Lowering my head, I let the water rush through my hair.
Hot water, like hot flashes, sometimes reminds me of hot emotions I once endured but no longer harbor. The long habit of passion—originally produced by an adolescent obsession with popularity—has finally atrophied and freed me. Emotional promiscuity—the end result of my teenage compulsion to be liked—has evaporated at last. Male desire and approval are less important to me now. Ditto for the approval of family, friends and academic colleagues. How I feel in the presence of a particular person has finally become more important than how that person feels about me.
Wrapped in a bath towel, I return to Sukie’s bedroom and open her closet. The sundress I’ve worn for two days is no longer presentable. I leaf through her dresses until I see a crinkled cotton skirt and blouse that remind me of Southwestern American Indians. Sukie liked to wear that outfit with some of the turquoise silver jewelry she collected and I always thought she looked beautiful in it. Slipping it on, I kick back into my sandals, grab my makeup kit, and return to the bathroom.
There, facing myself in the medicine cabinet mirror, I am suddenly besieged by a parade of faces—faces from a thousand public bathrooms around the world where I saw women, emerging from toilet stalls behind me, suddenly see themselves in an unfamiliar mirror and recoil with regret at their appearance. Instantly rejecting their own faces, they would begin to approach and reproach their reflections, furiously taking up arms against themselves with cosmetics they sightlessly clawed from the depths of their purses as they advanced, half homicidally, upon their images in the mirror.
Saddened by my thoughts of all the wounded women I’d witnessed reject themselves, I begin my own reconstruction—applying base, blush-on, eyeliner, under-eye eraser, mascara, pale lipstick—the works. No two mirrors have ever returned my same self to me. Some are kind and others severe. Sukie’s mirror makes my face—in which my original beauty is buried, out of reach but not forgotten—seem soft and blurred. That’s not bad, but a woman requires some image stability.
Last summer at the beach, after a few glasses of wine, Sukie and I had stationed ourselves before a mirror and, like little girls, created new faces by pulling back the skin near our eyes to test the effects of a future facelift. Ultimately we decided we looked like fifty-year-old Oriental women trying to look like young Occidentals, so we quit. But the very next day we went shopping for new frames for our reading glasses. We tried on an endless number, hunting for forms and shapes that would cover the lines radiating out like wings from our eyes. Eventually we each bought a new pair of frames that we didn’t need and considered it a savings since it postponed possible surgery.
But now, finally, I am compelled to ask myself if I am making up in order to make up to Max. And if this is so, why I am doing it. I do not understand why I must still attempt to make such enormous changes at the last minute. Obviously, I am prepping myself to see what Max will see when he sees me. I have already tested the depth and range of my laugh lines by smiling at myself in the mirror and then watching the smile hang crepe around my eyes. Why, despite all my new-found independence, must I still seek to look good for a man toward whom I feel a considerable amount of disapproval? This man—for whom I am primping—wounded, perhaps mortally, my dead friend, yet I cannot stop wanting to look good to him.
It is at this moment I begin to hear yelling.
The voices carry over all the various room air conditioners, up the stairs, and into Sukie’s bathroom in the rear of the house.
Elaine and Max are going at each other.
By the time I reach the kitchen they are positioned diagonally across from each other as if in a boxing ring. Elaine has her back to the stove and Max is leaning against the door. Joanne is sitting, upset but silent, at the table. Only Happy is in motion, tearing back and forth between the two antagonists.
“Don’t give me that long-suffering shit, Max,” Elaine warns. “Everyone knows what happened here and what it did to Sukie.”
“Oh, come off it, Elaine.”
“You fragged her before you deserted,” Elaine hisses.
“You’re crazy, Elaine,” Max groans. “You’ve gone off the deep end. Just like Sukie did, for Christ’s sake. After all your talk about independence and autonomy and equal time and all that shit, as soon as you arrange to get left alone, you all freak out. What the hell’s the matter with you, anyway? You’ve turned into a crazy lady since Nathaniel got remarried. What happened to all your political commitments, Elaine?”
