Apples & Oranges

by Jan Clausen

  All of this preparation helps, but it can’t neutralize the social toxins in the air we breathe. So we avoid solemnity wherever possible. We joke a lot, compare, play “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.” Lesbians, I inform Benjamin, are hugely entertained by research indicating that the average heterosexual encounter takes less time than the average coffee break. “Black people are too!” he replies. “We figure those studies get done on a bunch of ofays!”

  He often calls me “’oman,” in a voice of parodied command that usually prompts me to answer him back, my uppity rejoinders touching lightly on real anxieties about being “his woman” in a gender-unequal world. Simultaneously, the routine underscores the absurdity of his pretending to possess, simply on account of being male, a woman whose class and skin privilege place her out of reach of that sort of domination. Last but not least, his affectionate undertone allows me to indulge in the fantasy of being “’oman,” not “woman,” in other words, of “belonging” to him, and with him, in the closer way I sometimes imagine I might if I were from home, talked Carriacou talk, had survived Hurricane Janet and West Indian parental discipline, knew the taste of fry bakes and tree-ripened mango—or even if I’d simply been African-American. For to me, the most painful, threatening effect of societal racism on this relationship is its relentless divisiveness. Gay and lesbian partners are at least in the same boat, usually bearing the brunt of homophobia together, whereas the de facto segregation of North American life silently but relentlessly insists that my lover and I belong in separate and unequal places.

  Yet Benjamin and I have this in common, at least: our respective race-and-gender identities put both of us in positions that simultaneously entail entitlement and social disadvantage. While wary of the mistake of mechanically equating very different forms of disempowerment (as 1960s white feminists used to do when they drew on the imagery of racial oppression to make the case against male chauvinism), I think that the analogies in our situations have facilitated our empathy with each other in ways that complement, although they can never substitute for, our political commitment to each other’s liberation.

  Our path, too, is smoothed considerably by our current rough equivalence in socioeconomic status. Almost as though we hadn’t taken such disparate routes to get there, we meet on common ground, reading the New York Times and discussing mortgage refinancing. In a far more dramatic and telescoped version of my own family’s now distant bootstrap efforts, Benjamin has moved from agricultural subsistence to a prestigious profession and comfortable salary. Meanwhile I, having exercised my privilege by rejecting it for much of my adult life, have begun to earn a precarious middle-class income. The pattern holds for formal education, as well, Benjamin holding a doctorate in history as well as a law degree, while I, the college dropout, recently completed a master’s program. Having been poor, he lacks my defensive attitude toward the bourgeois amenities—our spacious house foremost among them—that cushion our life together.

  But none of this, of course, really explains our affinity, which is a question of persons and not of categories. I am with Benjamin because we suit each other; because our interests, quirks, and passions are complementary; because we’re runners and vegetarians and food co-op stalwarts, gleeful spotters of errors in grammar and word usage, compulsives when it comes to household cleanliness; because in early childhood we felt acute separation from everything around us. Because we talk about South Africa’s class structure and police brutality and Bowers v. Hardwick at the breakfast table; because we’re Luddites and throwbacks, defiers of market forces; because we couldn’t care less about passing on our genes; because (as he says) we “hate enthusiasm”; because we please each other in bed.

  I like the steadiness of sex with Benjamin—a kind of physical bluntness, a lack of complications. It’s an activity and not a psychodrama. Having experienced the rehabilitation of the femme during the Feminist Sex Wars, I’ve accepted my own facility in performing certain gestures of “surrender,” no longer imagining, as I did at age sixteen, that my pleasure in them indicates my fate to be subjugated. I can indulge the fantasy of opposites attracting (“being a woman for him”) and know it’s just that, good old hetero boilerplate, not some iron law of nature.

  Sometimes I think our plain, hard differences make things easier. I can never be Black, I can never be male, I can’t stop seeing the world from my queer, North American angle of vision. He’s completely distinct from me, and while it pleases me to think that his life is enhanced by my presence, I’ve never felt that I needed to rescue him, or imagined such a thing would even be possible.

