Max looks both insulted and angry, but then he sights a waitress and signals her over to our table. When she arrives, I order another beer and Max asks for a double Scotch.
“I had too many equity struggles with Leonard to let him lie on top of me in bed at night anymore.”
Max decides to turn it into a joke.
“There are other options, you know. Other positions. After a couple of decades it’s probably time to try Number Two. You should have climbed on top. Nowadays all the girls want to be on top.”
I ignore his humor since he’s inadvertently offered me an insight.
“Leonard always had to top me. He had to best me and beat me. Whatever he did had to be more important than what I did. I traveled around the world with him on his business trips, but he would never once go on a field trip with me. And, of course, he’d never let me go alone. When the kids were little, he refused to take over the responsibilities so I could get back to Brazil. And every year after that he found some other reason why I couldn’t go. Jesus, Max, I couldn’t proceed with my life. I couldn’t progress. But he always made me go with him to Europe for business or down to the islands for vacations. We must have gone to a million resorts.”
Max shakes his head. “What the hell are you complaining about? You went first-class with Leonard, is that what you’re saying? What’s wrong with first class, for Christ’s sake?”
The girl brings our drinks.
I just couldn’t do it anymore.
I could no longer gaze across a wide beach boulevard, hemmed with haughty palm trees, at a handsome horizon above some turquoise ocean from a hotel terrace surrounded by frangipani, where we were served a sweet breakfast of mangoes or papaya while we watched some “lucky” native clean the hotel pool by slowly sweeping the surface of the aqua water with a rake as gently as a mother skimming the skin off a cup of hot cocoa for a finicky child. I could no longer drink glasses of fresh fruit juice or deep cups of fragrant native coffee beneath a green tree with chartreuse flowers and cerulean blue butterflies while some skeletal young boy hurried to set up chairs and chaises for the hotel guests before the sun began to heat up the day.
I could no longer swim in pools where rats had died during the night from drinking the chlorinated water and floated on the surface in the dawn’s early light when I first opened the thickly lined drapes of our room to inspect the landscape and weather. I could no longer carry a loaded, but unused, camera over my shoulder to shoot scenes of harrowing inhumanity, or mail frivolous postcards from central post offices in enormous, underdeveloped capitals where handsome teenaged boys pushed broken wheelbarrows full of debris along the major boulevard from one place to another for no explicable reason. I could no longer go where it was unsafe to drink the water and where it cost too much—in human terms—to get high in the capital of a country whose primary export was dope.
What remained of my soul was no longer strong enough to support such enormous contradictions.
“Oh, I don’t know, Max. Maybe our marriage ended from the slow burn. The slow burnout. Maybe it just died the same slow death any marriage does. Twenty years of misunderstandings. All I knew was that I didn’t want to watch television with Leonard anymore. He defied my sense of myself. He denied me and I couldn’t hack it.”
“Did the sex go?”
“Yah. It was a case of mistaken identities. The guy I was fighting with every day turned out to be the same guy I was supposed to ball at night. That wasn’t too terrific. It’s hard to make it with someone who makes you crazy every minute you’re not in bed making it. I mean, after enough time, a simple screw can get pretty complicated. Screwing just lets you have your fights in sign language.”
“You’re too clever by half, Diana. You always were,” Max complains, finishing his Scotch.
“You know, there ought to be a word for twenty years of monogamous sex.”
“Long term monogamy is as close as you can get to masturbation while still keeping up appearances,” he laughs.
“Jeez. Two decades of sex with the same partner. Actually, there ought to be a medal for people who make it.”
“Right. And an awards dinner at the White House so the Reagans could eat alone.”
We both laugh, but then I feel heat flood the area below my neck that is always exposed by a V-necked blouse. Immediately, I am distracted by that launch pad, that Kennedy Space Center for hot flashes. Using my lower lip as a funnel, I blow my breath up onto my face as the heat mounts and look away to scan the room while my skin shrivels from the slow burning sensation.
