“Christ, you go sort of gray when you talk about it.”
Julian shrugged as they gathered up their things.
“What can I do, Charlotte? She won’t let me in—not in any way. I don’t know if it’s the medication that’s made her so damned paranoid or if it’s just exacerbated all her old feelings of betrayal from when I first left the business, then left her, then married Larry. I don’t even know for sure that she’s taking the medication … All I do know is, once in a while, I’m able to get through a day without obsessing about her. And then, too,” Julian added drily, “life is so charitable. It gives you respite from one wretchedness groove by scratching your brain over onto another with screechy regularity. Of late, the marriage misery has taken precedence, I confess.” Julian started to rise from the table, but Charlotte stopped her, laying a hand on her sleeve.
“Not been the best of years, has it, Jule?” she asked quietly.
“No, not the best. I tell myself, you just put one foot in front of the other and keep on. But sometimes it gets … just very … tiring.”
“Have you tried writing about it? Hope, I mean.”
“I can’t see any way to do it, Charlotte. I’ve tried. Thanks for being an intrepid editor at heart, though.”
“A little nudge never hurt now and then. I’d be willing to look at whatever you’d like, at any stage, if it would help. Maybe it would be just the thing to get it—”
“—out of my system? Thanks, but this isn’t ‘flu, it’s more like malaria. Recurrent bouts, lifelong. I’ve tried to exorcise it—in poems, nonfiction ‘political analyses,’ short stories. Besides, ‘catharsis’ in art is deadly. Forget it.” She rose again, and this time Charlotte followed her, still trying, as they made their way out of the restaurant.
“What about a play?”
“A play? Are you nuts, Charlotte? Has Zach finally driven you round the bend?”
“No, I’m serious. Maybe that way—”
“I can see it now: ‘Enter the Mother, the Daughter/Wife, the Husband—from stage left, stage right, and upstage center, respectively. Each is armed with lethal weapons. They proceed to massacre one another. No dialogue except screams and groans. It’s a pantomime. Curtain.’ Short play, Charlotte. Very avant-garde. Just the thing to make me the rage on the so-far-off-Broadway circuit I’ll be the toast of Peoria.”
“Well, not a theater play, then. What about a television script? I mean, the medium you know best, the one that’s probably in your blood? Just using that form as a way to—”
“Oh, even better! ‘Will Laurence and Julian find their way to happiness? Will Hope answer her daughter’s phone calls? Tune in tomorrow and find out!’ Maybe I can sell the idea to Paola Luchino as a soap opera—but set in the Riviera for lush visuals.” They emerged into the street. “Look, love, thanks anyway, I’m afraid it’s not even worth a try. Oh,” she changed the subject, “it’s starting to drizzle. Just for us. Because you and I came outside, Charlotte. Targets. Make no mistake.” They embraced. Some atavistic training rose in Julian. Always leave ’em laughing—and wanting more.
“Oh Charlotte,” she brightened, pulling back from what felt to her like pity, “so you won’t think my life is too much Perils of Pauline, I have two new feminist jokes for you. Picked them up last month after a speech in D.C.”
“D.C.? They can’t be very funny, then.”
“No, really. Nice nasty man-hating jokes.”
“What are you waiting for? Tell!”
“All right: What is 250,000 men at the bottom of the ocean?”
“Uh … I give up, what?”
“Not enough.”
Charlotte smiled. “And the other one?”
“How many men does it take to tile a bathroom floor?”
“Um … none, unless they’re paid more than any woman?”
“No. Only two—if you slice them very thin.”
“A little hostile, aren’t they, these jokes?”
Bombed, Julian thought. On her way back toward the office, Charlotte was already donning her Athena sensibility.
“Oh, I don’t know. Even if they are hostile, don’t we deserve some recompense for all these centuries of farmer’s daughter and mother-in-law and dumb-blonde jokes men tell?”
“Well. Anyway, Julian, I hope it gets better for you. And for Larry, too. And with your mother and everything. It was good to see you.”
