by Marge Piercy
I liked the Rhône Valley enormously and would have gladly stayed in one of those towns like Montélimar, where we ate nougat. We kept wandering till we got to Avignon. We played in the Villeneuve, which in spite of its name was a well-preserved medieval ruin. There were not many tourists anyplace we had gone so far (none at all in Le Puy), and we had the ruins to ourselves. Michel lightened up away from Paris. He was once again charming and less judgmental, less instructional. The Rhône fascinated me. It was a fast powerful river like the Detroit River, although not as wide. As a treat, I bought a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape that we drank picnicking.
We went on to the Riviera, to Menton. I know we went to the beach. I know we saw Roman ruins, but for some reason, Nice impressed me more. I thought it charming and livable, halfway French and halfway Italian. I had my first pizza in a restaurant on a date my freshman year in college: here it was street food and cheap. Here when I spoke to people, they did not first correct my grammar but answered me back. I found it easy to understand their melodic French and easy to communicate with waiters and fruit sellers and people standing waiting for buses. We slept in a park one night and then located a youth hostel up on the mountain in Villefranche.
A few days later, we went on to Pisa and then stayed for two weeks in a little dusty pension in Florence, in the studio of a sculptor on vacation. Michel talked of marriage but was not sure. I got caught up in persuading him. What a tangled weave of intentions and fears and unlikely desires. I was far more experienced sexually, and it did not occur to me I could not make him enjoy sex with me, could not waken him sensually. Sex came easily to me. It was years before I understood it does not come so easily or naturally to everybody else. It was the natural language of my body, but not of his. I could give him an orgasm, but I could not really give him pleasure. He doubted the body too much. I should have understood our differences would not only refuse to mesh but grate on one another, but I was too naive, too eager, too confident. I was like a poker player convinced I could bluff my way to the pot on two tens.
His speaking voice was deep and pleasant, as was his singing voice. He had quite a repertoire of songs, most in French but some in Hebrew. I am not a polite person myself—too greedy, too blunt, too much in a hurry—but I greatly appreciate true politeness in others, particularly in intimate situations, and I appreciated Michel’s polite manner. Michel was gentle and kind, but rigid in his ideas and expectations. His early life had been chaotic and terrifying. His parents, upon leaving Germany, were not permitted to practice medicine in France; immigrant Jews were barred from the professions. They had to survive as shopkeepers. After the Germans invaded, things grew rapidly worse. He remembered his mother running with him from one of the roundups of French Jews—the notorious rafles—and he remembered the clandestine trip to Switzerland, the difficulty crossing the border. His early childhood had been marked by danger and terror.
In Switzerland, his parents were put in a detention camp and he was placed with a Swiss family, where he was forced to practice the Christian religion. He felt that his parents did not love him as much as his younger brother, for Daniel was with them in the camp and here he was, farmed out to people who, if not cruel, were certainly not warm or kind. He had many psychic scars even though he had experienced, comparatively speaking, “a good war,” as they said in his family. Close friends of his family were in the Jewish Resistance, as perhaps his father was before they had to flee to Switzerland. They only got in because his parents kept all their passports and papers. They had originally been Polish, gone to Germany for schooling and a better life and then fled to France early in Hitler’s regime. They were more like German Jewish families I had met in college than like Polish or Russian Jews I knew from childhood on. They belonged to a very tight group of friends who had gone through the war together, protecting one another. They were people who had counted on one another for their very lives, and they had a strength to their friendship I have only known with a few friends with whom I went through the antiwar movement: someone to whom you can absolutely trust your back, who will not betray you, with whom you take risks and hope to survive, together.
I learned many things in France and with Michel. I learned how Jewish I am. I learned how American I am. These two realizations caused a rethinking of my identity. Michel was extremely French. The things he said oftenest to me were: One does not do that. One does not do it like that. That is not how it is done. He had secured a small fellowship at the University of Chicago, since I was to go to Northwestern. We were married upon our return to the States, in Detroit.
