“It’s interesting,” he observed, “that the only man you say you loved is a father, as old as your own father, and forbidden to you by the mother, his wife.” He ended on a question mark, hoping I would pick up the thread. But I wouldn’t. I found his tiresome moralizing silly.
“I loved Alport before I knew he had a wife,” I said. “I’ve been to bed with older married men with more children than he. And not for love.”
Sometimes I rebuked him for the genetic fallacy: taking cause for value—which only proved to him that he was probably “on to something”; and sometimes, planting my profile smack in his line of vision, I penalized him with silence.
I would wait, smoking cigarette after cigarette, until he came up with a question. Usually it was, “I wonder why you are feeling hostile today?” or else it was his second-favorite conversational gambit:
“What about Frank, your husband?”
“What about him?” I would return. My husband, like my marriage, bored me, as, no doubt, I bored him. We no longer had any life in common. He was full of no’s and don’t’s while I liked to think I lived by yes and do. Frank did nothing but study during the week and see his friends on Saturday nights. He varied neither schedule nor sentence structure. The baby talk he had always used for addressing me in public he now used in private as well. Deceiving him had led me to avoid him, and since being in therapy exempted me from his sexual advances (“I’m still frigid, Frank, so don’t touch me”), our contact was minimal.
“You hardly ever mention him. Don’t you think that’s rather … uh … unusual?”
And then I told him once again that, not believing in romantic love and finding my husband sufficiently tolerant of my idiosyncrasies to permit me a modicum of freedom, I considered my marriage satisfactory. Apart from the sex, of course, which was my own problem.
“And Frank? Does he consider it satisfactory too?”
“He doesn’t complain,” I snickered. It was wrong of the doctor to call him Frank and take his side.
“Don’t you think he knows about your … uh … activities?”
“Oh, no!” I was shocked. “Do you think I should tell him?”
The doctor said nothing. I knew my “activities” had no bearing on Frank. They might have, if I ever pursued them for love. But I never did. Frank, however, couldn’t be expected to understand that. A conventional fellow, he would feel himself wronged and required to do something if he knew.
“What do you think, Sasha?” Dr. Webber asked, enigmatically stroking his beard.
“I think it would upset him terribly to know, and I’m really not out to hurt him, whatever you think. It would mess up all his plans. He’d probably feel obliged to leave me.”
The doctor nodded. He seemed to like that speech better than my other one, the one in which I weighed my own ten reasons for leaving Frank. That one made Dr. Webber break all his principles and actually give me advice:
“If I were you, Sasha, I wouldn’t make any drastic changes right now while you’re in the middle of analysis.”
He seemed to feel that the known was better than the unknown, another man would prove no better for me than this one, and a crazy nymphomaniacal penis-envying castrating masochistic narcissistic infantile fucked-up frigid bitch like me was lucky to have hooked any man at all.
Actually, Dr. Webber seemed less interested in the practical questions surrounding my marriage than in the theoretical. Over the months I had been working painstakingly at getting him to reveal his premises, but with little success. Until one day, while I was discussing a dream I’d had the night before, a chance remark I made caused him to reveal his entire theory.
That night I had dreamed a chess game in which I, a plain red pawn, had so yearned to reach the eighth rank and become queen that I had refused gambits, squandered opportunities, betrayed my team. Alone and unprotected, I went on trying for queen despite certain defeat.
“What does being queen mean to you?” asked the doctor, suppressing a yawn.
I couldn’t tell him about the Bunny Hop. Knowing I had once been considered beautiful might prejudice his own answer to the question I still hoped one day to ask. “The queen is the most powerful piece on the board,” I answered. “She outdoes everyone. She can move almost every way there is to move.” It was rich with symbolism and also true.
“The most powerful? Is she more powerful than the king?” he asked with an insinuating smile.
Either he didn’t play chess, or he was after something. I went along.
