Apples & Oranges

by Jan Clausen

  Being with Paul was an interim solution. In effect, he and I seceded from straighthood together. Our relationship turned on a new kind of bisexual plot, its tension imparted by the lively possibility that one of us might leave the other for a gender. We actually drew closer in the shivery dance of “Maybe I’m gay.” “Yeah, and what if I’m gay,” our sex infused with urgency by the thought that a quite different body was possibly what was wanted. Simultaneously, we mocked the flesh’s literalness; our thought experiments in homosexuality (not to mention our exposure to psychoanalytic theory) kept reminding us that gender is a work of imagination. Our lying down together felt valedictory, as though we were performing ancient rituals that an age of skepticism had radically undermined. I wrote of this with fierce ambivalence, in a poem I titled after a sentimental ballad whose lyrics still evoked the shadowed grove of mysterious longing I’d entered as a child through the door of Mother’s voice singing me to sleep at night.

  DEEP PURPLE

  The old

  is engraved

  somewhere on the brain.

  When we meet,

  the dream or dream-setting:

  bombed-out city,

  flesh of water,

  mountains:

  their piled-on permanences.

  I am woman-

  country.

  You sink into me

  like Southeast Asian jungle

  like the old

  lush smelly primeval

  forest Daddy knew

  the poem about,

  and we still fit

  our irregular edges together

  in the old ways.

  I have made my relationship with Paul sound neatly symmetrical, but as the poem hints, it wasn’t. Didn’t I take more interest in his world of men than he did in my world of women? (It is true that I might not have welcomed his intrusion in my world, but that was beside the point.) If I could feature being a boy (at least not quite a girl) for him, I didn’t think he’d care to reciprocate. The question why did Paul want to have his lust with me? was finally framed by the brute social fact that in patriarchy, male is beautiful. (“Beck said that I think male homosexual love is ideal because there are no breasts involved.”)

  So why should I want to have my lust with him?

  After Nadine, I knew I could do women, but not casually. I thought of lesbianism as a high-walled cloister garden, a lushness contingent on withdrawal from the world, on heroic renunciation. (Why did it please me to think of it this way? And what had I to renounce? Not penises so much as gray areas.) I felt defensive in the presence of the dykes I met, mostly lefties whom I viewed as right-on feminist militants. Following dinner with a couple who were friends of Jonathan’s, I exhorted myself to “just be around some lesbians, and stop thinking of lesbianism as such a mystical thing.”

  When I read my work at an event where most of the poets were lesbians, attended an antiwar demo where women held hands and chanted, “Hey, hey, whaddya say, bombing dikes is antigay,” I felt as though my waffling were branded on my forehead. As often happens with me and People in Groups, I worried too much about admissions standards. It was catch-22: I’d never have been attracted to a club that let just anybody in.

  Sex aside, with Paul I was anxious to demonstrate that I was capable of having what I thought of as a healthy relationship. I needed a love that wouldn’t crash and burn. I couldn’t afford another fuckup.

  When I stood back to evaluate, I felt I was making progress. I wasn’t in thrall to Paul, as I’d been to Nadine, nor was he a millstone around my conscience, like Sasha and Josh. We were capable of silly, sordid fights, but the damage was on the surface. (In the end, we would let each other go more gracefully than I’ve managed with anyone before or since.)

  Paul settled on a doctoral program in psychology at a university in New York. He would be pleased if I decided I’d like to come along, but understood I might have other needs. I vacillated, half eager to ditch my West Coast self for a try at the wicked East, half embarrassed to think that my fate would, as usual, be taking shape around someone else’s prudent planning. (Covertly, however, I relished this very randomness.) Though I didn’t expect to be with Paul forever, I didn’t want to part from him now for a merely geographical reason. And I knew I’d have a tough time leaving Portland on my own, without the nudge that he provided. Left to myself I’d simply dither, awed by the possibilities. Paul proposed a definite destination, one that happened to be perfect for an aspiring writer.

  There were no West Coast people I would miss unbearably, provided I could see them now and then, but it grieved me as though I were parting from a lover to lose the trees and mountains. Before culture was, I am, they proclaimed, in the language-before-language of my deepest childhood. To visit them would never be enough.

