by Gail Godwin
There was a chapter in The Prophet that I loved at eighteen. “Speak to us of love,” it began. That is just what I propose to speak of now. But with a few qualifications to my eighteen-year-old viewpoint, which has lasted far past eighteen, I am sorry to say.
DAUGHTER: What do men want most?
MOTHER: Sex and tenderness, without emotionalism or silent reproaches.
DAUGHTER: But, Mother, then he won’t marry me—if he has it all before.
MOTHER: That is not the point. Can’t you see? That is not the point.
DAUGHTER: You don’t talk like a mother, Mother.
MOTHER: I am talking like a human being, which is what I hope you’ll grow up to be. Don’t you see? If you are maintaining a relationship for the sole purpose of getting something out of it—i.e., marriage, security, guaranteed affection (can such a thing exist?)—then you’ve missed the boat. You’re still in the dark ages of the mid-twentieth century before people learned that the only real duty was to love. Sometimes I think you are very old-fashioned. Even if you are my daughter.
MARCH 23
I didn’t have to kill Tuesday. Late in the afternoon, Sandy, the Complicated American, passed. He had been to a travel film with Briggs and Miller.
They pass through the office. He glides by the window, comes back: I blow him a kiss. He disappears. Then in a moment reappears, smiling to himself. Comes around the corner of the fishbowl and into the office. Says, “Can you get away for a coffee?” As soon as we are on the pavement, we resume last Friday’s thing. In the coffeehouse, we kiss. It doesn’t matter about the stuffy English; and the Italians understand.
“I missed you,” he said. “What are you doing after your class tonight? I don’t want to wait until tomorrow.”
He is full of pickings from the human situation. I tell him about the two psychiatrists. He says how a friend of his, twice married, was just about to do it for the third time because his analyst told him it was time to form a lasting relationship.
“But you … or I … We can make up our own minds,” he continued. “We haven’t even begun yet, and who knows where it will end?”
MARCH 28
It is seven o’clock Sunday evening. The week that I was in such a hurry to get rid of has now ended. The sun is still shining, reflected in a window across the street. Gulls flash past against the still very blue sky. There is some schmaltzy music on the radio. Whatever the word is—malaise, despair, or an acute awareness of what being alive involves—I’ve got it, and it hurts.
My most natural impulse is to sit here and do nothing and let it carry me away. Suddenly I think of a similar sun reflected in the window of the Wasps rugby club. What home truths am I now going to pen with a sense of shame for not being more artistic about it?
In a minute I am going to start another love story.
LAST SUNDAY I sat wondering if Wednesday would ever come, and it came on Tuesday. I attended my creative writing class in a fever. Earlier in the evening, I had stood in the barely-dark at Piccadilly Circus and watched the lights, feeling exalted and tensed to high pitch. I came home after class (Mr. Mayhue gave me a ride) and began preparing for what I kept telling myself would not be permitted to happen. At ten o’clock, the phone rang and Sandy’s lazy voice said: “Can I come see you?” In twenty minutes, he was there, looking Uriah Heepish with his funny face, slightly hooked nose, receding chin, and floppy red hair. In his buttonhole was a wilted yellow carnation, and in his hand he held a bunch of similar ones. The anticipation of that moment when I would open the door and let him take me into his arms was more intense than the actual doing of it.
TODAY, HE TELLS ME he writes straight from his unconscious. Whereas I am afraid I am going to find tedious old craftsmanship the only way out.
“I think I’m a lucky man,” he says. “I have three outlets: writing, sex, and jazz.” At 2:00 p.m. [at his place], he sat down at the old upright piano with the sun coming through the window onto his already burnished hair—everything about him is orange to me, both in color and feeling—and played himself away. First the tune, then the foot-tapping counterpoint to the notes. He sang, too. A kind of hoarse grunt, then a lazy sigh and spewing out of words. No Jungian analysis on this man.
His little daughter and I were dispatched to wash the dishes. Until that time, there had been a feminine wall between us. Even at four, she had sense enough to know I might claim a chip of her father’s affection.
