Soon she would look for another job, before they fired her from this one. Maybe then she could make four hundred. Free herself from the family purse strings. She studied Gregg shorthand at night. . .. Maybe then she could at least become a secretary.
In the evenings she fed Isabel, bathed her, and played with her. Isabel was speaking a few words now. She was a plump, fun-loving, bright child. “My sunshine, my joy,” Rosa crooned to her. The child aroused in her a deep gladness. The child was the most important thing in her life. Sometimes, overcome with reflection, she mused about what she would do if the child were to die. She felt that then there would be no reason for her to go on living. She tried to be cheerful whenever she was with the child, to be conscious of her words, her gestures, her tone of voice. “The adult is a role model,” wrote Maria Montessori. She hoped that Isabel could go to a Montessori School.
Rosa read book after book on child care and tried to put all she read into effect. She bought a tiny table and two tiny wooden Mexican chairs of bright blue, ornamented with flowers. She bought a deep blue carpet on sale for twenty-five dollars, sewed muslin curtains, and rejoiced in her cottage on Pearl Street. When it was dark, light from the street lamp, the stars, and from the moon refracted against the glass window panes, cast sparkling white shadows on the walls. A tree with waving branches merged into a darker pattern.
Everywhere she met men—through her neighbors, at stores, the post office, the library, the park.
Nick or Ron or Richard or Dave or Steve or Joe or Sam. Names and faces changed. They diverted her. They entertained her, provided touch, sex. They were phantoms. Illusions. Fool’s gold, she thought.
Occasionally she would become infatuated with one. The infatuation had an unreal quality, an obsessiveness.
She made love erratically. It depended on her impulse, on the phase of the moon, her menstrual cycle. No one can touch me. None of them can touch me, no matter how many I screw, or who I screw.
They helped her with the faulty starter on her car, gave advice on how to deal with the landlord, planed down the closet door, fixed the toilet that would not flush, bought groceries, took her out.
She hated it that she needed their help. Why had she never learned auto mechanics, plumbing, how to deal with landlords? Why did she feel so vulnerable? Whatever she did, whatever she said, somehow it was not all right.
Sometimes she saw Clyde in one of the bars or on the street, but beyond a casual greeting they had nothing more to do with each other. Shortly after she had left Antonio, while she was still living in a hotel, Clyde had squeezed her against a corner where she sat in the No Name Bar, and he had murmured, “I always wanted to have a woman wear spike heels and black lace panties when I made love to her.” She almost choked on her beer, moving away from him with shock and disgust. Through him she had ruined her marriage. Ruined it with a cheap fling.
Apart from Clyde, she sought out other friends more conscientiously than she ever had before, because she needed them. What if she were to fall ill? What if anything happened to her? Who would help her with the child?
Saturdays she shopped, cleaned and laundered, and cooked a stew of onions, garlic, carrots, celery, and Swiss chard and chicken or stewing beef. The stew could be reheated for the next four or five days. If the house was clean and in order, then her life was workable. If it were messy, disheveled, dirty, she felt as if everything would overwhelm her. Housekeeping seemed much simpler now that she was alone with Isabel.
Sundays she might drive with her lover of the moment to the Russian River or Sonoma, Stinson Beach, Mount Tamalpais, or Santa Cruz. On days when it was sunny and warm, these seemed golden days. Golden fields. Golden hills. The warm quality of the sunlight against her body.
One Sunday as Isabel nestled in her lap, she turned to look at the man who was at the steering wheel. He was dark-haired, good-looking in a rough-hewn way, and about fifteen years older than Rosa. “If only I could love him. If only I could love someone else the way I love Isabel,” thought Rosa, feeling the child’s soft hair against her chin, holding her tiny hands in her own. Isabel wore red sneakers, her very first pair. Everything about the child filled her with delight; she loved every pore of her. She was Antonio. She was part of Antonio made flesh. She was Antonio and herself made flesh. The child was Antonio redeemed, Antonio without corruption. The child was her own self, born again. It was up to her to save the child.
Sex was simple. The rest of being with a man was not. If only there were another human being she could love as simply, as deeply, as openly as she loved her child.