  And then difference evaporates. Sometimes when I hold him in my mouth, I swear it doesn’t feel as though our sexes are “opposite.” Any more than our two colors, when no one else is looking.

  But enough. I can hear what he’ll say when he reads these paragraphs: “Have you gone completely crazy? Don’t you remember the goat mouth?” That Carriacou name for the treacherous frailty of luck and happiness. Don’t speak aloud of your good fortune. Someone might put their goat mouth on it. Hide it even from yourself, lest it be snatched away from you.

  My life has been lived in productive, exhausting tension between the creative clamor of People in Groups and the sumptuous freedom I know alone, where the line between thought and fantasy is blurred, where eros and aesthetics shade into one another, and analysis, too, can be deeply sensuous. At best, I’ve been able to touch another person without surrendering that freedom.

  “Living with you is like living with nobody,” Benjamin announces, paying me a compliment. I remember once saying something similar. We’d recently met, I was in the hell of indecision. My therapist asked me how I imagined it would feel to be with him. “As if I were by myself, only someone would be there,” I answered instantly, intensely longing for it.

  In this protected space I’ve won, I’m trying to “live inside my story,” in the words of a poem I wrote twenty years ago. “How difficult to live inside my story,” the piece laments.

  But it’s the only way for a floating woman to get her bearings.

  The trouble with official identities is not what they assert, but what they promise. I’ve wasted a lot of time trying to live up to labels, or else to live them down. I’ve fretted over the implications of names that authorized or entrapped me. Now I want a life that can’t be paraphrased—my own, with all its imperfections and surprises. Its lack of romantic certainty. Its failure, precisely, to be some other story, to be justified by anything external to itself.

  Living inside my story means inside my full story, acknowledging the possible future relevance of every portion of my past. It means living inside my story, not in awe of someone else’s—which has nothing to do, of course, with arrogantly supposing that my tale is central or universal, but only with understanding that this and no other is the one given me to inhabit whole. It means living inside my story, not popping outside all the time to check on how I’m doing with the audience, but getting the clearest possible view from where I stand.

  When I make this effort, a discipline, really, an approximation to an elusive but illuminating goal, then I can voice perennial questions of my responsibility to others in a different register, unconstrained by feminine martyrdom, identity envy, or received notions of proper radical behavior.

  Living inside my story allows my fullhearted presence in those places where many stories intersect and complete one another.

  To get there, I need a lot of solitude. I find it in a Brooklyn row house, set back from the world somehow, yet only a block from Flatbush Avenue with its music shouting from the record stores, curry goat, urine scent, darting bike riders on the sidewalks. Overlooking a small back garden, my room entertains a quiet that resists the incessant buzz of traffic, children’s games, a steel drum next door plunking out “Happy Birthday.” From here I watch the lilac bloom and fade, the delicate permutations of the wildflower mix I planted. Always I seem to favor the understated flowers, while
my neighbor delights in showy lilies.

  Not some other life, but this one.

  Who I am is not a noun, but a narrative.

  Postscript to the First Edition

  IT ALL COMES back to gender, that old flickering heap of meanings.

  Our sexual system presupposes that my attraction to certain bodies must logically preclude my attraction to certain others, that male and female are mutually exclusive propositions, both/and a contradiction in terms. This peculiar way of chopping up the world, quite at odds with many people’s desires but reinforced by the structures that shape our social interactions, is so ingrained in our thinking about sex that we fail to notice the absurdity in treating a moment of erotic life as an answer, the answer, to a standardized test question: gay or straight (bisexual if you must)?

  Or perhaps the more appropriate metaphor is that of competitive sport, with each “object choice” racking up points for a gender team. If that’s the game, then no wonder some people see my current relationship as a goal scored for the noxious proposition that Men are where it’s at.

  Nevertheless, I’ve chosen a man, not Men.

