The Judas Rose

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  Like any woman of the Lines, Belle-Sharon thought. It was a matter of courtesy, that one should be a superb wife. “My darling,” she said to Jared, “you give me such joy!” He had lifted his head and was looking down at her; she let her pupils dilate, as she had let her vagina dilate, and she drew a long sighing breath—the sigh of a woman replete. That, too, was courtesy.

  “And you, my sweet lady,” he said to her softly, taking a long strand of her hair and curling it round one hand so that he could smell it more easily. “No man ever had a better woman in his bed than you, Belle-Sharon Adiness Chornyak.”

  She smiled and thanked him, and touched his cheek with her fingertips, and when the tug of his hand on the lock of hair hurt her scalp she did not let that show on her face. It was a tiny inconvenience, not a real pain. The real pain—the pain that she had known too many times before she brought her body under control—was the pain of letting yourself truly take part in this act that Panglish called “sexual intercourse.” Or “fucking.” (More ugly words!) It had taken Belle-Sharon nearly six months to achieve fully the control that would spare her that pain, and there had been many nights when she had gone desperate and frantic back to Chornyak Womanhouse to be soothed and comforted by the other women, who had been through it themselves before her and knew what she was enduring.

  She wondered how on earth she would have survived that period if Jared had been one of those overly romantic young men who insisted on taking a bedroom for the two of them adjoining the rendezvous rooms, where she would have had to sleep with him all night, every night. There were such men; and often they clung to the arrangement for a year or more before the pressure of the other husbands’ teasing finally put an end to it and the wife was released to Womanhouse. Belle-Sharon was absolutely certain that she could not have lived through that without a distortion of her mind and spirit; it had been horrible for her even as it was.

  “It can’t be helped, sweet Belle-Sharon,” the women had told her, soothing, stroking her hair. “It takes a little while to get the knack of fulfilling the demands of courtesy to your husband adequately and at the same time never letting yourself become too much aroused. It takes every woman a while to get it right, and some far longer than others.”

  Sometimes she had screamed at them that she could not bear it, could not possibly bear it, and then they had sent for Dorcas to brew the bitter tea that would bring sleep within minutes, giving her peace and letting the swelling of her body, so ready for what Jared could not be expected to provide, go away during the long drugged night. And while she waited for the tea one of them would hold her, saying, “Hush, hush now,” and rock her in gentle arms.

  There were some women, Belle-Sharon knew, who drank the tea and slept deep and long, but woke the next morning still tumescent, to linger that way for days at a time, not eased even by the orgasms any woman could of course provide easily enough for herself. Poor loves, thought Belle-Sharon. Poor tormented loves. She was grateful that she was not one of those, also.

  Jared lay now with his hand still tangled in her hair, still pulling at her scalp, sound asleep, softly snoring. She moved just a little, to ease the tug at her hair and to get one cramped leg out from beneath the weight of his knee, but she was cautious; he woke rather easily and if he woke and wanted her again it was important that enough time should have passed so that any stray touch of passion that might have gotten through the barriers she raised would have subsided. It would not do for him to take her again until she was entirely calm.

  Jared had no complaints about her, she knew that. He would not have been so rude as to speak them to her openly, even if there had been things he disliked; courtesy bred courtesy. And he was a man of the Lines—he did not betray himself by posture or expression or tone of voice unless he did so by deliberate choice and for a reason of his own. But he was like any other man, linguist or no linguist, when passion took him; he had no skill left at dissembling then. As she also would have had no skill, she reminded herself, noting her unbecoming vanity, if she had been overtaken by passion. A woman was fortunate; the passion need not be real, and still she could be all that her husband wanted. For a man matters were very different, and unless he truly meant the passion he would be as helpless as a dead stick. Rather more helpless, in fact; a dead stick might still be of some use.

