Darling

by Richard Rodriguez

  And you were right, Darling. Going through to the bar was a betrayal, a sudden disinclination for intimacy; boredom with your melancholy; the hope of an early evening. Let’s make this an early evening. Darling. Because all of a sudden you were going to say—you did say—that I was pretending to be someone I am not. In fact, Darling, I was pretending to be someone I am. Despite my many sins and shortcuts, I have always been a player—on my mother’s side.

  A player recognizes other players. I once met a German shepherd who was a player. And so was his dog. Oh, come on, what’s wrong now? What should I call you, then? Sweetie? Dulcinea?

  I had studied so diligently to become a serious man. I stood in awe of serious, competent men—scholars, janitors, fathers. But I had as well, at the time of the Garden of Eden, an adolescent anxiety about Chekhovian Sunday evenings, about melancholy, about sex. I had endeavored to suggest to you, Darling, without resorting to scarves or cigarette holders—you just never cared to notice—that I had some interest in the casbah, in people you wouldn’t approve of. Obviously I had a fear of the casbah, as well. One foot in. “Darling” seemed to fit the bill.

  • • •

  Exhibit A: I wore a suit and tie; Helen carried a purse—teenage brother and sister standing on the sidewalk in front of the Curran Theatre in San Francisco. We had lunched at Normandy Lane in the basement of the City of Paris. We had used the restrooms at the St. Francis. The future was years ahead of us. We were still an hour early for the Saturday matinee. We looked at the photographs of the cast. A Yellow Cab pulled up to the curb. The back door opened. Cary Grant got out of the cab. I nudged Helen. Cary Grant extended his arm into the cab and handed out Dyan Cannon, whose portrait we had just examined. (Dyan Cannon was playing the female lead in the national company of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.) Cary Grant drew Dyan Cannon into an embrace. Dyan Cannon melted somewhat. Cary Grant kissed Dyan Cannon on her lips. We watched. Cary Grant got back into the cab; he rolled down the window. “Bye-bye, darling,” he called as the cab sped away.

  • • •

  I have found that “darling” serves as a signal to women that one’s relationship to them is going to be a comic pas, an operetta, a tease. (If that’s the signal you caught, Darling, you were not wrong.)

  If a woman returns the serve—if she is a willing player—then you’ve got her where you want her; “darling” is understood: One is not a sexual player. One is Cary Grant. One has Randolph Scott sewing curtains back at the ranch. “Darling” is the net, not the birdie.

  You were not going to join my menagerie of darlings, though, were you, Darling? Just trying you out. Sorry.

  Elizabeth Taylor, toward the end of her life, when she could (I imagine) have summoned anyone in the world to dine, spent many evenings at a gay club in West Hollywood, just to be a darling among darlings. She was too fond of life, too fond of people, too shrewd to be shrewd, to retire into mystery.

  A favorite darling-ist of mine is Harold Bloom. He’s not gay, is he? And yet he darlings like a champ.

  But the all-time was Bunny Breckinridge. “Hell-o, darling,” Bunny would purr, straightening the lapels of his silk suit, composing his hands (diamond ring) as if he were leaning forward upon a walking stick—a top-hatted chorister’s stance, a top-hatted chorister’s patience. Bunny could sit without moving for long periods of time, like someone on stage, which, of course, he had been—he had been on the stage. Every thirty minutes he would sigh a two-tone sigh like an ormolu clock to let you know that he was still there, that he would wait you out. Bunny’s mannerisms were as those described in some bad translation of a Russian masterpiece. He giggled suggestively. He squeaked with pleasure. He winked salaciously. Face powder dusted his collar; his rinsed white hair was swept back to a meringue peak at the North Pole, like the hair of one of those puff-cheeked Aeolian figures in the corners of antique maps.

