The cats were on the roof outside the window, tearing apart a chicken carcass, and a june bug banged against the screen. I lay there expecting a dark angel to fly in and possess me. Instead, something—a mouse probably—dashed across my bed and down the hall. For the first time, I was sure I’d be leaving that house, and the minute I realized this, I was swept by a fierce wave of love for it. The neglect that let us grow wild there, the drama that whisked every thunderstorm into a tempest and had made an operatic cycle out of the rabbit question, the utter brokenhearted wrongness we lived in: against these things, every beauty blazed more vivid, and this seemed to me a blessing for which it was worth suffering the rest.
Four
“YES, BILL Canterbridge is my father, but that does not make me a modernist.”
It was our first day at Sweetriver. We were sitting in a circle in Dove House living room, introducing ourselves. Olney Canterbridge, having made the effort to speak, balled his white linen jacket into a pillow, rested his head against it, and closed his eyes. He was so widely experienced as to be bored already, on the first day of school.
I was in awe. Who could guess, who could believe that I was at college, and not just any college, but Sweetriver. “The right place for my Beatrice,” Ma had said, in her Voice of Great Importance, which was usually used for describing men other than my father. After all, look at the people who had taught at Sweetriver, when they were still alive. Here they were in the catalogue, the poets, painters, composers, dancers, whose ferocious originality had fueled a century of art—the Leninites and the Trotskyites, the beats, the bohemians—anyone who had raged against convention. The name Sweetriver had been synonymous with sex, whiskey, and irony, in an age when these were magnificently daring things. Just walking into a dorm room, you could feel the ghost of someone like Mary McCarthy sitting at the end of the bed, legs crossed, spitting an occasional nail.
God knows what she’d have spat if she’d seen the place when I got there. By the seventies, Sweetriver’s ideals had been taken up by the very bourgeoisie they’d been developed to épater: you could grow marijuana in your windowbox at Wellesley; you could live in the gay dorm at Smith. Sweetriver went coed to avoid going under and still they had to accept almost everyone who applied. Which was good because, for some reason my mother could not figure out, I’d been rejected from Wellesley and Smith and all the other places whose names would have served Ma and wounded Pop (Not Yale, there I’d simply said to the interviewer: “I won’t get in here, will I?” and had felt, as he mournfully shook his head, a rare happiness: the knowledge that I, unlike my parents, had some sense of reality).
Still, we walked to class across wide lawns that looked down over the Sweet River Valley, beneath elms as graceful in death as they’d been in life, along hallways that smelled of dry volumes and pipe smoke. Sweetriver seemed like a temple of reason and light to me.
“It’s just like Oxford!” I kept exclaiming, to various uncomprehending stares. But if I was a farmgirl, then Sweetriver might as well be Oxford. If you closed your eyes and smelled the leaves as you scuffed along, you could certainly summon that Oxford feeling, and it seemed that the clear light of scholarship was falling over my shoulder as my roommate, Dotsy Maven, introduced herself. She was a “legacy” who told us she’d spent the summer “playing along the East Coast.” Forever after, I thought of her wearing a striped romper, bouncing a huge beach ball. Dotsy told me later that I struck her as the exemplary college girl—my hair in a thick braid, my thrift-shop shirt printed with roses, my jeans frayed just so. I smiled—I’d spent days on this outfit. It was my forged passport and if the details were right, I’d be crossing the border, leaving the old country behind. I had real Tampax, too, and Clairol shampoo instead of the stuff Ma mixed at home out of dish detergent and raw egg.
It was almost my turn to speak. Horrors—were my parents modernists or not? Should I try to sketch the farm story? But no, they’d guess that I came from people who couldn’t manage their own lives. My heart slammed and my mind raced ahead, deciding what to say so as to appear able and authentic. I imagined that when I opened my mouth some shameful broken language would come out and they’d all know how pathetic I was.
I was saved, though, when the guy sitting beside me refused to speak at all.
