MY THIRTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY. Did I ever once, in the ten years I lived with Mike, tell him I wanted to write? I’ve never told anyone. Yet he gave me this absurdly pretentious blank book, which has been sitting on my night table now for three months, growing more pretentious and blanker each day. If it had been a house plant, it would have been dead of neglect in a couple of weeks. The only way to kill this book is to fill it with failed hope. Do I always begin things already knowing they won’t work? Like school? Like Mike? Like Roxanne? Like this? If I were going to write something real, I’d have to make it up. Scribbling in this reminds me of Vic filling pages with what writing looked like to him because Tony was really learning how. So I read Sita and think, enviously, “Anyone can do that,” and set out to show myself up because, even if I did know enough about language, my life, unlike Kate Millett’s, is only life-sized.
If my chief excuse for living were writing it down, would I live very differently? I’d have to. The moment I got out of bed this morning, I’d have to start packing my bags because I wouldn’t be having dinner with my parents and sisters and sons—what a crowd that sounds and is—I’d be going off to Roxanne instead to celebrate my real birth. But even if I did that, I’m far too amazed by loving her to be able to write it down. And anyway, when I get up, I’m going to put on the yellow pantsuit Mother gave me yesterday, my yearly birthday suit, which remakes me into a daughter, and live through the day here in my parents’ house, where no one will suggest—perhaps because they don’t even think it—that I am an embarrassment or a burden, failed wife, apprehensive mother, with no idea what to do with myself or my children because the one thing I want to do is impossible even if I had the money to do it. And I can’t leave this house until I’m sure I won’t do it.
When I asked Carlotta all those months ago, right after Mike left, if she’d ever made love with a woman, she said, “Other than myself? No.” I let that shut me up. It needn’t have. Even when Carlotta didn’t want to listen to me, she would, then anyway. I suppose I’ve been half in love with her all these years, and I felt—feel—as guilty about Carlotta as I do about Mike. In a way, Roxanne didn’t have anything to do with Mike, or Mike and me, except as a way of showing us how bad it really was.
Is that true? I am so guilty in every direction that I can’t understand anything.
I suggested to Dad that maybe I ought to see a psychiatrist. He didn’t say no; he wouldn’t. He simply said, “Why don’t you give yourself some time to think things over for yourself? Then, if you still feel it might help, of course.” I’ve spent most of my time trying not to think things over. I haven’t the faintest idea what I’d ask a psychiatrist if I saw one …
Why did I marry? Why did I marry Mike? Aside from the fact that he asked me. Probably aside from the fact that he still, even strained and thin, is the handsomest man I have ever seen, and initially that made me feel that I must be attractive myself, not just a great oversized cow of a girl. Surely not aside from the fact that I thought he was an artist, which made me imagine sensitive depths beyond the repetitive pigheaded nonsense which I thought was simply the surface of his mind. Yes, aside from that, too. Those are my excuses.
Because when I was an eighteen-year-old virgin who had never been on a real date except when it was arranged by my parents, my friend Bett, who had already been “ecstatically” married for two years, taught me the facts of life. She told me I was too tall and too womanly (read: one of monstrous tits) to attract boys and too dumb to attract men. She said “shy.” I had to get in touch with my own body, and she could show me how if I could just pretend, while she was doing it, that she was a man. It took her three weeks to get my clothes off, another week to get her hand between my legs, and I never did imagine it was anything but her hand. I was so wet I thought I was hemorrhaging, and I was terrified by what I felt, as if I were being raped not by her hand, but by my own body, which had set fire to itself in some Dickensian spontaneous combustion.
“Am I bleeding to death?”
“That’s sex, sweetie.”
When I refused to play her part, which she wanted me to do just in order to see that I understood how it worked, she lost interest in the enterprise. Since I couldn’t even think about her without beginning to shake, we found it easy enough to avoid each other. Someone told me the other day that she’s just married for the third time.
I’m not so worried about what a psychiatrist might make of that as I am of the fact that it didn’t occur to me until a year ago today that Bett had been attracted to me or I to her. I let myself believe for all those years that I allowed that long, ridiculous seduction in the interest of nothing but self-knowledge. In a sense, because I certainly wasn’t in love with Bett, I was right, except, of course, that I didn’t want to know. I was so afraid of being betrayed by my own body that feeling nothing but mild discomfort with Mike was a relief. When I realized that at his inaccurate touch I wouldn’t begin to melt down my own thighs and burn to my tits, I stopped fighting him off and let him do pretty much what he liked or needed to do as long as it didn’t involve me in any active or important way.
One of Mike’s arguments for getting married was that women like sex better after marriage, as if the ring had an ancient erotic power. I was nearly sure by then that it didn’t. He’d been fucking me on a mattress in the back of his truck twice a week for six months before he tested his theory on a wife in a proper bed in a bridal suite at the Bayshore Inn. I used Vaseline then. I wanted to please him. It wasn’t until after Tony was born … What is this myth about forgetting birth? If that kind of terrible commotion could go on, juices spurting out everywhere for an audience of people, of strangers, and afterwards I felt a smug exhibitionist, my breasts full of milk, why on earth was I frightened or ashamed of the wet animality of my own pleasure? I used to want Mike to fuck me just after I’d nursed Tony or even, if he could have been gentle about it, while I was. He was embarrassed even to see me nursing, and when a spot of milk seeped out onto my blouse, I had to change at once. I felt almost innocent in my indignation, married to this prudish ape of a man, a sexual illiterate in an age of information overkill. I even pretended to myself that he was perfectly satisfied. He got it up; he got it in; he got it off. And he was on his way to getting the army of children his vanity required, who, in fact, irritated him to violence for the first three years of their lives and were too expensive for him to support after that.
Why did I marry? Why did I marry Mike? To put off for good knowing that I did not attract men because they didn’t attract me. I don’t need a psychiatrist to tell me that the only kind of man who insists on marrying a lesbian is a man like Mike, for whom even fucking a brick wall is a test of his virility. Oh, there’s the other extreme, a man who wants to pass no tests at all. A man like that could not have protected me from myself for so many hard, safe years.
I was safe. Mike did protect me, and he would have gone on even without the children he still wanted, and I would have gone on, yes, even after Roxanne (she might even have made it easier), if I hadn’t finally really seen his pain, not hanging there in the shed but on Joseph’s face, in Joseph’s simple, humiliating words, “He’s unhappy.”
I don’t know how Joseph’s wife feels about his going crazy. Maybe she isn’t responsible and so doesn’t feel betrayed. But if Mike had actually had to kill himself to get away from me, he would have killed me, too. I would have died of exposure. I still have nightmares about the truck smashed up in a pile of cars or going over a cliff, and almost always Mike in miniature is hanging there on the rearview mirror, where he had a nude doll when I first met him.
I couldn’t possibly want to get even. In public measure I’m probably way ahead, as long as Mike doesn’t contest the divorce. Dad didn’t want me to accept the last check, but I told him that would rile Mike, and I don’t want Mike angry even as far away as Arizona. He could so easily, if he wanted to, take the children away from me, have me declared unfit as a mother.
I don’t see Roxanne more than once a week. She knows, because of the divorce, I have to be very careful, and even once that’s over, we can’t possibly live together, not while I have the boys. But at least we’ll be able to have an occasional weekend together. I can always leave the kids here. Roxanne doesn’t ask for anything. I’m the one who gets hysterical about not being able to see her. I’m the one who suggests crazy escapes, even without the boys. She shakes that great flower of hair against my belly and says no into my navel.
I love her thinness. I love the tiny cups of her breasts, the way she shows them off in tank tops and see-through shirts. I love her low-slung trousers, so beautifully indecent when she leans over; her cleavage, she says, inviting my finger down to tease the pucker of her ass hole. I touch her wherever and whenever I like. She’s as greedy as a cat.
And now I’m trying to be Violette Leduc, writing with one hand, masturbating with the other, and I don’t think it’s disgusting, but it is stupidly, stupidly lonely to lie here in bed on my birthday, my cunt weeping with greed, while Mother indulges me by cooking breakfast for the children. This should have happened to me when I was fifteen. Is conscience always perverse? I had enough sexual shame for a nun at fifteen, but I had no trouble lying in bed any morning while the bacon cooked. Now, with no sexual shame at all, the smell of this morning’s bacon makes both hands equally guilty.
Get up, woman. You’re thirty-one years old today even if you are lying in bed in a room that still suffers traces of your childhood. In twenty minutes Vic and Tony will have to be driven across town to school, and Mother may or may not refrain from saying, “If they transferred schools, they could walk.” I can’t really tell her the truth: that I don’t transfer them because once a week, on Roxanne’s day off, I can go to her from dropping the boys without having to explain anything to anyone.
I wrote that three weeks ago. Obviously this isn’t going to be a diary. There’s really no point in filling it with silly excuses and half-baked explanations and guilty confessions, though that’s certainly the garbage in my head. I do feel retarded, here in this little girl’s room, in a house where I increasingly feel more like a big sister than a mother to my children, whose manners are improving so drastically that something’s going to have to give somewhere. Tony will start shoplifting. Victor will be sent home for obscene behavior on the playground. It’s hard to believe I’d ever miss the foulmouthed bellowing I put up with for years, but one good “Fuck off!” or “Stick it up your ass!” would sometimes be a real relief. Has Mike ruined me for genteel life?
I tried to talk with Dad the other day. He’s been saying, “Wait until you have your divorce. Plenty of time then to sort out what you want to do.” They not only don’t mind having us here: they’re getting used to it, and I shouldn’t let that happen. But if I suggest moving out, what I’m suggesting is Dad’s paying the rent on another place, and he wouldn’t hear of my going back to Kitsilano. I could get a part-time job, but short of making enough money to be really independent, what is the point?
I’ve had another check from Mike. I’m putting them in a savings account for the boys, building them a fantasy independence so that they won’t need to come running home at thirty.
It’s what Mike has done, too. What a couple of great babies we are! And always were, playing house in that ridiculous place, Mike carrying out some movie version of the working-class husband, I the superior wife, or he was the abused and I the secret genius. We were unreal. We still are, he pouting over his mother’s perogi, I putting off getting dressed for chamber music, from which Mother is staying home to babysit so that I can have a night out with Dad.
Most men Dad’s age have other women. When Dad gets restless, he squires one daughter or another around town. How can I help feeling guilty—appalled—that all I really want to do, if I can’t be with Roxanne, is lock myself into this room like a mooning teenager pretending to be Canada’s Rita Mae Brown or whoever? I hide the books I borrow from Roxanne, not because Mother would rummage through my room; she never has, and there would have been nothing to find when I was growing up. I hide the books as I hide so much of myself to be the wholesome daughter of a wholesome father who is waiting patiently for me downstairs.
One of the rare, interesting fights Mike and I had—I didn’t usually fight with him since silence daunted him far more—was about language. I told him I was sick not of his feelings so much as the way he belched them out in such vulgar clichés. Did everything from a miscooked egg to an offensive political statement have to be shoved up somebody’s ass? What was appropriate about it as a storage for everything he disliked? From what I’d read, it was for men the only secret pocket of the body for storing valuables, contraband.
