So some little bubble of deformed love must have mutated inside her and floated up to her mouth. Affection and pity. Thank you, ma’am. His jaw tightened.
“No, oh, Larry, I didn’t mean it like it sounded. ‘A dear person’—like some sort of charming acquaintance. Jesus but we can be supersensitive with each other lately.”
“Yeah, well, ‘lately’ has stretched quite a while—”
“No, no. Look, all I meant. There was—She did something else that really was hideous. It’s just that … I’d sort of put it out of my mind, didn’t want to think about it. Anyway, there was plenty else that happened. A hair-raising scene with the doctor, who wanted to know—”
“But what about Hope? What did that bitch do to you now, Julian?”
“Don’t call her that! She’s a helpless, ghastly old woman all twisted with her disease and her unlived life, Laurence! For god’s sake can’t you see it doesn’t help when you try to play the heroic prince?”
“Pardon me. For being interested in what Hope Travis-ty laid on her hapless daughter this time. Demanded money, perhaps, when she’s got it all already, thanks to your child labor? Berated you about your commie husband with workingclass dirt still under his fingernails? Or just managed to ignore—for the thousandth time—the fact that you’re a writer, a grown woman, a political leader, my wife?”
She put her hands over her ears and screamed at him, “Stop it! Have some mercy, Larry! Stop it!”
Once she’d so loved his defense of her against Hope, his intransigence. The first time he ever hung up the phone on her mother—grabbing the receiver out of Julian’s hand where she sat crying at the venom pouring through it in Hope’s voice—she had thrown herself into his arms with sheer gratitude and admiration. Julian had never hung up on Hope in her life; it was her tactic for ending an argument, one Julian neither wished to nor was able to imitate. But he, having survived the first twenty years of his life in family basic training, used to violent voices and well-aimed fists, was not intimidated. Wasn’t it for this that Julian had fled to him in the first place? Why then did the same tone of protecting her now seem merely gratuitous, devoid of human compassion?
“Is it my craziness, that you seem to be getting off on Hope’s downfall? Or is it just that I sometimes feel like the grass being trampled when the elephants fight?” she murmured, as if in answer to his unasked questions. They sat in a silence broken only by the clink of his fork against the pottery plate, his chewing. He refilled his glass again. Then he said formally,
“So what did the doctor want.”
She bit her lip.
“He wanted to discuss ‘extreme measures.’ He says her heart is strong as a horse, but you never know with a Parkinson’s patient, it could go at any moment. On the other hand, she could continue like this for years. In fact, they’ll be releasing her again on Monday. Anyway, for the record, he wanted to know did I want respirators, oxygen tents, all that stuff, in case there should ever be an emergency.” It came out flatly, like a journalist reporting on an overheard conversation in a hospital corridor.
“And what’d you tell him.”
There was another pause.
“I told him no extreme measures. Let what happens, happen.”
“That’s decent. She’ll die with dignity, thanks to you. She never lived with it.”
Julian ignored his judgment.
“I must have pronounced my decision so quickly—I’ve thought about it for months now—that Dr. Bernstein looked at me funny.” She let out a cynical laugh. “Then he said, ‘You know, Ms. Travis’—he’s very proud of being au courant, always uses ‘Ms.’—‘you know, Ms. Travis, the law itself says we have to take some measures. If your mother starts eating less, we’ll have to go to intravenous. The law reads that to do otherwise would be to starve her to death.’ As if, by implication, I was suggesting they do that. As if I was some kind of murderer.”
“Well, not notorious for their empathy, doctors,” Laurence said carefully, as he cleared away the plates and went into the kitchen. Julian trailed after him, bringing the glasses and the wine.
“Yes, well … it was most unpleasant, to say the least.”
“And then what?” He began washing the dishes.
“What do you mean? Here, let me wash those. You cooked.”
“No, I’ll do them. I mean then what? What was the next yard laid down in the wall-to-wall trauma?”
“Oh, sort of a blur, I guess. I rushed to the airport, almost missed the plane. Worked on my notes for the speech during the flight. Did some mail. Then there they were, waiting to meet me in San Francisco. Really good women, though.”
