Difficult Women

by David Plante

  I said, “And you’re the only person here I understand.”

  I was always vividly aware of Germaine as a woman, a large, imposing woman. Her intelligence was to me the intelligence of a woman, because she had, as a woman, thought out her role in the world; the complexity of the role required intelligence to see it, and she had seen it, I thought, thoroughly. Even when, once, she said to me, “I don’t understand women at all,” I took this as an observation of what it was to be a woman. So, if I with some degree of logic believed Germaine understood me, it followed that I believed she understood me with a woman’s intelligence. I wanted to know what she understood.

  I was drunk on champagne.

  I wanted her to tell me what she thought about me. I believed I needed her to tell me. She stared at me. I stared back.

  I didn’t say anything.

  She continued to talk about the Center.

  Going to bed, I thought: A relationship with a woman did this for me: it made me feel complicated.

  We often had dinner together in different restaurants.

  As most restaurants were closed, late one evening, she said we’d drive out of Tulsa to a Mexican place where the guacamole was a whole meal. She drove fast, and faster, in bursts, over empty stretches of highway out of Tulsa, shouting out. Rounding an unlit curve, I saw ahead in the headlights a black and white wooden barrier with red lights flashing on it; Germaine swerved to miss it, and, the tires screeching, the car turned into a crossing where a lone bicyclist was pedalling; she swerved again, so the car missed the bicyclist, who simply looked back at us and continued to pedal, and we stopped across the highway.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why the fuck weren’t there any signs warning us that there’d be a barrier round the curve?” She was very angry. “I would have slowed down and we wouldn’t have had this scemenza.” Frowning, she righted the car and we drove to the restaurant.

  As we ate the guacamole, her anger left her, and she kept repeating, “I really should have been more careful. I really should have.”

  “There should have been signs before the curve,” I said.

  “No, no, it was my fault. I wasn’t careful. I drove badly.” She hunched her shoulders up, put a hand across her mouth, and looked at me with the look of a deeply embarrassed girl. Through her hand, she said, “I drove very badly. I shouldn’t have done that. I’m very sorry.”

  “I felt you were in control.”

  “It shouldn’t have happened, and wouldn’t have if I’d been driving properly.” She placed her other hand over the first, across her mouth, and she hunched her shoulders closer together. “Oh dear.”

  I had never before seen her embarrassed; and she was because she had performed badly.

  At the Graduate School of Letters staff meetings, I understood little because I was unfamiliar with academic jargon. Germaine knew the jargon, and hearing her discuss a certain problem it came to me why everyone listened to her with such attention: she had a command of whatever vocabulary happened to be appropriate to the problem. She was the only woman at the meetings.

  One morning, I sat in the large leather swivel chair at the large polished desk in my office, which I kept stark and empty. (Germaine had made her own private office at the back of the Center personal with paintings of and by women, a kelim thrown over a sofa, her own books in the book shelves.) I looked to the side of my room, where there should have been a high-backed leather chair, and in its stead I saw a small, rickety, paint-spattered chair. I jumped up, ran through the kitchen into the Center, and shouted, “Where is my chair?” Germaine was out. Her assistants, some of whom were my students, looked for the chair, which was in Germaine’s office.

  “I’m very angry,” I said.

  I exchanged the chairs.

  Later that day I encountered Germaine in the kitchen, making soup.

  “You took my chair,” I said.

  “I deserved it,” she said.

  “No you didn’t. I deserve it. And, anyway, it’s mine.”

  “I deserve it,” she said, “and I should have it.”

  “Well, you’re not going to get it.”

  Smiling, I went back into my office.

  In a loud voice, I heard Germaine say, “We need more room for the Center. We need more office space.”

  I went out. “You’re not getting my office,” I said.

  “We need it,” she said.

  “You’re not going to get it.”

  She stuck out her tongue at me.

  I said, “You know all the tricks of expansionist politics.”

  “How else can I get what I have to get?” she said.

  I said, “I’m going to make it a condition of my staying here that I keep this office.”

