The Odd Woman and the City

by Vivian Gornick

  “Those fuckers!” he cries. “Did you hear what those fuckers in Washington have done now?”

  “No, Boris,” my mother calls out, “I haven’t heard. What have those fuckers in Washington done now?” Her eyes narrow. “By him,” she says to me before he reaches us, “it’s forever 1948.”

  I look silently at her. She tilts her head back, staring me down.

  “Okay, okay,” she says. “I know what you’re thinking.”

  I remain silent.

  One more block and she bursts out, “I can’t help it! These people!”

  “Still not the right ones, eh, Ma?”

  * * *

  Two Russian girls on Thirty-Fourth Street.

  One stamps her feet. “Nyet Grisha!”

  Mentally, I stamp mine. “Not George!”

  * * *

  There’s a famous photograph of Robert Capa’s that has been pinned to the bulletin board above my desk for a number of years. It was taken in 1948 on a beach in France, and it shows a smiling young woman dressed in a cotton gown and a large straw hat striding forward across the sands while a sturdy-looking old man walks behind her, holding a huge umbrella over her head: a queen and her slave. The young woman is Françoise Gilot and the old man Pablo Picasso. As Robert Capa was an artist, the picture is charged with emotional complexity. At first all the viewer registers is the lit-from-within triumph in Gilot’s smile; and right behind it Picasso’s amiable servitude. But keep looking and you’ll see in Gilot’s eyes that she believes her power everlasting; and then you’ll see the cold worldliness behind Picasso’s playacting deference. It hits you full force: Gilot is Anne Boleyn in her moment of glory and Picasso the appetite-driven king before he’s had his fill of her.

  The photograph is so richly alive, it is actually shocking: it both excites and appalls. Most days I don’t even glance in its direction, but on the days that I do take it in, it never fails to arouse pain and pleasure, in equal parts. It’s the equal parts that’s the problem.

  * * *

  Daniel called to tell me that Tomas has cancer. I hadn’t seen or heard from Tomas in three or four years, but the news knocked the wind out of me. We’d all grown up together, in that neighborhood in the Bronx, a band of ten or fifteen children destined to keep one another company from grade school through college. Once our lives began to take shape most us had fallen away from one another, but we’d kept track over the years, as this group contained the people who had given each of us our first erotic thrill, our first experience of friendship cherished and betrayed, our first taste of privilege mysteriously extended and just as mysteriously withdrawn. Tomas was special in this group: he was the one who supplied the first hint of existential anxiety.

  He had come among us when we were all about twelve years old: an orphan and a foreigner. He’d been born and raised in Italy, and when his parents died in a car crash somewhere in Europe, he’d been sent to the States, like a package, to the family of an aunt who lived in the apartment house next to ours. One day he appeared on the block—dark, silent, serious—standing calmly at the edge of a group of the boys playing ball in the middle of the street: watching, simply watching. The next day there he was again; and the day after that: dark, serious, silent. Years later he’d tell me that he’d been silent because he could hardly speak English; but even after he learned English we continued to experience him as a boy whose eerie quiet was oddly affecting: every one of us developed the same strong urge to get a rise out of him.

  The children of working-class immigrants who had neither the time nor the inclination to pay us the attention that was needed, out in the street we were wild to feel ourselves in the responses we could evoke in one another. Our games were not really games, they were exercises in which strength, smarts, cunning, ingenuity, daily determined where each of us stood in the hierarchy of value and respect in the only society that mattered: that of the kids on the block. From all this Tomas stood apart. Like everyone else, he came out on the street every day after school, but he never joined in the ball playing or the word games or the quarreling, just stood on the pavement, watching. When one of us spoke to him, as one of us regularly did, he replied monosyllabically.

  Ordinarily, such a kid would either be ignored or openly rejected, but, paradoxically, the distance Tomas kept drew us to him like a magnet. There was some strange allure in his remoteness. Not one of us could have told you why, but to make Tomas respond to us was a goal we, boys and girls alike, each felt compelled to reach. Somehow, his behavior implied judgment: as though we were being appraised and found wanting. Unconsciously, I now think, every kid began to feel that if he or she had been better, smarter, more interesting, displayed more character or backbone, Tomas would happily have joined us, but as we weren’t and we didn’t, he chose to remain separate.

