Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  When he drew back and looked at her, she could not sustain his gaze. She reached forward to bury her face against him. His face bruised her in a new vulnerability. Such sharpness in him, angles and pikes and jagged escarpments. Stony places and thorns.

  He had a sexual confidence and a simplicity that got to her. Perhaps it was like her own. Jackson was intellectual and withdrawn, but when he got into bed with her, he was there. Here I am, I want you, his body said against her and did not require support or encouragement or assistance: only that she respond. No, his body said more than Here I am. Phil was knowing her; Jackson was having her.

  That scared her, but part of her rose up from under and flowed with it. Caught, hooked, tangled with him. Something in her said, This is how it is supposed to be. This is a man. This is loving. His possessing was a current that seemed to require from her only that she let go: then she would be held firmly in him without tension, without decision. Let go into him. She would be carried on that wanting that came out from him. It was the memory, the strong image of him carrying her off to bed in his arms. Like the letting go in orgasm, she thought: it felt powerful around her. It was a deep image present from earliest adolescence of the strong man who would want her, who would find her, who would carry her off, who would be a world in which she floated, whose being would contain hers.

  In the morning they sat dressed and nervous at the table, expecting Phil. Sometime around noon he called, telling Jackson he’d see him Monday, remarking he hadn’t been able to reach Miriam. Nothing more was exchanged. Yet she did not go home, she did not leave. She remained with Jackson feeling like an opened package, loose, half spent, vulnerable. Waiting. Why had Phil gone off? She wanted to blame him, she wanted to tell him he had thrown her at Jackson. With other men she had had an ease, based on desiring nothing more than respect and consideration. Some relationships were good and some were disappointing. But she had never been hurt beyond a quiet sadness when things did not work out, or the sadness of departure when they could not continue and yet the end was not ripe. Phil was always with her, her friend, her lover, her guru. He sent her out to learn of others and she returned with that knowledge to him. Now what? Now what? She felt raw in her nerve endings as if she had been torn loose. She could not endure thinking about Phil.

  Jackson and she sat on the cot in the front room, his hand tangled in her hair. “So you think you’re confused?” His hand dropped to her nape. “Don’t lie to me. You aren’t confused about us.”

  “I’m not confused about feeling for you—”

  “It’s a plain thing, a man and a woman. People invent fancy things when they’re bored with each other. Do you think I’d have taken you from Phil—hell, do you think I could have if he’d wanted you the way I do? He wants you and a dozen other things. He wants you sometimes and sometimes he wants no connections at all. His relationship to you is no different in kind than his relationship to me. That’s not what you need as a woman. That’s not what I want from you.”

  Weeping. All day she kept weeping, dissolving into water and whimpers. She had not cried like this since the summer of her mother’s dying. She felt like a child, seeking blind comfort in his flesh. There was a terrible simplicity indeed about him.

  When she awoke Monday morning he was still asleep, and she lay in the crook of his arm unnaturally still and sick with anxiety. Phil would come home. Phil. She must think. Jackson’s eyes opened, sandy, slightly bloodshot, vague at first then focusing on her. Their second night together. She felt that heaviness gathering.

  “Still here.” Voice with a morning harshness in his chest.

  She put on her rumpled clothes. The wrinkled tie-dyed shirt she had been wearing: a slow bolt of sadness passed through her. A butterfly design Phil had made of soft opulent purples and bronzes.

  “Go to school. I doubt if Phil will be back early but it’s conceivable.”

  “Jackson, I have to talk to him.”

  “No.” Slowly he shook his head. “I’ll wait for him. Better that way.”

  “Jackson, I’ve been involved with Phil for years. He’s been my closest friend. I can’t let you do it for me.”

  “He’s been my friend for more than twice that long. I don’t want you to talk to him. I’ve been jealous enough, Miriam, jealous enough.”

  “But I have to talk to him. It isn’t in me to go along home and twiddle my thumbs while you two have it out.”

  “You have to find it in you. Don’t you see that, with you here, it will become a fight? I’ll be asking you to hurt him, to reject him. I don’t want to do that to you or to him. Don’t do it to me.”

  “But I owe it to Phil. He has a right to be angry at me. I haven’t got the right to run and hide and leave it all to you as if I hadn’t the guts to admit what I’ve done.”

  “Doesn’t have anything to do with guts. Can’t you see that? Has to do with my telling Phil that you used to have a relationship with him and you don’t have it any more. Decide. You can’t have both of us like puppets on a string.”

  “You’re pulling me apart!”

  “You can’t have things both ways. Miriam, I’ve gone through the pit of jealousy watching you with him and every other idiot you feel like playing with. You’re not going to play games with me. You’re mine or you’re not, but I’m not dancing through hoops.” He took her face in his hands. “Trust me!”

  “You ask a lot!”

  “Just everything. Are you woman enough to give me that?”

  She leaned into his arms and began to weep.

