She glanced surreptitiously at her seatmate again, then looked away, out the window. The certainty had been there a decade earlier, in the old group—one of the first consciousness-raising groups—when she and nine other women met once a week, to sit in a circle on the floor in one or another of their apartments. Those women had tried to question everything, had dared peel off each of their masks in turn, with exquisite care. The skins of an onion, yes, through to what core? But “sisters,” yes. It was in that group Julian finally had been able to whisper—bringing forth the sin with the mortification of one who had surely invented it—that she had at times faked orgasms with her husband. It was in that group Iliana had leaned across the circle and replied merrily, “Oh, you too?” It was there that Julian felt one whole fronted self crack like a plaster cast and drop from her body while the room broke into a laughter giddy with mutual relief. Recognition. Innocence. Freedom. Momentary, but a glimpse … Yet even there, in the halcyon days of honeymoon “sisterhood,” Julian had not spoken of her childhood or of Hope. Even there, when they delicately probed in that direction, she had stopped them. They needn’t know behind-the-scenes details. They needn’t further know she nursed a secret grievance that they hadn’t persisted, had settled instead for respecting her privacy.
Privacy. Julian sipped her drink and smiled to herself. Such moments as these, she thought, in airplanes, motel rooms, taxi-cabs, were the only privacy she now knew, maybe had ever known, except for those few months in that tiny walk-up apartment of her own before moving in to live with Laurence. But hadn’t she chosen a mode of living-in-public through her writing? “The personal is political” had been a Julian Travis phrase, and she felt required to live by it, as if to prove its validity. “Living out loud” had been her phrase, too, a deliberately opted-for vulnerability to the women she wanted to reach, at no small costs to the Julian-self and to those close to her who might not have chosen quite such an on-stage existence had they been consulted first.
“Celebrity Diet Tips” headlined an article in Polly Esther’s magazine. The hunger to be perceived. Wasn’t that a basic human hunger, not merely the neurotic tic of an ex-child star? But being perceived and being looked at weren’t necessarily the same. Julian suspected that she felt visible only when looked at. Didn’t that mean she couldn’t look back at, much less perceive, others accurately? “But Momma, how can I see who’s out there when the footlights are so bright?” she’d complained to Hope after her first appearance in proscenium theater. “They’re here to see you, darling; you don’t have to see them. Trust me.” Curiosity sacrificed to self-consciousness—but self-consciousness lacking a self, which in turn meant finding something external to reflect. Maybe, she shrugged to herself, that’s why I play witness, watching other women’s suffering and transformations to learn some of the shapes of my own—then putting it down in code, marks on paper. If so, then politics at least had reshaped pretense into an eerie Moebius strip—a consciousness curling back on itself, like Iliana’s “Oh, you too?”
Julian tossed down the last of her Bloody Mary and crunched a chip of ice between her teeth in unconscious imitation of Hope. I’ve changed somewhere along the way, she realized, I’ve grown greedy about what privacy I do have, moments like this—so I’m not up to initiating a one-on-one mini-CR session with my seatmate. It didn’t occur to Julian that the woman beside her might also not feel like talking. She knew her Polly Esthers too well. Is this what they call burn-out, she wondered, this lack of energy, this floating anger—at whom? Hope? Larry? Myself for being so damned sure I know what the conversation with Polly Esther would involve that I just can’t begin it? If only she could sleep …
But she knew the answer. The women’s movement had become a personal Hope Travis of her adulthood, the creature Julian felt had birthed her, saved her life, given her language. The women’s movement was the creature she loved passionately and seriously, believing it to be the last best nurturant hope for humanity. It was also the creature she served and sang and danced for, performed for, donated part of her earnings to, felt guilty about not doing enough for. It was the creature whose approval she desperately sought. It was the creature who had given her what Hope had never permitted: a mask of one’s own.
