Rita Will

by Rita Mae Brown

  Furious, I marched over to another bank. I had to go to three banks before Jane Shield, an officer at Central Fidelity, finally corrected the overt sexism.

  I knew that the South was backward in many ways, but I’d been away long enough to be shocked at how backward it had remained.

  In 1979, I’d been living in Virginia for two years. Women had been admitted to the University of Virginia, a state-funded school, for only nine years and you could count the black students on your fingers. As for professors from minority groups, don’t hold your breath. Business was done by men in sack jackets, rep ties and high-waters (pants that are too short). Many of them were ruddy-faced from bourbon. Hearty, affable and provincial, the “in” male group hadn’t a clue as to how destructive they were to other people, including their own wives.

  Over time some of them learned, but they taught me the dangers of insularity, of doing business with “your own kind.” Your worldview becomes warped. Not that such people aren’t often kind, they are, but they really think the rest of the world is like they are. It makes for bad decisions—one of the real reasons Nixon’s advisors tripped over their own feet.

  When I moved to central Virginia I did two things that were sneaky. First, I never told anyone my bloodlines. This way I dispensed with the blood snobs right off the bat. I lived here six years before I ’fessed up to Buckingham and Venable blood.

  The second thing I did was to feign ignorance about horses. My small boarding operation demanded only that I feed, muck stalls and check legs. No one expected me to know much.

  My first victim was to have been Dr. Dan Flynn. He came out for a prepurchase vetting of a nasty mare I was boarding, a good-looking but hateful animal. She had vitreous bundles in her eyes, little strands of inflammatory debris that can sometimes cross the field of vision. Unless they shift, they aren’t a problem. I waited for him to act in collusion with the seller. Well, Dan Flynn is dead honest. To the bone. He was the first person in Albemarle County to earn my total respect. His wife, a small-animal vet, is equally as principled. Since then Dr. Dan Flynn has become a towering figure in his profession.

  Ginny Flynn is still saving little critters.

  I found out quickly who was honest, who was conditionally honest and who was a lying sack of shit. Conditional honesty is interesting. This means Miss X will sell you a decent horse because she has to see you frequently. If you’d driven in from North Carolina, she’d have soaked you good.

  Once I started taking riding lessons my ruse worked even better because people confused my pathetic efforts with complete ignorance. This is not to say I’m the best groundsperson who ever lived. I’m not. Mom gets that accolade. But I know a bog spavin or a bowed tendon when I see one. Then there are the injuries where the pain is referred just as in a human: your leg hurts but you’ve really pulled a muscle in your hip. These are harder to figure out.

  Mother applauded my tactics. It was exactly what she would have done.

  However, the isolation over the years was beginning to tell on me. My small local victories, satisfying though they might be, did not constitute a community.

  I needed a community and I was too dumb to know it.

  I missed Fannie. I missed Kate, too. Since gay people lived silent, hidden lives, I couldn’t even mourn them for fear of exposing them. They were the only family I knew apart from Mom and Aunt Mimi, Julia Ellen and the boys. My success distanced me from some relatives. If they were jealous, they had the good grace not to show it, but as for being confused, of course they were. You can’t understand the film business unless you’re in the middle of it. Publishing at that time was still a gentleman’s business, a bit easier to understand. But my life veered up and off at a wide angle from the rest of them. It made sense, though. I had never belonged to them. You can’t tell someone over and over that they don’t belong and then expect them to stick around.

  Mom sensed she had been part of the problem, not that she was willing to tackle it directly. Her way of trying to make up was to help me now. Thank God she did.

  Again she asked if I couldn’t marry Jerry. We could lead our lives as we saw fit. She didn’t realize Jerry was going through an antiwoman phase that can only be described as faggot bitchery at its worst. The straightness required of him at work was counterbalanced by an exclusively male social and sexual life that bordered on the compulsive. Jerry was sick at heart and couldn’t deal with it. Two years older than I, he had hit the glass ceiling. He wasn’t going to become a powerful figure at DuPont without a wife and kids. His hatred spilled over everything he did and said. Mostly it spilled over me and his lover, Herb May, a former navy career man.

