Michael and Sharon Fortune are too young to have ever seen Lenny Bruce in performance, but they have vintage editions of Bruce’s records, on which he denies vulgarity in anything sexual. There are no dirty words. And there are no dirty acts, except for the insidious ones of social injustice.
At the end of one record there’s something about a flasher, a man who opens his raincoat and displays a bunch of lilacs instead of a penis. Like the trick of a gentle magician, Sharon thought the first time she heard it, and the visual image has stayed with her. Because she is an artist, all words convert finally into pictures; even her dreams are a silent, colorful banner of visual events.
Michael interviews elderly welfare applicants, and Sharon believes he is a vessel for language, a Steinberg cartoon figure composed of the hard-luck stories of strangers and his own urgent, unspoken words.
He’s only the second lover she’s ever had. The first was a prose poet named Beau Carpenter, and she met Michael on the rebound from that affair. The difference between the two men astounded her. Beau had been so authoritative, and she such a willing follower. She would wait in the wings of their bed for her cue to enter, apprentice to a master in a complicated acrobatic act. Not that Michael was passive. But he always made room for a fair, healthy share of her aggression, and sometimes Sharon was surprised to find herself raucously sexual.
With Beau, she had affected silence because he required it. After two years of marriage to Michael, she still questions him as if she were the social worker, and he had come to her for aid. He’d had the worst childhood she could imagine. And he spoke about it, when asked, with an almost detached calm. The family had lived in the Midwest. His mother was the breadwinner, a practical nurse who traveled around, staying in other people’s houses to care for newborn infants. His father, once a Linotype operator, was housebound with severe emphysema. The rooms were clogged with his breathing. Michael was their only child, an easy target for his father’s maniacal revenge on the world.
When Michael was about four or five years old, he told her, his father held his small hands over the open gas jets on the stove until his palms were scorched, until they cooked and blistered, a lesson on the dangers of playing with matches.
Sharon had cried out in an agony of compassion. “I’d like to kill him!”
“Too late,” Michael said. “He’s already dead.”
“Well, what did your mother do about it?”
“She wasn’t there. I guess she was out on a case.”
“But she must have seen your hands when she came home.”
Michael shrugged. “I don’t remember,” he said. “Maybe they were healed by then, I don’t know. She came back every few weeks, dying for sleep, and headed for bed.”
“Terrible,” Sharon said, and he thought she meant for his mother.
“Yeah. She used to wake up and she couldn’t remember where she was. She’d forget sometimes if a baby was a boy or a girl until she diapered it again.”
“You must have hated your father.”
“Yes.”
Sharon stared at him. “Michael, why are you smiling?” she asked.
His mother died suddenly, of a stroke, and Michael flew to Dayton to take care of the funeral. While he was there, he rented a car and then decided to drive it all the way home. When the phone rang that night, she thought it was Michael, sleepless and lonely, calling from a motel room. But it was their lawyer friend Dick Schaffner.
She was working, finishing the last in a series of political cartoons. She clamped the receiver between her chin and her shoulder and continued to ink the drawing in front of her. Then she said, “What? What?” as if the connection had been broken or her hearing had failed, so that Dick was forced to shout the details at her. As she listened, she scribbled nervous markings all over her drawing, ruining it.
Dick told her to try to keep things in perspective, that it was pretty complicated, in a legal sense. “And it’s not even supposed to be really sexual, you know,” he said.
Of course she knew, and felt both tenderness and irritation at his affectionate condescension.
But despite everything, she clung to the idea that it was sexual, part of the whole damn business of bodies to which all psychic suffering can probably be traced. What else is it if a man takes his prick out in a public place and invites a strange woman to look at it?
She was alternately cold with shock and blazing with humiliation. She had been this way once before, when Beau left her for that other woman. The analogy was all wrong, but she felt stubbornly logical. This was a kind of jilting, too. She had become as ludicrous as those poor women who wrote desperate letters to advice columnists. It seemed to her that men never wrote to them for counsel in the love department, anymore than they asked anyone for directions.
Now Sharon is flying to Ohio because she urgently wants to go, and because Dick said that the presence of an attractive, supportive wife is invaluable in cases like this. He added, half-seriously, that if she were pregnant or could muster up a kid or two for the trip, it would even be better. Would she like to rent one of his? His office was going to make travel arrangements for her, and he would follow on a later flight and meet her there.
Sharon wishes that Dick was beside her now, holding her hand in one of his bear’s paws and shuffling through official papers with the other. Instead, she has the aisle seat next to a man with tortuously styled hair, who is drinking a Scotch sour and staring out the window as if he were communing with Saint-Exupéry. Sharon has refused a drink; in a couple of hours she will be in a motel room where she can smoke one of the joints she has hidden in a cigarette pack, and be soothed.
Across the aisle an elderly woman, dressed resolutely in black—dress, scarf, stockings, shoes—is asleep. Italian, probably, or maybe Greek. She looks like a billboard for death. Why is it always the women in those places who are assigned the work of perpetual mourning?
