The connection was immediate and primary. Without discussion or analysis we moved directly into the heart of the feeling. In a single fluid motion we had achieved both peace and excitement. “Home,” my body said to me, “I’m home.”
I did not think to ask what Joe’s body was saying to him; it seemed unnecessary. He visited me nearly every day, called when he said he’d call, came when he said he’d come. He was, I knew, even more devoted than I to maintaining the swiftly moving current of infatuation. Insecurity was not going to slow us down. Joe was as good an organizer in love as in politics: next to the labor movement he most adored women. That is, he adored feeling alive through the act of love, and was possessed of great tenderness for the agent of renewed vitality.
I realized it was not me he was adoring, I knew it was the hungriness that had awakened in him, yet I lay back on the bed smiling secretly to myself, exactly as though what I knew to be true wasn’t true at all. You would have thought I was Nettie. “It’s not me he loves,” I said to myself as he bent over me, “it’s the sensation I arouse in him”—and then didn’t believe what I told myself at all. I couldn’t. No one under the influence can. And in some ways it was not so farfetched that I not believe myself. With Joe I was learning better something I already knew: that sex buys time. I saw that whenever we went to bed we were drawn into an exchange of feeling that repeatedly took us by surprise. The surprise kept us coming back for more. Thus, we remained locked in an embrace that caused each of us to look on occasion into the face of the other.
He had a million war stories and he never stopped telling them. A tall noisy man whose voice dominated the room, Joe was endlessly absorbed by his own effort to make sense of things. I think each time he told one of his old stories he expected to find something new in it that would, explain things better than it had the time before. In his late fifties, the man did not know the meaning of mental repose. Engagement was the need of his soul: he responded to everything. If the terms of an argument were foreign to him, or the circumstance he found himself in confusing, or a set of gestures unintelligible, he rapidly translated the terms, puzzled out the circumstance, made an interpretation that persuaded him he understood what was going on. He found it unbearable to live in a world he could not make sense of. If he couldn’t make sense of things he couldn’t act, and to act was his necessity.
In this respect we were wonderfully matched. I had been uncertain all my life about how to act, but I, too, could not live a minute an hour a day except in a state of indiscriminate verbal responsiveness: I had a position on everything. What’s more, my anxiety over an absence of response in others was monumental. In the face of silence I talked rapidly and at overwhelming length to fill what I experienced as the void, exhausting myself and those who had brought down on me the punishing need to speak words, words, words. With Joe it was heaven. We had a built-in mechanism for release and replenishment. We talked ourselves to a frenzy, then made fierce and dreamy love, then uncoupled and went on talking.
Our exchange was not exactly conversation. Carried on at a high level of speed and noise, it consisted of a series of rapid-motion confrontations. Assertion, denial, defense was the way we understood talking. And the more urgent the facedown—that is, the more volatile and explosive—the more stimulated and reassured, I think, each of us was. This appetite we had for arguing the point right down to the ground was a measure of how fundamental a weapon we both conceived the articulating intelligence to be. If we could each persuade the other to see the truth as we saw it, the world would somehow turn on its axis and all that thwarted us would be emptied out into harmless space.
We paid no real attention to the fact that we quarreled continuously. We laughed about what a social cliché we were: the feminist and the leftist locked together in erotic battle. We thought because we were always talking we were connecting. In truth, we connected only in bed. On our feet we defended positions. Given such tumult, it seems remarkable now that the surprises kept coming.
One day, when we had been together six or eight months, we went for a walk and met a school friend of mine. She suggested a cup of coffee. Joe, thinking to be socially responsible and to charm my friend, took over the conversation. That is, he did not allow conversation to develop. If one of us said, “There’s a banana peel on the sidewalk,” Joe said, “Speaking of banana peels, that reminds me of the time in Flint, Michigan, when …” and he was off on a twenty-minute labor story. My friend looked puzzled. Joe did not notice. In a few minutes he repeated the performance. If we had been alone I would have exploded at him. As it was, I kept my mouth shut and watched. I began to see him through my friend’s eyes. I heard him as I thought she heard him. I imagined her thinking: Here’s an overbearing blusterer one doesn’t engage with, one simply walks away from, too exhausting to try to make terms here.
