The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

  ‘Next day, he felt rotten, of course. At first he apologized just for the mess, as if that were all he’d done. I told him the rest. He was very upset. He cried. But truthfully, Mira, I felt nothing at all. Or rather, I felt I had to get him in shape before I threw him out. Chris slept most of the day. It was Easter Sunday. The three of us were supposed to go to Brad’s for dinner. He was having a crowd to celebrate, as he put it, the birth of the New Year, reminding us that it used to open on Lady Day, March 25, which was in the vicinity of Easter. Anyway, I had to settle with Tad some way. He cried, he mourned, he grieved, he apologized. He wrote notes to Chris, then tore them up.

  ‘The thing he did not do was listen to what I was saying. Because he kept apologizing for trying to seduce Chris. I couldn’t make him understand that that wasn’t what I was outraged about. He never had the slightest chance of seducing Chris.’

  ‘But, Val, that was terrible! Terrible! To treat her that way!’

  ‘Yes. It was terrible,’ she said in a low voice, her face full of softness and tragedy, a terrible face on its own. ‘But not for the reasons he thought. I mean, he thought it was terrible because he broke rules, because he offended Chris’s honour, or her morality, or some stupid thing like that. I mean he’s all fucked up.’

  Mira looked confused.

  ‘Look, he’s angry with me, right? He has a right to be, I hurt him, I’m not knocking him for that, I’m not expecting he should sit there like a fucking saint and turn the other cheek. I expect he will get angry. But, how he does that is important. And the way he chooses is to figure – what can I do that will hurt Val most? I can screw her kid. Or else he figures the thing that will hurt me most is to hurt my kid’s feelings. It doesn’t matter which it was: he thinks he can get to me most painfully through Chris. Which on its own is rotten and cowardly. But if you add to that that Tad and Chris had a relationship, they loved each other, it takes on another dimension. I mean, they really loved each other. Chris didn’t love him in the same way she did me – it was more sexual than that, and less personal. She didn’t always want to talk to him, she didn’t always want him around when she was talking to me. But they cared about each other. And he never thought twice about that. It never occurred to him while he was busy getting even with me that he was sacrificing his relationship to Chris, that he was treating her feelings for him as if they were just so much expendable matter.

  ‘And she understood everything. She felt sorry for him, for the way I’d treated him. She felt – I suppose she always feels – that a guy involved with me is at a disadvantage. I won’t say she’s fair in that, but because she is my child and feels that way herself, she has sympathy for anybody – well, any young guy I get involved with. At least those she doesn’t hate on sight. In such cases, she is quite capable herself of being cruel in exactly the way she felt I had been cruel to Tad. But when she came in with the car keys – I could see it on her face – there was something numb and furious in her. She didn’t know how to direct it. She felt, I guess, just general disgust – with both Tad and me. And a desire to get away. Understandable.’

  ‘I don’t understand why you didn’t stop him, Val. Why did you let him talk to her that way? I would have gone in there and … I don’t know. I think I would have hit him!’

  Val shook her head. ‘Yes,’ she nodded, as Mira held up the wine bottle questioningly. ‘Mira, Chris is eighteen. He was talking to her. If I’d gone in, it would’ve been like saying she wasn’t capable of handling it herself. As it turned out, she was very capable. If she’d asked me for help, I would have helped her. She didn’t.’

  Mira shook her head slowly, not understanding, but did not argue.

  ‘Look,’ Val said wearily, ‘I long ago gave up the protection of the rules. If I’m not going to live by them, I can hardly invoke them in time of need. “How dare you, sir! Unhand my child!” Nonsense. Chris and I have lived through things almost as bad, worse, maybe. Humanly. You don’t need to call in the law.’

  ‘How did Chris feel afterward?’

