Rough Strife

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  Ivan came in. She pretended to be asleep. He undressed quietly, came into bed and put his arms around her.

  “Are you asleep?” he whispered.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Caroline,” he persisted. “Are you awake?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Be awake, Caroline.”

  “Why?”

  “Why do you think?”

  She had already extended herself, in fantasy, beyond her powers. This was asking too much.

  “Aren’t you tired?” she said.

  “Not too tired. Come on. Come to me.”

  She did not want to touch him because of the possibility of Chantal, but she wanted him to touch her. Exhausted and empty, she wanted to do nothing, only to receive love. Ivan understood, and she in turn gave him the response he sought. And because for the life of her she could not tell whether he sought her after a solitary evening working, or after Chantal, who disappointed or aroused him beyond measure, she wept.

  “What’s the matter, baby? Wasn’t it good for you?”

  “Yes, yes. It’s…Ivan, I have this awful feeling…something is very wrong between us, and I can’t bear it.”

  He was quiet. She expected that he would brush it off or else had fallen asleep.

  “I know. I know. But I am just so exhausted I can’t talk about anything now. Can we talk about it another time?”

  On the way home from work a few weeks later she stopped in a bookstore to buy a birthday present for Lila, the five-year-old daughter of friends who lived downstairs. Lila was a precocious, wispy child who was already learning to read. Lately she would ring their doorbell weekends and, clutching a book to her chest, step shyly over the threshold. Ivan held her on his knee and read whatever she had brought with her, and then in a deep dramatic voice told her stories of fairies and ogres and elves. Lila took them to be real, and he did not disillusion her.

  Caroline had never been in the children’s section before. Quickly seduced, she read book after book straight through, and left an hour later feeling exalted, as though she had traveled to far-off places. There was an entire subculture, complete with a literature that embodied the consciousness of its race—children—as thoroughly as any literature did for its people. Springing with life, it was an alternative more appealing than the corrupted mainstream. To inhabit it, though, you needed either to be a child or to have a child.

  “Look what I bought for Lila,” she said that evening. Ivan was lying on the couch reading, one hand under his head and one hand holding the book upright on his chest, the way her father used to do after dinner.

  “Let me see,” he said. “Ah. When We Were Very Young. I don’t think she has that.”

  “I think you’ll like it. Do you know, when I browsed through all those children’s books in the store I had an epiphany.”

  “Really? You mean like James Joyce?”

  “I think I would like to have a baby.”

  “A baby.”

  “Yes. It’s easy to do. You just do what we do all the time, except without—”

  “Will you please stop talking like an idiot?” Ivan sat up and put The Tale of Genji aside. “You want to have a baby. I’m a little surprised. The other day you said, and I quote, conjugal life was overrated,”

  “I know. But I changed my mind. This would be something productive.”

  “People who have babies to…to prop up marriages—that is the worst thing in the world.”

  “Yes, yes, I know. But it’s not for that. We’re not in such bad shape, really. I mean, look, we can still make love. People on the verge of…of, you know…don’t make love like we do.”

  “How do you know? That’s a very naïve assumption. Anyway, sex means nothing. You can have sex with anybody.”

  She looked at him sharply but her voice was calm. “Oh. I don’t know anything about that. I didn’t think it meant nothing.”

  “Well, not nothing. But the point is…” He scrutinized her with doubt. “You’re sure you want to have a baby?”

  “Why, you like Lila, don’t you? You like children.”

  “Lila visits. Our own would live here. But that’s not an answer.”

  “No, I’m not sure. I only thought it might be interesting. I’m waiting to hear your opinion.”

  “Caroline!”

  “What?”

  “Why are you talking like this?”

  “Like what?”

  “You know what I mean. You don’t sound like yourself.”

  “Because I don’t know how to talk to you any more,” she cried. “I don’t know where you are and what you’re becoming. You don’t tell me anything. The only time we make any contact is in bed. What the hell is this all about?”

  Ivan bent over with his head in his hands. When he sat up again his face was washed over with gray. “That’s not true.”

  “Almost true.”

  He took her hand in both of his. His hands were warm and large, and her hand disappeared between them. He placed her hand on his thigh.

  “Oh, that’s a lot easier than talking, Ivan, sure. But it doesn’t change anything.”

  He let her hand go. “You don’t even want me for that any more. What do you want me for, then? To help you make a baby?”

  There were tears in his eyes. Caroline’s heart flipped over. Her inner organs shriveled up, and for a moment she feared her shriveled heart would stop beating altogether. But she wouldn’t touch him. She said, “You think that’s your best feature? You’re mistaken.”

  “I think you’ve had it with me. I knew this would happen.” Ivan leaned back and stretched both arms across the back of the couch: he was spread out like an offering. If she wasn’t careful she would be climbing on him to ease her frustration, but it would not be eased, just stifled.

  “No. I can stick anything out. I’ve waited out death twice. It’s you. You don’t love me any more,” she said. “You only love yourself. Your projects. Your work. Your pleasures.”