  She lay resting, quiet, waiting until he either woke or was so deeply asleep that she could leave without his knowing, listening to the soft sound of the rain. It was not real rain either; no downpour, however torrential, could be heard through the earth piled over the roof of a linguist household. It was a recording of rain falling on a roof open to the sky; like the lilac perfume, it was Jared’s favorite. Belle-Sharon’s ear, that could distinguish easily more than thirty different varieties of the unit of sound symbolized by the letter “t”, caught a hint of a hiss behind the rain, and she made a mental note to get a new copy. This one was worn, from too many men of the Lines fancying rain on the roof while they took their pleasure.

  Sometimes, in the early months when she had still been so miserable, she had thrown wild oaths around the table in the kitchen at Womanhouse, swearing that if she bore a daughter she’d see to it that every last scrap of desire was stamped out of her before ever she married, to spare her that same misery.

  “Tsk, child,” they’d said to her. “For shame . . . that’s only your pain talking.”

  She had been fierce, and stubborn. “I mean it! I swear I won’t let any child of mine go through this hell!”

  “Belle-Sharon, please do think,” they’d said, after more clucking of tongues. “If true passion is driven out of our women . . . and certainly that’s easy enough to accomplish, if we were such fools . . . then what hope is there? How are the men ever to learn, if we do that? Do you want your granddaughters, and their granddaughters, still to be spending half their lives, or all their lives—horrible thought!—wedded to men who have no more idea what to do with a woman in bed than a blue-balled baboon would? Is that what you would choose?”

  And when she had insisted that there was no possibility, ever in all this world, that a man would learn, they had all laughed at her. The Young Wife’s Complaint, it was called. So predictable that they were able to finish it for her, almost word for word, while she fretted at them to take her seriously.

  “Belle-Sharon, there are many men who learn.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Nothing in your experience so far would lead you to believe it. But then nothing in your experience so far would lead you to think we would lie to you, either.”

  “You might. To make me more patient.”

  “Did we lie when we warned you it would be like this?”

  “No,” she admitted. “But you didn’t make it clear to me!”

  That had set them off again, of course, and deservedly so; how were they supposed to make it clear to her when they had no way of knowing what sort of man Jared would turn out to be? Or how she would react to the sort of man he turned out to be?

  “Belle-Sharon,” they had chided her, when they could stop the loving laughter, “if it weren’t that quite often men do in fact—over the course of time—manage to learn what a woman wants, and if it weren’t that quite often such men are willing and able to give her ecstasy instead of what you are bearing now, we women of the Lines would long ago have done just what you are threatening. We would have found an efficient way to simply put an end to desire, for all of us.”

  “That is exactly what you should have done!”

  “That is a very male solution,” Dorcas had observed. “If it can’t be made right instantaneously, throw it out. Downright manly thinking, Belle-Sharon . . . set it to music, we’ll call it the Testosterone Rag.”

  “It’s a stupid, stupid system!” she had cried, and had—if she remembered correctly—smacked the table so hard with her fist that it had made her cup rattle in its saucer. Not courteous, to be sure, but everyone had pretended not to notice.

&n
bsp; “It certainly is stupid,” Nazareth had agreed, and had spelled it out for her, her lips thinner with indignation than they were with age. “Raise the boys ‘decently’ so they have no experience at all before they marry—unless it’s stolen experience, and done in such a terror of getting caught that the only goal the poor youngster has is to get it finished as quickly as possible. Which, for a male human, is very quickly indeed. Then give them wives with no experience of any other kind either, and no training except the marital academies’ lessons in the choosing of nightgowns. And then leave the couple to batter away at each other in total ignorance, while the wife grows ever more bitter and vicious and the man wonders what happened to the nice girl he married. Perhaps, if she is very lucky, he will be so decently raised that he’ll never read any of those books that bring up the concept of preparing a woman for his sixty seconds of attention. On his own that will never occur to him, it not being ‘natural,’ and in a year or two the wife will be sufficiently dead to all passion to get by.”

