On Keeping Women

by Hortense Calisher

  What she wants to tell him and them is what goes on below all the talk-talk, below even the silent screaming—to give them a psychograph of her own dark interior, and what deeply murmurs there. Of how it is to be a Lexie-on-the-hill, waiting for a Ray to find her. In the ultimate sulk—as if she’s always expected the synopsis of her life to be played by some winsome but unimportant movie-star. Of how all her life she has felt the humiliation of having small aims.

  Naked on a bus; can’t explain, can’t say a word. Of how in all the exercises of her life—meals to be made, children to be made—she’s dealt only in small patterns concluded. Of how, each morning, a woman had to project her own poem on the populace. A hopeless situation. Yet daily it was done—with a nylon soup-net. Compounding the absurdity, the ego and the humiliation all at once. And the soup. So that while the men before her can go ragged with inconclusiveness—in tragic asymmetry—she’s been allowed the minimal satisfaction of small ambitions quenched. While the men keep for themselves the tors unsealed, the grinding treks which come to nothing—the great, souring inconclusiveness of life.

  She raises her head to see who she’s been telling this to. Maybe only one woman, dozing behind her babuska. But all the men are looking back at her, eyes bloodshot with the experience, of keeping women like her. They include: A redheaded man—who goes in early, in order to keep two of them. One Robert Kellihy, Jr., whose four cars are out of gas, whose pocket is out of money but has turned up a one-way ticket—and whose presence in the city is that morning required by his mother, at nine o’clock sharp. And there in the back seat—with his felonious masher’s hands showily on top of his raincoat—is the village molester, gazing outraged on her nakedness.

  What did the streaker say, bravura—“I am your Representative”?

  And what would she herself say? “This is the way it is, it is. And it has nothing to do with sex”?

  Hadn’t she heard the bike? That boy would see her. And him. He stands stooping but tall, his deed done.

  Up on the road overlooking their riverbank, the bike stopped. He could feel the boy standing there, in depth-charge quiet. Then the shouted syllables rolled over him, over her, motionless there.

  The bike moved on. The boy’s second shout skimmed back through the trees.

  She rolled over, luxuriously flat to the sky. Lazily an arm lifted in backward salute, flopped again. “What’d he say?”

  “Sin. Sin and damnation.”

  “He doesn’t count,” she muttered, stretching sensuously, and sat up. “Ray!”

  He felt foolish. Country-suburban devilish—and without a party’s excuse. His naked buttocks are dudes to this air. A good enough frame, and well-hung, but in younger locker-rooms these days his shoulders look rounded. He has left on the shoes.

  “Ah he counts with me,” he said, eyes glinting.

  A man’s body—husband, father or lover—shouldn’t it look more resolute? All the bodies that had been on hers have been admirable ones. Yet, all male bodies seem to her to be still hunting their armor. Even that chub gladiator the caterer’s boy, shedding his jeans in slit-eyed arrogance, or standing naked in his ten-gallon hat, would be belied somewhere—maybe by a rib slender as glass, or the target hip-plate above the angry sex, or the mutely hollowed clavicle. They’re caves of bone, in which deeds must, must generate.

  He’s moving off.

  “Where you going?”

  “Where’d you think?”

  “You going to walk down the road like that.”

  He stood still. “No, I’m like you. I never thought of it.”

  Some yards further on he was climbing down the bank. “Going in,” she heard him call. “Clean myself off.”

  “Take off your watch,” she heard herself call back.

  So now were they that suburban couple who merely got up a little sooner than the rest? And lay out in the non-wild, hoping for kicks?

  Over the bank the watch came flying at her, landing with a thud.

  So we’re not the stuff of legends. Or not yet.

  He hates river swimming. But borrowing another person’s gestures—or hers—is useless. He’d tried before this to say silently “I side with you”; he never gets it right. This time, at least she hadn’t laughed. That startled “Ray!” even warms him.

