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2: “I Had Been Working My Tits Down to Nubs”

By

The ‘Mating’ Book Club

From “Martin Wade Leaves a Party” through “Sekopololo,” pp. 29–55

mating

This is the second entry in our Mating Book Club. Read along.

My God, that’s awful!” This was, by her own account, Elsa Rush’s reaction to one of the most memorable—and one of my favorite—lines in her husband’s novel: “I had been working my tits down to nubs.”

Some context: Our unnamed narrator is trying to ferret out what her current paramour, a British spy she calls Z., knows about the elusive Nelson Denoon, an iconoclastic figure in the anthropological world. Denoon, who has been hovering on the novel’s margins since its very first pages, will soon become—and I trust this is no spoiler—her lover; but, for the moment, he is merely “the pinnacle of whatever vineyard I was laboring in as a groundling,” the object of her “ressentiment.” “I was thirty-two,” our narrator explains, “and a woman and no doctorate yet, no thesis even, and closing in on my thesis deadline. I had been working my tits down to nubs in the study of man, with the result that my goals were receding farther the faster I ran.”

 Those tits have engendered some controversy. For some, they exemplify the folly of a man who tries to write a woman. Asked, during his Art of Fiction interview, to recall any useful bits of writing advice he received from his wife, Rush said,

There were so many I can’t recall them. What I remember instead are a few lines I kept in over her strong opposition. One came back to haunt me when a reviewer picked it out and said, No woman would ever say that: “I had been working my tits down to nubs.”

In the London Review of Books, Michael André Bernstein called the line “wildly implausible”; in Slate, Christopher Caldwell wrote, “No human being would ever say this.”

The assertions of these esteemed—male—reviewers aside, I would like to vouch, at least in part, for the tits-to-nubs line.

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Toiling on the vineyard. A German copper engraving from 1695.

As Elsa admits, “it’s not really a defensible position to say that no woman would say something.” Indeed. Even if it’s supposedly “a poor metaphor for the effect of hard labor,” I have had this precise tits-to-nubs thought several times since I first read Mating, and I’m prepared to defend it as plausibly feminine. During months when I worked sixty or seventy hours a week—months when I often made dinner out of Luna bars grabbed at delis on the way to readings; months when I couldn’t manage more than five hours of sleep a night—my breasts, small enough already, shriveled and drooped. I can remember looking at them in the mirror and thinking, Well, not quite nubs, but close enough. I make no claim to universality. My sympathetic reading reveals as much about my own fraught relationship with my body qua body—my insistent desire to take up less space, to degenderize the space I do take up—as it does about the novel. But Rush’s narrator is hardly an everywoman, and in her voice, the sentiment reads not as jarring but as apt.

She is, after all, obsessed with bodies: both hers and, thanks to her field of study, those of others. Nutritional anthropology, she writes, “combined the two things most compelling to me, food and man.” She fixates on weight, especially on her own avowedly robust proportions.

This obsession manifests itself most obviously in her relationships with men. She says she wants to meet Denoon “in the flesh” twice in four paragraphs. Her three pre-Denoon romantic partners are all described in terms of their bodies. There’s the supernaturally attractive Giles—“His beauty made him unusually goodnatured. You could revile him and be sure he wouldn’t mind for long because when all was said and done he was still going to be the beautiful six foot plus guy you or somebody else wanted. This was not vanity. It was reality”—followed by the supernaturally emaciated Martin, “so thin he looked like a weather vane.” And there’s Z., the British spy with scoliosis, who is less a person than a collection of physical symptoms she manages to soothe:

I mastered his back. I developed a rapport with it … I could sit on him. I could walk on him if I was careful. I could put my heels in the nape of his neck and grip his arms at the elbows and pull until he gave me a groan of pleasure that was absolutely specific.

With the specter of her obese mother looming over her, our narrator tracks her weight and her eating habits. “When I was with Martin,” she tells us, “I was almost never hungry, partly out of involuntary corporeal sympathy and partly because there was a limit to how disparate from my skeletal boyfriend I could stand to be.”

And so of course her work—the study of man—is considered in relation to its effect on her body. Of course the striving makes her both thinner and, specifically, less feminine, more masculine. (“We suck after the male imprimatur,” she remarks at one point—the choice of verb is suggestive.) And of course our narrator’s travails are still not enough to raise her, in her own mind, from the ranks of the mediocre.

All this gives the metaphor some potency—but it’s also why the metaphor doesn’t, as Elsa correctly notes, quite make sense. Yes, hard work may lead to weight loss, but in a patriarchy, no amount of labor will turn a woman male. Tits the size of nubs are still, at the end of the day, tits. And yet: if only they could be erased, if only hers had been—then, maybe, she would not be a mere groundling; perhaps, in a masculine form, she would be up at the pinnacle of the vineyard already, standing side by side with Denoon.

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Vocabulary

Mating’s narrator boasts a daunting lexicon. We’ve looked up a few of the more abstruse words so you don’t have to.

Gynecomastia (p. 38; “He was well built but still showing some gynecomastia”): enlargement of a man’s breasts, usually due to hormone imbalance or hormone therapy.

Yakuta (p. 44; “I did accept one gift, a beautiful ethereal blue and white yakuta”): a casual summer kimono usually made of cotton or synthetic fabric, and unlined. Yukata seems by far the more prevalent spelling.

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Miranda Popkey is on the editorial staff at Harper’s.

Norman Rush will receive The Paris Review’s Hadada Prize at this year’s Spring Revel.

Next week: Wyatt Mason on the party where our narrator first encounters Denoon.