‘By the way, Mr. Peters,’ she said trying imperceptibly to read the letter, not succeeding as he moved towards her, ‘Do you know of a green philosopher by the name of Max Bergmann?’
‘Can’t say that I do.’
Helena paused for a moment, ‘Oh. His name was mentioned in close conjunction with yours in an article about the trial.’
He looked at her impassively.
‘I think he might interest you.’
He didn’t comment on that either, simply stretched out his hand. ‘It’s been more of a pleasure than I supposed, Ms Latimer.’
‘Thank you,’ Helena took his hand, shook it, she later thought, with perhaps too much warmth to cover what had been altogether too ostensible snooping.
Chapter Twenty
Women - Adam Peters told himself in another sequence of the dialogue that had run obsessively through his mind for the last week - are no longer interested in love. The life of the passions has been lost to them. They have wanted to approximate men and they are achieving it fast. The problem is they have chosen the worst men as their models; the hit and run, fast track variety.
Nonsense, his other voice protested. The reason women are not interested in love is men themselves. And quite right, too. They’re either violent brutes who kick first at what’s closest to them or blindly arrogant brutes who don’t notice what’s closest to them. What’s more, you, my dear ageing male, are becoming the worst form of misogynist. The whining closet variety. A few little disagreeable episodes and whambang, a whole sex is at fault.
- No, just a regional phenomenon.
- Name names.
- Bah!
With a violent gesture, Adam Peters flung the creamy white paint on his roller angrily at the wall. He watched the thick rivulets form, lazily edge their way downwards. Then with a mutter he corrected the damage and spread the paint evenly on the wall. Up down, up down. But for the ceiling, it was almost done.
A cold breeze whipped up the terrace and round the open door of the Seehafen drawing room. He looked out disconsolately and wished with a desperate fervour that he might see Ms Helena Latimer walk in. He could shout at her then rather than at the wall, the paint, himself.
What had induced her to leave like that, without so much as a word? They had fallen asleep with their limbs entwined, their eyes locked in caress. If anyone had asked him then would he wager his life on her being there when he woke, he would have done so gladly. The taste and smell of her had engulfed him like the sweetest of dreams. Still did. And like the sweetest of dreams she had dissolved as soon as he had opened his eyes.
But why?
Adam sloshed more paint thickly on the wall, covered the outlines of picture frames, ancient marks, like ghosts of other lives.
He had asked himself that question at least a thousand times in the last eight days. Days in which he had been good for nothing, unable to concentrate, to sit still, to sleep; days in which he had thrown himself into physical labour which left his mind too free to roam.
Was a shared passion, for it had been shared, he was certain of that, worth nothing at all, not even a goodbye, it’s been nice knowing you? Was he so hopelessly out of touch? Or had it all been a sham, a masquerade?
No, he could swear that wasn’t the case as certainly as he could swear that he was standing holding this roller of dripping paint in this room somewhere in Germany.
He put it down, went to gaze out the window. The view was no solace today. The mountains were covered in lowlying cloud. He could barely see the lake.
Was it something he had said? For he knew that he had said far too much. He had derided her, mocked her. But it wasn’t her he was mocking so much as the fact that she had chosen to stand for something, as if all of her could be subsumed in that. Words said in anger, to provoke. Directed at someone else, he had thought as soon as he had said them. For she had come to him after that, met him so beautifully, so fully. He could still see those eyes, darkly blue, with something of astonishment in them, gazing at him, wide open at the height of her passion.
With a curse, Adam Peters threw the pack of cigarettes he had dug out of his pocket on the floor. Perhaps he should have told her he loved her, thought he had fallen in love with her at first sight. It wouldn’t have been a lie.
Yet no woman wanted to be told of love anymore. No man either, he suspected. It was a dirty word, much worse than its four-letter kin.
Perhaps it was simply that he understood nothing of women anymore, was no good to them.
‘Stupid self-pity,’ he lambasted himself out loud, sank into a deep chair draped in a dust cloth. ‘You’re soon going to join the Victim Brigade,’ he sneered at himself, stared into the empty hearth.
It had started well enough, his life with women - after the first few inevitably clumsy overtures, more like the tuning up of an orchestra really. The overture itself had taken place right here. That was probably why he always liked being here. Had taken place the very summer that he had read Anna’s Book. Perhaps that romantic great Aunt of his had inspired him.
He had met the girl, Olga, in Munich, had invited her to join him and his friends at Seehafen. She had come, a blousy young woman of his own age, with soft lazy eyes and a fierce tongue. They had talked unstoppably about Marx and Freud, Vietnam and America, Red Army Fractions and alternative societies. She knew far more than he did, innocent Californian that he was. About love as well. And she had taught him, right here under the trees for the length of that summer. It was a lesson well worth the learning.
Olga still wrote to him occasionally, he to her and he had seen her not so long ago, shared that laughing conspiracy of one-time lovers, playing with but never quite reviving the flame.