Their political enmity is ancient. Elaine always outflanked Max on the left. During the sixties, she was constantly daring him to organize bolder antiwar actions and demanding more militancy from him and his male comrades.
“Oh, gimme a break,” Elaine moans, lifting her hands in supplication. “You’re a lightweight, Max. All you ever did was chase little bimbos around. You’re a phony.”
“Oh Jesus, Elaine. We’re here to … bury Sukie. She’s dead. She died. Can’t you ever let up?”
“You’re more than a little responsible for her dying,” Elaine charges. “You’d been killing her for years. As soon as you started making it, you dumped all the shit-work from your life on her so she had to run the house and raise the kids and free-lance to earn some extra money and she couldn’t write fiction anymore. And you didn’t give a damn because she was just a woman. She was just your wife. And then you took a powder when you found a replacement and just left her to have a breakdown all alone.”
Max moves to the middle of the room and takes a deep breath before he speaks.
“Elaine, I did everything I could to help Sukie. But Sukie was a self-destructive woman with absolutely no self-awareness. I am not going to take the rap for either her life or her death. Do you understand me?”
“You fragged her from the rear,” Elaine repeats wildly.
We have all experienced that feeling of flailing, objectless anger, of unfocused rage which won’t let us articulate our most fundamental beliefs. But it is Elaine’s style to plunge ahead, rather than retreat, even if words fail her.
“All those years she had no support system, no network, no nothing to help her survive. All during the sixties, it was every woman for herself and every woman against each other. Sukie spent so many years trying to patch the pieces of her life together, she never got the chance to accomplish what she really wanted to do.”
“Shit. She just drank too much,” Max rants irrationally.
“Sukie didn’t start drinking too much until five years ago,” I say with great authority, since it’s the first time I’ve spoken.
“She always took those damn uppers. Sukie loved speeding. Face it. She was a speed freak and speed kills. That’s what probably killed her. That’s what probably caused the hemorrhage.”
“You just got scared, Max,” Elaine continues as if she’s heard nothing Max has said. “You got scared because you’d crumped out of any real commitments. You were afraid because you couldn’t provide enough excitement for her anymore, enough action. You were slowing down and you got scared you couldn’t cut the mustard.”
“You’re so full of shit, Elaine. You make me sick.” Then Max whirls around to face me. “I’m going over to find that stud of hers—who, by the way, is just one in a long line of studs of hers—so if you want to come, I’m leaving right now.”
I look at Elaine for a moment, but then turn and follow Max out of the house and down the block to where he’s parked a new Nissan Sentra. The heat is still hovering low over the city and there is a lot of traffic. Our ride to Georgetown takes a long time and I have several hot flashes on the way.
Hot flashes during a heat wave—back to back, one on one, white on white. It is a thermal redundancy. I am stoking up. Sukie’s cotton blouse sticks to the leather seatback. The bottom of her skirt is glued to my thighs. I am thoroughly overheated. Although I don’t remember much college chemistry, I think there is a flashpoint of evaporation. I believe my hot flashes are now approaching that te
mperature and that I am in danger of disappearing into a wet sweat. I can no longer tell when one flash ends and another begins.
We are temporarily gridlocked at 23rd and M streets, waiting to turn right into Georgetown, when Max finally speaks.
“Listen, I’m sorry about that scene back there. I know it sucked. But Elaine can be so goddamn overbearing and self-righteous. She gets herself all revved up and then she’s all over the map. Personally, I don’t know how Nat took it for so many years.”
“She’s a wonderful woman, Max. She’s been a better …” I take a deep breath. “She stuck with Sukie when Sukie needed her the most. She was a better friend to Sukie than I was.”
Max is staring straight ahead into the traffic. “Well, she’s really got a hair up her ass about men and I can’t stand that kind of talk. If that’s the end result of the women’s movement, it’s a fucking shame.”
