The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

  ‘That’s not true, Val! What about rape, or seduction? Lucrece was destroyed by sex.’

  ‘Lucrece was destroyed by aggression. The line does cross. Tarquin’s aggression against her, and her own aggression against herself. If she could stick a knife in herself, I don’t know why she couldn’t stick one in him. Rape is aggression that happens to involve the genitals. There are methods of torture that do that too. But those are not primarily sexual acts.’

  ‘What about sexual depravity? …’

  Val leaped at her. ‘What is sexual depravity?’

  Mira sat in shock.

  ‘What is it? Is it homosexuality? Cunnilingus? Fellatio? Masturbation?’

  Sophisticated Mira, who had experienced only one of these, shook her head.

  ‘Then what is it? What sexual act can you name that is depraved? That is harmful?’

  ‘Well … in pornography … well, pornography itself … and parties where men wear lipstick … well, heavens, Val, you know!’

  Val sat back. ‘I don’t know. Are you talking about S and M?’

  Mira, pink-faced, nodded.

  ‘S and M is only the expression in the bedroom of an oppressive-submissive relation which can happen also in the kitchen or at the factory, can happen between people of any gender. There is obviously something titillating about these relationships, but it isn’t the sexual component that makes them ugly, they’re uglier elsewhere. Nothing sexual is depraved. Only cruelty is depraved, and that’s another matter.’

  Val lighted a cigarette and continued. She talked about polymorphous perversity, and how the whole world was just like a litter of puppies who want to curl up together and lick each other and smell each other, and about exogamy and endogamy and the absurdity and destructiveness of notions like racial purity, and about the ways property, the whole idea of property, had infected and corrupted sexual relationships.

  Mira had another drink and listened uneasily. She was overwhelmed. It wasn’t just Val’s readiness with words and arguments, but the enormous energy she put into them, the energy radiated by her mere physical presence, her voice, her face. She closed her mind to Val. Val was extreme, she was a fanatic, she was like Lily, talking on and on about the same thing as if it were as inexhaustibly interesting to others as it was to her. She felt small, silenced: Valerie’s power nullified her own.

  ‘You’d like to nullify the world,’ she muttered. ‘You’d like to be Dictator of the World.’

  Nothing fazed the woman. ‘Who wouldn’t?’ she laughed.

  ‘I wouldn’t.’

  ‘Actually, I’m really an old-fashioned preacher at heart. I’d like to get up in a pulpit every week and teach the world how to save itself.’

  ‘And you really believe you know how.’

  ‘Of course!’ Valerie crowed, laughing.

  Mira went home smoldering.

  Nevertheless, she thought about what Val said, and sometimes it helped her. Val really did know a lot about sex, partly because she had had so much experience and partly because she was intelligent and thought about it. For her, sex was almost a philosophy. She saw the whole world in terms of it. She used to say that only Blake had known what the world was really about. She used to read Blake at night: the book lay always on her bedside table. She said that even if he was an mcp, he knew what wholeness comprised. Val slept with people the way other people go out for dinner with a friend. She liked them, she liked sex. She rarely expected anything from it beyond the pleasure of the moment. At the same time, she said it was overrated: it had been so tabooed, she claimed, that we had come to expect paradise from it. It was only fun, great fun, but not paradise.

  And she was a happy person; she was one of the happiest people I ever knew. Not happy in the sense of smiling and gay: she was a crank. She loved to crank about politics and morals and intellectual idiocy. She enjoyed cranking. There was a wholeness in her, I guess. She went breezing through, and even though she was sensitive and aware of what was going on around her most of the time, it rarely flapped her. She laughed at absurdities, went home and cooked a great meal, had a good talk with somebody, then made love until two in the morning and next day got down to the books again. She was unflappable. Until the end.

