Third Place Husbands: On Rachel Ingalls’ “In the Act”
Rachel Ingalls | In the Act | New Directions | July 2023 | 64 Pages
Husbands, in Rachel Ingalls’ fiction, are always drab, mundane, and a little obtuse. They are middle-aged, professionally unfulfilled, and laser-focused on their own affairs—literally and figuratively. In Binstead’s Safari we get Stan Binstead, “an academic pill” who is so obsessed with his next book project that he cannot see his wife, Millie, transforming into a goddess on their safari and falling in love with a man who seems to be a lion god. In Mrs. Caliban, there is Fred: a man who is too busy having an affair with his wife Dorothy’s best friend to notice the reptilian man taking up residence in their house, not to mention failing to support his wife while she grieves a miscarriage. These men take their spouses for granted, viewing them as amenities rather than equal partners. Wives, in Ingalls’s hands, are decorative furniture for an appropriately conventional life.
Given the husband of poor character and limited affection reappears frequently in Ingalls’s fiction, it’s no surprise that in her latest rereleased novella, In the Act, we have Edgar. Edgar is smart, an accomplished scientist, and importantly, a total bore who neglects his wife, Helen. For Ingalls, empty nests and midlife crises spiral into surrealism, as gods, monsters, and robots force husbands—and sometimes their wives—to examine the sorry state of their lives and marriages. What they see is horrifying.
•
In the Act opens with relative peace. Helen and Edgar’s two sons are away at a New England boarding school, and the couple live lives so structured by routine that they barely speak to each other as they go through their days. But this harmony is tenuous, extending only so long as Helen attends her adult continuing education classes in various subjects (“flower arranging,” “oil painting and transcendental meditation”) twice a week, giving Edgar two uninterrupted days to work at home, in the attic, in his off-limits laboratory. When Helen’s classes are canceled due to infrastructure, Edgar demands that she stay out of the house so he can continue his schedule. She can walk around the block, see a dozen movies, find new classes, anything to give him two days of “complete freedom to work,” he says. Of course Helen resists, maintaining her equal claim to the house, but a domestic, sexist complaint from Edgar—that “she hadn’t cut all the segments entirely free in his grapefruit” at breakfast—sends her to her tipping point. Her irritation with Edgar’s inflexibility morphs into suspicion. After all, why is he so insistent that she leave when she doesn’t make any noise? Why is the attic door locked all the time? Helen does what any savvy woman would: she finds a key and goes up to the lab.
In a play on the Bluebeard folktale—a story in which a man marries and kills a series of women, locking their bodies in a closet—what Helen sees in Edgar’s laboratory is not a dead body, but pieces of a robotic female doll: something Edgar “had built for himself out of other materials.” Convincing herself that he must be “pioneering research of victims of road accidents,” Helen gives Edgar a week, and the benefit of the doubt, to assemble the pieces before returning to see his progress. When she returns, the doll is fully assembled, incredibly life-like, outfitted in lingerie. Edgar’s fantasies, and perhaps his dissatisfaction with their partnership, Helen realizes, have led him to design the female figure of his dreams. When Helen recalls “the pink dress and black underwear,” he has selected, she crumbles, imagining Edgar expending mental effort on each finishing touch. “The doll had been built to specification: his specifications. Oh, Helen thought, the swine.”
•
In true Ingalls fashion, the story only gets more bizarre from here. And bizarre is the best descriptor for her oeuvre, which has been aptly described as “hallucinatory realism” by Lidija Haas and “feminist surrealism” by Jessica Ferri. Ingalls has a knack for warping the known quantities of the domestic into strange, existentially charged tales. Up in the attic, Helen presses a button behind the doll’s left ear, causing its hips to gyrate “in an unmistakable manner,” her legs to spread open, and obscenities to fly out of her mechanical mouth. All the suspense of the Bluebeard tale morphs into hilarity of the mad scientist.
Upon her discovery of the device, whom Edgar calls, creatively, “Dolly,” Helen is “quivering with rage, shame and the need for revenge.” Here we get the book’s most cogent articulation of feminist anger: Helen “prickling all over with a sense of grievance.” “She’d been slaving away for years, just so he could run up to the attic every evening and keep his secrets,” the narrator tells us. All Edgar wanted, she bemoans, “was someone menial to provide services for them.” Her sons, she fears, will follow in his footsteps.
