The Varieties of Erotic Experience
Page 2
made her nervous. She had a dossier. There was dirt on her. She felt as if she'd found her way onto one of the FBI's infamous lists.
"You look like my son," she heard herself blurting out.
"Philip."
"Yes, she said, "yes, that's him." For a moment she was surprised that He knew her son's name. They had never met, so far as she knew. Of course, it was preposterous to be surprised. "He's gay."
"Yes," He said.
"I don't know why,” she said, not knowing why she’d said it.
"Does it matter?"
"No. Well, I guess it does," she said. "I've always wondered whether it was something I did, or Philip's father." She couldn't bring herself to utter Theo's name, although she assumed the He knew that, too, even if Theo had ended up down yonder, where he belonged.
"You mean, you wonder if you failed him somehow," He said, "or if he failed you."
"I have wondered," she said, "both of those things. I like Sam a lot," she added rather desperately, naming Philip’s friend. Already this conversation seemed to be headed in a direction she did not like. Yet she had chosen the direction. It was perverse. She wasn’t going to get this gig. No way. Her mouth had run off on its own like a badly trained dog that had somehow escaped its leash and then made a mess in the middle of the neighbor’s front lawn.
"You must have wondered, too, whether he was made that way. You wonder whether I made him that way," He said.
"Yes," she said, trying to sound as un-blaming as possible.
"Does it matter?"
"It does matter."
"Why?"
She was aware of chewing her lip. This was an unseemly tic. She’d picked up the lip-chewing from Theo, years ago. First she was scratching her ears, and now this. He would think she had fleas or cold sores or both. Theo had been gone forever, but here she was, munching away at herself, just like Theo.
"It just does."
"You want to assign blame."
She nodded her head. She might as well concede this point, since, big surprise, He knew the truth already. She didn't picture heaven as being full of blamers, and she was a blamer, she knew it. But maybe she would get partial credit for trying to be honest about it. She could offer a vow to do better. If He let her in, she would try to stop blaming. And she would stop scratching her ears and chewing her lips. Whatever it took.
"Blame implies that there's a fault or problem someone needs to be held accountable for. Blame implies that something went wrong, rather than that there was just a variation. Don’t you think?"
Well, excuse me, something had gone wrong: She was dead, and she’d died of unhappiness. Her son was a homosexual, and apparently she was now being told that He’d made him a homosexual. She couldn't possibly say this to Him, it seemed much too cheeky, but there it was, as plain as day.
"I wish he hadn't been gay."
“For his sake or your sake?”
This was an awkward question.
"You don’t have to answer that," He said. "But it is his life and his destiny. Do you think Philip is loved?"
"You mean, now that I'm … I think he is loved, yes."
"You believe that he knows what love is."
Was He asking or telling? She nodded tentatively. She was thinking: No one knows what love is, and what do You mean by believe? That was a tricky word.
He looked at her, and she knew what He was thinking. It was as if she could read His mind instead of the other way around. He was thinking that love had come to Philip in the person of Sam. This wasn't surprising, really, when you thought about what Sam's mother was like. She was a loving woman who loved her son for who and what he was. And what was he? He was a human being afloat on the river of time like everyone else; he was heading right for the falls like everybody else. The shape of his raft really didn't matter. Sam’s mother loved him so much that when his friend’s mother had taken sick, she’d come to help.
He looked at June, and His eyes were asking if she felt that way about her own son. His beautiful eyes -- blue-gray, she thought, though the light played tricks -- were quite different from Philip's, which were hazel, just like her own. She certainly had mixed feelings about Philip, and this complicated the love question. She wanted to say she loved him but didn't always like him, but that would sound too clever and premeditated.
She didn't like his ambition. That she could admit to; it was a bit less sweeping. Could she admit that she didn't like it that he'd found love while she never did? She didn’t like it that he seemed to know what love was while she didn’t. She didn’t like it that he didn't love her unreservedly, the way children were supposed to love their parents, their mothers in particular?
