Apples & Oranges

by Jan Clausen

  The fact that Nadine was on such an emotional roller coaster—“driven,” as she said, and quoted her analyst’s warning that she seemed to be shadowed by a ruthless destructive force—should have alerted me to the ultimately impersonal nature of all this intimacy. Like a sacred prostitute, or some pop goddess on a billboard, she’d attained to a pitch of promiscuity that aimed at voracious connection. In fact, I was suspicious at first. But in the end I volunteered to be another Paul, to get singed in the flame of her passionate patronage.

  During the winter and spring of 1971, I consciously cultivated protolesbian sentiments. Much of my excitement was generalized, rising like steam off events—a Bridge editorial meeting, a gourmet women-only dinner chez Glenda—that brought my kind together. I was sensing not only a powerful group dimension to eros, but the fact that a discovery of women as romantic is just a step away from finding one to fall in love with.

  I cared a lot for Josh, and it hadn’t escaped me that ours was the most satisfying sex I’d had since leaving Sasha, but those important facts couldn’t stem my restlessness. Josh was moody; his depth meant difficulty. I felt the tug of his unstated needs, the irritation of our housemates at his efforts to enforce punctilious standards of household maintenance. As he slogged through his senior thesis, he grew more curmudgeonly, reinforcing in me an ambivalence I’d noted in the fall: “great flashes of affection & love—then, the feeling that no matter what our love is like, something is stifled by it, something I might be becoming.” That “something” was connected, in part, to my urge to plunge deeper into the intricacies of a lush all-female world that seemed to be forming within the shell of gender-mixed society. At Christmas, I’d sketched our Community holiday dinner: “Arlie, always Beautiful Woman to me. Marge, a 19th-century suffragette in her long coat and scarf. Lizzie always a wench, somehow sexually attractive to me too. . . . Mark, at one point sitting at Nadine’s feet looking like a high-school kid worried about his girl. Paul and Nadine are so beautiful together, beyond their personal selves there is an archetypal scary quality. A woman and her young lover—darkness—I am also emotionally-sexually attracted to Nadine. Who isn’t.”

  Though the process was neither linear nor completely conscious, I think it’s accurate to say that as this world of women took on vibrancy and substance, the world of men—which I’d mistaken for the world!—dimmed in my mind’s eye; its denizens acquired a washed-out, sickly look. I had some sympathy for their problems, but couldn’t help noticing that from my new vantage point their force appeared fragile, their self-importance laughable, their clumsiness with emotions potentially dangerous to children and other living things. “Women seem so strong to me now—I feel that we start out ahead in some way.”

  I wasn’t the least bit daunted by the prospect of perversion, which sounded to me enticingly subversive; I only worried that I might not come off as a credible woman lover, given that my lust felt so tentative. (It was strong enough, at least, for me to devote many pages of my journal to a pornographic saga featuring characters based on Alexa and Sasha’s friend Naomi Marks.) With men, my hesitations hadn’t mattered so much because they were inclined to make the first move. But in a situation where it looked as though I’d have to take the initiative, I somehow wasn’t sure of my right to this desire that was neither overpowering nor respectably single-minded. (I knew I could do men.) Nor, in a basically straight milieu, was I at all clear about who might be approachable. By summer, I was strongly attracted to my housemate Arlie, a heavy-browed beauty who shared my political leanings, and whose deep, melodious voice and sibylline air I’d mistaken for maturity and wisdom. But, much as with Alexa, I found it safer to fantasize and keep my fledgling passion to myself.

  The Community was now in serious difficulties: contention growing, projects failing, people leaving. Like so many other experimental institutions of the period, it had purchased the democratic advantage of flexible leadership at the cost of dangerous instability. Once the initial surge of optimistic energy subsided, it proved hard to sustain plodding, incremental growth. When tensions and disagreements took center stage, few structures were in place to forestall dissolution. Add to this a larger political environment wracked by apocalyptic jitters (to cite just one local example, in the summer of 1971 the American Legion held its national convention in Portland, causing widespread expectations of rioting and repression that never materialized) for a picture of the conditions that fed the vortex of libidinous misery I was about to be drawn into.