  17

  Ava had gone home to Alabama for the holidays; Iso went with her ‘to make sure nobody kills anybody,’ she laughed. They did not return in two weeks, as Ava had been supposed to. At the end of January, their phone still went unanswered. Mira was worried about Iso, who was supposed to assist Wharton in the medieval course. It was strange: close as they were, none of them would have known how to find another, to contact parents or family. If Iso and Ava had never returned, Mira would simply have lost them. In mid-February, when the new semester had already begun, Brad Barnes said he had seen Iso coming out of Wharton’s office. But the phone still rang empty.

  The following week Iso called sounding tight, almost curt, and Mira agreed to have lunch with her and Val the next day. She stood on the street near the back gate of Widener, where they’d agreed to meet. Gazing down Mass Ave, she saw Iso walking, a couple of blocks away. She had a long stride, but she paused in her step as if with each one she were debating turning back. This gave her a loping, sideways walk, ungainly. Her head was down, her hands plunged in the deep pockets of the shapeless pea jacket she wore, a remnant from her adolescence. As she came nearer, Mira studied the tight face. Her mouth was pursed, her cheekbones looked more prominent than ever, and the skin stretched tight across them as if the tight, pulled-back hair were drawing the skin too. She looked like a middle-aged nun worrying about coal for the school as she walked swiftly to her next duty.

  Val came up behind Mira, greeting her. When Iso saw them, she stopped still. She did not smile. They approached her without haste, cautiously, both understanding without any communication that it was important not to rush over to her. She looked as if she were swaying, standing there. When they reached her, Val put a large arm lightly around her and said to Mira, ‘Let’s go to Jack’s,’ a bar that served food and was always deserted during the day. They sat at a back booth. A few people stood at the bar in the front of the place, and music was playing, but the back was empty.

  Iso sipped the whiskey sour Val had ordered for her, and looked at them. Her mouth was twitching. There were dark circles under her eyes and her hair looked as if it would pull all the skin off her face. It was tight and smooth and tied in a tight, smooth little knot on top. She looked like an aging schoolmarm who has just been fired. ‘Ava’s gone,’ she said.

  In the fall, Ava’s dance school had held a recital. Just before Christmas, Iso told them, a woman who had attended the recital had called Ava and offered her a ‘scholarship’ to her ballet school in New York. This meant free lessons, and the possibility of dancing in the corps de ballet of an opera company with which the woman was connected. It also meant Ava would have to move to New York, find an apartment, a new job, a new life.

  ‘But that’s wonderful!’ Mira exclaimed.

  ‘When did she leave?’

  ‘Yesterday.’ Iso kept looking at her drink, rolling it in her hands.

  ‘How long have you two been together?’ Val continued.

  ‘Four years off and on. Steadily for the last three years.’ She tried to pull her mouth back into shape.

  ‘You can still see each other,’ Mira suggested uneasily, unsure about what was going on.

  Iso shook her head. ‘No. No.’

  ‘It’s really a divorce,’ Val said gently, and Iso nodded yes, vigorously, as tears began to splash down the tight cheeks. Controlling her weeping, she tried to tell them, gasping out phrases, blowing her nose, sipping her drink, pulling at her hair until its smooth front was a mass of webbing. Intense, passionate, all-consuming, their love had sprung up instantly. They had tried to fight it off, Iso going around the world, Ava moving to a new place, a new job. But always they returned to each other, and three years ago had given in, had decided to live together, to brazen it
out, although pretending, always pretending that they were mere roommates. Ava curled up inside Iso’s mothering like a kitten, but she clawed like a cat when she wanted to jump down, when the arms grew too warm, when the nest felt oppressive.

  ‘I could never give her what she wanted. I could never be right. She pounded on me all the time, demanding, pleading that somehow I do something, something to make things all right.’

  ‘How could you when what she wanted was to dance?’

  Iso nodded. ‘I know, but I felt there was more she wanted, I wanted to give it, I wanted to be able to give it, and I resented her because I couldn’t, because she needed it so much. For the last year, practically all we’ve done is fight.’

