I remember I said I was a labyrinth, a maze. (I wanted to show off how much I’d read in mythology. I was only fourteen, after all.) I said the labyrinth had a starting place and a center, but between these two was an enigma. I told her I wanted to be a writer. I’d never said that aloud before, and I was stunned to hear my own mouth put it right out there. Then I started to talk about myself as an actress—but she went directly back to the writer part.
“What kind of writer?” she asked.
I thought I’d die again. Or that I had and was now in paradise. We were off from there. It poured out of me like a flood. That I wanted to make people laugh and cry and think and change, have an effect the way I’d sometimes had as an actress, but with my own words and thoughts this time.
Barbara is one of those people who can sum up all your inarticulate gurglings in a few magical words and you know you’ve been understood.
“So,” she smiled at me. “You want to be of use.”
“Even worse,” I heard myself say. “I want to change the world. I know that sounds hopelessly fourteen.”
“Or hopefully a sign of positive evolutionary mutancy,” she shot back. “I believe it, Julian.”
And she wasn’t smiling when she said that. She believed it. She knew it. She respected it.
So what’s the use of wasting notebook pages on Barbara now? Hope managed to find reasons to dismiss her—for having committed the sin of trying to save my life. It always comes back to Hope’s power over me.
Like cutting me off from Barbara, because I loved the me I was when I was with Barbara, and I loved Barbara. Like keeping distant any friends I might have—on the rare occasions someone near my own age has wanted to be friends with a person like me. Like managing to throw up a Dead End sign about Bramwell. For fear of what? That two teenage prodigies (except he was one and I’m really not) would fall in frenzied mouth-frothing love with each other and screw night and day and get me pregnant? When he has to sit at that piano of his and practice a minimum six hours a day in between his tutor and homework and concert tours and things that make him as disgusted with his life as I am with mine?
She encouraged it at first, like she always does. The night we met, both of us headliners at a benefit for the New York City Youth Scholarship Fund, it was Hope who invited Bramwell and his mother over for coffee and snacks afterward. When they left, she and I giggled together about how cute he was. When he came to lunch the following Saturday, I had planned to cook something but she took us both out to the Japanese restaurant around the corner. She got tickets for her and me for his next concert at Carnegie Recital Hall. She told my press agent about it and there was an “item” in Leonard Lyons’ column about the two “youthful talents” being seen around town together—which made me want to shrivel up with embarrassment. But she let us be friends.
It was only when he and I started to be friends that she changed. Whenever I saw him, she’d ask me, sort of “girlfriend to girlfriend,” how it was going, what had we done, what had we talked about. But I didn’t want to tell her every detail. Some of the things we discussed were private. I suppose that was the kiss of death. She started sniping about him: he was too full of himself, his career wasn’t going right, why didn’t he take me to an opening night on Broadway where we’d be seen and it would help both our careers. She and I started to fight about it. Then he called and told me that she’d called his mother and told her she thought it was best “if the kids gave each other a rest because they’re both so young and shouldn’t monopolize each other’s time.” His mother was angry about that but what could she do, so she told him, and what could he do? There was nothing at all I could do.
I really loved Bram. Sure, probably I was in love with him, too. At least I think. It’s very hard being a teenager, because you think and feel everything strongly and at the same time everyone is telling you that you only believe you’re in love, you only think you’re depressed, you only imagine you’re confused. (To me in particular this feels like Charles Boyer secretly turning the gas lights up and down in order to drive Ingrid Bergman daffy.) Also, you would give anything in your adolescent life not to be a sophomoric “teenager.” Which in fact you are. Disgusting state. So the more you try not to be all those things the more you feel yourself being and doing them. Arrrggghhhhh!!
I’d give anything to be able to peel me off myself. Then I get frightened that this is the kind of thing people who commit suicide say. But I want to live, not die. It’s almost a surprise that I look forward to the rest of my life.
This time I want to pick up on what I was writing about Bram. Because he really was wonderful and gorgeous and I’ve never dared say or write that to anyone—definitely not him, certainly not Hope.
I’ll try to describe him. That’s good practice for being a writer. He had (well, he still has, I suppose, even though she managed to put him into the past tense as far as it concerned me) he has dark blondish hair, the color of old brass, and it curls a little at the base of his neck. He has brown eyes, but not like mine; his are glinted with amber flecks and they just take your breath away when he looks (looked) at you. He’s got this divine chin. And when he sits down at a piano and rips off a Bach prelude or lets loose with a Chopin ballade, you might as well swoon. The thing is, he was only a year older than me (still is, dumbbell), but even at seventeen he had, not just sophistication, but maturity. He’d been concertizing since age five, playing classical music. Not a grinning, shuffling kid who sweethearted her way through one vomitously darling part after another, who got nonalcoholic drinks at fancy restaurants in New York named after her the way restaurants served “Shirley Temple cocktails” in Hollywood. Bram at least had been himself—even if he was put on display. But he wasn’t pleased with himself, either. Because all he wanted to do was compose, not perform. He wrote wonderful music, too. He worried that it was “derivative,” the way I hate the idea that I have to trudge through miles of clichés to reach what Barbara called “one’s own unique voice” on the page. But to me, his music sounded the way I want my words to sound, lyrical and powerful and inevitable and surprising all at the same time.
