Behave

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  “Don’t worry,” John said once. “You give them a free peep show every now and again. That’s worth a nickel.”

  He meant only that I often had to stand outside the bathroom door, waiting for my turn, in John’s robe, which he left there at the boarding house. I suppose I was less careful as the weeks went by, roaming the upper hallway, unkempt, with tangled hair, and smelling of salt and bourbon and sex, not even minding when another man exited his room, and stopped in his own bathrobe and socks, hungrily staring—all of us a little charged up by what we knew was happening behind all those doors, by the sounds of knocking against the thin walls and the opening and shutting of car doors late in the night, and the trip of a woman’s footsteps in the gravel and next on the stairs, and then the five-minute wait, and the grunting and mewling, authentic or exaggerated.

  “What do you think they’re doing in there?” John said one night, and shook me more awake to make me listen with him. He’d left a lamp burning low. I could make out the bulk of his shaggy head, hanging over me. “Go ahead, Rar. Paint me a picture.”

  When I summarized the action to him, succinctly and objectively, he pouted. “You have a much more extensive vocabulary than that. And you’re a much more precise observer. Be serious for a minute. Try again.”

  And so I did. No doubt they weren’t doing anything all that special, just whatever was simplest and most efficient, and the woman was on bottom and perhaps mostly motionless and—for all we knew—on the clock. But I painted a more interesting picture for him, one step at a time, one new position at a time, with endless erotic fussing and fretting and tormented rearranging and alternately vexing and arousing attempts at novelty elaborating the coupling. At that moment in the next room, we heard the sound of a quick final series of flesh-slapping sounds in triple meter, and then another simpering, climaxing mewl, and John’s lips parted slightly and I could see his wide eyes flashing in the half dark.

  “Imagine,” John said, turning on his side, hard from listening to the final echo of our neighbors’ bedsprings—or more likely he’d been hard since the very moment he’d first jostled me awake. “If we could set up a lab here. Imagine the tools we’d need. Imagine the behaviors we’d discover.”

  “Don’t you wish,” I said, and if only to change the subject, I let him push into me, finding his release—a maneuver that didn’t take long on that particular night of auditory stimulation.

  I’d be dishonest if I claimed our boarding-house visits didn’t stimulate my own scientific curiosity, in my own way. I was less interested in positions, performances, and tumescence in general than in practical matters, like how the women avoided getting pregnant. Quietly broaching the subject on the front porch, when I happened to share a cigarette with one of the more experienced lady visitors, didn’t entirely enlighten me. Some of the women did in fact have multiple children as well as unfounded confidence in all manner of over-the-counter “women’s friends,” “monthly aids,” and “pearls of health.” (Dangerous abortifacients sold under misleading names, in other words.) Then there was Lysol, that product in which we’d put our trust while the Spanish flu had raged. It wasn’t yet advertised euphemistically as a feminine hygiene product, but even at Vassar, the girls had whispered about it.

  A few women who visited the boarding house simply claimed they rarely got pregnant. I suspected they’d been injured by abortions or infected by men enough to compromise their fertility. Many a Great War soldier was discharged critically ailing from syphilis or gonorrhea, and the army didn’t make things any better by pretending that patriotic “self-control” was the best solution. (No more than a third of soldiers agreed, I’d learned from John.)

  One of John’s better-funded projects, just the year before, had been a detailed study of the extremely limited efficacy of a wartime anti-VD motion picture on military men and civilians. The lengthy paper and the exhaustive postwar surveying—nearly five thousand people from all walks of life were shown the motion picture—was one of the best conducted and least remembered of John’s works. Looking back, two things strike me: that despite John’s lifelong fascination with emotional manipulation, he had no trouble admitting that arousing fear about sexual disease was not the best way to control behavior; and that he had been much more methodical when studying sexual activity than when studying babies. Without any sarcasm, I can say that it was a calling overlooked.

  Despite John’s clinical interests and my own willingness to pry into other women’s lives, we weren’t as candid about our own concerns or as well informed as we should have been. No one was, in those years. Suffrage leaders had frowned on the use of rubbers, which only encouraged promiscuity. Margaret Sanger had more good sense—enough to land in her jail—but our opposition to her stances on eugenics kept John and me from ordering many of her publications. Privately, I took an interest in her introduction of “birth control,” as she’d started to call it, but John was not as interested in forgiving someone such backward views on race, immigration exclusions, and other matters.

  What did that leave? I’d heard of coitus interruptus, and John knew even more terms—coitus reservatus, coitus obstructus—and questioned the usefulness of many of them, whenever we broached the subject together, which was less often than you might think. Various pessaries and caps were illegal and hard to obtain. Then there was the calendar method. It certainly fit John’s fondness for charts. The problem was knowing when, exactly, a woman was fertile. Was it during menstruation, or just before? A dog’s fertility coincided with bloody discharge, and I was the last to tell John, still fond of quoting Pavlov and recalling his own days studying birds and rats, that humans and animals aren’t always the same. But why am I chiding John? I had no better idea, myself.

