nasty cunt
He called me a nasty cunt once, and the thing about language is that it arrives dressed as revelation. Men fling words like prophets hurling tablets down mountains. They always seem so pleased with themselves, as though they have discovered a continent rather than merely named it. A nasty cunt. Well. I rolled it around in my mouth afterward like a cough drop. Maybe I am. The world has never rewarded women for being sweet except temporarily, and usually at a discount. Sweet girls are consumed. Nice girls are borrowed. Good girls are furniture. Every woman eventually develops a little mildew around the edges from being sat on. Perhaps nasty is simply what happens when a woman remains intact.
Still, I suspected he was not conducting a philosophical inquiry. He was trying to hurt me. Men rarely become amateur linguists unless they're angry. The funny thing was that this same man would call me mommy in softer moments. Not because I was maternal. God forbid. Men who want mothers do not actually want maternal women. They want witnesses. They want an audience for their suffering. They want someone to kneel before the altar of their damage and call it depth. He wanted to be my baby. Then, when the hunger embarrassed him, I became a nasty cunt. A promotion, really.
I found myself wondering about his mother. Not in the cheap Freudian sense, not with a cigar and a couch and a certificate framed on a wall. Just practically, the way one wonders about a country after meeting its refugees. Who taught him that dependence was humiliating? Who taught him that wanting tenderness made him weak? Who taught him that the woman holding the knife and the woman bandaging the wound were always the same person? Perhaps he hated her. Perhaps he loved her. Often those are neighboring houses.
But even as I wondered about his mother, I grew suspicious of the question itself. Why is it that whenever a man behaves badly, a woman is summoned to explain him? A mother, an ex-wife, a girlfriend, a teacher. Some woman somewhere is always dragged into the witness box. He calls me a nasty cunt and suddenly we're drawing maps back to the nearest maternal figure, searching for the origin of the flood. It is a curious habit. A man is cruel and we ask who raised him. A woman is cruel and we call her cruel. There is something almost flattering in the way masculinity is perpetually excused from authorship. As though men arrive in the world as hurricanes. Unfortunate things happen around them. Roofs collapse. Trees fall. Women get hurt. Everyone rushes to investigate the atmospheric conditions.
Perhaps his mother failed him. Perhaps she didn't. Perhaps she was tired. Perhaps she was trying to survive. Perhaps she loved him so much it swallowed her whole. I don't know. What I know is that eventually every son becomes a man, and every man reaches the age where he can no longer hand his mother the pen and ask her to keep writing his story for him. At some point the call is coming from inside the house. At some point the mouth saying nasty cunt belongs entirely to the man using it.
There was a part of me, an inconvenient, unsaintly part, that enjoyed the violence of it all. Not the insult itself but the charge beneath it, the electricity, the sense that every conversation was balanced on the edge of a rooftop. Some people mistake chaos for intimacy because both make the heart race. I was not innocent of that confusion. There is a peculiar thrill in being cast as the villain in someone else's mythology. Suddenly you are enormous, dangerous, powerful enough to ruin a life merely by existing inside it. A nasty cunt. A whore. A witch. A mother. A mirror. Whatever name he needed that day.
The older I get, the less interested I am in defending myself against these transformations. Men have been turning women into symbols for centuries , virgin, whore, muse, monster, salvation, destruction. They carve us into shapes that fit their fears and then accuse us of being sharp. Maybe I am a nasty cunt. Maybe I am not. The more interesting question is why he needed me to be one. Because if I was merely a woman, ordinary, flawed, separate from him then he would have to confront the possibility that the ache inside him belonged to no one but himself.
Or maybe I'm a nasty cunt. That would certainly be easier.