  My erotic universe continues to encompass women (and Women). I remain attuned to the allure of “women in multiples,” and aware, as well, of seductive undertones in relationships that aren’t overtly sexual. I felt a jolt of recognition when a lesbian academic whom I recently heard speak at a panel discussion of queer pedagogy mentioned the “safe” erotic charge she feels with certain attractive young women students. Her comments underscored my awareness of subtle erotic currents that tend to be discounted in a culture whose sexual bias runs consistently toward the literal-minded, graphic, and explicit.

  I’ve chosen a person, but I can’t leave it at that, as though somehow all of this happens apart from categories. Because I’m not gender-blind anymore than I’m color-blind, I have to be aware that my gravitation to a male partner repositions me vis-à-vis the gendered world. For, just as our notions of being female and male partake of our perceptions of parental figures who were our earliest models of what it means to inhabit those identities, so our later passions for individuals will inevitably be shaped by broad notions of gender, developed over a lifetime. And thus, in a sense, we do touch (not exclusively choose) an imagined collective of Women or Men each time we make love with a “person.”

  In loving a man, I’ve declared my independence from a notion of Women that threatened to stunt my growth. I’ve marked off a boundary (flexible, not fixed) between Jan Clausen and People in Groups, asserting my libidinal and artistic autonomy. If, at a prior stage, I “married” my own gender via the affirmation that my lesbian attractions were the true sign of my identity, then this “divorce” acknowledges that the union was unequal, one in which, as so commonly happens in matrimony, I gave away too much of myself. It proposes that the happiness and pleasure of a real, specific woman take precedence over theories about how Women ought to love.

  In the early seventies, I joined a feminist movement made up largely of rebel daughters, ambivalent sisters. We attempted to solve “the problem of being a woman”—which, for many of us, and certainly for me, involved intensely contradictory feelings about our gender—by making Women the center of our lives: “eat rice have faith in women,” as Fran Winant’s poem said. Good advice, except that our ingrained lack of faith—our schooling in the intricate forms of self-contempt endemic to dispossessed peoples—was precisely what we needed to overcome. It was like trying to walk on water.

  And yet it worked, amazingly, it worked. It worked for me, enabling me to revise what had been a painful, resentful sense of my gender destiny. It taught me to revel in the company of my kind.

  But even as it allowed me to participate in a thrilling sense of female possibilities, the awesome importance I attributed to Women undermined my confidence, cramped my range of motion. It encouraged my preexisting tendency to measure my personal worth in terms of services rendered—not, in my mother’s pattern, to biological family, but to lesbian family, lesbian feminist causes, and the imagined community of people with vaginas. I’d eagerly responded to the idealistic summons, “Ask not what your gender can do for you. Ask what you can do for your gender.” I’d given my all and wound up feeling used.

  Ambivalence and anger don’t mean an end to passion; Women and I aren’t through, but we’ve entered a brand-new phase. As far as I’m concerned, it’s more mature and realistic now that I’m inclined to balance serving the people with more consistent attention to my own needs.

  Like becoming a lesbian, “falling in love with a man” was a situation-specific response—contingent, by no means destined—to a lifelong gender problem. If one of my crushes on women had gotten further, I might have taken the path of some of my still lesbian friends who’ve moved beyond the pressured, incestuous community life of the late seventies and early eighties. They, too, have revised their relationships to Women, in many cases inviting more men—friends and comrades, sons and colleagues—into their inner circles.

  But what about me and women in the flesh? Because we invest the fairly minor differences between male and female bodies with such elaborate symbolism, I believe it is really this physical dimension that many people are concerned with when they wonder if my being with a man isn’t a disavowal of my passions for women. It’s a dicey business to try to figure out what in my experience of particular women and men is really a function of gender, not persons—yet of course I compare.

