“Nuns!” Philippa said to me as she passed. “They’re a bunch of nuns.”
We watched a woman in a shiny polyester shirt as she crossed the floor to the bar, looking so self-conscious she seemed to have forgotten how to walk.
“Dowdy. Aggressively dowdy,” Philippa cried. “Why?”
“Well, it’s not exactly the Champs Élysées,” I said.
“It ought to be the working-class version,” she said, taking a long and morose pull on her Scotch. “They’ve been in the factories all day. This is their chance to express themselves, and look … Honestly, I think women become lesbians to get away from sex. I am not going to be able to demonstrate hunting and gathering here tonight.”
A poignant slow song came on and the Westerners held each other like kids at a waltz lesson and box-stepped conscientiously.
“Straight out of the fifties,” Philippa said, rolling her eyes.
“It’s sweet,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, as if I had just tapped the definitive nail into some coffin. “Ready to go?”
There was a strange sort of claustrophobia in that room, the feeling that no one of real interest was ever going to walk into it, that nothing would ever change there. I felt crazily restless. What was happening back at school? Suppose Esmé had changed her mind and was sitting on Philippa’s doorstep right now, or Dotsy had gotten a buzz cut? What if Sid had finally conquered the Chaconne?
We slouched away down the stairs. Even the fluorescent glare of the pizzeria looked cheerful now.
“Is there any hope?” I asked in the car. “Is it just foolishness to even imagine some deep, whole love?”
“If it is,” she said, “everyone’s a fool.”
She sounded exhausted and resigned. “Work, you can rely on,” she said. “Love … fffft.” She sounded too tired to lecture me. I almost felt like patting her shoulder, though I knew that if there was one thing Philippa hated, it was consolation. Dissolve the grain of sand before she had the chance to make a pearl of it? Certainly not.
“There are many feelings that take the name of love, but once you give it the name, it’s no more than an idea,” she said grimly. “You have your pastoral thing—you’re infested by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Which puts you in step with the rest of the country, God knows … it’s not a bad thing. But…”
“But I’m trying to make a dream come true…” I said. “Without a wand.”
“You do expect a lot,” she said. She had too, once, and I was furious to think she’d been disappointed. Sweetriver had been one long ordeal for me—from that first day, it had been clear I would never be chic or bored enough to fit in. I wasn’t yet a modernist, and the rest of them were postmodern already. I should have realized the night I dreamed I was spooning up a revolting bowlful of Jackson Pollock (turned out to be a stomach flu) that I’d always be on the wrong side, the naive side, of everything. But Philippa had looked so closely at me, and where everyone else wanted to see how small and dull I was, in order to feel bigger and shinier himself, Philippa had looked for exact, subtle truths. There was more in her than in most people, so she had seen more in me. And a ray of her intellect had glanced off the jewel of my ambition, lying there where I’d left it so no one would guess how it mattered to me—and in that light, I saw it, possessed it again.
“I’m going to find you a girlfriend, someone really wonderful,” I said.
She checked the rearview mirror and turned. A fine rain was falling and the reflection of the stoplights ahead of us shimmered in the road. It was late and we were alone in a hopeless city, and she sounded almost wistful, as well as skeptical, as she asked, “You are?”
* * *
BACK AT Sweetriver I let myself into Sid’s room, intending to slip into bed without his noticing, and found a stranger sitting there, reading Nietzsche. He looked up, throwing his wild curls back so I saw wild eyes glittering, a mouth whose deliberate curves made him look almost cruel, and—
“Don’t tell me,” Philippa said, “You recognized your celestial twin.”
“In a word, Philippa, yes. I mean, there’s this dark-haired stranger, sitting on my bed, and he looks at me as if I’m the intruder. And with this cool, appraising look on his face too. I couldn’t let him get away with it.”
“And, you just had to go to bed with him.”
“I don’t like to be dismissed, Philippa,” I declared with a haughty wave of my cigarette holder, and settled one haunch on her desk. I sounded like Philippa herself, and this was a sound she loved to hear.