The best move now would be as graceful an exit as could be managed.
“Thanks for everything, Charlotte. It was good to see you, too. And I hope we won’t have to stay in the TGIM club for too long. Give my regards to Zach—if you’re still speaking to him, that is.”
“I will. And mine to Larry.”
It was like the married women’s reassurance ritual: All Will Be Well. Commiseration Now Closed. Business as Usual.
“And thanks for lunch, too.”
“Quite welcome,” Charlotte called, starting off in the opposite direction. “Take care, now!”
Julian watched her disappear, swallowed up among the black-coated men swarming the streets. Then she turned toward the bus stop to go home.
It seemed to her these days that every motion required an act of will. From the big ones: keeping her forced exile from Hope in perspective, holding on to the love for Larry, trying to find a moment of time for writing anything of her own in between political articles, traveling, speeches, free-lance editing. To the tiny ones: remember to confirm air ticket for Wisconsin next week. Missed the bank today, go first thing in the morning and deposit the new royalty check and ask for immediate credit no delay please. We’re almost out of toilet paper. Call Mrs. D. in case she has any update passed on from Hope’s companion. Soon as check has cleared go with Larry to buy him two new pairs of slacks. We need milk. Check-in calls to Scribner’s and Knopf, any new free-lance stuff available? Fix alarm clock or buy cheap new one. Remind Larry he needs a haircut. When at bank get quarters for laundromat. Soon as check has cleared—remember to nag that college in Oregon where is check?—pay urgent gas and electric bill. Remember to draft press statement for Welfare Women’s Coalition press conference and get it to Renée Fitzpatrick before Wednesday. Take boots to shoemaker for resoling … She thought of the famous tombstone epigraph of a witty suicide: All this endless buttoning and unbuttoning. She didn’t want to go home. But where else was there to go?
She zipped up her windbreaker and hunched under a building overhang nearest the bus stop. An April downpour had begun in earnest, rapid needles of rain seeming to perforate the asphalt as if it were a black satin pincushion.
Sometimes the will cracked, but before it could break outright, exhaustion rushed in. She could summon the energy or, if necessary, project a façade of serenity when around other people. But not with Larry. And not when alone with herself. Fatigue at the bone, at the brain, in the pores. Fatigue beyond depression, and certainly beyond the anger depression was said to conceal. Truth tyranny! Lying about finding that odious Preston manuscript tolerable. Opportunist. Manipulator. Put one foot. To what bloody goddamned purpose? Then the other foot. For the approval of Hope? (That’s my baby trooper!”) For the approval of Larry? (“I’ll say this for you, Jule, you’ve got staying power.”) For the approval of the movement? (“You give me courage” … “How can you be married and call yourself a feminist” … “I know this is crazy, but weren’t you the little girl who” …) For the approval of herself? An approval from which she lived in eternal exile?
A bus loomed along the rainslick avenue. Julian boarded with the other waiting would-be passengers, becoming entangled in the aisle with a Puerto Rican woman attempting to juggle two large shopping bags and two small children who whined continuously in Spanish at their mother. Mothers and children and exiles, Julian thought, and you carp that you have it bad, you self-indulgent turd? Think about Iliana, for that matter. Christ, she’s been an actual exile for most of her life. Try that one on, Julian. A rebel against her mother, too, against her entire
family—refused to marry, rejected the Church, defied the sexual codes by daring to sleep with anybody she chose, man or woman. Defied the social codes by becoming an art photographer when that was unheard of—in Argentina, yet. Defied a totalitarian political system, first by her incendiary photographs, then by her open anti-government activism, finally by going into exile. At age nineteen, for god’s sake, Julian. When you were all atwitter with the major cosmic crisis of trying to “find yourself.” Then roamed the world: New York, Paris, Madrid, then back to New York, the early CR group—then Europe again. And always the necklaces of cameras, always adorned by the precious lenses through which she saw the world in her unique way, always registering that, capturing it on prints that now hung framed along the best gallery exhibition walls. Inventing and reinventing the world through her own eyes. By sheer will. And you talk about will, Julian? Game-player. Better self-disgust than self-pity.
