"Ninety-three Million Miles Away", by Barbara Gowdy

The other afternoon, I found myself rereading some of the stories in We So Seldom Look On Love. One that caught my attention was "Ninety-three Million Miles Away", a story exploring a woman's compulsive need to expose herself to a stranger.

Ali is married to Claude, who works all day as a plastic surgeon. Since she has no specific occupation, Ali tries to fill her time with various pursuits. Dissatisfied with most of them, she at last decides to take up painting, and specifically, to paint a portrait of her naked body. To do so, she must stand nude before a mirror as she paints her reflection on canvass, and, of course, painting beside a window allows her the best light.

On her second day of painting, Ali notices a man in the opposite building watching her. At first, she conceals herself behind the curtain, but then she allows the man to observe her, and as the days pass, she begins to perform various sexual acts, wanting him to watch, needing his attention more and more. And she herself knows, “her episodes …seem to have nothing at all to do with lust” (95). Her need for his fixated gaze is simply “expressed through the sex act” (95).

Very soon, she grows obsessed, learning that he is a general surgeon, one who rids the body of illness, unlike her husband Claude, who carves and alters. Dreaming one night that he performs surgery on her, she grows compelled to bring this about in her waking life, even though, on one level, she understands the absurdity of the desire. Finally visiting him in his office, she is faced with his “adenoidal voice” (98) and “garlic breath” (99), but her psychological darkness fails to entirely break, at least not enough for her not to be heartbroken when he tells her that he is moving.

At home, she tries to recover; she takes her clothes off, but realizes that “without Andrew’s appreciation or the hope of it (and despite how repellant she had found him) what she saw was a pathetic little woman with pasty skin and short legs. (99)

Ali is completely diminished, but how did this obsession come about?

The last few lines provide a hint:

As Claude was always saying, things looked different from different angles and in different lights. What this meant to her was that everything hinged on where you happened to be standing at a given moment, or even who you imagined you were. It meant that in certain lights, desire sprang up out of nowhere.(100)

The story, I think, could easily have become cliché , but because Gowdy renders the woman's obsession with tenderness and depth, the story is engrossing- dark and yet funny, strange and yet real. Ali, an otherwise healthy, smart woman, charges down the bleakest and most dangerous of paths; and in the end, she can only marvel at what has happened.

Gowdy takes on a subject- a woman with a terrible, painful need for attention-and unflinchingly details her crisis, a crisis which, as Ali knows, may or may not seize her again.

Gowdy, Barbara. "Ninety-three Million Miles Away". We So Seldom Look On Love. Somerville House, 1992. 81-100.