He sat silent, with enormous watching eyes, as if he’d been sent from another planet to observe us and record on an inner videotape examples of the earthling notion that one might sketch oneself out in a few sentences—that one had some idea who one was. Now, even Olney opened an eye. The refuser’s eyes, set in a long, skeptical face, became ever more comically baleful as we tried to prod him into speaking, or at least to guess his name. I looked at him in amazement, feeling he must be my kin. Finally Dotsy asked him if he would let us see his driver’s license. Still silent, he produced it: his name was Sidney Brown, he was from Chicago, his height was six foot one, his eyes (which looked more like discs) were blue.
The first full sentence he spoke to me came months later, quite uninflected.
“Beatrice, I’ve been thinking that I’d like to make love to you.”
We were sitting in a bar, among a hundred other students, and I turned to him with awed tenderness, his face suddenly so clear in my sight while all the others blurred. Me? He wanted me, this strange, strange man? But of course—he recognized our common peculiarity! I felt tears stinging—I had dreamed this would happen.
I reached out and touched his cheek. I knew I couldn’t hesitate, that even a split second of reluctance might make the difference between catching the great outwardly bound train I’d been waiting for, and being left on the platform alone. On the drive up to Sweetriver my mother (after caustically warning my father not to mistake a paper bag on the roadside for a rabbit) had undertaken, for the first time ever, to advise me: “Don’t dream yourself in love,” she said, “with a man you don’t know. Don’t confuse sex with love; men don’t think that way.” My father, who was negotiating a hairpin turn, did not show that he’d heard this. There was real fear in her voice—she couldn’t let my life go down like hers, but this flash of maternal protectiveness threw the rest of our relationship into relief: my God, if I went around taking her advice, it would be the end of me. What could she—who desperately craved the love of a man she utterly despised—possibly know?
Desire is a pure honest feeling and deserves to be acted on, no less than tenderness or sympathy or fear, I thought, lofty as a Salvation Army volunteer.
I’d long since learned to live by my own instinct, and when Sid made that stark proposition, I knew I should go with him. He too lived outside the ordinary bounds, so we could skip the formalities and plunge straight into deepest communion. We ran back to the dorm, along the dark streets of the town, past porches whose dry leaves still clung on their vines, rustling in the November wind. Yes, the time of warmth was coming, we would pull up the covers and whisper in the dark. Up the stairs to his room, where we faced each other and something lurched in me: finally, I was going to be transformed. I’d yearned for this, worked toward it, studying that I might give myself to it more fully—it being the joyful, shocking envelopment in love. I unbuttoned his shirt, feeling I was unveiling a great painting, except that you never get to touch a painting, and if you did, the painting wouldn’t give up all its deepest secrets in one soft sound of longing and satisfaction, you wouldn’t want to fall to your knees with gratitude for being allowed the enormous power of touch.
“I love you,” I said. I couldn’t help this, it just broke out of my throat. I wondered if he’d think I was crazy, seeing as I barely knew him. But the way he’d looked at me—our understanding was so deep, he’d know just what I meant by this declaration. No, I thought, still addressing my mother, I did know Sid, had always known him.
* * *
HE HAD a scalp problem; the smell of coal-tar shampoo became my favorite scent. He was studying classical guitar—his fingers moved with spidery precision as he worked the same piece,
Bach’s Chaconne, again and again, playing till he hit a wrong note, starting over. Because he said so little, the music seemed to speak of all the things he wanted, even his love for me. I knew, from knowing my mother, that love doesn’t necessarily accomplish anything. And I prided myself on understanding that a man can hardly bear to feel tenderness, that he has to turn it to aggression.… and so, comes sex. With every thrust, I felt it, his wonder in me, and when he came it was his soul spilling into mine. Then I’d fall asleep while he practiced the Chaconne. In my dreams I could exert a force to guide him through the difficult passages, so he’d come out the other side of the music into my arms.
His dreams were specters: small, sticky creatures spoke to him in tongues, he broke into a cold sweat and woke up screaming. Soon I’d absorbed these fears and would wake just before he did, screaming so loudly myself that I’d short-circuit his dream. A few months after we started sleeping together, we’d forgotten which of us first suffered from night terrors.
