Now and then at night in the dark, briefly unshielded, he would reach out for her. They could do that in silence, old hands, expert at procuring pleasure. Waking in the morning, brittle and tossing, her opening thoughts on making breakfast, packing lunches, planning dinner, the countless ruthless and boring demands of the day, she resumed her anger. But Ivan would smile tentatively, his eyes holding a memory. Only when she stood up and felt the stuff running down her legs did she remember what he was smiling about. That memory was a luxury she couldn’t afford. She washed it away.
Just once, afterwards, lying together, he said, “Why must we be so cruel to each other? Can’t we stop this?” She had the satisfaction of refusing an answer. He caressed her again, with gestures of such grace that she tightened every muscle to resist.
“You can’t deny,” he said in the special voice, nearly forgotten, “that this makes you happy.”
“I’ve never denied it. That’s not the point.”
But in truth she felt so harassed that she had lost sight of the point altogether.
Looking at herself in the mirror, she wondered if she looked like the callous woman she had become. No, the changes were superficial: she was thinner, her hair was shaggier, her movements more nonchalant and her clothes more expensive—no time to hunt for bargains. She had an air of experience and authority. After Greta, little could frighten her. Ivan had taught her strategies for every situation in life, and she knew how to get along. In topology, there were infinite numbers of looping paths you could take around any given knot, and sometimes when she felt cut loose and freed, she imagined she could travel them all simultaneously. But she knew well that they could be grouped and reduced to a finite number of repeating patterns, all ending at the point where they began. She had become an exaggeration, she felt, a parody of a certain kind of driven woman. The French professor, whom she saw once in a while, said that in the last year or so she had become a very beautiful woman. An impressively beautiful woman. She liked hearing it. He said it in three languages. Ivan rarely said things like that. She laughed with the French professor and said, “Oh, you just like them aging and gaunt.” But she would never trust a flatterer.
At home there was no need to talk about separation or divorce or breaking up the family. They were separate enough. When their hours did not coincide, she and Ivan left each other notes, informative like the memos of business partners, often witty and stylized, on some days even affectionate. Coming in late one night and finding him asleep contentedly on his side of the bed, a note on her pillow—please get him up at seven—Caroline thought, He must have someone. He wouldn’t go for weeks at a stretch without it. And the sight of him, the classic lines so pure and harmless in sleep, gave her a terrible pang of nostalgia, and of love, unaccustomed. She missed him bitterly. Her anger, stiff and heavy, was the oppressor, a mercenary’s suit of armor. Did she have to be angry too at the burden of waking him? At the casualness of the request? She was sated with anger. She would wake him. She tossed from dawn on anyway, and he knew it. Naturally she looked no different in the mirror. Naturally, because it was only the center that had dissolved, the living part, that once had grown layers and striations of color from exposure, had been lashed by weather and sent out tendrils of connection, to him, and that she had permitted to be crushed to nothing, by politics. The center was empty and longing for him. Wherever she was, however she fled him, she was thinking of him, a bondage more constraining than love.
On a Saturday afternoon in early June she came home from her office pulsing with energy, and flung down her book bag. She had finished the most resistant section of a paper she was scheduled to deliver at a conference, then stopped to visit the French professor, who gave her coffee and the inevitable brioches. The aroma of honeysuckle rising from the hedges into the lush spring air had encircled her all the way home. Now she would see to the children. Isabel, who was almost thirteen, was recovering from chicken pox, and Greta would break out at any moment. On the living room floor, Ivan, wearing his glasses, sat cross-legged, reading aloud with the book on his ankles. Isabel and Greta lay stretched out before him, rapt like statues. They looked up at her and smiled but didn’t speak. There was a passionate hush in the air, of people holding their breath in unison with anticipation and wondrous dread.
“‘What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here?’” said Ivan, his husky voice rolling with sonorous urgency. Greta’s thumb rested inert between her front teeth. “‘My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it.’” He paused and glanced at Caroline as though to welcome her, for she had stretched out on the floor with the children, to listen. “‘My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don’t talk of our separation again: it is impracticable.’”
He stopped, releasing his audience. There was a moment of ardent silence. Ivan took out a handkerchief, blew his nose, and surreptitiously wiped his eyes with his fist. Isabel turned to Caroline.
“Mom, why are you crying? It’s only a story.”
“I can’t help it. Stories always make me cry. Look, Greta is crying too.” She put her arm around Greta and drew her close; her childish eyes, shining with sorrow, streamed. “Do you understand it?” she asked.
Greta shook her head no, and wept.
Ivan took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes again. He stretched out his legs and stretched his arms towards the ceiling. Their eight legs, elongated on the rug like chaotic vectors, were identically clad in blue jeans. They all wore cotton T-shirts. The four of them, she thought, were like members of a primitive clan, bound by the markings of hallowed tradition.
