Chapter Sixteen
“We’re there,” she said. “This is the right stop.” They got out together and walked down the platform.
“Wow,” Doc said. “You were looking for morality and personal recognition in the middle of serious tourism. That’s very Heart of Darkness of you. I mean, there’s no way to be there and be polite because your presence itself is rude. But geographically, we’re in the sphere of your humanity now. That’s what is up for consideration. If this was the World Court, probably no one would care. But that’s one of the strangest aspects of analysis, Anna. No one is looking at you but you. That, of course, has its ups and downs.”
“I know, Doc, it’s really confusing. I mean something different in the World than I mean in my world.”
“You watch,” he said meekly. “You listen when people talk. You listen too closely. You listen so closely to find the meaning that you never find the meaning.”
“Not the meaning,” she said. “But a meaning. If I look too closely I get these strange results that make it worth it. The same thing is true in love, Doc.”
“How?”
“When a woman is really happy. When our faces are close and there is only streetlight, she looks slightly Mongoloid, her most beautiful. There’s that way that she kisses when she really likes me. Too lightly on the forehead.”
“Then you have to choose,” Doc said, feeling slightly hurt, like there was some distasteful counter-transference going on. “You have to choose between your own vision and reciprocity. And remember, reciprocity is not on the general agenda for the nineties.”
“Why not, Doc?”
“Because, Anna.” Thank God I got my authority back, Doc thought. Why do I want her to like me? That’s supposed to be one of the advantages of being a man. I’m supposed to be able to have control and still slide around at the same time.
“Because, Anna, most people don’t listen to each other. They don’t listen to themselves. They don’t think about what other people mean and are feeling and the impact of their own words on others. They don’t remember later what they said in the first place. They don’t think about it when they’re saying it. You listen too closely. You are overinformed. Do you want to have lunch first? What are you staring at?”
“Wow, Doc. This is very important to you, isn’t it? Someone must have interrupted you big-time. You keep coming back to this listening thing over and over again.”
Then she said, “Let’s have lunch, buy the flowers, and get this over with.”
Confidentially, it was Doc’s birthday too, his thirty-first. He wished she would give him the flowers. Flowers. When they got out of the subway he made a phone call to an old number that he still remembered. He left a message on the tape asking something of this woman, asking this person who did not know how, to remember his birthday with kindness. It was a sneaky thing to do since Doc already knew what would happen. But he did it for reassurance of the status quo. However, once that tape actually beeped, he stammered, leaving uncertainty and weakness unretrievably on the answering machine. He had wanted to be careful, to not say one wrong word. Sometimes people jump on you for saying the wrong word. This woman in white was one of those people. If Doc said, “You know, I was thinking about going to San Francisco …” then she would say, “What do you mean, you know? How am I supposed to know?”
She was always right down the other person’s throat. She didn’t listen to the intention behind the vocabulary. And whose fault was that?
They looked for a restaurant. The Upper West Side had a mystique about it that had not been deserved for some time. True, it had once been majestic, faded, with high ceilings, cheap apartments, huge rooms, Haitians, Dominicans, Holocaust survivors, student radicals, John Lennon, Leonard Bernstein, old women eating lunch. But it had lost its soul and become schlocky the way that rich people can. It had gotten greasy.
“What about this place?” Anna asked, pointing to a very normal, dirty leftover.
“No, not here,” Doc said. “This is the kind of restaurant that is so disgusting the waitresses bring lunch from home and go to the coffee shop next door to use the bathroom.”
“What about the coffee shop next door?”
“Okay.”
“Forget it, Doc. I’m already nauseous. Let’s go for a walk.”
They walked around slowly.
“Now, Doc, family is a delicate thing. Families of lesbians are particularly hard.”
They walked even slower.
“What is the most important thing to remember about families of lesbians?” Doc asked.
“That you just can’t outwit them,” Anna answered. “There’s always some weird little twist. No matter how normal you try to be, you’ll never be normal. Like last year my friend Nancy’s mother died. It had been a long, horrible thing and we were all involved. On the morning of the funeral I started getting dressed. Suddenly I realized that all of these lesbians, Nancy’s friends, were about to walk into a synagogue in South Brooklyn and Nancy wasn’t even out to her relatives. It would be terrible for her.”
