Kyra

by Carol Gilligan

  “Let’s not talk about psychoanalysis,” Roya said, her eyes glistening. “Let’s say what we know about love.”

  “Kyra’s the expert”—Anna nodded toward me—“but she’s just been burned, so you have to be careful.” The wine was going to her head.

  I bit into a slice of pomegranate, the red seeds releasing their juice. I reached for my napkin to blot the stain, the scar on my wrist almost invisible. I didn’t think Roya had seen it, and whatever her travels through the university, no one seemed to have mentioned it to her. It was hardly the subject for a public lecture, a mix of anger and satisfaction now rising about Greta. What right had she, if it was her? Yet it seemed she had heard me, taken it in. “You can’t do this work without love,” she had said one day when I pressed her about her feelings. “Why not say ‘I’?” I had said.

  “Okay, I’ll start,” I said, putting my napkin down. “People used to think of love as the oldest of the gods.”

  “Chaos, earth, and then love,” Anna said. “That’s Hesiod.”

  “Who?” Roya asked.

  “A Greek poet,” Anna said.

  “And when you fell in love, they said you’d been smitten by a god, or pierced by an arrow, or infused with a potion. It was a kind of madness. Beautiful, but still…I know the feeling, the sense of being overtaken, consumed.”

  Anna was watching me, her eyes slightly blurred. Roya’s face was lit with anticipation. I would take her dare, say what I knew.

  “But I would say in a way it’s just the opposite. It’s the deepest kind of knowing, and that can drive you mad. It can make you feel crazy, but this crazy feeling is not love. Love is something you know with someone. It’s hard to explain, but you know it in your body. It’s like it happens in your cells, your cells and their cells recognize one another. You can’t make it happen or make it not happen, which also drives some people crazy.”

  I edged a circle of wax from the table with my fingernail. It broke away in bits.

  “It was almost two years ago. A total surprise. This is happening? I tried to brush it aside. We started working together. He was directing a play, an opera. He asked me to do the sets. It was something I’d never done before, but I did it, and then I went away. And when I came back, it felt inevitable. We became lovers. It sounds trite, but everything lightened, as if gravity had released us from its grip.”

  I examined the spot where the wax had fallen, the wood glazed milky-white.

  “Or like the wind at this time of year, clearing the leaves, exposing the structure of the branches. I felt seen in a way I’d never been before. And he too. We said it to each other. That’s what I mean by knowing. We knew each other. Or at least I thought we did. Was that love? I don’t know. It felt like love, but then what happened didn’t look like love.”

  I braced my elbows against the table and put my head in my hands.

  “He left. Suddenly, with no warning. Someone else told me he was going, not him. Nothing had changed between us, but then he was going. He said he had to do his work, but that wasn’t it. In this world there are many ways to work out these things. If he had wanted me in his life, he would have told me he was going, tried to work something out. But he was adamant, he had to go, and by then I was furious. He wrote me a letter, but it made no sense. I love you desperately, in more ways than I knew existed. We cannot see each other. I couldn’t feel without feeling crazy. Then I started to go numb, and that was worse. I’m in therapy now because last December I cut myself. People thought I was trying to kill myself, like someone in an opera. But that wasn’t it. I cut myself because I had to get under a surface that was crazy-making, to see what was real. And Greta, my therapist, she knew that. She said no to medications. Which was a relief. And there was this other thing that surprised me. I thought she would say ‘get rid of this guy,’ which is what many people told me. Get over it. But that wasn’t it. If you can’t feel love, what can you feel? Greta said I would find out what I wanted to do. It might take time.”

  I stopped, suddenly rattled. I looked at Anna, wondering if she had noticed. She was picking the pomegranate seeds from their white husk, lining them up on her plate. I hadn’t even mentioned Simon.

  Anna scooped up the seeds with her spoon. “I’ll go next,” she said, filling her mouth. I couldn’t read Roya’s expression. I assumed she would be in the get-rid-of-him camp. She held up the bottle of wine. I shook my head, and she filled her glass.