  From out here he had a seal’s view of the strip of town. The gently antediluvian houses straggled the waterside and hill in placements which often seemed to follow some conformation or purpose long gone. He could see clearer from here how life-in-general pushed its hollows through the earth, and through people. He could safely regard how he and she came to live in one of those houses. How he’d made them come. Because the city was his rival; he could never have hung onto her there. Bright as she is, she’d never suspected it. People always came to the suburbs because of something. It was travel parodied.

  Down in the underwater the Hudson was briny dark. Eel on bottom, shad still to be netted in May, and crab returning, but on the surface utterly trafficless. A summer morning without inflection, holding the land in pause. In the river the great teeming pause which was life. Riverbottom thoughts, one got here. Does she know yet what he does? That men at their best don’t swim in couples but for the planet only?

  Carefully he stroked back from the central channel, which was timbreless and very deep. Eyes open to the oily Pleiades ahead, nosing through the brown alluvial shorewater, he was swimming for the planet and with it, like everything else down here. And up above. His fingers grasped land; he vaulted onto its shelf. Not bad—he’d have years yet. Not to live in the future only, always denying it.

  Halfway up the bank he turned back again. Hector’s shoes—he’d left them down below; better get them. Airports were prosy about bare feet. For his flight back he’d as soon be thermally protected only, in some friar-stuff of brown or white. It had always half surprised him, that for flights into what just might be forty thousand feet that much nearer God, the air-services didn’t provide even temporary migrants with some such stripped-down uniform. After he’d made clear his intention to work in the ward, maybe Hector, now reduced to his dead brother’s medical black serge, would dig up for him one of the old monk-tunics the Sisters surely had saved.

  Up on the roadside again his own clothes are where he’d dropped them. “Conservatively” pinstriped and dotted, they seem to him now a clown’s. But on the undershirt is one of the ward-woman’s crazy red darns, with which half the hospital-gowns were spotted. He put the shirt back on, for affection. Plus his undershorts, against allergy. Poison-oak sprouted here every spring. Chess, who’d inherited his bones, his tender skin—and it might be, the hoarded soma of a lifetime of dreams unrecollected—once swelled to dropsy from it. Lexie, toughskinned as a gypsy, is immune.

  Approaching, he saw she’d arranged herself on elbow—and on circumstance. This nonproducing ripple of land he’s provided her with has just enough rise. For much of the day its cranky, offshoot road remains hermetically empty. But shortly a few persons traveling of necessity south will have a champion view—for one camera moment longer than life—of a woman with a river behind her. And he can see how for her to set herself up as signal is appropriate. The bodies of women lurch beyond anatomy. Toward what may be obscure—but artists have spent paint on it.

  She’s been disposing of her two extra men, which through all the movie-colored infatuation has been how she’d thought of them and had treated them. One, in spite of his pose of hunting only sex in her, had helped her respect her mind. The other, hungering for other people’s talents as the rich sometimes starved for protein, had given her a candidate’s hopes. Both had shown her that she’s had four kids by a man who, in the pure matters of the body—which run on carnally to the heart—is bitterly and maybe hopelessly shy.

  When he sits down beside her the fertile river is shining from him. For a moment she’s almost sure he’s going to cover her with himself; then it passes, in her, and maybe in him. The air’s tingeing peach, pearly acrid as a
baby’s sweat.

  She sneaked a look at him. Never coarse enough for her? But surely the rape was mutual? Thinking back on how it was with her, she isn’t sure. Youth-sex, hot for immersion, and a young mind already in extremis, in its urge not to be eunuchoid. A matter of the spirit—with the sexual self conniving. Against her abiding fear that all her relationships would be with herself.

  But the man beside her is still the mystery she raped. She could slice his throat to raw meat with her armed tongue, before he could tell her what he thinks.

  Where’s she walking to? To the high edge of this riverbank, which here falls away in raw fissures and mesas for ants, down to the soggy pebbleline below. No one could build here; what’s he been saving it for?

  Her ankles have swollen with the night’s heat; her buttocks are redprinted with weed. The pattern of my wife’s backside changes with the season and the sofa; I must assume a similar swell in her brain. Women and the moon were both oedematous—part of their charm. Stark naked—she’s gone behind a bush to pee.