“I don’t need a lecture on that, Max.”
Thoroughly sickened by the meanness Max displayed in the kitchen, I feel no need to appease him now by apologizing for Elaine. Instead, I wrap myself in silence.
Trapped in traffic, I realize my hot flashes often produce early-warning rushes of impatience, the same kind of irritability I feel when I’m trying to make a green light and the car in front of me dawdles taking a right-hand turn. A sharp-nailed, edgy anger scratches its way up my nervous system. My still-damp hair, rubbing against my shoulders, annoys me and angrily I push the wet ends away from my face. I cannot tolerate any intrusions or incursions upon my self during the spell of a hot flash.
“How are Loren and Lisa doing?” Max asks.
“They’re good. They’re both at Yale; they love it.”
“Are they … coming to the funeral?”
“I’m not sure.” My voice falters and my heart flutters. “We’ll probably talk tomorrow so I can tell them when it is. Their classes start Tuesday morning and they’re out on Long Island …”
I stop.
I will not allow myself to expect anything from my daughters any more than I allow myself to expect anything from any man. Nor will I allow anyone, other than Lisa and Loren, to expect anything from me. I’ve eliminated all expectations from my life. I haven’t stopped living, I’ve only stopped expecting. I no longer want to be exposed to disappointment. I no longer want to be at risk. By eliminating expectations, I reduce those possible occasions for unhappiness to less than zero.
Still, Sukie’s death has made me somewhat vulnerable. It has made me regress into wanting my daughters. It has unraveled the delicate sweater of indifference that I knitted for myself to wear and temporarily caused me to backslide into wanting some demonstration of love or loyalty from Loren and Lisa. I must admit, I would feel richly confirmed if my girls went through the major exertion of coming to Washington from Long Island on their way to New Haven in the course of a single day.
Now we are hunching along like an inchworm, looking for a parking space in Georgetown. Signs proclaim a new Saturday-night parking ban on Wisconsin Avenue, so lines of cars, like beetles, cruise through the side streets, circling the same blocks again and again. Finally Max leaves the residential area and drives down toward the river where there is a huge parking lot. Couples are emerging from the river flat to hurry up the long hill to the M Street strip of bars.
The sidewalks are congested and I can hear expectation beating its drum as we join the people parading up the hill. We are easily twenty years older than everyone else. These are young straights, gays, yuppies and college kids out for a night on the town. They are wired for fun, laughing and talking as they ooze across the sidewalk, forcing some of their group to limp along in the gutter.
3203 M Street is a doorway between two discos. It is, of course, locked. There is no bell, no mailbox, no security system, just a paint-smeared steel door. Max knocks for a long while and then resorts to kicking at the door with suppressed frustration. Finally he steps back and looks around. To the left of the entranceway is a disco called Peppermill. Max looks at me, shrugs, and then motions me to follow him inside.
The bar is a long, narrow space divided in two by a mirrored wall. On one side is a crowd of people milling around and on the other a few tables and a small dance floor fenced in by spectators. Max has seen enough movies to know what to do.
He approaches the bartender, orders us a couple of beers, and then parks his elbow on the bar like a nineteenth-century pioneer pausing on the western ledge of the United States so as not to plunge into the Pacific. When two barstools are vacated, he nods at me to take one. After a while, he too sits down and motions the bartender over.
Then he tells him he’s looking for Jeff Conroy.
The gray-bearded bartender does not respond. Instead, he takes several swipes at a puddle of spilled beer. This man is clearly a former hippie and grossly offended by Max’s self-conscious movieland performance.
I, of course, like this guy immediately and when he turns to look at me it’s with an understanding based on our shared embarrassment over Max’s macho manner. Our eye contact is a complicated hangover from the sixties, when we believed it possible to perceive people’s characters visually. People who still practice that look trust each other. It’s like the “high five” blacks use. It’s part of our sixties code. Despite the gauze of age over my face, I know this man can see through it to who I am. Even if it’s been a while, he knows I’ve been around the track a few times with the right team.