  “I didn’t know you were in therapy,” she said quietly.

  I stared at my hands, white against the olive-green suede of my pants. My mind was on Simon. The lecture suddenly seemed inconsequential. “You saw her,” I said, “my therapist. At that lecture.”

  A startled look on Roya’s face.

  Her eyes widened, dark circles of amazement. “She was the speaker?” She paused, clearly flustered. “I should have not said…” she began, glancing first at Anna, then at me. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t know.”

  “I didn’t either when you started, but then it became obvious,” I said, turning to Anna, who was staring into her wine. I suddenly felt too exposed.

  “Isn’t everyone in America in therapy?” Roya asked, adjusting her bracelets.

  “It may seem that way,” Anna said, “but judging from the political situation, it isn’t having much effect.”

  “But that’s what she was saying,” Roya said, her face brightening, “why it hasn’t been effective.”

  Anna picked up her glass and held it to the light, waiting for the awkwardness to dispel.

  “Love is what we bring with us into this world,” Anna began.

  “Hesiod was right, in the beginning there is love. And then? That’s where the story starts. I loved my parents, I love Kyra, I’ve loved many people, men, women, you name it. When I was at university, all the old rules were suspended. We were going to reinvent love, strip it of jealousy and possession. We actually believed that we could, but love has a way of circumventing such plans. As Kyra said, you can’t contain it, and yet it wants to be contained.”

  She put another slice of pomegranate on her plate and began to sort the seeds, darker red, lighter red. They glistened in the light.

  “With Tony now, it’s a sweet love. Aside from Kyra, he’s my best friend.” She hesitated a moment, then looked up shyly.

  “We’re talking now about having a child.” I knew she wanted a child. I didn’t know they were actually planning it. I picked up my spoon and turned it, watching the flame from the candles appear and disappear. “It’s not a passionate love,” Anna said, “but then maybe the two are incompatible. With patients, I would get into these Talmudic discussions about love. They would fall in love with me, or at least some of them would, and I would say that I felt love for them. But as they suspected, I wasn’t in love with them, or if I felt my feelings moving in that direction, I would remind myself that it wasn’t really me they were in love with but some image they had projected onto me or a need they had to reenact an old script of rejection and confirm their worst fears. Then I began to question that. I started reading Ferenczi, the Hungarian analyst who said that the physician heals the patient through love. He experimented with what was called wild analysis, and got into all sorts of trouble. But me—I’m not a wild person. And unlike my sister, I’ve never been what you would call ‘in love.’”

  She rearranged the seeds on her plate, mixing the colors, her face unguarded, incandescent. Had she been too much the older sister?

  She smiled as if reading my thoughts.

  The candles had burned down to the wicks. Anna began to hum an old ballad she used to sing on her guitar. Quietly, she added words: “The roads they are so muddy, we cannot walk about, so roll me in your arms, love, and blow the candles out.” Wisps of smoke rose from the pools of wax. “I’ve said more than I intended,” she said, getting up and heading for the drawer where we kept the candles. “It’s Roya’s turn.” She pressed the fresh candles into the melted wax and lit them.r />
  Roya held the pomegranate to the light. “Eat the pomegranate, Mohammed said, for it purges the system of envy and hatred.” She sucked the seeds into her mouth.

  “Me? I always thought love was a trap, and for many women it was. I wanted freedom. Not marriage or children. My dream was this, to be an architect, to work with the landscape. I fell in love with trees and plants—their names, their colors, their shapes. It was magic. I had an image of the life I wanted to lead. I would have passionate love affairs in different countries with amazing people. And I did. I have. Sometimes my heart was broken.” A shadow crossed her face. “Still, it was worth it.” She looked past us, into the room. “I read once that if you want to be an artist you have to be prepared to have your heart broken. In the revolution, we were going to purge ourselves of envy and hatred, renounce possession. It was a discipline of the heart. But given what happened, I think we were mistaken about freedom. What it meant. Maybe it’s love that’s revolutionary. Because it’s love that frees us.”

