by Renata Adler
What do you tell the Sanger people? Lily asked.
You are, you know, you were the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life.
Would it have cost him all the earth, sometime in all those years, to take her to New Orleans for a week?
Look, the sun is a sort of bribe, you know, and so is a heavy thunderstorm or a snowfall. So is a dawn, though not I think a sunset. So is a warm bath or a shower, and a sound sleep. Bribes all, in the conspiracy of everything to continue to exist.
You’ve left out the B Minor Mass, Mozart, all kinds of music. Also pleasure in high speeds, the deeply comic, something to eat or drink, success in an enterprise.
Well, all of them have their ingredient of death, you know.
And you’ve left out love.
So I have, so I have.
“You owe me ten dollars, Leander Dworkin!” the blond young man was screaming, late at night, on the sidewalk on upper Broadway. That was in summer, the early sixties. Leander wanted no one to know he was gay, thought no one but the men he slept with, whom he always swore to secrecy, did know. How they hated him, those men in their Village duplexes, or on the beaches of Fire Island, for his insistence, for this particular form of the pretense. It mattered bitterly to them, the way, by the morning after, he denied them. But Leander insisted, and thought he could enforce the demand, that they keep his secret. Of course, they did not. And then, on that summer night almost twenty years ago, on account of his unwillingness to honor debts, his liking to be paid for, even his taste for threesomes, he found himself, after midnight, virtually running along a sidewalk on upper Broadway, pretending to ignore Simon, his principal lover, Simon whose feelings he had hurt even then by inviting Howard, whom he had met at the gym, to move into their apartment, Simon, to whom he owed debts of various kinds and who was now running in the dark beside him, screaming for all the world to hear, “Leander Dworkin, you owe me ten dollars! Ten dollars, Leander Dworkin! You owe them to me!”
Let me just say this about Homer. That part in the Odyssey, about the weaving and the unweaving, and the suitors. It cannot be true, not quite that way, and Homer, I think, never meant us to believe it. At home, the faithful wife, with their son, Telemachus. Weaving. On the road, Ulysses, fighting, all those years. Fighting, as it happens, to bring another man’s woman, Helen, back from Troy. But that is not the point. The point is that, through all the years Ulysses was away, doing battle in the Iliad, traveling and having adventures in the Odyssey, through all the years of the war and his return, his wife was faithfully at home. Weaving. Surrounded by suitors, it is true, but she explains the matter, or Homer does on her behalf, in this way: that she rejected the suitors, kept them all at bay, by constant daylight weaving, and the claim that she must refuse them all, until her work, this carpet, or blanket, or tapestry perhaps, in any event this piece of weaving, was complete. Then, at night, every night, she secretly unwove what she had woven by day. Unobservant, for some time, these suitors. Unobservant, too, Telemachus, a troubled child. It is hard to know, at this remove, whether the underlying situation was simply a conspiracy among the wife and suitors to conceal that she had been sleeping with one, or maybe all, of them. It is only clear that, as a faithful wife, she had two difficult circumstances to explain. The presence of the suitors, and how very little weaving she had done. Enraptured as he always was with cleverness, Ulysses believed the story. Or pretended to. After all, he slew the suitors all the same. But that his wife did not unweave by night, and therefore by implication hardly ever wove by day, we’ve known ever since we learned, not what love is, but what reporting is and what public figures are, and how much more than we were ever taught to expect is really lies.
What I wish I had not lost is the photograph of him, the only nice one. What I wish I had not lost is the ticket for my raincoat at the shoe repair shop. What I wish I had not lost is the suitcase with the letters. What I wish I had not lost is the time, or the inventory of the lost things, or the consciousness of all the things that are not lost. But nothing I had, I think, is anything Jake’s wife wants or ever wanted. Nothing was lost, I think, by any of us there.
What do you tell the Sanger people? Lily asked.
Let me just mention people’s expression when they are bored by a confidence, or when their minds are elsewhere, or when they have been told it once already. Let me mention, too, a confidence of long ago, an intimacy, completely, as it turns, out, misunderstood.
