by Laurie Fox
The morning after we collided into each other on the hiking trail, Freeman joined Mummy and me for breakfast at Le Bateau Ivre, a Viennese-style coffeehouse on Telegraph Avenue that reeked of dark-roasted beans and Old World romance. Immediately we went into “couple” mode, nodding and teasing and elbowing each other. Lacking common knowledge about music or literature, we boldly completed each other’s sentences and applauded each other’s jokes. Freeman even fiddled with my hand under the table, tenderly counting my fingers and toying with Great-Nana’s boulder-sized ring.
The entire time, Mother sat woodenly in her high-back chair, drinking her Mokka mit schlag in short, brittle sips—how she hated being on the periphery. In a transparent bid to grab the spotlight, she offered Freeman a generous dollop of her whipped cream and he promptly went to work, painting his face with the stuff. The foamy goatee and eyebrows he gave himself charmed my pants off, and I returned the favor by sucking my empty water glass so hard I sealed it to my lips.
“Very attractive, Wends,” Mother observed. “I’ve always considered sucking the perfect strategy to snag a man.”
“Mother!” I chided.
“It totally works for me,” Freeman offered. He picked up his own glass and followed suit.
Mother rolled her eyes as if to suggest she was dining out with children; but she blew me a kiss when Freeman wasn’t looking. Even though Mummy wasn’t the center of this specific universe, I saw that she took some pleasure in her daughter’s success, and I winked back.
FROM the very beginning Freeman and I set opposing agendas. He required of me a certain cheerfulness—a quality I lacked but could feign (Daddy had required the same of me)—and I asked that he indulge me in my pain: put up with my frequent crying jags, my phobias about hugging, about fishing. My fear of being held at the waist was not uncommon, doctors assured me, but my fear of fish and meat hooks was as weird as they came. I did not want my new boyfriend to demand that I “just get over it.” Our agreement to tolerate each other’s quirks was understood; there was really no need to discuss the particulars.
As I said, Freeman turned out to be deliciously silly (which made cheerfulness much simpler to fake). After we finished breakfast at Le Bateau Ivre, he invited Mummy and me over to a local recording studio, where he asked me to repeat “It’s the bugs” another twenty times into a microphone (“Sound like you worship bugs, Wendy”). Then he asked the same of Mummy. Her rendering of this phrase turned out to be earthy, verging on carnal. From that day on, Freeman took to calling Mother Mae West (he liked to puff out his chest like a bodybuilder in her presence), and the two enjoyed an intimacy that was, at the outset, lost on me.
Despite his chumminess with Mummy, Freeman never failed to paint a smile on my sorry face. Plus, he incorporated me into his art. The “bugs” tape quickly became the centerpiece of a composition that would become his master’s thesis at Berkeley. A joyful melange of voices, it celebrated our meeting—and distorted it. The music was tender, it was pretentious, it was elegant, it was button-pushing. And in a postmodern gesture, he incorporated bars of the Love Boat theme song, a fact that endeared him to his classmates if not to his professors. For the piece’s debut at Zellerbach Hall, I was prominently onstage for everyone to see—well, to hear—and thus felt unusually present in my new boyfriend’s life. Freeman was showing the world I existed, not that anyone could trace the voice in the piece to me. On tape I sounded like a banshee on steroids (and Mummy like an alien hooker), but I was proud to be a part of the composition and, in the front row, beamed conspicuously at my talented new beau.
After the concert Freeman made the social rounds in the lobby, introducing Mother and me as his “gals.” Unfortunately, as the evening progressed, the camaraderie between Mummy and Freeman grew loose and liquored, and I ended up ditching them both for the privacy of a nearby ladies’ room.
