by Marge Piercy
She should have been more shocked at what he had told her about Jeff and himself, but she had always known Jeff to fall into bed with almost anyone. With his flippant comment about incest he had struck a sore within her. She had observed for years that when Jeff and she were together, they were interested in nobody else. They felt complete. She had so frequently been called mannish, she had brooded on what gender meant and found it murky and implausible, where others seemed to find it simple as a light switch that was on or off. No, she was not affronted or disgusted. She was more shocked that Zach suddenly wanted her.
He knelt over her, grinning. “Resigned to her fate. Ah, Bernice, give me a little smile. That’s right. You can leave the slip on for the moment.” He lay down beside her and began to explore her body with his hands, large, warm, competent as her own. After a moment she touched his back tentatively. He felt enormous under her hands and well muscled. She had imagined men’s skin would be as prickly as their beards, but his face was smooth from recent shaving and his back was satiny and hot.
“Will you get undressed now?” he asked her, and she obliged.
“Can I touch you there?” she asked him, her voice sounding oddly polite against their heavy breathing. “Am I holding too tight?”
“No, sweet, no. Move your hand. Yes.”
When he reached between her legs searching for her clitoris, she put his hand on it. “Around is better,” she said simply.
He laughed, softly, against her ear. “I believe you have been guilty of self-abuse, my child.”
She smiled. “What do you think I have been doing all these years?”
“You’d be surprised how many married ladies don’t know how to press their own buttons. Like this? You can tell me what you like. I’m never too proud to learn a new trick.”
It was strangely familiar and strangely different, for no one else had ever touched her except herself. She felt embarrassed to be huffing and puffing and making little noises in the company of someone else, yet it also felt exciting. When she came, she stopped the movement of his hand.
Then he let his body down on top of hers and pressed the cock she had held earlier against her flesh. It hurt and an involuntary cry escaped her. He said nothing but pulled back, then thrust harder. She turned her face aside. She knew he would not stop and she could imagine that amused grimace he had sometimes when he was causing pain that she would bet was on his face now. He thrust and thrust until she felt herself tearing. She bit the inside of her cheek open. She bit her lip until it bled. At least he was inside her now and the tearing was done, although the pounding hurt too.
Afterwards there was little blood on the sheets: a blob about the size of a clenched fist, bright red. When he returned her to the barracks, she had stopped bleeding. Her thighs were sore, the tendons stretched from his weight.
Flo and Helen were sitting up for her, and when she came in, they murmured and cooed about her, avid with curiosity. She saw herself in the tiny mirror of the shared bathroom, hair mussed and loose, makeup long gone, her dress rumpled where it had fallen to the floor.
“What happened?” Flo asked.
“Did you have a nice evening?” Helen asked more cautiously.
“What happened? What was supposed to happen? Don’t women get tricked up like that to attract men? So he was attracted. So he made me go to bed with him. That’s what happened.”
She had silenced them both. She took a shower and went to sleep.
The next day orders came that she was to pilot Major Zachary Taylor to Washington, leaving immediately. Zach wanted to see more of her, and he had so arranged things. She felt a little encumbered by his will, his power. She also felt deeply confused. The sexual connection was interesting to her, but in a way she did not approve of. Down, it led, into murky depths of wanting and needing and being caught.
She did not worry about pregnancy. Zach told her he had failed during five years of marriage to impregnate his wife, who had finally borne him a son that was not his, whom he had acknowledged because it got him off the hook to produce an heir. He believed he was sterile, as none of the women he had slept with had ever gotten pregnant, and for the last three years he had not bothered taking precautions.
She could not find in herself any different feeling toward Zach than she had before. It was only that he had suddenly grown from a distant cloud to an overarching sky. She did not usually think of herself as object rather than as subject, but that was how she experienced herself with Zach.
In Washington Zach spent half his time on the telephone and most of the rest in meetings, so that she saw comparatively little of him in the thirty-two hours they spent there. “I’m getting into the war when I return,” he said. “Probably Italy. Lots of fun and games there. I rather fancy Rome or Florence where the underground is hopping. I’m not even passing through London, so I won’t get stuck this time. I’d love to take you with me. Think you could pass for a man?”
She told him the story of her impersonation in South Carolina, and he was amused. “Someday, we’ll give it a try. Put on my uniform and let’s see.… A little big on you. Baggy as it is, however, it’s true catnip. Come here.”
When she boarded a train in Washington, the roomette arranged and paid for by Zach, she could not decide whether she hoped the affair would end as abruptly as it had begun, or if it would, at least as an occasional aside in both their lives, continue. Her cheek against the dirty pane of the railroad car, she thought of him much as the Greek maidens so violently chosen must have experienced Zeus or Apollo. The god descended and choice vanished. Then the god went about his business, and you resumed your own forward motion at your own pace. She was neither altogether sorry nor altogether pleased. What she looked forward to was the regular run of ferrying, her solitude in the plane that was hers for the ride.
