She hurried on, piling up intellectual sandbags against the flood. After all, she said, a man is aware that once there’s a child, he’ll be cast aside. Did I know, for instance, that female bees sting the males and stuff them alive into the honeycomb to protect the stores of food for their young? “Stuffing behavior” it was called—how loyal would I be to a gender that was willing to use me as a living bottle stopper? Of course I was distraught—quite understandable, but …
“Which one is it?” she asked. “The one you pointed out across the cafeteria?”
I nodded, miserably. It hurt me to think of Sid, his long bones that I’d felt were part of me, his air of living at a great distance from ordinary things.
“That one looked like a physics major!” she said.
“He is a physics major,” I admitted, and after a minute, “What do physics majors look like?”
She drew back a little, twinkling all over, ready to press her point home. “Physics majors, my dear, are psychically extraterrestrial. They mean to impose a grand plan on the universe.” (She gestured to show that I was the universe.) “They imagine they can think their way out of orbit!” She threw her head back, laughing, then reined herself in, pursed her lips, and added, in precise, campy diction: “However, they are wrong.”
“He was my celestial twin!” I insisted, but it was my last sob of the day.
“I have never heard anything so preposterous!” she said, making a show of sputtering. “Your celestial twin? He is your polar opposite. My God, he belongs on Easter Island. No, no, I don’t say he wasn’t worth your while, it will serve you very well, in the end, to have had an experience with a type like that. You want to try all types.…” she turned to size me up again, and nodded briskly—yes, she had been right the first time, she was always right.
“Yes,” she said, laughing a little nervously, “yes, I’m sure you’ll try all types. I don’t see any problem there.”
And suddenly I was as curious as heartbroken; the process of my sophistication was begun.
Five
THE FINANCIAL aid director laid my father’s tax return out on his desk, to show me an “adjusted gross income” in the minus six figures. A man who had lost two hundred thousand dollars in a year had once possessed that same amount. Did I understand?
I did not. My father only borrowed that money, I insisted, it had never really been his. But, this forbearing man asked, setting a box of Kleenex discreetly before me on the desk, could I see that this showed my father had spent two hundred thousand dollars in the last year?
At the sight of the Kleenex I, who always tried to do as expected, began to cry.
“Has there been trouble? An illness maybe … or…?” Was there some other reason my father couldn’t have spared a bit for my tuition? He looked at me with bafflement and concern. He was a ruddy WASP in corduroy trousers, whose handshake and ringing voice had come down to him through generations of wealth and confidence—such blessings can cramp a man’s imagination. I went over the possible answers: Teddy had climbed up the ladder-back rocking chair, and when it started to tip, had clung to the television set, which came over on top of him. He needed twenty-two stitches. (Why does one boast of one’s sutures? But one does.) The white pine that had towered beside the house, which Pop had been meaning to cut down, had come down of its own accord during an ice storm, smashing out the whole bedroom window. Days later Ma found a perfect bird’s nest on her dresser top among the scarves. And the demand for ping-pong balls was not what they had expected, but Pop insisted sales would “bounce back.”
That was the important thing, after all—to meet the vicissitudes with a smile. The sob that shook me arose from depths unfathomable. We were poor, poor, I insisted—my mother cooked on a single burner because mice had taken over the rest of the stove, Sylvie did without orthodonture though her teeth were crowded into her face so that, in just the moment of perfect delight when a woman is most beautiful, she seemed to turn into a vampire. After all, it wasn’t as if I were an only child; the others needed things—shoes, for instance. A struggling ping-pong ball company absorbs cash like a sponge, everyone knew that. My God, if losing two hundred thousand dollars in a year didn’t impoverish a family, what on earth would? Did he really think it was so important that I have the opportunity to explicate Sexton’s “Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator” that I should take the bread out of children’s mouths?
He sighed, he checked the clock, he began again.
* * *
“IT IS, in fact, a lot more sensible for you to study ‘The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator’ than for you to give up and go home,” Philippa said.
“We can’t afford this. They need me there.”
“Water safety!” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“Water safety, ever studied it? What do you do when someone is drowning? Or, no, what would you do if you saw a number of people, all drowning together in the middle of a lake?”
“Sit on the bank reading ‘The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator’?”
“Well, better that than jumping in to join them!” she said. “They are drowning in American anti-intellectualism!”
“God, I thought it was debt.”
“Same, same!” she said. “You could get a student loan. You should go forward, Beatrice.
“You should not go home. If you want to understand the disintegration of the WASP tradition, you’d do better to read Robert Lowell.”
She was my thunderbolt; I loved to watch her teaching, her eyes darting as if thoughts were pinging back and forth in her head like badminton birdies, while she lit each cigarette from the last until there were too many birdies, and too many cigarettes, in play, and she blinked and shook the head to clear it, and rapped her pointer on the blackboard and asked, “Miss Wolfe, may we assume your full attention is focused on the text?”
It was, it was! “Okay,” I said, and rushed to the library to get Life Studies, and to the bank to get a loan.
