But first came the defeated one, a chubby middle-aged woman who tried to hide her identity by sitting with her back to the camera and wearing an ill-fitting wig. The man she'd accused of raping her was there, too, and he had a lot to say “She go like this,” he said, “on the desk!” He stood up and bent over, putting his hands out as if bracing himself. “And I say, ‘No! I don't want that!’ “
The awful thing was, you could totally picture her bent over the desk. Even viewing her from the back, we could see her bending nature—the mild, gentle slope of her shoulders, the sweetness of her excess flesh, the way she turned in her chair to yell, “No! That's not the truth!” Her anger was like a clumsy animal, and you could hear in it the soft puzzlement of a person who does not understand cruelty.
“You are an alcoholic!” yelled the accused rapist. “Everybody knows!”
“I offered you one drink!” she cried. “I thought you were lonely!”
“You are a whore! You give VD!”
“No!” cried the woman. “No!” And then she just wept.
A stout little woman came on to talk about rape. She planted her feet, set her small barrel body in a “no bull” stance, and gave it to us straight: Rape was bad, and she was prepared to duke it out with anyone who said it wasn't.
“I agree!” screamed the accused rapist. “I agree!”
The wigged woman continued to weep. Nobody looked at her. In swept the triumphant redhead, who bellowed about her rights. “And I just hope the rapists who are watching the show right now understand that we aren't going to take it anymore!” she cried. The audience cheered. The wig woman wept. The talk-show hostess strode about the set, blond and bristling with savoir faire. She had featured progress, but she had not forgotten the agonized face. Unlike the feminist author, she had put it right up there on the screen.
But wait! The feminist author was not talking about rape, was she? Being a prostitute is not the same thing as being raped, is it? And of course they are not the same. But for the purposes of my discussion here—for the deepest layer of my discussion—they are close enough! The rape victim on TV was treated like a prostitute on an official pro-victim show, and the feminist author—well, it probably wasn't fair to talk about her that way in the pamphlet, even if nobody read it, even if it was true. Can you blame her for not wanting to be like the poor, hurt woman on the talk show, preferring to prance around, swinging her little handbag, instead? Can you blame her for trying to put a good face on it? For talking so loudly about things that have been used to shame women for centuries?
Wordless knowledge can be heavy and dark as the bottom of the ocean. Sometimes you want the relief of dryness, of light, bright words. Sometimes you might be on the side of a smart-aleck middle-aged woman who thumbs her nose at the agonized face and fellates a snotty sexy man, just for a dumb little thrill. Sometimes you wish it could be that easy.
I looked at my watch. I drank my seltzer and felt myself return to sobriety I listened to the prairie author entertain a group with a story about how he had been so drunk the previous night that, in a muddled attempt to find the bathroom, he had left his hotel room naked and had roamed the halls until a “beautiful woman” from room service had escorted him back. Everyone laughed. A harried caterer wiped her hand on her rumpled white shirt and made a disgusted face. I looked out the window; people strolled the sidewalks like sensitive grazing animals, full of trust that what they needed was to be found there on the grounds of the hotel. I heard the prairie writer cry, “And she had the most incredible ass!” There was delighted laughter.
Suddenly, I was flooded with goodwill toward the feminist author. I didn't even care that she had refused to speak with me. She wrote well enough and she was an articulate, perhaps even socially significant, figure. Why should she be dismissed, while a man who ran around naked in public and yelled about people's asses was coddled? And yet … some part of me was still troubled by the issue of the agonized face. Because the face is not only about rape and pain.