One night I went back to sleep in my own bed, and was awakened by the Chaconne, echoing down the hallway, note-perfect, flowing all the way through, just the way I’d always dreamed it. It was Segovia, on tape, blasting so loud it seemed Sid must be calling for me. I got up, went toward the music, found Sid wasn’t in his room. Then the piece ended and I heard, from the bathroom, a light laugh and a little splash like a fish jumping.
There he was, in the bathtub, with Cindy Crowe, the girl across the hall. It was ghastly, beyond imagining, and I stared the way I suppose a soldier would, when his own bone is suddenly laid bare. Sid had flinched back from her breast when he saw me, but kept his hand poised above it now, defiant. Their bodies had a greenish cast underwater, Cindy turned away, Sid looking me hard in the eye—had I really been so arrogant as to assume he loved me?
He was right of course—I’d never asked him for constancy. I’d thought that touch confirmed a pact between us. At home we’d kept ourselves a family by dreaming the same dream together, and I’d worked to bring myself into such accordance with Sid, to convince myself my dreams had come true with him. Now I felt a fool. I tried to speak but no—luckily, because it would have been that incomprehensible language I’d feared the day Sid saved me from speaking—grief and rage and shame. So I stood staring until Cindy pulled herself up out of the water, and, refusing to cover herself, strode away, wet and regal, down the hall. Sid’s face showed real feeling then—contempt. He pulled the plug and left me alone in the glare of the bathroom, staring into the drain.
* * *
I TRIED to bear this bravely (not the betrayal, but the shame of having been so hurt by it; everyone wondered what was wrong with me, that I was so dependent, so possessive), but as the weeks passed and Sid’s lectures (“I don’t believe you can own another person’s love…,” etc.) bore in on me, I lost heart. Twice a week I got dressed and went to Philippa’s class—I couldn’t stand to have her guess my humiliation—but otherwise, I haunted the dorm halls in my nightgown, unable to sleep or eat. When I did manage to confide in someone, it was my assigned faculty adviser, known for her feminist reconsiderations of classic works, her pleated skirts, and her long, horsy face with its large and strangely unsynchronized eyes. She was said to be living, en ménage, with two paleontologists, both uglier than she was. She flared her nostrils and asked me earnestly: “Why is sex so important to you?”
I couldn’t say. I guessed that other people, the people for whom sex wasn’t so important, just liked it when strangers touched where they were most tender. Or, maybe they weren’t so tender there? I vowed to toughen myself, become more like them. I had to, if I hoped to grow away from my family and really become part of the world. If you can’t rely on your kin, you must turn to your culture.
Wherein it was, somehow, always the first day of the rest of your life, the perfect day on which to love the one you were with. It turned out that Sid often had the recognition that he’d like to make love to this or that woman, that his declaration to me was not the amazing thing I’d taken it for, but more on the order of “Have a nice day.” Not long after Cindy Crowe in the bathtub, came a new one, a small, earnest creature with a long braid like a rat’s tail, who started most of her sentences by saying “Well, being the sensual type, I…”
I watched out the window as she and the others went along to their classes, tried a few steps to see if I could learn to walk their way. There, they were gone—I ran to the bathroom to study their cubbies, try to discover their secrets so I could imitate them. The shampoo I’d been so proud of was beneath them of course—Cindy Crowe’s shampoo showed its price in francs. Turning over her jar of Tiger balm, to try to figure out what it was, I caught my reflection in the mirror and wanted to slap that frozen, cringing face. I’d let Sid inside me—of course he’d found me out. I woke up in the middle of the night (I’d slept most of the day), looked out at the hard little stars glittering in the sky, and swore that someday I’d be like them.
