We walk Central Park, the new grass a lovely pale green in the cordoned-off fields. Children funnel down the paths toward the carousel, trailed by stunned-looking parents. Neither of us speaks until we reach Sheep Meadow. “Okay,” George says. “I get the part about timing. I see that I pushed. But what was the problem with the whole world getting in your face about engagement? I mean, isn’t that supposed to be part of the fun? When everybody gets excited for you?”
“People congratulating me,” I say, “would have been fine. But not when I knew you and I weren’t working. That was unbearable. And, George, you don’t know what the wedding buzz is like for women. People all but yelling at you to drown your worries in floral arrangements. Wedding vendors vending kitsch as if it has a thing to do with love. Bridal magazines blaring: Weddings are romantic. Roses are romantic.”
As George listens, a corner of his mouth twitches, and I see he’s about to laugh at my distress. I finish, an extra edge in my mimicry: “Moons are romantic.”
With a settled expression he reaches for his belt buckle, turns around, and, in the middle of a trafficked path, in the center of Central Park, moons me.
The smell of simmering onions warms Yolanda’s apartment. In the living room she addresses me in a hurried whisper. “Would you believe it?” she says. “He’s an electrician. Or maybe an electrical engineer. One or the other.”
I set the coffee table with plasticware. “I’d believe anything. I’ve decided he’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.”
“He fixed my oven this afternoon, just took it apart and rewired it. Then he made this little diagram of what he’d done for me, and he looked up the words in the dictionary, and explained he’d been at school a long time studying it.” Yolanda’s glowing. “He has a six-year-old boy back home, and an ex-girlfriend who broke his heart—until he met me. He showed me his son’s picture. He says he’ll introduce us one day, maybe we can visit him.”
From the kitchen George laughs aloud; through the door I see him pass a beer to Chad. George says something in a broad, Canadian French, which prompts a roar of laughter from Chad—then a long, mellower-accented, bemused-sounding reply. They clink bottles.
“Santé,” says Chad.
“Santé,” George replies.
Yolanda is still whispering. “Chad says—he looked the word up and he swears this really is what he means—he says I’m vivid. And he loves it. But he thinks I work too hard at being vivid. He thinks I need to float.”
Yolanda looks so sated I think she’s going to pass out.
“He’s perfect.” She shakes her head, trying to disbelieve herself and failing. “Okay, he does have this one thing he does. I guess it’s a cultural thing. He comes to my yoga class, and during silent meditation he sings. Loud. It’s kind of beautiful, I think. But some of the other students complained that it interfered with their solitude. So the instructor—who I guess tried saying something to Chad, but she was probably so polite and Buddhist about it that the message got lost—just left me a voicemail telling me, in a polite Buddhist way, that we’ve been kicked out. I haven’t told him. I just said I’d outgrown the class and we’re going to a new studio.”
“Don’t you need to say something, in case he gets the same reaction in the new class?”
She shakes her head firmly. “No way. I made a promise to myself. I promised I’ll never tell him. I’ll make myself live with the embarrassment. This is a big city. There are plenty of yoga studios.” Beneath the light of the side-table lamp she splays the fingers of one hand, examining her manicure. “It’s good to be reminded there are things about each other we have to just accept. Isn’t it?”
I move into his place and sublet mine. There is no talk of weddings. We’re too busy learning how to argue.
I flex my fingers once more at George’s head. “I’m changing your mind,” I say, “using magic brain waves.”
He lowers his magazine. “I still think the sofa looks better on this side.”
“Maybe I willed you to say those exact words just now.”
Dropping the magazine, he springs out of his seat, hoists me on one shoulder, and lands us on the sofa. “Try it my way,” he whispers, as I stretch beneath him, lacing my fingers into his.