I remember how it was with my husband sometimes, or, rather, how it was on occasion, or, really, maybe just once. It was before I became pregnant with Kira. We had not been getting along, and we were trying to have a special time together. We lit a candle and we undressed and lay on the bed, outside the covers. We rubbed each other with oil. It was relaxing, and awkward, too—it would feel really good and then he would have a sneezing fit. Or I would turn his foot at a strange angle during the foot massage and he would open his eyes and tactfully try to pull it a more comfortable way. When he touched between my legs, I wasn't even thinking about sex anymore. His presence was physical and insistent, like the smell of a wild animal, like a bear, grunting and searching for food, picking berries with the elegant black finger of its tongue—but my mind had wandered away It wandered like someone browsing a junk store, its attention taken this way and that by each gewgaw, the faded, painted face of each figurine: an argument with my sister, a birthday gift for a friend, the novel I was supposed to review, and, like a tiny reflection on the curve of a glass, a scene from the novel (hero and heroine in tense conversation on a fire escape at dusk, red flowers climbing the wall, traffic darting below). Every few moments, my attention would return to my husband, and I would feel what he was doing, and caress his rough fur and then dart away again. Except with each return, I darted away more slowly, and then I didn't dart at all. His touch had entered my nervous system without my knowing it. The images in my head softened and ran together, colorful, semi-coherent, and still subtly flavored with the novel. The blunt feelings of my lower body came rolling up in dark, choppy waves. He put his hand on my abdomen and said, “Breathe into here.” I did. He didn't have to touch me anymore; the flesh between my legs was hot and fat. He touched me with his genitals. I took his large bony head in my hands. We kissed, and we entered a small place sealed away from every other place. In that place, my genitals were pierced by a ring attached to a light chain. He held the chain in his hand and we both looked at it, smiling and abashed—Whoa! How did that get there? Then I became an animal and he led me by the chain. We entered into stunning emptiness; we emerged. He moaned and bit my shoulder with his hot, wet mouth.
Afterward, we smiled, rolling in each other's arms, laughing at ourselves, laughing at the agonized face. But we couldn't laugh at the emptiness. It was like entering an electrical current, passing first into a landscape of animate light, and then into pitch-darkness, warm with invisible life, the whispering voices, the dissolving, re-forming faces of ghosts and the excited unborn. Everything horrible to us, everything nice to us. We did not conceive Kira at that time; I think that happened one sleepy morning when, without even realizing it, we entered emptiness again and brought a tiny female out of it.
My husband and I are not friends, but we are amicable. Once, after we split up, I called him late at night, after I'd had a terrible dream, and I was glad for his kind response. But I have never called him like that since, and I'm sure he is glad of it. He is now another wholly separate creature with whom I can negotiate, chat, joke, fight, cooperate with or not. But I remember that moment between us, and it is represented to me by the agonized face. It is easy to be ashamed of the face—and sometimes the face is shameful. But it is also inextricably bound up with the royalty of female nature. It symbolizes our entry into emptiness because it is a humiliation of our personal particularity the cherished definition of our personal features. Men don't go there because they can't or because they are too scared. (Okay maybe gay men go there. I'm sure they'd say they go there. But somehow I doubt it.) So they pretend to look down on us for it—but really they know better.
It is this weird combination of pride and shame that makes you want to snap at the feminist author, like a dog in a pack. Perhaps it is also what gives her an audience; I don't know. But for her to raise the issues that she sweetly raised in her earnest elf voice—the middle-aged woman pretending that humiliation is an especially smart kind of game, together with the casual mention of
her experience with prostitution—and yet to leave out the agonized face? No way. If she had told the same story, even with the prostitution attached, and let us see the face—that would've been one thing. We could've sat back and nodded to ourselves, a little contemptuous maybe, yet respecting the truth of it. But to tell those stories and pretend there's no agony—it makes you want to pinch her, like a boy in a gang, following her down the street while she tries to act like nothing's wrong, hurrying her step while someone else reaches out for another pinch. It makes you want to chase her down an alley, to stone her, to force her to show the face she denies.
Which in a metaphorical sense is what I did with my article. When I turned it in, the managing editor said, “Whew! She sure pissed you off, didn't she?” And I said, “Do you think it's too much?” And the editor said, “No, if that's what you feel …” Although, of course, I didn't say what I “feel.” I couldn't, because it could not be printed in a newspaper. I had to speak in the fast brute code of public discourse and count on people to see the subtler shapes moving in the depths below the conventional grid of my words.
