Original Sins

by Lisa Alther

  “It’s the jacket I hate, not the book.”

  “Lots of luck. Maybe she’ll find another editor who won’t be so crass.” He began dialing the phone.

  She understood she’d been trying to have it both ways—expecting Harold to part the corporate waters so she could skip dry shod into some editorial position. And at the same time, insisting on asserting contradictory opinions, when all he wanted was agreement. If it was patronage Emily was after, she had to fulfill her end. If she wanted to play in the big leagues, though, she had to take her chances just as he did. She’d been dumb enough to hitch her wagon to his star, but like everyone else up here, he was a comet—just passing through.

  At supper she said to Matt, “Guess what happened to Mommy today? She got fired.”

  He blinked. “Like with matches and stuff?”

  “No. The man I work for doesn’t want me anymore.”

  “Oh goody, Mom! So you don’t have to go to the office anymore. And you and me can stay home together all day?”

  “I guess I’ll have to find another job, honey.”

  Maria came over after Matt was asleep, and Emily told her about Harold and her new sympathy for the pressures men were under.

  “The stupid fucker,” Maria growled.

  “No, he’s not, Maria. He’s actually a nice man. Come to think of it, it’s so weird you don’t know him. There are the people I know at work. The people I live with. The people I socialize with. And none of you know each other.”

  “What’s weird about that?”

  “Well, in Newland everybody knows everybody else. You could talk about your boss to friends, and they’d know him and his family and have opinions on whatever he’d done. It’s like having a live-in backup band.”

  “Sounds horrible. You’d never have any privacy.”

  “Well, I guess that’s one way of looking at it”

  “Jesus, how many years have you been away from that fucking place? And it still occupies your every waking moment.”

  “Not all of them,” Emily said.

  “Yeah, right. We were going to discuss Friendship tonight, weren’t we? And whether or not sex messes it up.”

  Emily described the ways in which sexual expectation had distorted her friendship with Raymond. Maria recounted a series of experiences, good and bad, involving sexual interludes with friends.

  “What do you want out of this, Emily? Homosexual Experience?” Maria stood up. “You’re an important friend. I don’t want us to use each other.”

  They laughed nervously and kissed at the door. Maria drew Emily’s tongue into her mouth and Emily’s stomach dropped through the floor. As a friend, as an enemy, she wanted Maria in her bed right away. Instead she closed the door after Maria and locked the three locks.

  Harold informed her later that week that the only opening was in the accounting department, but he offered to fire her so she could get unemployment She was horrified. Her moral code reserved government assistance for the less privileged—the undereducated or handicapped or disabled or over-fecund. Emily was healthy, well-educated. Harold reminded her she was a taxpayer and that she’d been paying unemployment insurance. As she thought about it, it occurred to her that she was in fact handicapped: She had no penis. Freud was wrong, though. It wasn’t a penis she wanted, but rather the prerogatives that mysteriously accrued to those who had them. The right to play on athletic teams in high school. The right to have a draft card to burn. Cut loose from Harold’s noblesse oblige, cut loose from Justin’s and her father’s earning power, what were her prospects? She’d earn half as much as a man doing the same job. Just enough to get by on for Matt and her. Her situation was only marginally better than that of the people she’d helped get on welfare in Cincinnati. Newland said if you couldn’t manage on your own, you weren’t trying hard enough. Newland was sometimes full of shit.

  Maria and she went to an old Katharine Hepburn movie at the Thalia and held hands, then they went to a Chinese restaurant on Broadway.

  “Maria, I’ve been thinking about friendship.”

  “Me too,” Maria said, her mouth full.

  “What have you decided?”

  “I’ve decided you’re doing your passive Southern best to manipulate me into deciding for us.”

  Emily smiled. “A lot’s been going on for me. With my job collapsing and all. And with Justin gone.” “If you say so.”

  “But I have decided what I want.”

  Maria waited for her to summon her courage, their chopsticks poised like the claws of grappling lobsters.

