“What’s the matter, are you queasy again?” asked Sheila. Her hands were clasped around her stomach as if it might detach and roll away.
“Oh, just a little. So, Jerome, how is business? Have you encountered anything like the Wolf Man yet? Or Dora, poor girl? Remember you told me about Freud and Dora?”
He held the pipe between his teeth. He wore his satin heart on the knot of his striped tie, over his throat. “Your symptoms sound like morning sickness.” Perhaps to keep the pipe in place, he barely moved his lips when he spoke.
“Hardly that.”
“You sure?” asked Sheila.
“I’m sure. But really, Jerome, how’s it going? Are there enough willing neurotics in the Boston-Cambridge area? I imagine this would be a fertile field.”
Antonia put a restraining hand on her arm. “Caroline,” she whispered, “don’t be outrageous. Jerome’s not in a good mood.”
“What happened,” she whispered back, “faulty transference?”
“My diagnosis is, just horny.”
“It’s coming along,” said Jerome. “Fortunately, most people are not quite as resistant to their own best interests as you are.”
“Aha! Now what is that supposed to mean?” She lit a cigarette, even though smoking sometimes made her sick.
“I’ve told you before, for your problem you ought to seek help. Then you’d be able to drink at parties, at least.” Jerome removed the pipe, and taking from his lapel pocket a small tubular chrome instrument with a sharp point, began cleaning it. He dug the instrument with mincing thrusts around the circumference of the bowl and dumped wads of tobacco into an ashtray. “Tell me something, just out of curiosity. When you were a little girl, how did you think babies were made?”
“I believed in the Immaculate Conception,” said Antonia. “I always wanted to do it that way. I think that’s still one of my wish-fulfillment fantasies.”
“That’s another story. I’m asking Caroline.”
“Oh, Jerome, take a night off.”
He pointed the stem of the pipe at her. “What are you afraid of? I’m only making conversation.”
“I don’t remember. I think I always knew how it was done. I had a couple of rabbits for a while, in the backyard.”
“Did it have any connection in your mind with eating and digestion?”
“Eating?”
“There is a common fantasy among girl children that a baby gets started because of something eaten. It’s quite natural, because they see how it expands in the stomach region.” He cast a brief glance at his wife’s stomach. “Like Sheila here, a child might think she had eaten a watermelon whole.”
A wave of nausea rose through Caroline, and her thighs felt watery. “I would eat, then, wouldn’t I, to make it happen?”
Jerome leaned forward and tapped at her knee with the empty bowl of his pipe. A few grains of tobacco fell to her skirt. She stared at the little cluster they formed, a nearly perfect hexagon. “It’s not that simple,” he said. “What you’re doing is rejecting food. You’re fighting the idea of pregnancy, obviously.”
She put her hand to her throat. He was so close she could see the pores around his nose. He smelled of pipe tobacco. “That is the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.”
She blinked several times. At the peripheries of her vision, about Jerome’s round face, shadowy scallops jiggled. The room swayed and slowly turned. She leaned back. “He is literally making me sick,” she said to Antonia.
“Go lie down then, Caroline. You’re a delicate shade of green.”
“Could she be unconsciously imitating the symptoms of pregnancy, Jerome?” asked Sheila.
“Sheila, please,” said Jerome with a cautionary look. He replaced his pipe between his teeth, unlit, and tapped Caroline’s knee with his fingers. He rested them there for a moment. “Also, little girls are confused about how a baby comes out. As an extension of the digestive metaphor, they think—”
She rose, gripping the arm of the couch. “You know you’re quite a wit? That theory is second only to penis envy.” She looked around vaguely for Ivan, but Ivan was standing way across the room, talking to some woman. “Pardon me while I go throw up. Jerome, I think you have just violated the Hippocratic oath.”