I shut myself in the bathroom and cry. George thinks it’s self-indulgent that I’d rather eat takeout or canned soup seven days a week than give up work time in order to trade off cooking dinner with him. But how can it be self-indulgent if I’m willing to eat cardboard pizza slices so as to have one hand free to hold a pen? If I’m not asking him to cook for me, either? I’m certain Shakespeare’s depressed stifled sister cooked gourmet meals every night. Me, I’ve read Virginia Woolf. I harbor murderous intentions toward the angel of the house.
Between the claustrophobic bathroom walls, cracked tiles swimming before me, I wipe tears and turn on the shower. As I shampoo I continue the quarrel under my breath. Winning. And shut off the water with the unsteady hope that George will be waiting for me in our bedroom; that he will not have closed himself off from me with a change of subject, a faraway expression; that he will feel it, too: that happiness can be built up, brick by brick, out of argument.
Which is—I confess it to myself in the steamed bathroom—the most Jewish idea in the history of Jewish ideas.
I wrap myself in a towel (in our bedroom he stares at the ceiling, meditating his way to a compromise) and I take a moment (he inhales steam from my shower, sighs) to let my breathing settle. With my finger I write it on the mirror: Love [sic].
The labor of becoming a couple is bewildering. But this time I choose it. And I discover this advantage to commitment: arguments get solved. You can storm out onto the fire escape if you like. But it’s a long shaky climb down, and an awkward drop to the sidewalk. And then what? Where will you sleep? At a certain point you begin to feel ridiculous out there. At a certain point you lower your head, climb back in through the window, and negotiate.
“You hardly ever let go, do you?” he says, turning to me as the cab bounces down the avenue. “You wear your mind like armor. Like you’re afraid if you’re unintellectual for too long, you might actually enjoy yourself.” And before I can respond he’s calling to the driver for a change of destination.
“I thought we were going home.”
Wrapping his arms around me, George murmurs in my ear. “We’re going to a karaoke bar. I’m not letting you back into the apartment until you’ve made an ass out of yourself in front of strangers.”
And, two beers later, I do.
Before I met this man I was perfect: I had no faults I was aware of. Now all I can do is absorb the pleasures and stings that come with being known. And conduct myself with humble, patient obstinacy—knowing that while a woman’s independence may be a hothouse flower, I am not. I will survive the jousting. So we stake out positions, compromise, draw and redraw lines. I trust George. But I don’t trust the world. And I can’t forget the first thing I learned from the month I wore an engagement ring: if you’re not careful, it represents engagement not only with the man you love, but with the world—with its propriety obsessions, its taboos, its hysterias. A step not to be taken lightly.
But then there’s the second thing I learned: that that ring represented an extraordinary invitation—to stop watching the mess of human desire from the shoreline.
“Halt!” shout the feminist police. The squadron crests the hill and stops, horses chafing. “Do you have a permit for that compromise?”
“It’s just a small concession,” I explain, “about how often I cook dinner.”
“No woman should ever feel obligated to be domestic,” calls the lead officer, her cheeks glowing from the wind. “Just say no.” She wheels her horse and, bright standard fluttering, squadron following, gallops off.
Feminism taught me how to critique the world, but not how to live in it. Relationships are sacrifice, my aunt Rona mentions casually at the end of a phone conversation; and I set down the receiver and gl
are at my office bookcase, outraged: no one in years of women’s studies colloquia ever mentioned this. You cannot mention feminism and voluntary personal sacrifice in the same sentence. It’s against the law. Feminism has been too busy rebounding from millennia of oppression and establishing our right to be all we can be to acknowledge that every human being—every human being who wants to live in relationship to others—gives up some portion of her wide-open vista.
Which may not be feminism’s fault. But it’s time to update the model.
On lunch break at the American Women Writers’ symposium I overhear two senior English majors discussing Frances Newman. “She was amazing,” says one of them, dipping a piece of celery into creamy dressing. “Did you know that she never gave herself to anyone? She just lived for herself—for her writing. She made a feminist choice.”
