In the late summer of 1980, I was in New York, on my way to Oklahoma, where I was to be writer in residence for the autumn term at the University of Tulsa. Germaine was also to be there, as she’d been the previous autumn term, setting up the Tulsa Center for the Study of Women’s Literature. I had seen her in Italy the summer before, and she’d said to me about Tulsa, “The people there are good people. You’ll be treated very well. But you’re not going to find many men of a particular sex in Tulsa, Oklahoma.” I said, “What sex is that?” She drew in her chin and pursed her lips; she put her hands to her breasts and threw out a hip and fluttered her eyelashes. She said, “If you don’t know, my dear, you can’t expect me to tell you.” I laughed. In New York, I could not imagine Tulsa inhabited by any people, of no matter what sex, except for Germaine.
I was staying with a friend on the West Side; invited one hot Sunday afternoon to lunch by another friend on the East Side, I walked through Central Park. I tried to keep my course across the park by sighting a tall pointed building on the East Side, but, among narrow paths about hillocks and mulberry woods and scummy ponds, I got lost; I walked round and round, and came out of the woods into a meadow; in the high, dry grass of the meadow were hundreds of men, all in narrow bathing trunks, sun bathing, and as I walked along the path at the edge of the meadow they moved, as if together, and looked at me. Their oiled bodies gleamed. I walked quickly, though it was hot and dusty.
The path took me through woods again, then out on to a wide flat playing field, and I sighted my tall pointed building.
As I walked, slowly, I thought of what Germaine had said.
I could not imagine myself among those men, in their country. It frightened me, I knew, because there were no women in it.
This occurred to me in Central Park: why should I, who was supposed to be independent of women, so want to be with women?
When, after I returned to the West Side, I told this to my friend, he said, laughing, “Not just women—difficult women.”
“Oh Christ,” I said.
Why, I thought, why was I so anticipating being in Tulsa with Germaine, whom I knew to be an enormously difficult woman?
•
I arrived a few days before she did, and stayed with the Dean. With him I went to meet Germaine at her hotel. It was white-hot in Oklahoma, and all surfaces seemed to vibrate in the heat. In the cool car I kept asking myself why I was anxious about seeing her, as if my stay in Tulsa were not going to be judged by the University, the graduate department, my students, but Germaine. For some reason, my success or failure seemed to depend on her. I was talking with the Dean about Tulsa and thinking, at the same time, about Germaine. Then I thought: You must sort this out. We drove under the portico of the big, glassy, modern hotel, and there she was, waiting outside the revolving glass doors, her shoes held by their straps in her hand. I got out to meet her, and kissed her, lightly, on both cheeks.
“Isn’t it extraordinary,” I said, “that we should have seen one another last in Cortona, Italy, and this time in Tulsa, Oklahoma?”
She scowled a little. “I don’t think it’s at all extraordinary.”
As she walked barefoot across the pavement, I looked down at her feet. It was the first time I had noticed that they were broad and stubby. I had, before, thought of her as beautiful beyond any fault. I had thought of her, large, standing high above me and looking down upon me, a very beautiful public woman. Her feet made her, in one small part, a private women. But she was private only in her feet. At the car, she put her shoes on.
I sat in the back seat. By the Dean in the front, she said, “For all that it’s supposed to be the best hotel in Tulsa, it’s fucking awful. I rang room service for a bottle of champagne, and they had nothing but Californian, no French. What a fucking provincial place I’ve come to.”
The Dean said, “Some of those California champagnes can be pretty good.”
“Pretty good is not good enough.”
We joined the Dean’s wife and children at a Chinese restaurant. Germaine’s talk had nothing to do with where she had been or what she’d done since she was last in Tulsa; what she talked about was contraception and abortion, and we, silent at the round table, listened; she opened up about us the great problems of contraception and abortion around the round world. She was obsessed with the whole world and what was happening, or not happening, in it. We were among peasant women in India, aboriginal women of Australia, middle-class women of northern Italy, and Germaine was concerned for them all, and angry that so few others were concerned. She seemed not to be very much aware of us, who were attentive to the details of her stories: infanticide as practiced by women in certain cultures by smothering the baby in ash, or throwing it against a tree, or placing a stick across the throat and standing on both ends. As well as anger, there was a look of grief and pain on Germaine’s face. We were all silent for a while. “What’s to be done?” she asked. “About unwanted children, what’s to be done?”