  Josh was one of the worst casualties, though in his case as in others it’s hard to sort out how much of the desperation really had collective causes and how much of it would have happened anyway. Throughout the summer and early fall, he slid ever deeper into a depression that seemed connected to his great uncertainty about what to do with the rest of his life now that he’d finished his Reed degree and the Community was failing. He said that only wilderness could console him; he talked of a ranch in Wyoming, but it was clearly only talk. There seemed to be little I could do for him, and our intimacy increasingly felt like a circumscribed space where I was shut up with an anguish I didn’t fully understand. I don’t recall noticing the obvious parallels to the way I’d felt with Sasha. I only hoped, through rising claustrophobia, that outside attractions could let in oxygen without forcing a breakup.

  Lending force to this notion, polyerotics were in the air. As the Community imploded, more and more energy seemed to go into what I view in retrospect as a sort of erotic “folie à n.” “I want to scatter my sexuality everywhere,” I wrote in midsummer. “I want it to permeate all my relationships, whether a subtle flavoring or the overt taste of the dish.” The revolution, a powerful metaphor then, even for people who didn’t contemplate literal barricades in their future, was understood to be a transformation so far-reaching that it almost didn’t seem to matter whether you started at macro or micro levels, at the furthest reaches of the economy or in the most intimate interstices of psychic life. This imperative to hoist the social order by its heels and shake its pockets out, repeatedly, was exhausting and scary to an extent never imagined by those who envision serial nonmonogamy as a purely hedonistic exercise. We seemed to have a duty to chaos.

  Along the way, the thrills were real and dangerous enough. A “ménage à n” was really a bisexual plot writ large, significant not only because it multiplied one’s personal erotic options, but because it allowed vicarious participation in others’ intimacies. I have said before that I tended to eroticize my rivals; now I decided it might be worth having rivals for the erotic tension their presence helped to generate. Late in the summer, Josh got interested in a new Community member, a long-legged, pretty girl who unnervingly shared my name. I watched—I encouraged—their burgeoning affair. “How can she be making love with him and not have it be as though I were making love with her?”

  Jealous, energized, I deemed myself a free agent. Joining the Community game of musical residences that mirrored our incessant emotional realignments, I painted a room (it had formerly been Paul’s) at the top of Nadine’s house, newly rechristened the Joy of Cooking, and abruptly quit the attic I’d been sharing with Josh upstairs from several singularly uncongenial housemates. Laurann, a new recruit, lately arrived from the Midwest, was moving into the Joy of Cooking as well. She and Nadine and I were spending a lot of time together. I planned on seeing Josh when it suited me, and I hoped Nadine, who’d kissed me once or twice, would become my other lover.

  I never expected to be her one and only. I could see that she didn’t do that, she couldn’t be pinned down that way. I don’t even know if I can say that I fell in love with her. It was more a case of entering her orbit. When she put her hummingbird tongue in my mouth, I thought, No boundaries.

  Nadine, however, was sinking into her own vortex of despair. Shortly after my move, she took to visiting Josh’s attic, having sex with him in episodes that she described to Laurann and me as less an affair than a sort of erotic binge. Apparently in ministe
ring to him, she briefly eluded her own misery, a bottomless pit of need and self-disgust that I had trouble picturing (in my eyes she was always brilliant, powerful) but took on faith because she insisted it was there.

  I couldn’t bear Josh’s thickening anguish. I felt more frightened by his blank, dissociated way of speaking than I was by a listless suicide attempt. I grasped his suffering as I couldn’t grasp Nadine’s. I believed him when he said the pain was unendurable. He told me he had a feeling of wanting to hoard touches and kisses, as though, if only he stockpiled enough of them, he wouldn’t need actual people anymore. Our former housemates had all moved out, and he spent days in bed in the attic, barely bestirring himself to feed the cats that remained as his sole companions. One evening I stopped by and he’d been baking, but my relief at this small sign of energy faded when he told me he’d made peanut butter cookies because he’d dreamed about them. I wondered when his dreams had become his sole guide to action. Another time he showed up at Joy of Cooking, swaggering in what seemed a macho parody, except that he wasn’t joking. He’d been drinking beer and proclaimed his intention to find Paul and beat the shit out of him.