A rowboat, without oars. An outboard motor. As you can sit there for years, forever, with that outboard motor, pulling again, and yet again, that rope, or cord, or wire, or whatever it is, and winding yet again, and each time, every single time, the motor, though it may give a cough or two, will fail to start, though if it starts, and when it starts, you are, at whatever speed you choose, within the engine’s limits and the hazards of the course, well on your way, until it starts you are no nearer where you were going on the fifteenth try than on the first; the enterprise may last forever, and yet never quite begin. The fact seems to be, however, that unless some apparently unrelated event should intervene—a bullet, a heart attack, a loss of interest, a cry from shore that dinner’s ready, or company has come, or junior’s run away—the engine will eventually start. In the meantime, though, while you have been intensely busy, it is difficult to account for how the time is spent.
What do you tell the Sanger people? Lily asked, late one afternoon in those years. We were well educated, certainly. We had read widely. And there was no “we,” of course, except in retrospect, since it’s just an I, alone, who reads. We had, all the same, failures of information. The books which determined to such a large extent what we would become were, well, sure, Beatrix Potter, Little Women, Dickens, war and frontier novels, Albert Payson Terhune dog books, Kipling; then, suddenly, poetry, great classics, any or all of them, Dostoevski, Conrad, Melville. With a transcendent, though far from complete comprehension. Hemingway, Salinger, Fitzgerald; then lastly, oddly, in some ways pre-eminently, John O’Hara. How could he have known that? He could not possibly have known it. For some, at an impressionable age, Ayn Rand. Also, inevitably, mountains of trash. The Amboy Dukes, for instance, forbidden in all schools and read by everybody. Forget it. Don’t think about it. There were the other interdicted books, God’s Little Acre, even Sanctuary; but we didn’t understand them. We may have read and reread, with curiosity, D.H. Lawrence. But if we were, in the end, as young adults and in sexual matters, anybody’s creatures, we were also, though we would never have mentioned it to one another, John O’Hara’s. Highly educated. Even original or finely tuned. But his creatures all the same.
That year, finally, in those years, we knew it was absurd. We had been adamant about how our lives would be, not like the stereotype daughters of left-wing urban parents, not like the fallen woman in all of letters, not even like the adulterous women in O’Hara. So few of us anyway were married, as his women seemed to be. But, apart from everything else, we were beginning to sense in ourselves the creation, if not of another stereotype, at least of another predictable pattern. Unmarried. Waiting. Studiously cooking dinners. Going out. Working, on that carpet, or blanket, or tapestry perhaps, in any event, that piece of weaving. Keeping alive the sense of high romantic possibility. That possibility which, educated and even worldly though we were, we knew, from all of letters and from our generational respect for institutions, was a matter of not going to bed with people unless you were going to marry them. That year, finally, it became absurd. What do I have this apartment for, Maggie said, after a few months of her first job in the city, if I’m never going to sleep with anybody in it? We were drinking gin. We had been talking about people it seemed we were not going to marry. Confronted, then, with a lack of information, we remembered Margaret Sanger. So we took out the phone book, and found what turned out to be the Sanger Institute. At that moment, at that very moment, the phone rang. It was Lily, and she said, What do you tell the Sanger people? But she was not that close a friend,
and she was younger than we were. So Maggie replied in a way that, though worldly enough, was noncommittal. Anyway, we didn’t know what you told the Sanger people.
The next morning, Maggie called them to arrange for an appointment. And they asked her when she was getting married. Maggie paused. Then, with great presence of mind I thought, she said December ninth. And they said, they honestly really said this, that they were sorry but they didn’t make appointments earlier than five weeks before a wedding day. Maggie said, I see. Two hours later, she called and, not thinking she could use her own name again, made an appointment in my name. The next day, in a seizure of cowardice or paranoia, I called the Sanger Institute. The voice I reached had a German accent. I thought, oh my God, I know these refugee voices, this person is probably some immigrant doctor’s wife, some friend even of my own parents. So I didn’t cancel the appointment, or say anything at all. Since I hadn’t canceled, though, I felt obliged to go. When I got to the waiting room, there were so few people, nobody looked like me, my courage failed. I left. I called Maggie from a phone booth and we met for coffee. So that we were only able, after all, to inform Lily that what you told the Sanger people was that you were getting married in five weeks.
