by David Plante
Early after all, we sat in the bar of the restaurant and ordered tequila. Germaine said, referring to the woman we were to meet, “I hope her two friends are poofs. I wouldn’t be able to take two heavy ladies.” We ordered more tequila. We were sitting by a fireplace in which piñon logs were burning. A moment of intimacy seemed to encircle us. From time to time I’d reach out and touch her, or lean towards her and kiss her.
The elderly woman came with an academic husband and wife.
In Santa Fé, before we went to our rooms, we walked around the Plaza, under the arcades, to fart out, Germaine said, the gas from the beans of all the bad Mexican food we’d eaten. She stopped, or I stopped, to fart, then, laughing, we continued.
I was drunk, and threw off my clothes and got into bed.
•
Saturday morning, our last full day, we went out to look through the shops we hadn’t been into.
The first shop was filled with fur coats. As Germaine was looking at them, an old thin man wearing a toupee approached as if to take from Germaine’s hands the coat she was examining. She still wore her check flannel shirt and bib overalls and jogging shoes. She asked the man, “How much is this?” He said something like, “Forty-three thousand dollars.” “I want to try it on,” she said. He helped her on with it, and Germaine strode about the shop, swinging the coat, and pausing at mirrors to look at it on her. I said, “That’s beautiful, Germaine,” and I found myself emphasizing her name so the man in the toupee might twig who was in his shop. She said, “I’m not sure.” She tried on other furs, all expensive, which the man helped her with. Again and again, I’d say, “Germaine—,” because I wanted the old man to know I was with someone on whom, if he knew, he would have waited with deferential attention. She said to the man, “I don’t think any will do, really.” “Very well,” he said. We left.
In the sunlight, the snow was melting and dripping from the adobe roofs.
I asked, “Would you really have bought a fur coat if you’d found one you liked?”
“I was just playing,” she said. She sprinted a little ahead of me, along a street. When I got to her she clapped her hands and said, “We’re going to do a lot of playing in the shops.”
We went into shop after shop up and down Canyon Road, and Germaine, it seemed to me, looked at every single item, even every bad painting. Often she’d point out a bit of weaving or pottery, Indian and old, and say, “Look.” About turquoise, she said she was pretty tired of it (and she had by now learned the names of all the different kinds and where each was from), but when, in one shop, she saw in a glass case a bracelet of silver and mellow greenish turquoise, she said to me, “Look at that. It’s very moving.”
I laughed.
She said, “You see, I am becoming like you.”
In another shop she tried on Ecuadorean ponchos. The saleslady, who wore many silver and turquoise bracelets, recognized Germaine, and said, “We’re very impressed.” A lot of attention was given to her also by other salespeople in the shop. Germaine often hugged me and kissed me. With each poncho, she asked me, “What do you think of this one?” The sales people looked at me, and I could see in their eyes the wonder: Is this Germaine Greer’s lover? She bought the poncho I specially liked, one woven in delicate stripes of white, pale blue and pale pink. She went out wearing it.
We were on Canyon Road till, at sunset, the dripping snow began to freeze into icicles.
She bought yards of Guatemalan fabric and a Rio Grande rug.
I had to pee, and went behind an adobe house and peed into a bank of snow.
Germaine called, “Can I watch?”
As I was coming out of my bathroom to go to bed, I passed the open door and saw Germaine in bed, the blankets pulled up to her chin. I stopped at the doorway.
In a moment of intense self-consciousness, so great I was not sure who I was, I said, “Good night.”
“Good night,” she said.
I got into bed.
Whenever I woke, I heard her breathing in the next room.
•
Germaine insisted on paying the hotel bill. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I have the money.”
We left in the bright cold morning while Santa Fé was sleeping to drive up through the mountains to Taos. The red-pink earth showed where the snow was melting.
She asked me, “Do you think you would ever kill yourself?”
“No. Never.”
“Did you ever try?”