Most of the tables around us are filled with groups of girlfriends rather than couples. The young women have good haircuts, blunt cuts that count—and cost—a lot. This summer they’re wearing sleeveless cotton sweaters and straight, rather longish, skirts. They are far less self-conscious than we were at their age and also less wired. They clearly don’t make a habit of sleeping with strangers.
Lisa told me that young men no longer dare ask women for their telephone numbers at discos or bars. Instead, the men write down their own names and numbers on pieces of paper and offer them to the women they find most appealing. I glance over at the stag line—a lot of guys who look like former marines—hanging out together near the dance floor. The ambience hasn’t changed all that much since high school mixers in the 1950s. There seems to have been some regression. Some fifties fairytales seem to have come back into style.
Hot flash …
In that bridge of time between 1955 and 1965 when we lost our innonence, sex meant adventure to us. Back then, there was little chance of our getting onto the fast track under our own steam. Finished with college, but unable to find any political, financial, artistic or professional mountains to scale, we began searching for men whose lives contained a little adventure. In this search, we traveled tirelessly—anywhere and everywhere. We begged, borrowed, or stole money to make those trips to Europe, again and again, first by boat and then by plane. We wanted to be anywhere but here.
We sought love in Paris, romance in Rome, drugs in Katmandu, God in the Orient and sex in the South Pacific. If we weren’t in the air, we were on the ground sitting in a bar close to the tarmac. During those years, we treated affairs and adulteries as little adventures leading up to serious experiences. But then somehow, at some point, we became confused and began to feel that our affairs were the experiences we’d been seeking. Click. That mistake might have been one of our costliest ones.
Our manhunts, which began as hobbies, became habits. Our sexual safaris ended up as ends rather than means. Our games were our Big Game. The men we met and made it with became our missions, our crusades, our epic battles, our new horizons, our works of art, our last frontiers, our Moby Dicks. To us, each attractive new man became a mountain to be climbed just because he was there. We saw interesting strangers as unexplored and uncharted lands waiting to be mapped and mined. In our urgent search for Graham Greene adventures—where the bloated atmosphere buoys up both the action and the settings—we often ended up in seedy hotels with shady characters seeking sordid scenes. But back then, mood and place and tone and style were everything. We wanted to replay Key Largo and Casablanca again and again.
During that decade we had a lot of sexual self-confidence so we had a million all-night one-night stands. Since we had once dreamed of being torch singers in dark jazz clubs, hat-check girls in racy nightclubs, or showgirls in Las Vegas, we’d been practicing our lines for many years. We always knew exactly what to say at any given moment. All the guys got a big kick out of us because we gave such good dialogue. Yah.
For us, men were environmental intensifiers, enhancers and enlargers of experience. Men meant magnitude to us which might explain our addictions. We loved it when they reappeared after their showers wearing only aftershave lotion and a towel twisted around their waists, leaving bare the expressive prairies of their handsome midriffs. We liked their smells, their smiles, their contradictions. We liked the way they could grow both bear
ds and roses, the way they could make both love and money, the way they could carry responsibility or a-six-pack with the same sweet nonchalance. We loved the language and luggage they used, the grins and sweaters they wore and the enormous pleasure they got from playing a pickup game of basketball or balling all night long.
Even when the fifties started turning into the sixties, fun still meant meeting some handsome stranger when we joined a group of friends in a crowded, croissant-curved booth at the back of a smoky cocktail lounge into which we slid as if into the arms of a waiting lover. And, often enough, there would be a man there waiting to meet us, some flirtatious type who would casually wrap his arm along the back of the booth, surrounding and claiming us without a touch, and making the less interesting people smudge into background, become bit players present only to offset our performance in a play that was always about the possibility of passion.
Max starts signaling the waitress for another round of drinks.
“Sukie had a pretty rough time, Max. Did you know that?”
