The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

  ‘Leave me alone, fuck it! Leave me alone! I can do it myself!’

  Iso dropped her hair and retreated a few feet and sat down in the grass with her back to Kyla. There were tears in her eyes. Kyla got free in time, she marched up to Iso, faced her, and when she saw her, plopped down opposite her and sobbed. Her face broke out in blotches. ‘I don’t need you! I don’t want to need you!’

  Iso’s eyes dried. She looked at Kyla sadly. She knew that Kyla was crying because she was being cruel to her, Iso, and because she didn’t want to be cruel and she couldn’t help it. It was her own round robin, a circle of emotions only tangentially related to Iso. It was Kyla’s trip.

  ‘But what about me?’ she asked quietly after a while. ‘I am a person who has learned to demand nothing. Don’t I count at all?’

  ‘You! You! What about you! It’s all pure pleasure with you, it’s love, I owe you nothing!’

  She leaned back and lighted another cigar, and watched the smoke circle around her. She felt utterly empty. She had poured herself out for them and they had drunk her. They would go on drinking her up as long as she poured herself out. But if she stopped, who would come to her, why would they come? She, with her strangeness. Men came because they wanted to screw her; women, because she offered them love. It never occurred to anyone that she wanted something too. But then she had not acted as if she wanted something too.

  She stood up and began to pace, walking around the shabby room that had held so much dramatic life, straightening pictures, books, emptying ashtrays that had lain there for a week.

  She felt completely isolated. She was a loving mother whose children had all grown up healthy and left. She thought: I am just as alone as if they had never existed, as if I had never poured them glasses of love and sympathy, spent myself on them. She sat down, her back erect, her head at attention. This was the nature of things. She was the woman for everyone; she played the woman to women’s men. And suffered the way women suffered from men. Illegitimate of illegitimates, servant of servants. It was good; it was better than it had been; but it was not good enough. She would have to find a little man in her, whatever that meant. It did not mean being a champion sailor, or canoeing in white water, or being able to fence, all of which she did very well. It meant insisting on self, not the way they did, God forbid, but a little. Otherwise you were the tramping ground of the world. A little. But how did one do that?

  She sat up late, thinking about it. She would have liked to talk to Val; and dialed her number several times, but there was no answer. Val had the secret, she really had things knocked. Tomorrow.

  She went to bed with her mouth firmly set. But she could not decide anything about how to live. All she had decided was to close her door. From now on, she was going to spend more time with her work. She loved it, it was always a wrench for her to stop, but a wrench she had not minded for their sakes, her friends. No more. Let them knock.

  But it was only a few nights later that Clarissa knocked, late, around ten, and without thinking, Iso went to open the door, glancing back at the last sentence she had written.

  She stood at the door looking coolly at her friend. Clarissa stood there with intense eyes. ‘I came to apologize,’ she said. Iso opened the door. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said fervently. ‘You’ve been true to me and a friend to me and I – it was just that I couldn’t stand it, it was too painful, and I blamed you, I know that’s ridiculous …’

  Iso tried not to smile, but she was delighted, and ended by returning Clarissa’s embrace.

  ‘Oh, well, I was tired anyway. It’s about time to quit. How about a drink?’

  Clarissa handed her a paper bag. ‘I stopped and bought us some Scotch.’

  They settled themselves in the living room with their drinks. The old rapport was there, the old comfort, but something subtle had changed. Iso was less affectionate, less demonstrative. She seemed to keep back part of herself.

  ‘I came back to ask you if I can sleep here. I’m not going back to Duke. I’d be glad to pay the expenses if you’ll let me stay here until I find a new apartment.’

  ‘Sure.’ She almost said, ‘You don’t have to pay anything,’ but stopped herself.

  ‘What I don’t understand, what I can’t forgive myself for, is having been blind for so long.’

  Iso smiled. ‘Shall I call Mira? She has you beat by some ten or so years. You can sing the lament chorus.’

  ‘But it undermines your confidence in your own intellect, your own perceptions.’

  ‘And we all go through it.’

  Clarissa leaned forward grinning. ‘Shit!’ she said and reached for Iso’s hand. ‘Can I sleep with you tonight?’

