by Marge Piercy
All through 1978, Robert was around little, working full-time and evenings at the office with his new partner, immersed in their project. Then the next winter, the roof fell in. The company that had him under contract demanded the software he was supposed to be working on and discovered that contrary to his contract, he had been building hardware. The contract was terminated. They had not been successful with their project, although they built a prototype. He and his friend blamed each other. Robert sank into a terrible depression. He suggested I break off with Woody and we have no more relationships with other people.
I felt strongly committed to Woody. Nor did I trust Robert. I had no sense that this disgust with multiple relationships arose from anything more than that he had been having trouble finding women. He was talking about how boring his work was and how he might stop working altogether for a year or two. He was weary of trying to support interesting work from computer contracts. He wanted to play, he wanted to do only work that fascinated him.
I suggested we go to England together. A couple of my novels that had sold to the Women’s Press were being brought out in spring of 1979. I thought it worthwhile to go over and do publicity, to make myself known in England. It was an investment, since they paid few of my expenses, although they did set up various gigs. Since they weren’t paying for lodging, we stayed in a grungy bed-and-breakfast off Earl’s Court. I hoped that taking Robert as my guest to England would cheer him up, break his depression, give us back some intimacy. I had book signings, TV and radio shows, newspaper interviews, readings—including the University of London, a women’s conference, a couple in pubs, where I had to come and go quickly because of the smoke. Nobody in England understood being allergic to cigarette smoke, and they thought me full of myself, a fussy hypochondriac somewhat lower on the social scale than a sanctimonious vegan.
I kept remembering how well our marriage had worked for both of us in the good years, how he had supported me in my writing, how we had enjoyed keeping house, making love, sharing books and ideas, walking, learning about wine and identifying birds and plants. Surely we could recover our joy together. The past of our relationship seemed more vibrant, more real than the pallid present. Robert spent time at the British Museum, went sightseeing, bought clothes and books. Finally I was done except for a reading on Sunday. That Thursday, we took the train to Exeter, rented a car and set off. Almost immediately, we got into an accident. Robert was not used to driving on the left side of the road. A great big log lorry came at us, and he drove into what he thought was a hedge. Hedgerows in Devon have rocks as their core. Back we went to the rental agency. It did not put Robert in a good mood. Much of the time in England, he was sulking. He disliked the food, the British, London, whatever.
Fortunately, once we got up on Dartmoor, we encountered wild ponies, hawks, curlews, blackface sheep, dun cattle and prehistoric ruins—stone circles, standing stones, hut circles. We walked and walked from one set of ruins to the next, from one copse to a bog to a clapper bridge over a stream, built of stone slabs. We climbed several tors and explored ruins to the horizon. I had gotten sick in London. Air pollution sickens me, and I had been exposed to an unavoidable amount of cigarette smoke. I was coughing from the bottom of my lungs. Dartmoor has pure clear air, and I felt better. Walking is my best exercise. I love Dartmoor. I have been back many times and written about it in Gone to Soldiers and various poems. Something in me resonates to its green vastness, its wildness, its antiquities scattered about without signs or protection. We were suddenly good companions again, exploring. This trip would work, I knew it.
The food in Devon was better than we had been able to afford in London: smoked trout, salmon, sole, saltwater lamb. Even the vegetables were good. We stayed at a fisherman’s motel built over a rushing stream, the Exe, near an old stone bridge and a seventeenth-century coaching inn where we ate. Then we drove on to Cornwall. We spent the night in St. Mawes in a house where Byron had stayed. The owner was an Eastern European woman who set out an elegant breakfast. I had booked the best room in the house, Byron’s room. That night, I managed to seduce Robert, convinced that the spirit of Lord Byron was helping. With this breakthrough, I was sure things would improve. Noisy rooks (I call them noisy, but I confess I like the cries of crows and ravens and rooks) roosted in the trees outside the white Regency house. It had a circular stairway that was perfect, a frozen song in space.
The next night we arrived at what I shall call Dead Bird Manor. It sounded wonderful in the guidebook, with a cordon bleu chef. It was near Clovelly, set in a valley among wooded hills—a fine Victorian house with a stuffy Victorian spirit. They offered us tea, cookies and a paper when we arrived. We immediately offended them by asking for the wrong paper. “We don’t carry that left rag.” It was downhill from there. The parlor was decorated with glass cases of dead and dowdy birds. Upstairs the room was tiny, mattress well used and sagging, plumbing noisy, radiators dripping and gurgling. We could not pass each other getting around the bed.
Supper came. The guests anticipated the meal in silence. They did not speak to each other. Perhaps they were all telepaths, or perhaps they were people at the end of their marriages with nothing more to say—a state I was beginning to fully comprehend. The meal was pretentious: overcooked broccoli with an orange glue they called hollandaise sauce. Tough meat they called veal. Everyone was scraping at it with their knives and no one was talking. I began to giggle. Robert glared at me, but I couldn’t stop. It was all silly and inflated and pompous. I giggled my way through the dreadful meal. When we went upstairs, I discovered that Robert had withdrawn again. There were to be no more breakthroughs on the trip.