I wish I had slept with Bram. (Hope better NEVER find this notebook!) Frankly, I’m so tired of being a virgin I could screech it from a broadcasting transmitter. And it would’ve been just lovely if Bram and I had been the first ones for each other. I just bet he was a virgin, too, though of course we never talked about that. But we talked about almost everything else. Music and composers and books and how it felt to get a standing ovation and how putrid most tutors are and how it must feel to go to a regular highschool and what hell it is to go on tour once you get over the excitement, and how you have no friends your own age. And about the mixed-up love and fear and hatred you feel for your parents, though in my case it was parent singular.*
Most of all Bram understood how it feels to be a child playing at being a child. How they expect that indignity of you as well, and how scared you are they’ll reject you if you’re not convincing.
It’s the reason I intend never to have a child. I think it’s vicious to grasp someone’s life and mould it to your own liking.
But I will marry.
She could never get a man to stay with her. I will, by god.
She could never imagine herself not being a mother (so she says). I can’t imagine myself being one.
Take that, beloved enemy my mother. We’re utterly different, you and I. Exact opposites.
All day today I’ve been wondering how I can be so petty in my feelings toward Hope. Sometimes I almost take a perverse pleasure in her obstructing me, as if that gave me more ammunition for eventual vengeance, as if I were storing it up to explode in one blast strong enough to fling me free of her. Eventually she’ll die and I’ll be left alive, the stronger even if only by default.
My god, what a terrible thing to think, and to write down, about your own mother! I must be sick.
Re-reading what I wrote yesterday makes me realize all over ag
ain how creepy it is that I came out of her body. I don’t feel as if I’m in my own, but I know I was in hers. I wash me, dress me, feed me. I urinate and defecate. But where I really live is inside my head. I’ve never once cared beans for sports or athletic stuff, I guess. I do masturbate. The psychology books seem divided on whether that’s good or not. Anyway, that’s one thing I do do down in my body. Of course, never having had a damned room of my own, even here in the long-promised holy land of a Sutton Place apartment, I learned long ago how to masturbate real fast, in the bathroom. I must be the fastest hand in the East. Door locked, sink water running, zip bang whoosh three minutes flat. Then flush as if you’d used the toilet, and emerge (not even breathing heavily) before she can ask why the door is locked or say what are you doing in there that’s taking so long don’t you know reading on the toilet will give you piles.
Somehow it’s all connected to the way I feel about my body. It’s short, short-waisted, too. Small-boned, but tending toward the plump. Like hers. Yet without her good features—even teeth, pale skin, large eyes.
I make me sick. Breasts too big (and have been since I was fourteen; they had to use binders to flatten them for certain roles so I could look younger). Nose too large. Eyes too small. Hair thin and given to stringiness, though I did win the Battle of the Blonde and got her to let me return to my own color—which is, I have to confess, a revolting mousey brown. Ick. But I’m stuck with the principle of the thing. My face is still baby-fat round. Yuchk. Barbara said all teenage women (she actually said women) felt this way about their bodies—too tall or short or fat or thin—and that I was quite different from Hope and should have compassion on myself and give myself time.
Well, Barbara’s gone and Hope’s still here.
And face it, Julian. Even if it was with money you earned, Hope paid Barbara to be your tutor and your friend, as Hope so delicately reminded you. When the payment stopped, the visits stopped. That day I ran into Barbara by chance in the public library I was afraid I might start crying. But I used to be able to tell her things I’d never uttered aloud to anybody, so this time, too, I came right out and said it:
“Why didn’t you ever call or write or anything, Barbara? It’s been six months almost.”
For the first time ever, she didn’t look me right in the eye. She fiddled with her pinky ring. Then she did look me in the eye.
“Julian. I respect you. I loved … teaching you, working with you. You’re a remarkable young person.”
It was so good to hear. I had to clench my jaw to stop the lump in my throat.
“Couldn’t we still—I don’t mean you should tutor me or anything, certainly not for free. But just … I thought we were friends.”
“It’s not for me to come between you and your mother. She loves you and wants only what she believes is best for you.”
“You mean if you and I went on being friends, it might get me into hot water with Hope? I wouldn’t care, Barbara. Honest. I’m already in hot water with her most of the time. And I really miss—”
“I mean that if you and I were to be friends it would get me into hot water, as you put it, with your mother. I can’t afford that. I’m sorry.”
“You mean she would try one of those ominous threats of hers? Like saying you should lose your tutoring license because you didn’t challenge me enough or some baloney like that? She would never really—”
“I mean she could … Yes, something like that.”
I felt panicky. I just couldn’t let her disappear from my life again. I started babbling.
“Barbara, look, I could explain to her,” I said. “Maybe if she understood what talking with you means to me, that I miss it so. There’s nobody … I mean, literature and art and politics and … even the music you introduced me to. I mean, Bach. I’ve been trying to write sonnets, Barbara. Petrarchan and Shakespearean both. I’ve been sending them out to the little poetry magazines. I’ve been reading Karen Horney’s psychological books, like you suggested. I joined the NAACP and I went to a memorial rally for Hiroshima last August. I’m trying to get out of acting altogether. I—Barbara, I—”
“Julian. Oh Julian,” was all she said.