* * *
I’D STARTED sleeping in Sid’s bed, since he was always with someone else. It was strange comfort, the smell of his shampoo on the pillow, the warmth of the down quilt he’d brought from home. But it was the best I could do. There, at 3:11 one morning, I was awakened by a full, soft kiss. I knew, I had always believed that a kiss like this would come, and that when it came, I’d be ready to give myself over completely, courageously. It was almost exactly what I’d imagined, this gentle responsiveness, a will to shape one mouth to the other again and again. I reached up tenderly, taking the dear head in my hands, eyes closed, lips parted to inhale the other, whose lips were cool and whose woolen coat smelled of the night air. Night air? I shook myself awake and pulled away, and the kisser stood bolt upright in alarm.
“Who are you?!” I asked.
“Who are you?” she replied.
It was Cindy Crowe, the girl from the bathtub, the one who was so free of the scourge of jealousy—I suppose Sid was spending the night with the sensual type. Cindy stalked out of the room and I heard her door slam shut—I pictured her taking Sid by the neck and smashing sense into him—in, of course, an utterly nonjudgmental and jealousy-free way. I turned over and pulled up the blanket. Philippa was going to love this story.
Six
“FIRST, YOU must withdraw from that harem,” she said, speaking the word harem with a relish that suggested she was as jealous of Sid’s possibilities as she was disapproving. She’d shown us a slide of an Ingres harem scene to illustrate the romantic sensibility—the women turning their faces and their full, round breasts toward the painter without the slightest modesty, nor curiosity. They were so complete in their beauty they needed nothing else, while I ached all over.
“You don’t have to prepare a legal brief, just explain that it is your unfashionable misfortune to have love and sex all tangled together, apologize, and let them go their enlightened way.”
“Once I start talking to him, I’ll accidentally throw myself weeping on the
ground, grab his ankles, and beg him for love,” I explained.
She started to laugh, because she saw me starting to cry. “No, you will not, because we will have rehearsed it and you will have practiced not throwing yourself on the ground!”
“I can’t, Philippa,” I said brokenly. “I love him.”
A smile flickered on her face and I heard the drama in my voice, a strand I’d pulled out of the movies—a false strand.
“You will act as if you are above this sort of longing,” she decreed sharply. “There’s no need to actually feel that way. When you feel as if you’re at his mercy you will—silently—repeat this mantra: ‘I want you, and I will have you.’ Just remember that, and keep cool. Do you think you can do that?”
I can do anything, I thought suddenly. “I want you, and I will have you,” I said.
“That’s exactly right, try it again.”
“I want you, and I will have you,” we said, together, with the kind of conviction that does not allow failure.
“You know, you could dance to that,” I said. “Like, a tango.”
I started to sing it, and she said, “Yes, Beatrice, I think you’ve got it!”
“The rain, in Spain, stays mainly on the plain…” I sang, really expecting her to sing along, but she remembered her professorial stature, opened the door, and I spun out into the hallway, breathing chalk dust and pipe tobacco and wondering, for the first time in weeks, what was for dinner that night.
* * *
DOTSY WAS moussing up her blonde helmet at the mirror. “It looks so normal,” she said with furious frustration. “No matter what I do, I look like a Long Island housewife,” she said, moving as if to tear the hair, and its ordinariness with it, out of her head.
“I mean, I want to be normal,” she explained, with a sweet sigh. “Like you, you know.” I could hear her condescension toward me, though it was very, very slight, and leftover, really, from the time when she had thought it ignominious that I’d never skied Gstaad. By now it was Gstaad that looked ignominious—the real action was at the edge of life, Avenue A or someplace. It was the same as I used to feel crossing the state line on the school bus—as if I’d gone over some edge into a more squalid—more authentic—world. Who could blame poor Dotsy for wanting to go over that edge? Or for thinking she could transport herself with a salon product? She grew up on Long Island, after all.
“I want to, but I’m not, I never will be,” she said, with such breathy hopelessness that a man would have caught her in his arms to reassure her. I, however, knew too well that a determination on unconventionality could leave a person doomed to dine forever on puffball.
“I got into Arbileth’s poetry section,” she announced, very much as Percy Shelley may have announced he was sailing off to war.
“Congratulations, that’s wonderful!”
“But, my hair.”
“Come on, let’s go get dinner.”
“I’m not hungry,” she said. She had passed beyond such things.
* * *
THANKS TO Philippa, I was ravenous. I walked into the glare of the cafeteria as if I were walking out on a stage, tray in hand, dazzled by the choices—chicken parmesan or vegetarian nut loaf, broccoli or carrots, peach cobbler or chocolate pudding. During my first weeks at school, I had been really overwhelmed by the bounty of the cafeteria, with its huge bowl of yogurt and all the different fruits and honeys and cereals. What would my mother have said? I wanted some of everything and my hunger embarrassed me so that I could barely peep out a request for “gravy” on my mashed potatoes. Tonight, I was a little different, because Philippa and I had nearly sung “The rain in Spain” together. Sid was eating with the sensual type, and I went out of my way to pass their table so as to smile with benign disinterest as if I were a completely poised and self-contained person and they had never feasted on my entrails while I looked helplessly on.