“Yeah? So then?” His voice was raised above the running water.
“Well, so then. The usual. Motel, shower, change. The dinner—with faculty women this time, all of them struggling to keep some shred of women’s studies alive despite the cutbacks. Then the speech—on battery, this one—and then the reception afterward and then the motel again and then up at six for a breakfast meeting with the women artists’ group, then the midmorning guest workshop on poetry, the rush to the airport again—and here I am.” She wound up lamely, standing in the kitchen with empty hands.
“Just garden-variety trauma, you mean.”
“Yeah,” she smiled, “garden variety. God, I’m tired, though. What happened with you while I was gone?” She yawned.
He dried his hands and strode back purposefully to wipe down the table.
“Me? Oh, nothing.”
“Well, something must have happened.”
“There were lots of calls for you. I put the messages on your desk. Oh, except the last one. It’s by the livingroom phone. Tim Monahan wants you to—”
“I don’t care about Tim Monahan.” Her hands hung helplessly at her sides. “Laurence,” she pleaded, “what did you do, think, feel? Talk to me.”
He rinsed out the sponge and dried his hands again.
“Want to go out on the roof for a while? There’s not many warm evenings left.”
“Sure, Larry. I’d like that.”
The hell you would, he thought. What you’d like is a bath and the wipeout of sleep. But you feel obligated to “communicate.” So all right we’ll “communicate.” Julian’s agenda: finish speech, autograph books, catch plane, arrive home, read mail, do telephoning, sign statements, make deadlines. Agonize over mother. Change the world. And at the very bottom of the list—usually bumped to the next day’s list because of space limitations—Have Meaningful Communication With Laurence. So why do I give it to her, he wondered. Because I’m an addict, that’s why. Because I’m as hooked on believing our marriage can still be transformed as Julian is on believing the world can still be transformed. Because I keep hoping maybe we can have just one conversation and keep Her out of it since we’d actually be hearing each other for a change.
The roof was quiet in the evening cool; even the traffic sounds seemed far away. How proud they both had been of having “made the tar bloom”—the pots, basins, window boxes, the hanging plants, the cherry tomatoes and lettuces, all the herbs—dill, parsley, marjoram, thyme, mint, rosemary, chives—and the ivy and the impatiens and his own beloved little avocado tree nurtured from a pit.
“All this has to come in soon,” he said wistfully. “Strike the set, as you’d say.”
They unrolled two tatami mats and sat down.
“I know. It’s always a shame to see it go when September comes.” She was the one waiting now, a signal of restraining her own leadership, of denying it.
Finally, he spoke. He could hardly hear his own voice.
“Me? What did I do, think, feel?” He laughed softly. “I should thank you for remembering to ask, Jule. Last on the list of ever growing priorities: your writing and the movement and your being the burdened breadwinner and now Hope again and doctors.”
There was no reply to this. There never had been.
“Me?” he went on. “Well, let’s see. I clipped an article from t
he Times. Thought maybe it’d be useful for the chapter you’re working on in the new book—some new study of long-term effects on rape victims. I wrote a nasty letter to the head of the station about his refusal to let me turn over the program to women for a month next March, in honor of International Women’s Day. I got an even nastier letter back from him. I got groceries. I got the stuff at the cleaners. I got depressed. I got drunk. I think I got a cold.”
She plucked a dead leaf from the furled morning glory nearest her.
“Aw, Lare, something’ll happen. At least it’s not as if you don’t have a platform for your political ideas—”
“Platform? Christ, Jule, a dip-shit one-hour weekly radio show on the local public radio station—at one a.m., yet. That’s a platform? So I get to ramble on about what I see happening to this country. For a few minutes here and there. Between playing jazz records like a goddamned disc jockey. All for the munificent sum of seventy-five bucks per show. A platform. Jesus.”
“You have a big following, listeners who—”
“—are insomniacs or like jazz. You should see the mail I get, down at the station. Though there’s precious little of it. Mostly they want me to play more records and shut up about politics. Especially shut up about feminism and how men have to change blah blah blah.”
