The girls oohed. They said how smart he looked.
“He’s a genius!” Doris said. “He writes entire plays in his head. Of course, he’s very absent-minded. He’s always bumping into things and breaking his glasses. You see there?” She pointed to the arm of his glasses where there was a spot on the photo. “That’s cellotape. He can’t be bothered to go to an optician and have them properly fixed. He hasn’t time for the everyday things.” She kissed the photo. “He knows all of Shakespeare’s sonnets by heart. The first thing he said to me when we met was, ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.’”
One of the girls waggled her ring finger. “So when’s he going to pop the question?”
“Oh, he doesn’t believe in marriage. We’ll probably live in sin.”
The girls shrieked.
It gave Doris a charge, scandalizing them. Some mornings she pretended to be hung-over from a wild night out with Dean and his actor friends. “I’m blotto,” she’d groan. “Stay back, kids.” She made up stories about these friends. Their dire love affairs, a suicide. She said that a local actress (“I’m not naming names”) went to New York for an abortion. “And the next day she was still bleeding so badly she had to sit on phone books. I brought her ours from home and she bled through to the S’s.”
The typists ate it up. There was nothing Doris told them that they didn’t believe. In fact, the more unbelievable she was the more devoutly they believed her. It was unbelievable. Growing up she’d had a horror of lying. Now she lied all the time, without guilt, without ever weaving a tangled web. There were tricks to lying, she realized. Or not tricks so much as rules. Look people in the eye, remember your lies, stick to your lies, never back down from a lie, salt your lies with the truth, respect lies, know that there is no such thing as a simple lie.
Very quickly she had all this down pat and working for her.
So it isn’t exactly true to say that she didn’t get a foot in the door, because she could talk her way into any audition. It was talking her way into a part that she somehow loused up. That silence as her last line died in the rafters like an electrocuted bird, and then, from a back row, that English-accented “Thank you, Miss Gayler,” which meant she’d blown as much as a dollar on train fare … it was not an experience she ever got used to or entirely over.
Afterwards, instead of going straight home from Union Station she usually consoled herself with tea and a chocolate éclair at Fleming’s on King Street. The set-up of the restaurant was in the form of a daisy, five petal-like counters surrounding a central preparation area, and at one of these petals she sat across from a young man who looked so much like the man in her locket that she opened it to check.
No, it wasn’t him. The mouth was wrong. And the chin. Dean’s had a cleft, this fellow’s didn’t. Still! He was tall, very tall and lean. And the right arm of his glasses was held on with tape! Masking tape, but that’s splitting hairs. And he was reading The Complete Works of William Shakespeare! The same edition that Doris owned! The sonnets were at the end of that edition, and he was concentrating on a page somewhere near the end, looking up every few seconds and then down again, as if committing the words to memory.
Several times he glanced at her. Finally he said, pleasantly, “May I help you?”
“Let us not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,” she said. “Am I right?”
He smiled. “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes.”
“You don’t say. Well, I would have tried ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ next. Then ‘When in disgrace.’”
“You’re an actress.”
Were she not already in love with this man from having more or less invented him and therefore knowing all his dear, irreplaceable quirks, she’d be head over heels now. (So much for Ed Metzer.) “Give the man a cigar,” she said. “First guess.”
(Ed Metzer had been her high-school sweetheart. He had called her Pancake and kissed her for hours without going further. A fine young man, he joined the British navy, he always said he would. The night before he set sail he took her to his aunt’s empty house and they lay fully dressed on a bed and kissed while he panted like a dog and slapped her all over, not too hard but almost. “Wait for me, Pancake,” he said. “I will,” she said, half believing she would, half thinking, “Fat chance.”)
She continued auditioning for parts she never got while spinning Gordon the line that she was taking a vacation from her exhausting stage career. A few weeks before their wedding she announced (and she wasn’t kidding) that she was giving up the theatre for good. Because they would never see each other otherwise, she said. Because the pay stunk. Because she was tired of lying to her parents about it. And so on. The real reasons were: there’s a limit to how much rejection a person can take, and the cost of train fare.