“In the world a king may be more powerful, but in chess the queen is more powerful. That’s why as a little pawn I wanted to be a boy and as a woman I enjoy playing chess.”
I was pleased with my answer, but nothing like Dr. Webber. I could tell by the way he sat up and began to scribble that he was through yawning for that session.
“Can you think of what the dream might be saying?” he prodded.
I considered. Frank had applied for a Fulbright for a year’s study in Germany. I was excited at the prospect of going abroad, but apprehensive as well; perhaps the dream took on that dilemma. As I was about to suggest something along those lines, Dr. Webber, impatient to share his revelation, leaned forward, reading from his notes.
“Even as a little pawn you always wanted to be a boy. Yet you long to be a ‘queen,’” he said. “You have ‘betrayed your own team’—your own nature?”
Dr. Webber’s crude “hints,” which I had always felt free to pursue or let lie, now came thickly. He was like a prompter, trying not to be heard, yet unwilling to let the lines be lost and the play ruined. The more I ignored his interpretation, the more certain he became.
Didn’t everything, he asked, reduce for me to queen versus king? My belligerence, my seductions, my willfulness? Did they not all point to a profound conflict within my nature? Was I not always attempting to conquer where I should yield? Take where I should give? Did I not identify with my father instead of my mother? Were not my very ambitions (to be a lawyer! a philosopher!), my rejection of maternity, my fantastic need to excel, my unwillingness to achieve orgasm—were they not all denials of my own deepest, instinctive self—my feminine self?
I had never before seen Dr. Webber so animated, not even when he was advising me to do nothing rash. I felt the time had come to plunge in and pose my own question. Catching him off guard in an expansive moment seemed my best chance of getting a truthful answer. After all, self-knowledge was what I was paying for.
He was still waiting for me to agree when, as casually as I could, I said, “Do you think I’m beautiful, Doctor?” If I could learn the truth about myself now, it would be worth all this painful analysis.
Dr. Webber pounced on the question. “Why do you ask?” he asked.
“I don’t know, I just wondered,” I said, looking intently at the telephone and mentally dialing a number. He was impossible to pin down; already I was sorry to have asked.
He examined me closely while my cheeks went red and my hands went damp. Then he said, “We have just come to an important—a breakthrough!—discovery with this chess dream. Even if you don’t acknowledge it openly, unconsciously you do acknowledge it. You ask, Do I think you are beautiful? You mean, Do I think you are a woman? Don’t you see? Yes, Sasha, I think you are a woman. I know you are. Now you must begin to accept this in yourself.”
In his enthusiasm, he sounded positively Viennese. He was clearly too wrapped up in his breakthrough to spare a thought for a poor red pawn like me. My spirit sank as I realized I would never get a straight answer to my question.
He ranted on. “There is nothing the matter with you, Sasha. You are no ‘freak.’ You are exactly what you were born to be, if you will only open up to Frank and let yourself.”
It was all so unfair. I was his patient, my father was helping to pay for his vacations, and yet Dr. Webber seemed again to be taking Frank’s side. I began to cry.
“Yes, Sasha, I have no doubt now that you will soon achieve orga
sm on the deepest, most fulfilling level. Cry, go ahead. You are on the threshold of woman’s greatest fulfillment. You are at last beginning to feel. Yes, cry. Feel. When you are fully able to do that, you will be able to give yourself totally to your husband and have that blissful union with him you long for.”
I stopped listening and blew my nose. My skin would be blotching. I sensed my time was up, though Dr. Webber was too engrossed to his theory to notice. Well, perhaps he wouldn’t notice the blotching either, or the clouds of skin puffing up around my eyes. As I put on my coat, I heard him say,
“—quite certain that someday you will even feel deeply enough to think about having a family.”
I turned to leave.
“Not yet, of course,” I heard him say as I neared the door—I was nowhere near ready yet—but someday, when I wanted to.
There was nothing to do on shipboard but drink brandy in the bar or snuggle under a blanket on a deck chair rolling with the great waves and try to read until the next meal. Now the next meal would be the last.
