The Women's Room (70 page)

‘I haven’t kept you away.’

‘Yes, you have, Kyla,’ his voice rose firmly. He recited his wrongs without emotion, like a judge reading off the counts of an indictment. There were plenty of them: times the defendant had been absent when she was supposed to be home; engagements, even dinners missed; the unforgivable missing of dinners she had been supposed to cook; weepy drunkenness at parties, continually; and the final, the terrible remark to Kontarsky. ‘Luckily, his first wife had several nervous breakdowns –’

‘I’ll bet she did!’ Kyla shot in.

‘– so he understands,’ Harley continued calmly, only frowning at her. ‘I had a long talk with him – ‘

‘About me? You talked to him about me?’ she shrieked.

‘Kyla! what are you trying to do to me? I think you’re trying to destroy me! I think you’re insane – certifiable!’

‘So!’ she exploded, throwing out both her arms and knocking over a glass vase that stood on a side table. ‘It’s all my doing, is it?’

His face carefully expressionless, his movements conspicuously patient, Harley rose, retrieved the fallen vase, and placed it on the mantelpiece, out of a child’s reach. Kyla leaped up, charged into the kitchen, and poured herself a glass of straight gin.

‘If you’re going to get yourself smashed, I’ll leave. There’s no talking to you when you’re like that.’

She charged back and threw herself on the couch and began the recital of her litany. He was never home, and when he was –

‘That is illogical.’

‘You know what I mean!’ When he was he was uninterested in her, in her work, in her excitements, her discoveries, he wanted her only as an audience. She had done everything for him when he was studying for orals, but he had done nothing for her. And, and (biting her lip, turning away her head) sexually he was – inconsiderate.

Harley sat looking like a Greek sculpture, his fine noble profile serene, but at the last charge he blinked and turned.

‘Inconsiderate how?’

‘You know how. You know. You’re always in such a hurry, you don’t get me excited enough and you thrust yourself into me before I’m ready and it hurts and you know all that. How can you ask me how when you know?’

Harley looked straight at her, and there was fear in his eyes. Then he dropped his gaze, but his face had changed, it had shadows of pain in it. That tinge of suffering on his face stabbed through her. She tried to ease it for him: ‘Well, we’ve talked about it before. I’ve asked you. But you always seem to forget.’

He was staring at the floor, his hands lightly clasped between his legs. ‘So it’s really that. All this while you’ve been storing up hate for me because of that. All this crazy behavior …’

‘No,’ Kyla heard herself sounding calmly assured, in control. ‘No. It’s that you don’t take me seriously. In any area.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

She launched another litany, but this time her voice was quiet, dignified. He regarded her work as frivolous, her nature as emotional and therefore invalid, her concerns as insignificant. She offered him example after example. Harley stood up and ran his hand through his hair again. He came closer to her, but did not look straight at her. Gazing half out the window, half his face visible to her, he said, ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you, Kyla.’

She closed her eyes and a tear splashed on her lashes. Harley stood before her, looking down. ‘I’ll try, Kyla.’ It was the most unsure she had ever heard him, and she knew what that cost him. He looked like an angel standing there, his hair white in the last glow of sun. He was an angel fallen because of her, dragged down by her into the world of flesh and pain and limitation and inadequacy where he was not at home. He belonged in the world of pure thought. His face had never looked sad like that before, his voice had never trembled before. She grabbed his hands and kissed them and laid her cheek against them, and he bent and kissed the top of her head, and she rubbed her cheek on his hands and as she did so, she smelled her underarms, and when he crouched down to embrace her she became conscious of her sweatiness, it seemed she could smell her crotch, her period must have arrived, she felt rank and stained, and she pulled away from him, she ordered him back to his chair, she scratched her head and felt its grease. ‘I’m having an affair with Iso,’ she said.

Harley stared at her. She explained how it had happened, how upset she had been, how sympathetic Iso had been, how she had clung to Iso desperate for love.

‘Ummm.’ Harley said nothing, although he watched her acutely during her explanation. ‘Are you telling me I’ve been replaced by a woman in your affections?’ he asked finally, his mouth twisting a little.

‘No. It’s different. It doesn’t replace you, it complements you.’