“I’ve often thought about it, but, no, I’ve never tried.”
“I once did,” she said, “when I was a teenager. I was wearing my father’s greatcoat, which I loved, and which was much too big for me, so I had to clutch it about my body. I was very depressed. I was depressed, deeply, deeply depressed, because I had thought out that there was no God. I thought, though, that I’d give God a chance to prove Himself, and, in my father’s greatcoat, I walked along the edge of a cliff, allowing myself to teeter, and I thought, if there were a God, He would save me, and if there weren’t I’d fall over and die, which was what I wanted, anyway, if there were no God. I fell. I fell and rolled down a steep bank, and I tried to keep myself from rolling further by clutching at branches. Finally, I stopped rolling, a long way down. And I was very upset because I had torn my father’s great-coat.”
I tried to see her at that age. I tried to see her at any age younger than the age of her public image, and I couldn’t. That the present large Germaine might contain a past small Germaine who wanted to die did not seem possible to me. Whatever had happened to change her from a small girl into a large women, the change had been essential; she did not think inwardly about herself, but outwardly about the world.
We passed through the high strange mountain towns of Truchas and Trampas. In all directions, the mountains rose and rose.
I risked asking her, “Don’t you want a long lasting relationship with someone?”
“There’s nothing I’d like more,” she said, “but I get bored by people after a very short time.”
“Are you getting bored with me?”
“Yes, I am.”
I laughed.
“So you’ll never commit yourself to a relationship?”
She glanced to the side at me, but said nothing.
At dusk, we stopped in the Oklahoma panhandle for gasoline. A little blond boy came out of the station to put the nozzle of the hose into the car tank; the pump looked broken down, and the numbers rolled quickly, and soon the price was up to twenty-five dollars. I said to Germaine, “The last time we got gas, we filled it up, and I paid, and I know I didn’t pay more than fifteen dollars.” Her eyes snapped open on me. “Don’t make a federal case out of it,” she said. I stepped back. The price went up to thirty-five dollars. The little boy kept his hand on the nozzle; I heard not gasoline but air pumped out. I dared myself to say, “There’s something wrong.” Germaine said sharply to me, “Cut it out, will you? Just cut it out.” I turned and walked away and wandered about the old gasoline station. I saw her go into the illuminated station and, through a wide window, I saw her talk to a man in greasy overalls. When she came out she laughed a little and said, “You were right.”
I was silent in the car.
At Woodward, just off the Oklahoma panhandle, we stopped again for gasoline, and from there Germaine, taking swigs from a bottle of Jack Daniels, drove on to Tulsa, normally a six-hour drive, in three hours. I did not look at the speedometer. I was frightened, and held myself still.
•
A week or so after we got back, Germaine gave a lecture at the Unitarian Church in Tulsa on abortion and contraception. The long church hall was filled. In front of me was a mother with her two teenage girls. Powerful lights illuminated the stage so TV cameras could film the lecture; in the intense light, Germaine appeared to have a burning silver sheen about her. As she talked, she moved her arms in loose, soft gestures, and I found myself being drawn in, not to a public argument in support of abortion as she defined it, but a private revelation
about love. It was as if, moving her arms, Germaine had begun to sing, and the aria, about deeply private passions and regrets, happiness and pain, rose up and up and out. I thought: She’s talking about herself. And yet she wasn’t talking about herself. She was talking about the outside world, and in her large awareness of it, she knew it as I did not; it was as if she had a secret knowledge of it, and to learn that secret from her would make me a different person. I wanted to be a different person. I had never heard Germaine give a public lecture; I had never seen her so personal. I thought: I love her.
At our Thursday luncheon in the Greek restaurant Germaine said to me, “You like difficult women, don’t you?”
I said in a Tulsan accent, “I guess I do.”
“Well then,” she said, “I’ll introduce you to my mother.”
THE THREE
JEAN RHYS, born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, 1890 or 1894. (She has never revealed her age. The record office in Roseau, Dominica, where she was born, burned down and with it her birth certificate.)
