by Marge Piercy
“That’s just what men say about women who don’t giggle and play dumb. He’s always setting himself up as some kind of judge! How will I support you in your old age if I don’t have a profession! … But I don’t understand the two of you together. The way you poke at each other.”
“That’s just fooling around. What do you want us to do, kiss each other? He’s my old buddy, old Jackson. We both know where the other one’s at.”
“Do you?” She put her finger on his lean aquiline nose and pressed gently. “I’m not convinced.”
“It’s beyond you, girl.” He brought his mouth down to her breast.
Saturday night between Christmas and New Year’s she sat facing Jackson at the kitchen table over a chess game while Phil was tending bar. He would come home after work. In the meantime she had taken the first game with style: for once Jackson had conceded long before the end game. Sometimes he was stubborn, but as he read his chess books, less often he insisted on prolonging a game whose outcome was clearly charted.
“Come on, two out of three.” Jackson began to set up the pieces again. “We’ll have time for another game before he gets home. If he can find his way. Some nights he swallows as much as he sells.”
“Okay, two out of two.”
She hoped that Phil would not drink too much. She wanted badly to unwind with him. She had worked hard all week, debugging a program on the computer. The night before, something gratuitously nasty had happened. She had run into Barnett from her course in compiler generator systems and he had asked her how she had done. At her answer he had given her a mean squinty smirk and said, “Maybe if I had tits to shake in his face I’d ace it too.” He had walked off leaving her feeling daubed with vomit. As if she hadn’t been eating and sleeping and breathing that course.
Women did not get turned off by a man because he knew how to do things they knew how to do. At least it was a basis for communication. But men seemed to prefer that women sit in some nether land in suspended animation crocheting doilies while waiting to be fetched out. In going from undergraduate to graduate school she had crossed a boundary: before, no matter how good her grades, she had been minimally threatening. But to go to M.I.T. was to announce herself as meaning to get a good job in her field: not to be kept, not to go to school four years and then take a job typing, but to do real work she could live on.
Now men responded to her differently. Even if they were attracted, and some men she worked with obviously were, they seemed to resent that. It baffled her. Other new students is good as she was were already treated with respect: she was not. When she met someone who seemed to have a good mind and ideas and a flavor to his talk, she wanted to be with him, but men did not react that way to women. She felt hemmed in. Just as this one, Jackson, kept himself closed to her. With everyone else he was so damned sympathetic, listening to their troubles, but some stupid prejudice kept him from perceiving her. He would not be her friend and she bristled back. Repaid insult with insult, coldness with coldness.
The phone rang halfway through the second game. Jackson answered. “Yeah, she’s here. Playing chess. What? Sure, here.” Jackson handed her the phone.
“Pigeon? Listen and forgive.” Phil’s voice came over slurred with excitement. He must be calling from the pay phone. Sounded like a roomful of people. “Got to make this fast. Chick in here tonight, strange, I’m telling you. A purseful of coke and dressed like a leather queen. First I wasn’t sure she was a woman and not in drag, I mean, she’s too elegant. Passed me an invitation. Pigeon, I want to follow this. Maybe it’ll be a bad scene and I’ll clear out. But I’m itching to follow my nose.”
“Sure. But watch out. She could be a sadist, she could be a nark.”
“They couldn’t pay enough for her to dress like that. Three-hundred-dollar vests, Daddy knows. I can take care of myself. Listen, maybe I’ll get back there, maybe I won’t. Don’t hang in if you don’t feel like it. Sorry to pull this on you so late.”
“It’s okay, Phil. I’ll go home. Be careful and tell me all about how leather tastes tomorrow. Take care.” She hung up.
“Your move,” Jackson said. “Come on, you get feisty if I take too long.”
“I should leave. It’s getting late.”
“In the middle of the game? You can’t do that to me.”