LOUISE 6
The End of a Condition Requiring Illusions
Louise awoke too early in the apartment that suddenly felt too large. She had set the alarm for eight, but again she woke at six and could not coax her way back down into the warm pool of oblivion. A few years ago, four people had lived in these rooms. Now with Kay at college, only she remained. Perhaps if she were home more, she would not feel the air of disuse that seemed to taint the apartment. Disuse? Louise smiled. Maybe it was only dust, without Mrs. Shaunessy to keep the rooms spotless. Louise had once been a diligent housekeeper, ten years before, but she did not think she was about to be one again.
That particular joy, of keeping a clean apartment, had belonged to the golden stage of her marriage before and for several years after her pregnancy. She had not felt trapped with her young child in farthest Flatbush in those penniless years, but safe, shining, fortunate. She had a home. In her orphan’s bones she believed her family could vanish, and therefore her housework held an element of magic play: here is Louise pretending to be a good balabusteh, washing windows and making stew of chicken gizzards and backs; here is Louise playing mommy with her kitten-doll K-K-K-Katie. Nor had she ever found Kay a burden in traveling, even the months they had spent in Germany while Oscar was studying with Franz Widerman.
Until the day Kay left for college, this apartment had felt barely adequate. Kay could expand to fill any space with magazines, rumpled sweaters, sneakers, tennis racquets, hair curlers. Then all at once it was too big. Louise was traveling a great deal. What she missed most was a person at home when she returned, someone who had prepared a welcome.
When she was thirteen, this would have been her idea of paradise: room upon room to herself with no one to intrude. Yet while she had enjoyed little privacy in her days as a foster child, she had also been lonely all of the time like an ache in the bottom of her belly. Now she shook herself roughly: dwelling in the past again.
Grumpily she made herself breakfast, the radio on. When she had poached her eggs, toasted her English muffin and sat down with a cup of dark coffee before beginning her morning’s work, The Times arrived, permitting her to kill an hour and cover t
he drinking of still more coffee, to make up for the sleep she had not enjoyed. The Soviets were attacking along the Dnieper. The Germans had taken Kos in the Aegean, wiping out the British garrison. In Italy, American forces had reached the Volturno.
Suddenly she glanced at the clock and ran for her bedroom. She made it a point of professional pride to be dressed before Blanche arrived; now she had exactly seven minutes. At nine o’clock Louise sat at her desk, going over the day’s work. Nonetheless she felt bleak: a tree whose leaves had fallen. She disliked feeling sorry for herself. In the middle of a world war, she had little to complain about.
A decision began forming in her. Why not take up OWI on its constant attempts to woo her to Washington? Blanche could take care of her mail until she got back. Don’t moon about, don’t hesitate, she instructed herself: act. They say you will be useful. Give it a try. As soon as she had finished dictation, she reached for the phone.
By the end of October, Louise was glad she had decided to move temporarily to Washington, because she was too busy and overworked to brood. However, living in hotels was untenable. The law said no one could stay more than five days in a Washington hotel, so on the last morning, she had to hike to another hotel, followed by a bellboy carrying her suitcases and her portable typewriter, and meeting a stream of other Washington visitors, trekking to her hotel with their luggage. It was absurd and exhausting, and the night she went home in a rare taxi at one A.M. to the wrong hotel made her swear to solve her housing problem at once.
At once was not quite what happened. She asked every acquaintance, but mostly she heard bad jokes about the scarcity of housing. Ramsay in her office said he had always believed in polygamy, and she could move in and be wife number two. It was through Franz Widerman, whom Louise suspected of recruiting his old student Oscar for OSS, that Louise finally heard of an apartment. Something about it did not quite sound on the up and up. Louise thought she detected suppressed amusement in Widerman’s voice.
She tried to guess what was wrong as she questioned the woman who was living there now. Louise would have to share the apartment with Susannah for some weeks, but then it would be hers, free and clear. Was the woman an alcoholic? dipsomaniac? round heeled? Susannah seemed normal, although obviously well into the fourth or fifth month of pregnancy. She had married recently and was leaving Washington at the end of November.
The joker materialized as soon as she talked to the super, for this apartment had been occupied by Oscar’s girlfriend Abra, now in London. Thus Franz knew of the apartment. He thought it was amusing to install the ex-wife in the current girlfriend’s abode. Louise almost gave up.
She walked around the block trying to decide if it was injurious to her dignity to move in. She had not found any other apartment whatsoever. She had seen rooms in private homes, exorbitantly priced and offering accommodations much worse than the hotels. This would be all hers by the beginning of December. There would even be room for Kay when she came home on her periodic visits.
She imagined dragging through the winter moving every five days from hotel to hotel, never able to make herself breakfast or a late supper, never able to have her books, her desk, her privacy. From the end of the block she came trotting back at a clip that left her breathless, to tell Susannah and the super that she was extremely pleased to take over the lease.