The man at the wheel was of Antonio’s generation, and that irritated her. She both took comfort in and rebelled against his authoritarianism.
Always there was ambivalence. . . . Always an aspect of the man—no matter which man—she feared, whether he were young or old.
She thought of Antonio in Chile. “Poor Antonio,” Eleanor had kept repeating when she was in Sausalito.
As if Antonio’s character, his drinking, his situation were all Rosa’s fault.
“How sad,” Eleanor kept saying during her visit, while Rosa began to rejoice in her new freedom. She wants me to be sad. She wants me to break down and need her, thought Rosa. But I can’t break down, because Isabel needs me too much.
The double bind. On occasion, when Rosa called in a distraught state, Eleanor would listen on the phone three thousand miles away back in Plainville. Eleanor helped in crises. Eleanor helped when the Buick broke down and needed expensive repairs, when Isabel needed things that Rosa could not buy out of her salary. Eleanor sent money or got a grandparent to send her money. But Eleanor gave poisoned doses of love.
If only I can get free of her somehow, Rosa thought. But expenses mounted. Even with her new job, even at four hundred a month, she didn’t earn enough to get by.
Maybe she was a lesbian. Maybe that was the reason she felt so torn up about men, could not trust them, feared them, felt herself at a great distance from them.
Maybe Antonio was right. Maybe she truly preferred women. She began to forget about how he had mistreated her. The tiniest incidents out of their past life together could arouse her grief. Once as she was peeling onions she thought of how he’d held her hand and, laughing, showed her how to mince an onion. He had to love her still. It was impossible that he didn’t.
If she were a lesbian, she would live it out. That would be better for the child than if she were to hold it in and express it in distorted ways.
In a spirit of desperation she went to a party for lesbians which she had seen advertised on a poster. It was held in the basement of a San Francisco church.
Women danced together. Some were young; some were not so young. Most had hair cropped very short. They wore pants and jerseys or sweaters. Many of the older ones were overweight. The linoleum floor with its slightly stale odor, the pale green walls, and the flourescent lights reminded Rosa of the mental hospital. She recalled girls there who wrote love notes to each other and who embraced secretly in corners or outside, hidden behind trees or shrubbery or walls. The doctors (mostly male) separated them whenever possible. That had outraged her. Why couldn’t a person love whom he or she pleased? But she felt out of place in this brightly lit basement. A record played—a woman singing loud, gutsy lyrics with a piano background. She danced with a girl who looked like a delicate boy, who had cropped black hair and a slender build. Afterwards they talked. Although they made tentative plans to meet again, Rosa felt ill at ease with her and with the entire group. When she thought of Tanya, remorse flooded her. She had treated Tanya shabbily. None of these women were as beautiful or alluring as Tanya.
Driving back, when she reached the toll gate of the Golden Gate Bridge, a black man with friendly eyes collected her quarter. “Hey mama, what you doin’ all alone tonight?” The timbre of his voice, with its good humor, its masculinity, warmed her.
Perhaps it was a relationship with a bisexual that she wanted.
Accordingly, she
searched through ads in the Berkeley Barb.
Through Golden Gate Park she drove with the young girl whose ad she had answered. The girl’s face was lit milky green by street lamps. She had straw-colored hair. The girl stopped the car and drew towards Rosa, put her thin lips to Rosa’s neck, throat, and mouth. Rosa felt the girl’s white leather jacket. She massaged the back of the girl’s neck and felt the smooth texture of her face.
With a shock of illumination she realized that touch was simply touch, skin was simply skin. It was the emotions one brought to the touch of skin that charged it all with electricity.
“We are sacks of skin,” Antonio once said. Skin a little rougher, a little smoother. So subtle the differences, the scents. The feel of the muscles, bones, and fat beneath the skin. The feel of the girl’s fingernails, which were long and oval and unpolished.
It shocked her to realize that the girl’s touch as well as the effort of her own caressing began to feel tedious. The touching began to bore and irritate her exactly as Antonio’s touch bored and irritated her long ago.
She wished then that she could feel the girl’s breasts, but it was impossible because of the heavy jacket over them. “Can you take the jacket off?” she asked. The girl laughed, “It’s glued on.”
