“Not like that!” she said. “No! You can’t kiss that way right off, that’s for later!” Her imperial confidence had returned and she pressed her lips tight together and gave me a hard little smooch.
“Have you had anything to drink?” she asked. I had not. She rummaged in the depths of her purse and pulled out a beer bottle—everyone should have a light sedative before lovemaking, she told me. She herself downed a little bottle of Bombay gin left over from her Christmas flight home, as if it was a nasty sirop prescribed for the nerves.
“There,” she said. “Now we can…” She was on top of me, and I was wondering what on earth I had done. I reminded myself that I adored her—no matter how numb I felt lying beneath her. I kissed her again.
“No!” she said irritably. “This is not the time for that kind of kiss!”
I tried to sit up, but it wasn’t possible. “It is so!” I said. “I understand perfectly what you mean, it’s horrible the way men try to stick their tongue down your throat and grab your breasts and claw their way into you right off the bat, but this isn’t that way, it’s a soft, longing kiss, a kiss of yearning, don’t you see?”
“Lie back!” she said. “I am six years older than you are, I think I’ve learned something in those years, and the time for that kiss has not yet arrived!”
“Talk wrecks it, Philippa,” I said plaintively. Then I remembered that as a child she had enjoyed reenacting Napoleonic battles. I decided to follow her will. Trust in the physical, I admonished myself—the simple warmth of her body against mine would counteract my discomfort, I thought, if only she could stop lecturing.
She could not. It was like making love to an owl—great wings enfolding you, brilliant eyes spying out every thought—and the beak and talons to contend with. When I finally got her on her back, kissing her neck and her breasts and brushing my lips down the center of her, she sat up suddenly, and said, “No, no!”
“Philippa? What?” I laughed a little and traced my finger along her thigh.
“No,” she said, with finality. “This is your first time. That is not appropriate for the first time.”
But I wanted to transgress, to declare that I was on a mission and would go where I pleased, that nothing would stop me. There were things I needed to know about love, and I was going to discover them. I had to. “I want, I want…” I took her shoulders and pressed my hips into hers with clumsy fervency, as if I could break into her and steal what I needed.
“Now there’s something,” she said, “that is quite enjoyable.”
Afterward, as I tried to slip into a dreamy postcoital satisfaction, she plucked a tissue from the bedside and blotted her lips as if she’d just enjoyed a rare delicacy. I couldn’t keep from laughing: such a gesture is unusual in a bird of prey.
She sat bolt upright.
“This is what those bunnies are like!” she exclaimed, pulling the sheet up to her shoulders, which left me completely uncovered so she could look me up and down.
“What bunnies?” Having just compared her to an owl, I felt strange being thought of as a bunny. I tried to sit up too but she pushed me back down.
“Playboy bunnies! You know! Like, ‘Here she is, watering her plants!’ and they’d have you bent over.” She giggled lasciviously. “‘She loves the warmth of the sun on her bare skin and goes through her yoga positions every morning to be sure of full exposure to the healthful rays.”
She ran a hand over me, starting with the arch of my foot and going up over the whole moonlit landscape, fitting her palm to every curve, in wonder, as I looked on in even greater wonder. I thought she must be mad, but it was a madness I didn’t mind submitting to. I’d never had any real idea what I looked like, in spite of the hours I spent at the mirror. Maybe I was ugly, or maybe … I stretched and reflected on my own beauty until, as she dusted down the side of my breast to my arm, she found a sticking point.
“Beatrice,” she said, and I recognized the irascible humor she showed to a tardy or unprepared student. “Beatrice, there is hair under your arm. Why?”
Because we lived in a world that considered shaving one’s underarm as the first misstep on that slippery slope that would eventually land one in the suburbs, barbecuing enormous steaks for some enormous husband, waxing floors, shaking martinis, and probably in the end even voting Republican. So this question came as a shock.
“Philippa!” I said, sitting up again.
