by Diana Ramsay
"What good would that have done? If she's that desperate for attention it's obvious she can't control—"
"You'd be surprised what people can control when they know you're on to their little tricks. It would have been worth a try, at any rate."
"All right, so I didn't try. Damn it, I didn't know when I rented the lousy apartment that I'd have to take on the job of resident analyst!"
"Hey, Joyce, take it—"
"I'm sorry, darling. I didn't mean to snap your head off. My irritability threshold is so low that getting caught in the rain would probably inspire a fit of hysterics. It's shameful, but if you only knew what I've been going through—"
"Baby, you don't have to explain to me. I'm sure it must be bad or it wouldn't be getting to you like this."
"It's bad, all right. It's not only bad, it's horrible. You know, every time I start thinking about the kind of mind that willfully submits itself to a frontal assault like that, my blood runs cold. Now, of course, she's stepped up the pace. She blasts off all night long, and this past weekend she didn't shut the damn thing off for a minute, unless she gave herself a rest while I was out walking the streets to get a little peace. It's a wonder the thing doesn't explode."
"Isn't there anything you can do to deaden the sound? Line the walls and ceiling with cork or something?"
"It wouldn't help all that much. I had a soundproofing man in, and he told me that to do anything really effective he would have to take up the flooring in her apartment and practically rebuild the place. At an astronomical cost, needless to say. I tried getting after the landlord, but it was no use. He said if I was that bothered I should move—and forfeit the security, naturally. He said she's paid her rent on time for six years and there's nothing he can do to keep her in line."
"There probably isn't. And even if there were, he probably wouldn't do it. When do they ever? Maybe you ought to move."
"What about the security? What about the agent's fee? I won't get that back either—I've already checked. And what about moving expenses? I can't see myself making the outlay all over again."
"If you're short of money—"
"It's not only the money. It took me ages to find this place, and the thought of embarking on another hunt—Besides, who knows what I'll come across in the next place? Dracula in the basement and the Wolf Man in the attic, with my luck. I'll try to grin and bear it a while longer. If I don't do anything further to antagonize her, maybe she'll let up."
"Chances are she will. Chances are calling the police set off a marathon tantrum and when she cools off she'll be feeling ashamed of herself."
"I don't much care how she feels, as long as the marathon ends. Do you know, I can't even telephone at home? I have to make all my calls from a booth or here at the office. Which reminds me that lunch hour's just about up and the mob will be upon me any second. Take care, darling. Thanks for letting me bend your ear."
"No sweat. I wish I could do more than listen. Look, baby, if it gets too bad, just come here and camp out with me for a while. Okay?"
"Not a chance. We made an agreement, remember? It would take more than Charlotte Bancroft to make me go back on it. If you really want to be helpful, send up a few prayers for her change of heart. Or make a wax effigy and stick pins in it."
"There speaks the voice of rationality. Which course of action do you prefer?"
"Maybe you'd better do both. I wouldn't like to think I'd missed out on aid from any quarter through want of asking for it. All kidding aside, unless she lays off I'm going to have to haul her into court, and that's something I'd hate to do to anyone. Even her."
...
One wall of the large living room was a montage of travel posters, many of them advertising music festivals ("Jake's wall," Kitty Shanks had explained. "He's a percussionist, and the posters are his way of keeping score of the places he's toted the sticks"); the wall opposite was all mirror; the other two walls, painted white, had windows. There were no chairs, only giant cushions in diverse colors, a low divan covered with a batik throw, and a shaggy yellow Greek rug, which made an ideal seat, as Joyce had discovered on her first visit. Sometimes one or two of the others joined her on the rug, but not tonight. The only other group member with squatting potential present tonight, Veronica Stanton, a willowy red-haired dancer, every inch the siren (she was full of diatribes against men who regarded her as nothing but a sex object), had announced that she was being taken by her broker to a late supper at El Faro and didn't want to get her black velvet trousers all hairy.