And this is where our agreement kicked in, the silent bargain we’d made about pleasure and pain. After a half hour of sitting in a bathroom stall, memorizing the graffiti and inventing a few lines of my own, I showed my waterlogged face in the hallway. Freeman was both baffled and worried, while Mummy was merely angry. Now that I finally had a lover, she felt I shouldn’t fuck things up, and she said so right in front of Freeman. He took me aside in a small rehearsal room and let me know I hadn’t screwed up—an act of kindness for which I shall be eternally in his debt. In turn, he allowed me to bitch about Mummy’s intrusive nature; I even blurted out that she was the one who’d pushed Daddy away, once upon a time. (I hadn’t yet considered the glaring similarity between Freeman and Daddy: they were both members of the Puer Aeternus Club for Men, and as such, would push off for distant, more compelling shores with little provocation.)
Freeman listened to me with a childish impatience and yet heard me out, rubbing my hands and head as if I were a puppy. I liked this a lot. Alas, to deal with his discomfort with anything that smacked of conflict, he resorted to invention. In minutes, he conjured up a dozen nicknames for me: Wendolyn, Window, Wenston Churchill, Wenderella. This was a gift of no small proportion. Then he called me Wendybird.
“W-why did you say that?” I asked, instantly suspicious.
“Say what?”
“Why did you call me Wendybird? I mean, where the hell did that come from?”
Freeman dropped my hand, which he’d been stroking lightly, and appeared mortally wounded. “I don’t know. Just the British sixties thing. You know, women are birds, men are blokes.”
“Oh,” was all I could manage. And then, “I’m sorry, okay? I ruin everything. Well, not everything, just the good things.”
He smiled tautly and shook his head. “Okay, okay, okay. Let’s get back to those good things, hey?” I nodded and he escorted me back to the reception, where we found Mummy encircled by music students—all male. She was leading them in an animated chorus of “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame,” though only a few knew the words. As a result of her gyrations, her tight black sweater had crept up her tummy, revealing her belly button.
“Oh, Mother!” I whined, propping my hands on my hips.
“Oh, Wendy,” she echoed. “When did you become such a grown-up? What a disappointment you must have been on the island. What a wet blanket.”
I can’t tell you how much this hurt me; Mummy could be so unconscious. Though Freeman hadn’t a clue at this point to what she was talking about, he’d seen and heard enough. “Mae West,” he whispered, “let’s make like a leaf and blow!”
At this, Mummy tittered like a teenybopper and bade farewell to her admirers: “Cheerio, boys, this town’s not big enough for the ten of us!”
The three of us waltzed out the door in dramatically different moods, Freeman clinging to the idea that everything was all right, me clinging to the idea that it wasn’t, and Mummy still glowing from all the male attention, her cropped sweater showing off her bare midriff like Barbara Eden in I Dream of Jeannie.
V
ON a flight back from Boston last week after visiting my publisher, I spent the better part of five hours sifting through the wreckage of my marriage to Freeman, its pieces too small to add up to divorce or separation, but sharp nonetheless. Freeman, now my husband of seventeen years, was still the boyish guy I nicknamed Man from the get-go. I’ve always fancied the sweet literalness of Man, its Neanderthal sensibility. Besides, Free was too painful a reminder of what he wanted most from life, and I could never give him that. Giving a person his or her freedom was beyond my power.
Through the years I’d felt entirely free within the institution of marriage; fastened to something bigger than myself, I could drop my anchor in Freeman’s reality. Unfastened, I would surely have spun out of orbit and landed in a tomato patch just like Daddy had. It’s clear that I needed the safety and predictability of a partner who, over time, permitted me to speak about the unspeakable. Marriage to Freeman also provided the illusion of structure, enough to experiment with my writing, my childhood poetry having given way to absurdly ta
ll tales that brought me a decent living as a children’s book author. My lifestyle was modest, on par with my talent, and I tried to keep a lid on the depression. Plus, Freeman would be there when the going got tough—at least that was always my theory.
Back in 1976, though, marriage to Freeman wasn’t in the immediate cards. Living together not only made good sense politically but was the vogue. And I was really in no rush to jog down the aisle. In The Neverland my domestic skills had been tested exhaustively and, to tell the truth, I’d failed: I hadn’t had a clue about baking bread or sewing buttons, a budding feminism having gotten in the way of learning such practical matters. However, it so happens, I could sweep like a demon.