When we got out of the restaurant the after-sunset sky was green and mauve, and huge, and strung out low against it were black poles and cables. I was in a country I had never been in before.
I said, “Look at that. Look.”
The Dean said, “It’s the big sky of the West.”
Germaine said nothing. I wondered if she lived, not in the particular country in which she was bodily, but in the general, problematic world which obsessed her. And then it came to me: Germaine’s awareness of the world was totally unliterary.
We had our offices in a small brick house on campus. The house was isolated in a great black space of parking lots, surrounded by stumps of trees which had been cut down because of disease. In half the house Germaine was setting up the Women’s Literature Center, and at the back of the house I had my office; between us was a kitchen.
I went at odd hours to my office, and every time I went I found Germaine, often alone, in the Center, working. She had filled the fridge in the kitchen with beer and fruit juices, and we drank and talked a little there.
Alone with her, I felt that she was disapproving of me in a way I couldn’t understand, and I told myself she was often and arbitrarily disapproving of people. We talked about Italy and England, not about ourselves, and she was abrupt.
Then one late afternoon she said, frowning, “You told friends in Italy that I’m a castrating woman.”
“Well, you are,” I said.
I saw her frown deepen.
“But you may like to know that’s not the reason why I’ve been looking forward to being here with you.”
She grunted a little. She said, “Would you like to have supper together?”
I thought: If she’s been offended by what I said privately about her months before, how offended must she be by what is said against her publicly day after day?
At supper in one of Tulsa’s fancy restaurants, I asked her questions about contraception and abortion, which she answered with vivid anecdotes; and I asked her questions about female sexuality, and what a woman felt during orgasm, and, again, she was vivid, and to help me understand used similes: her own long, long, violently fluttering orgasms were like . . . She talked and talked about women and sex. It occurred to me that I listened as though I had never heard anything about the subject.
One white-hot Sunday afternoon early in the term I arrived at my office to find Germaine, with a male friend, painting the walls of the Center a bright red, Liberty Red. She had decided to do it herself, even to buying the paint, rather than have Maintenance do it, because she said, they wouldn’t do it for weeks, and they’d do it badly. The furniture in the two rooms was pushed to the middle, and on a long, drop-cloth-covered table, among cans of red paint, were paper plates of fried chicken and an ice-filled cooler with champagne bottles sticking out. Standing on a chair, Germaine’s friend, his shirt tails out and sweating, was painting a corner, and Germaine, in a dress, was painting low on a wall. She didn’t crouch, but bent her long body at the waist to reach down and painted with long, loose strokes.
“I’ll help,” I said.
“Have a glass of champagne first,” Germaine said.
It was pleasant inside, with the air-conditioners going and the champagne and chicken. I felt I had come into a centre of privileged pleasure.
“I’ll get my clothes covered in paint,” I said, “so I’d better take them off.”
Maybe it was partly because Germaine wore no underclothes—sometimes, if she had on a dress that buttoned down the front, when she sat the space between the buttons would gape open and you saw her pubic hair—that her bodily presence was always so powerful. With Germaine’s own body in mind, I undressed to my narrow briefs, and even took off my shoes and socks. Just arrived from Italy, I was tanned, and work with the peasants in the valley had, I thought, tightened me up. So, aware of Germaine’s body, I was aware of my own.
Brush dripping red paint, I strutted about.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
“The little areas we missed,” she said.
As I painted, she came up to me, put her hand on my behind, and said, “I like a nice ass.”
This made me happy. Her touching me was not only an acceptance, but a justification of my body by a woman who had the authority to justify anything.
