The Americans, Baby

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘Yes! With lemon juice – baked potatoes with lemon – with butter – with pepper and salt. Delightful.’ He spoke with exuberance.

  She hid her instant hungry disappointment.

  He continued like a salesman, ‘Simple, wholesome potatoes. I like simple wholesome cooking – I’ve done a list of my favourite dishes – of course, you’ll have yours. I argue that there is too much confusion of flavour and too much spicing in modern cooking – I like the meals of the pioneers and peasants.’

  She watched him serve and her disappointment went. A bowl of baked potatoes – a beautiful dark wooden bowl – two wooden platters – a pile of coarse black bread – two sliced lemons – and deep yellow North Coast butter. He had made a side salad too.

  She ate the potatoes and found their taste for the first time. She enjoyed the concentration on one vegetable. After, they ate mixed, unsalted nuts.

  Hugo was ‘primitive’ in other ways. He ground his own pepper, coffee, spices, flour, baked a type of bread, extracted his fruit and vegetable juices by a special process, and ate unrefined sugar.

  As a chemist he knew about food. ‘I will teach you the real arts of cooking,’ he laughed, ‘how to really use food. Do you know why our teeth rot out, our hair falls out, why we get ulcers and cancer? – it’s because of our over-refined diet. Old Henry Miller has a delightful essay on it.’

  ‘My parents’ teeth haven’t fallen out.’

  ‘They will – if they eat a corrupt diet.’

  He said that modern food manufacturing was criminal.

  She felt guilty when she threw away the raisin sandwiches she’d made for lunch – at Hugo’s direction. She’d eaten two meat pies instead. The guilt came from the feeling that she’d betrayed Hugo – been dishonest. Then the guilt dissolved to resentment. She laughed it off, saying ‘My God, you’re becoming so self-analytical.’ She had not followed the thought of resentment because it led down an overgrown track.

  Usually she did not mind the natural cooking which Hugo taught her. Now and then she cooked him grilled steak with onions, chips, eggs and tomatoes, or something from the book Cooking Greek Style. He joked that he was being murdered by spices.

  Hugo and she fished in the harbour and he talked of hunting and fishing trips in the Nebraskan forests and once in Canada, before he’d fled the U.S.A. as a ‘nuclear refugee’.

  ‘We’ll go hunting one day and in the evening you can cook the food and then you will really come to know the good life.’

  ‘I’ve always had some sort of repugnance for hunting – for killing animals.’

  ‘You’ll get over that. It’s OK if the food hunted is for food. It’s at the very heart of the natural existence as I see it.’

  She had hurt a boy to come impulsively to live with Hugo. Bobby had been seeing her at lectures during the first year and taking her to film screenings, buying coffee in the foyer, and having lunch with her on the grass. Nothing about love had been spoken, but in the second year she bought her first pills and after a few timid circlings they had slept together – clutching each other and trembling – his elbow pinning her hair to the pillow – both sweating with tension. Still, it was good. It was exploratory for them both and she accepted it as that. She was relieved also that the ‘first time’ was behind her. Perhaps this had been a big part of the satisfaction. She remembered little else.

  She had not told Bobby of Hugo at first although it happened so quickly and there was so little to tell. Over coffee in the foyer she had told him she was leaving Betty and Jill’s flat to live with Hugo. Bobby had been upset and told her that she was being stupid, had stood up abruptly and said he had to go.

  She had shrugged and said that there had been nothing between them really, she hadn’t pledged herself. She felt irritated by unreasonable guilt.

  Hugo’s way of life was a second cross-road taking her yet another direction from her suburban upbringing. She had moved a long distance from baked Sunday dinners, cold meat and salad in summer, and Chinese food in saucepans from the Dragon restaurant on the corner. She was not of the suburbs any more. She had known that when she left home to live with Betty and Jill – stopped reading Women’s Weekly and found her way, lost and unguided, in Betty’s New Yorkers. She was not dramatically ‘alienated’ but she was bound in her own direction. She was glad that she could expose herself to Hugo and that she had flexibility to go in a way that was different.

