The Summer Without Men

by Hustvedt, Siri

  And so that was the night we tackled the double bedtime together. On my side, this involved a complex strategy of rocking, bouncing, and occasionally shaking the just-nrsed Simon, who seemed to have developed paroxysms in the gut vicinity. The little red man squirmed with discomfort, spat milk on my shoulder, and then, after straining mightily, let out in one heavenly, propulsive motion a gob of creamy yellow shit into his diaper, which I happily cleaned while examining his tiny, adorable penis and surprisingly consequential testicles and tucking up his bottom in a Pamper, and then I found a rocking chair, into which we settled, and I rocked and lullabyed the small scion of the family into the arms or, rather, the lap of Morpheus. Meanwhile, Lola waged a parallel campaign with the chattering, not-yet-four fruitcake, Flora, who dillydallied and shammed and bargained her way toward what Sir Thomas Browne once called the “Brother of Death.” Valiantly, how valiantly she fought the loss of consciousness with every possible ruse: bedtime stories and glasses of water and just one more song until she, too, exhausted from the rigors of battle, collapsed, knuckle of curled index finger inside her mouth, free arm flung out across bedspread featuring large purple dinosaur, while Giraffey and his companion, a peroxide beast stolen from the head of slumbering warrior, kept vigil from the bedside table.

  Lola and I ate the quiche and slowly got potted over the course of several hours. She lay on the sofa, birdcages catching the light, her tanned, round legs stretched out in front of her. From time to time she wiggled her bare feet, with their slightly dirtied soles, as if she were reminding herself that they were still attached to her ankles. By eleven o’clock I had discovered that Pete was a problem, “even though I love him.” Lola had been informed of my marital fiasco and a tear or two had dripped down both of our noses. We had laughed about our Problems as well, chortled loudly over their mutual propensity for odiferous socks that stiffened with some unknown manly secretion, especially in winter. The girl had a good laugh, a deep and surprising one, which seemed to come from somewhere below her lungs, and a direct way of speaking that charmed me. No indirect discourse or Kierkegaardian ironies for this daughter of Minnesota. “I wish I knew what you know,” she said at one point. “I should have studied harder. Now with the kids, I don’t have time.” I muttered some platitude in response to this, but the fact was, the content of our conversation that night was of little importance. What mattered was that an alliance had been established between us, a felt camaraderie that we both hoped would continue. The unspoken directed the evening. When we parted we hugged and, in a fit of affection augmented by alcohol, I cupped her round face in my hands and thanked her heartily for everything.

  The transience of human feeling is nothing short of ludicrous. My mercurial fluctuations in the course of a single evening made me feel as if I had a character made of chewing gum. I had fallen into the ugly depths of self-pity, a terrain just above the even more hideous lowlands of despair. Then, easily distracted twit that I am, I had, soon after, found myself on maternal heights, where I had practically swooned with pleasure as I bobbed and fondled the borrowed homunculus next door. I had eaten well, drunk too much wine, and embraced a young woman I hardly knew. In short, I had thoroughly enjoyed myself and had every intention of doing so again.

  * * *

  It may come as no surprise to you that brains are not all that different from those of our mammalian cousins the rats. My own rat man has spent his life championing a subcortical primal affective self across species, heralding our shared brain areas and neurochemistries. Only in later years has he begun to relate this core spot to the puzzle of higher levels of reflection, mirroring, and self-consciousness—in monkeys, dolphins, elephants, human beings, and pigeons, too (most recently)—publishing papers on the various systems of this mysterious thing we call selfness, enriching his understanding with phenomenology, with quotes from the luminous Merleau-Ponty and the murkier Edmund Husserl, courtesy of HIS WIFE, who walked him through the philosophy step by step, retreating to Hegel, Kant, and Hume when needed (although the old man has less use for them, his interest is in embodiment, yes, Leib, schéma corporel), and read over each word carefully, painstakingly correcting errors and smoothing prose. No, you moan, not she, not she of the small stature, red curls, and comely bosom! Not the lady poet! Yes, it is so, I tell you in all gravity. The great Boris Izcovich has repeatedly gone marauding for ideas in the brain of his own wife, has even acknowledged her contributions. So? So? you say. Isn’t that all right then? It is NOT all right because THEY do not believe him. He is the Philosopher King and Man of Rat Science. After all, Dear Reader, I ask you how many men have thanked their wives for this or that service, usually at the very end of a long list of colleagues and foundations? “Without the unflagging support and inestimable patience of Muffin Pickle, my wife, as well as my children, Jimmy Junior and Topsy Pickle, this book never could have been written.”

