by Alix Shulman
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“My mother would pull me out of school if she found out I was living with the Jewess.”
“How would she find out?”
“She’d find out.”
She grew glummer and glummer until, finally, she told me what was the matter.
“I think I’m pregnant.”
“Pregnant! My God! Have you missed your period?”
“No, not yet, but I’m sure I will.”
“How can you be sure?”
“My luck.”
She was already sick, vomiting in the mornings and unable to eat. She didn’t dare go to the infirmary, since pregnancy meant automatic expulsion from Baxter. When she missed her first period, I begged her to get a pregnancy test, but she wouldn’t. “Why bother with a test? I know I’m pregnant.” She smiled an ironic I-told-you-so smile. I knew she wouldn’t take the test out of the same defeatism that kept her from taking the zoology exams: she simply wasn’t prepared to deal with the result.
She had been knocked up by a West Point cadet friends had thrust on her late in the summer. So eager was he to make out that he had hardly pulled off her pants and lay on top of her before he’d come all over her legs. It had been their third, and, she had determined, their last date. It was a freaky impregnation, but, as they say in the hygiene books, all it takes is one sperm and one egg.
When she missed her second period she finally consented to have a test. We searched among the doctors in the Boston Yellow Pages for a sympathetic-sounding obstetrician. There were only a few names left after we eliminated all those sounding Catholic (O’Brien), expensive (Van Aken), or Puritanical (Goodwin). We finally picked out a Dr. Brodsky (“Pick a Jewish name,” said Roxanne; “at least he won’t be Catholic”) on Flint Street, and the following Saturday, while Roxanne waited in a diner across the street, I took him a sample of her urine in an instant-coffee jar. It was I who put on the dime-store wedding ring and walked into the doctor’s office because, should the police be called, unpregnant I could deny everything. We used a pseudonym with my true address.
The result came a week later. Positive—Roxanne’s luck. We couldn’t go back to the same doctor, because now it was Roxanne who had to be examined, not I. She wanted an abortion, but she had neither money nor an abortionist. I offered her all my money, but she had no one to spend it on. Tucked away in western Massachusetts, we knew no one to go to for help. Absolutely forbidding me to discuss it with Alport, Roxanne decided to go to Boston and tell Dave, her M.I.T. friend. Maybe he could find the name of an abortionist.
“What did he say?” I asked eagerly when she returned.
“We had such a nice weekend I couldn’t tell him.”
“You mean you wasted the whole trip?”
“I knew he’d think I was trying to pin it on him if I told him. Anyway, it wasn’t all wasted. We had a good dinner and we read King Lear together. I played the women, and he played the men.”
“Roxanne, you don’t have any time to play around. I’m going to tell him if you won’t. Or else I’m going to get in touch with the father.”
“No you won’t,” she said firmly.
“Well, what are you going to do, then?”
“I don’t know.”
It was already almost too late. Roxanne spent precious hours in front of the mirror trying to see if the pregnancy showed instead of getting rid of it. To torture herself she put on her tightest clothes and examined her profile.
“Don’t you think it shows?” she asked hysterically, and changed her clothes again. She stopped attending classes and began to withdraw, spending more and more time in bed. She refused the food I brought to her room, saying, “I’m going to starve it out.”
She looked terrible. “I am going to notify the father, that bastard. Let him find a doctor. It’s his fault,” I said.
But Roxanne wouldn’t hear of it. “He’s got his own problems. Anyway, I can’t stand him.”
When she missed her third period and it was too late to do anything else, Roxanne went home to her mother. “Don’t worry,” she said, preparing to leave. “She’ll find me a nice home for wayward girls and maybe I’ll finally get some sleep. I’d never graduate anyway, since I’m flunking Zoology and History. Maybe I’ll get a degree from a correspondence school.”