“It’s the working-class equivalent for putting sand in somebody’s piggy bank,” he said, surprising himself out of sarcasm by how interesting the idea was to him. “What I call tight-assed, you call cheap. Everything you don’t like is cheap or vulgar. The money metaphor can get fairly boring, too. You’re not going to teach me to price-tag people. I’m not interested.”
I went on flinching at “cunt” and “prick” and “ass hole” mostly because I didn’t want the children using that kind of language at school or in front of their grandparents. But Mike didn’t either. He cuffed them away from his vocabulary as regularly as he did from his tools, and it worked. The only time Victor ever called me a cunt, I was relieved that he had a word to tell me I had humiliated him.
I went on calling people and things cheap and vulgar but with a new self-consciousness about my tastes … and my flinchings.
Mike’s proudest possession is his body. He’s most comfortable in nothing but a pair of cutoffs, most himself. A suit is a uniform that, like all uniforms, diminishes individuality. “You look like a million dollars, Mike,” my father said as we arrived for dinner. Mike didn’t flinch. I did.
Looking like a million dollars was all I’d ever tried to do. Something that expensive would have to be all right. The only time I’d ever had any confidence in the body underneath was when I was pregnant and when I was nursing a baby. I was then sacred but repulsive to Mike, who, for all his graphic language about everything else, was reduced to talking about buns in ovens. Well, he did finally get over that when I was carrying “Victor.
The problem is that I have no language at all for my body or Roxanne’s body that isn’t either derisive or embarrassing. I don’t like to write about fingering her ass hole, which immediately becomes personified for me as a belligerently stupid male, a surreal genie, metaphorical fart emanating from that … anus? I think of licorice, which I don’t like. We make love without nouns as much as possible, speak directions instead. “There.” “Here?” “Yes, there.” Adequate for the lovely circumstance of two very present and visible bodies which are wonderfully familiar in fact as well as practice, but a love letter filled with nothing but adverbs is ridiculous. Gertrude Stein tried to invent a new language for lovemaking, but it was more a code to be cracked than a communication. Imagine the limitation of that when scholars are still debating whether “cow” means turd or orgasm.
I heard a psychologist the other day say that when you teach children names for all the parts of the body, “ear, eye, elbow, leg, thumb,” and then say, “This is your wee-wee or pee-pee,” they know something’s funny. We, my sisters and I, called our own our cracks when we were little. Now we don’t talk about our bodies except in gynecological terms. We’re graphic about Pap smears, D and Cs, loops, pills, stitches, and itches, but we might have been artificially inseminated for all our talk about fucking. This is an accurate word for what Mike did to me, if you add “over.” And maybe that is what goes on in Margaret’s bed and in Joan’s. We don’t talk about it.
I didn’t miss a language with Mike, only felt assaulted by his. Roxanne doesn’t need a language. She makes sounds that begin somewhere deep in her chest, like the startling wind of underground caves, that are measured by her percussive heart, rise out of the tunnel of her throat, in glottal clickings and whole tones, a narrative song repetitive as any legend so that I now know by heart not only what my fingers and tongue experience but what she experiences as the landscape of my adventure. I listen sometimes at her mouth, sometimes at her chest, sometimes ear pressed to her belly as to a shell to hear her gathering tides. She is like a shell, so fragile and intricately interior, sounding and tasting of the sea. I understand why the clitoris is called a pearl, hidden in oystery frills. I am inside her one of the instruments of her song; also, she is the instrument I play, music a faint imitation or memory of the staccato tonguing, accurate fingering, long bowing that makes her body into song. I think, if there were ever a female Beethoven, the climax of such music couldn’t be politely endured.
Roxanne said this morning, “I will call something one day ‘Alma’s Coming.’”
“Do I make a sound?”
She laughed.
Roxanne doesn’t call herself a composer, though that surely is what she is.
“I document sound,” she says, if pressed to say so.
She is not a talker about her work, as Mike is, needing to make a theoretical point for every nail he hammers, until words are nervous propaganda for something he needs to believe in and doesn’t quite. When Roxanne is caught up in work, she is usually listening and invites me to listen, as if we were audience together to something as accessible to me as to her.
I didn’t want her to be an artist of any sort, sick of them, all those pretensions and terrors of ego. Mike’s sort of art is like Mike’s sort of sex, an attack against foreign material. Carlotta’s is too often an invasion of herself, masochistic.
Roxanne isn’t either pretentious or afraid. Her seriousness is more like a child’s, like Tony’s, when he is caught up in watching something. Like that incredible picture of Picasso and his son at a bullfight, the child behind his father, with a finger in his father’s mouth.
Now when I’m invited to Allen and Pierre’s, Allen comes to pick me up. He knows I have my own car, but Allen has certain masculine formalities which are important to him. They are his passport to the foreign worlds he visits even in his own city; therefore, he carries them everywhere. I didn’t think anything about accepting their first invitation after I moved in here. I had not been invited before, but Mike and I never were because of his job. Anyway, he wouldn’t have gone. I couldn’t ever quite believe in Mike’s hostility toward Allen as disapproval. I think Mike was envious. Being free to accept was delightful, and, of course, Roxanne was there.
The next morning at breakfast Dad said, “Very nice fellow, that Allen. But I wonder—I hope you won’t think I’m being old-fashioned or overcautious—if it’s wise to see him while the divorce is still pending.”
“It’s perfectly safe, Dad,” I assured him. “Allen’s gay … homosexual.”
It gave me the thrill of fear without the fear itself to use those words in front of my parents.
“Are you sure? What a shame.”
“But he’s such a nice-looking boy,” Mother protested.
She would probably protest the same thing about me, though I think she’s mildly alarmed by the size of all her daughters; our big bones come from Dad’s side of the family.
“He’s perfectly happy,” I said, something I don’t believe about any of my friends. Being just over thirty and happy is a contradiction in terms. “He lives with a French Canadian boy who makes him a better wife than most women would choose to be, given how often he’s away.”
My parents are too polite to attach moral issues to real people—that is, people they have met in their own front hall. And I am too old to be told that such a subject is inappropriate at the breakfast table in front of Tony and Victor.
“Pierre even looks like a girl,” Tony explained to his grandparents.
“Well, with all the long hair around these days, just about everybody does,” Mother said cheerfully.
“Dad won’t let us,” Victor said.
Victor with hair to his waist would be more of a Samson than ever. Tony is a different matter. If he doesn’t want to deal with ambiguity he’ll have to wait to grow his hair until he can also grow a beard.
Do I not care, as Mother later in private suggested to me, whether the boys grow up straight? The little sermon I preached to her was pure self-defense, and I was even nervous that she’d wonder why I’d gone into the matter so thoroughly as to know the date the American Psychiatric Association voted homosexuality out of the sick and into the personality trait category. But she was too caught up with the argument.
“Then it’s a bad personality trait,” she said.
“I think being able to love anybody is a step in the right direction.”
Well, I do, but if Tony grew up to be a gay militant, I’d feel like the original castrating mother, and Mike would kill him. Still, I know it isn’t something mothers do to sons, fathers to daughters.
I love Roxanne like a blade of grass breaking concrete to get to the light. And if Tony had to love like that, couldn’t I have the courage to be glad? I haven’t even the courage to face all I’m breaking. I pretend it’s not going on, as if all these months were a long holiday from a self I’ll go back to in a house I take care of with Mike banging in and out. Yet every time I’m with Roxanne, I know I’m already leading the life I say is impossible. The more I protest to myself that I can’t live with her, the more determined I am to risk everything, even my sons, and that terrifies me.
Allen and Pierre aren’t the ideal couple I make them out to be, and if they had a couple of Allen’s daughters from a previous marriage, well, I can’t imagine. But Roxanne isn’t the child Pierre insists on being. She can enter his fantasy: they play dress-up together for hours the way my sisters and I did. It would bore Allen if he had to pay too much attention to it. His game, another of his masculine affectations, is chess, and I play well enough to distract him. Am I his real counterpart, carrying my feminine affectations around to cover an essentially masculine nature? I don’t feel at all masculine, least of all making love with Roxanne, who is so enthusiastic about my breasts I have a dream of having a daughter for her so that Roxanne could taste my milk. And she is not playing at being a boy when she dresses in Pierre’s clothes, which are often more feminine than her own. She is entertaining him as I entertain Allen.
Why is it so important to me to insist that we both are feminine women? I find the frank ambiguity of Pierre’s sex intriguing, the subtle femininity in Allen actually mildly attractive. If it ever occurred to him to take me to bed, I’d go. Yet any trace of masculinity in either Roxanne or me is something to cover up, deny. Is that why, aside from being terrified of exposure, I don’t want to go to a women’s bar? I don’t want to see women in motorcycle drag and think we have anything in common.
Roxanne hasn’t been to the clubs since she’s known me. She says the only reason she’d go now would be to enjoy making love in public, a desire I couldn’t understand at all until the first night we had dinner with Allen and Pierre, and Roxanne stretched out on the couch and put her head in my lap. I have been embarrassed by obvious sexual gestures between men and women, yes, calling them cheap and vulgar, but to see Pierre kiss Allen is an affirmation of my desire for Roxanne. Pierre occasionally kisses Roxanne.
“Do you find him attractive?” I asked her.
She shrugged and said, “He’s sometimes very lonely.”
“In leap year,” Pierre said, “we should all four marry each other.”
At that moment it seemed to Roxanne and me an hilarious and wonderful idea, one of the thousand never-never lands we dreamed of living in together. Allen stays aloof from such games, indulgently parental.
I think Allen is the loneliest person I’ve ever known, far lonelier than Carlotta, for instance. There is a great deal in Allen Pierre doesn’t touch. It’s not just the difference in their ages. Allen stays aloof from everyone. It’s as if he’s protecting not himself but other people from something in himself.
Carlotta is even harder to face than this notebook, which at least doesn’t talk back with experiences of its own. I have tried to drop in on her several times in the last couple of months, but she’s never at home. Then this morning, driving back from taking the boys to school, I saw her on the beach, sitting on a log. I pulled over into the parking lot and just sat in the car for awhile, watching her sketch, the only one on the beach on this cold April morning. Finally I got out of the car and walked over to her.
She didn’t look up from her work, so I stood looking down at what she was doing: a very accurate sketch of the debris at her feet. Carlotta is the only person I know who can make a pencil drawing sulk.
“I’m tired of not knowing why I don’t see you,” I said finally.
She kept on working.
“According to everyone in town, I’m the one who should be mad at you.”
She still didn’t look up.
“Carlotta, you’re my oldest friend, really my only friend. I don’t want to talk about anything you don’t want to talk about, honestly but I need to know you’re around.”
“I’m not around,” she said, “not for anybody.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve had enough, more than enough, and I’ve got work to do.”