“You read so beautifully,” she said to Ivan. “You make it real.”
“Well, I have good material. And you came in at the right moment.”
She couldn’t look at him. “I wish you would read to me sometime.”
“You do? But you’re so busy. You’re always dashing somewhere.”
“I could make time to hear you read like that.” If only he would read to her like that she would not need to whirl any longer. That would content her. “My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath.” Yes, that would do. It transcended the political, and even the personal.
A year of kindergarten had a calming effect on Greta, so that Caroline no longer woke at sunrise with the apprehension of disaster—would they survive this day? The house was not the prison of perpetual dangers, as in Greta’s earliest years. As though she and the child were reflections of each other’s inner state, Caroline’s vision unblurred as Greta calmed: Ivan was not responsible for social atrocities. It was hard to say who was responsible; that was the problem. Everyone had an historical alibi. The political was so impersonal.
Gradually she slowed down; the pulses that used to beat on the surface of her skin like the vibrations of an itchy serpent—the amused French professor’s image—disappeared. In a delicate manoeuvre, she slipped out from under the skin of her anger to laze in the back yard sun. With the relentlessness of truth, the dispatches about women and men kept coming at her in all their dissonant clamor. She tried to cleave to their truth but scrape away the fury it came wrapped in like a layer of static. That was an even trickier manoeuvre, requiring some imagination.
With Ivan she lived in the uneasy balance of truce, like ancient, bickering neighbor nations of common descent, common language, and common perversity. There might never be a lasting peace, but the injuries se
emed smaller in scale, and in any case they were even. He was the more magnanimous power; as her malice ebbed, it was he who found the means to approach with the olive branch. More magnanimous, or politically astute? She didn’t pursue the question.
There were times, especially when Greta relapsed into peril, that she cried out to herself, No, the cause is just! And she wanted to flee. But you could serve a just cause insanely, she remembered. Flight was no service. It was worse than being a closet anarchist. The cause was just, but were their lives not their own, and a cause more just? Or simply more precious? She was full of these contradictions and qualifications. Her life was so riddled with ambiguity that any path she chose was a betrayal of something. But she was hanging on, though it was hardly what she had expected.
Like Caroline, Greta was still intermittently alarming. She tugged at a picture book wedged tightly in the bookcase supported by tension poles, and the entire structure collapsed. Luckily she covered her head with both hands while scrambling out. At the university swimming pool while Caroline’s back was turned, she wandered onto the high diving board, pranced, and fell in. Luckily, Ivan had taught her to swim a bit, early on. And one night with Ivan and Caroline out at the movies and Isabel on the phone with a friend, she dragged a ladder to the center of her bedroom, unscrewed the burnt-out light bulb and screwed in a new one. She had forgotten to turn off the switch. Startled by the sudden light and heat, she fell off the ladder, breaking a finger. Isabel found a neighbor to drive them to the emergency room, where the family was known. Looking at the splint when she returned from the movies, Caroline grieved that this accident was her fault because she used to lecture her daughters about self-sufficiency: they must not get into the habit of waiting for Ivan to make simple repairs.
Greta’s most terrifying venture was the fault of a feverish imagination, and occurred the summer they spent packing. Caroline and Ivan were tired of their small university town. They wanted action, noise, flurry. Without saying so aloud, they each wanted to leave the scene of remembered ugly spells. Ivan had received a call from New York in the spring: he was offered a tantalizing place at the Metropolitan Museum. And the City University needed someone with a background in topology and knot theory. An available qualified woman was beyond their wildest hopes. She could embody affirmative action. Like Yeats’s Anne Gregory, she wished they could love her for herself alone and not her yellow hair. But not even Ivan could manage that. Yeats said only God could do it. So they sold the house in which they had built up equity, and in their bedroom, stripped prints from the walls. Standing on the ladder, Caroline heard strange sounds from the other side of the wall, Greta’s room. They were rhythmic, repetitious sounds, like an incantation. Greta was in there with her dearest friend, a tractable boy named Harold, who camped at their house weekends from dawn to dusk.
“I have a funny feeling,” she said to Ivan, climbing down. “I think I’d better go see what she’s up to.”
Ivan no longer laughed at her funny feelings. He had come to the conclusion that Greta was the true anarchist—nothing could restrain the public unfurling of her private identity. He laid down his screwdriver and came along. Caroline pushed open Greta’s door.
The children sat on the floor facing each other. Greta held a long bread knife in her right hand and chanted, “This vow will seal our kinship true, Blood of me and blood of you.” Blood oozed slowly from her left index finger. She was reaching for Harold’s right hand, which he sat on. “Come on, Harold, it doesn’t really hurt.”
