by Jan Clausen
After that night, we spent much of our time together, as the delegation, relieved and a little punchy at having successfully completed its mission in San Juan, relaxed into a less pressured schedule of meetings with government officials and visits to sites of political interest. I liked Benjamin’s personal reticence, the clarity he brought to our group’s discussions of matters of principle, his determined training for the New York Marathon, getting up at first light to run ten miles before breakfast. (In Patio Grande, of course, we couldn’t leave the area, and he’d been reduced to charging up and down a muddy hill.) In a situation of enforced togetherness, he projected an air of permanent solitude, often whistling or singing to himself.
He actively pursued me, and I enjoyed that to the hilt; it’s something I’ve experienced very infrequently in my life. The dramatic struggles we’d just visited had induced in me a reckless urge to experiment. My normal life seemed a million miles away. While we remained in Nicaragua, the implications of my attraction, including the puzzling gender of its object, simply didn’t have to matter.
For several days our courtship proceeded with a strangely old-fashioned sedateness and restraint compelled by the proximity of the rest of the delegation. We were never alone together. At times our friend Ollie functioned as a sort of unwitting chaperone, our threesome wandering off from the rest of the group, but except for that hour or two in Estelí, there’d been little chance to exchange confidences.
As the date of our return flight approached, I grew desperate for a chance to talk to Benjamin alone. On our last night in Managua, he offered to take me out to dinner, but I blanched at the suggestion of conventional gallantry (not to mention the likelihood of running into our comrades, given the very limited choice of restaurants). For lack of real privacy, we ended up wandering in the airport and it seemed that what I wanted was not talk after all, but to see if what I’d felt up in San Juan had been a fluke.
It hadn’t. Our bodies still pretended to know each other from some inconceivable prior incarnation. “Compañeros, please,” the polite young soldier said, ousting us from the dark corner where we were making out like teenagers on a park bench. “This is a restricted area.” Benjamin recklessly suggested going back to his hotel room, but we both realized that his roommates might return at any moment. In any event, I wasn’t up for it, for the risk of HIV and pregnancy. Above all, I knew that if we had “intercourse” (what a strange, strange word and concept), I’d have to inform Leslie right away.
I arrived in New York in a panic, but determined to hold myself together until Les’s departure for the New Jewish Agenda national conference, which began just a few days after my return. I thought that her absence would afford me time to sort out my feelings, to become, as the saying goes, “myself” again. But I also planned to see Benjamin. He’d made me promise to call him once we got back and arrange a date for dinner.
At first the meeting was stiff; we were strangers once more, embarrassed at having gotten carried away. But over the restaurant meal we managed to loosen up a little, and afterward I invited him to walk me back to my apartment. We sat down sedately on the living room couch, and I went over again why I couldn’t make love with him. Infidelity with a woman was one thing, I said, but in my lesbian world sleeping with a man was an unpardonable offense. So Les, at least, would look at it.
“Well, maybe we’d better each stick to our own kind,” he said, and the lonely ring of it, the layered ironies, the fact that I saw he was principled enough not to push me any further, had me reaching out for him, dizzy with desire but level-headed enough to insist on an excursion to buy condoms we would later neglect to use.
In hindsight, it seems so clear what I was up to: step by step, meticulously, as if I’d consciously planned it out, I was arranging to make it worse to stay with Leslie than to leave her. I couldn’t go until I’d organized such torment that our breakup would be the lesser evil. And I could not tell myself what I was doing. I was Jan Clausen, lesbian feminist, proud campaigner against all forms of feminine servitude. Yet I had not learned to say: I want this. I remarked to a friend, who should have laughed in my face and didn’t, that I hoped that enacting my passion with Benjamin once or twice might be enough to last me.
The strangeness of my finding with a man the sex I’d been looking for—not to mention the strangeness of encountering his body (other, familiar, bristling with symbols)—was something I at first thought about only glancingly, I had so many other worries. After we slept together I compared it in my journal to committing “the sin against the holy ghost,” yet noted that it didn’t feel like sin—not, that is, on account of gender. Part of what I meant was that I felt no less a lesbian, though I did believe that I’d sinned against Leslie by sharing with Benjamin an intensity that for me could never be merely physical.
