Unaccompanied Women

by Jane Juska

  But the fact is that Barrett, unlike nineteenth-century fictional men, in his desire to bed me did not offer security of any kind. The fact is that I was not looking for social correctness by way of a man. The fact is that I was financially independent, past childbearing, and unencumbered by those things nineteenth-century women had to do. It was myself I was not free of. I was determined in this day and age of equality between men and women to prove to myself that I could be as I assumed men were: free of sexual guilt, free of the need for fidelity, free of jealousy and envy, free of the need for love. I wanted to have sex with a man I liked. Here he was. I liked him. He was nice to me. He would help me prove that I had risen beyond—transcended, if you will—the pettiness of female neediness. I wanted to be like John, who said, “I never didn’t want to.” Never not wanting to would free me from wanting to love and be loved, from wanting someone who stayed, maybe even forever, to help me bear the cruelty of life. Besides, I had been taught to be a nice girl, to be grateful to men who were nice to me, and now, in the twenty-first century, offering this man whatever pleasure he might receive from sleeping with me seemed the liberated thing to do. At seventy, I didn’t have all that much time to get liberated. This was no time to get fussy.

  Back home once again, I go round the corner to my neighborhood movie palace to see Gloomy Sunday. In it the beautiful heroine agrees to have sex with the Nazi officer, who in return promises to save her lover from Auschwitz. After the officer finishes with her, she rises from the bed, her loathing of him and of what she has been a party to so palpable as to reach into the far corners of the movie house. But it is clear that she has lost none of her integrity, nothing of herself, in the ugly encounter, not even when she discovers the officer’s betrayal of her and her lover. I cannot get the movie out of my mind, and of course I see that in the light of her sacrifice my experience pales in significance; worse, I had no such excuse. I had no good reason to pretend to Barrett an enthusiasm I did not feel, to let him do with my privacy what he wished, to remind myself again and again that this was, after all, just casual sex. I didn’t have casual sex, I had bad sex. I had sex I didn’t want to have. There is nothing as scuzzy as lying back and letting a man go about his business, unless it’s letting him go about his business and pretending you like it. Somewhere along the way I lost the control I thought I had and gave it all to Barrett, forfeiting a friendship and my own integrity as I did. What the hell, I thought, sleeping with me can’t be that big a deal. But it was. So don’t give yourself away. Keep some for yourself. That’s not bad advice. I plan to take it.

  “Misunderstanding and separation are the natural conditions of man,” writes Katherine Ann Porter. Here we are, our whole lives, searching for understanding and connection, which in turn results in misunderstanding and separation. Round and round we go. What a struggle, and how brave—and foolish—we are to keep at it.

  CHAPTER 16

  the 92nd street y: something for everyone

  And learn upon these narrow beds

  To sleep in spite of sea

  —from ARCHIBALD MACLEISH’S “Seafarer”

  JOHN PHONES FROM his woodsy hideout. “I’ve taken your lesson to heart,” he says. “I’ve placed an ad in The New York Review.” I race to the library to scour the ads: Which one is John’s? He is a very, very good writer, so I cannot identify any of the ads as his because clearly he does not want me to. Several of them specify the Boston area, which is John’s bailiwick, sort of; they are well written; any one of them could be his. The next time he calls, he says, “Good lord, I don’t know if I can handle this. I’ve already got more than fifty letters. You would be amazed at how many women have convinced themselves that Cleveland and Saint Louis and Chicago are in the “Boston area,” and are willing to travel huge distances to get to it.” No, I wouldn’t be amazed. I am the last person who would be amazed at a woman’s eagerness to take extreme measures to have sex with a man she might like. And, knowing John, he would be worth the trip.