  He recalled how after Charles was born the contour of her back became as he could glimpse it now through the scrawny bush—fatally thickened from the outline of girl. And how this had frightened him, repelled him almost. For as he now knew, this was the most subtle sign of maternity; a woman could become nearly skeletal and still keep that contour. While by the time a faint prolapse in his own belly had occurred, it was age, not fatherhood.

  Yet Charles has been accepted at Harvard and Oxford both—and hasn’t yet told her. Instead writing him—in the formal misery which keeps his son untouchable yet keeps them kin—that he can’t decide. “Of course Boston’s conveniently near Chessie’s school.” Then a paragraph down: “Would you mind if I went into medicine too, the mental side of it?” And finally the postscript stopper. “I think I understand what you might be hassling with, Dad. I’m reading William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience.”

  To be understood like that. Lightly, without moral suasion, by one’s own child. He felt the grace of fatherhood. His son’s heart, firmly transplanted on the pocket-ruin of his own.

  Tears haggled for his face.

  Relieving herself, she said goodbye to this beloved promontory, its nile weeds and crystal sky. A lookout, a lighthouse even, but conservationist to the end. Up here it all went into the chlorophyll, women like her included. Downriver her city tumbles heavenward, a Chartres of waste. But within it are all the trampoline hills, multi-leoparded. A language-thrill went through her—nonsexual. I never wanted to be ideal—only alive. Joy alone was never my thesis. She saw the winter city as she used to, its darkly scarlet innards—of people, sunsets, chickens—scattered on the stonegray streets. In those iceberg evenings which harshened down on many lines of troubled roof, could her life pursue some thesis, unfinished maybe, but always emancipating from the too pure arch of self? There will they let her be that—objective? Not a gender but a human animal rising?

  She stared down at the clump of weed she’d wetted. “Called dock in the vernacular” the children’s flower-book said. “Otherwise snakewort, or adder’s root.” Once it was rumored here that someone had managed to grow a dafora, a plant from a warmer clime and poisonous; when it bloomed was why the woods smelled of shit and sirocco—threatening. Others said it was only a native mulberry dropping its tassels and pulp in some secret acre not yet built upon. There were no real crops here. Yet these mysteries are what she hopes to remember, hopes the children will, when they’re grown. Though from now on with them she must keep to the vernacular. They’ll have enough to bear without her language forcing them to bloom before their time.

  She can smell herself steaming up from the shiny leaves. Dogs stunt a path that way. Afterwards turning their backs on their mess, their hindlegs scuffing. Trembling, she tore at a sparrowgrass bush, dropping fronds on the spot where she’d been. She knew the mess her language had made. All she’d meant to do was to carry her family with her, rung by rung, as the pulse of the world flooded her, lifting them along with her, bootstrap insight by insight—but always domestically—as was happening to her. All she’d meant to do was to characterize the world for them. She’d been forging it—her language. But once empowered, there’s no hiding it. At times the woods behind her house must fill with the smell of female dissenter, rank as a new menses. And with the odor of childbloom forced.

  Peering through the bushes she saw he wasn’t watching her but the river. How Buddha-quiet he’d grown; that old tee-shirt might already be a monk’s singlet. With one holy darn. Ever-suggestible he is, yet hard. In all their children there’s some of that. Of him.

  Be off then, Ray. Will I be the one to go back to the house?—I always am. Yes, leave me. To the self-pity I can never master.

  She stole a look at her house. It’s always our house, whether we choose it or not. There you are, nanny-house. Still guarding those loving banditti, my children. Who’ll suck us dry if they have to, because they have to. Because they too are in thrall. To the flesh we’ve given them.

  Stay, nanny. Hang on just a little while yet; I’m coming. One village to pass; then I’ll cross the road to you. And what’ll I do then?

  She drew a long breath, lifting her. I’ll organize.

  Her body’s wealed, scratched, swollen feverish and ever vulnerable. Its bare soles never harden sufficiently. Abusing it helps.

