Incubus

by Ann Arensberg

  Among sexual intimates, no matter how unbridled their activities, there is one last taboo. Sex is inhibited by discussion—before, during, or afterward. Lewd words have their place between partners in the throes of union; but nothing lowers the temperature like instructing, petitioning, or rehashing. As Henry’s clients reported it, sex did not die a sudden death. It dwindled away, its end no doubt hastened by the wives’ predilection for talking. Recent sexual reformers have spoken out for women’s rights in the bedroom. They advise us to let the man know what we like and how we like it. According to their scenario, the sex act would come to resemble a crew of movers lowering a piano out of a second-story window: “Take it up! Stop. Take it down. Slowly. A little to the right. Now the left. You got it. Hold it steady!”

  Although my friends and acquaintances did not practice playing traffic cop during intercourse, they had no qualms about holding post-mortems when the act was unfinished. Each of us delivered the same lines in the same gentle, neutral tone of voice: “Is there something on your mind, Ralph (or Ford, or Henry)?”; “Are you feeling all right?”; “Didn’t the pork chops (chili, sauerkraut) agree with you?” No matter how carefully the inquiry was conducted, it came out accusatory. Most men have a large investment in their mechanical skills. All over the county at this season, when the grass starts greening, they are struggling with lawn mowers, weed eaters, electric hedge clippers, and power saws. These recalcitrant appliances will eventually have to go to the shop, where their owners confer with the expert in technical language, reviewing discarded theories and advancing new ones. In the meantime they fill the air with commotion and curses. From the depths of basements and garages in every household you can hear their battle cry resounding: “I’ll fix it if it kills me!” Any sensible wife blocks her ears and keeps her distance, knowing better than to get in the way of a man and his implement.

  When the sex drive is on the fritz, there is usually no specific remedy, no spark plugs to clean or replace, no loose wires between the motor and the ignition. Men can’t fix it, so they lose their status as amateur mechanics. The shame and frustration of failure puts a dent in their spirits. As long as they can act, or be allowed to act, as if nothing were wrong, time will recondition them. As long as they are not reminded, every night and at every meal, that their engine is stalling. “It helps to talk about it, Frank (or Ford, or Tommy). We can’t sweep it under the rug. It’s too important.” “I haven’t mentioned the subject for a week. I hope you’ll give me a little credit.” “Why am I always the one to bring it up? Don’t you want things to be normal?”

  After a dozen—or several dozen—of these one-sided dialogues, we stopped pouring our substance down a dry well. We lost faith in one of our most precious feminine resources. Men fix things with their brains. Women solve problems by uncovering feelings, using speech as their instrument. For us, talking is intimacy and silence is estrangement. By keeping silent, the Fords and Henrys believed they were preserving the status quo, while we felt they were destroying it. Since words were forbidden, we acted out our bitterness indirectly. Gail Croft tried to find some evidence of a rival, poring over her husband’s appointment book in search of a recurring mark or squiggle, his personal code for the name of, or a meeting with, his mistress. Sally Bissell, who had a diploma from a Paris cooking school, began to make mistakes that would have disqualified her in her student days, adding sugar to a pot au feu instead of salt, burning the onions for soupe à l’oignon instead of caramelizing them. Her soufflés didn’t rise and her béarnaise sauce curdled. When she turned to simpler dishes like egg custard and baked stuffed potatoes, the potatoes exploded in the oven and her custards wouldn’t set in the middle. Ruth Hiram developed a rash on her calves and ankles, scratching herself raw until the sores became infected.

  My symptoms were less dramatic—only intermittent bouts of sleeplessness, a kind of blank white insomnia with no content. I had no thoughts, but my body hummed and vibrated. Ordinary sounds were magnified—the radiators, the clock, and, above all, Henry’s breathing. I shook him awake four or five times a night: “roll over,” “blow your nose,” “you’re wheezing,” “you’re puffing,” “you’re gurgling.” After more of these bouts I took myself out of our bedroom, dragging my pillows. I had the choice of many flat surfaces. There were beds in the guest rooms and the attic and two well-sprung living-room sofas.