“Look, the only reason I haven’t asked about you and Mike is that I didn’t know at the time whether to be outraged or grateful. I couldn’t quite believe, after all these years of putting up with him as my husband, you actually wanted him, though you were certainly always nicer to him than most people, and that’s one of the reasons we could stay friends. Anyway, it seems to me crazy now that he’s gone, not to see you.”
“I don’t much like you in generous moods.”
“How do you want me to feel?”
“Melodramatic and silly the way I do.”
I sat down next to her on the log. I wanted to put an arm around her, but I was physically shy of her, as I have been with everyone lately.
“I’ve never felt so silly in all my life,” I told her.
“But you’re happy about it. You’re glad to be rid of him.”
“Terribly.”
“Of course, he didn’t leave you. He left me.”
She was crying. I forget how easily Carlotta cries. It’s not something anyone in my family does, at least not in front of anyone else. How do you go about comforting your best friend about being left by your husband? I suddenly felt impatient with her.
“Why on earth did you get involved with him? You know what a bastard he is.”
“Why did you?”
“The more I think about it, the less I know, but I was twenty-one, not thirty-one.”
“And now that you think you’ve got what you want, will you know any better what to do with it than Mike?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You’re as cruel as children, both of you.”
I was very cold and very tired. I had been with Roxanne until three o’clock this morning, crazy with need of her, and even now I felt more like an amputated part of her than a person to deal with Carlotta. I had probably stopped here on the beach more for the reason of avoiding questions my mother was waiting to ask me than to make any real connection with Carlotta.
“Where is he?” she asked suddenly.
“In Arizona with his mother and brother.”
“Is he going to stay down there?”
“I don’t know.”
I thought she might try to hit me. There was really no point in fighting over a man I don’t want who is a thousand miles away, and I feel so little charity for him I really do find it hard to believe anyone else would want him in the painful way Carlotta apparently does. I left her there on the beach and came home to Mother.
Why do I feel guilty about Carlotta? It took time for me to believe what everyone in town was telling me, that Mike and Carlotta were having an affair. I knew exactly what Mike was doing, getting vengeance and teaching me a lesson. He couldn’t have known that, if I felt any jealousy, it was of him, not of Carlotta. I lied to her this morning. To be torn between gratitude and outrage was the sarcastic surface of what was really happening. Her being with Mike gave me an excuse to ignore her, to punish her a little. All along the person I was deserting was not Mike but Carlotta, and the card on the bottle of perfume was intended to hurt her, not Mike. It didn’t occur to me until this morning that she might really have taken Mike not to spite me over Roxanne or teach me a lesson but because she actually wanted him.
Mike has always accused me of romanticizing Carlotta. I did see her as a free spirit, made of sterner stuff than the rest of us. While she was attached to no one else, I admired her detachment from me. I even identified myself with it, thinking my secret self, my real self, was detached, too, and, if I hadn’t been trapped in the prison of a family, I might be a disciplined and determined writer, paring Joycean fingernails over my characters. In that fantasy Carlotta was always with me, and we stalked about town, being famous and aloof.
I feel guilt about Carlotta because, from the moment I met Roxanne, I felt cheated by Carlotta of all that friendship might have been. Of course, it couldn’t ever have been anything other than what it was. It was only in the first few moments of touching and holding Roxanne’s thinness that I might really have been making love with Carlotta. Then I wanted to break what I hadn’t been able to touch.
“You’re as cruel as children, both of you.”
But she didn’t want me. She wanted Mike.
Am I cruel? I confess, where Roxanne is concerned, I don’t care. I’ve got to be with her.
When Mother asked why I was out so late last night—wasn’t I just going to a movie with a friend—I said, “We were invited to a feast, and we went.”
I was tempted to tell her how many hours it lasted, what each course consisted of, how little appetite I have now for anything else. For the first time in my life I’m losing weight without dieting, and Mother sees it as a sign of my unhappiness.
Victor hardly ever mentions Mike these days, but sometimes he comes apart at the seams under the burden of Dad and Mother’s unspoken expectations, and I have to yell at him, sometimes even swat or cuff him, as his father would, to give him a line to get back into. Mother and Dad don’t approve of that. Neither do I, but a seven-year-old can’t cope with a vacuum as he’s been asked to, as if it had always been there.
Tony, whom I would have expected to miss Mike as I do, with daily relief, begins to draw pictures of him which are all very large and full of black hair. And he asks questions about his father. “Does Dad know I’m learning to play the violin?” “Does Dad know I have to wear glasses?”
I’d suggest he put such information into the postcards he writes every week, but every fact Tony raises is something he doesn’t want his father to know, vulnerabilities he’s building up against which he may have to defend himself.
“Is Dad ever coming back?”
I say, yes, of course, after a while, to visit. His own sending of postcards to the boys and the religiously prompt monthly checks make me know what I would know anyway: Mike has no intention of forgetting he is a father.
Is Mike biding his time, just as I am, until the divorce is a fact, his parental rights spelled out by law? Does he know what he’s going to do any more than I do? Sometimes the idea that he might try to take the boys is a nightmare, sometimes a daydream, but I could no more be made to give them up than decide to volunteer them.
I wish this were a clearly bad place for all of us to be. Living with Mike, I sometimes felt guilty about how much I simply liked my family, as if it were deeply disloyal to him. But the real point is the money isn’t it? And it always has been. But I wouldn’t have married Mike in the first place if there hadn’t been money. I couldn’t have walked into that trap without one guaranteed open door, which I’ve now walked through. If I have to be dependent, it’s certainly safer and more comfortable to be dependent on my parents than on an ex-husband of Mike’s temper.
If I hadn’t dropped out of school when I married Mike, if I’d finished my degree, I could go out and teach. But I didn’t do that. It would take at least a year back at UBC to finish off, and I couldn’t face that.
Is there anything I can face? Certainly not one more question.
I have invited Roxanne to dinner. I have kept her so much to myself that my parents didn’t know her name until last week, when I said I’d like her to come. Mother immediately suggested I invite Carlotta as well or any other friend, but I said, no, just Roxanne. I told them she was a friend of Allen’s. “Such an unfortunate man!” is now Mother’s habitual punctuation whenever his name is mentioned. I told them she worked in a record store with a hi-fi store in the basement. Father knows the fellow who owns the shop, a Jewish fellow, quite a nice sort. I told them she was interested in electronic music. Mother, who thinks Stravinsky should have been deported to another planet and the twenty-first century, frowned. Dad asked what instrument she played. Woman and tape recorder. I offered only the second and explained the little I could.
Roxanne’s compositions are called things like “Swimmer,” “Bird,” “Boat,” “Fish,” “Bridge,” and they are made up of the sounds she collects and then manipulates with her various machines. She says they should be played together in different combinations. I have heard no more than two at a time because of the limited equipment in her room, which is also not large enough for the sound. Fortunately she lives over a grocery store so that she—and we—can make as much noise as she likes at night, but she wishes I could hear them as they should be heard.
“A bit like that fellow John Cage?” Dad asked.
A man with Dad’s memory can read Time and never be at a social loss. It’s a kindness in him which he uses to make other people feel at home, and tonight he’ll remember every conversational clue I’ve given him.
Tony suggested himself that he could play for Roxanne. Victor, not to be outdone, offered to stand on his head, but he’s not allowed to do any of his tumbling tricks inside this house since they can be more tumble and less trick than makes Mother comfortable. One of the reasons I’ve asked Roxanne is that the boys haven’t really seen her in months, and they like her. She plays with them as seriously as she plays with Pierre. Mother is kindly disposed to anyone who indulges her grandsons.
I can’t hope that either Mother or Dad will accept Roxanne. They won’t even know they are supposed to. She’ll become for Mother “one of your creative friends,” a category of decreased expectations. I think Mother is frightened of Carlotta. When I used to spend so much time with her, Mother checked me over for symptoms of temperament until she was satisfied that I was immune. Carlotta is a mass of middle-class conventions compared to Roxanne. It doesn’t even occur to Roxanne that she has nothing to wear for dinner with my parents.
I should be nervous. I should be wondering why on earth I asked her, but I do know why. Living here is like being under deep anesthetic, Roxanne a wild, repeating hallucination of another world. I don’t want to drag her into this drugged sleep. I want her to wake me here, make me look at her here, and begin to have some sense of what I can do. I am playing Snow White without a wicked stepmother, Rapunzel with no one to lock me in, except, if you wait for a princess instead of a prince, any parents in the story may turn into poisonous toads. But I am not even afraid of her transparent shirt at the dinner table. I wonder why.
Extraordinary! We could have been back in grade school, Mother asking me to take Roxanne to my room to leave her coat and even play awhile before dinner, which we did until the boys banged on my door like obnoxious little brothers, and Roxanne tumbled into the living room like one of them. I think Dad was on the brink of offering her a Shirley Temple when I told him she likes scotch on the rocks.
She had a tank top on under her see-through shirt and was wearing the single pearl and gold chain I gave her for Christmas, a pin made of real butterfly wings in her hair, which she took off and clipped on Victor’s glass of milk.
She was like a magical toy, fascinating to everyone. When she left soon after the boys went to bed, she said, “Maybe next time they’ll let me spend the night.”
Would we get involved in a pillow fight?
“Such amazing hair,” Mother said. “I suppose it must be natural.”
“How old is she?”
“My age.”
“It must be her size. She isn’t really like a child,” Dad said.
“She’s awfully good with the boys,” Mother said. “I was afraid Vic would get overexcited, but he really did awfully well, even when Tony was playing. They grow up every day at this age, don’t they?”
It was, in fact, Mother who suggested Roxanne spend the night. It was last Saturday, and she suggested it not even as a convenience but as a treat, offering two shifts of Sunday breakfast so that we could sleep over like teenagers and get up to pancakes and bacon after the boys had gone off to the beach with Dad. Instead of wailing into this notebook with guilty fingers that this should have happened to me at fifteen, I lay touching and being touched in this bed in the first innocent pleasure of my life. We took a shower together before we dressed.
Mother said, as we ate second helpings, “Ah, it’s nice to have girls in the house again. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard that kind of laughter.”
Did I ever play in the shower with Margaret or Joan? So long ago I hardly remember and certainly never the games Roxanne and I had been playing!
Later Mother said, “Roxanne’s a funny little thing. She’s good for you. You should have her over more often.”
I guess, without thinking about it, I expected Mike to come home for the divorce, as if it were an occasion for both of us, or, if it were mine, he should attend as he would my funeral. I dreaded seeing him and at the same time longed to, not simply as a way of ending my relationship with him but as the signal that I, and everyone around me, could stop saying, “After the divorce …”
Even this morning, on the way to court, I expected him. And now I feel no more divorced than I would have felt married if he hadn’t turned up at the church. My lawyer assures me that I am. “A free woman,” he called me. I feel the way I did when I was a kid and stole something. Getting it out of the store was no relief, and as long as I had it, I felt in danger. I remember throwing a pencil box into the sea. It was weeks before I’d go to the beach again because I was sure I’d find it washed up with the tide. I buried a typewriter ribbon—I took it long before I had a typewriter—and waited for a dog to dig it up. By the time I was nine I had learned to steal only what I could eat.
