Difficult Women

by David Plante

  In a shop, she bought a little turquoise and silver fly, a pin, which she said was too beautiful not to have. She pinned it to the lapel of my jacket to stand back and examine it, and as she did she clasped her hands under her chin and squealed. “It is beautiful,” she said, then, “Do you want it?” “No, no,” I said.

  In another shop, she examined closely a San Ildefonso black bowl held aloft by an elderly woman with blue hair. She said, “All right, I’ll have it.” Again, she squealed and clapped her hands when the bowl, packed in a cardboard box, was handed to us; I took it to carry. “Do you want to keep it?” she asked. I knew that if I had said, Yes, thank you, it would have been freely mine. “No,” I said, “thanks.”

  She said, “I have it, have money, because I’m famous, and I can earn a lot simply by being famous. Don’t worry about it. I’ll pay the big bills. And if you see something you can’t afford, tell me, and I’ll buy it for you.”

  She bought a small hand-made cedar box. She bought a rough black bowl from an Indian woman under the arcade. She bought a weathervane for her house in Italy.

  Everything we looked at appeared edged with the clear sharp winter light of New Mexico.

  In the shops, people smiled at us. I smiled back. Germaine said, “You smile, and I find I smile, too. You’re going to get me into the awful American habit of smiling at people when they look at you. You’re going to make me as nice as you are.”

  “I’m not nice,” I said.

  “So you’ve told me.”

  I asked, “And what are you going to do to me?”

  Along the narrow street, shop after shop was filled with antiques and paintings and rugs and weaving and pots and specially designed clothes. In the whole of Santa Fé, there seemed to be only one drugstore, one grocery, one Woolworth’s; all the other shops were galleries.

  Germaine said, “This is Poofterville.”

  I carried all the packages back to the hotel, and in my room I lay on my bed and fell asleep. From time to time I woke and saw, out of the window, different stages of sunset over the snow-covered adobe town; then I woke to a view of the town outlined along flat roof edges and windowsills with lights flickering in brown paper bags and the night sky dark blue.

  At seven I knocked on Germaine’s door. She had been typing one of a series of articles she was writing on gardens, under the name of Rose Blight. Gardening books were open on the bed and floor, and papers were everywhere around the little table by the window where she had put her typewriter. She was wearing the red and black check flannel shirt and blue bib overalls she’d been wearing, and she said, “I’ll have to wear what I’ve got on to go to dinner. I forgot my pantihose, so I can’t wear my dress.” I didn’t say, “But I thought you didn’t wear underclothes.” Perhaps it was too cold. I said, “You give the flannel shirt and jeans real style.” She laughed. “Cut the shit,” she said; “I look like a fucking mess.” At the long mirror on her bathroom door, she took various poses, examining herself. She sighed. “Anyway, let’s go eat.”

  We walked to the restaurant. The night cold was sharp, bright, dry. I kept breathing it in deeply; it burned throughout my sinuses and lungs. Hunched over, Germaine said her ears were freezing. I offered to give her my scarf to tie round her head. “No,” she said. I thought that Germaine, when she said no, would mean no. But I offered again, and she said all right. From time to time I grabbed her and rubbed my hands, hard, all over her.

  The air smelled of the smoke of piñon fires.

  At a corner table in the restaurant, Germaine said, “I’m going to pay for this meal.”

  The fancy restaurant had a sommelier who came with the wine list, which he held out to me. I said, pointing to Germaine, “She’ll choose,” and he stepped back to look at me and look at Germaine, and, frowning a little, said, “Very well.” Germaine ordered a bottle of French wine. After the sommelier came back with it and opened it, he began to pour wine into my glass for me to taste it, and I said, “No, she’ll try it first,” and again he frowned as he poured a little of the wine into Germaine’s glass. She said, “It isn’t premier cru, as it’s supposed to be.” “It is,” he said. “No,” she said, “it isn’t.” He said nothing, staring at her. “However,” she said, “it will do, thank you.” He poured out a glass for me, then for Germaine.