He had liked women then, continued to really, despite what he sometimes named for himself as the ‘hiccough’ of the last few years when everything had gone wrong. And there had been many women after Olga, friends and lovers, any number of which he might have settled down with happily enough. But the women seemed to want it no more than he. The times weren’t about settling. They were about falling into and out of love. Everyone was in a hurry, hungry for more and different, relishing the freedoms that freedom brought. There was pain, of course, but few seemed to sink with it.
Perhaps they were all merely young and callous.
Certainly, as the decade grew older things shifted, imperceptibly at first and then with a vengeance. He had been in Brazil with the Yanomamo for some eighteen months and when he returned to Berkeley, the University he was by then attached to, there was a new woman in the department.
He first met Samantha Grey at a meeting. He was rivetted by that clear precise voice which argued so logically, so concisely, as much as he was taken by that mane of flaming hair, the green eyes, the pert suit over her trim body. He had always liked strong women who spoke their own mind, had always liked to argue - Bettina’s legacy, undoubtedly; and there had been no one to argue with in the Amazon. So when she approached him after the meeting, invited him to lunch, emphasized how much they had to talk about, he was delighted. He still remembered how he had had his hair trimmed, gone out to buy a new shirt and trousers, had presented himself punctually at 12.30 at her office door.
They had gone to a small Japanese restaurant near the campus, sat at a table outside by a little makeshift fountain. They had talked for nearly two hours, talked shop - kinship systems, myths, barter economies. They had dropped names, exchanged cv’s and bibliographies. It had all seemed strangely exhilarating, like some first meeting with a tribe he had long forgotten. It was only in retrospect that he realized the only questions she had asked him about the Yanomamo were about the women.
It was a busy season. There were notes to write up, courses to organize, trips to various campuses for pre-arranged lectures, as well as visits home to his parents. So except for brief exchanges in the corridor, he hadn’t seen her for some weeks when she invited him home to dinner. He had gone willingly, fascinated by the punctiliousness of the little
card she had sent him. The dinner was a more formal affair than he had expected, an assortment of colleagues and strangers around a carefully set table, complete with candelabrum. She had presided with all the cool of a practised hostess, though once he had heard her bark at the little Mexican maid in a voice which made him shudder. He ought to have known then.
But that was always the story one told oneself in retrospect, Adam acknowledged, still staring into the empty grate. Stories which had endings were always different from those one lived.
At the time, he was quite taken with her ways: an Easterner, he thought to himself, amongst this casual gaggle of Californians or those who had acquired its lazy ways. So when she had asked him to stay after the others had left, he had stayed, more than willingly.
Going to bed with her had a whiff of high excitement. Although she had effectively invited him, it was as if there were a host of trials he had to endure and overcome, a book of rules he had to learn, before he was considered suitable for the ultimate race.
At one point she had said to him, her pretty lips formed into a perfect pout, ‘Unless I initiate, it’s rape, because I’m the weaker one.’
‘I hadn’t noticed,’ he had laughed, assumed a joke. And when she had said to him, sitting astride him, her wild mane of hair covering him, ‘I don’t like penetration, except sometimes, when I’m on top,’ he had simply buried her words in a kiss.
And so they had gone on for some months, merrily enough, enjoying the astringency of their professional arguments, not exactly engaged on a love affair, but lovers nonetheless, though the four-letter word itself never reared its head.
During the summer, he had gone back to Brazil to finish up some work which would provide the finishing touches to his book. He hadn’t thought about her much then, had assumed without quite putting it into words, that it was over, the matter of a season.
It was when he got back early in September that she told him. She had invited him to lunch at her place. He could see the expanse of the Bay from her window, the curve of the Golden Gate Bridge, had been gazing at it dreamily, when she said, ‘I’m pregnant. It’s yours.’
His first reaction was to protest, - but I thought you were on the pill, you never said… He didn’t. He knew there was no reason to make that assumption. So he stilled his thought, said instead, looking into those green eyes, ‘Do we get married or…’ She hadn’t let him finish his sentence, had simply kissed him and declared proudly, as if he had passed another test, ‘I knew you’d do the right thing.’
It was strange how she always knew what the right thing was, about everyone and everything, as if there were a moral guide book imprinted on her mind which she read off at any occasion.
They rented a house together in the hills overlooking the City, had a wedding party of which all he could remember was his mother’s tears; started their lives together.
She was as meticulous over the pregnancy as she had been over staff meetings and dinner parties. Everything was by the rules. He could understand her not wanting to be touched, her fear of harming the baby. What he couldn’t abide was the way she perched herself next to him every time he started to work and complained that she couldn’t concentrate. ‘Look, I would carry the baby for you, if I could,’ he said to her, meaning it, ‘But I can’t, so please let me earn our keep.’
She never forgave him that, repeated it to their friends, as if it were the ultimate in male malevolence.
He started to curtail his working to office hours, relishing them as he had never done before, loving his book, writing it speedily. But he was fascinated, too, by the baby’s growth, wished she would let him touch it.
She kept him away from the birth, preferring her female friends. Yet as soon as he saw that puckered little face with the clear unflinching gaze, a sense of wonder overcame him. And a gratitude. The intensity of it surprised him. He held the tiny bundle in his arms. It was not unlike being in love. ‘Thank you,’ he kissed Samantha, who averted her face. ‘Thank-you. She’s beautiful. Like her mother.’