My mother in a fit of pique refused to attend. I could not understand what she was furious about. I could have been married in Europe. It wasn’t costing them anything. Michel did not believe in Jewish ceremonies, so we were married by a justice of the peace. There wasn’t even a wedding supper at a restaurant. My father too acted annoyed. I had imagined that they would understand that a physicist was a reasonably exalted occupation, like a doctor or a lawyer, but neither of them seemed to grasp that. Besides, they mistrusted doctors and lawyers. They acted as if I were marrying a hit man or a pimp. I was embarrassed for Michel, to have to go through this ugliness, and I promised him we need see little of them for the next few years.
Once we married, slowly I became aware that he expected me to put my writing aside like a childish hobby when we returned to France. It took a while for this to sink in, because for the first nine months, I was going to Northwestern up the El in one direction, while he was going to the University of Chicago down the El in the other direction. We lived on Wilson Avenue in Chicago in the Granada apartment hotel—cheap, cheap, twenty dollars a week—between the Friendly Tap and the Backstage Bar, which had a sign out front CONTINUOUS ENTERTAINMENT BACKSTAGE. It was a neighborhood of transients, pawnshops, dark beery bars, check-cashing storefronts, secondhand stores and Pentecostal churches. We were three blocks from Lake Michigan and two blocks from the El. Michel was preparing for his prelims for his doctorate, as well as working on the cyclotron. We got on well. Our time together was precious, perhaps because there was so little of it.
The El fascinated me. It was not a from-above maplike view of a city, nor immersion in traffic of the streets. Instead I sat looking into private lives, glimpses of people similar to those that had engrossed me in our summer sublet on the Lower East Side of New York. Now, however, instead of watching dramas slowly unfold day by day, I caught glimpses of lives, snapshots in passing. Every day I passed from the urban grime and electric bustle of Chicago across a frontier marked by a line of bars and liquor stores flashing neon day and night into mostly prosperous spacious tree-lined Evanston, which was dry. I found the students at Northwestern bland and boring, for the most part. They seemed cast all from the same mold.
Early in our marriage, the super found a tiny black kitten. We took her in. She had a fierce, avid disposition, a great desire to survive, a purr bigger than she was. Since I was writing on Marlowe in graduate school, I named her Tamburlaine, after the protagonist of one of his plays, a fierce Mongol leader.
She was just a cold lonely kitten and wanted to sleep with us, but Michel, who had never had a pet, insisted she must sleep in the kitchen. She managed with her tiny weight to open the swinging door. He put down pans of water—an improvised moat—to form a barrier. She slogged through them to the bed, arriving wet, half drowned and coughing. I felt as if I were a child again, having to endure my parents’ ideas about how cats should be kept. This cat never went out, was living in a two-room apartment and I was still weaning her. Why couldn’t she take comfort from the warmth of our bodies and snuggle with us? It is not done to sleep with animals, Michel said. We had our first serious fight.
She was a bright cat but confined to our tiny furnished apartment. She had an imperious disposition and liked to be played with, amused. Many evenings we would both be studying, and she would select one of us, usually me, and pull the plug from my floor lamp out of the wall. She had learned th
at made me put my book down. After we taped the plugs to the wall, she learned to turn off the lights by taking the pull chain in her teeth. When I would sit at the kitchen table working, she would often sit in the chair opposite me, only her eyes and sharp black ears visible over the tabletop.
I worked hard at Northwestern and established a perfect record. My one friend there, besides my professor in Elizabethan drama, was Charlotte, an Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn, also a graduate student. She and I had come to Northwestern to study with Richard Ellmann, the Yeats and Joyce scholar. As he had gone off on a Guggenheim that year to Europe, we found ourselves forced to take a seminar in Keats instead. We made up for our disappointment by reading Ulysses aloud together and sharing our reactions to all the critics we ploughed through for our seminar. We once had the police called on us for doing Israeli dancing in the Evanston streets to blow off steam after a particularly boring seminar.