  My parents caught on pretty quickly where I was going, with whom, and probably why. “Men are disgusting,” Mother said to me once, on the verge of tears, as I was hurrying out the door on a Friday afternoon, just hours before Shabbat. My father was away, as he’d been away increasingly since the infamous day of the stolen letters. He claimed his absences were due to work. It would have been a terrible irony if we’d awakened in him any longings previously suppressed, or provided some justification for being less cautious about behaviors he’d previously concealed. It was John’s goal to free every American from unnecessary and outdated moralities, but did I really want my parents’ generation to be part of that change? Maybe we could start with our own generation, or the one to follow.

  Things were becoming so awkward, with spells of two and three days when we didn’t even talk or share meals, that my mother convinced us all to go on a family motoring vacation to the Great American West. I consented, knowing that I’d be alone and silent in the backseat, not getting a clean break as my mother saw it, but only brooding on Baltimore, my head turning with the memories of every conversation, every negotiation, every debauched tryst, trying to sort through it all.

  At the first fill-up stop we hit, heading out of state, a man who was looking under the hood of his car glanced up at me standing near the pump, rubbing the sand out of my eyes, and said, “Well hello, Sugar, aren’t you sweet.”

  And I smiled back, as innocently as I could muster, thinking, You have no idea.

  Most of the time was en route, with a week or ten forgettable days in between spent at Colorado and Yosemite—and that’s all I have to say about that, not enjoying backseats or endlessly dusty roads or terrible food or nature camping. But it did give me a cover story for part of the summer, and when I filled out my alumnae news card to Vassar, I mentioned that I’d just returned from an out-West trip, extending the time it had taken us, and fudging the time I got back, for the very same reason I pocketed one of those salt and pepper lighthouses, which is to say, for no reason, or none I’d care to admit.

  Early fall continued as late summer had been spent, a dozen or more visits with John to the flophouse, where I was getting to know everyone by name, and where
no one ever told me my lipstick was too red, or my new haircut too short, or my arched eyebrows plucked too thin, or my eyelids painted too dark silver. We put on records and danced, John shuffling side to side, or more often sitting, fingers gripped around a glass, watching me dancing with other women, who left all too quickly after they’d finished their visits and eaten their tuna sandwiches or salami and eggs. Or, just as often, with other men. The men all said they were charmed by my laugh, and so I laughed even more to please them.

  But I’m confusing the order of things slightly, and failing to remember that just after the Yosemite trip, the very first thing I did was go to the city for two days and apply for jobs in advertising. I’m muddling that for good reason, as one does when logical lines begin to split and go in different directions: the researcher and decadent paramour I had been, and the confident lover and future professional woman I wished to be, for whom doors were no longer opening so easily. Make no mistake: my own Johns Hopkins days were over, and Albert had gone away, but there is no such thing as a clean break. Our most famous experiment would inform every professional and philosophical position John ever took, and everything we’d ever done together during those Hopkins days, every pain we’d ever caused, like every self-deception we’d ever practiced, would have shadows and echoes.

  I did not realize it at the time, of course. I embraced optimism. What other choice did I have?

  Staying with Hilda and her friends, with all their talk of fashion magazines and new opportunities for women, had given me the courage to think about a new direction for myself. My writing skills were more than adequate, and of course I felt I knew something about what women would like to buy, and how to speak to them. Ad agencies were thriving and I would love being in the city in my own apartment. John could visit me often, of course. It would put us on a more balanced footing, for him to have his world, and I to have mine, at least until he brought his marriage to its conclusion. Maybe if we came to the next stage of our relationship with equal independence, we could create something different and more lasting, exceeding the expectations of anyone who had an opinion about modern marriage.

  My most exciting moment was a call to interview at an ad agency on Lexington Avenue. I actually included in my alumnae note to Vassar that I was fairly sure I’d gotten the job. I shouldn’t have been so eager to spread that news prematurely, but I suppose I wanted everyone to know I had plans, I was charting my own course, just in case word got out that I wasn’t continuing at Johns Hopkins.

  All summer, John had exhibited no concern whatsoever about his own professional standing. A dozen universities had tried luring him for the last decade, he’d spent more time turning down jobs than seeking them, and he was utterly convinced of the merit of his own theories and experiments, especially the most recent work. He felt he was indispensable. Each step toward divorce, including the most recent July separation agreement, had added to the rumors circulating around campus, about the cause of the divorce and the various dramatic steps leading up to it. John did nothing to counter the gossip or to prove that he felt any remorse. The problem wasn’t just that he was divorcing, of course; it was that he was having an affair, and not with anyone, but with a student.

  Adolf Meyer, in John’s corner more than not, had written John a letter in September, when we were visiting the flophouse often and were at our most incautious, expressing that he hoped John would continue at the university, but that he must sever his relationship with me and acknowledge, without reservation, the impropriety of what he had done. John ignored that warning letter. Then in October, John was called into President Goodnow’s office. Even if Goodnow had failed to notice my small role in the lab, he recognized my last name. My own grandfather, William Solomon Rayner, had made a sizable donation to Johns Hopkins in the year after my birth. That hurt our case, rather than helping it. The university seemed to feel even more of a custodial responsibility toward me. If John were a different man—if he’d simply apologized, or acted contrite, instead of wagging a progressive finger at anyone who restricted his social and sexual imperatives—things might have turned out differently.