  When we got older—were teenagers hanging out on the block, in the candy store, or in hallways when the weather was bad—it was the same. By now our games consisted mainly of hours-long, impassioned arguments in which at least two of us took an oppositional stand and everyone else jumped in tumultuously on one side or the other. Everyone except Tomas, who still stood among but apart from us; and whose approval we each still yearned for. In the midst of all the arguing, one or another of us would regularly turn to him to say, “Whaddaya think, Tomas?” or, “That’s right, isn’t it, Tomas?” Tomas in turn would now either shake his head glumly, as though to say, “Jeez, I can’t believe you people,” or nod slowly, as if delivering a reluctant sanction.

  More than once, however, when the talk grew hotly insulting—as it did when our meager intellectual powers began to fail—Tomas would surprise us by weighing in, not on any particular element of the argument, but on our verbal savagery. He never took a position or defended an opinion, but his forehead would crease up, his mouth would start working, and then, looking puzzled himself, he’d pronounce softly, “This ain’t right, it just ain’t right.” When that happened—although no one could have told you why—the adversarial voices died down, and we each took new stock of the situation. That’s how Tomas became our Solomon: the arbiter of moral rightness. The more we acted out and he did not, the more we turned to him for mediation when the argument got out of hand; the more we turned to him, the more anxious we each grew that his judgment rule in our favor. And all this because he never had a dog in the race.

  For women, Tomas soon proved irresistible—although he never had a dog in that race, either. From the moment he turned eighteen, girls and women swarmed around him, all of whom he treated with the utmost courtesy whether he slept with them or not; each of whom was convinced, at least for a time, that she would provide the exception that proved the rule; none of whom made a dent in his detachment.

  I don’t know when it occurred to me that Tomas’s experience of early loss—parents, language, even homeland—didn’t seem a sufficient explanation for why he was as he was; rather, it began to seem that these losses were the objective correlative to a condition whose origins lay elsewhere. Then one day I realized that the distance he kept was not from us, it was from himself, its character determined in the absolute long ago and far away, and I remember thinking then (as I think now) that Tomas was one of those people destined almost from birth to remain a stranger to himself.

  What we were witnessing as children was our first glimpse of the kind of inner remoteness that, in later life, one recognizes as primal in its very nature. In the years that followed life in the Bronx, I and nearly every woman I knew fell in love at least once with a Tomas, in each case in the same vain hope that ours would be the warmth that penetrated the cold at the center; vain because no amount of love can defeat the tsunami force of that primitive melancholia.

  None of this could we have understood as children, but all of it we had sensed and, quite properly, experienced as a threat to our own humanity. As we had all come from sturdy peasant stock—much of it of the superstition-prone variety—it was quite remarkable that we had struggled to survive the thre
at by seducing it rather than beating it off with a stick.

  Once, in our forties, Tomas said to me, “I’ve always had a funny effect on people. Like there’s something in me they want to get at, some secret they think I’m keeping from them. I’ve never known what it’s all about. I’ve tried to tell them, especially the women, Hey, babe, what you see is what I got. That’s all there is. They don’t believe me. They always think there’s something more. But there ain’t. Believe me. There ain’t.”

  I did believe him, and I tried to explain not only his effect on us as children, but how it had taken me half a lifetime to understand it—and then, I said, it was only because as the years passed I’d often glimpsed that dangerous disconnect at work in myself. Poor beast, he didn’t know what on earth I was talking about. He stood there staring at me as of old.

  * * *

  Early on a Friday evening in spring, cars coming from three directions are halted in the middle of Abingdon Square, in their midst a rat running frantically back and forth. A man turns the corner nearest to where I am standing, mesmerized. He is in his forties, wearing khaki shorts and a bright blue camp shirt and carrying a Whole Foods shopping bag in each hand. His brown thatch is graying, his features painfully delicate; his eyes blink worriedly behind designer glasses.