A free woman? I’ll never get away with this. I can’t eat my wedding ring. If I knew how, I would cry.
God, this is awful! I had a near fight with Dad tonight at dinner. He wants me to take the boys off on a trip somewhere as soon as school is out.
“A change will do you good.”
I don’t want a change. It terrifies me. Everything terrifies me. I haven’t seen Roxanne in a week. I haven’t even phoned her. Why hasn’t she phoned me? Suddenly everything’s up to me. Suddenly everyone expects me to know what to do. I don’t want to do anything. I don’t even want to take the boys to school in the morning. Mother’s done it three times this week. When I try to tell her how awful I feel, all she can say is, “It’s only natural, dear.” As if divorce had as many recognizable physical symptoms as pregnancy. I want to scream at her kind, stupid face, “What do you know about it? What do you know about anything?” She manages to love her children by not knowing the first thing about them. Motherhood is blindness and platitudes.
Fatherhood is a mortgage on your children you can never pay off. Witness this damned check from Mike today in the mail. He must know by now—he’s been informed—that he’s not required by law to send anything now that the divorce is final. Final.
It doesn’t change anything. I wish there were somebody I could talk to who has been through this. I remember trying to persuade Mike that getting a divorce was the most ordinary thing in the world, something simply everyone did these days, and we were somehow retarded not to have thought of it years ago. Everyone did think of it years ago, getting out while Mike and I were struggling to get deeper in. Where is out? Where did they all go, those broken-in-half couples? Out of the country, like Mike, back to Mother and Daddy, like me? I don’t know. They simply disappeared.
I want to disappear. Maybe I have and just don’t realize it. I’m in the nowhere I’ve been in ever since Mike left. I want him back to get this over with. To get what over with?
I want to be punished for what I’ve done, but not like this, not the daily dread of all those years washing up on the shore, undisposed of after all, the garbage still life of all I’ve done, and the much more I haven’t.
If I’m a free woman, why doesn’t someone untie all this guilt, all this fear and say to me, “Yes, it really is true. You really are free.” What I’m waiting for is to be as humiliated as I feel, and I know I couldn’t bear that. There is no point in it.
Is freedom nothing but responsibility to punish myself, shout “cunt!” and “dyke!” in the mirror? Face myself with my own sins until I’m as sick of and bored with them as I was when they were Mike’s to catalogue, until I can feel as superior and defiant as I did then?
I have never paid for anything in my life. And if I’m paying now, I don’t even know how to recognize the price.
I have seen Roxanne. She’s as unwilling to be angry with me as everyone else. When I tried to tell her how guilty I felt, how fearful, as if I had no right to anything, hadn’t earned anything, was in terrible debt to everyone, she said, “That’s no way to get out of being loved.” That isn’t at all what I meant; at least, I don’t think it is, though I could hear then what it must sound like to her.
All these months Roxanne has been different from everyone else, a time bomb in my life, dangerous enough to make the risk a kind of price in itself. But now, unless I were graphically perverse and exhibitionist, my parents would accept my living with Roxanne as a reasonable solution. I have to begin to count costs I couldn’t pay or she couldn’t pay.
“You don’t want to have to lie. You’re not a hypocrite like me,” I said.
“I don’t lie. There’s no point in making love in front of people who don’t like it. It’s something to share, not to expose.”
She doesn’t understand that if we actually lived together, I’d have her in a bra in a week, in slacks that belted over her rib cage. Or if she does understand, she thinks she wouldn’t care if it pleased me, just as Mike tried not to care when I dressed him up in suits.
I won’t even meet her friends now. When there was no possibility of it, I liked her to tell me about them, about their wild parties and partner swapping. As erotic fantasy it was just fine, but in fact, I’d be as turned off as I was with Mike. I can’t even watch the sex in movies. I hate it.
She doesn’t believe me: my nakedness, unabashed, my breasts offered up to her, my legs spread wide, so open, so hungry, I could swallow a roomful of her friends.
“You want to earn this,” she asks, “and you also want to be punished for it? Is it so good and so bad?”
“Why don’t you feel guilty?”
“Nobody ever taught me how.”
She is trying to unteach me, and she does at moments when coming to her is the grand performance of my life, as amazing as giving birth but without its pain. I can feel then that I not only wouldn’t mind a world of bystanders but would think it is the one act the world should witness, its pure pleasure, its pure joy. But that is euphoria.
Away from her, the safer I actually am, the realer the possibility of taking her not only as lover but as mate, the more guilty I feel, the more certain I am that the only way I could live with her would be to ruin her. Roxanne is wrong. Guilt is exactly the way to get out of being loved.
Taking the boys to the dentist this afternoon, I met Joseph and Carlotta, who had met each other on their way to the liquor store. I had to prompt Tony and Victor into speaking to Joseph. Only now I realize they didn’t recognize him. If he had not been with Carlotta, I’m not sure I would have either. I suppose he has to wear out some of his old clothes, but, if I were his wife, I’d draw the line at those particular trousers. He’s withered, and his color is awful. I don’t remember that he actually stammered before, though he’s always looked like the sort of man who would.
He has a daughter two days old and was buying champagne to celebrate.
“I hope that’s what you wanted,” I said.
“I didn’t want anything,” he said, and laughed that peculiar laugh.
Is that why I’ve been afraid to go out? Carlotta and Joseph are the two people in the world who genuinely disapprove of me as much as I do of myself. And they’re the only two, aside from Allen and Pierre—who really don’t count—to know what I’m doing. They didn’t make me at all nervous. My best friend and Mike’s best friend both turn out on Mike’s side because they share with him their heterosexual pruderies. They were nervous, behaving as if they’d been caught in an obvious conspiracy, a couple of refugees from the year we were thirty. I’m the only one of us who could stand to lose fifteen pounds. I know I’ve never looked better in my life, and they would have had to say so to each other when I left. They would have had to say, “Well, divorce seems to agree with her.” There’s nothing like a little real disapproval to give perspective.
Joseph never has liked me. Mike and I pretty well forced people to choose sides. The parties we gave got more and more like intramural sports. I always thought Carlotta was so deeply on my side she could afford to play referee. But she always liked Joseph. I didn’t. I couldn’t stand the way Mike felt obliged to behave when Joseph was around, Marlon Brando playing the life of Henry Moore. Joseph didn’t forgive me for refusing to get into the act.
Why is it that men—even men who pick up their own socks and know how to fry an egg—never manage to believe in themselves without a deeply sympathetic audience? Carlotta has never asked anyone to believe in her as an artist. Roxanne so simply believes in herself she wouldn’t know what to talk about. If I’m as much a needy fake as Mike, at least I keep it to myself. I couldn’t fawn over him. And that damned dummy was so mean and melodramatic and like Mike I couldn’t believe it. It was Joseph who made me afraid. I’ve wondered how much that night contributed to his crack-up.
I’m sure Mike doesn’t have Joseph on his conscience, or Carlotta either, and why they’re loyal to him when he screwed them both so soundly is one of the mysteries.
I miss her. I always did feel a little on her sufferance, but the sense that any minute she might be bored was a challenge. I was almost required to say any outrageous thing that came into my head. A present could never be something small and thoughtful. It had to be extravagant. I didn’t have overt sexual fantasies about Carlotta, but I used to like to think of us as a pair, a contrasting pair of women, extremes, of the sort that attracted Picasso. If there had been a hope in hell of Mike’s being a Canadian Picasso (which I admit is a contradiction in terms), would I have fawned over him and encouraged him to act out my appetite for other women? Another of my invented flashbacks to before Roxanne which would exclude Roxanne, give me back my innocent misery.
I meet her at Allen and Pierre’s tonight for dinner. We haven’t been there together for a long time. Allen’s been in Europe. If Pierre is alone, only Roxanne is invited. As a couple we’d simply increase his loneliness.
I asked Allen last night why Pierre never went with him. For a moment he kept his eyes on the chessboard, reluctant to take his mind off the game. Then he seemed to realize it wasn’t an idle question.
“He’s phobic about traveling. Aside from that, most of the places I go I couldn’t take him. Since Trudeau got married, single men, unless they are distressed fathers of three legitimate sons, just aren’t in. I have a string of good-looking women over two continents.”
“Do you feel guilty about that?”
“Heavens, no. As a matter of fact, I was about to ask you to the Gallery Ball, now that you’re a respectably divorced woman.”
“I’d be delighted.”
“Good,” he said, and turned back to our game.
“Don’t you ever feel guilty about any of it?”
“About Pierre, of course, but sex, if it isn’t a tiny bit wicked, is ever so dull, don’t you think? Mike must have been an awful weight of responsibility in bed.”
“I was.”
“Well, my point is made either way.”
“Roxanne doesn’t feel guilty.”
“Of course not. It takes a certain amount of breeding to be morally trivial, as you and I are.”
“Morally trivial?” I know Allen jokes and never jokes.
“You’ve already begun to fret about ruining Roxanne, I expect, teaching her your own nasty middle-class inhibitions, isolating her from her old free life. It’s one of my favorite topics for brooding about Pierre, and I have the advantage of being years older, of having found him when he was still a criminal offense. You couldn’t even be jailed. The fact is, of course, Pierre seduced me, and he would have been beaten to death years ago if he hadn’t found someone to take him in. But the facts haven’t much to do with it.”
“Roxanne doesn’t need my protection—if I could protect her.”
“No, but she does need your love. There’s that, you see. If I go to friends’ second and third weddings with you and we’re occasionally seen at an opening, that should take care of our need to pass and give Tony and Victor the option of thinking of you as heterosexual if either of them needs it. That way each of us earns the right to an immodest and indecent bed. Do you know, I’m nearly the only man I know who goes home for sex? I attribute it to my impeccable heterosexual behavior in public. I deserve my vice.”
Pierre appeared at that moment from the kitchen. “We’ve decided to make fudge.”
Allen sighed and shook his head. “They conspire to turn us into a pair of fat old cows.”
It’s true that Roxanne mourns every pound I have so gratefully lost, and Pierre needs to imagine that Allen fasts in his absences. I am not sure he doesn’t, for all his tales of expense-account dinners with the handsomest flesh of both sexes in all the cities of Europe. I wonder if the only kind of success I can accept in a man is the kind he believes in as little as I do. I admire Allen.
“You have no alimony,” he said then.
It was my turn to be more interested in the neglected game than in the turn of conversation, but I answered, “No, I didn’t want any, but Mike keeps sending money anyway. He must have got a job down there.”
“That shouldn’t irritate you.”
“He’s trying to buy my good behavior.”
“Is he? Then he should have contested the divorce.”
“Yes, he should have.”
“You wanted him to?”
“Oh, Allen, I don’t know. I feel so irrational about it. I don’t feel free.”
“Of course not. When are you going to start looking for a job?”
“I don’t know. Would that solve anything?”
“Part of your charm, Alma, is that you are hardly aware of how totally spoiled you are.”