This homeward voyage was different from the outward journey. Back then when the waves rocked the ship I had struggled to keep my balance. That voyage was to have described the largest of the concentric circles on which I had been expanding my universe since that first train ride through the Adirondacks back in the forties. Stuffing the sleeves and pockets of all my clothes with a year’s supply of Tampax (Regular and Super) in case the remote corners of Europe were unsupplied, armed with a select list of people to look up in all the cities of my choice, I had gone to plot my future, rising early each morning to play shuffleboard and participate in the drama of the morning sea.
And now? The concentric circles were shrinking. My future was doubling back on itself. The seven days at sea (like the summer in Rome, like the year abroad) had come and gone with the salt spray, leaving only a residue of abandoned plans. From Genoa I had written Roxanne of my return, swearing her to secrecy. “Don’t tell Frank I’m coming,” I wrote, and lapsing into our old idiom: “In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.” But with no one on board to save me, it was clear even before we sighted the Statue of Liberty standing catatonic in New York’s filthy harbor that I’d be living with Frank again that very night. End of the journey. Unless …
“I’ve been watching you. Do you mind if I talk to you?”
At last! I looked up from my book.
It was the soft-spoken engineer from Brooklyn, seven days too late. I had hardly noticed him since our brief introduction at the champagne sailing party; we had evidently signed up for different sittings.
“Why should I mind?” I said. He had a gentle, a respectful air.
“You’re always so preoccupied when I see you up here. I’ve been afraid to intrude. But since we’ll be docking in a few hours, I figured it was now or never. My name’s William Burke, in case you don’t remember.”
It was a straightforward, low-keyed pitch. I smiled at him.
“You must be eager to be getting home,” he said, looking off at the deep waves. From out on the ocean we all called it home, no matter how we felt.
“Not really,” I confided. “I’m actually dreading it. In fact, I have a strong impulse to stow away some place on board and go right back to Europe. What about you?”
He looked straight into my eyes. “My impulse,” he said softly but without the slightest hesitation, “is to follow your impulse.”
The sentiment, so softly expressed, was enough to trigger the appalling flow of lust. I lowered my eyes. It took so little. However often it happened, I was always unprepared; abashed to discover that so-delicate mechanism reacting despite me.
A confused shout and a rush of passengers to the rail came to my rescue. People began hugging one another and leaping around like children.
“Someone’s sighted land,” said William Burke.
“Do you see it?” I asked.
“No. But then, it’s not what we’re looking for, is it?”
Again. Sinking stomach, confusion. How crudely my body behaved. “We’d better go down for breakfast,” I said, not really wanting to leave the deck but desperate to say something. Why hadn’t he come forward a week earlier?
My chivalrous friend touched my elbow and led me down.
We exchanged addresses. “Maybe we can get together in the City,” said William Burke.
“You know, I’m married,” I answered, liking my candor but loathing my message.
“Oh? Where’s your husband?”
“We’ve been separated,” I said, trying to salvage something. “He’s in New York. We’re going to try to work out an arrangement.”
“Well, if you do, perhaps he’ll join us for lunch, then.”
Not until much later, on the dock awaiting customs inspection, did we see each other again—far too late to be of any use. Once I got home I would have to behave myself—or else what was the point of going back? Indecision was unpardonable at this late date. Anyway, I had tried it alone and failed. From under our respective letters, B and R, we waved to one another; after that I avoided looking over at him.
“Anything to declare?” asked the customs inspector. I wasn’t prepared for declarations. He looked from my two suitcases to me and back again. Since Spain, my two bags contained all I possessed.
“Nothing. Six packs of Bleus,” I said, opening my purse. He gave me an indulgent smile and chalked my bags without examining them, leaving me free to re-enter New York.
I looked quickly around the cavernous dock. Afraid Frank might be lying in wait for me. No one in sight.