I took my master’s degree at Northwestern and passed the exam with the highest score they ever had up to that point. They offered me a better fellowship. I had only to complete the Anglo-Saxon requirement and write my thesis. But Michel and his family saw no reason for me to continue. We had, they said, to get together key money to buy an apartment in Paris. That was, Michel iterated, the way it was done. I liked some of my professors in graduate school, but the scholarship alienated me. I felt as if we were killing the poems we dissected. The work was boring, boring, boring. My head was being stuffed with stale cornflakes. I did not want to be a scholar; I wanted to be a writer. I suspected that if I continued graduate school, I would begin to get ideas for papers for MLA conferences instead of poems or stories. Security lay that way, but not the work I was put into the world to do. I would never be the writer I wanted to be if I continued for my Ph.D., I was convinced. I went to work as a secretary—first to a project studying urban renewal, then at the University of Chicago in the sociology department—to support Michel and the distant apartment.
My desire to write had not diminished, in spite of setbacks, including a friend’s losing the only copy of a novel I had just completed. He was saving money by sending it parcel post instead of first class, as I had requested. After that, I would never again have only one copy of anything I wrote. I sometimes kept carbons of letters, out of a compulsion to make sure nothing disappeared—which proved useful in writing this memoir, frankly.
Michel’s parents purchased an apartment for us, and his mother proceeded to furnish it in the style of her choosing: large formal bourgeois interiors of heavy wood, massive, respectable, depressing. We were living on what I made, and now we were in debt thousands of dollars to purchase an apartment I did not want, because that was what one did. Somewhere in Paris was a six-room apartment we were paying for, that I was expected to go to work to support in France at some extremely menial and ill-paid job, while Michel was off in Algeria in the army fighting a war he opposed. When we returned, he made clear, he wanted to start a family at once. We would visit his parents every Sunday. We would live in that damned flat with its hideous furniture.
What I wanted did not enter into the equation. He simply ignored it, not arrogantly, but backed up by his family. That was the way things were done; that was how it must be. There was only one path, and we must walk it, me several feet in the rear. I had not expected this, in my idiocy. I thought how things were when we were both university students was how things would be when we were married. I thought this in spite of everything I had seen all of my life about sex roles in marriage. I expected it to be different for me.
I experienced something interesting. As a student at Michigan and again at Northwestern, I was highly visible. I was loud, opinionated, noisy and sought as a friend and earlier as a sexual partner. I was known as a poet and a fiction writer and as a political person. I was used to being listened to, argued with, fought, followed. I was used to walking into a party and being instantly noticed.
The moment I became a married secretary, I experienced a loss of visibility. I would speak and no one would hear me. It was as if my voice had been swallowed by the air. I moved through rooms as if on castors, as if in purdah. At first, I rather enjoyed being invisible, although I found no pleasure in being inaudible. I came to resent my nonpersonhood. I got louder, shriller. It did not matter. I spoke, but the conversation went on over my head in waves that broke over me. I was of no more consequence in a conversation than Tamburlaine.
When we moved to Hyde Park, the racially mixed neighborhood around the University of Chicago, where Michel was studying, Tam went with us. Now we had a much bigger apartment, unfurnished in a run-down building. Tam could run and jump and climb up on the ledges and see pigeons and sparrows in the trees outside. She was a lithe cat, completely black. Her eyes were an amazing yellow green, deep, more green than yellow. We had her altered. She was thin, as were we, partly because we had been living mostly on my fellowship and now on what I made as an underpaid secretary. Once we lived on smelt for ten days because it was the cheapest thing on sale and I bought an enormous quantity of it frozen. We ate a lot of rice, and I used food coloring on it to make it more interesting: blue rice, anyone? One night while I was still studying at Northwestern, I invited my favorite professor, a Shakespeare scholar, and his wife to supper. What I served them must have been astonishing, if not frightening. One tiny lamb chop apiece, lots of blue rice, frozen beans and some kind of pudding from a package. After they had left, Michel and I took a walk and saw them in a Chinese restaurant near the El, eating ravenously. They were both very polite.