  “What is it?” he cries at me.

  His eyes follow my pointing finger.

  “Oh,” he says wearily. “A neur-rotic rat.”

  “Or else a prelude to the plague,” I say.

  “Now there’s an only slightly more comforting thought.”

  For a moment the man looks thoughtful. Then he shakes his head no.

  “Poor thing. He’s looking for a way out and there isn’t any. Believe me. I know.”

  He shoulders his fancy provisions anew and goes his way, now burdened by the useless wisdom he only rarely has to face up to.

  * * *

  Wandering aimlessly in the Metropolitan Museum, I find myself in the Egyptian section. It’s a holiday season—what on earth impelled me to come here today?—and the place is packed with tourists: each glass case is surrounded by men, women, and children standing two feet deep, carrying these dreadful tape-recorded capsules of culture whose ear wires emit a sinister whir of noise to all within ten feet of them. At this moment I hate democracy.

  But then the waves part and I am standing before a small statue of wood covered in gold leaf, with kohl-rimmed eyes painted on the gold. It is the image of a young goddess (Selket is her name) whose task it was to guard the intestines that had been scooped out of Tut’s mummified body and placed in a tiny gold coffin made in his own image. She (the goddess) is stunningly beautiful, her breasts, shoulders, and stomach rounds of carved tenderness. She stands with her slim arms outstretched, as though beseeching the darkness Tut is entering to let the purity of spirit placed in her human frailty intercede for him. Unexpectedly, she moves me so deeply that the noise around me drops away, and in the sudden silence I feel tears welling up not in my eyes but from somewhere deeper down.

  Although I am alone with the goddess, have no one to whom I could utter a sound, I nonetheless feel speechless: cannot find the words inside me to describe the engulfing emotion this little bit of wood and gold leaf has aroused. An awful gloom falls on me. Once again, as it has with irregular regularity throughout my waking life, that sickening sense of language buried deep within comes coursing through arms, legs, chest, throat. If only I could make it reach the brain, the conversation with myself might perhaps begin.

  * * *

  Coming downtown at midnight on Ninth Avenue, just past Fifty-Seventh Street, the bus slows up for traffic (it never ends in New York), and in the doorway of a White Rose bar stands a couple. They have their backs to the bus, but I can see they are both derelict and both reeling. The man has the woman by the arm and is pulling on it as she fumbles to open the door of the bar. Unable to shake him, she turns back to the man, and I can see her beat-up face as she mouths, “Whaddaya want from me?” He, I think, doesn’t answer, just keeps pawing her. I see that hand raking ineffectually at the woman, and I can feel the despair in the rigid set of his neck. “I don’ know what I want,” it says, “but I want.”

  I think, Don’t you two know you’ve got to be more attractive than you are to be playing this scene?

  No. They don’t know.

  * * *

  I ran into Gerald in midtown.

  “You used me!” he cried.

  “Not nearly well enough,” I said.

  He stood there looking at me, memory clouding his eyes.

  “What was that all about anyway?” he asked wearily.

  “Sweetheart,” I said, “it could never have worked. I was headed for … where I am now.”

  “What is it with you?” he countered. “Why did you make such a holocaust with us? Why did you keep making scenes until all I had left was the taste in my mouth of your unholy dissatisfaction?”

  I felt my eyes turning inward, toward that thick white opacity that surrounds my heart when it comes to erotic love.

  “I can’t do men,” I said.

  “What the hell does that mean,” he said.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “When will you be sure?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So what do you do in the meantime?”

  “Take notes.”

  * * *

  The habit of loneliness persists. Leonard tells me that if I don’t convert the loneliness into useful solitude, I’ll be my mother’s daughter forever. He is right, of course. One is lonely for the absent idealized other, but in useful solitude I am there, keeping myself imaginative company, breathing life into the silence, filling the room with proof of my own sentient being. It was from Edmund Gosse that I learned how to frame this insight. In his remarkable memoir, Father and Son, Gosse describes how at the age of eight, having discovered his father in an untruth, the child is thrown into inner turmoil. If Papa does not know everything, the child asks himself, then what does he know? And what is one to do with what he says? How is one to decide what to believe and what not to believe? In the midst of this confusion he suddenly realizes he’s talking to himself.

