Lucinella

by Lore Segal

  Old Lucinella still sits in the chair. Isn’t she going to get up? Isn’t she going downstairs to the party to talk with Ulla, and Betterwheatling … with Winterneet, whom she has known for more than half, more like two thirds of her life—who’s so embattled now by his illness, his obsolescence, his old wife—who was it said Lena Winterneet drinks …

  Old Lucinella knows that if she doesn’t get up now she won’t the next moment, nor at any moment after that. She’s frightened. She hears the footsteps coming from the veranda, running past her door and down the stairs, and a second pair running after, hears William crying, “Lucinella!” She knows he does not mean her.

  I cry, “Here I am, William!” I run down the stairs behind him and out through the front door in time to see him follow young Lucinella round the left corner of the house. “For crying out loud, William!” I yell, ashamed to see him chasing the silly girl, and as I come around the corner I see his narrow back, the familiar, callow neck, rounding the next bend. “William!” I cry. I know he hears me. He’s recognized the horror in my voice, knows that the ice age is encroaching on my heart, and runs faster and faster. We circle past the front door and I see how to save myself. I run more and more slowly till I hear William panting behind me. “Lucinella!!” he cries. I say, “Here I am!” Sweetness suffuses my blood like a substance that melts jealousy in retrospect. He catches up with me. The ice age, which never existed, recedes. I say, “Darling, one thing, and it’s important. Let there, please, William, always be truth, absolutely, between you and me. Promise,” I say and, for safety’s sake, pass quickly through the front door into the house.

  VIII

  In the curl of the banister stands Zeus having a quiet smoke. The party has got too hot and noisy for him, he says.

  “Me too,” I say. “I’m going up to bed.” I lift my cheek for a good-night kiss. His tongue thrusts straight and deep between my lips and the world suspends its rotation. His hand inside my blouse touches, his mouth lifts out of mine, pronounces my name as if it were a foreign language: “Lucinella.”

  I’m looking into the same astonished roundness of eye that Europa saw the instant of her rape. Whether disguised as bull, or swan, or golden shower activity (as they call it on television—and which requires a great imaginative effort), or as my aging intellectual, your true lover has the grace to be dazzled by each new passion. His veteran confidence needs no double-entendre to make loopholes for a misunderstanding. He says, “Let’s make love.”

  Now that I know Zeus and I are going to be lovers (and know it’s him I would have wanted all along if it had occurred to me), I freeze. I want my mother! “Let’s not!” I say.

  “Let’s,” he says, waits. No rape, no suasion. There’s no need.

  I say, “All right,” and his immense arms take me up and lift me through the front door down the steps.

  “But you’re married,” I say, ashamed to be so vulgar, but I have been jealous. It is Hera who’s my sister. What does Zeus know!

  “We won’t tell her,” he says, on the faintest rising pitch of irritation. “Hera and I’ve been married these eons and have eternity to go.” He carries me over the midnight fields, tree and stone, into his bed. And when the earth resumes its motion, the direction has been radically altered; I’ve slipped away and run back to New York. I’m not ready yet to meet him with my morning face.

  At home his letter awaits me: a quick page of astonished jubilation, and what admirable prose! Happiness is its keynote.

  Mine is bewilderment. I’d wanted to be virtuous—that’s the prettiest dream of all!—but now elation must learn to co-exist with my guilty treachery and it’s not hard—oh, shabby guilt. As for happiness, there’s a word! I smile and smile, but how shall I recognize what I can’t exactly remember ever meeting face to face before? And I don’t know the rules. Is it all right to dispatch my prickly perplexity into Arcadia? If I could only talk with him for half an hour, I’d understand everything, and so I write him what I never meant to say: Come!

  He writes back to say he will be here at 8:15 but must leave by 7:20 the next morning. He arrives on the dot.

  I doubt if I’d have given Zeus a second look in his heyday, when he was gaudy with health, his dark-blue locks, his bristling beard, eyes like oxidized copper sparking pink and gold and purple lights, and his enormous size. I prefer my gods in their twilight. I lean into the voluptuous laxness of elderly flesh. Under my hands, great Zeus lies patiently; he knows how to suffer pleasure. His divine cock has lost none of its potence and his hand is omniscient.

