Apples & Oranges

by Jan Clausen

  I took a plane, my first from coast to coast, and this concession to modern travel methods also seemed to mark the finality of my relocation. My future life would be increasingly punctuated by the solemn rituals of takeoff and landing, by the revolutions of baggage carousels, by dizzying transitions from one time zone to another.

  In the air I read Kate Millett’s Flying. It had been an extravagant purchase in hardcover, but I hoped that someone else’s chaos could help me. (“Time stops . . . while Teresa Juarez’s voice loud butches me from a floor mike center of the room, a bully for all the correct political reasons. Five hundred people looking at me. Are you a Lesbian? . . . Yes I said. Yes. Because I know what she means. The line goes, inflexible as a fascist edict, that bisexuality is a cop-out. Yes I said yes I am a Lesbian. It was the last strength I had.”) In writing about her own gray areas, Kate reassured me that my burning longing to touch a woman again was more than just a figment of my imagination. Or rather: not an isolated figment, for if fancy is the truest substance of desire, it still requires backup. I needed to see my imaginings reflected along with my self-doubt. (“Go down dream mouth tongue singing on her center tasting knowing her essence. . . . Good it is, lovely the fullness of him in me. But need one be torn, forced to live in one place or another?” This raw report, not Radclyffe’s overcooked fable, would be my guide and mirror.)

  Kate’s girlhood in St. Paul, my mother’s town, was a nice coincidence. She’d survived the regime that my parents, who’d also fled, carried on them like a scent—not just the sexual reticence but the suspicion of art and beauty, wherever they go beyond the safely decorative, wherever they interfere with steady habits and killing work, with business as usual.

  Back in Flushing, I found myself on an interesting edge. Paul and I still made love, but seemed less and less like a couple. He took to showing up with bite marks on his neck, to calling from noisy bars to say he’d see me in the morning. Both of us found it mildly amusing that the men he was meeting viewed my presence in his life as proof of his reluctance to reckon with the truth of his sexuality. He’d started “seeing” someone, also named Paul, who worked at Bloomingdale’s. Once when I was on the Upper East Side I stopped by the store to check out this other Paul, the only man working in cosmetics, Paul (my Paul) had said. There he was, slender, quietly good-looking, surrounded by the beautiful colors of perfectly made up women in ads promoting Elizabeth Arden products. I remembered hearing that he’d been flown to Europe to do makeup for the Elizabeth Taylor film Ash Wednesday and felt ridiculously impressed. As always, jealousy was an erotic stimulus, but one that had its downside: too much focus on the allure of male bodies for male bodies left me feeling drab and dated.

  Theoretically freed for my own adventures, in fact I knew I couldn’t hold a woman the way I wanted while he and I were still together. It came down to that. To touch her, heat her, kiss her everywhere, knead her hard between the legs until she came—and that was my main idea, to satisfy a woman—all seemed to depend on my willingness to pledge my troth to womankind. With Nadine it had been otherwise; she’d made the rules, and they weren’t political. But now it wasn’t merely a question of some random love affair, and I couldn’t bear the negative judgment of the group. I wouldn’t risk being interpreted as a trifler, a tourist of desire.

  If the world of women was a cloister, my vocation was growing on me. It helped that feminists seemed to like my writing. I was elated when Audre Lorde, then poetry editor of the lesbian magazine Amazon Quarterly, accepted a submission. In October I got a letter from a Park Slope poet, Marge Bannerman, who invited me to join a group of “serious feminist writers” who’d be meeting regularly to discuss one another’s work. Leslie Kaplow had recommended me.

  I went to readings and literary parties featuring semifamous poets: Alta in a top hat and lipstick, Pat Parker in tight white jeans, both briefly in from the Bay Area. Alta had printed a poem of mine in a little saddle-stitched magazine she ran, and I introduced myself, secure in the thought that she’d already recognized my claim to be a poet. (It seemed to me in those days that the statement “I’m a writer,” unless accompanied by some sort of proof, would mark the speaker as a probable impostor.) She was gracious enough, but plainly had no idea who I was.

