Apples & Oranges

by Jan Clausen

  “Why?”

  “Look, should I leave?”

  “Do you want to leave?”

  “No.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  “I want to be with you, make love with you.”

  She flicked off the lights, took my hand, and pulled me to my feet. To my surprise, I practically towered over her. At work I never noticed; I was always sitting down.

  She got my clothes off in a hurry, then her own things. Disappeared between my open legs too fast. I’ve always been a little skittish about this operation, to me a somewhat abstract, fleshless stimulus, the butterfly dance of tiny, potent parts. I like whole bodies doing things, deliberate hands. It makes me anxious to lie still and bask in pleasure.

  Not that she wasn’t mistress of a precocious, detached technique. Yet when I lifted her face to mine, it was a child’s sweet mouth I kissed, a child’s tender earlobes.

  For a while now, deciphering her hints, her hazy boasts about making love to women, I’d wondered whether she modeled herself on the one-way butches of yesteryear. But she let me slide two fingers up inside her, moved against my hand while she continued tonguing me.

  It went on for a while. I wasn’t feeling much.

  She stopped. I lay there on the expensive carpet. Then I heard her voice, sarcastic. “Not quite what you were expecting, I guess, was it?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know.”

  “Luz. But I’m not finished.”

  “I’m Puerto Rican and we have our pride.”

  I thought: a braver woman than I would laugh out loud.

  We got into bed upstairs. She turned her back on me, and it felt as though we were settled lovers in the middle of a fight. I suggested she was fucking with my head, treating me like those women she’d told me about, the ones she used to sleep with and never see again.

  When she heard me say I was leaving, she got all soft, contrite. “I’m really sorry. It’s me and Gloria. She acts like she hasn’t been with anyone in years. Then afterwards she calls me an animal, a pervert. Says she can’t even remember the stuff I did to her, blames it on the booze. What can I do, Jan, I just love her so much.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I just figured it out. You know, I was lying here not feeling very good. I can’t help it how I feel about satisfying a woman.”

  “But I didn’t want to stop.”

  “I know. And then I realized—I feel disloyal to her. I’m sorry if this messes things up with you and Leslie.”

  “Never mind. It’s easier this way.”

  I was angry at Luz, but I got over it. Mostly I was sad, with a bottomless sadness that came out of nowhere and attached itself to her, to the memory of her lying in the dark beside me and crossing herself and kissing her fingertips and dialing across the city and murmuring “M’hija, m’hija” into the telephone.

  I saw how young she was, and that I’d pushed her too hard. It must have scared her silly to have me come at her like that—a grown-up; a model, married lesbian; a parent and published writer. I suspected that our unspoken differences had figured in the brief hostility she’d shown to me, an intimacy that was now safely buried as we resumed our roles of diligent typist and efficient office manager at a busy midtown tape transcription agency.

  As I look back on these travels in desire, I’m reminded of Thoreau, who said that he had traveled a good deal in Concord. The depth of my ambivalence about ranging far afield wasn’t just about the risk to my marriage (though that was certainly a big part of it, and I see my technical infidelity with Luz as a sort of clumsy practice for the full-blown affair I hadn’t quite worked up to). It was about the propriety of my having desires at all, in the sense of needs that exceeded bare survival requirements and didn’t demonstrably further the commonweal.

  It would be too easy to dismiss this as political correctness. If some of my hesitations seem absurd in retrospect, I still think I was basically right to question the implications of my own privilege. In the world today, both travel and sex too often devolve into modes of casual consumption—of “eating the Other,” in bell hooks’s striking phrase. What I want to know is how to hold onto both things at once—the critique and the necessity to act; to reach beyond oneself not out of duty but through passion, bearing in mind that action is always dangerous.

  We live desire and politics as one, but our only language for them divides, prioritizes.

