Wicked Women

by Fay Weldon

  What happened last summer? Let me put it like this. I took a decision on my father’s behalf and carried it through in a way that quite shook me. I discovered a ruthlessness in myself which I fear I may inherit from my mother. What I did certainly smacked of the impetuous. Impetuously, my lovely mother ran across a road, and that was the end of her.

  My family background? It was stable and ordinary enough to begin with. I lived with my mother for my first thirteen years. So far as I knew I had no father. We lived in a small house in a mean suburb; my mother worked as a secretary; all her earnings went on our subsistence and to see me through ballet school. She was not a typical stage mother, not the kind who vulgarly forces forward a talentless child; on the contrary. My talent had been obvious to everyone from my seventh year: my mother merely did her best for me. I suppose, in retrospect, that she had a tendency to the threadbare, to dramatic self-denial, to martyrdom. If we could make do with an old brussels sprout rather than a fresh and more expensive green pea, we did. My dancing tights were darned, not instantly replaced, as were those of the other children in my class at the Royal Ballet School. Yes, the Royal Ballet School. I am as good as they come, I am told. If we could save money by walking, and not taking the bus, we did. Of course I was curious about my father, but he was absent to the point of non-existence. I assumed he’d walked out on us. I knew my mother didn’t want him mentioned: I knew it would be risky. I always felt she and I were in a boat together, in dangerous and mysterious seas, and that if ever I rocked the boat, both of us were lost.

  But when my mother died her sister was able to get in touch with my father readily enough. He turned up on the doorstep within days of the funeral. It turned out that my mother had quite coldly and ruthlessly kept my father away: she would let him have nothing to do with us. She had accumulated large sums in a dollar account; hundreds of thousands of pounds, which he had sent for my maintenance over the years, and which she had kept but refused to touch. These sums I inherited, but, incidentally, in time lent back to my father. Yes, his income fluctuates wildly; he is a theatre producer working out of San Francisco; his great love is The Dance, as he refers to it, though I wish he wouldn’t. It sounds pretentious. But my father is very particular; he loves beauty, he loves perfection: for him The Dance exists as some kind of Platonic ideal. My father is no sort of dancer himself; that is the strange thing: my mother showed not the slightest aptitude. It is as if my father’s absorbing interest has been inherited in physical form by me. It is enough to make one a Lysenkoist, a Lamarckian, and believe in the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

  I don’t think it is that I am miraculously well-informed, Miss Jacobs, I think it is rather that the rest of my generation is so badly informed. My mother and I had no television set; we borrowed books from the library. I daresay that helped.

  Yes, of course I was upset by my mother’s death. It was so sudden. Five years later, and I still dream about her. Whenever I buy new dancing tights I think of her, and feel guilty because I have no intention of taking up my needle and darning. I may be composed but I promise you I am not without proper feeling. Yes, I think I have properly grieved, and properly incorporated her into my being. I am grateful to her for giving me birth, and no, I do not resent her because she hid my father from me. She lived in one world, and he so very much lived in another. She wanted to protect me; she never could understand how little protection I needed.

  The sudden appearance of my father on the doorstep? No shock or trauma there. Fortunately he is a very good-looking man so it was easy to accept him as a father. Good looks help in most situations, I find. He’d called from Heathrow first, to explain himself. I’d thanked him for his interest, and for his trouble in coming all the way from the States. I asked him if he was married, if he was bringing anyone with him, and my father replied he was not married, since the law did not allow it, but he was bringing his lover. They went everywhere together. I tried to envisage her, but since I could not envisage him either, I failed, and perhaps just as well.

