by Mary Gordon
Don't worry about what people say. When I married Frederick even his mum wouldn't come, and people would run down his first wife, thinking they were doing me a favor, and all the time they were making it worse because I'd think if she was so bloody awful why did he marry her, and then I thought if he loved her and she's so dreadful and he loves me I must be dreadful too. And I kept going around in circles and hating Frederick and myself and some poor woman whom I used to think of as a perfectly harmless, remote monster. I could scarcely get out of bed in the morning, and people thought they were being kind. You must simply shore up all your courage to be silent. That's what I have done and sometimes I am so silent I like myself a great deal, no, more than that, I admire myself and that's what I've always longed for.
You shouldn't listen to me either, I'm probably half-mad talking to babies all day. Only there's something sort of enormous and gray and cold about marriage. It's wonderful, isn't it, being a part of it? Or don't you feel that way?
5. GILLIAN
My mother had this thing about beauty, it was really very Edwardian the way she approached it. She had this absolutely tiny private income, and my father took off the absolute second I was born, and we hardly ever had any money, and my mother kept moving around saying these incredible things like “It'll be better in the next town” and “When our ship comes in” and things like that that you expect to read in some awful trashy novel.
But she was a beautiful woman and she taught me these oddly valuable things, about scent and clothes and makeup. I'm trying to be kinder to her now I'm forty. I suppose one gets some kind of perspective on things, but what I really remember is being terribly, terribly insecure all the time and frightened about money and resentful of other girls who wore smart clothes and went off to university when they weren't as smart as I was. My mother used to dress me in the most outlandish outfits as a child, velvet and lace and whatnot. I hated it in school. I was forever leaving schools and starting in new ones, and I was perpetually embarrassed.
Well, when I married for the first time, I was determined to marry someone terribly stable and serviceable. As soon as I could I bought these incredibly severe clothes, they just about had buttons on them, and I married Richard. I was eighteen. I suppose it is all too predictable to be really interesting— and we lived in this fanatically utilitarian apartment, everything was white and silver, and I couldn't imagine why I felt cold all the time. Suddenly I found myself using words like beauty and truth, et cetera, and I went out and got a job so we could buy a really super house. I spent all my time looking at wallpaper and going to auctions, and the house really was beautiful. Then I met Seymour, and he was so funny and lugubrious— I just adored it. Here was this Jewish man taking me to little cabarets. The first time we went out, he said to me, “You know, Gillian, girl singers are very important,” and I hadn't the faintest idea what he was talking about. Here was this quite famous psychologist who bought a copy of Variety— that American show-people's paper— every day, but it was very odd, the first time I met him, I thought how marvelous he'd be to live with.
And then, of course, I did a terribly unstable thing, I suppose. Shades of my mother only more so, and I divorced Richard and married Seymour. He gave all his money to his wife, and I let Richard keep everything of mine, and we started out without a penny. We slept in the car in our clothes, but we were terribly happy. So I got a job and we got another lovely house, only this was a really cheerful one, a very motherly home. Then I went back to school. I suppose it's hard for you to understand how important it would be for me: doing something on my own with my mind and speaking up and having people listen. I'd had too much sitting on the sidelines pushing the silver pheasant down the damask cloth and cradling the saltcellar while the men spoke to each other. So I told Seymour I simply had to go back to college, and he agreed with me for a while in theory, but when the time came he said to me, “What about the house?” But I was very firm, and I told him, “The house will simply be a bit less beautiful for a while.” Then he understood how important it was to me, and he stood right behind me. We didn't do much entertaining for a while, but I did very well, really, everyone was surprised. I guess everyone else was much less smart than I expected.
Then I took a job teaching secondary school, and it was a disaster, really. There were all these perfectly nice people who wanted to grow up and repair bicycles, and I was supposed to talk about Julius Caesar and the subjunctive. It was all too absurd, really. I simply cared about the books too much to do it. I suppose to be a really good teacher you have to not care about the books so. Well, one day I simply didn't go back. I suppose it was awful, but there were plenty of people who wanted the job. I didn't feel too badly about it. Going in like that every day was making me so ill.
Now I've gone back to writing. I don't know if I'm any good. I don't suppose it matters, really. It's a serious thing, and that's important. I see everyone off in the morning and I go up to my study— the window looks out on a locust tree— and I write the whole day. The hardest thing is closing the door on Seymour and the children— but I do. I close the door on being a wife. I close the door on my house and all the demands. I suppose art demands selfishness, and perhaps I'm not a great artist, so perhaps it's all ridiculous and pitiable, but in the end it isn't even important whether I'm great or not— I'm after something, myself, I suppose; isn't that terribly commonplace? Only the soul, whatever that is— whatever we call it now— gets so flung about one is always in danger of losing it, of letting it slip away unless one is really terribly careful and jealous. And so it is important really and the only answer is, whatever the outside connections, one must simply do it.