This guy whose arrogance permeated every gesture was Sid’s old friend, Ross Symkowicz, who was transferring to Sweetriver. He looked up at me, his suspicion resolving into curiosity, and I saw some question rush across his face, which was not the question he asked—
“Is there a coin laundry?”
I took him over to the basement of Arbuthnot House, helped him get his laundry in, and then …
“It just happened, Philippa, everything was so beautiful. We walked up on the woods path and the leaves are just coming out—lit from beneath—you know, birch leaves are like little fans, and they’re completely translucent, they were the tenderest green…”
She tapped her fingers: last night, we’d been world-weary and battle-scarred and everything that Troy, New York, inspired, but we’d been together. Now I was starry-eyed and she was still rooted—in her very hip and very heavy Frye boots—to the earth.
“It was the first time this year I could really smell the earth, you know what I mean, that real first day of spring? And we were just mesmerized by it, I don’t even know what happened.”
“No,” she said irritably. “Birds don’t know, bees don’t know, why should you? But don’t stop, not right there. What happened then?”
I went back and explained exactly—she didn’t want rapture, nor theory, she wanted to know how each movement led to the next. I’d slipped on a mossy stone, and he put his hand out to steady me but I caught myself. After that it was impossible not to feel what we lost by not touching each other. Something went through me, coloring every cell; the gesture was uncompleted, and it was like Sid’s Chaconne, my entire being wanted to see it fulfilled. We said not another word, for fear that speech, with its attachment to reason, would wreck it all.
“You know how it is—you get caught in this spell.”
“You do?” she inquired.
“You know what I mean,” I said, or squealed, coy as a teenaged girl. Which of course, I was—I’d forgotten.
“I mean, the moonlight, and the peepers calling, and a little splash on the surface of the pond, and you just want to throw yourself into it, become part of it somehow. Oh, Philippa, he smells so good!”
I sighed, swooning into her confidence, grateful to have the chance to go back over it all and solidify it in words. There had been the inkling, in the dark, that life was finally fulfilling its promise, sweeping me into the embrace I’d been waiting for. All that feeling I had to keep back from Sid for fear he’d hurt me again had surged toward Ross.
“Instinct took over, that’s all, and we just … Oh, Philippa, to feel him inside me, I…”
“See,” she said, “you remember. Women always remember. Think, just try.”
“Well, Philippa,” I said (with a giggle), “I wasn’t taking notes!”
“And why not?” she asked, in a parody of the stern professor.
“I was otherwise engaged,” I replied, gazing way down my nose in a parody of the sophisticated boulevardier-ess.
“Oh, Philippa, if you knew how it felt…” I went on, determined to give her a fuller, truer picture.
“With some small assistance, I might be able to form an image, partial of course, but still…”
“Making love to Sid, it’s like he’s doing some careful experiment on my body.”
“I do not find this entirely unerotic.”
“But with Ross…”
I looked over at Philippa. I was feeling awfully indiscreet.<
br />
“Yes? Complete sentences please, Beatrice!” she said. “But you might take a deep breath first. Your bosom is heaving!” She laughed, at herself—she wanted to know, and oh, how I wanted to tell her—we were girls together and any minute there would be a pillow fight. The subject of love was a kind of meal we were sharing—and Ross was a rich morsel, we couldn’t wait to suck his bones.
“Oh, he touches me like he wants to know me,” I sighed. But remembering how good it all felt, I had to remember something else. “I’m an adulteress,” I said, with stagey contrition, hoping it would sound glamorous, but no. The smell of coal-tar shampoo made me want to cry. I knew Sid and all that troubled him; I couldn’t make him suffer like I had when he hurt me. But to make love to him now was to sense the shape of some great void, which it seemed only Ross could fill.