  “How can they possibly let that go on, century after century?” Belle-Sharon had demanded when the old woman paused for breath, her mind finally off her own selfish frustration and contemplating the awfulness of what women outside the Lines had to endure. It did change your perspective about your own problems, remembering how much worse it was for most women. Each one of them all alone, in her own house with her children, with no other woman to comfort her or help her or advise her. And the women of her family as ignorant as she was, even if they happened to be close by when she was miserable, by some accident.

  Dorcas had shrugged her shoulders. “Dearlove,” she said, “it comes of so many things, all working together. The idea of a decent Christian upbringing—that’s so powerful. The idea of not wallowing in filth, which I must say is one we also support, if we could only get rid of the confusion about what is and what is not filth. And then American men are extremely attached to the myth that a spectacular act of love is one that lasts three whole minutes. . . . I don’t know about men elsewhere, my dear, not from direct experience, but I suspect that it’s much the same wherever you go. The idea of a decent Moslem upbringing. The idea of a decent religious upbringing, period. After all, men would tell you that during the twentieth century of Earth an attempt was made to dispense with that—the decent upbringing—and the result was movies about hacking up young women with power saws and group sexual acts with whips and chains. Not to mention drug addiction, poverty, juvenile delinquency, the decline of Western Civilization. . . .”

  Belle-Sharon had made a rude noise. “It makes a good excuse,” she scoffed, “all that nonsense. But do you know what it really is?”

  “What?”

  “What it really is is that men are just lazy!”

  “Mmmm . . . There’s that. Some men are lazy, just as some women are lazy. But what it really is, sweet Belle-Sharon, is that the men are perfectly contented with what they’re doing. Why should they change it, when it suits them so well?”

  “Exactly! And so they never will learn!”

  “They do. Not always. Not even most of the time—we will not lie to you. But it does happen. It has happened. We know, therefore, that it is possible. And so long as it is possible, we must try to help.”

  Belle-Sharon had said a word that made even Nazareth jump, and Dorcas had thrown up her hands and gone for the bitter tea, because it was clear that she was not going to be reasonable that night. But she had known they were reasonable, even though she was unwilling through the aching of her breasts and loins to speak up and admit to what she knew. It was a principle as basic as breathing; the teacher does not give up while there is still the possibility that the student may learn.

  Furthermore, she was a woman of the Lines; she was not all alone and locked into “decent” ignorance! Thanks be to the Holy One, into Whose hands she wished she could give the responsibility for helping all those other women out in the world. And she had mocked herself, disgusted even in her disarray—Now who is lazy, Belle-Sharon Adiness Chornyak? You are the one who is lazy! Those women were her responsibility as long as she lived and had her wits about her; it was something she must keep firmly in mind, even when she was in a foul temper because the whole process was so abysmally slow. She was most emphatically her sister’s keeper.

  Beside her, as she was admonishing herself to patience and yet more patience, Jared opened his eyes and reached one hand casually for her breast. “Hello there, sweetheart,” he said, and his voice was not the voice of a man preparing to “make love” again. It was the voice of a man contented and happy, finished with all this folderol as a man properly ought to be, and ready to go on about his business or get a good night’s sleep, whichever happened to be his preference. Very good! Belle-Sharon could relax and spend as much time in pleasant conversation as he wished, until he suggested that they leave. After which the bed, skilled servomechanism that it was, would strip itself of the used linens and drop them through the slot in the floor beneath it, and remake itself all fresh and new and inviting for the next couple, and the folderol would begin all over again. Belle-Sharon would go back to Womanhouse and tackle a problem in sentential complements that had been set aside when Jared sent for her; Jared would go join his buddies in the big diningroom and brag a little about what a marvel she was. Meaning what a marvel he was, of course.

  She smiled at him, and told him hello in return, and waited for the ritual that would open his aftersex conversation. It was always the same line—and there it came.

  “All right, woman,” he said briskly, leaning up on one elbow and peering at her. “Tell me the truth. Would you rather just cuddle than fuck?”

