Braided Lives (41 page)

“I should go offer up my secrets to the enemy? I should say, You haven’t got me yet, but here’s my valuable gut if you’d like to do a better job on me next time? Besides I can’t afford it, even with their sliding scale.”

He calls me paranoid. When supper is over he pays the cashier for his meal and walks out. “Peter, you forgot me.”

“You can buy your own supper. Why should I pay all the time? We aren’t married yet.”

“I wouldn’t have eaten so much if I’d known I had to pay.”

“Just out for what you can get, see?” He is only half kidding. Part of him believes everybody is out to take him. I am almost mad enough to stalk off. But what will happen if I do? He will pick up another girl and swindle her into bed. He will get laid, I will get none, and he will have the satisfaction of demonstrating he does not need me. Therefore I follow him. The trouble is I always do want to be fed. Whenever he takes me out I eat as much as I dare, making up for my missed meals. Hunger is a wind that blows through me most of the time. As I sharpen into life again, I am hungry for food, hungry for work, hungry for learning, hungry for love, hungry for sex, hungry for friendship. I experience myself as a clamorous need, a volume level of desire turned too high.

What holds me is the sense of Peter as a prisoner in the finely molded cage of bone that is his skull. What captures me is the elaborate game he constructs around me, traps and lures and attacks and feints and withdrawals. What brings me back to him is the sex, athletic, physically complicated but emotionally simple as a good workout. He is full of experiments. We are always laboring in strange yogic positions. He bites harder than I like, he uses his fists and elbows. It leaves me pleasantly used and with an interest in my body’s health. My mind labels elements sadistic, elements masochistic, but I feel nonetheless perfectly safe.

If he would touch me before he came in, if he would eat me, I would come better, but he says wanting that shows I am sexually immature and stuck in the clitoral phase of development. If I was a real woman, he says, I would not need stimulation. He has learned that certain things you do in bed are healthy and certain things are forbidden because unhealthy under his Freudian code. I don’t know who assigned all the point values but they have nothing to do with what feels good to me. He is also uncomfortably (for me) aware that I want sex oftener than he does. Though I try to be subtle in my expression of desire, he is quick to sense a source of power and at times he enjoys deferring my pleasure more than taking his own. That too is interesting, so unlike Mike that I unlearn my barely formed generalizations about male sexuality. I also learn more about my own. Wanting him more than he wants me makes me aware of myself as actor, as agent, even if frustrated. Lying caressing him tonight wondering if we will or we won’t, I think of Alberta who always talks about sex as something men do to you. She is passionately active politically, passionately passive sexually, I surmise from our late night conversations over the Wild Turkey.

Tonight we do. He is semiviolent, battering on me as if I were a door that could admit him to oblivion, a tunnel through which he could pass prick first to Somewhere Else. Relaxing afterward with his sleek-skinned neat body against me, his eggshell head sullen with pleasure at my breast, I am moved for him and his inturned pain.

“I’m no good,” he mutters. “I’ll never be any good. For anything. For anybody. There’s something deeply crooked in me, all the way through. I’m a runt. That’s what
he
used to say. I’m shorter than he is. How can you be shorter than your father? Every generation gets taller.
He’s
five feet eight. Gene, my brother, is five feet ten. I’m a throwback. I get lost in crowds. Nobody ever looks at me and thinks, He must be brilliant. I’ve never had love at first sight. I don’t deserve it, maybe. Then or ever. I’ve never had real love. I’ve never been loved and I never will be loved … because there’s something deeply wrong with me.”

“Peter,” I hold him like a petulant child, “you just need to open up. That’s all. Reach out! Of course you can be loved. Don’t I love you?”

He snorts and sits up, staring at me with narrowed eyes. “You what?”

I hadn’t paid much attention to what I said; now I feel stuck with it. So what? Loving is easy; it grows on female trees. Love comes up thick and abundant and ordinary as grass. You can love anybody if you want to. “I said I love you. I want you to feel better about yourself.”

