The Women's Room (38 page)

Mira did not feel as if she had a part in that. Samantha’s friends lived near her; Mira was in Beau Reve, polishing furniture. The money she had given to Samantha (who, incredibly, tried to pay it back a year and a half later) was the closest Mira ever came to a declaration of independence. Norm understood that. He never mentioned it, but for several weeks after he looked at the checkbook, he regarded Mira as from a great distance. His eyes on her were cold; she felt he was looking at a stranger. She often wanted to bring the whole thing up, to have it out, but she didn’t dare. She remembered her feelings the last time they spoke about it, and was terrified of what more might be said, terrified of finding out what Norm really felt, and of feeling herself the emotions of that horrible night. So they went on. In August the bodies of the young civil rights workers were found, and the futile and laughable search began for someone to blame. So much for that, Mira thought bitterly. Her mouth, she noticed, was coming to have a thin and bitter aspect. She went on polishing furniture.

Martha’s life, however, was turbulent, and in those months she came often to Mira, who was the only person she could talk to. David still filled her eyes, her laugh, her voice. You could not call it adoration though. She saw David whole. She knew he was arrogant and selfish and magnetic and commanding and intelligent and occasionally dense
and incredibly mean and petty. She accepted all of it. ‘Who am I to ask for more?’ she laughed. They had a terrible fight one evening in the Xerox room of the library when he wanted to copy a paper he had written for publication and she wanted to copy a paper she had written for a course she was taking and he wouldn’t let her go first even though her paper had to be in by five o’clock and he ended by tearing it to shreds. Mira was appalled. ‘You took that!’

‘I hit him,’ Martha said. ‘I punched him in the face and kicked him.’

‘What did he do?’

‘Hit me back.’ She removed her sunglasses to show the black eye.

‘My God!’

‘Well,’ she went on complacently, ‘then he retyped my paper for me. And he explained to Professor Epstein, who is a friend of his, that it was his fault my paper was late. I can’t imagine what Epstein thinks – probably that we’re both crazy – but he didn’t dock me for lateness.’ She laughed again. ‘It was a power struggle, the kind of thing we’re in all the time. But I understand that, I can live there. The problem with George is he doesn’t fight back and leaves me always wrestling with my own guilt. George just gets sullen. I much prefer a good sock in the eye myself.’

‘Oh, Martha!’ Mira shuddered. It was things like this that made her retreat.

‘Well, George is pulling his usual routine right now,’ Martha went on breezily. ‘You know, I told him about David as soon as I was sure it was more than a passing thing.’

‘You said he took it fine,’ Mira said, wondering where she found the coolness to talk so. She could not imagine such a thing in her own life.

‘Yes. Then. I mean, what could he do? He’s been sleeping with his secretary off and on for a year now. Whenever he stays in town overnight, he stays with her. We’ve always been honest with each other.’

‘I know.’

‘But the problem was David. He’s so goddamn jealous.’ Martha said this with a certain relish. ‘He can’t bear the thought of my sleeping with George. He holds my body, he talks about it … well, as if it were the center of the universe for him. I really think it is. It isn’t my body anymore. But it isn’t possessiveness either that makes him act that way. It’s that the two of us really are one. He stopped using a soap because
I didn’t like it, he’s even given up a deodorant I don’t like. He had a rash on his chest a couple of weeks ago, and he didn’t want to make love because he didn’t want me to see it. He wants to be perfect for me. And it’s true, we feel the same way about everything, we feel the same feelings. That’s why things are so turbulent with us. We’re so close, we really want to be one person, and that means neither can allow the other to disagree about anything. The slightest difference in opinion feels like a chasm. And both of us are fighters, neither of us will give in. I feel as if for the first time in my life I’ve met my equal in a male.’

Martha was still glowing. She was dressing these days with thoughts of David, who had lovely taste, and she looked exquisite, her skin shades of paleness moving into pink, her hair simple, straight and long, her clothes simple and tailored. Mira gazed at her beyond envy, as if she were watching a miracle.

‘So he’s been after me to separate from George. I can’t do that. George has been good to me, we have a good marriage, we like each other. And there isn’t enough money – there’s barely enough for us to live together and pay my tuition. If George had to live by himself, it would be difficult.’

‘David lives with his wife.’