Reaching for the vegetable platter, I chide the two gently. “There’s no such thing as a feminist choice,” I say. “That’s redundant. Feminism means having a choice. And feminism doesn’t care which choices you make, either. Just that you have them. The point has never been to establish some principled refusal to give yourself to another human being. The point is to make sure you can give yourself—or not give yourself—of your free will.” The two listen warily, their faces set in that impassive expression students use to rebuff overenthusiastic professors. “Feminism has nothing against relationships,” I persist, “even those with actual men.” I dunk a slice of pepper into the dressing. “We get to talk about love too, you know.”
One of the students looks indignant. The other relieved.
Weeks pass. Two walls have dropped from between us: pride and justice. It no longer matters who was right. The Hippocratic oath has no place here—do no harm is the wrong standard for love. Everyone does harm. Now George and I have new problems to face together. George’s search for a well-paying, conscience-satisfying job. Elizabeth’s troubled progress. George’s father’s continuing uneven health. My own parents’ awkwardness as they re-embrace George: awkwardness fueled, I understand, by their love for their only child—a love I know is real, though inaccessible to me.
“Don’t take the SchoolNet job if it’s not right,” I say to George as I pull a Mrs. Hale’s Presto Chicken Pie out of the oven. “I can swing us for a few months. Find the job you want.”
“How will I pay you back?”
I shut the oven. “We’ll put it on our thirty-year to-do list. Let’s make a thirty-year to-do list.”
George nods. Then he nods again. He leaves the kitchen for a moment, then returns. He stands opposite me. “We’ll work through our differences,” he says. “But while we’re working through them—because I expect that may take thirty years, or fifty, if we’re lucky—will you?”
The ring glimmers from his palm. I slip it onto my finger.
“I always loved this ring,” I say.
George folds my hand in both of his. His voice is deliberate; his eyes are a bright brown, and wonderfully still. “Please,” he enunciates. “This time, keep it on.”
Slowly I nod. We look, together, at the ring on my finger. It’s the sign of a beginning.
As is the courthouse wedding we plan. Thirty guests. Dinner at our favorite Italian restaurant. Tulips. George will convert because it’s important to him. We’ll go to synagogue for holidays, listen to the sermons, hash them over at home. The prospect of marriage, to my surprise, has transformed while my back was turned. It’s no longer a threat. Marriage is a tool for our protection. An arrangement designed for the express purpose of making sure we hang in there while doing the necessary work. And this time it’s for the two of us—nobody else. No gifts, thank you kindly.
“The important thing,” says the hawk-eyed matron pairing socks at the Laundromat, “isn’t whether two people can find each other. That’s hormones, and the thrill of the unknown. Got nothing to do with nothing. The important thing is whether, after you lose each other, which you will”—she shakes a menacing finger—“you can find each other again.”
I set my hands on her shoulders and look straight into her piercing eyes. “Thank you,” I say.
My last lecture concludes with an overview of contemporary literary trends and a meditation on their influences on journalism, Hollywood, Hallmark cards, and the White House’s PR machinery. When I’ve finished, there is a surge of applause. I don’t take it to heart. I haven’t yet issued final grades, and there are several students in the hall who wouldn’t be past hoping such an expression of good will might be reciprocated. I organize my papers at the podium, wave curt thanks to the students, and wait for the hall to empty. The applause goes on, long enough to make me uncomfortable. I look at my hands, at the clock, and finally back up at the clapping students. I imagine their life goals flittering in the air like newly hatched moths.
I pack my office, rejecting the temptation to wait until evening to haul the book boxes to the elevator. I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. I work with the windows open, admitting a spring breeze that makes everything—even the stale departmental air—smell newly woken.
Eileen has settled on the edge of her desk to survey my progress. She nods approvingly each time I huff past her with a large book box. “I’ve seen them come and go here, love,” she says. “And now, now you’re leaving.”
I carry my box toward the elevator.
With a wicked lilt, Eileen continues. “And some people don’t deserve to have their secrets kept anyway.”
I kneel stiffly, tipping the box onto my thigh and from there onto the carpet beside two identical boxes. When George arrives at six we’ll load his car. Together we’ll bear my academic life along trafficked side streets to my new office: a bright airy Hudson Street room with a view of brownstone rooftops. “I don’t think I want to know,” I tell Eileen. “No offense.”