A crazy fear. Perhaps the girl was a man. She had long fingers and large hands like a man’s. Rosa felt the dry hair. Perhaps it was a wig. Perhaps he was in drag.
The girl wore tight black pants. Gingerly, Rosa felt her crotch. It was a girl’s. But then she had heard of men taping their sexual organs to disguise their existence.
The girl kissed her, thrusting her tongue deep within Rosa’s mouth. They held each other close, curiously immobilized from going further, held back by fear.
Yet the girl’s voice sounded feminine.
She did not sound as if she were a man.
The panic subsided. The girl’s tongue inside her mouth, between her teeth. The girl blowing in her ear. The girl’s hand on her back.
Joanna and Les invited Rosa to dinner. They sat in the kitchen and ate soup made with kale that Joanna had grown in the garden. Joanna wore a black dress with a print apron tied around her waist.
“Your life is your business,” she said in her intense way with her thick Portuguese accent. “I know you’re not a Catholic. Otherwise I would say talk to a priest. All these boyfriends. Isabel’s too young now to be hurt, but later she’ll realize what’s going on.”
“You’re young and pretty now,” said Les, leaning back, lifting up his glass of beer, appraising her. His reddish face with its coarse features gleamed with sweat. (Once, drunk, he tried to fondle her during Joanna’s absence. Joanna complained that he showed more fondness for Isabel than for their own son.) “You got another ten years, sweetheart. After that your looks will begin to go, and men won’t chase you the way they do now.”
Did all her power rest in her youth and looks? The idea that so much hinged on her physical appearance aroused in her a profound disgust both for herself and for other human beings.
Afterwards she looked at herself in her bathroom mirror. Les was right. Of course she would age. Had she no more to offer the world than an unlined skin? In the soft light she lifted up her hair. She felt an urge to shave it off, to wear no makeup, to give away all her clothes except for one dark cotton dress. How would people respond? Then she would be down to a basic core of truth; her life would be simplified. But she needed this armor of hair and clothes and plucked eyebrows. She herself was so swayed by physical appearance. “She’s nuts, whacko, off,” they would say, jeering, if she discarded their rules.
“A nice Jewish boy, a doctor, the kind you should marry,” her father’s sisters would say. He was exceptionally tall, white, and thin, with a long beaked nose. Only he was not making love to her. He was thrusting furiously against her, and it was as though she were not there at all.
CHAPTER THIRTY
“Give me the money you owe me so I can go back to California,” said Antonio. “Remember how I helped you and Jorge?”
Francisco was chopping green onions. Sunshine streamed in through the windows of his kitchen.
“We don’t owe you any money. That was Rosa’s money,” said Francisco. He heaped the onion slices into a mound.
“I persuaded her to give it to you. Without me you would have been foutu.”
Francisco began to carve a piece of veal into thin slices, not responding to Antonio. He dipped each slice into egg batter and then rolled it in flour.
Antonio drank the rest of the wine. Jorge, who sat next to him at the wooden table, gazed at him impassively. Antonio pounded his fist on the table. “Damn you both! Francisco, I saved you when you were dying in Paris. I persuaded Rosa to give you the money for the Swiss doctors. If it hadn’t been for me, you would be dead.”
“Come now, Antonio,” said Jorge, “we appreciate what you did. We’d help you if we could.”
Antonio punched Francisco in the jaw, knocking the knife out of his hand. Francisco fell backwards against the bowl of batter, which splattered over him and onto the floor.
Jorge grabbed the knife from the floor, but Antonio snatched it from him, then held it horizontally in front of his own chest. He stroked its blade. “Bastards! Cons!” he shouted. “I could kill you both!”
He kept stroking the blade. No one said anything. Then in a calmer voice Antonio finally spoke again. “Eleanor gave me money to come to Chile and I’ve spent it. They paid me practically nothing for my articles. I can’t find a job here.”
Jorge said, “Francisco, what if we sold the antique clock?”
Antonio still stroked the knife. His eyes narrowed. His voice grew level. “What if the tax collector were to receive an anonymous letter about your farm, which has been put in your aunt’s name to avoid inheritance taxes? What about her forged signature on the original Deed of Trust? And what about the fact that you receive the rents? I remember what you tell me too clearly, my friends.”