After she threw up she lay face down on the tile floor till her strength returned. She was used to it now; this was a short spasm. Once she washed her face and combed her hair she would look none the worse. Back in the party, she glimpsed Jerome leaning against the banister talking to another woman, a younger one, who was listening intently as he gestured toward her breasts with his pipe, from which a thin trail of smoke curled upward like a small tornado. Famished, Caroline ate half a roast beef sandwich and went off to find Ivan. On the way she tapped Jerome’s companion on the shoulder. “I would watch out if I were you,” she told her.
Ivan too was talking earnestly to an unknown blond woman, but he waved no object at her. They laughed together easily, like old friends. As Caroline approached he turned to make room for her in their tight space. He put his arm around her. “Caroline,” he said, smiling, “I’d like you to meet Chantal Morgan. Chantal, my wife, Caroline.”
“Hi.” Chantal held out her hand. “Ivan talks a lot about you.”
“Hello. I feel as though we should have met before,” said Caroline, also smiling. Chantal! She had nearly forgotten about her over the past months. She looked neither frigid nor gypsy-like. She was slender and of medium height, with short shaggy hair and a blue dress that was short too, simple and almost severe. She wore no jewelry or make-up. Her face was very beautiful in an unproclaiming, sculptured way. When she laughed her light brown eyes narrowed, her severity disappeared, and she looked at Ivan and Caroline as though to draw them into her mirth. She was talking about how well Ivan had handled a crisis that arose with the Artmobile. One of the pieces had gotten slightly damaged while out on loan, and the museum director wanted to use that as an excuse to halt the project, but Ivan had managed to have the damage repaired and to placate the director. Caroline tried to imagine her flat on her back with her legs spread out for Ivan, but for once her imagination failed her.
“If it had been up to me, I would have argued and alienated him,” Chantal said, “but Ivan is so diplomatic—he can get around anyone.”
“Yes,” said Caroline. She had never thought of him in quite that way, but now that Chantal pointed it out, she saw it was true.
“Is Joe in town?” asked Ivan.
“Yes, but he wouldn’t come to this. He hates these kinds of parties.” She laughed. “I left him in front of the TV with The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”
Toward the end of the party Ivan sat down on the floor in a small circle of people. They passed joints from mouth to mouth, from Antonia’s mouth to Jerome’s to Chantal’s to Ivan’s. He was high, ambling around in slow motion, touching the arms of women, with a dreamy smile. Caroline drove the car home through the falling snow and he lay back in the seat next to her, sighing from time to time.
“So that’s Chantal,” she said.
“Hm.”
“She’s not the way I pictured her.”
“Hm?”
“She looks something like me, doesn’t she? I mean, the same type.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Jerome says my nausea is a symptom of secretly not wanting to be pregnant. Subconsciously I think that if I keep the food down I’ll get pregnant. Some hangover from childhood.”
“Jerome is an asshole. If you provoke him, what do you expect?”
“I don’t want to try to have a baby any more. I don’t want to go to any more of these parties. I don’t like any of our friends.”
He gave a long sigh.
“Did you hear what I said?”
“I’m not deaf, Caroline. Deafness, unlike possible sterility, is not one of my infirmities,” he intoned very slowly. “I hear everything you say. I hear every word, every syllable, every phoneme, every letter. I could repeat everything you have said in
this car since we entered it. I am one of those people on whom, to quote one of your favorite authors, nothing is lost. In fact, at this very moment I hear music, I hear bells, and I hear that you don’t want to have a baby, or go to any more of these parties, and you don’t like any of our friends. Every…single…syllable.”
At the next red light she turned and took a long look at him. “How much of that stuff did you smoke?” she said.
They were tired of Boston. The Back Bay, with its ever younger inhabitants, had grown too chic for their tastes. Their friends were defecting to the suburbs, where their preoccupations were formulas, night feedings and car seats, adultery, money, and analysis. When they visited, and Caroline saw and smelled the babies, watched the puréed foods dribbling down their chins, and heard their peculiar, grating wails, she felt a kind of panic. Once one of them spit some white lumpy stuff on her shoulder, and she kept smelling the curdled milk even after she laundered the blouse. Finally she gave up and used it as a dust rag. Ivan found a job in a small university town a couple of hours away as associate director of a foundation that gave grants for the visual arts. And Caroline, through a combination of her contacts, published papers, and notoriety as a female researcher, was hired as an assistant professor in the math department. When they drove out to visit the foundation and the university and to look at houses, their future neighborhood appeared mild, even beneficent. Speeding back along the turnpike to Boston, she asked him, “Do you mind leaving?”
