All About Women

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Or want to take them off herself.

  So you don’t think at first that sex could possibly be the problem in a troubled marriage in which that kind of woman is the wife.

  “We have a good intellectual relationship,” Brian, her husband, said at the beginning of their conversations with the priest. “A few years of marriage taught us that sex isn’t very important in our relationship.”

  “It has taught us only that we can get along without it,” she contradicted him, “if we have to.”

  It was, the priest told himself, unimaginable that one would lie next to such a magnificent woman in bed and not touch her for months.

  He knew better, even in those days. The fires of human passion may be fierce, but during its long existence, the species has developed ingenious cultural and psychological mechanisms which easily extinguish the flames, not unlike the methods by which one caps a burning oil well.

  Rita was classically beautiful, not voluptuous, certainly not anything as cheap as “sexy,” but rather the kind of well-proportioned woman whom it would be easy to picture in a long and elegant Roman or medieval dress, with a face so perfect that you imagine it as having been copied from a Bayeux tapestry. She would have been ideally suited for a model on the cover of Bride, a chaste and prudent virgin in transition to a chaste and loving wife.

  An instant transition, of course, accomplished on a single day without experience or preparation, from a status in which not even brief fantasies were permitted without the obligation of confessing them, to a status in which total sexual abandon became an act of virtue.

  You leaped from the high dive of perfect virginity into the pool of passionate married chastity. Cold pool or warm? You didn’t know till you jumped.

  She was also a delicious blend of talent and timidity, gifted enough to have had two poems published in poetry journals before she graduated from college and vulnerable enough to hint that she needed reassurance and protection against critics who did not understand her poetic vision.

  At their wedding Mass, flushed and happy, they seemed to everyone in the parish, including each other, the perfectly matched couple. Well educated, handsome, devout, serious, passionately idealistic and intensely intellectual—as those latter two adjectives were defined in the Catholic community just before Pope John and his council changed the meaning of lots of adjectives.

  “There was nothing in Paul Claudel,” Rita said bitterly later, “to prepare me for pregnancy sickness on our honeymoon.”

  Nor was there anything in Thomas Aquinas (read in The Companion to the Summa) to equip Brian to protect his masculinity from an apparently indefinite term of indentured servitude to his father’s construction company in which, despite your law degree and title of vice-president of the company, you were paid a semiskilled laborer’s wage and your lifestyle was supported by weekly bonuses you had to ask for every Friday afternoon.

  Intellectualism for them was constituted by the “Neo-Thomists,” who found in the text of St. Thomas almost all the answers to the problems of the modern world, by Henry Adams’s Mont St. Michele and Chartres, which suggested that the thirteenth might after all have been the greatest of centuries, and by the English Catholic convert writers a generation older than them—Waugh, Greene, Chesterton, Eric Gill—and the conservative French Catholic authors like Bernanos, Mauriac, Bloy, and Claudel.

  “There is but one tragedy,” they would quote from the ending of Bloy’s The Woman Who Was Poor: “that is not to be a saint.”

  That quote served as a transition between their intellectualism and their idealism: Brian’s visited Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker Center in New York and worked in the soup kitchen in Washington during his last year in law school; Rita’s served in the Catholic inner-city tutoring program in Chicago during the evenings after her English M.A. classes at Northwestern.

  The models for idealism which their “sophisticated” Catholic college–educated religion provided were Waugh’s Julia, who gave up her love to be true to the Church’s marriage teachings, Manzoni’s Betrothed, who remained faithful to each other even though it seemed likely they would never see each other again, and Bernanos’s Country Priest, who offered his own soul to be damned to hell in order to save the soul of another.

  Or, if one did not find literary models appealing, there were always the standard retreat master’s Catholic husband and wife who practiced celibacy because another pregnancy would risk the wife’s health and they would not “pollute” their marriage with the “mutual masturbation” of birth control; or the college “marriage course” instructor’s Catholic wife—“still in her twenties”—who, deserted with her seven children, by a brutal drunken husband, refused to marry a “wealthy Protestant” who would have been a good father to her children, because she did not want to be deprived of the Church’s sacraments.

  The “marriage course” was, naturally, always taught by a nun or a priest.

  They had both thought about “vocations”—Brian to the Dominicans and a life of intellectual contemplation, Rita to the BVMs and a life of poetic creation. But they decided, separately before they began to date one another, that their “vocation” was to the “lay apostolate,” she representing the Church in the world of creative writing, he in the world of Chicago politics.

  They had to be the best, they would tell you, eyes shining brightly, at what they did, to reflect Jesus and the Church in their respective worlds. One now transmitted to others the Catholic “answers” by example rather than by indoctrination. The deep love of their marriage relationship and their dedicated activity in the parish would provide them, they said confidently, with the spiritual resources they needed for their contribution to the secular world.

  Seemed reasonable, the priest thought, and envied Brian, ever so lightly, his gorgeous bride.