“Lie down,” she replied. “Lie down. A woman is supposed to be smooth, Beatrice. Sweetriver lacks depth in the art history department, so it’s unfair to expect you to know this, but from the earliest days of classical antiquity, the smoothness of women has been one of the keys of our civilization.”
So there, in the same moment that she was examining me with all the greed of a thief with a stolen jewel, she spied a flaw! So began the book of her disappointment in me, which, like everything of hers, was long and complex and comprised of thousands of details.
Well, I wanted nothing more than to be made over. I knew the ways I’d learned at home were wrong, that I’d have to shed them if I wanted to escape. And here she was, my teacher, and my lover, a woman who stood above the world, looking over it, into it, seeing it whole, instead of cowering in the crevices, weeping and raging by turns.
She was my inspiration, provenance, and terror. And I remembered how shy she’d seemed, knocking at my door. She was absurd, talking and talking, her mad firefly intelligence lightning now against this leaf, now there, and there, until the pattern of illumination, more vivid than the firmament it played against, was all that seemed to matter.
Of course. I was a lesbian, why hadn’t I seen it before? The strangeness, the separation from the world, the bottomless yearnings—it all made sense now, as did the fact that I’d spent four years crammed into a dormitory phone booth, ruminating with Philippa. I’d be safe with her; she would school me until I was truly able to please her. Ross wouldn’t be able to hold me in his arms and slash at my heart with his qualms anymore.
And I could leave Sid without seeming to do wrong. I made the devastating announcement the next morning. I have, I said, discovered my true way. Not the cruel, “I’ve fallen in love with another man,” but “I’ve fallen in love with another species.” It was a fact of nature: the climate had simply changed.
* * *
COMEDY, AS Philippa had explained in that freshman English seminar so many eons ago, is what happens when the body tries to follow the mind. Her mind was on the move between Aristotle’s Athens, Paris in the twenties, and the Hollywood of Yvette Mimieux. Her body was stuck in the seventies in bed with mine. This ought to have been perfect: I was twenty-one, I had that fleshly springiness one wants in women and muffins, and I was her own creature, fed solely on her wisdoms these four years, bathed in the light of her favorite films, shaved by her own chosen razor, offering her exactly the type of kiss officially sanctioned by herself.
So, what was it that grated, that didn’t quite fit? Twelve nights after our first, she came in through the doorway and some anxiety overtook her. “I don’t think I’d better stay,” she said. “It’s that parking lot—someone’s going to scratch the car.”
“You park there every night,” I said. My thesis, lurid or not, had gotten an A from the committee, and I had a bottle of champagne on my dresser. I was wearing a silk nightgown I’d gotten at the thrift shop that morning—someone’s bridal nightgown, faded like old rose petals, with a dove embroidered on it, and fluttering from the dove’s beak, a banner that read GRACE. Champagne, silk, petals, doves, grace—there was a lot of longing, magnetic longing, in that room, especially as it was only a small dormitory single. Philippa kept a vigilant hand on the doorknob so as not to be drawn farther in.
“Where are you going next week, by the way?” she asked suddenly.
Next week? But of course, I was graduating. Sid and I had planned to go back to Chicago together, but obviously that was off.
“Maybe I’ll stay in town for a while
,” I said. “We…”
“We, like you and me?” she said. “Together?” She looked mortally puzzled. “But, what would you do here? Surely you’re off to the city, or … wherever … aren’t you?” Then, suspiciously: “Beatrice, have you been boasting about me? Have you told other people we might be staying together?”
“No!” I said. “I mean, I hadn’t even spoken to you about it.”
“If this were me I’d have been boasting and had to cover my tracks.”
“Well, as it’s me,” I sniffed—
“You want to live with me?” She was beaming all her hummingbird’s concentration now on the strange idea that I might love her, as if it were the drop of nectar in a lily’s throat.