Twenty years later, I again spoke to the Sanger people. I was looking for a worthy, touching charity to receive a check on my behalf. The check was in settlement of my own suit for libel. Nothing like Teagarden v. Denneny. Libel actions, I knew, had always been one of the real slums of Anglo-Saxon law. From Oscar Wilde through Alger Hiss, they seemed almost always grim, misguided, profoundly tainted, in some way, at the source. The grounds for my own suit, however, against a rich sensational publication, had occurred to me, one afternoon, in a state of high hilarity, as the first sound and witty libel suit of which I had ever heard. I thought it only required just the right charitable beneficiary for a check in settlement.
Worthy, the Sanger people. Maybe. But touching?
Well, I know. I was looking for a home for babies, unwed mothers. Something on that order. I even called the Foundling Hospital, which I’d walked by a hundred times, and asked them if they really were for foundlings. They said, Yes, but please hold, Sister Elizabeth would discuss it with me. And I thought, I can’t, in view of the present state of things having to do with abortion and birth control, send this check to a Roman Catholic institution. I called the Sanger people, and I said, I can’t tell you why, but I need a worthy, touching charity to have a check sent to. What is it exactly, apart from Planned Parenthood, that you do? And the voice said, Well, abortions. I said I didn’t think that was what I had in mind. She said, If you came down here, you would see some very touching, moving abortion cases. I said, I know, I know, but what is required in this case is something more like babies, foundlings, a home for unwed mothers. She said, Well, we have our fertility institute. And we do have a place for unwed mothers. I said fine. Worthy and touching. And they got their check.
Is he not going to call, then? I don’t know. I guess he’s not. I seem to be having a harder time with this than I thought or it was worth.
In France, they have the story of a ballet dancer so moved by her role that, in a scene in which she was supposed to be dying, and touchingly reunited with her mother, she actually blurted Maman, and her career was ruined. It seems you have to keep, you just have to keep a distance.
I wonder whether he will ever ask himself, say to himself, Well, she wasn’t asking all the earth, why did I let her go?
Here’s how it is now, at the women’s college, which is still scholarly, still feminist. There has been a compromise with the nearest all male college, which had threatened, otherwise, to go co-ed. Ten percent of the male students now live at the women’s college. Ten percent of the female students live at the men’s college. Since some of the feminist dormitories have chosen to admit males, while others have chosen not to, the campus is now divided into two groups, which refer to each other, solely on the basis of the single-sex or co-ed dormitory issue, as the lesbians and the whores. The antipathy between the groups is deep. Students are “coming out” as lesbians, who, in the old days, would have been thought of as shy, or bold, or having crushes, or simply loyal in their friendships, but who would not have been, probably are not now, lesbians at all. And students are declaring themselves whores as though that were the only heterosexual choice. The dean’s office believes that to the degree that it still has responsibilities in loco parentis it ought not to act but just sympathetically abide, providing a benign place for things to sort themselves out. The latest, now, is this: whores and lesbians have found an issue on which they are united, unanimous in fact. The issue involves shower curtains at the gym. Male gyms do not have shower curtains. Male athletes are not hidden in the showers from one another. As a symptom, a residue of shame about the female body, the shower curtains, the students say, as with one voice, must be removed.
Those of us who remembered how relatively worried for our privacy we were, in those years, suspected campus-wide intimidation. Those of us who are of an age to be trustees, and to have young daughters, and those daughters timid, asked the most timid daughters what they thought of the shower-curtain crisis. And with one voice, though their mothers asked them separately, they said: Remove the shower curtains. So that’s what we’ll do. And, whatever may become of the declared whores and lesbians, what will happen if someday, somewhere, they are asked, Are you now or have you ever been one or the other, about the shower curtains, and that unforced unanimity, well, we know it’s fine.
