July 17, 2007
Sappho’s Poem of Jealousy


cydytame066.jpgTo me it seems
that man has the fortune of gods,
whoever sits beside you, and close,
who listens to you sweetly speaking
and laughing temptingly;
my heart flutters in my breast,
whenever I look quickly, for a moment -
I say nothing, my tongue broken,
a delicate fire runs under my skin,
my eyes see nothing, my ears roar,
cold sweat rushes down me,
trembling seizes me,
I am greener than grass,
to myself I seem
needing but little to die.

But all must be endured, since . . .

Translated by Diane Rayor (1991)

Bureau of Public Secrets: Sappho: Poem of Jealousy (28 translations)
http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/sappho.htm

It’s the metaphor near the end that really makes this poem for me, that simple declaration, “I am greener  than grass.” It’s one of those lines, short and intensely pithy, that I wish I had written myself. The line in one deft stroke paints its author as jealous, vulnerable, tender, lush, and naïve all at once. It’s just a solitary perfect image.

We have this fragment of Sappho’s only because the literary critic Longinus quoted it at some point in the mid-to-late 1st century. It’s incomplete,  as are so many of the remaining Sappho poems. This one, though, is poignant, tantalizing in its ellipses ending. Why must all be endured? Because of what? We’ll never know. We will always teeter on the brink of imagined causality.

The poetic lines put the author at the apex of a lover’s triangle: there is the writer, her beloved, and her beloved’s…something. Husband, most likely. This speaker presses her nose up against the glass of her lover’s domestic bliss. This speaker, fluttering, aflame, sweating, trembling, recounts the imagined scene: the fragment begins, after all, with this line, “to me it seems.” What she describes isn’t real. The lover may or may not be speaking sweetly and laughing temptingly. The man may or may not sit beside, and may or may not be close if he does so. He may or may not have the fortune of the gods.

This scene is as illusionary and mercurial as the poet’s imagination. Only the pain behind the words, the pain that blinds and deafens, that weakens nearly unto death, is real. So overwhelming is this love, the poem declares, that even if it sets loose maddening images, spectral shadows dancing wicked flights of  chiaroscuro fancy on the walls of the poet’s brain, it must be experienced in all its horror and its glory.

It is not a love to be enjoyed, to be savored, to be embraced, to be cherished, to be held close to the breast and breathed on gently as one would a baby bird. It is, as the last tormenting and incomplete line avers, a love to endure.

This poem reminds me of a story. It’s not my story, that is it’s not a story that happened to me, but it was a story told to me, and as such it has become mine to bear, to carry it until in telling, I lay it down, and it becomes yours.

This story, like this poem, is one of love triangle, of jealousy, of love to be borne, and of lovers separated. The teller of this story, like speaker of this poem, was a woman separated from her beloved who was married to a man.

This story begins in 1984 at a restaurant in Boston where I was a waitress. My section that lunch was the outdoor café facing the Boston library. It was early, or maybe it was late, but I didn’t have many customers, and I found myself drawn into talking to a tall, very thin, blonde woman who was lunching with a tiny white fluffy dog. The woman’s name was Chelsea, which is to say that her name is the same as my name, and neither name is really Chelsea. The dog’s name was Teddy.

There was something enigmatic and magnetic about Chelsea. She was about ten or fifteen years older than I and terribly glamorous with her short-short haircut and hawk nose. She wasn’t exactly beautiful, or even pretty, with her sharp, narrow face and thin lips, but there was something unnameable and compelling about her. Her large blue eyes, maybe, that seemed to collect an unfathomable well of sadness and let it pool there, deep and quiet and mysterious.

Chelsea tipped me really well-at least 100% of the bill-and she left her phone number. I was new in town, hungry for some friendship, and this woman seemed nice and genuine. I called her. She invited me over and introduced me to a bunch of her friends. I suddenly had a group of women to hang out with, and even though many of them wanted to sleep with me, I had a long-distance boyfriend at the time, and they didn’t press the issue and everyone was very convivial and polite, however credulous, about my straightness. They saw it as a liability, but certainly one they could overlook. They were a generous bunch.