‘You don’t mean that.’
‘She’s beautiful,’ he repeated firmly.
The sense of little Janey’s beauty, the awe that she was there at all, never altogether left him, not in the face of Samantha’s growing hostility nor in what now became her constant jibes. There was a new rule book, a time-table of who was responsible for the baby in what hours, who did the shopping when. Samantha wrote it, had assumed that was her natural right.
He would gladly have done more than his half share.
Before Janey had come along, he had always thought that the great anthropologist, Malinowski’s description of the behaviour of Trobriand Island fathers was an idealisation - one of those little sleights of hand common enough among anthropologists. In order to emphasize the lacks in their own culture, they painted a rosier-than-thou picture of the other. So Malinowski, product of a strictly patriarchal Europe, where the division of labour put children firmly in the mother’s camp - though they were the father’s property - evoked an idyllic Trobriand Island: a matrilineal society, where fathers tended to their babies with a natural fondness, fed and changed them, carried them around for hours, gazed on them with pride and love, talked about and exhibited their virtues and achievements untiringly. And because of this, the children when grown, in turn had a duty toward their fathers, even though these same fathers had little authority or property power over the generational line.
With Janey, Adam felt he could have entered the idyllic condition of a Trobriand Island father - if only Samantha had permitted it.
It was her clock-like precision which drove him mad, the fact that nothing was ever spontaneous or allowed its own time. So that on the dot of four, whether he was in the midst of a game or feed or more rarely a paragraph, the shift ended.
Yet whatever he did, however malleable he made himself, it was either not enough or too much. It came to him after some months had passed that Samantha resented the baby with a barely containable passion, could neither forgive Janey for being there, nor him for wanting her there and enjoying her presence. He knew the first was not altogether unusual, so he waited for it to pass. He hoped that once it did, her resentment of him might diminish as well.
It was in May, when Janey was five months old and Samantha had already proudly been back at work for three, that his wife announced she had accepted a post at Tufts outside Boston. She had given him no prior warning.
For once he had voiced his rage, ‘And what am I supposed to do?’ he had shouted.
‘You can come with me and be a house husband. Or you can stay here. Janey comes with me, of course,’ she had looked at him smugly. It was in that look that he had started to hate her.
He knew that he was part of a generation living an experiment. The roles were being reversed and he had been cast as old-fashioned wife. Would he have minded so much if he had felt the casting had more basis in love and less in vengeance? He didn’t know.
In any event, he had gone with her, unable to be parted from Janey, at a loss as to what else to do. He didn’t have a set of rules ready-made to apply to the situation. He arranged for a leave of absence, found odd bits of lecturing to do on the East Coast; and for a year he had written articles, made inroads on a new project and looked after Janey except for those five afternoon hours when the minder he had hired came to the house
Strangely enough, he had enjoyed it. Janey sustained him, her gurgling laugh, her first running steps, the babble which wasn’t quite speech; as did the favourable notices for his first book when it appeared, the promise of a post at Princeton. There were a few friends too, though the oldest one, met again here, told him he was becoming a martyr to the women’s movement. Adam didn’t feel like a martyr.
He was both too much in love with his daughter and too angry with his wife for that. The anger had come again after his book had appeared.
Ever since the new year, Samantha had taken to having regular meetings with her women friends in the hou
se. He thought he didn’t mind the meetings, but the voices raised in complaint would sometimes fall irritatingly on his ears. It was always the same tone and when he bumped into the women, they would look through him, like he imagined the Victorians had done for their servants.
Had women felt they suffered from this invisibility? His mother? Bettina? He certainly couldn’t imagine the latter ever being invisible. But perhaps it was the case, and he was being made to pay for historical crimes.
Then one day, he had heard Samantha’s voice, raised over the others, mocking his work, complaining of how that piddling little achievement had prevented her from finishing her own. He had stolen her ideas, she claimed. It was the last which sent him into a fury.
They no longer shared a room, rarely sat at the same table. But that night he had sought her out, his fists tightly clenched lest he raise them to hit her.
‘I don’t like it being said that I’ve stolen my work from you. There isn’t a grain of truth in it and you know it.’
‘Isn’t there? You’ve stolen my life.’
He looked at her aghast. ‘Stolen your life?’
‘I have your child now. I’m trapped.’
‘Trapped?’ he could only echo her stupidly.
‘Yes, it’s your doing.’
‘You’re not trapped. You can go when you please.’
‘I can’t leave my child.’
‘She was mine a moment ago.’
‘She’s mine. I carried her.’
‘I am not responsible for biology, Samantha.’ He had hissed that.
‘I should never have allowed you to seduce me.’
‘I never seduced you. Who invited me out, invited me home? Who got me to marry her in a contemporary version of the shotgun marriage? You’re so completely enmeshed in your cruddy ideology, that it’s driven you mad. Tell me: is there anything I can do which is right?
She looked at him blankly.
‘No, nothing,’ he had answered for her. ‘Because I owe you. By the very fact of my sex, I owe you. Right?’ He was screaming by then. ‘It’s biologically determined.’
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