Suddenly I felt lonely, terribly lonely. “Let’s go back to the house,” I said when we had parted from my friend, “I don’t feel well.” Joe put his hand up for a cab. Once inside the apartment I tore my clothes off and dragged him into bed.
“I thought you don’t feel well,” he said.
“I’ll feel better if we make love,” I explained.
But I didn’t. I still felt lonely. Joe didn’t notice. He was propped against the pillows, his legs extended on the bed, chattering on, adding to the Flint, Michigan, story, caressing me steadily, mindlessly, as he spoke. I lay against his chest feeling more and more isolated.
“Oh, stop!” I cried. “Please stop. Stop!”
Joe’s mouth closed in the middle of a sentence. His head pulled back. His eyes searched mine. “What is it, darling?” he said. He’d never heard me sound this note before.
“Listen to me,” I pleaded, “just listen to me.” He nodded at me, not taking his eyes from mine. “You don’t know me at all,” I said. “You think I’m this hot-shot loudmouthed liberated woman, as brash and self-confident as you, ready to walk across the world just like you, and that’s not who I am at all. It’s making me lonely now to make love with you, and you not know what my life is about.” He nodded again.
I told him then how I had hungered for a life like his but that I hadn’t ever had it, that I’d always felt marginal, buried alive in obscurity, and that all the talk I manufactured couldn’t dissolve out the isolation. I told him how sometimes I wake spontaneously in the night and I sit up in bed and I’m alone in the middle of the world. “Where is everybody?” I say out loud, and I have to calm myself with “Mama’s in Chelsea, Marilyn’s on Seventy-third Street, my brother’s in Baltimore.” The list, I told him, is pathetic.
I talked and talked. On and on I went, without pause or interruption. When I stopped I felt relieved (alone now but not lonely) and, very quickly, embarrassed. He was so silent. Oh, I thought, what a fool you are to have said these things. He doesn’t like any of this, not a bit of it, he doesn’t even know what you’re talking about. Then Joe said, “Darling, what a rich inner life you have.” My eyes widened. I took in the words. I laughed with delight. That he had such a sentence in him! That he had spoken the sentence he had in him. I loved him then. For the first time I loved him.
“What about his wife,” my mother said. “What about you,” my friends said. I ran into an acquaintance on the street. She wore silver earrings and curly gray hair, her eyes danced with interest, her smile was warm and knowing. “You’ll need a lot of stamina and a lot of self-control,” she said. This woman understood the issues better.
It was assumed by everyone I knew that Joe’s wife was the wife, and I the other woman, and Joe the prize slated to fall to one or the other of us, but such was not the case. Why, I thought, would I want him to leave his wife? What would I do then? Take him into my apartment? It’s too small. Besides, I may not like sleeping alone, but I like waking up alone. Yes, it’s painful when he leaves, but it’s not that painful. The situation suits me. And then again, it’s interesting.
Joe’s wife was an abstraction to me. I felt neith
er guilt nor jealousy toward her. This because I did not feel jealous of Joe, whose gifts for life (gifts he made use of in union organizing as well as in love affairs) included thoroughgoing reliability and a remarkable constancy of mood. A man of immense appetite and energy, Joe had quality time for all. When he was there he was so thoroughly and unreservedly there I felt neither deprived nor possessive when he wasn’t. For the first time, what a lover did when he was not with me was of no real concern; in fact, it was none of my business. This was an experience.
