The Women's Room (84 page)

Dissertations proceeded, or snagged, Kyla still spent her days leafing through books, unable to find anything that touched her deepest places. She regretted she had not specialized in the Renaissance, with its moral categories, or had not gone into ethics. Clarissa read hard, but went further and further afield. The connection between social structures and novel form was a tenuous area, but the structures themselves grew more and more fascinating to her. Iso’s work absorbed her totally, and she applied for a grant to go to England and France to study manuscripts not available in this country. Grete was working well but slowly. She and
Avery were spending much time together, and even when she was not with him, she was thinking about him. Grete had been a prodigy, and was very young still, only twenty-four. ‘I think,’ she told her friends, ‘that perhaps it is necessary to get some solidity, some
security
in one’s emotional life before one can really sit down to work.’

‘Have a baby,’ Mira cracked, sounding like Val.

Mira’s work went as well as ever; Ben had written fifty pages. They both expected to be finished within a year. Then in November, Ben got a letter from Lianu, an offer of a job as consultant from the president of the country. The Africans had difficulty in understanding the peculiar American mind. Ben soared. The job could not be counted on, at any moment Lianu might throw out all whites, but oh, it was so beautiful there, the people were so interesting, so wonderful, oh, Mira wait until you see the waterfalls, the volcanic craters, the jungles, the deserts, his friends …

Mira agreed it was wonderful, yes, you should go and stay until they kick you out, as they inevitably will, your career will nevertheless be made, you will be The Africa Expert, what all the white countries wanted, a White Man Who Really Knows Africa. She could not keep a sarcastic note out of her voice, and Ben felt it. He would retreat, and then, next time they were with people, start in all over again, with the same excitement, the same eagerness. It took Mira two weeks to isolate the source of her irritation.

Ben had never asked her if she wanted to go to Africa, he had just assumed that she would.

That alone was enough to distort her thinking about the thing. She remembered Normie saying he didn’t know if he didn’t want to be a doctor because he didn’t want to be a doctor or because his father wanted him to be a doctor and her saying that by the time he found the answer, it would be too late. Norm was presently enrolled at Amherst, which was, he said, ‘full of kids like me, privileged and pretending we’re not.’

She had to get drunk to tell Ben, which she did, not consciously, one Friday night, feeling afterwards like Kyla, seeing in hindsight that it had been intentional if not conscious. Got drunk and nasty and picked on Ben until they got back to her place, he shouted at her, and then she felt justified in shouting back, and blasted him with his complacency, his arrogance, his selfishness, and other assorted sins.

He defended himself at first; he even lied. He insisted that he had asked her about it and that she had agreed. He insisted this for two
hours. She argued that if this had happened, she would have known it, but he did not give it up. He moved from the expectation of compliance to flattery. It would be so painful to him without her that he could not even consider going without her and so had imagined this conversation she claimed they never had – although he remembered it distinctly – and had simply taken it for granted that she would go with him.

She shrieked.
‘Fuck off, Ben!’

One advantage to not using indecorous language is that when you do use it, it carries quite a wallop. Mira had, in the last year, uttered words that had been foreign to her tongue, but she had done this mainly with her women friends, rarely in front of Ben. Like her mother, she had categories.

He stopped dead in the middle of a sentence. He looked at her. He lowered his eyes. He said: ‘You’re right. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did that. But I think – Mira, I mean it – that the last thing I said was true. I can’t imagine going without you. It would be too painful. I couldn’t stand it.’

He looked up at her again. She was looking at him with a twisted mouth, and tears were streaming down her cheeks.

‘Yes, I believe that, Ben,’ she said in a hushed voice. ‘You wanted to go, and it would hurt you to go without me, and so you simply assumed I would go with you because that was the simplest solution to the problem. And you never, never once,’ she rose, and her voice rose, ‘never thought about me! About my needs, my life, my desires! You
eradicated
me, me as a person apart from you, as successfully as Norm did!’