After Beau left her, Sharon had plunged into mourning, too. Not inaccurately, or even unkindly, he predicted a full, formal year of grieving for her. She’d wondered if this was based on his own past experience or whether it was an absolute standard for female behavior in that kind of situation. That’s how naïve she was in those days. But obediently she began to grieve, to start to get it over with. In a few weeks, she was able to think about him again. It wasn’t that grief had become less, but that it had become different, moving up into the intellect, away from the body, from those aching places, the shoulders and the fingertips.
She is trying to focus on Michael, and it’s his body she thinks of first, or bodies in general, a commuter’s crowd of them in which his appears looking reasonable, if mortal. Cautiously, she imagines him clothed: the singing corduroy of his trousers as he walks, that yellow shirt. Sharon remembers the work of the cartoonist after whom she’d first fashioned herself stylistically, and who undressed everyone in the mind’s eye of his characters. She does that sometimes, too, in life. Not for the sake of humor, though, or even for democracy; there is no democracy anyway. Sharon is tall and the woman Beau went off with is petite, and so on.
But she is unable to undress Michael now, must keep him protectively, lawfully covered. Instead she considers what has happened, what might happen next. The night before, after she had recovered a little, she called Dick back. Her voice was tremulous and uncertain, but her questions were not. “Why didn’t he call me, too? Did he say, did he actually say that he did it?”
Dick sighed deeply and Sharon realized that it was very late and that he was probably in bed beside Anna. “We didn’t go into it, Sharon,” he said. “It’s never a good idea, on the telephone. And he was allowed only one brief call, like in the movies. You know how that goes; they always call their mouthpiece.”
“But why can’t he be released until the arraignment? Isn’t that what usually happens?” She hesitated and her voice fell into a hoarse whisper. “He doesn’t have a record or anything, does he?”
“No, babe, no. Of course not. It’s just that his timing was lousy for this particular place. There’s been a series of assorted complaints over the past month or so. So they’ve invented a few extra charges to hold him on.”
“That’s not fair!” she cried.
“Fair!” Dick said. “Are you kidding? What does fair have to do with anything? Don’t worry, Sharon. Come on. We’ll get them to drop them all. We’ll get the best local counsel. Everything will be okay.”
“Did he explain that he was only driving through? Did he tell them about his mother?”
“Yeah, he explained everything. But the locals are still uneasy. And suspicious. They’ve all just buried their mother, and they don’t know our Mikey the way we do.”
But now Sharon didn’t know him, either. “What kind of complaints?” she asked.
“What?”
“You said before—assorted complaints.”
“Oh. An attempted rape in the Laundromat. Kids talking about a guy who hangs around the schoolyard.”
“Oh, God, it wasn’t a child, was it?” Sharon has always been sternly moralistic about what adults do to children. She might even have to cast the first stone herself. She remembered a drawing she did for a newspaper decrying inadequate security in city schools, after a child had been molested in a stairwell. Her version of the molester lurked in shadows, a grotesque, subhuman figure.
But Dick reassured her. “No, no. I told you. A grown woman.” He said it in the condoning way one says “consenting adults,” and he added, “In the parking lot of a supermarket.”
“She could be lying, couldn’t she? Or hallucinating?”
“Sure,” Dick said, but his tone was palliative, and the details finally stunned her into silence.
“Are you okay?” Dick asked. “Listen, do you want me to bring Anna over to spend the rest of the night?”
And then Anna took the phone and asked a few gentle questions in a sleepy voice.
“No, I’m fine,” Sharon said. “Really.” And she did feel better, not only because there wasn’t a child involved, but because the situation was becoming less real again. Men, other men, did that sort of thing in subway passages, or in dark alleyways. The parking lot of a supermarket seemed foolishly domestic for such an unnatural gesture.
Yet suddenly she pictured Michael unfolding to his height from the car. He was stopping for cigarettes, probably, on the way to a motel. And she pictured the woman, also, midthirties, darkly pretty, wheeling one of those recalcitrant shopping carts, or juggling too many grocery bags and trying to find the car keys, and thinking of dinner and what to do about her elderly widowed father, and recalling a fleeting lust for her minister, and then seeing Michael.
Public nudity still surprises Sharon. When she was sixteen, she took a life drawing class. She was late for the first session and arrived after the model was arranged in her pose on the platform. How flagrant her nakedness seemed; she loomed so large Sharon could not fit her onto the newsprint page. Sometimes her feet were missing, sometimes her head. After several poses, the model put on a robe and wandered among the easels smoking a cigarette. Sharon felt embarrassed and apologetic, as if she were witnessing the aftermath of the primal scene. And she knew again the frustration of not knowing anything, with the underlying fear that it was not due to her youth, but to some fatal flaw that would keep her from the world’s mysteries forever. She smoked one of the model’s cigarettes and said pretentious things about form and space. Later the bare breasts stared at her with contempt.
The plane dips slightly and Sharon presses back against a wave of vertigo. The man in the window seat looks at her inquiringly, and she shakes her head and shuts her eyes.