  They courted during a sunny era when issues and solutions were clear and clean; Pope John was alive on the banks of the Tiber, John Kennedy on the banks of the Potomac. It was to be their age and they approached it with graceful confidence, heads up, eyes glowing, hand in hand, looking, as another Catholic cliché of the time put it, not at one another but together in the same direction.

  “I can’t figure out where it went wrong,” Brian told the priest. “Everything seemed neatly put together. We had our ideals and our ideas. Then a month after our wedding, it all fell apart on us.”

  “I knew we shouldn’t have stayed in the same parish with our families,” she said. It had become an automatic response from Rita to explain how Brian’s mistakes had blighted their dreams.

  Their sexual relationship would have been much better, she would then insist, if Brian had only bothered to read the “little book about women” that she had put on the bedstand at his side of the bed. Brian would reply that he didn’t need to learn about women from a book. When she was especially angry, she would end this bit of dialogue with the emasculating crack that then he’d better learn about them somewhere.

  They were two medieval figures—a tall, broad-shouldered, dimpled-chin blond knight (former captain in army intelligence at the Pentagon) and a black-haired, ravishing maiden. Cathedrals and plainsong seemed to leap from Rita’s angelically passionate poetry. Brian’s commitment to decentralized political power (which in Chicago actually existed in the corrupt ward organizations he despised) was sound medieval “organic” social theory, worthy of an enlightened feudal aristocrat.

  Later, friends would joke, meanly, to the priest that Rita and Brian were the last ones to leave a party because they wanted to put off entry into their bedroom as long as possible. They would gleefully quote Rita advising her unmarried friends to purchase twin beds for their first apartment.

  When he was finally summoned to provide help, the priest realized almost at once that they needed better counseling skills than he possessed. But Brian and Rita would never dare seek professional help as long as they lived in a community in which both families kept a close eye on every move the couple made—much as they had
watched them ten years before when they were teenagers. Like many other Catholics in those days Rita and Brian sought bargain-basement clerical therapeutic help because it was unthinkable that they should need anything more, and besides, psychiatrists cost “twenty-five dollars an hour.”

  “Where would I get that kind of money?” Brian asked querulously. “And what would Pa say if I told him I needed more money so I could pay to have my head shrunk?”

  The priest had been trained at the seminary never to turn his back on people in need. So once every week, after he was finished in the rectory office, he would tramp over to their apartment (not yet called a town house) and struggle against the harassed, irritable frustration which had become the climate for this, the parish’s “perfect marriage.”

  It was required that he come to their apartment—and thus lose his own professional base and some of his professional status—because they had to economize on baby-sitting expenses.

  The priest felt like a doctor who was forced to fight infection without antibiotics.

  If he had been more confident of his own skills, he would have bluntly accused them of taking turns in their efforts to sabotage his efforts. He would have insisted that he would not visit their apartment again unless he was assured that their angry, irritable three-year-old was put to bed first and kept there so she could not disrupt any more sessions.

  “We were certain we’d be different from our parents,” Rita said one night through her tears. “Now we fight as much and are as unhappy as they are.”

  “Just a minute, honey.” Brian raised his hand as though he were flagging down a car on the expressway. “I think my parents are happy.”

  “How long have they slept in separate bedrooms?” she fired back.

  “Well, they don’t cut each other up in public all the time like your parents do.”

  Their “real” world was not Virginia or Northwestern, not degrees or publications or prestigious LaSalle firms or Capitol Hill offices. That world was a game, like basketball or volleyball, to be played so long as it didn’t get in the way of the important elements in life—the neighborhood, the country club, Brian’s father’s construction company, Rita’s mother’s never-ending litany of worthy charities, grandchildren for their parents, what neighbors might say or think, settling down to the “serious responsibilities of life.”

  Once, when the two children had been particularly disruptive (the three-year-old teasing the one-and-a-half-year-old), Brian said just as the priest was putting on his scarf to venture into the winter night, “I suppose Rita has told you about our sexual program?”

  To protect his own male image, Brian pretended that the counseling was for his wife and he was an occasional participant in order to keep her happy.

  “No, she hasn’t.”

  “We have not made love much in the last two years.” She turned her face away so that the priest would not see her embarrassment. “We tried rhythm after Norine. I was pregnant within six months. We’re good Catholics and we didn’t want to violate the Church’s law. So we’ve been on abstinence ever since.”

  “It’s kind of hard sometimes,” Brian complained. “It’s not an important part of our marriage but … well, it’s Rita’s fault that we’re still on the program.”

  “It is not! I was the one who suggested we try the pill. Lots of priests say…”

  “And then you forget to take them…”

  “Once the spring benefit is over and I get organized…”

  “You’ve been saying that about your book and your M.A. paper for the last four years. Do we add sex to the list?”

  “You’re usually not interested, so why should I remember to take the pills?”

  On his walk home, the subzero cold a painful wall against which he bent his head, the priest wondered what would happen if the pope’s commission should approve a change in the Church’s birth-control teaching? What other excuse would Catholics like Brian and Rita have for the disappearance of passionate love in their marriage?