Very well, she confessed to herself, so it is a game, this trying to get through each day. A gambit. A technique not only to survive but to teach oneself some meaning in this otherwise distasteful process called daily life. You learned all over again to improvise, the skill an actor needed as much as—no, more than—the ability to memorize.
The Game was like a dare. Seeing how long you could let the exhaustion prey on you, how remote you could let the will become before catching it again, pulling it thread by thread like a spider would out of some place in you that you still trusted could secrete it.
She dismounted the bus at her stop and started the two-block walk to the loft. The rain had stopped. Maybe Larry would feel like talking? Maybe she could secrete from herself the will to talk, too. Maybe there was hope beyond Hope. Because if the Game was still a shake of the adolescent fist, Prometheus against the gods, it had also become Job refusing to curse God and die. The Game was more than to suffer and survive. The Game was also to find or forge some moment of beauty, of grace, at least once a day. Say “Thank you” to the harassed bus driver and he might light up with a smile of surprise. Praise something. The shape of a rainwashed nectarine in a street fruit-stand, its self-contained sunburst colors. The way an ailanthus tree flourished up through a subway grate. A moment of laughter with Charlotte, however much the two women misunderstood that they understood one another. The brief freshness of city streets after a thunderstorm. Praise something. Vignettes of a York Mystery Play inserted into this Samuel Beckett life.
If the Game succeeded there would be a small flare inside, a kindling of energy at having affirmed some particle of existence.
She let herself in at the street door.
If the Game failed there would be a hollow sensation: of hypocrisy, of Norman Vincent Peale positive thinking, of competing for some Plucky Wench of the Week award. If the Game failed it would feel as if the attempt to affirm had in itself been stagey—so that the bus driver would approve, so that Charlotte would approve, so that whoever Julian Travis was, she would approve. Circular thinking, the way the damned would brood in hell. If the Game failed, it was just another scam, the legacy, the only heirloom Hope bequeathed. If the Game failed, you had to wipe it out of your mind and start all over again. Put your right foot …
Julian passed the hall mirror and stopped to look. There she was. Can I love her, even like her? Some days she looked younger than forty, because of the cursedly round face that had been so adorable for the first ten years of her life. Today she looked older than her age. Olive skin drained ashen by the fluorescent hall light. Short straight mud-colored hair. The mouth fleshy, too sensual for what it had never dared. The eyes dark and large—like Hers. The one good feature, like Hers. She tested a smile at Julian from the mirror.
“Who are you, Julian?” she murmured to the glass. “Is it as bad as all that, that Hope didn’t just rob you of yourself but you never even got a chance to create a ‘who’ in the first place?”
The eyes in the mirror started to fill. Julian always can cry on cue, she thought scornfully.
“I’ll tell you who you are, Jule. Julie. Baby,” she muttered. “You’re a fake. ‘Write it as a TV script,’ Charlotte says. Little does she know you, Julie. You’re a self-pitying bitch, a failure and a phony and a fool. You wouldn’t know reality unless you’d learned it in a script. You have nothing, nothing in the whole vast universe to do with me here inside myself, do you hear me? I hate your phony faking guts, Julian Travis, your lovey-dovey affirmations, lies, martyrdoms, goody-goody bids for ego worship. I hate your garish face over my immaculate skull. You don’t even exist. God. You’re all I have, I’ve got to live with you until we both die, and you don’t even exist.”
She turned her back on the mirror.
“And if you don’t exist,” she whispered into the dim hall, “then who in hell am I?”
