The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

  Kyla smiled a cruel cold smile. ‘I sat there very calmly through all that. I did not let myself think how much I loved him. When he was finished, I said, very coolly, “You don’t need to worry about that, Harley. When I want real lovemaking, I go to Iso.”

  ‘He just sat there. You could see under his inexpressive exterior that he was stunned, but he said nothing, he sat there for a few minutes, then he got up and left the house. I called the airline, and got the first flight out. I left before he returned, so we never said good-bye formally. I’m sorry I hurt him. But he was so ugly, so stupidly assured. I can’t tolerate stupidity in Harley.’

  ‘We don’t, in our idols.’

  Kyla was playing with Iso’s fingers. ‘Do you think I was cruel?’

  ‘Yes. I also think it was about time.’

  Kyla rested her head on Iso’s shoulder. Iso put her arm around Kyla, ‘And where have you been since then?’

  ‘At my brother’s. I visited with them for a few days. That was good too, really good. You know, they have it all – the big house, the successful husband, the bright, handsome wife who does everything right, the three kids. God, it was deadly. The things they talk about, the things they’re concerned with! Ugh! I could never stand it. If that’s what baking bread turns into, I’ll skip it. The kids were wonderful, though,’ she said a little wistfully, as though she had already put such things behind. She sat up suddenly. ‘How come I couldn’t come to your place?’

  Iso told her about the trouble between Clarissa and Duke. ‘She’s staying with me for a while, until she finds a place. I wanted to be alone with you, and I couldn’t very well ask her to leave. She hasn’t any other place to go. You know, Clarissa’s so quiet, she doesn’t have many friends.’

  ‘Ummm. You’re a sweetheart, Iso, you’re so good.’ Kyla nestled in Iso’s arms. Iso spent the night there with her, sleepless long after Kyla had given in to her exhaustion, preparing tomorrow’s lies.

  For, having begun that way, there was no choice but to continue. She had to get Kyla back to Cambridge, she had to create stories to explain why Clarissa stayed on and on, and why Kyla could not show her feelings for Iso in front of Clarissa, and tales of explanation for Clarissa, as to where she was, day after day. She was aided in her fictions by Clarissa’s desire for secrecy, by Duke’s suspicion, and by Mira’s empty apartment. For the next two weeks, she spent all her time either with Kyla or with Clarissa or plotting. Her work fell apart. She felt weary and trapped, but she kept going.

  Mira returned to Cambridge; Kyla’s apartment was free, but Harley was in it. Kyla did not want to stay there, and she demanded that it was time Clarissa found a place of her own. Iso became adept at the instant lie as she wove explanations: Clarissa was in love with Iso, Iso did not return the affection, but did not want to hurt Clarissa, who was in bad shape after the breakup with Duke. Clarissa did not seem to Kyla to be in a bad shape, in fact, she seemed happier than ever, if also, somehow, older. Clarissa did not understand why Iso was absent so much of the time, and when she stopped at Child, Iso was not there. Iso ran, more and more panicked. She did not stop to think where she was going. She was in a flying cage at an amusement park, being tossed so dizzyingly she had no leisure to consider what position she would be in when the motor slowed, the ride ended.

  Frantic and pressured, one day she told Mira about it.

  ‘The French would make a farce out of it,’ Mira grinned.

  ‘I know, I know,’ Iso said, twisting her hands.

  ‘Why don’t you just tell them the truth?’

  ‘I can’t. I can’t hurt them that way.’

  Mira gazed at her. ‘Hurt them?’

  ‘You’re right,’ Iso said without looking up. ‘I can’t choose.’

  Eventually, Iso lost control. Kyla, in a hassle with Harley about who would keep their apartment, although neither could afford to keep it alone, got disgusted with what she saw as Iso’s weak kindheartedness to Clarissa, and went to see Clarissa herself. She understood that Clarissa was still shaky from the breakup of her marriage, but everything was shaky, and it was necessary now that Iso move in with Kyla, and that Clarissa either take over Iso’s apartment or find another. Clarissa blinked: What? But it was Kyla who was shattered by the breakup of her marriage, which was why Iso had to spend so much time with her, listening to her grief. Kyla blinked. Both turned to Iso.

  It was the worst moment in Iso’s life. She sat there, on a wooden chair, under their interrogation, their accusation, and admitted it all. She had no excuse. Her fingers twisted, her mouth pursed, her eyes were moist, but she did not cry. She said only, ‘I love you both. I couldn’t choose.’