“I think that is most unlikely,” she said, with incontrovertible authority, so that I had to reconsider. Who would want to live with Philippa? She was a dictator in bed, barking orders just when I felt most tender, so that by now I felt tender at the very sound of her barking an order, which was, yes, unlikely, but didn’t it prove my point? I adored her! And she—just that morning she’d turned up outside my economics class, saying that as she had nothing to do except comment on these last fifty essays, she’d looked up my schedule so she could walk me to lunch. Then, as we stepped over a drainage ditch, she stopped still, peered in, and accidentally delivered a lecture on the Roman aqueducts. How would such a thing happen, if not from love?
But she knew so much, about aqueducts and everything—she must know what we ought to do. She stood there cocking her head to the left and to the right, as if the idea that we might stay together was such a revolutionary upending of the laws of physics that she felt a pedagogical responsibility to follow out the whole equation, lest she overlook the sort of astounding new theory that would escape a more conventional mind.
Then she nodded, quickly and definitely—yes, I was absolutely wrong.
“I really have to go,” she said. “These dorm parking lots are like bumper car rinks. Students are terrible drivers!”
So ardent, so vigorous, full of belief, full of longing—we made terrible drivers, but as lovers, well, that was another thing.
“Philippa, are you saying that you’re leaving me because you’re afraid your car will get scratched in the parking lot?”
She thought for a moment. “Well … yes.”
I started to cry. I thought this was what one did under the circumstances. “But Philippa, I love you!” I said.
She smiled involuntarily, a sudden flash which was instantly put out. Maybe she was touched, or maybe mocking, but whatever, those words had sealed my fate, because she picked up her teaching manner where she had thrown it twelve days ago, and proceeded to demolish my quaint little notion as quickly as if I’d tried some deconstructionist foolery in class.
“We’ve had an affair, Beatrice,” she said. “It was very nice. But there’s no real match here. It’s in the pheromones, you know that. The nose knows.”
She paused appropriately but I refused to laugh. “Pheromones!” she said, throwing up her hands, “What can we do about them? Nothing! We’ll still be friends of course!”
“Of course,” I said, taking a deep breath. I knew that what came naturally to me was invariably wrong. After all, I’d learned it all from my parents. Philippa was a woman of the world, so if she thought crying was inappropriate the tears would have to go.
“Okay, okay, ’bye!” she said, seeing headlights come down the drive and fearing her bright little convertible was about to suffer an insult. “We’ll talk!”
“Okay, ’bye,” I said. I felt dazed, as if a hummingbird had flown in one of my ears and out the other. I couldn’t feel sad, though—Philippa had said not to, and she was my North Star. I sat still on the bed for a long time, until I realized I was waiting for her to come back. Then I got the champagne out of the sink, popped the cork, and drank some out of bottle, congratulating myself, though my A seemed meaningless suddenly. I’d only wanted it for her.
Nine
AND THEN, there it was, commencement. I’d arrived at the end of the journey I’d set out on that day fifteen years ago, when I’d hidden in my mother’s skirt to peer out at the real children learning real things. Now, waking up to hear the tents go up, gears groaning to lift the poles and then the snap of canvas over commons lawn, I lay in bed breathing the June air as if it were a perfect drug, light and cool and scented faintly of mock orange. My education—my suffering—was over, my life was about to begin.
To the mirror! Yes, I was blooming in spite of my hangover—Philippa had been right, I was beautiful. Or almost beautiful; I lifted my chin, I smiled, turned slightly and there it was, that cringing inwardness in my profile, a sort of stupidity, the refusal to look at myself, at anything, for fear of what I might see. Just then, though, the tent swayed up into the view behind me, catching on something deep in my imagination: my mother’s vision of my future. Tents had billowed there too, and ships sailed across the horizon with ropes of starry lights swinging, dancers gliding on their polished decks.
Ridiculous notion, but I was infected with it, so this glimpse of tent made my heart beat and my hopes balloon. One deserves an indulgence on such a special day. Mine would be expectation. I’d done what my mother needed me to do, so my reward had to come in kind—in a few hours I’d have my degree and the right to live among those people I’d seen only through windows up until now, the kind of people who always knew what to do. Tomorrow I’d be home! A thousand beauties burst into my mind, things I wouldn’t have guessed I remembered—the creek that cut through the back field and the wild irises that grew there, which newly dazzled my mother each spring: “Beatrice, look, the blue flag!” And the bubbles in the glass of the barn windows, the light shining in through the cobwebs, the moths dead on the sill. My eyes stung with tears. How had I ever left it? I felt the enchantment of that place around my shoulders like a magical robe.
