She felt twinges of some new emotion that made her happy and then later made her uncomfortable. She had never experienced power of this kind before, and she rather enjoyed it. She had been wronged. She had been treated unjustly. She could forgive or not forgive. She could condemn him to … what? … outer darkness? Well, eventually she would forgive him, but not just yet.
Meanwhile Dixie Kizer seemed to appear in her life with increasing frequency. She was in the library, in the parking lot, at the cafeteria having coffee. At first Maggie was infuriated. That adulteress, she thought, that husband-stealer, that bitch, daring to follow me around. But after a while, Dixie seemed to her merely pitiful. And there was something peculiarly satisfying in chatting about the weather with somebody you knew had slept with your husband, but who didn’t know you knew. It gave you the chance to double-think them all the time—a shrink’s satisfaction, she supposed—to know the implications of what they were saying, their motives, their secret desires, and they had no idea you knew. Another kind of power. Maggie disliked herself for enjoying it, but who wouldn’t enjoy it, and besides, she was the injured party, not Dixie. Dixie was just dumb. Beautiful and rich, but dumb. And not even sexy.
“How rich are you?” she asked Dixie one day as they walked from the library to the cafeteria. They had met for coffee nearly every day that week.
“Rich?”
“People talk all the time. They talk about me and Philip”—she paused here and looked over at Dixie—“and of course they talk about you and Hal. You’ve got the money, they say. Do you? Lots?”
“I was brought up to think it was vulgar to talk about money.”
“It is. I’m vulgar. Tell me about it.”
Dixie told her that she had a trust fund, two trust funds actually—one from her grandmother and one from her father—and she couldn’t touch the principal but there was quite a lot of interest.
“Good,” Maggie said. “Good for you. Now that wasn’t so hard, was it.”
The more she talked with Dixie, the more Maggie felt she could forgive Philip. There was nothing, surely, he could find attractive or interesting about this woman.
Maggie’s silences became less long, less angry. She and Philip began to chat at breakfast. They went out for dinner again. They even had a cookout and invited the whole psychiatry gang. Beecher Stubbs and Calvin came, and Beecher whispered to Maggie that she was sure Philip was first choice for the Deanship, and Maggie smiled and said terrific. But when Calvin, later in the evening, told her the same thing, Maggie began to think it might really be so. Good for Philip. Good for poor old unfaithful Philip. That night they made love, tentatively, but it meant they were friends again.
Classes were not going well, however, and Maggie was studying longer and longer hours with less to show for it. Her paper on Frost turned out to have been a fluke; it was, so the hot Phoebe suggested, the product of too much Wellek and Warren and too little Saussure and Jonathan Culler. Revising it proved impossible and, discouraged, Maggie decided to write off Structuralism as one of the great lost mysteries. She moved on to Deconstruction and her confidence fell further. She began taking Xanax again, not to sleep, just to relax a little as she forced her way through Derrida and Foucault and Lacan. She couldn’t understand what any of them did when they deconstructed and she couldn’t figure out why they bothered. Their conclusions—that things were not what they seemed—were always relative and subjective. Nothing meant anything. Everything meant nothing. She despaired of the theory business altogether. Theory was merely a rival literature, a way of being important in the academic world even if you couldn’t write a novel or a poem or a play. She wrote up these opinions as notes toward her final paper. They were stupid, she knew. They were old-fashioned. They might even be proof that she was not equipped to go back for her Ph.D. She sipped a long scotch each night while she studied. Sometimes she’d have a second. She needed it. Philip, who noticed, didn’t dare say a word.
“If you’ve got your own money, why don’t you just leave him?”
She was having coffee with Dixie and once again Dixie was whining about how she had nothing, how she was nothing, how greatly she envied Maggie her marriage and her family.
“But you’ve got your own money,” Maggie said.
“Yes, but it’s only money.”
“Marriage is only marriage, for that matter. Do something.”
Dixie toyed with her coffee cup and searched for some response.