  He used to tell me I was the only woman worth talking to and think I would perceive that as a compliment. Misogyny frightens me because it is rooted in the very inequality that creates the undesirable traits we perceive as belonging to women: slyness, indirectness, emotional blackmail, feigned helplessness. Those traits belong to other pushed-down groups as well, but individual men live with individual women. That’s what makes sexism so vicious and personal. You can’t mistreat someone without expecting their revenge, and the more oppressed a group of people or an individual, the more malicious and subtle the revenge. Women have been bleeding men drop by drop since B.C. When a man suddenly cries out as an innocent victim, you know one thing: he’s dumb. No one is an innocent victim in this dance.

  There too, I had Mom and Aunt Mimi as vibrant examples of women wrapping men around their little fingers. They appeared to enjoy the dance of sexism. I didn’t.

  “You are as sick as you are secret,” I told Jerry. He told me to shut up.

  What Mother recognized was my vulnerability. I was blind to it. The years of aloneness or being the proverbial backstreet woman had set up a hunger for connection. Since that could not be fulfilled with Fannie, I was about to shoot off in another direction. I’d lived so many years alone that I thought I was made of forged steel. It’s easier to live alone, and besides, you learn a great deal. At the same time, we all need other people to push us, to humanize us, to challenge our daily tyrannies. I know that now. I didn’t then.

  “Do you think you’re in love with this girl?” Mother asked one night as I built a fire in the library.

  “I don’t know her well enough to say that.”

  “She’s young.”

  “She’s traveled all over the world. I think she’s a bit more mature than her twenty-two years.”

  Mother crossed her arms over her chest. Her pose said, “You’re full of shit.” What she did say was, “Hmm.”

  “Mom, if I’m going to fall on my face, I might as well fall on my own terms.”

  The argument reached her.

  She piped up, “Now, you know what to do when I die?”

  “Mother, I am not doing the death drill. Besides, everything is at your house.”

  “Practice makes perfect.” She got up and pretended we were in her bedroom. “Now here’s the bureau. Open the top left drawer.…”

  62

  Gypsyfoot

  Martina showered attention on me, calling eight and ten times a day. Her first present to me was an electric pencil sharpener. She called from Kansas City to ask what I would like. When I told her a pencil trimmer she was surprised. Jewelry, clothing, cars—I don’t know what she expected me to request.

  I still use the pencil sharpener. She gave me a good one.

  She promised not to hide me. She told me she loved me. That sounded glorious although she hadn’t spent more than two hours in my company. She was making up for it on the telephone.

  The lowest circle in hell is reserved for Alexander Graham Bell. I swallowed my distaste for that most intrusive invention and chatted. Finally, I agreed to meet her in Chicago.

  Baby Jesus would sit in my Hunting World duffle. Explaining that she would stay in the care of a good house-sitter did not improve her mood. Even Cazenovia got crabby.

  When I touched down in Chicago it was snowing. I’ve vis
ited this midwestern city many times. Never in the summer. Chicago has the best shops, good theater, good sports while retaining a midwestern solidness that’s beguiling.

  I arrived at the International Amphitheater as Martina was wrapping up a match. This was late January of 1979. I met her in the locker room afterward. She showered, then burnt the wind getting us back to her hotel.

  Exhausted from the bumpy flight, mourning Fannie, wondering what I was doing, I sat down hoping to talk, relax. Martina, convinced that I was the love of her life, was not in the mood for a meeting of the minds. She wanted a meeting of bodies. Not that I was opposed to that, far from it, but I wished we would have talked a bit.

  Allow me to digress about sex. I am not motivated by sex. I enjoy it. I can be passionate, even imaginative, but sex for me is on a par with hunger—it’s a physical need.