Les, all trusting, returned from her conference. I had to tell her; I told her. In the aftermath of that harrowing reunion, I found myself thinking once more in Christian images, remembered the Ballad of the House Carpenter from a Joan Baez recording. The song closes with the house carpenter inquiring of the woman he’s run away with what hills they spy in the distance. She answers him tenderly: “Those are the hills of Hell, my love, where you and I must go.” I felt then that I understood completely the terrible concept of eternal punishment for yielding to forbidden desire, not because I cared for divine or human rules, but because it seemed so hellish to knowingly wound an innocent.
At the same time, I was cruelly direct, telling Les of my “overdetermined defiance” (of lesbian public opinion, racial taboos, middle-class prudence and planning). Desperate to hold her own balance, she tried reason alternating with the rawest of emotions. Sometimes she sensibly proposed contingency planning (how would we arrange care of Emma and handle finances if we broke up?); sometimes she treated me like a wayward child; sometimes she badgered me with grievances. (“Fornication! With a Man! In our Home!” I angrily parodied.)
It galled me that she kept telling me who I was, reproaching me not merely with the pain I was causing her, which seemed to me to be her right, but with my inconsistency. She accused me of straying from the outline of some supposed true self. “He’s even more unsuitable for you than Luz,” she taunted, adding that, while Luz was no intellectual, Benjamin couldn’t enter my world of feminism. The comment left me almost speechless with rage. Who was she to specify suitable desire? I felt as though I were fifteen again, with my mother insisting that the world was flat and the rude boy I fancied would lure me over the edge. (But of course Les was right: dykedom was flat, and in the end I fell off, precisely as she’d predicted.)
I promised I wouldn’t make any snap decisions. We began to talk as though apocalypse might be averted. We headed off to spend August in the country, house-sitting for a time in upstate New York, then adjourning to Vermont, more or less sustained by the centripetal habits of companionship that the married appeal to in centrifugal circumstances. Yet it was horribly confining to be round-the-clock companions just when I so needed privacy, and misery to be so far from Benjamin, whom I couldn’t write or phone without Les’s knowledge.
I couldn’t sleep. I’d fall into bed exhausted, wake up wired in the wee hours, arise at six or so, looking aged and dissolute. I had never in my life taken sleeping medication; now I borrowed Les’s pills. Everything was awful yet far away. I knew there’d been important developments in the Central American peace process but couldn’t force myself to pay attention to nightly newscasts.
When we left the Vermont farmhouse late in August, I knew it might be for good. I had loved it there; it had symbolized to me everything blameless, deserving of protection. It was connected to my hope that in taking care of Leslie, I might in some mysterious way help to mend the shattered world. Now I was on the verge of leaving her, and it brought me face to face with a vision of myself as one of the destroyers.
We returned to the city, having negotiated ground rules to manage the situation while we tried to work things out
. Les consented to my pursuing a friendship with Benjamin, on condition that we consorted only in public places and didn’t get physical. I promised her I wouldn’t “do anything” without informing her in advance, and I kept my promise except for once in a public garden that he and I visited over Labor Day weekend. I’ve always wondered how we looked to passersby, two fully clothed grown-up people, dark and pale, almost devouring each other behind some bushes. Our otherwise exemplary abstinence merely transferred erotic focus from “acts” to gestures. Like a single bite of food to an anorexic, quick hello hugs and kisses of farewell acquired fierce significance.
In October, Les, Emma, and I drove down to attend the national March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. I dreaded the whole thing, wished it wasn’t happening, yet felt I had to go. It was too important an event for me to shirk just because my personal life was in a mess. Besides, I feared my absence might be misinterpreted. Not many people knew that Les and I were in difficulties, but I wanted those who did to see me there. Les, who’d organized a gay and lesbian havdalah (the service marking the end of Shabbat) for the night before the march, had found us beds in a friend’s apartment.
