Just A Few Little Pokes

As I begin wrapping up this part of my life, this story that I believe is still appropriate to call “Love in the Time of Addiction” (though I would maybe now borrow the undiluted names of other works—A Grief Observed or even Should I Stay or Should I Go?—for the subtitle), I find myself looking for gaps left in the narrative, those unanswered questions that still niggle.

Often, the gaping hole in the middle of this story seems to not just be just the lack of an apology from Mark, but also the absence of any formal, full disclosure. Though my gut has told me since discovery that there’s more to this tale of sex addiction, the only evidence I can offer to anyone else is “just porn.” And for a long time, that’s nagged at me. For a long time, that’s part of why I stayed—even after I decided to go. Throughout this period of grief, one question kept reeling though my mind in an endless loop: Should I and could I really end a relationship with a man I deeply love over “just porn”?

I recently found some form of an answer while reading Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, a novel about the gaping hole in someone else’s story. In it, the narrator, a Mexican boy, (fictitiously) becomes housekeeper and confidant to the famous artist Frida Kahlo. He describes coming across one of Frida’s more disturbing paintings (above), which Americans refer to as A Few Small Nips, but that the boy translates from the Spanish into “A Few Little Pokes”:

The bloody portrait of the stabbed girl is called A Few Little Pokes. She [Frida] painted it after a man in the Zona Rosa stabbed his girlfriend twenty-six times, and, when the police came and found her dead, the boyfriend said, “What’s the problem? I only gave her a few little pokes.” The story was in all the newspapers. Senora [Frida] said, “Insolito, you’d be amazed what people will buy.”

Did she mean the painting, or the man’s story?

It’s important to note a little bit about Frida’s personal life. She was married to renowned muralist Diego Rivera, a notorious philanderer who she caught sleeping with her sister, as well as half of Mexico’s female population. The couple’s fighting was as notorious as Diego’s philandering—they were the Sid and Nancy of the Mexican art scene. After several years of this insanity, Frida and Diego divorced, only to remarry (each other) not long after. Their second marriage was as turbulent and fraught with infidelity as the first. A few days before her death in 1954, Frida, still dysfunctionally married to Diego, wrote in her journal, “I hope the exit is joyful—and I hope never to return.” It’s still uncertain whether her death was caused by a pulmonary embolism or a drug overdose that may or may not have been accidental.

Given Diego’s cheating and Frida’s passionate reaction to the news story about the stabbing (it even inspired a painting), it’s hard to miss the double entendre implied by the Mexican boy’s translation of the painting’s title into “A Few Little Pokes.” How many times had Diego given Frida the same excuse? How many times had she bought it? And did she know that buying it was eventually going to kill her?

Asking those niggling questions about Frida's story (as portrayed by Kingsolver) is how the gaping hole in my story finally started to close. Not because I finally found evidence of anything more than “Just a Few Little Pornos” but because, even if it really was just porn that comprised Mark’s acting out, I no longer buy the “just” part about it—I haven’t for a long time. Whether or not my husband, like the boyfriend in Frida's news article and like so many others in modern-day news articles about public sex scandals, is still asking, “What’s the problem?,” I—and everyone else who knows my story—can see me lying in the bed, hurt and bleeding. “Just porn” is a problem--for me, in this relationship, and for so many others in other relationships.

And maybe that’s what Frida wanted us to see in her painting—“Just A Few Little Pokes” can cause serious damage. The only important difference between my story and hers is not that she expressed herself through a famous work of art while I've got this little blog, not that one of us stayed and one of us left, and not that Diego had "pokes" while Mark had pornos, but that one of us stopped buying "What's the problem?" before it killed her.