“I’ve had it with the limelight,” she said, and Gordon kissed her as passionately as a man whose hands don’t stray can.
Like Ed before him, Gordon respected her virtue. To her relief, to her disappointment. She was the type of young woman who had been raised to take baths in the dark. On faith she accepted that she must have been seen naked in her life but when she imagined her mother changing her diapers she imagined a photographer changing film—using a box, doing it by feel. Added to which Ed’s idea of romantic bliss had hardly toppled the walls. When she and Gordon kissed, her body yearned. When she thought about what her body was yearning for, she cringed. Yearning and cringing, her seizured rumba to the altar. Which turned out to be the flower stand in her parents’ living room. Her father hadn’t worked steadily since the start of the Depression, so it was only a small family ceremony in the living room.
Afterwards, after the cold cuts, sandwich squares and lemonade punch, Doris and Gordon drove through pelting rain to the waterfront and drank half the bottle of bootleg whisky that was the best man’s wedding gift. Doris had never been inebriated before. She had assumed it would relax her, but it made her so jumpy she screamed at every clap of thunder.
She screamed when Gordon picked her up and staggered over the threshold of the decrepit Victorian apartment house that was their new home. He carried her up the three flights of stairs. She covered her mouth so as not to scream and wake the other tenants. He put her down to open the door, then picked her up again and carried her into their little furnished loft. Earlier in the day she and her mother had cleaned it, you could still smell the Murphy’s soap. He kicked the door shut behind him, wove over to the bed and dropped her. She let out a pure, high, steam-kettle scream, and was applauded it sounded like, but it was the rain pattering into the room. Around the bed was a canopy of drips. He fell down beside her. “I can’t see,” he said. Her response was to remove his glasses, a liberty she had never before taken.
She carefully put them on the bedside table. She felt very calm now. More than calm, she felt a cold formalness, a peculiar expertise, as if her job were to dismantle this very long man feature by feature, limb by limb, and spread him on the bed for the sake of science. In her head a German-accented voice sang, Ze shin hone’s connected to ze ankle hone, ze ankle hone’s connected to ze foot hone, now hear za verd of za Lord. She was all set to undo his tie when he turned toward her and began to pull out pins that held the soggy garland of pink roses in her hair.
With her help he succeeded. He patted her head and murmured, “The bride.” He kissed her. Still kissing her, his hand slid down her hair to the front of her neck and then lower, to her collarbone, and she demolished into the flesh that surrounded her breasts, she was all breasts on a pillow of flesh, but his hand lifted, and where it landed next was stretched along her waist. “Small,” he said, giving her occasion to appreciate the yardage of his fingers. Then he rolled onto his back and closed his eyes.
“Sweetie?” She shook him. Shook him harder. “Sweetie.” Gave up. Let’s face it, for all her brave readiness she was mostly relieved.
The next evening was the first time. It wasn’t
her plan but she ended up wearing the Saturday-night nightgown her mother had sewn and wrapped in a Weston’s bread bag and left under her pillow two days before the wedding. Thick flannelette, high-collared, floor-length, a pattern of tiny strawberries … a flap, midway down the front, that you unbuttoned. Doris knew what it was, what it was for. How many Sunday mornings had she seen her mother’s plain white Saturday-night nightgown laundered and drying on the basement clothesline? (Never the outside line.) The strawberries, now those were a surprise. Risqué for her mother. Would Doris wear it? Her reaction when she opened the bag was an embarrassed, insulted snort. Crumpling it up and stuffing it back into the bag.
But she packed it with her trousseau, didn’t she? And that second night, when Gordon set the tone by emerging from the bathroom in grey cotton pyjamas and a housecoat, all her nerve slithered off and she made her entrance in “the contraption,” as they would eventually call it. She caught him squinting at the flap as she climbed into bed. “Don’t laugh,” she said.
“I’m not laughing,” he said and switched off the light.
Eight months went by before she had the nerve to touch him down there. It was February. She remembers, because earlier in the day Ed’s sister had telephoned to say that Ed’s ship, HMs Exmouth, had been lost at sea and that Ed “had gone down defending the Empire against the Nazis.”