Imagine. I was living entirely in the moment, with no formal assurance beyond tomorrow morning’s telephone call, and I found myself interested; not sad tearful frightened or resentful, only interested. Here, I reasoned, is a circumstance where you clearly cannot make terms. The truth is, one never makes terms. This affair is only the bare, unfiltered truth. Can you take it in or will you founder on the absence of illusion? Indeed, it was stamina and self-control that were required to answer the question. I rose to the task. I began to grasp the idea of living without a future: we had few moments to waste on bad behavior. I saw errant impulses die before they could make trouble. I saw reflexive anger give way to analytic understanding. I saw petty indulgence stifle itself and a kind of rough emotional justice prevail. All this I saw, and all this I was pleased to see. Then a day came when I also saw that learning to live without a future is a sterile exercise: what looks like life within a walled garden is really life inside a renovated prison yard. Joe’s wife remained an abstraction, but Joe’s marriage became a stunning confinement.
We occupied a universe composed of one room in one season: my bedroom on weekday afternoons. As time went on, we occupied this universe more and more fully. Hunger multiplied on hunger, desire on desire. We couldn’t get enough. Because we didn’t get enough. I was always wanting more. “Not more,” a friend said evenly. “Enough. You want enough.” In a year or two I realized that it wasn’t exactly more I wanted, or even enough. It was a larger world for our feelings to walk about in. Life requires space as well as air and light, room for exploration and self-discovery. The limits of exploration on the life of our feelings were set by Joe’s marriage, and those limits were close in. However deeply we might feel, our love could not make laws or map territory. There was no country of experience for it to cross, no coast to reach, no center to penetrate. We were in possession of a small interior space somewhere in the midst of a fertile region of unknown proportion. Around this space stood boundaries of rigid stability. Love might intensify, but it could never expand to occupy a territory made in its own shape. The reality of the predetermined limit bit into me.
At about this same time I realized that the rectangle inside of which my thoughts lived or died was also a small interior space into which my working life had crammed itself, rather than that the work had carved out of the larger body of a free self the shape and extent of the territory it needed to occupy.
For a moment I backed off from myself. I saw that I was suspended inside my own life. Only a small part of it contained substance, I was daydreaming the rest. Joe, and the time I spent at the desk, were equal efforts at manifest destiny. I backed off even farther and saw that I could not imagine how I would begin to take possession of the larger territory, either in love or in work.
So then, in my late thirties I led a fantasy life in work and in love: rich, dreamy, girlish, a necessary complement to the impoverished reality. The twin nature of this compulsive daydreaming led me to a discovery of some consequence.
One week in summer when Joe and I had been together two years I found myself working unusually well. I sat at the desk and I concentrated. I didn’t glaze over looking at the words, or stumble about in my chair reeling with fog and fatigue. Rather, I sat down each morning with a clear mind and hour after hour I worked. The rectangle had opened wide and remained open: in the middle stood an idea. A great excitement formed itself around this idea, and took hold of me. I began fantasizing over the idea, rushing ahead of it, envisioning its full and particular strength and power long before it had clarified. Out of this fantasizing came images, and out of the images a wholeness of thought and language that amazed me each time it repeated itself. At the end of the week I had a large amount of manuscript on my desk. On Friday afternoon I put away the work. On Monday morning I looked at it, and I saw that the pages contained merit but the idea was ill-conceived. It didn’t work at all. I’d have to abandon all that I had done. I felt deflated. The period of inspired labor was at an end. The murk and the vapor closed in on me again, the rectangle shriveled and I was back to eking out painfully small moments of clarity, as usual and as always. Still, it was absorbing to remember the hours I had put in while under the spell of my vision. I felt strengthened by the sustained effort of work the fantasizing had led to.
During this same period of time Joe and I achieved a new level of intensity. Every afternoon at four we burned and we drowned. It seemed during those dangerous days as though we were moving toward a climactic moment. In the evening, after he had left me, I would walk in the sweet hours of final daylight, fantasizing about us. Us together now, us together in the future, us walking, us in bed, us larking about. Us. It came sweeping up in me that week, all nervous excitement, melancholy sweetness, open longing. Then one evening I felt stricken and bereft, frightened to be walking the streets alone, dreaming a life in my head about a man who was off elsewhere, and would always be off elsewhere. I shivered, and felt sick. My stomach ached. I went to bed early that night and woke out of a fitful sleep to find myself once again on the empty landscape. The deep wave of dreamy suggestiveness around which my body had curled all week turned into a bag of worms eating at my insides. Oh, I thought, this is dis-gust-ing.
