Apples & Oranges

by Jan Clausen

  I joined the Community after returning from my cross-country trip, which lasted only a few weeks but made a big impression on me. I felt as if I was jettisoning my cultural virginity, for it was my first sight of that eastern metroplex to which, despite our pose of preferring “God’s country,” the western provinces consistently deferred.

  Life on the road with Alexa had been fun, but too easy, I thought, not a proper test of my self-sufficiency. Leaving her in Pittsburgh, I’d hopped a bus to New York and stayed with Lynne Jasper in her mother’s tiny walk-up on the volatile, heroin-ridden Lower East Side. Then I’d continued north to Maine and camped in Acadia National Park. Missing Josh and increasingly nervous about my isolation after a few days of hitchhiking around the park and sleeping alone in the open, I wrote in my journal that I’d been “proving my masculinity long enough.” I called my parents and accepted their offer to pay my plane fare to Minneapolis, where I endured a family reunion as the price of my safe conduct home.

  When I arrived back in Portland, Josh and I resumed our wary-tender affair. He was then about to move into the Learning Community, and through him I got to know a good deal about the new organization’s objectives and makeup. By fall I’d decided it made sense for me to join.

  The core group of refugees from Reed aimed at nothing less than reinventing higher education in a form far more egalitarian and “relevant” than anything a smug private liberal arts college was prepared to countenance. Though not exactly devoid of elite connections—it got a starter grant from the Carnegie Foundation—the Learning Community was anything but smug. Made brave or desperate by disillusionment with liberal tradition, its founders wrenched apart the familiar framework of their lives in the hope of building something better. Members—all white, many Jewish, some married and raising children—tried bravely to adjust to communal living in newly purchased houses in the mostly Black, lower-middle-class Irvington section of northeast Portland.

  The idea was to combine self-directed study with socially useful work. Major projects included setting up a rural site complete with organic farming options, starting an experimental (“free”) school, and transforming a dingy coffee shop in the run-down Burnside area into a funky café whose cheap prices and eclectic menu we hoped would appeal to skid row derelicts and counterculturalists alike. There were plans to obtain accreditation and offer undergraduate degrees, but for most of us the issue of formal credentialing was entirely secondary to that of relocating intellectual endeavor outside the ivory tower.

  “We,” I say, but I joined with reservations that I never entirely got rid of. For one thing, the Community seemed like Josh’s project, and by now I had firmly in view the folly of supposing that my own aimlessness could be redeemed by joining a man in a life of his design. But a more important factor was my ambivalence about giving myself over to the process, the flow, the rhythms and preoccupations of a collection of people who spoke of themselves less as an organization than as an organic body. In the Learning Community, I glimpsed for the first time the positive potential of People in Groups, and with it the hope for an end to chronic dissatisfaction with my social surroundings. I responded to the vision of a creative whole that would reinforce the strengths of the parts. But I was used to seeing myself as a woman-island, and the prospect of immersion in an ocean of others felt deeply threatening. Perhaps I sensed, accurately, how dangerous groups can be—that they can amplify destructive dynamics as well as positive ones—but rather than credit the wisdom of my forebodings, I mostly reproached myself for my (“bourgeois”) individualism. I thought my efforts to be a writer had something to do with my need for a solitude I feared was selfishly at odds with communal openness.

  A similar tension would characterize my later relationships to communities of women. Both in the Learning Community and in lesbian feminist settings, part of the intensity involved the deliberate breakdown of the distinction between erotic and other forms of group connection. Imparting a local twist to the era’s fascination with freeing libidinal impulses, Learning Community members tended to reinterpret lovemaking itself as a form of communalism, another way of moving beyond the isolating structures of monogamy, nuclear households, or the hip and heartless promiscuity that flourished at Reed. In an atmosphere in which we fondly imagined ourselves to be making everything new, taboos on both intergenerational and same gender attractions fell rapidly by the wayside. Polymorphous perversity began to look like civic virtue.

