The Women's Room (26 page)
1
One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape; they have beginnings, middles, and endings. Whereas in life, things just drift along. In life, somebody has a cold, and you treat it as insignificant, and suddenly they die. Or they have a heart attack, and you are sodden with grief until they recover to live for thirty petulant years, demanding you wait on them. You think a love affair is ending, and you are gripped with Anna Karenina-ish drama, but two weeks later the guy is standing in your doorway, arms stretched up on the molding; jacket hanging open, a sheepish look on his face, saying, ‘Hey, take me back, will ya?’ Or you think a love affair is high and thriving, and you don’t notice that over the past months it has dwindled, dwindled, dwindled. In other words, in life one almost never has an emotion appropriate to an event. Either you don’t know the event is occurring, or you don’t know its significance. We celebrate births and weddings; we mourn deaths and divorces; yet what are we celebrating, what mourning? Rituals mark feelings, but feelings and events do not coincide. Feelings are large and spread over a lifetime. I will dance the polka with you and stamp my feet with vigor, celebrating every energy I have ever felt. But those energies were moments, not codifiable, not certifiable, not able to be fixed: you may be seduced into thinking my celebration is for you. Anyway, that is a thing art does for us: it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear. Whereas in life, from moment to moment, one can’t tell an onion from a piece of dry toast.
Mira lived contentedly through the last months of 1959 without realizing that her life had already drastically changed. Natalie was gone; Theresa was a destroyed person, no longer accessible. Mira had not been close to Adele for some time, but because of her other friendships, had not noticed that until now. She had grown
intensely close to Bliss, whom she loved second only to her family. Their intimacy was not especially verbal; it arose out of their feeling the same way in a situation, from their being able to look, simply glance at each other in a situation, and know they knew, knew the same things, felt together.
For some weeks in the fall, Bliss stopped in only once or twice a week; she had been distracted all summer, humming and off buying paint. For a while, she didn’t stop in at all. Then, suddenly it seemed, she was busy when Mira stopped in to see her. She was spending much time on her house, painting the living room, making new drapes for it, painting her bedroom, making a new bedspread, new lampshades, new pale pink opaque curtains. Finally, Mira challenged her, asked her what was wrong, what had happened. Bliss hummed and raised her eyebrows. Nothing was wrong, nothing had changed, she was just busy. Mira went home with a numb spot in the middle of her forehead. What she had thought of as love and support had simply stopped, stopped with no reason or at least no reason given. She knew there was no point in pushing Bliss; she understood how tough Bliss was. Bliss was through with her and she did not know why and she would never know why. Maybe it was because she knew about Bliss and Paul. But even suspecting that, she still did not know why.
Late in the fall, before Bliss cut her off completely, Paula and Brett had a party. Mira had a vague feeling of being an outsider in her own group, and she got drunker than usual, faster than usual. She recalled, the next day, that Paul had come over to her frequently, more often than usual, to ask her to dance. She had thought it odd, and she had refused him many times. Yet he returned, over and over again. She had a strange feeling, but drunk as she was, disoriented as she felt, did not draw any conclusions from it except that she was disorganized. The feeling she had, not solidified into perception until later, was that she was being used as a decoy. But there was no way she could talk it out, no way to check her perceptions against reality. She no longer got more than mere social politeness from Bliss. Then, one blustery January day as she was removing the frozen bedsheets from the laundry line, Adele came out her back door to shake a dust mop. Mira hailed her. Adele looked up, looked straight at her, and turned and went back in the house.