ME (effort at being friendly): Oh, look, you have electricity in your hair.
CHILD: I do not.
DADDY (trying to pacify us both): Everyone has it, honey. Look.
So I got her a chair—as she commanded—and stood her up in the chair at the sink and left her slipping into the too-large black rubber gloves. Then I went into the bathroom and took my time putting on lipstick. When I came back, she was standing in the chair, looking terrified. Her face was very still. She had broken a glass.
“Oh,” I said, picking up the pieces and dropping them in the wastebasket.
“I’m very sorry,” she said to me. “I really am. I didn’t mean to do it.”
This was too much. I took her in my arms. “Of course you didn’t, darling. Of course not.”
MOZART FILLS MY coffee-cup-and-Sunday-paper-littered room. I do not want to be a hard woman living alone in my ivory tower. I want to touch my own little girls instead of borrowing other people’s for the afternoon.
We went to Kensington Gardens and lay on his old tattered sexy tweed coat near the round pond. There was a Russian father with his son flying a red kite. Sandy sat there with his floppy red hair, unconscious of his dissipated face, reading the Telegraph. He reads about a million periodicals. Whatever I ask about—“Did you see where …?”—he has seen.
She, with her matching red hair—she is truly beautiful and feminine—put on my pearl bracelet and sunglasses, and I gave her my mirror and she admired herself. “Oh, I look funny.”
Little coquette. She knows that “funny” is not the word. From time to time, I am shocked at the way he makes no allowance for her small, innocent mind. He discusses lesbianism on the police force and in the WACs as a hefty woman police officer strides by. The sun is hot. I feel acutely the difference between my age and the child’s downy cheek.
I keep remembering the absent mother. I cannot help but think she is a threat. But she is not. But what is she doing, then, this afternoon? Does she miss her warm, feminine child? Does she think of the moment of her conception? But then, that is “a naive statement,” as he would say as he did last night as he set about disillusioning me on the Tube [subway] coming back from the East India Docks.
We hadn’t been able to get a table at the New Friends restaurant because Ken Tynan had written the place up. It was filled with Knightsbridge debs. He [Sandy] was annoyed. The phone box wouldn’t work. He cursed.
Coming home on the Tube, he told me of his infidelities, what a bastard he’d been, “not the marrying type,” how he’d brought women home flagrantly toward the end, how he’d gotten tired of the same woman, wanted something new and different. It wears off. This talk horrifies me. But I don’t completely believe it. My woman’s mind searches for an explanation.
But it is probably true, what he is saying. If I choose to distort it, to read a message of hope into his clear warning, then I can have the solace of reading that over later and saying, “You knew, but chose to hide it from yourself.” Later he adumbrated: “It sounds awful. But I don’t find many people who wear well. I like new ones.”
TODAY—LEAVING KENSINGTON GARDENS. I am holding her pig-puppet. He looks at me, all appreciation, then says: “It was nice having your company. Something new and different.”
MARCH 29
Seventy-two degrees in London. Lying in Green Park during the lunch hour, rereading my old manuscript.5 Decided to do it over with what I know now. I am tired of all these exercises and no results. I will do most of it over Easter and let Miss Slade read it. I have a built-in opp
ortunity with her. After all, she is an editor at Hutchinson.6
I know the area of Miami. I know the story. What will enrich it is to dispense with Al and put in the Englishman—the unknown quantity. He represents all the qualities Bentley isn’t used to. Evan has got to be more of a Bob B. and a little of Bob L. when I didn’t like him. You’ve got to feel he’s an American possibility—rough diamond, etc.
Gull Key is an island on which middle-class American couples live their lives. Bentley lives there. Why did she marry a man like Evan? Because she was scared. It was an escape from the unknown. And that is her tragic flaw. She can only exude freedom and rebelliousness in an atmosphere of total security. Faced with the real thing, she runs for the nearest prop. In the end, she stays with Evan because the Englishman rejects her. But he says, “If I said come back to London with me, you’d be scared to death.”
Man to wife in bed, after trying unsuccessfully for an hour: “What’s the matter? Can’t you think of anybody either?” Bunny7 tells this at the beach.
