"Hey Gene!"
"Hey Eddie!"
"How are you?"
"What are you doing here?"
"I'm just… " (The explanation mumbled.)
"Well, you're looking good, you rascal!"
"Take care." (Fingers raised in casual salute, turning away.)
"And you."
Across the glassy row of ticket windows, two men had exchanged a greeting, flashed a wave, and rushed away. Eddie was silver, Gene not yet grey; in subdued suits, both looked like commuting professionals although it was a holiday weekend, too. Jeanne watched Eddie dash off to the right and Gene to the left, birds of passage met in flight. They had mobility, but had they freedom? she wondered.
People rushed by, and Jeanne stayed in the midst of them. She felt again the strange sensation, a feeling of fineness over her entire face, as if a silk scarf were being slowly drawn over its whole heart-shape: chin, lips, nose, cheek, brow. It was a weightless softness and all a mirage.
So devious was desire and yet so simple that even submission might become mastery, if only for an instant. In that instant was the eternal. Jeanne was dedicated to these realizations that endowed her with fleeing light. She thought that were she never to have one true love, she would still hope to feel again as radiant and tender as this, as thrilled as this to be alive.
Above her head were the painted stars, and above them, the real ones. Admitted, she was insignificant, and she didn't need to stand inside Grand Central Terminal to know that. So she wasn't meant for immortality; no matter: she was happy enough to leave little trace of herself. Yet, as she walked past the ticket windows with black-and-white timetables above them like chalkboards between ads for alcohol and airlines, Jeanne felt certain enough that whatever triumphs were due her would not be denied her, and that these she would survive, too.
It wasn't only that she could take a fall, but that something uplifting could come out of it. And whatever else might happen, she was convinced, as she stood at the top of the stairs with a darkened newsstand to one side and a lit café to the other, that her affair with Paul would not harm her, and that, when the time came to let go, she would not suffer too much from regret. In the course of her life she would undoubtedly endure denial, injury, loss, and death, but she blessed the receptivity that had already shown her so much and hoped she was prepared for what it might yet ask from her.
And if she had less assurance than she had hope, nothing troubled her spirit as she passed through the exit door. She didn't even have to go beyond the overhang outside at Vanderbilt Avenue and Forty-third Street, because a cab was already waiting. She hailed it and got inside, and it delivered her home.
Chapter 13
On the day before Halloween Althea awoke feeling vulnerable and achy. A pale, plain reflection stared back at her from the bathroom mirror. Her hair lay lank against her brow and separated into oily clumps on her shoulders. She recognized this state as a sign that her period was imminent. It will come today, she predicted. Filling the kettle with water and setting it on the stove, she thought of how pleasant it would be to stay at home and lounge on her couch, drinking tea and soup, and read a book, or hold one and not read it while she listened to music.
But she had to teach in the Bronx. Her artist residency was at an elementary school in the distant end of the borough, in an Italian neighborhood near the next-to-last stop of the subway line.
She took a bus crosstown to 116th Street and Lexington Avenue, in Harlem, to catch the number six train. It was early in the morning, and many of the stores were still closed, their glass fronts shielded by sheets of corrugated steel. As she walked toward the stairs leading down to the subway, she heard men calling to her from the street corner. Their voices were jeering and ugly. They stood in a group, drinking out of bottles concealed by brown paper bags. She looked away, fixing her eyes on the pavement, wrapping her scarf more tightly around her head. As she descended into the subway, their taunts trailed after her, nearly incomprehensible.
Forty-five minutes later she entered the school. This was only her third session, but she knew where everything was, because the building was an exact replica of another school where she had taught in Brooklyn. In the office, a student's mother dressed in advance of the holiday in a witch's costume—a scarifying mask, a black pointed hat and a long black dress—was gossiping with the secretaries. A plastic orange pumpkin basket filled with candies was looped over her arm. The secretaries and the witch greeted Althea perfunctorily and then ignored her as she wrote her name and time of arrival in the consultants' book.