  And Bunny could soliloquize. Picture Edith Evans, seated on a stone bench in a painted garden in some Restoration comedy. Dirtier, of course. He once recounted, for reasons that had to do with a diamond cross he wore at his throat, the Passion and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ. At the completion of the narrative, huge tears, clotted with powder, rolled down his cheeks. Bunny is the only human being I have ever met for whom the death of Christ had the immediacy of personal tragedy. “He died for our sins, darling,” Bunny confided piteously.

  Then you said: Why are you telling me all this? If men would only listen to themselves sometimes.

  I said: Men? I’m demonstrating the rhetorical uses of “darling”—as if you were my Orals Examiner.

  You: Then as your Orals Examiner, Darling, I feel I should tell you something important. “Darling” should be intimate; “darling” should be understood, not flung about the room like a stripper’s garter. If you feel you really must darling someone in public, and karaoke is not readily available, scribble your sonnet on a napkin and pass it under the table when no one is looking. Don’t toss “darlings” around like you are feeding the seals. It is no way to treat a woman. (Tears.)

  • • •

  Later that same evening . . .

  You: Should we get a room?

  I: What? (Punctuation cannot convey.)

  You: It’s late. We could watch a movie.

  I: I think I’ve seen this movie.

  You: . . . ? (Judy Garland.)

  I: . . . ? (Houdini.)

  You: You’re not interested in women. Say it.

  Zorba the Greek: “God has a very big heart, but there is one sin He will not forgive. If a woman calls a man to her bed and he will not go.”

  I: I am not interested in sleeping with a woman, if that’s what you mean. Isn’t it odd we say “sleep” when what we mean . . .

  You: Thank you. That is what I mean. Was that so hard?

  I: Yes.

  So, just like that, we were over the rainbow. You would continue to explore the pleasures of the natural law. There was a young one, a rich one, a dumb one, a tan—probably gay, we both agreed. And I was free to darling up a storm—a neutered noun twirling about a neon palm tree.

  When the time came, I wasn’t sure how I should introduce you. . . .

  Darling, this is Jimmy, I said.

  (Your braceleted arm extended.)

  • • •

  Over time, you stopped making faces; over time, my theatrical affectation became the emblem of our true affection.

  You even returned the herring in kind. In a small white bed, in a curtained cubicle, the prongs of the slipped oxygen tube hissing about your throat, you endeavored to show you understood who was holding your hand. With your eyes closed, you raised one finger and whispered: Darling.

  10. The Maternity Ward

  The maternity wards of Tel Aviv are in a contest with the maternity wards of Ramallah. Might the future depend—as in the Old Testament—on the number of children your tribe produces? If Ramallah wins, there will be a Palestinian state. Babies are a political force in the world.

  For several years, we, in the West, have talked about the future as a “clash of civilizations,” by which we meant primarily a clash between fundamentalists and secular society. The attacks of September 11 seemed to many Americans to join that clash.

  September 11 has prompted me to consider the future in terms of a growing, worldwide female argument with the “natural” male doctorate of the beard—a coming battle between men and women.

  In China, men outnumber women. That might be the statistic to think about. One outcome of the one-child policy was that many couples contrived to make their one child a son. The result of the policy—the contrivance, the forced abortions, etcetera—is that China prepares for economic, technological, and military preeminence in the twenty-first century, the rare-earth century, the expanding desert century, the starving century, while sustaining a fundamental biological imbalance: There
are too few women.

  Such an imbalance might seem to favor a patriarchal order by force of number. But because reproduction is such a profound human balance, the rare-woman century may give humans of female gender the opportunity to control, to seize control of, reproduction. If the female gender were ever to control reproduction, then the female gender would control what?

  Point of view.

  If menses were the parable, not seed—if sea, not ships; if sky, not missiles? If protective imagination were the parable, not domination, not conflict, then . . . ?

  If Silent Night were the prologue, and not Sing, Goddess, the anger of Peleus’s son.

  Then?