  Two men turned up on my doorstep, hand in hand, not the man and woman I had expected. It was disconcerting for a moment, that was all. Many of the boys on my course are gay, or claim to be, or pass their adolescence as such. The acknowledgement of bisexuality, in my circles, is more and more common. I should not have been taken aback, but I was and it showed in my face; Bo said to my father, distressed, “You should have warned her first: I begged you to but you wouldn’t listen. You never listen!” and I could tell they were as good as married, and relaxed. Bo was in his mid-twenties, African-American, gentle, kind, smooth-skinned, and a dancer too; I could tell that at once, simply from the way he stood: a body at rest, but with all the waiting energy of a coiled spring, and only at rest the better to prepare for that spring. I liked him at once; well, I am like my father; I adore beauty, and Bo is so beautiful. Besides, if he loved my father and my father loved him, that was enough for me. I could hardly claim exclusive rights to a father so recently acquired, could I? It might have been much worse; he might have turned up with some blonde bimbo on his arm, or a dowdy wife; he could have had six boring children: I’d still have accepted it. As it was I was elated. If I was perforce to do without a mother, obliged to have a new life, by all means let it be with a gay couple from San Francisco. My father was one of those guys with a bald head, a good moustache, and sad, humorous, intelligent eyes. Okay, so Bo was a young and beautiful show-biz boyfriend, so what. Well, yes, a few eyebrows were raised amongst the neighbours; they may have been an ordinary enough couple in California, but they came over as exotic up and down my very suburban street.

  No, I repeat, I did not find the fact that my father was gay in any way traumatic. Many a man breeds a family before discovering his true sexuality. I am a rational person. For the most part what happens does not distress me: what I am does not depress me; I can see that Fate has dealt me many good cards. It’s just that sometimes what I find myself doing disconcerts me, Miss Jacobs. And I wake too early. I need someone to evaluate what is right and what is wrong. Or, in your terms, to differentiate between healthy behaviour and unhealthy, mature and immature. That’s as pejorative, as judgemental, as you lot are ever likely to get. You’re soft.

  I decided to stay in London to continue with my training; I lived with my aunt—who fortunately had a less frugal temperament than my mother—and I was with my father and Bo during the summers. Either I went over to San Francisco or they came to Europe, and we would tour the main cities, living in the best hotels. One meets little prejudice if one sticks to the centres and can spend money. My father’s credit was always good: it was only sometimes he had cash flow problems, when I was happy enough to help out. It was his money, after all.

  My Aunt Serena told me I had been conceived just before my father “came out” as gay. When he told my mother she was sickened, angry and horrified; she was after all the child of her generation. She felt the best way to protect me was simply to wipe my father out of her and my life: better to pretend that I was an immaculate conception than the daughter of what she saw as a pervert. My parents had met at a production of a Sondheim musical: it seems my father was trying very hard at the time to confirm his heterosexuality but had in the end failed. However translucent, however ethereal my mother, she was still too female for him. He did his best to honour his responsibilities in relation to both of us; it was my mother who wouldn’t let him. Yes, he left her for Bo.

  Why should I not be kind towards this cast of characters, Miss Jacobs? Why should I feel angry? Everyone did the best they could, according to their lights. Even the truck driver who ran down my mother was not to blame for what he did. She all but flung herself under his wheels. That’s why I am so glad I am a dancer; dancing like singing is an activity that can’t possibly do any harm to anyone else. And if I tire my body sufficiently I have no energy left to wonder since everyone I know believes they are good, and does the absolute best they can considering the circumstances they’re in,
then why is the world in the mess it is? Which otherwise might exercise my mind considerably. Seven hours a day at the barre, and you have little energy left for cosmic thoughts, thank God.

  Last May my father called to say he was coming not with Bo but with Franklin. He had broken with Bo, after sixteen years. I was distressed and told him so. My father said I would love Franklin as he did. Everyone must love Franklin. No, Bo had done nothing wrong: my father just felt it was just time to move on. I felt cheated. Go to college and say “my parents are divorcing” and everyone feels sorry for you: say “my father’s left his boyfriend” and you’ll elicit no sympathy, only at best a prurient curiosity.

