by Lore Segal
“Why can’t I be in the damn symposium?” asks William, who is making Bloody Marys.
“Because,” says Maurie, “we have J. D. Winterneet to be our elder, and Meyers our younger, poet.” Into the telephone he says, “Meyers’s subject is ‘Why Read?’ I’ll take ‘Why Publish?’ and Pavlovenka is doing her usual comedy routine, ‘Why Teach Writing?’ Afterward we’ll have ourselves one hell of a party. Terrific! Great!” Maurie hangs up. “Newman is coming, so that’s our black, and this year they’re not even asking to be in on things.”
Ulla says, “Maurie, don’t pick! Go slice your own pepper. Try the red one, it’s sweet,” she says and feeds him a piece and now I remember why one wanted to be married and have someone always around to be fantastically nice to, but not William, exactly.
We sit around the table, eat, drink, and talk. My theory is Frank Friendling woke one day, discovered he was forty, happy in his work, his friends, and in love with his handsome, intelligent wife, and still he was nothing but Frank Friendling and he couldn’t bear it.
William thinks it’s the claustrophobia of marriage.
Cilena says it’s boredom.
No, Ulla says, it’s the hostility. She hands Maurie a knife and a carrot, and says, “Scrape. We’re making navarin for sixteen people. I will start cutting up the meat.”
“I’ll cut up,” says Maurie.
“Cut it out, Maurie!” Ulla says.
“I’ll cut the capers,” says Maurie.
“I’ll make another batch of Marys,” William says.
“I’ll make the jokes,” says Maurie.
“While everybody else is working!” shouts Ulla.
“Dear,” says Maurie, “that’s my joke you’re stepping on.” Sharply, briefly, they quarrel.
Betterwheatling comes in—how can he work when we are having so much fun down here—and Meyers fetches himself a sandwich to take back upstairs.
“Okay, okay,” says Maurie, “so I’ll make my special apple charlotte, if somebody will peel the apples.”
“I will.” It’s J. D. Winterneet in the doorway. Pavlovenka drove him down. All afternoon we sit around the table, cook together, talk; we laugh a lot; once in a while the house gives itself a shake: like pieces in a kaleidoscope we’re rearranged. Ulla asks Maurie for the car keys to go and fetch old Lucinella from the station. Meyers comes back. He can’t write anything at all in this rotten house. Now Pavlovenka leaves to unpack and Winterneet must take his nap after the long ride. Betterwheatling, who stands behind me, says he’s got to put in an hour on the galleys of his book.
Don’t everybody go away!
“Betterwheatling,” I ask (I’ve had a lot of Marys), “so what do you do when marriage palls?”
“I suffer,” Betterwheatling says, surprised.
By five everyone’s come down. William is making the martinis. Maybe a commune is the right idea after all.
By six, happy, and in love with everybody, I go up to take a nap.
At a point in time William touches me on the shoulder.
“What?”
“Dinner, Lucinella,” he says, but I’m out for the night.
Another point in time: the mattress dips. William has sat down on the bed. The bed rocks. William is taking his shoes and socks off.
“What’s happening? Where’s everybody?”
“It’s past two o’clock. You go back to sleep.”
But I have sat straight up. “What have you all been doing? What’s going on down there?”
“Nothing, Lucinella. Maurie is reading a manuscript. Ulla and Meyers went for a midnight walk. The Zeuses’ plane was late—Jesus, is she beautiful! A Renoir woman sculpted by Michelangelo. Young Lucinella did a double take.”
“Because that’s what she would look like if they’d given her a choice. And Zeus?”
“As always, two heads taller than everybody else, but now that he’s past middle age, I forgive him. I’m drunk,” says William, rolling into bed. He puts his arms around me.
“What, Will, what is it, love?”
William muffles his weeping at the base of my throat, and mumbles that he cannot stand it, he cannot, cannot, cannot, cannot stand it.
“What, what, sweet?” I murmur.
“Being married to you!” William wails.
“The nagging, is it?” I ask him.
“That. But not only that! Think of all the other women I can never, never, never marry now!”