  I used to laugh at gods and kings. I’d imagined Zeus muscle-bound, stupid with power, rattling his enormous thunder, unable to control the whims and spectacular tempers of his oversized relations, but in my bed his mind moves feelingly. It’s just that mine, being Jewish and from New York, leaps more nimbly, which he enjoys. I sense his smiling in the darkness. When I get silly he reaches out laughingly to fetch me home to good sense and we make love again, sleep awhile, and more love and more talking.

  I ask Zeus to visit inside my head. (You are invited, too. In here he and I, and you, will get to know one another, though like every hostess I’m a little nervous. Notice how I elide my sentences and keep my book short. I’m watching for signs of a yawn burgeoning behind your compressed lips. You don’t want to hurt my feelings, I know, but feel free to leave any time. Though your departing back will make a permanent dent in my confidence, one survives. I prefer it to your sufferance behind my back.)

  Morning. I am chilled by the expanse of air that separates me from Zeus. He’s sitting on the edge of my bed. Once he’s put his socks back on, there’s no seduction of mine that can keep him one minute after 7:20.

  “What did I do wrong?” I ask in my letter. I think I’m joking, but Zeus, who, like me, knows how words work, hears a faint note of trouble, and finds me troublesome, and I hear the faint rising pitch of irritation in his tone. With deliberate gentleness, he maps the boundaries of our permitted pleasures, which have the circumference of points reiterated on a razor’s edge. I joyfully entrust myself to his governance because I see where the two hundred and fifty-fifth, -sixth, and -seventh words of his letter are out of focus with feeling and my left nipple rises to meet the lack of Zeus’s hand—why can’t I recall what his hand looks like? Next time I’ll study it.

  I write him back a poem and all’s well so long as I keep typing, but in the interval after extracting one page, before I can insert the next, desire has created the phantom of his tongue. I look down. There’s nothing there—but even the reality is so palpably unlikely, always, I never believe it.

  Nights, I thrust my hand into his massive absence.

  I call Friendling, who’s the editor of that cheapie black paperback series called Living Ancients, the ones with the skimpy margins; you have to break the spine to get at the last words of the even and first words of the odd pages. He sends me Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides in great empty mouthfuls of blank English verse.

  I’ve had to stop writing my soap opera. I can’t invent wanting what I’ve got. Even now Love sits down, here, on the edge of my bed. The mattress dips under his weight. I had forgotten the fit of his enormous chest into my arms.

  This time I invite myself for a tour of the inside of Zeus’s head, but keep peering at him to make sure I’m welcome; I’ll retreat at a moment’s notice. He’s looking all around, a little surprised. He stumbles. I take him by the hand. He’s used to freer movements in a larger landscape with a fresher circulation of the air, while I am most at home playing indoors, though I love to look out through other eyes, to see what the world’s like when one is male, beautiful, immortal. I’ve never been to Greece. (Once I dreamed I sat on sand the size and shape of the map of the Isle of Naxos; my footbath was the Aegean Sea, as blue as blue, the temperature of my own blood.) I ask him what is underfoot when you stand on Olympus. How does one throw lightning? I’ve never been that angry. Look down, there! An aerial view of history! Imagine: to have a
will capable of intervention and to refrain, though he might have sent his heroes sooner when monsters were devouring all that young flesh, but you have to look at things in their historical perspective. We know how problematical problems are compared with hindsight, and Hera never any help. Delicacy prevents speculation. I refuse to wonder what she’s like to lie with (what I want to know is what it feels like to desire me), but I do ask him all about Semele, Io, and Perseus’s mother—what was her name? I love him for the decency of his reserve (he’s grown so civilized!), though all I wanted to was to know how his affairs ended so I can bear my pleasure in the certainty that it will pass.

  I’m crying for the day when Zeus will not be holding me like this, or will be holding me like this while I am scheming how to inch myself out of the constriction of his arms. He doesn’t ask me what’s the matter. Think of all the women, mortal and the others, who’ve wept in Zeus’s arms and he perhaps, when he was young, in theirs. He strokes my hair and keeps holding me. My tears grow cozy. For sophistication’s sake I’ll tell you the nature of ardor is to cool, but I can’t believe it.

