okay, the concealment and containment that had begun at puberty would need to ramp up if I wanted to keep presenting as feminine in the mainstream; big deal. Vaginal dryness? I’d been using lube for thirty years, ever since my second girlfriend [...] had said It makes everything hotter. It was only on the third read-through that I spied the buried lede. reduced libido, or sex drive.”

Entering perimenopause represents a personal crisis for the narrator. Her reaction to the list of menopause symptoms heightens her awareness of her age and worsens her fear of cultural irrelevance and sexual obsolescence.

“This dance had to work because generally, going forward, things would not work out, disappointment would reign. My grandmother knew this, and her daughter. Everyone older knew. It was a devastating secret we kept from young people. We didn’t want to ruin their fun and also it was embarrassing; they couldn’t imagine a reality this bad so we let them think our lives were just like theirs, only older. The only honest dance was one that surrendered to this weight without pride: I would die for you and…I will die anyway.”

Dance is the narrator’s way of communicating emotions and experiences that exist beyond language. She’s determined to record her dance for Davey because she wants to express an inarticulable truth to him.

“‘You haven’t indulged enough. You’re anemic.’ She looked me up and down with a sympathetic frown. ‘You poor thing, you made this whole place and didn’t even get what you most wanted. Just a fantasy, a tease. And now you’re going to think about it over and over again for the rest of your life.’ She shook her head, tsk, tsk.”

Audra’s character awakens the narrator and compels her toward personal and sexual freedom. Audra confronts the narrator about her penchant for fantasy and challenges her to engage with her body and therefore with reality in new ways.

“What was keeping me from taking a different exit? Why didn’t I throw themed parties or run an artists’ salon? I should have a lover, sure, but also other specialized relationships—someone who I only cried with, someone for mutual back-scratching, artistic pilgrimages; I could be the part-time child or pet of a lonely adult, how interesting for both of us—and each of these people could be anyone, from any walk of life. I had always done this kind of thing but in secrecy (Davey) or in my work (harmless make-believe) or while belittling myself (what a kook!) when really this was no trifling matter.”

The narrator’s sexual experimentations in Monrovia alter her outlook on sex, intimacy, art, and life. She achieves a higher plane of understanding after sleeping with Audra, an experience that in time compels her and Harris to open their marriage.

“‘Must I become this other kind of person to be good? To deserve pleasure? Should I just never have desire? Or always be ashamed?’ No! I say no! And I was just getting started. ‘Do you understand that I only have three years before my libido drops? Your testosterone goes like this…’ I made a near horizontal line. ‘And my estrogen goes like this…’ I drew the cliff, angrily chopping the air with the flat of my had—furiously actually, I was FUCKING FURIOUS about how unfair this was. ‘You have all the time in the world, but I’m about to die in here, in this house!’”

In this scene, the narrator’s speech patterns convey her desire to own her experience and claim her voice. She tells Harris how she feels for the first time. The use of italics, capitalization, dashes, ellipses, exclamation points, and fragmentation enact the intensity of her feelings and desperation to express them.

“I tried to imagine a woman just like me but without secrets. Unapologetic. Would such a woman be acceptable or would she be cast out like a witch? And why such a fear of being cast out when that wasn’t even really a thing anymore? Because we were all witches until very recently. We were cast out and burned at the stake only three hundred years ago. That’s nothing. No time at all.”

The narrator’s reflections on womanhood contribute to the novel’s subtextual feminist themes. She wants to claim her identity and desires without fear, but lives in constant terror of being judged and dismissed. She’s attributing her shame to women’s history and therefore deepening her examination of her own self-discovery journey.

“‘For example, dances. They once fulfilled an important function in society—court dances, barn dances, ballroom dances—they allowed people to legally touch someone who wasn’t their husband or wife.’ ‘That’s…healthy?’ ‘Yes, biologically it’s important to feel different arms and hands…smell strange bodies. A diverse human biosphere makes for a healthy marriage.’”

A friend’s remarks about marriage widen the narrator’s understanding of intimacy, relationships, and sex. Her friend’s theories help her reconcile her own desire for sexual experimentation and freedom and her family life without feeling ashamed of these impulses.

“He asked about my youth, where I was from, and I ended up telling him about working in the peep shows. Squirming around in lingerie and less. Despite fifteen years of careful downplaying, I didn’t actually have any particular shame about this job; it felt like other things, a mixed bag. Unlike Harris, the telephotographer liked hearing my stripper stories; he said he’d dated a lot of women ‘dancers’ and he actually preferred them because they were more free with their bodies. I was quietly stunned by Harris’s convincing portrayal of this kind of man.”

The narrator can tell Harris about her past life and experiences only when they’re roleplaying. Their imaginary game grants the narrator the freedom to express true things about herself that she knows her husband wouldn’t otherwise accept. This moment therefore captures the characters’ incompatibility and foreshadows their coming decision to start seeing other people.

“For some reason the way he had said it, favored nations, had made me think he was going to be dating various women, women of all nations. For a moment I wondered if all this could have been avoided simply by having a project to do, something in the future to prepare for. Without that, everything had unraveled. Or maybe this leap had been dangerously delayed by my work; maybe it would have happened years ago if I hadn’t been so satisfied by risks taken in art.”

The narrator expresses her struggle to reconcile her artistic life with her marital life. The reflective tone of this passage captures her desire to merge these seeming dichotomous facets of her experience and thereby live a more liberated, fluid lifestyle.

“Without really noticing, I’d stopped worrying about hormones falling and libido waning, such that right now I wondered if perimenopause was even still happening in there. I put my hand on my stomach where I thought my uterus might be. Was it possible that in reshaping my domestic life I had also reversed course biologically?”

The narrator’s newfound sexual freedom grants her a new perspective on her body and her age. Once she exercises agency over herself, she feels less inhibited by the biological changes occurring in her body.

“Wet-faced, mouth hanging open, I spent the next few hours staring at the artifacts I’d pinned to the garage wall—telephotographer note, cross-country map, real estate card, etc. I had entirely misunderstood the assignment, the scale of what life asked of us. I’d only been living second to second—just coping—this whole time. White-knuckling it until the next shared dream, emergency, premiere. And in between these I’d whipped myself into a froth of longing—or worked, created fictions. Fuck. My ‘conversations with God’—even God was in on this. Was there any actual enchantment or was it all just survival, was to muddle through?”

The breakup with Kris opens the narrator to significant pain and heartbreak. The end of their relationship compels the narrator to more concerted bouts of reflection like this one, and these reflections ultimately challenge her to change her life.

“And then it was just the birth again and I was terribly, terribly sad. For little Sam. That dying was their very first experience and that one day they would have to do it again. ‘I can’t believe this happened,’ I said, as if for the first time. She blinked, mutely, and looking into her sad, sad eyes, I loved her baby Smith just the same as if he were mine. This was probably presumptuous, but we had landed and were still holding hands and Arkanda’s face was all sweaty and tearstained and my heart just went out to her. As hers went to me.”

The narrator and Arkanda’s intimate encounter in Room 322 helps the narrator confront and move past the trauma of Sam’s birth. For the first time, she owns the pain of what she experienced. Sharing this pain with Arkanda, who experienced the same thing, reifies what she lived with and therefore helps her to heal from it.