She had an answer the instant she walked into the loft. A piece of paper tacked up on the cork bulletin board accosted her with ragged block-printed capital letters:
DEAR POWER-BROKER,
I CAN’T STAND WHAT YOUR LIFE IS DOING TO OUR
LIVES. I’M BEGINNING TO HATE YOU
FOR WHAT YOU’VE DONE TO
WHAT IS (LAUGHINGLY CALLED) MY LIFE.
I’LL BE OUT ALL NIGHT IF NECESSARY DOING
WHAT I DON’T EVEN ENJOY DOING ANYMORE
THANKS TO AMERICA’S TAP-DANCING
REVOLUTIONARY DARLING. PLEASE GO TO HELL BEFORE
I GET HOME. URGENT URGENT URGENT THIS HURTS.
ALL POWER TO THE WOMEN!
YOUR LOVING HOUSEWIFE FORMERLY
THE RED MENACE NOW THE GRAY MOUSE,
LAURENCE (TRAVIS)
CHAPTER FIVE
Autumn, 1961
This was really happening: she was on her way to meet him.
Five years it had taken. Five years of sleuthing, patching the evidence together from all those eavesdropped-on conversations between Hope and Yetta or Essie, library trips on literary excuses in order to research her way through the telephone books of every major and many smaller cities in Connecticut. Five years of imagining what it would be like. What he would be like. Five years of fantasies. The fantasy in which he refused to acknowledge her, in which she was denied outright, annihilated on the spot. The fantasy in which he physically threw her out the door. The fantasy in which he burst into tears and flung his arms wide, unabashedly sobbing, “My daughter, my daughter. I always knew you’d find me someday.” Five years of lying in bed at night imagining how he would look; what she might recognize in his features of her own face; what his voice, his accent, would sound like.
A curtain had been dropped on the subject since Julian was thirteen, since the confrontation that had broken open the lie that David was dead. Hope’s version had simply picked itself up that night and ambled sideways, settling down again not far from where it had been: so he was alive, what of it. He had deserted them. Why be curious about a so-called father who had never taken one particle of interest in his own child—especially when such curiosity wounded the other parent whose entire existence had been given over to that child? But the obsession wasn’t so easily exorcised. Julian knew that Hope neither understood nor would grant one millimeter of sympathy to the obsession: it was done, over with, finished; there was nothing to learn from or about David Traumstein; he was, in effect, a dead man. And so should he be to Julian. Hadn’t eighteen years of his silence made that clear?
The obsession went into hiding. Julian’s imagination took inventory of all the ways he might have tried to contact his daughter, but been impeded by Hope. Had she destroyed letters? Deflected phone calls? Julian knew that nothing was beyond Hope when fighting for what she thought was her survival and her daughter’s love. So the powerful mystique of him endured and ripened, nurtured in secret by Julian’s care. Sitting stiffly in the window seat of this dingy bus en route to the university town of Storrs, she began for the thousandth time to number the minimal facts she had about him, telling the beads of memory through this last novena.
He was a doctor, a ped
iatrician. Born in Vienna, of a “good” family, upper-middle-class, well educated. About ten years older than Hope. A linguist: spoke German, English, French; supposedly had excellent Greek and Latin. Had read the classics in the original, for pleasure; particularly relished Greek drama. Knew and loved music—but Hope would go into no details there. Was brilliant, handsome, arrogant; could be cold, cruel, emotionally aloof unto “sadism” (Hope’s word). Indeed, Hope’s virtuosity for exaggeration had to be weighed against every detail, at every re-listing. To drop one’s guard about that for even a second was to be assaulted by such doubt and fear as to the possibility of actually connecting with him that Julian would again give up the whole idea. This had already happened three times, this reconciling herself to eternal ignorance on the subject, even after she had finally learned where he was—the city, the address, the telephone number. That moment, sitting in the wooden library chair with the phone book for Storrs in front of her: how the room froze, how still everything became when the name leapt at her, in the same fine print as those above and below it but with the impact of emblazoned letters flaming ten feet high—DAVID TRAUMSTEIN, M.D.
Dry Your Smile Page 22