Betsy Sallee

Repetition Compulsion

It’s in her eyes as the hawks fly by above us. My hair looks good and I’m holding her in my arms, trying to take a selfie, but she’s scared and it’s ruining the shot. It’s October, the Catskill Mountains, where there’s everything I don’t know about the hunting habits of birds. And last night, we heard something howling. I just mean to say there are real reasons to be afraid. Our bedroom flooded on Yom Kippur—that’s what it took for me to leave him. Two years later and the rabbi doesn't recognize me, plus the man who came next was lying. He still circles me, watches my stories, but can’t find words to say to my face. Predator, as afraid as the prey. It’s repetition compulsion. Like the fight between Yaya and Carl in Triangle of Sadness, eighteen minutes into the film. Charlbi Dean is on the inside of an elevator, trapped almost, and Harris Dickinson is in the bay, and he’s screaming, but every time the doors start to close he jams his hands between them, opens it all back up again. Let me put it another way. The artist who makes the same thing over and over eventually saturates the market. It’s basic economics. Lately I’ve been thinking about how we sipped Calvados in a hotel lobby in downtown Chicago the first weekend we spent together. And years later, that day we spoke at the park, a butterfly landed on my foot and then I couldn’t find my way back to the car. Now Jeff’s wife is in the waiting room and Jay won’t stop talking at the dinner party. The first boy who ever loved me shot himself in the head. I wrote a poem about it, showed it to Dan, and I still remember the line he liked: I have wanted things I did not want to want. That was years ago, long before he died—cancer—and I started having dreams about him. But then that’s what happens when you expect a man to be too many things at once. Elevator doors open, try to close. It’s rumored that Östlund shot as many as twenty-three takes for every scene. I saw it for the first time with Nat, in theaters, two months before we split; then again, on Gabe’s couch, who offered, sweetly, You’ve had a lot of loss. I want to say more about the end of my dad’s life, but what do I really know? There was a nursing home, hallucinations, we’re talking January, February 2020. Beyond that, nothing. There’s a terror there, just on the other side, but it’s gone the second I try to make it sexy. The pose always takes the truth out, truth lying where the fear is. Here’s one: a single woman in her thirties has everything to lose. Botox how much what age. There’s a ritual to it, this shoring up. Selfie after selfie after selfie after selfie; elevator doors, elevator doors, elevator doors. Like maybe I can meet him one last time, let him fuck the spark out of me. Make a screen memory, but for what? Fantasy of a man who hurt me, looking in my eyes, saying, You’ve still got it, kid. Fantasy of everyone saying sorry, all at the same time. Back at the cabin Nellie’s sleeping in the sun and I curl my body around her, whisper that she’s safe. Yaya and Carl patch things up okay, at least until they get to the cruise, but Charlbi Dean died three months after the film premiered at Cannes. It was sudden, sepsis. She was thirty-two. I saw the news on Instagram.

Betsy Sallee’s poetry has appeared in DIAGRAM, Nat. Brut, Pinwheel, and No, Dear. New poems are forthcoming in Hot Pink Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn.