Braided Lives

by Marge Piercy

  “I’ve eaten,” he says bluntly but takes my coat. “What are you doing here?”

  “Pure desperation.” My head tilts forward on its stalk.

  He turns my face toward him. “What happened to you?”

  “Donna just told me she wants to move out.” I pull from him, leaning on the mantel over the grate where the speaker blows Stravinsky in my face. “It hurts.”

  “Did she say why? What did she tell you, exactly?”

  I shake my head. The end of something I loved. “She gave stupid reasons, like I’m messy and I talk too much.”

  “You probably do.”

  “So?” I wheel between the furniture waving my arms. “I’m me. I love her. She should care more!”

  “Maybe she doesn’t love you. Maybe your love is a burden to her.” A nervy alertness in his face and in the tense hunch of his shoulders under a tee shirt, he sits yoga fashion holding the soles of his narrow feet. As I pace his eyes blue as Donna’s fix on me tauntingly.

  “What have I done to her? Only cared. She’s sick of me.”

  “You’re so naive. Must take a lot of work to stay that way.”

  “If you don’t want to listen, throw me out. I’m set to bleed for the night.”

  He rubs his feet in sensual kneading. “It’d be so easy to comfort you.”

  “Don’t bet on it.”

  “I do. Jill, I do.”

  “She wants to study? Bull. She wastes more time than I do.”

  He rocks back, chin against chest. “Cut the surface. Of course she didn’t give the real reason.”

  I stop pacing. “Since I’ve been seeing you, she’s resented it. How blind I am. You’re attracted to her and she’s attracted to you. What am I doing in the middle?”

  “You say I’m attracted to her?”

  “It’s clear from the way you talk about her, ask after her.”

  “I couldn’t… wouldn’t push her out of bed. But she’s more mixed up than I can handle.” “We’re a lot alike.”

  “Hardly.” He makes a fist and stares at it. “Considered it when I noticed her running around with Lennie. Obviously not going to stick to that poor twerp. Pure rebellion.”

  “Why not now?”

  “She’s too mixed up, I tell you. Too stormy.” He catches my arm. “You’re my size.”

  “Poor reason. If you’d rather have her, go after her.”

  “I don’t want to.” His arms tighten around me. “You’re trying to put me off, but remember, you came to me tonight. I’ve been waiting for this.”

  “It’s just pain, you know.” My tears soak into his shoulder. Emptiness expands in my chest till I feel as if I am floating. I can even observe that he seems to enjoy my crying as if it released something in him. His hands move on my back, my arms, hands cradling and stroking and soothing, hands curious and avid of me, hands exploring my breasts, my thighs. So be it. His tongue catches the last tears. I lie back and look at him. In a moment of silence the record changes. “What’s that?”

  His cheek resting on my breast, he listens. “Prokofiev. Second violin concerto.” He smiles. “Sometimes it’s like pushing buttons, how predictable your reactions are.”

  “Why bother, then?”

  “I want you.”

  The words echo through, tap tap on my spine. “Why?”

  He smiles as he bends to my mouth. Long kiss carrying me backward on a slow swell. I want to be carried. I lie loosely as he undresses me, even perversely applying my limp leverage against him. But finally free of clothes, the first impact stops my breath in the ice-hot shock of flesh on flesh. My skin is charged with static. His body against me in the lamp glow seems hammered of some warm pale metal, hard, sleek and hairless. I desire him. Attempting to control my reactions, I say to myself, See, this is Lust. I am glad for the break when I stop to put in my diaphragm. I realize abruptly that Mike and I never were naked together. As Peter nibbles on my breast, an image lights my closed lids of that flash of pink in Mike’s room and his thin arm pulling down the shade. Julie got what she wanted finally, although I wonder if she wants Mike entire.

  I am so busy exploring my reactions and defending myself against them (what do I think will stoop and sweep me away?) that I am slow to realize he has pulled back, his face sullen. He contracts as if he were being unborn beside me, returning to fetus. I fold my arms around him comfortingly as he grinds his face into my breasts. He is not erect. He cannot pump himself erect.

