“Think of me as an animal,” she urged Bill. They were in Oscar’s listening to her favorite local singer, a man whose voice reminded you, if you closed your eyes, she told Bill, of Smokey Robinson. He said he’d never close his eyes around her. Mark shifted in his seat and grimaced several times but Grace ignored him. Bill was completely in love with her. And frantic to have her. The American government, he was saying, had been lying right along, lying about everything. Grace, wary as she was, had had trust. She had admired JFK, but would never admit to having had heroes, and now it didn’t matter anymore. With Bill, she viewed through his devoted eyes a world differently constructed from what she’d been fed. Force-fed, she felt, and was, therefore, very happy to see that world taken apart, as if she could start, in the same way, to take herself apart.
The time came for Bill and Grace to enact a kind of divestiture service in which Bill’s virgin state would be renounced, shattered. His virginity existed differently from hers. His was a lack of experience, the sense that he was not really a man, that he was not aggressive enough, not daring, perhaps a coward, or a fag. He had not made a conquest. While hers, she reminded herself, had been a moral burden, something to worry about giving, indicating loss when given. And she was considered to have been a conquest for someone else. A passive gift, whether she moved or not. A given. Surrender and surrender again. But how could something physically surrendered mean that she, Grace, had really given in. She prided herself on her ability to separate neatly body from mind, self that was hers from self that she gave away. She was not given when she gave, she always held back and drew satisfaction from distance.
The night Bill brought her back to his room, she took her place in the center of it, feeling very certain that she would make the conquest, she would take it from him. He turned on the record player and she undressed. He lay his head on her breast and kissed the nipple many times, licking it like her dog would’ve, she thought, and she waited for him to make the move. For his penis to become erect the way every penis she’d ever encountered had. He rubbed himself against her and she moved her hand, down there, and Bill caught it and held it, not letting Grace, the way she hadn’t let boys when she used to stop them. Engaging in a wordless struggle, Grace moved more violently to grip his cock, which lay there small and soft and malleable. Impotence became dangerous. The room looked ugly. His penis was useless and its absence felt like an attack. And then he cried that he did really love her. Fear turns quickly to disgust. Why hadn’t Poe ever written about impotence? Or was it there somehow, disguised in the terror? Look for castration, Mark pounced, that’s what you’ll find, if you look hard enough. Or soft, he laughed. But soft? What light through yonder window breaks…
Dear Celia, I have a boyfriend who can’t get it up, so I’m going to stop seeing him, because I can’t stand it. It’s too weird. He always cries and says that he loves me, but I can’t help him and it drives me crazy and I don’t want…I mean, I want. Grace tore the letter up and went looking for what she might determine later was trouble.
CHAPTER 5
There is nothing to fear but fear itself, Emily mused as she put on her clothes. The cheap record player, which she turned on the moment she turned off her alarm clock, having punched the snooze alarm five times, got stuck on that part in “Baby Love” where it goes “breaking up…making up…” It’s better never to have reasoned than to have reasoned badly. She wanted to conduct her life through the mail. The phone was ringing in its insistent way. She knew it would be Christine, needing her help with something or other. Okay, Emily said, I’ll be over soon. Breaking up with Richard had happened at a distance, through letters, so perhaps she shouldn’t trust her personal life to the vagaries of correspondence. Their breakup was civilized, she supposed someone might say that about it, and while she liked the notion in an abstract way, the idea was better suited to English movies celebrating WW II that came on at 3 A.M.
Lying on Edith’s bed, the television on, Emily was explaining to Edith what had happened in art class. While she didn’t consider herself an artist, or consider that she might become one, Emily liked to draw and to paint. It’s a different way of thinking, she continued during the commercial. She told Edith that the handsome male drawing teacher—there were no women teachers in the art department—had asked the class to copy two drawings of interiors from their Janson History of Art book. I copied one of a room, I forget who did it, and the other one I chose was by Leonardo, of a fetus in a womb. When I showed them to my teacher he stared at the womb one for a while, and then he gave me a look. He said, “I said interior.” I said, this is an interior. He didn’t say anything for a minute and then he said, “When you’re an old woman, you’re going to be very eccentric.” Emily laughed as she told Edith. Edith took another cracker and didn’t speak. The commercial ended and the movie came back on. Emily was supposed to be reading seventeenth-century poetry for her 8 A.M. class and Edith should have been reading her friend’s book on raising children, though he hadn’t, a fact that Emily held against him. Young people could be such purists, Edith thought—the womb as an interior. It made her smile inwardly. She liked being around young Emily, but she was happy not to be young, a feeling that she thought she’d never have, having heard about it years before, when she was young. Is this the way the body prepares for death, she thought as she rubbed hand cream on her fingers and economically patted the excess on both elbows.