  Somewhat crestfallen, I went to a party in her honor, an improvised affair with invitation by word of mouth. I hoped I hadn’t written down the wrong address as I lingered nervously among the trash bins on Bowery near Houston, trying to figure out how to gain access to the oasis of light above. Some idlers I hadn’t liked the looks of kindly told me what to do: “Give a yell, the buzzer doesn’t work.” Feeling pessimistic, hating to advertise my exclusion, I nonetheless followed their advice and was miraculously admitted. At the top of a flight of dirty stairs, I entered a loft space full of visual drama, of music and wine and warmth and food and talk. As advertised, the party was women only.

  Soon I was eyeing Audre, in a head tie and flowing tunic, conversing gravely in a corner with her friend Adrienne, whom I knew by this time to be one of us, though I’d had my doubts when I’d first heard of her. It was Dr. Beck who’d thought I might be interested in some poems of hers, excerpted from a forthcoming collection, that had just been printed in one of the snobby-literate magazines he kept on the coffee table in his waiting room. How radical could she be? had been my reasoning. It was like having your mother recommend a rock band. Now I’d not only heard her read from the book, none other than the astonishing Diving into the Wreck, but was rubbing elbows with her. (I didn’t tire of such comparisons, of measuring my progress. Up from Portland, where culture was just a rumor!) This loft, with its buzz of politics and art, was part of the downtown scene Kate Millett wrote about. This was the longed-for center, this was my kind of fame, which had nothing to do with Jacqueline Onassis or the Zipless Fuck on Eighty-first Street.

  I was too proud to hover around the “heavies,” but just being close was cause for optimism and renewed my energy for the dread social effort. I talked with writers I’d never heard of (but they really were writers) about the advantages of publishing one’s work with a small feminist press instead of a commercial one. I slow-danced clasping women whose bodies would wander back to me when I was home in Flushing masturbating.

  In October I decided to move out. Paul was tenderly regretful; so was I. We’d both known it was coming. Marge’s writing group began meeting around that time. All white women in our twenties and thirties, most at some stage of emergence from the chrysalis of heterofeminism, we decided to call ourselves Seven Women Poets. Marge invited me to dinner—alone. She made no secret of her attraction to Madeleine, the one of the seven whose poetry was weaker than her lesbian credentials; not only was Maddy a dyke from way back but a smoldering butch whose world-weary air (aging Werther with a hard-on and a wisecrack at the ready) I already saw could be pretty devastating. I, on the other hand, tried to give no hint of my feelings for my hostess, detected days before and resurgent now as I cut up vegetables for salad in the kitchen of her elegant, cramped apartment high in a brownstone near Flatbush Avenue, a corner house with the great luxury of windows on three sides. “You get this marvelous Brooklyn light,” she explained. We drank red wine and traded insights about the writing group, and about a memorial reading for Anne Sexton, whose recent suicide was being interpreted as a dire portent for creative women.

  I summarized my checkered erotic past. “But my life seems to be moving in a certain direction,” I told her.

  “It sure does!” She laughed. Earlier, when she’d approached me about the group and I’d felt compelled to warn her I wasn’t a dyke exactly (though not exactly not one, and entirely sympathetic), she’d offered a sort of tactless absolution: “If you live with a man, that’s your problem.”

  Marge, like Nadine, was about ten years my senior. She was bringing up a sullen daughter, age eight. In those years it seemed that all daughters were sullen and all mothers struggling and cranky and sort of glamorous but sort of appal
ling in their quotidian martyrdom. White feminism would shortly get around to remythifying the joys of motherhood, but for now, women like Marge who’d had their kids in a different life were nearly swamped by propaganda for the advantages of soaring unencumbered.

  Much later, still high on wine, I agreed with Marge that it was late to think of schlepping off to Queens and accepted her invitation to stay over. Even when she indicated I might share her double bed in the alcove off the living room, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen next. She got out two flannel nightgowns, handed me one, slipped hers modestly over her head before undressing underneath. She turned out the light, I lay there, she reached out. Did she say, “Is this all right?” or, “We could just go to sleep.” The good feminist, presuming nothing.

