by Marge Piercy
“I have a friend in the lost and found. Operators are useful.”
“If they don’t operate on you. Or do you have a license yourself?”
He says sharply, “The knife goes across the bread-and-butter plate. Not on the table.”
“You should have taken out a sorority girl.”
“No reason you can’t eat like one. To your advantage. After all, aren’t you a social climber?”
“Like hell I am.”
“You told me you’re the first in your family to go to college. Working-class neighborhood. Going back there after college?”
“I can’t.” I am not about to explain my last summer in Detroit. “I’m a freak there now. What I aspire to is the society of compatible freaks.”
He pours more wine. “Culture’s nice but expensive.”
“Not to make it. All it costs is paper and time.”
“You don’t want clothes that show a little taste? For a change.” He can’t resist little jabs. “A hi-fi that doesn’t cook the music? Wine on the dinner table?”
“I bring out the inquisitor in you. Why?”
A flash of reaction across the high boyish forehead, the thin supple mouth with a groove like a scar of thought on either side. “You don’t know yourself.”
Old introspective me? “That’s where you’re wrong.”
Two-finger signal to the waiter. “You’re too busy reacting to take the time off. I’d gather you’ve had little enough to react to.”
As he pays I finish my wine hurriedly, but walking out to his ’51 Ford, he seems to have forgotten our conversation. Why doesn’t he annoy me more, with his attacks and feints? I suppose he arouses my curiosity. What’s behind all this? I experience an intellect that is cold but tactile.
Finally, waiting for a stoplight he asks, “How many sisters?”
“None.”
“Jealous mother?”
“Of me? Hardly. Just possessive. Where are we going?”
“I ask because it’s obvious those absurd ambitions and intellectualizing are compensation mechanisms you’ve picked up because she’s made you insecure as a woman.”
“Is any living thing secure? You must be a Freudian.”
“Of course,” he says. “In science you learn to prefer the most elegant explanation. It’s the simplest cause-and-effect pattern.”
“I find it a religious system in which everything means something else, as in Christian interpretation of the Torah. Whatever any poor bozo does prefigures Christ. In Freud you go on a long heroic quest journey into your psyche just to become normal—which is clearly not the norm—or healthy, which is clearly an unlikely state.”
But he has stopped listening. “Bastard,” he mutters as a red MG cuts us off. “Like to take it out from under him. A Jag or a Porsche, that’d be worth driving. But will he do that for me?”
“That guy? Do you know him?”
“My old man’s never given me one thing I want. This fat-assed tin can. Burns oil like a furnace.” He drives as if forcing the car through barricades. I am to learn that HE said with force through the teeth means his father. Finally Peter parks on a street hemmed in with Victorian rooming houses whose eaves almost touch.
“This isn’t where you lived when I came to one of your parties.”
Into the dim hall smelling of soft coal and overshoes. “Who could guess what was under that hair jungle?” He slides a wooden panel into a wall enough for us to step into what must have been the parlor, then slides it to. In the solid dark I can make out nothing, so stand waiting for a light. Instead, stepping up behind, he wraps his arms around me. His lips moving on my neck, he murmurs, “What a waste of time to find fault with you. When I hold you like this, you’re perfect.”
Schmaltz. Am I to stand in this cave while he nibbles my neck? He turns me to face him, letting our coats slide to the floor. Taste of wine on our tongues. I am half dizzy with the heat eddying in the room. We lock together. The breath catches in my throat, my hands want to wander on his back. Do I like him? The dark and winy warmth moves me, the curious movement of his mouth not passionate, no, but sensual, thorough. Perhaps what Donna speculated about. Finally it is he who steps back, switching on a lamp that sends a thick muted light through the room, then tossing our coats on a desk chair. A slice is cut off by an angled corner fireplace with a speaker in the grate and the mantel lined with records. I thumb through them.
He drops in a tubular chrome and leather chair, the only sitting chair and so out of place with the other fifty-year-old pieces I know he must have brought it from home. “What do you want to hear? Name it. But don’t touch the turntable.”