Then she knew. She thought about it on many evenings, sitting up late in the dark with a snifter of brandy, and smoking. She had
worked it out that Paul’s reputation was deserved; he had had affairs, and Adele knew it. But what could she do about it? With all those kids, alimony payments being what they were, she and the children would have to live like paupers. That is, if she even considered divorce. Someone who would not use birth control was not likely to use divorce. That in itself gave Paul enormous freedom. He might think twice if he felt he was risking loss of his family, his home, his wife. They are easy enough to ignore or abuse when one has them, but losing them is unpleasant. Adele’s only alternative was to beat him up. Probably they had an unspoken agreement: he did not insist on using birth control, but the kids then were her responsibility and he retained his freedom. Nevertheless, Paul and Bliss would want to keep Adele from knowing about them so the couples could continue to have an easy social mingling; they figured the best way was to find a substitute target for Adele’s suspicions. Bliss was not too worried about Bill, who was oblivious, but even if he did suspect, the story about Paul and Mira would serve to deflect him too. After all, how many women can a man handle at once? It was an ingenious plan. Mira thought bitterly about the two of them sitting together, plotting it, giggling.
But part of her understood. There were in love and they were protecting their love. It was understandable, and she did not much blame their motives. What hurt was Bliss’s betrayal of her. Of course, Mira had to be the victim. Because she knew, she might talk. Well, let her talk, no one would believe her now; Adele would not hear the story from someone she would not speak to. Oh, Mira supposed she could go charging over to Adele’s, insist on being let in, shout out the truth. She could keep a watch on Bliss’s house, and on a night when Paul was there, drag Adele bodily to find them together. But what good would it do? Adele might believe Mira was being vicious because Paul had left her for Bliss. Or she might believe Mira, but she would never again be her friend. Adele would hate Bliss; she might never trust another woman. She would go on living with Paul, humiliated and contemptuous. And Paul and Bliss would lose what they had, and Adele might tell Bill and Bliss would lose what she had, and only Paul would end up rather untouched, finding consolation in some new face and body. No, it was not worth it. Because the only thing Mira wanted was for things to go back to being the way they had been: and that was impossible. She wanted Bliss’s love, something, she told herself, she had had, remembering their long, close talks. But one could not
expect Bliss’s love for Mira to be stronger than her desire to protect herself. She had had Bliss’s love, but would never have it again, no matter what happened. Bliss could never like Mira again after what she had done to her.
Mira went over and over it until she understood it so well that the thing did not even hurt her anymore. All her love for Bliss had been translated into understanding, which was nonfeeling, and which she had chosen over hate. What was left at the end (when she knew it was the end – it came to her with a kind of surprise one day after she’d cleaned the house and had a free hour and wanted to go talk to someone) was loneliness. She had no friends left.
One night when he was home and in a good mood, she told Norm the whole thing, including her theory. He pooh-poohed it. She had too active an imagination. It was ridiculous: no one would believe that Mira would do a thing like that. He was uninterested in the rest of it, except he had some sympathy for Bill. ‘Poor slob,’ he said. ‘When the O’Neills went to visit Adele’s folks last summer, Bill even went over and mowed their lawn.’
Over the years Mira had come to feel it was useless to speak to Norm. Their ways of looking at the world seemed too different. Norm could not understand why Natalie or Bliss or Adele should matter so much to her. She argued that he got upset with certain patients, or with some of the big names in the local medical association, if they seemed to dislike him. That was different, he said, that was business, his livelihood was at stake. For their personal affection he did not give one straw. And he could not understand why she did, why she let stupid sluts and housewives bother her. She paled when he said that. ‘And I? What am I?’
He put an arm around her affectionately. ‘Honey, you have a mind.’
‘So do they.’
He insisted she was different, but she pulled away from him. She knew there was something terribly wrong with what was being said, but she didn’t know what it was. She defended the women from his attacks and he was puzzled about why she should defend the very people who had betrayed her. She gave it up.
She moved out in search of new friends, but without the enthusiasm she’d had years ago. She liked Lily, who lived a few blocks to the north, and Samantha, who lived a good ten blocks away, and Martha. But Martha lived in a different town, and without a car Mira could not
visit her. Mira visited Lily and Samantha on occasion, but it was a far different thing to walk some distance to someone’s house and sit, almost formally, with coffee or a drink, than to run next door or two houses down where you can see the kids when they come home, or leave them a note telling them where you are, so if they need you, they can run over. Mira deeply missed that kind of community, the daily intimacy and companionship of people who lived close by. She thought she would probably never have it again.