‘Then let’s forget it.’ He stood up. ‘Is it all right with you if I come back?’

She was overpouring with love, it flowed from her eyes as she looked up at him. ‘Oh, yes, Harley, yes, darling.’

‘Then I’ll get my stuff from the car.’

‘Okay. I’m going to take a quick shower.’

She hummed as the water washed away her sweat, her effluvia, her grease; she washed, thoroughly, all her orifices. He was more wonderful even than she had thought; he was large, he could accept criticism, he could forgive and understand. They would have a fresh start. Maybe
what they should do was have a baby. She could have a baby and write her dissertation at the same time. It might be fun.

That afternoon, as they made love, Harley was careful and painstaking, caressing her body, nuzzling her breasts, rubbing her clitoris. He did not push himself at her, only twice he asked her if she was ready. The third time he asked, she was too embarrassed to say no again, and she said yes, and he thrust into her painfully and she was so grateful for his care and remorseful at her slowness and embarrassed by her failure that she pretended orgasm, and Harley lay back afterward glowing with pleasure and a sense of achievement.

Kyla’s mouth twitched.

12

Kyla, smoking nervously, explained to Mira the arrangements she and Harley had worked out. He would take over the house completely for the next two weeks, until her orals were over, and after that they would divide the chores in half. She was to get home at whatever hour she had said she would; he would help her in her studying as she had helped him; and she would no longer be sexually involved with Iso, although they were still friends.

Lehman Hall was nearly deserted, but the tables around them held a clutter of filled ashtrays, empty coffee cups, balled-up cellophane potato chip bags, cigarette packages. Mira listened to Kyla, trying to reflect in her eyes and smile the elated confidence, the loving joy Kyla was expressing, but she felt dragged down. This was a depressing place with all its leftovers, she thought, all the dregs of the past, the lunches and afternoon coffees that left such a mess but hadn’t been worth it, hadn’t satisfied anything except the barest hunger. Val, sitting next to Mira, kept things going, and in time Kyla jumped up, looking at her watch, and went off to some duty.

‘I just can’t believe it,’ Mira said sadly.

‘I know.’

‘I should be able to. Ben and I are still good. But Harley’s different.’

‘It’s significant that he was able to accept the business with Iso so easily.’

‘That was remarkable.’

‘Hah!’ Val snorted. ‘It simply means he doesn’t take it seriously. A woman as a lover doesn’t count.’

‘Do you think so?’ Mira was surprised. ‘Oh, Val, have a little charity.’

Val grimaced. ‘It gets harder and harder.’ Val looked haggard. She was working, almost all the time these days, on the antiwar committee. She insisted to anyone who would listen that, without our knowledge, the war was being extended into Laos and Cambodia, that we were on our way to destroying all of Indochina. She was grim and angry much of the time. She sighed, and turned to Mira. ‘So how are you and Ben?’

‘We’re fine. At least I think we’re fine. It must be this place,’ she looked around, ‘so full of crap, all the leftovers, as though you could never get rid of things …’

Val’s brow clouded. ‘What things?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know why I’m feeling so low. It was listening to Kyla, to her enthusiasm. She really foresees a rosy future, and I can’t foresee that for her with Harley. And then that talk about maybe having a baby … You know, you go around feeling good about things and maybe to somebody else you look as deluded as Kyla looks to me,’ she finished questioningly.

Val laughed. ‘I take it you’re asking. You don’t look deluded to me. I think Ben’s great.’

‘But,’ Mira said warily, ‘he wants a baby too.’ She watched Val’s face.

It did not change. ‘How do you feel about that?’

