Chapter Eleven

Declaration of Moral Bankruptcy

Hilda apparently didn’t know about my date with Conrad Lowe, for which I give Abigail grudging credit. Her chapter eleven, of course entitled “Herstory,” explores the “psychosexual histories” of her two sexual psychos. Hilda expatiates upon our parents’ shortcomings, Mother’s “feyness,” Father’s insecurities and consequent “failure to validate” and when she finishes slandering them, she starts in on Dr. and Mrs. Lowe, who are by now, I guess, fair game. The centerpiece of this dreary pseudo-scholastic chapter is a pull-out chart in which two Circles of Abuse (which look like those weather cycles you see in high school science books, where OCEANS & LAKES & STREAMS, CLOUDS, and RAINFALL chase one another around with little curved arrows) overlap each other with perfect symmetry.

My chapter eleven is not so theoretical.

I was early, of course. Or he was late. I was seated by a window looking down over a little marina. The waiter, “LARRY,” asked me if I wanted to face the window or sit with my back to it. I didn’t know which I was supposed to want. I elected to face the large brightly lit room, so I could see him coming. I ordered a sherry, Fino.

This was not, I was pleased to note, a place for dating couples. It was way too noisy and roomy. It was the kind of place you brought your extended family to, and all around the barnlike room babies in high chairs littered the floor with crushed oyster crackers, and clattered their plates, and screamed with frustration and fatigue.

I saw him before he saw me. He stood at the entrance beside the hostess’s lectern. She was scanning a list and saying something. He cut her off with a familiar hand on her back, dipping quickly toward her for an instant of charm, and then quickly away, for he had spotted me. He moved toward me through the crowded room with absolute ease. There was no trace of self-consciousness, even though he had to stop three times for waitresses to glide by with heavy trays, and was forced more than once to squeeze sideways between the chairs of obese diners. He brushed past obstacles, human and otherwise, with indifferent grace, never acknowledging for an instant the possibility that he could stumble, or trip someone, or get stuck somewhere in the maze and have to backtrack and reroute. He cut through the crowd like a shark through choppy waters, and he never took his eyes off me.

He smiled and sat down opposite me, without saying a word, the early evening light, the last rays of sunset, full on his face. He told Larry, without looking up at him, that he wanted a double bourbon on the rocks with a dash of bitters. When Larry left he leaned forward on his elbows and widened his smile at me, and continued to say nothing.

He was absolutely familiar with me. The easy way he smiled, as if he had the right to say nothing, the right to a companionable silence, made me wonder, crazily, if we had done this before, many times, in some other life. I could have been, on the evidence of his smile alone, the depth of his apparent pleasure in my company, the only woman in his life. It just about made me sick.

When Larry brought his drink and the big wooden menu, Conrad Lowe put the board facedown on the table without looking at it, and drank his drink, still looking at me. This was too much.

“Aren’t you going to read the menu?” I asked.

“Oh, is this a menu? I thought it was a fraternity paddle.” He actually winked at me.

“Are you going to read it?”

“You decide. You pick something out for me.”

“No! Don’t be ridiculous. I do not know you. I have no idea what your tastes are.”

He laughed. “You’re perfect. You’re totally consistent.”

“You are totally objectionable.” This time I thought deliberately of Katharine Hepburn. “Food is an intimate subject, and intimacy cannot be enforced, Mr. Lowe.”

Now he was not stung, but pleased. “Sure it can,” he said. “Take rape. That’s enforced intimacy.”

“What I meant, of course, was that it should not be enforced.”

“But you didn’t actually say that.”

“With some people I would not have to say that.”

“Because some people,” said Conrad Lowe, “actually feel the force of the categorical imperative. The buddy-buddy between should not and cannot, between ought and is. Because some people are moral agents.” He finished his drink. “And some are not.”

I nodded, unable to speak. It had not occurred to me that he could know himself so well. I could not use the truth against him. He had already appropriated it.

Conrad Lowe procured another drink and continued. “They call these people psychopaths. They often say, of these people, ‘They are not like us.’ They are born without consciences, they say, like babies born blind.”

“I never called you a psychopath,” I said, silently adding to your face, crossing my fingers under the table, to preserve for my soul’s sake the letter of the moral law.

“A lot of women have. But they’re wrong. Do you want to know how I know this?”