“Did I know it? I was the object of it. She made it pretty tough on everyone else, too. Look,” he sighs, “what’s the point of beating around the bush? You want to hear my side of the story, right? So I’ll tell you. But we don’t have to go through the whole rap. We both know all about the social and political inequities between the sexes in our country. I was married to Sukie for a long time so I learned a lot from her as well as about her.”
The waitress arrives with our drinks and Max lights us two cigarettes in the old 1940s movie mode.
“So let’s skip all the generalities and just see what was distinctive about Sukie’s and my situation. I know Sukie did ninety percent of the work raising the kids and that handicapped her career. I know she should maybe have lived in New York instead of Washington. I know she wasn’t paid half of what I would have made doing the same things and that there aren’t enough women in Congress, etcetera, etcetera. I know the whole schmeer. But, dammit, that was just the tip of the iceberg. Her craziness was the icing on top of all the rest of that.”
Max lifts his glass and touches mine.
“To Sukie,” he says.
I lower my eyes as I taste my drink.
“The thing was that I had had it. She was just too self-destructive for me to live with anymore. I was tired. Do you know the divorce rate in our age group? The number of couples who split up after twenty-five years? It’s an epidemic, for Christ’s sake. I don’t know. Maybe there’s such a thing as marital menopause.”
“Bullshit,” I say.
The band is starting to regroup. They amble in from whatever dark alley they used for coking themselves up. Baby ripples of anticipation begin to spread through the room.
“Jesus,” Max says in disgust, taking a last, serious gulp of his Scotch. “Let’s get out of here. They’re going to blast our heads off.”
I inspect his face. He has purposefully been keeping the conversation general, away from any particulars about Sukie and himself. He had tried to talk about American women, not Sukie, and that was okay with me for openers. He was entitled to act gentlemanly and protective of a woman he once loved who had just died. But it was clearly also a way of keeping the heat off himself.
Now enough was enough.
“Okay,” I say, with great intentionality. “Let’s go someplace where we can really talk.”
He finishes his second drink, leaves a bill on the table, and leads me outside.
CHAPTER 10
It is almost eleven o’clock when we reach the parking lot down near the river. Max drives out of Georgetown along K Street to reach Dupont Circle.
Dupont Circle is the watch face on the wristband of Connecticut Avenue.
In the sixties, it was our launch site for the war against the war—the place where we mobilized before proceeding toward designated battlefields on the Mall. It was here that Sukie and I always cautiously removed our earrings because women we knew had suffered torn ears when riot police rioted and caused panic among the demonstrators. It was here we used the fountain in the center of the Circle to dampen the large handkerchiefs we carried to protect our eyes from tear gas and kept wrapped in tinfoil inside our pockets along with any prescription medicine we might need in jail if we got arrested.
Of course Max would live near the Circle. The Circle is an easy statement about one’s social and political values. That’s what Dupont Circle tells the real residents of Washington who ignore the “official” city. By tradition, the Circle is a free, independent territory—a retreat and sanctuary for marginal people—in the center of the city. It is like an Indian reservation for foreign students who gathered there to play their native music near the marble fountain which, as years passed, was more and more frequently left dry.
The summers of the sixties enveloped everyone. Dupont Circle blossomed with flower children who grew brown from sleeping in the sunlight. Drug-blissed hippies washed themselves in the forbidden white fountain while long-haired boys and girls roamed the avenues that moved around the Circle like hands on a clock.
In the summer, when the Circle was green, young mothers, still anointed by their sweet new maternity, pushed buggies or strollers full of self-important first babies along the paths. I remember walking in the Circle with Sukie and our collection of three toddlers one eerily quiet Sunday following an enormous 1967 peace demonstration. That afternoon we both felt profoundly dramatized by the political actions of the previous day, which had polished our commitment to a high sheen. That, plus the sweet sense of immortality produced by baby fists gripping our forefingers, exhilarated us as we walked through the Circle, and though I don’t remember anything we said or did, I can recall the happy high we shared that day.