  Of course, I am minutely jealous. At seventy-two John shows no signs of a slowdown: He is perfectly happy to make love with the lights off; on is fine, too; clothed or not; summer, winter, or fall; springtime, too. During one of my visits to his lair—unclothed, springtime, lights off—I ask him why he had answered my ad. Another nice thing about John is that after the deed is done he does not roll over and go to sleep. So he plumps the pillows up under our heads and answers my question with alacrity. “Three reasons,” he says. “First, I thought the sex would be good. Second, there were no strings attached. Third, the pillow talk promised to be terrific.” He got all the right answers! So why aren’t I enough? “You are plenty,” he explains, “just not close enough. You’re not going to move here and I’m not going to move there, so . . .” Just like me. He wants the same thing I want: a life made richer by another person or persons more easily accessible, though as yet undiscovered. He wants to have a lot of sex with a woman he likes who does not live on the opposite side of the country. While I understand completely, I fear for the future of my sex life: Given John’s charms in and out of the bedroom, he will have no trouble finding the woman he wants—some intelligent, attractive, cultured, independent female who asks of him only one thing: fidelity. Hello, Ms. X; good-bye, Jane.

  The geography of my love life seems to be shrinking. But the interest in my love life is expanding: People all over the country want to know how to do it, how to inspire one’s life with the juices of desire. Even the 92nd Street Y in New York City wonders. They call me up and invite me over. Would it be possible for me to come to New York? You betcha. Finally I am going to play the Palace.

  The 92nd Street Y is a fabled New York institution. Founded in 1874 for the purposes of bringing young Hebrew men together, it has grown. Now, in one way or another, it addresses everything missing from your life. Physically unfit? Sign up for Pumping the Prime or Flamenco. Sexually deprived? Sign up for Moving from Serial Dating to Lasting Love or How to Make Anyone Fall Madly in Love with You! Politically ignorant? Go listen to David Brooks or Maureen Dowd or Bill Moyers. Culturally starved? There’s Dick Hyman on piano, Yo-Yo Ma on cello; there’s drawing at the Met, collage on the East Side, Kabbalah on the West Side, gallery tours all round the town.

  For me it is the writers who have read their work at the 92nd Street Y that make it magical: Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Langston Hughes, and now Joyce Carol Oates, and . . . Yes, I could go on. At the 92nd Street Y, I will sit on the shoulders of giants. Or crouch in their shadows, for I have not been asked to speak as a writer; I have been invited to share the stage with three other women over fifty who, so thinks the Y, have stored up enough liveliness to get them through old age. We are empaneled in the catalogue as Juicy Living after Fifty. The room is full.

  The panelists are: a psychoanalyst who has written many books about the goddess in us and who will suggest to the audience of almost all women hovering over fifty and beyond that they create a circle of women and light a candle for those who cannot join them; a well-regarded journalist who, after detailing her long and wonderful marriage, will tell everybody to go on long walks and don’t forget to vote; and, on my right, a onetime model, scorned by the beauty industry while still in her thirties, who will tell us do not despair, age will bring tolerance and an appreciation of things like her teenage son’s hip-hop music. At this I can no longer remain silent. I say to her, “When you reach seventy, you don’t have to listen to that junk.” As for the rest of the advice, “Don’t forget to vote” seems the most useful. I am loath to add to all this nonsense, but finally I do, more out of frustration than anything else: “Do something hard.” Had I been in the audience, I would have asked for my money back.

  Backstage I sit at a table and sign books. I am surprised when two lovely young women, in their late thirties perhaps, hand me books for signing. The woman with light hair says, “You’re the one we came to hear. I’m recently divorced and my friend here is newly widowed.” Oh, my. It is
not the New York winter that has chased the color from their cheeks; it is grief. “We were wondering what to do with our lives.”

  I am stumped. If I were braver, I would get up and put my arms around them both; maybe our very own circle of women would help ease the despair that is sucking the life out of them. But I am not brave, and besides, I sense they are here not to be hugged but for some real-life advice. Banality to the rescue: “Have you thought of going online?” I ask, and hate myself as I do. How can I suggest this, knowing as I do the disappointments, even the dangers, that await the online naïf—the veteran, too? I think back to Hannah and Genevieve and Tanya and their trials and tribulations, though all three of them came out all right in the end; nobody got murdered, not that I know of. But what am I to say here and now? These lovely young women have left their houses on a search for something to do. My suggestion back in the hall—“Do something hard”—was enough to bring them backstage. Well, going online can be hard, that’s for sure. I don’t say any of this. They do not look eager for a lecture, however brief, on the complications of Internet dating.