No, I thought, because I already know how important it is for you to believe yourself complete. No one wants to be a monster.

“Because my earliest memory is of the experience of moral outrage. How many children can say that? Now, my father…My father was a walking advertisement for the categorical imperative. My mother, breathing air, laughing, happy in work and play, was a living illustration of injustice. These were the first facts I knew.” He regarded me in dead earnest. “I was raised by a nurse, a succession of them actually, but the first was Concetta. She lasted for four years, and then they canned her, but I saw her again about ten years ago. She wrote to me when Violet Angel came out, and we met for lunch. She wanted to talk over old times. To fill me in on stuff I didn’t remember. To help me, she said, in case I ever wanted to do a sequel. Well, she was hustling, but that’s okay. That’s inevitable. Anyway, do you know what she told me? My first words. Can you guess what my first words were?”

I had no idea.

“Bad Mommy,” he said. “Bad Mommy.”

There was on his face a slack and tortured look. He seemed utterly vulnerable. The sight so confused me that I looked away and off to the side, where a child of perhaps eighteen months, a wide-mouthed little girl with a purple bow on her wispy topknot, was handling her scoop of ice cream as though it were a lump of clay, and I was the only adult to see her look around, spot the large sacklike leather pocketbook of a stout woman seated at the adjoining table, and deposit the dripping blob inside with a bull’s-eye drop from the height of her baby chair. Her attention remained fixed on the interior of the pocketbook for about three seconds, at which point she forgot what she was doing and looked up at her parents with a sweet, loving expression, which was seen, and instantly rewarded.

The idea of this or any other small child saying “Bad Mommy” or bad anything was all too ludicrous, and I laughed freely with derision and, I must admit, relief. Every child born, monster and human alike, recognizes injustice when it is visited upon him. Conrad Lowe never universalized the experience. Now he comforted himself with the memory of outrage. Whereas the only persuasive evidence for his humanity would be a memory of remorse; an experience which I very much doubted he ever had.

Knowing all this about him, seeing his weakness at last, relaxed me as the sherry had not. I leaned back and placed my forearms on the table. I said, “What do you want from me? What are you up to?”

He was still distracted, his eyes fixed on some inner vision. The two rapidly consumed drinks (he was to put away one more before dinner) had effected a change in his manner, in his appearance. Drinking was bad for him. It robbed him of total control. I was very surprised that he drank at all. He thought about my question now, slowly closing one eye, staring idly with the other at his empty glass, his slender fingertips. Just then he reminded me of something, but I couldn’t get exactly what it was. “What do I want from you, Dorcas? Companionship. Fellow feeling. Entertainment.” Each word rolled out without inflection, or conviction. He was trying these ideas on for size. He looked shrewdly up at me then, one eye still shut, the fine dark lashes delicate upon his cheek. “Maybe I want a challenge,” he said. “Maybe I plan to seduce you.”

“And why would you do that?”

“Because I could.”

“Just to prove that you could?”

“I don’t need to prove anything. That would mean I was unsure of myself. Which I’m not.”

“Of course.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“I believe that you’re sure of yourself, yes.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “You’re my type.”

“That’s too bad, because you’re not mine. I don’t have a type. Any fool could see that.”

He smiled, in a lazy, profoundly unpleasant way.

“I’m an old maid, Mr. Lowe. I was born to it. When I was twelve I took a long, slow look around and said, ‘Nope. Not for me.’”

“With your sister there, you didn’t have to look far.”

“With my sister there, I didn’t have to do anything.”

“You must have resented her.”

“I was never jealous. She had nothing I wanted.” Was this true? “Abigail and I divided up the world. Sacred and profane. Spiritual and physical. Mind and body.” It couldn’t have been the sherry. Something was getting to me, though, making me reckless.

“Male and female?”

“No. Certainly not.”

“Girl and woman? Artemis and Aphrodite?”

Polyphemus, I thought, confronting his one-eyed stare. Like the cyclops, he should not have drunk so much. Polyphemus was not civilized, and neither was my sister, and neither, despite his disguise, was this man. Sitting there across from him, and thinking these things through calmly, made me happy in a way I had rarely experienced. “Abigail and I,” I told him, “were both born naked. We each came into the world with longings and needs. I am not some mutant. Mine is not some third sex. I could tell you things….” I smiled, despite myself, thinking of Abigail and me at twelve, and the games she made everybody play, boys and girls, the delicate operations under the gazebo, with the afternoon sun slipping through the latticework in orange diamonds, and the spiders and shovels and rakes and mousetraps.