He made very little effort to conceal this shortcoming. Oh yes, he’d been a good son. He’d been there endlessly when she was ill, helping her out of chairs, bringing toast and brewing tea, looking after the house, watering the garden. But he always managed to imply that he regarded these exertions as his duty and obligation. He honored them for reasons that had little to do with her. He did not seem to care what she thought of him, and this was upsetting. A son ought to care what his mother thought of him. He ought to be swayed by her views. He ought to seek out and accept her guidance.
Perhaps, she thought, she should have been more philosophical about the path he’d taken through life. She shouldn’t have taken it so personally. According to him, it wasn't a matter in which he'd had any say, yet she'd spent an enormous amount of emotional and psychic treasure in waging an unwinnable war to make him into the son she thought he should be. He was suppoed to be her son. Disapproving of a son's life was like disapproving of the wind. You might dislike it. You might wish it blew from the south instead of from the north. It might bite your face and knock over your garbage cans in the middle of the night, but it didn't care what you thought, and you couldn’t change it. It didn't care if you disapproved, and it wouldn't have cared even if you had approved. It would have gone on howling and whistling regardless. That was its nature and fate.
Of course, it was human nature to rage against indifferent and untameable forces It was natural to denounce the numbing wind and have the mischievous sea whipped if it rose against one's navy. It was particularly human nature to rage against indifference if one were full of the sense that life had not unfolded the way it was supposed to. His eyes were calm and kind, yet she saw a lifetime of her own crushed and dented expectations reflected in them.
She saw that her life had been an exercise in thwartedness, and that her toxic feelings about that life had not found adequate expression until they’d turned themselves into lethal cancer. Her unhappiness had organized itself around her son because he was at hand. He was was supposed to be her junior and subordinate. Yet had made choices different from hers. By doing that, he had called her own choices into question. They both had eyes of hazel, but they saw different worlds.
Why had she been so miserable? She wasn't miserable now, sitting in this office, looking into His blue-grey eyes and seeing a quizzical empathy in them. She was almost happy, even though the interview was going badly. She expected that any moment that He would push one of His little hidden buttons to send her tumbling down a chute to the netherworld.
Unhappiness was a form of pain, and pain was a signal something was wrong. It meant: change your life. She had chosen to express her unhappiness by disapproving of Philip, because that was easier than disapproving of herself. She couldn't give Philip an illness, but she could become ill herself. She could let her misery fester into depression, and depression became illness: the feeling made flesh.
She could not help disapproving of Philip. It was the way she felt, and why should she be blamed for that? Surely it was unfair to judge someone's feelings. It was unfair to judge a person by feelings she had. Feelings were not subject to the moral sense. He would understand this. It was a part of His design. He would have to judge her by her actions. How had she trea
ted Philip, how had she behaved toward Philip?
Well, how had she? She had fed and clothed him and put him through school. She had endured his many phases and moods. She had accepted Sam as a permanent reality in his life. She had many times welcomed Sam as a guest into her home -- now their home, since the house had passed on her passing to Philip, and Philip and Sam were a union in the eyes of the law.
Since she liked Sam, she was reconciled about the change of possession. In fact she was happier that Sam was living there than that Philip was. Sam would take better care of the house. He was more considerate and gentle. He was less full of that terrible male drive for power and glory. He was less full of himself. Philip was a conqueror, and nobody loved conquerors. They were impossible. People did fear them and fawn over them, which could produce the illusion of affection.
Sam, she had long felt, had caught a tiger by the tail, yet he had managed not to be devoured or even scratched by the tiger. By some mysterious power, he was protected from the tiger’s fangs and claws. He rarely showed even the slightest exasperation. He was a man locked in a cage with his tiger, calmly reading the newspaper while the big cat paced and prowled, growled and glared. No matter how hungry the big cat grew, it would leave the man alone. The man would speak soothing words, and the tiger would come to be stroked. She wondered what those