Because she wasn’t especially eager to go out and stand around the dark windy corner waiting for a bus and warding off approaches, she easily persuaded herself it would be mean lot to finish the game. Besides, it shouldn’t take long. She could map out a strategy of quick victory and be out of here in plenty of time to catch the last bus that started from the end of the line at midnight. She tried a daring attack involving a queen sacrifice that should have hooked him. Instead, Jackson took the game with a line of play she had overlooked, an immediate countersacrifice of his own queen. She had tried to entice him with a strategy that would have worked better on Phil.
As she stood, he reminded her, “Two out of three.”
She pointed to the clock. “I’ll have to hustle to catch the last bus. I don’t like hitching this late.”
“Stay. You do it often enough. Besides, Phil might still show.”
“On cocaine? Don’t bet on it.” She picked up her purse from the chair.
“Come on, sit. I’m going to beat you tonight. Why leave me lonely on Saturday night? I think I’ve pulled my game up to where I can take you. I want to prove it.” He spoke emphatically for him, leaning back in his chair as if relaxed but watching her closely, smiling for once at her. “Come on, we never get this long to play. When are we going to sit down and play three games again? I improve in long sessions, whereas you do better marshaling your energies for one game.”
“What nonsense! I played tourneys in high school, all day.… It was a form of escape to a world with rules. Master the rules, remember history, and you win. Life was rather less satisfying.”
“It still is, I find … Miriam.”
How seldom he addressed her directly, by name. Still she looked at the clock. A problem sat on her desk that she could be working on, if only she were transported there instantly. His insistence puzzled her. Was he really convinced he could beat her? No, she didn’t accept that. Something funny between, around, something buzzed. She looked at him levelly and waited. That remote monastic abstraction was missing tonight. He was actually there across the kitchen table seeking to confront her in some manner. He did not scratch himself or slump there but sat gathered in his muscles, watching her with his steady gaze. Not ignoring her, not fending her off, not insulting or looking askance at her. But there.
“Tell you what,” he said. “Let’s have stakes.”
She shrugged. “Five bucks?” She sat down, tentatively.
“No. Covered stakes.”
“What do you mean?” She felt irritated. Now he was slipping back into games playing, aloof gestures, hints.
“A chess game shouldn’t be played for money—”
“Mishegoss. Romanticism.” She snorted. “What do you think masters play for? Like athletes. You learn to do something specialized really well, how else would you make it?”
“We are not masters, Miriam. But we can play for something real.”
She sat chin on knuckles, frowning. “What is this, Jackson? Don’t dodge back and forth.”
“It’s you who keep getting up.… Covered stakes. You must have something you want me to do or not to do. Likewise.” He leaned back, his sandy eyes crinkled up but measuring her.
“I’m awfully curious what you have in mind.” A hook pulling.
“I can only think of one way to find out.” He began setting out the pieces, white for him and black for her.
If she had any sense she would go home. But an opening finally. She had a now-or-never sense that she might force Jackson into dealing honestly with her. She did not want this hostile prickly skirmishing with him, this endless playing of formal bouts, this scarcely covert struggle for Phil’s attention and frien
dship. This was a strange confrontation. The two of them were never alone except waiting for Phil. They had no basis of contact or communication except Phil and the endless games of chess. “What do you want, Jackson? Can’t you just talk to me like a person? Do you want me out of here?”
“Wrong guess. No more free guesses. Your move.” He opened with his knight to king’s bishop 3: Nimzovich’s attack. He had indeed been studying.
She smiled and he smiled back. As they played she was aware of the silence in the flat, the little noises that reinforced the silence. She began to wish very hard that Phil would come. But he was off on his adventure. She should have left. While she still could. Trying to make someone like her who was set against her from the beginning, who was so judgmental, always weighing her and putting her down, what odds on winning that? What could she do but bribe him with victory or her body? Oh, she was being superparanoid. He was even attractive in his grim way, but she blamed him for Phil’s not living with her. Why should she be so nervous? Just because they were here late at night where she must sleep now, just because she was playing chess with Jackson, who resisted her for the fortieth time, just because he was so cocksure he would beat her for a change. Why should she have such a strong sense of having gone far into something unknown?