  “Our friendship is real important to me …”

  “I think we’ve been over this several times already.”

  “… but if we have to choose between sex and friendship, let’s take sex.”

  Maria collapsed onto her plate. “Outasight,” she said, summoning the check.

  Through Maria’s skylight, past hanging baskets of plants, Emily could see the full moon. Her mind was vaguely cataloguing differences. No beard, as Maria’s face grazed her breasts and stomach. No hair on the chest …

  “God,” Emily whispered eventually, rubbing her face with her hand.

  Maria gave her several tiny kisses, like reassuring pats. “Was it OK?”

  “God.”

  “You said that already.” “God.”

  “It was all right?”

  “I’m going to miss you when you’re gone, Maria.”

  “But I just got here.” Maria laughed. “Don’t start worrying about the crops in the field. Just this once, allow yourself to gaze directly into the sun.”

  Justin returned armored with otherworldliness and ready to plunge into corporate corruption. He’d met a holistic stockbroker at the meditation center who had really turned his head around, and taught him how to be into subordinated debentures but not of them. While he sat on the living-room floor demonstrating meditation postures, Emily said in a low voice, “Justin, I think I’m bisexual. I made love with Maria while you were gone. I hope you don’t mind.”

  He looked at her, trying to endow his face with the tolerant expression his intellect believed appropriate. But there was panic in his eyes. “That’s cool. Why should I mind?”

  “I was afraid you might feel rejected or something.”

  Life became one long orgasm, as eroticism drove her to Maria, as guilt drove her back to Justin. Each professed an absence of jealousy, and affection for the other. But Emily, devoted to keeping everyone happy, felt like a Ping-Pong ball in a championship match.

  Sometimes Maria and she bit and scratched and moaned. Other times they lay like lizards on a rock. Emily was amazed by the variety of emotions that fitted under the label “sex.”

  She’d return comatose from a session with Maria, and Justin would grab her. Usually she feigned enthusiasm out of loyalty. As he tried exotic new holistic sex aids, Emily ground her teeth with irritation—that it had taken a third party to inspire them to experimentation, that Justin had forced her to be the heavy who blew the factory whistle on their routinized love life, that the notion she’d just been with a woman seemed to titillate him.

  Once he gasped grimly as he thrust, “Women-got-nothing-I-don’t-have.-And-I-got-plenty-they-don’t!” He came on the second “don’t.”

  Emily didn’t say so, but he was wrong. Maria was able to sense the swelling and receding of Emily’s desire and respond to it instinctively. It was the difference between a musical score and improvisation.

  But one day Maria appeared to stop worrying about Emily and let herself go. She shouted and wept. Her body shuddered, twisted, and heaved until Emily collapsed into exhaustion and revulsion. The insatiability. The lack of decorum and self-control. Emily lay in prim silence.

  “Hell, I’ve scared you, haven’t I?” Maria murmured.

  Emily couldn’t think what to say. That great throbbing, slurping maw. Ugh.

  Maria took Emily’s chin in her hand and turned her face toward her own. “Ah shit, I blew it.”

&
nbsp; “It’s all right.” In Newland people parceled out emotions. If you were going to spend a lifetime with the same people, you couldn’t afford intensity. But in Maria’s world people came and went, like bouts of indigestion.

  “What is it that scares you?”

  “I’m afraid we’ll burn ourselves out and have nothing left for the long haul.”

  Maria smiled. “But we’re not talking about long hauls. It will last as long as it lasts. Let it be whatever it’s going to be.”

  “But I don’t want it to end.”

  “I don’t either. But either it will, or it won’t.” “I know lots of couples in Newland who’ve been together for years.”

  “Are we talking grand passion, or are we talking marriage?”

  “Can’t you have both?”

  “Can you? You’d know better than I.”

  Emily said nothing.

  “Marriage has its pleasures—mutual comfort, security, routine. But passion isn’t among them. And I thought you’d had your fill of domesticity for a while?”

  “Well, I guess passion is OK. But can you base a life on it?”