  He’s putting on his socks again, shaking each one methodically before he inserts his toes. I study him. From the minute he rises out of the sheets until he leaves by the front door at 7:20 he keeps his attention sideways to me: that way he can walk out of my room while I, still sensually attached, am drawn behind him. I stand in the doorway. He’s profiled over the kitchen sink, letting the water run. Within the half hour, I had this man where a woman has her child, and now he’s standing over there, by himself, he turns, opens the cupboard door—what’s he looking for? He’s choosing himself a glass, fills it, lifts it, tips it at the lip. I watch the water run into his mouth, see it hurdle the Adam’s apple; now it’s flowing down his inside, where I can’t follow. Oh, fortunate Metis!

  So that’s how it is done! I can learn. I go and drink a glass of cold water too. It doesn’t hurt. He’s gone. On my way out I meet the super in the hallway and embrace him. “Sorry, my mistake!” I say, laughing. He hugs me and promises he’ll fix my dripping faucet this very afternoon. “Thank you, you good man, you excellent super!” In the lobby I catch hold of the doorman’s hand in both of mine. I press my cheek into his palm. We sit together on the front steps in the sunlight; he tells me about his boy doing nothing all day except sitting and watching TV, cutting his toenails. You can’t tell with people, we say, you think this one’s flipped out and next year you meet him and he’s married, with a Plymouth. Three years later you hear that he’s in Bellevue. These days you can never tell with young people.

  I forgot to look at Zeus’s hand again.

  A letter. I get my magnifying glass to check this word, here, that looks like “love,” and is. Don’t look now: I think this is happiness. And Zeus, as I said, knows the weight of his words. When he writes “love” he knows what he means, what kind and how much, depending on the word that precedes and follows, the nearest mark of punctuation and its place in the body of the letter (sixth word of the second line in the second paragraph).

  I run to the mirror, the way you might run to the corner to see the passing astronaut or what visiting royalty looks like, and it’s me, and it seems reasonable to me that I’m Zeus’s beloved.

  I write him back stories, whole novels, juggling words for his entertainment, elated by my mastery, for these days I can keep three, six, twelve perceptions and two mutually exclusive feelings in the air at one time, as well as a secondhand thought and a half, and a joke about juggling. “Oh, Love,” I write him, and we both know I mean the kind unfreighted by workaday life. Never will he scrumple up his bathroom towel or I think to tell him not to put his shoes on the bedspread, for those are things that scuttle love when it is anchored in reality. Not Zeus and Lucinella! We make our arrangements. On the fifteenth I drive along the highways and freeways of America to motel row, Memphis, Tennessee. Humbert Humbert and Lolita slept here! Zeus has to leave at 7:20 the next morning, but in June there’ll be a three-day conference in Jamaica.

  I fly through the air to meet my love, leaving Kennedy at 6:15 a.m. The blue, red, and yellow lights, like chips of stained glass, spell the ground pattern that lifts us efficiently into the breaking dawn. We lean on the wing. The city slants radically up toward us and, with a long breath, settles back, spreading itself between the wide bodies of its waters, which ripple copper-colored, green, primrose. If we crash now, who would quarrel with so rich a death? The bellboy unlocks the door and he’s already here, stretched on the bed …

  Later that summer we go to Nîmes and take in a third-rate bullfight. We sleep over in Rome.

  For my sake, Zeus agrees to a Swann’s Tour of the Aegean. From our narrow bunk, we see through the porthole the same, innumerable, nameless, little, rock-bound islands that Odysseus must have passed. In January we spend a Monday and Tuesday at the Sacher. We leave the tasseled curtains parted so we can see the old yellow stone of the back of the Vienna Opera from the baroque feather bed, and the next month in Barcelona, in Addis Ababa, Buenos Aires. There are beds everywhere. The world is our playground where we two accomplished lovers meet in mutual joy and without rancor sail our toy loves.