“Oh, I know. I do know.”
“Allen has a friend who runs the most successful gallery in Vancouver, one nobody ever hears of because it doesn’t handle anyone local, only the international giants. There are no opening nights. The place isn’t even open to the public during the day. Investors make appointments and fly in from Montreal and Toronto, even from Los Angeles and Houston and Atlanta. His last local employee couldn’t resist a second business with the customers, and he felt it lowered the tone of the establishment. He’s perfectly willing to supply call girls or boys, but he wants people working in the gallery to be singularly professional.
“I didn’t ask him the salary, but it wouldn’t be peanuts. You don’t type, I suppose, or add, or do anything useful like that?”
“I type,” I said. I must have been the only one in the class for whom it was nothing more than part of a fantasy for future greatness.
“Would you like an introduction?”
“I don’t see how I could work full time … with the boys.”
“It isn’t that sort of job.”
I wanted to say, “Don’t push me,” but I’ve been waiting for months to be pushed in some direction. I think I imagined ultimatums rather than possibilities.
I am thirty-one years old, and I have never had a job. I have never even considered it seriously. I majored in education instead of English not to be practical but because it was easier. Mickey Mouse courses were ideal preparation for the hours I play stupid card games, Monopoly, and put together jigsaw puzzles with the boys. Roxanne says working is as interesting as gin rummy.
If I’d decided to be something outlandish—a brain surgeon, a commercial pilot, a Greek scholar—to work would be the natural outcome. To take a job simply for the sake of a job seems slightly sordid for a woman, particularly for anyone with children. Oh, I know I sound more like Mother than I should, who thinks Roxanne is such a brave little thing to sell records to people.
“Do you work a cash register?” Mother asked her, as if that were one of the central mysteries.
Well, it’s a mystery to me, too, and I have Mother’s unhealthy awe of the million very ordinary things I don’t know how to do, like use a laundromat or put gas in my own car.
I don’t suppose the gallery has anything as obvious as a cash register.
Being propositioned by rich men doesn’t frighten me. I doubt that it would happen. Might there be a rich woman or two? Allen was careful to point out that the last thing his friend wants is sex-crazed employees of whatever tastes.
Do I think the only respectable reason for doing anything is love? I certainly wouldn’t have married for money. In the first couple of years I was very proud that people would know I’d married for love.
If love was really vanity and a need for safety, what is it with Roxanne beyond lust and escapism? If I lived with her, we might lock ourselves into roles as stupid as mine and Mike’s, or, what is more likely, we’d fight constantly about the roles we weren’t playing. Who cooks? Who pays the utility bill? Who changes the beds?
Mother and I never fight about chores. She never expects me to do anything, and aside from cooking, there’s very little to do. Roxanne and I wouldn’t have a cleaning woman, not just because we couldn’t afford it. We couldn’t have someone like that poking around in our lives.
When I’m with Roxanne, I really enjoy doing ordinary things for her. In her room it’s like playing house. She hasn’t more than a couple of glasses and plates to wash, and her clothes fit into two drawers. The only complexities are her machines, and she keeps them impeccably.
But would I enjoy coming home from work and having to cook the meal, spend the evening doing the laundry, being with the boys, while she was off fiddling with her recorders, night after night? When would I ever read a book or write—or cut my toenails for that matter? I put up with Mike’s sculpting and crazy hours for two reasons: it gave me plenty of time to myself, and I didn’t want to be with him. I don’t even like Roxanne to go to the bathroom without me. Anytime there’s a chance to be with her, I don’t want to do anything else. The idea of sitting in the same room with her and reading a book is unimaginable.
Why won’t I imagine? It has nothing to do with Roxanne. I don’t want to be looked at and called “an unfortunate woman,” having to work, living with another woman. Being lesbian is a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. I don’t feel humiliated at home because it’s temporary.
Any day now I can suggest to Dad that summer will be too much for Mother, the kids underfoot all the time. School is out next week, and once they’ve been running around loose for a while, Dad won’t be hard to convince. I couldn’t stay here and work and let Mother cope all day with the children. Once I move out, there’s no way I can have a job in summertime.
If I rented a room to Roxanne, a room to herself, I wouldn’t be asking Dad for a house of my own simply for that. I could start using Mike’s money. He told me it was to keep me home with the boys. If Dad bought me a house—he certainly has offered more than once—and there was no rent to pay, Mike’s money and Roxanne’s rent together would be enough—well, not for clothes, but Mother and Dad have always been generous about that.
I simply assume Roxanne wants to live with me. We talk about living together all the time, but it’s always in some other place, near other mountains, by other seas, in a house of our own, which never gets furnished beyond a huge bed and sunning mats and certainly doesn’t have Tony and Victor running in and out with stomachaches, broken arms, and the obsessive need to tell the plot of every TV program, including the commercials. There is no huge laundry basket for the piles of their dirty clothes. In those dreams, the nearest they’ve got to us is about a mile down some tropical shore as naked as we are, as absorbed in seashells as we are in our oceanic sex. I have never said to Roxanne, quite simply, “Would you live with me and help me raise the boys?” She can’t suggest it herself, but also she may have as many doubts as I do.
I have just read this through. It’s hours and hours of nagging myself with guilts and doubts and indecisions. The only changes that seem to have taken place are that from resenting Mike’s money I’ve begun to be grateful for and count on it; from being afraid I’d do that drastically immoral thing of living with Roxanne, no matter what anyone thought, I’m afraid I can’t live with Roxanne because of what I think.
This isn’t writing. This is to writing what masturbation is to making love, an analogy that wouldn’t have demeaned it for me while I still lived with Mike since my own fingers were so much more skillful than his. The lonely pleasing of oneself is certainly better than the mutual displeasure of bad sex.
But I wasn’t trying to deal with sex. If this is to have any purpose, it should at least make me more aware of myself, of how I really feel and what I really want. When I admit the worst, I often don’t really believe it. When I try to sound as if I’m coming to terms with my life, writing becomes a substitute for doing anything about it. Even when I’m most discouraged, there’s satisfaction in the pages I have filled.
If I were at all serious about this, I should at least try to write a story, even if it were about myself. It would be nothing to send to Chatelaine or Saturday Night, that’s for sure. And the sort of little magazine that might publish it would send me nothing but a subscription I wouldn’t want delivered to this house. Roxanne already takes them all, Branching Out, A Room of One’s Own, Body Politic, The Advocate, Christopher Street, Conditions, Sinister Wisdom. I read them the way I used to read Vogue and Redbook, trying to imagine myself glamorous or matronly, even occasionally the writer of one of the stories. Now I try to identify with Adrienne Rich, whose husband really did kill himself, leaving her with sons to raise. But the differences are enormous. She was an accomplished poet—even W H. Auden said so—when she was years younger than I am. And now she’s years older and talks about herself at my age as if it were another life. She lives in New York and knows all the important women in the movement, for whom sex is political.
All of them, from Violette Leduc to Kate Millett, are artists and radicals first. There must be a lot more women like me than like them for whom loving another woman is nothing but that, with no redeeming politics or transforming art.
I think Roxanne does feel like one of them. She doesn’t talk a lot about it, but occasionally she says something that makes me feel the world she actually lives in is the moon’s distance from mine. She calls people she’s never met—like Pauline Oliveros—sister. I didn’t even know she was a famous composer. My only sisters are my sisters, who are not my sisters at all in that sense. We don’t know each other either.
No one would be interested in reading the self-doubt and moral dilemma of a woman living safely at home with her two children, protected by indulgent parents who even let her have slumber parties with her little friend and never come in without knocking and never look around when they do, so that this notebook is as safe from them as it would be locked in the vault of my heart. The only one I hide it from is Tony because he seems to look at me more and more often with my own eyes. A ten-year-old.
We read about people who have already been heard of in places that already exist.
I have a title for a novel—I suppose it could be a short story—“The Annals of War.” It’s out of a Hardy poem which isn’t about war at all but about a “maid and her wyte” plowing a field. But that is an eternal story. My wyte was a bouncer, and there wasn’t any field to plow. We lived in a world of concrete and other people’s flower beds. What’s ordinary isn’t eternal, not here and now for me.
Two women in a ring of flesh, as if they were continually giving birth to each other, may go back as far as Sappho, but as a symbol they have more in common with war than with peace, fission rather than fusion, destructive of all holy clichés: motherhood, the family maple syrup, our bacon wrapper flag!
Listen (as Mike would say), I want to record here how often I’m happy, simply happy. When Mike decided to go somewhere with us, I always dreaded it because having an audience increased his sense of responsibility. He shouted and cuffed so much I thought the boys would have permanently damaged eardrums. Now I really like the long summer days when we can go off together, just the three of us, today all day on the Gulf Island ferry. I didn’t take a picnic lunch, let them eat those bilious burgers and fries. Ferries are a marvelous way to travel with kids. There’s enough room for them to explore, two stories of decks and lounges and cafeterias. They play tag, hide-and-seek, race each other, occasionally rest and actually look at the landscape of islands, and they are as intent as the captain every time the ship docks at one.
“Victor is enchanted by sea gulls, which seem to him beautiful flying into the light, hilarious hitching a ride on the deck rail. Tony dreams off into the shoreline, asking of every white beach, “Do you think that’s Indian, Mom? Do you think there might be petroglyphs?”
I think how I’d like to take them around the world like this, though I don’t suppose a freighter crew and passengers would be as tolerant of their antics. For today going around this world was just fine. We counted twenty-eight sailboats, five tugs, twelve commercial fishing boats, eight other ferries, one carrying freight cars to Vancouver Island, and even saw a cruise ship coming back from Alaska. We followed it through Active Pass with a great sounding of ships’ horns. We spotted eagles, named trees: hemlock, Douglas fir, cedar, alder. Tony is very good at that. Victor likes shouting out “arbutus” over and over again until he is silly with repetition, and his spinny giggles seem to me as fine a hymn as any to those distinctively beautiful trees, red branches distributing weight in curious and graceful gestures to balance the tree on precarious rock. They all are in high white bloom this time of year, which will turn into Christmas clusters of red berries.
On days like this I feel both more with the children and more detached from them, a special kind of companionship which is part of the long rehearsal for letting them go. I am proud of Tony’s absentminded tending of toddlers, stopping to set upright one diapered fellow, just capsized by Victor’s passing speed. I suppose, like his father, Victor has such a smile he can afford to make waves. I’ve stopped wondering why I can love him so simply, like him, when he reminds me a dozen times a day of Mike. I’m just glad I do.
I suppose by the end of August I’ll be counting the days until school begins, thinking up places for them to go without me, but right now I feel rich with a summer to share with my children. My apprehensions and theirs, since Mike left, have made us nervously dependent on each other sometimes. Vic hurls himself into my lap as if the force of sitting on me would keep me where he needs me. Tony tells long stories he doesn’t want to come to an end so that he won’t have to get out of the car to go to school, so that I won’t turn out his light at night. Days like this give us back to each other. By the end of summer we should be healthily bored, longing to miss each other.
