Hot Flashes

by Raskin, Barbara;

  The light inside the restaurant feels fictitious to me, filtered through literary prisms; it offers clues to someone else’s memories, not my own. This makes the past seem once-removed. I am now in such a state of estrangement that I am even separated from my own senses, unable to manufacture any authentic feelings. This place makes everything seem distilled and since my emotions lack any immediacy or authenticity I feel sensually dumb.

  Seated there alone, among clusters of tables crowded with morning couples on their way to work, I feel lost. I want to stand up and cry out. Can it be that one’s loneliness is the result of one’s own character? Is it possible that one is unloved because one is unlovable? Can a person be considered lovable whether or not she is loved? This is an interesting question; it throws some light upon the despair of loneliness.

  I know no one in the restaurant. I try to imagine some of my friends walking through the doorway. I try to think of them as I used to, as an ever-present, permanent army of occupation. But now my friends have become discrete individuals with whom I have complicated and confusing relationships. They are no longer just there; now everything has to be negotiated.

  Pride cometh before the fall.

  Falling.

  It’s not death that’s feared, but the falling first.

  How far in sensations is any window from the ground? Do people struggle to stop the fall and fight fright even as they’re falling?

  Perhaps everything was prophesied in the Bible and I just forgot to do my research. Perhaps I neglected to use the one reference book that would have illuminated my life for me—or at least have identified my problems before Max left.

  The days are so long. A quarter of an hour can feel like fifty laps in an Olympic-sized pool. And the nights. How long is a night? The length of a window shade. The difficulty of traversing time hasn’t diminished much. Time seems even slower now as I sit alone at a table in the Bread Oven.

  Lately the ground below my bedroom window has begun to summon me, to serenade me with seductive siren songs. I know for a fact that bloodstains do not come out of sidewalk pavement. The stains spread and darken, then finally just stay there. Once I met an American girl in Florence whose father had jumped out of their second-story window and permanently stained the paving outside her house. I can’t handle the thought of David having to walk around a splotch that used to be me, his mother.

  I recently read a newspaper article about lab rats made to feel increasingly more helpless. Next they began developing cancer at a phenomenally faster rate than the control group. Helplessness hurts a lot, no doubt about it. It is exactly at the moment when you are unable to pick up a man that you pick up the flu.

  Visits to the post office and grocery store have become reassuring rituals for me. In my mind I have begun to inflate paltry appointments into important engagements, casual invitations into required events. Terror tightens my sense of obligation. I can no longer remember the sweet taste of casual encounters. I can barely recall when my life was clotted with people and engorged with experiences.

  This restaurant is more French than some restaurants I’ve been to in Paris which proves a culture is as much an idea as it is a place. I had a French friend once. Her name was Jackie. She died of a heart attack in her elevator when she was forty-three one afternoon when I was supposed to visit her but didn’t. I will always wonder where she was going.

  Max stopped taking my phone calls long ago. He didn’t want to hear any of it anymore. I still want to recall the good things of our past to him—our riveting relationship, our obsessive quarrels, the incredible intensity of our lives. Coldly he asks what is causing my obsession. I inquire what caused his stubborn insistence on staying with me for more than twenty years. His affair, which he tries to inflate into some monumental love, seems to lack the magnitude of our past. But perhaps passion became too much for him after a while. To me, life without passion is nothing more than a broken promise. Now that the negative irritations have disappeared, all I can remember about Max is the unconditional love he gave me, the rich security he provided.

  Is loneliness more extreme in some situations than in others? Is a quiet room more lonely than a large restaurant, an empty car more difficult than a crowded bus?

  For a while, I joined a psychotherapy group. After a short time I began to feel an enormous contempt for the other members of my group because their pain did not seem comparable to mine. Only the outrageous anguish of a woman whose twelve-year-old daughter was dying of brain cancer reached me. Then I wondered how I could complain of loneliness in her presence. What was loneliness next to death? On the other hand, wasn’t loneliness a living death? Wouldn’t I exchange the slow passage of time when my soul was strangling from loneliness for the peace of death? Either way, I couldn’t say much in that group, so I just quit.

  My journal. I try to keep enough notes to set the scene and the mood, record the characters, and choose some clue as to the meaning of what happened. Anyway, besides my notebook, there are still plenty of scribbled notes all around the house. They are on the backs of envelopes, the margins of newspapers, the covers of matchbooks and crumpled paper napkins that I carried home from bars or restaurants. Now whenever a thought travels through my mind, I write it down on a piece of paper for later insertion in my notebook. I call these scraps of papers my Freudian slips.

  One day, shortly after Max left, I had this conversation:

  “But what do you do when you’re alone?” I asked the fifty-year-old woman who had never been married. I felt absolutely consumed by curiosity.

  “I just do what I do,” she answered rather sharply, tired of our talk, weary of my monomaniacal anxiety about surviving alone.

  “But what do you mean?” I persisted.

  “I mean—people do what they do.”

  We were sitting in Renée’s kitchen at the table drinking coffee. Renée has already left for work. The lady and I had both spent the night there—for different reasons.