  Where so much had been, plans and projects and curiosities and relationships and speculations and histories, was now everything and nothing in one: this painful hollow wanting, this fierce turbulence, this centering about him white hot and icy, cold and dark and bright. Lying on her bed and waiting for him to call, waiting for him to summon her, she understood that she was in love and did not know whether to label it good fortune or catastrophe. She had never before fallen in love, obviously. She had loved. She knew that she still loved Phil, she worried over him, she wrote letters to him she dared not send for fear of Jackson’s continuing jealousy, she sought the smallest scrap of news or gossip.

  Jackson was alone on Pearl Street. Phil had moved out. Why hadn’t she moved in? The answer was no longer all the reasons she used to have, good reasons having to do with her work and her interests. It was because he had not asked her. He took for granted that he would find some male roommate and she would continue living where she was. She felt ill at ease but uncertain. After all, those good reasons she no longer felt were still reasons. She needed her room. Yet she felt as if he demanded all of her and then took only a piece and went away, that he shut the door leaving her outside still vainly offering herself.

  He scorned the diaphragm. “How can you decide beforehand? Making an appointment to fuck. All that machinery in there with me. The damned jelly tastes like soap.”

  She went to a gynecologist and was put on the pill. It swelled her up. She rose in the morning belching and farting and her ankles turned watery. The doctor told her those were temporary symptoms and would subside. She felt vaguely uneasy. Her contact lenses began to give her some trouble when she wore them her usual length of time. But to be able to have sex any time he wanted was an enormous convenience. She did not have to be stopping to think where she’d left it and did she need to put more jelly in for the second time. She did not need to tell him to wait while she ran off to the bathroom, returning to find him reading a book. He disliked being reminded of the mechanics of contraception. When she talked about the swelling and flatulence he showed his disgust.

  “Why must women talk incessantly about what is, after all, a matter of plumbing? Little minds wondering where the turds go when you flush the toilet.” He could be quite sarcastic.

  The act itself was beautiful, was joining without the seam. She needed it as tangible proof of his love. Yet she had the feeling that her very responsiveness would sometimes turn him cold. As he
sensed her need, he drew back. He went into ascetic phases, said he needed all his energy, and shut her out for three days. She waited, empty.

  She lay on her bed in embryo position curled round her obsession. So much of what she had thought of as her self seemed to have vanished, to have dissolved. She was a loving. She was occupied entirely by him. Alone, she dreamed about seeing him, she re-enacted their last scenes, she made up things to say to him and things she wanted him to say to her, she made up things she was terrified he would say to her and she wept. She examined and re-examined, analyzed and memorized what he had in reality said to her to discern the inner hidden meaning and proper interpretation.

  When she did her work at all, she did it perfunctorily. Only occasionally when they had been together and it had been wholly good, she returned feeling cheerful and cleansed. Then she sat down with her neglected compiler and suddenly once again had ideas. She felt revitalized. Once again she could think and act and turn outward. Those times were rare. More often it cost such a battle to stop brooding about him that she used up her energy in the struggle and had nothing left to spend on real work.

  This was what she had always been told would be the true center of her being, the central act of her life. A woman loving a man. Now it had happened. The more she gave herself to her obsession, the more she loved him, the more she felt herself to be in love. The rougher things went, the more pain she felt in her loving, the more obsessive it grew. It was totally new, this sense of being out of control, occupied, taken over. Everything else in her life had been a doing, a deciding, a working, but this was something different. This became the content of living.

  With others she was elsewhere and impatient. In the middle of a conversation with a colleague, she would suddenly think of Jackson and she would resent the trivial chatter about programming languages that made her for a moment unable to loose her whole energies on her obsession. When other people came to see him, she could hardly enter talk with them, for she only wanted them to go away. It was a cold fierce winter in Boston. Every day the cars were parked a little further out into the street, as the glaciers pushed out from either curb toward the narrowing center. The sidewalks were deeply rutted in ice. She had no desire to go anywhere, to do anything except to be with him. She felt as if the rest of the world were frozen solid. Except for the minimal reading she had to do for courses, she could concentrate on nothing. She would begin to see his face, to hallucinate his hands, to study a tone of voice or gesture for what it hid of his feelings.

  Much of the time she felt lucky, chosen, exalted. Her life seemed infused with intensity, a plenum, shining and holy. She was never bored. Her previous life seemed vacuous by comparison. At other times she felt ashamed, that she had become a zombie. She seemed to have nothing left for anyone else, anything else. She was stupefied in general and in that one touch point intensely burning like a laser.

  Did he love her? He did not say so. She told him she loved him. She told him incessantly. It seemed to her impossible not to say it to him again and again. He did not answer her. A knife went into the same wound all of the time.

  She would cry out in bed, “I love you!” He would hold her to him. But something in him would clench against her. He would not speak. She could feel that locking in him, that stubbornness.

  “It’s because that woman hurt you, the woman you married. You’re punishing me for her.”

  “A fool sticks his hand on the chopping block once to feel if the knife will really lop off a finger. Only a complete idiot does it twice.”

  “I’m not a knife! I’m not a chopping block!”

  “I’m not a complete idiot.”

  She sensed in him a huge will to failure having run its course. She could not trace the history of it, but the janitor’s job and the cold sexual trade-off with the woman in 4B had been a bottom, and he was ready now to want to do something in the world. He would not admit to wanting much. It was she who had to send for his old transcripts and write letters to graduate schools and get his file of letters of recommendation together. Yet the activity was not her idea. She was responding to quiet pressure from him. He wanted to be made to do something. He felt it was appropriate for her to want him to return to school.

