Consenting Adult (21 page)

For still another time she read the few lines. She was a modern reader, a modern editor, a modem woman, and yet the brief passage spoke to her with an import she could not quite measure or describe. For one thing, the lines told her, by the satisfaction they aroused in her, that she herself was not a Peeping Tom while reading about love. They told her that she was one who found authors who do choose to make Peeping Toms of their readers, and those readers who so obligingly become the Peeping Toms—that she found all of them repellent and offensive.

She had never articulated this for herself so clearly before, and there was a thump of recognition now that she actually enjoyed. And it is the same, she thought, when it comes to reading about heterosexuals in bed or about homosexuals in bed. Some things need to remain private.

The Wolfenden Committee had specified “in private.” More and more the decisions of the Wolfenden Committee were becoming her decisions, their attitudes her attitudes. It was a new experience, on an odd stratum of living; she had become the pupil again, pupil though adult, pupil though parent, in this vast unknown area of sexual behavior.

It had been Nate who had at first guided her when she told him she wanted to know everything there was to know about “Mr. Wolfenden and his committee.”

“It’s Sir John, not Mister,” he had corrected her, with a small conspiratorial wink. “He’s not a doctor either, but an educator and sociologist, chancellor of Reading University, C.B.E., and then knighted, that sort of thing, quite a chap. You won’t find much on him in a library, but you could go to the British Information Service, on Park Avenue, I think, at Fortieth, but you better check—they’re moving to one of the glassy new buildings any day.”

“Do I just ask for the Wolfenden Report?”

“Ask for whatever
Hansards
cover the debate on it, in the House of Commons. It hasn’t got to the Lords yet, I gather.”

“Hansard,
oh yes. It’s like our
Congressional Record,
isn’t it?”

“And just about as exciting reading.”

But it had been exciting in strange ways. She went back to the bound blue volumes several times, following the debates as they were recorded from the late Fifties up to now, nearly a decade later, and it reassured her that the committee was no little group of psychiatrists but a large and complex gathering of illustrious people from many walks of life, two members of Parliament, two judges of the High Court, two doctors, three women, several lawyers and ministers. It took on an immense importance that the famous first report was no off-the-top-of-the-head affair, but that it had been based on no less than sixty-two sessions over a two-or three-year period, a report which had been publicly dubbed by some British authority “the major social statement of the twentieth century.”

All this she made notes on, and from time to time reported her findings to Nate. Sometimes he himself made notes of what she told him, saying, “You’re my Official Researcher, remember.” He was still building his own file against that “big article” he was someday going to write, “either for the paper or some magazine or whoever.” From the beginning he had let her see whatever data he had found for himself, news items he had come across, special pieces he had found in medical journals.

Always she had urged him to keep on with his project and to keep on “educating me.” And as her education proceeded, through Nate’s material or her own efforts, she would marvel at the fluctuating opinions of the highest authorities. As surely as one psychiatrist wrote a paper pronouncing homosexuality an illness or disease, another would declare that there was nothing ill or diseased about it; as soon as one body of new research offered proof that homosexuals were neurotic or even psychotic, a counter body of new research would offer proof that tests of two scientifically controlled groups of men, one group heterosexual, the other homosexual, both groups matched for I.Q., environment, age, economic factors, parental influences—that these most scientific of tests revealed no differences between the two groups on any level of human behavior or character or potential or achievement, apart from the single level of sex.

Her overriding reaction to such manifold disparities of theory or opinion within the world of psychiatry or analysis had at first been a heightened confusion and a nearly plaintive impatience with all the warring points of view. Later, a good deal later, this gave way to a kind of thin hope. It was a new kind of hope for her, unrelated to that long-ago hope for miracles that would turn homosexuals into heterosexuals. This was not only alien to that frantic earlier hope; it was on another plateau of thinking and of feeling.

