Apples & Oranges

by Jan Clausen

  At Reed I’d instantly reverted to playing at being single, allowing Ansel Geertz to pay me flattering attention. I knew I should discourage him, but kept postponing it. Then I heard that Sasha had been busted.

  I can’t recall our breakup conversation—not what was said, not by how far it followed my receipt of the news of his legal mishap (alarming precisely because it sounded so avoidable), nor the state of my understanding with Ansel at that point. I only remember standing in the hallway, holding the receiver of the dorm’s pay telephone and recognizing the corrupt power of distance, the simplicity of ending it all from here, from where Sasha couldn’t get to me. Of course I knew he needed me more than ever. I determined to ignore him, to be cruel.

  Very soon I was distracted from the guilt by the misery of my unsuccessful affair with Ansel. Over time I would be haunted. “Those nightmares about Sasha worry me,” I noted the following summer. “They reveal to me what it is that I can’t stand in him, in the idea of him—that is the cringing, the supplication. I don’t think he is really this way, in fact—but somehow I continue to fear that he will clutch at me with horrible fingers as he goes down for the third time. Why should I think he is drowning?”

  My sexual forays in the Reed years were largely disastrous, but at this remove, the specific boorishness of the half dozen men I slept with seems almost incidental. More salient in terms of my problem being a woman was my unhappy relationship to the school itself, a connection shot through with gender worries that I had no language for.

  Reed, which had been founded just over half a century before my arrival in the fall of 1967, had been imagined as an oasis of intellectual excellence in the landscape of relentless practical activity that characterized the Northwest in its post-frontier period. It boasted lofty admissions standards and an ambiguous reputation as the home of a sort of egghead, offbeat aristocracy. In Seattle or Portland, to say one had been to Reed was to lay claim to formidable cultural capital, but also to risk being seen as a little weird. The place cranked out record numbers of Rhodes scholars, maintained a challenging senior thesis requirement at a time when such a policy was unusual, and, by way of stressing knowledge for knowledge’s sake, issued letter grades but kept them secret from the students. There were no fraternities, and sports were a joke; supposedly, students had once devised a cheer: “Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky / We’ve got a team that’s really hotsky!”

  Thanks to the nonconformist spirit such legends celebrated, and to having harbored some counterculture heroes like Gary Snyder back in the Beat era, Reed had garnered a mostly undeserved reputation as a hotbed of radicalism. Students wore rags and patches, stayed stoned for months on end, scrounged leftover food in Commons, dwelled in cheerful off-campus filth—but the faculty clung to (nay, plumed itself upon) an extremely traditional Eurocentric curriculum, at whose core was a two-year humanities requirement, heavy on the ancient Greeks, ingested amid the glories of Tudor Gothic architecture. Tuition was high, insularity off the charts. Cynics tried to puncture Reed’s pretensions by referring to it as “the finest small liberal arts college in Eastmoreland,” the manicured Southeast Portland neighborhood that surrounded our bosky campus.

  My seasons at Reed weighed on me with a peculiar mix of aimlessness and pressure, loneliness and maddening lack of privacy. I was always dodging tedious roommates, always bored yet overworked. There was rarely a moment when I didn’t feel I should be studying or working on a paper. It rained incessantly, I had no means of escaping from campus (unless I bummed a ride, and I hated asking favors; in any event, I had nowhere to go), I was forever smoking the same depressing cigarettes, listening to Janis Joplin or Cream blasting out of a neighboring dorm room while crawling through pages of Plato or Saint Augustine, marking time until five p.m. when Commons began serving dinner. I can remember sitting in the chapel, where movies were shown on weekends, and thinking a wordless, anxious, totally unexpected thought: I am lost, I have no lover. It was the fear of not existing.

  I suffered in those years from a refugee mentality. I’d gotten out of Bellevue, which should have meant something, but even as it spread out before me all the riches of Western civ, Reed seemed appallingly self-referential. It offered me nothing I could see how to use. And that, I think now, was not merely because the course of study lacked what we would shortly come to know as “relevance,” but because I had no inkling who to be when I got out. My future was a terror.