The day after my piece appeared, there was some discussion among the younger girls at Quick! who did not like it that I had failed to “support” a woman artist, who felt that I used unfair, sexist language. And, privately, when I think of the feminist author, standing there at the podium in her long skirt and her glasses, blinking nervously, I almost agree that it was not fair. But fair or not, I was right. The agonized face and all it means is one of the few mysteries left to us on this ragged, gutted planet. It must be protected, even if someone must on occasion be “stoned.” Even if that person is someone for whom we feel secret sympathy and regard.
And besides, she wasn't really stoned. She will go on writing her books, making her money, standing up on stages. She will probably do better than I. I think of the night Kira and I watched the strange anime story about the armless heroine, and the villainess who dies. As Kira was getting ready for bed, I asked her if she found the story scary.
“No,” she said, yawning. “But it was sad the other girl had to die.” She paused, climbing into bed. I bent to pull the covers up to her chin. “But even if she died, she won anyway,” she continued. “Because it was her arms that beat the bad guy”
“That's right,” I said, and kissed her. That's right. As I turned out the light, I thought fleetingly about an article I might write on what you can learn from your children. Then I went to make myself a drink before preparing to get started on the next day's work.
Mirror Ball
He took her soul—though, being a secular-minded person, he didn't think of it that way He didn't take the whole thing; that would not have been possible. But he got such a significant piece that it felt as if her entire soul were gone. As soon as he had it, he not only forgot that he'd taken it; he forgot he'd ever known about it. This was not the first time, either.
He was a musician, well regarded in his hometown and little known anywhere else. This fact sometimes gnawed at him and yet was sometimes a secret relief; he had seen musicians get sucked up by fame and it was like watching a frog get stuffed into a bottle, staring out with its face, its splayed legs, its private beating throat distorted and revealed against the glass. Fame, of course, was bigger and more fun than a bottle, but still, once you were behind the glass and blown up huge for all to see, there you were. It would suddenly be harder to sit and drink in the anonymous little haunts where songs were still alive and moving in the murky darkness, where a girl might still look at him and wonder who he was. And he might wonder about her.
It was at one of these places that he met her. She was drinking with a friend of a friend. She was slim and elfin, with dark hair, long fingers, and tapered fingernails. She held her drink as if she held a bit of liquid flame. She smiled at him; he smiled back. The friend of a friend started talking about a movie she had seen, a complicated fantasy in which a hero and heroine fall into a hidden world running parallel to ours, and discover that the two worlds are on a collision course. The elfin girl punched him lightly on the hip. “We should go,” she said. There was a loud crash behind the bar. They both started and turned to look. They turned back to face each other at the same time.
They went to the movie that weekend and then to a bar afterward.
It must be said: She should not have shown him her soul. She flashed it again and again, as if it were a bauble meant to entice him, or a hand mirror flashing signals from a dark and lonely place. Everybody knows about dark and lonely places, he thought. But why was she sending these signals without knowing who he was and if he cared to read them? Still, her constant flashing was dramatic and attractive. Images from the movie they had just seen hovered about her. A woman in black strode through the city with a gun; a woman in white fell on her knees before a killer. The camera lingered on her terrified face; the hero pounded on the door. The girl's eyes flashed like her bright, nervous soul.
“Do you know that vintage-record store on Sanchez and Eighteenth?” he asked.
She shook her head and smiled.
“It's got a mirror ball in the window. It flashes over the whole street at night. Your eyes remind me of it.”
She looked down, her small lips in a sweet pinch. Her soul was very visible, and right then, he didn't care why; it seemed natural and lovely He embraced her, and for a moment he felt that holding her was like holding a bit of liquid flame.
“I'll show it to you,” he said. “It's right around the corner from me.”
She looked up. “Yeah, right,” she said, and the sweet pinch became a pungent smirk. She took her glass and swallowed the rest of her drink with a tart little face. He felt annoyed, but he walked her home anyway.
