In none of this is she so exceptional. She does what women do. Perhaps she does it more often, more openly, just a bit more ill-advisedly, and more fervently. Her powers of recovery, her faith, are never exhausted. I joke about her, everybody does, but I defend her too, saying that she is not condemned to living with reservations and withdrawals, long-drawn-out dissatisfactions, inarticulate wavering miseries. Her trust is total, her miseries are sharp, and she survives without visible damage. She doesn’t allow for drift or stagnation and the spectacle of her life is not discouraging to me.
She is getting over someone now; the husband, the estranged husband, of another woman at the farm. His name is Roy; he too is an anthropologist.
“It’s really a low ebb falling in love with somebody who’s lived at the farm,” she says. “Really low. Somebody you know all about.”
I tell her I’m getting over somebody I met in Australia, and that I plan to be over him just about when I get the book done, and then I’ll go and look for another job, a place to live.
“No rush, take it easy,” she says.
I think about the words “getting over.” They have an encouraging, crisp, everyday sound. They are in tune with Kay’s present mood. When love is fresh and on the rise she grows mystical, tentative; in the time of love’s decline, and past the worst of it, she is brisk and entertaining, straightforward, analytical.
“It’s nothing but the desire to see yourself reflected,” she says. “Love always comes back to self-love. The idiocy. You don’t want them, you want what you can get from them. Obsession and self-delusion. Did you every read those journals of Victor Hugo’s daughter, I think that’s who it was?”
“No.”
“I never did either, but I read about them. The part I remember, the part I remember reading about, that struck me so, was where she goes out into the street after years and years of loving this man, obsessively loving him, and she meets him. She passes him in the street and she either doesn’t recognize him or she does but she can’t connect the real man any more with the person she loves, in her head. She can’t connect him at all.”
5
When I knew X in Vancouver he was a different person. A serious graduate student, still a Lutheran, stocky and resolute, rather a prig in some people’s opinion. His wife was more scatterbrained; a physiotherapist named Mary, who liked sports and dancing. Of the two, you would have said she might be the one to run off. She had blond hair, big teeth; her gums showed. I watched her play baseball at a picnic. I had to go off and sit in the bushes, to nurse my baby. I was twenty-one, a simple-looking girl, a nursing mother. Fat and pink on the outside; dark judgements and strenuous ambitions within. Sex had not begun for me, at all.
X came around the bushes and gave me a bottle of beer.
“What are you doing back here?”
“I’m feeding the baby.”
“Why do you have to do it here? Nobody would care.”
“My husband would have a fit.”
“Oh. Well, drink up. Beer’s supposed to be good for your milk, isn’t it?”
That was the only time I talked to him, so far as I can remember. There was something about the direct approach, the slightly clumsy but determined courtesy, my own unexpected, lightened feeling of gratitude, that did connect with his attentions to women later, and his effect on them. I am sure he was always patient, unalarming; successful, appreciative, sincere.
6
I met Dennis in the Toronto Reference Library and he asked me out to dinner.
Dennis is a friend of X’s, who came to visit us in Australia. He is a tall, slight, stiff, and brightly smiling young man – not so young either, he must be thirty-five – who has an elaborately courteous and didactic style.
I go to meet him thinking he may have a message for me. Isn’t it odd, otherwise, that he would want to have dinner with an older woman he has met only once before? I think he may tell me whether X is back in Canada. X told me that they would probably come back in July. Then he was going to spend a year writing his book. They might live in Nova Scotia during that year. They might live in Ontario.
When Dennis came to see us in Australia, I made a curry. I was pleased with the idea of having a guest and glad that he arrived in time to see the brief evening light on the gully. Our house like the others was built out on posts, and from the window where we ate we looked out over a gully like an oval bowl, ringed with small houses and filled with jacaranda, poinciana, frangipani, cypress, and palm trees. Leaves like fans, whips, feathers, plates; every bright, light, dark, dusty, glossy shade of green. Guinea fowl lived down there, and flocks of rackety kookaburras took to the sky at dusk. We had to scramble down a steep dirt bank under the house to get to the wash-hut, and peg the clothes on a revolving clothesline. There we encountered spider-webs draped like tent-tops, matched like lids and basins with one above and one below. We had to watch out for the one little spider that weaves a conical web and has a poison for which there is no antidote.
We showed Dennis the gully and told him this was a typical old Queensland house with the high tongue-and-groove walls and the ventilation panels over the doors filled with graceful carved vines. He did not look at anything with much interest, but talked about China, where he had just been. X said afterwards that Dennis always talked about the last place he’d been and the last people he’d seen, and never seemed to notice anything, but that he would probably be talking about us, and describing this place, to the next people he had dinner with, in the next city. He said that Dennis spent most of his life traveling, and talking about it, and that he knew a lot of people just well enough that when he showed up somewhere he had to be asked to dinner.
Dennis told us that he had seen the recently excavated Army Camp at Sian, in China. He described the rows of life-sized soldiers, each of them so realistic and unique, some still bearing traces of the paint which had once covered them and individualized them still further. Away at their backs, he said, was a wall of earth. The terra-cotta soldiers looked as if they were marching out of the earth.