  How to make vivid an obsolete emotion, arriving like tardy light from a fizzled star? After all that’s been done and said in thirty years of feminism, I find myself still rawly furious at the memory of having been seduced and abandoned by the elite institution entrusted with my mind. My anger is all the sharper because I usually repress it, ashamed to whine from the place of privilege that allowed me to end up at a fancy school like Reed. But this is one of those cases in which damage and luck are one. Here is one thing that privilege can mean: to be convinced of your inclusion, offered unceasing proofs of it, while all the while, invisibly, an efficient little worm is shearing away the root hairs of your being.

  Despite the world’s insistence that I “could be anything,” I did not feel like a welcome guest at the civilizational banquet. My sense of exclusion had everything to do with the body my mind lived in (my gender, as James Baldwin once said of his race, had inexcusably “failed to produce Rembrandt”), as well as, subtly, with class and geography. I came of folks too recently up from the toiling masses to take (or pretend to take) high culture for granted. And I was a Northwest native, while many of my fellow Reedies hailed from the heart of empire.

  At last I chose philosophy for a major, in part because I always wanted to get to the core of things, and hoped eventually to grasp some unassailable fact, some constant source of all our fickle knowledge, ignorance of which I thought must be to blame for my nagging sense of insecurity; in part to avoid the easy way out, the frilly, feminine field of literature. In three years I never had a woman professor for an academic subject (not that there were any in literature, either). The one healthily self-protective thing I did was to avoid writing classes, even though I’d been saying quietly for years that I might like to be a writer. I knew I’d be a failure at the public relations, unable to project a writerly persona the way all the leather-clad boy poets did. I composed private poems and fragmentary stories, and stayed up all night on speed writing well-received essays on Aristotle’s theory of action, on causation in Hume.

  The woman I was to be would clearly have to be invented. If I could scarcely imagine her mental and economic life, at least I was sure that she would be sexual—but how? With whom? This, too, was up for grabs.

  My sexual identity was changing, as the earnest young woman who signaled her defiance through passionate trysts with one rebel boy shaded into a libertine-in-training, committed, though not consistently so, to detaching bodily pleasure from emotion. This shift was in part a response to the ideology of the times (the Jacobins of the sexual revolution were gleefully busy smashing monogamy), but also in part to my perception that the association between desire and love presented an especial danger to a woman.

  With Sasha, I’d come too close to being a wife, in thrall to a man’s needs. If I’d resisted, had not been properly compliant, I’d nevertheless been perilously attuned to his wants and expectations. The “cringing and supplication” were more dangerous to me than his casual nastiness, his neglect or arrogance. The pressures that went with my insight into his despair felt like the price I’d paid for getting so close, for the intensity of our sex. Could I arrange to feel the thrill without the thralldom?

  As with every other goal I set myself, I looked to men to set the standard. Most men, I realized, were not handicapped by my really rather silly difficulty in uncoupling simple lust from a swarm of considerations encompassing my worldview, aesthetics, morals, politics, and aspirations for the future. Most men, in other words, were not in bondage, as was I, to the senseless precept that you shouldn’t fuck where
you weren’t prepared to marry.

  In truth, I had one foot in my parents’ world, which was formed in an age when the life consequences of women’s sexual choices infused the rule with sturdy material logic. For my grandmothers, the selection of a husband—presumably the first and only sexual partner—had amounted to the choice of a lifetime occupation. The same could fairly be said of my mother, who had a bachelor’s degree in home economics and who had never since my birth held a paying job, though she would later teach English as a second language.

  Easier access to contraceptives had helped my generation of women disengage the idea of sex from that of ultimate destiny, but I’d still come along early enough to know the dread of pregnancy before legalized abortion. (And birth control itself was of course highly imperfect: I tried the Pill, a diaphragm, and at last a Dalkon Shield, which I luckily survived with my uterus intact.) Although I was presumably going to become self-supporting very soon, I was terribly vague about the whole business. And no wonder. I knew no women who paid their own way, apart from a few librarians and teachers and Grandma Nell, my father’s stepmother, whose stories of toil in factories and sweatshops seemed like something out of Dickens.