  A couple of weeks later I had a phone call from Bo; he wept as he talked. I could not bear to think of his lovely eyes puffy and his perfect face swollen and disfigured. I would have preferred him to be composed, not to weep. His evident distress would do nothing to help him win back my father, who could not abide tears, or sulks, or disfigurement. To act blithe and make my father jealous would be much the better way, and I pointed this out to him. But Bo was too upset to listen to what I said. Franklin, Bo claimed, was a cheat and a liar; he would sleep with anyone or anything if it paid him to; he was very charming and very slippery: my father was completely taken in by him. Bo, in fact, spoke like any wife, discarded in favour of a newer, younger model. I could not bear it; I wanted everything to go on as it always had since I’d met them: we three, through the hot summers, in perfect accord and harmony. I told Bo I would do my best to intercede with my father on his behalf, though frankly I hardly knew how to set about it. I only knew I must.

  Franklin took it into his head to call me from San Francisco the week before he and my father flew over. I did not like the sound of him at all. You can tell a lot from voices, and his was somehow greasy, as if truth could never get a proper hold of it. He said he did so hope we would get on, he thought he should introduce himself in advance: I was so important in my father’s life, and now would be in his. He was so looking forward to his English holiday: he’d never been to Europe before: he hoped I’d found somewhere quaint and Olde Worlde for us to stay: he’d heard our theatre was fabulous: he looked forward to fitting in a show or two. I saw no reason at all for the phone call, other than that he wanted to check up that I’d made the bookings. In the past Bo had simply trusted me; I booked as I saw fit, and I’d never let them down.

  Intimidate other people? Who, me? I don’t think so. In fact I think my trouble is rather at the other end of the spectrum. I am full of self-doubt. I lack assertiveness. I sometimes think I should go to classes. There are lots around.

  I cancelled our hotel in Venice; I booked one deep in the English countryside. It was an Olde Worlde hotel near Stratord-on-Avon, expensive, staid, and much favoured by Americans. I got us one double room, one single, and wangled seats for a couple of “shows” through friends. Bo loved Shakespeare; so did my father: I was not so sure that Franklin would: in fact I doubted it. But shows he wanted, shows he’d get. I hoped his knees would twitch with boredom.

  I met them at Heathrow; I drove them to the hotel. Franklin was attractive: I could understand why my father doted on him. He had soft, large, childlike blue eyes and a very pink and fleshy, pouty lower lip: soft and weak. He was no older than I was. He made you think of sex. Bo made you think of matters more ethereal. Franklin had a high opinion of himself: he believed he was some kind of blond, well-muscled Adonis; he looked to me like an up-market rent boy. Worst of all was the soft voice which said whatever my father wanted it to say. And my father adored him. Franklin was a coward; we had to walk right round the car park to keep in the shade; he was convinced just a glimmer of sunlight would give him cancer. And he was very pale; the pallor you’d attribute to malnutrition, Miss Jacobs, but is just a particular skin type, like my mother’s, like my own. The opposite end of the spectrum from Bo: perhaps that too was part of the attraction. For my father to have left my mother for black Bo was one thing; to leave Bo for white Franklin was another. This way, it seemed, corruption and self-deception lay. I felt what I had never felt before: that it was safer to be heterosexual; that homosexuality was inherently dangerous; that a love directed towards something familiar, not something apart, could the more easily be replaced by lust, and lust in turn be overtaken by the desire for sexual excess. You had to be careful, or you ended up in the bath house. And that there was indeed such a thing as perversion: conceived by narcissism out of the homoerotic, slithering out to pollute and infect everything around, and that my father was oh some kind of slippery slope that fell away into—what? Hellfire? I had no idea, but I didn’t like it, and I feared for my father, and someone had to rescue him. I had a sudden notion of the existence of Evil, in absolute terms. I had always thought of evil as an adjective; now I could see it was a noun, and a proper one at that, well deserving its capital letter.

