Braided Lives (71 page)

There are several readers, loud rather than good, but you are about to witness a conversion experience. The last reader is Allen Ginsberg, thin and clean-shaven. He wears a plaid lumberjack shirt and radiates gentleness, patience, an almost motherly caring. I like him, although I recognize whenever he mentions women in his poems, it is with a casual and unexamined disgust. The subject matter is not the hook that snags my vitals. I have been afraid of drugs since a friend ODed on horse when I was thirteen and she was fifteen. The mysticism bores me. But certain poems cause me to sit bolt upright, breathe rapidly and experience the lifting of iron bars from my brain.

The meter moves me. I begin to think critically about what I’ve been taught about prosody. I begin to wonder about an English education for an American poet. The conversion experience, the sense of fire descending, strikes because I realize as I listen that it is possible to write with the whole entire live self. My self. It is possible to dare to write poems starting immediately tomorrow morning about what I care most for.

I sit there stunned. I started out doing that. Yes, in high school, when I first came to Ann Arbor, yes. But I unlearned to. I was taught to distance myself from my work. To write with a tiny part of my intellectual and emotional equipment. I was taught to see poems as complicated intellectual constructions full of carefully layered ambiguities, ironies and ironically treated myths, alluding in a complex web to other similar works. But you can write about fucking, you can write about supermarkets, you can write about your mother, you can write about the Bomb. You can write your politics. You can actually write poems that say what you feel and think.

I cannot speak. I want to run off and stare into my brain, opened suddenly from above and shining blue. I rush out followed by Alberta and cannot even take the subway. We walk miles downtown through the spring night. I have to work off the energy that chafes me.

Will I ever be visible? Will I ever be real? I want to be discovered into reality; yet I have not created my self, my work. I am inchoate, unborn. Who am I to assume that what I feel and think and experience matters to anyone else or ever could? I am too weird and strange to shape the dreams of others. My professors droned on of the universal in college, but they seemed to mean only notions, emotions, interests common to white men with money. I carry hope, born from a man who proclaims himself proudly Jew and queer, that I can write out of me, that I do not have to pretend to be an English gentleman to create.

Spring 1982,
Bloodstone Review

Miss Stuart’s seventh volume of poetry is crammed with reductionist simplistic snippets of women’s lib cant. In describing a series of male/female encounters in which women are injured, raped, maimed, Stuart is unsympathetic to male needs. Individual poems stress only the woman’s role and anguish, instead of taking a balanced view. Only the poems about good sex transcend this morbid polemical bias. When we men denigrate women, compare them to mud, death, meat, sows, sloughs, sewers, traps, toilets, when we equate them with mortality, contingency, nature, when we put down women who put out and women who don’t, we are merely being universal. Miss Stuart is guilty of special pleading. In art there can be no special pleading for women. Her poetry is uterine and devoid of thrust. Her volume is wet, menstruates and carries a purse in which it can’t find anything.

Sydney Craw

Howie could be considered the center of our triangle, the obvious fulcrum of desire. Stephanie could be seen as the center, the sensitive and often sore spot. She feels most put upon and must be catered to, pleased, courted. In another sense I am the center: as the most content in the triangle, I put the most effort into making it work. I try to monitor everyone’s level of conflict and annoyance. I negotiate. I tell Howie that Stephanie needs more time with him that week. I tell Stephanie that Howie is frantic with his exams, meaning we should let him take a vacation from both of us.

We are a minor scandal among our friends. Alberta puts up with it, for my sake, but it strikes her as unaesthetic. As a divorce lawyer she passionately believes in monogamy. The more she unglues couples by day and ministers to the problems of the incompatible, the brutalized and the rejected, the more firmly committed she is in her evening and weekend life to the search for Mr. Right. Sometimes when we are sipping bourbon on a quiet night she tells me she will never meet the man for her. Gerrit was It.

Bolognese is ribaldly amused. Donna is fascinated, half frightened, half intrigued. As June heats up the city, our primary problem is Stephanie’s job. She has been working as secretary to her second cousin who owns a furniture store in Queens. She wants a job in Manhattan and I go to work on Donna.

“But why?” Donna asks me. “How about we get her a job in Alaska instead?”

“She wouldn’t go. Besides, you have to understand. If one person in a family is unhappy, everybody in a family is unhappy.”

Donna eyes me with a faint smile. Ever since she took the job at Channel 11, she is more at ease with me than she has been since she fell for Peter. I wish I could understand why his cold mercury presence no longer pollutes our communication, but I accept the miracle. She says, “You want to bribe her not to fight you for Howie. You think you couldn’t win.”

“Wrong guess. I don’t want to think about winning. After a year of lusting after him futilely, a piece of the action is amazing grace. I rather like the triangle. I know I’m not supposed to, but it gives me a lot of time to write.”

She laughs. “Don’t ever say that to Howie. He’d never forgive you. I can’t imagine any man who would.”

“I should seem to be suffering? But that ought to be guilt-provoking. He can feel guilty about anything—the gross national product. The average mean income in Tobago. I’d like to iron the guilt right out of him.”

The phone rings. It is for her. She takes the receiver from me. “Ta, Liz, you’re an angel! Give me the address. How should I dress? No, I won’t be recognizable. Two twenty-two Lex?” She motions wildly at me, pointing to her purse. “Appointment book,” she mouths off-phone. “Who do I ask for?”

With the privilege of old friendship I open her purse and hand her the red leather appointment book. The purse is crammed with vials and jars and compacts of makeup and various pills: diet, headache, whatever. When she hangs up she turns to me insistently. “I’m trying out for a commercial. Should I? I’m curious. But, Stu, isn’t that completely selling out?”

“What’s the difference between being Weather Girl and selling … what is it?”