  You are whom you sleep with. The proposition was not gender-neutral; as a corollary to the tacit premise that women’s sex was especially central to our identities, it tightly bound me and let the boys go free. It animated my parents’ ideal of lifelong marriage, which set a standard of self-consistency that I was to flout but never entirely elude, thereby becoming an emotional modernist, dwelling in fragments yet nostalgically attached to an image of organic unity. No wonder that my turn toward women would implicitly propose: If I have to be a wife, then at least I want a wife.

  Ansel Geertz turned out to be a spoiled poseur with limited interest in sex whose image depended on his late-model car and a string of metaphysical insights, like cheap glass trading beads, picked up on psychedelic and amphetamine excursions. He impressed me with his talk of Jungian principles, his pursuit of ultimate meaning. He ferried me, tripping, in the middle of the night to all the places the coolest Reedies frequented: Hung Far Low’s for pork fried rice, the airport coffee shop for sundaes. He called me kiddo and lectured me, coldly, on my spiritual development, a fatal flaw in which he diagnosed very shortly after I moved in with him.

  I was scorched by guilt over Sasha, and this rejection was agonizing. I had the choice of accepting Ansel’s view of my shortcomings or admitting what a sucker I’d been. I felt plundered emotionally, reinforced in my fear that intimacy meant bending my perceptions and desires to a man’s requirements.

  Art Kane was kind, depressed, asexual. Mourning a girlfriend who’d left him years ago, he lived with a state-of-the-art sound system and his cat, S. Mack, on the ground floor of a house with gingerbread trim and sagging porches, a few blocks from campus. He was in his mid-twenties and had supposedly made big money dealing dope in the Bay Area. I knew I wasn’t in love and hoped that meant progress.

  I was slowly beginning to have a few friendships with women, but I didn’t work hard to cultivate them. It didn’t occur to me that I should have to work; now I see that my early isolation meant I had arrived in my late teens with serious gaps in my social skills. I wasn’t sure why women would want to know me, and while it began to dawn on me that they could be quite interesting, I persisted in viewing them as optional. I knew the ones it was easiest to know, observing others from a distance.

  In freshman year I saw a good deal of Lynne Jasper, a Seattleite I’d met in LRY. Lynne surrounded herself with a dense, eclectic crowd, including her roommate, Norah, who hailed from Oakland, and Norah’s Black Student Union buddies. Blacks were a tiny minority at Reed, but there were more as the sixties ended than there’d been a few years back, or would be again by the late seventies. They hung together, of necessity; as a group they were militant, but hardly separatist, despite the heady influence of Black Power.

  It was my first experience with an interracial scene, as opposed to what I knew of “integration,” which in Bellevue meant one (not very frequently), with all the bad faith and suppressed hysteria inherent in such arrangements. (The delicate tasks of not seeing difference and of forgetting history—“Just treat him the way you’d treat anybody else”—were the core of this program.) I was attracted by Norah’s set, but careful not to seem impressed. I was petrified that I’d somehow let slip how badly screwed up I’d been by my thorough indoctrination in the unspoken and unspeakable principle that Others exist so that We may demonstrate Our lack of prejudice. I certainly couldn’t be playfully irreverent like Lynne, who proposed to test on her thick Caucasian hair the effect of the curlers required by light-skinned Norah to impart plausible density and shape to a too relaxed natural. I’d eat with their entourage in Commons (it was bad form to eat alone); I’d visit their dorm room late at night, sit stoned while Aretha blasted at top volume, but it wasn’t intimate, not a one-on-one friendship.

  At the start of junior year I got close to Alexa Abrams. She was as smart as a sleek machine, really into sex with men, and much more socially adept than I. I was pleased and slightly bewildered when she sought me out, inviting me for dinner. She cooked efficiently (she did everything efficiently) on a hot plate in her dorm room: vegetarian goulash, chicken curry with peanut butter. She’d brew a pot of tea, put on a record by the Kinks, pick flecks of stray tobacco off her teeth as we smoked and talked about parents, men, ideas.