She ran from the room and into the toilet and locked the door. She sat there weeping. Ben sat for a long time, smoking his little foul-smelling cigarettes down to the last half inch. Eventually the bathroom door opened, and Mira came out and went into the kitchen and poured a drink. Ben sat, his mouth pursing and unpursing. He put out his cigarette and lighted another. Mira returned and sat down across from him. She crossed her legs lotus-fashion. Her eyes were puffy, but her face looked bony, austere, and her back was very straight.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay. Your needs, your life, your desires. What are they?’

Mira seemed almost to squirm. ‘I don’t know exactly …’

He leaped forward, pointing one finger. ‘Aha!’

‘Shut up, Ben,’ she said coldly. ‘I don’t know exactly because I haven’t had enough room in my life to think about what I wanted. But I know I love what I’m doing now, and that I’d like to go on doing it. I want
to finish my dissertation. Beyond that, I can’t want, because I don’t know what I can get. I learned long ago, before I was twenty,’ she said bitterly, ‘not to want what I could not get. It hurts too much. Anyway, I think I’d like to teach. I know I want to do literary criticism, and I
will
finish my dissertation. And,’ she turned her head aside and said, with a phlegmy throat, ‘I also love you and would not like to separate from you. I want you too.’

He was across the room in two bounds, was kneeling on the floor before her chair, and had her in his arms, his head in her lap.

‘I love you too, don’t you see? Mira, don’t you see? I can’t bear the thought of separating from you.’

‘Yes,’ she said coldly. ‘I see that. I also see that you were willing to eradicate me in order to keep me. Ironic. That’s what Val says. The paradox of what gets called love.’

He sat back on the floor and crossed his legs. He sipped her drink. ‘Okay. What can we do then? Mira, will you come to Lianu with me?’

‘And what should I do in Il-lianu?’ she lilted, but he did not catch her allusion.

‘I don’t know. I really don’t. Look, I’ll do everything I can … I don’t know what will be available. But we’ll buy all the books you need, we’ll Xerox every article – I’ll help you. We’ll take it all down there with us. We’ll subscribe to every journal that you think is important. And you can write your dissertation there. There’s no real problem. You can mail your copy to Everts. And after that …’

‘And after that?’ Her voice surprised her. It was so low, so cold, so controlled. It was not the self she had known.

He sighed. He took her hand. ‘Look, sweetheart, I can’t say there’s much down there for you. Surely I can get you a secretarial job in a government office, possibly even a job as a transla – no, you can’t speak Lianish. But something.’

‘I want to teach.’

He sighed and slumped. ‘Ten years ago,’ he waved his arms around, ‘that would have been possible. Now? I just don’t think so. There are still a few white teachers there, but they’re being phased out, and mostly they’re in sectarian schools.’ He looked directly at her. ‘I don’t think that will be possible.’

‘Yet,’ her mouth twisted as if she were about to cry again, ‘you simply assumed I would go. Knowing I’ve spent the last five years of my life preparing to teach.’

His head drooped. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, with pain in his voice.

They sat silent for a while. ‘I won’t be down there forever,’ he said finally. ‘The days of whites in Africa are numbered. We’ll come back.’ He looked up at her again.

She looked at him thoughtfully. ‘Yes. That’s true.’ Her heart rose. The thing could be worked out. With rising excitement, she said, ‘And if you don’t get thrown out in a couple of years, and I feel stultified, I could always come back. My dissertation should be finished. Of course it will be difficult to do it so far from a library. It will take much longer than it needs to. But I could spend the time waiting for books … gardening,’ she smiled, for the first time.

His brow was clouded. ‘But, Mira, sweetheart, you couldn’t just go off and abandon your child.’

‘My child?’

He started. ‘Well sure. Isn’t that what this is all about? Our kid. The one we’re going to have.’

She froze. Her entire body felt freezing cold. She felt as if she had taken a drug, or were dying, and was pressed against some terrible wall where only basic truths could be uttered, and had found hers, and it horrified her, it was
I am, I am, I am
. And the second basic truth came right after the first, the way the lower part of a wave follows the upper:
I want, I want, I want
. And in the next second she realized that these were two statements that she had never felt permitted to utter, or even to think. Cold, in a white frigid corner, she opened her blue lips:

‘I don’t want to have another child, Ben.’