  An astonished look, as if she were amazed by the words that had come out of her mouth.

  We sat watching the candles burn down. Stars spinning in their distant constellations. Maybe love is the revolutionary emotion, the true freedom, because it releases something in ourselves. The thought made me sad.

  We had finished the second bottle of wine. I stood up, waiting for the room to steady. “What’s the old Dylan song, ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose’?” I put the bottle in the recycling bin.

  “That’s not Dylan,” Anna said. “It’s Kris Kristofferson, ‘Me and Bobby McGee.’ The song he wrote for Janis Joplin.”

  “Who was Bobby McGee?” Roya asked.

  “Who knows,” Anna said, “but about freedom. You can’t love without freedom. That’s what makes love feel so unsafe, you have to relinquish control.”

  We left the dishes on the counter, a red stain on each plate.

  “I hear you’ve been talking about me,” I said.

  Greta stiffened in her chair.

  “My friend Roya, the Iranian architect, she went to your lecture. Each week she goes to a different lecture, it’s her way of sampling Harvard, and last week, she chose yours.”

  I waited, my heart beating fast.

  “And you have some feelings about that?”

  I laughed.

  “I do,” I said. “For one thing, you might ask me if you’re going to quote me. I gather you talked about problems in the structure of therapy. And for another, you might have told me. I’d like to have heard what you would say.”

  A twist in the corner of her mouth.

  “What do you think I would say?”

  “Actually, I know what you said. Roya told us, without knowing that you were my therapist. She might have done so anyway, since she doesn’t really believe in therapy, but that’s beside the point. What I think is that you would have said exactly what you said. But the problem is not just that women need to discover that they can change the structures in which they are living. That’s what my work is about, changing the structure. It’s why do you set up this situation, this structure, in the first place. Why set up a relationship with the ending built in? You’re asking women to buy this, but my question is, why have you bought it?”

  She picked up a pencil, her features set. I could see she was angry, not therapist anger but really mad. A genuine feeling. I sat up straight in my chair.

  “I think I see your point,” she said, her voice steady. “But I have to ask, why now? Why is this coming up now?”

  “Because of the lecture,” I said. Because of the conversation with Roya and Anna the other night.

  “I’ll tell you something that will interest you,” I continued, pulling off my sweater and tossing it onto the wooden chair next to the desk. Outside it was still light. Soon the time would change, the clocks aligning with the earth as it moved into darkness.

  Greta removed her shawl, placing it on her lap, an island of red against the black of her dress.

  “Roya came to Nashawena for the weekend, and we had this long conversation about love, Anna, Roya, and I. I spoke about love without even thinking about Simon. I was talking about Andreas, how it had been, how I had thought that was love, and then when he left, I didn’t know what was real. The love? The leaving? Which only underscores the absurdity of this situation here. Because if you think about it, it’s an exact repetition. Someone elicits love and then leaves. But here, the ending is built in from the start. What’s the point? I’m in the same situation again. Maybe I’m not in love, but love, that’s what you’re inviting. You say you can’t do this work without love. And if that’s true, why would you end the love, the relationship? Roya would say you’re just perpetuating the old system.”

  I thought of Mohammed, what Roya had said. Purge the system of envy and hatred.

  “You know,” Greta said, “you can attack me. Maybe you need to get angry at me. But it might be worth asking if you’re also angry at yourself for not thinking about, or speaking about, Simon. That would show a big shift, for you to let go of that.”

  “That’s too easy,” I said. “When I realized I hadn’t even mentioned him, at first I was startled, but then I had this image of myself standing on the shore, watching a piece of the continent drift away. As I thought about it, it made sense. I had already let go of Simon when I fell in love with Andreas. I just hadn’t seen it.”

  She raised her eyebrows, indicating a question. Was that true?