  ‘General disgust. Tad got himself together and I told him to leave. He argued about that. He wanted to stay. He wanted to talk to Chris, but she was still asleep. I insisted, because he was okay, I could see that. He wasn’t going to fall in front of a car on the way home. Chris got up after he left. I guess she had been waiting for him to go. And we just looked at each other. She had some coffee and we talked. She still felt sorry for him, but she didn’t want to see him or talk to him. I didn’t tell her what I just said to you. I told her I thought he was trying to hurt me in the worst possible way, and had decided that was through her. Once she looked up at me and said, “He really did want to screw me, though. I mean, before last night. And I wanted to too. But I decided not to. Tad didn’t try, but I could have. I would have liked to …”

  ‘“Why didn’t you, then?”

  ‘She shrugged. “I didn’t want to be compared with you. No matter how it came out. I would have felt rotten being compared with you. But he did want to.” She insisted on that. I agreed. That was the end of it. She stayed until the end of the vacation. Tad called a couple times and wanted to talk to her but she wouldn’t speak with him. She was fine when she left.

  ‘But, oh, Mira, when I sit here thinking about it, I get the shakes. All kinds of guilts come towering over me. I think, if I hadn’t done that and that and that, this would never have happened. I think, this happened because I broke the rules. But how could I live without breaking the rules? Still, I can’t avoid the feeling that my kid has had to pay because I broke the rules.’

  ‘And mine had to pay when I didn’t. Their lives were more shattered by Norm’s and my divorce than Chris’s was by this. And I broke no rules, none at all.’

  ‘Your kids never got dragged into such an ugly scene.’

  ‘No. But if it hadn’t been for Martha – or maybe I really hadn’t cut deeply enough, I don’t know – they’d have been dragged into an uglier one: finding their mother dead with her wrists cut, on the bathroom floor.’

  ‘I never knew you did that.’ Val raised her eyes, reappraising Mira.

  ‘Does it change your evaluation of me?’

  Val put a hand on Mira’s shoulder. ‘A little. When I first met you, I thought you were a little – shallow, maybe. I don’t think so now, haven’t for a long time. But I guess I had assumed you’d deepened in the past couple years. That you tried to knock yourself off tells me you always had strong feelings.’

  ‘But you’re right. I had them but they were buried. I buried them myself, and planted flowers over the grave. It was the divorce that upset the funerary arrangements.’ She paused, thinking. ‘And heaven knows what effect that had on the boys – an absent father and a mother with only half her feelings operating. Chris is a lot wiser, a lot tougher – in the good sense – than my kids.’

  ‘Maybe. You’re right, of course, it’s incalculable. Still, they hurt, attacks of guilt. Do you suppose they do any good at all?’

  ‘Oh, little ones. Like when you were rude to somebody at a party last night and feel guilty this morning. Keeps you human.’

  Val shook her head. ‘I hope so. They’re so fucking painful I hope they have some use.’

  The doorbell rang and Iso came in. ‘God, everything’s falling apart!’ she said looking worried. ‘I just met Tad in the Square and he said you two are on the outs.’

  ‘Not on the outs. Finished.’ Briefly, Val told Iso the story.

  ‘Wow. Heavy, as they say.’

  ‘What else is falling apart?’

  ‘Oh, that Kyla! She’s been with me a week, during which Harley is going around telling everybody I’m a bull dyke out to seduce everybody’s else’s wife and to watch out for me, and nice stuff like that, you know? And she goes back to him! I just can’t get over it. We were so happy together, she’s so happy with me. I’m not being arrogant, am I? Couldn’t you see the difference?’

  ‘It shone out – ’

  ‘Like shook f
oil.’

  ‘What did she tell you?’ Val asked, uncorking the wine.

  ‘Oh, a whole lot of shit. At least it sounded like shit to me. She said she came to me in a fit of pique because Harley hadn’t shown up after her orals. I mean he’s really rotten – he had to know how terrified she was. If he didn’t, he really doesn’t care about her. And that that was no way to make a decision, it should be thought out, one should be sure it was the right thing to do.’

  ‘But that’s how Kyla is. She never trusts her feelings.’

  ‘I know.’ Iso put a hand on her head and wiped her forehead, as if it were wet. She kept doing it. ‘And he handed her some line about she has to learn to be independent and that’s why he didn’t come, and he wouldn’t come later because I was there, and now that the pressure was off her, they should try again, and besides she has to rent the apartment for the summer because they’re committed to go to Aspen to some physics conference. And she went!’