Rebecca Rosenberg was on center stage at the moment. Soft-spoken Rebecca, with her rounded contours and Madonna's face and air of placidity that beguiled people into thinking she didn't have a care in the world, until they spotted her fingertips swollen, with the nails bitten to the quick.
"... hate myself, just hate myself," Rebecca was saying. "Every time I swear to myself it'll be different next time, I won't behave like a bitch again, but it doesn't do any good. I'm not a bitch by nature, I know I'm not. I don't come on like one with anybody else. But just let him telephone me or show up at the door and the rage rises up in me like bile. I can't control it. I try and try, but I can't. So when he wants to take the kids to a football game I tell him I have tickets to The Nutcracker. It's a lie, of course, and I hate myself for it. Why do I behave that way? I don't love him anymore, but I certainly don't hate him. It's not as if I can't trust him with the kids. He loves them, and he'd never in a million years try to use them against me, any more than I'd try to use them against him. So why can't I—"
"You do use them against him," Del Peterson cut in, in a tone as uncompromising as her words. Militancy was her bag, and, emaciated, with perpetually red-rimmed eyes and pale face obscured by wings of lank, straw-colored hair, she looked like someone who spent a lot of time at the barricades. Reputedly Del was short for Adelaide. "Quit kidding yourself, baby. You're using the kids against him and you're doing it because you hate him. When he offers a football game it isn't good enough. It never has been. You have to be one up, so you make him feel like a slob by coming on with the ballet."
"It's not like that. I like football myself and I'm not a snob. It's just that—"
"Okay, so if he offered the ballet, you'd top him with a football game. What's the dif? The point is, you hate him. You've never forgiven him for using your cunt and trading it in for a different model, the way he does with his car. You've never forgiven—"
"That's not the way it was!" Tears were forming in Rebecca's eyes. "There wasn't any other woman. We just—"
"Okay, so he got tired of your cunt. Or you got tired of his prick. What's the dif who got—"
"But it wasn't like that! It wasn't!" The tears started to flow. Slowly.
"Balls it wasn't like that! It's never not like that. The whole one-prick-for-one-cunt bit is a myth, a bill of goods women have been sold for much too long. Men don't believe in it, they never have. It's something they've invented to keep us in the trap, and how it must have tickled the old funny bone down through the ages to see us swallowing it hook, line, and sinker. Fucking is fucking. All it takes is a prick and a—"
"Stop it," Rebecca pleaded, sobbing now. "Stop it, Del. You're being horrible!"
"—cunt. Cunt, cunt, cunt and prick, prick, prick. What's the dif whose? Why invent a mystique about it? All the blah, blah, blah about love is pure horseshit, and all the blah, blah, blah about love being gone is horseshit piled on horseshit.
How can something that never existed be gone? The way we delude ourselves makes me puke. We sell ourselves into slavery, and the worst of it is, we're overjoyed to do it. We rush to meet our doom with stardust in our eyes and confetti in our hair, and when we find out it really is doom we're—"
"You're way out of line," Joyce exclaimed, and immediately wished she'd kept her mouth shut. For Del was quick to react, with raised eyebrows, a mocking smile, muscles tensed and ready to pounce on a new victim. "I mean, you exaggerate so much. To do that is to knock dow
n one myth and set up another in its place. Some of us go into things with stardust in our eyes, but some of us have our eyes wide open. It's wrong to generalize. Every relationship is unique."
Del threw back her head and laughed—a bellicose donkey's bray of a laugh. "Too much! Oh, baby, that is too much! Every relationship is unique! Groovy! I dig that, I really do. You've been holding out on us, baby. Sitting there on your tuffet all preoccupied with your own curds or turds or heartburn, and all the time you have gems like that to contribute. 'Every relationship is unique.' Groovy, groovy, groovy." And Del threw back her head for another laugh, louder and more bellicose.
"She's right, Del." Support from Rebecca. "It is a mistake to generalize. You can't possibly know what goes on between two people."
"One does run the risk of getting too simplistic when one takes hard-line attitudes," Kitty said, in the kindly, judicious accents of a den mother. Well, it was her den.