  I thought: That’s what she would do.

  With her, I was always conscious of trying to speak at least grammatically, and sometimes with style. She said I had a peculiar accent, but she never corrected me, as she sometimes corrected others, especially, of course, her students. Once I said, “I still feel disorientated here.” She said, “Disoriented.” “No,” I said, “it’s ‘disorientated.’” “No, it isn’t.” “It is.” “I know it isn’t.” I said, “It is.” I looked it up in the OED, and found both words; but, strictly, “disorient” was defined as “to cause to lose one’s bearings,” and “disorientate” as “to turn from an eastward position.” The next time I saw Germaine I told her that I’d looked up the word in the OED and that I was right, though I was wrong. She simply pursed her lips. When I was alone with our friend I told her what I had done, and she said, “Just a while ago I said ‘disoriented’ to Germaine, and she corrected me and said, no, it was ‘disorientated.’” I said, “She took my word.”

  A week before Thanksgiving, I had a party at my house for some of my students. I also invited a drag queen I had met in Tulsa. Germaine, too.

  In the kitchen, I found Germaine talking animatedly to the drag queen. I stood by them and listened. Germaine took on the gestures and the accent of the young queen, a thin boy, as if she herself were a drag queen, or at least knew everything there was to know about being one, and she was talking to the queen, named Dou Dou, as an equal. They were talking about street trade.

  After the party, I said to Germaine, “You were getting on very well with that drag queen.”

  She said, “She was brave.”

  I felt in the very presence of Germaine’s body the positive power of some kind of political sex. She herself meant something in the world, and any relationship with her had to be meaningful in the world. In the same way that she saw the most intimate of intercourses, sex, as meaningful in the world, a relationship with her had to be political, had to do with the world outside.

  3

  Germaine was looking drawn and pale. On one of our Thursdays at lunch in the Greek restaurant (she was beginning to speak a little Greek to the owners) we decided to go away together for the Thanksgiving break.

  I said, “You really need a rest. If we go anywhere, it must be to a place where you can rest properly.”

  Her eyes large, she looked at me as if to say: Do you imagine that I don’t know that?

  With Germaine, there was always the fear of stating the obvious.

  We planned on going to Santa Fé, New Mexico, where neither of us had been.

  We left directly after Germaine’s last class before the holiday break. It was a cold, grey afternoon. We were told it would snow and we might not be able to make it across the Texas panhandle. One of our students gave us votive candles in case we got stuck in the snow, though I wasn’t quite sure what we were supposed to do with them; another gave us a flashlight. Packing Germaine’s car with our bags, a huge electric typewriter, piles of books about gardens, I had a sense that we were going very far. A few of our students waved us off from the little brick house.

  Germaine insisted on driving because, she said, I drove too slowly.

  On the bac
k seat of the car was a Styrofoam cooler, without ice, and in it three bottles of champagne. Before we got out of Tulsa, we stopped at a grocery store to buy a big bag of ice for the cooler. Germaine also bought four or five clear plastic bags of liquorice.

  As soon as we got back into the car she said, “Open a bag of liquorice, will you, and give me three sticks together.” Her eyes narrowed on the highway, she held out her hand and I placed the liquorice in it. She ate the three sticks together. “More,” she said, and again she held out her hand.

  “You really like liquorice,” I said.

  “It’s good for my hernia,” she said.

  I wondered where she had heard that liquorice is good for hernia. Then I thought: Germaine wouldn’t have heard it from anyone, but would always have known that liquorice is good for hernia.

  I kept giving her liquorice sticks whenever she held out her hand. Her eyes were always on the road, as she was driving fast. She read out loud all the highway signs. And she was on the lookout for police cars. She said she was lucky with the police; they only appeared when she happened to be going slowly. As we slowed down to turn off one highway on to another, a police car approached us from the opposite lane. “You see?” she said. She held out her hand for more liquorice.

  When we crossed over into the Texas panhandle she shouted out, “Whoopee,” and hit her thigh. “Open a bottle of champagne,” she said.