  “But like what, for instance?” I pressed her suggestively.

  “You read,” she answered sharply. “You clean your room. You pop corn. You watch television. You lie in bed.”

  She was only a friend of a friend; I didn’t really like her.

  A short time later I went home.

  Although I have been an intellectual all my life, I never thought to look for any books concerning my situation. Helen ran off a bibliography for me on “divorce” and “separation” at the Library of Congress, but it never occurred to me to read any of those books. I just stuck that long list of titles in my desk drawer and forgot about it.

  I can no longer remember how many times I have sat alone in some strange beach house hearing acorns, or maybe magnolia leaves, falling on the corrugated porch roof outside a bedroom window while I wondered if I was going mad. Twice since Max left, I have gone out to the ocean where, lying on the warm sand beneath the sweet summer sky, I felt as if I were beginning to heal, as if my heart were growing warm again, losing the chill of its loss. I would watch the children and babies playing with their pails near the water and I would begin to feel gentle once again, available to life.

  But when I returned to the city, my pain would crystallize once more, making my heart as hard as melted sugar boiled until it burned.

  Of all the summer houses I ever rented, I loved the little Rehoboth Beach cottage best. There I always tried hard to wake up early so I could hurry across the highway to the bakery and buy thickly frosted doughnuts for my family—as a morning promise to be sweet to them all day. But though I struggled hard to maintain my equilibrium during those summer holidays, I had little control over the twin self that developed inside me during the long hot hours when the heat of the sun inflated my yeasty moods.

  A sudden rainstorm could create havoc in my soul. Undefined yearnings and longings would rise and develop into unfocused rage. Sharp winds would make me intolerably restless. The sight of certain couples on the beach, young mothers with toddlers, or a provocative co
llection of windblown teenagers could set me off. But I am not near the sea now and it is no longer summertime.

  I am home alone. The mailman just slid my mail through the door. There are eleven letters. I have to forward nine of them: Carol’s to New York, where she is visiting a friend, and Max’s to his office. David never gets any mail; adolescents seldom do. I wonder if I should go to the post office and get some change-of-address cards. I wonder if I should notify the authorities about what has happened to me. Why is there no women’s bureau here as in France? We could use one.

  Eventually I realize why this day is so difficult for me. It is the second anniversary of my aloneness and I am reexperiencing the pain that accompanied the end of my marriage. Even the memory of that pain destabilizes my equilibrium. A sudden loss of identity such as I suffered makes the world tilt and the self seem smeared across time.

  I have learned that anniversaries are much more important than I previously believed. Jan has a friend who survived the Allegheny Airlines crash in Connecticut and, every year a few days before the anniversary of the crash, the woman feels a burning sensation in her feet just as she did when she walked out onto the hot metal wing of the plane to escape.

  On this anniversary of mine, I feel once again the loss of definition from which I suffered so severely just two years ago.

  I would gladly die right now if I could see my mother just one more time. I want to tell her that Max left us. I need her to know this piece of information.

  CHAPTER 12

  “Diana, Diana, wake up.”

  Joanne is crouched beside the bed, her face close to mine.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask. For a moment my mind is murky, but seconds later reality rushes in and I remember Sukie has died.

  “Shh. I don’t want to wake Elaine,” Joanne whispers, “but I want you to come someplace with me.”

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s only eight, but I really need you.”

  I sit up. I have only slept a few hours and I feel headachy and hung over. My night with Max is segregated in a part of my mind I can skirt and avoid, but Sukie is still gone from this world and I will never feel safe again.

  “Where do you have to go?” I ask, swinging my legs off the bed.

  Joanne is wearing a long T-shirt under which I can see the outlines of a bikini. With a rubber band, she has pulled her hair back so tightly from her face that it appears darker than usual and makes her look even more glamorous.

  “I’ve got to get some exercise,” Joanne says. “Really. Like sometimes you need a drink or a cigarette? Sometimes I have to … move. I was inside here all day yesterday without any fresh air.”

  I look at her groggily but in my heart I relent. Although I have never felt much urge to exercise, I have come to concede its authenticity as a human need.

  “I found Sukie’s membership card to the Hilton,” Joanne whispers. “And I found a bathing suit in Carol’s room that looks like it will fit you. Please,” she pleads, standing up. “Please?”

  “Okay.”

  I take the tank suit she’s holding and go into the bathroom to try it on. It’s tight, but I manage to get into it. Quickly I cover the suit with one of Sukie’s sundresses and then hurry downstairs. Joanne is waiting for me in the front hall, twirling Sukie’s keychain around her forefinger. Happy is sitting beside her, thumping her tail against the rug with erroneous excitement. We both look guiltily at the dog, but let ourselves outside without walking her.

  The air is a little cooler and lighter than yesterday, but that is probably only because it is early. There is no sign of a breeze or any actual change in the atmosphere. Indeed, this false freshness begins to evaporate as soon as we start walking toward the Washington Hilton, which is set back on a hill off Connecticut Avenue. After a few blocks we feel the heat swallow us again.