“Oh, don’t tell me,” Doris said, although somehow the news seemed like old headlines. She pictured Ed slapping the waves as he sunk.
“You were almost a war widow!” the distraught sister gloated, as if by dumping Ed, Doris had thrown away her one shot at glory.
When, hours later, Doris wrapped her fingers around Gordon’s penis, the impulse was to have something to hold on to in the world. And to verify that being the receiver of this thing was all the glory she or any woman needed. That wasn’t verified, not overwhelmingly or lastingly, but the sense she’d had for months that his penis was no carrot was.
She wasn’t completely innocent, she’d heard that a man’s thing was supposed to feel hard, not be so droopy. His worked perfectly fine, he ejaculated, it was just that it took a lot out of him. Sweat so torrential she sometimes held out a hand to see if it wasn’t the roof leaking. His feeble heart banging away. When he paused for a breather she could never tell whether it was that, or he was having heart attack, or he was through.
That night as on every other night she awaited the warm drool between her legs. She was the one who cried out then, she was so happy for him, so happy for herself, her drawn-out pleasure. As usual her climax had happened way back from all his fiddling around trying to get himself erect and inserted.
In other words his penis was no disappointment. Far from it. The other payoff was that intercourse was painless. Nice and easy, for her it was anyway. At her end it was rather luxurious while being so driven at his end that it was, really, a heartwarming event. Most women have to be pregnant before they experience that rush of protective love that a blind little invader of their body is capable of arousing.
By the time she was pregnant she was so moved by his penis—its helpless pluck—that she was pitching in: rubbing it on her bare breasts (“the contraption” had long since been torn up for rags) and planting little kisses on its German-helmet-like head. Somehow she wasn’t surprised that her lips had what it took to make him erect. Which is not to say that her feelings weren’t hurt. He found her private parts unsavoury—this was the conclusion she drew—and she started washing them in a vinegar solution that seared her numb and within a few days lent an orange tinge to her pubic hair. For a while after that she wouldn’t touch him, but eventually she couldn’t resist. Back to the rubbing and squeezing. The little kisses.
When he ejaculated in her mouth for the first time she spat the semen all over his stomach and groin. She would have sworn there were quarts of the stuff. She was horrified. But even as he was apologizing and pawing at the fanned-out strings of semen linking her lips to himself, even as she was watching his dumb play on this harp, a pulse was drumming between her legs and she was like a bomber of Berlin, gaping down from the stratosphere at the splendid aftermath, saying to herself, “Look at what I just did!”
Did he ever kiss her down there? Seventeen years later Harmony would put the question to her. “Are you crazy?” Doris would answer. She could imagine almost anything but she could not imagine Gordon nuzzling her like a dog. Until Harmony came along, she had thought it was pretty far-fetched that any woman was loved in this way. She wasn’t even sure that it was legal. It had to be slightly demented, she thought, the desire for somebody’s lips on your private parts. Yet there it was, sideswiping her during sex with Gordon, springing up in her dreams where nine times out of ten the kisser was a woman. In one of the first of such dreams the woman was her great-aunt Beatrice! The sleeping Doris thought, “Oh, well, Aunt Beatrice is dead,” and decided to enjoy herself. She woke up aghast, climaxing.
These dreams continued all her life, once or twice a week.
She’d be at a home-and-school meeting or at the beauty parlour, and suddenly she’d be in a clinch with a woman. As in dreams where you’re naked in public, nobody paid attention. Furthermore, the climaxes that rocked her awake made the ones she had with Gordon feel like minor aftershocks. So she wasn’t talking about nightmares. A lick of shame maybe as she emerged from the smoke of the dream, but shame wasn’t inevitable. Could she help what she dreamed?