  ‘To Aspen?’

  ‘No. Back to sublet the apartment. And to try again. Shit!’ She shook her head as if she were trying to free it from something. ‘I know she doesn’t trust her feelings, but I wish she cared a little more about mine. On-off, on-off. You know, I love her!’ Iso added this with surprise. ‘I had to tell her, I had to say I thought she was being cruel. And she hugged me and she stroked me and she treated me like a two-year-old with a cut knee. She sat me down calmly and explained very rationally how she owed her first obligation to Harley because she’d known him first and committed herself to him first, and besides he was her husband, that was a contractual bond! Can you imagine?’

  ‘I can see her doing that. She has a moral account book in her head, with priorities clearly outlined: I, A, 1, a.’

  ‘It won’t last,’ Val said. ‘Two or three weeks with Harley and all her rationality will be thrown to the winds again. With him she’s all emotion.’

  ‘Anybody would seem to be all emotion with Harley!’

  ‘Do you think she’ll come back?’ Wistfully.

  ‘Well, I’d bet she won’t last out the summer with him. Unless she has even more determination and self-hatred than I think.’

  Iso sighed. ‘I thought we’d have such fun this summer …’

  Val patted her hand. ‘Well, Iso, you and I can go to the beach, take long walks …’

  Iso laughed. ‘I know what kinds of long walks you mean, man! Marching on Washington! No thanks!’

  The mention of politics brought a frown to Val’s face. ‘God, I forgot! I have to prepare a report for tonight … this was so good. I never see you two anymore. For an hour I forgot all the shit.’ She gathered some papers together. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, dismissing them.

  They left cheerfully, but on the street they looked at each other. They were a little hurt, and more than a little concerned about Val. ‘Do you think it’s healthy to worry so much about something so distant? I mean, don’t you think it’s a sublimation or something?’

  Mira shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Val doesn’t seem neurotic to me.’ They walked home slowly. ‘I guess it’s good somebody is doing something.’

  ‘Even if it does no good,’ Iso concluded sadly.

  15

  In February of 1970, Duke was transferred to a base in New England within commuting distance of Cambridge. He was elated: since their marriage, he and Clarissa had never really lived together. Their time had been limited to snatched weekends or furloughs, and so were always tinged with the bittersweet, the special joy and special sorrow of separated lovers. For months at a time he might not see her; although his tasks kept him occupied, he always longed for her as soon as they were over. Clarissa seemed to Duke a hot center, a vivid living fire that warmed his numbed fingers. This feeling was not just sexual; her mental ardor warmed him too.

  But in the year and a half she had been at Harvard, he felt – he could not pin it down – as though she were slipping out of his hands, as though he could no longer fully grasp her. He laid the blame on his nine-month tour in Vietnam and on the influence of her friends. He saw Harvard as penetrated by intellectual elitism and radicalism. So he looked forward to their new arrangement not only with pleasure but with a sense of purpose: he would reforge the links between them. He bought a Porsche and settled into Clarissa’s apartment.

  Clarissa’s reticence and thoughtfulness, her intent watchfulness, gave her an air of great maturity and experience, and intellectually she was developed. But the softness of her face, her inclination toward shyness, and her unselfconscious carriage showed her younger than her twenty-five years.

  Clarissa was the flower of her time, the kind of product the magazines, the psychologists, the educators, the parents, are all aiming to produce. She was a source of continual amazement to the women because she did not seem to have any problems with herself or her world, and she admitted without pride or shame that she had never in her life suffered pain beyond that of a pulled tendon. Born to educated parents, she and her sister were loved, nourished, gently disciplined, liberally educated, treated as persons and never shunted toward the doll corner of the kindergarten. They lived in a fine old house in Scarsdale, but Clarissa not only evaded the contagion of snobbery in the place, she did not even know it existed. Both sisters did brilliantly in school, were fine athletes, were popular. Her sister had gone on to become a pediatrician, get married, have five children, and practice with her husband out of an enormous house in southern California. The relationship between the two sisters seemed perfect: there had been no sense of competition or any envy because there had been no reason for such things to exist.