At the impressionable age of thirteen, I took to the broom faster than you can say Cinderella. Sweeping afforded me solace, suffused me with purpose. With broom in hand, I could process all the strange goings-on in a world that made sense only half of the time. And so I swept Peter’s mucky cave, his mates’ messy grottoes, the stables where they sheltered a hodgepodge of beasts. And when I returned to the Mainland, I swept the floorboards of our house like a girl possessed.
After ten years of dedicated sweeping, I showed such a belief in its therapeutic power that Mummy persuaded me to write a book on the subject. She had just climbed the charts with her own self-help rant, The Pan Pathology: Refusing to Grow Up and Other Ungenerous Traits, and wanted me to follow her on the pop psychology path. With little conviction, I took pen in hand and stared down the page—but nothing occurred to me. I could hardly rally the women of my generation to take up the broom; we had just gotten accustomed to wearing bras again, and housework was still thought an impediment to higher consciousness.
* *
FOUR impetuous weeks after our meeting in Marin, Freeman helped me move in to the many-gabled Victorian in the flatlands of Berkeley, where he rented a studio (his own living space was a mere half gable). At the time this seemed like a good idea, but when I finally gazed out the window of his apartment, instead of taking in bridges and skyscrapers and a sky full of stars, I saw nothing. And nothing is what I felt inside when I gazed in his eyes; I was so stunned that a man could like me and live in a house (as opposed to a tree or a cave) that my heart froze over like an ice cap. Sometimes getting what you want is too much to feel. And so you don’t.
In my numbness, I did find Freeman’s apartment pleasantly disheveled: the vaulted ceiling gave an impression of roominess, and the clutter—mike cables and power panels and something called a fuzz box—faintly echoed Daddy’s garage workshop. A coffee-stained futon on the floor in the corner was topped off with a musty patchwork quilt, and the single bay window was sheathed in torn lace, the lone feminine touch. Posters of Brian Eno and John Cage were thumbtacked to the wall above an altar of avant-garde LPs stacked halfway to the ceiling. The whole place was marvelously seedy, a set director’s idea of la vie bohème. Best of all I saw a grand opportunity here for sweeping.
After I stumbled over one of three guitars propped against a wall, Freeman pointed to the bed and said “sit,” as if I were a trained tiger. I sat as directed, happy just to be away from Mummy’s metaphysics. Her curious ideas about relationships and destiny had ruled the roost for over two decades now and, frankly, I wasn’t all that clear on the difference between her and me. Just because we shared an unreliable childhood secret, we were not the same woman, I reminded myself. While Mummy had waded in a pool of lovers—more like a whirlpool of jerks—and dipped her big toe in the puddle of love more times than I can count, I had had one “simple” encounter with an asexual, flying boy. And for all the affection Mummy routinely received, her heart had become indifferent to men (no doubt a product of Daddy’s indifference), whereas my feelings for men were merely frozen, but ready to thaw at the warmth of a kiss.
And kiss we did, that first day in the apartment. With all the agility he demonstrated as a guitarist, Freeman peeled off my near-Victorian layers of clothing: a root beer–brown pullover, pilly and soiled with ink at the cuffs, a chambray blue work shirt with a W embroidered on the breast pocket, and a fifties western-themed circle skirt, under which waffle-weave long johns shielded my chilled limbs. On my own I slipped out of my bra and panties. I kicked off my boots and, with each foot, scraped off knee-high argyle socks.
“Sheesh, Wends, are you sure that’s everything?” Freeman said as I lay naked and shivering on his quilt. “Are you sure you haven’t forgotten a barrette or something?”
I slapped him on the bum, which was milk-white and goose-pimpled. The radiator clicked away, trying to keep up with the sinking temperature; the bay window had clouded over with condensation. Throwing my arms around Freeman’s neck, I drew him fast to my chest: “Be my blanket or I’ll freeze to death.”
Freeman lowered himself to the bed. While my height had thankfully topped out at five foot ten, his was such that, even when we lay side by side, my head barely rested on his shoulder. “Better?” he asked.