  Yet there was the resentment and the confusion which was the overgrown track. Without vanity, she saw herself as an intelligent, independent and unneurotic girl (certainly not as neurotic as Betty – or Jill). Yet some of her reactions to Hugo were uncontrollable and they battered her – as though he were holding her fists and hitting her with them. She kept her reactions secretly screwed down because they were foolish. The relations were mainly from house work and cooking and his attitudes.

  She had been at the housework while he was out, as she preferred to. He had returned early.

  ‘Hullo, Miss Wife,’ he said, kissing her. ‘It warms me to see you cleaning the cave.’

  She gagged an outcry which rose in her.

  ‘Hygiene is essential for survival,’ she said standing behind her mock rationality. ‘I was just finishing up.’ Two hours later she recognised that she had felt degraded by him. By him seeing her doing the work and by his remarks.

  They were drinking beer from his twenty-ounce Mexican pewters. It was the time for what Hugo called ‘looking over the day’.

  ‘I think we should share the cleaning of the house,’ she said.

  He drank a large mouthful. ‘I agree, I agree,’ he said; and then pointedly, ‘We do.’

  He in fact did more than she but she disputed peevishly on a technicality. The toilet.

  ‘I know. I want a clean toilet. I think it is important and I appreciate the work you put in on it,’ he said. ‘I simply cannot come at it – it bugs me. I have a thing about toilets.’ He gave a big movie shrug.

  She had a thing about toilets too but did not let it into the conversation. It was opposite to his. He had an aversion; she had a compulsion to clean them. Tiredly she acknowledged that her mother did too.

  He gave her kitchen efficiency lessons but her switch-off was automatic. She couldn’t receive them and usually didn’t apply them. He seemed to know more about the kitchen than her mother.

  ‘I come from a family of boys,’ he said, laughing at her sarcastic query, ‘and I lived a bachelor for three years. Two training schools.’

  So he tended to cook and clean more frequently and better than she. She read during it, closed-down by her weird tension, seeing the print but not the words. When she did cook she slopped and burnt and when she cleaned she did so secretly and without patience.

  Hugo’s comment about him hunting and her cooking returned to her often. She would have an angry inner dialogue. She was not a squaw. She was a woman biologically – because she had a vagina. But she did not feel ‘womanly’, whatever that was. She was going to be an intellectual with a vagina – like de Beauvoir. She was not going to be like other poor deluded things. She could not analyse the stupid conflicts about house work and the rest and she became tired of chasing them and tried to ignore them as best she could.

  Then came the remark.

  Hugo liked her for her simplicity.

  ‘I like your simple clothes and I like your graceful ways. I know precisely how you will dress our children and how they’ll imitate their mother’s grace.’

  The remark reminded her. ‘Talking of children, have you seen my orals? I thought I left them on the ledge in the bathroom but they’re not there.’

  He looked at her solemnly. With a hard Nebraskan authority he said, ‘I threw them away.’

  She was amazed.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I threw them away. They upset me.’

  He turned the book he was reading face down on the table.

  ‘I hate contraceptives,’ he said. ‘I hate to think of y
our body being twisted by chemicals.’

  She was having difficulty composing a sentence. She said something like, ‘What?’

  ‘I want children,’ he said loudly, gesticulating the expression so-what-the-hell’s-wrong-with-that?

  ‘You must be out of your mind,’ she said.

  ‘Love goes bad between people when they don’t want children,’ he said. ‘Contraception is a rejection of children – a rejection of me as the father of your children – hesitancy about your love.’ He talked quickly.

  She remained standing at the bathroom door, toothbrush in her hand.

  ‘But – I’ve got a year to go at uni – we’ve never even discussed it – it is all so unbelievable.’ She was rigid with anger.

  ‘Love implies children,’ he said, buttressing his words with a heavy definiteness. ‘Children are the other part of the natural equation.’

  ‘I don’t give a damn about children. You threw away my contraceptives without telling me. You’re an authoritarian. And it’s not the first thing you’ve done without asking me.’ She remembered the theatre bookings made without her consultation, and other evidence.