“Someone Jeff knows died,” I say. “She was my friend.”
He believes me.
“Jeff usually comes in here real late Saturday nights. This is pretty early for him. But if you want to hang around, I’ll tell him you’re here if he shows.”
Max has missed most of this. The men of our generation resisted instinct and intuition. What Max knows is how to perform—walk into a bar, order, pay and exit. He has perfected his public style and handles all practicalities with liquid ease. He’s learned how to seem superior to his actions, like a rich man who consents to abide by conventions only because he chooses to do so. Max remains above the fray while mining its resources. He doesn’t contribute; he simply absorbs. So when it comes to one-on-one, Max often washes out because he doesn’t let instinct inform his actions.
When we walk around to the other side of the mirrored wall, everything is in motion. Max captures a tiny table for us and we sit down. The air is vibrating with heavy rock music. The floor ripples from feet beating like drumsticks to the music. The dancers throb. They lead with their elbows. Their arms are pumping as if they are trying to fly. Their bodies speak style to each other long distance.
Nowadays dancers try harder. They have to be given credit. We used to let the music carry us. The kids here are churning up movement; they have to reach down deep to get it. Partners are not in sync, but they are still producing a lot of body heat, working hard to make their body motions emotional. They look highly stylized even though dancing is no longer a contact sport.
I glance at Max. He is not immune to this music. Rock is referential. We both know what it means. Memories of passion are as persuasive as any expectations of it. It is simply that we no longer feel compelled to play it out. We’ve done that; there aren’t all that many riffs or variations.
The set ends. No one in the band has shaved in the last four days. They are all whiskered and whiskeyed up. They look weary and wicked, a look I like a lot. The guitarist has a special sweetness in his bleary eyes and I like the way he watches the women dancing. He likes girls; I like him.
“So what happened to you and Elizabeth?” I ask Max, hoping to catch him off guard.
He watches my mouth as I speak. The music has stopped, but the noise hasn’t totally subsided. Couples are leaving the floor, walking past our table with the empty expressions of dancers no longer tapping the source. They seem embarrassed without the music, shy and awkward after the urgency is over. They resemble dazed moviegoers coming out of a theater feeling displaced and distant, denying the
questioning eyes of those waiting in line to enter.
“She left Washington.”
“When?”
What I want to know is if Sukie knew, if she found some solace from their split before she died.
“I don’t know,” Max shrugs. “Four, five weeks ago. What’s the difference? She took a teaching job out at Berkeley.”
He’s been hurt. Bad.
“Is that why you took the kids to Europe?”
“Hey, gimme a break, would ya? We had this trip planned since last summer.”
“Sorry.”
Then we stare at each other through the smoky blue atmosphere. It is like looking into a mirror. We know each other too well. Our histories are parallel. Professionally we are on the same track. Personally we have suffered the same histories. Max, too, is a Depression Baby who lived through an explosion of suppressed sensuality, a premature marriage, extramarital flirtations, dangerous infidelities and a damaging divorce. He’s been around the track a couple of times, too.
“You were together four, five years?”
“Yah. But she’s young. She’s just twenty-six. She wasn’t sure about things, about what she wanted.” He lights a cigarette to change the subject. “So how about you? What are your headlines? Happy to be single again?”
I nod.
“How’s Leonard doing?”
“Haven’t you talked to him?”
“Yah, once in a while.”
“You never called me.”
“Hey! You’re Sukie’s best friend. Why would I call you?”
“I thought we were friends too.”
He gives me a powerful reprimanding look that insists we were always something more dangerous than friends. I’m flattered, so I let him have that point.
“Why’d you dump Leonard, Diana?”
I only pause for a moment. When I answer it’s with something I’ve never said before.
“Because I couldn’t bear lying underneath him anymore in bed.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
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