  * * *

  Without the bilateral prefrontal cortex of my wife, Mia Fredricksen, this book would not exist.

  * * *

  “That period is over,” my mother said when I asked her about men in her life. “I don’t want to take care of a man again.” I was behind her when she said this, massaging her back, and saw only the line of her straight clipped white hair. “I miss your father,” she said. “I miss our friendship, our talks. He could, after all, talk about many things, but, no, I can’t see the advantages of taking up with someone now. Widowers marry again because it makes their lives easier. Widows often don’t, because it makes their lives harder. Regina is an exception. I suspect she needs the attention. She flirts with everyone.”

  My mother, her chin lowered as I gently pressed my fingers into her neck, continued the theme of relations between the sexes with a story: Returning from her book club the night before, she had run into Oscar Busley, one of a dwindling number of Rolling’s male residents. Although his peripatetic days were behind him, Oscar had retained kinesis and increased his personal velocity by means of an Electric Mobility Scooter. Busley had whirred beside my mother down the corridor, chatting amiably, as they headed in the direction of her apartment. When they reached her door, she stopped to take her keys from her bag. The man must have unclenched his fists from the Mobility’s handlebars and lunged precipitously, because my mother was amazed to discover that Oscar had attached himself to her midsection. He had tric Mobild his arms firmly around her as he nestled his pate just beneath her breasts. With equal suddenness and probably greater force (she lifted weights twice a week), my mother had disengaged herself from the unwelcome embrace, rushed into her apartment, and slammed the door.

  There followed a brief discussion between us about the disinhibition that sometimes occurs in cases of dementia. My mother, however, insisted that the man was “quite all right in his mind”; it was the rest of him that needed restraining. She then countered the Oscar Busley tale with the Robert Springer story. She had attended a dinner in St. Paul and met one of my father’s old law acquaintances, Springer, “a tall handsome man” with “a nice head of hair,” who was there with Mrs. Springer. This entirely nonviolent encounter consisted of a handshake accompanied by a meaningful gaze. By then, back rub over, my mother had moved into a chair and was facing me. She made an opening gesture with both hands, palms up. “He held it too long, you understand, just a little longer than was appropriate.”

  “And?” I said.

  “And I nearly swooned. The pressure of his hand went right through me. I was weak in the knees. Mia, it was lovely.”

  Yes, I thought, the electric air.

  … lift your fingers white

  And strip me naked, touch me light,

  Light, light all over.

  Lawrence in my head. Touch me light.

  My mother’s wrinkled, slender face looked thoughtful. Our minds moved along parallel paths. She said, “I make a point of touching my friends, you know, a pat, a hug. It’s a problem. In a place like this, many people aren’t touched enough.”

  * *
*

  The girls were out of sorts. It may have been the heat. We were cool inside, but outside the day was muggy—swamp weather. Alice looked especially wilted, and her large brown eyes had a rheumy glaze to them. When I asked her if she was unwell, she said her allergies were bothering her. They chattered about Facebook, and boys’ names were mentioned: Andrew, Sean, Brandon, Dylan, Zack. I heard the phrase “later at the pool” several times, “bikinis,” and lots of whispering and hushing. But beyond the titillating expectation of meeting members of the other sex, there was an additional tension among them, not without excitement, but that turbulence, whatever it was, had a smothered, invidious quality I could feel as surely as the humidity beyond the room. Nikki, especially, seemed discomposed. She was unable to stop herself from simpering at every possible interval. Jessie’s pale blue eyes were heavy with significance, and once she mouthed a word to Emma, but I couldn’t rher lips. Peyton repeatedly laid her head down on the table as if she were suffering from a sudden onset of narcolepsy. Although her expression was illegible, Ashley’s always erect posture had an extra rigidity, and she applied lip gloss to her already shining mouth three times in a single hour. Emma, too, appeared preoccupied with some unknown, only half-suppressed joke. I had a powerful sensation of a text inscribed beneath it all, but I was looking at a palimpsest so thick with writings that nothing was legible.