  ‘I had given up all notion of living a normal life,’ Kyla stormed. ‘I was willing to live openly with you, to renounce marriage, to forget having children!’

  ‘So was I!’ Clarissa agreed.

  ‘You weren’t! You wanted secrecy.’

  ‘Yes,’ Clarissa said sadly. ‘But I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I decided some weeks ago that as soon as the divorce goes through, I would do it, make that leap, give up that life entirely, those aspirations.’

  Things were probably still resolvable at that moment, Mira thought – for she had stumbled into the scene that afternoon. If Iso had even then been able to say, ‘But you, you I can’t live without!’ to either of them, there would have been wounds and tears and attacks, but that one would have stuck. But she didn’t. She looked up at them with dancing eyes and a wicked smile and said:

  ‘Okay! How about we all live openly together, then?’ She giggled with delight at their love, and her pleasure in them.

  Clarissa leaped up, picked up the wooden chair she had been sitting on, and smashed it to the floor and ran out into the bathroom. Kyla leaped across the room and hit Iso, pounding her around the head. Iso put her hands over her head and cried out, ‘Hey, stop! Stop, man, this is crazy!’ but she was giggling at the same time.

  Mira tried to calm things down, but she was a bit like a woman trying to give a tea party in the middle of the London blitz. The cries, the tears, the accusations, the stormings in and out of rooms went on for over an hour. Mira sat back in an armchair, a glass of sharp bourbon – someone had left it there – in her hand. Iso sat in the middle, patiently, looking like a martyr being attacked by Romans.

  Eventually, Kyla fell on a chair exhausted, and Clarissa, startled at the silence, sat down across the room, her arms folded across her chest, looking at no one. Iso got up, went into the kitchen, and came back with four glasses of gin and tonic. They all took one without looking at each other. Finally Clarissa said, still looking at the wall, ‘You don’t take us seriously. That’s the real sin.’

  Iso gazed at her with love. Clarissa turned and saw it, and turned away again quickly. ‘You’re right,’ Iso said quietly, and they all turned to look at her. She was still sitting on a wooden chair in the middle of the room which was littered with a smashed chair, spilled ashtrays that had been thrown across the room, spilled coffee from cups that had been tipped over. She was looking down at her hands, calm, but with the tremendous inner power that comes when someone is digging inside themselves as deeply as they can, and pulling up whatever old boots and rusty cans and chipped axes they find.

  ‘I won’t ask you to forgive me; I don’t really feel in need of forgiveness. I am sorry I hurt you, but I’m not sorry I was able to love you both all this while, or that you loved me. And if hurt is the price for that, well, I’m willing to pay it, and you must know I’m not feeling too good right now.’

  ‘You paid it knowingly,’ Clarissa said. ‘We were never given a choice.’

  Iso nodded. ‘True, true. Look, I’m not trying to say what I did was right, or that you should think it was, or that you shouldn’t hate me, or whatever you feel. I just want to tell you how I feel. I don’t take you seriously. That isn’t because of you, isn’t because I don’t respect you or your feelings. It’s hard to explain. I don’t take anything seriously,
you see? It isn’t you, it’s me. I guess maybe I took Ava as seriously as I ever took anyone, but even then … there was always a part of me that didn’t. I mean, think about it. What makes you take something seriously? It isn’t ardor, or affection, or friendship – because we had those, and they were good, and they aren’t the reason you’re angry with me now. The thing that makes you take a thing seriously is the belief that it will endure. You were both planning futures – and I went along with that, I can’t deny it – but I forget, you know, I’m inclined to slide over the fact that other people aren’t like me. You felt you had sacrificed something – the proper, the respectable life, the husband, kids, career, house, whatever – a place in the world that you would not have to fight too hard to get, that was waiting for you because you are what you are and because you were doing things the usual way.

  ‘But that has never existed for me. Well, once I tried to do it, I got myself engaged to a man, but that didn’t last long, it was hopeless. So I’ve spent my life, sort of a beggar, standing outside the restaurant, waiting for table scraps …’

  ‘Ooooooh!’ Kyla brayed.

  ‘No, now let me finish. I’m not, you should be able to see I’m not sitting here feeling sorry for myself. Not too sorry, anyway,’ she laughed deprecatorily, and they all found themselves smiling at her.

  ‘The image is true to my sense of my own ability to fit into the mainstream of life, to be like everybody else, to be accepted like other people, to be one of the people the minister talks to when he comes out of church, one of the people who invites him back for Sunday dinner, to try my baked beans and potato salad and banana cream pie. You know?’