I could tell stories about some of these women-and indeed some day I might-but today is not that day. Today I’m writing about Chelsea and the time that she finally, with hesitation and sighs, told me the truth about her blue-eyed melancholy and how she came to be so upright, solitary and, except for the little and fluffy Teddy, bereft.

Chelsea had a magical apartment. One of those apartments that are most often seen only in films and on the pages of very glossy magazines. There were fresh flowers. There was brocade. There was a baby grand piano. There were shelves and shelves of books. There were meandering rows of silver-framed photographs, all grouped together in little clutches, as if they were at a party. The air always smelled perfumed in Chelsea’s apartment. One drank out of crystal. It was a literally fabulous place, unimaginable in real life, and yet she lived there.

One completely ordinary dreary afternoon, I had tea with Chelsea. We talked. She gently chided me about my boyfriend and my desire I had then for marriage, the white picket fence and the whole middle-class domestic nine yards. She never quite believed me, and to be honest, I never quite believed myself, but I thought it was the thing to want, so I averred  it all with faux conviction. I remember, I asked Chelsea, what about her? Why no girlfriend? Where was her other, better half?

She sighed, and paused, and she opened her mouth, closed it, and then, looking as if she was making a decision, told me a story, this story, which I’ve never told anyone, really, but which I’ve carried around with me for the past couple of decades like a bit of lace or a letter tied in a ribbon.

Chelsea had, of course, had a lover. How could she not, with those big deep blue pools of sorrow that were her eyes. She had seen things. She had been amazed. She had come to believe in them. And as she had, they had been torn away from her open hands. But I get ahead of myself.

The woman in question was named Lily, which is to say her name wasn’t Lily, but I don’t remember the name, and “Lily” to me carries the right weight and texture of nostalgia, romance and loss that this woman’s name needs to bear. Only Teddy, the fluffy dog, is rightly named in this story. Names aren’t the thing, after all, a rose by any other and so forth.

Lily was dark where Chelsea was fair. Dark curling tendrils of hair like the snaking vines of snow-peas. Dark eyes that flash and bite. White skin and whiter teeth. I saw a picture of her; it was just this far apart from a group sitting on Chelsea’s baby grand. Lily was undoubtedly a beautiful woman. In the photo, she looked happy, if not mischievous. Chelsea’s fingers caressed the frame when she handed it to me.

She’d met Lily through…something. Work, maybe, this detail escapes me. It’s not important. What is important is that Chelsea felt an immediate bolt when she met Lily, the solar plexus gong, that ineffable and indescribable sensation of unknowable importance, that unquestionable heartsong that we sometimes hear without hearing when we meet those people whom destiny has made for us. She met Lily, the gong sounded soundlessly. She was smitten. Before long, she was in love.

Chelsea, she told me, fell in love with this woman, this woman who was straight, this woman who was married, this woman who didn’t seem to feel the reverberations of the Chelsea’s gong that was shaking her from top to bottom, rattling her from the inside out, making her internal organs keen with unspeakable need. They had to spend a lot of time together, these two women. Work, maybe, or a charity. They spent a lot of time together.

And then slowly, shockingly, surprisingly, Chelsea noticed that Lily seemed to hear the gong. She seemed, somehow, amazingly, incredibly, fantastically, to be responding to it. A brush of a hand here, a lingering glance there, a blush, a quickly averted look. These small signals, nearly infinitesimal, began to accrue, and while Chelsea could overlook one or two, in great big heaps these tiny intimacies were visible, and she felt her heart leaping, stampeding, cavorting with hope.

Hope was soon requited. Chelsea and Lily recognized in one another what they wanted in themselves. The women became lovers. And what lovers they were. They slunk off together hand-in-hand for trysts in expensive hotel rooms and dinners by the sea. They kissed in orchards, fingered and touch in gardens, and lapped one another’s pussies in the falling petals of apple trees in bloom (this last I admit I don’t know for certain, but I take license). They fell deeply, profoundly, completely and requitedly in love.