“Your move.” His voice cut into her. “You’re playing slowly.”
“I must be tired.”
“I doubt it. A woman of your energies?”
She tried to concentrate on the game but that heaviness engulfed her. He was right: she did not feel tired. She felt strange. His will to win was enormous. Normally he was withdrawn, gently remote. Tonight he was stubborn and willful. He played solidly, carefully, following the principles he had learned from Nimzovich’s book, gradually bringing all his forces to bear on the center squares. She could feel his intense will to beat her flowing over the table. She did not have an enormous counterweight to that will. She was disappointed that Phil had gone off with a woman. She could not let herself react to that disappointment. It was part of their bargain, their rapport, not to drag one another from side trips and curiosities. Having so little of Phil’s attraction to chemical changes rung on the body, she sometimes found it hard to empathize with his adventuring. She felt, and judged it ridiculous to so feel, that he had deserted her. By now she could have been curled up in his bed telling him that scene with Barnett at Tech Square, looking into his seacolored eyes, rubbing her cheek against his. But Phil was off pursuing a handful of white powder.
Jackson was wanting and wanting to win. It was like a pushing against her. She did not want to win nearly that much. It was as if Phil were slipping farther and farther from her into the side show of his head, into the strange labyrinths of another woman, leaving her alone with Jackson’s desire to overcome her. She tasted again her curiosity. What would she ask for if she won? She would ask him for less uprightness, more acceptance. But was acceptance something he could provide on demand? Could he feel more tolerant of her just because she asked him to? He would try hard for a day, perhaps. Then he would resent her all the more for having made the effort.
It was not that she ever decided to let him win. It was not that she made a decision. It was that his will to win pushed on her, and losing was simply not pushing back. Her mind kept wandering. She felt almost anxious to get it over. She played out short strategies without much interest. Still, the game was long-drawn. She played a defensive game, trying to reduce his pressure on the center, and most of the exchanges were even. He gained only a slow advantage which she would normally have experienced as a stimulus. It was like very slowly letting go of a grip, a finger at a time. Sliding in sand. She never said to herself that she was losing. She only did not feel that she was winning. She only thought defensively and almost automatically continued to hold him off, until he seized control of the seventh rank with both rooks. Then she realized she was at a point where she should concede, and yet she did not and ritualistically they continued until checkmate.
At that moment the heaviness slid from her and she felt herself alert again. She leaned forward, tapping on the table. “Well, now what? What do you want from me?”
His eyebrows raised. His sandy eyes seemed sad beyond any cause. “Now you defend yourself.”
They were both quiet. Silence itched in her ears. The house was creaking to itself. It felt as if everybody else in the city had gone to bed to leave them facing each other across this table. “You don’t seem particularly pleased,” she said ingenuously. “I though you’d enjoy winning. I could have conceded the game, but you seemed to want to act it out. Were you gaining time?”
“I was. And I don’t seem to have gained enough. I thought the words would come to me.” He was rubbing his head, setting the hair on end.
They sat on in the abrasive silence until she began to laugh. “For heaven’s sake, you can’t really expect me to make a pass at you, no matter how long we sit here!” It came out. As if all along she had known what he wanted. She was horrified as soon as she said it, hot with alarm.
He began to laugh too and got to his feet. “It would simplify matters. But if you won’t, I’ll have to. Miriam, Miriam!” She had the impression he stepped over the table because he was suddenly upon her and gripping her almost in a wrestling hold, his lips against her, his tongue thrusting into her mouth. One arm was against the back of her waist like a bar of iron, the other closed on her buttock. She felt the start of a reaction of pain and anger, just the start of that reaction, and then she went under to him. His body felt hard against her, violent. The intensity of his desire to win turned into an intense desire to take her that she caught at once as if catching fire.