With a last gesture of independence I avoided the redcaps and lugged my bags outside myself, but I knew I hadn’t the muscle for an independent life. The taxis and trucks were speeding along Twelfth Avenue exactly as they had before I left. Everything was exactly the same—as though I didn’t exist. No matter how grand my schemes or fanciful my ambitions, my year abroad hadn’t dented the universe.
I hailed a taxi, gave the driver Frank’s address, and headed uptown to the mate, as the saying goes, I deserved.
Seven
“Who’s William Burke, Sasha? We’re invited to a party,” said Frank, examining the invitation.
“Burke? I don’t know. A party? Let’s see.”
I had been back less than two months, but it felt like years. Frank and I each had new jobs—he teaching at N.Y.U., I clipping and filing in an ad agency. We had a new apartment, spacious and rent-controlled, with a freezer compartment for me and a study for Frank. But though we had vowed to “try harder” and “start again,” our hearts weren’t in it.
The formal invitation was from someone named Hector Crockett announcing a party for “friends and associates” of him and William Burke, to celebrate their partnership in a new business firm. R.S.V.P.
“He must be the man I met on the ship coming home.”
“A business party?” sneered Frank. “Did you take up with a businessman?”
From a matrimonial dead end a party is at least a place to turn around. “If it seems like slumming to you, I’ll be glad to go without you,” I returned.
The day of the party, I bought a new dress—a black silk sheath I’d been seeing in the window of a little shop on Lexington Avenue—and against all my principles, desperate to be new, I had my hair done in a beauty parlor, molded into a smooth French twist. Though Frank scoffed suspiciously at my primping, when we set out in the snow for the subway he took my arm with the old pride.
We were both a little intimidated when someone opened the door and invited us in. I was wearing clumsy galoshes over my elegant Italian shoes, and did not know whether to leave them outside or take them in. I’d never before seen East Side bachelor quarters, though I’d been working in New York offices for years. A new country, only blocks from work. A bar in a corner, fashionable people, white furniture, flowers.
Hector Crockett introduced himself, and Frank told him what we were drinking. As I took o
ff my coat, aware of my hair twisted artfully on my head and my first resort to mascara, I sensed new possibilities. Was this party perhaps a bonus from my genie? One extra last chance?
William Burke was carving turkey in the dining room. As soon as I saw him, I took Frank over to introduce them.
“Hi there. I’m so glad you came.” He clasped both my hands as though we were dear old friends before retrieving one of them to extend to Frank for the ritual male handshake. “Glad to meet you,” he said. “I’ve heard about you.”
“How do you do, William?” said Frank.
“My friends call me Will,” he smiled, “or” (to me) “Willy.”
The table was spread with ham, potato salad, seeded rye, gherkins and olives. Frank popped an olive into his mouth, then asked awkwardly in the donnish voice he reserved for inferiors, “What sort of business are you starting?”
“It’s a consulting firm. Computer systems. I suppose your wife told you I’m an engineer. Hector’s the brains of it; I’m only a technician. Hector says it’s the coming field. You should really ask him.”
Hector approached with our drinks. “Are you the Franklin Raybel who wrote that piece on the German Question for Intersection?”
Frank’s eyes lit up. “Yes.”
“I’m glad to get a chance to talk to you,” said Hector, swiveling Frank around; and in a moment they disappeared as though by prearrangement.
As soon as they were gone, Willy started to feed me turkey. First he took a perfectly carved slice of breast, rolled it skillfully around a gherkin, and slipped it into my mouth. “Surprised to hear from me?” he asked.
I swallowed the turkey, my heart tripping, then rolled one for him. “Very.”
Then he rolled another for me, and I for him, until it seemed an improper way to carry on.
My antennae picked up Frank in a corner keeping me under secret surveillance. I excused myself. For the next hour I stayed out of the dining room so Willy wouldn’t think I was looking for him, but at the same time, I tried to stand where I could be seen.
Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen Page 19