"What you mean is that I'm outnumbered, so I'd better pipe down or be shouted down," Del said. She flashed her mocking smile at Joyce again. "Okay, Miss Muffet, you had a unique marriage and it went bust in a unique way. Why not tell us about it?"
Joyce hesitated. "There isn't that much to tell," she said, and even to her own ears her voice sounded prissy, uptight. How it sounded to the others was apparent from their faces, all but Del's full of reproach. No help for it. The challenge would have to be met. First, a deep breath: it came out a sigh. "I mean, it's not just reluctance to make a great moan and groan about my troubles, though that's part of it—early habits die hard. There really isn't that much to tell. Things didn't go bust or anything like that. It was more a process of erosion. Erosion of—"
Again Joyce hesitated. Erosion of what? Not of feeling, certainly not of feeling. Whatever she and Eliot had lost, they had not stopped caring about each other. Thus all was not lost. Something had been preserved, something that could be built on again when the time came. If the time came.
"Erosion of the desire to stay together. That's as good a way of phrasing it as any, I suppose. We simply decided that the life we were leading—deep in the suburban rut—was costing too much, much more than the returns justified, and—"
"Costing who?" Del asked.
"Eliot, mainly. He was doing television publicity, which he loathed. He went into it originally as a temporary thing, to get a stake to see him through his doctorate. But you know how it is, temporary has a way of becoming permanent when the money's good, especially if you've taken on obligations and—But I was paying, too. Being cozy and comfortable inside a cocoon can be soul-destroying, and I had seven years of it."
"Sounds boring as hell," Kitty said, with a laugh.
"Unless you have kids," Rebecca said. "But you don't have kids, do you?"
"No. We decided—" Joyce broke off. Damned if she'd go into that. "I wasn't bored, though. You see, I discovered I had a real flair for home mechanics. I practically rebuilt the house from top to bottom, and that took—"
"Seven years?" Veronica asked. "Seven years of home mechanics? And you didn't go off your nut?"
"Working with your hands can be satisfying," Del said, before Joyce could answer. "It gives you a sense of accomplishment, even when you know you're not accomplishing anything much. I used to be into making pottery, so I know. The thing is, you can get so far into the handicraft scene that you shut out everything else. Which isn't good."
"You're right," Joyce said. "That's exactly what I was doing, shutting things out, and it wasn't good. But then I woke up, and I was able to—"
"Woke up to what?"
"Why, to Eliot's needs, of course. Somebody who starts out with the ambition to scale intellectual heights isn't going to be satisfied doing something that doesn't provide a real mental challenge. If it hadn't been for me, he would have resumed work on his dissertation long ago. Once I faced the fact that providing a cozy existence for me was costing Eliot too much, I realized that things couldn't go on the way they were, that I'd have to stand on my own two—"
"Bullshit."
"Del," Kitty said reprovingly.
"It is bullshit. She sounds too good to be true. Who gives up the cutesy-pooh paradise where she's been nesting for seven years without a struggle? It's not human. It's not—"
"I'm not saying it was that easy. It wasn't easy at all. But when honor demands—"
"Honor? Who the hell thinks about honor when her lifeline's being cut?"
"When one is civilized—'
"Nobody's ever that civilized, baby! You know what I think? I think Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm here has more self-awareness than you. I think you come on like this because you've never confronted your problems in a gut way. I think—"
"That's quite enough!" Joyce was astounded at the intensity of the anger in her voice. Not warranted. Not warranted at all. Speaking bitterness was the name of the game: there was nothing personal in it. "Frankly, my dear," she began, exerting self-control, and was pleased that her tone sounded light and casual, "I don't give a damn what you think."
Del opened her mouth for a rejoinder, but apparently thought better of it. Slowly her tense face relaxed in a grin, though the red-rimmed eyes remained passionate. "Spoken like a gentleman," she said, echoing the casual note. "But remember, baby, even gentlemen lose their cool sometimes."
"Do they?"