  ‘Would you want that?’

  ‘That’s not the point. I don’t know if I’d want it or not. All I know is I can’t ever have it. I couldn’t bear to sleep with a man, but a normal life, husband, kids, house, all that, what is considered the good life, the right life, the fulfilling life – that’s always been out of the question for me. Don’t you see? It’s a major difference, it changes the way you see everything.’

  The women did not speak, but there was a change in the room. They were moving, crossing legs, sipping drinks, lighting cigarettes, and all of them heard a murmur, deep in the throat, inaudible but sensed, of assent.

  ‘So I learned to take what I could get. Joy on the wing, or something like that. I don’t think in terms of forever because forever is not something I can hope for. That I love you – you can’t doubt that, can you? You don’t?’ she turned to them, almost desperately.

  ‘No,’ Kyla said fervently, softly, leaning forward.

  ‘No,’ Clarissa said, sitting back with crossed arms, her face looking like a tragic mask.

  ‘Oh!’ She sighed. ‘Good.’ She sighed again. ‘You know, in a way, I’m glad it’s over. I was getting really weary, really uptight: the deceit game is not fun.’ She stopped, as if she felt it were over, and she smiled around the room, radiantly, like a child who feels the approval of the entire family.

  ‘You’re not quite off the hook, though,’ Clarissa said. Iso glanced swiftly at her.

  ‘One thing we can’t forgive you for is not taking us seriously. I guess we can understand that. But the basic thing we can’t forgive you for is for not loving one of us more than the other.’

  Iso threw herself back against the chair and hit her forehead with her hand. ‘I can’t! I can’t! Why can’t I?’ she asked Mira wildly.

  They all turned to Mira as if she would know, and she gasped a laugh in embarrassment. She had to say something. She wished desperately that Val were there. Val would know. How should she know? ‘It seems to me,’ she heard herself say gropingly, ‘that what Iso was saying is that she long ago gave up the hope that she would ever find the grail. You know – you must love God because He is the only one you can love for Eternity. The love that fills all need, assuages all hurt, excites and stimulates when boredom falls, and is absolute, I mean absolute, that never fails no matter what you do or don’t do, what you are or fail to be. I think we all spend our lives searching for that, and obviously we never find it. Even if we do find it – like some people’s mothers love them that way, you know? – it’s not enough, it doesn’t fulfill, it is too smothering or too submissively accepting, not exciting enough. So we go on searching, feeling discontent, sensing that the world or what it promised us has failed us, or even worse,’ she glanced quickly at Kyla, ‘that we have failed it. And some of us learn, late, I’m afraid, that that isn’t possible. And we give up the hope. Once that happens, we are in a different place from other people; we can’t communicate it easily, but we have different standards. We are more easily contented, more easily pleased. Love, rare thing, when it happens, is a wonderful gift, a toy, a miracle, but we don’t count on it to protect us from future days when it rains and the typewriter breaks and it’s just as well because the words won’t come anyway, and the article has to be written by Monday and mailed, or there won’t be enough money for next month’s rent – you know. Love is a golden rain that comes down when it will, and as it spatters in your open palm you exclaim over its brightness, its wonderful moistening of your dry life, its glitter, its warmth. But that’s all. You can’t hold on to it. It can’t fill all of you. If there were five Bens out there in Cambridge, I could love all of them as much as I love him. But there are few Bens anywhere. But the two of you – and some others too – Grete, Val, my old friend Martha – my God! You are a cornucopia of wonders. Iso can’t choose between you because she doesn’t need you, because neither of you can fill her up but both of you nourish her, and she doesn’t imagine, delude herself that either of you can do for her what her mother’s womb did.’

  They all turned to Iso, who did have tears in her eyes now, and was gazing with love at Mira. ‘You left one out,’ she said. ‘Yourself.’

  Their parting that night was as graceful as a ballet, and as formal. The formality did not arise from stiffness or anger, but from the sense that all of them had that something had ended, some way of relating, and nothing new had yet arisen to supplant it. Until it did, a certain graciousness of manner, a deep courtesy, was all that could express their profound intimacy and their impassible distances. One could understand and understand; but one still needed what one needed. They remained friends; but the almost necessary visit to Iso’s every afternoon turned into an occasional Friday or Saturday night. Clarissa found a room somewhere else; Kyla found someone to share her apartment. Iso’s apartment still held afternoon visitors, but not as frequently, and it was a new group.

  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 volcan
ic 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.