I want you, and I will have you, I thought, and when he left, I hurried to catch up and made my sex/love apology just as we’d rehearsed it. He looked surprised, but said he was proud I’d recognized my problem. In time, I’d toughen up and learn to conquer my jealousy, he was sure. I nodded enthusiastically, looked him full in the eye, smiling clearly, and repeated I want you, and I will have you, in my mind.
A few weeks later, I found him standing in my doorway with his guitar: he’d learned to play the whole Chaconne, and he sat on my bed and went through it very, very carefully, without feeling, but true to every note. As he passed over the place where he used to stumble as my dream carried him on, my eyes filled with tears—that melody seemed the exact sound of the project of belief I’d undertaken when I fell in love with him. But he hadn’t, I reminded myself sternly, fallen in love with me.
“Congratulations,” I said, with an appropriate amount of feeling—about one percent of the feeling I had. I want you, and I will have you.
“Thanks,” he said, terribly shy suddenly, so I had the inkling he recognized the fragile thing that had grown between us, and still wanted it to flower.
“Would you like a back rub?” It was hard work for him to say this but he got it out.
“No, thank you.” (I managed to speak drily here; Philippa and I had practiced.) “No, no, I’m fine.”
“I’ve got patchouli massage oil.”
“No, no, really.” I want you, and I will have you.
“It’s just that you look so tense.”
“Oh, well, you know me.” I laughed, and he looked up, our eyes met. “I’ve got a class, actually.” I went on, lying, praying he’d go before I lost my resolve. “Oh, I’m late, late,” I said (I want you, and I will have you), backing away down the hall.
The next day he came again, and asked me to follow him back to his room. As we went down the hall, I looked out the window and saw the sensual type and some others lined up to get on a chartered bus; they were going to protest the new nuclear power plant, and it had been suggested—nearly been promised—that they would spend the night in jail. They were paying grim attention as someone demonstrated the use of Vaseline against tear gas, but it had an air of make-believe and I thought how sad it was that we had nothing more than nuclear power to protest when the generation before us had lived in such beautiful solidarity against an evil war.
Sid threw his door open: he’d turned the room literally on its head—the bureau, the bed, his desk, and bookshelf with all the books neatly upside down. On the turntable a bowl of red Jell-O was revolving at 33 rpm. Sid went into the closet and emerged a few minutes later wearing every single thing that had been hanging there.
“You mean to say you’re sorry,” I said.
He nodded, silent and baleful. A wonderful pride swelled in me—this, I thought, was my real gift: I could find my way into even the strangest heart. I would join the great explorers—Lewis, Clark, and that gang. They sought the source of the Nile, the Hudson, whatever—I just wanted to find the one secret in each human heart. I went to Sid, felt his arms, stiffened by all the shirts and sweaters he was wearing, close around me, told myself to take courage and venture on.
“I’d never looked at it the way you do,” Sid said, and then, in such a low whisper that I felt he was trying to keep it a secret even from himself: “But, the more I think about it—I’d like to get sex and love all mixed up too.”
The record on which the Jell-O was jiggling was Louis Armstrong, and Sid sang with him suddenly, in a deep bass that shocked me: “I’m putting all my eggs in one basket … I’m betting everything I’ve got on you.”
He’d turned his life upside down, just so I’d feel more at home in it. He loved me and I knew it, which meant I’d escaped my mother’s fate. I pulled him in and held him tightly as I could through all his layers, and we heaved the bed right side up and burrowed into it together.
But as badly as I wanted to fall into a mutual dream with him, I couldn’t help feeling that he wasn’t the man I’d expected him to be. He touched me with great precision, the way he played
the Chaconne. He was proud of his acquired skill, but there was no anguish, no prayer in it. I threw my head back and cried out, most artfully aroused: I was skillful too. We fell asleep the minute we were done with each other, and when we woke up, it was dark and everyone else was up in the dining hall. I jumped up and got my clothes on. I wanted to catch Philippa while she was still in her office. It was as much her triumph as mine.
Seven
“AN APT metaphor, as far as it goes. But Lewis and Clark merely tried to enter the unknown; you are trying to let the unknown enter you!” said Philippa. “Yours is the more daring project,” she added, with satisfaction—she saw herself, and anyone close to herself, as engaged in great endeavors.
The fact was, my courage was failing. I worked against myself to trust Sid, and I did manage to act properly, never seeming suspicious if he was out late, making sure he had plenty of time to console the abandoned girlfriends. But there was no more blurring of the boundaries between us, and his silence, which I’d assumed was filled with thoughts too deep for words, just felt like emptiness now. When his guitar faltered, I was secretly pleased; he’d hurt me and I wanted him to stumble at the same chord forever. At night I’d lie awake remembering those first days, praying we could find our way back, but seeing the cold stars out the window, I remembered how lonely I’d been, and I didn’t dare risk relying on Sid again. Trying to love him was like trying to put my hand into a flame.
I’d come to see him as a specimen of manhood, rather than a man. Philippa and I were going to figure him out—with that we’d be on our way to mapping the territory of heterosexual love. I had to do this, to figure out where my parents made their wrong turn.
The Bride of Catastrophe Page 7