  As the class continued, I had to disguise my irritation. Nikki’s pudgy face, with its sparkling eye shadow and heavy mascara, which only two days earlier had struck me as good-humored, now looked merely moronic. Joan’s barely visible grin and similar makeup rankled rather than amused me. While they were writing their poems about color, I had to remind myself that some of the girls hadn’t turned thirteen—that their self-control was limited and that if I allowed myself to become alienated the whole class would sour. I also knew that my hypersensitivity to the atmospheric nuances around the table, combined with my own sorry experience at their age, could easily distort my perceptions. How many times had Boris said, “Mia, you’re blowing this way out of proportion,” and how many times had I seen myself holding a flaccid balloon between my lips, breathing into it as it slowly expanded into a great pear or long wiener, thereby changing it from one thing into another? No, the same thing, only bigger: more air.

  After a not entirely dull discussion of color and feeling—bitter, mean green; glum or soothing or huge blue; hot, yelling red; bursting yellow; blank, cold white; grumpy brown; scary, deadly black; and airy, sweet-tasting pink—they departed, and I, self-anointed adult spy, stood on the sultry front steps of the small building and watched.

  There unfolded before me a kind of dance, a jostling, animated shuffle of approaches, withdrawals, and various doublings, triplings, and quadruplings. I could see, only yards away, at the end of the short block, a group of five boys, happily pounding, slapping, pushing, and tripping one another as they exclaimed, “You fuck, what’d’ya think yer doin’?” and “Get your hands off me, homo!” With a single exception—a tall boy in wide shorts and a baseball cap turned backward on his head—they were runty amours, much shorter than most of the girls, but all five—towering boy included—were engaged in what appeared to be a clumsy, testosterone-infused form of group gymnastics. Meanwhile, my seven were also in performance mode. Nikki, Joan, Emma, and Jessie shrieked with self-conscious laughter, glancing over their shoulders at their stumpy suitors. Peyton’s drowsiness seemed to have lifted. I saw her aggressively insert herself between Nikki and Joan, lean down, and whisper some thought into Nikki’s ear, which instantly produced in the listener another high-pitched squeal. Ashley, rod straight, breasts up, out, and forward, shook her hair onto her back with two little twists of her neck, before she moved confidingly toward Alice. The latter listened, rapt, to the former, and immediately afterward, I saw Emma glance at Ashley. It was a glittering, facetious look, but also, I realized, with a flash of discomfort, a servile one.

  As they wandered off in a loose pack toward the still-raucous savages on the corner, I felt a mixture of pity and dread—pity, quite simply, because I was remembering not any particular day, any particular boy or girl, not even the gloomy period when I was pushed out by Julia and her disciples. Rather, I remembered that time of life when most of what matters can be summed up by the phrase “the other kids,” and it struck me as pitiful. The dread was more complex. In his journals, Kierkegaard writes that dread is an attraction, and he is right. Dread is a lure, and I could feel its tug, but why? What had I actually seen or heard that created this mild but definite pull in me? Perception is never passive. We are not only receivers of the world; we also actively produce it. There is a hallucinatory quality to all perception, and illusions are easy to create. Even you, Dear Reader, can easily be persuaded that a rubber arm is your own by a charming neurologist with a few tricks either up his sleeves or in the pockets of his white coat. I had to ask myself if my circumstances, my own unwanted pause from “real” life, my own postpsychotic state had affected me in ways I wasn’t aware of and couldn’t predict.

  * * *

  The two further amusements Abigail revealed to me that Thursday were as follows:

  One floral, hand-knit tea cozy, which, when turned inside out, exposed a tapestry lining of female monsters with oozing eyes, flaming breath, breasts with spears, and long swordlike talons.

  One long green table runner embroidered with white Christmas trees. When reversed and unzipped, it displayed (moving from left to right) five finely rendered female onanists on a black background. (Onan, the disgraced Biblical character, got into trouble for spilling his seed on the ground. As I examined the row of voluptuaries, I wondered if the term could apply to those of us who are seedless but egg-full. We waste those eggs like crazy, of course, flushing them out every month in days of bleeding, but then most sperm are wholly useless as well, a thought to be considered elsewhere at greater length.)

  Slender sylph reclines in easy chair, strategically dandling a feather between her open legs.

  Dark lady lies at edge of bed, legs in the air, two hands hidden beneath disordered petticoats.

  Chunky redhead straddles the bar of a trapeze, head thrown back, mouth open in orgasmic extremity.