“Do you drink?”
Dixie was startled.
“I’m playing shrink, I guess, and I don’t mean to offend you, Dixie, but you seem so unhappy and you seem to have so little cause to be unhappy that I can’t help wondering if there’s some other source of your unhappiness. Like drink. Or pills. People often think drink is a symptom, they like to think it’s a symptom, but sometimes it’s the real problem and not a symptom at all. Or pills.”
“I never take pills.”
“It was just a thought.”
“I do drink, of course, like everybody, but I’m not an alcoholic, if that’s what you’re implying.”
“Of course not, but …”
“But what? But what?”
“Well, you do have that slightly bloated look that drinkers get sometimes.”
Tears filled Dixie’s eyes. “I can’t believe you’re saying these things. You’ve always been so kind.”
“I’m sorry,” Maggie said. “I truly am.” And she felt sorry as she said it, but later she realized she was not sorry at all. These things had to be said. They were true. Dixie Kizer would just have to face reality.
Dixie Kizer had faced reality all her life and she didn’t like what she saw. It was terrifying and she was not up to dealing with it and so she drank. What was so awful about that? Everybody she knew drank. It was a refuge, a place to hide, it was like her pink blankie when she was a baby. Her father had died young of cirrhosis and that’s why she had all the money Maggie was so curious about. And her grandfather had died of cirrhosis too, now that she thought of it. It was sort of a family disease. Her mother hadn’t died of it, at least not yet, though she probably would.
Her mother lived in Atlanta with her latest boyfriend. She had lived in New York and in Paris and in London with other boyfriends, and she still had apartments in London and New York, but this boyfriend liked Atlanta and so they lived there. He was Dixie’s age and very handsome in a hired-stud sort of way and, since he was a painter, her mother had opened a gallery for him. They each had a schedule. He painted every morning and was very attentive to her the rest of the day. Her mother descended the stairs shortly after noon, bathed, refreshed, and flawlessly made-up, and the stud would be there waiting for her with a Bloody Mary in hand. Just to take the edge off. They didn’t drink again until after five. The other boyfriends had provided similar services, and Dixie had accepted this life as reality. Boarding school and college she accepted as a kind of substitute reality. Her abortion and her breakdown didn’t really count. They were unreal altogether. They never happened or at least they should never have happened.
So what was this nonsense about facing reality? She, after all, was the one who married Hal. That was reality. What did Maggie Tate know about it? She couldn’t even pass her course in theory.
Still, Dixie reflected, she liked being with Maggie. Maggie was a kind of surrogate Philip. If that was as close as she could get, she’d take it.
She poured herself a stiff bourbon and stretched out on the chaise longue. Philip might yet change his mind and show up some night. She had not seen him in three whole weeks, but she believed in love. He might come to her, and soon. He might.
It was August and the heat was terrible. Ordinarily the Tates spent the month of August in London so that Maggie could see theatre, but this year she was taking her theory course and Philip had a couple essays he wanted to write, so they remained at home, working, sweltering.
Cole wrote from Hopkins and told them, telegraphically, his news. He wa
s working on the immunology of white cells; very interesting, very important work. He had met a really great intern and they were sharing the cost of the apartment so he’d be saving money this summer and maybe in the autumn too, if they continued to share the apartment. He hoped they were both fine and that Mother’s course was going well.
Philip read the letter and noticed that the intern’s gender was not identified and decided, on the whole, it was better not to know.
Emma wrote from her island in Greece that the days were unbearably hot and the nights unbearably cold, but she was having the best experience of her life. It was very cultural. The other sand-sifters were okay and the work was exhausting. Bubby was the greatest. She hoped Mother’s course was a big success and that she’d get an A plus at least.
Maggie read these letters and cried. The kids were great. The kids were loyal. But their expectations served only to make things worse. She had been working steadily on her paper for weeks and she was convinced it was a disaster. She told Philip this, and she told herself this over and over, and finally she decided to drop the course. “Don’t do this,” Philip said, “please don’t,” and he persuaded her to go and talk to Professor Ritson about the paper and simply ask her for some help. “But don’t drop the course,” he said. “It’ll be the death of you.”