Chink returns from his Wales trip. We go out to the river and drink beer. It is a lovely night, but there is no joy. His edges are blunt compared with—compared with—that is the trouble. When you are secure in your preference for one, the others flock to you. But you have lost your taste for them.
There is not enough time in my life to waste whole evenings with people who give me nothing in the way of conversation or help to continue the search. If I’m going to get anything done, let’s not be so bloody concerned about pleasing everything in pants.
I am deeply impressed by Sandy, but the fatal thing would be to live for his attentions. If I myself demand other minds to be constant in springing novelties on me, how much more, then, should he? Don’t overestimate him. Just because he’s the first intelligent man you’ve known in a year (and whose fault is that?), remember: He might be the devil to live with. (“I disgusted my wife.”)
APRIL 1
I return to myself and find it not at all unpleasant, though too much life has come crowding in. The run on men continues. Chink; Tommy, mustached Tommy, full of a lifetime’s accumulated defenses; Jurg—yes, when it no longer mattered, I bumped into him on the street.8
Sandy is cynical, unpredictable, supercritical, and perceptive. He steals the show. He slouches back, chinless; long red-gold hair sweeping the cushion behind him; he pokes his nonexistent belly out, stretches his long legs, talks and talks in his supersleepy voice. He is the only person I know who can talk without moving his mouth. He talks about himself, about literary critics, about his daydreams and night dreams. “I want to be reviewed favorably by Cyril Connolly9—I want to be in there with the big-league intellectuals, I don’t want to grow up—I need women—there’s nothing worse for me in the world than not having a woman. I can’t do without them—ah, women are wonderful! Sometimes, I, too, feel made unreal by all the others. That’s why I (very gallantly and a bit embarrassed) am very glad to have … ah … met you. Ah, women are so transparent. They give themselves away. Come here … you’ll probably tire of it after a while … Who can say?”
Yet, for a cynic, he is happy. Or content with his lot. He is free, feels his health running in him. He shares a house with the foreign editor of The Spectator, a young man of twenty-five, one of the intellectual elite, of whom he speaks.
He has the love of his daughter, but not the day-to-day annoyances. He is free to screw as many women, lovely women, as he can get into his schedule. He has a job that allows enough leeway for him to nip home and write. He would like more money and to have a well-reviewed novel out. He likes women, needs new and different women, needs their closeness, their sex, their approval, both their ears (“Sometimes I feel like just snapping my fingers to get their attention”). But so cynical. I must not let it wear off on me.
HENRY JAMES AGAIN—he gets me reverberating. What unresolved aspects of ourselves are we seeking when we seek lovers?
“GULL KEY”—at last I have a definite goal. Bentley sees the Englishman on the beach, doesn’t know him. He looks foreign, from another time and place. She dreams about him. This is the opening of the book.
TODAY, MY CUSHY JOB involved going to Charing Cross with Bob Briggs to look for prints for Lynn Beaumont in D.C. Out-of-the-side-of-mouth-talking Sandy joined us for a drink. We headed up Shaftesbury Avenue in the pale spring sun. We got to the Western Bar. (“Let’s go in here. I’ve always wondered what it’s like.”)
Sandy has two books in his tattered coat: Better Dead than Red, a novel about Communist witch hunts, and a book about spies. He asks Bob what he did for the CIA.
“Can’t tell you that, Buddy,” says Briggs, putting on his sunglasses. He goes for refills.
“Have you been behaving yourself?” Sandy asks. We argue over the Negroes in Selma. I say, “People have archetypal fragments in their makeup.” Sandy says, “That’s nothing but Jungian mythmaking.”
We move on from the Western Bar, back into the sunshine. We part at the crossroads of Charing Cross Road. I look over the top of the National Gallery and see the top of [the statue of] Nelson, a misty outline of the great warrior against the haze. “I like that. Look,” I say.
Sandy looks. “I like that, too.” Then he says, “Nice seeing you both.” He goes off to the right, toward Nelson; we hasten up Charing Cross to buy our prints, full of purpose.
