by Whitney Otto
“We sound as if we had the same father,” said Cymbeline.
“It’s a conflict for me because I don’t care if a man opens the door for me. I mean, I don’t see it as patronizing. My consciousness-raising group? Forget it. All that talk about men crying, and the Masturbation Issue, and the Good Girl Tradition, the Orgasm Issue, and there is no way that I will ever be down enough to taste my own menstrual blood like Germaine Greer.”
“I’m still thinking about the men crying.”
“Yeah, they’re only ‘good’ men because they’re ‘in touch with their emotions.’ ” Jessie dropped into the chair next to the chaise.
“I thought it was because they were being asked to partake in the menstrual part of your program.”
“Can I tell you something? My father is a thousand times better to women than those men who cry, but I won’t even bring him up with the other women because I don’t want to hear how I have false consciousness when all I know is my dad is a great dad. I’m not a feminist because of my father. It’s the larger world. Geez, if society followed my father’s example, the women I know wouldn’t even be having these conversations. I believe absolutely in equal rights—it’s the other stuff—”
“The blood and the orgasms?”
“Yes! That I don’t care about. I think I changed my name so the other women would know how deeply I feel about legal abortion and equal pay and employment . . .” She fell silent.
Cymbeline touched her hand. “Sometimes I don’t understand how you young women can get it so right and so wrong at the same time.”
When Cymbeline said she needed a break from posing, Jessie knew the older woman understood that Jessie’s concentration was shot. Jessie followed Cymbeline out to the garden, where every so often the summer air revealed the nearness of the sea.
When Jessie mentioned that she recognized some of the plants from Cymbeline’s pictures, Cymbeline said, a touch of tension in her voice, “Tell me that this day isn’t about some lovers’ quarrel.”
“Actually, we rarely fight,” said Jessie.
“I’m not one of your feminist friends,” said Cymbeline.
“It’s true.”
“Then why don’t you tell me what else is true?”
So Jessie said, Emile is so good at his profession he makes it seem effortless. He can be funny without strenuously trying to entertain, and he understands the art of flirting and self-deprecation. He isn’t petulant or prone to silent fits of ill temper. One of his most winning characteristics is his endless interest in everything.
And his most dangerous trait is his interest in everyone.
And that there is no drug like the moment he discovers you.
She said that when she fell in love with Emile she believed she had found that mythical love of equals, thinking, Oh, we’ll travel and takes pictures, side by side. He didn’t care if they had children—odd fact: He was great with kids—or if she knew how to cook. He was a bit of a neatnik and accustomed to cleaning the kitchen or doing laundry.
“You know what I love?” she said. “To watch him iron.”
It was Emile’s blurring of traditional roles that bolstered Jessie’s confidence in their chances to make it work, though it also distanced her from the women’s art collective, all those women with their complaints that began with the words “He never—” The women seldom noticed that Jessie didn’t join in when their talk turned to the angry weariness at the physical caring for another human being over the age of consent.
Once or twice she tried to defend Emile, only to have her group say that she was a victim of “double-consciousness,” W. E. B. DuBois’s idea that one is always looking at oneself through the eyes of others. You are an insider and an outsider, politically and socially speaking, all of which has the effect of keeping you from your own true identity.
Only sometimes she wondered if her true identity was Lover of Emile. The lover, not the loved. Though, she added, she was loved. He made her feel loved.
“I heard of you before I met you,” said Cymbeline. “I hadn’t heard of Emile.”
“I know.”
“Is that the reason for your joint women’s project?”
“No. No. As I said, the BelleFemme Project is about showing that art can be without gender, you know.”
When Cymbeline didn’t say anything, Jessie could feel her throat start to constrict; ashamed if she should dissolve into tears, turning this bad day into a dreadful day. She said softly, “I don’t always know where he goes.”
Cymbeline sighed. “You think that offering up these women—these women that you are sharing with him, will fix things.”
“I don’t know what I think. I only know that I love him and I can’t lose him and I can’t say that to anyone.” Jessie caught her tears before they fell. “You must think I’m foolish.”
“I was married for nineteen years. I don’t think anyone in love is foolish.”
• • •
The bedroom was as modestly furnished as the rest of the house. As Cymbeline sat on her bed and pulled a worn copy of Dawn Powell’s novel The Wicked Pavilion from the lower shelf of her bedside table, folded papers stuck between the pages, she said, “I was offered an assignment at Vanity Fair in New York City. Our kids were gone, and I had been a faculty wife for so long I almost forgot I ever had a life before wife and mother. I was forty-nine years old.
“So, here I was with my heart’s desire and Leroy wanted me to wait until the term was finished—another fifteen days—before coming to New York with me. I told him they wanted me now, and he could meet me later, but they wouldn’t wait. He said that if I left, our marriage was over,” she said. “It wasn’t my choice to have to choose.
“This is what I wrote him from the train to New York,” she said, handing one of the pages to Jessie.