  Did I know I was arranging to be endlessly divided? I told myself I could always change my mind. In September, Paul flew east while I stayed put, continuing to check vital signs, stuff withered dicks into condom catheters, force nourishment on the dying, and restrain the crazed—all in a day’s work at the V.A. Hospital. I was saving what money I could for the move. One day I called a code on an old man without a pulse, thumping his chest smartly, blowing my timid breath into his corpse’s cavity, bringing down the wrath of the defibrillator. “He’s got C.A.,” an older aide confided. “Good thing you didn’t get too close.” I knew some of the aides believed cancer to be catching, but it amazed me she’d assumed I’d be cynical enough to make less than a total effort. My Lazarus died days later in Intensive Care.

  In November I gave two weeks’ notice at the hospital. I “terminated” with Beck. I packed up my things, books and papers mostly, in five or six cardboard cartons and mailed them to Flushing, Queens, where the rents were low and Paul, who’d stayed with an aunt for the fall semester, had signed a lease on a one-bedroom apartment.

  Wanting to savor my metamorphosis, I’d decided to take the train across Canada. I left one evening in mid-December. My friend Julie and I took turns in a photo booth in the Portland Greyhound station, trading souvenir snapshots before she put me on an overnight bus to Vancouver. Early the next morning, dazed with lack of sleep (and with four more bedless nights to look forward to, between the train and the bus from Montreal), weighed down by the bulging backpack that was my only piece of luggage but determined to wring from my travels every drop of experience, I explored the streets of boxy houses built from Pacific timber. My father had taught me to appreciate these soft woods, Douglas fir and true fir and redwood and cedar, that had been our ticket to class mobility. The winter air was moist, great mountains a fact of city living. Vancouver was foreign, but it felt like home in a way the deciduous east would never be.

  As I soaked up the last of the West and nursed nostalgia for fringie exploits (it was here in Vancouver during the Trips Festival that Sasha had been entranced with Naomi Marks at the height of her stoned powers), a flock of pigeons squirted shit on my old red jacket. I wasn’t pleased, but tried to think of it as some sort of zany benediction while scrubbing off in a service station rest room. I finally got settled in the train, which slouched interminably through the ugly sprawl of New Westminster before ascending into subtle hills with their variegations of rock and lichen, their straitened spectrum of browns and grays and the thousand muted greens of a northwest forest at winter solstice.

  When at last we hit snow country—Alberta of frozen lakes and bundled figures fishing through the ice, open tracts of hardwoods and patches of scrubby pine—the change seemed almost festive. My companions for the long haul in the cushy steerage of coach included an orange-garbed Hare Krishna and lots of hippies and teenyboppers who were overjoyed to be thrown together for the journey and kept up an incessant low-key sexual agitation. I spoke to almost no one, but looked out the window, wrote in my notebook, and read Henry James’s Roderick Hudson. I savored these landlocked provinces—their icy desolation, the heroic bulk of the land mass, my suggestive glimpses into the nooks and cra
nnies of towns like Capreol, Ontario, where the jukebox in the slummy trackside restaurant played Elton John’s “Elderberry Wine” as we watched the crew make up separate trains for Toronto and Montreal—with complacency enhanced by forward motion. I could have been watching my ancestral past (Bemidji, Minnesota; Fountain City, Wisconsin) flash before my eyes. I would never forget that darkest North America had made me, or cease to give thanks that I didn’t have to live here.

  My bus arrived at the Port Authority in the aftermath of an ice storm. Exhausted, and dismayed by the tawdry bustle of the place, I phoned Paul to come and meet me. While I waited for him, I eavesdropped on a young woman’s conversation with a couple of Trailways drivers. She danced in clubs, she said. She stripped, but you weren’t allowed to take everything off. “Come on, do you at least give ’em a little peek now and then?” one of the men pursued. “Oh sure,” she laughed, “you have to air it out once in a while.” What shocked me was her diction, the complicity of that it. As if sharing the joke of her body could lift her to their level.

  I transcribed the exchange in my journal. I’d come to be a writer, after all.

  I’d also come to be a different woman, though I didn’t exactly say so, not even to myself, for fear of failing.