In the light of day, Ross despised me. He couldn’t believe I’d betrayed Sid so easily, my mind didn’t have that edge he was looking for, and incidentally, my thighs were too wide. Around midnight, though, he’d forget all this and let himself into my room (I’d stopped sleeping at Sid’s, saying mine was quieter). He’d slip into bed behind me, push his hand between my thighs to pull me in, with absolute authority, as if when he touched me, he turned into a god. Everything was there between us, in silence, until morning brought his reproaches and my tears.
Sid was bound to find out. A thousand times I imagined, with the deepest satisfaction, how he would ask: Are you lovers? I’d have to confess it, and the pain in his face would prove, finally, that Ross really loved me.
But Sid refused to notice. When I mentioned Ross, he automatically reached for his guitar case and, note by careful note, he crowded us out of his mind.
I dreamed John Updike tried to kiss me, but I pushed him away.
“That’s out of character,” Philippa observed.
“Oh, he strains the rapture out of everything. He makes adultery sound like a logistical problem, he never says how you feel as if you’ll die if you can’t make everything right for them both, that you need to spend your full heart on each of them. He doesn’t say how wrong it feels, how sad you feel, and for all you’re being greedy and stealing two people’s love, you still don’t have enough. I think Ross loves me … but it’s like its a secret he keeps from himself, so I have to pretend I don’t know it either. And Updike, he was supposed to be the Great Man, I trusted him!”
* * *
LATE THAT night I woke up and saw Ross standing beside me, wearing the velvet pants I’d taken off when I went to bed.
“Très piquant,” said Philippa.
“And they fit him exactly, that’s the weird thing … I’d never have guessed we were the same size. He was standing there so proudly, like a statue of Aphrodite.”
“Wait, what statue of Aphrodite?”
“Unlike you, Philippa, I don’t have a catalogue of Aphrodite statues in my head. I mean, he looked like he had a woman’s pride, he carried himself that way.”
“Yes, of course,” she said. “Because they don’t have it, no man feels that way about his body. They know they’re lacking. A woman’s body is a vessel in which a miracle is about to happen. I mean, a child is going to grow there. It’s like being in possession of—”
“A crystal ball—”
“A volcano—”
“A nuclear reactor.”
“You can see why a man would feel sort of intimidated.”
“Yeah, I thought he was trying to get inside my skin.”
“Like one of those serial killers,” Philippa mused.
“Exactly.”
“Men focus on things, like enigmas and women. They penetrate them, figure them out, which is to say, they’re always just slightly behind us. We are, and they want to know why,” Philippa cackled happily. Above her head, Matisse was squinting—he hadn’t quite got the curve of the breast, the weight there.
“It was touching in a way. I did feel like he was trying to know me.”
“So touching … he’ll be getting out the chain saw next.”
“Okay,” I said. “I admit, when he realized I was watching him, he looked at me so coldly, it didn’t seem touching at all. It was like I’d caught him stealing.”
“I can see it exactly,” Philippa said, shaking her head. She had worked her mind into synchronicity with mine, had tried to see the same image, even feel something similar. A man works to keep apart (until you fall asleep—then he runs to the mirror to see how he looks in your clothes), but women are always divining the common stream. The relation between a man and a woman seemed to me a pageant, a feat of choreography, but I wanted real love in all its organic peculiarity.
“Oh!” I sighed. “If only he had been a woman!” Then we’d have swum away together like a pair of dolphins, been happy all our lives.
Philippa smiled …
“I mean … not a woman, a physical woman.” But the phrase “physical woman” made my cheeks blaze. “I mean, you know, just, less like a man.”
“Of course, of course,” she said, tapping her pencil. “Less like a man.”
* * *
SHE WAS in the air, she was making me dizzy. She would know just how to touch me, she’d have that sixth sense that hears more than what’s said, sees more than what’s shown. The looks exchanged by the schoolgirls or religious novices or lonely young wives in Philippa’s recommended films were rapacious and yielding at once: women have that full range of feeling, a harp with a thousand strings. Men need that music so badly! Sid and Ross had a rich source in me, but I lived in silence somehow.
