The Women's Room (46 page)

‘Val …’ Iso shook her fork at Val.

‘Okay. Love is one of those things you think is supposed to happen, is a fact of life, and if it doesn’t happen to you, you feel cheated. You’re walking around feeling rotten, you know, because it’s never happened to you. So one day you meet this guy, right? And, ZING! He is gorgeous! It doesn’t matter what he’s doing. He may be making a point in a debate, he may be chopping up concrete on a city street, with his shirt off and his back tanned. It doesn’t matter. Even if you’ve met him before and not thought much about him, at some moment you look at him and everything you’ve thought about him before goes straight out of your head. You never really saw him before! You realize that in a split second! You never saw how totally gorgeous he was!

‘But you suddenly see it. That back, those arms! The strength in his jaw when he leaned forward to put his opponent down. That brilliance in his eye! What an eye! So careless he is, as he runs his fingers through his hair. What hair!’

Iso was bent over the table, laughing. Val’s face as she spoke was a complex network of acting: she was full of adoration and mockery.

‘His skin, my God, that skin is like satin. You sit there hardly able to contain yourself, you want to get your hand on that skin. And his hands! My God, what hands! Strong, delicate, thick, and powerful, it doesn’t matter what they are, they are gorgeous hands. Every time you look at them you start to sweat, your armpits get soggy …’

Iso choked on her wine and had to leave the table. She went only as far as the kitchen door, however. Val paid no attention.

‘You can’t look at his hands without imagining them on your body. Looking at his hands becomes a forbidden act, an act of lasciviousness. His hands are full of touch and your body is tingling just as if they were on it. And on it in such places! Heavens! You move your eyes away from his hands. But those arms! God, such arms! So strong, so gentle, made to hold, to enclose, to protect and comfort, but they could also break you in half, that’s part of the fun, those arms are unpredictable, they
might twist your body, they might be able to turn you into a piece of clay …’

‘Tsk, tsk,’ Mira heard her mouth go.

‘And his mouth! Oh, that mouth. Sensual and cruel-looking, or full and passionate, he looks as if he could devour you with his mouth. You want that mouth, no matter what it will do to you. You long for even its cruelty. And when he opens it! My God, what pearls! Everything he says has a halo, it radiates brilliance. He is pithy or symbolic; everything he says means a hell of a lot more than the surface. He turns to you and says, “It’s raining out,” and you see a glitter in his eyes, you see him figuring if the two of you are going to be able to get together somehow that night, and you see him devising means, you see passion and desire, you see unconquerable will, and all that will is directed towards
you!
Or he is talking about politics and everything he says is brilliant, you can’t understand why the other people in the room don’t leap up the way you want to and kiss his feet, the savior. When he turns to you and smiles, you want to curl into a little ball and fall down and snuggle under his feet like a footrest. When he turns away from you, you feel as if the world had just stopped, you want to die, you want to pick up a knife and stab it through your heart, standing up in the room and shouting, “If he doesn’t love me, I don’t want to live!” Any turn of head in another direction devastates you: you are jealous not just of other women, but of men, of walls, of music, of the fucking print hanging over the couch.

‘Well, in time, you sort of get together. Your passion is so extreme that no other possibility exists. And someplace you know that. You know that somehow you made this happen. So you don’t trust it. You keep feeling that somehow you got him to ask you out for coffee, or lunch, or dinner, or a chamber music concert, or whatever it is, but that if you lose control for more than a minute, the enchantment will be broken and you’ll lose him forever. So whenever you’re with him, you’re high, you’re brilliant, your eyes look a little mad but very beautiful, you act just right, but the way you’re acting has nothing to do with you, you’re acting, just like someone on a stage, acting the part you think will get him, and you’re terrified because you’re also exhausted and you don’t know how much longer you can keep it up, but every time he appears, you manage.