  Another salient feature of Community life, and a crucial one for me, was that here women exercised more power than in any other setting I’d experienced. Particularly after a series of sharp debates led to the departure of a faction who worried that we were becoming too inclusive and standardless, several older women (teacher types in their thirties) emerged as highly influential. Their leadership was informal, but so was most leadership in a group that increasingly equated explicit structure with odious hierarchy. I admired Glenda Tate, who’d taught economics at Reed. She seemed to regard Josh as a protégé, which meant we got invited to U-pick berries with her and made a soggy threesome on weekend backpacking trips. A lover of all things local, small-scale, and natural (she would later open a tiny, exquisite restaurant featuring Oregon produce), she’d helped start an economics study group with a neo-Marxist slant. Single, she was reported to be a feminist, though it was characteristic of her prickly manner that she disclaimed expertise when I inquired what that meant. I knew I should investigate the women’s liberation movement, but kept putting it off, like a hypochondriac in dread of official medical opinion.

  Nadine Reiter, I at first regarded warily. She was married, had a five-year-old daughter, and was expecting a second child. She had taught English in the Portland schools, but now her husband, Mark, supported the family with some kind of regular job in the social services. She trailed around their house (shared with several young Community members) in a floor-length cotton dress, mingling energetic housework with spirited arguments about Community politics, offering opinions on Kenneth Patchen’s poems or Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body—but looking, I thought, rather too much like a housewife, altogether too barefoot and pregnant for my taste. Yet people were drawn to her; she was one who made things happen. She lacked the aura of dowdy martyrdom that clung to several other Community wives who’d arrived among us on their husbands’ coattails.

  Nadine possessed no striking beauty, no overtly provocative ways, so I realized only gradually her remarkable talent for erotic persuasion. Her face was long, eyes narrowly set above high, prominent cheekbones. (The cheekbones were beautiful.) Her wide mouth was always in motion—talking, laughing, eating, pronouncing everything with that distinctive Brooklyn accent—and perhaps it was this mobility that made her so attractive, the liveliness, the interest she took in everyone around her, the passion of her judgments, her indignation at cruelty, at the cruelty of convention, of “normal” families and childhoods. She never used makeup, she wore what we all did then—long dresses cut from imported Indian bedspreads, short dresses over jeans, head scarves, overalls.

  Nadine ran her house like a perpetual salon, populated at most hours of the day by assorted Community members. Among her regulars was Norman Migdoff, an old friend from New York, who’d given up tenure at Reed and now worked tirelessly to make our experiment succeed. When the conversation turned to some brewing controversy—for example, Community membership criteria—Nadine gravitated toward the affective dimension of the issues, trying to interpret political positions in terms of underlying feelings. She kept a semipublic diary, sometimes reading aloud from it and including relevant portions in The Rag, the Learning Community’s periodical of record (where I myself had begun to print my poems). The entries sometimes referred to her therapy sessions. I knew she was seeing a real analyst, a German neo-Freudian, couch and all.

  Josh and I would sit at her kitchen table and watch her work away, mixing bread from the Tassajara cookbook, spreading oily raw granola on cookie sheets to bake, all without mi
ssing a beat in the conversation. When we saw her right after the birth of her daughter Liesel, I thought she handled the baby as deftly as challah dough.

  She would talk about herself—her feelings about mothering, her anger at a painful childhood, her orgasms, even, with a candor that attracted and unnerved me. She told stories of her affair with a former student, a woman named Claire whom she spoke of as the love of her life. The relationship, and Nadine’s refusal to hide it, had resulted in the loss of her teaching job. Despite my own recent experience with Alexa, this caught me by surprise: I hadn’t expected such a thing to pop up in the life of a wife and mother in her thirties. Her stories reeled forth at a level of detail that almost assumed you knew the characters personally, as indeed you felt you did when she referred to mileposts like “when Claire wouldn’t make love with me anymore” as matter-of-factly as she’d say, “when Mark and I got married.”