  When the women first knew her, they would listen to her rare recitals of her past in silence. It was incredible: they repeated that frequently. It was awesome. They stared at it as at a miracle, and returned to their own shit and string beans. Clarissa, on the other hand, was fascinated by their stories. She would often ask: what did that feel like? Her ideas of emotional pain were derived from books and her imagination; in her later adolescence, she would sit for hours trying to feel what Anna Karenina or Ivan Karamazov or Emma Bovary was feeling. Although her family was religious, and she had spent many of her summers on the family farms in the Dakotas, where the most religious members of her family lived, she did not even suffer a religious crisis. She moved from total acceptance of Catholic doctrine, to simple faith in God, to nonbelief, to an awareness of absurdity as easily and smoothly as she moved from geometry to algebra to trigonometry to calculus. Both were just series of steps of ascending difficulty concurrent with her increasing ability in comprehension.

  She had attended Radcliffe, had met Duke at a party given by some friends of her parents’, and so had managed even to fall in love in the most proper way possible. Duke’s family was old and famous, with a tradition of West Point or Ivy League training, political service to the country, and old manners, with a former governor of New York and a former secretary of state among their forebears. Their marriage pleased both families. Their life together was destined, it seemed, to partake of the highest sort of happily-ever-after. And Clarissa’s serene brow, her quiet contentment after four years of marriage, suggested that it did.

  But there was an underside to Clarissa that she rarely spoke of and most people did not know about. All through college, she had worked with a neighborhood program in Roxbury intended to help ghetto children to learn to read. She carried herself so well in this usually hopeless situation – not acting, as some people do, as if she were there to confer the grace of her whiteness and culture on the poor benighted, but like someone who had come to them to learn, come there to know them and be known. She grew to be a part of the extensive ‘family’ network of the neighborhood. They trusted her, and she was able to bring other people in. The reading programs she was involved with had great success. After college – Duke was overseas – Clarissa and some of the Roxbury people got federal funding to extend the program, and for two years, she spent most of her life in Roxbury. She lived there, sh
e worked there. Duke was very upset; he insisted she keep an apartment in Cambridge for times when he was on leave. He hoped its comfort would lure her to it most nights. Clarissa loved Roxbury, though; she felt alive there in a way she never had before. And she saw pain enough there to make up for her ignorance. Whenever she spoke about those years to us, her eyes glowed, her face became animated. She had even had lovers there, a thing she did not tell us until much later.

  Despite the success of the program, the funding was cut off under Nixon – one of his first acts in office – and Clarissa had to leave. She had already begun graduate school at Harvard. More than any other of the English majors, she questioned her purpose there, albeit, silently. But sometimes, late at night, she’d bring it up.

  ‘You know, you think if you help to educate young scholars, young teachers, that you can have an effect on things, can change the way people think. But I really question whether memorizing the kings of England or knowing the cruxes in Shakespeare or, for that matter, most of what we do here, is calculated to develop that side of you. It’s more likely to kill it off as you get involved in competitive scholarly debates about the better reading of a text.’

  ‘And you wish you were back in Roxbury,’ Val smiled.

  ‘No. There’s no point. The money is dried up, the people I had collected are dispersed, the neighborhood has gotten more dangerous for whites – there’s nothing to go back to, not for me, at least, maybe not for any white person. Besides it was parasitical: I’m glad I did it, but in a way I was getting my nourishment from them, living through them instead of generating life in myself. But I can’t see that Harvard’s going to help me to do that.’

  Still, she did brilliantly in courses and exams, and seemed headed for a plum. There are three plums for English graduate students at Harvard: an assistantship at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Since in 1970 it was inconceivable that any woman would get the Harvard appointment, and unlikely that a woman would get one at Princeton, the Yale appointment was what most people anticipated for Clarissa. It simply fitted in with all the rest. What her brilliance and demeanor did not do, her family connections would.