It all fell apart then. Ben was hurt, shocked, whatever. He could understand her not wanting to have another child with Norm, or anyone else, perhaps, but not with him. They argued, he passionately, she desperately, for she was arguing against herself. She loved Ben, she would have loved (once, long ago) to have his child, it would have been joy (once, long ago) to go with him to a new place and grow flowers and bake bread and talk to a little one pattering around learning to say, ‘Hot! Mats hot!’ and have him come home at night and explain to her the subtleties of Marcusan theory while she explained to him the subtleties of Wallace Stevens’ versification. Assuming he still had the leisure to be interested in such discussions. But now (after forty years) she wanted to do her own work, she wanted to pursue this stuff, this scholarship that she loved so much. It would be a sacrifice to go to Africa – it would hurt her career, would slow her work. But she was willing to do it, she would take the books with her, she would have things sent out. But
she could not, no, she could not have another child. Enough, she said. Enough.

There would be plenty of help in Africa, Ben said. And when we come back? Or suppose I need something here and have to come back for a few months? That could be arranged, he said reluctantly. She had enough experience to be able to translate what was reluctance now to furious refusal later. And what about when they came back? The child would still be hers, although he was the one who wanted it. It would be her responsibility. There was not plenty of help here. He would do what he could, he said, but he was too honest to promise more.

She sat alone with her brandy, late. She and Ben did not break up, they simply did not see each other very often. There was little impulse for it, because every time they did see each other, they had an argument. She felt that Ben was regarding her from a height, that with part of his mind he was looking down coldly at this woman he had loved for almost two years, whom he had just discovered to be selfish and egotistical. When they slept together, their sex life was poor: he was mechanical and she uninspired. She felt terribly squashed at his manner; she felt an intense need to protest, to justify, to vindicate herself from his unspoken charge. But she was too proud to do that, she understood that his superiority, her abasement, had nothing to do with them, were cultural accretions, that humanly he was not superior, she not beneath, but still …

She felt utterly alone. Val did not answer the phone. Iso and Kyla and Clarissa could not help, they listened to her, but they did not understand what it was like to be forty and alone, what did they know about aloneness? She tried to tot things up in columns. Column one – last chance for happy love; column two – what? Myself. Myself. She remembered sitting alone on the porch of her mother’s house, insisting on
myself
. How horribly selfish! Maybe she was what Ben seemed to think she was.

She pulled at her hair, hurting her scalp, trying to think it through. All she had to do was pick up the phone, say, Ben, I’ll go, Ben, I love you. He’d be there in a moment, he’d love her the way he used to love her. Her hand stopped in midair. The
way
he used to love her. Then he didn’t love her anymore? No, not when she insisted on her own desires. But if he didn’t love her insisting on her own desires, how did he love her? When her desires were the same as his. She poured another brandy. She felt herself getting drunk, but she didn’t care. Truths were discovered in drunkenness sometimes. If he only loved
her when her desires were the same as his, and stopped loving her when her desires were different from his, then that meant he didn’t love her but only a reflection of himself, a complement who could comprehend and appreciate, but who was smaller and flattering.

But that was how it had been at the beginning. She felt smaller than he, she flattered him, sincerely, because she found him more important, larger, better than herself.

That was what he had been led to expect.

She put her glass down.

That was what she had led him to expect. And now she was reneging.

But she was different now.

She was different partly because of him.

That didn’t count. He was different partly because of her too.

She leaned her head against the chair back. Suppose she went to him passionately, the way she loved it when he came to her, and grabbed him, the way she loved it when he grabbed her, and demanded, insisted, ‘I love you! I want you! Stay here in Cambridge with me. Let us go on as we have. You can make a career here too!’

She smiled grimly and picked up the brandy. ‘Hah!’ she heard. It was Val’s voice.