Yet another bookcase full. I have never seen so many records outside a store. “This Scarlatti I never heard. And Ives—who’s he?”
“Relax. You have to be improving yourself even when you’re supposed to be having fun.”
“To satisfy my curiosity is more fun than you think.”
“There’s always so much more. You can’t eat history in one gulp.”
But in several? To sit I must choose the bed or lift both coats from the desk chair. I wander a circuit. Tennis racquet in a press, book on chess openings with the place marked with somebody’s IOU for fifty dollars. Although he has turned the music so loud it crowds the room, his voice cuts it easily, clear with a rough undercadence, a hidden throatiness as if some part of him tried to hold it back. “The way you look around makes me feel I should have been more careful of the objects in my room.”
“Sorry. I’m a cat in a new house.”
“You don’t feel safe till you’ve checked the exits?”
With a sticky smile I perch on the bed. “Cats are always on the wrong side of any door. They like all doors to stay open.”
“Whereas I like them shut?” Lithely in his stocking feet he crosses to the mantel and takes a bottle of brandy and two glasses from behind the records. He holds the glasses to the light, blows in them with a quick shamefaced smile.
Kicking off my shoes I sit back. Now that I am used to the volume of the music, I like it, a warm liquid beating in waves across the room but miraculously leaving all in place. The special quality of this room affects me, deep, with close walls and high ceiling and drawn draperies. Habitat of a neat comfort-loving but not overly clean man. The atmosphere is of an organic interior, the inside of an ear, a sybaritically furnished stomach.
He lets himself down beside me and pours the brandy. He is going to kiss me again; strange to feel that impending and yet sit as if I did not guess. The record finishes and in the moment before the next drops, we freeze. Unreal that I should be waiting for him to move in on me, unable to relate what is coming to him or to myself.
“You have a sensual profile.” His hands coast down my face. “Soft.”
Mike’s word. “Why do you imagine I don’t know myself?”
A smile deepens the grooves along his mouth. Taking off his glasses, he reaches past to put them on the nightstand. Then still leaning across he takes me in his arms and with his cool smooth cheek against mine says, “Because you don’t know who you are or why you do what you do or what you really want.” His tongue licks at my ear caressingly.
I sit primly trying to carry on the conversation. “And you do?”
“There’s more than one way to talk.” His lids half shut, veined leaves of a blue-white tree. His palm is suddenly hard on my back to guide me down. A cold shark-fin of fears cuts the surface.
I jerk back. “I’m sorry but this is too pat. I’m dense but not this dense.”
He sits up, dusting his blond brush. “What am I supposed to do, come on shaggy? Hiya, Jill, let’s go to bed.”
I take my Luckies from my purse. “I’d better leave now.”
“I’m not taking you home yet.”
“I know how to walk.” I reach for my coat.
He gets there first, quick on his feet. “What would you do if you had, say, two months to live?”
“Do?” I stop a cha
rged half foot from him. “I’d write seriously again.” Mike persuaded me I couldn’t write. I have only slowly begun again by taking the course with Bolognese and Weisbuch.
With an impatient gesture. “Would you stay? Be that curious?”
“What’s the price of staying?”
He takes a step forward and I catch my breath, but he spins me by the elbow toward his desk. “What are you afraid of? You won’t even flirt most of the time.”
“I don’t play games.”
“Too senile?” He lets my elbow go but the grasp of his fingers tingles. “I’ll bet you could learn. I do nothing else.” He broods over his desk. Then he takes up an inlaid wooden board and an Indian box of chess pieces and carries them to the bed, jerking the chocolate spread smooth. Uncertainly I tag after.
“Here’s a game you can start on tonight. First the movement of the pieces.” In short impatient sentences he instructs me. He does not touch me again till the perfunctory kiss in the idling car outside my co-op.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
ON VARIOUS KINDS OF SEPARATIONS
“HE SAID HE was separated. That’s what he told me. Being separated from his wife—that means something, doesn’t it?” Donna sits astride her desk chair, her face wizened with pain.