There were stairs to go up and stairs to go down side by side, forming a column enclosed in a vertical steel cage. The room assigned to Althea for a studio was all the way up at the top of the school, on the fifth floor. It was otherwise unused, damp and melancholy, furnished with worn desks and chairs too derelict for the regular classrooms. She unlocked the door and turned on the lights, and her first class and their teacher filed in.
Mrs. Feinberg was a scattered, kindly woman, who genuinely liked her students, all generally labeled "slow." But their inattentiveness obviously affected her, leaving her at a loss. She seemed glad of Althea's presence and never attempted to rush her. Today the students were experimenting with primary colors, laying down blotches of red, yellow, and blue tempera paint on wet paper and then letting them run together to create new colors and abstract shapes. It was an easy lesson, which never failed to interest the children and engrossed Althea as well, so that she neglected to keep track of the time. Before she realized it, her next class was waiting at the door.
Mrs. Feinberg lined her children up and led them out, while Althea laid out their paintings to dry on top of the low cupboards that ran the length of the room. Her second class came rushing in pell-mell. Althea stopped what she was doing to settle them down. Most of them were already at their desks when Mr. Berger, their teacher, barged in, red and shouting. He yelled at them, "Sit down and shut your ugly faces up, or every last one of you will stay after school!"
By the time he finished and motioned for Althea to take over, she felt laid low by him, as if she were one of the children.
He made it a point to sit among his students, in the last row, incongruous with his grey, heavy beard and barrel chest. Twice he interrupted Althea in her demonstration, imposing himself, ridiculing her. He bullied her as he bullied his students, and though she answered him calmly and went on, she felt herself chafe under his will.
But he was a fixture in the school, and she was only the visiting artist in the third day of a ten-day residency. She had learned that he had been teaching for twenty-five years; she had overheard the vice-principal of the school affectionately call him "Bill." Although she'd come to dread his class, she tried to let his retorts slide right over her.
She finished her demonstration and gave her instructions, and the children began to paint. This interval of silence was the time she liked best, observing the children absorbed in what they were making. A habit of careful attention was what she wished above all to inculcate. The best children already possessed the faculty. Others would achieve it, but would not keep it. Still others would never acquire it. Some children would forget their paintings sooner than she did. That was not so important, she thought, walking slowly up and down the rows, watching them at their work.
But Mr. Berger had to get up, too, to give his judgments. When he criticized a student's effort that Althea had admired, claiming that the boy had not done what she wanted, she contradicted him in a low but clear tone. He glared at her, but did not argue. He continued to proclaim his opinions in a loud voice. Althea felt annoyed; before she'd quite realized it, she'd laid a finger over her lips. "Sshh!"
"They're used to me," he said. He did not care. She turned away from him to look at her first class's drying paintings. But her distaste didn't matter in the least to him; he pursued her. She looked up. He had followed her into a corner. Over his shoulder, she saw the children bent to their brushes; then he b
locked them out. Raising a stubby finger, he deliberately touched her face, between her eyes.
She couldn't at once marshall herself against him, but stood paralyzed, as if spellbound. Then he seemed about to speak and did not. For once, the sneer was gone from his face. He looked surprised.
For Althea, the horror consisted in her momentary weakness at his touch. It was a commentary on her dislike of him. The realization made her want to raise her hand and try to rub his touch away, but her pride wouldn't allow it. Then she glanced at him and he stepped aside. She passed by him and went on to the students who, a few at a time, were finishing their work and needing her attention. For the remainder of the class, she didn't once look at Mr. Berger.
Yet she was aware of him all the same and angry—at him and at herself—because she hadn't confronted him at once, but had been passive. She felt unable to speak to him still, but would make sure that he never touched her again. After the class was over, she went to the bathroom and washed her face, thoroughly scrubbing the skin between her eyes.