  The hotel was as stately and staid as I had anticipated. There was a willowed drive, and a Capability Brown garden, plus lake with swans. Franklin fell in love with it at once. The staff were courteous to the point of servility. My father and I put up with it; Franklin revelled in it. It was assumed that Franklin and I, who were of an age, were the couple: that my older father would have the single room. When it turned out otherwise, when the porter was asked to put the men’s luggage into the double room and my small suitcase into the single room, he did so, but hurried away. Pretty soon reception phoned through. Management told us with deep regret that it was against company policy for two men to share a room with a double bed. Management was embarrassed, Management was tactful, but Management was immovable.

  Franklin was baffled. My father was aghast. I told them this kind of thing was not unusual outside London; I said the solution was simple. Franklin and I would share the double room: in the night my father and I would swap places. This we agreed to do. It was late, we were tired; the two men had flown a long way; simpler to give in than cry Homophobia! Barbarity! and walk out into the night.

  It was hot. Indeed, there was what amounted to a heat wave. Once prolonged good weather sets in over England it tends to stay, week after week. The sky was deceptively hazy, the palest of blues: nothing like the clear bright densely blue Californian sky, of which I admit to not being overly fond. It seems too real, something actual, like a painted, arching ceiling, not the illusion, that accumulation of the next-to-nothingness of atmosphere, which “the sky” actually is.

  No, I had no particular feeling about leaving my bed so my father and his lover could share it. I am not hung up about sex. I just don’t do it if I can help it. I focus my sexual feelings into dance as a true priest embraces celibacy the better to realise the intensity of spiritual experience. This, to tell you the truth, is what worries my father about me: he being so much in denial of the possibility of a life not ruled by desire. And he thinks my loveless state must in some way be his fault. That by following his own passions through he has somehow prevented my own from flowering. Obscurely, too, he blames my mother for encouraging me to dance, in his eyes making matters worse. Parents seem to be like that. They blame themselves, or one another. I am prepared to take responsibility for myself. If I can’t sleep, that’s my doing, not theirs.

  To continue. No sooner had my father laid his head on the pillow of his narrow bed in his quaint and Olde Worlde single room, complete with false eaves and flower prints on the wall, than he fell asleep, exhausted.

  “He isn’t going to wake before morning,” I said to Franklin. “I think we’d just better let him lie there, and ignore the bed-swapping routine. Besides, the air-conditioning in our room is better.”

  Franklin agreed. We would share the double bed. It was only sensible. A soft night breeze blew in through the open latticed window, and played over my sleeping father’s face, and refreshed it with all kinds of garden scents: I could detect lavender, and night jasmine, and violets. But Franklin slammed the window shut, and I suppose he was right: moths and mosquitoes came in a-plenty as well as
the perfumes of the night. Personally, I never get bitten by mosquitoes, a quality I inherit from my father, but poor Franklin suffered dreadfully; he was allergic to bites, it seemed. We left my father’s room, in haste.

  Now it had seemed to me from the occasional sidelong look that Franklin had directed my way during the afternoon that his homosexuality was a decidedly moveable feast. As Bo had indicated, he would do whatever he wanted with anyone, regardless of gender, if only he could get away with it. His soft hand lay frequently in my father’s, but held in itself the potential to stray. I daresay this contributed to my father’s obsession with him: that he loved Franklin a whole lot more than Franklin loved him. A middle-aged man, head over heels in love with a young boy. I didn’t want to see my father as pathetic, I did not want my love for him spoiled by pity. It was obvious to me that my father existed in Franklin’s life to further Franklin’s interests: a leg up (and over) in the theatre world to bring him a fraction nearer to the stars, to yield up the cultural background Franklin knew he needed if he was to go far as a kept man, even in the city down the coast, in Hollywood.

  Franklin lay naked in the bed; I lay naked next to him! It was too hot for covers. The window was closed: the air-conditioning hopeless. We both knew what would happen. Franklin of course had no idea of the degree of my calculation, my ill will towards him, my affection for Bo; certainly not the capacity for martyrdom I had inherited from my mother. To lose my virginity thus was the cold brussels sprout; to have kept it for a loving relationship the sweet and tender green pea I, like my mother, could not allow myself. And if I think about it my sleeplessness dates from this night. I have not really slept well since.