Lady Oracle (28 page)

It wasn’t that Arthur was dishonest: what he thought and what he said he thought were the same. It was just that both of these things were different from what he felt. For years I wanted to turn into what Arthur thought I was, or what he thought I should be. He was full of plans for me, ambitions, ways in which I could exercise my intelligence constructively, and there I would be, lying lumpishly in bed in the mornings while he was up and making himself black coffee and pursuing one of his goals. That was what was wrong with me, he told me, I didn’t have any goals. Unfortunately I was unable to think of this word except in connection with hockey, a game I didn’t much enjoy.

But Arthur wasn’t always an early riser. He had his down moments too. After his disillusionment with the atom-bomb people he’d stayed out of politics for a while. But soon he was on the upswing. This time it was civil rights: he went down to the States and almost got shot. But then that came apart and he was into another period of depression. In quick succession he went through Vietnam and sheltering draft dodgers, student revolt, and an infatuation with Mao. Every one of these involved extensive reading, not just for Arthur but for me. I made a real effort, but somehow I was always out of date, perhaps because I found it so hard to read theories. By the time I’d adjusted my views to Arthur’s, his had already changed. Then I would have to be converted anew, improved, made to see the light
once more. “Here,” he would say, “read this book,” and I’d know the cycle had begun again.

The trouble with Arthur was that he meant well, he meant too well, he wanted everyone to mean as well as he did. When he would find out they didn’t, that not all of them burned with his own pure flame but some had pride, others were self-interested and power-hungry, he would become angry. He was a prisoner of conscience.

Once I’d thought of Arthur as single-minded, single-hearted, single-bodied; I, by contrast, was a sorry assemblage of lies and alibis, each complete in itself but rendering the others worthless. But I soon discovered there were as many of Arthur as there were of me. The difference was that I was simultaneous, whereas Arthur was a sequence. At the height of his involvement with any of these causes, Arthur would have the electricity of six, he’d scarcely sleep at all, he’d rush about stapling things and making speeches and carrying signs. But at the low points he’d barely be able to make it out of bed, he’d sit in a chair all day, chain-smoking and looking out the window, watching television, or doing crosswords or jigsaw puzzles of Jackson Pollock paintings and Oriental rugs. It was only on the way up or the way down that I existed for him as any kind of distinct shape; otherwise I was just a kind of nourishing blob. We made love only during the middle periods. When he was way up he had no time, when he was way down he had no energy.

I admired and envied his purity of conscience, despite its drawbacks: when Arthur was going down, overcome by disillusionment and clouds of doom, he’d write letters to all the people he’d worked with during the up period, denouncing them as traitors and scoundrels, and I was the one who would get the phone calls from them, outraged, puzzled or hurt. “Well, you know how Arthur is,” I’d say to them. “He hasn’t been feeling very well, he’s been discouraged.”

I wished he would do his own explaining, but he specialized in ambushes. He never had fights with people, he never talked things
out with them. He would simply decide, by some dark, complicated process of evaluation, that these people were unworthy. Not that they’d done something unworthy, but that unworthiness was innate in them. Once he’d made his judgment, that was it. No trial, no redress. I once told him that I thought he was behaving a little like Calvin’s God, but he was offended and I didn’t press it. Secretly I was afraid of this same kind of judgment being applied to me.

I often hoped Arthur would find some group that would be able to sustain the overwhelming burden of his trust. It wasn’t just that I wanted Arthur to be happy, though I did. I had two other reasons. One was that his depressions made me miserable, because they made me feel inadequate. The love of a good woman was supposed to preserve a man from this kind of thing, I knew that. But at these times I wasn’t able to make him happy, no matter how badly I cooked. Therefore I was not a good woman.

The other was that I couldn’t write Costume Gothics when Arthur was depressed. He hung around the house much of the time, and when he wasn’t doing anything he didn’t want me to do anything either. If I went into the bedroom and closed the door, he would open it, stand in the doorway looking at me reproachfully, and say he had a headache. Or he would want me to help him with his crossword puzzle. It was very hard to concentrate on my heroine’s tumultuous breasts, my hero’s thin rapacious mouth, with this kind of thing going on. I would have to pretend I was going out to look for a job, and from time to time I would really get one, in self-defense.