  Clarissa settled in with Iso very contentedly. Duke was wild. He threw himself into work with the MIT group every evening and weekends. He did not suspect that Clarissa and Iso were lovers; but he felt that ‘the women’ had won. He could not bear that; he felt emasculated. He told that to anyone who would listen. He never probed what lay beneath his words, what ‘emasculated’ meant to him. It was a term calculated to gain him sympathy, and with his male friends, and an occasional prostitute, it did. In fact, he was still not able to have an erection, but it never occurred to him that this had anything to do with him. It was all because of the bitch, Clarissa. His male friends shook their heads sympathetically: they knew how it was. They told their wives about this poor guy done in by his bitch of a wife who wouldn’t even wash a dish. But behind his back, they joked about him.

  Mira and Ben, however, were still fine. The summer seemed an idyll to them, broken only by the unhappiness of their friends, and Mira’s shakenness for a few days after she visited Val. She had begun research for her thesis the day after her orals, and she found she loved the whole process. She was one of those odd people who enjoys compiling bibliographies, and takes pleasure in reading scholarly books and articles. She was as painstaking in this work as she had been in running a house; she bought special file cards which enabled her to cross-reference by a set of ingenious little holes. She worked methodically from nine thirty every morning to three thirty every afternoon, and at home in the evenings. Yet it did not seem slavery to her but freedom. For the first time, she understood what graduate school had been about: it was all designed to free her for this. She did not have to worry over every detail; she had enough knowledge to make certain statements, and enough awareness of how to get knowledge to find out how to make others. That was liberating. She was free to be as methodical as she chose in a work that seemed significant. What more could she ask?

  She felt she was doing the work she had been born to do. She charged into her stack of books and articles with the exultation she imagined an explorer feels, starting off before the sun is fully risen, breathing the chilly, clean morning air, listening to bird noises and the tramp of her own feet in the dry brush as she chooses a path into the wilderness. Each day she opened the volumes with a fast pulse: would she discover her own hard-won points spread out gracefully and easily in the pages of someone who wrote before she was born? Or a sharp word or sentence that would jab the seed in her mind into sudden fruitfulness? Would she reach the Indies, that place where literature, logic, and life came together in one beautiful whole, a crystal oval one could hold in one’s palm? Or an interpretation so searching and so strongly argued that it demolished her fragments before they ever cohered?

  She felt strongly, but confided only to Ben, that what she was doing required courage. It seemed ludicrous: courage, to sit in a library day by day reading, writing? Courage of the backside, perhaps. But so she felt it. She crowed to Ben, glowed to him, full of joy and the sense of discovery, of fury at the outrageous comments of A, awed love for poor B, dead so many years and smart so long ago, intense involvement with C, who was both brilliant and prejudiced. Ben glowed back and listened and grabbed her just a moment or two before she was through, always cutting her off in midsentence, but always at the right time, to kiss her. It was, she felt, love’s hardest test, and
his score went off the scale.

  Ben’s cartons had finally all been exposed, their contents arranged in careful piles in both rooms, and the hallway of his small apartment. He had begun to write, but it was wretched labor to him, and he would not show Mira his pages. He concerned himself most, he told her, with the state of his pencil points, sharpening them all many times each day. ‘A pencil lasts me five days, tops. I guess I feel if they’re sharp, I might be.’

  Occasionally they took a day off; sometimes they drove to the coast with Iso and Clarissa and Grete, or with Ben’s friends David and Armand, and Armand’s wife Lee. But often, because they were apart most of the time, they went off alone, feeling a little treacherous toward those friends who were carless and suffering in the Cambridge heat, but with the same delicious delight kids feel sneaking out of school. And in August, Mira, Ben, and the boys went to Maine. They had rented a little cottage on a lake; it came with a rowboat, a canoe, and a barbecue grill. All of them threw off their work completely and rollicked for two weeks. Ben threw his work off with particular zest. He tore around the beach like a wild man, threw softballs and Frisbees with the boys, swam, rode, and took them out in the boats as if his body had been let out of a cage. Mira played with them sometimes, but sometimes sat with a book, wearing giant sunglasses, watching them, a smile of complete contentment on her face.

