The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

  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’?

  But if for Mira this was an old story, it was not for the young students. They had been taught, from their earliest years, that America was the land of equality, of democracy, of equal opportunity; although they knew there were flaws in the system, people of goodwill were attempting to repair them. Their superiors, their teachers and deans and parents, all sounded well-intentioned. But in the privacy of their offices, they wrote these sorts of letters. They hadn’t known, hadn’t seen, and in the shock one feels when it is partly one’s own blindness and easy acceptance that one blames, they went around screaming, crying, shaking. They realized suddenly that this had been obvious all the while if they had cared to look, that this was the ugly underside of the very ideals they had been taught, the aspirations they had inherited. This elitist thinking, so close to the thinking of Hitler, was precisely what their luxury was founded on, required, assumed. The cost of ease is another’s slavery. It was intolerable.

  They tried to work it out. They clung to the ideals, the aspirations; they tried to renounce the luxury. But this they could not bring themselves to do completely. A few of them left school, went on the road, went to live in communes, repudiating their backgrounds. There were arguments, full of rhetoric which was a kind of shorthand, on both sides. If you want to change things, you need power: poverty was not a power base. Some joined militant groups doomed to ineffectuality, continual splintering, and infiltration by the FBI so extreme that some groups had only a few nongovernment members. All the sensitive among them found insupportable the loss of innocence, the guilt and responsibility which are the price of knowing that you eat because another starves. For such a problem there is little solution, and no consolation. A saint may choose to starve so another may eat, but that doesn’t change the situation.

  But Val said that was all bullshit. She said to reduce the world’s power alignments to that sort of simplicity was to turn a political problem into a metaphysical one, as if, she protested, it was a given that there should be more people than food. This was not necessary. There were alternatives. Suppose people gave up eating too much; suppose they gave up – she’d met a man once whose family of four owned four cars and four snowmobiles, and that had remained her image – three of their snowmobiles and two cars. But how can you force him to do that, Clarrissa argued, except by dictatorial fiat? Socialism is wonderful in principle, horrible in practice. Not so! We think so only because we look at socialism in countries which were undeveloped, in which, without socialism, the mass of the people would have been starving. But it does seem to repress initiative, creativity, individuality. Not in Sweden, Val said. The arguments raged. The thing ended, as it began, in words.

  2

  The strike petered out as examinations began, and things returned to normal. This does not justify the claims of those cynics who believe that the uproar and protest of the sixties and early seventies had no more meaning than the rage for the lindy. The things that were revealed, discovered, and discussed in those years were driven deep into people’s minds; what happened in those years affected the way we think. Nevertheless, I do not expect that one day as I return from the beach, I will hear on my car radio that Eden has been proclaimed, except, of course, when an incumbent is running for re-election to the Presidency.

  The night of the dinner party at her house, Val had broken up with Grant. She was a little upset about it. ‘Here I am, for God’s sake, almost forty years old and I still do these things!’ What upset her was that she and Grant had not much liked each other for some time, but had done nothing about it. ‘He’s really resented me – for a lot of reasons. He wanted someone steady, someone always there, someone to minister to his hurt soul, and I wasn’t willing. But instead of walking out on me, he hangs around, sniping and griping at me, being useless in bed, always starting stupid arguments. And I, who wanted from him only a companion to have fun with, in bed and out, have not had fun with him since – well, for God’s sake, since before I left the commune. Yet I didn’t break it, I didn’t call it quits. I don’t know why I let myself fall into these depressing habits. I feel ten years younger and much more cheerful since Grant is no longer among my responsibilities. And that’s just how I’d come to think about him – as a responsibility, like a dog that has to be taken for a walk every night. Jesus! What’s wrong with me!’

  ‘It’s not just you,’ Iso said consolingly. ‘Ava and I hadn’t been happy together for a long time too. Even so, I was devastated when we split. At least you’re not that.’

  ‘My relationship with Grant never had the profundity of yours with Ava. You two really loved each other. We just like each other.’

  ‘What about me?’ Mira droned. ‘I have the worst track record around. Fifteen years with a man I probably stopped loving after six months.’

  ‘Y
ou had kids,’ Iso offered, always nourishing, salving.

  ‘I’ve thought a lot about it. You know, since Ben and I have been together. At first, I really wanted it kept private – I just wanted to be with him.’