Her office was in the limestone and brick new Social Security building on Independence Avenue in the heart of governmental Washington facing the Mall, right near the Botanic Garden and the Capitol. She had a cubicle with a window onto one of the courtyards, which indicated her middling rank. This Monday she was lunching with a New York—based radio and print journalist who was the chief writer for “Now It Can Be Told.” That was a show designed to whip up enthusiasm for the war by telling stale secrets, no longer classified tales of derring-do and danger. He felt he wasn’t getting what he needed out of the OWI, and she was there to hold his hand and soothe his irritation. Louise wanted to help him prepare a program on concentration camps, but her bosses had strictly forbidden that. OWI had a policy she disliked of putting out no information on what was known about the camps and the fate of the Jews in Europe.
By midafternoon, Louise was feeling mildly rebellious herself. She had gone directly from lunch to a meeting on the campaign that was supposedly in high gear already, to recruit more women into war work. Survey after survey showed that women worked primarily for economic motives, but they were not allowed to gear any propaganda toward women’s desires to make money. Their propaganda assumed all women were housewives who had never worked before, married to middle-class men.
All the ads prepared for the campaign stressed emotions she thought far less compelling. Some were based on guilt. The bullet she didn’t make was not there to save her husband. “You know, most men in the armed forces are not at the front, and their wives know it. I frankly don’t think this kind of approach will work as well as stressing the money she’ll make and what her family can do with it—after the war, if that’s more patriotic.”
“We want to appeal to them as mothers, as wives.” Ramsay sucked on his corncob pipe, wreaths of smoke around his head and floating toward her.
“Why? Why not appeal to her as herself?”
The guidelines were going to maintain an emphasis on women’s nurturance supporting husbands, boyfriends, brothers and sons overseas or stressing glamour, showing beautiful young models working on assembly lines. OWI had launched a big campaign in September to get women into factories, targeting areas of severest labor shortages, but they would only sell the war to women on terms that did not alarm men. The slogans Louise had worked up were going to be ignored.
Well, at least they were recruiting. Louise had seen a recent intelligence study released to key people in OWI—and to her because she was a resident expert on women—that indicated that although there was a far more acute shortage of laborers in Nazi Germany than in the United States, the Germans were using foreign workers, slave labor, anything rather than their women. There was a perfunctory effort to get women into factories, but it was hampered by the Nazi party’s dogma on women’s place. Fascinating. Even in wartime, maintaining sex roles could be felt as more important than victory.
Moved into her new apartment, Louise asked herself, Do I feel emanations from Oscar’s affair? She could not imagine him crawling into Abra’s bed with Susannah in the living room. She had seen his Washington digs, and they were far more sumptuous than this place. No, she doubted Oscar had spent much time here. Visiting her New York apartment on a weekend Kay wanted to be home, Louise felt as if the deserted rooms were reproaching her. Kay was on the phone half the weekend to old friends, telling them about her new classes, her professors, her roommate, practicing her elementary French and giggling.
Louise brought back to Washington a load of books, papers, some cooking utensils and a few accents, a vase, a Klee print, a Ukrainian bowl. Her major decorating, such as it would be, must await Susannah’s departure. Neither Abra nor Susannah seemed to have done much to the place. It was graduate student scruffy.
She and Susannah were ill-suited as roommates. Susannah was a young twenty-three, mainly concerned to create the illusion that she and her master sergeant had been married for months instead of weeks. She related to Louise as a surrogate mama upon whom to dump her troubles, who would surely love to take care of her. Louise marked the days until her departure.
Thus when the young man upstairs began hanging around on Sundays, although Susannah seemed used to him and saved up little tasks—putting things on the high shelves or getting them down, carrying out the heavier trash—Louise decided to make her position clear. “Look, Daniel, that’s your name? I don’t mean to be unfriendly, but I don’t like being appointed anybody’s part-time mother. I have a daughter seventeen at college, and if I’d craved more children, I would have had them.”
“Susannah has been leaning on you.” He grinned. “She does that. Don’t worry. I’m just curious about yo
u.”
“About me? Why?”
“I was Abra Scott’s confidant. She claimed your ex-husband was still in love with you. You were the looming figure in her romance. How could I not be curious?”
“With a little self-discipline.” She looked him over carefully. A young man with a pleasant-looking open face and black curls. “Were you involved with Miss Scott?”
“Only in the line of friendship. She needed a shoulder to cry on.”
He was a friendly type, not at all threatening. Accent of the Bronx toned down by time away. She wondered idly if he were homosexual, like her agent Charley; perhaps that was why he gave that impression of relaxation with women. What she must do was restrain her sudden curiosity about Abra. The less she brooded about Oscar, the better for her. A translator: one who put off queries about his work and put in long hours. She said, “I suppose it seems absurd, even masochistic, that I’m living here.”
“I’ve been around Washington too long. I know couples who don’t break up because they can’t. After the war, they’ll divorce. In the meantime, who would get the apartment?”
Claude had not sounded pleased when she told him she was taking the position in Washington. After Thanksgiving she learned why. She phoned the hotel where he always stayed. He was out. When she finally went to bed at one in the morning, he was still out. The next day, he called her. They had supper together. She was appalled how frightened she felt as she went out on his arm in her perennial mink and her best black dress. She wanted, she needed, the relationship with him, but suddenly it was not there.