“Separated by six hundred miles. Are they really coming here?” I am proofreading a paper on the Platonic influence on Sir Philip Sydney.
“That’s why he doesn’t want to see me during the holidays. And after I made up all those excuses to my parents and Estelle. Now I have to go home. What’s the point hanging around Ann Arbor? Worrying I’m going to run into Sal on the street with his wife and kiddies.”
On the back of the door hangs a dress he bought her, electric blue with a fishtail. I never knew a man could buy dresses. My father hands my mother twenty dollars and tells her to get herself a present. Once he bought a new garbage can for her birthday; he thought that was funny. Mike used to give me books. Donna is supposed to yank on her girdle and waist cincher and iron-maiden bra and wriggle over to his party for their final appearance as a couple until his wife and two daughters have gone back to Arlington, Virginia. He never comes to the house to pick her up. He gives her cab money to come and go. She is already late and when he called she had me tell him she was in the shower and couldn’t come to the phone. She is made up carefully and enclosed in her armored carapace of bone, elastic and rubber, but she has not pulled on the dress.
“Come on, stay home with me,” I plead. “We never kill time together and just talk anymore.”
“Aren’t you seeing Peter?”
“He’s gone off to Grosse Pointe. His older brother just had a baby and I think they’re gilding it or whatever they do to the first boy baby in each generation—lay down a magnum of old money for it?”
“You’re not that interested in him? Are you?”
“He isn’t open with me.”
“I thought maybe you liked his being a physicist. But I didn’t think he was your type.”
“My type is not yet in production.”
She gets up and takes the dress off its hanger. “It is gorgeous. Be a pity not to wear it at least this once.”
“Donna, don’t go. Stay with me tonight. Let’s talk. I’ve been writing a lot again and I’d love to show you.”
With a quick shudder she dives into the dress and begins working it down. “It’d be too depressing, sitting home on a Saturday night.”
After midnight, she returns giddy. “I’m so glad I went, Stu. I had a wonderful time. He told me he’s going to work things out with his wife —he says he really is separated but the children want to see him at Christmas. He just isn’t ready for me to meet them until all the details of the divorce have been worked out.”
“Donna, if Wanda upstairs came in and said that about some married man she was seeing, what would you think?”
“You don’t like Sal. You’ve been jealous about him from the beginning.”
“Granted. But jealousy has a sharp eye for flaws. Real ones.”
She smiles crookedly in the mirror, touching the newly processed fluff of her cottony hair. “You’re just surprised I could get him. A celebrity. Someone who could have any woman on this campus!”
A strenuous politeness in my parents’ house. My mother fetches out a bottle of Mogen David from the linen closet. “I always like a little wine during the holidays.” She beams, her face a caricature of the pleasure she longs to feel. “Your father doesn’t appreciate it. That smalltown streak.”
Wine is Valpolicella or a California red to me, not this cough syrup, but my novice snobbishness is disgusting. Am I scared of losing the little status I’ve gained if I respond to an incorrect cue? “I’d love a glass of wine.”
She stands by the stove with her arms loosely folded. “Christmas is fun even if we do have to do it at midnight after your job.” Her gaze, fixed on the drawn blinds, turns opaque. “How I used to envy Gentiles their Christmas. I was so tired getting up from the table still hungry so the little kids and Papa could eat. Nothing ever clean or nice or new or right. All I want is to live like a human being.” She groans, her hands dropping to her sides. “Like a mensch. They won’t let you live.”
“But now do you have what you want?” I have grown up thin on the milk of her discontent, and yet I do not know its source.
“We have to get back to your father. He always feels so lonely when he hears us talking in the kitchen together.”
“Does he?” I wonder if that is not one of her myths. I wish I could see my father’s love just once through some medium other than Mother’s interpretation.
Peter drives in from Grosse Pointe Shores to see me. He is polite but clearly wary of my famous boy-eating parents. With my father he talks football successfully. With the rise of professional football leagues, my father finds it acceptable as he never did when it was primarily a college sport. Peter tells me I am to go with him to a party at his parents’ country club on my evening off. He is amused at the idea. Mother sniffs after him with mistrustful approval.