I stood at my window, watching my classmates cross the common through the cold spring, and heard one of Ross’s heavily inked sheets of notebook paper slip under the door. A love note, or a threat, it might be either. I threw it on my bureau; I’d get to it later. My thesis was nearly finished, the apple blossoms were opening.…
That night I dreamed of a woman, a pink-and-white woman from whose amplitude I would take the kind of satisfaction Ross had in me. Her heavy breasts and rough nipples, her sex so luxuriously swollen, I drew my fingers through it like a pot of thick cream. I woke up and ran my hands over my own body in amazement.
“Sid,” I said. “Wake up!”
One of his eyes opened, incredulous. “What?”
“You’ve got to stop working at the guitar the way you do!” I said.
“Why?”
Because you’re wrecking the music, was what I wanted to say. “I think it’s counterproductive. I think you’re sort of—squashing the impulse, the feeling—by being so careful to follow the script.”
“It’s not a script, it’s a score,” he said into the pillow, “and it’s there to translate the music so a musician can reproduce it.”
“It’s there to suggest the feeling the composer intended,” I said, “and give you the notes and tempo, but…”
“Beatrice, I’m asleep,” he said piteously.
And I’ve been having an affair with Ross. He’s cold and critical in life, but in bed he touches me as if he were blind and could only know me that way. With you—I’m like that damned guitar.
“It’s important,” I said. “Hold it with feeling!”
He put the pillow over his head. I had to get out of there, to find the thing I’d dreamed of. I looped my Isadora scarf around my neck and rushed down the hall toward the future, and as I passed the pay phone, it began to ring.
“Clearly, you’re on a quest of some kind,” Philippa said carefully, after I reported my dream. “And these things always have an erotic component. Now you will go to your own room and sleep because we have to go over the thesis in depth tomorrow.”
* * *
THE KNOCK at my door the next evening was so tentative, no one would guess it was made by the fist of Philippa Sayres. “I just have a few suggestions here, for your final revision,” she said, and held out the recent draft of my thesis, annotated in huge red letters with remarks like: “This ought to be much more lurid,” and, “You
are missing the vampirism here.”
“Oh, God, I thought I got the vampirism in pretty well,” I said, sitting down to look the thing over, irritated to be diverted by this from my obsessive examination of the vicissitudes of love.
Philippa sat down beside me. “Beatrice,” she said suddenly, “this dream, do you think—”
“Do I think what?” I asked, stalling, because suddenly everything was crystal clear to me and every moment of my life was strung like a streetlight, leading up to this.
“Do you think that—if such a reality were to occur—do you think—?”
I had never known words to fail Philippa. Neither of us could really differentiate between thinking and talking, we just babbled along like a couple of torrents coursing into a common pool. There were times when only one of us was speaking (say, when the other was about to sneeze), and times when, having accidentally come out with the same idea in unison, we’d gasp at the spectacle of ourselves for a second before speeding on ahead. This, a real pause, was a first.
“I mean to say, you’d have gone through with it?” she said finally.
I couldn’t bear the suggestion that I didn’t have the courage for something, especially something in the way of love.
“Of course, I would have ‘gone through’ with it,” I declared. “I always follow my instincts, you know that.”
She looked down, shuffling her feet a little like a pitcher readying his curveball, and suddenly, in a voice as gruff and husky as that pitcher’s, asked: “Well, what about it? Wanna fool around?”
“Oh, Philippa—I don’t think … I’m not sure…”
I was surprised to hear myself demur, more surprised still to see my hand reach out by reflex and close around her wrist, as if she were a tuft of cotton, or bread, or cloud I was pulling off for myself, from the world of soft and beautiful and nourishing things. She was still arching an inquisitive brow and I was still shaking my head solemnly no as I sat her on my lap and kissed her.
But as our mouths met, she remembered which one of us was the teacher.
The Bride of Catastrophe Page 9