Christine phoned Emily. Emily went right over. He’s violent, she reported of Peter, her Slavic lover, as she called him. To Christine, Slavic itself implied violence, or if not real violence, then excitement and volatility, terms very different from those with which she described herself. Just one of the few poor whites from Westchester. “What do you mean, violent?” Emily asked. “Did he hit you?” Christine showed Emily the bruises on the upper part of her body. “I’m afraid of him,” Christine said. “Of course you are,” Emily reassured her, “he’s crazy,” Christine had already lived with a man, though the two young women were only nineteen, and because they were only nineteen and Emily a young nineteen, Edith told her, it seemed a mark of great maturity to have already lived with a man, a man ten years older, too, who was a sculptor. But then, considered Emily, Christine had lost her father when she was eleven, and he had been a painter, and so it made sense that she would quickly live with a man. At nineteen things seem very simple. “You don’t know what this is like,” Christine continued. “I’m afraid of what he’ll do.” “Can’t you stop seeing him?” Emily asked sensibly, pouring herself a glass of wine, drinking and pulling at single strands of her hair. “You don’t understand,” Christine uttered in a kind of moan, and looked at Emily as if she were just a visitor. “I guess I don’t,” Emily responded. And she didn’t. Was she going to cry, thought Emily, at a loss, desperate to return to her small room and read. Christine often chided Emily for wanting to avoid life. I have plenty of time for that, Emily thought as she walked home from Christine’s apartment which was only five houses from hers, closer even than Nora’s had been. Is proximity the best basis for a friendship, she wondered.
Her parents said she didn’t call them enough or visit them enough. It wasn’t normal, they said. Emily had a hard time remembering she had parents; they weren’t in the picture, as no one from her former life, as she liked to put it, was, as if she had led a dangerous one. While she had been fastidious in high school, Emily lost all concern for what she looked like, she said. The tyranny of changing clothes, of wearing something different each day to school, was overthrown. It’s not exactly criminal, Edith thought, although that very phrase did come tomind; she was sure that Emily could be such a pretty girl, if she wanted to. She didn’t say this to Emily; she would of course have said that to her own daughter.
Christine was to do battle with Peter one night and Edith and Emily took in a movie, Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel. Christine never minded if Emily went out with Edith, because Edith was so much older, but she bristled when Emily wanted to
see any of her other friends, and gradually Emily stopped seeing them. She spoke to them on the phone. Edith said nothing about this either. They didn’t go out together often, but Edith especially enjoyed it when they did, especially because Emily could have been her daughter and wasn’t, a fact which meant more to her than she thought it should. She felt a certain irresponsibility, almost collusion with her young tenant. She felt they made a bizarre pair and when they bumped into people Edith knew, she introduced Emily proudly, as my tenant, the poet or the student, a young person who was visibly different from people she had known for thirty years. She wondered if her husband would understand this enjoyment and decided he would. Emily was struck by The Exterminating Angel, figuring it had to do with neurosis in general, and that maybe she too couldn’t leave her room in the way that Buñuel meant. You think there’s something out there and there isn’t, except for what you think is there stopping you. She turned to Edith as they entered the dark apartment and quoted Kafka. “My education has damaged me in ways I do not even know.” Edith argued briefly, defending the necessity of education, then let it go, glad that she didn’t think about Kafka anymore, and never had just before bed.
Emily wrote a poem about receiving and sending letters that was so romantic it surprised her. She was aware of this tendency in herself, but it was usually mixed like a salad dressing with a lot of other tendencies and wasn’t so naked. The naked truth: the oil separates from the vinegar. She laughed and shoved it into the drawer she optimistically called To Be Published, and shut it. She never showed her work to anyone, although she didn’t consider herself a secret writer. She said she wasn’t ready and squirreled her poems away keeping them to herself even keeping them from Christine. It was another thing they fought about. You’re not a writer, Christine intoned, if your work sits in a drawer and no one sees it. When it’s ready I’ll show it, Emily would respond, as if her drawer were an oven in which her poems were baking. Christine and Emily fought and made up, fought and made up. Generally, they fought about intangibles, the ineffable. When Emily realized that she hadn’t seen one of her very closest friends in nearly a year, she startled, called her, and made a date. Christine acted like a lover betrayed. Emily went anyway. You don’t have to obey her, her other friend told her. I don’t understand what she wants from me, Emily added, to which her friend countered, What do you want from her?
Are we lesbians and we don’t know it, Emily deliberated when walking home, walking fast to speed up her thoughts. Her mind sorted things back and forth, a shovel digging up stuff and separating it into discrete piles. Except nothing was discrete. She’d been too demanding. On the other hand, I can’t stand it when she disappears for weeks with a new guy. That means I’m possessive about her too. She felt as if she were in a cave and she had always hated the dark. She visualized herself: a child, lying in bed, the blanket up to her eyes, no light in the hall, no light anywhere. What bothered her most was that there was no way to determine right and wrong, or to determine if those categories applied to relationships. She supposed that this was what was meant by mystery. They made up, they made up as they always did. They spent as much time as they could together. Movies, bars, school. They went to see Persona. When the two actresses’ heads merged, Emily screamed. Several people turned to look at her. You’re so emotional, Christine teased. Me? Emily asked, defensively, deciding in her mind that poets should be, a thought she kept to herself hopefully.