  They all cooked together, and did what little cleaning they did together. They all experimented. Norm made chili (Mira’s recipe) and Clark spaghetti sauce (Ben’s recipe) and were applauded. Ben tried to make pecan pie, and Mira tried to put live lobsters in a pot: these experiments were not successful. At night they sat up talking, playing cards, teaching the boys to play bridge. There was poor TV reception on the lake, but no one seemed to notice. And late, tired, Mira and Ben sank into bed in each other’s arms, and as often as not, turned over to go to sleep. When they did make love, it was quietly: the boy’s room was contiguous to theirs. But if there was less passion, there was tenderness and complete security. No belch nor fart could dismay them. They might as well, Mira thought, have been married.

  21

  Kyla and Harley had planned to leave Aspen in mid-August to go to Wisconsin and visit Harley’s parents, and return to Boston early in September. But one night in August, Iso’s phone rang late, after midnight, and a nervous voice blurted, ‘Iso, I’ve left Harley. For good.’ She was at the MTA station; her apartment was sublet, and she had no place to stay.

  It is at moments like this that a lifetime’s formation is revealed. People write plays or movies about agonized decisions, but I think our important decisions are made instantly, and all the talk is simply later rationalization. Iso’s life had been made up of concealment and that was her first impulse now.

  ‘Take a cab to Mira’s and wait for me there. She’s away. I have her key. I’ll meet you there in a half hour.’

  Clarissa was in the living room watching a baseball game on a TV rebroadcast, but Iso was whispering. She stood in the bedroom with racing heart, feeling her hot cheeks, preparing a story. When Mira asked her later why she had not simply invited Kyla to stay with her and Clarissa, she had no answer. She knew only that it was necessary to lie. She and Clarissa had an acquaintance who was known as a gossip and a prude, a young graduate student named Peggy. Clarissa was not eager to have the truth about their relationship known. These facts came instantly into Iso’s mind.

  ‘That was Peggy,’ she told Clarissa with an irritated frown.

  ‘Peggy!’

  ‘Yeah, she sounded very upset. I couldn’t ask her to come here –’ She let that hang.

  ‘But why would she call you? You aren’t a friend of hers.’

  ‘Well, I guess she doesn’t have many friends. And I was talking to her in Lehman Hall the other day. Maybe she thinks I’m her friend. She sounded almost hysterical. I told her I’d come over.’

  Iso knew that Clarissa would not argue, would not question why Iso had to go there, and would not call Peggy or even speak to her about the thing.

  Iso raced to Mira’s, but Kyla was already there, her small figure standing alone on the sidewalk in front of Mira’s house, a suitcase beside her, looking somehow battered. Iso spotted her under the streetlight. She could have been a worn-out prostitute, waiting for business, or a shopgirl who had worked ten hours and was waiting for a bus to take her to her cold room and a supper of bread and cheese. She looked like that, and Iso’s heart turned over. Why did she look like that? Kyla saw her and ran toward her, and they embraced each other, laughing, nearly crying, Kyla babbling nonstop about planes and buses and Wisconsin and Ohio, and Iso had to grab her arm and drag her inside, and sit her down and make her start at the beginning while she searched Mira’s closets for something to drink. All she could find was brandy.

  Aspen had been deadly. They lived in a condominium where there was no possibility of growing flowers and no equipment for baking bread and she had no books but Shakespeare and the library there was terrible and Harley was unsympathetic because she had not had enough foresight to pack her books. He was at the conference every day; at night, as often as not, they had to attend stuffy dinners with visiting celebrities and other physicists – ‘not notable for their conversational grace,’ Kyla said dryly. After two weeks she decided to leave, to take the car and drive to New Mexico, Arizona, anyplace. Harley didn’t mind if she left, but he wanted the car. Harley was very happy there: he was in his element. She took to hanging around in the afternoons in the pretty bars and cafés that line the town, gardens in which you could sit all afternoon and drink beer. She met people, kids traveling who had come to see Aspen. She decided to go on the road with a bunch of them. They were heading for Santa Fe. Harley exploded, but she packed the little clothing, the one book she had brought out in a canvas backpack, and went. They hiked, camped, hitched, bussed all the way to Arizona. She shacked up with a couple of the guys. She was trying to have ‘real’ experience, but, she laughed, ‘Shabby as they looked, one was a Ph.D. candidate at Berkeley and one had his degree from Colorado. Another one was a geologist. The women were all students too, but young, undergraduates at Colorado and Utah. It was a pretty safe adventure.’