‘Yes, but he says that’s different. He doesn’t like his wife. He uses her for a servant. He comes in late, never tells her where he is. She cleans the apartment, cooks his meals, and doesn’t complain if he doesn’t turn up for dinner after all, and she takes care of the kid. The brat, I should say. She was with David one day when I met him “accidentally” in the park. Yugh! Well, I hate kids anyway, they’re all monsters, but she’s worse than most. He says he doesn’t sleep with his wife.’ Martha laughed the braying laugh she used whenever her shit detector was working. ‘Anyway, he’s been giving me a hard time about it, but I was holding my own. And now, suddenly, I get it from the other side. George has decided I’m really in love with David. I mean, at first I guess he thought it was just an affair, and after all I was with him more than with David, and he and I were other things besides lovers – you know. But when he decided that I loved David, he suddenly became impotent. George! That great lover! I was flabbergasted. I mean, he can’t handle it after all! So now, in addition to everything else – I have a major paper on German socialism in the twenties and thirties due Wednesday, a real bitch! – in addition to David’s grumblings and attacks, I have to put up with goddamned George’s
sullenness – because of course it’s all my fault – and my own fucking guilt. Christ! Why is it all my fault? Did I get impotent when he started sleeping with Sally?’

They both giggled.

‘Of course, I’ve been impotent all my fucking life. It doesn’t matter!’ she brayed, laughing. ‘You know, it’s convenient being a woman!’

‘If you’re impotent, what am I? I don’t even get any pleasure from sex.’

‘But you can masturbate.’

They pondered.

‘It sucks, being a woman,’ Martha finally announced.

After she’d left, Mira thought about it all. It was like another form of fairy tale. She pictured Martha making love to George – ‘I may not get it off, but I’m a damned good whore,’ she would say – moving around him, over him, on him, caressing him with hands and tongue, and George, usually so responsive, lying there limp. Like me, she thought, then forgave herself. Norm, after all, was hardly a good whore. And she pictured Martha making the best of George’s impotence, carrying it to David like a gift, food set in plantain leaves to please the strange white man who had landed on the island. He would smile, his eyes would light up at the exotic stuff, he would eat and lie back content, and all their problems would be over.

But that is not what happened. David, darling David, difficult David became a walking explosive. First he accused her of lying to him. They argued that out for several weeks. Finally, in a weepy violent session, he admitted that he believed her. But then he grew even stranger and more wary. He began to make cutting remarks about George. Martha, of course, defended George staunchly. After a month and a half of passionate conversation followed by violent sex (which Martha loved), she probed and poked at him until he spat it out that if her husband could live with her without wanting to screw her then he had to be a faggot and if her husband was a faggot what was she and besides he’d always felt in himself a strong urge toward faggotry. This violent current carried them into Thanksgiving. Mira, listening, drifted away. They were so passionate, so involved. She’d met David several times, had lunch with him and Martha, and had found him almost irresistibly attractive. Well, what did that mean? Was she really in love with Martha and wanting to screw David because she couldn’t screw Martha? Her mind rebelled. She was disgusted. It all seemed so ludicrous, so absurd. It was hard to believe that people lived and died about things like this,
that they were really hurt or upset or crushed, that they could delude themselves that the things they felt mattered.

Just before Christmas, Mira had lunch with Martha.

‘It’s all decided,’ Martha said, and she was grim and glowing at the same time. ‘There’s no other solution, there’s nothing else to be done. We’re both going to get divorced and later, when things simmer down – we don’t want to hurt David’s career – we’ll get married.’

Martha’s face was serene; it gave forth light. Then it grew grim again.

‘I feel terrible about George. But he’ll just have to learn to live without me. It will be hard for him, he depends on me for everything. But he’ll make it. I hope. I can handle only so much guilt.’

‘You’re sure that’s the right thing …’

‘Absolutely!’ Martha announced transcendently. ‘Absolutely right! We belong together.’

She waited until after the holidays to tell George, however. Early in January of 1965, George moved out.

21

Mira felt sorry for George, and invited him for dinner over Norm’s objections. But Martha had been right. George could not live without her. He came to dinner, drank too much, and whined. He had taken to going to a shrink. He lived in a shabby rented room near his office. He had no life, no money. He was miserable. Mira invited him twice, then stopped. George stopped sending Martha as much money, saying he deserved to live too. Martha could not pay the bills on the house, could not buy shoes for the kids. It went round and round. Still, Martha was happy. David could come to the house now, they could spend full evenings together and go to bed, luxuriously, in her room. She introduced him to her children and watched with fascination and love as they, as she put it, ‘learned to relate.’