So little was yet sure. So little yet known. So many fine minds were out there in the world, in England, in this country, in Denmark and Sweden and France and everywhere else, thinking and, theorizing and testing and formulating new approaches to the problem of homosexuality. From this sort of inquiry in other fields, this manifold, warring, contradictory inquiry, all knowledge had finally emerged; could it not be that man was now at some new threshold about the age-old subject of the homosexual?

She had begun to wonder about that, and with the first tentative thought of such a possibility, her life seemed to move a notch from where it had always been. She hoped for nothing less than that threshold; she could feel it off there somewhere, waiting to be crossed, perhaps already crossed, though she did not yet know that it had been. She whose inner life had so unexpectedly become meshed with the thousand variables embraced by that single word, “homosexual,” with all the thousand questions of potential, stigma, acceptance, disability, persecution, she who cared so intensely within herself about the world’s history of rejection, now could find in this very disparity of opinion among the various “experts” the first seeds of change for the future, change that might carry with it change for her son, change for all the other sons and daughters of all the parents who had been unable as yet to move that single notch.

Thinking of them all, her heart filled.

There would come, every once in a while, a happy stretch of time, an unexpected respite, unrelated to the great central core of what life had become, and doubly welcome because of it, welcome to Tessa and to Ken, welcome to all of them.

One such happy period came with the birth of Margie and Nate’s second baby, born when Lynnie was nearly three, a boy whom they had named, in some flinging gesture, Jeff. Not Jeffrey, not Geoffrey, not Jefferson, just Jeff Jacobs, that was it, just by itself, neat.

“Another great by-line,” Nate had said in half a shout when they had told Tessa, and Margie had added, “When we told big Jeff, he went bright red and sort of got all husky.”

It had touched Tessa too, this sign of a continuing loyalty, part of the singular relationship that had developed among the three of them. Long after Jeff had moved out of their house into the dump near the campus, the center of his family life continued to be with Margie and Nate; birthdays were spent there, Thanksgiving and Christmas were always there, with Ken and her the “visitors” for part of the day or evening. She remembered Ken’s eighty-year-old mother, sitting so silent and remote at one end of the table, and her heart quaked briefly that, the same role seemed prematurely to be approaching for them. But it was gone a moment later, that passing apprehension; neither Ken nor she was out of it; far from it, with decreasing intimacy among them all as a family, there was always some big nugget of news to tell, some coup to reveal and be congratulated about.

One of these was Tessa’s—another happy stretch in her life, in her professional life, a new excitement, a time of triumph. In reality it was Helena Ludwig’s triumph, and only tangentially hers, yet at the office Tessa had found that it became, in the eyes of practically everybody, her own triumph. Helena was “your author,” and the runaway bestseller
Hurricane
was “your book.” Again and again she heard “Congratulations, Tessa” and “Great book, Tessa.”

Her first disclaimers had sounded so mock-modest, so false (“I only edited it; it’s Helena Ludwig who wrote it”), that she soon desisted and began to accept the office tributes as they were tendered, a tribute from her own colleagues for what they regarded as an accomplishment for her own work. Perhaps it wasn’t as meretricious as it had seemed on the face of it; editors were part of the process or there wouldn’t be any editors.

Helena Ludwig herself insisted on handing over a large share of credit for the unexpected good fortune she and her novel were experiencing. “Without your editing,” she said to Tessa, “the book would never have come out right Never. You will never know what support it was for me just to know you
cared
so about it.”

If s like believing your own press agent, Tessa thought, but it’s nice. She had never before had an author with a book like
Hurricane,
a major book club selection, an overnight smash in the stores, a movie sale, a big paperback deal, all within eight weeks of publication.

“You sure brought in a big one, Tessa,” Tom Smiley said one morning, and Gail, who still acted as secretary to each of them, looked agitated until he had left Tessa’s office.

“He’s green,” she then announced. “Green with envy and miffed as hell.”

“Come on, Gail.”

“Miffed because he dumped Helena Ludwig onto you after her first book, the one that bombed.”