It was only after I got married that my writing became for me anything more than an easy way of earning a living. I’d always felt sly about it, as if I was getting away with something and nobody had found me out; but now it became important. The really important thing was not the books themselves, which continued to be much the same. It was the fact that I was two people at once, with two sets of identification papers, two bank accounts, two different groups of
people who believed I existed. I was Joan Foster, there was no doubt about that; people called me by that name and I had authentic documents to prove it. But I was also Louisa K. Delacourt.

As long as I could spend a certain amount of time each week as Louisa, I was all right, I was patient and forbearing, warm, a sympathetic listener. But if I was cut off, if I couldn’t work at my current Costume Gothic, I would become mean and irritable, drink too much and start to cry.

Thus we went on from year to year, with Arthur’s frenzied cycles alternating with my own, and it was fine really, I loved him. Every once in a while I’d suggest that perhaps it was time for us to settle down somewhere, a little more permanently, and have children. But Arthur wasn’t ready, he would say, he had work to do, and I had to admit that I myself had mixed feelings. I wanted children, but what if I had a child who would turn out like me? Even worse, what if I turned out to be like my mother?

All this time I carried my mother around my neck like a rotting albatross. I dreamed about her often, my three-headed mother, menacing and cold. Sometimes she would be sitting in front of her vanity table, sometimes she would be crying. She never laughed or smiled.

In the worst dream I couldn’t see her at all. I would be hiding behind a door, or standing in front of one, it wasn’t clear which. It was a white door, like a bathroom door or perhaps a cupboard. I’d been locked in, or out, but on the other side of the door I could hear voices. Sometimes there were a lot of voices, sometimes only two; they were talking about me, discussing me, and as I listened I would realize that something very bad was going to happen. I felt helpless, there was nothing I could do. In the dream I would back into the farthest corner of the cubicle and wedge myself in, press my arms against the walls, dig my heels against the floor. They wouldn’t be able to get me out. Then I would hear the footsteps, coming up the stairs and along the hall.

Arthur would shake me awake. “What’s the matter?” I would say.

“You were grunting.”

Grunting? Humiliation. Screaming would be one thing, but grunting.… “I was having a nightmare,” I’d say. But Arthur couldn’t understand why I would have nightmares. Surely nothing that terrible had ever happened to me, I was a normal girl with all kinds of advantages, I was beautiful and intelligent, why didn’t I make something of myself? I should try to be more of a leader, he would tell me.

What he failed to understand was that there were really only two kinds of people: fat ones and thin ones. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I didn’t see what Arthur saw. The outline of my former body still surrounded me, like a mist, like a phantom moon, like the image of Dumbo the Flying Elephant superimposed on my own. I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.

W
hen I stopped to think about it, I felt our marriage was happier than most. I even became a little smug about it. In my opinion, most women made one basic mistake: they expected their husbands to understand them. They spent much precious time explaining themselves, serving up their emotions and reactions, their love and anger and sensitivities, their demands and inadequacies, as if the mere relating of these things would get results. Arthur’s friends tended to be married to women like this, and these women, I knew, thought of me as placid, sloppy and rather stupid. They themselves made it from crisis to crisis, with running commentaries, on a combination of nerve ends, cigarettes, bludgeoning honesty and what used to be called nagging. Because I didn’t do this, Arthur’s friends envied him a bit and confided to me in the kitchen. They were beleaguered and exhausted; their wives had a touch of the shrill self-righteousness familiar to me from my mother.

But I didn’t want Arthur to understand me: I went to great lengths to prevent this. Though I was tempted sometimes, I resisted the impulse to confess. Arthur’s tastes were Spartan, and my early life
and innermost self would have appalled him. It would be like asking for a steak and getting a slaughtered cow. I think he suspected this; he certainly headed off my few tentative attempts at self-revelation.