  That is when I notice Joanne has developed a serious expression on her face and I realize I am going to catch some shit from her about last night. Obviously she knew how late I had stayed out and she is clearly going to stick it to me for socializing with Max. I can’t really blame her for being suspicious. Whatever Max’s faults, he is still one of the few men we know who knows how to be intimate, which makes him fundamentally seductive.

  But instead, when she finally speaks, Joanne asks, “What did you think of Miranda?”

  “Oh, I’m not sure,” I answer, relieved not to have to explain about Max. “Sometimes she sounded pretty sincere, but other times she sounded a little too facile for my taste. Oh, I don’t know. Sukie never knew what to think about her either. Sometimes these new women just go with the flow and let whatever happens happen. Guilt or innocence isn’t quite relevant. By the time they get to be thirty, they’re hard nuts to crack. You never know what’s going on in their heads. I guess it’s because they’re so embattled from having to support themselves on lousy salaries and from dealing with men who won’t make even a minimal commitment.”

  “But I did get the feeling Miranda really liked Sukie.”

  “Sure. But that doesn’t mean she might not have done a lot of damage. You know, it’s not like it used to be when we could tell in a minute if some woman we’d just met understood—when there was a pre-verbal, chemical connection. These new women are different. They always have to ask what it is you expect them to understand, and if they have to ask, then they don’t. They don’t even consider themselves feminists.”

  “I think feminism left them holding the bag,” Joanne says forgivingly. But then suddenly her voice cools off. “So what’s the story about last night?”

  “Oh. Well we couldn’t find. Jeff so we just sat and talked. Max had a lot to get off his chest.”

  “I’ll bet. What’d he have to say?”

  I begin to repeat Max’s monologue and Joanne listens without any comment. Since she walks more purposefully than I do, I have to insert little half-steps to keep up with her, but my summary lasts until we reach the hotel driveway. I can tell she is as mesmerized as I was, and when we turn off the avenue she reaches out to take my hand.

  “Thanks for coming with me, Di. I had to get some non-air-conditioned air or I was going to have a breathing attack.” She pauses a moment and then says, “I suppose there’s two sides to every story. Just because we loved everything about Sukie doesn’t mean she wasn’t difficult for him to live with.”

  So we walk into the Hilton holding hands—to hell with the Ethiopian and Eritrean cabbies hanging around outside the main entrance harnessing their ancestral hatred into rowdy roughhousing and rude comments. We totally ignore all the short squat American businessmen clustered around the lobby who look at our locked hands with ugly anti-Lesbian leers. We couldn’t care less what anyone thinks about us anymore.

  Sukie had often joked that whenever she wanted to feel like she was in a foreign country, she simply walked over to the Washington Hilton and had a drink outside on the terrace beside the pool. She said the same Americans appeared there as at any other Hilton around the world, and she could pick up exactly the same types as were available in Abu Dhabi or Amsterdam—minus a few Red Adair jocks whose careers kept them careening around the world outside the United States.

  It was from visiting Sukie over the years that Joanne and I had learned the drill for Hilton summer “members,” city residents who paid to use the tennis courts and swimming pool. Confidently, we walk through the lobby and out the terrace doors, past the café area sprouting striped umbrellas, and up to the gate where an attendant checks membership cards and distributes towels. Finally we reach the long aqua pool petaled, like a daisy, with yellow lounge chairs.

  Joanne selects two chaises near the diving area and then wanders off toward the side reserved for swimming laps. I pull off Sukie’s sundress, adjust the tank suit, and walk toward the diving board. The ceramic tiles, baking in neat margins around the pool, burn my feet, so I dive hurriedly into the water, swim two laps, and then climb up the ladder and retreat back to my chaise. From there I watch the
early-morning hotel guests stationing themselves around the pool before I close my eyes.

  I want to think about something. Max and I both did the same thing. We both ended our marriages. But I feel he was wrong and I was right. Essentially I asked Leonard for a divorce so I could be alone for the first time in my life. Max wanted his freedom so he could be with some else. Those are two very different things even though untangling the thick skeins of any marriage is painful, regardless of the reasons.

  Actually Leonard had been a lovely husband to me, at least in the beginning, when he was young and idealistic and more interested in politics than money. But when the Movement began to shrivel, he panicked and cast about frantically for something new to care about. It turned out to be money. He still does a lot of pro bono civil rights work, but he’s really interested in money.

  Perhaps Leonard never believed that I had no romantic attachments or entanglements when I asked him for my freedom. Maybe he didn’t believe I was truly content with the natural silence of my solitude which I saw as the only natural resource for good, if not great, work. Perhaps Leonard never believed what I said about enjoying the sensuousness of a solitary life undisturbed by the needs of another.

  Perhaps his hurt is still too great to let him accept the fact that my work is now flourishing, that my time with our daughters is more nourishing, that reading and studying comfort me, and that the simplest excursion with a friend satisfies my now minimal social needs. Perhaps he’ll never understand how the emotion and commotion I abandoned had already fertilized the soil in which I now plant the seeds of my own interests so as to yield the last and—hopefully—greatest harvest of my life.