  And still I wanted to make love with Nadine. She spoke so sanely about her “craziness.”

  Kissing her, I was thrilled that power could be so soft. Her tongue knew how to do a melting tremolo, her stomach throbbed in time with the pulse of her orgasm, she laughed afterward, and said, “My hair smells like you.”

  And then there was the triumph of simply having done it, like breaking the sound barrier or running the four-minute mile. (Why had I imagined I might prove incapable?) Yet I hadn’t shed the old anxieties about how to tell real desire from a possible counterfeit: “I keep wondering whether my attraction to women is just something I make up, to be modern (how amazing that when I hold Nadine’s body I’m aroused in the same way as with a man—like finding out you don’t have to be married to get pregnant).”

  Though I wouldn’t have used these words at the time, Nadine stirred a butch ambition, already tested in fantasy, that embarrasses me, not because it’s unfeminine (which indeed it is, as the world reckons these things), but because I’m afraid of being disbelieved. (I know I do a credible femme. Butch aggression is a long shot.)

  I mean I wanted to “take” her. To answer yielding with insistence, softness with firmness, enveloping with filling to the brim.

  Nadine and I were housemates, but she slept with Mark at night, and the days were filled with taking care of Liesel, talking, cooking, going to shrink appointments. We made love a few times, when she could fit it in. Meanwhile she and Laurann were getting closer. I spent a lot of time with both of them, talking over the communal follies that raged around us, noting how the men, especially, “made themselves stupid” as things fell apart. We came to see ourselves as a troika of seers possessed of understandings beyond the ken of the multitude. Nadine had always supported my writing, and now she saw the poet in me as the source of precocious insights. I’d been singled out as one of the elect, and though I recognized that the general collapse boded no good, the fact was that I found the promise of inclusion in a tiny, women-only avant-garde more enticing than membership in an undifferentiated throng.

  The three of us determined to leave the doomed Community. Nadine’s older daughter would stay with Mark; we’d take Liesel with us. We’d rent a cheap house, figure out the next steps from there. (And there was much to figure. Not one of us even had a job.) Amid the general wreckage, it would be good to be together, to bask in the intimacy of aligned perceptions.

  I understood that Nadine and Laurann had formed a sort of spiritual couple, but Laurann seemed to be a confirmed celibate and had already vetoed the suggestion that they might sleep together. I thought I’d have Nadine’s body at least, and portions of her attention. It seemed reasonable to hope that, in a quieter atmosphere, there’d be more chances to make love, to spend nights together.

  We did have sex a few times once we’d moved to the new place, a flimsy, freezing three-bedroom rental, but it seemed that with attending to Liesel, getting the house in order, and talking over everything endlessly (à deux and à trois), there still wasn’t much chance for romance.

  And then it flipped, like one of those tricky drawings where the background becomes the foreground. The first time that Nadine prevailed on Laurann to spend a night with her—an utterly predictable evolution that I didn’t at all foresee—she didn’t speak of sex. She said that being held the way that Laurann held her was utterly amazing; it felt like everything she’d ever wanted. But I could hear their passion, always in Nadine’s voice, through walls about as soundproof as shower curtains.

  Very well, I thought. I can handle this.

  We three never thought of ourselves as lesbians, which to Nadine would have meant the surrender of freedom involved in embracing any category, and to me a consistency that was hardly credible given my record of heterosexual dalliance. We claimed, in that house, to be different from everyone (we claimed to be wiser); outlaw sex was only part of it. Being women making love with women seemed like putting one over on society at large. It felt like getting away with something.

