Then another entry, after a lot of blank pages, right at the end.
So much to do, learn, become. Maybe it’s not too late to begin singing again. If I work hard enough and I’m strong enough, I can be anything I want to be. There’s talk about war but I refuse to believe it. I’m so full of hope that today I decided to call myself “Hope” from here on in. I’m going to create a whole new me. Today is the start of a fresh chapter in my life. It’s going to be a perfectly beautiful life.
September 15, 1938
June 4, 1983
Went to the hospital directly after work, filled with love for her. She’s out of the oxygen tent. She sometimes talks to me now, though not always to me, it turns out, but to Yetta or Esther. I don’t contradict her anymore. When she does speak to me, just the garbled “Julian,” or even “Baby” lisping out of the side of her mouth is a triumph for both of us.
But today she was drooling a lot, and I kept blotting it away as gently as I could, each of us sending out shy smiles to the other. Then—and I meant it as a little joke, god forgive me I thought she’d chuckle with recognition about it—I wiped up another dribble and I said encouragingly, “Come on, Little Momma, dry your smile.”
Horror spread over her face as though I’d struck her. She squeezed her eyes shut and wrenched her head away from me. For the next two hours I pled with her. I wept, tried to explain the joke, apologized, tried to coax her back to me, told her how much I loved her. But she sealed off completely. I couldn’t get through. Then I was forced to leave because visiting hours were over.
Coming down from her floor in the elevator, I felt like a monster. I called Iliana from the lobby phone booth. It all poured out. When I was finished, Iliana said simply,
“She knows.”
I didn’t understand, and began to repeat that I’d humiliated Hope hideously, that I’d rubbed in the fact of her disease by way of a long-ago reference she didn’t even remember. But Iliana’s voice rang firm over the phone:
“Juliana. I tell you she knows. Not just the reference to your childhood saying, though she knows very well where that comes from. That’s why she can’t face you. She knows what she’s done to you.”
As I walked out of the hospital, the realization of what Iliana meant hit me. Then, almost simultaneously, it dawned on me that Hope would eventually die, and I would live. I would outlive her. I was alive in the young summer evening.
It was odious because I thought I’d reached the other side of forgiveness. But this didn’t feel like revenge, only exuberance. It came as a shock—which is idiotic, because most children do outlive their parents. It’s not that I’d really believed I wouldn’t; more that she and I couldn’t both be genuinely alive at the same time. Now that she begins to fade, I begin to be. Is that vampirism or rebirth? There was some anger along with the euphoria, but it tasted clean. Not a ready-to-dance-on-her-grave anger, because it contained no celebration of her dying. It felt instead like a ritual festival, the breaking of an old spell. It’s hard to put my finger on it. I was appalled at the intensity of my elation. But strangest of all, I felt no guilt.
I think I don’t want to return to Larry.
I think I want to get my own apartment.
I think I’m falling in love with Iliana de Costa.
June 9, 1983
Miracles fluttering down all over the place, like magnolia blossoms from the trees in the park. The co-op’s been sold. A vacancy opened up at Peacehaven. Hope’s recovered from the pneumonia, though she still won’t look at me or talk to me. Charlotte says I can have the Athena job for as long as I want it. I’m back at Georgi’s in the J.T. Memorial Den and Georgi’s going to Europe on the fifteenth for an entire month so I can have the apartment all to myself. That means I can begin to write again. I can pay Hope’s bills and she can be moved into Peacehaven day after tomorrow. I’ve been trying to prepare her for that, to explain she won’t be going back to the co-op and why. But she won’t respond in any way, not since the “dry your smile” day, not even with fury.
Last night, after Iliana and I had a celebratory dinner with champagne (every fragment of good news is an excuse for her to declare another celebration), we walked arm-in-arm through the Village. When I left her at the street door to her apartment, I kissed her full on the lips. Then I raced off and leapt into a taxi. All the way up here to Georgi’s in the cab, I trembled as if Parkinson’s were a hereditary disease.
I think I definitely want my own apartment, and a more permanent separation from Larry. In fact, I think I’ll have to tell him that as of July first I won’t be able to shoulder the loft bills any more, because I’ve got to start saving for a place of my own. It’s time he was nudged out of the nest, too.