  She said to me, “I know when you’re annoyed.”

  “Do you? What do I do when I’m annoyed?”

  “You say, ‘No, no, I’m perfectly happy to do anything you want,’ and I can tell by the tone of your voice that what you really want to say is, ‘Let’s stop fucking around, I’m bored going through these fucking shops.’”

  I laughed.

  “I could tell,” she said, “that in the car you felt you couldn’t go silent, couldn’t withdraw into yourself, but had to keep up a conversation with me, which was a strain on you, and you wished you didn’t have to do it.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But I believe in politeness.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Oh, I take it to mean that the person you’re with is more important than you are, and you must go out to him and treat him with the deference he deserves.”

  “Even if you don’t want to? Even if it means being nice when you’re not nice?”

  “Yep,” I said.

  She stuck out her lower lip.

  With our food, though I can’t imagine it was the food which started her off, she talked about her marriage. She described the ceremony and the dinner afterward in a restaurant. She left the party, went to the ladies’ room, looked at herself in a mirror and realized she had made a great mistake.

  Living with her husband, when she came in from a day out, he would ask, “Where’ve you been?” and she wouldn’t tell him simply because she didn’t want to be asked where she’d been or what she’d been doing; she didn’t want to feel she had to account to him, and she didn’t want to feel guilty for not accounting to him. She hadn’t felt, she’d made quite sure she wouldn’t feel, guilty towards others since she’d left her mother in Australia.

  Then, for most of the meal, she told me about her mother.

  I asked her questions. I don’t know if I asked her a question she thought offensive—I don’t recall if I did—but I recall her all at once looking at me, her face hard, her jaw long, her eyes narrow. Perhaps I had said something which she disapproved of. I certainly felt she disapproved of me, suddenly, entirely. I didn’t know what had happened.

  We ate in silence for a while. The waiter kept filling our glasses. Later, with dessert, she told me that she had argued terribly with all her friends, especially her women friends. She raised her head up, so her long neck curved, and she sighed as with relief. She said it always happened that her friends decided, at some point of intimacy, to tell her just what they thought of her: that she was self-involved, and if she considered other people at all it was only as an audience to whom she gave lectures.

  She put her fingers over her lips. “They think I can’t be hurt. I suppose they imagine I don’t know the way I am, and they feel impelled, for some reason which they call friendship but which is their convoluted idea of friendship, to tell me. They don’t at all know the way I am.”

  I wondered if I had said something about her which had hurt her for being so misunderstanding of her.

  I said, “But you do give the impression that you don’t hear, or ever see, the person you’re talking to. Whatever I say, for example, seems to produce no reaction in you; and the more important what I have to say is to me, the less you react. Your face becomes stark.”

  “Does it?”

  “I’ll tell you, though, that hours, days, sometimes weeks after I might have said something I thought brilliant enough to impress you, and which I imagined didn’t, it happens that you’ll publicly comment on what I said, and I’ll suddenly see you’d been listening closely.” I said, “Do you remember the time I made the Anatolian dish with aubergines in Italy? I thought you hadn’t taken it in, really, b
ut years later you mentioned that I had taught you to make it, and that you made it often.”

  She smiled a little with the corners of her mouth.

  I still felt I had said something wrong, and I didn’t know what it was.

  Maybe it had to do with her mother.

  We went back to the hotel. In my bed, I couldn’t sleep, and I lay wondering why. I knew I felt guilt towards, not all women, but difficult women, and I felt guilt because, somewhere in my life which I could not recall, I had done something, perhaps simply said something, which was wrong, which had hurt them, and the only reaction possible for them to what I had done or said was to be difficult. I had made them difficult.

  Yet they gave me something, these women, or at least promised me something, for which I wanted to be close to them. They could justify me in my body and soul.

  •

  Germaine rang me in the morning, her voice bright. I ordered breakfast for us both, which we ate, she in her nightgown, by the sunny window in my room.