They were giddy with love. Drunk with it. Inebriated. Besotted. Out of their minds with love. Passionately, excludingly, blindingly in love. Their love was so big they had hire a hot air balloon to carry it, and the balloon trailed behind them, invisible and bright in the sky.

What was at first a careful studious affair, where Lily had at first laid pretty narratives in place to cover her extramarital tracks, where she had lied to her husband with delicately crafted aplomb, where she had made plans with Chelsea only when she was certain her watchful-and it would turn out vengeful-husband was busy looking another way, soon she became heedless, hapless, sloppy in her happy love with the tall, thin, and not-yet- disconsolate Chelsea. They became reckless lovers. They wreaked havoc and they found they enjoyed it. They took risks and they felt the red-line adrenalin rush of it. They only saw each other and their love, bright red and shiny in the sun.

They were, predictably, discovered. The husband became suspicious. The husband had his wife followed. The husband, while expecting the to be confronted with stories of another man, was no less displeased to be regaled with tales of another woman. He could, he said, almost stand for her, his wife, to fuck another man, but this, he said, was beyond the pale.

In the interest of strictest accuracy, I should admit that I don’t know what the husband said to his wife or to the person who first broke the news to him of her Sapphic affair, the person he had follow her in order to confirm his worst fears, which I suppose were confirmed, after a fashion. In the interest of strictest accuracy, I should admit that all I know is this: that the husband was connected. He was, as they say in Scorsese movies, a made man. He was, as they say in The Godfather, “one of us.” He was, as they say in The Sopranos, mafia.

He caught Chelsea and Lily in flagrante delicto. Whether they heard the footsteps outside the door of the room at the inn where they were, I don’t know. They did hear the door burst open. They did see the husband and one of his men. They did, cowering together under an expensive eiderdown, see a gun. Chelsea did see her lover yanked from beside her, pulled out from under the comforter, torn away from her. She saw Lily cry and she saw a muzzle of a gun in her face. She heard too the threat that if she ever saw Lily again, if she ever talked to her on the phone, if they ever had any contact whatsoever, she would die. And so would Lily.

Chelsea saw her lover’s husband pull her half-dressed and weeping out of their room. She sat, numb and impotent. There was nothing she could do. She went home. Her apartment, I imagine, did not feel magical that day. She wept enough to fill all the crystal-goblets and vases. She sat alone and at a loss, pickling quietly in the salt of her tears.

A few weeks later, she bought Teddy. And at some point in the meantime, she developed those pools behind her eyes, that hunted quality, that invisible shroud of ineffable loss. She told me this story in the gloaming afternoon as it rained outside and day turned almost imperceptibly into dusk. I’ve never told anyone else. It wasn’t really mine to tell, but now I’ve gone and told it anyway.

I left Boston a few months after that afternoon. I just up and left it. I never looked back, or I did once or twice, but those are also stories best left for another time. About ten years ago, pretty much the mid-point line between when Chelsea and I met for the first time and now, when I tell her story, I saw her once again. I was, once more, setting up an outdoor café in an city. I was, once more, a waitress. She looked as she always had-tall, thin, expensive, sad. We chatted briefly. She did not have me wait on her; she did not tip me nor give me her phone number. Those days were past.

I think of her from time to time, especially when I read this Sappho poem. Reading it, I see Chelsea and her estranged lover, her lover to whom she can never speak, her nose pressed against the imagined glass of their life, and her enduring that enormous, consuming love.


Comments

2 Responses to “Sappho’s Poem of Jealousy”

  1. Curvaceous Dee on July 23rd, 2007 12:27 am

    This made me cry. It’s so overwhelming, so loving and sad and heart-breaking all at once…

    xx Dee

  2. chelsea girl on July 23rd, 2007 8:21 am

    Thanks so much. It’s a story I’ve been waiting to tell for many, many years. I’m happy that you enjoyed it.

    cheers,
    chelsea g

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