  “But you’ve got a life already, Emily. A husband, a child, work, friends. What you and I have is the frosting, not the cake.”

  Emily nodded numbly. It was beginning to feel like cake to her. And she knew that cake, once it went stale, crumbled.

  At Sammie’s apartment that night Sammie passed out some Playboys and Harper’s Bazaars. The women’s group studied the models, then took off their clothes and stood up one by one, reciting height, weight, and measurements. Most giggled or tried to shield parts of their anatomies with hands and arms.

  Tall, short, thin, fat, big breasts or small, thin waists or thick, bulbous hips or flat, each had an attractive, healthy body. Yet each had gone through a lifetime of dieting, exercising, and worrying, frantic attempts to conform.

  Afterward, they were angry or depressed. Finally, Gail said weakly, “Yes, but it’s our problem. We fell for it. We didn’t have to try to conform.”

  Maria growled, “Just one more example of that male totalitarian mind set. Monotheism. Monogamy. Monopoly capitalism.”

  “Same thing with skin color,” grunted Lou. “White is right.”

  “When I think of the somersaults I’ve turned trying to convince men it doesn’t matter what size their wretched penises are …,” Susannah mused.

  “God, I just remembered something,” Emily gasped. “In high school when the girls would walk into the cafeteria, the jocks would hold up cards with numbers on them, rating us like Olympic divers on our figures.” Her smile crumpled.

  “Jesus, that’s so bad,” Lou muttered.

  Later, as Emily removed her clothes under Maria’s skylight, she ran her hands down her sides. This waist she’d always thought was too thick (which Justin had agreed with), maybe it was OK after all? Maria came up behind her and slid her own hands down the path Emily’s had taken.

  Emily turned to face her, and her eyes ran down Maria’s body. “We’re both gorgeous.”

  After making love, Emily lay with her mouth against an artery in Maria’s neck, feeling with lips as Maria’s racing pulse slackened. Raindrops rolled down the skylight. Emily was swept with wave after wave of an aching tenderness.

  “What was that?” Emily whispered.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Tenderness?”

  “You’re really getting into this.”

  “I’m feeling things I didn’t know were possible.”

  “Shrink types say it’s pre-verbal sensations. Everyone’s earliest experience of security and physical pleasure is associated with the female body, and contact with one in adulthood can trigger those sensations. Most women never get a chance because, unless you’re sexually immature like us, you’re supposed to switch your allegiance to male bodies.”

  “Well, that certainly killed that,” Emily said, sitting up and lighting a cigarette.

  “I’m sorry, darling. I didn’t mean to get clinical.”

  With her unemployment checks and with Justin working, Emily didn’t need a job right away, but she started looking anyway because she missed working. Finding a job in publishing was a word-of-mouth process. She was passed from person to person. But she was like a walking wound: If a potential male employer looked at her wrong, she’d stalk out, leaving him bewildered. Later she herself would be bewildered and unable to explain to Maria precisely how the man had offended her. It was like trying to find a job for a land mine—you stepped on her by mistake and she exploded, demolishing herself in the process.

  One Saturday as Justin and she came out of a movie, he said, just as he always had, “Well, what do you think?”

  Emily told him. Just as always, he said, “No, you’ve missed the point, Emily. Do you remember when that guy said, ‘Yes, and I’ll show …’”

  “Fuck it, man! I have eyes! I know what I saw!”

  Passers-by stopped and stared. Justin looked at her, his mouth hanging open.

  “I’m sorry,” he mumbled, as they stalked back to the apartment.

  “It’s OK.” Emily fought her need to apologize.

  In bed that night her body responded to Justin in some of the ways it had learned with Maria. He was appalled, but then he got smug, taking credit.