We drank champagne, she, her friend, I. I was not sure if she and the other man were lovers. I didn’t care. We continued to paint, and, at moments, laughing, one hand with the red brush held up, I embraced and kissed her, and she responded by embracing and kissing me at other moments.
Whenever his back was turned, Germaine stuck out her tongue at her friend.
After we finished the painting of the two rooms—which Germaine called the right and left ventricles of the Liberty Red heart of the Center—the three of us went to a fish restaurant on the North Side of Tulsa.
In a booth next to a wide window (outside was the parking lot with trucks and big cars, and, beyond, low brick buildings with billboards on them, and above and beyond that the hot, bright sky), we ate fried oysters and scallops and catfish and corn balls and drank cold beer. To me, everything was an object of a new, vast awareness; I commented on everything in the restaurant, which her friend, from Tulsa, of course took for granted, but Germaine smiled, and I thought, She approves of my enthusiasm, and that made me more enthusiastic.
“Look at that!” she said.
I turned. Into the restaurant had come a black man wearing a short-sleeved shirt, loose, which was a patchwork of reproductions of Matisse paintings. He wore, in miniature: Grand intérieur rouge, Le rêve, Grande robe bleue fond noir, L’escargot, Jeune fille en jaune, La leçon du piano, Madame Matisse, Les plumes blanches, Baigneuses, Les marocains.
I said to Germaine, “What does that mean? What, that a black man in a fish restaurant in Tulsa, Oklahoma, should be wearing a whole museum full of Matisse’s greatest paintings?”
She raised her eyebrows and kept looking at the man.
On the way out, she went to his booth and asked him where he had got the shirt, as she wanted one also.
Her friend drove us back to the little brick house on campus and left us off. She and I had more champagne, and she talked about the friend.
She said, “I invited him to Italy this past summer, but he didn’t notice anything, anything. It was as if nothing he saw, heard, tasted, smelled, or felt, was in any way different from anything he’d seen, heard, tasted, smelled, felt here in Tulsa. He was unaware, totally and blankly unaware. I couldn’t bear it. I can’t bear unawareness. I can’t. It takes so little, so little, to see—”
“Yes, yes,” I said.
“To see the sky over fucking Tulsa, Oklahoma, if you’re not utterly blind.”
It occurred to me that she was referring to my enthusiasm for the skyscape the first evening we were together here. I’d remarked on the huge green and mauve sky and the telephone poles because I’d wanted her to know that I was aware, when she seemed to me to be unaware. But she was aware.
She was always aware.
•
Our classes began. Germaine had a Monday evening seminar at the Center, and every Monday afternoon she prepared, in the kitchen between our offices, soup for her students. She bought big cooking pots, bowls, spoons, a ladle, a chopping board.
She said, “This seminar lasts three hours. My students need some food to get them through. Then, I think I should open their taste buds as much as the buds of their tender little brains.”
Each week, she prepared a different soup: gazpacho, avocado soup, cucumber and yoghurt—
From my office, in the evening, I heard her conducting the seminar. She read out passages of poetry in different dramatic voices, and she sometimes shouted, “Listen! Listen! Use your ears!”
On the red walls of the Center she had hung reproductions of paintings by women and a large plan on which, down one side, were listed the eighteenth-century women writers her students were reading—Mary Chudleigh, Mary Leapor, Mary Molesworth Monck, Mary Masters, Mary Wortley Montagu—and, down the other side, the important contemporary historical events. More and more women writers were added over the weeks.
When I went into my office in the morning, I sometimes found objects missing—a bulletin board, a typewriter stand on wheels—which had been appropriated by Germaine for the Center. She said, “You didn’t need them. We need them.”
Sometimes I found a gift from her on my desk: a bottle of retsina, a book she had bought for me—
Some of her students were in my workshop. They called me by my given name; she insisted on being called Dr. Greer.
She said, “They’ve got to fucking well bear in mind that, for the time being, I know more than they do.”