  “I do love you,” he said bitterly. The words sounded squeezed out of him, as in an interrogation. Caroline’s eyes widened in pain. “All right, I didn’t mean it like that, wait a minute,” he said. He closed his eyes and rested his hands on his thighs, extending the long taut fingers. He breathed in and exhaled like an exhausted runner. “I do love you,” he repeated quietly. “But you’re sticking it out.”

  “You can be very perverse. I’ll stick it out because I love you. Because it matters to me. But still, something is very wrong.”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary. This is what real life is like. It gets to be…inert.”

  “I’ll never accept that,” she said. “If that’s so, then I don’t want to be ordinary.”

  “What, then?”

  “It would not be inert if we were available to each other.”

  “Available to each other! I hate that kind of jargon.”

  “All right. Be a purist. But you are somewhere else, Ivan.”

  “Tell me where I am then, Caroline.”

  “I wish I knew. Maybe…maybe with Chantal.”

  He stood up and walked to the window. “Don’t be ridiculous. I thought you were going to say something profound. Metaphysical. An epiphany!”

  “Not that I care,” she said. “Not that I care. It’s just that if you are, she certainly takes it out of you.”

  He whirled around. “Shut up about that! Do you know what you’re doing to me when you say that? How can you say such things?” He flung himself into a chair and flung himself up again. He paced. “You’re venomous, you know? You’re crude. You’re like an ax. You’re killing me.”

  She was amazed at how hard she had suddenly become. Her body received this as if she were a stone. “Ivan,” she answered coolly, “I can’t even get near enough to kill you.”

  “And you want a baby. To bring a baby into this.”

  “Yes. I know this is very ugly, right now. But it’s not the whole thing. It’s a…brutto periodo.”

&n
bsp; “A what?”

  “Don’t you remember? A brutto periodo. It has to pass.”

  “Oh, her.” Ivan sat down on the couch again. “That seems like another century. Look, Caroline, this is obviously not getting us anywhere. I don’t need scenes like this. We’d be better off living separately.”

  “We would not. Look at everyone scrambling around and switching partners, like a square dance. Do you honestly want that? You’re not going to find anyone who would understand you better than I do. And I’d probably never find anyone who would put up with me.”

  “But don’t you see, this kind of understanding is…is lethal. I can do without it,” said Ivan. His voice softened, though. It gave up the hard, sealed edge. “If you understand so much, understand that I can’t be something I’m not.”

  “That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking you to be what you are. Were.”

  “Then tell me exactly what you want from me that you don’t have.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know what else to call it.”

  “Caroline, let’s stop this. I want some peace.”

  “I don’t like peace. I mean, that sort of peace. It’s easy to be at peace when two people don’t want anything from each other, but just occupy the same space. That’s not peace, that’s a vacuum.”

  Ivan closed his eyes.

  After a long silence she said, “Barbara and Rick got their divorce papers yesterday. I met her on campus. She looked terrible. And Christine is having an affair with an actor in her company and is miserable about it. Cory and Joan are separating. I got a letter from her today.”

  “Cory and Joan?”

  “Yes. She didn’t say exactly how it came about. But for one thing he’s drinking an awful lot and she can’t live with that. It scares the baby too.”

  “Cory drinking?” Ivan gave her a puzzled frown. “Cory was like a child.”

  “Yes. But people grow up, you know. I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want to see you like that.”

  “That’s awful. Cory.” He got up and paced the room again. “I don’t get it. They all seemed happy enough to me.”

  “Oh, happy.” She waved an arm in dismissal.

  “What’s wrong with happy?”

  Caroline laughed briefly. “Don’t you remember, you were the one who said happiness is not the point.”

  “Did I? What did I say the point was?”

  “You didn’t say. I’m not surprised at all those breakups. I could tell. There were things…”

  “Well, I don’t delve the way you do,” said Ivan, sitting down beside her again.

  Caroline shifted sideways to face him. She touched his arm lightly. “Ivan. Let’s not be like that. Let’s be different. We’ll last.”

  “I’m sure they all felt that way.”

  “You wanted me to marry you,” she said softly, “so that I would always be here. So I did. I am here, and I will always be here. Now I want something, Ivan. I want to have a baby.”

  At last he turned around and looked her straight in the face. She saw that some barrier, at last, had yielded. He was fully present, as if they were joined in an embrace.

  “Ah, you did change your mind,” he said. “Did you get a feeling, right here, or here?” He knew by now exactly where everything was in a woman.

  Her eyes filled. “No. To tell the truth. But simply because this…is not enough.”

  “You mean,” he said, not moving his eyes from her face, “I’m not enough.”

  “No, not you,” she protested. She felt, remotely, tears dripping off her lashes. “This is not enough.”

  “All right.”

  “But do you want it?”

  “I said all right.”

  “That’s not the same as wanting it.”

  “It’ll have to do. You’ve gotten what you wanted, Caroline, haven’t you? Take the claws out of me.”

  “I’m sorry. I am. But I’m not trying to win a victory. I’m saying it because, you know, you’ll have to be a father. Will you do that?”

  “Oh Jesus! Yes, I’ll be a father. It’s my kid too. What do you take me for?”