  The champagne foamed in and spilled over our plastic cups. The sky was low over the low, snow-covered land, in which, at great distances, were oil pumps and drilling derricks. As we drank the champagne the sky darkened.

  Our first stop in Texas was at Shamrock, where we pulled up at the Blarney Stone Inn, just off the highway. To have a beer, because we were in a dry county, I had to join a club. We ordered T-bone steaks and baked potatoes; the steaks had to mushy excess the one quality which Germaine said Americans demand in their meat: that you should be able to gum them. The Blarney Stone Inn appeared, as all buildings in that part of America seemed to me, to have been put up temporarily; I was aware that beyond the walls of the dining room was the vast outside. Inside it was empty except for Germaine and me, a fat waitress at a table next to the kitchen smoking a cigarette, and, at the other side of the room from us, an old, skeletal couple, also eating soft steaks and baked potatoes.

  The woman had short, dyed red hair. He was in a check jacket and differently checked trousers. She called to the waitress for a doggie bag; when she took the bag the fat waitress handed her, she said, “This isn’t a doggie bag. A doggie bag is lined with plastic so it won’t drip. This is just an ordinary old paper bag.” The waitress didn’t answer, but slumped off. The old woman said to the old man, “But this isn’t a doggie bag.”

  As we ate, Germaine and I studied the couple as if we were trying, through them, to understand a little the place we were in. Sometimes Germaine stopped eating to look at them.

  Beyond them was the bar; through an open double doorway we saw men in brim-rolled stetsons and boots drinking and smoking. In the bar was a juke box and a small dance floor, which the old couple, he pulling her chair out from the table and taking her arm to lead her, went to; the old lady put a coin in the juke box and chose some records, loud rock music, and she and the man, stiffly swinging their arms and barely lifting their feet, danced. Sometimes she stepped back from him and clapped her hands and said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” while he, alone, shuffled his feet back and forth and moved his arms in startling jerks.

  As we left, by way of the smoky bar, I heard the old woman say to the old man, over the music, “If this place can’t give you a real doggie bag, it must be a dump.”

  We went on to Amarillo. The snow on the ground deepened as we went west, and the roads became icy. Germaine drove with great care, slowing down when she saw ahead parts of the highway where there was bound to be ice: under an overpass, at a banked curve. Our headlights illuminated a round vague space before us in the immense dark space about us, and in that round vague space appeared, suddenly, the bright lights of an oncoming car. It was in the wrong lane. I had a momentary hallucination: that we were not on a highway at all, but had somehow got off, and, wherever it was we were, the space was not defined in any way. We went silent. I saw Germaine’s hands tense about the steering wheel; she didn’t brake, but, on ice, guided her car round the oncoming car, as if in outer space. Once past the car, she said, “He must have skidded right round on the ice.” She had got us through by careful driving. She laughed.

  “Open another bottle of champagne,” she said.

  From time to time she rolled down her window on to the freezing night air because, she said, she was making smelly liquorice farts.

  We turned off the highway at a sign for Amarillo on to more broad highways, deserted; there were no buildings on the flat, snow-covered land, illuminated by the lights along the highways. Then, in the far distance, was a group of square buildings lit up green, and about the buildings vast empty parking lots, also lit green. Billowing about the buildings and lots were great clouds of steam.

  “What’s that?” Germaine asked.

  She had asked that about many strange sights; she wanted to know what everything was.

  “God knows,” I said.

  We came to a railway alongside the highway, and a railway yard with open flat cars; the tracks went up to the green-lit buildings.

  “I don’t understand what it could be,” she said.

  We saw a sign in green light: BEEF PACKING.

  “I should have known,” Germaine said.

  She drove on, over the icy, empty Amarillo Boulevard, along which were motels with signs shining high above them; some of the signs were not working, and the motels appeared to be falling apart.

  Germaine said, “We’re not going to stay in a motel with a sign that doesn’t work properly.”