There was a third office in the little brick house, occupied by a mutual friend in charge of university publications. Whenever Germaine was away giving a lecture I found myself talking about her to this friend, obsessively.
Over and over, I said, “Germaine is an entirely public woman. You can’t presume to be intimate with her. Even in private, she’s public.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m convinced she’s interested only in public issues, not personal issues. You know, I don’t think Germaine really has friends, close friends, and I think she doesn’t because she’s not interested in her relationships, she’s not interested in herself. She’s only interested in other people, and that, somehow, depersonalizes her interest. Does this make any sense?”
“I’ll have to think about it,” our friend said.
“So will I,” I said.
Germaine was devoted to her Center and the students in it as if to the one world she might make work properly; she arrived early in the morning and left late at night, and while she was there telephones rang all the time, typewriters clacked, papers appeared to fly about, and she, exuding the scent of patchouli, kept it all going. If I met one of our students in the kitchen, we talked a bit; Germaine, hearing us, would shout, “Come on, come on, there’s work to do,” and the student would run back. She expected them to be as devoted to the Center as she was. The scent of her patchouli was always present, even when she was away; but when she was away there was an air of quiet withdrawal among the students.
She said, “What they’ve got to learn, more than anything, is that there is a world outside them which demands as much attention, if not more, than their sad, introverted selves.”
Yet she quickly learned everything about their private lives, and talked to me, with worried concern, about one who was divorcing her husband, another who had just got out of the Navy in which he’d had some unbalancing experiences, another who hadn’t had a period in six months, another whose grandfather had died and to whom, because he couldn’t afford it, Germaine had given money for the plane fare to the funeral and back, another who had an unwanted pregnancy. At the back of the Center, she had a little office of her own; the door was often closed, and I knew she was having private conferences with students.
Later, she’d say, “What can be done for——?,” and sigh.
I arrived one day to find the Center filled with cameras, lights, silver reflecting umbrellas, and, in the midst, Germaine being interviewed about her work there by a woman with a spiral notebook and pencil.
Every Thursday, just before a class she was giving on Byron, Keats and Shelley, we had, the two of us alone, lunch in a Greek restaurant, and we talked about England and Italy.
Though I told myself I could live anywhere, Tulsa struck me, in all its particulars, as very strange, and I was never sure where I stood in relation to the particulars. In a supermarket, I would suddenly become unsure of what I should buy, and I had to think about whatever I was doing. When in a supermarket with Germaine, however, I noticed she went from shelf to shelf, pushing the shopping cart, as if she had been there all her life.
After two weeks, she was speaking with a Tulsan accent.
I liked to be with Germaine because she was, in her freedom to say and do anything, anywhere, always unpredictable in her reactions—her reactions to the world around us, and her reactions to me and what I said and did. Though this frightened me, in that I ran the constant risk of saying or doing the wrong thing, I was excited. It was when I was alone with her that I was most excited. And even though I was alone with her I felt that the risk I ran could be seen, at any moment, by the whole world. Private risks were, with her, very public. It amused me when, at our formica-topped table, eating our pasticcio, she might suddenly say in a loud voice, “How fucking wonderful,” and the Tulsans in the restaurant turned to look. She might as easily, as far as I knew her, have shouted, “How fucking awful.”
Every Thursday, she ate with her fingers half of the pickled chillis in a bottle on the table.
We were often invited together to drinks or dinner parties, and there we found ourselves talking to one another.
At dinner with six others, Germaine said to me across the dinner table, “I haven’t had sex in weeks, not since I got here.” “Neither have I,” I said. She said, “Well, I’ve been happy enough in my little white room taking care of it all by myself.” “I’m pretty content in that way, too,” I said.
Most often we went to parties together; she would pick me up in her car because I didn’t know my way around Tulsa. When I went alone I’d find her talking usually to no less than three other people.
Because I’d thought she didn’t want to talk about her past, as if she had decided that her past simply didn’t matter to her as she was now, I’d never tried to learn about it. I arrived at a party one evening to find her, in a large armchair, describing, to a full room, her family. This was startling. I sat among the others and listened.