  It had been a “scientific poll,” long long ago, that started that line. Thousands of women, allowed to answer that question anonymously, had startled the men of America by declaring that they would much rather cuddle. That was not surprising to Belle-Sharon; a woman would have to be out of her mind to prefer the systematic teasing her husband considered to be valid sexual experience to the consolations of mere affectionate touch. But the men, who must have been very like the men of today, had been so flabbergasted by the nearly unanimous indictment that it had become part of their folklore. Apparently they were never going to forget it; Belle-Sharon knew three other women at Chornyak Womanhouse whose husbands had the same post-sex verbal lucky charm dangling about.

  “Jared, my darling,” said Belle-Sharon with complete honesty, “that is such a foolish question.”

  “I don’t want any semantic wiggling,” he insisted. “Speak up, woman—cast your vote.”

  “You want a declaration? A proclamation? A manifesto?”

  “Any one of those will do,” he told her, grinning happily, sure of her answer.

  “Jared Joel Chornyak, my dear husband,” she said solemnly, leaning forward to softly kiss his handsome bare chest, “of course I would not rather ‘just cuddle’ than have you make love to me!”

  It was what he wanted. Satisfied, he grinned at her again and began to discuss the negotiation he had scheduled for the following day, while she listened, and spoke if she had anything to say that might be useful to him.

  It seemed to her at times that he was in some ways improving; she had told Nazareth so, and Nazareth had agreed that it was certainly possible and had kindly refrained from reminding her that people had told her so. “Continue to set him a good example,” Nazareth had advised her, “and perhaps he will improve even more rapidly. It is often that way, dearlove.”

  “Perhaps he will turn out to be one of those miracles, the man for whom it is not totally stupid to feel a little hope?”

  “Perhaps.”

  It was a matter of common knowledge that Nazareth’s husband had not been such a man, and Belle-Sharon felt suddenly ashamed—she had taken Nazareth’s hands in hers and laid her cheek against them to show that she had not meant to cause pain with her thoughtless talk.

  Nazareth had looked at her fondly, and let Belle-Sharon sit there with h
er without speaking for a little while. And then she had said, “Bíi dóhúuya ul beyeth hath nedebe wa.”

  In my experience, and according to my perceptions, I say to you: hope rarely does anyone harm.

  II

  “Sister Miriam, I don’t understand your request. I’m sorry—it makes no sense.”

  He knew he sounded cross; he was cross. Just looking at her irritated Father Dorien. He knew what the years had done to him. The elegance he had always relied on, the fair slender manly beauty that had made it acceptable for him to sit haloed in light from the window at his back, had failed him. Instead of becoming more and more impressive with the passing years, instead of taking on the distinction of an ascetic, he had softened and blurred and spread. His clerical collar was too tight, even in the larger size, and his cassock did not disguise the ample belly that afflicted him in spite of many a good resolution. He was a priest, an abbot, soon to be a bishop; he was obliged to spend much of his time wheeling and dealing over banquet tables, or in intimate opulent lunches. And he had not been blessed with the sort of genes or bone structure that allowed that to go on year after year without a penalty of the flesh.

  But Sister Miriam, now! She, who had once been merely an attractive young woman with an imposing voice and manner, useful for his purposes, now had exactly the look he longed for and could not achieve—in its female version, of course. She seemed even taller; certainly she was thinner. The thinness might have been upleasant under ordinary clothing, because it was unfashionable for women to be thin, but the black folds of the nun’s habit concealed any distressing angles. The headdress hid the raddled neck (if it was raddled . . . he had no way of knowing), and the only visible effect of the gauntness was a wonderful bony face exquisitely sculptured. Sister Miriam Rose looked like an El Greco saint. Father Dorien knew that he himself looked like one of those dumpy little country priests who got painted with mug or glass in hand, drowsing over a table where the debris of a generous meal testified to his recent excesses.