‘Mostly, if you’re female, you smile a lot and listen a lot and cook
a
lot. You adore him during the whole twelve minutes it takes him to stuff your whole afternoon’s work down his throat. And in time, you
get him where you want him, which is in your bed. If you don’t – well that’s a different trip, and I haven’t been on it. I can only tell you what I know. You get him in your bed and for a while, everything’s glorious. You never had sex like that before: he’s the greatest lover you’ve ever had. And in a way, it’s true. The two of you lie in a warm bath of love, you make love and you eat and you talk and you walk together and there’s not much of a dividing line among those things, they all flow together, and it’s all warm and hot and brilliant colors, and it’s all right, you’re floating in it, nothing has ever been so right in your life before. The two of you are one togetherness, one attenuated lovingness, your skins flow into each other, you can feel him get chilly even when he’s in another room. And every time he touches your skin or you touch his, the heat strikes as if you carried lightning around inside you, you were both Zeus.’

Mira was gaping now. Isolde had returned and was pouring more wine, but she was silent, if grinning. Chris was sitting with her head bent over her half-full plate, playing with the food with her fork. She looked glum. Val was in full sail. Her face was a little pink from the wine and the cooking, she held her wine glass aloft and gesticulated with it, she was staring at a point on the wall just above Iso’s head.

‘You can’t think about stupid practical details like making money or going to school. It is as if the sensual surface of your skin and the innards of your body had a direct connection, and that was all the life there was. Nothing else matters. You go along like this for a long time, months, maybe, flunking courses, losing jobs, getting kicked out of your house, whatever. Nothing matters, because nothing else exists. You get a little paranoid, you think about the world versus lovers. You think it’s all horribly unfair, you think everybody else is stupid and crass and lumpy and doesn’t understand the flame that life is.

‘Then one day, the unthinkable happens. You are sitting together at the breakfast table and you’re a little hung over, and you look across at beloved, beautiful golden beloved, and beloved opens his lovely rosebud mouth showing his glistening white teeth, and beloved says something stupid. Your whole body stops in midstream: your temperature drops. Beloved has never said anything stupid before. You turn and look at him; you’re sure you misheard. You ask him to repeat. And he does. He says, “It’s raining out,” and you look outside and it is perfectly clear. And you say, “No, it isn’t raining out. Perhaps you’d better get your eyes checked. Or your ears.” You begin to doubt all his senses. It could only be a flaw in his sensory equipment that
would make him say a thing like that. But even that flaw isn’t important. Love can’t be stopped by locksmiths, contact lenses, or hearing aids. It was just that you were hung over.

‘But that’s only the start. Because he keeps on, after that, saying stupid things. And you keep turning around and looking at him strangely, and my God, do you know what, you suddenly see that he’s skinny! Or flabby! Or fat! His teeth are crooked, and his toenails are dirty. You suddenly realize he farts in bed. He doesn’t, he really doesn’t understand Henry James! All this while, he’s been saying he doesn’t understand Henry James, and you’ve thought his odd, cast-off remarks about James showed brilliant perception, but suddenly you realize he’s missed the point entirely.

‘But that’s not the worst part. Because all these months you’ve been adoring him like a descended god, he’s been being convinced he is. And now he’s parading around with a smug superior expression on his face, cocksure and blind and insensitive, just like all the other males you rejected, but this time it’s your fault! You did it. You! All by yourself! My God, you created this monster! Then you think, well, he helped. I couldn’t have done it without cooperation. And you hate yourself for having deluded yourself about him (you tell yourself it was HIM you were deluded about – not love), and you hate him for having believed your delusions, and you feel guilty and responsible and you try, slowly, to disengage. But now, just try to get rid of him! He clutches, he clings, he doesn’t understand. How could you want to separate from a deity? He saved you, you told him that. He was – when was that, anyway? – the best lover you ever had. He keeps on believing all the things you told him, and he doesn’t believe when you try to untell. And after all, what can you say? He wasn’t the best lover you ever had? But he was, once. “So it’s just now,” he says, nodding his head judiciously. “I’ve become mechanical. It needs more thought. I’ve come to take you for granted, and women don’t like that.” What can you say without destroying his fragile male ego forever, or making yourself out a deluded fool or a liar?’

Val paused to drink. Mira was hanging on her. ‘What
do
you do?’ she asked, barely breathing.