“Poor darling, my poor love.” I kiss his forehead. “With me, it’s not so much wanting to marry everybody else. It’s that it isn’t you, exactly, I wanted to be married to.”
“Poor sweet,” William says, and kisses my throat over and over.
“I once wrote a poem,” I murmur into William’s hair, “called ‘The Best Seat,’ about this woman who goes to the theater and can’t afford a good seat, or there is none available, probably both. First she moves two rows forward, then looks for an empty place farther center. She genuinely suffers because she doesn’t have the best seat in the house. Of course she misses the performance.”
“And now imagine it’s the only performance there is going to be!” William is howling with pain.
“Shush, William, shhh.”
I’m wide awake. I study the sleeping man’s flesh, purple in the darkness, and find it in my heart to wish William dead. How dare he not love me all, not want me only! My instep tickles. I inch myself out of the constriction of William’s arms, pull the sheet up to cover his naked shoulder, and softly close the door behind me.
I meet Meyers coming up the stairs.
“Morning, Meyers,” I say.
“Good night,” says Meyers.
In the living room, Maurie is snoring on the sofa under a green afghan. A manuscript rises and falls on his belly.
I look into the kitchen, where Betterwheatling is correcting galleys at the great deal table. He looks up.
“What’s so funny?” he asks, because I sit down and laugh and laugh and laugh. “It’s this house,” I say. “Everywhere somebody is writing something, or eating something … or sleeping or just getting up or just turning in.” Betterwheatling yawns, aligns the edges of his papers, and stands up. “Two A.M. and tomorrow the silly symposium! Good night.”
“Good morning, Lucinella!” say Zeus and Hera. They’re in their pajamas. “Good to see you,” says Zeus. His basso profundo is self-accompanied by a diapason one octave lower. He’s hugging me to his colossal chest; my forehead prickles with his primeval beard, so different from the ever-changing decorations that grow on the faces of my New York friends. And Hera! Oh, those great, ageless, round, blond forms …
“We flew in late and missed dinner,” she says.
“I overslept it.”
We look in the icebox. Hera warms up the leftover navarin. I make coffee. Zeus has discovered the drawer where they keep the knives and forks. We three old friends sit together around the table.
“Who was it told me you turned down the presidency of—what’s the name of that college in upstate New York? Olympia? Ha, ha. I’m sorry,” I say and blush.
“That’s quite all right,” Zeus says. “One of the liabilities of my situation. The irresistible, goddamn jokes.”
“His students gave him a lightning-shaped silver tie pin. Ha ha,” Hera says.
“I find I like teaching,” Zeus says, “but no more politics! And I want to do my book.”
“What are you writing?” I ask.
“The longest history in history,” says Hera. “Open at both ends.”
“Right now,” Zeus says eagerly, “I’m working on the chapter about what Professor Preuss so charmingly called man’s Ur-dummheit or ‘primal stupidity,’ such as the cult of Zeus Meilichios, worshipped in the form of an enormous bearded snake, attended by a small pet man …” I am watching Hera watching the enormous male across the table with that wifely look, one part anxiety, two parts exasperation, but I can tell she cares for him. I’m jealous of that embattled, ancie
nt intimacy.
“You heard about the Friendlings?” I ask them. And I tell them about William and me. “I really admire the Betterwheatlings, and couples like the Winterneets, and you. You’ve survived claustrophobia, mutual boredom, chronic hostilities—whatever! There’s something profoundly respectable, something truly romantic about old marriages,” I wind up breathless with enthusiasm.
“Well, well, well, well, well,” says Hera, giving me a look. “Well, well, let’s not get carried away. I’m going back to bed,” she says. “Good night.”
“But really,” I say, “can you, Zeus, from the man’s point of view, explain to me why Friendling would walk out on Alice, who’s a smart, funny, good-looking, and bloody nice woman?”
“Why indeed!” says Zeus. “Why don’t we shape up and fuck the perfectly splendid persons right in our own beds?”
Why are Zeus and I sitting in our pajamas talking about marriage and sex while the night turns from black to a sharp electric blue to a dead gray to rose to gold outside the kitchen window?