Ivan grabbed the knife out of her fist. Caroline slumped against the door frame with her hand pressed against her heart. She felt very old. Too old.
“I wouldn’t hurt him,” Greta protested to Ivan. “It’s because we’re moving, and I want us to be blood brothers. He’s my best friend.”
Ivan squeezed her finger and wiped it with his handkerchief. “You could have chopped a finger off, do you know that! This is going to need iodine! And Harold! Don’t you know any better?”
Harold hung his head and sucked an edge of his polo shirt.
“What was that you were saying?” asked Caroline.
“This vow will seal our kinship true, Blood of me and blood of you.”
“And where did you hear that? On one of those crummy TV shows?”
“I made it up.”
“Don’t give me stories. Where did you hear it?”
Greta’s eyes filled with tears of injury. “I saw them do it on a TV show, but I made up the poem myself.”
“Don’t you ever open a kitchen drawer again!” Caroline shouted. “Don’t even go in the kitchen!”
Isabel ambled in. These days she affected a sullen, slinking walk which suited her narrow body very well. She was nearly as tall as her mother. In one languid hand she held Jane Eyre, a finger keeping her place. “What is all the commotion? Oh, hi there, Harold.”
“Your sister was performing an ancient ritual,” said Ivan, brandishing the knife. “She was making Harold a blood brother. Welcome him to the family.”
“Oh God,” said Isabel, averting her eyes. “That child is incorrigible. I shudder to think what will become of her.”
“Oh, cut it out,” said Caroline. “Incidentally, Isabel, I have an idea. Do you know what you might do this summer?”
“What might I do?”
“You might teach Greta to read. I think she’s ready. I’m sure you’d be an excellent teacher.”
“I wouldn’t mind,” said Isabel, glancing down at her sister as if from a great height, “but I doubt that her attention span would be sufficient.”
“Yes it would!” cried Greta.
“I want to read too,” said Harold.
“I’ll teach you also,” said Isabel, “but only if you stop sucking on shirts.”
In adolescence the once-gracious Isabel was proud and haughty. She found her parents deficient in many ways, notably in self-discipline, a charge which pained though they laughed with irony. “She should only know,” Ivan said. Caroline felt sorry for him—he had drunk up the adoration so thirstily. They joined forces to defend each other against Isabel’s lucid critiques: what could they possibly understand of passion and commitment, the conflicts between the actual and the ideal, the fire in the blood? Their speeches for the defense were mutually touching: they had forgotten, in all their strife, that they thought so well of each other. Greta was friendly still, but in the territory of adventure she had staked out as her own, they knew they had no place, unless that of the occupying militia. For solace they turned back, no longer young, but powerful, to each other.
By the time they had lived in New York for two years, almost everyone they knew had been divorced. It was like a marathon, thought Caroline, in which all dropped out but the most tenacious runners, panting and sore. Ivan had become an accomplished runner, in fact, and hoped to be ready for the Central Park Marathon in a year or two. When he went out in his white shorts and blue shoes these days, she did not work herself up with self-indulgent fantasies, or even think much about it. Nor did she ever run with him—she hated fads, and found him strangely guilty of a lapse in taste—but she did dance exercises on the hard wood floor instead, listening to music. She did not accompany him to the galleries either, in his quest for enduring beauty, and he did not go to the Mozart festivals, to which she bought subscriptions and took along friends or Isabel. She still disliked professional parties where she was expected to appear in the role of Ivan’s wife, but she went and performed because she knew he needed her there; he alluded proudly to her esoteric work and she smiled esoterically. Occasionally on the way home she ranted her resentments and he listened, driving calmly and very fast, secure in the knowledge that eventually, like a record, she would run down. For her part, she was glad to stop asking him to math department gatherings, where the jokes were exclusive and abstruse, and he was bored. All parties were haunted by the ghosts of missing persons. Everyone mingled with everyone else—there were few firmly packaged husbands and wives as
there had been in Boston—and Chantal’s living arrangements would hardly be considered eccentric.
What they did together was gossip with old friends and attend assemblies of protest. They were congenital protesters, they finally acknowledged, and politics could be relied on indefinitely for the necessary evils. Caroline still would not throw a bomb into the stock exchange, even at night when no one was there, but she had come round secretly to hope that someone with fewer scruples would. And they went ice skating and to the movies, especially Italian movies, which they loved indiscriminately. She was able, at last, to appreciate movies about the ambivalences of power, and Ivan had developed a taste for the grand simplicities of passion. He read to her sometimes, feelingly, in bed, from old and great tales of love and betrayal and sacrifice. She listened entranced. But when they made love they had to keep their cries and laughs down, because Isabel, sizzling with energy, prowled the apartment till all hours.
Rough Strife Page 18