  Emily lay awake in a rage. And at 2 a.m. she saw the light! The institution of marriage was a penal institution. Set up and maintained by men, to domesticate the passion she now knew existed in women. The ominous feeling she’d had first making love with Earl, that he was trying to tame her like one of his mares—that’s exactly what had been going on. Those passions unleashed, what would they do to the orderly male world of getting and spending and hoarding and defending? And willing it all at death to sons they were sure were their own. They filled their factories with machines. They filled their homes with machines. They preferred it if their wives were merely appliances: Plug them in, and they dispensed sympathy and meals and clean socks. Plug into them, and they got your rocks off. She got up and stalked to the bathroom.

  She watched the sky across the Hudson turn from black to grey. When Justin awoke, she announced she couldn’t make love with him anymore.

  He listened, nodded, and turned away. She had imagined shouting and weeping. Silence unnerved her. Didn’t he care?

  “But I love you, Justin. I think there are other kinds of love, maybe more important kinds.”

  He wouldn’t acknowledge he’d heard her.

  She tried a joke: “Justin, you know I’ll always have a vacancy for you in the motel of my mind?” He didn’t smile. She spent the morning trying to placate him by cooking a big breakfast, by not scrambling the order of the sections in the Times.

  She understood on her way to Maria’s that she now wanted to do what she wanted, but that she wanted everyone else to be pleased with it. That was progress, considering the years the Great Ear had spent wanting to do only what everyone else wanted.

  As Maria and she strolled through Riverside Park, she told Maria what she’d done. Maria tried to say something sympathetic about how painful it must be for them both. But delight showed in her eyes. She grabbed Emily’s huge pocketbook, and searched for the diaphragm Emily kept there “just in case.”

  “What are you doing?”

  She jumped up and with a flick of her wrist sent the diaphragm skimming above the condoms that quivered in the murky Hudson.

  “What are you doing?”

  “You won’t be needing it anymore.”

  “How do you know, damn it?”

  “If you do, then you deserve whatever happens.”

  As they walked to Maria’s apartment, Emily realized she was delighted to have her diaphragm floating down the Hudson to the sea. She’d swallowed the Pill until she hemorrhaged, shot up with foam until an allergic reaction set in, worn an IUD until its string like a wick carried an infection into her uterus.

  “God, it’s a wonder they can get any women at all to sleep
with them,” Emily mused. “Who?” “Men.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “All that contraceptive garbage.”

  “I know. I remember. It could put you off sex forever.”

  “Did you ever get your diaphragm all jellied up and bent for insertion, and have it slip and go flying across the room? You’re good for me, Maria: one hundred percent effective, and no side effects.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  Emily had hoped the Ping-Pong match was over. Instead, she ceased to be the ball and became a player in two simultaneous games, a paddle in each hand. After recovering from his sulk, Justin became friendly and forbearing.

  “The thing is,” he explained, “I’m jealous.”

  “Jealous?”

  “Yeah, I wish I were a lesbian.”

  Emily laughed. “How come?”

  “Because I love women, and so many of the neatest ones are gay.”

  “Can you blame them?”

  “Anyhow, the women’s movement is where it’s all happening right now politically.”

  “I suppose it’s not too pleasant to go from being the champion of the oppressed to being the oppressor?”

  “No, it’s not. It’s like when whites got kicked out of the civil rights movement by the arrival of Black Power. Only then, we had Vietnam to move on to. I miss that sense of community we used to have. Do you remember? The feeling we were all working together on something really important.” Justin told the men’s group, one of whom told Maria, that he was waiting for her and Emily’s relationship to “burn itself out.” Emily was going through a phase. He had learned at the meditation center the only way to hold on to something was with an open hand.

  Emily began phoning Maria every morning around nine, after Matt and Justin had gone and before going out job hunting. She told Maria she liked knowing where Maria would be each day and what she’d be doing, so Emily could visualize her in situ. Maria seemed touched.

  Since they were all old friends and sophisticated about sexual liaisons, Emily invited Maria to the apartment to dinner one night. As she brought out an eggplant casserole, Justin said, “You’ve got a good cook on your hands, Maria.”

  Maria glanced at him, her fork halfway to her mouth. “Yeah, this is great”