For young Lucinella, in her room at the head of the stairs, getting dressed is an intellectual act and her new housecoat the statement of an aesthetic principle undermined by another side of a different argument. Its silk being pure is a virtue sine qua non—young Lucinella would never wear any artificial put-on—but its being silk, and for breakfast, embarrasses her. Moreover, she has cut the phony golden button off and hasn’t found an honest one to keep her held together.
In her despair young Lucinella leans her head into her hands and smiles. She laughs out loud as her dilemma shapes itself into an anecdote. She needs someone to tell it to.
Young Lucinella comes down the stairs holding the front edges of her housecoat in a fist to cover her bosom. She stands in the kitchen door. “Does anyone have a pin or a piece of string?”
“Good morning, Lucinella,” Zeus and I say.
“How did you know it’s me?” she mumbles.
“What?” Zeus inclines his head.
“What’s the use of my new housecoat?” says young Lucinella, who exposes the comic turns she discovers in her mind the way a prettier flirt flashes a knee or unbuttons a breast, with the same shy, brave hope of connecting her eyes with another’s, preferably male, if not, mine will do, and in case neither of us is going to return her smile (in which case she hopes we will be so good as not to notice she has offered it) she bends to pick up the passing college cat and hides her long nose in its fur. She presses a passionate cheek against the fiercely struggling body, which bends into a U and bites her on the nose.
“Look at the time!” I say.
“You’re leaving?” cries young Lucinella, and rises too. She dumps the cat.
“I have to go and write my opening statement for the symposium tonight.”
“Don’t you want breakfast?” Zeus asks young Lucinella, who raises her eyes to where his eyes are looking pleasantly at her, and flees up the stairs close on my heels.
It’s noon. I’m done. Where’s William? Where is everybody? I can hear Meyers’s typewriter still going.
Downstairs, the windows stand wide. A breeze brushes my bare arms. I put my head out of the front door. The porch is empty. Sunlight. Lilac in bloom! A young rabbit sits on the lawn, so close I can see the nose waffling. I hold still, afraid my heart knocking in my chest, the faint presence of voices I can now perceive in the house behind me, might scare him off, but the rabbit sits. They must work on a different system. My nerves are already fidgeting, my hand inching toward the book someone’s left on that chair. Who’s reading Wordsworth? Wouldn’t he scoff if I opened to a page, while nature is blessing me with one of her babies at such close quarters, sitting as still as stone for me to watch. Or is it … it’s a little stone rabbit! With waffling nose!
How long is that rabbit going to go on sitting there like that? Shoo, rabbit, I think. Brrrr. Pssst!
The rabbit goes on sitting. I creep guiltily back inside the house to see who it is in the living room.
It’s William, cross-legged on the carpet in front of young Lucinella, who sits with her left buttock on the edge of the sofa, her right leg poised, so as to have been about to leave at a first sign that she bores her companion, for which the acute point of her intelligence is ever on the alert. She listens anxiously to what he’s saying, afraid of finding him a bore.
William is saying, “When Margery gets back to England, her confessor says he hears she’s brought a baby home from the Holy Land, and Margery answers—listen to this—she says, ‘Sir, this same child God hath sent me, I have brought him.’ ”
“Meaning?” asks young Lucinella, moving forward, to the edge of excitement.
“Exactly!” says William.
“Hi!” I say loudly from the doorway.
“Hi,” says young Lucinella.
“Hi,” William says. “It means either, ‘The only one I have had anything to do with is God, so how can I have brought home a baby?’ ”
“Or?” says young Lucinella, her eyes shining as if she were about to weep.
“Or,” William says, “ ‘The only one I’ve had anything to do with is God, so it’s his baby.’ ”
Young Lucinella slips down to the carpet beside William. I slip out into the foyer and I know the precise point where the first sharp crystals of the new ice age are forming, right here, in my belly.
Hera is drinking her coffee upstairs on the veranda.
“Tell me a story,” I beg her. “How did you and Zeus meet?”
“We’re closely related, you remember,” says Hera. “For eons he chased me, and I ran, until he turned himself into a cuckoo, so wet and bedraggled I nestled him between my breasts. The wedding night,” says Hera, “lasted three hundred years.”