It’ll be hard, telling him that. He’ll storm and rave about me destroying him all over again. It’ll be specially painful, because in just the last three or four phone calls, he’s been quite understanding. Like the original Laurence. He even came to see Hope at the hospital one evening, not that she recognized him. But then, she hasn’t seen him in years. Or maybe she did recognize him but wouldn’t concede that. In any event, he and I went for coffee after. There we were, Laurence and Julian, sitting in the hospital coffee-shop talking politics, deploring the latest round of Administration cutbacks in social services, trading bewilderment over Reagan’s grip on the public imagination. I reminded Larry that Reagan was an actor, albeit a lousy one, and we both started laughing. I’ll always love Laurence Millman. He might never believe that, but there it is. Just as Hope will never understand or believe that I’ll always love her, but there it is.
I told all this to Iliana at dinner tonight and her reply was, “Not surprising. Julian Travis might never understand or believe it, but perhaps you’re beginning to love her.”
My god. I hope she’s right.
June 18, 1983
Stunned, exultant confusion.
I’ve been to bed with Iliana.
Utterly different. Eerily familiar. Absolutely astounding. Totally “natural.”
Explosions going off in my brain:
How startling, at my age, to encounter this whole new sexual terrain in myself—as if I’d been color-blind to certain parts of the spectrum, and now, suddenly, can see shades and vibrancies of unnameable intensity but undeniable reality. It makes me furious that I missed so much for so long, lost so much time. It makes me giddy, childishly gleeful—that this gift of savage delight came to me at all, that I escaped going to my grave in ignorance of its existence. It makes me mournful beyond outrage—that the organic normalcy of this state of loving, its ease, its (there again, I can’t think of any other way to describe it:) familiarity, is a target for fear, hatred, bigotry.
I don’t understand the force of this “epiphany,” for me especially, since I’ve been to bed with women before, and it failed abysmally. I think back to all those years, particularly during the 1970’s whirl of organizing and traveling, where I’d wind up in a sleeping bag or on a spare mattress or sofa at some women’s collective after a day of meetings and demonstrations. There was inevitably at least one young woman who’d been at my elbow for hours, struggling with having contracted a severe crush but not wanting to come on as a “fan” or as what Larry used to nastily term “your lesbian groupies.” I developed my own brand of feminist diplomacy to handle such situations with as much tact, evasion, and delicacy as I could muster. But after years of this, I began to feel cowardly and narrow-minded. What’s more, my old approval-desire syndrome was being activated by what felt like a steady assault on me as a publicly heterosexual feminist (“How dare you call yourself …”). I just got tired of saying No. So there I’d be, huddled in the sleeping bag, satisfied with what I’d accomplished, but desperate for five hours of sleep before catching an early plane for the next town. Suddenly there she’d be: a young woman filled with longing and loneliness and a hunger for the feminist energy I guess I represented to her. She’d sit on the floor and tell her life story and we’d both begi
n to cry with a mutual yearning for some other way of living. I’d hold her while she cried, and then she’d ask—so vulnerably—if she could crawl in with me. Out of pity or embarrassment or tiredness (like god knows how many wives to how many husbands), I’d sometimes give in. It was easier than saying no. Though I sensed it wasn’t me who was being desired, but Julian Travis. Though I felt nothing but tenderness and a sorrow for both of us as women. Though I knew I might experience a residual bitterness—at finding myself a feather in someone’s cap, a notch in someone’s belt. Though I knew she might experience a residual bitterness—that I didn’t fall in love with her, that I left in the morning.
It didn’t happen often. Perhaps five or six times over all those years. And sometimes we’d just sleep. But it happened enough to convince me that I must be an unregenerate heterosexual, despite what was my search maybe for it to work, and despite my fine intellectual beliefs that sexuality was a single continuum, that society was the culprit for devising categories and pigeon-holing people into either/or boxes. When I told Larry, he said he understood—though during the later fights he’d ammo it up in terms of my being incapable of saying no to anyone except him (untrue). He even wondered aloud whether it might be interesting to try for a “threesome”—him and me and another woman—a proposal which seemed sickeningly close to a harem scenario, though he floated it as an exotic experiment in “sexual revolution.” I declined to organize such a meeting.