  “I am not the one who wanted the divorce,” says the light-haired woman. “I’m not sure I’m up to that sort of thing. Actually,” she bursts out, “I’m still in love with my husband.” The brown-haired woman, circles so deep and dark beneath her eyes, says, “My children are eight and ten, so dating would be difficult, and dating strangers, well . . .” They look at me expectantly as I murmur something inept and useless about time and how the right time will come along, and of course they look disappointed, and I stammer out something having to do with saving one’s own life, and dissolve into “Thank you for coming.” They thank me for coming and wander into the night, their shoulders a-droop on their slim young bodies.

  Sometimes just the right words come in the dead of night, when they are no longer of use to anyone, when the time and the people have passed you by and all that is left is “Darn, why didn’t I think of that then?” But later that night no such words come to me, only the wish that I had been able to summon them, whatever they might have been. For surely it is language that soothes, that heals the wounds of experience. But I remained mute, I had run out of words. There I sat, in my red jacket, looking up at these sweet young women through my bifocals, silence gaining on, and finally vanquishing, me—the writer, the one who is supposed to have words for any occasion. What a failure. And yet, in the silence of the long night to come, as I imagine these women in their grief, they are surrounded by words from family, from friends, words of consolation, of sympathy, of advice. It is likely that by the time they got themselves to the 92nd Street Y, they were not in need of words; they had heard just about enough, thank you. Maybe what they needed was just to look at me, to verify for themselves that life is a renewable resource and will not desert them forever, just for a little while.

  CHAPTER 17

  the valley of the kids

  Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

  —VLADIMIR NABOKOV

  MY LANDLADY IS birthing her baby in my front yard. See why I love New York? I pay my hotel bill, nobody kicks me out. But now here comes baby number one, and who knows where I’ll be next month? Things change when a baby comes; the world looks different when you’re a parent, it looks more crowded, the backyard gets smaller. You think about how to get rid of your renter.

  What is it with all this upheaval? Not two days ago there was a motorcycle store on my corner. Now there’s nothing. Of course, there will be something, no doubt a new parking garage. My parents lived in the same house for fifty years. I am in my fifth house, this one I don’t even own, and I’m looking for a sixth. In New York there’s stability. In New York my front yard is Central Park, my backyard an alley with a lot of dumpsters in it. It’ll be like that forever. But not here, not in Berkeley, which as long as I lived elsewhere seemed the home I yearned for and even now that I live here allows me to pretend I belong forever. An illusion.

  Part of that illusion is that we are sharing, my landlady and I: My front yard is her backyard, and on it, in my absence, there has appeared a serious contraption that looks like a teepee without its cover. One pole of the tripod is red, one is yellow, and one is purple, and on the yellow pole are little designs, like Navajo graffiti, painted in orange. From the apex of the teepee two really strong-looking rubber bands hang down, and hooked onto the ends of the bands are slings, which are red and will hold the legs of my landlady when the baby decides to come. When it comes time, she will push hard, and the baby will drop onto the grass, I guess. The baby is late. It was supposed to come last Tuesday and here it is Sunday, and my poor landlady is kind of fraught, now that even the midwife has gone home. My suspicion is that the baby peeked out, saw this contraption, and decided the hell with it, it was going to stay inside where it was safe. Or it could have gotten pissed off at the flute playing on the deck overlooking its backyard/my front yard. “Greensleeves” over and over accompanied by a lot of swaying of the flutist. She’s gone now, too. That leaves the grandmother-to-be and a sister who does the dishes. The baby’s father had to go back to work. Uh-oh, here comes a guitar. Now it’s “Moon River.”