“What things, Dorcas?” he whispered.

I laughed at him. “Do you think that nuns and spinsters are all hormone cases? Can’t you imagine for a moment that at least some of us know what we’re missing? Exactly what we’re giving up? And that we sign on the dotted line fully informed of our rights, and sign happily, and consider that we got the best of the bargain?”

“How? Tell me.”

“You see, I know what an appetite is. I know what it feels like. I know, as well as Abigail, as well as you, what it feels like to want. To experience desire.”

“Yes.”

“Yes, but because I lived with Abigail, I also knew what it looks like.”

“Ugly? Disgusting? Ruttish?”

“Ridiculous! That’s all. Ridiculous.”

“Silly?”

“Exactly. My sister has great power, but no dignity.”

“Ah.”

We were both quiet for a while, listening to my reverberating pronouncement. Seafood platters were placed before us, upon which we each ravenously fell. Conrad Lowe with, I suppose, that indiscriminate, senseless hunger that comes from too many drinks, and I from what? I don’t know.

The food was terrible, the breading orange and tasteless and soaked with old grease, the scallops distinguishable from the shrimp only in shape. I ate everything—fried food, cole slaw, tartar sauce, corn bread; chomping and breathing to the accompaniment of power and dignity: the sounds. Eventually, when my plate was clean, I could no longer avoid the thought I had been pushing away. That these two were just words, just alphabet pieces and noise. This was a foolish thought, but I couldn’t shake it, or shake off their echo.

Conrad Lowe put down his fork and leaned back. “Name something with power and dignity.” He said this in a companionable way, as though we were playing “Botti-celli.” Logy with bad food, I had the awful bloated thought that he could read my mind, hear with my inner ear. “Okay, name something with dignity and no power.” He picked up the fork and played with his fried fish. He shoveled a big piece into his mouth. Grease ran down the middle of his chin. “A hurricane, say, or the sea. Do they have dignity and power? Or—”

“Only people can have dignity,” I said, trying to clean my fingers with a red cloth napkin that would not absorb anything. They make napkins now out of shiny, handsome material that won’t even pick up water.

“My mother,” he said, chewing his fish, “now she had power. No dignity, though. Except on screen. My father. No power, no dignity, no nothing. This is interesting.” He looked up at me and pointed at my nose. “Now, you. Now, you have tons of dignity! But no—”

“Go to hell.”

“When I was a kid we had this Great Dane. Cromwell, his name was. Big as a pony. He was Mom’s pet, really, and I’ll spare you the grisly details, but you know I’m pretty sure Cromwell had power and dignity, both.” He put down his napkin. “When Father died I took Cromwell out behind the stables and blew his brains out.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t believe what? That I could kill a dog?” Conrad Lowe threw back his head and laughed, suddenly sober, suddenly happy. “That’s the twentieth century for you. It’s significant now when a man kills a dog. It means something about his character. I mean, not just anybody can kill a dog.”

I have always had a strong stomach, and this is the only thing that kept me from bolting across the room with my hand over my mouth, like a squeamish child in frog-dissecting class.

“Look, honey. Power, dignity, bullshit. You looked at your sister and saw an amoral, rotten, monstrous ball of fat. You knew evil when you saw it. You are a mutant, Dorcas. You’re a woman with a conscience. I’d like to believe you’re a hint of things to come, an evolutionary feeler, so to speak, but I’m afraid you’re just one of nature’s oddballs. You have a sense of honor. Shame on you. No real woman knows the meaning of the word.”

“You’re insane.” I started fumbling with my purse, trying to fish out ten dollars and change.

“You’re so honorable that you’re going to pay for your half of this grotesque meal. Not for boring feminist reasons, either. Not to prove anything. Just because it’s the right thing to do.”

“You’re very good,” I said, standing. “You study people and think about them and make clever inferences, and you’re very, very good. You’re a gifted psychologist. But the fact that you do it for fun…” I was shaking so badly that I couldn’t continue.

“Yes?”