“I
knew
you could love me. I had that sense.” He rubs his nose, almost glaring. “I knew you could! Ha. Then why can’t you learn to play chess?”

“I can’t put that much effort into a game. My mind wanders off to poems I’m working on or papers I’m writing,” I say apologetically. “You have lots of people to play chess with.”

“But we have to share more things. I have to develop you.”

Like the fields populated in my childhood with pheasants and rabbits developed into dreary little tract houses, I think, but then I am pleased as I consider that is after all his way of caring. He is opening up, he is cracking open, my beautiful pastel egg.

A couple of mornings later as I am eating breakfast in the Union with Howie, I feel a cumulative dissatisfaction like an itch between my shoulder blades: intolerable to sit in the Union across the room from Mike three or four times a week and never speak. We are dawdling over our second cups of coffee when Mike takes a table, attended by Julie and Grant Stone.

With unkind heartiness Howie, who never drinks too much, asks, “Hung over?”

“In a sense. I was thinking about Mike.” A knot of old emotions and an ongoing curiosity that is part concern. I feel as if I’ve become unauthentic in his presence; his gaze makes me an actor. “I haven’t spoken with him in months.”

“Not that long since you spoke
about
him.”

I look at Howie’s broad serious face on which the lines that will score the forehead are already faintly etched by his frown of worry. I know how often I think of Mike and how little by comparison I speak of him.

“Know what you do?” He persists as if poking a stick through bars at me, I think. “Use that rotten experience to protect yourself against anything really meaningful with a man.”

“I hadn’t noticed a line had formed.” But I am staring across. Perhaps Howie is right and I make every man, every imagined coupling, stand in contrast to my myth of first and total love, secure in its wrapping of violence and tragedy from inner decay. I must make Mike into a person I can size up. “This is absurd. I’ll say hello to him.”

“He may not answer. Finish your coffee and let’s go visit Bolognese, if he’ll let us in. He has a new story.”

“I want to know how Mike is.” A little opposition gives me impetus. Mike watches me coming with a sly look that I’ll bet is a bastard to maintain. I cross a tilted slab of stage, feeling too many eyes on me. I scramble through their gazes awkward as a damaged puppy, swaggering and recoiling at once. My notoriety is something I try to pretend I do not know about. I do not even know if I am supposed to be clown, menace, femme fatale, or culture hero-ine.

“Mistress Stuart, how’s your boneyard friend?”

“Howie, you mean? Just fine. Hi, Julie. Hi, Grant.”

Julie purses her lips looking hard at me. She cannot quite bring herself to smile.

“If he’s doing jes’ fine you must not be done picking his brains or his bones yet.” Mike raises his left eyebrow in that old gesture. For almost two years his presence has maddened me. It is irritating that the beloved should continue to look and act as the beloved did, and no longer be loved. It is as if they persist in the old tricks in order to tease you for your credulity or to flog you for having failed in your loving. Mike seems a parody of himself, but I must force myself to see him now. His presence has solidified. He sits like a Chinese sage, the bones in his head and body not padded by the weight he has put on but confirmed. An ironic line already shaping his mouth, he looks more than a couple of years older than the man I loved. His clothes are new, a black Shetland pullover that sharpens his pallor, grey flannel pants that actually fit. The collar of the shirt that shows between outthrust chin and new sweater is not frayed. His hair is somewhat longer, tumbling over forehead and collar, that dark, dark brown just a shade lighter than mine.

I peer at Julie, who puts her hand quite deliberately over his on the carved wooden tabletop. Grant Stone, winking at me, puts his hand over Mike’s other hand, but Julie is watching me and does not notice. Mike endures both passions with equanimity. In a slow drawl, his gaze beating into mine, he says, “I hear that your hero’s risking his head. Or at least his chair.”