  IX

  If you can stand another party (this is the last one before the last one and there’s to be a black magician at midnight and an exorcism at cockcrow):

  Lucinella

  requests the pleasure

  of your company

  to honor

  Betterwheatling

  on the publication

  of

  A Decade of Poetry, 1960–70

  (Regrets only)

  I’m always particularly fond of my friends when they’re walking in my front door. It seems nice and a little ridiculous of them to leave their comfortable homes and come and stand around my living room. They hold their drinks. They turn their good, intelligent faces to one another and move their jaws up and down. Listen to the pleasant hiss and hum of innumerable conversations.

  Happy and distraught, I move among my five novelists, four live poets (one of them eminent), six publishers, two agents, a writer of children’s books, eleven critics, and a pair of gods.

  “Hera! I didn’t know you were in town!” I lie, while the back of my head charts the course Zeus is taking in the direction of the bar. “So! How have you been? How’s Zeus?” I ask her.

  “Waiting,” she whispers, she leans toward me, “to become human. Ha! Ha!” We both laugh.

  I’m astonished how expertly my vocal cords, jaws, gums, tongue, lips perform the motions of a woman chatting with an old friend at a party. I look around: who might be lying to me? Young Lucinella mumbles, “I am terrible! I haven’t even read Betterwheatling’s new book.”

  “You should,” I tell her. (I’m studying the set of her jaw, the motion of her lips. Did she come with William? I didn’t see him arrive.) “Betterwheatling is the best critic we have,” I say. (Where does William sleep these nights? If it’s in young Lucinella’s bed, I would mind at the level where I shall mind my death.) “Come and meet him,” I say.

  “We’ve met,” she says, “at Maurie’s party and again at the symposium,” but I interrupt what Betterwheatling is eagerly saying to Frank Friendling to say, “Betterwheatling, I want you to meet—I’m sorry, Lucinella, but I seem to have forgotten what your name is. This is my guest of honor … and now I’ve forgotten your name too, Betterwheatling.”

  “I’m Betterwheatling,” says Betterwheatling. “Young Lucinella and I have met.”

  “And this is …?”

  “Friendling,” says Friendling. “We all know each other, Lucinella.”

  “Then would you tell me what my name is, in case I have to introduce myself to someone.”

  “You are Lucinella,” says Friendling.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t read your book,” young Lucinella is telling Betterwheatling.

  “It’s a good book,” I say, “and a beautiful piece of scholarship.”

  “Maurie t
hinks it’s worthless,” says Betterwheatling. “He wouldn’t publish my afterword in The Magazine.”

  I see that Winterneet has brought his wife, the girl his mother picked for him, I’m sure, big, high-bosomed, high-shouldered, like one of the larger amphorae. He sits her down among the coats on my couch, and walks off.

  I am the hostess and must go and talk to old Mrs. Winterneet. I can’t tell if she is petrified by all those years with Winterneet, or stoned. Across her forehead file sixty-six gray hairs like the exemplary letter S the teacher draws on the top line of a second-grader’s copy book, but I dare say she’s a sterling and loyal wife, which is nothing to be snide about. There’s much I could learn from Mrs. Winterneet if we could talk woman-to-woman, it’s just that I have trouble remembering to keep listening to her telling me how Winterneet drives her to town every second and fifteenth of the month so she can see her doctor on East Eighty-ninth Street, in an even voice, just loud enough to drown out what Maurie is telling Winterneet. Seeing old Lucinella passing, I pull her sleeve. I say, “You know Mrs. Winterneet, of course!” and rise, obliging her to take my seat. She glares at me. Let the old ladies chat.

  I join Maurie and Winterneet and say, “by the way, Maurie, why wouldn’t you publish Betterwheatling’s afterword in The Magazine? I think it’s a beautiful book. The prose is so adroit—”

  “I know,” says Maurie. “That’s why I published his foreword.”

  “Oh. Come and help me talk to Meyers,” I say. Meyers is standing by the wall alone.

  “I don’t talk to Meyers!” says Maurie. “He no longer sends his poems to The Magazine.”

  I carry my drink across the room. Young Lucinella is telling Ulla she’s sorry she’s never read a word Ulla has written.

  “Meyers!” I say. We sip our drinks. I don’t have the stamina to wait till Meyers thinks of something to say, so I say, “You’ve hurt Maurie’s feelings. Why don’t you send your poems to The Magazine?”