“It’s not your fault, dammit, that you’re one of the few—maybe the only—man alive with such dedication to the women’s movement. And that you risk talking about that. It’s not your fault that this society is filled with sexist shitheads.”
“You get published by those sexist shitheads, I notice. And invited to lecture at their colleges. And sought out for guest shots on their talk shows. And their talk shows reach millions of people—so you reach millions of people.”
“Larry, I—”
“And I’m glad. You know that, Jule. Truly glad. I’m proud of you. It’s just that …” He trailed off.
“It’s just this bloody moment in bloody history, that’s what. It’s backlash. It’s that something crawled out from under a rock and has been crouched in the White House for almost a year calling itself Reagan. It’s that the only reason they publish me or invite me to talk is because women want to read and hear a woman speak on women’s lives. Women don’t want—understandably—to hear any more men on that particular subject. Unfortunately, men don’t want to hear about the subject at all, especially not from a turncoat male. It makes me want to throw up.”
He found himself appreciating her anger as a convincing performance.
“Funny thing, Jule,” he said slowly, “at certain levels it doesn’t really bother me. Sometimes I think that’s ’cause I just shut it out—the bothering, I mean. But mostly I think it’s because I know who I am, what I have to say, what impact I could make. If only they’d let me have some forum from which to make it. I’m not just another Abbie Hoffman or Jerry Rubin. Or even Tom Hayden.”
“At least Tom hooked himself up with an actress wife who’s successful enough to buy him a political forum. Poor Larry, you got a dud from Central Casting.” Her joke went sour and she tried to rectify it. “You’ll be remembered long after those Sixties Samurais—”
“I’d rather not be remembered admiringly as a footnote to history. I’d rather not wait for my posthumous vogue.”
“Long before that, darling. Genius, like murder, will out. Oh, Larry, Larry, what are we going to do about us,” she tried to laugh. “For me you’ll always be as you were the first moment I saw you, at that godforsaken party given by Kent whatshisname—”
“—Campbell—”
“—Campbell, that’s it. The one with the small publishing house who got so broke he was even thinking of publishing widdle pink me in a vanity edition Hope would have paid for—to my embarrassment. But he did do one good thing in his life: introduce us.” She began to build her reminiscence. “How else would your universe and mine have crossed? Me, fidgeting with insecurity among real radicals, intellectuals, poets—those dirty old and dirty young men who kept sidling up to me drooling things like ‘My dear, you needn’t write poems; you are a poem.’ And then—you. I’ll never forget it so long as I live. Them in dowdy suits and atrocity ties, and you in khakhis and a plain white T-shirt, your body slender as a Greek ephebe, leaning against the old upright piano with your pipe in one hand and a drink in the other, talking revolution.” He couldn’t stop her, and he knew she couldn’t stop herself. In the absence of a present, she was trying to seduce him toward the future via the past. “The sight of you standing there: cobalt-blue eyes, just the right kind of Leslie Howard lock of red hair falling over your forehead. The way you peered at me through narrowed eyes and swirls of pipe smoke when we were introduced.”
“‘Laurence Millman, the Red Menace,’ no doubt.”
“No doubt. Well, what undereducated hardworking adolescent-of-the-world who was secretly devouring Rosa Luxemburg wouldn’t have gone all weak at the kneesies? I remember you had just come from a year in Alabama, working in one of the earliest voter-registration drives. Way before they became chic for Northern white liberals. You talked about it. How the adrenaline was continually in your bloodstream and metallic in your mouth at every telephone ring, every knock on the door. The—what did you call it? The commonplace daily shapes of hatred.’ To me, you were everything brilliant and brave. All that stuff could certainly turn a girl’s head, you know.”
“Certainly hadn’t turned many girls’ heads before,” he smiled, admiring the effectiveness of her entertainment despite himself.
“Well, it gave me a permanent crick in the neck. Though god knows what you saw in me, through all that pinkiness.” She was fishing.