  “Of all the thoughts which rushed upon my savage and undeveloped little brain at this crisis,” Gosse writes, “the most curious was that I had found a companion and a confidant in myself. There was a secret in this world and it belonged to me and to a somebody who lived in the same body with me. There were two of us, and we could talk with one another … It was a great solace to me to find a sympathizer in my own breast.”

  * * *

  In the late nineteenth century, great books about women in modern times were written by men of literary genius. Within twenty years there had been Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways; but penetrating as these novels were, it was George Gissing’s The Odd Women that spoke most directly to me. His were the characters I could see and hear as if they were women and men of my own acquaintance. What’s more, I recognized myself as one of the “odd” women. Every fifty years from the time of the French Revolution, feminists had been described as “new” women, “free” women, “liberated” women—but Gissing had gotten it just right. We were the “odd” women.

  The novel is set in London in 1887. Mary Barfoot, a gentlewoman in her fifties, is running a secretarial school to prepare middle-class girls for occupations other than that of teacher or governess. Her colleague is Rhoda Nunn, thirty years old, darkly handsome, highly intelligent, uncompromising in her open scorn for what she calls the slavery of love and marriage; there isn’t an argument to be made in favor of legal union for which Rhoda doesn’t have an instant comeback.

  Enter Everard Barfoot, Mary’s clever, well-to-do, strong-willed cousin whose intellectual sparring with Rhoda (the glory of the book) becomes steadily and mutually eroticized. The story of these two is the one that Gissing tracks with skill, patience, and understand
ing. What, his book asks, are men and women to be, both for themselves and for one another?

  Rhoda and Everard both imagine themselves dedicated to the proposition of true partnership between the sexes, but in the final analysis, both take a two-steps-forward, one-step-back journey into self-knowledge that accounts for the snail’s pace at which social change progresses.

  Barfoot’s intelligence persuades him that he seeks companionateness in marriage: “For him marriage must … mean … the mutual incitement of vigorous minds … Be a woman what else she may, let her have brains and the power of using them … intellect was his first requirement.” Yet at the same time, an appetite for mastery exerts an even stronger pull on him. Side by side with the pleasure Rhoda’s intelligence gives him, his thoughts linger on how much “a contest between his will and hers would be an amusement decidedly to his taste … It would delight him to enrage Rhoda and then to detain her by strength, to overcome her senses, to watch her long lashes droop over the eloquent eyes.”

  As for Rhoda—absolute in her conviction that women first and foremost must become “rational and responsible human beings”—she pronounces regularly on her position with a defensive bluntness that betrays her own emotional ignorance. When Barfoot chides her proud severity—“Perhaps you make too little allowance for human weakness”—she replies coldly, “Human weakness is a plea that has been much abused, and generally in an interested spirit.” Everard thrills to this response, but it also makes him smile. The smile frightens Rhoda into rudeness—“Mr. Barfoot … if you are practicing your powers of irony, I had rather you chose some other person”—but in truth the exchange excites them both.

  The attraction between them is rooted in the classical antagonism of sexual infatuation at its most compelling and its most exhausting. Bereft of tenderness or sympathy, it wears away at the nerves; consumes itself ultimately in self-division and self-regard. A year and many astonishing conversations later, when his feeling for Rhoda is considerably advanced, Barfoot is yet of two minds: “Loving her as he had never thought to love, there still remained with him so much of the temper in which he first wooed her that he could be satisfied with nothing short of unconditional surrender.” Concomitantly, Rhoda—her senses fully aroused for the first time in her life—is rapidly losing the comfort of her brash certainties. Now openly drawn to Everard, she is gripped by anxiety at the thought of yielding to desire. Insecurity and trepidation become her daily companions.