“What would be terrible?”
“For them to see us as we truly are. And for them to see her for her.”
“Why would that be terrible?”
“Because in their minds we are inherently terrible and she would, therefore, be punished emotionally. Better to pretend you’re not what they think is terrible even though that’s what you really are and even though you know it’s not terrible - although somewhere else you do believe it’s terrible - to avoid the emotional punishment.”
“Got it.”
“So, I decided to look as straight as I possibly can. I put on a beautiful black dress, designer stockings, shined my heels, makeup, two earrings from the same set. Then I got on the subway. An hour later, I climb out in the middle of nowhere and up ahead I see three of my friends. You know what? They all made the same decision. They all put on their best, most feminine clothing and they looked so beautiful. I loved them. We were walking together, our high heels clicking on the streets, our waists shapely, necks exposed and decorated. Then we stepped into the chapel and all Nancy’s relatives were wearing polyester double knits. They couldn’t stop staring. Later, at the shiva, her Uncle Heshy asked me if we were a rock and roll band. It’s really hard to get away with being the wrong thing.”
Then they bought the flowers. Seventeen dollars’ worth.
“How do I look?”
“You look good, Anna. You look all dolled up.”
“I’ve been in training for this for weeks. I’ve been swimming every day and doing yoga and running before work and only eating macrobiotic food and taking vitamins and not smoking. I went out shopping three times for the right dress and finally got this one for sixty-five dollars. That’s a lot of word processing, let me tell you.”
It was a serious dress.
“Maybe you’re reliving something here,” Doc said.
“Then I went and got a haircut and I tried on different lipsticks. I bought new heels. The prettier I look, the more she’ll like me.”
“Sounds like you’re going to a funeral.”
“You know, Doc, I did do this recently for another funeral. All my mother could say was ‘Thank God you wore a dress. But your hair is too short.’”
“Yeah, I’ve got a mother like that too,” he said.
“Look, Doc,” Anna stopped short. “I just don’t want her to take one look at me and say ‘That dyke.’”
“Who, your mother?”
“And my old lover’s mother. None of them.”
Crossing the streets took longer than either of them were used to because the avenues were so wide, but the lights changed more slowly so everything compensated.
“Doc, I promised myself this. I’m ready to do whatever it takes to get inside. If they have to call the police to stop me, let them call the police. Okay, Doc, wish me luck.”
“Good luck,” he said. Then he followed her into the building.
There was a doorman, just as Doc had predicted, and Doc watched him with suspicious anticipation. Would her disguise actually work? Anna announced herself with great dignity and grace and then the doorman phoned upstairs.
“Anna O. to see you,” he said.
There was a sense of excitement as the doorman listened for a while.
“Thank you,” he said into the phone.
“Sorry,” he said to Anna, casually. Then he glanced suddenly to the left.
“What do you mean?”
He looked to the right, the way that all human beings do when they’re uncomfortable, and then he looked directly at her to reassert his position. Doc noticed that it was the same eye formation that he himself used when looking at homeless people. But Anna O. wasn’t homeless.
“You can’t go.”
“But I didn’t even get to talk to her.”
The flowers were big ones, they smelled like a really romantic date. You could bury yourself in those flowers and feel cool all over.
“Look, I can’t help you,” the doorman said. “Call her from the corner.”
Anna ran to the corner, but Doc stayed behind until he heard the doorman mutter under his breath.
“She’s pretty but she’s a dyke.”
But when Doc looked over at the doorman’s face, he found the comment was directed at him.
Then Doc ran to the corner too. This was the Upper West Side so the pay phones worked. Anna’s movements were a little wild. She wasn’t really thinking about what she was doing. He could see that she was furious. She’d thought that that dress would make a difference. She was so furious in fact that Doc thought she might be rude and blow the whole thing. That’s the way people lose these days. If they show how they feel it’s called rude. It is called manipulation.
“Hello? Hello? Mrs. Noren? This is Anna O., Mrs. Noren. No, I am not selling you The Watchtower. I’m your daughter’s former lover. Oh … Oh … thank you, Mrs Noren. Thank you. Thank you.”
Doc followed his client into the elevator.