When we got back to London, it was over ninety degrees. London when it’s hot is much like hell. I did the pub reading with several other poets and left, which they thought rude, but I was starting to cough again. We took a train to Leeds. We were due to be picked up by someone in the British equivalent of Science for the People, a family who lived on a farm. We had all our luggage with us. I had done a great deal of media, including TV, and given numerous readings, so I had a lot of clothes in a big suitcase, and my portable typewriter because I was doing revisions on Vida, which had just sold. I had all the books I was using in my readings. I was wearing a flowered summer dress in the heat.
The woman supposed to collect us was an hour and fifteen minutes late. We kept calling her house. Finally she turned up. “Oh, I saw you earlier, but I didn’t think it could possibly be you. I didn’t expect you to be dressed that way, and you had so much luggage.” She managed to feel superior about my wearing a pretty summer dress. I had been through the puritanical drab butch dressing nonsense in the women’s movement in the States, going without a brassiere for two years because that was politically correct—until I realized I was stooping, just as I had before my mother let me wear one. I bought six the next week. I decided a dress code for feminists was ridiculous. Liberation for me is choice.
As a means of bringing us closer, the trip had been a failure. I was reminded of Greece, when I had the impression I was carrying him around on my back, begging him to like something. There is a point in relationships when the way someone chews her breakfast cereal is a clear sign of moral decay. Certainly I’m making myself sound stronger and more single-minded than I was. Sometimes I looked at Robert with a cold eye and considered my options. Sometimes he went at me and reduced me to tears, especially when people were around, as several friends noted. Sometimes he was affectionate and we worked together in the garden or took long walks. There would always be times in any week when we were talking about something interesting, political, natural, and we would communicate well and feel close. That summer we stopped having sex—not that it had been so frequent an occurrence the past year. We still shared a bed, but I found it increasingly hard to sleep with someone who was not interested in me sexually. I had not abandoned hope, but it was abandoning me, gradually, drop by agonizing drop. In the best of times I am not an easy woman to get alon
g with, but when someone is estranged from me, I can be annoying indeed. Everything about me seems too much, too fast, too sure, too loud.
That summer my Norwegian and Danish publishers asked me to come over in September to do publicity. They would pay for a companion. Weekends, we would be responsible for ourselves. Robert was going to Germany shortly after that. His connection with Petrie and Tole was heating up again. Petrie got him funding. When I thought about taking him along, I felt ill. I knew he would sulk. He would not gladly endure the media fuss. I asked Woody if he wanted to accompany me.
Oslo is a business center, not the world’s most glamorous or historically interesting city, but it was new to us, and my publishers were friendly and welcoming. On the weekend, we took a train over the high mountains to Bergen and stopped at a fjord. There were twenty waterfalls visible from our little pension. We made the mistake of asking for a drink when we arrived. The innkeeper nodded solemnly and admitted that sherry was possible. We were taken down to a basement, through a bolted door, to a locked cabinet where exactly one jigger was measured out to each of us, with a stern look. It was as if we had requested a local pretty boy to play with. We drank our bit of sherry and did not ask again. We loved Bergen, running around as tourists. I visited local feminists, who told me drunken domestic abuse was their leading problem. We had a flash of insight into the pension keeper’s attitude toward alcohol.
Then we headed for Denmark, where we ate and drank ourselves silly. I was on the Danish equivalent of 60 Minutes. The producer had the bright idea that since I was doing publicity for Woman on the Edge of Time, the shoot should be in a large mental institution. Neither the burly interviewer nor I was permitted to wear a coat, although the temperature was about forty. As soon as the television crew started filming, the inmates pushed in front of the camera, swarming. “You American?” One grinning partially toothless lad kept asking, “You rich?” It was a mad scene, indeed.
While we were in Europe, Linda took up with a fellow student, and Woody came home to find their relationship over. Robert had become involved with a poet from the Fine Arts Work Center. He found her sexually exciting and fascinating, so he dropped his idea about resuming monogamy. He also was interested in a woman he met at Science for the People in Boston. He was choosing between two affairs and feeling just fine.
At the same time, Vida sold to the movies. Although the film was never made, I got a chunk of money I decided to put in the house. First I wanted larger windows in the master bedroom, different from the little inexpensive awning windows the builder had used all over the house. I also decided, since we had no basement, attic or garage, we needed storage space. I designed a hall to go where part of the bedroom had been, and then the bedroom itself would stick out on the east side for more light and air. There would be a large storage room and then an extra bedroom, designed for Woody. He was romantic about ecology at the time and insisted that rather than connecting to the oil burner heating the rest of the house, this new wing should be heated by a woodstove. He was to regret that nostalgia many times in winters to come as he cut down and then chopped up trees with his trusty hand ax, as he went out to split logs at six in the morning, as he hauled in wood (and spiders and mice and wood roaches), digging logs out of three-foot drifts, as he lived in a room either roaring hot or icy. One frigid March, tired of sodden pine boughs, I found him smashing up an old desk.