Val swallowed and put down her glass, and spoke in the most matter-of-fact possible voice. ‘Why you bring in another man, of course. That’s the only thing they understand. Territoriality, you know. If you turn them down by yourself, that’s inconceivable and horribly ego-deflating. If you move to another man, that’s bad, but
understandable. They always knew they weren’t up to par, that somebody else could beat them. And then you’re not rejecting them period, facing aloneness alone, you’re just one more promiscuous bitch of a female. It all fits that way. That’s the way the game is played. You must know that.’

‘I don’t know if I’ve ever been in love,’ Mira said doubtfully, ‘or if I was, I was so young …’

Chris looked at Mira sympathetically. She turned to her mother. ‘Not everybody’s like you, Mom.’

‘Sure they are,’ Val said cheerfully. ‘They just don’t know it.’

That’s the way Val was. Absolute. There was no point in arguing with her. And in fact she was so right so often that one simply shrugged off her gigantic arrogances. They were part of her, like the sprawly way she sat, her large movements of arm as she spoke, the way she held her cigarettes high in the air. And in time one came to feel that Val’s extravagances of statement were harmless. She did not impose her categories on other people any more than anyone else does: she was simply louder in announcing them.

11

October is the month in which Cambridge is most beautiful. The brilliant gold and crimson leaves tint the sunlight dusky and soft on the redbrick sidewalks and the sky is very blue. The soft, ashy, burning sad autumn air, the sad sound of brittle leaves crushed underfoot that makes autumn a dying time in most places is offset here by the thousands of new young faces, bodies hurrying to a thousand events planned for one more new year.

Mira found her classes uninspiring, but the reading lists a challenge. She spent hours in Widener or Child library, poring through bookstores, and felt her mind expanding with this opportunity to read in depth, as well as width. The emphasis was on primary texts; anthologies were regarded as no more than study guides. It was a pleasant change from what she was used to.

She hung her curtains and bought some throw pillows and a few more plants, and planned her first dinner party. She invited Iso and Ava, Val and Chris, and struggled in the tiny kitchen over the blackened stove to do something as graceful as what they had done. She was not able to think of anything more exotic than baked chicken, but they
all acted as if she had created a feast, and when it was over, she was flushed with pleasure. She had bought red carnations for the kitchen table, and Ava oohed and hung over them, saying how much she loved them, saying it as if the flowers had taken root in her soul and her body was enveloped by them.

‘Please, take them home with you.’

Ava’s eyes widened. ‘Me? Ooh, Mira, I couldn’t. It’s just that I love them so.’

‘It would make me happy if you took them.’

‘Really? Oh, Mira, thank you!’ Ava acted as if Mira had given her something large and valuable. She embraced Mira, buried her face in the flowers, thanked Mira over and over. Ava’s mannerisms were so extreme that it was hard to believe them, but it was clear, even in the short time Mira had known her, that she believed them, that somehow they really expressed her.

After dinner they sat in the living room drinking wine.

‘Well, look at your life, for instance,’ Val was saying to Iso. ‘You grew up on an orange plantation, or whatever they call them, you surfed, swam, skied, you’ve been all over the world with a pack on your back, you’ve done white water canoeing, you bicycled across Kenya. Or me: my life hasn’t been that glamorous, but I’ve been everywhere. Chris and I traveled through Europe in a VW bus; we helped register voters in the South; we’ve lived on Indian reservations doing teaching and rudimentary nursing; we worked in Appalachia trying to mobilize opposition to the strip mining companies; we’ve been working with the peace movement, with Cambridge school and city problems, for years now …’

‘You have, not me, Mom.’

‘Or Ava …’

She raised her eyes from the flowers. ‘Oh, I haven’t done anything.’

‘You have. You’ve been living on your own for years now, working, supporting yourself at a boring nine-to-five job and living in ratholes so you’d have money to study ballet four nights a week and all day Saturday. That takes courage, energy …’

‘It’s just all I care about,’ Ava demurred in a tiny voice.

‘But what do you find in the movies, in TV? The same old figures, the sex bomb and the housewife – that is, when they even bother to have female characters …’

‘They come in three types: the heroine, the villainess, and the
crossbreed. The heroine has blonde hair, is utterly moral, and has as much personality as a soft roll; the villainess has dark hair and gets killed in the end. Her crime is sex. The crossbreed is a good woman who goes bad or a bad woman who goes good. She always gets killed too, one way or another,’ Iso laughed.