  ‘We noticed,’ Iso grinned.

  ‘But after a while – when I was sure I loved him and he, me – I wanted – what do they say in the popular songs – to shout it from the rooftops. I wanted to go out with him in the world, to announce us as a unity, to say, we love each other, we are together. Not for the sake of showing off, but out of, well, joy. And of togetherness. I mean, it’s as though you have a new identity; you’re Mira, and you’re Mira and Ben. You want the world to recognize both. It’s a corporation of the heart, a new emotional identity. Then, I guess, you want that identity legitimated, you want it to be legal identity as well. So you get married, you have these ceremonies and official seals so that people have to treat you as a unity. But then of course, you – well, women, anyway – lose the other one, the private one. Men don’t seem to, quite as much. I don’t know why. But once you have this unified identity, once it is an entity in the world, it’s hard to give up.’

  Val shrugged: ‘I never had that with Grant.’

  Iso laughed. ‘Could anybody? He came in sullen and left sullen, wherever he went. And he came and went alone.’

  ‘That’s because he was angry with me all the time for not living with him, for not always meeting first and going together.’

  ‘So why couldn’t you break up with him sooner?’

  Val was exasperated. ‘I don’t know! That’s exactly what I don’t know!’

  It was only about a month later that Val appeared with someone new in tow. People talked about this. Her friends accepted it as they accepted everything any of them did unquestioningly, but even they wondered about it. It was not his age, although he was only twenty-three. It was his personality. In the year that he had been at Harvard, he had developed a small reputation for insanity.

  Tadziewski was tall, fair, blond, blue-eyed, and beautiful. He was also extremely erratic. He was still gangly, and his eyes wandered, as you talked to him, in various directions. He, like Anton, was in the school of government, but people wondered why. He was a member of the peace group but his attendance was erratic, and when he went, he sat in the back and spoke little. When he did speak, he expressed himself so incoherently that everyone discounted what he said. Only a few women seemed to understand him, and they regarded him with affection and respect. On the rare occasions when his name came up, they defended his humanity, his sensitivity. Those were qualities incomprehensible to Anton and his colleagues, and they wrote his appeal off as sexual. It was not. His beauty was angelic, his body disconnected. One could not imagine him being sexual. The reason he sounded incoherent, Val said, was that he was so sensitive, so acute about people’s vulnerabilities, that whenever he spoke, he went round and round, trying to find ways to say what he wanted to say without offending anyone, not because he was afraid of their disliking him but because he shrank from wounding them. ‘He’s not for this world,’ she concluded. ‘It’s funny to hear myself say that. What he is is humane. But there are damned few people with any humanity at all in that crew dedicated to saving lives in Southeast Asia. Men,’ she added with disgust.

  One evening after a long meeting, Val walked down the two flights of rickety wooden stairs in the house Julius lived in, and found Tad standing in the entry. For a moment she thought he was waiting for her, then decided she was mistaken, and started out.

  ‘Can I talk to you?’ His voice jutted out so rapidly she did not understand what he’d said, but she stopped and turned. His eyes were shining at her. ‘I never believed it, but the metaphor is true,’ Val told Iso and Mira. ‘His eyes looked like stars.’

  He stumbled, stuttered something about how he enjoyed her remarks at meetings, and that he would like to know her better. She gazed at him gravely.

  ‘I just didn’t know where he was coming from. He could have felt that I was one of the few people in the group who listened to him – which is true – and wanted in some way to express gratitude for that. He might have wanted sympathy, support. He might have been drowning and grabbed out at me as a life jacket. He might have been coming on sexually – although that seemed unlikely. But I couldn’t tell – he is so awkward, so unworldly, that he has no notion of trying to create an image – which I like, but which makes it difficult to read someone – anyway, I didn’t know how to respond.’

  ‘Thank you. I find your remarks interesting too.’

  ‘No one understands them. I’m on a different plane.’

  ‘That could be.’

  ‘They don’t know how to get beyond ego.’

  ‘Oh? What does that mean?’

  ‘They’re so involved with their own egos, they have no room for larger concerns.’

  ‘Yes,’ Val said doubtfully. Although she damned the men in the group for their egotism, she had a strong suspicion that she and Tad did not mean the same thing by the word.

  ‘You get beyond ego,’ he said eagerly. ‘That’s what I like about you.’