As it happened, she would have lost it anyway. In the spring of 1960, Norm announced that he had finished paying back his family, and a month or two later, he completed arrangements to leave the local practice he was involved in and join a group in the modern new medical clinic they were building. He would pay off his share of the costs over the next five years, out of his share of the profits, which were expected to be staggering. It was time, he said, for them to move to a ‘real’ house. Early in the summer he found a place that suited him, and took Mira to see it. It was beautiful, but it overwhelmed her. It was too big and too isolated. ‘Four bathrooms to clean!’ she exclaimed. He found her provincial and petty in her concerns. ‘Three miles to the nearest store, and I have no car.’ He wanted the house. He promised her a car and help in the house if she insisted, although he added, ‘What else do you have to do?’
Mira debated. She would like to have the house, of course: she too had wanted material success. But it frightened her. She felt she was sinking, sinking – into what she wasn’t sure. Norm’s parents were proud of their son: to be able to own a house like that at only thirty-seven! But they were also a bit anxious: he wasn’t getting himself too far in debt now, was he? Paying off the new partnership, buying the house and another car too. They glanced significantly at Mira. She was an ambitious driving woman, she supposed, in their eyes. She no longer cared what they thought, but the injustice nevertheless scratched her. Her own parents were more enthusiastic: Mira had really done well for herself, marrying a man who could afford a house like that.
Mira sank. She was thirty when they moved to Beau Reve.
2
Yes, I know, you think you see it all. Having shown you the nasty underside of life in the young, struggling white middle class, I will now show you the nasty underside of life in the older, affluent, white middle class. You are a bit chagrined. I start you off at Harvard, in the middle of an exciting period full of exciting people with new ideas, only to drag you through an afternoon of soap opera. I’m sorry. Really. If I knew any exciting adventure tales, I’d write them, I assure you. If I think of any as we go, I’ll be glad to insert them. There were important things happening during the years just described: there was the Berlin Wall, John Foster Dulles, Castro, who was the darling of the liberals until he shot all those people (having read his Machiavelli) and became suddenly the devil. And a senator of less than national fame took the Democratic nomination and forced Lyndon Johnson to go along with him.
Sometimes I get as sick of writing this as you may be at reading it. Of course, you have an alternative. I don’t. I get sick because, you see, it’s all true, it happened, and it was boring and painful and full of despair. I think I would not feel so bad about it if it had ended differently. Of course, I can’t talk about ends, since I am still alive. But I would have a different slant on things, perhaps, if I were not living in this inconsolable loneliness. And that is an insoluble problem. I mean, you could go up to a stranger on the street and say, ‘I am inconsolably lonely,’ and he might take you home with him and introduce you to his family and ask you to stay for dinner. But that wouldn’t help. Because loneliness is not a longing for company, it is a longing for kind. And kind means people who can see you who you are, and that means they have enough intelligence and sensitivity and patience to do that. It also means they can accept you, because we don’t see what we can’t accept, we blot it out, we jam it hastily in one stereotypic box or another. We don’t want to look at something that might shake up the mental order we’ve so carefully erected. I have respect for this desire to keep one’s psyche unviolated. Habit is a good thing for the human race. For instance, have you ever traveled from place to place, spending no more than a day or two in each? You wake up in the morning a bit unnerved, and every day you have to search for where you put your toothbrush last night, and figure out whether you unpacked your
comb and brush. Every morning you have to decide where to have your
café
and croissant, or your
cappuccino
or
kawa
. You even have to find the right word. I said
si
for two weeks after I entered France from Italy, and
oui
for two weeks after I entered Spain from France. And that’s an easy enough word to get right. You have to spend so much energy just getting through the day when you have no habits that you don’t have any left for productive labor. You get that glazed look of tourists staring up at one more church and checking the guidebook to see what city they’re in. Each day you arrive in a new place you have to spend two or more hours finding a decent cheap hotel: subsisting becomes the whole of life.