It was Mira’s turn to smoke nervously. ‘Well,’ she laughed halfheartedly, ‘it may seem strange coming from me, but I’m not sure I even like the idea of marriage.’ She developed it; Val watched her intently. She had forgotten that most of the things she was saying now she had heard first from Val, a long year ago. Marriage accustomed one to the good things, so one came to take them for granted, but magnified the bad things, so they came to feel as painful as a grain in one’s eye. An opened window, a forgotten quart of milk, a TV set left blaring, socks on the bathroom floor could become occasions for incredible rage. And something happened sexually in marriage – the swearing to forsake all others, despite its slight observance, had a profound effect. Some people felt trapped by it, impelled to assert what they called freedom. Some accepted it like a rein, and in the effort to avoid pain in the form of hopeless desire, cut off occasions of desire, avoided having long talks at parties with attractive members of the opposite sex. In time, all feeling for the opposite sex was cut off, and intercourse limited to the barest politeness. The men then gathered talking business and politics: the
women talking people. But something happened to you when you did that, a kind of death seeped up from the genitals to the rest of the body, till it showed in the eyes, the gestures, in a certain lifelessness. On the other hand, it would kill her if Ben got sexually interested in somebody else, and she hoped, yes, she hoped, he felt the same way. But if they were to marry, then what? Would Ben feel he was cut off from the feast of life? She would not. She had no desire for anyone else, of course there was no one else much around, perhaps in a different place … but would she lose her friends? The great nights she and Val, she and Iso had spent, talking wonderfully far into the morning, would they still be possible? She and Ben would start to be just a couple. Then their time together would lose its intensity, would become mere dailiness.

And – she hesitated, and her voice deepened – a baby. A baby. She shook her head vigorously. ‘I couldn’t go back to that, I couldn’t stand it. I love my kids, I’m glad I have them, but no, no, no! But after all, he’s entitled, isn’t he, to want a child? Except he wouldn’t be the one to take care of it. If all I had to do was have it – well, I wouldn’t be thrilled, but I’d do it. But I’d have it forever, you know how it is. And if he left me, when I was sixty and he was fifty-four and the kid was still at college, I’d still have it. Still, he wants a child, and if he insisted …’

‘Yes. If he – well, he doesn’t have to insist. Just press.’

‘Yes. What would I do?’ She puffed nervously. ‘I don’t know, you see. I know I shouldn’t have a baby. I know that for myself. But I love Ben so much, I might give in. Just the thought of being without him gives me the sensation of being on an elevator that suddenly drops ten floors. He’s my center: everything is good because he’s in my life. But if I did it – oh, God, I don’t know.’

Val looked at her, and Mira saw in Val’s face what it was that made her so extraordinary. There were whole networks of shapings and turnings, age lines, not deep, just complex. And Val’s expression at this moment had everything in it: understanding, compassion, the knowledge of pain, an awareness of the impossibility of what, when we are young, we consider happiness, and at the same time, an amused, ironic gaiety, the joy of the survivor who knows the value of small pleasures.

Mira spread out her hands. ‘There’s nothing to be done,’ she shrugged.

‘The trouble is that something must be done.’

Mira raised her eyebrows questioningly.

‘You must do something. You will go on together or you won’t. You’ll marry or you won’t. You’ll have a child or you won’t.’

Mira sank. ‘That’s what I can’t deal with.’ She appealed to Val. ‘Do you think he’ll forgive me in years to come if we stay together but don’t have a kid?’

‘Do you think you’ll forgive him in years to come if you stay together and do have a kid?’

Mira laughed then, they laughed together heartily. ‘Fuck the future!’ Val crowed, and Mira grabbed her hand, and they sat looking at each other’s not-young faces, lined with time, bright with life, survivors grinning at a joke that in this young place was not widely shared. And Mira was reminded of Val’s entrance at a costume party they’d had months before, wearing a sexy black pantsuit trimmed with feathers, and with silver sprayed in her hair, and sparkling blue eye shadow over her eyes, carrying a long black cigarette holder. Everyone stopped when she walked in and took an extravagant pose: she laughed too. She stood there unperturbed by her bulk, her age, posing like a vamp of the thirties, laughing, triumphant, at herself and her illusions and desires, at the foolishness of glamour and its joy, and the colorlessness of a world without it. Some of us understood. All of us were contained in that laughter, all of us who knew that our necks had grown thin, our chins soft, our legs too heavy, our hairlines diminishing. Even the young were part of it, who didn’t yet accept that they would grow old or that the beautiful life they had imagined would not occur, but who did know that there was something not quite ideal about the length of their bodies or the knobbiness of their knees; even the youngest and most beautiful of us had an eyebrow or a nostril we were not happy with, all of us beautiful and aging, walking forth preening in the middle of our dying, preening with life, shrugging off death. She made us see that. She came in glowing and laughing and gay. Ah, indomitable Val!