  While she worked on her gardening articles, I went out for a walk. It was Thanksgiving Day. People were gathered about the cathedral; I entered and stood at the back and listened, beyond the congregation, to singers and guitarists at the front of the church singing and playing Mexican songs, and suddenly the double doors by me opened and a procession of Indian women wearing soft leather shoes and embroidered shawls came in, followed by altar boys, then a bishop with a crook. I left, and walked up into the foothills above Santa Fé. The snow on the ground and piñon trees had crystallized, and the dry crystals blew up in small cold bursts of wind, and flashed in the clear sunlight. I walked off the road, into a piñon woods where there were no footmarks but my own. Then I returned to the road, where a one-eyed old Indian in a battered pickup truck stopped to give me a lift, but I told him I was taking a walk, and wished him a happy Thanksgiving.

  When I got back to the hotel room I found the door to Germaine’s room wide open, and I looked in. She was still in her long nightgown, barefoot, watching a maintenance man try different large keys on a ring in the lock of the door between our rooms. One opened the door and Germaine jumped up, clapped her hands, and squealed.

  She said to me, “I got him to do it.”

  The maintenance man smiled.

  A thrill of fear passed through me.

  We left the door open.

  It was as if I were naked, and, self-consciously naked, I sat on her bed while she sat in an armchair, and I told her about my morning.

  She got up from her chair. “I guess I’d better get ready to go out,” she said. “I’ll have to wear what I wore yesterday.”

  A student of ours had, from Tulsa, rung up a friend of hers in Santa Fé, an elderly woman, who through our student had invited Germaine and me to Thanksgiving lunch. At first Germaine said, “I’ve spoken to too many people, and I don’t want to speak to anyone now. You can do it. You can be among people who even bore you and put on an act that they’re the most interesting people you’ve ever met. I can’t.” She shrugged. “Well, let’s go. No doubt we’ll have turkey. I hate turkey, a tasteless bird which has all the tasteless qualities of this country.” I said, “We’ll only do what you want to do. Honestly. I’d rather. I want to do what’s most restful for you, and if, after your weeks of lecture tours and thousands of people to talk to, you’d prefer to have a sandwich here in our rooms, I’d like that.” “No,” she said, “we’ll go.”

  On a map of Santa Fé I found the street where we were to go. It did not appear far, and I suggested to Germaine that we walk. Outside the hotel she asked, “Which way?” It occurred to me that every time we left the hotel Germaine asked, “Which way?” and did not know her way back to the hotel. I was surprised that she should be so disorientated (to stick to my guns), and I was surprised, too, that she was amused and not annoyed when I, turning the map in all directions, got lost. I stopped a big car to ask directions; the driver, a young Indian, took us to the street. Germaine kept laughing.

  Our hostess was short, plump, in a long black dress, her white hair tied up at the side of her head in Hopi fashion. She introduced us to other guests, two women, one with a little boy, and a male high-school teacher. From the living-room window of the cottage was a wide view of a snow-covered mountain crossed by thirty-six (Germaine counted them out loud) electricity cables.

  We sat. Our hostess gave us wine. We were silent.

  Germaine said, “Do I smell turkey? How wonderful! We’re having turkey!”

  I smiled.

  When our hostess and the high-school teacher and the little boy went into the kitchen, I followed them to help.

  From the living room I heard Germaine talking to the other women as if giving a lecture.

  At table, the hostess asked Germaine, “What is it like to be a cult figure?”

  “I’ll tell you what it means,” she said. “It means that people who don’t know your work at all, so have no idea what you stand for, presume that they do, and insist on discussing your work with you. What I really want, and don’t have, is the respect of my peers. For whatever reason, and it could be jealousy, my peers are suspicious of me, and don’t respect me.”