  “If you don’t want to, Peter … You know it’s not necessary.”

  “Damn it, damn it,” he mutters. “You don’t understand. It doesn’t mean anything. I can’t explain. It’s absurd. It’s just the body. The damn stupid body. It’s mechanical.”

  I lie weary in a bubble of calm, my arms tiring as I hold him flung over me. Slowly his muscles loosen and at length he rolls onto his back. “What I really want, I can’t have, it seems.”

  I touch his mouth for answer. Long blond lashes almost invisible, mauve-veined lids. He has hooked something in me. He will not meet my gaze but turns the clock to face him. “Better dress. Time to take you home.”

  Not to leave him like this. “Would you like me to stay?”

  “After that, you want to? Won’t they catch you?”

  “I didn’t even sign out.” The truth is, Alberta is my friend before she’s my housemother, and she slipped me my own key awhile ago. Probably because we work together politically and because she respects my class background and my putting myself through school, she considers me mature above the other inhabitants. Of course I think her a great judge of character. I don’t doubt that Donna would cover for me anyhow.

  He rolls away to lie with his hands under his head. Just a slit of sharp blue like a knife edge glints under the lids. “I was about to write a letter when you arrived.”

  I am used to being naked with Donna, and that seems to extend to feeling natural with him. “The pages on the bed.”

  “That’s Sue’s last letter. I’ve been going with her on and off for years. She graduated from Wellesley last year. Now she has a dippy job as a buyer for a shop her aunt has an interest in.”

  “Do you love her?”

  The record finishes, letting a glacial silence in. Down in his throat he groans once, whether from pain or annoyance I cannot tell. “At this point it’s a formal engagement or good-bye. I can’t string her along any further. That’s what I was trying to decide.”

  “Did you?”

  Hand closing on my shoulder. “In a sense does it matter whom I marry, long as she’s healthy, functional and good-looking? Got to have a home, children. Why not?”

  “What is Sue like?”

  “Light brown hair, hazel eyes. Pretty since she was a baby. Good sailor, good swimmer. Won a trophy in a meet once. Nice legs. No sense of humor but lots of poise. I took her virginity and so what?”

  “Did she take yours?”

  “Not bloody likely. I had my cousin when we were fifteen…. But Sue’s absolutely rooted in family and the Grosse Pointers. I have New York visions. I’m working on landing a job at Brookhaven National Labs.” He kneels, a hand on my stomach. “Feel used, because I didn’t tell you? You can still leave.”

  “What’s the difference? You don’t love me.”

  “Try to make me?”

  “Maybe.”

  “It won’t be worth it if you don’t. Casual sex depresses me. I had quite enough that year I lived with those two losers in the music department and played la vie bohème. Gave parties for all the campus arty-farties to come and drink up my booze and patronize me…. I could have had you that first night I brought you here. But I wanted to wait till you came around to me.”

  Till I got desperate enough? Curious enough? I know I am with him to avoid Donna. “Are you sleepy? I am.”

  His sleek shoulders hunch as he reaches for the light switch. “We’ll talk about it all in the morning.”

  I am glad for the warmth of his smooth body beside me and glad for
his indifference. Someone who cared would not let me cover my eyes, and I cannot stand to see the pain and rage that burn through my mind leaving shame and devastation behind.

  “Good night, Peter.”

  “G’night.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHICKEN POTPIE AND THE PASTEL EGG

  THE DRIP OF icicles. The radiator burbles. Whatever I shouted, whoever I argued with in the room of sleep I’ve lost now. Only a phrase remains, the mirror is broken. All my fantasies have left me. He groaned, ground his teeth. Once his outflung arm struck me. Now in light sleep his face has a sensual innocence, death mask of a fallen seraph. I start as the clock radio turns on Vivaldi from the university station. When I face him he is watching under his lashes.

  “Hello.” Hand drifting over me. “The name is Jill, isn’t it?”

  Games. “The name’s Penelope and I’m Queen of the Fleas.”

  His drowsy face broods on me. “Good body. You look better out of your clothes.”

  “I don’t expect to be courted this early in the morning.”

  A laugh sticks in his throat. “I’m not the first to tell you that.”