I had no idea how to cook, but since I was expected to, I soon bought a cookbook and tried. I developed a repertoire based on the inner organs of cows and chickens and seventeen ways of cooking kosher hot dogs. My early attempts were limited by the one cookbook (I now own a hundred), our meager finances and my severely limited knowledge of food, not to mention how little time I had when I got home from work. I went through the usual period of dumping a can of soup on everything to make a sauce. What I produced was barely edible, but we were always hungry, and food was unimportant to Michel. The vet said Tamburlaine was malnourished also, but we could not afford much. I shared my food with her, all I could do. She was particularly my cat, and as my life began to fill me with despair, I cried into her fur. We would lie on the double bed together, its sagging mattress sloping to a ravine, and I would hold her and weep.
Michel and I fought more and more. I began to try to have some influence on the course of our marriage, and I wanted our sex to improve. Michel went to a psychiatrist who told him I was immature sexually if I could not have an orgasm during our brief and perfunctory intercourse, and that I was pursuing what Michel called a chimera. Having had a good deal of quite satisfactory sex, I could hardly argue that I knew what good sex was without hurting his feelings, but neither Michel nor his psychiatrist nor his family could dissuade me of what I knew I desired. I began to realize he had little desire to please me but wanted me to “behave correctly” in all things, including sex. These were the days of the Freudian ideal in which a woman was supposed to come on demand as soon as a penis was inserted, and both partners would go off together in a simultaneous big bang. Always when I tried to talk to him, he would put off the conversation by saying he had some pressing thing in graduate school. He was angry with me but expressed it in withdrawal. He adopted a superior tone, as if dealing with an irrational child who had to be firmly disciplined. The whole last summer we were together, he refused to discuss our marriage at all until he had finished his experiments and the cyclotron run.
I began to have vivid symbolic dreams about freedom, about escaping. I was excavating a tomb, finding a sarcophagus from which the light was pouring. When I opened it, I saw myself inside. I’m alive, I thought as I sat up. Why had I doubted it? I was writing feverishly, aware that if I succumbed to his wishes, I would soon stop, perhaps permanently. I could feel my life closing upon me, and I clutched Tamburlaine to me and talked incessantly of what I should do. I was
stifling. In my dreams, I was in danger of being buried alive; when I woke, I thought my life was narrow as a grave and growing darker. I tried to speak to him in spite of his prohibition, but he turned away and glowered. He spent more and more time in the lab. I scarcely saw him. He would come home for supper and then he would go back. I knew his experiments were consuming, but I also suspected he found it pleasanter in the lab than in our apartment. I was a loud demand he wasn’t about to meet. The guys using the cyclotron were a jolly lot, an elite, a club of the chosen who were careless with the danger. They held occasional parties there, drinking beer and dancing around the cyclotron.
After one of our really bitter, bitter fights, Tamburlaine pushed out the screen and ran off into the night. I put up handmade posters on every tree. I ran through the streets calling her. It was not until a year later I was walking down Woodlawn Avenue in Hyde Park and heard a cat meowing loudly. She came running up to me. With her came a boy of six. Tamburlaine was now his cat. She was sleek, well fed, friendly but not about to go off with me. She remembered me, but she had given herself to this family, a professor’s family with a nice brick house and a big backyard. She was allowed outside, but the boy said she never left the yard. Tamburlaine had moved up in the world. I had moved on down.
That summer, I read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which clarified my thinking and gave me an analysis I could share with no one but found illuminating. She gave me a way to think about being a woman, about marriage, about sex roles, about expectations, about freedom. I tentatively began an affair with a man I met in a writing group, loved him as I tended always to love anybody I was close to. The sex with the fellow writer was good and strengthened me, although I did not take the relationship as seriously as I was supposed to. He was southern and much older. At least he listened to me when I spoke, and he understood I was serious about writing. Both of us were in a group of Black and white writers on the South Side who met once a week and shared our work. Several other writers came out of that group, including Harry Mark Petrakis and Robert Coover—but none of us were published yet, all wanna-bes. My lover went out of town to visit his ex-wife and children, and I resumed brooding about what I should do. Then quite simply I decided.