  But that wasn’t all. Except for a few casual ‘flings,’ they had been only with each other. ‘We knew, nobody else, it was our secret, it kept us together and the world outside, it kept us glued together, like having a deformed child, as if each of us had a limb that had to be strapped on and off that nobody else knew about except each other. And if we split up, either we’d have to let other people know or we’d have to live alone, isolated, completely cut off …’

  Val ordered sandwiches. Iso stopped when the waitress brought them. Val ordered another round of drinks. Nobody ate.

  ‘We never went to Alabama. We didn’t go anyplace. Ava didn’t go to work. We went late at night to the market and didn’t answer the phone. We’ve been sitting in that apartment for two months, arguing, talking, pacing, fighting, accusing …’ She put her forehead in her hand. ‘It was crazy, I thought I was going crazy, maybe I did, maybe we both did.’ She looked up again, appealing to them with her eyes. ‘Is everything in life like that?’

  Ava wanted to go, wanted the chance; she did not want to go and leave Iso; she felt guilty about wanting to go, so accused Iso of wanting to be rid of her; she resented Iso’s unwillingness to leave Harvard and go with her when she had left every place to be with Iso; she was frightened of going alone; she wanted to go alone, she was sick of their fights, their hopeless circle of accusations.

  ‘And me too, it was the same for me. I wanted her to go for her own sake, but I didn’t want to lose her. But I didn’t want to leave Harvard, it’s taken me so long to settle down to something and besides, I love what I’m doing. And I felt angry that she wanted to go off without me, and frightened for her: how will she get along without me? She’s so … vulnerable, so fragile. We went around and around and around. There was no solution. Except night before last we had a real bang-up, blast-out fight and she packed her bags and called the woman and said she was coming. Then we both cried and held hands. It was finished. Like a war. It ends when everybody’s dead.’

  She stood up suddenly, clumsily, and walked swiftly across the room to the toilet. Mira fiddled with her glass.

  ‘Val … did you know?’

  ‘I knew they loved each other.’

  ‘I’m so dense. I have cutoff points in my head. I just won’t think about things beyond a certain point.’

  Iso returned. Her hair was restored to order, but her face was splotchy, and the red blotches emphasized her freckles, usually invisible in her pallor. Her eyes were pale and very dead. She lighted a cigarette.

  ‘And now?’ Val began.

  Iso spread her hands and shrugged. ‘Nothing. Just nothing.’ She puffed nervously. ‘Although I’m sure Ava will find someone to take care of her fast enough,’ she added grudgingly.

  ‘Was that part of the problem?’

  Iso nodded, eyes lowered. ‘It’s embarrassing. It’s humiliating to be jealous. And of course she claimed that I was just dying to be rid of her so I could get involved with a whole flock of women …’ She pursed her lips tightly. ‘I’m much too old to start being promiscuous. Besides … She twisted her mouth again and sipped her drink.

  ‘Besides, anything might happen,’ Val laughed.

  Iso looked up surprised.

  ‘I remember when I divorced Neil. I was too young, even younger than you, to imagine living a celibate life for the rest of my years, but I had Chris and couldn’t quite figure how to handle just the mechanical arrangements, you know? Because I loathe lying and sneaking. And I set my lips the way you’re doing now –’

  Iso instantly untwisted her mouth.

  ‘– and said I wasn’t going to be promiscuous, and I’d worry about finding the One and Only when I found him. Actually, I was dying to screw around. Everybody looked attractive to me. And if a guy came onto me, I wanted to try him even if he wasn’t all that attractive to me. I was really hungry for experience.

  ‘And I had it. Once, I remember, for about six months. I had five lovers at once. The thing is, it’s just too time-consuming. You can ignore a husband, but you have to spend time with a lover – talking, eating, touching, making love all afternoon or all night. You can’t get anything else done. So after a while, I cut it out. Nowadays, apart from a casual encounter – they’re always nice, sort of sweet – I only see Grant. And not that much of him, the grouch.’