  We sat in the living room afterwards, Germaine and I together on the sofa. The sun set. Two middle-aged men with moustaches came in; they were interior decorators and lived together. Germaine and I often touched one another as they watched us. While we talked, she held one of my hands in hers and with her other rubbed my arm for a long time as with a great warm affection and familiarity.

  One of the men asked me if I knew a certain young British painter.

  I thought a moment. “Yes,” I said, “I do.”

  “He comes to Santa Fé often,” the other man said.

  “I knew that,” I said.

  “He had an exhibition here last year,” the first said, “with a drawing of you in it.”

  “Really?”

  I was very attentive to Germaine. After three hours there I saw she was tired. I put an arm round her and said we should go. She nodded and sighed.

  She sighed a great deal.

  The high-school teacher gave us a lift back to the hotel.

  That evening in my room we watched television, one stupid programme after another. In her nightgown, Germaine sat in an armchair and knitted; I lay on my bed, my feet at the top, my head at the bottom, pillows under my elbows. Germaine kept getting up to change the channels, saying, “What shit American television is.” She came to the musical The Sound of Music, and we watched a bit of it, both saying, “This is awful, awful, awful,” and Germaine changed to other channels, but more awful programmes appeared, and we always came round to The Sound of Music, which, after all, we watched. The governess to a family of unhappy Austrian children wants to make them happy, and she does this by contriving clothes for all of them out of the flowered curtains of her bedroom; happy in their new clothes, they go out into the whole of Switzerland, singing. I saw Germaine lower her knitting to her lap as she watched the governess lead the children up into the green mountains, all of them singing to the sky. Then she turned to me, her lower lip stuck out; tears were dripping down her face, and she wiped them away with the back of her hand. She said, “This is shit,” and got up and changed the channel.

  We slept with the door open between our rooms.

  •

  In the morning, out of the bath and wrapped in a towel, I passed the open door and saw Germaine, dressing. She grabbed the fat round her waist and squeezed it into a roll. “Look at that,” she said. Then she slapped her behind. “I’ve gone slack-assed.” She pulled up the skin on her thigh and said, “That’s gone crêpey.”

  While she worked on her gardening articles, I went out to bookshops. I looked for and found her books in the shops.

  After lunch in a Mexican restaurant, where Germaine said only the guacamole was good, we drove off in the car to tour the country round Santa Fé.

  We stopped at the Pueblo San Ildefonso, a low ring of ado
be houses about a vast sandy plaza in which, off-centre, was a round stone platform. Nailed to a tree at the entrance to the pueblo was a sign: KEEP OFF THE KIVA. “What’s a kiva?” Germaine asked. “I don’t know,” I said. The pueblo appeared deserted. We went into a part adobe, part corrugated-iron shed, a gift shop, where an Indian, behind a counter with a few ugly bowls, simply looked at us. In a whisper, I said to Germaine, “I’ll ask him what a kiva is.” She frowned. “No,” she said. “I’d better,” I said, “or we won’t know what to keep off.” There was a flash of anger in her eyes, and I wondered why. I asked the man, who said in a low, slack voice that the kiva was the stone platform in the plaza, and that it was used for ceremonies. Germaine pointed to the bowls and said they were lovely, when I knew she knew they were ugly. I realized she said it because she was embarrassed, and when we got out of the shop it came to me that she was perhaps embarrassed because she hadn’t wanted the man to know she was ignorant of what a kiva was, and she’d been angry at me for a moment because, by asking, I revealed to the man that she was ignorant. We walked across the empty plaza, over which sand blew up, past the kiva and to a large, twisted, bare tree which Germaine said must be the Council Oak. In front of some of the houses, which had porches with carved pillars and cross-beams, were beehive ovens, and as we went by them I felt heat come off them. But we still saw no one. Dogs barked.

  We were to meet the elderly woman who’d given us Thanksgiving lunch, and two of her friends, at a restaurant in Chimayo for dinner, but we got lost. At a gasoline station, I asked directions to Chimayo, and, again, I saw Germaine get angry.