Dad has bought me a house. He’s such an instinctively tactful man I’ve rarely seen him so nervous about being misunderstood in his intentions. The house is an investment, nothing I need to live in if I don’t like it. It was a foreclosure sale, and he already held the second mortgage. I’m always welcome to stay here. This will always be my home, and the boys’. On the other hand, parents shouldn’t be possessive. Children—grown children—need a life of their own.
I finally had to stop him, telling him I couldn’t ask to move out and put the additional financial burden on him; it would seem too ungrateful when I’d been made to feel so welcome here. But if he was offering me a house, he was wonderfully generous, and I delighted.
“Well, your sisters both have houses. It seems only fair …”
It’s not the house I would have chosen. For one thing, it has no room to rent. There are only three bedrooms. And, of course, the boys will have to change schools in the fall. Tony is enthusiastic about that, Victor apprehensive with having to establish his territory all over again. The biggest drawback is that it’s lovely. It’s not really a question of not deserving it. Of course I don’t. I am still looking for some sort of punishment I could tolerate, and this house eliminates one more possibility. I don’t even have to share a bathroom with the boys. I have my own off the master bedroom, which has a view I like better than Mother and Dad’s, which disappears at night, except for the lights of an occasional ship, because they look out on the unpopulated mountains of Howe Sound. This house overlooks not only the sea and the mountains but the great spread of the city, which from this distance and angle looks real, even beautiful, not only all day but all night. It’s not a big house. The furniture I already have will look, for the first time, very much at home.
There’s a garden. I’ve never learned to garden, except for snipping off dead heads, watering, raking a few leaves, but it’s something I’ve always imagined I’d do, like having children.
We move next week.
“Why don’t we take the boys back with us, and then you and Roxanne can work as late as you like?”
I am getting used to Mother’s conspiring with me for my most nefarious pleasures, and I didn’t even feel guilty when Tony went silent with disappointment at not spending the first night in the new house and Vic said, “Oh, shit!” Because it came out only in a whisper, we all ignored it.
Roxanne and I had to go on working for a while simply to have advanced the order enough to have earned the pleasure of being alone in this lovely space. And I did want the kitchen settled to get up to in the morning. I could fix the boys’ rooms after Roxanne went to work and before I picked them up.
When we finally got into the bed I had occasionally so fearfully and guiltily taken her to last summer, I felt like a woman warrior who had finally reconquered her own kingdom, a bed big enough for acrobatic celebration in a house that could be filled with the noise of victory.
Later, standing naked at the window, looking down over a city I felt I owned, I wanted to propose to Roxanne, who stood beside me, her high small breasts like those of an Egyptian goddess, who is incongruously crowned by a bright aura of hair.
“Live with me,” I said. “Really live with me.”
For answer, she led me back to bed and made love so gently, so tenderly, with such reluctance to reach any climax that I could feel her wishing there were a way to go on and on at a pitch of sweetness that never had to end, but it grew higher and hotter until it ended for me in a crying joy, for her in a harsh noise in her throat.
We said nothing about it at a hurried breakfast this morning. She refused to let me drive her to work. Has she really made up her mind that it won’t work? Or do we have to go through a new period of separation we choose before we can choose to be together? I don’t know.
The boys are finally asleep in their own beds after a rackety day of overexcitement and testings, I too tired, too much in a daze of exhausted satisfaction, to be much help to either of them. I did tell Vic I’d warm the seat of his pants if he dared throw one thing out his window, which was his angry solution for being told to unpack and tidy instead of settling to play with every old toy he’d discovered. He knew I hadn’t either the energy or the investment, but he took my effort of attention in reluctant obedience. Tony simply asked, in a voice of almost adult weariness, how long moving took.
There’s something absolutely satisfactory in the people you love who get put to bed, kissed, and left to sleep alone. For tonight this enormous bed feels magnificently christened and not one bit too big for me alone. I stretch in every direction, yawn, sigh, feel beautiful and beautifully alone.
I’ve used every domestic excuse I could to avoid writing in this notebook, and with the move there have been enough of them to keep me silent for six weeks, long enough to make me wonder if scribbling here was one of the symptoms of my regressing into childhood. Last week I decided, if I were going to write, I should sit up properly at my desk and write something real. First I tried writing a story about Roxanne and me, but since part of taking myself seriously is trying to write something for sale, I changed Roxanne’s sex. She became Robert, still selling records and spending all his spare time documenting sound. To keep him from seeming effeminate, I had to make him restless with his job, as Roxanne rarely seems to be, and I had to make him take his real work not more seriously than Roxanne does but more … pretentiously, I suppose. He did think of himself as a composer. I didn’t have to write many pages before I saw that Robert was sounding more and more like Mike, and there would be absolutely no point in a woman’s choosing between a bouncer and a record clerk, between a closet sculptor and an unrecognized electronic music composer who, never having met John Cage, still called him “brother.” I tried to make Robert much better in bed, but a man to be as good as a woman in bed would have to be not only well instructed but impotent. The husband, page by page, became a paragon of manhood compared to Robert, and, though I suppose there are some women, not knowing any better, who would leave a Mike for a Robert, no one remotely like me would.
So I tried turning myself into a man and Mike into a woman, and that was, surprisingly, a great deal easier. I called myself Alan and was a moderately successful businessman of some sort. Alan came out sounding more flippant than my father, less cynical than Allen, with a male kindness I like in them both. Mike, as a woman, was amazingly attractive, perhaps because tending a house and children is so much more human a job than beating people up night after night. As a woman she could sculpt without driving ambition, seem a little silly to herself sometimes but not to other people. I got so interested in what our marriage would have been like that I forgot Roxanne entirely. As a businessman with a wife who wanted evenings for her own work, I didn’t have time for Roxanne, to say nothing of avocations like writing. I was looking after the kids.
I did not stumble on a way to write fiction, and here I am back in bed with my notebook. I think I feel about bed the way Mike does about the dining-room table; it shouldn’t be shut up for the day, reserved for nothing but sleeping and making love at strictly appointed times. Mike never liked the children in bed with us. The first time Victor climbed into bed with Roxanne and me and planted himself firmly between us, nearly comfortably jealous, Freud shuddered in my bones, but Roxanne laughed. Now, if she spends the night on the weekend, both kids bring everything from the Monopoly board to the soccer ball into bed with us in the morning. Colette wrote in bed.
I didn’t try to write when I was married to Mike. I must have had at least as much time to myself as I do now. I didn’t use it. I went to bed soon after the children did because I had to be up so early to feed Mike. Then half the time I’d have to barricade the kids into their rooms to go back to bed with Mike, get up twenty minutes later, occasionally stimulated enough to be frustrated, usually dry and sore and angry. All day long he was a sleeping presence, and, if the children’s noise woke him early, there would be hours of his irritation to get through before he went off to work.
I sleep much less now. I don’t seem to need it. I spend at least as much time in bed.
I wonder if most women who love each other don’t live together. The only ones we really know about are probably just the tip of the iceberg. Roxanne and I may be part of a vast majority of underwater women, making love in the back seat of a car on the way home from PTA meetings, in the morning after babies have been nursed and put down to nap. Why is illicit sex always a man on his lunch hour or on a business trip? Or a woman with the Fuller brush man. There are jokes about steam baths and public toilets as well, but there’s never an arched eyebrow about bridge games or meetings of Brownie leaders. Even with the women’s movement characterized as a bunch of bra-burning dykes, people still don’t believe women have sex with women except when they can’t get men or are man haters.
I wasn’t honest about turning myself into a man. I simply made up the sort of man I like and depend on. Mike made a perfectly good woman because he stayed heterosexual. As a man I would have been a guilt-ridden fairy, and I would have met Robert in a public toilet at the Bay and never even known his name.
In general I feel horribly sorry for men. In particular I either resent or admire them. I don’t even feel sorry for Joseph, though I think I probably should. I would feel terribly sorry for him if he were a woman. I understand what drives women crazy. Men aren’t supposed to go.
In this notebook, I touch my imagination as I do Roxanne’s body. Here? Here? Is this the beginning of something? Or this? Changing the sexes of everyone I know could be a device for seeing something more clearly, but I’m using it as a cover-up, not simply to hide my being lesbian but to keep my general attitudes and my specific feelings and behavior as far from meeting as possible since they can’t meet; they don’t even speak the same language.
That last entry seemed to me so silly at the time I haven’t written here for a month, but I have written. Now that Tony and Victor are back at school and can walk to school, I get them breakfast and come back to bed and work until lunchtime five days a week. I haven’t finished a story yet, but I’m beginning to see why even the beginnings that feel alive start to dissolve five or six pages in. I’m tightening characters into what they ought to feel for some point I’m trying to make, when most people live as far out of the tent of their ideas as I do. I asked Roxanne the other night if ideas got in her way. She said, yes, when she didn’t listen well enough or couldn’t hear. An idea should come like a bloom on a plant, a song out of a bird.
I’ve been toying with the idea of taking a writing class at UBC. Then I remembered a cooking class I took when I was ten. I couldn’t eat most of the group-concocted messes, but I was enchanted with something called candlestick salad—half a banana standing in a ring of pineapple, a curved slice of apple for a handle, a maraschino cherry on top for a flame, and mayonnaise dribbling down for melting wax. I’d only sliced the apple at school, but I decided to make the whole thing, five times over, for the family. The bananas I bought were too big for the holes in the pineapple. I had to squeeze and shove, and even then the much-handled bananas tilted uncertainly and looked gray from all my effort. Everyone did eat them, and I was fortunate to have a reticent and kindly father and no brothers to make obvious remarks. Mike would have been graphic! My mother said, “If you want to learn to cook, go into this kitchen and cook.”
So that’s what I’m doing now, hoping to get beyond the stage of candlestick salad sooner alone.
If Carlotta hadn’t written a note on her show invitation, I wouldn’t have gone. I’ve broken so many patterns, faiths, expectations in the last year, some even in the hope of consequences, that not turning up at her opening would have been an easy enough first, perhaps easier than going.
It is peculiar to go anywhere with Roxanne. No matter how much people gossip about our sex life, they don’t treat us as a couple. A man and a woman don’t have to live together to be paired. At their slightest indication, they are treated like Siamese twins. Roxanne and I are two single women at the same party, ten years older than most other single women there. Roxanne doesn’t look it. I do. We don’t look as if we came from the same generation, or perhaps planet. The surprise of this public separateness is always double-edged: I feel relieved not to be so exposed and at the same time very unprotected. Though Mike at these occasions could be so obnoxious I wanted to disown him, he was nevertheless my husband, the tallest and handsomest man in the room. He was better than a mirror for my vanity. Roxanne doesn’t disappear in a crowd; her hair is too extraordinary. The way she turns to anyone who speaks to her, like a flower to the sun, alarms rather than makes me jealous, but she isn’t really easily taken in. I know that. Still, she’s vulnerable, and I have no convention for protecting her either.
