All About Women

by Andrew M. Greeley

  He awoke later in the night, his body hungry for a woman. She must have haunted his dreams. This time he ran by the pool and across the lawn. The door was still open, but the bed was made. She was gone. Only the maroon pen on the table and melted water in the ice container showed that she had ever been there.

  The next morning the early sun was already searingly hot. The black maids were making up her room early as he went to breakfast. The Cuban clerk insisted that no woman had been registered in that room. After his tea and English muffin, he walked back through the garden. The maids had left the room. The maroon pen was still on the desk.

  She was not an illusion after all.

  Impulsively he darted into the room and picked up the pen. Helmsley Palace Hotel. New York. A clue if he wanted another chance.

  He put the pen in his jacket pocket and slipped out of the room. The image of her delicious shoulder would not fade from his memory.

  You don’t get second chances, he told himself as he packed his flight bag. Virtuously he threw the Helmsley pen into a wastebasket.

  He collected his papers and left the room. Halfway to the motel office, he turned and sauntered back. The pen was where he had thrown it. He picked it up and balanced it in his hand.

  Maybe long searches were better than short ones.

  Carefully he put the pen in his flight bag.

  He took a cab over to the university for his lecture, still uncertain whether he would return to his own school or fly to New York after the lecture.

  Gilberte

  When fact, he reflected, begins to model itself after fiction, it should stick to the script.

  “Aren’t the Bears wonderful this year?” she said, a line that he would never write.

  She wasn’t supposed to be an enthusiast for the Chicago Bears. Neither in the treasured memory of his adolescent admiration nor in the paradigm of the woman who flitted through his stories in various shapes and guises was there any room for the Mighty Monsters of the Midway (whose headquarters were in Lake Forest, about as far from the Midway as you could get and still vote in Cook County). He was the Bears expert; he remembered Clyde “Bulldog” Turner and George “One Play” McAfee; he knew that the 1942 Bears had been unbeaten until the play-off game, the only unbeaten team before the Miami Dolphins of 1972.

  Yet the handsome upper-middle-class grandmother, marked by age indeed but hardly ravaged by it, who sat across the table from him in the slightly baroque splendor of the Arts Club—a wall of windows, polished black floors, infinitely polite waiters—could match him story for story. She knew that Jim McMahon was the best quarterback since Sid Luckman and that Ray “Scooter” McLean had once drop-kicked a point after a touchdown in 1940.

  “Who would have thought,” she continued, “that Mike Ditka could handle the Refrigerator story with such grace? Remember when he was tight end? He sort of invented the role, didn’t he?”

  What bothered him about this story in which he was one of the two principals (the less important, in all candor) was that he couldn’t quite figure out what metaphor the Storyteller had in mind.

  “He and John Mackey.”

  “Of the Colts, wasn’t he? Before they moved to Indianapolis?”

  Fair enough. Despite endless autumn Sunday-afternoon agony in front of the TV screen, he’d been to one Bears game in thirty years. She seemed hardly to have missed one.

  At first he had felt like he was in a Hindu myth, an author caught up inside one of his own tales in which he and another person recite lines that he has already written, all part of the dream of some medium-caste god. Three, maybe four videotapes, playing at the same time.

  The Hindu myths, however, stick to their scenarios. Mike Ditka does not intrude, Refrigerator in tow, to disconcert and unhinge.

  “I knew you would reappear in our lives.” She eased her fruit salad to one side. “I wasn’t surprised at all when you wrote at the time of Tim’s death.”

  “Really?” In his stories he would ask why. Love never dies, even distant and unspoken love, even when the loved person becomes a myth and invades your stories.

  Still, in the myth in his head, as distinct from the myth in his stories, the fascination was supposed to be one way.

  “I phoned your sister’s house a few years ago. Did you get the message?” she asked.

  “They said you’d call back.”

  “You’ve changed. You were so quiet we hardly knew you.”

  He was talking to three different women, a past, a present, and a dream, the last of which had become a myth. The boundaries separating the three faded and then reappeared. She was a story become real, perhaps so that she might become a story again.

  “You’ve changed, too.”

  “Not as much. But what happened to make you change?”

  He tried to explain that when you find yourself a pariah in the Church because there is a new administration, you discover that freedom has been thrust on you whether you want it or not. Since you have no intention of leaving, you use that freedom, first gingerly, then with increasingly reckless leprechaun flair. The quiet rule-keeper had been an unperceived mask all along.

  “I kept all the rules till I was thirty.”

  “My daughters”—she laughs at herself—“say that I never broke a rule in all my life.”

  He sensed that he had explained poorly, but she nods quickly, seeming to understand. In all the versions, her intelligence was decisively quick.

  The young waiter carefully offered the plate of roast lamb from which they were to help themselves. The Arts Club was like home—you ate what was put before you.

  “You’ve had an interesting priesthood, haven’t you? Exciting even?”

  “Not what I’d expected. Things changed.” The male in his stories had much better lines. “The excitement I could often do without.”

  “I suppose so.” She nods again, once more seemingly to understand his cryptic responses. “Any regrets?”