She left the school in the mid-afternoon. The houses she passed were decorated with paper pumpkins, witches, goblins, and ghosts. They looked small and mean, built close together, with only scraps of yards. She had the sensation that suspicious eyes were watching her from the windows. She felt she might have been in a small town, a poor, ugly town that had fallen on hard times. This was the New York that most of her friends, like Jeanne for instance, knew nothing about. Today she didn't blame them for not caring. Why should they? If she didn't have to teach here, she thought, she'd never come back. She felt like an outsider in a provincial backwater.
Even the subway here was an elevated train. The raised platform over Westchester Avenue dwarfed everything around it. In its shadow, at a doughnut shop, she bought tea with milk to go. She was carrying a heavy bag, as usual. She put her wallet in her jacket pocket, because she had some shopping to do on the way home and wanted it convenient.
On the platform, waiting for the train, she drank her tea, grateful for its warmth. The steam rose in her face. A gust of wind blew up grit in her eyes, and she blinked. Ugh! When she thought about it, she could still feel Mr. Berger's finger on her brow. Why had he touched her there, of all places? For her, an artist, it seemed a particularly vulnerable spot. Now she felt weakened, depleted, as if his touch had sapped her strength. Given her obvious dislike of him, she thought, she ought to have instantly resisted him.
She realized that she had been afraid he might kiss her right there, in the middle of the class. She'd wanted to scream, but she hadn't. She'd seen it in his face; his threat was a sexual threat. Perhaps if he had tried to kiss her, she wouldn't have been able to stop him. Thinking about it made her sick. What had she come to? She was pitiful; she despised herself.
Her fingers clenched around the empty styrofoam cup, destroying it. Her sharp nails bit into her bare palms. She hated him; she wanted to hurt him. She imagined scratching his self satisfied, smirking face until she drew blood.
Her anger appalled her. What is wrong with me? she wondered. I need a protector or, better yet, a protectress. I need a goddess on my side.
"Athena, I need you to warn and guide me, as you warned and guided Odysseus through all his trials."
Speaking under her breath, Althea raised her eyes, as if she might glimpse in the sullen, overcast sky the apparition of a woman, fierce and terrible to behold, in shining armor: a goddess to do battle for her, with stern gray eyes. The same color as my own, she thought.
A saying occurred to her: the eyes are the windows of the soul. For an artist, she reflected, this was an article of faith. She wondered if Athena's eyes changed shades as hers did—dark, or pale and opaque, or flecked with gold—according to the light, or the color of her clothes. She wondered if Athena's eyes gleamed when she wore armor.
She knew it was ridiculous of her to speculate about such things. But to imagine the presence of the goddess close to her, invincible, even untouchable, made her feel stronger against threats like Mr. Berger's. She thought that if she didn't allow herself such fantasies, she'd then feel truly defeated.
Across the subway tracks men were welding. A spray of fire shot up, followed by a shower of sparks. In the sodden air the sparks glowed like fireworks, making an intense impression on her: the only beautiful sight in all the ugliness that surrounded her. She saw the subway train arriving, its exterior disfigured by hideous graffiti. I refuse to believe that these scrawlings are art, she thought. The train stopped, and she got on.
She had finished her shopping and was just a block from home when, jostled by people at a curb, she felt something she knew should not be happening. Reaching for the pocket where she'd put her wallet, she found her hand clapped over a stranger's wrist and her pocket empty.
Despite her packages and her fatigue, her fingers were like iron on the alien arm, which was thin and smooth and very dark.
"Where is it? Where is it?" she said.
The girl said nothing. She resisted, but she didn't fight. Her hand was empty.
By now, people had cleared a space around them, but remained, witness and barrier. A woman nearby said, "It's in her other hand." She was right. The girl scowled.
"Give it to me," Althea said. She might have been a teacher issuing a command; it seemed that clear-cut. The girl surrendered the wallet. Althea even wanted to say "Shame on you" afterwards, but she refrained. She'd lost nothing. A tall, rangy, light skinned black man stepped up from the group and took the girl away, his arm over her shoulder. The girl had a young, sullen face. "To hell with you anyway, you bitch," she cried as the man turned her around. The man said nothing. They went away. The rest of the people dispersed, muttering to themselves. Althea gathered up the packages she'd dropped, and left. The very day felt foul. She went straight home.