  At first we didn’t know we were angry. We called it “nerves” or “hurt feelings.” Henry identified the anger for his clients. Naming it released it. They kept on coming to Henry because he acted as a stationary target. He tried to schedule these women on separate days or with an empty hour between them. I saw him leaving one of those sessions, breathing hard and walking unsteadily. Our new faces shocked him. Every one of us, myself included, the pastor’s helpmeet, looked in the mirror and saw the reflection of a harpy—taloned, powerful, hideous, and famished.

  Anger can explode or implode and none of us could risk the aftermath of an explosion, the rubble of our homes, the torn, scattered limbs, the brushfires that flared up in the wreckage for a long time afterwards. At this point, we managed our anger by the simple expedient of denying it. There was no problem with our sex lives, only lack of creative effort in finding a solution. In retrospect, the denial phase seems comical. I think of Jane Morse poring over the back pages of men’s magazines, clipping ads for Oriental products that roused desire, dragon seed pills, “male toner” tea, rubber sheaths with ridges to stimulate the penis. Ruth changed the Hirams’ meatless diet to include rare beef. Sally perfumed the backs of her knees with a dab of musk oil. She dug a bed near the kitchen door, where she seeded summer savory, an herb with a reputation as an aphrodisiac. When the plants came up, she dried the leaves and sewed them into “love pillows.”

  In other words, each of my friends started to practice witchcraft, that branch of the medical profession dominated by women. Like any researcher engaged in an experiment, they learned to temper hope with patience. Failure became a meaningless term, since there were so many variables to play with: regulating the dosage, changing the time of day it was administered; deciding when to harvest herbs, whether at full moon or in the morning before the dew dried. Ruth kept watch over her husband while he was sleeping, recording the number and strength of his nighttime erections. She believed she was well on the way to proving that steak for breakfast produced more and longer-lasting results than steak for supper. She had yet to put shellfish to the trial, or leaner meats like veal, lamb, and chicken.

  For myself, I made Henry seek help from various practitioners, both alternative and conventional: a hypnotist, a bioenergeticist, and a marriage counselor. He went to Portland in civilian clothes, guilty and obedient, keeping his appointments at first, canceling or forgetting the later ones. He found hypnosis relaxing, a pleasant, unfreighted interlude. The doctor, a young Israeli, gave him a suggestion to increase his sensual awareness—an image of a sun-soaked beach, the heat washing over him in waves, pretty girls in bikinis oiling their supple bodies. During this time Henry began to approach me, making overtures with his mouth and his hands. One night I misjudged the state of his readiness. Any progress brought about by hypnosis was lost in an instant. The penis is a finely graded instrument, too complicated to be gauged by a lustful woman. There are many degrees of stiffness and congestion. Neither verticality nor engorgement necessarily constitutes a viable erection.

  The bioenergeticist, a hairy, short-legged man in his fifties, ordered Henry to strip off his clothes. He lunged at him until Henry, buck naked, started to retaliate. The man parried Henry’s blows with a rolled-up towel stretched between his hands. As they fought he encouraged Henry to grunt and bellow, to open his throat and release the sound from his abdomen. These mock battles gave Henry the idea that he needed more exercise, though not the kind of workout I had intended. For a while he went jogging on the track behind the high school. He bought a metal chinning bar, which he installed in the rectory basement. He invited me to com
e on a daylong hike through Rankins Woods. We took the canoe to a stretch of easy white water on Crooked River. Every one of our shared activities took place outdoors, in the daytime, wearing regulation sporting gear.

  I called Doctor Swan myself and accompanied Henry, since marriage counselors begin by seeing people in pairs. Ethel Swan, Ph.D., received us in her office on Harbor Street, a suite of rooms with white walls and bare, uneven floorboards. A chesty dyed blonde wearing a fuchsia scarf that clashed with her red blouse, she greeted us with a smile, giving each of us a firm, two-handed handshake. She singled out the identified patient while we were still in the reception room. Henry followed her inside and I sat down to wait until she summoned me. After a quarter of an hour she opened the door and I went in.

