The Women's Room (58 page)
They fell back on the rumpled sheets for a while, then Mira lighted a cigarette. Ben got up and smoothed the bedclothes out, and fluffed up the pillows, and got in beside her and pulled up the sheets and blankets and took a drag of her cigarette and put his arms behind his head and just lay there smiling.
It was five o’clock, and the sky above the houses was light, lightening, a pale streak of light blue. They were not tired, they said. They turned their heads toward each other, and just smiled, kept smiling. Ben took another drag of her cigarette, then she put it out. She reached out and switched off the lamp, and together they snuggled down in the sheets. They were still turned to each other, and they twisted their bodies together. They fell immediately asleep. When they awakened in the morning, they were still intertwined.
1
Strange. I can see now, writing this all out, what I never saw before. Everything that characterized Mira’s and Ben’s relation was there from the very beginning. It was formed in a mold. But even seeing that, I don’t know what to say about it. Is there any relation that is not formed in a mold? I remember Clarissa saying – after she and Duke had been divorced for over a year, and Duke badly wanted a reconciliation and was pleading with her to believe that he had changed, had become more sensitive, more able to see other people – ‘He says he’s changed, and maybe he has. But in my head and feelings, he has the same shape he always had. I think I’ll always see him that way. So even if I could bear to go back to him – which I can’t – and even if he has changed – which is unlikely – I’d turn him right back into what he was, because that would be what I expected from him. It’s hopeless.’
I find it a desperate thought that people can’t change, can’t grow together. If that’s true, people should be required to re-enact marriage every five years or so, like signing a lease. Oh, shit! No rules: we have enough as it is. But if it is true that relationships are formed in molds, then how do people live together when time brings change, and change inside a mold either breaks the vessel or agonizes the bound foot?
But people do live together: men and women, women and women, ancient ladies with lace curtains at the windows who dress up in rayon print dresses and high heels to go to the market for a half-dozen of eggs and a quart of milk and two rib lamb chops. Do those women, like some elderly married couples I know, sit in silence at dusk, chewing the insides of their lips with irritation at Mabel or Minnie?
‘Scratch a woman, find a rage.’ Val said that so often that her voice still says it in my ear. Does Mabel’s habit of using so much talcum powder after her bath that she leaves the bathroom floor dusty, which bothers Minnie’s nostrils, does that lead inevitably to explosions, during which all of Mabel’s other annoying habits – peering at the name of the
sender of all Minnie’s letters, never vacuuming behind the sofa, and missing the eyes when she peels the potatoes – are thrown at her like a set of knives, sending her into tears and counter-accusations? Because of course (Mabel announces the terrible truth tearfully), Minnie herself is not perfect. She always asks who is calling when the telephone rings (ah, so rarely!) for Mabel, and that is pure nosiness. Minnie pulls out her smelling salts at the slightest provocation, as if she were frail, when the truth is she’s healthy as a horse. She even did it that day the neighbor’s dog, in heat, met a stray on their front lawn. Yet surely, Minnie, at seventy-four, had seen such things before! And Minnie, never, never, puts the newspaper back together again the way it was after she reads it: it is enough to drive one mad.
It is true they both cluck and tut at any news story about children being mistreated; that they both tighten their lips and look away when there is a sex scene on television; that they both live uncomplainingly on canned soup and eggs and a lamb chop or hamburger every third night, which is all they can afford on Social Security and their tiny pensions; that they both disapprove of smoking, drinking, gambling, and any woman who engages in them; that they both love the scent of lavender and lemon oil and freshly laundered sheets. Neither of them would think of going out with curlers in her hair, the way some of the young women do, and each spends a chunk of her little allowance to have her hair set and blued every week. And neither of them would ever go outdoors, or even walk about the house, for that matter, in disarray. Their ancient knobbed arthritic fingers struggle every morning with the iron-tight girdle, the delicate hose. And both of them remember, as if it were yesterday, the Baum family that used to live next door.
But I ask you: is that enough?
