The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

  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 ‘Are you telling me I’ve been replaced by a woman in your affections?’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 qu
estioningly.

  ‘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!

  13

  The first time she had the nightmare was a week before her orals, and she had it every night after that. She would wake up damp and shaking and get up and smoke and pace around the apartment. But she did not tell Harley. She did not tell anyone.

  She dreamed she was in the room where orals were held, a wood-paneled room with small paned windows and a broad shining table. The three men who were to examine her were sitting at one end of the table quarrelling as she walked in. She had just stepped inside the door when she spied the pile in the corner. Instantly she knew what it was, but she was incredulous, she was so ashamed, she moved nearer to check it out. It was what she thought. She was horrified. Those stained sanitary napkins, those bloody underpants were hers, she knew they were hers, and she knew the men would know it too. She tried to stand in front of them, but there was no way she could conceal them. The men stopped quarrelling, they had turned to face her, they were peering at her …

  Her apprehension became severe anxiety. She made more lists, swiftly, grimly; she ran to the library first thing in the morning and read until Child closed, but at the end of the day she knew she had absorbed nothing, that she had read words, words, words. She did tell Harley about her panic, but he could not take it seriously.

  ‘Kyla, for God’s sake! That’s ridiculous! You have nothing to worry about!’

  He was impatient with her repeated fears; he insisted her examiners were all assholes and she would run circles around them. Beneath his impatience, she sensed his disdain for grown men who would involve themselves with something as trivial as English literature, but she was too panicked, too caught up in terror, to talk about it. She barely spoke to Harley: she read, day and night, made lists, crossed things out, and every day, dreamed the same dream.

  The day of her exam, she entered the wood-paneled room and saw the shining broad table and the three eminences sitting at it. They were quarrelling about which window, if any, should be open and how wide. Their quarrel lasted some minutes and contained surprising snarliness: over a window? she thought. They were like an aged trio who have lived together squabbling for fifty years. She glanced at the corner, but it was empty. She sat down. Her whole body was shaking.

  A little over two hours later, the judgment having been whispered in her ear by the director, she trembled down the wooden stairs of Warren House. She could not see, but she held her chin firm. She would not cry here, not in front of them, not in Warren House. She walked down carefully, holding on to the banister. She would not fall here, not here. Objects glimmered and swam in her vision, but there was a group of people, they did look familiar, it was, yes, it was Iso and Clarissa and Mira and Ben, and someone asked, ‘How did you do?’ and she said, the words gurgled out of her wet throat, ‘I passed,’ and they cheered, but they must have seen, must have been able to know, because they gathered her in their arms and helped her out and things were gray, but then there was fresh air and she was being held up and they were walking, they were all walking together and the air was fresh and sweet and it was April, and things were in bud.

  They took her to the Toga and ordered drinks, and asked her about it, and she repeated some of the questions and watched their horrified faces, and then she was able to laugh too. ‘Wasn’t that impossible? They only asked it to shake me up, but it did shake me up!’

  They drank and drank. Someone got up to phone Val, who showed up a half hour later, and someone, she had a vague feeling – it was Mira, she thought, after Iso whispered to her – telephoned Harley. But Harley never came. Kyla did not ask why, she did not ask about it. They ordered food, and after a while they left and stopped to buy a gallon of cheap wine and went back to Iso’s and sat talking and drinking until late. Kyla did not leave.

  It was after one when Iso shut the door on Val. She came back to see Kyla perched like a tiny child on the edge of a wooden chair, her arms around herself, hugging herself, shivering.

  ‘I really failed. That’s the truth,’ she said.

  Iso paled. She sat down. ‘You mean you lied?’

  ‘Oh. No. No, they said I passed. Hooten came up and whispered to me that I passed.’ Iso sighed. ‘But I really failed.’

  Iso poured them more wine. ‘Iso, it’s no use. I can’t do it. I can’t make it in their world. I can’t stand it.’ She told Iso about her dream.

  ‘Did you talk to anybody about it? That might have helped. Did you tell Harley?’

  She shook her head. ‘He would only have had more contempt for me than he has.’ She described Harley’s response to her panic. ‘It’s all of a piece – Harley, Harvard, the whole fucking world, for God’s sake! I’m just going to go home and have a couple of babies and spend the rest of my life baking bread and growing flowers and sewing gorgeous clothes. I can’t stand this, I can’t.’

  ‘Shit!’ Iso breathed.

  ‘You think it’s wrong?’

  ‘Oh, Christ!’ Iso stood up and started pacing. ‘I can’t stand what you’re feeling.’

  ‘They demoralized me, they had that kind of power. I gave them that kind of power. And you can tell from the dream what the grounds were. I can’t feel legitimate in the face of them. I’m sick of trying. I’m sick of trying to prove to Harley that I’m as rational and intelligent a human being as he, I’m sick of trying to prove to Harvard that I too can write disembodied intellectual tours de force.’

  Iso paced, holding her arms around herself, hugging herself. Kyla saw, and knew, that Iso was feeling her pain as keenly as she was. ‘The thing is,’ Iso said, her voice obviously fighting for calmness, ‘you’d be bored baking bread and growing flowers.’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t. They’re great things to do.’

  ‘Yes, they are. And almost everything in me wants to say they are the best things to do, that they are the things that really matter.’

  ‘Not according to Harvard. Or the Pentagon.’

  ‘No. And the thing is – it isn’t that I think Harvard or the Pentagon is right – or the male establishment, in any form – or that if you stay in it, you’ll do more important things than baking bread or growing flowers, because
most of what they do is even more transient, less nourishing, less creative – and having babies has to be the greatest thing there is – but,’ she turned to face Kyla, ‘the seeds were planted in you so long ago. There’s no escape for you. Don’t you see that?’

  She sat down, trembling, and sipped her wine.

  Kyla stared at her.

  ‘I know because they’re in me too,’ Iso shivered.

  ‘Seeds.’

  ‘I’m bright. You’re bright. Maybe we’re even brilliant. We have had opportunities lots of women never get. Our aspirations are equal to our intelligence and our backgrounds. We want to make it in their fucking world. But suppose we quit, suppose we say the hell with it, let them destroy themselves, I’m going to go off and cultivate my garden. Well, suppose you do that. It would be different for me. Suppose you go off with Harley or somebody and quit the shit and just have babies and grow flowers and bake bread. You still won’t feel legitimate. You’ll still feel resentful, even more so, of the world out there. You’ll hate it twofold because you’ll feel you failed in it. And you’ll hate him – the man – the one who is legitimate out there, who can make it without its seeming to devour his soul.’