The other wives, too, wanted their husbands to live up to their own fantasy lives, which except for the costumes weren’t that different from my own. They didn’t put it in quite these terms, but I could tell from their expectations. They wanted their men to be strong, lustful, passionate and exciting, with hard rapacious mouths, but also tender and worshipful. They wanted men in mysterious cloaks who would rescue them from balconies, but they also wanted meaningful in-depth relationships and total openness. (The Scarlet Pimpernel, I would tell them silently, does not have time for meaningful in-depth relationships.) They wanted multiple orgasms, they wanted the earth to move, but they also wanted help with the dishes.

I felt my own arrangement was more satisfactory. There were two kinds of love, I told myself; Arthur was terrific for one kind, but why demand all things of one man? I’d given up expecting him to be a cloaked, sinuous and faintly menacing stranger. He couldn’t be that: I lived with him, and cloaked strangers didn’t leave their socks on the floor or stick their fingers in their ears or gargle in the mornings to kill germs. I kept Arthur in our apartment and the strangers in their castles and mansions, where they belonged. I felt this was quite adult of me, and it certainly allowed me to be more outwardly serene than the wives of Arthur’s friends. But I had the edge on them: after all, when it came to fantasy lives I was a professional, whereas they were merely amateurs.

And yet, as time went by, I began to feel something was missing. Perhaps, I thought, I had no soul; I just drifted around, singing vaguely, like the Little Mermaid in the Andersen fairy tale. In order to get a soul you had to suffer, you had to give something up; or was that to get legs and feet? I couldn’t remember. She’d become a dancer, though, with no tongue. Then there was Moira Shearer, in
The Red Shoes.
Neither of them had been able to please the handsome prince; both of them had died. I was doing fairly well by comparison. Their mistake had been to go public, whereas I did my dancing behind closed doors. It was safer, but.…

It was true I had two lives, but on off days I felt that neither of them was completely real. With Arthur I was merely playing house, I wasn’t really working at it. And my Costume Gothics were only paper; paper castles, paper costumes, paper dolls, as inert and lifeless finally as those unsatisfactory blank-eyed dolls I’d dressed and undressed in my mother’s house. I got a reputation for being absentminded, which Arthur’s friends found endearing. Soon it was expected of me, and I added it to my repertoire of deficiencies.

“You apologize too much,” one of the strident wives told me, and I began to wonder about that. It was true, I did apologize. But why did I feel I had to be excused? Why did I want to be exempted, and what from? In high school you didn’t have to play baseball if you had your period or a pain in your stomach, and I preferred the sidelines. Now I wanted to be acknowledged, but I feared it. If I brought the separate parts of my life together (like uranium, like plutonium, harmless to the naked eye, but charged with lethal energies) surely there would be an explosion. Instead I floated, marking time.

It was September. Arthur was in one of his slumps, having just written a batch of letters denouncing everyone connected with the Curriculum Reform movement, which had been his latest cause. I’d just started a new book;
Love, My Ransom
was the working title. With Arthur hanging around the apartment it was hard to close my eyes and drift off into the world of shadows; also, the old sequence of chase and flight, from rape or murder, no longer held my attention as it once had. I needed something new, some new twist: there was now more competition, Costume Gothics were no longer regarded as mere trash but as money-making trash, and I felt
I was in danger of being crowded out. From scanning the works of my rivals, as I did every week, anxiously, in the corner drugstore, I could see that the occult was the latest thing. It was no longer enough to have a hero with a cloak; he had to have magical powers as well. I went to the Central Reference Library and read up on the seventeenth century. What I needed was a ritual, a ceremony, something sinister but decorative.…

When Penelope awoke, she found she was blindfolded; she could move neither hand nor foot. They had tied her to a chair. The two of them were whispering together at the opposite end of the room; she strained to catch their words, knowing that her life and that of Sir Percy might depend upon it.

“We can use her to gain access to the knowledge, I tell you,” Estelle was saying. She was a tempestuous beauty with gypsy blood.