Carlotta, skeletal and composed, is very elegant in a long dress the color of fine ash. She more or less ignores her friends on these occasions, expecting them to do what she is doing: soft-selling to potential buyers. I link arms with a doctor friend of my father’s and say, “It must be your training to save lives. Have you noticed that, if it weren’t for the medical profession, a lot of Vancouver artists would starve?”
“There are some real collectors,” he agrees. “I can’t claim to be one, but I always have been interested in Carlotta.”
We look together at her X-rayed bones, arranged in tidal washes. He chooses her pelvic bone, stranded alone on an otherwise-barren beach.
“I should have given that to you,” Carlotta says, the first time she’s spoken to me since I arrived, and I have no idea what she means, peace offering or taunt.
“Too late. I’ve sold it,” I tell her.
We both turn away to other buyers. I don’t care about being reconciled with Carlotta. I want to be interesting enough to her so that there will always be at least brief moments between us, which never have worked and never will. I don’t mind that now, and, when I did, I didn’t know. Long friendships may be seasoned by unrequited love and betrayal. She hasn’t given up my perfume.
Allen and Pierre are here, as separate from each other as Roxanne and I are. Pierre has found Roxanne. They stand together in their transparent shirts, Pierre flashing his diamonds-are-forever ring like a newly engaged teenager, Roxanne’s pearl perfectly visible between her small, arrogant breasts. There are so many outlandish costumes here that they don’t seem out of place. Nor do Allen and I, who are not simply disguised as buyers, since I will help him choose the debris I watched Carlotta sketch with such moody accuracy on the beach that cold day last spring. As we stand discussing it, I am aware that my father’s doctor friend has noticed us and is probably deciding I am now half of a less striking but more appropriate couple. Allen does enjoy being one of the most elusive and eligible bachelors in Vancouver, whose name has been linked with a dozen different women, none of whom, he assures me, has had any more illusions or desires than I do. “All lesbian?” I ask, incredulous.
“My dear, I’m not a gossip.”
Now he admires my brown sapphires.
“They belonged to my grandmother.”
“A woman should wear nothing but real jewelry, preferably at least fifty years old.”
Allen’s attention is caught by a sound which has been repeating at long but fairly regular intervals, familiar as a friend’s voice, but I can’t place it until Allen excuses himself and goes over to Joseph. The sound is Joseph’s laugh, like a warning buoy in that sea of people. He looks less seedy than when I saw him last, but he’s still not a good color, and the vacant hopefulness on his face makes me afraid he won’t be able to remember Allen’s name. Allen is inviting Joseph and his wife back for drinks after the opening, as I have been invited, with Roxanne.
I wish they weren’t coming. I wish Carlotta had other friends, a lover to go off with, and Roxanne and I could go home to bed. I don’t realize, until after we’re there, that I must not trust Roxanne to understand what she understands perfectly well and can deal with.
Carlotta is elated by the success of her show, jokes about being the richest rag-and-bone woman in the city. She’s free of financial worry for six months now and has a couple of good commissions. There is no one who plays big frog in little pond with more attractive irony. Roxanne and Allen are being a good audience, Allen because he plays her quipping game with her, Roxanne, as always, because she listens. I watch Carlotta contemplate Roxanne’s breasts, the pearl which Carlotta touches suddenly as if it were something she herself is wearing, a gesture so uncertain and sexual that it makes me catch my breath.
I am standing with Ann Rabinowitz and turn to her to shield her from something that is shocking only to me, who, in imagination, quite cavalierly changes the sexes of all my friends but never their sexual partners. I feel prudish and silly. There is a spot of milk on Ann’s blouse. My own breasts tighten in sympathy, in pleasure. I ask her about the baby. Behind her glasses her eyes are very tender. This is the first time I’ve ever talked with her, and I feel she’s being very careful of me, a manner she may have developed for Joseph, a gentle testing of what I can take. I mention Mike casually to indicate that I’m not fragile.
“He was very kind to me, a good friend.”
“I’m glad,” I say. “Joseph has always been a very good friend to Mike.” And I like admitting that without my own selfish reservations. “How’s Joseph getting along? He does look better.”
“He is. He has trouble with his memory. It makes his teaching very tiring. But he loves the baby. We all do.”
“I’d love to see her.”
“Then come over some morning. I bathe her around ten o’clock.”
And then feed her? I have such a desire to see those milk-filled breasts, to watch their being sucked by a hungry girl baby, that in this moment I wish I’d let Mike talk me into one more baby not because I’m envious, not because I want another child but because I want to share the experience with Ann, its marvelous sensuality.
“Why are you the only one not in purdah with your breasts?” I asked Roxanne later, in bed.
She laughed at my lust, and so did I, because she sucked me until I was Ann, until I was everywoman, brimming with milk, frothing, spilling over, an orgasmic fountain.
After Mike and I went to a party, our separately stored-up lusts burst out as accusations of narrow jealousy so that, if he finally did fuck me, it was in assertive ownership and revenge. Roxanne gathers up the details of the evening, hers and mine, and takes them home to be opened and shared, like the presents they were meant to be.
“I’d die at an orgy,” I said just after dawn.
“Perhaps.”
“This is an orgy, at least four of us in this bed all night.”
Lovely, as long as it is fantasy. Roxanne knows that. I think it may be something she regrets about me and hopes I’ll outgrow. I can regret it a little myself until I am cooking breakfast for two small boys and wonder at such depravity.
Carlotta is doing a portrait of Roxanne. Carlotta phoned and asked my permission.
“You must ask Roxanne. It has nothing to do with me.”
“Her body is so much like mine, I thought I might break the narcissistic spell—or extend it. I’ve already done a couple of male portraits that aren’t bad, one of Joseph particularly, but I feel much less certain about doing women. If I could do Roxanne, I might try you. If you would.”
Carlotta, as a painter, can do that, simply borrow any friend she wants to study without apology or subterfuge. I’ve done a portrait of Joseph, too, but he’s a twenty-five-year-old girl who cracks up after an abortion. About the only thing left of Joseph is the laugh, which Roxanne has also recorded. She used it in a short piece called “Similes,” which has single notes of all sorts of instruments as well as car horns, buoys, bells. Carlotta can’t paint his laugh. A portrait can suggest a great deal but reveal nothing. What, after all, is a cruel mouth? Just that, if I write it down. But in a face actually represented, unless it is a cartoon, all the features are as ambiguous as those of any stranger—unless, of course, you actually know the person. Will I be able to tell, by looking at Roxanne’s portrait, how aroused she is by the exercise? Since it will go on for weeks, perhaps months, Roxanne will go through every sort of mood. Carlotta will catch what she wants. So, whether they’re her own bones or someone else’s face, Carlotta’s paintings will go on saying more about Carlotta.
And my writing? Well, here in this notebook, of course. I haven’t really tried to present anyone but me and often at my least presentable. Carlotta has yet to paint herself masturbating with one hand, painting with the other. Maybe she doesn’t. Obviously her deciding to do portraits is like my attempting stories to get outside myself, but I don’t think I have the right to use my friends for that, except in unrecognizable fragments. If I actually tried to do a word portrait of Roxanne, I couldn’t simply catch a passing expression on her face; I’d have to know what it meant. And since words don’t trap a subject in space and time, she wouldn’t have to be alone or thirty-one years old. I could write something as long as a novel about her, fleshing her out with all her past experience so that she would be a person rather than simply a presence in this notebook, a snatch of dialogue or a yellow tank top in a story.
Major biographical clue: any character in my fiction who wears a tank top is sexually attractive, even though I wouldn’t be caught dead in one.
A portrait painter doesn’t have to deal with anything but the physical presence. A writer, like a lover, has to deal with the past, with all the acts of the past, and that’s impossible. Yet the minute you start paring away at the clutter of events to get at essential experience, you’re probably doing the equivalent of removing essential teeth for the line of the jaw. Maybe leaving thirty-one years undisturbed inside the sack of skin and concentrating on the shape and texture of that sack is more possible, as making love is more possible than loving. That is, I know Roxanne when we’re making love. My tongue by now can call the farthest outpost of her nervous system to attention. I can consume everything alien until her mind is purified of everything but what I am doing and about to do. But do I know her at all when desire hasn’t emptied her of a self that remembers, experiences, and grows quite apart from me, and always will?
I don’t even know why she isn’t living here, but that may be because I don’t think about it. I suspect she isn’t living here because I haven’t made it clear that I want her to. I am not sure I do. So, when I stop to think, I learn something about myself rather than about Roxanne, except that she is tactful.
When we are making love, I am a female multitude with an appetite so various that I can be a hundred women, each a new pleasure to her, but the lovelier the night has been, the more I want time to myself, time when I am not waiting for her to come home, wondering where she is. Then I can think of her as a person instead of the obsession she is to me.
Pierre’s history is an important part of his attractiveness to Allen, who is more apt to dwell on him as an abandoned child and street orphan than on his transparent shirts and tank tops. That Roxanne was a foster child is important to Pierre, a way they make common cause. For me she might have been born full grown the night of my thirtieth birthday. What is childlike about her has nothing to do with her childhood; it is an essential attention she’s never lost. Carlotta can hardly help catching that in her face, for if she isn’t paying attention to Carlotta, she will be to something or someone else.
Roxanne didn’t call me; she called Allen.
“She didn’t want to bother you. I told her I didn’t mind bothering you at all.”
At first I said I couldn’t go and leave the boys alone. What if Victor woke up and needed something?
“There are parts of the world where people Victor’s age are supporting their old mothers. Tony’d look after him. Leave a note.”
“Can’t you just go and bring her here?”
“Yes.”
I responded more to the anger in Allen’s voice than to any sense of responsibility of my own to go to the police station. I hadn’t had time to take in what had happened to her until after I’d hung up the phone and began to wait for him to get here. Once I’d written Tony a note and put on my coat, there was nothing else to do.
I simply couldn’t understand how she could have been caught breaking into the store where she works. She has a key. She often goes down there at night to work.
When Allen finally arrived, he explained, “I didn’t say she had broken in—I said she was charged with breaking and entering and theft over one hundred dollars.”
“Why?”
“Because she was down there running half the tape recorders in the basement.”
“But she does that a couple of times a week and has for years. It’s the main reason she likes the job.”
“And never bothered to ask permission?”
“I don’t know. I don’t suppose she thought of it as doing anything wrong. I mean, she’s sometimes wished she could take me down to hear, but she thought, since I wasn’t an employee, it might not be right.”
“It isn’t even a Maoist plot, but it might as well be as far as the authorities are concerned. I can understand why Roxanne has no sense of private property, but surely by now a little capitalist responsibility could have rubbed off from you. You don’t really think all the toys in the world belong to you.”
“Why are you so angry?”
“Because you don’t take care of her, for God’s sake!”
“She’s a grown woman, Allen.”
“She’s no more a grown woman than you are!”
“I am the mother of two real children. I’m not about to pretend she’s another. I don’t happen to want her to grow up and leave home.”