  When I fell in love with Luz, I fell in love with her stories, redolent of worlds I had little access to, that seemed beautiful to me in their energy and harshness (whether or not I had a right to that perception). I imagined her as the hero of a documentary, longed to set down the grainy texture of her days. Yet I was a middle-class novelist and poet, she was a hardworking woman from a ravaged neighborhood. I knew I could be charged with being a tourist in her life, snapping mental pictures, jotting notes in my travel journal. Who was I to fasten her in language, annex her to my reality?

  But in the end, when it was the only way to have her, I cast my scruples to the winds and wrote her down.

  TEN

  I Cross the Pass of Love

  IN THE WAKE of the Luz fiasco, I informed Leslie that I had no intention of giving up the possibility of sleeping with other women. I felt sharply that what was at stake was less my happiness (nonmonogamy made me miserable, not happy) than some bedrock sense of an erotic self, of sexual personhood. I needed to feel alive in desire. Touching was believing. Without that faith I would not die, of course. But I wouldn’t be whole, I wouldn’t be me, I’d have yielded to the fate of “woman as lack” that had been the appalling subtext of my early gender education. For me, for good or ill, feeling like a sexual person was all bound up with creativity and freedom.

  With Les, the old directness of my desire had been compromised—fatally, I believed—by what I called a lack of space, by festering angers and disappointments. Though we sometimes had sex, we had ceased to be lovers in the true sense of erotic co-conspirators. Yet I couldn’t imagine losing my companionship with her, ceasing to discuss every scrap of our common life in a language we’d invented, that kept alive our shared past. I couldn’t admit how the urge was growing in me to see what my life would look like if it were only mine, not ours.

  During the mid-1980s, I consolidated the foundations of a new existence within the shell of the old while pushing aside any thought that my actions might be read as preparations for departure. Through my crushes and fantasies, I cultivated a private eros; through Central America work I entered a sphere of political action less directly linked to my lesbian identity—and more removed from Les’s projects—than my earlier activism. My creative life, too, felt increasingly solitary. Les was battling depression in addition to a series of physical ills, and retreat to a private psychic territory, a “room of my own,” offered some respite from the loneliness and panic I felt at unpredictable fluctuations in her energy and moods.

  So often, looking back, I’ve asked myself why I couldn’t be selfish sooner. I’ve thought that it would have been better for everyone involved if I’d cut and run instead of clinging to a cultural ideal of marital stability and my own myth of myself as Les and Emma’s rescuer. I can see how my reluctant loyalty to a partner in emotional difficulties partly echoes my pattern with Sasha and Josh—and how the fact that this time I was older, and involved with a woman, made the stakes seem that much higher. Coming out had relieved me of lingering guilt feelings toward the boys I’d ditched in their hour of need only to impose an even graver responsibility toward women in general and certain ones in particular. And while the Cloud made me scoff at the former commitment, it did nothing to diminish my investment in the latter.

  Beyond my powerful and complicated feelings for Les and Emma as individuals, being an empathetic partner and conscientious flommy signified, in my mind, being a good lesbian, which in turn meant that I was doing gender right, putting safely behind me the old self-hating equa
tion of femaleness with disability. Perhaps even more important, it allowed me to feel effective—at least within the symbolically potent realm of my chosen family—at countering the world’s ravages, creating a zone of hope and solace. I desperately needed to be one of the repairers—part of the solution, the familiar slogan said. (In fact, my wish went deeper down than politics, all the way to ontology; at bottom, it concerned those dangerous cracks in being that I’d first become aware of as a child musing on hell and nuclear holocaust.) At the same time, I had other, conflicting needs that now refused to be ignored.

  I had made the mistake, so common not just in dykedom but in most progressive circles, of moving from the crucial understanding that “we are all part of one another” (in the nonviolence activist Barbara Deming’s phrase) to a naive assumption that personal fulfillment will automatically square with collective goals. What I was going through in common with a lot of other lesbians was a growing need to reckon with the cost of ignoring feelings that didn’t jibe with our ideals. In divergent ways, the radical sexperts’ insistence that both body and psyche often resist our best-laid plans for them and the growing feminist interest in various forms of spiritual practice manifested this awareness.