"Do they ever!" Veronica said with gusto, and at once launched into an anecdote concerning the most gentlemanly man she had ever set eyes on, a Baptist minister in Houston, who had invited her to his private box in the Astrodome and tried to make her while a ball game was in progress. Pithy, graphic, and thoroughly irreverent, the story reduced everybody, even sorrowing Rebecca, to fits of laughter.
Anecdotes, outbursts, sporadic infighting—that was the way things usually went. Often some very real problems were introduced, but they never seemed to get explored very far; somehow the sessions, when they didn't lack direction, lacked follow-through. It was too bad, it was really too bad, that more couldn't be accomplished. Joyce had once said as much to Kitty, who had explained that the whole conception of women banding together to discuss matters other than clothes, the kids' schooling, and hubby's food preferences was totally new, so it was hardly surprising that progress was slow.
Well, perhaps. Joyce was not convinced. Not that it mattered. What if it was sometimes hard to tell the difference between a consciousness-raising session and an old-fashioned hen party? One evening a week was taken care of, and that had to be counted a plus. A great big plus. It wasn't so easy to find things to do away from home. Tried and trusty distractions like the theater, movies, concerts, and sightseeing jaunts were okay once in a while, but no use kidding herself, the absence of the post-mortems she and Eliot used to hold after every outing caused fresh pangs of nostalgia. Even if this had not been the case, it was a truism that distraction gone at full tilt soon loses its power to distract, so, for the most part, it was necessary to cope with the noise, and cope she did, with the aid of wax earplugs (plugs of rubber and earmuffs had been tried and found wanting). The wax hurt her ears when she kept it in for too long, and it didn't shut out the noise entirely, but, resorted to late at night, it enabled her to sleep.
One can, over a period of time, build up a tolerance for noise, just as one can build up a tolerance for pain. It is largely a question of exerting the will, of forcing oneself to keep busy with things that require full attention. Joyce kept busy. She made herself some summer clothes. She knitted a sweater for Eliot in a complicated Aran pattern. She worked a succession of difficult, tedious jigsaw puzzles of abstract paintings until the thought of Mondrian or Jackson Pollock was enough to make her flinch. She wielded a razor blade on Ivory soap to carve the whimsical animals that had delighted the children of friends in Moccasin until she had produced a supply to outlast the dispensing of Christmas gifts for the next decade.
The siege was bound to end. It was bound to. Nobody could keep it up forever. Charlotte Bancroft would see reason eventual
ly. There were limits to vindictiveness, after all. In the meantime, cope and go on coping. Joyce went on coping. Coping well. How well was brought home to her one day when she was walking past a midtown construction site, unruffled by the noise of the drill and by the vibrations underfoot and evidently showing it, for a deaf-mute rushed over to her and happily began addressing her in sign language. A triumph for mind over matter.
...
"You could get a tall stepladder, put the speaker of your hi-fi up against the ceiling, and blast back with a different station," Sheila said.
"Not such a hot idea," Dick objected. "All the horrible hag has to do is switch her dial to that station, too, and she's getting enhanced amplification."
Sheila was not fazed. "Well, how about records? The same record over and over until she screams for mercy."
"That's more like it," Dick said. "And I know just the record for you, Joyce. Respighi's Feste Romane. Somebody gave it to us for Christmas, and I swear the damn thing would wake the dead."
"Let's keep our eye on the ball, huh?" Sheila said. "Applying the kiss of life isn't exactly the idea, is it? How about Death and Transfiguration?"
Joyce laughed. "Sounds absolutely brilliant, but I'm afraid it might backfire on me. Mine isn't a repeating turntable, so I can't just start it and go away and leave it, and if I should happen to be more suggestible than she is—Still, I could always invest in a new turntable, couldn't I?"
"Don't do anything rash," Dick said. "You might be getting into deep waters. If the power of suggestion does its stuff, they'll book you as an accessory after the fact. Or before it."
"Well, perhaps I could choose something more subtle in the way of program music. How about The Rite of Spring? I can just see our sainted Charlotte dancing out into the street, straight into the arms of the men in the white coats."
"Hide all her clothes before you start the music," Dick said. "It should make for a better spectacle."