It takes me a few minutes to understand he means Donaldson may be in trouble if we put on our HUAC farce. I do not bother to ask how he knows I sit in on Donaldson’s class, because his acquaintances always spy on me and report back. “So, what are you doing this summer, Julie?” I ask ingenuously, making eye contact. “You’re graduating, right?”

“We’re not sure yet. Mike has been accepted to Yale but he didn’t get a fellowship. We’re thinking of going to graduate school here or at Northwestern. I’m accepted both places too.”

What a married sounding
We.
No ring on that possessive hand. Mike looks into outer or inner space. Grant Stone says in Mae West style, “You ought to come up and see
me
sometime. I’m a broad-minded fellow and curious as hell. The world’s my thing.” He glances at Mike. “Don’t mind him glowering. He treats everybody as his serf.”

“We
—and that is the royal WE—” Mike announces, glaring at his family left and right, “We may go off to Madagascar and eat fried monkeys. We may retire to a Tibetan lamasery. We may sign up as a lighthouse keeper. We may go off to Morocco and screw Arab boys. We may go off to Antarctica and screw ourselves. Aren’t you bored, Jill? I think you look bored.”

“That’s just my morning expression.” Howie is putting on his yellow oilskin slicker and I must hurry to catch him. “Hey, wait for me.”

“My breakfast is not only eaten but digested. I got tired of being put in storage.”

Have I pushed him too far? “Please don’t be moody. You haven’t the ego to do it like the master over there.”

To my relief he turns back to me. “Arf.”

“He says Donaldson is going to get fired because of our play.”

“Arf!” Loudly. Several heads turn. “Arf arf!”

“Has rehearsing the play turned you cuckoo?”

“Making faithful dog noises. You’re so easy to embarrass. I don’t think Donaldson will be fired. McCarthy’s fallen. The tide’s turning. Two years ago, maybe. We’re too late to be brave, kid.” We hike off toward Bolognese. “They’ve won what they wanted—they broke the Left. Nothing remains but a few study groups and some folksingers. Donaldson’s too popular to be got rid of easily.” Howie loves to sound cynical. I am not so sure.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

L
E DÉJEUNER SUR L’HERBE

A
T FIRST DONNA is pleased with her new lover Charlie. He is twenty-four. (“A man ought to be a little older, Stu, because boys our own age just don’t know enough to keep us interested. But I admit Sal was
too
much older. He couldn’t take me seriously.”) Charlie is pleasant-looking. His voice has some rough honey in it I can always recognize when I answer the phone and he asks for her. He dotes on her. Being a graduate student who works for a sociologist, he has no money. In April he stole daffodils from his professor’s garden. In May he picks bouquets of lilacs from the hedge outside the astronomy building, their rich sexual fragrance dyeing the air in our room for a week before they droop.

Tonight Donna sits painting on a face, with brushes, pots, powders, unguents spread out in a semicircle. She does her work slowly and with many wry grimaces. The dollface she will create is much admired by men, but in truth I prefer her scrubbed face with its albino pallor and sharp bones. “You seeing Charlie?” I ask.

“Who else?” She shrugs in her plaid bathrobe. “Want to switch?”

I grin. “Afraid not.”

“You like
him
now, don’t you? You’re hooked.”

“Good word—hooked. He’s like a stainless-steel fishhook in my gut…. Did you talk Wanda into switching rooms?” I try to sound indifferent. Every day I expect Donna to move.

“I decided I couldn’t take her roommate Billy Sue.”

“Are you sorry you moved into this house?”

“It’s cheaper than the dorm and a lot looser. But who wants to live with a bunch of females?”

“Jesus, Donna, I sure wouldn’t want to live with fourteen men. They’d all leave the toilet seat up and expect you to pick their socks off the floor.”

“Men—not boys—men have something to offer—in fact, the world. If you want to learn anything, you have to learn it from a man,” she says sententiously, beginning to brush on mascara.

It’s certainly true that the only woman who has taught us at the university was in Romance languages. “But you don’t think we’ve given each other a lot? And what are you learning from Charlie?”