The words she spoke and wrote this time might be forged in a million disparate experiences of other women, but when Julian spoke them, they were her own. The issues might be shared or alien, slack with imprecision, macrame in correct-line thinking or taut with insight, but when she wove them, they had a Travis stitch. So all the old skills she had come to regard as superficial and treacherously addictive, the ones employed whenever she mounted a podium or handled an interviewer or faced into a camera, were this time put to a purpose larger than her own—and through that crucible the skills themselves were somehow cleansed.
Was that how it worked? she brooded: you started out thinking you were doing something for others, to find you were doing it for yourself—or the reverse? And was that a good thing or not? Certainly it had been a good thing in the old group, which she had joined claiming it was not for her own needs but to bring “those feminist women” some sobering political analysis from the Marxian New Left. Fortunately, “those feminist women” asked questions of themselves and of her that not only encompassed her missionary message but revealed it as puerile; they got to her before she got to them. Thank god for that, Julian almost muttered out loud, remembering the first time Maggie had asked her, “And, uh, where do housewives fit into your economic analysis, then?”
If the women’s movement had come to function in her life as another stage mother, at least its early years had bathed her with support the way she remembered those other early years when Hope had been plain Momma. Never had Julian laughed so hard as in the old group: the night Judy mimicked each of the male bosses at the architecture firm where she worked as a secretary, taking them on one by one with devastatingly vivid gestures and in different accents of pomposity; or the night Ivy demanded to know why scientists able to send ships up into space were unable to invent a diaphragm that could be inserted without making a woman engage in a solitary bathroom game of (greased) frisbee; or the night Andrea wondered why she had to be born female and Jewish and a Scorpio and be right in the middle of her Saturn cycle, and aware of all those burdens—only to have Miki top her, chuckling, “Try being all of that—well, at least half Jewish—and black and a lesbian. That’s me, kiddo. Isn’t that cheery?”
We came to love each other, it was that simple, Julian thought. And somewhere in the process, we came to like ourselves a little. Never had she cried so unselfconsciously as in the old group. Never, before or since, had she looked forward to a meeting. Never had she been so happily exhausted before, during, and after demonstrations: up straight through the previous night at the mimeograph machine cranking out leaflets, or arguing hoarsely over slogans to be magic-markered on pieces of cardboard strewn around the floor in a tangle of blue-jeaned sprawling women, or consuming cup after cup of black coffee in order to stay awake and do more of the same. Never, in the earlier years of the anti-war movement or the civil-rights movement, had she so felt as if she had a real people of her own.
The seatmate finished Good Housekeeping, neatly slid it into the seat-pocket in front of her, and immediately opened a copy of Family Circle.
But the old group did even more. They taught Julian new dimensions of intimacy. She learned that sometimes disloyalty wasn’t even disloyal, as when she confessed that she must be a prude because her husband’s unabashed belches and farts dismayed her—only to hear the reliable chorus of “Oh, you too?” from five other women in the group. She learned that she didn’t need to prefix an insight with “I must be crazy, but I wonder …” She learned that exposing a long-dead self could lure that self up into existence. And like every new convert to a belief in resurrection, she had longed to pass that message on. The irony was that in the passing-on process, a public self—a new one—got reconstructed.
She rubb
ed her eyelids, thinking dully that she should take out her contact lenses; the recirculating cabin air always dried out your eyes. I never should have given in to them about the media, she thought, resting her head against the seatback and closing her eyes. As the movement began to surface in the press, she had refused to be any kind of spokeswoman. Yet her whole group knew about her childhood even if no one spoke of it, and finally they tactfully admitted their awe of someone who wouldn’t be intimidated by a microphone. She countered by setting up women’s media workshops:
“Look, it’s really just building a repertoire of gimmicks. Afraid of speaking to a group of people? Well, imagine them all sitting out there not on chairs but on rows and rows of toilets, their pants down around their ankles. Who could be intimidated by that? Afraid an interviewer might lead you astray with a tricky question? Well, just side-step it, say something like ‘Interesting you should ask that, and I’ll get back to it in a minute, but what I really think is relevant is …’ Afraid of a camera? Well, look right into the lens and through it, to the woman who’s watching the program while doing her ironing or the woman seeing the picture in her morning newspaper on the bus as she rides to work, that’s who you’re really looking at.”