So this revelation with Iliana is all the more odd, for me. As usual, there’s an irony in attendance. I’ve spent almost two decades fighting for the right of sexual preference as one of the central issues of women’s freedom. If I’ve been straight-baited by some women I’ve also been gay-baited by right-wingers who assume all feminists are lesbian. Hello! Surprise! Here we are now, part and parcel of the group we thought we were safely crusading for as an outsider. Like the work on behalf of abortion rights—with Julian’s private secret locked tight in the back of her throat during every speech. I better be careful about which oppressed group I defend. One of these days I’ll wake up as a peasant in India.
Still, more than irony and amazement, there’s the confusion. I find myself thinking about Larry, and a great calm undramatic bell of grief strikes and tolls through me. I think about Hope slowly beginning to die, and somewhere in my bowels something cries out My God My God but all regions between that cry and the surface of me feel numb, as if I’ve sleepwalked the past twenty-two years with Larry, sleepwalked the previous twenty with her, hearing messages of myself but from far away, underwater. I think about Iliana and I know that being drawn to her woman’s body is connected with Hope and Hope’s dying. Beyond that, I know only my own ignorance.
No, that’s not true. I discover my own—bizarre to feel this at such a crisis-laden moment in my life—capacity for happiness. Shock upon shock. With so many details crowding my brain, my thoughts keep going back to Iliana: anticipation at seeing her, excitement at being with her, the combination of intimacies—friendship (the type one can only have with another woman, yes Charlotte) simultaneous with an erotic charge! Not having to sacrifice one for the other! So many layers of emotion oscillating at once. Even the pain, homelessness, fear, gets put to use by this new energy. I feel I’m internally hemorrhaging Life.
Is that the difference, then, from those other times, with women reaching for me like lost daughters in the night? That here I reach back—and find? That I’m cared for, tenderly and raucously, reminded to eat and sleep and relax, coaxed into laughter and pleasure? And how distinct the lovemaking: to be wanted for oneself with such passion that one glimpses that self through the eye of one’s lover—as desirable, sexual, actually beautiful!
Is that the difference? That with my entire life lying in ruins about me, I’m in love? I’m in love—with a woman?
CHAPTER NINE
Summer, 1983
“It’s Independence Day,” Julian said softly. “Independence Day,” she repeated, her awestruck whisper echoing the first thought that had come into her consciousness on awakening. She lay still, letting the smile of that revelation play over her face. Then she turned her head to look at Iliana, asleep beside her.
My friend, she thought, easing herself up carefully on one elbow, the better to watch that sleeping face in morning light gauzed blue by the curtain. My … lover. The word still stammered in the brain. Yet there the lover was, her breathing calm, her hair tousled against the pillow, those beryl-gray eyes—the color of rain, Julian had declared—moving rhythmically in a secret dream visored by the lids and the lashes that curved over the cheek. Full and rich, the features of that face, even when in repose, but never more so than when animated in conversation. The cosmopolite with the naughty smile, the connoisseur of wines and cheeses, olives and Caravaggio, music, chiaroscuro. The patient watcher, who knew how to wait—and then how to woo when the time was right. How to bring Julian slowly, through these weeks of lovemaking, into responses at first passive, then awkward, then gradually sensual, open, less afraid. Oh how different, Julian grinned, how different to find a mutual desire heating in the blood, tensing the muscles, quickening the breath. Her trepidatious lovemaking to Iliana had elicited reactions so generous they seemed to Julian out of proportion to her own ineptitude. But last night, she thought, with a shameless blush this time, the very previous last night, something had broken loose in Julian, reverted to the wild, surged through her, resurrecting in her a lover whose arms, legs, torso, hands, mouth, seemed to remember a primordial cuncipotence of what and how, where and when, if, yes, now, there, yes this way, yes, yes. This time she had seen astonishment widen Iliana’s eyes, felt it shiver through Iliana’s flesh, heard it answered in her own body. And Iliana had opened with the abandon of an antelope to a leap of air.