  Pressing against her in the deep bed, I laughed to myself, remembering that notebook still with plenty of blank pages. Then I was only thinking yes, yes, it’s like this, cupping the heat of her mound, the ever so slightly abrasive hairs. The wetness nested there, surprise impossible with men. Luxuriant ass weighing heavy on my palms as I bent my mouth to her. (Later, she told me I was “easy to make love with.” Nadine had said this too. I wondered what they meant.)

  The first time I wasn’t able to come, though I answered in the ambiguous negative when she conscientiously whispered, “Did I stop too soon?” It hardly mattered, for I’d entered the arc of her desire, felt her powerless, at last, to keep herself from pleasure. Our next encounter was more reciprocal.

  Euphoria, then doubt. Were we having an affair? I found it disconcertingly hard to tell. I was “crazy in love with her,” I decided, but Marge was a busy woman, rushing from child to teaching job to friends to poetry. She kept hoping to seduce the elusive Madeleine, who pined for some manipulative brunette with varnished looks that suggested terms like “dame” and “broad.”

  In truth, Marge and I were almost comically mismatched. She couldn’t be monogamous, she claimed. I, who’d resolved not to replicate with women the patterns that had made me feel so trapped with men, kept falling in love and lusting after easeful permanence.

  The friend of Jonathan’s who’d first told me about the Women’s School let me crash with her and her roommate while I looked for a place to rent. Their dark, skinny apartment on Prospect Park West seemed to stretch miles from front to back. I used the kitchen almost furtively, aware of infringing on other people’s space. I was sleeping in the living room near the household stereo, and practically memorized Alix Dobkin’s “Lavender Jane Loves Women” album. “Any woman can be a les-bi-an, les-bi-an,” ran the refrain of one song. Intentionally provocative, it also seemed true. Not that I thought most women would make the effort (not that I wished they would—the cloister would get too crowded). But the song reflected the proselytizing stance that was popular with lesbian activists at that time. It was the flip side of Kate Millett’s anguished disavowal of bisexuality, the idea that loving another woman was simply a better deal (why sleep with your oppressor?) and civic-minded to boot (sisterhood will harness your libido). It had the democratic virtue of inclusivity, the wisdom of which was apparent as converts swelled the ranks.

  For the first time, I’d gained access to a social universe (not just a fantasy island, as with Nadine and Laurann) that made desire for women seem perfectly logical, while enveloping it in an atmosphere of legend as compelling as the heterosexual tales that had grounded my ambivalent attractions to men. Logic and legend together made my dykehood feel real, more so the more I lived it out. And it wasn’t just a matter of what I did in bed; I was slaking my thirst for “women in multiples,” reveling in the play of shifting alliances, the layerings of beauties and talents, ironies of perspective. If I’d entered an enclosure, the cloister garden I’d envisioned, what lay inside its walls felt simply infinite. The whole shimmering fabric of our connected womanhood was erotic to me, was part of what I touched in making love to Marge. I’d glimpsed some of this in Learning Community days, but merely as a private revelation. Now I was sharing it with multitudes.

  Alix’s song was about overcoming false consciousness. It said one’s most authentic wants could be discovered, cultivated. It encouraged me to think that my history with men was no barrier to proclaiming, “I am a lesbian.”

  Sometimes, looking back, I think what I did was like marrying simply in order to get laid. What if I’d waited, cleaved to complexities? Fat chance. I’d fallen madly for a gender.

  All my life I’d had problems with People in Groups. Now I wanted to belong. I said, “I do.”

  I looked at one apartment on Ocean Avenue where the white landlady wanted my assurance that I wouldn’t acquire a Black or Puerto Rican roommate, and though the likelihood seemed minimal (I wasn’t meeting women of color then; “the community” was white, my coworkers were all white, I don’t recall a single person who wasn’t white at the New York Women’s School), I told her off. Where were they supposed to live, I asked. She said they’d taken over everything already. Belatedly, a frightening thought struck her; she followed me out, screaming, “Are you from the En Ay Ay Cee Pee, are you from the En Ay Ay Cee Pee?”