  As she nibbles at her roast lamb she is exploring the boundaries, making sure she understands the geography.

  “No. I’d do it all again.” This is the time to define the boundaries sharply. “I wouldn’t even leave if they tried to throw me out. Stay and bother them.”

  She laughs for the first time in the conversation. “As in marriage, I’m sure faithfulness has something to do with it.”

  “I had a hard time understanding those who left until I was forced to put myself inside the soul of one of them in a story. It’s not my path.”

  The waiter clears away the dishes. Outside, traffic is already backed up on the crowded street which feeds the hungry Kennedy Expressway.

  “Blueberry cobbler? With ice cream? I’d love it. I’ve always had a sweet tooth. And weight isn’t my problem. Just the opposite. My daughters are always on my case because I’m too thin.”

  The woman in the story had sweet teeth, too. He did not know the past woman well enough to have learned her tastes. So quickly had she been transformed from a beautiful girl to a lingering myth. Now reality was imitating the myth again. Or maybe he’d made a good guess.

  Before lunch, he had tried characteristically to order his thoughts and emotions for the drama with models of Marcel Proust’s Gilberte and Jim Farrell’s Lucy Scanlan. Why not start with two of the most shimmering young loves in all of storytelling?

  Neither one of whom is as beautiful as she was.

  Unlike Marcel Proust he had recognized his Gilberte at a dinner party after forty years. Instantly.

  Proust’s metaphor was Gilberte’s daughter. The daughter of his “Gilberte” was dazzling, too. But “Gilberte” was the metaphor. Whatever the metaphor was.

  “You stared all evening,” his companion said.

  “Can you blame me?”

  “Not the first time.”

  Did Jim Farrell ever think of the real-life counterpart of Lucy Scanlan as anything more than an object for Studs’s doomed dreams?

  Very young love is an illusion; intense, pr
eoccupying, unbearably sweet, but finally shallow, transient, and deceptive. Right?

  Maybe not.

  An author who tried to peddle the plot of À la recherche today would be laughed out of the offices of any self-respecting New York publishing company. Similarly a writer who suggested that young love might be revelatory, sacramental, a hint of what life is finally about, would find himself dismissed as an incurable romantic.

  Which doesn’t mean necessarily that he is wrong.

  It all depends on your Gilberte, doesn’t it? Or your Lucy Scanlan? Or the god, possibly Hindu, in whose dreams you live?

  What if you were lucky? Or had enormously good taste?

  Even in first grade?

  Okay, lucky. Either in your Beatrice or in the god into whose dreams you have managed to intrude.

  “It’s hard to express in words,” she begins, her eyes, always the sparkling blue of a pretty Wisconsin lake stirred by light summer breezes, smiling even if her face is serious. “Or it is for me anyway, how I feel when I read a book by someone I knew long ago.”

  “It must be.”

  “It’s not that I don’t like them”—she hastens to dispel any thought of criticism—“and I’m astonished by your memory. You don’t forget anything, do you?”

  “The images and memories come back”—he knows that he must have written this exchange in one of his books—“when the story requires them. Nothing happens in the stories quite the way it did in life—not even that spelling bee between two people, both of whom we might think we know.” His face becomes warm. “And no one in the stories is drawn from life exactly either. It’s all what didn’t happen but might have happened.”

  “Or should have happened?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “I’ve read them all. I think we all have. Looking for ourselves”—a quick, shy blush—“shocked if we recognize ourselves and disappointed if we don’t.”

  He had wondered when his stories became popular whether those whom he hadn’t seen in four decades would read them. He had assumed that they would not. Then it turned out that they did indeed read them—as quickly as they could grab them off the stands. How come, my own people in my own country?

  “They’re not exactly autobiographical. I mean, a storyteller—this one anyway—rewrites it all to make the story. It’s not a video replay. Even the great autobiographical novelists, Proust and Joyce, retold their lives to fit the story.”

  Lit 101. She probably hadn’t read either Portrait or À la recherche, not that it mattered. She should read Studs, however. It was about their own kind, the incorrigible Chicago Irish.

  “Are you the narrator in the first book?”

  “My sister says twenty percent of the time and I’d like to have been forty percent of the time.”

  “No Ellen?”

  “That’s what the cardinal asked me once. No, no Ellen.”

  “That’s too bad, in a way.”

  “He thought so, too.”

  “But you know a lot about women.”

  “I’m a male member of the human race, with all the hormones that accompany that.”

  “That doesn’t always make much difference.”

  “Thank you then for the compliment. I’m still trying—in the process of learning.”

  Why do you fall in love with a little girl when you’re both in first grade, worship her from a distance for eight years, see her once or twice after graduation, and hold her in a place of honor in your memory ever after? So much so that your childhood and adolescent images of her survive for four decades and explode in your stories, almost every one of them?

  Because you are an incurable romantic, that’s why.

  All right, but even for a romantic she must have been someone special.

  She was pretty, she was smart, she was good, she was self-possessed, she was a resilient academic rival. Are those not enough good reasons?