She read, in bits and pieces:
Why in the world would you think that it puts you in a ridiculous position for me to go away for a time on a working job. . . . I am sure you are bitter about my methods of working my exit, but with your attitude nothing else was physically possible for me. I begged too many times for co-operation and permission. . . . I cannot get myself straightened out through idleness—I have never really learned to play—and if I did want to play, I could not afford to. . . . I assure you I do not value myself so highly as a photographer as you seem to think, but neither could I venture afield unless I had some confidence in my ability. Only by putting myself thru it, as it were, can I really think that I am worth anything to you or the family. . . . Try not to forget that I have always really done the essentials, have always been at home after school, when the children came, that my work has not been as distracting as most wives’ occupational bridge, that I had always had the hope that in place of going down in the scale of worthwhileness and achievement as most hausfraus do that I was going up. . . . I really thought I had the right of an adult to undertake an obligation. I never thought for a moment that a person so liberal in all else would deny me this.
Cymbeline said to Jessie, “I never think anyone in love is foolish. We do the best we can.”
Jessie handed the letter back to Cymbeline.
She said, “But you must know that this project is your affection’s swan song.”
• • •
They had just returned to the backyard when the women heard a car pull into the driveway. The seven-foot wooden fence that divided the driveway from the back garden obscured the identity of the car, but Jessie recognized the radio station and the funny little wheeze that accompanied the cutting of the engine. She felt the thrill she always felt at the prospect of Emile: something she thought would lessen over time but continued nonetheless, and mixed in with relief.
The car’s back door opened, and Jessie could hear their camera gear being dragged across the leather seats before the door of the BMW was slammed shut.
It wasn’t until she heard the soft footsteps of the driver walking to the front door that Jessie knew it wasn’t Em
ile. There was no aural evidence of a passenger.
“Hello? Hello?” The woman’s voice was slightly husky, the vocal equivalent of an unmade bed.
“In the back,” said Jessie, standing with Cymbeline near the fence.
The gate opened to reveal a barefoot girl in a thin cotton sundress that didn’t cover much territory, more youthful and fresher than the quality of her voice suggested, struggling with the assorted bags that Jessie recognized as belonging to Emile: the camera, the tripod, the strobes, the umbrellas. Upon seeing Jessie at the gate, the young woman said, “Thank God,” and handed off the bulkiest, heaviest bag.
“She’s a little gorgeous, isn’t she?” whispered Cymbeline, as the girl moved past the women, dropping everything else on a lawn chair. The appearance of this girl unexpectedly altered the entire relationship of Jessie to Cymbeline. Whereas they had spent the first half of the day in a conversational thrust and parry, trying to find the common ground that so many women seem determined to find when meeting other women for the first time (in this case complicated by the shy hero worship of Jessie for Cymbeline), they now had feelings of long friendship, a kind of connection, summed up by the word we, when Cymbeline whispered to Jessie, “Do we know her?”
“So, I drove over here,” said the girl, “in Emile’s car? He wanted me to bring his stuff, you know, to meet him here?” Her voice trailed off as she took in her surroundings, searching for him at the same time. “He said he’d be here?”
Without warning, she swooped down on Cymbeline, giving the elderly woman a hug of such spontaneous affection that Cymbeline was startled into hugging her back. The photographer’s stature seemed that of a child next to this tall, willowy girl who commanded attention with the sheer force of her Nordic beauty. “I hate to ask, but can I get a drink of water? I’m parched.”
“Inside,” said Cymbeline, whose eyes followed the sylphlike girl as she went into the house.
“Jesus,” said Cymbeline. “She’s like something out of Greek mythology. The sort of being that lives in a stream or a wood and has Hera turning everyone into livestock. Who is she?”
Jessie shrugged.
The girl called out to ask if she could use Cymbeline’s phone, and Cymbeline told her to help herself, then said under her breath, “Just don’t expect Emile to be on the other end,” which caused Jessie to laugh. Which caused Cymbeline to laugh.
The women were sitting on the painted metal slider; Jessie closed her eyes, enjoying the sun for a moment.
Then they heard the girl on the phone laughing.
“You know,” said Cymbeline, “I sometimes think things are harder for young women now than they were in my time. Oh, we could also be shamed into doing things that didn’t really benefit us in the name of modernity.”
“No one’s forcing me to do this project.” Jessie shifted her position, sitting up just a little straighter.
“Yes, well, maybe that’s the true burden for women—progress—the thing that appears as liberation when it’s really just another way for men to get what they want. Not what you want.”
“I do want to photograph all the different women,” said Jessie.
“Except the women aren’t all that different, are they?”
Before Jessie could think this through, or argue with Cymbeline, they were joined by the girl, hurrying into the garden, her beautiful body collapsing next to Cymbeline in a pose of forceful exhaustion, setting the slider in motion.
“I’m Ibis,” she said to Cymbeline, whose smile said everything about the girl’s name being Ibis. “Short for Scarlet Ibis. Like the firebird.” These days, everyone seemed to be rechristening themselves with names like Zephyr or Free or Love Butterfly—as if everyone under twenty-five was engaged in a child’s game of pretend. It seemed no one wanted to be an adult. As much as Jessie wanted to comment on “Ibis,” she knew that her own self-chosen name of Berlin more or less disallowed commentary. Then again, when Cymbeline was young, what about all those Italian and Eastern European names that entered Ellis Island and came out anglicized? Sometimes, Jessie thought, only in America is identity a choice and reinvention an imperative.