Across the street are Grace and Charlie, also in their seventies, married over fifty years, who are the same way. Except Grace gets angry at Charlie for every day consuming three cans of beer and constantly belching, and Charlie gets angry with Grace because she doesn’t let him watch all the TV programs he likes, insisting on watching those stupid game shows. Both are proud and smug about the neatness of their front lawn – not like some people’s, they tellingly remark to Mabel and Minnie, who of course feel the same way, and all four of them look downstreet at the Mulligan house. Yes, but is it enough?
What holds people together? And why do we have to hate each other so much? I ask this not to have you shake your head piously and pronounce that we must certainly not hate, not hate our fellow-man.
We do. What I want to know is, why? It seems necessary, you see, like breathing out after you’ve breathed in. Okay. I can accept that. The true mysteries of the true church, if there ever were one, would be those: Why do we love and hate? How in hell do we manage to live together? I don’t know. I already told you: I live alone.
It’s easy enough to blame men for the rotten things they do to women, but it makes me a little uncomfortable. It’s too close to the stuff I read in the fifties and sixties when everything that went wrong in a person’s life was Mother’s fault. All of it. Mothers were the new devil. Poor mothers, if only they realized how much power they had! Castraters and smotherers, they were unpaid servants of The Evil One. It is true that men are responsible for much of the pain in women’s lives – one way or another, whether personally or as part of a structure that refuses to let women in at all, or keeps them in subordinate positions. But is that all of it?
If anyone ever had a chance for a good mutual life, it was Mira and Ben. They had enough intelligence, experience, goodwill, and enough room in the world – whether you call that opportunity or privilege – to figure out what they wanted and to achieve it. So what happened in their relationship ought to be paradigmatic somehow. It seemed so at the time. It seemed to glow with the divinity of the ideal. They had the secret, keeping both intimacy and spontaneity, security and freedom. And they were able, somehow, to keep it up.
It was April when Mira and Ben became lovers. Mira’s first Cambridge April, and her mood was perfectly attuned to the little green balls that appeared on the trees, the thin feathering of forsythia, and the lilacs in the Yard, hanging over the brick wall around the president’s house. As the sun grew warmer, the tiny green balls expanded, then opened, and cast green light on the warm uneven red brick. The days smelled warm; light perfume of dogwood and lilac drifted down from Brattle Street, from Garden and Concord, and penetrated even the crowded, fumy Square. People thronged on the streets, jackets open, smiling, unselfconscious, carrying a bunch of daffodils from the Brattle Street Florist, a rolled-up poster from the Coop, a polished apple from Nini’s.
Mira was studying for generals and finishing up papers; Ben was trying to organize the ten crates of notes he’d brought back from Lianu. They met almost every day, for lunch or coffee at the Patisserie or Piroschka or Grendel’s, where they could get a table outdoors. When everybody was broke, a group of them would meet for a drink at the
Faculty Club, where Ben or another teaching assistant could charge things. They always spent the most money when they were broke.
Mira was working very well: the sense of home she had in her relation with Ben freed her mind. She could focus intensely for hours without feeling restless or getting up to pace her apartment or the top floor of Widener. She could be as organized and efficient as she had always been without having to feel she was substituting order for life.
The lovers spent Saturday night and Sunday together, in an extended honeymoon. They ate dinner out on Saturday night, trying every interesting restaurant in Cambridge. They had guacamole, the Szechuan shrimp, and vegetable curries, and Greek lamb with artichokes and egg lemon sauce; they tried a variety of pastas, baba ganoush, hot and sour soup, sauerbraten, quiche, rabbit stew, and one special night, suprêmes de volaille avec champignons. They tried buffalo stew at the Faculty Club. They tried for variety and goodness of food and surroundings. They found everything good, and some wonderful things.
On Sundays, when most restaurants in Cambridge are closed, they cooked in. Sometimes this became quite a production, as when Ben insisted on cooking a Beef Wellington that took him all day and left the kitchen a shambles. More often it was simple: soufflés and gratins, stuffed crêpes, or pasta, and salad. They had friends in or ate alone with chamber music on the stereo Mira had bought.