“Jesus, this goddamn traffic,” says Mr. Briggs, shifting painlessly from the threesome to the twosome. I answer with some wisecrack, seeing in my imagination the floppy red hair, the threadbare coat, the lanky man with the books in his pocket going down to the Strand, away from us.
BOB BRIGGS HAS this dream about children on a bridge. They are hellish. They say “here’s what we do to cowards” and pummel his head open with a swinging stone attached to a piece of wire that runs through the boy’s hand—like stigmata. The boy’s hand is bleeding. Bob’s head cracks open. He wakes up, takes two aspirin, reads. Then decides to try and sleep again. He closes his eyes. He sleeps. He dreams. Once more the children are coming toward him on the bridge. This time he pushes them away, like insects. “Just as they’re going over the rails, into the abyss, they look at me and I see my children’s faces …”
HENRY JAMES, “The Private Life.” How does he manage it?
MISS SLADE: You’re an American. What do you think of him as a fellow American?
GAIL: He became English at the end of his life …
MISS S.: Are you trying to disown him?
G.: He’s one of my favorite authors. I think he’s great.
MISS S.: Why? Oh, good. Tell us why.
G.: Well, because he always manages never to quite go over the line, but he makes us go over. Do you know what I mean?
MISS S.: Yes! Yes. Yes, I do.
Well, then, my dear friend, if Clare Vawdrey is double (and I’m bound to say I think that the more of him the better), his lordship there has the opposite complaint he isn’t even whole … I have a fancy that if there are two of Mr. Vawdrey, there isn’t so much as one, all told, of Lord Mellifont.
—HENRY JAMES, “The Private Life”
APRIL 4
It was always there, waiting—after her various attempts to dispel it, which included being with people as often as possible. But sooner or later, when others departed to take up the threads of their lives, she was back—alone with it. After years of forced company with this nameless presence, she came to look forward to seeing it again. She found, in spite of what she said, or wrote, or thought, her allegiance was to this nameless spirit alone. As time went on, her loyalty grew. She began to shorten the periods of alleviation in order to get back to the reality.
SANDY CAME OVER, and is now gone. I am first of all relieved. It is good to be with my quiet spirit, the sound of traffic through an open window, the BBC, cool air, the smell of lemon cologne, and the remains of breakfast for two. He has that redhead look of always running a fever. At times, I watch him and marvel at his hedonistic calm. I simply doubt that
he has any moral equipment in that cynical cauliflower of his. What I mean is, his goals seem to be immediate pleasure, whether in the form of writing (so that he can read it over and laugh) or in sex, or in smoking pot. He is loving and affectionate, but somehow I instinctively don’t feel any human love exchange in our exchanges. Perhaps that is why I can’t give myself up to him.
“I have something new and different,” he says. It turns out to be little squares of a chocolate substance. He slices it with a razor blade over the eye of a model on Vogue.
“Would you mind not doing it on the eye?” I ask, getting nervous. Satanic, I called him. He wasn’t especially pleased. Then he bundles the little flakes up in tinfoil and sets a match to them. They emerge all crumbly. Then he rolls them into a cigarette paper and takes a deep puff. I do the same. Nothing happens. I puff until tears roll down my cheeks. The stuff burns my throat and nostrils.
He feels it almost immediately. I keep saying, “When am I going to?” Meanwhile I get a pillow and lie down on the floor because I feel I might fly out of my chair. I am completely aware of every object around me. But time has slowed down and sometimes there are unexplainable “lapses” when I “disappear” for a minute, then come back, lucid as ever, and wonder if the whole thing was my imagination. I am acting sensual, yet my body is doing it. I am not willing it to do anything of my own accord. I feel like the great earth mother.
He tries to make me talk about it: “Tell me what you see. How do you feel?” Finally he says: “Well, baby, you’ve been down a new road.”
A polarity in me wants to bestow a blessing on him, but also to want wholeness, direction, God. It has nothing to do with convent-bred guilt. It is something built into my system, and I am responsible for replenishing it and keeping it intact.