  Maybe it was just as well she couldn’t see Phil. She feared she would have nothing to give him. She seemed to have nothing left over. What did they do? They made love. They ate meals. They quarreled. They walked together. In pauses in the long icy winter, in the occasional thaws of February, on frigid clear nights in March, they walked. He liked especially to walk in the evenings past the lighted houses on the hilly tree-lined streets of Cambridge and Somerville. “So many little lives,” he drawled. “Look in and try them on for size. Window-shopping. Would that life fit you, those apple-cheeked kids, that TV set, that lamp with its tutu in the window? That book-lined study and 1917 posters and the oak table? That black light and the strobe and the purple walls and mobile of the solar system going round under the huge speakers?”

  “Who’d walk into anybody’s life? Like sticking your feet in somebody’s old boots. Too loose in the places you curve in and too tight in the places you stick out.”

  “You think people’s lives fit them? Maybe they all feel that way. Silent screams going up like smoke, Get me out of here!”

  They listened to music a lot, mildly stoned. Often he would cook them a good meal and then they would sit about replete, listening to records. See, she would tell herself, it is an equal relationship, for he does the cooking. But she knew she lied. He had too much heavy will for controlling her.

  One Friday evening she was to spend with him, when she arrived and let herself in, he was not there. She waited. She waited two hours, while anxiety and resentment wound her tighter and tighter. She tried to fight her tension. After all, how many times had she waited for Phil, casually relaxed, knowing he would come or he wouldn’t and never attaching that much importance to one time in an open series? Why couldn’t she achieve that grace with Jackson, that looseness? Why must she sit like—like a woman was supposed to, stewing? Her anxiety stripped away her sense of herself as a strong person moving through things in her own style. She became grasping woman. She became dependent woman. She became scared woman. This waiting had teeth.

  When she heard him on the stairs, a great relief loosened her. Now to find the strength to suppress what she had felt. She came to meet him, reaching up to kiss. He tasted of whiskey.

  “You’ve been drinking it up.” Keep the voice light.

  “Dropped by Finnegan’s Wake, got to talking.”

  “Finnegan’s Wake. Isn’t that where Phil works?”

  “Yeah, he was on duty. Being as it’s early, he wasn’t that busy yet.”

  She searched his face. “I’m glad you saw him. It’s bad, never seeing each other, never talking, never knowing how he is.”

  “Old Phil? He’s fine.” Jackson set his jaw, put a record on loud on the phonograph, got out his hash pipe. Every line of his body told her what they had said was none of her business.

  “Did you talk about me?”

  “No.” His gaze asked her scornfully why they would. “Is he really all right?”

  Jackson did not answer.

  She began to shout. “You’re just going to sit there, right? Closed off. No communication, no warmth, no contact. I can sit and twiddle my thumbs and freeze to death.”

  “You might try listening to the Mozart. It’s a new recording of that horn concerto,” he drawled.

  “Go fuck yourself!” She bounced up. “If you’re going to pretend I’m not here, I’ll save you the trouble. Good night!” She felt like a fool. Going for her jacket, putting it on, making the motions of leaving, she kept waiting for him to stop her, to protest, to save their time together. But his stubborn silence held. He sat and sucked on the pipe, presumably engrossed in the music. She slammed out.

  At home she could do nothing but brood and weep. Perhaps she had been unreasonable. Perhaps he had had little co
nversation with Phil beyond How are you doing, okay, keep on trucking. Perhaps he had really wanted to listen to the record. Perhaps he had been depressed and, instead of trying to reach him, she had attacked. Perhaps he did blame her for his estrangement from Phil. She had hurt only herself storming out. But she had to draw the line someplace in what she would endure. She felt wrong on the left and on the right, no matter what she did or didn’t.

  She kept getting glimpses of the man who had wanted her so much, of the man who could love her. Was it Jackson she saw then or only a trick of the light falling at the right angle on what her wishes projected? Sometimes he would open to her. He would push aside his fear that she would get too close to him, gobble him, possess him, to reach out and meet her suddenly.

  One mild night in April she took him to a party someone in her department was giving in Watertown, a married student and his wife who worked as a nurse, on the ground floor of a late Victorian house. Uniquely among such parties it turned out to be the kind she enjoyed, with lots of dancing as well as the inevitable shop talk by the men and house talk by the women. Jackson never danced but he found some men to talk to. After she had danced for an hour she felt good through her body and was ready to leave with him, both of them pleased till they got outside and found it was pouring rain. The wind was blowing from the east, smelling of fish and bringing torrents. Her apartment was closer and they decided to spend the night for a change. He seemed to like the idea.

  “You sure were busy with those vats of colored water,” he remarked, but he still seemed relaxed. He sat on her bed, back to the wall and one leg flexed, rolling a joint. For once the memory of her intimacy with Phil did not jog him into withdrawal. He held her ankle with one hand and the joint with the other and sucked smoke and sighed and relaxed.