Who is right, and who is wrong? For years, I have waited for a sign, a sentence, periodic and complete. Now I begin to know there is loneliness even in this love. I begin to think of death, of solids. My friend, who is my age, is already a widow. She says that no one will talk to her about it. Everyone thinks she is tainted. They are frightened by her contact with dead flesh, as if it clung to her visibly. I should prepare for a staunch widowhood. I begin to wish for my own death, because I am happy now and vulnerable to contagion. A friend of mine who has three children tells a story about a colleague of his, a New England spinster. She noted that he had been out sick four times that winter; she had been healthy throughout. “But that is because I have a wife and three children,” he said, “and I am open to contagion.”
There is something satisfying about marriage at this time. It is the satisfaction of a dying civilization: one perfects the form, knowing it has the thrill of doom upon it. There is a craftsmanship here; I am conscious of a kind of labor. It is harder than art and more dangerous. Last night was very hot. I didn't want to wake my husband so I moved into the spare bedroom where I could thrash, guiltlessly. I fell asleep and then heard him wake, stir, and feel for me. I ran to the door of our bedroom. “You gave me a fright. I reached for you, and the bed was empty,” he said. Now I know I am not invisible. Things matter. My feet impress a solid earth. I am full of power.
The most difficult thing is my tremendous pride. To admit that there are some things I do not know is like a degrading illness. My husband tries to teach me how to use a hoe, a machete. I do not learn easily. I throw the tools at his feet and in anger I weep and kick. He knows something I do not; can I forgive him? He is tearing down a wall; he is building a fireplace. I am upstairs in the bedroom, reading, dizzy with resentment. I come down and say, “I'm going away for a few days. Until you finish this.” Then I cry and confess: I do not want to go away, but I hate it that he is demolishing and building and I am reading. It is not enough that I have made a custard and a beautiful parsley sauce for the fish. He hands me a hammer, a chisel, a saw. I am clumsy and ill with my own incapacity. When he tries to show me how to hold the saw correctly, I hit him, hard, between the shoulder blades. I have never hit another person like this; I am an only child. So he becomes the brother I was meant to hit. I make him angry. He says I should
have married someone with no skills, no achievements. What I want, he says, is unlimited power. He is right. I love him because he is powerful, because he will let me have only my fair share. Stop, he says, for I ask too much of everything. Take more, there is more here for you, I tell him, for he is used to deprivation. We are learning to be kind to one another, like siblings.
Two people in a house, what else is it? I love his shoes, his shirts. I want to embrace his knees and tell him “You are the most splendid person I have ever known.” Yet I miss my friends, the solitude of my own apartment with its plangent neuroses, the coffee cups where mold grew familiarly, the little grocery store on the corner with the charge account in my name only.
But I feel my muscles flex, grow harder, grow supple with intimacy. We are very close; I know every curve of his body; he can call to mind in a moment the pattern of my veins. He is my husband, I say slowly, swallowing a new, exotic food. Does this mean everything or nothing? I stand with him in an ancient relationship, in a ruined age, listening beyond my understanding to the warning voices, to the promise of my own substantial heart.
Acknowledgments
These stories originally appeared in the following publications: “Vision” in Antaeus;“The Deacon” in The Atlantic Monthly;“Rosecliff” in The Columbia Review;“My Podiatrist Tells Me a Story About a Boy and a Dog” in Fiction,“Conversations in Prosperity” in Glimmer Train Stories;“Bishop's House” in Harper's Magazine;“The Translator's Husband” in Ms. Magazine;“Sick in London” in New Letters;“City Life,” “Eleanor's Music,” and “Separation” in Ploughshares;“The Baby” and “Intertex-tuality” in The Recorder;“Death in Naples” in Salmagundi;“The Healing” in St Anns Review;“Storytelling” in The Threepenny Review.
“Agnes,” “Billy,” “The Dancing Party,” “Delia,” “Eileen,” “The Imagination of Disaster,” “The Magician's Wife,” “Mrs. Cassidy's Last Year,” “The Neighborhood,” “Now I Am Married,” “The Only Son of the Doctor,” “The Other Woman,” “Out of the Fray,” “Safe,” “Temporary Shelter,” “The Thorn,” “Violation,” “Watching the Tango,” and “A Writing Lesson” were originally published in Temporary Shelter by Mary Gordon (Random House Inc., New York, 1987).
Copyright © 2006 by Mary Gordon
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product
of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Gordon, Mary, [date]
[Short stories. Selections]
The stories of Mary Gordon / Mary Gordon.
p. cm.
1. Irish Americans— Fiction. I. Title.
PS3557.0669S47 2006
813′.54— dc22
2006044275
eISBN: 978-0-307-49138-1
www.anchorbooks.com
v3.0