People in Groups were torture to me that weekend. I longed for solitude like an opiate. I escaped for a while to the National Gallery, looked at paintings by Berthe Morisot. Whatever her problems as a woman artist, they seemed fantastically remote from mine. I went to the havdalah, watched Les preside; she looked brittle, but pulled it off magnificently. I smiled at all the people who expected it of me when they said what a terrific job she’d done. That night we had to share a bed, though we were barely speaking. With Emma present, it was family as usual.
The day of the march was one of the strangest of my life, its rituals and objectives achingly familiar, yet closed off from me. So many times I’d been to Washington demonstrations, those grand family reunions of the left, with their atmosphere of some funky afterlife in which the soul is reunited with apparitions from every cranny of its past. Once again I was seeing ghosts, and they seemed to recognize me, but of course they didn’t know what I was thinking.
The three of us ran into Sarah and Pat, friends of ours from the Bay Area. Les and I thought of them as iconoclasts like us; they edited an unorthodox lesbian publication, and Sarah had published a very good book about doing solidarity work in Nicaragua.
We decided to stand on the curb and just watch for a while. AIDS organizations were filling the street, displaying a new militance. Many demonstrators were in wheelchairs. Sarah and Pat discussed an acquaintance. “I haven’t seen her,” Pat said. “I don’t know if she’s coming. I’ve heard some rumors. She might be going straight.”
Sarah made a face. “Time will tell. You know what I’ve noticed, though? They tend to come back.”
It was such a simple exchange, so casually uttered—for Pat and Sarah, of no consequence. For me, it marked the formal ending of an epoch. I’m not here, I thought, I’m not part of this, a feeling that was all the stronger because the comment sounded like something I myself might have said just a few months before. And because I might have said it, I knew what it implied: that lesbian existence was a secular state of grace, that sleeping with a man was “going away,” that in doing so, an “us” becomes a “them,” estranged from all those who matter.
The entire day was a huge celebration of a tribe I was about to be kicked out of. I focused on getting through it: just a few hours more. I kept running into old acquaintances, having to reiterate that this event was wonderful, marvelous, inspiring—how fantastic, how historic, that “we” were here in such numbers. Each smile of greeting, each hug, was an ordeal. Shirley spoke at the rally; I couldn’t retain a word. At last it got to be late in the afternoon, and Emma and I could leave. Les, thank God, would be staying another night. She was with a group that was going to do C.D. on the steps of the Supreme Court on Monday morning.
I couldn’t bear the dividedness any longer. I couldn’t live with my own duplicity, which, though I’d been entirely too “honest” with Les, only intensified as I strove to placate her. I had no guarantee, only very modest hopes, that Benjamin and I could be lovers in the real world. I didn’t know him yet. But I had to try.
I left, in the end, because I couldn’t bear confinement. I left because my future was dying and I had to rescue it. I left because I felt like that Sandinista ag tech, up against the roof, breathing through a bullet hole. I left because I needed a life of my own.
I decided late in October, while Les was in Albany. We’d rehearsed so thoroughly that the real thing felt oddly truncated. Even telling Emma was quick, though hideous. She cried a little and asked to be left alone. (Much later, she’d remember it like this: “I’m sitting watching television, just like any other evening, and my parents, who I’ve never seen have fights—you guys never fought around me, I never knew anything was wrong—come out and tell me my family is over.”)
We’d agreed that I’d stay with Emma half the time, which meant I needed a place to crash when Les was with her. Soon I’d rented a tiny hall bedroom in the sort of shared apartment that Benjamin calls a “group home.” My roommates were a vivacious feminist, her quiet economist husband, their infant son, and a gay Jewish South African man who worked as an urban planner. The household was cluttered and cheerful, full of infant accessories and energetic discussions of Jewish lefty politics. Adam, the urban planner, was friendly and tolerant; his sense of humor was a boon to me. After our Thanksgiving dinner, he told me that a gay friend of his who’d been present had mistaken Benjamin, introduced as my guest, for a really butch lesbian.