He said it reminded him of X’s women. Row on row and always a new one appearing at the end of the line.
“The Army marches on,” he said.
“Dennis, for God’s sake,” said X.
“But do they really come out of the earth like that?” I said to Dennis. “Are they intact?”
“Are which intact?” said Dennis with his harsh smile. “The soldiers or the women? The women aren’t intact. Or not for long.”
“Could we get off the subject?” said X.
“Certainly. Now to answer your question,” said Dennis, turning to me. “They are very seldom found as whole figures. Or so I understand. Their legs and torsos and heads have to be matched up, usually. They have to be put together and stood on their feet.”
“It’s a lot of work, I can tell you,” said X, with a large sigh.
“But it’s not that way with the women,” I said to Dennis. I spoke with a special, social charm, almost flirtatiously, as I often do when I detect malice. “I think the comparison’s a bit off. Nobody has to dig the women out and stand them on their feet. Nobody put them there. They came along and joined up of their own free will and some day they’ll leave. They’re not a standing army. Most of them are probably on their way to someplace else anyway.”
“Bravo,” said X.
When we were washing the dishes, late at night, he said, “You didn’t mind Dennis saying that, did you? You didn’t mind if I went along with him a little bit? He has to have his legends.”
I laid my head against his back, between the shoulder blades.
“Does he? No. I thought it was funny.”
“I bet you didn’t know that soap was first described by Pliny and was used by the Gauls. I bet you didn’t know they boiled goat’s tallow with the lye from the wood ashes.”
“No. I didn’t know that.”
7
Dennis hasn’t said a word about X, or about Australia. I wouldn
’t have thought his asking me to dinner strange, if I had remembered him better. He asked me so he would have somebody to talk to. Since Australia, he has been to Iceland, and the Faeroe Islands. I ask him questions. I am interested, and surprised, even shocked, when necessary. I took trouble with my makeup and washed my hair. I hope that if he does see X, he will say that I was charming.
Besides his travels Dennis has his theories. He develops theories about art and literature, history, life.
“I have a new theory about the life of women. I used to feel it was so unfair the way things happened to them.”
“What things?”
“The way they have to live, compared to men. Specifically with aging. Look at you. Think of the way your life would be, if you were a man. The choices you would have. I mean sexual choices. You could start all over. Men do. It’s in all the novels and it’s in life too. Men fall in love with younger women. Men want younger women. Men can get younger women. The new marriage, new babies, new families.”
I wonder if he is going to tell me something about X’s wife; perhaps that she is going to have a baby.
“It’s such a coup for them, isn’t it?” he says in his malicious, sympathetic way. “The fresh young wife, the new baby when other men their age are starting on grandchildren. All those men envying them and trying to figure out how to do the same. It’s the style, isn’t it? It must be hard to resist starting over and having that nice young mirror to look in, if you get the opportunity.”
“I think I might resist it,” I say cheerfully, not insistently. “I don’t really think I’d want to have a baby, now.”
“That’s it, that’s just it, though, you don’t get the opportunity! You’re a woman and life only goes in one direction for a woman. All this business about younger lovers, that’s just froth, isn’t it? Do you want a younger lover?”
“I guess not,” I say, and pick my dessert from a tray. I pick a rich creamy pudding with pureed chestnuts at the bottom of it and fresh raspberries on top. I purposely ate a light dinner, leaving plenty of room for dessert. I did that so I could have something to look forward to, while listening to Dennis.
“A woman your age can’t compete,” says Dennis urgently. “You can’t compete with younger women. I used to think that was so rottenly unfair.”
“It’s probably biologically correct for men to go after younger women. There’s no use whining about it.”
“So the men have this way of renewing themselves, they get this refill of vitality, while the women are you might say removed from life. I used to think that was terrible. But now my thinking has undergone a complete reversal. Do you know what I think now? I think women are the lucky ones! Do you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because they are forced to live in the world of loss and death! Oh, I know, there’s face-lifting, but how does that really help? The uterus dries up. The vagina dries up.”
I feel him watching me. I continue eating my pudding.
“I’ve seen so many parts of the world and so many strange things and so much suffering. It’s my conclusion now that you won’t get any happiness by playing tricks on life. It’s only by natural renunciation and by accepting deprivation, that we prepare for death and therefore that we get any happiness. Maybe my ideas seem strange to you?”
I can’t think of anything to say.
8
Often I have a few lines of a poem going through my head, and I won’t know what started it. It can be a poem or rhyme that I didn’t even know I knew, and it needn’t be anything that conforms to what I think is my taste. Sometimes I don’t pay any attention to it, but if I do, I can usually see that the poem, or the bit of it I’ve got hold of, has some relation to what is going on in my life. And that may not be what seems to be going on.
For instance last spring, last autumn in Australia, when I was happy, the line that would go through my head, at a merry clip, was this:
“Even such is time, that takes in trust –”
I could not go on, though I knew trust rhymed with dust, and that there was something further along about “and in the dark and silent grave, shuts up the story of our days.” I knew the poem was written by Sir Walter Raleigh on the eve of his execution. My mood did not accord with such a poem and I said it, in my head, as if it was something pretty and lighthearted. I did not stop to wonder what it was doing in my head in the first place.