Then I got embarrassed, like some nagging kid. So we just stood there and didn’t say anything. Then she cleared her throat and looked at me again.
“There are some things I can’t … I think that your mother misunderstood the way I worked with you as your tutor. I think anything you would say to her to explain differently might only confirm her misunderstanding. And I’m afraid that her misunderstanding is profound.”
“But I understand. I’m a separate person from her. Maybe we wouldn’t even have to tell her? I understand—”
“Not everything,” she cut in, with that little half-smile of hers she used to wear when asking me things like “So you feel Sophocles telegraphs his endings in advance?”
“Well, of course not every—”
“There are some things you don’t understand that I can’t teach you. For my own reasons. Not even because of Hope.”
I certainly didn’t understand. I still don’t. But that day I just stood there feeling like I’d been left behind without even a map to help me catch up. All I could manage to say was,
“I guess that’s that. I hope you enjoy working with your other students, Barbara. I envy them. I loathe the tutor I have now. You wouldn’t believe how revolting he—”
“I have to go, Julian, I’m late. Forgive me.”
“Sure, sure. I have to go, too. Well …”
“I’m glad we ran into each other. I think about you often.”
“Oh well, don’t bother. I know how busy you are and … I am, too. Actually, my new tutor keeps me hopping with assignments, so I’m really very stimulated. I’m just fine.” I knew she could see right through me but I couldn’t help myself.
We said goodbye and started walking in different directions. Then I heard my name and I turned around.
“Julian,” she called, “send me a signed copy of your first published book someday? I’ll buy all the rest of them, one by one as they come out, myself.”
Then she waved and walked away.
So that was it. And I still don’t understand. But I have to face it. It’s been over a year now, with no word. In Hope’s lovingly brutal phrase: “She dropped you, dear.”
Well, Barbara left me something, anyway. I can retreat into my brain—away from Hope and Hope’s body, my life and my body, this showy apartment and the embroidery of lies we live with here. If I had a room of my own! (Virginia, how right you were.) Then I think how Jane Austen wrote at the kitchen table while running her father’s parsonage, so that’s no excuse. Hope, naturally, always points out to me (and everyone else) how well off I am. I suppose I am. People are starving. But my being well off isn’t of any use to me, so what’s the good of it?
I get these depressed fits of laziness where I don’t want to do a thing around the apartment, especially since it’s her home, not mine. Then there are my weird surges of housework flurry, when I feel I can’t bear the disorder anymore or her indifference to it. So I attack the kitchen. It drives me crazy how she never washes a pot or pan properly. What’s she got against kitchen utensils, anyway? She’s a lousy cook (her lamb chops always are so well done they bounce on your plate when you try to cut them, and her vegetables are so overcooked that whether they start out red, yellow, or green, they end up a uniform gray). Consequently, I’m a pretty good cook. On the other hand, she’s very skillful with a needle (oh the ghosts of those organdies!), so I refuse to learn to sew.
Sometimes I make a foray on what I’ve named The Ironing Closet. The Ironing Closet is an otherwise ordinary closet into which Hope stuffs the clean laundry she insists one of us do at the building’s free laundromat machines in the basement. It’s so like her—to spend tons of money on this apartment but not give me a room of my own (and what about a room of her own?); to scrimp by not sending stuff to a laundry but then leave it indefini
tely, clean but scrunched up, in that closet. So when you open the door, blouses, towels, underwear, lacy placemats, all come fluttering down on your head. She hates ironing but doesn’t like me to do it. Maybe she thinks I’ll burn something, like my precious commodity self. Yet she procrastinates doing it, so there always are washed but totally unwearable clothes piling up until there’s a fight and she sighs like a martyr and does the ironing.
I am such a petty person!
Today I had to miss the class on Provençal poetry I’ve been attending (non-matriculating of course) at Columbia. Why? Because there was no other time in the world except those three hours for us to tape this cankerous, suppurative “public service” commercial for U.S. Savings Bonds. (I’ve been using the thesaurus, like Barbara said, and it really does expand your adjectives). Anyway, the Ideal American Girl, now Ideal American Teenager (doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, doesn’t date, doesn’t swear, doesn’t EVER revolt, doesn’t LIVE) had to tell the television audience how super-dooper it was to invest in Eisenhower-Nixon America. (I hope that Kennedy guy does get nominated and even elected, never mind if he is Catholic. I only wish I could vote.) Before Barbara, I used to detest doing this sort of patriotism thing just because it felt goody-goody. Then she introduced politics into my life. So now I know about the difference between socialism and communism, about how the Korean War was complicated, about South Africa. (And my own mother believed all that crap that McCarthy did a service to the country!) So now I know. Thanks a lot, Barbara. Now I have more reasons for wanting to gag when I have to go through one of these wholesome Ideal American Girl things. Like being Queen of the Boy Scouts’ Ball—which is supposed to make up for my not being allowed to see Bramwell?
Dry Your Smile Page 17