  Let him dare laugh, she thought, emerging. He’s clothed.

  She’s grinning down on him, half superior, half abject. But with the quick self-ridicule which always rescued her, she shrugged, sweeping a glance over herself—an actress throwing a line away. “This is the way it is, Ray. Without pearls.”

  Without his pearls. Cheap hurts she can always inflict. But she can never steel herself to the big ones. Will that still do her in?

  He can see her in that city flat he’ll do his best to pay for—maybe one near Royal’s hospital, and also convenient enough to her brother’s so that she can leave in nightly charge Maureen. Who’s suitable to leave, and in the daytime will sweep. In time will her mother find a job—in one of the talking disciplines? In order to become one of those women at her brother’s parties—those evening Statues of Liberty, with their hair in braids instead of spikes? Who more often than not, he’d observed, had a child at home to sweep.

  And a string of pearls from the past, now and then wearable. For a couple of James’s black girls, lazily stretching their zebra necks and flower-toed feet in a party-corner, to laugh at.

  “No, never trust your brother,” he said. “But I suppose you’ll go on seeing him.”

  “My brother?” She smiled, flopping down beside him. Her hazel smile, big-eyed. She can’t help her innocent coloring. “He and I have a mutual friend. Who’s finally made me see what James is to me. Has always been. James is the way I know my own force.” She snapped her fingers, an odd gesture in a naked woman. But that appeared to be the end of James. It would take some odd gestures, that’s for sure—to be rid of him.

  “The city’s deep, Lexie. Deep.” He studied the tangling shoreline of the river; he should have known that sooner or later it would lead her there. The river was her lifeline, while she was here.

  “Deep?” She flung her exalted, alto laugh at him. “I’m out of my depth—and I mean to stay there.”

  He retreated. He knows her depth.

  She sneaked a look at his watch, still there on the ground. Soon men will be standing at every river street-corner, with their watches strapped to their wrists. Not a one of them on this road was born here. Ah how good it was to know an environment—any—but in your very grain, dusting your brain dark forever, searing your heart in tannic light. The city’s not deep, only multiple. It might look like a clutch of verticals aiming at God but its history was always horizontalizing, all connection and disconnection going on at once. There I can travel out from what I am, and no one the wiser—except everyone. Maybe to be what I am, without benefit of where? No—that’s poetry.

 
; She wondered what sex Tom Plaut’s baby had been. And Mrs. Plaut’s. Women don’t live by images alone, Tom; perhaps by now he knows. But Plaut’s language was the public one the minute he was born. In the eyes of the world he and it have a continuity of scrutiny, of an altogether different scale. Painful to him at times maybe, but marvelous—to all those who have only voice.

  I know that to some I’m all voice; maybe that’s why.

  Here’s Ray, who has almost none. And married her for it. “The coloratura’s husband,” James said scathing behind Ray’s back once. And Charles rushed at him.

  Listen, all of you. Even Dad, whom I haven’t much thought of in a long time. All of you with whom I’ve had argument. That was Girlbud. This is Lexie speaking. To herself:

  Lexie. If a language is so private it makes people stare—then make it public. Make it a deed.

  Could I do that, she thought, awed. In some small station of life—which might get to be an outpost—could I be workhorse to an idea? Not a proclamation. Or even a treatise. A little manual of my own. On how it keeps with us. One person’s manifest—on keeping on.

  Awareness—yes, she lives for it. But not like Charlie’s philosophers, under world-mandate. Because she has to. Hers being a special case of it, which the world finds ungraspable. She’d have to define it her self—and still not fall in love with it. Only to end up circling that tunnel-of-self love which the world called “sensibility,” and was particularly happy to attach to the awakenings of her kind.

  She wonders humbly whether she will have to be an intellectual.

  He’s been watching her. Hunched there—the way rebels are? No—though she may think so. In the way of those patients who, after long cures, are signed out. He’s seen it often in those discharged by rule in wheelchairs even if they can walk—this sudden adoration at the door. There’s one scratch on her breast should be seen to.