I asked Robert, if he no longer wanted a sexual relationship with me, to move into the downstairs bedroom that had been Wayne’s. I installed my assistant’s office in what had been our bedroom. He took Arofa in with him every night and made an immense fuss over her. She had never been so happy. At one point, he entered the bedroom, now mine except for my assistant’s desk and files. The new larger windows were in place and light poured in. He sat on the bare floor and began to weep. “It’s so pretty,” he said. “And I’ll never sleep here.”
“But it’s your choice,” I said.
He began to hint that he wanted to move into the new room. It had its own door to the outside, and he could come and go without dealing with me. I said I had designed and built it for Woody, and he had an entire huge office at the end of a road overlooking a stream and a pond. I was not going to set him up so that he could live in the house without relating to me while moving in his new lover.
He began doing all the things he had done in the summer of 1976 and being surprised I did not break down or run off to the city. There was an underground struggle going on about who was going to leave. I became cold and stubborn, nasty. If he wanted to get free of me, he was going to have to leave. This was my house and I was staying. He could always make me cry, but he could no longer sway me. I was a bitch. I would not let go of my home. I was wasting away physically, losing weight by the day, a regime I called the Marge Piercy Total Weight Loss through Total Relationship Loss Diet, but I was all teeth and stubborn resolve.
I did not like myself during this period, although I had plenty of support from friends. Our relationship was by this point so bizarre in the mores of the time that everyone expected it to explode. Almost all our friends who’d had multiple relationships had settled into monogamy again, except for a few gay friends who continued until AIDS scared them. We were the lone weird stragglers from the experiments of the 1960s. Also, we had been having a rocky ride since the summer of 1976, and everyone was bored with hearing what he said and did and what I said and did and felt. It was an old sad story that needed to come to an end. My love for Robert had undergone a slow starvation and there was little left; but the ruins made me grieve for what had been lost. I wanted it over, but at the same time, every step out of the marriage pained me. If he did not like me, I did not much like myself those months.
It was a strange December. Robert did not observe Jewish holidays, as I did before him and do now, but he made a fuss about Christmas. He always wanted lots of presents and gave me extravagant gifts, but never more than that year. Not that I didn’t enjoy the fuss: I thought it sumptuous fun. I love being given things and I like shopping for other people, when I can afford it. But that year, there were piles and piles of gifts. Then the day after Christmas, he left. He said he was going off backpacking and did not provide any more information. By the third day, his poet girlfriend was calling me on the hour, demanding to know where he was. It did not take much detective work to learn he had gone off to Negril in Jamaica with his girlfriend from Science for the People, a wealthy young woman who had been unhappily married, had accumulated several advanced degrees but had never found anything she wanted to do.
Robert’s poet girlfriend almost drove me mad, calling every few hours. I told her what I knew, making her furious. Well into January, Robert returned. He came to the house at five and waited for me to make supper. I charred the chicken livers and potatoes, everything but the salad. He announced he was leaving to lead a simpler life. He saw me as entangling him with material objects, with the garden he suddenly hated, with the house he despised now. He was going to simplify everything and get rid of what he didn’t need. No, he didn’t want a divorce. But he wanted to wander around, to do what he wished. He wanted to be free. He was dying in the relationship, he said, dying. He complained about everything from not having fun in Greece after his father’s death to various problems with various girlfriends scattered over the years. I had heard all this endless times, the litany of my sins. I was “an unacceptable compromise” he had negotiated with himself. He had entered the relationship with ambivalence and he was stuck in that commitment. It was, he said, killing him emotionally. His voice broke as he declared his unhappiness. He said I was always arguing him into continuing, but he was done now. I did not argue. I too thought we were done.
I wondered whether if I had sacrificed Woody to him, we could have made it. I did not believe that. He had accumulated a baggage of deep dark fuming anger that nothing but separation could dispel. Some of his resentments went back to our first year, around that accident in the Porsche, and more resentme
nts had piled up every year since. I could recite them with him, for I had heard them all many times. The very first anger was still inside him smoldering.
Over the next couple of months, he would give in to fleeting second thoughts, leaving notes and messages and once chocolates, insisting it was not over. I knew it was. It was as dead as a relationship could be.
THE WEIGHT
1.
I lived in the winter drought of his anger,
cold and dry and bright. I could not breathe.
My sinuses bled. Whatever innocent object
I touched, door knob or light switch,
sparks leapt to my hand in shock.
Simply crossing a room generated static.
Any contact could give sudden sharp pain.
2.
All too long I have been carrying a weight
balanced on my head as I climb the stairs
up from the subway in rush hour jostle,
up from the garden wading in mud.
It is a large iron pot supposed to hold
something. Only now when I have finally
been forced to put it down, do I find
it empty except for a gritty stain
on the bottom. You have told me
this exercise was good for my posture.
Why then did my back always ache?
3.
All too often I have wakened at night
with that weight crouched on my chest,
an attack dog pinning me down. I would
open my eyes and see its eyes glowing
like the grates of twin coal furnaces
in red and hot menacing regard.
A low growl sang in its chest, vibrating
into my chest and belly its warning.
4.