  CAROLINE THOUGHT IT WOULD be so easy. Everyone else managed to do it in a flash, managed so well that half the women she knew had at some time taken the weekend economy flight to Puerto Rico for an abortion. She had scant pity now for those horror stories. What was wrong with her and Ivan! In algebra, if only you persevered, eventually you would get results. But in human endeavors there was no just correlation between effort and results. She and Ivan, like the aborters, were the proof. Her flat stomach was, anyway, as it was equally the envy of friends working on their second or third.

  A few careless words, and soon advice and sympathy poured in from all quarters. Obvious cripples were treated with respect; they were patronized. A pair of freakish losers. Caroline did not care if the problem lay in him or her or both or neither; she was only vastly irritated. So was Ivan. The irritation spilled out onto the advice-giving friends, who maddeningly excused them—the strain they were under. They could not afford to be too irritated with each other. Anger, they already knew, could be a powerful aphrodisiac; irritation was not.

  They did not try hard enough, it was suggested. There were ways open that their pride balked at. Caroline would not take her temperature for five minutes every morning and enter it on a chart, seizing the hottest occasions for sex and graphing the event. Carpe diem, Ivan called the chart. She called it Frequency of Fucking. She would rather die barren than divulge to a doctor the patterns of hers and Ivan’s desire, or lack of it. Yet the vulgar truth was that she needn’t graph the frequency of desire, merely of performance. Once these were a single line, now split and diverged along separate paths. They desired without performing, performed without desiring.

  She studied the chart as they sat drinking Scotch before dinner. Ivan leafed through the National Guardian, which had gone wild over the Cuban missile crisis. A past master at graphs, Caroline found this one a poor job. Messy. An uncontrolled experiment with a highly imperfect grasp of the complexity of factors involved. The data, because they were incomplete, might incorporate gross and misleading fluctuations, with no means of correction. Aesthetically, it offended—the sophomores under her guidance could do as well. But of course aesthetics was not her concern. Her concern was to get pregnant. You did that by placing a dot, placing an asterisk, placing a letter. There was a code, with a legend.

  “Aha! I bet you don’t need to record it if you do it orally,” she remarked.

  “What are you muttering about?” Ivan asked, still reading. “An oral thermometer?”

  “Oral sex.”

  He coughed discreetly. “I would imagine not. What for?”

  “Tut tut, I guess that’s out, then. Unless I want to try growing it in my throat.”

  He gave her the sidelong look, a disapproving schoolteacher. She tossed the chart aside. “I don’t have the patience for this stupid thing. I can’t think about this first thing in the morning. I have to go to work.”

  Ivan turned pages. “It is incredible,” he said, “how close we came to a full-scale nuclear war.”

  “Ivan. How would you like to beat the system by performing an indecent act?”

  Always a selective listener, he put the Guardian down promptly. “I wouldn’t mind.”

  And if she would not keep a chart, the other option was even more unthinkable. She knew Ivan. She knew exactly what he would and would not do for her. He would stay married and be a father, but he would not follow a white-coated attendant into a small room where Muzak played, and jerk off into a plastic container while studying photos in Playboy, Hustler, and Swank. She did not even bother to suggest it.

  Ivan did not wilt from anxiety. He became more potent, with a raging determination to get the better of nature, which in its futility grieved her heart. She wished she could explain that this was not an experiment in physics, where increased thrust and depth and velocity might make a difference, but in chemi
stry, a more subtle, less easily controlled discipline. But she could not hurt him in that way; she had never been the sort to give critiques in bed, so she shut her eyes and suffered it. When he exploded within her she felt relief, and thought about probability theory. She forgot what it could be like without a goal.

  Her own reaction to failure was nausea. There were sporadic stretches when she was barely able to eat, spells of vomiting bile from an empty stomach, headaches and dizziness. At the beginning she thought they were viral infections going around, but they came too often for that. They came when everyone else was feeling fine.

  She hoped she would be all right for the Valentine’s Day party given by one of Ivan’s colleagues at the Institute. They arrived late, as usual; Ivan had to finish reading a proposal. As they entered they were each handed a small red satin heart to pin on. Ivan said, “Maybe I should wear my heart on my sleeve.”

  “You! You’re hardly the type,” she replied. “Wear your heart on your heart, that’s good enough.”

  Ivan wandered off and Caroline sat down near a friend, Antonia.

  “There you are at last. I have Jerome for you,” Antonia whispered, nodding at a plump man opposite, who was lighting a pipe. “Don’t you have a drink?”

  Antonia, a former ballet dancer, had recently given birth to twin boys. She came to these parties sullen and bedraggled, but as the night wore on her eyes began to sparkle: she drank the hours away and usually had to be carried home by her husband, who worked with Ivan.

  “No, I’m not drinking tonight.”

  “Why not? Are you saving yourself for the pot later on?”

  “No,” said Caroline. “No pot either. I just don’t feel like it. Hi, Jerome. Hi, Sheila.”

  After a seemingly endless period of psychiatric training and analysis, Jerome was starting a practice. Because he was a zealot, Caroline badgered him as a matter of principle. Sheila, his wife, was in the final stages of pregnancy.