“Ought to scare you to death. It certainly does me. Mr. Lowe, you are a bad man.” Conrad Lowe blinked at that, actually blinked, and paled. “Stay away from us.” Carefully I turned from him and made my way across the bustling room, every movement slow and deliberate, for I was light-headed and my heartbeat was shallow and if I did anything too quickly I would lose my balance, stumble, fall. I didn’t look around until I was in the parking lot and opening my car door.

He had not followed me. I was safe.

 

When I let myself into the house Abigail was asleep, passed out on the wet couch, her face still swollen in misery. I hated to leave her like that, all damp, but it seemed a worse cruelty to wake her, and I went straight to bed, exhausted myself, without bathing.

Sometime later I had a nightmare, the only part of which I ever remembered being a great wooden door exploding inward into lethal splinters, the explosion being the occasion for my sudden waking, and when I came to, which I did all of a sudden, disoriented, I was staring at my own closed bedroom door. I lay for a few minutes, frightened, listening, wondering, but there were no noises in the real world. And I was too tired to ponder the mysteries. Dreams are always banal anyway. I went back to sleep and slept straight until morning.

When I rose to use the toilet I could see, from the light in the hall, that the door to Abigail’s room was open, but I was just shuffling, still waking, my eyes on the floor, and did not pause to wonder or look in. I started coffee and picked up the living room. I was going to have to take the couch outside on this sunny day and dry it out. There was a man’s herringbone jacket folded over the rocker. I saw it and did not take it in. There was an alarming scent in the air, half horribly familiar, like the smell of rotting roses, half horribly unfamiliar, like the lather of a mutant horse, and I smelled this and took note of it and set it aside for later. There was a strange old car out front, parked badly, its right front wheel up over the curb and dug into the grass, and I stared out the window at it, interested but not really curious. I was handling myself like an invalid on her first day up. I was emphasizing the positive. How delicious, I thought, sipping my coffee; and, What a beautiful day.

(While in the next room my other selves, the rest of me, the part that notices and the part that analyzes and the part that takes care, conferred in anxious whispers. “Should we let her know?” “No, no, no!” “Look, she’s going to find out sooner or later. Why not now?” “Too soon! Let her wake up first! Let her get her strength!”)

I padded back down the sun-drenched hall to my room to get dressed and from this angle could not miss looking into Abigail’s room on the way. I made my bed and got myself into jeans and sweatshirt. I drew the curtains. I leaned against the glass. I closed my eyes then and only then and saw what I had just seen, when I passed my sister’s open door. That morning it was as though I could not see anything directly. In high school biology they always compare the eye to a camera, and now the analogy was exact. My eyes had functioned independent of my brain. I had not been able to register anything until the picture developed. And then I could see, from every angle

 

my sister naked, pink and enormous, inert, unconscious and perhaps dead, perhaps sleeping, cast up on her own rumpled bed like some sea creature on an alien beach, a sight at once hypnotic and deeply frightening, because you’re so afraid you’ll see something awful, a human resemblance, a human being, a dead human being, deformed forever by the appetites of cold-blooded predators, and scuttling, clicking spiders of the deep. And behind her, just visible beyond the rolling pink hills, the narrow head of Conrad Lowe, eyes open, mouth grinning wide, nodding good morning to me.

 

I ran out of the house that morning as though it were on fire, pausing only to scrawl a note to Abigail. “GET OUT OF HEAR,” it said. That’s how distraught I was. I didn’t even catch the mistake. And “NOT ONE MORE NIGHT UNDER MY ROOF.” I taped it to the bathroom mirror and fled.

When I returned very late that night they were gone, and her closets cleaned out, except for cobwebs and enough dust cotton to make a human being and a couple of filthy cardigans abandoned in the far corner. She took no furniture, although half of it was hers. She left most of her toiletries behind: dusty bottles of drug store cologne, puffs of matching talcum. I don’t know why she bothered to take her clothes. She left everything else, including her scent, which filled the abandoned bedroom like a mournful and corpulent ghost. Her bedding was left on the dusty floor, tightly wadded and tied into a perfectly circular hassock shape, the two sheet corners sticking out like rabbit ears. This was not Abigail’s style, and it had not been her doing.

My note remained on the bathroom mirror, with Abigail’s additions, printed like my own. Our handwriting had always been similar.

 

GET OUT OF HEAR

SORRY ABOUT THE SHEETS

BE HAPPY FOR ME

NOT ONE MORE NIGHT UNDER MY ROOF