We couldn’t share the anxiety except by fighting with each other. By the time we arrived at the station, I felt Allen was taking me there not so much for Roxanne’s sake as for punishment because in some way I hadn’t anticipated the danger she was in and prevented this from happening.
Allen’s lawyer was already there when we arrived. Allen was so familiar with the procedure I wondered how many times he’d bailed Pierre out of trouble Allen had not been able to prevent in all his wisdom and self-righteousness. I had a sudden image of Roxanne as someone quite alien to me, a hardened juvenile delinquent who might be caught any night she wasn’t with me, breaking into buildings, stealing quantities of expensive equipment, or out cruising the streets like a prostitute. The infidelity—mine—shocked me, but I couldn’t shake it. In my own safe house and all the way down to the jail I could be sure of what had happened and why. Once in that wretched public place I was exposed, reduced, with nothing to do but shake, while the men played their power games against each other, Roxanne the prize.
When she was finally produced, she looked like one of those mechanical dolls whose spring has been wound too tight and broken, rigid and still. I wanted to run to her, embrace her or shake her or whatever it took to bring her back to life again, but I was as rigid with terror as she was. Allen took her arm, and then he took mine and steered us both out of the building to the car. Roxanne answered his battery of questions very softly with no more than a word or two each time.
“And who was it who found you? A night watchman?”
“The owner.”
“The owner?” I asked, indignant. “But he’s a friend of my father’s!”
“Why didn’t you think of that two hours ago?” Allen demanded.
“Don’t get your father into this,” Roxanne pleaded.
“Roxanne,” Allen said, “I hate to face you with the facts of life this late at night, but we’re talking about the difference between a jail sentence of a couple of years and dropped charges. Would your father be willing to talk with him, Alma?”
“I’m sure he would.”
Dad was able to make the store owner listen to reason. All the charges were dropped the next day but Roxanne is out of a job, and Mother is a little more formal and dubious about her than she was, giving me one of my attacks of respectability, and I question Roxanne not like a lover but like a lawyer for the prosecution.
Roxanne assures me that she has served time in jail only on morals offenses, never for offenses against property. She served her first term when she was fifteen in a juvenile correction center in some place like Kamloops or Nelson. After that she was put in a foster home where people are paid eight hundred dollars a month to deal with incorrigibles. Roxanne was in and out of jail until she was twenty-one and became a consenting adult. After that, she was careful not to associate with anyone under age, not only to keep herself out of trouble but not to risk jail for someone who had never been.
“They’re not good places,” she says.
I am appalled. I behave as if I’d just discovered that the maid had syphilis. I don’t want someone with a criminal record around the children. I make excuses not to ask her to the house. Since she never questions or protests, it isn’t difficult, now that she’s not working, to see her in her room during the day. Simply because I’m scandalized by her, I am more obsessed by her than ever. I grill her with sexual questions. I want to hear exactly how women intimidate, rape, keep in bondage other women. I know I’m making her miserable. I can’t seem to help it. I want her to act out all her own sexual humiliations on me. I beg to be abused. For I’ve had a revelation: the punishment is the same as the crime, and I am in a frenzy for it. She won’t.
“It’s my past, Alma. I can’t give it to you any more than you can give me yours.”
Often now, when I arrive, she has the same rigid, blank look she had that night at the jail, and again I feel she is a doll wound too tight, broken, and I am an alarmed and petulant child who wants to shake, push, wind tighter the toy I’ve already broken.
Then she’s not at home, two days, three days, a week. I track her down, sometimes at Carlotta’s, sometimes at Pierre’s. I feel their reluctance to let me in.
“I thought you said you were looking for a job today.”
She shrugs. Pierre sulks, wanting Roxanne to himself because Allen is again out of town. Carlotta won’t let me look at the portrait. She won’t let me stay around while she works. Daily the wall around Roxanne is getting higher. She might as well have been sent to prison. I know I am building it, and I can’t stop. She has become the prison of my need, and she won’t let me in, angel at the gate with flaming sword instead of welcoming jailor. No, just something I’ve broken and can’t mend and want to smash and want to mourn and want back. Roxanne! Roxanne!
I haven’t seen Roxanne for a month. I haven’t seen any of them, except for Ann Rabinowitz, who doesn’t seem to me one of them. I went first because Joseph was spending all of the Christmas holiday in the hospital, and Mike is no longer around to be the friend he was to Ann last time. I watched her bathe and then nurse the baby. We talked about the care of cracked nipples. Then I asked them all over for dinner, though we agreed the children were just the age to detest each other. But the baby is a real novelty to the boys, and since the girls are so good with her and also just that much older than Vic and Tony, the boys are impressed with them, too.
I feel useful and wholesome around Ann, companionably matronly, and I like her. We’ve been slow to exchange real confidences, she probably because she hasn’t wanted to burden me with hers, I because I didn’t believe she could understand mine. Then this afternoon she gave me a surprising opening.
“Mike told me you’d had some sort of breakdown.”
“He did? What else did he say?”
“Not much. He thought it had alienated you from him. And he said you had one friend who had stayed close to you.”
“Did he tell you I was a lesbian?”
“No,” Ann said.
“Well, that’s the breakdown, and that’s the close friend. I was in love with another woman.”
“And you aren’t now?”
“Yes … no. I’m not seeing her right at the moment. I’ve been so obnoxious I may not be able to see her again.”
“Why?”
“I think it must be more important for me to be guilty than anything else in the world, as if my life depended on it. Have you ever felt that way at all?”
Ann nodded.
“Do you feel guilty when Joseph’s sick?”
Two tears, like premature bifocals, caught on the lower rims of her glasses.
“No, I feel angry.”
“At him?”
“Not exactly. At the pattern of suffering, I guess. I try to believe it has some point.”
“Is that why you had the baby?”
“Yes—and why I named her Joy.”
“Mike wanted a daughter.”
“Joseph didn’t. He may have been right. Sometimes I think it’s a kind of joy that shakes him apart. He tries to live his life in camouflage, which doesn’t really help because, if it doesn’t see him, he still sees it.”
“What?”
“Wonder. He seems to be able to deal with it only when he’s irrational.”
“Do you ever feel crazy?”
She shook her head, and then she smiled. “I’ve felt wonderful.”
“And you can cope with that,” I said, laughing.
“Oh, yes.”
“Well, apparently I can’t. I wreck it.”
“Maybe we all do,” Ann said. “Maybe that’s the pattern.”
I share Ann’s anger at that possibility. Perhaps it’s time I felt guilty about those things I can do something about. Correction may be just a polite word for punishment, but it might also help.
Carlotta wouldn’t come to dinner last night; neither would Pierre. Allen came by himself. It has always puzzled me that of all the people I know, Allen is the one I find easiest to talk to. He puts so many people off with his flippant cynicism, though it’s usually directed at himself.
“This was supposed to be peace and reconciliation night,” I said to him, “but I’m glad you’ve come alone.”
“I never turn down dinner with a handsome woman,” he said, “particularly if she has delicious sons.”
“Actually Vic and Tony are at their grandparents’ tonight.”
He sighed.
Once we’d settled with drinks and Allen had paid the appropriate number of compliments to the flowers, the fire, my hair (which I’ve had cut), I said, “I want to talk about love—honestly.”
“You’re too ambitious. Only writers talk like that.”
“I am trying to write.”
“Oh, my God, Alma, not you! How long has this been going on? Why didn’t you tell me at once? Maybe I can still help.”
He did such a parody of the male friend advising abortion that I had to laugh, and his mock horror—real enough underneath his style—made it easier for me to have finally confessed to someone other than Roxanne.
“I need to do it.”
“But I offered to get you a decent, quite interesting job. You go right on confusing freedom and bondage. Freedom is money, Alma, not art.”
“Well, you manage both.”
“I do not. I have never pretended to be an artist.”
“You are one just the same.”
“I’d rather talk about love, if those are my only two choices.”
“Good. So would I. How is Roxanne?”
“Working at a drugstore, one of the few that don’t stock tape recorders.”
“Where is she doing her real work?”
“She isn’t. She says she doesn’t feel like it.”
“I’ve been working harder than I ever have in the last month.”
“Self-justification.”
“What?”
“That’s all art is, you know, for most anyway.”
“We were going to talk about love.”
“So we were.”
“Would she see me again?”
“Of course. She’s the same fool she was a month ago, only slightly less miserable.”
“I don’t know what I was doing.”
“Shall I tell you? You were having a long, self-indulgent tantrum about your sullied love. I took you down to that jail to give you a taste of the reality Roxanne lives with. I thought it was time. I was wrong.”
“How often have you had to bail Pierre out?”
“Once … after he’d been picked up in the men’s room at The Bay. I took him back to the diamond department and bought him that ridiculous ring. You don’t seem to believe in Roxanne’s innocence.”
“I should have bought her a … tape recorder?”
“As a start. You shouldn’t punish other people for what only you feel guilty about. Roxanne doesn’t feel guilty about loving you any more than Pierre feels guilty about loving me, and if someone as self-loathing as I am can cope with it, certainly you can learn to.”
“How?”
“Where are you most likely to find your self-respect? Mine’s in making an adequate amount of money—more than adequate, enough to buy off my guilt in ways that please Pierre.”
“In writing, I suppose.”
“Well, then, all right. It isn’t that either of them needs buying off, but at least you could live with Roxanne. That would spare her something.”
“You think I ought to earn money and support her.”
“Of course I do. I’ve been telling you that for months.”
“Why me? Why not Roxanne?”
“With a jail record and a grade eight education? Are you kidding?”
“I haven’t ever even supported myself.”
“Think of it as noblesse oblige. That should suit you better than women’s liberation.”
“I don’t feel all that superior.”
“Being a snob has nothing to do with feeling superior.”
“What has it to do with?”
“Being afraid. You shouldn’t be afraid of Roxanne. She’s very gifted and very gentle.”
“Are she and Pierre having an affair?”
“What has that got to do with anything?” Allen demanded.
“I don’t know,” I said, and got up to put dinner on the table.
It had never had anything to do with anything before, but, once Allen started talking about money, I began to think of Roxanne as an object which should come with an exclusive lifetime guarantee, very like Mike’s image of me. It was the one mistake I had not already made.
“If only you were a man,” Allen said as he sat down to eat, “you’d understand what I’m trying to say.”
Allen does not know how often I play that game. If I were a man, I would probably be in love with Ann or Allen. For the first time my lot as myself seems less complicated and more possible. All I really need is nerve.
All my reconciliation scenes were extravagantly penitent and entirely sexual. The reconciliation itself took place over the phone yesterday morning. When Roxanne arrived for dinner, the boys greeted her as if she’d been away on a long trip. She brought them a game involving Ping-Pong balls and cones, which they played all evening. I didn’t rush them off to their rooms. Even after they went to bed, Roxanne and I sat in the living room, having a drink.
“I guess I should make the boys’ lunches before we go to bed.”
“I’ll need one, too. I’ll make the soup.”
The sacramental moments in real life come over lunch boxes on kitchen counters. The ordinary for the reconciled is holy. This house is going to have two cooks and no master.