And so, terrified and bucked up by a couple Xanax, Maggie went to talk with her professor.
“What’s your point?” Phoebe Ritson said.
Maggie explained at some length the reading she had done in the early Faulkner, the thesis she had devised, the arguments she had used to develop her thesis, the texts that would substantiate it, the references, the footnotes, the intertextuality at issue here, but Phoebe Ritson interrupted and asked again, “What’s your point?”
Maggie explained that she was trying to explain.
Phoebe Ritson listened for a while longer and then said, “Look. I’ll read through your paper right now and give you some kind of preliminary report. I’ll give you advice. I’ll suggest revision. And that’s a hell of a lot more than I’d do for anybody else, any normal student, I mean. I’ll do it for you because you’re older and you’re a woman and you’re coming back into the field and I want to give you a shot at it. I believe in sisterhood and all that. But you’ve got to do the work. You’ve got to summon the intellect and the spunk and the balls, so to speak. There’s just so much I, or anybody, can do for you. You’ve got to save your own life, as it were. And if you can’t, well then it’s better to face it right now and get on with something else. Doing lit crit is not the end of the world, if you get me. Be an investment banker. Be a real estate agent. Be a cook, for God’s sake. But if you’re gonna do this stuff, lit crit, you’ve got to be tough. Okay?”
Maggie listened. Phoebe Ritson was a woman in her thirties and she was hot. She needed nobody. She controlled her own life. All hail, Phoebe! Maggie saw that she could never be Phoebe Ritson, that it was too late, that she simply didn’t have the talent for lit crit. Nor for investment banking. Nor … but, as Phoebe would say, what’s the point?
“Okay?” Phoebe Ritson said again.
“Got it,” Maggie said, “A thousand thanks, Professor Ritson. You’ve made all the difference.”
She went home and drank gin until she threw up. Then she took a Halcion and went to bed. Perhaps, with luck, she would never wake up.
It was almost a month now since Dixie had been alone with Philip and she decided she had to see him, to be with him. She had seen him at cookouts at the Fioris and the McGuinns. She had seen him at a performance of Comedy of Errors put on at Brandeis. And she had seen him at his kitchen window one night at 2 A.M. when she drove by just to check on him. But she wanted to be alone with him. She wanted him on top of her, inside of her. She wanted to crush herself into him until she disappeared altogether.
She thought of Hal and his filth and his sick goings-on in Boston. He had told her things she didn’t want to know and he had showed her the raw flesh of his groin and, just this week, the knife marks on his breasts and under his arms. Theda did it at last, he told Dixie. He’d persuaded her to cut him, just a little, and then she’d licked up the blood. Hal confided this slowly, patiently, holding her down on the bed, whispering that she could do the same to him, he would let her, he would help her, and he would only do to her as much as she wanted. He’d stop whenever she said to stop. He wouldn’t hurt her, not really. He paused, his breath sour and hot. It would be the fuck of a lifetime, he said. But Dixie turned her face away, sobbing, and finally he let her go.
She hated hearing these things. She hated thinking about them.
