Inside My Cell by Natalie Derr

When our group started exchanging poems in 2010, Alison’s husband had been dead for two years. She was writing a long poem about a photographer and his wife and the progressive ravages of his inherited disease, how it claimed him molecule by molecule and took away all that she recognized as his. The photographer responded to his wife’s care and devotion by initiating an affair with her friend, which he pursued even when confined to a wheelchair. Was the betrayal an attempt to escape the disease? To escape his wife? Was it the disease that was responsible for wreaking havoc with his emotions, encouraging behavior that would not have occurred had he been healthy? Or did the disease unmask his essential self, and that self was not faithful?

From these materials, Alison was weaving a complex narrative of retribution without justice, where humiliation, anger, and shame took their places beside love, awe, and desire. Just as Shakespeare larded his tragic dramas with buffoonery and subplots, so, too, did Alison. Her pitiless descriptions of the husband’s growing physical incapacity and the wife’s sense of a crime having been committed were echoed in the descriptions of the wife’s work as a forensic psychologist helping a police detective interpret photographs of crime scenes. By turns, the poem was lyric, dramatic, epic. Time was telescoped. While the poem’s flow sometimes made it hard to follow, I trusted the wife’s voice as narrator—rueful, caustic, imaginative, angry and yet resigned. The poem meandered like a stream, following the byways, not the highways. A philosophy professor whose aesthetics of photography becomes an organizing principle appears in the poem. I had looked him up on Google to learn more about his aesthetics theory but found nothing.

“Next time, I’ll alert you when I am inventing characters such as Dr. Winston Lazarus, Philosopher of Aesthetics(!)” Alison wrote me. “For now, I’m uncertain how I will proceed with him in this poem, so he’s on vacation in the south of France.”

Our group’s focus on craft was why we were valuable to each other. The fact that we knew so little about each other’s lives made us more objective critics of each other’s work. Because of the many framing devices of Alison’s poem and her distanced tone, I hadn’t considered that she was writing her own story. Although had I considered it, it would have been obvious.

Alison’s poetic gift distinguished her story of a philandering husband. The litany of his mental and physical decline and the wife’s despair were wrenching. Why would anyone want to commit adultery with a man who was so deteriorated? Why did the husband’s lover think it worth betraying the wife, who was her friend? Alison’s poem suggested that it was because he offered her the possibility of transformation: Her face glowed with the rose of the freshly explored. Its soft blur dazed me. Soon enough, framed, it gazed again in the gallery, engaging everyone circling again then again.

Beneath the wife’s apprehension of this change in her friend, her realization of the depth of the betrayal, was a deep well of anger. * * *

Now there was another man in Alison’s life. He was also an artist, and she confided that he was eighteen years younger than she. I was curious to learn more, but she wasn’t forthcoming, and I didn’t press her. From the oblique way she referred to the state of her health, I understood that she was a person who lived with illness, not only her late husband’s, but her own.

Nevertheless, I felt buoyed up by my meeting with Alison. I don’t have many friends who are writers. As we parted, we pledged to continue to exchange poetry through our group. When I returned to New York, I sent Alison a gift, a blue bowl from a pottery studio in Maine, which she celebrated in a poem.

Six months after our meeting in Seattle, Alison divulged that she and her brother had had their DNA tested and discovered they had different fathers. Their mother confessed that they were early donor offspring, as their “Dad” (Alison added the quotation marks in her email to me) was unable to father children. Through the online DNA service, Alison discovered a first cousin on her birth father’s side. “Probably I’m the biological daughter of one of four brothers, all doctors, who formed a practice together,” Alison wrote me. “Their kids haven’t been comfortable about going any further with me. I accept that. I just feel all round disoriented.”

It was a shattering discovery. Alison had thought she knew who she was and where her people came from. Now she was grappling with questions of identity and a whole new origin story. “It wasn’t always easy for me growing up, as my parents favored male over female,” wrote Alison. “I definitely assumed I was my Dad’s daughter, but often felt confused by the intrinsic differences in our natures. My brother who does look like me, also felt differences of character with Dad.”

Alison thought of herself as the “difficult black sheep” of the family. Although she and her brother got along reasonably well, they were very different. Her brother was a financially successful inventor fond of hunting and fishing. Now, with the DNA analysis, she had an explanation for the alienation she had always experienced.