She planned, after she gave away the baby, to get a job in New York City and write poetry. “I’d rather take Martha Foley’s writing workshop at Columbia than stay here worrying about zygotes. At least,” she said with her ironical smile, “by then I’ll have lots to write about.” The more cheerful she tried to sound, the more desperate I knew she was.
“Take the Little Leather books with you for good luck,” I said, thrusting several at her.
“Good idea,” said Roxanne. “If the nuns enforce lights-out after evening prayers, I can read Voltaire under the covers by flashlight. Till human voices wake us and we drown—or till we have to get up and change a diaper.” She smiled her distant smile. “Well, so long. You’ll be hearing from me. I hope everything works out with you and your dreamboat. Be careful not to let the old man knock you up.”
Alport came to my room for occasional quickies in the evening, or between certain classes, and on Saturdays, but we never did get to spend a whole night together. The best we managed was a whole Saturday, from nine until six, with a long delicious nap in the middle. I was grateful for whatever I could get.
There were no more courses of his left for me to take, so I stopped being his student. Still, we managed to see each other almost every day, if only for coffee, whether or not there was time to touch, whether or not I was having my period.
In all my classes but French, I began to feel like a pro. My dream was coming true; finally I saw the entire history of ideas, at least in outline, at a glance. Every new text fit so neatly into place that I was able at last to concentrate on the details. I may not have had the answers, but I felt familiar with the standard questions. I could recognize and catalogue them as readily as Beethoven’s quartets.
I got out of gym with a fake heart-murmur letter from one of the family MD’s, and officially protested chapel on philosophical grounds. It was a good ploy to submit my junior honors paper (on the Refutation of Anselm’s Proofs of the Existence of God) in support of my position. The Dean of Women, afraid of controversy and aware that I was born Jewish, allowed me to skip chapel if I agreed to give some alternative service instead—tutoring poor town children in math, for example. I agreed. Alport insisted that I learn my French, giving me Descartes’s little Discours de la méthode to study from. Since he expected me to pass, I did, preparing to cheat on the final if necessary. Nothing would prevent my graduating.
The wife? Alport refused to discuss her, and I tried not to think about her. She was simply one of the limits within which I was forced to operate like the Kantian categories. She was the invisible context. Though the thought of her filled me with pain, I wasn’t jealous, for she had preceded me and would survive me in her claims on Alport. To understand that was, as Spinoza taught, to accept it. My only claim on Alport was my love.
Alport helped me fill out applications for graduate school. Despite the mediocre reputation of its graduate philosophy department, I applied to New England University to be near him, as well as to the University of Chicago and Columbia. To all three Alport wrote me glowing recommendations.
“Let me see what you wrote.” I grabbed for the letter.
“It’s highly irregular,” said Alport in his deepest voice, raising the paper out of my reach.
“I don’t care. Let me see.” I leaped up and snatched it from him, then read it with my heart in my throat. It took no more than one sentence to remind me of my irrepressible itch. “Do you really believe this stuff you wrote? Is that person really me?”
“Yes, I really believe the ‘stuff’ I wrote. Yes, that person’s really you.”
There was only one way I knew to express my gratitude. An
d even that was sadly inadequate.
It was a long time before I heard from Roxanne. I was so worried about her I called her house in Virginia. But her mother refused to tell me where she was, and I had no other leads.
Finally in April I got a letter. It was from an army base in Dallas, from a Mrs. Whitney Boyd, Jr.—“housewife, mother, and camp follower.” It was heartbreaking.
Roxanne’s mother had “convinced” her to marry the cadet instead of bearing the baby out of wedlock. With herself as the living proof, Mrs. du Bois had said: “You can always get a divorce; it’s better than being used merchandise.” And for Whitney Boyd, Jr., it was evidently better than sacrificing a commission. Roxanne said she was naming the baby after me if I didn’t object—“unless it’s a mongoloid.” Luckily my name was good for either sex.