  She got right down to business. “Was it your idea to seek treatment, or your husband’s?” “It was mine,” I answered. “And your husband agreed?” asked the doctor. I caught Henry’s eye. “Well, he didn’t disagree. He went along with it.” She turned to Henry. “You asked your wife to make the appointment?” Henry shifted in his chair. “I don’t remember asking. She wrote the date and the time on my calendar.” “Mrs. Lieber, will you face your husband? Dr. Lieber, face your wife. Now, let’s begin at the beginning. Ask your husband again. This time answer her directly, Dr. Lieber.” I felt like a child who hadn’t prepared her lessons. “We should go to see a marriage counselor,” I recited. “That’s a statement, not a question,” said the doctor. I tried again. “Will you go to see a marriage counselor?” “No, I won’t,” said Henry after a moment. We gaped at each other and at the therapist, who got up from her chair and came toward us. “Come back to me,” she said very pleasantly, “when you reach an understanding on this subject.”

  Chapter Eight

  My sister came home for the Easter holidays with her bag of troubles. Once I was married and provided an alternative to staying at Emily’s, she showed up every year or so, sometimes announced, sometimes unannounced. The drive from Albany took a good six hours, seven without pushing it. Anyone else would have made a start well before noon to be certain of arriving before her hosts had gone to bed. Hannah roused us at four in the morning of Good Friday. Her muffler had conked out in the Effinghams, near the Maine–New Hampshire border, disturbing the sleep of every household along her route through the lower Sebago region. When she pulled into the rectory driveway, she was dragging her tailpipe.

  For a churchman Easter week is as busy as foaling season for a horse breeder. Henry had two early Communion services, one at six-thirty at St. A’s and one ecumenical service at the Fourth Congregational at seven-thirty, followed by a meeting with the members of the Easter Vigil committee, who wanted to hold the Saturday night vigil at the Violette Brook Campgrounds. There was no sense in going back to sleep for an hour and a half, so Henry and I unloaded Hannah’s gear and took her duffel bags upstairs. Hannah’s van was packed to the roof with scrap lumber, weathered pieces of red and gray barn siding. Jammed behind the lumber was a rusty wood stove, four kitchen chairs with the seats missing, a pair of wooden cross-country skis, and a carton labeled sheets / towels / blankets. “I’m thinking of staying awhile,” Hannah said. “You have plenty of room in the garage. You can store all this junk until I find a place.”

  By now my mother had lived alone for nearly fifteen years, if I don’t count her annual trips to France with the Huguenot Society. Since the Huguenots gathered and were persecuted in every province in the country, Emily’s pilgrimages came to resemble ordinary tourism. When I married, she gave away every stick of the Beaulac furniture, along with all the curios and knickknacks, the beadwork pictures, stuffed songbirds under glass domes, tapestry footstools mounted on deer hooves, three-tiered revolving centerpieces. She made her house as spare and clean as a wilderness cabin. Every object it contained had to pass the test of usefulness, whether for sitting, eating, writing, or storage. Some of my father’s pieces were there (a chest of drawers, a bench, a trestle table), the few he had not willed to the museum in Portland, the ones he called his “Shaker plagiarisms.” The brightest color in the house was the terracotta glaze on some pottery soup dishes. All the color was in her garden, where she sided with Nature against good taste, planting reds with oranges, hot pinks and yellows with purples. Garden books tell you that white flowers tone down vivid colors. Emily discovered quite the opposite: she used white to intensify them.

  My mother observed partial mourning, demi-deuil, as the French say. She favored neutral shade in her dress, browns and grays with no light in them. We wear mourning for the dead, not the living, but my mother was grieving for her elder daughter, who was lost to her. There was no longer any open rift between them, which might have forged a vital connection, even though a negative one. Feuding parties can be sure of always being in each other’s thoughts. Perhaps it would have been kinder if Hannah had kept on using Emily as her whipping boy, as she had when she was in her teens, spiteful and defiant. For the last ten years she had treated Emily with a casualness reserved for old acquaintances, names in her address book who got notices of art shows where her sculpture was on exhibit, or a postcard out of the blue from the western provinces of Canada: “You can breathe here—everything on a massive scale—we live like ants in the East—Roger (Phil, Gary, Mark) and I back next month if the van holds up—Be well, Hannah.”