  To make sex a metaphor for life, which the arts have done since the 1950s, is foolish, narrow-minded and ultimately boring. If sex were truly a metaphor for life, then the greatest novels would be written by prostitutes, the most marvelous symphonies by call boys.

  Sex, especially if allied with love, enhances life. It’s the floor of the house you build.

  Getting trapped in sex, asking too much of it, is as dangerous as taking drugs. Sex is by definition temporary. Art is eternal. Everything else lies in between.

  Gay people are punished for sex. In many states it’s a criminal offense. In Virginia a homosexual is considered a felon. It stands to reason that sex will be out of kilter in a gay person’s life even more than in a straight person’s. The danger of falling into the sex-as-a-metaphor-for-life trap is extreme, and for some poor sods, sex is their life. The shallowness of it borders on both the absurd and the tragic, but then deforming people is absurd and tragic. Such people develop strange ways to survive the daily dose of badgering and occasional outright danger.

  Lesbians are beyond sex. Their neurosis dovetails into being women. Some people imagine that lesbians are imitation men. Wrong. They are women to the second power. Love. Everything is about personal love. Sexual attraction has to be love. It can’t be an animal attraction. They want to live as magical couples shutting out the world that has so successfully shut them out. No relationship can carry that weight, and many lesbian relationships implode. But once a lesbian matures to the point of realizing she can’t escape the world and that her partner isn’t Cinderella, she stands a strong chance of building a lifetime relationship, even in the face of unrelenting hostility.

  I respect lesbians enormously for this and I hasten to add that I am not one of them on this issue. I am fundamentally a lone wolf.

  I wanted a relationship with Fannie but accepted less. The lack of commitment didn’t wear me down as much as her homophobia, and again, at the risk of repeating myself, it was homophobia rooted in reality.

  I traveled, gave speeches, wrote political articles alone. I live my ordinary, everyday life alone. It suits me.

  Martina is a love junkie. Not that I knew that at the time. I wrote off much of her enthusiasm to her youth. She’s in her forties now, so youth is no longer a sufficient excuse.

  I believed that I was the great love of her life, that she would cherish me and honor me and vice versa. She repeated these protestations until they became a liturgy. There’s comfort in the liturgy.

  As for sex that first time, I have often been tempted to write on standardized forms where they request your age then sex, “once in Chicago.”

  Practice makes perfect. We improved.

  The world of women’s tennis is traveling in purdah. Velocity is confused with achievement. Every week they pack their bags and move on to the next city, serve the next American twist, return the next crosscourt backhand and so on. Then there’s all the time spent practicing.

  There they are, a handful of athletically gifted kids, shuttling from city to city and seeing only tennis courts. No British Museum. No Louvre. No Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most of them aren’t inclined that way, perhaps, but they do occasionally hit the expensive shops where, by virtue of being young, they have no sense of value. The wild spending made my head spin.

  Martina’s like a raven, she can’t resist anything shiny.

  She had more gadgets, more junk than I’d ever seen, plus a few very expensive handguns, which I asked her not to keep in the house. She was generous with her stuff and never minded sharing or giving it to friends. It was a good thing, because I didn’t want any of it.

  But I learned to want her. The ferocity of her passion dazzled me. I was the center of her attention. Everything I said was witty and brilliant. She threw out her entire wardrobe because she wanted to dress the way I did. Although she’s taller than I am, 5′8″ to my 5′4″, my shoulders are broader than hers, so we could wear the same shirts. I tactfully suggested she might enjoy creating her own look, but she ordered tons of the Turnbull and Asser shirts I have made to my pattern. I can’t wear off-the-rack shirts because of my shoulders and the size of my biceps. I can’t buy boots either. Muscles, today, are in vogue. I wish they had been when I was young. It would have saved me a lot of ridicule.

  Everything I did fascinated her.

  I learned to love her. She needed me. I felt important and useful. She heaped gifts on me along with physical affection.