Baby’s all right, Uncle Jacques and Aunt Zabeth used to say in times of worry or of crisis. Baby’s all right. A friend of theirs, an only child, had always said it, like a little incantation, when he was alone in the dark and frightened, from his babyhood, through his childhood, all his life. His friends took it up. Think of the RAF, my mother would say, for the same reason, at such times. Think of the RAF. Baby’s all right.
The world is everything that is the case. And in the second place because. In the sixth year, I went to New Orleans by myself. Look, I can’t. The relation between storytelling and eroticism is always close. I mean, it’s not just a matter of spinning yarns.
Yes it is. Spinning yarns.
Not any more, I think. Not even in thrillers, which is the path the purest storytelling impulse took. Not even in thrillers. Where stories are, there is always sex, and sometimes mortal danger.
You mean in stories.
I mean in telling them. Sex, mortal danger, and sometimes reprieve. For a woman, it is always, don’t you see, Scheherazade. For a man, it may be the Virginian. There he goes, then, striding through the dust of midday toward his confrontation. Here I am, of an evening, wondering whether I can hold his interest yet a while.
Did I throw the most important thing, by accident, away?
There was this about the infestation. First, the tent caterpillars, clustered black in grey-white webs at the clefts where trunk and branch, twigs and branches met, loathsome gossamer, sticking to hands, eyebrows, hair, as one tried with a broom or a branch to disengage them, everywhere, filmy, hopeless, travesty of silk. Sprayed them. Blasted them with torches. Must have missed a few or, more likely, they came again, borne by the wind. The crab apple was bare of leaves. The birches dangled leaves half-eaten, covered now with creatures advancing by hump and stretch, never seen to eat, only seen to crawl and rest, leaving devastation, overnight. Then, new buds, new leaves, a second growth. Within days more, the gypsy moths. Little beige egg casings all over the bark of every tree; hanging from stringy webs, at the same time, capsules, lacquered, layered, like some strange dessert, eggs in the cases, caterpillars in the hanging pupae, powdered wings on the night air, so prolific an infestation that we had three simultaneous generations of gypsy moths. They ate nothing, of course, that summer, just left their progeny to sleep and wait, on virtually every surface, on the fence, the firewood, the wisteria, webs, adobe casings, pupae, waiting all winter as we brought in and burned the firewood, slee
ping, repellent, waiting, just as we waited, I suppose, for spring.
And if I had a complaint about the matter, it was only this: that you did not help me with it. Not that you needed to help me, not that I even needed help. In the end, I called the agriculture station, and they told me what to do. But the point is that, at the time, your land, your many acres of trees were being sprayed against the infestation. And when I asked you the name of the people who were spraying your land, so that they might spray my acre and a half as well, you said you could not remember their name. Then, I asked where I ought to look in the yellow pages, and you said, and I’m afraid you said this with some small satisfaction, that it was probably in any event too late to look, because the infestation this year had been so widespread and intense that all professional sprayers would by this time be booked up. Can this be as I am telling it? That was certainly not, at the time, how I perceived it, though I know that at the time I felt dimly, more than dimly but for obscure reasons, sad. And when the builders came to make the addition, the huge addition to your new house, with much digging, and blasting, and refilling, and moving of the earth, and you praised, rather daily praised, the young Irish contractor in charge, and I asked whether he might know someone who, when his job with you was done, could dredge the silt that has accumulated in my pond, you said, No, you thought the job too small for him. Months later, when you praised and praised two brothers, Finns, who had come with their backhoe to dredge for some source of water at your place, and I asked whether they might have or know someone who had a backhoe for my pond, you said you had forgotten their names as well, and they were gone. I thought for a time this was on your part some fastidiousness, some discretion, in not wanting to have the same workmen engaged at your house as at mine. Weeks later, though, you had no hesitation in asking Paul and his son, while they were working on my land and on my time, whether and under what circumstances they might come to cut, and split, and stack your firewood. You had asked me for Paul’s name, and I had given it, but you talked with him at my place. You did not call him at home.