Which I needed, because as I crossed the lawn toward the Student Union I heard Philippa calling. “Beatrice Wolfe?”
How was it she always managed to sound as if she had a megaphone? I stopped in my tracks and looked down at myself to see what I’d done wrong.
And met Philippa’s squint of amused irritation. “Are you really wearing that to commencement?” she asked.
“What?” I asked, though I knew she hated my dress—two layers of gauze that floated over me light as an apple blossom; Bette Davis wouldn’t have been caught dead in it.
“That … that dirndl!”
“It is not a dirndl,” I said, meaning to be dismissive but accidentally sounding defensive.
She drew back, hands on hips, the way she did midlecture when she was about to make a particularly savory observation. “As the author of the catalogue for the Costume Institute’s History of the Skirt exhibition, I am afraid I will have to differ with you. And as your thesis advisor I must remind you that I have an investment in the way you look today.”
She said this with affection; she was showing me she really did care. Which meant that it would be unseemly of me to shriek: “And as my ex-lover you can just keep your nose out of my skirts!”
“What’s the matter with that black dress, and where are the new shoes?” she went on. (She’d insisted I buy a pair of stiletto heels, saying that if Nancy Kissinger was five inches taller than Henry it was only fitting that I should tower over her.) “This … this is a schmatta!”
“Well, it can’t be a dirndl and a schmatta at the same time, can it?” I asked, exasperated, and found myself immediately waist deep in the history of the skirt and the relationship between German and Yiddish, and all the while watching with envy as my classmates slouched up the steps toward lunch. This commencement was not a momentous event to them. Next week they’d be in Paris, where some of them would eat in bistros so dreadfully out of fashion that the others would politely pretend not to see them as they passed. They were above haste, hunger, and sentiment, above any kind of longing. Philippa would never fit in with them,
and thinking this, I couldn’t help but feel a little spring of tenderness.
“I’ll change,” I said. “I’ll change as soon as I eat. Okay?”
“Okay.” And she went away happy. This was all she wanted, to organize the world into a picture that pleased her eyes. And to change—that was the easiest thing in the world for me.
* * *
SO AN hour later, seeing my family straggling toward me over the little rise, like refugees from an utterly senseless war, I was unable to take flight, for fear of turning an ankle. My father in his city clothes—sparrow-brown suit and wingtips—looked tall and decisive, like a real businessman. No one would guess trees were turning to molten filaments in his mind. Dolly stuck carefully beside him; he was our representative of propriety. She was just thirteen, but nearly as tall as he was, and thin, her long, straight hair tied quickly back. She refused womanhood and the madness that must come with it. Sylvie had accepted this—she was wearing my high school graduation dress, hemmed to a miniskirt, a pair of Ma’s sandals (she walked with her toes bent up to keep them on), and over it all, a heavy, scarred leather jacket. The skin of some boy she’d captured, I thought.
And Ma, blazing with a near-atomic radiance—the look with which she declared that she had never, ever cowered in a linen closet, that she fed her family on tinned sardines and fried puffball because she was fascinating and unconventional, not because she was afraid to face the ordinary, competent people in the supermarket, who might see through her, guess all that was wrong. Her dress looked like a stolen flag: striped red, white, and green, and slit all the way up to her hip, a fact particularly notable because of the magnificent strides she was taking in her attempt to be the first one to reach me, so she could give me her side of the story.
A pace away, she stopped, leaned back and spread her theatrical arms.
“Sweetheart,” she said, “Oh, my girl,” and took me in, resting her head on my shoulder as if she had never rested anywhere before. Behind her someone else’s parents came along, the mother in shell pink, her husband’s hand at the small of her back.
The Bride of Catastrophe Page 10