  ‘You didn’t tell me that you were using contraceptives so why should I ask you if I can throw them away? Who’s imposing on who? And what’s so odd about having children – or are you twisted enough to think it is odd?’

  ‘Only a fool wouldn’t take contraceptives. You’re trying to enslave me with children – or whatever way you can – like all men – and you’ve been trying to do it from the beginning. Well, you’re not going to trap me.’

  He did not move his hands from the table where they lay palms down in front of him. As though he was about to rise. He began to colour from the fire of her anger.

  ‘Trap you?’ he said, ‘I suppose you think love is a trap – and that wouldn’t surprise me – you’re so hung-up on modern crap about independence – which you mistake as being neuter – that you can’t love.’

  ‘You monster.’

  ‘Having a child would make you a woman – that would scare you.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a woman,’ she yelled, sensing too late that it was a bad tactical admission and then not caring. ‘You’re sick, you’re neurotic,’ she yelled.

  He raised his hands in a motion of futility. He stood and reached to her with his hands, his eyes following helplessly behind. He tried to take her in his arms – she pulled away and went to the bedroom. She heard him break down. Cold and frightened she piled as many of her things as she could into her wicker basket. He had tried to force children on to her. In the kitchen he was sobbing at the sink with his back to her. She left the house. ‘I’m going,’ she said. It was male domination asserting itself. And she was humiliated by the demoralising power of the things he had said. But they were crazy. His attitude was authoritarian: he resented the independence that the Pill gave women. She wouldn’t become involved again – she would have lovers – but not become involved. One didn’t have to have children. In a mental skip she was nauseated by the thought of the sexual act. Instantly she was embarrassed by guilt and severely expurgated the nausea from her mind. She gathered her principles and theories around her like bedclothes – for security. She almost ran down the street with emotional panic. ‘I had no alternative,’ she said, and she herself heard how positive and how desperate it sounded and the sound frightened her.

  INTERLUDE ONE

  The American Poet’s Visit

  ‘There is a lefty poet from America here – Kenneth Rexroth – and he wants to meet some of us. Heard of him?’

  ‘Vaguely,’ I say to Cooper, a dodging reply. ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow night.’

  We arrange the party or ‘soiree’ as Gillian insists on calling it. We hope Rexroth isn’t going to be too eccentric because as Gillian says, ‘American eccentrics can be tiring at close proximity because they expect you to like them for it.’ She prefers British eccentrics because they don’t expect to be liked. ‘I mean,’ she says, ‘it’s their way of pissing people off, isn’t it?’

  We look Rexroth up in our poetry books.

  But we are more interested in biography than verse at this stage, but find little. We are interested, for instance, in his age – is he under forty like us or what? Trust no one under forty. We vaguely associate him with Ginsberg and Kerouac and the old Beats. God Bless. (Though Ginsberg keeps pace with the literary fashions, doesn’t he?) We find Rexroth’s poems but they don’t tell us much – biographically, that is. We find he did write a poem in praise of a masseuse and prostitute.

  I ring Cooper back. ‘I found him,’ I say, ‘I found him in a footnote to a book called Writers on the Left.’

  ‘Read it to me,’ says Cooper.

  ‘“Born 1905 in South Bend, Indiana. Some members of his father’s family, Ohio German, belonged to a communistic religious sect, and Owenites could be found on both sides. The son of a ‘passive socialist’ wholesale druggist, Rexroth joined the Wobblies when he was a precocious teenager. As an ‘inveterate hitchhiker’ he worked as a fruit and grain harvester, in the forest service in Washington and Montana, and at one time or other, according to his own testimony, passed through almost every incorporated town in the country. Rexroth talked to I.W.W. men, carnival performers, criminals, front men, female impersonators …”’

  ‘What?’ says Cooper, ‘what did you say then?’