“I wouldn’t say that”

“It’s true. They’re all the same anyway. If a woman makes it big, they hate it”

Loyalty, Tessa thought. Woman to woman. The same side of the fence. Maybe of the barricades. She smiled. A new feeling about women with jobs had been building everywhere in the last years, perhaps the old question of women’s rights rising anew in the great new sweep of battle for black people’s rights. There was constantly a new and stronger rejection of all the old myths about woman’s place, with new emphasis about such practical little matters as women’s pay compared to men’s pay for comparable work, and about a woman’s options about how to live her life.

There had been a burst of new books about this too which she had read, some quarrelsome and strident, others thoughtful and persuasive. On radio and television programs there arose entire new vocabularies about women’s liberation and women’s refusal to be sex objects, about male chauvinists and even sexist pigs. Magazine articles and feature pieces in the papers were beginning to be peppered by words and phrases that had once been confined to analysts’ offices: postmenopausal intercourse, orgasm, male frustration and the ubiquitous penis envy, leitmotif of every mention of feminine stress or neurosis.

Again she had the feeling of a spinning world, of shifting mores and opinions, changing values. Again it was a heady feeling, with a thin new hope threading its way through all of it like a living scarlet thread.

That Christmas she received a three-thousand-dollar raise as well as a three-thousand-dollar Special Bonus. There was no mention of
Hurricane
or of Helena Ludwig, but she knew that by all the standards in the world of publishing, indeed of all business, she had just taken a quantum leap in her own professional status. It was a good feeling, at a time when she needed good feelings.

Tessa’s sudden success was a powerful tonic for Ken. At his own office he was delighted with comments about the “emergency,” the need for “getting her into Brannick and Lynn before she does any more damage,” and with rebukes that “your wife is like a foreign agent out there.” He would telephone Tessa in the middle of the day to pass along these tributes, and in so doing, he realized that it had been years since he had called her in business hours just to talk. Not to say he would be late for dinner, not to announce some change in plans, but just to talk. It was pleasant. It was a pleasant time, and it was good to have something pleasant that lasted, that wasn’t over after an hour or two, like a Christmas afternoon where everybody knew that there was a coating of sham over the “Merry Christmas” flung about so gaily. He had come to dislike these family gatherings, but they meant so much to Tessa that he could never bring himself to say, as he had that first time, “Let’s go to London or someplace and skip the whole thing.”

And so they had gone on, year by year, with the Happy Birthdays, and the Happy Thanksgivings, and the Happy New Years. That word, “happy.” How many daydreams were connected with it. Happiness, perhaps the most elusive of all attainments in the course of life, and yet the pursuit of it was so much a part of the human need and yearning that it had even worked its way into the Declaration of Independence.

A pleasant time, that was attainment enough, he thought ruefully, and we might as well enjoy it to the fullest extent. He wondered how he could prolong it, for himself as well as for Tessa, when the first acute celebrating was ended. Perhaps it would be a mistake, though, to undertake prolonging it, as if by artifice and guile. Moods had a way of turning on you if you kept prodding at them; better to lie back and wait.

His own mood had been slowly changing, hadn’t it? That supposedly infallible healer, Time, seemed to have failed him during the passing months and years since Jeff had told them, but though he was not healed, and never could be completely healed, he had surely the right to feel that he had conquered his first reflexes of pure horror. Tessa had helped him across the years; he could admit it freely without being able to say how she had managed to do it. She would never be free of her first feelings either, but after a year or two, it was clear to him that she had at last achieved a kind of weary capitulation to the fact itself, as if she had finally thought, It won’t change, so the only thing left is to absorb it more thoroughly.

He too had absorbed it more thoroughly across the wide span of time, but even now, at sixty, it still mattered more than his intelligence told him it should. At times he caught himself thinking, If only it had been Margie. He recoiled from the notion, embarrassed that it should have occurred to him, wishing it had not, almost denying that it actually had. It was an absurdity, a male absurdity he could not account for, but it had always been easier for him to accept the visual image of two girls together than of two men together. Once he had told this to Tessa.