“No.”
“I’ll miss some of the people.”
“We can still see the ones we really like.”
“You’re very detached, Ivan. Isn’t there anything you’ll miss?”
“Not much. I’ve had enough of that sort of life.”
It had not been what she expected, either. Except for the very beginning, when they were so close, there had been long stretches of bleakness. Yet the odd thing was, her richest memories were from that time she called bleak, when they would be estranged for long stretches then come together, unaccountably, for days of ineffable common delight, knowing all the while that the delight could fade instantaneously into bleakness again. What she recalled most from their first two years as the happy couple was a vague constraint, like behaving well in school. A too tight embrace. The blankets at night heavy, like straps. Unhappiness loosed them into a manic oscillation, like the needle of their speedometer, which had broken and ran wild. It made the future unimaginable and frightening. No wonder they were weary and sought rest.
“What about Chantal?”
“What about her?” He passed a car, accelerating to possibly seventy-five, though the needle was at twenty. As he grew older he drove more and more furiously. Caroline did not comment—she knew him too well for that—but trusted, a virtue born of necessity.
“Won’t you miss her?”
“You’ll never get that out of your mind, will you?”
“I don’t even mind so much. It’s just that you don’t say one way or the other.”
“You know I’ll never say now, don’t you?”
“My punishment for asking.”
“Did I ever ask you one thing?”
“Never. But then you are a saint. We know that.” All very quiet, she thought. So quiet, like after a death.
They stopped on the road for sodas. She watched him standing with his head bent back, tipping the bottle to his mouth. He had worn a suit and tie to meet with the board of directors, but took the tie and jacket off afterwards; his white shirt was open at the neck and the sleeves were rolled up. He was tired, and more and more lately, when he was tired, he wore thick horn-rimmed glasses instead of the contact lenses. They made him look vulnerable, and older. He was still lean and a young man and still when she looked at him appraisingly, as now, she remembered his touch. But she had an inkling of how he might soon settle into middle age—spreading belly, baggy pants, thinning hair, beefy neck. Her flesh shrank at the idea of some potbellied meaty man crawling all over her. She had never chosen that. She had chosen Ivan as he was then, in Rome. Time, what it would foist on her, was the ultimate unfairness.
At home it depressed them to find the apartment a shambles of half-packed cartons, piles of books and records, dishes and pots. The early morning, when they set out, seemed very long ago. The years spent in that apartment were piled on all sides too, a weighty thickness of time surrounding them. They had a history, and history was more potent, even, than love.
It had turned suddenly hot. Caroline rummaged in a carton to find shorts and a halter. She heated last night’s dinner, and they drank cold white wine out of paper cups. Ivan stared at her strangely, long and intense as the very first time, but with a predatory glimmer. He stood up.
“Would you please get up?” he asked.
“What is it?”
“Just stand up. I want to see you.”
“But why? I haven’t changed.”
“I would just like to see you. Can’t I see you?”
“Ivan, I…I don’t like the way you look.” She stood up.
“You’re very attractive, still. You’re right. You haven’t changed a bit.”
“Attractive” was not his sort of word. “I’m flattered, but what is wrong with you?”
“You know,” he said, taking off his glasses—and without the glasses his eyes narrowed in the glare of the uncovered bulbs—“sometimes a certain body has a hold on you, it’s a completely irrational thing. At least for a man.” He shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s the same for a woman.”
“Are you talking about me?” She looked down at her own body, which seemed slight and harmless.