  “What really rattled me that night was the realization that with Andreas I had gone to a completely different place. What’s the poem, ‘somewhere I have never traveled.’ It was like that, which I also hadn’t admitted to myself. And then after he left, I had to ask myself, was it like that? Was it the way I thought, had felt? Because then I couldn’t tell anymore what was real. Which is why I cut myself. Now I have feelings for you, you say you have feelings for me. I can feel that. But are the feelings real?”

  She switched on the lamp.

  “Our purpose here is to understand your feelings,” Greta said, “for you to know them. Then you can make whatever choices you want. To act on them, to not act on them. But in either case, you will understand what you are doing.”

  A clutch in my stomach, a wave of despair. I could see where this was going. It was just my problem. Not hers. A voice in my head. Don’t give in.

  “I just don’t buy that,” I said. “You speak as if my feelings exist completely apart from yours. But here we are in this small room, breathing the same air, literally taking each other in. If you’re fudging your feelings or withholding your feelings, it’s confusing to me, to mine. It makes it hard to breathe.”

  I picked up a Kleenex and put it over my nose.

  She watched. I couldn’t read her face.

  “Roya said that in the revolution in Iran, they tried to discipline their hearts. Isn’t that what therapists learn to do? But it’s not something I want to learn to do.”

  That was the point. I had no stomach for this situation, this so-called relationship. Once was enough. Too much. I looked at my bag, lying on the floor. I had seen the effect on Anna. She had done that, learned to discipline her heart. I saw the cost.

  “This is the way I know how to work,” Greta said. A simple statement.

  I watched the light shift on the painting of the door over her chair, the blue deepening as the afternoon waned. I had seen that door as an invitation. Now I noticed. It was shut.

  “I have a proposal,” Greta said, her face alert. “It’s October now. What if we agree to continue until January, that gives us three months, and it will be a year. Then we can decide together how we want to proceed.”

  My stomach went into free fall. She had removed the barrier. What would happen would be up to us.

  “I’ll be away in January,” I said. “There’s a conference in Vienna on reenvisioning the city, and I’ve been asked to give one of the talks. It’s the first week in January, and
since that’s reading period at Harvard, I thought I might stay on another week.”

  “Then that will be our break,” Greta said, picking up her book. “It will give us time between now and then, and we can continue to talk about this.”

  That was her signal. I looked at the clock. We had run over. I gathered up my things and glanced at the painting. I could swear that the door had opened a crack.

  3

  WE HAD GONE THROUGH THE FACULTY MEETING AGENDA, AND the dean asked if there were other matters people wanted to bring up. Reckless question. Silent prayers lofted around the room: let no one speak and the meeting end early. Jerry raised his hand. He was the young recruit on the architecture faculty, a winner of prizes, a popular teacher. “What about the students’ demand for more diversity on the faculty?” A shudder ran through the room.

  A naïve plant lover from landscape looked up, consternation on his face: “I don’t see any objection to what they’re asking for. The question is, how are we going to respond, what action are we prepared to take to make this happen?” Diversity was the coinage of landscape architecture: many plants, different colors.

  I glanced at the dean, his face impassive: whatever happens, may it not involve emotion.

  Roya, on my left, was doodling. She sketched a woman in a chador. I raised my eyebrows. She raised her hand.

  “Mike, Alex, Roya, and then Sanji,” the dean intoned. He made a list on his pad.

  Resignation settled over the room. Give academics a topic and they will debate it. Give administrators a question, they will form a committee. The dispirited soul on my right began surreptitiously to read his mail.

  It was twenty to four.

  Mike, who taught the seminar on deconstruction, began by demolishing the dialectical oppositions and binary categories that were, like the not-diverse faculty, deeply entrenched.

  The jargon landed on the sodden faces of those allergic to critical theory, not to mention Mike’s outfit of black sweater and jeans. Philip, the chair of architecture, in tailored jacket and trousers, got up to refill his cup of tea.