  Slowly, we drove down and then up the wide Boulevard. Amarillo seemed to have no centre, but to spread out over the flat, empty land. We stopped at a large motel which looked like a Swiss chalet.

  It was about midnight. Germaine went directly to her room, I to mine. The motel was silent as if empty. I had a hot shower, then got into bed. I lay awake for a while, feeling that I was in a foreign country.

  I was glad I was with Germaine.

  She woke me at 6.30 by phone from her room. I got up, a bit lost in the large darkness, and, naked, went to the curtains closed across a window as wide as the wall; I pulled the cord to the curtains, which, in little jerks, opened on to an expansive view, in dawn light, of the motel pool, the ground, shrubs, furniture about the pool covered in snow, and, beyond low banks of snow, the highway, where cars with lit parking lights were creeping. I saw no people, only cars, moving.

  I met Germaine in the dining room. We were the only people there. She was spirited as we looked at maps and marked out the route. When the waitress came with our eggs, over easy, and bacon, Germaine had a long talk with her about the conditions of the roads in New Mexico.

  Sometimes, Germaine would be friendly with waiters and waitresses, and have intimate conversations with them; and sometimes she would be curt with them, and I saw they served her grudgingly. I didn’t understand why she would be one way one time, and at another time another way. She seemed to be unaware of the difference.

  This morning she asked the waitress about her work. The questions might have been those of a researcher trying to compile statistics on waitresses; and yet I saw the waitress respond as to someone who took an interest in a job which she herself considered just a dumb way to make money.

  When we crossed over into New Mexico, Germaine shouted out, “Yip, yip, yip, yayee,” and leaned forward as she gave the car more gas.

  In the bright mid-morning we drank the remaining bottle of champagne.

  We were to turn off the highway at Clines Corners; signs appeared, each larger than the one before, announcing Clines Corners where, the signs told us, we should stop to buy Cactus Candy and Cactus Jelly. Clines Corners
consisted of one large, windowless, prefabricated building and a gasoline station. We didn’t stop for Cactus Candy and Jelly.

  Over a narrow road, we drove up into the mountains towards Santa Fé. The country was covered with snow, the surface brilliantly crystallized, and through the snow were visible great swaths of gold plains grass. Beyond the shining white and gold mountains the sky was clear blue.

  We went silent driving through the mountains.

  Then, rising over a mountain to a view of a valley, Germaine said, “Look at that.”

  I was enthusiastic for what we saw; and I knew that I could express my enthusiasm because she did hers.

  “And look at that,” I said.

  It was as though—how can I understand this without having recourse to “as though”?—Germaine were educating me to views I had never seen before, and I was, and wanted her to know I was, an enthusiastic pupil.

  Looking in all directions not to miss anything, we drove into the small, compact, brown adobe town of Santa Fé.

  •

  Our hotel rooms were adjoining, with a locked door between. The high headboards of the beds were painted red with green and yellow Mexican flowers, and at the foot of each bed was a wooden chest painted like the bedsteads.

  Germaine said, “Your room is better than mine.”

  “They look the same to me.”

  We were in my room. She tried the door between our rooms and said, “We should have this opened.”

  I became vividly aware of myself standing next to her.

  “That’s a terrific idea,” I said.

  On our way to lunch, I stopped at reception and asked the receptionist please to have the door between Dr. Greer’s and my room opened.

  She said, “We can’t. We’ve lost the keys, I’m sure. And the doors between the rooms are painted shut.”

  I made a face of disappointment at Germaine.

  In a Mexican restaurant we had, each of us for the first time, blue tortillas with our chili. Germaine said they were tasteless, and the chili was hot without having any flavour.

  Then we went out to look. She had to see everything. We went in and out of every shop along the street the hotel was on, and around the Plaza. Indians were sitting on the edges of blankets spread out under the arcade on one side of the Plaza, and on the blankets were black pots, silver and turquoise jewellery, and large round loaves in transparent plastic bags. Though Germaine said, “What a lot of tat,” she examined the tat closely. When she saw an object she thought special, she pointed it out to me.