  ‘Female impersonators. There’s more,’ I continue ‘“… and anarchists. His first poems appeared in Blues. Besides his activities in the unemployed councils, the John Reed Club, and other party organisations during the ‘third period’, Rexroth painted a mural for a Public Works art project and worked on one of the federal writers’ projects. ‘I believe the time will come soon,’ he wrote to Cowley, circa 1938, ‘if not interrupted by Fascism when every working stiff will be lots eruditer than E. Pound if he cares to be and folks will read Dante’s Canzoni often for fun. I write that kind of poetry because I think it important and beautiful. I also think that unless a few intellectuals get busy and shake the farts out of their drawers and write things people, real people, busy and harnessed here and now, are going to understand and read, they are going to be dead, and the working stiff mentioned above isn’t going to read at all. And by farts I mean funny ideas about what Marx should of thought about Wallace Stevens …’” ’

  I finish.

  ‘Is this one of your jokes?’ asks Cooper.

  ‘I swear it’s all true.’

  ‘Well. Well, he has all the qualifications for the all-American poet-revolutionary.’

  ‘But that’s not all. He endorses some San Francisco Hotel or restaurant. I saw an advertisement in an American magazine.’

  ‘My goodness.’

  ‘I dare say, though, it’s a good restaurant.’

  The evening begins in a relaxed way with Cooper introducing him as ‘Rex Kenroth’. The evening also begins good naturedly with me asking him if he is here on a Congress for Cultural Freedom grant. J-o-k-e. Like some of the people in our group he is unable to detect the delicate irony of the remark and takes it seriously and defensively. I have to hint that I am j-o-k-i-n-g without insulting his sense of humour. I do this by digging him in the ribs. His secretary is about twenty-five and wears a pair of attacking spectacles and says, ‘No, Ken is paying his own way,’ and they both give me a left-wing winking look to show they are awake to the machinations of the CIA and also, now, to my joke. And they don’t think it’s that funny.

  ‘Ken writes a syndicated column for some newspapers,’ his secretary rushes to tell me as if to answer the implication that if he isn’t on a grant then perhaps he is indigent and wants us to collect for him. Not that we’d mind. God knows we collect for everyone else. Is Seeger out of gaol yet?

  We are wearing suits and ties, which is unusual enough for us, still being blue jean personalities at weekends. Katherine is also wearing a suit and tie which subdues the bourgeoisosity of the scene with a dash of deviation. I wear m
y ‘I am an enemy of the state’ badge. ‘Terrified of being late,’ as Gillian is wont to add.

  ‘Bunny’ Stockwell Anderson has hay fever and can’t come from the English Department so they don’t have an observer. Hence Stockwell Anderson misses rubbing shoulders with an American Literary Figure which as it turns out is little more than two ships scraping the sides of each other in the night.

  ‘We saw a reference to your magazine in the Provo stuff in Amsterdam,’ says Rexroth.

  ‘Yes, in a list of fraternal publications,’ his secretary amplifies, ‘published as a supplement to their own publication, Provo, in November.’

  ‘She’s well detailed,’ I comment to Gillian who tells me to belt up. But we all shuffle. We haven’t published an issue for a year. We don’t know why.

  ‘What are you guys doing in the way of protest these days?’ he asks, moving away from the magazine, about which we are still formulating excuses.

  We try now to think about protest.

  ‘Actually we don’t hold much interest in protest these days,’ says Wayne.

  These days of all days, I think, these days of rapid change and dehumanisation. And we choose to relax on protest. Our lives, I observe, are spent wading against trend.

  ‘Some of us might be what you call existential protestors,’ I say, ‘but no reformist protestors.’ Everyone in the room looks at me except Gillian who looks up at the ceiling.

  ‘We see the protest thing more as a permanent thing – you know … a way of life … in conflict with the authoritarian nature of society,’ Cooper puts in.

  The rest look at him gratefully.

  We walk up the historical escalator the wrong way. That’s what we do.

  ‘That’s our bag,’ I say, but no one admits to hearing me.

  ‘That’s our bag,’ I say.

  Gillian makes a nauseated face.

  ‘Oh you people should see what the Provos are doing,’ his secretary says, with the enervating enthusiasm common to American business executives, folk singers, and tourists.