  The brave knight as impotent, the fair bride as frigid. A pair of romantics dying of an overdose of realism.

  Rita had argued that they should not be living in the same neighborhood, where his parents could watch every move and ask foolish and embarrassing questions. (“I heard you had morning sickness again the other day, darling.”) And Brian, she said, ought not to be working for his father. He should take one of the jobs offered him in the Loop. Sure, his father had used the construction company as a step to political influence, but it was not the kind of influence that Brian wanted anyway, was it?

  Brian argued that Rita was too “overcommitted” to give him the “encouragement” he needed. The priest could not figure out whether he meant good sex or help in resisting his father. Probably, the priest finally decided, Brian didn’t think that the two were different. If their marital sex became suddenly satisfying—without any change in his approach to it—he would be sufficiently assured of his manhood to resist his father.

  Rita was always a little breathless and a little late—a busy woman rushing desperately to keep up with will-o’-the-wisp responsibilities which receded ever further into the distance.

  “What’s worth doing at all,” she frequently quoted her mother, “is worth doing well.” So everything—a dinner party, a benefit dance, a one-class-a-week poetry course in the parish school, natural childbirth, breast-feeding, a surprise party for her father—all had to be solemn high productions which frazzled and exhausted her. She enjoyed none of these projects. They were things which had to be done.

  At first, the priest thought that they ought to move as far away from the neighborhood as possible.

  After Rita’s outburst about their “program,” he added another goal: they should resume, no, begin a normal sex life.

  Whatever that was.

  “Sex isn’t the only thing in marriage, not even the most important thing,” Brian protested when the priest, as delicately as possible, tried to return to the subject of their intimacy the week after Rita forced the topic into the open. “Sometimes I think you celibates overrate its importance. There’s more holding my wife and myself together than sex.”

  “Certainly it’s not the most important aspect of marriage.” The priest hoped he could remember the points he wanted to make. (He had outlined them carefully at the rectory before he trudged over to their house.) “But if it wasn’t for sex, we wouldn’t have marriage. And without sex to smooth over the frictions and bind a man and woman together when their relationship is troubled, most marriages would be difficult, if not impossible.”

  “Maybe we ought to try it.” Rita laughed.

  Then Brian took a deep breath. “I’ve been offered a job with a new organization that is committed to building low-cost private housing—foundation money. I’d be general counsel and vice-president. Three-year contract.”

  “Then we’ll be able to move out of the neighborhood!”

  “Well, I haven’t accepted yet…”

  “You have to accept it, Brian, you just have to.”

  “I’ll see what Dad thinks; we have a busy summer. Maybe they’ll give me till autumn to decide.…”

  Then, better late than never, she changed her tactics, threw her arms around her husband, and became the proud medieval matron embracing her hero husband, returned maybe from the Crusades.

  “I’m so proud of you, Brian, and so happy. It’s exactly what you’ve always wanted. Now I’ll have to finish my book of poems to catch up with you.”

  “It’ll all work out,” he agreed, nestling her close.

  They parted quickly, but the hormones were already gushing through Brian and Rita’s bloodstreams, at their timeless task of driving man and woman toward one another, despite the anger and the fear which resisted intimacy.

  When the priest was leaving to walk back to the rectory in the falling snow, Brian tentatively extended his arm around Rita’s waist, let it slide a little lower. She leaned against him.

  “Di
dn’t I tell you things would work out, Father?” He was again basketball captain who had made a game-winning free throw and was reassuring the coach.

  What the priest said next was pure instinct: “If I were married to her, I couldn’t keep my hands off her.”

  “I can’t either.” Brian drew her closer. “She’s a terrible distraction.”

  They all blushed and laughed happily. Thus did they seal their tripartite friendship and love. The priest walked back to the loneliness of his rectory oblivious to the blizzard.

  He had said something totally outrageous and they had not been offended. It had worked.

  He’d won.

  Both families campaigned to prevent the rebirth of married love between Brian and Rita. The group which was hiring him was a communist front. Didn’t it have Ford Foundation money? What about the June dance at the club? Did they realize what people would say? What about his father’s heart condition? Couldn’t it wait till next year?

  Brian wavered and vacillated, changing his mind every day and sometimes several times a day. Rita, however, was unshakable: she shoved aside the piles of lists on her “secretary” and began to edit her poems. She called real-estate companies about apartments near Lincoln Park. She announced that though Brian’s new job would start April 1, he was quitting his father’s company on March 10. She called a travel agent and made reservations for two and a half weeks in the Caymans. She persuaded her older sister Kate to take the kids while she and Brian were on their “second honeymoon.”

  “It’s really going to be the first, Father,” she told the priest, to whom she spoke on the phone for moral support every day.

  Brian, attracted more by the transformation in his wife and the prospect of a couple of weeks alone with her on a deserted beach than by the new job, finally stuck to his guns and walked out of his father’s office on Friday afternoon, despite the elder man’s accusing silence (and despite his mother’s last-minute tearful telephone plea, “Do you want to kill your father? Can’t it wait six more months?”).