  Still pretty, still smart, still resilient—tense and nervous as she fought off pain and grief and adjusted to life alone, yet determined to survive and survive well, a burden to no one. No, not all that different. From a distance, and not much of a distance, in skirt and sweater, she made it 1942 again.

  But what’s the metaphor here? What does this mean in the dream of a god who loves surprises? No Hindu god, that.

  “The stories bring back a lot of memories for me, too. You were so smart. I think I was probably envious of that.”

  His temptation is to say that to her alone envy is permitted. Instead he tells the truth: “You had reason to be angry. You were a girl, you were too pretty, and you weren’t going to a seminary. No way you could win.”

  She laughs, not convinced. “I never thought I’d become as much a feminist as I have in the last five years.” She folds her glasses and puts them in her purse. “There really is terrible discrimination against women.”

  “Women priests?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There’s only one reason to exclude them. If they’re inferior human beings.”

  “They’re not inferior.” The feisty rival once more. “But I do think of God as a mother. I mean, if you’ve had a mother and been a mother and loved and been loved both ways, how could you not?”

  He hadn’t written that line. But unlike talk about Mike Ditka and Jim McMahon and the Fridge, he wished he had.

  Certainly no medium-caste Hindu god was writing this story. It was Yahweh, Good Old. And Lady Wisdom, God’s self-disclosure in the order and charm of the cosmos. Lady Wisdom, whom he’d once told a reporter was an Irish comedienne.

  “If God is a mother as well as a father, why not women priests?”

  “I suppose.” She was thoughtful again, slipping up to a big question perhaps. “None of us thought you would be a novelist.”

  “I didn’t either and I’m not sure I am.”

  “I am the girl in this book?” She held it in front of her, like a shield, or maybe a prayer book. “Kind of?”

  “Bits and pieces.” He swallowed much too large a piece of blueberry cobbler.

  “My daughters didn’t recognize me. So I didn’t tell them. They all say it’s their favorite.” The same magic smile from first grade. Special indeed. “I know you much better after reading these books than you know me.” She opens the book tentatively. “Yet you know a lot about me that you couldn’t possibly know.”

  The God in whose dreams he lived, perhaps not at all the God who dreamed Proust and Farrell, is a God who enjoys surprises, twists and turns, kinks and ironies, and happy endings. Ultimately anyway.

  Nonetheless, it was excessive of Her to write him into the kind of story into which he had written his own characters.

  “A lot of the girl in the book is based on my imagination of what you might have become. Some of it was pretty thin.…”

  “And some pretty accurate, too. I can’t understand how you did it.”

  “All the people are composites. I dream up the story line and then the characters come rushing out of my imagination, fully grown.” He omits any reference in this writer’s workshop lecture to Venus from the sea. “Only afterward do I realize that bits and pieces of people I’ve known through the years have been incorporated.”

  “Am I in the other women?”

  “Most of them, I guess.”

  “That’s nice.…” She reaches for her glasses again, as though to reread the book. “I like the books. And I like the women, too.”

  “I was half-afraid that you might read this one especially, recognize yourself, and be angry.”

  Another quick blush. “Certainly not angry. Surprised. Maybe flattered. Anyway”—pointing at the girl on the cover—“she wouldn’t be angry, would she?”

  “She would love it. Maybe I should have trusted my imagination.”

  Neither of them says what they both know. To have so influenced stories after forty years, she must have occupied an enormous place in his imagination.

  A new Cadillac is becalmed outside the win
dow beneath their table. Not at all like the startling Studebakers of 1946. He imagines a Study on the street and thinks that Proust, genius that he was, erred. Time is neither lost nor found, but given.

  “You wrote that poem, the ‘rival’ one, about me, too? The one that ends, ‘We shall be young again, we shall laugh again’?”

  “Who else fits it?”

  “Thank you for that, too.”

  As someone else remarked when she heard about this tête-à-tête at the Arts Club, no one is anything but pleased to discover that they’ve been loved for fifty years.

  Or, for that matter, to say that one has loved for fifty years and is fully prepared to love for fifty more.

  Which is certainly true, though it doesn’t help much in the search for a metaphor. He ought to be depressed. No one could live up to his residual adolescent fantasies. Only somehow she went beyond them, not as a two-dimensional fantasy, but as a three-dimensional person.

  Is the Author trying to tell him something?

  “Do you think the Bears will go to the Super Bowl?” She nods at the waiter for more coffee.

  Is that what the Author had in mind? He thinks this story is being changed into a comedy.

  “No doubt.” He crosses his fingers and together they laugh with the hollow cheer of the dogged Chicago sports fan.

  “None at all. Will you watch it at our house?”

  Forty years—the span of a woman’s adult life: falling in love, courtship, marriage, the difficult early days of parenthood, struggle against initial economic problems, life for a while in a strange city, marvelous but contentious kids (in the nature of the creature), sorrows, disappointments, failures, difficult decisions, intense if all too transient joys, unexpected surprises, pride of accomplishment, interludes of contentment that slip through your fingers, tragedy, the somber realization that most of the joys are in the past and were not embraced as fervently as they might have been, grim awareness that the end is now much closer than the beginning. Life too quickly almost done before it has even begun.