“I’m Jessie,” said Jessie to Ibis.
Ibis laughed her wonderful, throaty laugh. “I know who you are.”
Of course, thought Jessie, Emile.
“Your house is really cool,” said Ibis. “I could live here really easily.”
“Did you talk to Emile?” asked Jessie.
“Not exactly,” said Ibis, her eyes now closed and her lovely face tilted toward the sun, light mirroring light, much in the manner of Jessie moments before. Except for the light mirroring light.
“And?” said Jessie.
“Oh, he’ll be here,” said Ibis. She smiled a wide smile, lowered her face.
“Fuck,” said Jessie softly, then, louder, “We’re losing the light.”
Cymbeline struggled from the swing with help from Jessie and Ibis.
Jessie noticed that Ibis’s bright mood had seemed to darken slightly when the two women were left alone, Cymbeline in the house.
“He did say to meet him here,” said Ibis, her tone a little wounded.
The childlike moue of disappointment, the posture of a gangling adolescent. Except the women aren’t all that different, are they? That’s what she meant, thought Jessie, those women, they’re all young.
“He wants to take my picture,” said Ibis. “I’m supposed to be part of a project he’s doing.”
A bruise, already beginning to yellow, showed on the tender underside of the young woman’s upper arm as she stretched in the sun, her long legs dangling over the arm of the swing. Catlike is such a cliché, but even more cliché, thought Jessie, is the colorful bite mark on the sweet softness of the girl’s outstretched arm. She’s very young, this girl, maybe (maybe) twenty. Maybe.
Cymbeline had correctly guessed Jessie’s reasoning when she’d agreed to this dual photography experiment: It would allow her to keep Emile to herself. It wasn’t about gender, or the male gaze, or who can better read a woman; no, it was knowing Emile’s charms and history, and trusting that, if she encouraged him to take pictures of all the girls he wanted—all those nude girls, or girls in diaphanous hippie garb; girls in bedrooms and sitting rooms and sunrooms and gardens. In the bath, in a pool, sleeping in the tall grass—then he would be satisfied. It would be all the possession he would need.
Look, she was saying, I won’t be like those other women you’ve left brokenhearted with your wandering.
Here, she was saying, I’ll go those brokenhearted women one better and stay by your side. I’ll admire the girls you admire and see what you see and want what you want. It’ll still be you and me, babe.
She remembered the first lines of Frank O’Hara’s “Meditations in an Emergency”:
Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?
Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.
Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?
I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.
Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.
Jessie turned toward the house to see Cymbeline coming outside, the Rollei dangling from its leather strap. Cymbeline dropped the camera in Jessie’s lap, saying, “You don’t need him. You just think you do.”
Jessie found Ibis sitting on the concrete stairs leading up to the cottage. She looked distressed, as if she had begun to cry, then stopped herself. Turning toward Jessie, she said, “He’s not coming, is he?”
“I honestly don’t know.”
Ibis said nothing as Jessie, moved by the young woman, this (maybe) nineteen-year-old girl, nearly a decade younger than Jessie, who foolishly fell for an older, i
nvolved man. Jessie sat close to her, their bodies brushing against each other, and the sweet, floral scent of the girl mingled with the jasmine and roses of the garden, punctuated by the exhaust and stray cigarette smoke of a passerby, and that elusive whiff of ocean. An embrace was more than Jessie could manage; sitting side by side on the narrow stairs as they watched the street was her limit.
“C’mon,” she said after they’d sat quietly for several minutes. “Let’s take your picture.” She lightly patted the girl’s back—barely touching her really, the memory of the bruised love bite still fresh in Jessie’s mind. “You’re too lovely to waste.”
“Sometimes it bums me out to be so pretty.”
Earlier, such a comment would’ve sent Jessie into a dark mood. Now it simply seemed silly that her attempt at comforting her lover’s mistress should be met with such undisguised self-love; the girl was very pretty.
“I’m serious,” said Ibis. “You don’t know what it’s like.”
This made Jessie laugh to the point where she found herself reclining on the sharp little steps. “No,” she said between breaths, “I guess I don’t.”
The girl blushed slightly. “God, that sounded terrible. And you’ve been so nice and, God, I mean, I think you’re very attractive, you know, for your age.”
“Oh, Ibis, you must stop before I turn on you.” She stood, extending her hand to the girl.
Beauty was something that the feminists in the women’s art collective didn’t like to talk about, unless it was to disparage men who liked “that sort of thing,” implying that the attraction to beauty was just another failing. But Jessie wanted to say, If you’re an artist, all you think about is beauty. Yes, it was possible to have a more personal definition of what you found exquisite, but there were some beautiful things that most people agreed upon: a cathedral, a house, a bridge, a nature vista, a necklace, a garden, a gown, a girl.
You couldn’t politicize beauty, no matter how much you wanted to; and you couldn’t shame people for being entranced.