Julian stretched languorously, her brain stretching, too, into twenty directions at once. How depraved it was to imagine or impose fixed roles in such a fluid situation! When the whole energy resided in this dancing balance—to take and be taken, give and receive, flicker effortlessly from one fever of surrender that lost nothing but regained one’s self to another fever of passion that seized the surrender of the lover to the lover’s self!
She yawned luxuriantly as a cat, congratulating herself on this dazzle of insights occurring for the first time ever in history, to her, Julian, the Chosen One. Fireworks of the intellect. Happy, oh happy Independence Day, she sang to herself.
Iliana stirred, opened her eyes, focused on Julian, and promptly announced in a sleepy voice that she was famished for breakfast but neither could she imagine ever being able to move again, considering what Julian had accomplished upon her last night.
“Then I’ll make breakfast and we can have it in bed,” Julian shouted giddily, bouncing up to a sitting position. “What have we got? What would you like? Quail eggs? Truffles under crystal?”
“Dona nobis pacem. Such energy,” came the muffled reply, “We’re out of everything but canned tins and condiments. I haven’t had a chance to get to the market in days.” Iliana emitted a human purr as she rolled onto her back. “I want … croissants,” she blinked.
“Croissants you shall have. Fresh flakey croissants adrip with butter. Poached eggs greenly flecked with marjoram. Sizzling bacon, crisp as your laughter. Fragrant steaming espresso with a pungent curl of lem—”
“This is torture,” Iliana growled. “Don’t describe it. Wave the wand and make it to happen.”
“—thick pulpy orange juice brassy as your smile, a triplecrème cheese wantonly gooey as your—”
“Juliana! This is not Tom Jones in a book! This is your starving lover whom you have incapacitated and who if you do not manage to feed soon will devour whatever is near,” Iliana slithered closer, smacking her lips menacingly.
Julian leapt out of bed and grabbed for her jeans, sweeping them up off the floor where they had been unceremoniously deposited the night before.
“What?” Iliana wailed. “Where are you going?”
“Wait, I’ll go with you. Don’t move so quickly, for god’s sake.”
“No you won’t. You’ll lie there like an odalisque and I’ll be back in a flash with a feast.”
“But I want to go with—”
“Please? I’m crackling with energy. Let me do something for a change?”
Iliana flopped back onto her pillow. “Just as well,” she groaned. “For me, I am not the same woman who went to bed last night. I will never be the same. Now I know how Atlantis felt after the tidal wave.”
Julian had already strapped on her sandals. “Then just lie there and float,” she called back, wriggling into her T-shirt as she stumbled toward the door. “The tidal wave is ebbing. But only for the moment.”
Running down the brownstone stairs, she hummed to herself, “Independence Day, Independence Day, I’m crazy and happy, does this mean I’m gay, tra la.”
Grove Street was serene as a sabbath, because of the national holiday. Only one other person was out so early, Jim Kwan, the always impeccably attired Hawaiian computer expert who lived just downstairs from Iliana. A short, rotund man in white linen shirt and shorts, he was walking his dachshund, the two of them a study in contrasting shapes. Julian called out a hello, wanting to address them as the Line and the Circle.
“Beautiful, beautiful amazingly brilliant day, don’t you think?” she added, not waiting for a reply, but beaming as she swung past where the dog and his walker, pooper-scooper in hand at the ready, were stopped beside a tree. Fortunate man, she noted, the dachshund was at least a hundred and two years old and barely able to waddle; walking him could not be half so difficult as reconciling Sido and Phideaux in their polar temperaments and “sex role” styles.
Incredibly reductive, her fireworks brain flared again, to think of women playing roles! You didn’t want an imitation man. You wanted another woman. That was it. Of course, the psychologists (the better ones) termed all this the “animus” or “anima,” the “male in the female and vice-versa.” Which not only missed the point but substituted another point entirely, still attributing action to some abstract male principle and reception to some abstract female one. Nor had the political rhetoric—lesbian, feminist, lesbian-feminist, or feminist-lesbian—really approached the implications of what such a glimpse of freedom might mean—for everyone, female and male, with a same-sex or opposite-sex lover. And for the self. Political insights at profound genius level, Julian congratulated herself.
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