  Paul led me home to our brick apartment building, a ten-minute walk from the end of the Number 7 train line. The neighborhood had little I could see to recommend it, no instructive blight or bohemian cachet, just block on block of tidy housing and lower-middle-class retail outlets. There was a HOT BAGELS place that sold the real article (chewy, not fluffy, no pastrami-on-a-bagel, no St. Patrick’s Day tricks with green food coloring) and shut down for Shabbat and all the Jewish holidays. Going out to dinner in the neighborhood with Paul’s relatives meant consuming an “Oriental” meal as ersatz as though we were living in Spokane and not in a metropolis with a huge Asian population. Once I’d found a clerical job at Scholastic Magazines on Forty-fourth Street, much of my life was spent in contemplating Manhattan’s patrician profile or Shea Stadium’s homely bulk from the vantage point of the elevated train tracks.

  Our apartment building boasted a creaky elevator, an incinerator chute on every floor, and monthly exterminator service—all exotic in my eyes. Two of our three rooms overlooked a courtyard that was basically an oversized air shaft. After dark, the lighted lives of total strangers signaled intimately; when spring brought open windows, other people’s fights and crying babies and parties became our atmosphere.

  All the same, I was living privately with a lover, a thing I’d never done before, and I felt dismayed by the aura of marriage that clung to the arrangement. It didn’t help that we had so little space. We installed our double bed in what should have been the living room, and our two desks from the Salvation Army in the bedroom, which got direct sunlight. Here we kept a narrow bed used occasionally by guests, more often by one of us when we were arguing or simply preferred to sleep alone. We tried to keep out of each other’s way, but I found it hard to write when Paul was home, and he was, I thought, oversensitive to noise. Even the sound of tarot cards being shuffled could bother him when he was studying.

  We fought sporadically over little things. A certain caustic tone of his could set me shrieking. Once in a movie theater I cited the no-smoking rule to a man who lighted up in the row behind us. Paul said that it was priggish to appeal to rules; if the smoke bothered me, I should simply ask him to stop. Before I knew it I was standing on a subway platform, yelling: “Don’t you dare talk to me that way.” I must have been a sight: a short woman with lopped-off hair, in a floor-length skirt that had started life as a bedspread, assaulting my tall lover with a soft-cover copy of Ned Rorem’s diaries. When the train arrived I marched off to ride in a separate car from Paul’s, a fine but foolhardy gesture given the late hour and the fact that the train was perilously empty. I’d been raped on the street in Portland the year before, and that memory now combined with legends of big-city danger, making me far more timid than I liked to admit. The voice of my nebulous anxiety, as banal as a car alarm, nattered endlessly on at the edge of consciousness. I hated it, it seemed so womanish.

  At first Paul and I did all the standard New York things. We greeted 1974 with the throngs in Times Square, trekked up to the Cloisters, hung around in the old Willentz’s on Eighth Street or uptown at Gotham Book Mart, leafing through new poetry collections and dog-eared little magazines. I got my first exposure to live opera and ballet, and an astonishing look at Jacqueline Onassis, who floored me simply by being human and uncaptioned when I spied her in a quiet gallery at the Met.

  Superficially impressed, I wasn’t satisfied. Culture felt like a hobby; I needed to get a life. I enrolled in a poetry workshop at the 92nd Street Y. I also contacted a high school friend of Jonathan’s, a radical nurse who he’d said could clue me in to what was happening with women’s liberation. She wasn’t exactly encouraging. The local movement, she explained, had been pretty disorganized lately. But there was something called the New York Women’s School, a grassroots effort in Brooklyn, that would be worth checking out.

  I had to take the G train to get there from Queens, apprehensive at the thought of traveling over an unknown route to a strange neighborhood. What made it worse was my strap hanger’s ignorance of the metropolitan area’s surface geography. I seemed to be forever hurtling through the city in intestinal passageways, surfacing to encounter decontextualized strips and patches—Sixth Avenue near Forty-second Street, Sheridan Square and environs, Columbus Circle north to Lincoln Center—whose relation to the whole remained obscure to me. The G, among the most local of all local lines, dawdled for over an hour through depopulated stations before ejecting me in a tattered neighborhood named, oddly, Park Slope. (Terrace or Vista, Row or Hill—but Slope?) I had no inkling then of how its streets and rooms would be mapped onto my brain circuitry, as indelibly as the very different landscapes I’d abandoned in Oregon.