  I was nineteen, she was my first important female friend, and I felt amazed that anyone who projected such self-assurance would bother with a wallflower like myself. Her husky voice, the assertive temperament that so many men found threatening, her perceptiveness about the workings of our social world, the amazing fact that she worried about keeping her weight up—all were becoming romantic for me. I savored her wry descriptions of the grubby pool-playing set who spent all their waking hours at the tables in Lower Commons and her insight into the circle orbiting Bill Crabbe, a flamboyant thirtyish professor. Crabbe dressed like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, talked like William Blake on downers, supposedly screwed his students of both sexes, and had made the ossified humanities curriculum (Herodotus! Plato! Dante!) improbably popular.

  Alexa was adventurous without the self-destructive streak so prominent in many rebel girls I knew. Though often hurt by her musician lover, Danny, a feckless, inconstant charmer, she was bound and determined not to bleed for long. I marveled at her focus, her ability to descry a future that loomed so blurrily in my field of vision. She planned to graduate with a teaching credential, a practical supplement to her liberal arts degree. She was a winner. I loved to watch her work.

  By the end of September, I was writing in my journal: “Alexa is the reason why I wake up in the morning feeling like I’ve got a steady and reliable lover. In the past three weeks she has become to me what a lover ought to be; I feel closer to her than anyone else. We are alike. We understand one another.” I fully intended the sexual implication, for I added, “I don’t know, I don’t know and I just don’t know what I want at all. Do I have too many theories in my head from reading Colette?” I’d been perusing an anthology of her writings that included juicy excerpts from Le Pur et l’impur, and as usual was worried that nascent desires might prove to be merely a species of emotional plagiarism.

  At precisely this time I began a long-distance affair with Ned Cusumano, a gregarious twenty-seven-year-old hip capitalist and the former dope-dealing partner of the melancholy Art Kane. Ned lived in San Francisco, where he ran a small business that supplied head shops with the staples of their trade. He was a brazen chauvinist, but I thought that needn’t touch me. My excursions to the cradle of hippiedom offered glad escape from rainy Reed. I savored stolen weekends where the living looked easy, where you zipped over sun-warmed, fog-cooled hills on the back of a motorcycle, where days began with the Book of Changes and a joint, where couples called each other “my old lady” and “my old man” and “vibes” were material forces
. I had not yet learned to manage my writer’s consciousness, to distinguish clearly between wanting to live a life and simply wanting to observe it.

  Being with Ned was less an exclusive coupling of the sort I’d pursued with Sasha and Ansel than an emotional triangle, with Alexa at its vertex. Ned played right along, denouncing Alexa’s unfeminine demeanor, pressuring me to shun her influence. In effect, without needing to utter the word, he warned me against perversion, which he alluded to with some Friscobabble label like “lending energy to negative areas.”

  My life became, for a month or two that fall, a tale that reads like the perils of Persephone. I was dramatically divided in my allegiance to male and female principles—although, in Ned’s version of gender symbolism, the terms were reversed, the male principle constituting the link to a sunny realm of natural bounty, the female beckoning me to a sinister underworld. In my journal I admonished myself to cultivate “the incredible deliciousness of relating to someone you like through differences rather than through samenesses,” to moderate the intensity of my feelings for Alexa by rationing our contact and seeing more of other girls. In effect, I was enmeshed in what the cultural critic Marjorie Garber, writing in Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life, calls a “bisexual plot.” She defines such a plot as “a mode of erotic triangulation in which one person is torn between life with a man and life with a woman,” and notes that “often . . . the erotic tension is greatest when it is not acted upon”; in some instances, à la D.H. Lawrence’s The Fox, “it is the triangle that produces eroticism to begin with.”

  According to the lesbian feminist perspective that I was shortly to embrace, my connection with Alexa should have been primary: in effect, she and I had the “real” relationship, potentially lesbian, potentially more fulfilling than anything to be hoped for with a man. That’s not the way I see it now, although I do think that my recognition of sexual feelings for her laid the groundwork for my more assertive handling of later lesbian attractions. I agree with Garber’s thesis that bisexual triangles can in themselves be a source of erotic energy—which, far from suggesting that my libidinal best interests lay in choosing Alexa over Ned, hints that I may unconsciously have relished my dilemma. Ned pointed the way to a mode of queer seduction exempt from the considerable risks of an open declaration.