SONIA ORWELL, born 1918.
GERMAINE GREER, born 1939.
A
abortion
In Jean’s day it was called “an illegal operation.” She writes in her autobiography that, after the operation, “I didn’t suffer from remorse or guilt. I didn’t think at all like women are supposed to think, my predominant feeling was one of intense relief, but I was very tired. I was not at all unhappy. It was like a pause in my life, a peaceful time.”
She resists identifying herself, even in having an abortion, with other women. The abortion is entirely personal, and she does not give it much thought.
Sonia, I believe, sees abortion as an of course.
Germaine sees abortion as a political as well as a personal issue. She has thought out the issue very carefully and articulates her thoughts carefully.
In her office at the back of the Center, I see, spread out on her desk, multicoloured propaganda put about by the anti-abortionists; I pick up a pamphlet on which are photographs of a pile of aborted babies in a black plastic garbage can and of an adult’s hand holding the two tiny feet, perfectly formed, of an aborted foetus. I say, “How upsetting these pictures are,” and expect Germaine to tell me I don’t understand, but she says, “It is very deeply upsetting. They are entirely right to make us aware of the horror of abortion, because it is horrible.”
Germaine considers the effects of abortion on, not simply women, but women in the United States, women in Italy, women in India.
alcohol
Germaine will clutch the fat at her tummy and shake it and say, “That’s alcohol.”
Sonia never drinks spirits, only wine. She does not mind plonk. If, when she comes to dinner, she sees, for four people, five uncorked bottles, she may ask, “Is that all the wine there is?” and if you say yes, she may say, “Look, could you go out to buy two more bottles just to be sure?” and try to press the money on you. In the future, you make sure you have three bottles of wine for Sonia.
She says, “I’m not an alcoholic. I’m a drunkard. An alcoholic drinks with a hangover. A drunkard can’t bear to.”
As for Jean, she imagines she survives on drink.
animals
When Germaine visits Jean in her cottage in Devon, she suggests Jean should have a cat or a kitten. Jean says she’ll have to think about it; she doesn’t quite know how to feed a cat, or a delicate kitten. Sonia says, “Jean have a pet? It would die the way her son died, because she wouldn’t know how to take care of it.”
She feeds birds crumbs one hard winter, then she sees that cats wait, crouched in the bushes until she goes into the house, to pounce on the feeding birds; she gives up feeding the birds.
She likes to look out of her window at cows in a distant field.
Animals seem not to come into Sonia’s life at all. She does not like cats to be near her, and asks you when she visits please to put the cats in another room.
In London, Germaine takes the cat of friends who no longer want him. He is ill, and she keeps him alive for two years with special care. When, finally, she has to take him to the vet to be put down, she insists on holding him in her lap. As she tells the story, her eyes fill with tears and she wipes them away with her knuckles.
B
babies
Jean’s son dies as an infant, the daughter grows to maturity raised by her father in another country. Jean cannot take care of babies.
I cannot imagine Sonia having a baby; it is as if it were a physical impossibility.
Germaine has made public requests for a man to give her a baby. She tells me this story: Peeking into a bedroom, she saw her then lover whacking off, and said, “What the fuck are you doing?,” to which he replied, “I’m getting good and ready to give you the baby you want,” and she laughed.
A sense emanates from her of being able to have many babies whom she would hold to her, all together, all the time: babies in her arms, under her arms, between her breasts, playing about her thighs.
blacks
Jean’s relationship to blacks is, I think, more complex than her relationship with her family.
In the toilet in a train in France, Sonia sees, scribbled on the wall, “Les nègres ont les lèvres épais et le nez plat.” She tries to rub it off with a wet tissue, but can’t. As she leaves, a black man is waiting outside to go in, and she is worried what his reaction to the graffito will be.