  So I say yes to the invitation from an instructor in women’s psychology at a nearby community college. Anything to get out of my front yard, where I want to stand and yell up at the birthing room that for god’s sake, the hospital is two blocks away, and go there!

  The invitation from the college offers me the opportunity to teach the class for a day. Teach what? I have nothing whatsoever to say about the psychology of women, don’t think much about it, mostly don’t care. Long ago my mother instilled in me a disdain for women. All their talk about food and babies and lotions and laundry bored her; she preferred the company of men, where she could talk about what she truly loved: sports. Women were silly, always complaining about something: cramps, husbands, their weight, recipes gone awry. As I grew up, I preferred the company of my younger brother and his friends and ignored their sighs of resignation as I tagged along behind them when they went out into the night to commit their adolescent skulduggery. They were a pack of trouble.

  My favorite trick of theirs involved cars and took place in the days before freeways, when the fear was manageable, not amplified and magnified beyond our control by Hollywood and its special effects. Still too young for drivers’ licenses, the boys terrified those who weren’t. Uninvited, I tagged along ignoring their protests, which, by the time we reached the road, would dwindle to nothing, for they knew I was a good sport, for a girl, and would not get in their way or rat on them. They divided themselves into two groups, one group on the right side of the road, one on the left. They stood one behind the other—I hid behind a tree—waiting for a car to shine its headlights on them. When it did, the boys shouted, “Pull!” and made as if they were pulling a rope tight across the road just at the level of the headlights. Cars screeched to a halt, drivers yelled or gasped; we ran away laughing at our—okay, their—boldness. At fifteen I was too old for this, but I preferred tagging after twelve-year-old terrorists to painting my toenails and wadding my hair up in pin curls.

  Today, thanks to the words and deeds of Kate Millett, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, Helen Gurley Brown, and others, I consider myself a feminist—although Catharine MacKinnon makes me nervous and Andrea Dworkin makes me mad, though I did not wish her dead, which she is. Still, I did indeed get liberated and am now a woman who believes that we should receive equal pay for equal work and respectful attention to our humanity. On one hand I remain suspicious of college courses and departments called “women’s studies,” fearing—needlessly, I hope—that male-bashing is part of the curriculum, that literature and life will be explored through too narrow a lens. On the other hand, today I admire women who cook, sympathize with women who have cramps, and paint my toenails whenever I feel like bending down there. Still, I don’t know a damn thing about women’s psychology.

  Sensing my hesitation during o
ur phone conversation, the instructor suggests I talk about the double standard and aging. I don’t want to do that either. I am asked all the time to pontificate on sex after sixty—hell, I just got back from presenting myself as a juicy liver over fifty—and at a recent conference of women writers someone actually demanded, “Tell me something cosmic.” I suppose I could make up something about almost anything, except maybe cosmic, but I would feel a charlatan, and besides, I don’t find those topics very interesting. What I do find interesting is engaging people in conversation about topics not usually confronted in the open air of the classroom, topics like sex: like doing it, like talking about it, like arguing about it, like laughing about it. I maintained for most of my teaching career that the more incendiary the topic, the more certainly it belongs in the classroom, where the clean, clear wind of reason can cool it. And yet, do I really want to go way out there where these kids could very well ridicule me, if not worse?

  The instructor tells me on the phone, “I’ve included your book in the Collateral Reading List. Our bookstore will be fully stocked.” My gosh, she’s selling my book for me. Okay, I’ll go.

  In the intervening weeks I receive maps and instructions on how to get there and where to park, the latter being a matter of such significance that ominous consequences will befall me should I do it wrong. And then, one week before I am to journey eastward, the instructor’s e-mail announces that when she issued the invitation and placed the book on her reading list, she had not read the book. Now she had. “I am apprehensive about our meeting next week,” she writes. “Please know that my students are diverse in ethnicity, religion, and culture.” And attention span, I bet. She ends with, “Please try not to offend anyone.”