  I rented a floor-through in an eight-family building in the South Slope one block from Prospect Park. I owned almost no furniture, and retained the services of a greenish foldout couch the prior occupant had left. It shed a fine yellow dandruff on the floor, whose boards were covered in old linoleum. The stove was ancient, grease-clogged; I wiped roach shit from the cupboards. The kitchen window, which gave onto the fire escape, was secured against forced entry (and exit, in case of fire) with that staple of tenement living, a padlocked accordion gate. Through this barrier, when spring came around, I’d admire apple blossoms in the junk-filled yard below.

  The rent, slightly under two hundred a month, was a lot for me to handle on my pay at Scholastic. I’d planned to get a roommate, but couldn’t stomach it in a railroad flat whose layout defeated the possibility of real privacy. I decided I could afford to live alone. I rattled around all winter, having wistful adventures at the Duchess and Bonnie and Clyde’s, two lesbian bars in the Village, as Seven Women Poets devolved merrily into a women-only ménage à n. (I ached for Madeleine at unavailing length; Marge dallied with Jill; Jill and Mara fell in love and lasted several months, while Mara and Madeleine, who were just friends, rented an apartment together and ended up not speaking. We kept the workshop going, somehow focusing on craft despite all the rivalry, erotic and literary. We even gave a reading at the Women’s Coffeehouse. It was exhausting, glorious. I wouldn’t repeat it for anything.) I left my single mattress and box spring on the floor, papered grimy walls above my writing desk with rejection notes from magazines and publication contests. I was sending around a poetry manuscript entitled If You Live.

  Up close, the lesbian cloister looked like turf I recognized, intricate and bumpy, full of gray areas. Some days just had to be gotten through. Then I’d make discoveries, feel a surge of vigor, while life kept leaking out the way it does, its sinister finitude always on the edge of consciousness.

  Still, it was my life now: Lesbian poet. New York writer. I’d made my bed and meant to lie in it. As usual, I thought that if I waited patiently, the loneliness might part and vouchsafe me a vision.

  SEVEN

  Fish Without Bicycles

  The kind of lesbian that I am is something new, something that has to be defined, made. There is a social opportunity for this now that there probably never was before. And I am very thankful, because it seems to me now that in loving women is my only chance for intense sexuality without violating the rest of my life. Perhaps my only chance for intense sexuality at all. . . . For me, it is so far the most intense experience of what Jung would call the process of individuation. That is: no answers.

  —Journal entry, February 1, 1975

  A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

  —Feminist aphorism

  “WANT TO SIT DOWN and rest for a few minutes?”

  It was
a Saturday in June, most lushly womanly of months, and Leslie Kaplow and I had been walking in Prospect Park, our talk of feminist poetry and feminist politics modulated by a running exchange of biographical details symptomatic of our undeclared courtship. Absorbed in the conversation, I only now saw that we’d strayed into Brooklyn’s nearest equivalent to country privacy, a small hollow beneath trees, screened by a modest hill from the Little League crowds, yet public enough to be reasonably safe. Around us the hardwoods were coming into meaty fullness, leaving off spring’s subtle riot of greens for a soberer and more regimented forest hue, a case of the theme succeeding its variations. Wafting toward us from the Long Meadow came the scent of mown grass, the mutter of recreation. My eyes felt itchy from seasonal allergies, but it wasn’t too hot—not yet. This year marked my second time experiencing the east’s Ferris wheel swoop from brutal chill to languid swelter, and the haste of it still felt almost violent. The park must have doubled its weight in leaves since April.

  I sat cross-legged on the sparse grass. Leslie lowered herself beside me, then lay back, her legs outstretched, head pillowed on my thigh. This arrangement felt slightly awkward, but that didn’t bother me. My one concern was to make her comfortable so she wouldn’t move away.

  Miraculously, she lay there and we kept conversing calmly, as though we didn’t both grasp the crucial nature of this moment. After a minute or two I laid a hesitant palm on the soft brown curls above the high forehead. I stroked her hair, kept talking, thinking exultantly of evening. Her daughter, Les had informed me, would be sleeping at a friend’s house. I’d eagerly agreed to accompany her to a performance of It’s All Right to Be Woman Theater.