  I asked the question of a priest-scholar: If women were to control reproduction, what would women control? The priest paused for a moment before answering efficiently: “Evolution. Who controls the zygote controls the zeitgeist.”

  It is only after shopping my question around the boys’ club that I bring it at last to the banquette of the Garden of Eden.

  Here is my question, Darling: Say there is a battle forming between men and women. I do not mean for equality, but for primacy—for who will ultimately control reproduction . . . What are you doing?

  Looking for my pills.

  What’s wrong?

  Nothing’s wrong. I’m looking for my pills.

  So here’s my question. What would a woman control if a woman controlled . . . ?

  A schoolboy’s question. Why must it be a question of “control”?

  You haven’t even heard the question.

  I heard the frame. It’s a riddle, isn’t it? No doubt there is a correct answer. Tickle me. Amuse me.

  I asked Father Rafferty the same question. If women control reproduction, what will women control? You know what his answer was?

  I cannot imagine.

  No. His answer was evolution. That’s good, isn’t it?

  Are there bones in skate?

  So . . . ?

  Look, Richard, a woman . . . No I can't speak for Women. I cannot consider your question abstractly. Your question presses against me like an exploded safety bag. Back up! Or should I say pull out? (Once more to the handbag.) There you are! (She aligns the arrows on the safety cap.) Pregnancy is never a hypothetical for a woman. Never. Not even for me. Not even at my age. Cheers. (Prednisone.) It is a condition of our existence.

  Your answer is you cannot conceive the question?

  No, my dear. My observation is that you cannot conceive! That freedom alone allows you to conceive of conception as a power. Whereas a woman might argue that a refusal to conceive is the only power.

  Are you sure you’re not just pulling a hetero on me?

  Women and men will never be equal. Women will always be superior in knowledge and irony because men will never have a clue what it feels like to have the entire dangerous future of the planet crammed up their twats. I’m not pulling a hetero. I’m pulling a utero.

  You are so pleased with your funny that I am rewarded with your laughter, which is like a percolating calliope. Everyone in the Garden of Eden must turn to see what sort of creature could produce such a ridiculous, infectious sound.

  11. Three Women

  A woman:

  Andy Warhol made a tracing of Leonardo’s Annunciation. Leonardo’s painting is venerably burnished—browns, golds, Venetian red. On the left side of Leonardo’s canvas is an angel, of idealized profile—one dead eye and two partially aroused pinions. The angel kneels in the manner of a mezzo-soprano cavalier and raises its right hand in benediction; its left hand supports the stalk of a lily.

  Mary sits at a reading carrel; her right hand worries the pages of an open Psalter. In the background are some odd topiary—cypress, perhaps—and a garden in which lilies bloom. The vanishing point is a mountain in the far distance. Mary’s lap is shelf-like—knees apart, feet braced, as is characteristic of many Annunciation paintings—but not yet receptive to the implication of the angel’s presence.

  Warhol’s silk-screen rendition, a kind of explication, uses three colors—gray, salmon, white (in the version I prefer; Warhol printed several variations)—and crops the scene to a close-up, isolating three elements: On the left, the blessing hand of the angel (the Question, the Proposal). On the right, Mary’s hand, restive on the Psalter (the incipient reply, not yet an assent). In the center is the white alp, like a dish of ice cream in a comic book (the Suitor, the Unknowable, the Impossible).

  The alp has sent its mouthpiece to ask if it may enter the foreground, overshadow the maiden. Gabriel kneels to proclaim: Hail, Darling, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women. And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

  • • •

  “It is a woman I want rather than any particular one,” the young Victorian novelist, William Makepeace Thackeray, wrote to his mother in frustration.