And now that I’m trying to look at things soberly I should remember what we said when our bags were packed and we were waiting for the taxi. Inside the bags our clothes that had shared drawers and closet space, tumbled together in the wash, and been pegged together on the clothesline where the kookaburras sat, were all sorted and separated and would not rub together any more.
“In a way I’m glad it’s over and nothing spoiled it. Things are so often spoiled.”
“I know.”
“As it is, it’s been perfect.”
I said that. And that was a lie. I had cried once, thought I was ugly, thought he was bored.
But he said, “Perfect.”
On the plane the words of the poem were going through my head again, and I was still happy. I went to sleep thinking the bulk of X was still beside me and when I woke I filled the space quickly with memories of his voice, looks, warmth, our scenes together.
I was swimming in memories, at first. Those detailed, repetitive scenes were what buoyed me up. I didn’t try to escape them, didn’t wish to. Later I did wish to. They had become a plague. All they did was stir up desire, and longing, and hopelessness, a trio of miserable caged wildcats that had been installed in me without my permission, or at least without my understanding how long they would live and how vicious they would be. The images, the language, of pornography and romance are alike; monotonous and mechanically seductive, quickly leading to despair. That was what my mind dealt in; that is what it still can deal in. I have tried vigilance and reading serious books but I can still slide deep into some scene before I know where I am.
On the bed a woman lies in a yellow nightgown which has not been torn but has been pulled off her shoulders and twisted up around her waist so that it covers no more of her than a crumpled scarf would. A man bends over her, naked, offering a drink of water. The woman, who has almost lost consciousness, whose legs are open, arms flung out, head twisted to the side as if she has been struck down in the course of some natural disaster – this woman rouses herself and tries to hold the glass in her shaky hands. She slops water over her breast, drinks, shudders, falls back. The man’s hands are trembling, too. He drinks out of the same glass, looks at her, and laughs. His laugh is rueful, apologetic, and kind, but it is also amazed, and his amazement is not far from horror. How are we capable of all this? his laugh says, what is the meaning of it?
He says, “We almost finished each other off.”
The room seems still full of echoes of the recent commotion, the cries, pleas, brutal promises, the climactic sharp announcements and the long subsiding spasms.
The room is brimming with gratitude and pleasure, a rich broth of love, a golden twilight of love. Yes, yes, you can drink the air.
You see the sort of thing I mean, that is my torment.
9
This is the time of year when women are tired of sundresses, prints, sandals. It is already fall in the stores. Thick sweaters and skirts are pinned up against black or plum-colored velvet. The young salesgirls are made up like courtesans. I’ve become feverishly preoccupied with clothes. All the conversations in the stores make sense to me.
“The neckline doesn’t work. It’s too stark. I need a flutter. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes. I know what you mean.”
“I want something very classy and very provocative. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes. I know exactly what you mean.”
For years I’ve been wearing bleached-out colors which I suddenly can’t bear. I buy a deep-red satin blouse, a purple shawl, a dark-blue skirt. I get my ha
ir cut and pluck my eyebrows and try a lilac lipstick, a brownish rouge. I’m appalled to think of the way I went around in Australia, in a faded wraparound cotton skirt and T-shirt, my legs bare because of the heat, my face bare too and sweating under a cotton hat. My legs with the lumps of veins showing. I’m half convinced that a more artful getup would have made a more powerful impression, more dramatic clothes might have made me less discardable. I have fancies of meeting X unexpectedly at a party or on a Toronto street, and giving him a shock, devastating him with my altered looks and late-blooming splendor. But I do think you have to watch out, even in these garish times; you have to watch out for the point at which the splendor collapses into absurdity. Maybe they are all watching out, all the old women I see on Queen Street: the fat woman with pink hair; the eighty-year-old with painted-on black eyebrows; they may all be thinking they haven’t gone too far yet, not quite yet. Even the buttercup woman I saw a few days ago on the streetcar, the little, stout, sixtyish woman in a frilly yellow dress well above the knees, a straw hat with yellow ribbons, yellow pumps dyed-to-match on her little fat feet – even she doesn’t aim for comedy. She sees a flower in the mirror: the generous petals, the lovely buttery light.
I go looking for earrings. All day looking for earrings which I can see so clearly in my mind. I want little filigree balls of silver, of diminishing size, dangling. I want old and slightly tarnished silver. It’s a style I well remember; you’d think the secondhand stores would be sure to have them. But I can’t find them, I can’t find anything resembling them, and they seem more and more necessary. I go into a little shop on a side street near College and Spadina. The shop is all done up in black paper with cheap, spooky effects – for instance a bald, naked mannequin sitting on a stepladder, dangling some beads. A dress such as I wore in the fifties, a dance dress of pink net and sequins, terribly scratchy under the arms, is displayed against the black paper in a way that makes it look sinister, and desirable.
Desire Page 17