I grew attached to my minimalist refuge, which offered a welcome break from the history that besieged me when I was on Eleventh Street with Emma. It didn’t matter when I heard the baby crying, roommates fighting or fornicating: I wasn’t responsible. That room was all mine, with its single window looking south to rooftops timeless in the thin blue light of winter, its borrowed metal typing table, an uncomfortable straight-backed chair, and the eggplant-colored futon on which Benjamin and I at last reconsummated our romance interruptus.
I was always comparing in those days. Heterosex is so absurdly plot-driven: tension, rising action, climax, resolution. Contraception is such a hassle (and hadn’t improved in twenty years). Men’s beard stubble is so scratchy, their fear of emotions so transparent. Some of them still hate to see a woman cry. They fail to share one’s most basic conditions of embodiment—monthly bleeding, yeast infections, breasts that jiggle when not restrained—let alone the powerful feelings that go with them. So much effort is consumed in tedious explanations, so much simply goes unsaid.
We were very careful, getting into things. Benjamin was ardent, but also formal and cautious, stubbornly attached to an old-world standard of privacy. (“Americans,” he grumbled, “spill their guts to anybody.”) His reserve sometimes hurt me, but overall it helped. It is not a wise thing to begin a new love before finishing with the old one, and I was frequently detained in a place of guilt and grief.
My strongest image of that winter is of dancing in the dark, alone in the living room of my makeshift lodging. When my roommates were out, I regressed shamelessly, “twirling” in tight circles in the middle of the floor, the way I used to listen to records as a child, aiming for a moment of orgasmic dizziness. I’d discovered Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks album, released long ago but new to me since I’d stopped listening to rock around the time I left Portland. I drowned myself in the rue of “Tangled up in Blue,” savored the way “You’re a Big Girl Now” refreshed the overworked themes of pop tragedy: “Like a corkscrew to my heart / Ever since we’ve been apart.” I wept and wept, thinking of Les, who’d made it clear she wanted nothing further to do with me. Precisely. Like a corkscrew.
Yet I felt freer than I had in years. No penance could atone for the crime of my relief.
ELEVEN
Floating Woman
MORE THAN A DECADE has gone by since I sailed off the edge of my worl
d, ten years of having borne in upon me at random moments the recollected texture of an all-important relationship now locked in the museum cabinet of the past. A face can do it, or a phrase, a reference in a footnote, or the first persimmons blazing in the market (she loved persimmons with a passion). Look, but don’t touch: the brutal law of memory, familiar to all who acquire adult experience of time. In this case, the effects are peculiarly potent: Leslie and I have no contact whatsoever.
It is a powerful act, this absolute disowning of someone with whom one has shared a bed and so much of consciousness over many years. It means that—for the disowned one, anyway—the relationship with the disowner, which of course does not end but continues in the mind, becomes peculiarly stunted. The disowned must imagine her former intimate without the benefit of periodic emotional updates that inform less strict estrangements. She conjures a hulking shape in a shadow theater, a crude projection from obsolete history.
Leslie’s tenacious silence combines with her status as my only long-term woman lover to grant her enormous power in my imagination. I have to admit that our rupture has had its advantages, sparing me prolonged and vocal acrimony. But in fact I don’t need to hear her grief and rage restated. They came through loud and clear the first time. They reverberate.
Divorce is the continuation of marriage by other means.
• • •
My separation from my lesbian world, though far less absolute, has been equally painful. It has required giving up that sense of being among the elect that my lesbian feminist identity furnished in return for its exorbitant demands on my sense of political duty. It has entailed admitting that, like lots of other modern people (and I don’t mean just the queer ones), I have asked desire to do entirely too much—to symbolize the whole of who and what I am. I have gazed too long upon that apparition Foucault wickedly termed a “sort of mirage in which we think we see ourselves reflected—the dark shimmer of sex.”