  When Hannah blew into Dry Falls, I usually got a few days’ warning, but Emily had no word from her. Left to herself, Hannah might or might not drop in on her after a few days, squeezing in her mother between visits to her high school woodworking teacher and Bobby Court’s sister, Helene, who owned the Dexter Shoe franchise on the strip in South Freeport. I made it my job to get everyone together for the evening meal, as if we were a closely knit family reunited after an unwelcome separation.

  Emily was quiet and unobtrusive on these occasions, like a first-time guest or a governess or companion who has been invited to eat in the dining room with her employers. Hannah smoked cigarettes between courses, giving us her opinions on the art world (dominated by a handful of powerful collectors and dealers), the probability of nuclear war, the reasons for the failure of her latest experiment in communal living (“it doesn’t work if everyone’s an artist”; “I was the only artist in a bunch of farmers”; “there’s such a thing as too little structure”; “they had too many rules”). She tried to get a rise out of Henry: “You work for a big corporation. What’s the difference between you and a VP at Procter & Gamble? Nothing but the wages.” I came in for my share of it: “I love this fifties food, sis. Lot of wonderful passé things going on in your kitchen.”

  Early Good Friday morning I told Emily about Hannah’s arrival. It was best done in person. I rang the bell and let myself in the front door, although Emily was probably in the garden. I saw her from the screened-in porch, carrying a tray of seedlings in peat pots. I called out to her. I wanted to talk to her before she started tucking the pots in the earth. Emily was touchy and withdrawn when she was planting, as unapproachable as a nursing animal. My eccentric mother, weak-eyed from childhood, who “saw men as trees walking,” refused to wear her spectacles in the garden. Inside the house she bumped into furniture without her glasses, but I have never seen her put a foot wrong outdoors. She came toward me, or toward the direction of my voice, stepping over a pile of bamboo stakes lying in her way, skirting a pitchfork plunged upright in the ground. She gave me that luminous smile of the poor in sight, an unfocused smile that embraces much more than its object.

  “Ma mère,” I said. “She’s here.”

  Although the path was level, Emily seemed to lose her footing. I took her arm and guided her to the steps.

  “We’ll sit down for a little. You should wear a hat when you work in the sun.”

  Her hands, small and freckled, were covered with scratches, the nails ringed with dirt.

  “Where are those gloves I gave you? Have you already lost them?”

  “I knew she was coming,” said Emily. “I
always know.”

  “Now listen, mère,” I said. “This time she talked about staying.”

  The hope and dread in Emily’s eyes were painful to see.

  “I’ll get the barn ready for her,” she said.

  “No, no. Pay attention. It won’t happen. It’s just one of her notions.”

  Emily lifted her eyes and stared out at the back of the garden. If she had been wearing her glasses she would have seen the Smalleys’ tiger cat climbing the dogwood.

  “Before she comes I always have the same dream. I’m chasing her across a field full of flowers. There are hills in the distance. I’m so out of breath I lose ground. She runs into a cave and I follow her in the dark. I never catch up with her.”

  I put my arm around her shoulders. “It was only a nightmare, darling. Were you sleeping on your back?”

  “Let me speak, Cora. This time the dream changed. There was someone else in the cave. I can’t remember. I keep trying. She screams. I can hear it in my mind. The scream was very high. It had notes, like a piece of music.”

  “It doesn’t mean anything. You know what dreams are. They’re a kind of mental sewage system.”

  “She was in danger. She may be in danger.”

  I laughed at her. “From what? There are no caves in this neighborhood.”

  Emily stood up abruptly. “I must finish my beans. The pots are drying out.”