It was a cold fall night with a feeling of secret pockets and moving shadows. They walked past a park full of human shadows, drunks, crackheads, and vagrant kids, half-visible and half-audible in the dark. Cars rolled through pools of street light; blurred faces and pale hands appeared and vanished, on their way somewhere else. She put her cold little hand in his pocket, taking the tips of his fingers in her grip, and he felt as if he were in a fairy tale where the hero is led into the forest by an enchanted ball of light. She looked up at him and said something, and once again her soul flashed in her eyes.
When they reached her door, she invited him in, and her invitation had the same tart face he'd seen at the bar. He followed her slim figure down a long dark hall that smelled of onions. Squalid electronic music came from behind a door. The door opened and a roommate emerged, wearing a short robe with a cat face on it. She was introduced in motion, and her gleaming eyes went from the girl to him and back as she continued down the hall. Another girl sat before the TV in the living room and yet another was in the kitchen making instant macaroni and cheese. There were dirty dishes, a shiny garbage pail, fruit on the counter, notes tacked up on the fridge with colored magnets (magenta and orange).
The enchanted ball of light paled in the bright room; he glanced at his watch. The macaroni roommate was telling him how much she'd loved his last record. She had forthright blue eyes and a muscular red arm that stirred the milk into the glass bowl while he talked. His elfin date smiled and petted the sharp-cut hair at her temples with both cold hands. She glanced at him, and there it was again—the forest and the ball of light.
Who was she that she should have this? He sincerely wanted to know.
When she led him to her room behind the kitchen, he followed. She lay on her bed, eyes full of invitation. He sat beside her. He said, “I usually like to get to know a girl better,” even though it wasn't true. “Why?” she said. “Can't this just be for now?” He felt insulted, although he didn't realize that was what he felt. She lay like she was posing in a mirror, except that she was trembling slightly under the pose. He felt like he wanted to take her and throw her away; he didn't realize that, either. He kissed her. She rose through her body to meet him. He touched between her legs; she opened her pelvis and recklessly unfur
led her soul. He felt like a man in a small boat under which a huge sea creature has passed, causing the boat to pitch gently. Like a man in a boat, he could chase it or run from it, and he picked chase. If he felt it on her lips, he put his mouth on her lips. If he found it on the palm of her hand, he opened her hand and licked it up. Her soul darted here and there, sensitive as any creature, tipping her center of balance back and forth as it oscillated.
She liked this, and if she had any fear, she did not take it seriously. He liked it, too, so much that he could barely concentrate on the chase. Sensation nearly overwhelmed him; his will strained almost to the breaking point when he felt her soul gather its vast-ness in one small spot, pulling so hard that it yanked him off the boat. He felt her all about him in a tingling feminine myriad; out of this myriad appeared formless spirit that lived in the form of their bodies, touching their eyes, their mouths, their limbs, their genitals. The unknown rose up through their souls and became joined with the known in the form of feelings. Something hot and glowing flew from her. It was joined with Ardor, and it compelled him; it compelled the part of his soul that was joined with Hunger. He reached for it, and she did not hold it back. She cried out, delirious and ignorant of her danger. Hunger snapped shut its jaws, and her soul, which should have filled the room with her, contracted and went silent. Her cry was clipped off with a sharp, bewildered gasp. Her liquid flame was out, and she was just another girl who shared a flat with too many other girls.
Still—he was not indecent—he felt tenderly toward her body and toward his own body, too, and he held her close while she buried her face against him. He could sense her diminishment, and that made him feel protective toward her. He meant it when he kissed her good night and told her he'd call her. But out in the hall (which still smelled of onions), he changed his mind. He weighed her good qualities as he walked home in the interesting light of 4:00 a.m., but he did it like a man counting pocket change, yawning and half-interested. When he got home, Hunger yawned, too. He dropped her soul on the floor, where it quickly became invisible to him. He forgot her.
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