The next night, though, as she lay on the chaise longue thinking of Philip, she imagined him bending over her, bearing down on her, hard, hurting. With a knife at her breasts? Licking the blood? It was revolting. It was the very opposite of the reason she loved Philip: he was so gentle with her. He was hesitant in making love, he held her softly, he kissed her with feeling that came from his heart and not from his groin. She lifted her glass and discovered it was empty. She filled it with straight bourbon—to heck with water—and took a long sip. Hal couldn’t understand this kind of love. He had always been rough, grabbing and twisting and wrenching his gross satisfactions out of her body. He was a violent man, period. He liked to hit her. It was true that he had hit her only once, a fake hit intended to get her excited. But he was, he was a violent man. He was a potential wife-beater, a rapist, a killer. He was not beyond that. He could kill her. And it would be her right to defend herself. Women did that all the time these days. They shot their husbands, or set them on fire while they were sleeping, or just stabbed them to death. Maybe she should agree to his sex games. Tie him up with ropes around that disgusting thing of his, get his hands and feet tied to the bedposts, and then take a knife … It was all so clear and easy. She could do it. She could kill him. And she would get away with it too, they all did, the abused women who killed their husbands. She lay on the chaise longue, her eyes closed—was she sleeping or was she imagining this or, she laughed to herself, was she actually doing it?—and she saw him stretched out on their bed like the da Vinci model of man, and she saw herself draw the knife from his left nipple down to his crotch. And then from the other nipple down to his crotch. And then across his chest, a line connecting the nipples. She had made a perfect triangle on his body. She could press deeper and then lift the skin off his chest. She would do this. She straddled his body to make the work easier. She ran the knife over the lines she had made, pressing a little deeper, just a little more, and a little more. Fine. She loosened the flesh from his left nipple and then from his right, and she ran a finger along the line between them to loosen the flesh there, and then she began to peel it, slowly, down toward his crotch. It stuck a bit, but she worked slowly, tugging with both hands where that was necessary, and she found it was coming along nicely. She was fascinated by what she was doing and she was fascinated that it was such an easy operation. And necessary too. She should have done this a long time ago.
She sat back to examine her work. It was then that she truly saw what she had done. The huge triangle of skin was wet in her hands and she could smell the blood and she sat up, screaming.
Hal came down the stairs two at a time. “What?” he shouted. “What?” But he saw it was nothing, just the bourbon, and he sat on the chaise next to her and held her until the screaming stopped. He smoothed her hair. He kissed her on the neck. He pressed her head to his chest.
She put her arms around him finally and said, “Don’t leave me, please. I’ll stop drinking. I’ll stop now. Don’t ever leave me.”
Maggie skipped the next two classes and when she returned it was just in time for the final exam. She had never seen anything like it. She had expected essay questions, of course, but these seemed not to be questions at all, but points in an argument she could not understand. “Structuralism divides the sign from the referent and poststructuralism divides the signifier from the signified. This is a
n obviosity. But it’s implications for Derrida’s Limited Inc as opposed, say, to Roland Barthes’ From Work in Text require (de)lineation. N’est-ce pas?” She looked down the page and saw that the questions or essays or whatever they were got increasingly confusing. She had a headache from too many pills and too little sleep. She was sick to her stomach.
She took several deep breaths and began to write an essay on the word “delineation,” breaking it down, stretching it out, free-associating with it. She planned to take it into other art forms—painting, sculpture, architecture, videotics—after which she would move backward into signs and referents, signifiers and signifieds, making informed guesses as to the content of Limited Inc and From Work in Text. A half hour later she sat back and looked at what she had written and saw it was gibberish. “Shit,” she said, and did what she had wanted to do all along. She got up and left.
She wanted out, out of this exam, out of this world. She avoided the cafeteria where, she had no doubt, Dixie would be waiting and instead went straight to her car. She drove around Cambridge for a while and then took Mass. Ave. to Storrow Drive and out toward the airport. She began to cry a little, but she brushed away the tears and willed herself numb. She forced herself to think of the road and the cars and the fact that everything ends sometime, somehow, and this too would end.
She got to the airport but kept on going. She hit the stretch of the Revere Beach Parkway where they had porno movies and Lo-Ball bars, and she slowed down, looking for a place to get a drink. A lousy place. A dive. She pulled into Buck’s Neon Palace and parked her car.
It was mid-afternoon and Buck’s was nearly empty. Neon signs provided the only light and cast an unreal shimmer on the bar and the pool tables and the tiny stage at the back. Two rotten-looking kids were playing pool and an old Asian man was wiping down the tables. The bartender nodded to her as she stood in the doorway.
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