For Emily was hopeful, it was astonishing how much hope she had, Edith reflected as she washed the dishes, carefully drying the paper towels though she knew Emily thought that was cheap. Emily hadn’t grown up during the Depression. Edith always thought that thought and sometimes decided that that thought might be too convenient for all the questions it was supposed to answer. Well, it certainly was a part of it, she continued to herself as she put each dish away in the yellow cupboard. This was a rent-controlled apartment and she blessed the day she’d moved in, a young woman, with a husband and two small children, over twenty years ago. Finding herself staring at the cupboard, she shut it, conscious that the way her arm moved now was the way it moved then. She was never going to move. She could be very stubborn; her husband could have attested to that. And her children. “They’ll have to take me away,” she had said to her husband, who had been a sociologist. “You can’t stop change, Edith,” he had answered. “I’m not stopping it, I’m just not going to be a party to it.” Then, she remembered, he’d touched her on the arm and laughed. He had such a wonderful laugh, Edith thought, and left the kitchen,
“Makeup”—Christine smiled—“makes some of my imperfections more obvious. More perfect.” They had just eaten an enormous bowl of salad and tuna fish. “I like you without makeup,” said Emily, who wore less of it, or none. Emily was considering letting her eyebrows grow in. First, she thought she looked too much like Bette Davis playing Queen Elizabeth. Second, they looked like parentheses on her forehead. “I look like a clown.” “Of course you don’t,” Christine insisted. “Your face is perfect.” They smiled at each other over the big bowl. “Dare I eat a peach or wear my trousers rolled?” Emily mimicked. Christine smiled again, encouragingly—Emily had had a man over the night before—“let them grow,” she urged, as if growing one’s eyebrows signified activity.
It was Valentine’s Day, a fact the two young women noted, cynically, over the tuna fish, mentioning having received valentines when they were young, in grade school, Emily remembering her love for Peter. Dressing up. Kissing games. My mother taught me never to lie. She’d received this day a card from Richard, who was in Italy, driving around the hill towns. With someone, probably, she commented to Christine. Emily did not want to talk about last night. It was disappointing. Oddly enough, Edith had had a man over the night before too. Emily had gone in the back door—the maid’s entrance—and Edith had used the front one, as she always did, so, in a sense, they had missed each other. Emily heard a man’s voice in the morning. Edith saw a cigarette on her dining-room table. Both were made aware, but neither spoke of it. It was something they didn’t enter into with each other. Emily would never discuss sex with Edith, that was reserved for Christine. The subject with Edith was skirted; she amused herself with the image. We pull in our skirts so as not to appear like flirts. Emily never wore skirts anyway, which her mother found difficult to digest, like Mexican food. “And she always wears the same things,” she complained to her husband. “Those army pants that are falling apart. And she never tells us about her boyfriends. If she has them.” Her parents couldn’t decide which was worse—her having them or not having them. Emily’s father threw up his hands like an evangelist enlisting God’s aid. “It’s not normal,” he said. Both parents shook their heads in unison.
“My mother walked right out of the room when I walked in.” Emily was reporting to Edith about her latest visit with her parents. “She couldn’t stand the way I looked.” Emily started to cry then stopped, suddenly, just turning it off. A leaky faucet in Edith’s bathroom appeared like a cartoon in the older woman’s mind. She didn’t want to be emotionally involved, she kept telling herself, using those exact words. I do not want to be emotionally involved. The two women walked into Central Park and sat on a large grey boulder that stuck up from the ground, a tough couch for Emily’s sorrows. That’s how life is, Edith kept thinking, she’ll get used to it. Edith restrained herself from saying that your mother can’t help it. She had parents too. But she didn’t say it because she didn’t want to be an apologist for parents. Stretched before her she saw long lines of children and their parents and then their parents and their parents. “It must have been awful at the very beginning of time,” she said, ending her vision. “I’m just thinking out loud,” she told Emily.
They watched walkers and bikers and runners. They stayed for three hours. A civil rights march that had begun in Harlem passed right in front of them. In fact, it stopped in front of them, allowing Nelson Rockefeller to get out of his black limo and join its ranks. He wa
lked by them; he was so close they could have slapped him on the back. Rockefeller forced himself between two black men in the front line whose arms were tight around each other’s backs. Their arms relaxed truculently, and he took his place between them, as if he were born to be there. Emily was astonished at his lack of feelings, maybe it wasn’t a lack of feelings. She was astonished at his wanting to get his own way and knowing that he could and would. She concluded that a great fortune makes people indifferent, imperious. He had acted like an emperor. Emily had nearly forgotten about her mother by the time she opened the door to her small room. The phone rang. Her mother said, “I didn’t realize I could hurt your feelings.”
As for Edith, it was Sunday, and on Sunday she did not want to think about her children and their feelings. She wanted to read The New York Times and make herself a sandwich. That night Christine’s mother called her daughter. She called faithfully every Sunday. “Your father left me nothing. I’ll have to work for the rest of my life in a dentist’s office,” recited tonight exactly as it had been done over the years, and responded to by Christine with the same precision. Mixed with the complaints was a sense of the absurd, the absurdity of their situation, mother and daughter, together, against the world, a sensibility that Christine comprehended and inherited, so to speak, rather than money.
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