  I’ve loved the luxury of women’s bodies, the deep plenitude: fit of pubic bone to hand, vulva’s subtle, strong engorgement. Putting my mouth to the sweet-acid crease, the brave little fist of feeling. I’ve loved a woman’s leisurely arousal, the dallying, meandering, the indulgent sense of time. And the great range of it, the ruthlessness too, no reticence or leisure in the storm of orgasm. I miss making love to women, not their making love to me. Why is that? Do I more easily accept my own body as erotic via male desire? Or could it be an accident, merely, of whom I’ve been with up till now?

  Women are my origin, my people, the speakers of my first language. In those fantasies in which all fulfillments coexist, the circle is unbroken, I return.

  It wouldn’t be official, I feel sure of that. One marriage to a gender was quite enough to last me.

  I once believed that the orange hegemony could only be defeated through fidelity to apples. Now I wonder: what sort of apple? A tart organic Macoun or Jonamac, treasures heaped in dusty boxes at the outdoor market in the aster-eyed perfection of late September? A mealy Red Delicious, two seasons past harvest? Or a waxed Granny Smith flown in from New Zealand, consumed on a bitter day in January?

  And why only apples? What about mangoes, their flat furry pits, sexually allusive, deposited on the sidewalks along Flatbush Avenue by Trinidadians, Guyanese, rude kids in baggy jeans and solemn hatted old ladies from St. Vincent and Haiti? What about mamones (“mamar” means to suck), like pink, fleshy gumballs in their gray-green carapaces? Or the little red-skinned plums with the sweet amber flesh that I used to find under our neighbor’s trees in Eureka? So many fell and perished, a feast for yellow jackets unless I ate them warm from the sun. That ruined orchard was mine for perusing Reader’s Digest and drowsing in the shade of lichen-tufted branches, dreaming of a garden where I’d live all by myself but never be lonely.

  The pure people attract me, but I can’t live up to them. Perfection always gets me into trouble. I fear that my quest for the Fountain of Innocence, pursued with the manic zeal of a modern conquistador, has prevented much in the way of discovery. An insistence on being right all the time, squeaky-clean, without fault—on zooming along the high road of progress while getting optimal mileage—betrays an egotistical disregard for the greatness of what just is, the limitless unfolding and becoming that doesn’t know or care if we are virtuous or not. It’s like asking eternity to ratify a minute. It’s also not very realistic.

  You say I am mysterious. Let me explain myself. I’ve been despe
rate to belong, and to be free. I have lived as though identity were a set of problems to be solved—the problem of being a woman, the problem of desire, the problem of my relation to outsider groups with which I “identified” but couldn’t claim literal kinship. I have lived as though identity were a matter of faithfulness. Now I find that it is a series of questions, shaped but not determined by People in Groups.

  The paradox of belonging is this: It happens in time. We have to improvise.

  Later, other shapes will be possible. Necessary.

  Acknowledgments

  FOR THE NEW EDITION, my first and ardent thanks go to my friend Beverly Gologorsky, who insisted that Apples & Oranges needed to come back into print and generously introduced me to Seven Stories Press, her own publisher. Together with Jane Lazarre and Jocelyn Lieu, Beverly did so much to sustain my energy and faith via our monthly writing group meetings.

  I am deeply grateful to everyone at Seven Stories—first, for their long-standing, passionate commitment to publishing books that matter, and then for all the hard work that went into this reissue. Crystal Yakacki’s generous reading started things off. Dan Simon extended a warm welcome and took time from urgent duties to offer crucial feedback as I hashed out ideas for the new preface. I was fortunate to have Lauren Hooker as my hands-on guide to editorial and production matters.

  Over several decades, every facet of my writing has been shaped by my involvement in a unique creative community linked to the Goddard College MFA in Creative Writing Program. Goddard is not only a vital seedbed of literary arts but an ever-evolving site for challenging explorations of identity, difference, power, and social justice. I am especially indebted to the stellar advice and encouragement of program director Elena Georgiou and program alumnus extraordinaire Christian Peet.