  Actually he is. I swing out of bed reaching for my scattered clothes.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I have a nine o’clock class.”

  “Right here. Don’t try to run out on me now.” He slides out after me, moving lightly on his feet. His menace makes me smile as he circles, his face wary, his penis quite erect now. I have a moment to contemplate him and what I will do before he seizes me. No doubt he is stronger but I would, if I meant to get out of here, clout him with the lamp or the radio, not my small fists. I did start something last night, and that my mood of masochism and passivity has tightened into a harder resolution this morning does not wipe out his usefulness then. I guess I owe him one. I let him pull me roughly down on the bed. His face grim, determined, he acts out a scene of brute mastery. I am something soft he is conquering. Holding my wrists in one hand over my head he pokes at me, thrusts in finally. I don’t think he knows a lot about exciting a woman. It hurts when he enters but not much or long. Light small body on me hammering. I am warmed by the tussle as if he had held me tenderly. I move with him and he releases my wrists. His face relaxes.

  He starts and stops and rides up on me carefully. He is very controlled, to use that phrase of Donna’s, and yet gone, grim in purpose, totally rapt. No sound but the bed creaking and the Vivaldi still tripping along. I cannot let go, conscious always of his different hard body athletic and determined and adjusting itself to me, bearing in, riding up. The phallus as tool, sex as technique. I am sore with disuse, my thighs aching. I am sleepy, hungry, cranky. He goes on. Heat rises from us. An announcer speaks. A Haydn quartet begins. Then a loose partial pleasure fans out and hangs on, a slow wholly muscular release. Finally he comes, moaning through clenched teeth. I am glad I still have my diaphragm in from last night.

  “You didn’t really want to leave, you see,” he says.

  “Looks that way.”

  “I didn’t hurt you?” He is smiling in tentative enjoyment.

  I shake my head no. He feels good and keeps giving me little proprietary pokes and taps as we dress. On our way toward campus the snow is soft and rotten underfoot, the air spongy. The sun leaks intermittently between torn clouds. “Breakfast at the Union?” he says. “Sort of public announcement, what the hell? Why are you so quiet? It’s man who’s supposed to be sad after coitus. Woman is supposed to be smug.”

  Lennie in a booth looks up from The Times and Professor Bishop, comp. one, gives me a damp hello as we pass the table where he sits alone eating stewed prunes. After my eleven o’clock class I will go home, cut my afternoon classes and sleep. Peter’s smooth mask across the table is a void I refuse to fill with fantasy or false hope. He eats methodically, slicing his fried eggs into neat parallelograms and spearing them with his fork. Good-bye, kid, it’s been fun, he’ll say, and be surprised when I am not hurt. I am oddly content sitting here, easy in my body. I do not hate myself; I do not even hate Donna. I feel at home in my flesh and I want to survive. I am a step further from Mike and that summer.

  He spears the last yolk-smeared parallelogram, finishes his toasted English muffin. “I’ve decided to break off with Sue.”

  “Sue?” Far away a pasteboard woman shrivels.

  His hand clutches the cup. His forehead seams. “I have only a short time here. I make my second try at my orals soon. Then off to wherever I land a job. The sons of successes are always such poor little shits. I’ll never be more than an indifferent physicist. Sometimes I wish I’d picked something easier, but I had the talent for math early on and it seemed like something to quell him with. The lightnings of the atom grasped in my puny fist.”

  “Do you really admire his buildings?” He showed me pictures, and some in concrete reality when we were last in Detroit. Monolithic, hierarchic office buildings decked with poured fretwork like frozen rage. Pompous ill-tempered monuments to corporate wealth. They are Assyrian, I think, without the massively phallic power of their winged bulls.

  He waves that question away. “We can take this time and see what happens. No promises. I am what I am! Try each other on for size and see how it shakes down.”

  Careful as it is, this proposition stuns me. “You want a relationship with me?” Relationship: the jargon of our world. The relationship of two parallel lines.

  “Why not? Try it on for a while.” His gaze rests on me, sullen. He is actually tense with waiting.