But it hadn’t succeeded. Her protegées still trembled with stage-fright, fell silent before a perfect-cue question, managed to be sick or busy when the moment came. So, kicking and screaming, Julian went. Kicking and screaming but with the blasé pride of the old pro, Julian went. She had sat in audiences and stood offstage too many times by then, wringing her hands with frustration over a missed chance to make a point, over a tone that lacked conviction though she knew its speaker had the conviction. She had endured the frustration of the teacher unable to correct or cover up the nervous mistakes of prize pupils. She had glimpsed the helplessness of the stage mother. At last, when they repeated that they needed her, she sprang to the call with an exultation that warmed her sisters and chilled her soul.
Then, suddenly, it was too late. There was a new persona: Julian Travis, the feminist. The exposure that shone on that face was unsettlingly familiar—and antithetical to the other exposure, the hunger to be perceived.
Privacy, she mused. And so, in an act of insanity, she was now thinking of writing about it? She shook her head violently against the seatback. The gesture of an exhibitionist, she admonished herself, not someone seeking privacy! What kind of madwoman would try to bring the behind-the-scenes—of a childhood, a marriage, a political movement—center-stage, as if reality were a rehearsal for art?
But even to pose that rhetorical question was to activate an internal dialogue between two familiar voices, resident character-actors in her own private repertory company:
“Why would you write it? To justify yourself? Poor beleaguered Jule, beset by evil nonstepmother and then by wicked nonprince and finally by starving masses of enthralled women? Come on.”
“Well, to justify them, then? The other characters? To kill them off, free them from their long-term contracts in a series gone stale? How about that one?”
“That’s a more interesting one, I’ll grant.”
“And—to understand something more about it, beyond stereotype of child star, rhetoric of politics, erosion of marriage, pretense of truth. To find something … universal in a life so peculiar? Recognize something that … recognizes itself as real?”
Julian loosened the seatbelt and fumbled at her feet for her overnight bag, fishing the writing pad from its depths. Like a neophyte possessed by her first visitation, she hurried to locate a pencil, grope for the overhead lightswitch, unhook the tray-table.
The white sheet of paper. The world before her, hers to choose.
She’d have to do it as a novel. Hadn’t Mary McCarthy once said somewhere, “Only in fiction can I tell the truth”?
But if she did it as a novel, then it would be too close to life—autobiographical, roman à clef, or godforbid “confessional.” Or else it would violate life: it would disguise. Which was the problem and always had been. The masks beneath the masks. The nested Chinese boxes. And all the while famished for the core, for one thing simply true.
She wrote at the top of the lined pad:
“A Mask of One’s Own”
Notes for a Novel:
But how could she do it? She’d been Julian, all the Julians. Now she wanted to see Julian in the third person. Change her name; something else, also genderless: Ashley or Leigh? Lesley. Shawn? Blair. No, not right, any of those. Never mind, she could keep her as Julian for now, change the names later. Write it with the real ones, fiddle the details afterward. She could try to go behind the scenes of the writing of a novel itself. Behind the proscenium, the set, the frame. Behind the Stand By We’re On The Air sign. Behind the script. Yet the opening line of the book should be in the first person. Yes, she reasoned, but I don’t want to get trapped in Julian’s first person. I’ve been her and been her.
She drew in a sharp breath, as if the realization were a sudden paper-cut along the skin: I don’t want to be her anymore.
“Excuse me … I’m sorry to interrupt you, but aren’t you Julian Travis?” the stewardess smiled above her.
Polly Esther on the aisle side looked up at the flight attendant, then over at Julian.
“I—uh, yes. I am.”