  Iso was staring hard at her drink. There were two tiny pink spots on the corners of her cheeks. Her mouth was tight, almost angry. When Val finished, she looked up; her eyes were hard, hurt.

  ‘You act as if it were the same thing. As if I don’t have special problems.’

  ‘You have a problem whether you do anything or not. As you no doubt know. If people are going to snipe at you as a lesbian, they’ll do it whether you’re involved with anyone or not.’

  Iso’s flush deepened. ‘I have the name so I might as well have the game?’ Her voice was hard, cold.

  ‘I don’t know if you have the name. I’ve never heard anyone say anything. Besides, around here, who can tell what anyone is?’

  They all giggled: it was a sad truth.

  ‘I’m talking about the long run.’

  Iso relaxed a little. She picked up her sandwich and took a bite.

  ‘It’s a matter of costs,’ Val resumed. ‘Aloneness, careful watchfulness, suspicion – it’s a horrible way to live. Always squelching impulses for fear the truth may show.’

  ‘But the risk,’ Iso objected.

  ‘Gossip? It can be damaging, I suppose.’

  ‘Oh, if that were all!’

  ‘Why? What do you think?’

  ‘Survival.’

  Iso trudged off, when they parted, toward her home. She was in hiding, she told them, and came out only to attend Wharton’s class – she’d made peace with him – and to see them. Mira had tears in her eyes as she watched her go, head bent forward, hands plunged deep in the pockets of her old pea coat, loping along as if she were never precisely sure she wanted to go in the direction she was going in. She was going home alone, to think about all of this alone, to decide or avoid decision alone. Like me sitting with my brandy, she thought, and felt gushy and sentimental, thinking that everyone must do that, face alone the worst truths, the worst terrors. Yet we do do something for each other, she protested, we can help. How? a grim voice insisted. She meditated on this on her swift walk home through the biting February cold. As she neared her house, she saw a small figure sitting on her front steps, reading. It was Kyla.

  ‘Aren’t you freezing?’

  ‘Well, I had just two hours between my class and a meeting, and I wanted to see you so when you weren’t home I thought I might as well wait, you might come in and if you didn’t I didn’t have anyplace else to go anyway, of course I could have sat in Widener or Boylston, but my meeting’s up this way anyway and besides, you might come home,’ she announced smiling.

  She came in, lugging the heavy green bookbag she always carried, and got warmed up with two gin and tonics which she gulped down like water. She chattered about the differences between German and English Romanticism, and a paper she was writing. ‘It’s so interesting, Mira, almost as if you could talk about differences in German and English souls, as if you could define national characteristics. I don’t believe it, yet I do. Like Harley and me, you know? He’s really
German, despite the name, and I’m really English, well, with a little Scots, both Teutonic, I guess, but so different!’

  ‘Are your differences like those between English and German Romanticism?’ Mira laughed.

  Kyla paused, taking this seriously. ‘No, no, well, I don’t know. I haven’t tried to align us with them. But that’s a thought, you know? It might be illuminating. It might help.’

  And she burst into tears.

  She tried, but she could not stop crying. She kept gasping, and raising her head, and blowing her nose, and drawing in sighs, and sipping her third drink, and talking, but through it all, she sobbed. Harley was brilliant, so brilliant, Mira should meet him, he was really wonderful, his work, his professors had said, no question about it, someday the Nobel Prize, nuclear physics such a difficult thing, a consuming thing, it was understandable, she was a dog to complain, she should be proud, she was proud, to be even the smallest part of it, if she just made his life the teensiest bit easier, happier, more comfortable, it was enough, she should be grateful just to have the chance, she was a rotten complaining bitch. And why should she complain? She was so busy herself, a member of four organizations, president of one, studying for generals, taking two seminars and Hooten’s demanding conference course, she had so much to do in the house, of course Harley helped, she had to say that, he was really wonderful, he always made breakfast, but there was the shopping and the cleaning and the cooking and it seemed too much, but that wasn’t the problem, she could do it, she could do everything, she wouldn’t have minded, if only if only if only.