“William and young Lucinella come out on the front porch below us. I lean over the railing and watch William crush a leaf of lilac and hold his finger under young Lucinella’s nose. She draws her head back. They saunter together and disappear around the left corner of the house. “How does one handle jealousy?” I cry.
“Badly,” says Hera. “You know the story of Zeus and Semele, how I went to her disguised as a neighbor and whispered, ‘Next time tell him to show himself in his true nature or deny him your bed!’ Zeus, of course, came in thunder and lightning. That was the end of her. Poor Io! They thought it was Zeus who turned her into a cow and sent a gadfly after her, but it was me! And it wasn’t only jealousy,” says Hera. “Nobody knows that all the time I was watching my husband chasing every skirt and saw the skirts running, and knew he wasn’t going to make them except in some fool disguise, though everybody thinks it was to fool me.”
“Why did they run? I mean, I really like Zeus,” I say, and blush.
“I know you do,” says Hera and gives me that look I don’t understand. “Maybe,” she says, “he wasn’t all the prize you think.”
“Because of the skirts? All those nymphs and princesses?”
“All those princesses, and not only that,” says Hera. “It was the brutality, the cowardice.”
“Zeus’s cowardice?” I don’t like that.
“Cowardice, yes,” she says. “You remember how his mother—Earth, you know—prophesied the child that Metis bore was going to dethrone him. Damned if Zeus, like his father and grandfather before him, doesn’t open up his mouth and with one gulp … and not the child only! Mother and all. So now he had to birth the baby. Have you ever been around a man who’s got a cold in the head? Imagine Zeus with Pallas Athene ready to spring from his brow! Then there was the time Typhon stormed Olympus when Zeus didn’t happen to have his thunder on him. What does he do but turn himself into a ram and skidaddle to save his own skin! When the monster made a pass at me, don’t you think Zeus strung me from the rafters of heavens with an anvil tied to each ankle—though he said it was in punishment for my rebellion. Ares had to come and get me down.” Hera sits very straight, chin high, still smoldering. She has forgotten not a tittle of her husband’s ancient offenses
.
We are silent. “So why do we stick with them!” I say.
“Oh,” Hera says, “because one’s tied to them by one’s own possessiveness, by sex, I suppose. Not so much now any more, but I used, once in a while, to borrow Aphrodite’s girdle … And by pity.”
“Pity for Zeus?”
“Oh yes,” Hera says. “It’s watching the erosion of their powers that breaks the heart and grapples you to them even when they no longer want you. You’ve read your Aeschylus?”
“Well …” I say.
“Read it,” says Hera. “Read where the buccaneer god and philanderer has a stature second hardly to Jehovah, before Euripides began to psychologize and Plato turned us into literature. The Romans carved two frown lines between Zeus’s eyes, set his heads on prefabricated torsos, and disseminated him through the known world. In the Christian era, he had to go underground, and when he turns up again, he’s gone baroque, going rococo. By the eighteenth century what is he except a self-conscious grace note of erudition? Yesterday I saw him in company with Thor and Green Lantern, if you please—not all badly drawn—in a kiddie comic. Tomorrow he will find himself a minor character in some Tom, Dick, or Harry’s comical new novel. Desecrated, deposed, exiled, but incapable of dying, no longer god and unwilling—or is it unable?—to be human, what can he do but turn into an intellectual, write a book, research his own descent—heaven forgive me, maybe it’s an ascent—from a bearded snake to what? A refugee college professor!”
“Lucinella!”
It’s William calling me. “I’m coming!” I cry.
Before the symposium we huddle in the kitchen as if by prearrangement. Maurie is having himself a small, stiff whiskey. “I feel euphoric,” I tell everybody. “What am I feeling so euphoric for?” I ask Meyers, who looks stoned on neat terror.
Betterwheatling is sweating. I have an idea for a poem about the physical despair of a fat man inside too many layers of cloth, but Ulla, who is passing, says, “Betterwheatling, take your jacket off.” No wonder everybody wants to marry Ulla.
William brings me a drink. “I’m fine,” I keep saying. “I’m positively euphoric.”