  Grinning blonde with shower nozzle—spray stitched in neat fanning lines of blue thread.

  And, finally, a white-haired woman lying in bed clad in a long nightgown, her hands pressed over the cloth against her genitals. This last character changed the work entirely. The jocularity of the four younger revelers turned suddenly poignant, and I thought about the loneliness of masturbatory consolations, of my own lonely consolations.

  When I looked up from the tapestry of self-pleasuring women, Abigail’s expression was both shrewd and sad. She told me she had not shown the masturbators to anyone but me. I asked her why. “Too risky” was her curt response.

  It was strange how quickly I had become accustomed to the woman’s jackknife posture and how little I thought about it as we talked. I noticed, however, that her hands were shaking more than when we were last together. She told me three times that no one had seen “the runner” but me, as if to be sure of my confidence. I said I would never speak of it without her permission. Abigail’s sharp eyes gave me the strong impression that choosing me as a repository for her artistic secrets was not caprice. She had a reason, and she knew it. Nevertheless, she explained little and conducted a roving, shapeless conversation with me that afternoon over lemon cookies and tea, moving from her visit to New York in 1938 and her love for the Frick Collection to the fact that she was six years old when women got the vote to the poor supplies that were offered to art teachers in her day and how she had had to buy her own or deprive her pupils. I listened patiently to her, aware that despite the insignificance of what she was telling me, an urgency in her tone held me in my seat. After an hour of this, I felt she was tiring and suggested we make another date.

  When we parted, Abigail grasped both my hands in hers. The squeeze she gave them
was weak and tremulous. Then, lifting my hands to her lips, she kissed them, turned her head to one side, and pressed her cheek hard against the skin of my knuckles. Outside her door, I leaned against the wall in the corridor and felt tears come into my eyes, but whether they were for Abigail or for me, I had no idea.

  * * *

  I knew Pete was back because I heard him. Now that I had befriended Lola, I felt worse about the noise. I was sitting in the backyard on my chair after a long talk with Daisy on the telephone, my up-and-coming comedienne with the kind but overly possessive boyfriend “who wants to be with me every minute when he’s not at work.” She had called because she needed to discuss diplomacy. Daisy wanted to find the perfect way to tell him, “I need my space.” When I suggested that the phrase she had just used seemed inoffensive, she moaned, “He’ll hate that.” Pete was hating something, too, but fortunately after only minutes his bellowing stopped, and the house next door went quiet. Perhaps the combatants had taken to the wordless thrusts and parries of copulation. My father had not been a yeller, Boris was not a yeller, but there can be power in silences, too, more power sometimes. The silence draws you into the mystery of the man. What goes on in there? Why don’t you tell me? Are you glad or sad or mad? We must be careful, very careful with you. Your moods are our weather and we want it always to be sunny. I want to please you, Dad, to do tricks and dance and tell stories and sing songs and make you laugh. I want you to see me, see Mia. Esse est percipi. I am. It was so easy with Mama, her hands holding my face, her eyes with mine. She could roar at me, too, at my mess and disorderly ways, my crying jags and my eruptions, and then I was so sorry, and it was easy to get her back. And with Bea, too, but you were too far, and I couldn’t find your eyes or, if I did find them, they turned inward and there was gloom in that mental sky. Harold Fredricksen, Attorney at Law. It was a great joke in the family that when I was four, I had recited the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father who art in Heaven, Harold be thy name.” And Boris, yes, Boris, too, husband, father, father, husband. A repetition of the pull. What goes on in thre? Why don’t you tell me? Your silences pull me toward you but then there are clouds in your eyes. I want to ram the fortress of that gaze, blast beyond it to find you. I am the fighting Spirit of Communion. But you are afraid of being broken into, or maybe you are afraid of being eaten. The seductive Dora, glamour-puss mother weighted down by the myriad gestures and accoutrements of femininity, the sulks and coos and eyelash batting and shoulder rolling and hints and around-the-bend methods that will get her what she wants. I can hear her gold bracelets jingling. How she loved you, her bubeleh, her boychik, her darling, but there was something cloying in that love, something theatrical and selfish, and you knew it and, as soon as you were big enough, you kept her at a safe distance. Stefan knew, and he also knew that for her he came second in all things. Two boys with a father in heaven. And so it was, Boris, that we carried them, our parents, with us to each other. The Pause, too, must have them, father and mother, but I cannot think of her. I don’t want to think of her.