“Well, he’s better than that Mike Loesser.” She peers sideways, washing dishes, and waits for a reaction. “Doesn’t it bother you that you can’t wear heels? He’s so short. But of course I wouldn’t let what anyone else says trouble me … that is, if I really cared about him.”
“Right you are.”
“He thinks he’s a good catch.”
I shrug. “Could be.” Shut face. My skin is leather.
Peter that afternoon takes me off to watch some friends of his bobsled in competition. On the way back he is glum. “Had a pinsticking contest with the old man. Oh, to be born from a bottle! He tried to forbid me bringing you to the country club.”
“But they haven’t met me.”
“They’ve asked questions. He keeps discoursing about inappropriate discrepancies in background.” He takes his narrow head in his hands. “Ties up with his general attack. Whatever I do is wrong and must be done only to irritate them.”
“Does he want you to come into his business instead of being a physicist?”
“He wouldn’t trust me to design a privy.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Forest Crecy, architect. Hell and gone successful. You had to know that.” He glares suspicion.
The next day he calls just as I’m off to my late shift at the telephone company. “You don’t care that much about going, so let’s forget it. It’ll be goddamn dull. I got us tickets to the road company of West Side Story. A matinee because of your ludicrous job.”
When he comes to pick me up he drives a gleaming white Sprite. “Not what I wanted, but a hell of a lot better than that garbage wagon, right? They couldn’t find a cheaper sports job, but at least it’s a real car. He says, maybe, maybe if I don’t rack this one up, he’ll get me a Porsche for my Ph.D. The bastard. Next year I’ll have a job and I’ll buy myself a goddamned silver Porsche.”
Saucy white bribe. I hold my hair down and we
are off like a playful hornet. A game with me as his sacrifice pawn. He boasts that his parents refuse categorically to sanction his relationship with me. I want to giggle. What relationship? His small well-made hands grip the wheel as he plays racing driver. I bet he even makes faces in the mirror while he shaves.
I ache with weariness as I lie on the glider in the attic, its grubby plastic worn to my body. My parents sleep. Sometimes I like the feeling of sitting up alone but tonight it gives me the sense of being more isolated than I care for. I snap on the little radio to the CBC. Mozart, yes, clarinet concerto, K. 622. Ignoring that my recognition is based on Lennie’s having given Donna the record, how nice is my exactitude. I, Jill, daughter of Flicka, Bride of Frankenstein, rise from the morass of bubble gum and comic books and Saturday Roy Rogers matinees. What a triumph of will over environment. It was Mr. Stein, the high-school English teacher who took such an interest in my poetry and sadistic pleasure in my crush on him, who taught me to say Mo-tsart instead of Mo-zart, a habit which has, my friends, become almost second nature. I am even now working to perfect the short o into what sounds to my Midwestern ears like harrible, preferred by New Yorkers on campus and my desk dictionary. What do I want? I ache through all my body and that can’t be only the telephone company, uncomfortable as the switchboard is, swarming with roaches.
O Western wind, when wilt thou blow,
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
A clean sweet sinking hurt those words leave. I sat in honors class while they explicated that poem—what we do to poems—and worried and worried over that phrase “the small rain.” Finally I had to stick my hand up and say that due to the subject of the poem I thought it might allude to orgasm. I have never heard a silence as hot and wet as that one, broken a full minute later when our button-down, black-umbrella-toting professor let out his pursed lips, “That is a very interesting interpretation … Miss Stuart… though perhaps a bit pornographic for our purposes.”
Four lines like four powerful straight blows on the head of a nail to the brain. Where did you read your dreams? An early addiction to the romantic poets, who could not live out their verses either. Pain is aesthetic only at a distance. When Julie lent me Axel’s Castle and there I read what Mike said that first night we made love, I felt conned. Maybe the solution is simply to have sex without building castles over it—friends who sometimes copulate. Do I know?