I got up and wrote in my journal: “Love is a function of the passive feeling life, dependent on an ideal other for satisfactory resolution: the primitive position into which we are born. Work is a function of the active expressive life, and if it comes to nothing, one is still left with the strengthening knowledge of the acting self. Only when access to the imaginative life is denied does one go in for love in a big way.”
I sat at my desk at four o’clock in the morning looking at the blotter, the bookshelves, the orderly comfort of the place in which I worked, and I thought: Mama worships at the shrine of Love but that lifelong boredom of hers is a dead giveaway.
I went back to bed. In the morning I would struggle on. It was always in the morning I would struggle on. Never right now. Not with work, not with Joe. I could not see that each was a means of escape from the other. With Joe I blissed out, avoided the pure pain of sustained labor. With work I hardened myself against the “intrusion” of love: a married man was just fine. For years I said: In the morning. Which, of course, never came.
Joe was the most socialized man I have ever known. His sense of life was generic: at any given moment any one of twenty-five people could fill the spot for the wife, the lover, the friend. He considered it childish to think human happiness devolved on a particularity of attachment or circumstance. He said the point is to make as much world as possible in whatever small clearing is allotted one. He did not feel the bite of our confinement as I did. Rather he said to himself, “This is what we have to work with, let’s see how well we can do with what we’ve got,” and he pitched in.
He never stopped delivering life to me, at me, for me. He was forever creating amenities and pleasures that gave spark and dimension to our exchange. We had champagne in bed, oysters in midtown, surprise trips to the ocean. He brought me books I needed, sent me clippings daily, arranged to stay overnight when I least expected it and made breakfast in the morning. Our emotional life was an absorbing subject for me, and became one for him as well. He delighted in the extensive nature of the discussion, entered into it without fear or defensiveness, and soon had me hooked on the regular feeding such talk provided me with.
I watched with tender amusement as he bent over backward not only to be reliable and loving each day but also
to be continually thinking of how we might have more. Joe never felt he didn’t have enough, but he too wanted more and he was always conniving to get it. I didn’t think much about the conniving. It seemed natural that I simply let myself be carried along on the wave of bounty it delivered up to both of us.
One day, in the autumn of our third year, Joe told me that a friend of his had a boat he was thinking of buying. The boat was berthed in the Caribbean and Joe was flying down in two weeks to see it. “Come with me,” he said. “It’ll be great. We’ll have two or three days together, maybe longer.” I was free, and the proposal came as an unexpected gift. I kissed him all over. What a lovely man, I thought. Always on the lookout.
We flew down to the Caribbean on a Tuesday afternoon. That night we ate dinner on a terrace that hung out over a blue-green bay and made love in a whitewashed room with the night air coming through open shutters, soft and sweet. Bliss. Tuesday night bliss. Wednesday all day bliss. Thursday also bliss. On Friday morning we prepared to leave for New York. We packed up, checked out, and drove our rented car out to the airport. Suddenly I couldn’t bear the thought of going back. I laid my hand on Joe’s arm and pleaded, “Let’s stay over the weekend. Call your wife and tell her you need another day or two for the boat.”
Joe turned his head halfway toward me. I saw the frown forming on his forehead, and I saw his eyes narrow. “Sweetie, I’m not going back with you,” he said. “My wife is coming down this evening.”
It was the tone of his voice I never forgot. The slightly puzzled irritation in it. As though he had, of course, already given me this information and he couldn’t understand how it was I had forgotten it. I remember afterward thinking: gaslight.
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