  John may have known more than most of his peers about psychology and biology. What he didn’t care much about was history. We’d both heard the story, from the time just before John had come to Baltimore, of the prof who’d been let go after being caught in a bordello. The administration had made one stand against such shenanigans, more than adequate rehearsal for standing firm against another. But John didn’t see how that former case applied to him.

  That day in October, John walked into Goodnow’s office. When he walked out, he’d left a letter of resignation behind, scrawled at that moment, spontaneously and irritably, on a blank piece of university stationery sitting on Goodnow’s desk. John packed his bags and went to New York, to temporarily live with a sympathetic friend, a sociologist named William Thomas, who had been dismissed from the University of Chicago, for similar reasons.

  Meyer had wanted John to admit his errors. John didn’t want to, especially at first, and he maintained it was their loss for getting rid of him. But he did have one moment of doubt after all his bravado. He asked me, the next time I saw him, “You don’t think I should go back and try to explain, do you?”

  “Apologize, you mean?”

  “Not that.” But he was considering something close, I could tell. He was deciding what it would take to eat some crow.

  “You don’t need to go begging. You can do better,” I said with my heart in my throat, hoping. “We both can.”

  Maybe I thought that the least reward I could get from this debacle was John all to myself, in a faraway city preferably. We could run away, self-righteous and unrepentant. At the time, it seemed an easy enough thing to do.

  There were some inconvenient details, however. I left Hopkins with a blank transcript—no degree, no courses listed, certainly no published dissertation. At the time, I judged it—I had to judge it—as a mere setback. I might try another type of job here or there, to add some spice to my life, but I didn’t expect never to study or work in a university again. That simply wasn’t imaginable. Those had been the happiest and most productive days of my life.

  If the city visits and flophouse stopovers had been debauched fun appropriate to the steamy days of late summer, the headlines that appeared in later 1920 were a cold autumn shower.

  I came down at breakfast time to the rattling sound of my father hurrying to hide a newspaper on the table, and then changing his mind and pushing it in my direction, wrists balanced at the edge of the table, fingers still flexing in aggravation.

  “What am I doing? You’re going to see it. You have to see it. I can’t protect you anymore.”

  “Protect her?” Mother asked rhetorically, in a dead voice.

  Father was near tears. Mother was already temporarily drained of hers. She sat at a right angle to him, eyes pink, handkerchief in her fist, next to an untouched bowl of oatmeal.

  I took the newspaper without making eye contact. There it was, in black and white. The newspaper article discussed John’s dismissal and the fact that his wife was suing for divorce following an affair. It hadn’t named me yet, though anyone at Johns Hopkins would know my identity. It could be worse. It might be worse, in terms of my equilibrium as well as my future prospects, very soon.

  I was trying my hardest not to blow things up out of proportion. But there were other people and situations to think of: people involved in my father’s business, my mother’s social circles, our extended family, our synagogue. My family had come to Baltimore and labored hard to create a life here. And thanks to thin newsprint suitable for fish wrapping, that life might never be the same.

  I could guess how many people had seen my name in print a few months earlier, when my first scientific paper had been published. Enough to count on the fingers of one hand. No one would have actually read it, first page to last, but my father would have car
ried a copy to his synagogue board meeting and waved it in front of a few faces, just to show what his daughter was doing with her education. I held my breath now, naively hoping that if my name did finally appear, no one would notice it under this particular circumstance.

  In the days that followed, Frank was instructed to visit the nearest newsstand every two to three hours, checking the headlines of every large and small East Coast paper for the Rayner family name. When he came home with a dozen printed copies, nearly sending my father into apoplexy, we realized that his reading skills were even more modest than previously estimated, and we sent Agnus with him on all subsequent times, to monitor the news together. Her first language was German, and she had a little trouble with reading herself, but she could certainly skim the pages quickly for our surname. I think my father was sure it would be buried somewhere, easy to overlook, damning but obscure, in a column of tiny print. If only.

  My father stayed home from work, and each time Frank and Agnus left, we gathered in the parlor. Each of us pretended to read a magazine or novel (not a newspaper; now they all seemed contaminated) and awaited the sound of the kitchen door opening, at the back of the house. Each time Frank would step in, with Agnus behind him, and tiptoe quietly through the hallway, as if our house had been transformed into a funeral parlor, and come to stand in the doorway to the room where we three sat, mostly ignored books and magazines or knitting across our knees. Frank would clear his throat and say, “Nothing yet, Mr. Rayner,” and then wait to be excused. Each time, as if it had been the very first time, my father would say, “Of course. Thank you, Frank. And check again in about two hours, will you?” Frank would look across at the grandfather clock and look up at the ceiling, doing a mental calculation and say, “Sure, I can do that. Thank you, sir.”