  Reaching through mounds of gauze I take his hand and pry it from where it curls around the cup. Deep in my head something opens. “Why not? It’ll be spring soon.”

  “But no promises.”

  How have I touched him? “Peter, if you were going out with Sue for so long, how come you didn’t take her to your country club dance at Christmas?”

  “I did, finally. But I didn’t want to.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “About you? The truth. That you were this weird little black-haired exotic Jewish intellectual I might be very interested in.” With a paper napkin he blots his lips. “I told you I’ve never been in love with her.”

  I see the logic neatly: he doesn’t love me either, so how then will this be different? He chases false expectancies, disproved before he tries them. But maybe not: I am not from his world. Maybe I do offer him a way out and a chance at feeling? My calm after all is grounded in getting laid not an hour ago, and I feel loyal to his neat hard body if nothing else. I have to mend myself, I have to survive. And I am still curious. I kiss him and go off to my course in the metaphysical poets, where Dick tells me I look lovely, lovely, he repeats.

  What are we protesting in our corner, Dick and Bolognese and I? Partly our arrogance unites us, for English is a hierarchical department and as writers we talk with a fierce authority totally unrecognized by faculty and fellow students. Literature is the stuff on which grades are honed to most of the class. Every time papers or tests are returned, a bitter hush falls. On the way out we’re sure to be stopped by better-behaved students clutching their typescripts or bluebooks with the hopeful sally, “What grade did you get?” and the almost audible prayer, O Lord of Justice, let it be lower than mine! We are taught the narrowly defined Tradition, we are taught Structure, we are taught levels of Ambiguity. We are taught that works of art refer exclusively to other works of art and exist in Platonic space. Emotion before art is dirty. We are taught to explicate poems and analyze novels and locate Christ figures and creation myths and Fisher Kings and imagery of the Mass. Sometimes I look up and expect to see stained-glass windows on our classroom. Somewhere over our heads like a grail vision lurks a correct interpretation and a correct style to couch it in. We pick up the irony in the air before we comprehend what there is to be ironic about.

  With our skins Dick and Bolognese and I perceive that if we accept, if we acquiesce, we will never create a new good thing out of our wasted
heat; so in our corner we give battle. Dick struggles because he is given to trusting his own reactions and cannot be bent past a point close to his centers of appetite and strong Jewish family feeling: Bolognese and I because we feel ourselves in the service of a muse that is part art and part politics and part rebellion and part identity; we fear being wooed into the neat progressions and intricate small proprietary diversions of academia. Our best weapon is the wrong question. Our second-best weapon is bad manners. We make economic and biographical interpretations. We compare authors to others we’ve read in translation: heresy. We ask long questions and on occasion try to make speeches. We sulk and exchange notes.

  Eight years later, paranoid hallucinations one dead summer in Detroit after he lost an editorial job. Bolognese’s semiliterate parents sign the paper so that electroshock may burn the originality from that beautiful lizard brain. He calculates now for tenure at the small college in central Michigan where he teaches, where all his ingenuity goes into elaborate decoys to keep others from guessing the time spent in the state institution. Dick has settled with his family in San Diego, where he is doing quite well as a technical writer for the electronics industry. He has four bright and active children whose photographs he sends me every Rosh Hashonah in a card. The third, Fay, who calls herself after her nickname Feygele, is writing better poetry than her daddy ever did, but he does not like it because it is lesbian love poetry.

  We want another university. Bolognese says we want a permanent Symposium, to be drunk on ideas. I am sitting in with them and Howie on Donaldson’s class, auditing it, for this year he and Grimes have switched and he is doing the second half of American history. In that class we run before Donaldson like hunting dogs. We love him not because he is a good performer, for he is not. He goes off on side trips all by himself. He alludes to things he has never explained and never explains them. He puts charts on the board and charges on before we can copy them. He gets involved in questions from the floor and forgets to finish his lecture. But he speaks to us. He makes sense. As we copy his words we do not shut off our minds or shut out our lives. His view of mad autonomous corporations gobbling the riches of those with less fancy weapons is not a world we can live in: but we do not find our world one we can with conscience live in as we find it.