And off and on all weekend, they made love. They did it for hours, and sought for constant variation. They tried it standing up, hanging over the edge of the bed, sitting down, or with Ben holding Mira onto his standing body. Many of their experiments ended in giggling failure. They played games, pretending to be characters out of old movies, varying the power roles. She would be Catherine the Great and he, a serf; he would be a sheik and she, a slave girl. They acted the parts with verve. She played the woman of her masochistic fantasies, he played the man of his masochistic fantasies. It was like being a child again and playing house or cowboys and Indians. It liberated their imaginations and freed them to live out all the mythic lives they had rejected, like playing dress-up in all the costumes they had stored in the attics of their brains.
They went for long walks, down along the Charles, up to Fresh Pond, all the way along the Freedom Trail, ending in the North End with an Italian coffee or ice. And they talked, and they argued about everything conceivable, about poetry and politics and psychological theory, about the best way to make an omelet and the best way to rear a child.
They shared enough of the same values and assumptions to make their arguments rich and exhilarating, and both were old enough to know that small differences of opinion kept things interesting.
In May, there was a student protest against the war led by a group more militant than the peace group Val and Ben belonged to. The Yard thronged with students; the protesters surrounded University Hall and spoke to the crowds through loudspeakers that distorted their voices. Sounds wavered across the Yard: it was moral to use forcible means to try to stop the war because the war was immoral. That was the crux of the argument. They urged the students to strike. Mira, listening, watched the crowd. People stood, considered, wandered. Some argued with the speakers, who tried to argue fairly in response. But the arguments were over logic and legality: it was against the law for them to take over University Hall; it was immoral to act against the law; but it was more immoral not to act against the law when the law supports an immoral war.
Mira could not take the thing seriously. It was intellectual game-playing, juggling concepts that were valid only as long as the speakers chose to grant them validity. The real contest was between the powers of government and armies and the vulnerability of young flesh. This was not, she thought, how revolutions happened. Revolutions happened in the guts, in fury and outrage so deep, so long endured, so killing to the self, that they could issue only in complete rebellion. The cadres in Algeria, in China, in Cuba, had perhaps sat around finding ways to justify morally, intellectually, the overthrow of the government, but their impulse had been rooted in their daily existences, in years of watching the oppression of their people, in the muttered knowledge of an oppression so severe that life became secondary to a cause. The young people shouting on the steps of the Hall were right; they were committed; they grew hoarse yet still shouted through the loudspeakers, trying to reach the rest. But their audience was not hungry enough, not frightened enough; their families were alive and well and living in Scarsdale, not dead of a bullet, maimed by torture, enslaved, or locked up nights inside a compound. Ben said American imperialists were smart: they enslaved the population by giving them two cars, two television sets, and a case of sexual repression. Val and he argued Marcusan theory. Mira sat and watched. The thing was not taking off; there was simply not enough passion in enough people. Then one night, the president of the university called the police, who pulled the students out of University Hall. There was violence. Some people
were hurt, many were jailed. The next day the campus was in a state of shock. Overnight, it had been radicalized.
It is easy to forget the feeling of those days just because the passions that were aroused came from principles, not existence, and so were evanescent. I remember sitting in Lehman Hall feeling the fragile air; voices floated by sounding like broken glass; one touch, I felt, could shatter the whole building. Some people – mostly older male graduate students – were tough and grim and full of words, repeating over and over the rhetoric of revolution, trying to build up the threats of the previous fall, muttering in corners over dirty coffee cups about guns and tanks. The younger students were tremulous, near hysteria. Their eyes were permanently startled, and as they handed out leaflets, circulated petitions, their hands shook. Rumors – later verified – about materials found in administration files burned like a desert wind through the buildings, tinkling, shattering the delicate balance necessary to hierarchical organization. A lot of people old enough to know, but sheltered long enough and well enough inside privileged walls that they never learned, discovered in those years that power is not something you possess, but is something granted to you by those you have power over. The genteel pale men who quietly, blandly, courteously ran the university were revealed to be unapologetic, sexists and racists, who considered prejudice their right, and their right to be identical with the good of the nation. It was impossible to accuse them of conspiracy, for their collusion occurred on a subconscious level. It was, Mira thought, like her old confusion about Norm: can you blame someone for something he doesn’t let himself know he’s doing and even when you point it out, sees nothing wrong with it, although it demeans or oppresses you, calling it ‘natural’?