  For many of these seekers, myself included, Theodore Roethke’s line “I learn by going where I have to go” could have served as a watchword. Simultaneously, however, dykedom had adopted a formulaic new language for representing unsatisfied personal needs: that of addiction (or trauma) and recovery.

  In the seventies, dykes had called themselves “Amazons,” invincible, one-breasted women warriors; now, many had retrenched, their ambition encapsulated in the AA slogan “one day at a time.” Feminists flocked to groups that legislated an embrace of powerlessness. Twelve-step programs proliferated surreally in women’s communities, not only for alcoholics and women with drug problems, but for incest survivors, those with eating disorders, sexual compulsives, “codependents,” and ACOA’s (adult children of alcoholics). Along with everything else came horrifying jargon: “I’m maintaining my abstinence around my sugar issues.”

  To me, much of this was cultlike, distressingly reductive. I have never been one for monocausal explanations. I could certainly see that there were lesbians who needed to change their lives drastically in order to overcome dangerous addictions to drugs or alcohol. But could there really be so many ill among us?

  I didn’t like the fascination with damage, the confessional overtones of what sometimes shaded into a medicalized version of “cleaning up one’s act.” Like the craze for nurturing, the lesbian recovery culture paradoxically appropriated a deleterious gender stereotype (female = vulnerable, victimized) as the basis for a wildly influential feminist metaphor.

  I mistrusted groupthink. I’d had enough of systems. Still, I might have successfully ignored most of this, as I’d done with other dykely trends I disapproved of, if Les herself hadn’t found the metaphor increasingly persuasive.

  I’m aware that I have my own psychological motivations for regarding the recovery culture with distaste despite my familiarity with cases in which it did help women to move bravely through hard times and come out the other side. One of the clearest illustrations of my constitutional aversion to adopting the identity of “survivor” even when it seemed most warranted is the way I responded to being attacked and almost raped in June 1984, shortly before my first trip to Nicaragua.

  It happened on a Saturday in midafternoon, as I began my regular run around Prospect Park. I was heading downhill on Flatbush Avenue, with the park on one side and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden on the other. Pedestrian traffic on this strip is often sparse to nonexistent. Drivers hurtle by cradled in a dream of speed, oblivious to untoward occurrences on the sidewalk.

  He tackled me from behind, locked his forearm around my throat, and dragged me into the urban forest through a gap in the wrought-iron fence, one of many breaks, resulting from decades of hard usage, that the Parks Department hadn’t gotten around to patching.

  Strong men are incredibly strong: that’s one thing I knew afterward. The way he handled me felt omnipotent. I wasn’t even a grown woman but a child with a murderous father, face down beneath the trees in mud and underbrush, wavering in and out of consciousness as the pressure on my carotid artery cut the blood flow to my brain, a fragment from a poem hanging suspended there, above my struggle in the wet leaves so far from other help: She fought him off and she lived, a line from a Susan Griffin piece that Les had included in one of her collections. I forced myself (I remember: choice, not reflex) to scream and scream again, though he promised that he’d really hurt me if I did, and I longed for the nothingness it was torture to resist.

  And when he gave up—inexplicably, I felt, convinced as I was of his power—I stumbled through the woods and through the fence in terror of his return, and found myself on the margin of zipping traffic, facing the dilemma of persuading city drivers that a woman naked but for a bra and running shoes and yelling “Help! Help!” was not a confirmed lunatic but a temporary victim, amenable to rescue.

  In the aftermath, I felt stunned but determined to proceed, not to make too big a deal of what had happened, or of how it recalled the occasion in my early twenties when I’d been attacked by a stranger on a Portland street, that time raped for real. I think I sensed that my old anxieties, my childhood view of the world as a dangerous place, could engulf me if I weren’t careful. Those childhood terrors had been deeply gendered, had in fact included fears of bad men lurking in the woods, and to give in to them threatened to relegate me to the realm of helpless femininity I dreaded as much as violence.