  My experience with Nadine began to undermine my heterosexual identity, but could not topple it. I’d been inducted into the straight world as a matter of course simply because I could do men; now, bigger and stronger than any actual sex act, heterosexuality functioned like a dense, massive planet, whose gravitational field had captured me and could not be escaped absent extraordinary effort. This was especially true because, unlike a lot of ambitious women of varied erotic bents (my avidly heterosexual friend Alexa, for example), I’d never been taunted with appearing “masculine,” a charge that draws much of its force from the implication of sexual irregularity. I’d never felt abnormal in that sense, which made a revision of my self-description feel pretty optional. The notion of sexual identity, moreover, implies some expectation about the future, and at that point, I didn’t imagine a future. So far as I was concerned, we three were a timeless world.

  Three women spend a Portland winter in self-imposed exile from corrupt humanity: an existence at once the most austere and the most indulgent imaginable. A rickety house, three tiny upstairs bedrooms. No work, no cash, no friends. (There were food stamps; child support paid the rent; we planned on getting jobs later.) We ignored world events, television, newspapers. We got around on foot, by bus when necessary. We could hardly claim to be artists, though I kept scribbling. Apart from child care for a one-year-old, our only significant project was consciousness itself.

  This isolation made it all the rougher for me when Nadine abruptly dismissed me from her bed. Almost as soon as she and Laurann became lovers, she realized she considered their intimacy a marriage, and a monogamous one at that. The shift had everything to do with how their needs intersected, how harsh their mothers had been, how fully Laurann “saw” her.

  Laurann was a small, dark-haired woman in her late twenties. Her face was round, her upper front teeth prominent. She spoke softly and seemed gentle until you got to know her. Living with her was like having Emily Dickinson for a roommate—an Emily minus the poetic genius, but with all that ruthless hunger of perception, that selfsame phosphorescent anger. Thinking back on it now, I’m sure that our household’s bizarre narrowness, which both Nadine and I temporarily endorsed for very different reasons, had everything to do with Laurann’s preferences. She was capable of a terrifying focus, amounting almost to psychic anorexia.

  We went for long walks in different combinations, Liesel bouncing in the backpack. We planned and cooked elaborate cheap meals. Nadine and Laurann were much occupied with telling each other the stories of their lives. I tried to keep up; I felt superfluous. I taught myself to masturbate. Laurann pursued a vivid career in shoplifting, halted by the inevitable arrest. Nadine spoke credibly of suicide. I started seeing a shrink—Nadine’s.

  The life was thrillingly bleak. I thought I could tough it out.

  O
ne is able to conduct an existence alongside others only by virtue of sharing a point of view with them. In the case of my life with Nadine and Laurann, this principle was etched in high relief, both because we utterly lacked all the usual incentives (economic motives, larger social networks) that glue people together when common consciousness gets shaky, and because of our commitment to unstinting self-scrutiny.

  I had always been especially sensitive to the ways in which my private thoughts, my inner comments on the world, tended to diverge from others’ attitudes and judgments. Most people appeared to take such gaps in stride, maybe didn’t even notice. I seemed to be stuck with a perpetual choice between abrasive honesty and the endless small conformities that social life solicits. Because Nadine had especially praised my “vision,” and because both she and Laurann seemed to agree with me that it was of the utmost importance to examine and discuss all we each thought and felt, I’d imagined that life in our terrarium would finally afford me a way to be fully engaged with others without compromise.

  Of course there is no perfect, permanent fit when it comes to how three people view the world, especially not when two are making love and one is listening. Karl Marx said it best, a long time ago: it is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness. Yet the more clearly my emotional interests specified a rapid exit, the harder I scrambled, trying to bring my longings and resentments into line with the proclaimed needs of others, twisting self-analysis to service the illusion that made possible our lopsided threesome.

  The conclusion I drew when Nadine declined to be my lover was quite simply that I hadn’t been desperate enough. The previous year, when getting to know her, I’d written: “Nadine and I are like polar opposites—she demonstrative, revelatory, dramatizes herself to the point of exhibitionism; I allow everyone to think that I am always calm, quiet, sympathetic, mature, etc., etc.” When I finally mounted an explicit protest, tearing out some pages of her famous diary and flinging them in the garbage, I think I imagined I’d made some sort of breakthrough.