“You ought to connect with someone else, Beatrice,” Sid said. “You ought to go to bed with Palomino—it would really be good for him.” Palomino was the other boyfriend of the sensuous type. He had named himself for his hair, which was waist length and bleached an odd shade of buff. The next night he let himself into my room …
“Sid said this would be good for you,” he said, applying a patchouli massage oil to my thighs. I was glad of this, as Palomino didn’t bathe—in a museum of smells, his hair would nicely represent the seventies, full as it was of incense and hashish and Red Zinger tea, and, I first thought, falafel with tahini, until I realized that was just his own natural odor. I was lost and sad and all I wanted was to curl into myself and sleep, so I came as quickly as I could, after which he finished with a few thrusts, and went, finally, away.
When he called in the morning my heart jumped, though; maybe he really liked me.
“Are you on the pill?” he asked.
“I am,” I said, proud schoolgirl.
“Is your roommate? I thought I might try her next.”
To think I’d imagined a man’s love would resolve all my troubles, to think I had been so naive. I deserved the likes of Palomino, for that stupidity. How I wished to go home, where there was no reality—I wanted my mother’s fried puffball, I wanted my own bed. It was March and the fields of narcissus across the brook would be blooming in their brilliant defiance of the spring cold. I remembered going out one morning and finding them frozen—I’d flicked one with my finger and it shattered like glass. I warmed the shards back into petals in my open palm and knelt there grieving; I hadn’t meant to wreck everything, really, no.
My schoolwork was suffering; I read whole chapters without taking them in. What was the point of reading, when the minute you shut the book, the world the author had stretched so beautifully open snapped back to its harsh, banal self? Imagine, that I’d been fool enough to believe these novels reflected something real. A guy like Henry James, who spent all day writing and all night making clever conversation, who had never married or had children or a job, was never caught in any of the webs of life … of course he saw everything in all its thousand delicate shades of meaning. He had nothing to do all day but turn one scrap of experience under the light. And I, who knew nothing, had been so stupid, I’d thought real people lived this way. I tore The Golden Bowl in half and threw it across the room.
Clearly, my midterm essay, “Fanny Assingham and Her Ilk,” would not be in on time. So I had to slouch over to Philippa’s office, where, having knocked, I stood at the door shivering, hearing her chair push back and seeing her silhouette come toward the frosted window.
“Beatrice Wolfe! A rare visitor indeed! To what do we owe such an honor?”
She stepped back to look me up and down, and didn’t like what she saw. I’d started wearing a wretched black raincoat from the Salvation Army, to hide my fifties dresses with their cabbage roses, their air of postwar fertility. I looked like a blackened tree stump in the midst of a poisoned rice paddy—
finally, in step with my age.
“Beatrice, what did I suggest, about getting some more—form-fitting—clothes? And didn’t you promise me you were going to look into some kind of pomade or something? Because the hair is—” She paused to search for a suitable adjective, but it was too late.
“Philippa…” I said, sitting down hard and covering my face with my hands, which did not prevent a tear from running down my chin and plopping onto her notes. She’d been working on her book, figuring out how all the little pieces of life fit into her overarching theory, her key to all mythologies. One of her exclamation points swelled and blurred.
“Now. Beatrice. Now…” she said, looking very badly alarmed, as if she was afraid my tears were going to wash away all her efforts, and speaking to me like the unruly student I was. “Beatrice, we must not, we must not … we … What if soldiers cried on the battlefield? Where would we be? Enslaved! And certainly if soldiers can keep from crying on a battlefield, you can manage…”
“Philippa, I love him!” I said, smearing the words together with sloppy feeling. “I need him, I’m lost without him.”
She’d had a moment to collect her thoughts, now she could interrupt with confidence. “You what? You’re “lost without him”? Beatrice, I find that very hard to believe. You weren’t lost without him two months ago, why should you be lost without him now? Listen, males spill their seed and die. That’s their purpose on earth. It’s essential that a man spread his genetic material as widely as possible. Of course you received his nightmares by telepathy! Women are born to nurture, and nurturance depends on empathy, which, at its highest intensity, becomes telepathy. But you can’t expect that in return, not from a man anyway. It’s not what they’re made for.”
The Bride of Catastrophe Page 6