  My heroines (for whatever this says about me) were still the defiant ones. I favored those who kept moving, dealt with damage on the road, like Luz, whose plucky stance had much to do with her attraction for me. I agreed with Maud, who remarked of a book of essays by yet another squeaky-clean dyke feminist, “The trouble with these girls is they don’t believe in the tragedy of life. Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers do, and I love them for it.” I wanted less sobriety and uplift. I didn’t want to recover from anything.

  Les reacted strangely to the park attack. I needed her to empathize, of course, but also to cope while I regrouped. Instead, she seemed to crumple inwardly, so identified with me that she absorbed the blow directly, and I found myself having to comfort her.

  This was just one sign out of many that she was having a tough time. Over the previous year or two she’d gradually developed chronic problems with her physical health, including frequent visitations by a mysterious virus that we speculated might be connected to the anxieties of the Cloud and the stress of writing about controversial aspects of Jewish identity, the Middle East, and race. While her writing process was never easy, her work on this piece was especially torturous, and she dealt with the anxiety of authorship by showing multiple drafts of each chapter to trusted readers, hoping by incorporating huge numbers of comments not simply to hone her prose but to immunize her arguments against hostile readings. She leaned on me as her resident editorial consultant, a role I strove to fill despite conflicted feelings: I was genuinely excited by the project, uneasily compelled by the need to demonstrate that the Cloud had not diminished my commitment to fighting anti-Semitism, exhausted by contemplation of anguished histories and an obsessive authorial method.

  As her text took final shape, Les contracted yet another minor respiratory infection. One afternoon she had trouble breathing. Shirley Wilkes and I rushed her to the nearest emergency room where I told the nurses that I was her sister so they’d let me stay with her. The evening hours passed as she lay on a gurney, gasping, barely able to talk. The staff essayed random medications. A resident was talking respirators when he finally got lucky with some injection or other and she began to breathe more normally. I’d been terrified, and was only partly reassured when her trusted internist agreed with the hospital’s belated explanation that a vocal cord had swelled, putting pressure on her windpipe.

 
The episode, unimportant in itself—“not life-threatening,” the doctor insisted—was one of many times when I felt frightening, solitary, possibly exaggerated responsibility for the well-being of a loved one whom I could not really help. In the winter following the emergency room visit, she required major surgery for a benign uterine growth. But what alarmed and puzzled me more than her string of illnesses was her deepening though intermittent depression, which she seemed determined to bear stoically, without resort to a psychotherapist—somebody, she insisted, who was only paid to care. While she talked to several trusted friends about emotional issues, I was the only one who saw close up, day in and day out, what was going on with her. I alone knew how bad things really were at times.

  But how bad is bad? I wasn’t sure what to think. Aware that she was determined to carry on as normally as possible, I often ended up trying to cover for her, to prevent Emma and others from noticing when she hit another trough of misery.

  Though convinced it was only the cladding of her pain, I still took personally her scorn for common social intercourse. It surfaced in small, debilitating ways, like the time we ran into two lit biz acquaintances in a gay bookstore. Just as I started to enjoy talking shop and to hope that the four of us might go out for coffee, I noticed that Les was looking offended and answering friendly questions with words of one syllable. Embarrassed and disappointed, I cut the conversation short. When we were alone and I asked her what had happened, she replied that being recognized for her literary accomplishments made her uncomfortable. In any event she didn’t want to waste her time chatting with people who meant nothing to her.

  Since our breakup, there’s been a lot of popular press attention to the strain depression places on family relationships, and every time I read an article on the subject, I wonder why I didn’t insist on my perception that something major was going wrong, that Les had to get help. At the time, my own stoical tendencies made it seem sensible to soldier on and hope for the best.