  • • •

  A woman:

  I was crossing Broadway on my way to a theater—a warm spring evening, around seven o’clock, still light. Within the crosswalk, a woman walked alongside me. “Are you visiting New York?” she asked very pleasantly. She was dressed in a creamish, knittish, knockoff Chanel with gold buttons. Forty. Thirty-five, forty. Nice-looking. Not much makeup. Umbrella, just in case. You could tell she was a nice woman, even without the umbrella. “Where are you going in such a hurry?” she asked, trying to keep pace. I’m on my way to the theater, I said. “Would you like some company?” This last she said with desperation; she was cognizant of the absurdity of her question, posed in a crosswalk on Times Square. Oh, no thank you, I said, cognizant of the Greer Garson blitheness of my reply. I’m meeting some friends at the theater. At which her (gloved) hand moved to cover her mouth, stifling a vowel that was sick and sorrowful—humiliation, I thought, at having, on what must surely have been her maiden voyage as a hooker, or nearly, tried it out on a gay man who probably looked as benign to her (my blue suit, perhaps) as she looked to me, and probably I was one of the very few solitary male pedestrians on Broadway who was more interested in seeing a play than in sex with a woman who held an umbrella. I wished her a good evening. Her face crumpled in tears as she turned away to her fate.

  You see, I badly needed a “darling” at that moment—to make her smile, even if ruefully; to make it seem we were two adults who knew the score, which we weren’t, which we didn’t, neither of us.

  • • •

  When William Thackeray died at age fifty-two, a famous author, the most famous English author of his time after Dickens, he left two young daughters and a wife in a sanitarium who suffered from what we would now call postpartum depression. Mrs. Thackeray never recovered but lived a very long time in perplexity, seated in a lawn chair. William Thackeray was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery, London. Several figures in black, famous figures—Penguin paperbacks—accompanied the Thackeray daughters to their father’s grave.

  But what was that unseemly caterwauling?

  Black-clothed figures turned from the open grave to watch the advance of a carriageful of whooping and gesticulating Mayfair tarts in parrot’s plumage. The women choired lusty benedictions as their carriage drove round and round the grave: Goodbye Willie, they cried. Toodaloo, Dearie. We had a few laughs, though, didn’t we, Darlin’!

  • • •

  A woman:

  Jesus of Nazareth is not known for sparing anyone embarrassment, least of all his family, but in his meeting with the Samaritan woman, he displays evidence of knowing the score. As does she. And, as you say, “darling” is understood:

  At Jacob’s Well. Noon. Jesus rests from a long journey on foot. His friends have gone into town to look for something to eat. A woman approaches the well. She carries a clay jar. Jesus says to the woman, Will you give me something to drink?

  Wait, a Jew is asking a Samaritan for a drink?

  If you onl
y knew what God was giving you right this minute . . .

  I don’t see your water-skin, love.

  . . . you’d be the one asking for a drink.

  You can’t drink from mine, though, can you? Defile your inner temple, outer temple, which is it? And the well is deep, trust me. How do you propose to draw water without a skin?

  Whoever drinks your water will soon be thirsty again.

  If you’re afraid of the trots, you should stick to your own well.

  No one who drinks the water I give will ever be thirsty again. The water I pour out will become a spring of life.

  Oh, well then. In that case (as she lowers her leather bag into the well)—a skin of my donkey-swill for a drop of your kosher magic. (She extends the dripping water bag to Jesus.)

  Call your husband.

  What's that got to do . . . hey! (Snatching back the water bag, splashing them both.) I don’t have a husband.

  You got that one right (Darling); you’ve had four husbands and counting. But the one you’ve got now isn’t your husband.

  Oh, a prophet, too! Should’ve known from the toenails. My ancestors worshipped on this mountain a long time before you people showed up.

  The hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.

  Oh, Jerusalem. I was forgetting: True worship only happens in Jerusalem.

  You worship what you don’t know. We worship what we know; salvation comes from the Jews. But the hour is coming—it is already here—when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. That is the worship the Father wants.

  Well (Darling), when the Messiah comes, I’m sure he will explain everything to everyone. Even hillbillies like me.

  You’re talking to him.

  12. Mystery