Kissing him back, she was suddenly, totally delighted. Ha, he did want her, he found her attractive. It was like an enormous vindication, a proving of her. It was like the first time with Phil in discovering she could be what she wanted to be with a man. All the soreness of the last six months, the insults and jostling, the bad vibrations coming out from him, abrading her, all fused seamlessly into her victory. She briefly remembered then that she had wanted him to like her, not to want her.
Did I want him? Did I want him all along? No, this wanting that boiled up against his hard body, thin and strong arched against her, feeling him erect against her belly, was something she caught from him. No one had ever wanted her so much. The violent wanting excited her, she felt caught in it as if she need not think any more about him, need not agree, need not work things out but simply let go and be carried on it.
She had time to think that much as he picked her up and carried her into his cell and dropped her on the mattress and fell on her. It was not that he was brutal or rushed or perfunctory. It was just that the wanting was strong and she caught it at once. It was an abdication. She need only go with him. She need only let go and let him. She did not let herself think but willfully went under to him, she wanted and thrust and wanted. After the rough act, she felt peculiar as she came to herself in the dark—he had not even paused to turn on the overhead light so they could see each other—with his weight on her and his hand seized on her nape. She felt dazed. She felt lost, battered. Yet something in her stretched and purred: see, he wanted me, he did. And called that reality.
12
Love Is a Woman’s Whole Existence
She felt like a battlefield. She felt as if an enormous force had picked her up and turned her around, moving the masses of her along new fault lines, fracturing her being. “I forgot to do anything. I didn’t put in my diaphragm.”
He held her foot. “Why don’t you take the pill?”
“It’s not good for you. All that blood clot evidence. Anyhow, it’s probably not serious. My period ended four days ago.” But she was disturbed. She detested sloppiness, letting events carry her, determining action by consequence. She had always found sympathy hard when she heard women at Michigan worrying about being pregnant because they forgot to do anything, as if they had never heard of the mechanics of conception or t
hought natural laws would be suspended for them.
He rose on his elbow beside her and looked into her face, laying his warm callused hand along her cheek. “How long and how often I’ve wanted to do that.”
“You have to believe me, that I didn’t know how attracted I was to you. That is, I would never—”
He put his hand over her mouth. “Another story to tell Phil when he comes home?”
She freed her mouth. “Do you think I can reasonably not tell Phil?”
“If you’re planning to get up and walk out that door as if nothing happened, tell him, don’t tell him. Is gossip that important?”
“Jackson.” She knelt, putting her hand on his shoulder, where a jagged scar ran. “You’re picking a fight. Was fucking me a way of putting me down? And it didn’t quite work out your aggression?”
He glared at her lockjawed. Then he put his arms on her Shoulders and pulled her down, rolling over on her. “Nothing can work out my aggression. Don’t come at me so rational-like. I don’t believe it.” He put his hand on her belly, rubbing in low circles down into her hair. “Do you want me?”
Her body magnetized around his hand. “Yes.”
“Good. Because I want you. I’ll still want you in an hour. When I wake up with you in the morning I’ll be wanting you.”
A conversation that was another sort of struggle. She got up to get her diaphragm before anything more happened. She found it in Phil’s top drawer and put it in. She had a moment of queasy guilt, looking at Phil’s socks. What had she done? What had she got into? Yet she was pulled immediately back to Jackson, the sense of him waiting hard and heavy on her. She wanted him. She had never wanted in such an intense gathered way. Maybe it was only physical: the tension between them snapping finally. But already she did not believe that.
Feeling inert and passive, she flung herself down on the mattress. Waiting for him to take her. They did not speak. Falling into a river where the currents took her and spun her around and dashed her onward, a river where she rose and fell under an alien power, where she might drown.… Against his scarred shoulder she smiled at her nonsense. Alien power: it was only desire. She tried a little to get her mind around it. No one had ever wanted her as powerfully. She wanted to be wanted this strongly. It felt good, like a myth born full-fledged within her. She fell into it, she leaped into it. Something in her came to and snapped, saying, He is The Man. He is it. This is more real than anything gone before.