“As if I believe that. Now”—she glances exaggeratedly around to confirm that we’re alone in the reception area—“why do you think Steven took a year off from Oxford to come here?”
I have no patience for riddles of a faculty that’s ejected me. But before I can turn away I know the answer.
“He and Joanne met at the MLA conference two years ago,” says Eileen. She giggles. “He said her passion rocked his world. Can you imagine it? I guess some people think arrogance is attractive.”
Brushing away the distaste that’s since overlaid the image, I recall Joanne at her lectern in the shadowy light shedding from the screen. The soaring vaults of an anonymous sixteenth-century architect behind her. The ocean of uncertain faces before. In a ringing voice she revealed it to them: earth and firmament, error and luster. Vanity, death, mighty love. She was, in her conviction, stunning. As Steven doubtless saw. Their meeting must have felt like gravity.
Eileen stage-whispers from the edge of her desk. “After a year of visits they decided to try living on the same side of the ocean. They made the plan last March, but by summer they were through—just before her diagnosis.” Eileen shakes her head with an expression that falls short of sorrowful. “Steven decided to stick it out here and be civil, and help Joanne if he could. Of course she didn’t let him—she barely spoke to him all year, even though he went to all those horrible meetings for her. Wounded pride. God knows why she never cut the cord and took him off her little faculty-meeting e-mail list. The sicker she got the nastier things got. I don’t know which one hates the other more now.”
Looking back, it’s so obvious I’m shocked: how Steven’s participation in faculty meetings evolved from steady conspiratorial support of Joanne in September, to thin-lipped demurral by Thanksgiving, to pitched battle by December. As Steven’s solicitous encouragements replay in my head, I see the dozen ways he used my tenure candidacy as grist, provoking Joanne in a language no one else understood.
“She’s a horrid person, Joanne,” Eileen says brightly.
“Who knew about this?” I ask.
“Not a one of you,” Eileen pronounces, the enormity of her burden stilling her. It’s
a moment before she nods herself back to duty. “Except Victoria. And him.” She points toward Grub’s office. “When Steven interviewed. And we can all be sure he forgot the minute Steven told him.” Eileen crosses her arms against her bosom.
I used to think love was an extra—a spice that made life more fulfilling for some. It occurs to me now that it’s dangerous, that who has it and who loses it decides the course of the world.
I know better than to believe Eileen kept a departmental romance to herself all year. Probably she learned of it only now, from a departing Steven, who left this week for England. Probably he debriefed Eileen, after his year’s forbearance, in a burst of bitterness.
Or perhaps Joanne spilled the beans herself. I realize I don’t care. I can set Steven and Joanne’s tale down beside so many others, turn my back, and walk out of this building.
I am in my office, girding to lift the last box of books, when Joanne appears in my doorway. Scanning my emptied shelves, she speaks with studied neutrality. “Packing?”
Let Joanne flaunt triumph. My eyes belong on a bigger prize. I work the tape over the box’s top flaps.
Joanne watches in silence. When I’m finished she says, “Let me.” Brushing past me, she kneels and, with a slight stagger, lifts the solidly packed box. “Where to?” she breathes. There’s something plaintive about her expression. Yes, she’s showboating, but her gloating can’t harm me any further, and she knows it. Rather she needs to prove something, to me and to herself: that she can stare down illness.
I let her hold the box for a moment. Her arms tremble noticeably.
“There,” I say in a low voice. I point to the desktop not two feet from where she’s standing. She sets the box there with an expression of regret.
“All’s fair?” She extends her broad hand.
As she waits, her hand wavering slightly, her pale brown eyes telegraph an urgent request. It’s a request not for forgiveness but for something more: confirmation that I can see in her a colleague I recognize; that my seductive, magnanimous adversary is still alive; that Joanne Miller is something other than what illness has made her.
Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) Page 37