  She told me the usual things people say to one another but it was either the first time I’d heard them or the first time I’d listened. She said I’d given her the best sex she’d ever had in her life. I was the most exciting human being she’d ever known. I was the most honest person she’d ever known. I was beautiful. (I knew she was lying then, but I liked the way it sounded.) I was the only person she would ever love. We’d be together until death us do part. Etc.

  Even when I heard these uplifting sentiments I didn’t believe them on an intellectual level, yet I believed them on an emotional level. I was torn, but I loved being loved and I loved her.

  As to loving professional women’s tennis, never. The duplicity of the Women’s Tennis Association at that time was ludicrous. The game exists to make money. That’s why it’s a professional sport. But to make money for whom? For the players? For the coaches? If you believe that, you still believe in the tooth fairy. Because a few players at the top pull down millions, the public is misguided. Ask how much the middle-ranked players earn. If it’s six figures, take out a pad and pencil and figure in hotel costs, food and those expensive airline tickets. They pay their way.

  Promoters rake in the chips. Well, they bear a disproportionate part of the risk. As a capitalist, I understand that. And they go to sleep at night knowing that their sport isn’t destroying bodies the way boxing or football does, although I hasten to add that Mom made a genuine boxing nut out of me, and Sugar Ray Robinson did the rest. He was the best ever.

  The moral turpitude of women’s tennis came about in a distressing fashion. It continues to this day. The public face of the sport is that there is a sprinkling of lesbians. However, no one “knows” who they are—everybody just wishes they would go away. Speaking honestly about one’s personal life is actively discouraged. Billie Jean King, a woman out of charm’s reach, had no trouble ’fessing up to an abortion, but denied being a lesbian until called on the carpet by an irate former lover.

  Does the WTA believe that the public is that stupid? They actually think that if the lesbians finally come out of the closet, no one will watch women’s tennis. For Christ’s sake, the public has always known and watches the game because it’s damned good tennis.

  That’s not the worst of it. The slime award goes to the association for ignoring the abuse within their midst. When a male coach sleeps with an underage girl, this should be called what it is—statutory rape. When the girl is eighteen, no longer jail bait, it’s still an issue that might be addressed because the power imbalance is so extreme. And what about two infamous father/coaches who have publicly beaten their daughters at practice sessions over the last two decades? I wasn’t the only person to see
it. Silence.

  I’m not naming names. Let’s give the WTA a chance to clean house. If they know that we know, maybe they’ll do something. If they do nothing, then I strongly advise those women once abused by their father/coaches to come forward. Force women’s tennis to be responsible to the players.

  Watching Andrea Jaeger wear out before she was seventeen was painful. Watching Bettina Bunge walk away from the game exhausted was infuriating. Watching Rene Blount battle racism as well as lobs was sickening. She, too, couldn’t stand it any longer. Zina Garrison Jackson hung in there longer, but I can guarantee that the black players kept to themselves. Was it self-censorship, or had the unthinking racism become just too damn much?

  Martina can’t handle conflict. She looked the other way. Everyone around her, from other tennis people to director Milos Forman, a friend because he is a fellow Czech, to her parents, beseeched her to think of nothing but tennis. She did and she didn’t.

  My purpose in her life was to open the door. Those people whose economic well-being depended on her were terrified. My God, what if she dropped in the rankings? What if the endorsements dried up? They pretended to care about her. The good thing about her agents, IMG, was that they only cared about the money and they were up front about it.

  I didn’t just open the door for her to see the abuse around her. I opened the door to the world. Did I not love her tennis? Of course I loved her tennis, she was the greatest tennis player in the world, but I loved her more. She could have thrown her rackets down a well. I was making money. If she had invested some of her money, we’d have been fine.

  If she wanted to be the best in the world, bestride the game like a colossus, that was fine, too. Only she could make that decision.

  As it became clear to the hypocrites in the WTA and the parasites on her own back that she really was in love with me, they struck back.