He took hold of her arm and shook it angrily. “Of course I’m talking about you. Who do you think I’m talking about? You know how many times I almost walked out of this place?”
“What am I supposed to say? Go, then.”
“I don’t want to go.” He pulled her by the arm. “Come closer. I want to…Right now.”
“Get your hands off me! What kind of a way is that? Let go of me, Ivan!”
He didn’t speak. His fingers met around her arm, a tight ring. She remembered that grip from the very beginning, from the afternoon he showed her the wolf.
“Are you going to let me go?”
He shook his head.
“But I don’t feel like it. What do you want? Do you want to see me struggle? Is that the game? Or are you out of your mind?”
He just stood there, gripping her arm. She knew him. He could keep that grip all night if he had to. “Okay, Ivan,” she said. “Okay. You win. Take your prize. But just wait a minute, all right? Just take it easy, will you?”
“I don’t need instructions. Shut your mouth and open your legs.”
“Pig!” With her free hand she smacked his face hard.
He shoved her to the floor and grabbed at her shorts. She tried to twist out of his grasp, but it was no use. He didn’t wait. It was rough and it hurt. Then he collapsed on her neck and he wept.
“Jesus Christ, will you stop crying? I survived.”
“I don’t know what happened to me. It must be the move, and…everything. God, how could I? I’m sorry.”
“All right! It’s not as if you’re a total stranger.”
“Are you okay? Did I hurt you?”
“Yes, and yes. What did you expect?”
“Will you ever forgive me?”
“Stop it, will you? I can’t stand you like this.”
“What came over me? I’m not that sort of man.”
“You can’t figure it out? Ask Jerome.” He was so heavy a weight on top of her, she could hardly draw a clear breath. “Please move.”
“I’m sorry.” He moved.
“Stop saying you’re sorry. I know you’re sorry. Do something.”
“Do what?”
“Do something for me now.”
“How can you still want me…?”
“I don’t know how.”
So they had come to this. She ha
d no self left, only flesh, and she felt she might die of it, willingly. How much simpler to die now and not have to live with herself any more. As it faded she remembered the night in Rome when she was filled with panic thinking she would die if she could not have him, and how she had wanted to be obliterated. Now she knew what it felt like to be obliterated. She thought how love, to which she had surrendered, was a loathsome thing. She deserved it.
Ivan wasn’t ready to buy a house so they rented one, a small two-story frame house near the university. They spent the money they had saved in Boston filling it with rugs and soft furniture. On questions of style they agreed spontaneously. Ivan found butcher-block tables and enormous pillows and exotic posters, and he went in for plants—before long the living room was a jungle. He hovered over them, touching their leaves solicitously, and when he transferred them from smaller pots to larger ones he held the clumps of earth and roots in his hands the way a midwife receives a slippery, fragile newborn, with reverence.
Since the house had three bedrooms they could each have a separate study—Ivan’s sensible idea. Working at her desk in the evenings, Caroline had no one to turn around and talk to for diversion. It was better that way. The loss was easier to bear alone. And she could listen to music now while she worked; Ivan could not work to music.
Inspired partly by the room, which she painted white and furnished sparsely, Caroline resolved to devote herself to her work. Like a nun, she would renounce the joys of family and hearth. The students here were not as dazzling, but they were also not as tensely competitive. Their sense of wonder revived her own. She began an article about knotted spheres in four-space, difficult enough to claim all her attention. Falling asleep, dreaming and waking, she drew pictures of curves in her head; she could dress and scramble eggs and make coffee in utter absence from the physical world. Ivan was nearby, familiar and amenable, someone to eat with and go to an occasional movie with, to bring to math department parties. But she no longer explored him. As she had imagined long ago, the layers were endless, but since she had glimpsed the brutish underside she did not care to uncover anything more. About her own life she thought as little as possible. She saw it as narrowed to a single path where once there had been many, and she traveled it numb and alone. After their night of bestiality on the floor amid the mess of cartons, they mostly let each other alone.
Rough Strife Page 10