“How much do you need?” asked Francisco.
“Twenty thousand pesos.”
Afterwards Antonio vomited into their toilet bowl. They had promised the money in three days. People were ungrateful, every one of them. He vomited until his stomach was empty, and still he felt wretched.
In the mirror he looked at the gaping hole in his mouth where his two front teeth had been. A clinic dentist had pulled the remnants of them out.
Emerdante pissoir. Cesspool of humanity, his native land where his friends were so false.
Broken. Broken. They were crucifying him. They would glorify him after he died.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Antonio returned to Sausalito. At times Rosa saw him on the street with Ruth. He seemed shabbier. He took less care of himself. He looked older and more careworn, with the unsightly gap in his front teeth. When he laughed, however, his face lit up with a devilish kind of radiance. He and Ruth lived somewhere in the hills. He had a job cooking at a restaurant on a pier. Sometimes he would bring her and Isabel tidbits he had cooked—empanadas, which were Chilean meat pastries, slices of roast beef or pieces of chicken, corn, or guacamole.
Sometimes he would take Isabel out for a short walk or car ride. (Rosa was always fearful when he took the child.) They might return with an ice-cream cone, which Isabel licked as it dribbled down her chin. Sometimes he put the child on his lap as he drove, to give her the feeling of driving a car, although she was only two.
Months ago Rosa had filed for divorce. In December the Interlocutory Decree was read by a judge in San Rafael Superior Court. Rosa shivered in the black sleeveless wool dress she had worn long ago in Paris when Jean took their photograph. Ginevra, an older woman who lived down the street and who had a child Isabel’s age, accompanied her.
Rosa was awarded the Buick, their furniture, custody of Isabel, and seventy-five dollars a month child support.
Antonio, who wore the grey flannel suit he had been married in, conferred with his lawyer. He gave her no sign o
f recognition.
Rosa’s lawyer leaned across the wooden bench, exuding a tobacco odor. “You can’t squeeze blood out of a stone,” he said. “You’ll never see a penny of that money.”
Leaving court, she wobbled on her high heels. Antonio was only twenty feet away. He stared straight ahead, not acknowledging her. Ruth nodded slightly.
She fled with Ginevra. “My . . . my . . . he’s not earning anything . . . no property to speak of. No alimony,” said Ginevra as they drove back to Sausalito. “You poor thing. You are stuck with that baby of yours.”
Rosa parked the car in front of her house. She and Ginevra walked along the muddy street to a bar at the corner of Bridgeway which was frequented mostly by workmen. “Here’s to my friend’s divorce!” said Ginevra, lifting up her glass. They sat at a tiny table, and men were crowded all around them, at the bar, at neighboring tables. Ginevra had reddish hair. Her Persian lamb coat was draped behind her. She spoke with a trace of a Southern accent. Rosa struck up a conversation with an off-duty policeman. She lost track of Ginevra.
After three Black Russians, Rosa impulsively invited the policeman home.
Isabel was at the sitter’s.
She and the policeman sat in her living room. Her head hurt as though a jagged piece of glass were embedded inside it. Only the pain held her together; the rest of her body was circling outward in dizzy spirals, molecules dispersing into space. She sat next to him on the couch. He was burly, his hair greying at the temples. Through the window they could see the grey waters of the Bay and grey sky. His hand slid over her breast and warmed her through her dress. He was warm; she was cold, although the gas heater hissed. She felt unreal, as if she were floating in a terrifying expanse. She was empty. His body, his hard muscles, his stubbled rough face gave her solidity. He kissed her lips softly, insinuatingly, making her want more and more as his hands slid beneath her buttocks and over the insides of her thighs. She lurched against him. Whenever he touched her, she felt a wonderful warmth. As he stroked her thighs, inside her clothing, she grew more and more excited. She led him to her bed. Clothing was torn off, heaped on the floor. Bare skin. Hardness. He penetrated deep inside her, thrusting against her. She grew liquid, clutched him tightly, circling around him. His tongue was in her mouth, in the hollows of her earlobes. Her headache expanded until she was a knot of pure pain seeking release.
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