I thought: Perhaps she can only be so intimate about herself in a public way.
Then I noted that she would, to people she didn’t at all know and would most probably never see again, reveal what many people would reserve for a close friend. She might, in talking, suddenly observe about herself: “I can’t show affection. When a lover meets me at an airport, I go rigid and ask him if he got the plumber in or had the car repaired. I don’t know why. I can’t do it.” Or: “As much as I like fucking, I don’t like sleeping the night with someone I’ve fucked with. I usually end up sleeping on the floor beside the bed.”
I also remarked that, in talking to people she didn’t know, she might make an aside which would indicate worlds of experience she had had about which I, who imagined I knew her, had heard nothing. She’d say, “When I took care of mentally retarded children.” Or: “When I sang in the Bach B Minor Mass.” Or: “When I was a waitress.” The many lives she seemed to have had, revealed in flashes by such comments, revolved one within the other within the other. “When I worked with fishermen in Calabria.” “When I acted.” “When I . . .” She was stating her credentials for making an observation about the care of mentally retarded children, or Bach, or waitressing.
A colleague said to me, “Isn’t there anything she doesn’t know about from her own experience?”
Late one weekend evening she rang me from her office. Her voice was high. “Non ne posso più. Will you come and fetch me, and take me to a restaurant, and let me talk?”
I dressed in my summer suit, as it was still hot in Oklahoma, and drove my rented car to the campus and the brick house, whose lights, alone of all the university buildings, were lit and beaming out on to the empty, dark parking lot. Her having rung gave me, I realized, a strange confidence, which I interpret retrospectively and which that evening I was full of: Germaine’s widening acceptance of me.
She was in a white dress which swung loosely with the movements of her body.
At the restaurant, we started with a bottle of champagne.
She talked on and on, with developing obsession, developing, I thought, to a point at which her higher and higher pitched voice would break, about the Center.
“I’m running it myself,” she said. “It’s important. God damn it. It is important.”
“You must make everyone know how important,” I said.
She leaned towards me and in a lowered voice said, “Do you realize you’re the only person here I understand?”
She hadn’t said, “the only person here who understands me,” but, “the only person I understand,” and with this I felt a sudden pleased wonder at what there was to understand about me.
I imagined she had a structured vision of me, and she might, if I asked her, articulate it. She had the intelligence to.
I said, “And you’re the only person here I understand.”
I was always vividly aware of Germaine as a woman, a large, imposing woman. Her intelligence was to me the intelligence of a woman, because she had, as a woman, thought out her role in the world; the complexity of the role required intelligence to see it, and she had seen it, I thought, thoroughly. Even when, once, she said to me, “I don’t understand women at all,” I took this as an observation of what it was to be a woman. So, if I with some degree of logic believed Germaine understood me, it followed that I believed she understood me with a woman’s intelligence. I wanted to know what she understood.
I was drunk on champagne.
I wanted her to tell me what she thought about me. I believed I needed her to tell me. She stared at me. I stared back.
I didn’t say anything.
She continued to talk about the Center.
Going to bed, I thought: A relationship with a woman did this for me: it made me feel complicated.
We often had dinner together in different restaurants.
As most restaurants were closed, late one evening, she said we’d drive out of Tulsa to a Mexican place where the guacamole was a whole meal. She drove fast, and faster, in bursts, over empty stretches of highway out of Tulsa, shouting out. Rounding an unlit curve, I saw ahead in the headlights a black and white wooden barrier with red lights flashing on it; Germaine swerved to miss it, and, the tires screeching, the car turned into a crossing where a lone bicyclist was pedalling; she swerved again, so the car missed the bicyclist, who simply looked back at us and continued to pedal, and we stopped across the highway.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Why the fuck weren’t there any signs warning us that there’d be a barrier round the curve?” She was very angry. “I would have slowed down and we wouldn’t have had this scemenza.” Frowning, she righted the car and we drove to the restaurant.