Walking across the Tulsa University campus, Germaine says, “Look at that beautiful black, walking in an electric-blue aura of sex. Look at him. That’s what I want. You bet. I want big black nigger cock.”
bodies
Jean, I think, rather likes her body and is not modest. I see her often wearing a nightgown under which she is naked and, as she lurches from chair back to chair back across the room, her small twisted body may appear through the nightgown against a lamp.
Yet, she will dictate passages about having to bathe her body, spray it with talc, dress it, and get it on to the street where she feels she is pushing it along like a wheelbarrow.
As I arrive and when I leave her, she raises her thin arms high and wide, ready to hug me as I advance towards her to embrace her.
Sonia does not like to be touched. When one embraces her, she presents her cheek near her ear and winces a little. She appears to be very clean.
Germaine seems to be very much at ease in her large body. Her fingernails are usually dirty.
business sense
Jean has none.
In discussing certain litigation with her, Sonia’s lawyer asks if she hasn’t some friends in business who might have advised her in her dealings with the George Orwell Estate. She, angry, replies, “Of course I don’t have business friends! Of course not!”
On 17 May 1980, this item appears in the Sunday Telegraph:
SONIA ORWELL’S CASH MYSTERY
Friends of Mrs Sonia Orwell, widow of the novelist George Orwell, were trying last night to discover where most of her fortune of nearly £290,000 went.
Mrs Orwell, who married the writer shortly before his death in 1950, died aged 63 last December leaving estate in this country valued at £289,109 gross, but only £37,800 net. She lived in Paris.
A close friend of hers said last night it was not clear why the net estate was so small. “I think there may have been a tax problem, and that is probably where most of the money from the estate has gone.”
In Tulsa, Germaine talks of investing money in oil, but she doesn’t do it. If she has a business sense, she doesn’t act on it.
C
children
Sonia has a godson whom she talks about with great excitement.
“I took him to Hampstead Heath. He wanted to run a race. I told him I’d beat him, but he told me he’d beat me. We started off, over the heath. I had to put everything into it, and nearly collapsed in the end, but I beat him.”
Germaine complains often that the children of friends are not being properly looked after. When she h
as parents and their children as guests, she takes over the children, feeds them what she believes the right food for them, insists they go to bed at the right times, are engagingly entertained, and are disciplined.
Jean can have brief, lively conversations with children, treating them as equals; she doesn’t quite know how to treat children as children—unlike Sonia, who, with children, herself becomes a little childlike.
class
With Jean, the change from middle class to whatever class she now is is not intentional, but where her life has brought her.
(She has a great belief that her life has been all along out of her hands and in the hands of Fate.)
I imagine that Sonia does not so much turn against her middle class as be drawn into the class of writers and painters she meets in London.
Germaine has made statements in the revolutionary magazines of the Sixties, Oz and Suck, advocating the destruction of the middle class, from which she comes.
clothes
Jean dresses up and puts on makeup to write. She has one long purple-pink dress that clings to her, with sleeves which, when she lifts her arms, spread open into wings. After she has worn a dress a very few times, she never wears it again. She says, “They don’t understand. Yes, I have pretty dresses. But a new dress boosts my morale. I need to have new pretty dresses.” She comes up to London to buy dresses, though it exhausts her to be taken to the shops. The purple-pink dress is replaced by one with a bold flower pattern; it has a full skirt, a wide floppy collar and puffed sleeves. She has a number of wigs, one blond-pink, which she sends out to be “done.” In a pretty dress and wig, she stands, one hand on a chair back, the other on a hip, and you are quite sure she is, for a moment, posing, waiting for you to say something.
Though Sonia says she absolutely understands Jean’s need for clothes, she herself has little need for them. She dresses plainly, usually in a blouse with a lace collar and long sleeves and a skirt. You are more aware of her clothes, plain, and not expensive, than the body they cover. Sonia’s clothes don’t suggest her body. Sometimes her clothes are worn and darned in patches. She has one winter overcoat.