She described her domestic life with an elaborate military metaphor, matching detail for detail. The talent Martha Foley would be losing! She ended the letter bitterly: marriage was “not much better than home.” “Write me anything you like,” she said in closing, her distant smile rising from the page. “My husband is functionally illiterate.”
Something was wrong. Even before I opened the door to let Alport in, I sensed it. He was late, and wasn’t the knock different?
Inside, everything was arranged the Saturday way: coffee in the pot, our two mugs set up on the floor, a Rasumovsky quartet playing on the phonograph; and I, hair freshly washed, legs and underarms newly shaved, diaphragm in place, had bathed and dressed again in my one sheer nightie.
Yet something was not quite right. I undid the bolt and opened the door.
A woman. She didn’t have to say a word for me to know who she was. Alport’s wife.
She looked me over through my nightie, burning my skin with her eyes. Nowhere to hide.
“I think it’s time you and I had a talk, don’t you?” she said, planting herself inside the room. She bolted the door and placed her back firmly against it, folding her arms across her bosom. I backed slowly toward a dark corner, imperceptibly diminishing.
“Well? Aren’t you going to invite me to sit down?”
“Please. Sit down,” I managed. I didn’t care. I had already slipped out the window leaving only a sickly shell of me behind in the room to manage the charade of offering coffee and maybe saying a word or two.
She sat down on the bed. “No thank you, no coffee. But I’ll wait while you put some clothes on, if you like.” She took a cigarette out of her bag and leaned back on the bed against the wall while I obediently pulled on a heavy wool work shirt—my bathrobe. She lit her cigarette and, exhaling, spread her presence through the room.
“Ashtray, please?”
I brought her an ashtray.
“That’s better. You may sit down too.”
My shell sat at the end of the bed. Even seated, she dominated me from an imposing height. She was a large, beautiful woman of forty, say, or thirty, big-boned, big-bosomed, big-hipped. Lush. Her proud face with its fine toothy smile and piercing eyes emanated a sureness that made mush of me. She had my mother’s pink smell—the same face powder?—but none of my mother’s softness. No, there was nothing soft in this one, nothing to play on.
“What’s your name?”
“Sasha.”
“How old are you, Sasha?”
“Nineteen.”
“Nineteen. Why, Donald’s old enough to be your father.”
A strange thrill flickered through me. Donald. To me it was just a name in the college catalogue. I never called him anything, and thought of him only as Alport. She called him Donald.
“Do you know how old Donald is, Sasha?”
“Forty-three?”
“Yes. Forty-three. With a son of his own only a few years younger than you. And two little girls. And, of course, a wife.” She paused, respecting the magnitude of the pronouncement. “Tell me,” she said, covering my hand with hers, “aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
I was indeed terrified, but hardly ashamed. “For what?” I asked.
“For trying to take a married man from his children and his wife. For jeopardizing his job. For putting everything he cares about in jeopardy.”
It had never crossed my mind that I might be taking Alport from anything. He did the taking. I was just there, available for him to take. “That’s his choice,” I said. “I can’t make him see me. Maybe he cares about me too.”
She got up, walked to the phonograph, and took the needle off the record. “Do you mind?” she said. I shook my head. “It’s very hard to try to compete with Beethoven. ” She smiled down on me, crushing my shell into the mattress.
“Now, Sasha, I’m going to ask you to do something for me. It may be difficult for you, because I’m sure Donald has charmed you out of your senses, but I’m going to ask you anyway. For your own sake and his sake, as well as mine. I’m going to ask you not to see Donald again.”
But of course.
“He’s been in this sort of trouble before,” she continued. “You’re not by any means his first little … friend. But if he gets in trouble again, that will quite simply be the end of his teaching career. He has three young children totally dependent on him for support. Do you understand what that means? He has an enormous obligation to meet.” Her fine nostrils flared out as, again, she exhaled her will over me, and crushed out the cigarette.
“Why don’t you ask him?” said my shell. From outside the window I admired how coolly my shell answered her back.