  Yet she wasn’t self-centered, not in the usual sense. She believed in her teacherly knack for seeing things in others, for drawing what was special (or “amazing,” her favorite word) from the depths of those who mistrusted their own powers. I saw how she collected people, multiplied intimacy. I, who’d always had a thing for teachers, certainly wished that she would single me out, but I acted diffident, reluctant to vie for attention with all her other special ones. “You should make a point of saying hello to Nadine,” Josh warned me once when we’d seen her in a crowd. “It really hurts her feelings when you don’t.”

  He and I were living with several other ex-Reedies (though Josh, a nonconformist even among dropouts, planned to finish his senior thesis) in an old house full of romantic dark woodwork, a laden plum tree in the small yard. Short blocks away were the other collective houses, with names like Plotafoot and Leviathan, in whose living rooms Community members gathered, self-selected by intellectual and/or affectional inclination, to discuss Kate Millett’s frontal assault on male chauvinist fiction, Anaïs Nin’s diaries, Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital.

  Besides all those study groups, there were incessant, often contentious meetings to decide policy and plan future projects. I was less involved than Josh in the substance within the process, the ins and outs of all the battles. Instead, I divvied up my political energies, attending meetings of a nascent radical women’s organization and joining the editorial collective of the Willamette Bridge, Portland’s underground paper. Among the articles I wrote were several on the activities of the Portland chapter of the Black Panther party. With other Community members, I participated in a Panther-led boycott of a local supermarket chain, aligning myself with the multidimensional ferment we referred to as the Movement and thought of as converging on eventual revolution. For the first time, I was able to frame my frustration with my prospects in political terms, and to consider that the multitude of social ills claiming my attention might be bound up with the power imbalance between the sexes. I dreamed of using my writing to explore what it would take to liberate women.

  Although I hadn’t yet heard the slogan “The future is female”—it probably hadn’t even been coined at the time—I was having a presentiment of the faith it articulates. In flashes, I could sense that my gendered lot might offer creative openings. I saw that women like me were claiming social space in places like the Community, which hosted occasional events and gatherings just for women, and the Bridge, where feminist ideas freely circulated. Working together, we could hope to reshape the very meaning of womanhood, changing ourselves in the process. The fact that my notion of “women” was so narrow, that I vaguely imagined more than half the planet might share some version of my personal concerns, as peculiarly local, class- and race-bound as they were, was, of course, a serious flaw in my approach, as it was in so much white feminist thinking of that era. Yet I can’t dismiss the significance of the moment in which I first grasped the possibility of being my female self and socially effective.

  Josh and I had assumed a respectably coupled stance that belied the anxiety I’d felt back in May, when I wrote in my journal, “He is the 9th person I have slept with, and this bothers me because I am not yet 20 & I think I know a lot about love—and why is it that I cannot live up to the old ideal of permanence?” I was moved by the contrast between his surface diffidence—what he would say—and what his body admitted, wordlessly, in the privacy of our sex. He voiced all sorts of tricky philosophical reservations—could he really care for me? what, in fact, does it mean to care, given our radical human isolation?—but I felt a degree of assurance that he wouldn’t abandon me.

  And so I engaged in a sort of negative magic, an almost superstitious avoidance of patterns that had spelled trouble in the past, especially with Sasha. I liked that I’d been the erotic aggressor with Josh, liked the ways in which my broader experience of sex made him seem touchingly vulnerable at times. He seemed to understand my horror of domesticity. I can’t remember who started it, but soon he was calling me “my little husband” and answering to “my little wife.”