Inside her apartment, she set the police lock in place in the door and put down her packages on the table. She filled a glass of water from the kitchen tap and stood at the sink drinking it. Between swallows she pressed the cool, smooth cylinder of glass against her cheek. She grew calmer. After all, she thought, I got home intact. She toasted two slices of bread, made a tuna fish sandwich, and ate it mechanically, scarcely tasting it.
She ran a bath and removed her clothes, dropping them in a soft heap on the tile floor. She closed the door. The sound of rushing water echoed in the small room. Just before she stepped in the water, she felt a wet trickle on the inside of her thigh. She had been right. Her period had begun.
She shut off the taps and submerged in the warm water of the bath. She closed her eyes. She considered how this monthly process of her womb shedding its lining, which had long been a part of her nature, still shielded its mystery. She was unknown to herself, a daughter of the moon, as fluctuating as the tides. She thought, Now the moon is hiding her face.
Her cycles effaced her individuality; they made her feel ancient, eternal. She remembered other cultures she had read about, more primitive ones, where women were sent away from their homes at the times of their menstruations. They lived in communal huts where older women past their menopause cooked and cared for them. The bleeding women were believed to possess dangerous, destructive powers, and hence were taboo. If a warrior so much as gazed at a woman during her period, he would lose his strength.
She reflected that her bleeding signified not a loss of strength, for her or for anyone, but at worst a humiliation and almost always a humbling. She consoled herself, thinking, The moon will be reborn. This heaviness will pass from me. After its minor misery, she knew, she would be left with a clear, light feeling like a sheerness through her body, as if her very being had been passed through a fine sieve and then had reformed.
In her contemplation, the sensation of humiliation had left her. She considered that it had been almost two months since she had painted. When she had returned from Block Island, she had put her four unfinished paintings away in the walk-in closet that she used for storage, and she hadn't looked at them since.
All this time they had remained in the dark, unseen. Still, she reflected, her connection to them was not completely severed. But she had lost her capacity, her energy. Why? she wondered. She felt isolated; still, she had been isolated in the past. What was new was the extent of her withdrawal. Her famous confidence had been undermined, her spirit debilitated. She had dreaded facing her paintings, afraid that she wouldn't know how to proceed and that she would stand before them, paralyzed and despairing.
I really do need a goddess, she decided, recalling her thoughts earlier on the subway platform. As she lay soaking in her bath, she pictured the martial splendor of Athena's birth. For Athena had sprung from her father's head fully-grown, bristling with armor. Zeus's pain before the birth had been so great that, in agony, he had ordered his son Hephaestus, the blacksmith, to split open his head with an axe. Althea reiterated Athena's qualities to herself: self-sufficient, born from her father's mind, she was like the incarnation of a pure thought. She had never been a helpless child. She was female without being feminine and seemed to have none of women's usual weaknesses. While preferring peace, she was skilled in war. She cherished privacy and loved strategy; she was a virgin who repelled the advances of all men. She was, Althea thought, the proof of mental acuity prevailing over brute force.
Althea had lain in the bathtub so long that the skin of her fingertips was wrinkled. She removed the rubber stopper, and the water whirled down the drain. She stood up heavily, clumsily, the water dripping from her. She wrapped a towel around her wet hair turban-style and dried herself with another. She hurriedly pressed a pad into her underwear and put it on.
Suddenly she remembered a corrective to this version of Athena. It was in the story of how, when Troy was sacked and burning, Cassandra had sought refuge in Athena's temple. As she had clung desperately to Athena's sacred image, a Greek warrior had dragged her away, knocking down the statue of the goddess. He had raped Cassandra on the spot, while Athena's image turned its eyes away in horror.
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