Because Max has to park on a side street, we get to walk back up Connecticut Avenue past the modest office buildings housing various public-interest organizations in dim offices above the street-level Oriental antique shops. During the day, Pakistani and Ethiopian vendors set up card tables on the wide Connecticut Avenue sidewalks to sell cheap leather goods, used clothing, or kitschy products from their homelands. At noon there are cozy cultural interchanges as serene secretaries, strolling by on their way to lunch at the Golden Temple or Childe Harold’s, pause to inspect the wares, trying on earrings that they then study in huge hunks of broken mirror held before their eyes by the eager, dusty-faced vendors.
For a moment we pause in a pool of white light spilling out of Kramerbooks, which has a small café in the rear that Sukie and I frequented during the seventies when I came to visit.
The thought of never having lunch with Sukie again whips the air from my lungs and I have to skip a few steps to catch up with Max.
The entranceway to Max’s building is not unlike Jeff’s—a narrow doorway set between a dance studio and a Karate center. Two flights up, Max unlocks the door to a handsome, white-walled, Brazilian leather and Scandinavian wood apartment. Crayon-green ferns lace the Parisian-style floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Connecticut Avenue.
I am truly surprised by the apartment since few of the single men I know have the spirit to spend much time improving their nests. That’s why the homes of single women are usually nicer than those of single men. But, of course, Elizabeth had been living with Max until recently, so he was not necessarily responsible for the warm welcoming hug of his studio apartment.
Max asks if I want something to drink. I choose wine before sitting down in an old-fashioned wicker chair facing the wall of windows. After a while he joins me, sitting down in a twin chair before beginning to talk.
“You know, after Sukie’s mother died, it was around Christmastime in ’79, Sukie just sort of … lost it. That summer Carol was a counselor at the camp David went to, so Sukie and I were alone for the first time in … maybe fifteen, sixteen years. And I want to tell you, all hell broke loose. Really. I never knew what to expect from one day to the next. Sometime in the middle of that June—I was teaching two summer courses to beef up our income�
�I came home one night and found Sukie gone. Just gone. The place was empty. I mean, it really felt empty. I went upstairs to our room, and there was this note tucked underneath her spray can of FDS. You know, that feminine deodorant spray? And you know what the note said? It said, ‘The best way to get ahead is to give some.’ I swear to you. That’s all it said.”
I smiled. I remembered when Sukie first penned that line.
“And I didn’t even find it right away because she left it on top of some old Victorian bureau she was refinishing that wasn’t really on my territorial track. I mean, I usually didn’t go near that thing because the woodstripper stuff made such a big mess. All I could do was lie down on the bed and read her damn little message over and over again, trying to figure out if it was a suicide note or what. But after a while I decided it was much too combative to be a suicide note and that it was just a continuation of the quarrel we’d been having for the past ten years. The only thing I couldn’t figure out was if she had just left or if she had left me. You see the difference?”
I nod.
“I suppose that whenever I thought about her leaving, I guessed it probably would be like that—no warning, just an empty house one night with a note someplace where I wouldn’t find it right away, and then that kind of smack in the face: ‘The best way to get ahead is to give some.’
“It was just the same goddamn dramatic, destructive shit she always pulled on me. But I swear to you, I couldn’t decode that note and I’m not playing dumb. What the fuck was she saying to me? That our whole lives together boiled down to a blow job? Is that what she meant? Really. Can you tell me, Diana?”
First I shrug, but then I warm to it.
“It’s a pretty fair summation of how our lives feel to a lot of us, Max. When we look back at our various choices, we see how often we took easy outs, gave in, put out and shut up. A lot of what happened to us boils down to something like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like being nice. Like keeping quiet. Like not making trouble. Like … giving head, you know? Giving in. Going down. Going under. It’s a metaphor, Max. Maybe men can’t understand it. I think most women would know exactly what it means. It’s about doing some things to make other things easier. Oh, I don’t know, Max. I don’t know. It probably just meant that Sukie was feeling bad. Sad.”
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