  If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise. I’m looking at a photograph of Nadine and Josh, the only picture I own of either. It’s a 3½-by-3½ black-and-white snapshot, date-stamped APR 71. I think it’s from a session of the morning study group known as “Reading and Eating.” The two of them sit, looking very like a couple (the Jewish queen and her young goyish consort), at the far end of Nadine’s dining table. Their elbows seem to touch behind a jar of granola. The stuff of our everyday feasts takes up all of the foreground. A gallon of whole milk from the Food Conspiracy is larger than Nadine’s head and shoulders; there’s a loaf of what looks like homemade Irish soda bread, an uncapped bottle of maple syrup. Josh, laughing in that cagey way he had, squinting behind his oblong granny glasses, as though the laughter were being squeezed out of him, leans his cheek on his right hand. His mouth pulls to the left. His teeth gleam white between mustache and sketchy beard, both many shades darker than the sun-streaked tresses that drape over his shoulders.

  Nadine smiles from behind the milk bottle, her bright face tilted forward, the fringe of her glossy dark hair the darkest thing in the composition. She’s radiant, attentive, yet simultaneously abstracted. Her smile has something in it that points to complications, perhaps as innocent as the thought that the baby will soon need to be fed, or as guilty as the worry that someone who used to be her lover and is present at this table is about to make a scene. She glows remotely, like a goddess, an important executive, or the honored, efficient mother of a sizable family. Behind her, propped against a many-paned window, a dried starfish is silhouetted. It completes my sense that this scene is a tarot card, crammed with emblems of luck and plenty. Just in front of the camera, the hand of an unseen diner reaches toward the irresistible food.

  While many of the senior Community members wielded influence proportional to their erstwhile teacher roles, Nadine and her pal Norman Migdoff rapidly emerged as something like the symbolic Mother and Father of an institution so protean, so averse to rules and forms, that it inescapably fell back on the template of that most primitive and fraught of social structures, the nuclear family. The two of them clearly had some special understanding, but because they were grown-ups and parents and married to other people it took forever for me to figure out that they had recently been lovers. I did learn early on of Nadine’s affair with her housemate Paul Nardis, a former Reedie who played piano, practicing Chopin nocturnes on Glenda Tate’s battered upright, devoured psychoanalytic theory, and cultivated a brilliant polemical style that recommended him to Josh.

  Paul was skinny, distinctly unmuscular, with an elongated trunk and legs surprisingly short for such a tall person. He wore sweeping garments at times—a Dracula cape, a kimono in lieu of a bathrobe—clothing that complemented the characteristic haughty motion with which he flung lank locks over one narrow shoulder. Like Nadine (I supposed he’d learned it from her) he always said “making love,” never “fucking” or “having sex.” He reminded me of a
big young fragile bird with a cruel beak. In his suffering, he’d peck your eyes out. He stayed at Josh’s and my house after Nadine broke off with him, before she gave birth to Liesel, when her pregnancy was pretty far along and she said she couldn’t handle the tension with Mark anymore. She’d been Paul’s first lover, and he’d been very vulnerable. Now he was distraught, briefly close to suicide. At the time, I wrote in my journal that it was incomprehensible how he’d allowed Nadine to become “everything” to him. It must be, I concluded, because he was a man, and thus had never had to learn to be more prudent. I wrote that I thought of making love with him.

  Caustic Paul dubbed Nadine “the woman who sold love.” And Glenda Tate, whom I thought very sexy in her way, all reticence, a rose protected by cultivated thorns, contributed to The Rag a wicked quip about a “ménage à n, where n is very large.” It had much to do with Nadine’s tutelage that it would come to seem utterly natural to check my own erotic temperature and pulse as automatically as I would the time of day, highlighting ambiguous and often fleeting feelings for people of either gender. I liked to think of her as the high priestess in the tarot, by which system of divination she and Paul, at the height of their intimacy, had seemed nearly as enthralled as by the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s byzantine apparatus of good and bad breasts. (Not to appear unduly reverent, Paul liked to say that the letters “B” and “J” on the pillars flanking the priestess stood for “blow job.”) Nadine kept proclaiming how needy she was, how easily undermined, but I mostly couldn’t see it. I was too much in awe of her ability to take exactly the risk I couldn’t, to make a big deal of her feelings.