As we ate the guacamole, her anger left her, and she kept repeating, “I really should have been more careful. I really should have.”
“There should have been signs before the curve,” I said.
“No, no, it was my fault. I wasn’t careful. I drove badly.” She hunched her shoulders up, put a hand across her mouth, and looked at me with the look of a deeply embarrassed girl. Through her hand, she said, “I drove very badly. I shouldn’t have done that. I’m very sorry.”
“I felt you were in control.”
“It shouldn’t have happened, and wouldn’t have if I’d been driving properly.” She placed her other hand over the first, across her mouth, and she hunched her shoulders closer together. “Oh dear.”
I had never before seen her embarrassed; and she was because she had performed badly.
At the Graduate School of Letters staff meetings, I understood little because I was unfamiliar with academic jargon. Germaine knew the jargon, and hearing her discuss a certain problem it came to me why everyone listened to her with such attention: she had a command of whatever vocabulary happened to be appropriate to the problem. She was the only woman at the meetings.
One morning, I sat in the large leather swivel chair at the large polished desk in my office, which I kept stark and empty. (Germaine had made her own private office at the back of the Center personal with paintings of and by women, a kelim thrown over a sofa, her own books in the book shelves.) I looked to the side of my room, where there should have been a high-backed leather chair, and in its stead I saw a small, rickety, paint-spattered chair. I jumped up, ran through the kitchen into the Center, and shouted, “Where is my chair?” Germaine was out. Her assistants, some of whom were my students, looked for the chair, which was in Germaine’s office.
“I’m very angry,” I said.
I exchanged the chairs.
Later that day I encountered Germaine in the kitchen, making soup.
“You took my chair,” I said.
“I deserved it,” she said.
“No you didn’t. I deserve it. And, anyway, it’s mine.”
“I deserve it,” she said, “and I should have it.”
“Well, you’re not going to get it.”
Smiling, I went back into my office.
In a loud voice, I heard Germaine say, “We need more room for the Center. We need more office space.”
I went out. “You’re not getting my office,” I said.
“We need it,” she said.
“You’re not going to get it.”
She stuck out her tongue at me.
I said, “You know all the tricks of expansionist politics.”
“How else can I get what I have to get?” she said.
I said, “I’m going to make it a condition of my staying here that I keep this office.”
I thought: That’s what she would do.
With her, I was always conscious of trying to speak at least grammatically, and sometimes with style. She said I had a peculiar accent, but she never corrected me, as she sometimes corrected others, especially, of course, her students. Once I said, “I still feel disorientated here.” She said, “Disoriented.” “No,” I said, “it’s ‘disorientated.’” “No, it isn’t.” “It is.” “I know it isn’t.” I said, “It is.” I looked it up in the OED, and found both words; but, strictly, “disorient” was defined as “to cause to lose one’s bearings,” and “disorientate” as “to turn from an eastward position.” The next time I saw Germaine I told her that I’d looked up the word in the OED and that I was right, though I was wrong. She simply pursed her lips. When I was alone with our friend I told her what I had done, and she said, “Just a while ago I said ‘disoriented’ to Germaine, and she corrected me and said, no, it was ‘disorientated.’” I said, “She took my word.”
A week before Thanksgiving, I had a party at my house for some of my students. I also invited a drag queen I had met in Tulsa. Germaine, too.
In the kitchen, I found Germaine talking animatedly to the drag queen. I stood by them and listened. Germaine took on the gestures and the accent of the young queen, a thin boy, as if she herself were a drag queen, or at least knew everything there was to know about being one, and she was talking to the queen, named Dou Dou, as an equal. They were talking about street trade.
After the party, I said to Germaine, “You were getting on very well with that drag queen.”
She said, “She was brave.”
I felt in the very presence of Germaine’s body the positive power of some kind of political sex. She herself meant something in the world, and any relationship with her had to be meaningful in the world. In the same way that she saw the most intimate of intercourses, sex, as meaningful in the world, a relationship with her had to be political, had to do with the world outside.