“Floor polish.”

“So what’s the difference?”

“Weather’s a service, Stu. I’m just the visual equivalent of dialing weather on the phone. Lots of people depend on that information. Travelers. Bus drivers. Baseball teams. Farmers. People planning picnics.” She paces to the window, looks out at nothing, paces back. Her face is painted into hard edges, precise sculpture of shadow and light; her hair is a fluffy cloud. “I’m studying meteorology on my own time. What’s the difference between giving accurate forecasts in a long skirt or a short skirt? But a commercial …”

“Look, half the time when you get me to watch, I can’t tell the difference between commercials and programs anyhow, except that a lot of the time the commercials are better photographed.”

She seems disappointed, as if she wanted me to talk her out of going. “But, Stu, for the first time in my life, I’m somebody.”

“I see that. Donna, your ideas haven’t caught up with your life. You keep talking about fulfilling yourself as a woman and adjusting to sex roles, and yet, when you stayed home and did nothing, you were bored silly. You like working.”

She gathers herself to leave. I frighten her if I challenge the ideology she is supposed to live by, but clearly doesn’t. She has a need to pretend that her job is a temporary aberration to be washed away with all other neuroses when she is healthy, which is defined as wanting nothing but Peter and domesticity. Maybe she has to pretend that with him, but with herself? With me? Looking at the door she has just departed at full speed, I ponder and shrug. After all, that ideology is no different from the religions of most people, pious moralities shielded from the abrasion of actual use. If she want to go on believing in tran-substantiation or the immaculate conception of Mary or the Freudian biological destiny of women, what difference can it make when she is careful to live her daily life by quite practical criteria? She shares that set of beliefs with Peter and perhaps to unravel that fabric would threaten their marriage. As long as her ideas don’t interfere with her activities, what harm can they do?

Within a week, Donna comes through for me. She gets Stephanie a job typing invoices at Channel 11.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

T
HE
T
HREE-
L
EGGED
R
ACE

B
OLOGNESE CANNOT LIKE my new poems. “Irrational,” he calls them. But neither can he dismiss them. They command his respect even as they annoy him. As a slush editor, he is used to going through dunghills of rotting hopes in the form of unsolicited manuscripts every week, making snap decisions and moving on. My poems detain him. He knows they are bad by every criteria we were taught, yet when he finishes lashing me with the scorn informed by our common education in English honors, the poems still stand there. They are raw, they are often too long, but they are in a voice I know is mine. They are real as potatoes.

Sunday brunch at my apartment: bagels, cream cheese, bialys, Nova Scotia and orange juice. I did not buy the food, of course. Stephanie, Alberta and Bolognese kicked in and Howie went out and actually purchased it. I contribute the strong black coffee, the butter, the plates, the Mozart.

Bolognese finally stops worrying at my poems and slumps back, lying flat but for his head propped against the bed’s edge. “No, I just get two weeks’ vacation,” he answers Alberta. “My parents have a cottage on Crystal Lake in Michigan. They sent me plane tickets and it’ll all be free and no more, although just as, boring as if I went out to your playground.”

“I love Sag Harbor. It’s not spoiled yet. We rent a funny dear falling-down house. We could easily fit in more people or so if any of you reconsider staying here stubbornly to broil,” Alberta says.

Howie sighs. “I want to get out of the city. But with the orderly job, the only days I have off are Mondays and Tuesdays. At least Presbyterian is air-conditioned.”

“And when it gets really hot this August, I’ll just hike over to your apartment, Alberta. Your pad is my country air.” After all, I have a key. I’m supposed to keep an eye on things, bring in the mail, satisfy the minimal needs of a flowering cactus a recent suitor gave her. I think it was supposed to represent a symbolic protest, but Alberta likes it. It’s the only plant she’s ever been able to keep alive in her apartment. “And Mondays we can make a determined effort to take a bus to someplace green.”

First Bolognese leaves to work on his latest short story about a man who eats himself to death. Then Alberta is off to stuff envelopes for CORE and then meet her newest held-at-arm’s-length young man to go rowing in Central Park. I am at the disposal of my family, uncertain how we are to pass the hot hazy day. Stephanie has been quiet, not a good sign. She has been liking me better since Donna got her the job at Channel 11, for she too is excited by the romance of television. But whenever Stephanie warms to me, she shortly withdraws, sure I am fooling her.

“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” Howie asks her. “Do you have a headache?”

“A giant one. Does it ever occur to you that when you say ‘sweetheart,’ you’re not being specific enough? Never mind, this morning was boring beyond endurance.”

“I thought you liked Alberta and Bolognese—” he begins.

“They’re
her
friends. Who else would go on about her poems for two hours? As if anybody couldn’t write like that if they were willing to strip in public. You could do it. I could do it. But we wouldn’t. It’s the ravings of somebody who’s willing to rave!”

“It wasn’t two hours. Maybe forty-five minutes. And nobody was being exactly complimentary,” I say defensively.

“You don’t care what they say as long as you’re the center of attention. What you can’t stand is when you aren’t.”

“Steph, I can talk to Bolognese separately about my work—”

“Work? You call that work?”

“I didn’t realize it annoyed you. I guess it can be boring for other people.”

“My goodness, you’ve noticed there are other people! We may be getting someplace yet.”

Since I am The Other Woman, I am no longer The Poet to Stephanie. She dismisses my work as if it were some outre form of flirtation or self-decoration designed to seduce impressionable males. Since viewing me as a rival, she cannot credit me with any real ambition beyond possessing Howie. Yet frequently she forgets to scowl and we have wonderful times, the three of us, even she and I. The truth is that Howie has little time for either of us, and we make each other’s life easier and pleasanter in the city, if only she could acknowledge that. I want Stephanie to love me, but she won’t.