“Oh, I saw under that. Pain behind the eyes. A lot of energy. A shocking brain that knew more than you thought you knew and said more than you thought you dared. You weren’t just some upper-class princess. You kept … surprising yourself. And me. It was fun to watch. I dunno, that air of … possibility. A kind of I-can-do-it-whatever-it-is stubbornness. It fascinated me. And then you hit me like a ton of bricks—”
“With my lust for revolution,” she whispered lasciviously.
“Yeah, that’s right,” he chuckled, “with your lust for revolution. I’d never met anybody who wanted to save the world so much, except me. Certainly I never met such an unlikely candidate as you. I guess the temptation to play Svengali was overpowering.”
This time they both laughed. She leaned one elbow onto his tatami mat.
“I sure was ready and eager to play Trilby.”
But the present did exist. And the future? He stared at the silhouette of the avocado tree.
“So who’d have thought we’d wind up playing—what did that one leftist rag of a paper call us?—‘the Ball-less Wonder and the Castrating Bitch.’”
“Oh Larry, don’t think about that now. Forget them. What in hell does anybody know about anybody else, much less about any marriage? All the fine-tuned pain inflicted and exchanged in any intimate relationship—”
“You know what they’ll say, don’t you? If we ever do break up, I mean. They’ll say—”
“I know. I can list the cliché diagnoses. Who cares—”
“It Was Competition Over Their Careers.”
“Bullshit. They should know how hard you’ve fought for my work, how hard I’ve fought for yours. They should—”
“Also: That’s What Travis Gets for Having Married a Person with Oh Horrors a Penis. That would be from your movement separatist groupies, of course.”
“Larry, cut it out. That’s not fair—”
“And we can always count on the good old patriarchy itself: That’s What Befalls a Liberated Couple When He Does the Dishes and She’s Out ‘In The World.’”
“Why are we listing these idiocies?” she persisted. “You and I both know they’ll use any rift between us to bolster all the sexist, ageist, classist, ism-ist, bigotries they can muster. Gnatbrains. Since when has that stopped us?”
It was too dark for he
r to see his reaction. But he did answer, the rewarding content of his words belied by the tone of defeat in his voice.
“Helluva good reason to stay together, huh? I mean, not to give ’em the chance?”
“Sure beats explaining things.”
They sat in silence, watching a few stars trying to glimmer against the streetlit sky. Then she tried again, in a different key.
“Larry? I just want you to know … you’re not last on some mythical priority list. It’s just … Oh, I don’t know. There’s always so much to get done. And when I do ask, you sometimes act like it’s an insult. As if I were probing for you to name the latest Millman Failures or something. You should know by now I don’t ever even think of it that way.”
He groped in the night and found her hand.
“I know, Jule. See, but … the thing is, you are the one with the exciting news. Late-night meetings, urgent telephoning, trips, the thrill of political—”
“Sometimes it just feels like melodrama, Lare. You know that. Sometimes I think it’s all serial explosions triggered by a long fuse set ages ago by her.”
“Yeah, but … I mean, it was different when we could work together. Like in the anti-war movement. We were so exhilarated together, even scared shitless as we were all the time. Friends going to prison—I mean for longer than our piddly civil-disobedience jailings—or going underground or into exile to escape the Vietnam draft. But we had our own private … solidarity, just the two of us. You and me together. Getting teargassed, beat up, busted, recorded in FBI files, the works. And right through it we seemed to just—love each other so goddammed much. Was that only because we assumed we’d die any minute from some crazy shooting us during a demo?”
“Of course not. But you were the one who taught me that history moves, new contradictions surface, organizing isn’t one long glamorous siege of the Winter Palace—”
“Shit, I know those days are over. I know women had to get their own movement together. I know the Left, Old and New, fell apart in this country mostly because of the way it treated women. I know it deserved to fail apart. I know all that. I left the Left, because of that. Hell, I gave up a lot to—What I’m trying to say is there’s no way for me to follow you where you are now, more than I’m already trying to. I can’t even call myself a feminist man because that would be a rip-off, co-opting one of the few things women name themselves. I can just … play a supportive role from the sidelines. Any other involvement is instantly suspect as ‘taking over.’”
Dry Your Smile Page 14