‘He’s ten times more there for the kids than George ever was. He
talks
to them, Mira, he listens to their answers!’

There were problems. David had not left his wife, and now this was important to Martha. David had made the thing into a test – a test of love, almost. And she had passed it, she had separated from George, whom she loved, at some cost. David explained he had money problems. And his wife presented no difficulty, did she? She was a
helpless little thing, and would go to pieces when he left. He had to wait until …

The end of that sentence varied, but Martha still trusted him. Mira sat wondering bitterly about women’s credulity, but the few hints she dropped were not picked up by Martha. It was true that David almost lived with her as it was: he was at her house nearly every day. And it was true, Mira admitted as she saw them together, that he was in love with Martha. Then why? But it was the same old story. Mira was tired of it. Women and men. They played by different rules because the rules applied to them were different. It was very simple. It was the women who got pregnant and the women who ended up with the kids. All the rest stemmed from that. So women had to learn to protect themselves, had to be wary and careful. The way the rules had been set up, everything was against them. Martha was courageous and honest and loving, but she was also a damned fool.

Mira told herself this, sitting in the dark with her brandy. She felt mean and small, foreseeing tragedy for Martha. And tragedy it would be if David failed her. Her emotion for him was too intense and engulfing for it to be anything else. Maybe it won’t happen, her other voice suggested. Maybe he’s telling her the truth – after all, she believes him and she has a built-in shit detector. Maybe it will all work out and they’ll live happily ever after. David had applied for a job in a college in Boston. It was better paying than the one he had, and if he got it, he and Martha would get married and move up there and he could still provide for his wife. That’s what he said. Perhaps it was true. But the other part of Mira’s mind nagged and picked. Why did he force Martha into something he wasn’t ready for?

But both voices came together when she thought about herself. She knew what was right for her, and she had done it. She had hedged her bet. She had not understood the rules when she started playing, but she had managed to play right. It must have been feel. All her intelligence, that brilliance she presently applied to file cards listing windows to be washed, had not in fact gone to waste. In a world where women are victims, she was surviving on the winning side. She had a magnificent house, two fine boys, beautiful clothes. She and her husband had dinner at the club at least one night a week; if she had chosen, she could have played golf there every afternoon. She cleaned the house herself out of choice, not need. Wasn’t that winning? Look at Samantha, and Lily, and Martha too now, forced to ask
David
for money.

She sat, her lips nervously pursing in and out, when she heard the garage door slide up, and Norm come in, stumble over the doorsill, mutter ‘Shit!’ and come into the room where she was sitting. ‘Hi,’ she said, and he said, ‘Hi,’ and he entered and poured himself a drink, but he didn’t turn on the light.

She said nothing, but the entire surface of her skin came to attention. Something was going to happen. God knows she had imagined it often enough. He would come in one night and see her outlined against the window and he would remember the days when he respected her, and he would sit down on the hassock at her feet, and sip his drink and look at her dark profile and she would not be able to see his face, but she would remember the eager light and youth he had had back in the days when he was asking her to marry him and it would be there on his face and he would say, ‘I understand why you sit in the dark, I want to do it myself, perhaps we can do it together, perhaps we can do it and touch each other’s hands, not hold them, just touch, lightly. I would like to ask you what you dreamed last night. And why, when the moon goes beyond the clouds you watch it almost with terror, waiting for it to come out again. And why it is, whenever I put my hand out to touch Clark’s head, such a beautiful little head, bent over his game, I always end up giving him a cuff instead, a friendly cuff, you know, but a cuff just the same, and I always say something like “How’s tricks, big fella?” and he looks around at me as if I were an annoying fact of life, like bathtime, that had to be placated and is to be dealt with as shortly and easily as possible. And Normie. God, I hate that kid. Why is that, Mira, when I love him so much? But when he stumbles down halls with exactly the awkwardness I had as a kid, I want to kill him. Part of me wants to run and catch him so he won’t hurt himself, and to carry him, carry him everywhere so he’ll never hurt himself, and part of me wants to storm down the hall and smash him against the wall because he’s such an idiot that he will hurt himself, and I end up doing nothing except making some nasty crack and he turns to me with contempt and hate on his face and my insides curdle because that wasn’t it, I don’t want to do that to him. What is that all about, Mira, do you know? Does it happen to you? And I wanted to tell you that last night I had a dream, a nightmare. Can I tell you about it?’