  Though the Slope was indeed where I went to find the women, it wasn’t yet the “Dyke Slope” that someone in a Sarah Schulman novel refers to with affectionate condescension. That Slope is the Slope of the lesbian baby boom, of women loving women into prime real estate, of dyke chic vying with Lesbian Avengers. In those years most lesbians rented, yuppies hadn’t been thought of, and gentrification was a do-it-yourself affair conducted largely by heterosexual couples known as brownstoners. Many buildings had long been divided into rooming houses, with fluorescent light rings on the ceilings, crummy toilets in the halls. Stonework crumbled, wrought iron rusted, plasterboard triumphed over original detail. It would be more than a decade before the smug money crested, bringing the corporate lawyers and investment analysts and cable TV people who think of buying in Brooklyn as roughing it. Before the weekday streets filled up with dark maid-mothers pushing strollers for the pale.

  Leslie Kaplow, who cotaught the Women’s School course on women’s literature that I signed up for (after briefly considering “Introduction to Lesbianism”), heard me complain about Flushing and advised me to move to Brooklyn. She was a great fan of the neighborhood then, her enthusiasm for it having survived what she wryly termed her “Park Slope housewife” years, when she and her husband were fixing up a brownstone. She seemed content to have shed the property along with the marriage; she was free now, out and open, raising her tiny daughter, Emma, in a creaky building on Third Street near Seventh Avenue. I found her very attractive, smart and serious, a passionate partisan of our gender who nonetheless cast a refreshingly cool eye on the limitations of really existing women. Her abrupt demeanor helped keep my little crush in check. So did my chagrined awareness that no self-respecting lesbian would look at me twice. Living with a man was damaging enough; doing so in Queens seemed especially outré.

  There were, I was discovering, New Yorks and New Yorks; simply by changing locations I could feel like a different person. In Flushing, Paul and I became a “nice young couple” as inexorably as Cinderella’s coach reverted to pumpkinhood; in midtown
, I camouflaged myself as a dutiful servant of industry; in Brooklyn, I felt more and more like a dyke, though I never tried to pass. I had a horror of being labeled an “experimenter,” the sort of woman who toys with real lesbians’ affections while hanging on to heterosexual privilege. On the Upper West Side, where my poetry workshop met in the apartment of the teacher, Erica Jong (still a poet with a quiet reputation; her novel Fear of Flying was about to hit the charts), I was a low-class tourist amid the doorman-building set. Workshop members included the kid brother of a regular book reviewer for the Times and an heiress who kept a family in Ohio and a chauffered car in town. I couldn’t help but enjoy rubbing up against the corruptions of all this cultural and other capital; nor could I avoid feeling deeply patronized—the scholarship child in the posh nursery school—when they said nice, nervous things about my lesbian lyrics. My “fellatio poem,” so-called, was more their speed.

  In moving east I’d promised myself a chunk of summer in Portland, a symbolic dose of nature as a consolation prize for time served in the heart of artifice. I crossed Canada again and stayed for two months, backpacking near Three-Fingered Jack in the Mount Jefferson area with my friend Julie, staying in her room in a house full of strangers while she was out of town. I brooded over sad memories, got a shorter haircut, had my I.U.D. removed. I read a trashy book on Janis Joplin’s sex life, written by a woman who claimed to have been her lover. I bought a ritual copy of The Well of Loneliness in a women’s bookstore in Seattle, amused and embarrassed at the sales clerk’s caveat that its view of lesbians was pretty negative and definitely outmoded. (Did I really look like such a neophyte—or such a literal-minded reader?)

  Leaving Portland again seemed even more momentous than when I’d headed out the last time. In December I’d been able to say I was giving New York a whirl; now I felt that my relation to the West had shifted permanently. I felt, as well, that I was fast approaching some sort of sexual crossroads. I’d just bought a modest-sized notebook in which I jotted the prediction that I would make love with a woman before filling all its pages.