“Oh, I shall, don’t worry. But I wanted to meet you first.”
She suddenly smiled at me so warmly that I wanted to trust everything to her. She seemed fully competent to manage things and unscramble us.
“Tell me,” she said with concern, “do you love Donald very much?”
I nodded. Why waste on words the little strength I had left?
She nodded too, sympathetically. “I know. Luckily, you’re very young. You’ll love again. But it’s not everything. You’ll see that one day.” She raised her perfectly arched eyebrows and asked, “Where are your parents? Do they know about this affair?”
I shook my head. I saw that my hands were trembling, though I didn’t feel it. I hid them under me.
“I do hope it won’t be necessary for your parents to be told, Sasha,” said Mrs. Alport. She put her cigarettes back in her bag and walked to the door. “I hope I haven’t upset your Saturday too terribly. But when you start this sort of thing, I suppose you really ought to be prepared for the consequences.
She looked at her watch and unbolted the door. “You’ll understand if I say I hope we won’t have to meet again. Goodbye, Sasha.”
I saw him three times more. The first time, that very day, he was enraged to learn that his wife had been to see me. “It’s none of her business. I’ll decide whom I see and how I spend my time!” But he had arrived late, and had to leave early, and when we made love I didn’t come.
The second time he stayed longer. I brewed us jasmine tea. Just before he left he told me he was going away during exam week to use some documents in the library of another university.
“Is your wife going with you?” I asked.
“Yes, she’ll probably come along,” he said. I had never before felt the right to ask such a question. But with her presence still dominating the room, it just slipped out.
Exam week, between cramming and listening to the late quartets, I gazed out through my crumbling defenses to see there was really no room for me in Alport’s life except in the crevices. Philosophy, I consoled myself, had been my first love anyway. Why study here when I could go to a place like Columbia? The music was so poignant that I found myself bursting into tears, especially during the fugal passages. Perhaps it was because of all the No-Doz pills I took cramming for exams. I even cried in the middle of one exam, writing an essay on Aristotle’s thesis that it’s love that makes the world go round. Fancy crying, when I knew I was writing bullshit!
The third time I saw him was after he
came back. Over coffee I told him I was pretty sure I was going to Columbia.
He said nothing for a while, just sat on the floor and sipped his coffee. Then, stretching his long legs out before him, he said, “You know I hoped you would stay here with me. I wanted that more than anything. But I can’t blame you for wanting to go to Columbia. It’s got the best department in the country. You’ll go there, and you’ll get married, and I can’t blame you at all.”
“I’ll never get married!” I cried. “I don’t believe in marriage! Or in having babies or changing diapers or wearing aprons or owning anyone or being owned, either!”
He smiled a superior, knowing smile that made me want to kill him.
“Why don’t you leave now?” I screamed. “Why don’t you just go on home right now?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “As you wish,” he said softly, and walked out of my life.
Six
Nothing like seven days on the high seas for thinking things over. I boarded the Benvenuto Cellini at Genoa to the music of a little brass band and a hundred weeping families. After checking my cabin (no roommate: a good omen), I went directly to the Tourist Class dining room, where a sailing party was under way—champagne for everyone.
I entered expectantly. A whole shipload of new people; an international atmosphere. I sat at a table with only one other woman, old and evidently married. She nodded to me, then spent her time engaging a soft-spoken engineer from Brooklyn on her right and a Milanese exchange student on her left. There was something reminiscent of an old movie farce as we made our own introductions and nibbled at plattersful of French hors d’oeuvres.
“You have been in Italy long, signora?” asked the student from Milan, noticing my ring. He was on his way to Bowdoin College.
“Only a few months, I’m afraid. Not nearly long enough.”
“Perhaps someday you will come back,” he said, raising his glass. He had those deep, long-lashed Italian eyes.
“Oh yes,” I smiled, already pained to be going home, “I’ll drink to that.” In that tinkly atmosphere, all Italians were once again charming.