  ‘Umm.’ Val was puzzled. It seemed to her that she was as self-involved as the others; the difference was only that her self-involvement included others, and theirs did not. When they talked about the good of humanity, they meant what they thought humanity ought to consider good. When she did it, she spoke gropingly, as one trying to discover what felt good to people, using herself as an example.

  ‘I get beyond ego,’ Tad insisted, ‘I am killing the ego.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’

  He paled and pulled back. ‘Well of course! Don’t you?’

  ‘No.’ She was weary, and not up to a mystical discussion. ‘But keep up your effort,’ she smiled, and walked swiftly out of the door.

  After that, she paid even more attention to the things he said – when he spoke – at the meetings he attended. She heard more acutely his carefulness not to violate another’s standing place, and although she thought it was wasted effort, liked him for it. ‘Can you imagine worrying about Anton’s feelings? That’s like an Appalachian farmer worrying that his stream might interfere with TVA!’

  During the Harvard strike the meetings were long and tumultuous. Brad and Anton, who were members of SDS, wanted to merge efforts with other groups; others agreed to a degree; others did not. The group had a series of frustrating and finally destructive meetings. One night there was a meeting of representatives of all camps at Brad’s house. Val left late, discouraged. It was clear to her that the effect of the strike would be to fragment the group. She descended the stairs heavily. Tad, who had attended for a while, but left early, was standing in the entry. This time it was unmistakable; he was waiting for her. She sighed. She was not up to metaphysical discussion. She smiled a little, tried to pass him, but he put his hand on her arm.

  ‘You were brilliant tonight.’

  She turned to him, smiling tiredly, but suddenly he had his arms around her. He pushed her against the wall, he kissed her. His passion was so strong that her body reacted, uncertain as her mind was. He kept kissing her, and she kissed him back. His eyes and face were moist. She put her hand on his arm.

  ‘Tad …’

  ‘No! No! I won’t listen!’ His eyes were large and starry and moist. ‘I don’t know how else … I tried to tell you … I tried to do it politely, but I don’t know how … Don’t push me away, you can’t push me away, you pushed me away, you just slid by me last time. I don’t know how to tell you.’

  He stood there, looking intensely into her face, his right hand gently, gently caressing her hair. ‘I love you,’ he said. Now, Val was an old hand. She knew the range of interpretation possible to those words. But the boy touched her. She was intensely aware of their position. She did not know why, but she would have been unhappy had Julius or Anton descended the staircase at that moment. Their mocking, brilliant eyes, their twisting mouths – she did not want to loo
k at the two of them, Tad and her, through the eyes of Julius or Anton. But she could not, in humanity, simply push the boy away.

  ‘We can’t stay here,’ she said. ‘I have my car. Why don’t you come back to my place and we can talk?’

  He went with her as if it were the most natural thing in the world that he do so, as if it were to be expected. He walked down the outside steps and down the sidewalk to the car, with his arm around her, as if something were settled between them. Val felt this, and was able even to think it. She did not quite know how to handle it. What was she doing with this boy?

  Chris was asleep when they arrived, and Val fixed drinks for her and Tad and sat down in the living room in a single chair, rather than taking her usual place on the couch. Tad sat on a couch at a right angle to her, pressing against the table that stood beside it, as close to her as he could get.

  ‘I’ve loved you from the beginning,’ he said. ‘You’re so beautiful!’ His eyes and face were shining. ‘I knew it had to end this way.’

  ‘End? It hasn’t ended,’ Val said seriously, kindly. ‘I don’t know how it will end. How can you?’

  ‘It had to,’ he insisted, and then was on her again with his passion and his delicacy, and Val’s body at least responded, and it ended as he had anticipated.

  ‘And he’s a great lover,’ Val said thoughtfully. ‘Isn’t that strange? You wouldn’t expect that from him. He seems so disconnected. But he cares above all about me, about pleasing me. Which makes him, in my book,’ she laughed, ‘a great lover!’

  ‘This is one time,’ Mira taunted her, ‘when it wasn’t the guy who was dense.’

  ‘True,’ she shook her head. ‘I’m not sure, if I’d had a choice, I’d have chosen to get into this. But I didn’t have a choice. Not given who I am. It was all so clear for him … he had fantasized it, I guess, so often … the ending, as he called it, was so inevitable. How can you ruin the endings of someone’s fantasy?’