I nodded and inhaled his smell, a mix of Dr. Bronner’s soap and herbal shampoo. The bouquet carried me off for a second; when I returned he was pulling on a nipple with his teeth, so subtly I imagined a spider crawling across my flesh. But when he placed his hands around my waist, I pulled back and involuntarily slapped his wrist. “Stop,” I said.
“What?” he asked, looking up with flushed cheeks.
“I need to see you, Man.”
“I’m right down here, woman.” He waved merrily.
“Really,” I added with a serious face.
“Hey, I’m just getting started on a brilliant piece of music.” He puckered his lips and I curled over to meet them halfway.
“I need to tell you what Dick said.”
“Dick?” He sat up rigidly, casting a puff of air across my legs. “Dick Clark? Dick Tracy?”
“Philip K. Dick, the Blade Runner guy. You know, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”
“Do androids dream of electric sheep?” he repeated. “Ya got me.”
“No,” I objected, “that’s not the question.”
“Then what is the question,” he said, wiping his forehead clear of curls. “I’m not in the mood for games. I’m in zee mood for luff.” He broke into song, his crooning on par with Bugs Bunny’s.
I crinkled my nose as if something smelled bad. “Man, listen to me.” I pulled at the indomitable tufts at his crown. “Dick said, ‘Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.’ I repeat: when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. Isn’t that something? The stability of everything! This is what I’ve been looking for. I don’t need to prove myself to anybody.”
Freeman drew his long, hairless legs up to his hips and rocked his body to keep warm. He looked vulnerable, like a freshly shaved poodle. “You don’t need to prove yourself, period,” he said quietly.
A warm spring of water leaked from my heart. Then, too quickly, the sensation was gone. “Don’t you see, Man?” I said. “Everything can go on without me! All those other dimensions don’t need me to keep them going. They’re freestanding.” In a dramatic enactment, I stood up on the futon and rotated my arms like a windmill. “Just because I’m here with you doesn’t mean there aren’t other dimensions out there.”
Freeman offered a close-lipped smile, more pained than winning. Then he stood up on the hard-cotton batting and folded my hands into his, fanning our arms out on each side. Flush against each other’s chest, we remained pinned to the wall, suspended in a very old dance. Somehow Freeman managed to slip his hands behind me: he cupped my buttocks and let out a whoop. This eased the tension of the moment and I collapsed into the cave of his armpit. He licked my neck, his tongue rough like a cat’s, then he gathered my hair and twisted it up and off my nape. Now his thin, cracked lips pressed against my mouth, his legs folding around me. I lost my balance and slipped down onto our tangle of bedclothes. Freeman followed me down and we began to slither and twist, pulling on each other’s skin with hands and teeth, whatever was
available. He entered me with an endearing gentleness, lightly strumming my lower back as if I were one of his beloved guitars.
Now he silently worked his rhythms—bobbing, swaying, pausing for the briefest of meditations. When we did speak, it was in an exchange of sighs and pleased whimpers, though at one point he inquired if I was okay. I answered that I was fine on several planes.
We remained glued lip to lip for hours that afternoon. When we finally unhinged ourselves, I coasted over to the mirror to check out the damage: my mouth was swollen and distorted like a circus clown’s. But I was weirdly content: I hadn’t the slightest desire to sweep! When Freeman slipped away to take a shower, I deliberately ignored the cobwebs of his life—the crumpled balls of Post-its, the wires and white-gold wisps of hair. No longer numb, I allowed myself a brief happy thought and floated above the ground for a sensational three seconds.
FREEMAN emerged from the shower and dressed his skinny self in head-to-toe denim. When he looked up, he found me standing motionless in the middle of the studio, both hands gripping my suitcase. “Wendy, is that a suitcase in your hands or are you just happy to see me?”
“Oops,” I said, wondering if perhaps the Spring air had fooled me into thinking we were right for each other. I set down the luggage on the studio’s worn planks.
“You look like a person who’s seen multiple ghosts. Come ’ere,” he called, head cocked towards the bed. I ran into his arms and we rocked on the futon all over again. “Maybe we should talk about this moving-in thing?”