  Last week she went back to Aspen; Harley wouldn’t speak to her. ‘I don’t know, I suddenly saw. You know, you were the person who showed me what love could be.’ She touched Iso’s hand lightly. ‘With you, every day was so rich. I felt good about myself, about life. But I guess I kept thinking that was because you were a woman and only women knew how to love. And I guess I couldn’t see my future that way – I’m sorry, Iso.’ Iso was gazing at her intently; she did not look wounded. ‘You know, I still had the traditional picture – marriage, kids, the good life – especially after I visited my folks.’ She bit her lip. Iso noticed it was almost healed, and she tapped Kyla’s cheek lightly.

  ‘Stop it! It’s almost healed.’

  Kyla stopped. ‘Yes! My hands too!’ She held them up. ‘It was that time on the road. Not that it was good, you see. Oh, it was wonderful to travel and to travel that way, and I loved seeing those places. But the people I was traveling with, well they were okay, but they were a little disconnected too, you know, and not all that interesting. The women seemed terribly young to me. But I never felt the way I feel around Harley. Sex wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad. It made me see that the difference wasn’t between you and Harley, but Harley and most people. And that difference is exactly what I loved about Harley, his superiority, his excellence, his cold intelligence that keeps him from getting deflated by little things like emotions or sensations,’ she laughed. ‘With these people on the road, I felt comfortable, and I have to admit, for once in my life I felt superintelligent! I didn’t feel squashed, the way I always do around Harley. I didn’t feel that the best I could do in life would be to bake bread and grow flowers. I felt smart, and full of energy. I wanted to do something. So I went back to Aspen to tell Harley. But he wouldn’t speak to me. He spat coldly at me the night I arrived
that I’d humiliated him in front of his colleagues by going off like that with a bunch of bums. I’d humiliated him again. It was Kontarsky all over again. But this time I didn’t feel guilty, and this time I understood what my problem was. Because I did love Harley, I do love Harley: I think he’s great. But he crushes me. He’s great for himself, but he’s bad for me. I don’t know why, I don’t think he means to be.’

  ‘Kyla, he’s selfish and cold and unloving,’ Iso burst out. She had never said a bad word about Harley before.

  ‘No, he’s just totally involved in his work. As he should be.’

  Iso shrugged.

  ‘Whatever,’ Kyla said, brushing hair out of her face. In the past two years, she had let her bangs grow out, and her hair now hung down straight from the part. It looked straggly and dirty. She looked as if she hadn’t changed her clothes in a month. And if her hands were healed, her fingernails were bitten to the skinline. ‘I told Harley I’d come back to tell him why I was leaving him, and he turned pale. It’s funny. He gets so mad, he seems to hate my guts, sometimes he looks at me with that icy glare of his and I think he wants to kill me. But he doesn’t want me to leave. He wants me to hang around so he can hate me,’ she giggled. ‘So he can pick and carp and tell me how rotten I am. Isn’t that strange?’ But she was smiling, which seemed to Iso even stranger. ‘He immediately assumed that I was going back to you, and he began to attack you. It was really strange. You know what he’s mad at? He was interested – he wanted to have an affair with you! He felt you liked him –’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘But he thought you liked him sexually.’

  ‘Some people can’t tell an avocado from an acorn squash.’

  ‘He isn’t emotionally educated. He’s emotionally ignorant, that’s what he is.’ Kyla sounded bitter now, angry: this too was new. ‘He was furious because, he said, “She came to my house, she acted friendly to me, she ate my food, she drank my liquor, and all to seduce my wife!” I said it was as much my house, food, liquor as his. My fellowship paid as much as his, and that I was not just his wife, and that it was my choice. He said, “I refuse to talk about it. I refuse to be drawn into the pollution of that Cambridge cesspool. It’s disgusting. And don’t tell me you’re going to her out of choice. You’re just going to try to get at me, to try to prove something. Go, go ahead to your dyke friend! But when you get starved for real lovemaking, don’t knock at my door!”’