“Oh I thought so,” Cindy-from-her-lapel-name-marker chimed back. “I just knew it. I saw you on television last week, that talk show, what was it—”
“Mel Chester.”
“Mel Chester! Yes, that was it. You were talking about—uh, not equal pay for equal work but, uh—”
“Equal pay for comparable—”
“Yes, that’s it! Comparable. And you said schoolteachers and flight attendants get paid less than truckdrivers or, uh—”
“Parking-lot attendants—”
“Right! Parking-lot attendants. Because we’re mostly women.”
“Yes, well, it’s true. I—”
“And you said after all what should a society value most? Its safety and its education, or trucks and cars? I loved it.”
Julian couldn’t help but grin back at her. “Thank you. I’m glad it sounded good.” Stand By We’re On The Air.
“Well, I really didn’t want to disturb you. But I just … and there’s another thing, too. But I must be crazy …”
“No, really, it’s quite all right. I’m sure, whatever it is, you’re not crazy. What were you going to say?”
“I wondered about this before, when I saw your picture in some magazine. Is it possible? I mean, what I’m trying to say is, when I was growing up, every week just like a ritual I used to watch this TV show called ‘Family.’” Cindy began to giggle. “You couldn’t be. Could you possibly be the same little Julian Travis who was on that program?”
Julian adjusted her smile. Try to relieve this woman’s embarrassment. Remember that the idiot box can reduce us all to idiots. Remember that this woman is capable of directing the evacuation of a 747 in three minutes flat.
“Yes,” Julian nodded, “the same person.” At least try to use it constructively, then. “How nice that all this time later we’re both in the women’s movement.”
“Well, I’ll be … Oh I’m not really in … Well, yes, it’s nice. Oh and that wonderful Elizabeth Clement. Does she still—”
“She died, I’m afraid. Last year.”
“Oh what a pity … Well, anyway, sorry again if I disturbed you. It was great talking to you. Now you just buzz if I can get you anything, okay?”
Julian smiled her thanks and turned back to her tray-table, sensing the curious gaze of Polly Esther fix on her profile.
Notes for a Novel, the paper demanded.
It wasn’t even discomfiting anymore, hadn’t been since—when? Age four? It was neither embarrassing nor thrilling, not a violation or an ego-lift. It was “normal.” There was only one unsettling aspect to it, against which Julian’s reactions had gritted for years, trying to pearlize some matter lodged inside he
r shell exterior: the admiration or hostility accompanying recognition always landed just off-tilt, for the wrong reason or at the wrong time or for the wrong Julian—for the spotlit persona she followed like a shadow, the doppelgänger who had usurped her life, whose movements and convictions were more convincing than her own. Only some obscure Julian knew what she had accomplished that genuinely merited praise or warranted criticism; the heights of her secret worth, the depths of her hidden evil. And how does anyone believe in the validity of their own vantage point? Megalomaniac! she chided herself. Who are you not to be misunderstood? Every actor knows that a drunk scene, or one involving hysterics or “madness,” can be counted on to bring down the house—just as every actor knows that melodrama is child’s play and that comedy is what requires seraphic technique: nuance, timing, understatement.
Still, beyond her longing for the dross to be seen as dross and the gold gold lay her lust for “the real.” And beyond that lay the painfully gained insight that most attempts to live the real appeared to invite cries of “Fake!” What doubts she might have entertained about that had been put definitively to rest by a vulgar little man named Harry Clayburn.
He worked in the first agency she registered with to apply for any kind of basic office job, so she could get her own place and support herself free of Hope and free of Hope’s withholding of the childhood earnings.
“I know this name,” he said, looking up from her filled-in card and peering at her over smudgy bifocals.
“Uh. You do?”
“You were a child star. TV kid. Big stuff.”
“Well, that was a while ago. Look, I realize I have no office skills and no experience, but I’m willing to take whatever—”
“So, Miss Big Stuff, why’s a millionaire who got rich from doing nothing but being cute want a secretarial job, anyway?”
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