Could she help what she daydreamed? About the time that Gordon stopped making love to her (it was before then, but here’s the version she lives with) she would be attending a home-and-school meeting for real, no dream, and find herself staring at Harriet Barker and imagining her ironing or cleaning her oven in a see-through black negligée. Harriet was the tall, thin, sophisticated type. Only if Doris dressed her in a sexy nightgown and stuck a cigarette in her mouth could she conceive of her doing housework. When Harriet wasn’t there, Doris gazed at Libby Burt, who was trim and perfect, a little Dresden doll smelling of Jergens lotion. Libby she liked to imagine hanging laundry in white underpants and a white lacy brassiere. Pouty, sighing Libby, bending to pick up a towel, standing on tiptoe to peg it to the line.
For at least a year that was as far as it went. Visions of beautiful women doing housework in their underwear and nightgowns. And then one day she put herself in the picture. Showing up unexpectedly, being invited in. (No wonder when Robin knocked at her door, she knew what to do!) And then her dream women weren’t even ones she was acquainted with. Women on the bus, receptionists, nurses, women she spotted as she tore through magazines for coupons. Women who were only drawings! The ScotTissue woman in her tight zebra pants and red sweater with the white fur collar. The Hertz rent-a-car woman! “She’s Got the Hertz Idea,” the ad said. What did that mean? Stupid with longing, Doris tried to decipher the caption, as if the woman herself might have been the author, but the message was impenetrable. The woman had the Hertz Idea, that’s all that was clear, and because of this idea the woman’s lovely forehead was perspiring, and her mouth was wide open, and her tongue—red as her lips—was sticking out as if to catch raindrops.
Whether she could help them or not, Doris’s daydreams did shame her, though not to the degree that she put up much of a fight or was tormented. A rictus under her heart was all it really amounted to, a few seconds of adjusting to the evidence that she was one way and the world was another. She might have fretted more than that but there didn’t seem to be any point. Daydreams like hers were comparable to seeing crazy shapes in clouds—Winston Churchill wearing a poke bonnet, say. What was the chance that that mile-wide Winston Churchill head up there was going to start bellowing, “We shall fight in the fields!” and terrorize innocent bystanders? Until she met Harmony she would have said that she was more likely to win a million bucks than she was to kiss another woman even on the lips let alone below the neck.
So Harmony was a miracle. The absence of shame and guilt was a miracle. There was fear, but only after
wards and only of being discovered. Under Harmony’s hands, Doris’s body turned to bells. She could just lie there, blameless, as Harmony instructed her in the declension of her own flesh. “What’s this?” Harmony asked, touching Doris’s nipple. The nipple chimed.
“My breast,” Doris said shyly.
“Your nipple,” Harmony corrected. She cupped her hand over Doris’s crotch. “This?”
“You know.”
“Lie still, Baby Lamb. What? What is it?”
“It’s… down there.”
“Cunt,” Harmony said.
Doris gave an embarrassed laugh.
“Say it,” Harmony said. She meant business.
“Cunt,” Doris said out loud for the first time in her life.
Harmony stroked her with one finger. “This?”
“Beats me.”
“Lie still. I never knew such a jittery woman. You don’t know what this is?”
Doris shook her head.
“That’s your labia. Your labia majora, to be specific.”
“Labia majora,” Doris said, feeling like Tarzan.
“Labia minora,” Harmony said, moving on.
Sex was something else altogether. Slithery, equatorial. For Doris it almost restored her belief in God, because the lyrics that entered her head as she approached orgasm were from her old Sunday-school hymnal and because after her orgasms she found herself inspired to sing them (with Harmony humming along in a loose vibrato), feeling that at last she really understood “glory on high” and “joy divine,” and what it was to be hallowed and unburdened. On the train home the phrase “abomination of desolation” kept occurring to her. She couldn’t sleep. Come dawn she’d be standing between cars watching the endless basting of the sky by wires and poles while every love song ever written got an airing in her brain. Harmony had told her that lesbians were not as few and far between as Doris had thought, and maybe so, but Doris doubted the same could be said of women who decorated your breasts with gold leaf. She wondered whether, if she bought some gold leaf, she could talk Gordon into plastering it on her. “Well then, Sweetie, what about drizzling me with honey and licking it off? After the kids are in bed, I mean.”
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