Outraged, Helen stuffs Dolly into a suitcase and brings her to a locker at the train station: a hostage situation meant to leverage her husband’s odd infidelity into her own opportunity for revenge. When Edgar returns home to find Dolly missing, he threatens his wife. “You get her back here, or you’re going to wish you’d never been born,” he screams. But Helen remains calm. You’ll get Dolly back, she tells Edgar, when you invent a male counterpart for me. Helen is sure she is the only person who knows where Dolly is, but in fact she has been taken hostage again by a petty thief, Ron, who found the suitcase in a routine burglary. He falls madly in love with the fembot. Keeping her, Ron delights, would be “like having a wife, except that not being human, of course, she was nicer.”
•
The institution of marriage begins to look ridiculous, even slapstick, in In the Act. It is not uncommon for love to become transactional over time, and for ideals like romance to eventually give way to revenge and hatred. What is exciting is that Ingalls doesn’t hesitate in her skewering of men like Edgar and Ron, who see women as “someone menial to provide services for them”—an accessory to their own lives. Though their perspectives may seem outlandish, this is no satire. In Ingalls’ world, pathetic and self-centered men are the depressing material of reality. But if the men of Ingalls’ imaginative worlds are so limited, what of the women and wives who endure such treatment?
Helen’s loneliness and lack of purpose closely mirrors that of Dorothy from Mrs. Caliban and Millie from Binstead’s Safari, but those characters consummate with fulfilling otherworldly love affairs. Helen gets no such luck. In the end, Auto, the male doll that Edgar makes for her, is conversationally dull and sexually unfulfilling, “about as interesting as a vibrator.” But what is more depressing is that the dullness of Auto isn’t even sabotage: Helen “didn’t believe that her husband had tried to shortchange her; he simply hadn’t had the ingenuity to program a better model.” Even when Edgar makes some changes (“I didn’t think you wanted him to be able to discuss the novels of Proust,” he quips), the robot is still too predictable, still sexually unsatisfying. Of course Edgar cannot imagine female desire, but Ingalls seems to insist that the male form—even in its most platonic, robotic ideal—is ultimately disappointing. Auto, on his shell, meets all the requirements that Helen has set for him, but her dissatisfaction lingers, emphasizing the trope that women can only figure out what they want through refusal.
But we might see this refusal of men as its own feminist mythology, a rejection of the robotic world of made-to-order partners. Helen sees herself as a mother, as an organic creator, and she delights in that power. When Edgar rages about Dolly being stolen, going on about how long it took him to get the eyes right, Helen thinks to herself that “a woman . . . can get the eyes and everything else right without any trouble: her creative power is inherent. Men can never create; they only copy. That’s why they’re so jealous.” Helen has been copying, too, of course. She models her life after others’ lives, fitting into conventional boxes and maintaining good appearances. This is why it’s so exhilarating to watch her leave all of it behind.
Though the dark comedy has less time and fewer pages to develop than Mrs. Caliban or Binstead’s Safari, In the Act simmers into a perfect ending. When Ron comes by to return Dolly—or to negotiate a shared custody policy with Edgar—Helen has had enough. While the men discuss who deserves the fembot (the creator? or the man who appreciates her more?) Helen locks Auto and Dolly in a room together and presses their ear buttons. The robots go at it with pre-programmed abandon, making such a “raucous noise” that the men go upstairs to investigate: a mirror to Helen’s earlier suspicious venture. The robots continue to “try to fornicate with anything and anyone they encountered,” violently accosting Ron and Edgar. The scene morphs into a battle, the humans destroying the dolls, who are intent on completing the act. We end with Ron, Edgar, and Helen gathered around the remains: “There was nothing to say. They stared as if they didn’t recognize each other, or the room they were standing in, or any other part of the world which, until just a few moments before, had been theirs.” This is a distillation of what reading Ingalls can do to you. She makes you look so insistently at the seemingly straightforward domestic world until its edges begin to warp. The world becomes less recognizable, not more.