Oh, consider passion for a moment! Dick has assured her that Michael’s is not a crime of passion. And once she couldn’t wait to agree with Beau that it all begins in the head and then sends its orders rushing down through the nerves and into the bloodstream, arousing the troops, those mercenaries. But when he told her that the first thing he admired about her was her eyesight, she was bewildered, wanting only to be wanted in more conventional ways. Why not admire her blondeness, which was everywhere, or her buttocks, which were worthy of praise?
But soon she learned to feel cherished and, covering each eye in turn, read aloud to him the small print of a sign on the other side of the Williamsburg Bridge. Acting further in kind, she told him that his feet pleased her. Vision and stride. An uncommon attraction, but stirringly original.
All right, she decides, forget passion. It’s really comfort she’s trying to think of in bodily terms, anyway. How each of us starts out bravely alone, lover and beloved at once, and works toward the ultimate collaboration, that other serious presence in the darkness. Is it that she always fails in this connection, or that Michael is hopelessly wounded, inconsolable?
When the flight attendant comes down the aisle offering newspapers, Sharon takes one. But she cannot concentrate on the headlines, on the larger, shared tragedies of fires, famine, and politics. She reads a small article on an inside page. It says that scientists have discovered that the bones of fat people are especially dense and sturdy. As she reads it, she thinks of Michael and his thinness. She imagines his bones (a murderous urge and a longing), and they are as delicate and as porous as coral, yet unable to resist the loping curve of his posture. His breastbone is an archer’s bow.
Early that morning, Sharon had awakened abruptly and in a panic. “I can’t, I can’t,” she said, not sure what she meant, but feeling more desperate for distraction than for interpretation. Thought was treacherous. Getting out of bed might require major effort. To delay it she took a magazine from the nightstand and opened it at random to an interview with Sartre, by Simone de Beauvoir. He said, “We yield our bodies to everyone, even beyond the realm of sexual relations: by looking, by touching.”
Tell that to the judge, she thinks now, wishing she could be convinced of it herself. Maybe she will be when she is in her seventies, like Sartre.
Her seatmate gets up to go to the bathroom. His legs brush over Sharon’s and he murmurs, “Excuse me,” but he winks.
When he returns, she rises to let him pass.
“Business or pleasure?” he asks, and she looks at him blankly.
“In Columbus,” he says.
“I’m meeting my husband there. Not really there, farther east, on the outskirts. His mother just died,” she adds, and is horrified to realize she is smiling.
He smiles back. “What does your husband do?”
Do? He’s in zippers. He pops flies. He shows his choice goods to discriminating shoppers.
“He’s a social worker,” she says, “with the city’s welfare system.”
The man continues to smile, not registering her answer. He’s had a second drink, and maybe still another in the john from a flask, and she can see that he has a buzz on. He leans back in his seat and faces her intimately, as if they are sharing a bed pillow. He is wearing the kind of suit she most dislikes, with very large lapels and contrasting piping, and he has exaggerated sideburns. He looks like a member of a barbershop quartet, or like Captain Kangaroo. Yet she understands that he imagines himself attractive to her, sexy.
She goes through the mind process that removes his offending clothing, a piece at a time. Off with the jacket, with the busy tie. Off with the shiny synthetic shirt that clutches his bull neck in a stranglehold. She drops his trousers and they fall to his ankles, clanking keys and loose change everywhere. Impatiently, she pulls off his stacked-heel shoes, his socks, his plaid boxers, even the chains that protect his slack and hairy chest from evil with amulets from three separate cultures. But when he sits there at last, heavy-eyed with seduction and whiskey, the seat belt strapped across his puckered navel, just above his nodding cock, his body is as absurd to her as his clothing. Quickly, she dresses him again and turns away.
Michael always undressed without shyness or seduction, a practical business before bath or bed, as if he were unconscious of how well he was made, or of his easy athletic grace. And Sharon resisted what she considers a crude tendency toward voyeurism. He isn’t the first man she’s ever seen, though, and maybe he won’t be the last.
Once it was her goal in life. Father and grandfather dead before memory, she lived in a household of females: grandmother, aunt, mother, older sister. They undressed openly, too, offering Sharon the various stages of her future, and she was interested, but of course she wasn’t satisfied. Word was out.
She had seen statues of men at the Brooklyn Museum, budding in marble, bloodless and chaste. Their eyes were absent, too. At the circumcision of a neighbor’s infant when Sharon was four, someone turned her face to the wall at the last minute. “Don’t look,” the woman said, a good beginning for a fairy tale with moral significance if Sharon had not been consistently obedient, had not shielded those 20/20 eyes and counted until it was over. But just before the ritual, she watched closely and saw that the baby’s parts were still wrinkled from passage, and she heard him cry piteously, as if he were intolerably afflicted.
And she had a male dog for a while during childhood. He was a small mixed breed with a coarse brown coat and an affectionate nature. She called him Prince. She would take him into bed in the morning and stroke his belly and ears, and he would loll, sighing. Once, while she petted him, a thin red tube emerged from that hair-tipped pinch of flesh with the startling clarity of her sister’s first lipstick. Sharon picked him up quickly and roughly and put him on the floor. “Bad dog!” she scolded, uncoached, and Prince growled at her.
The first naked man she ever saw was a friend’s father, after Sharon slept at their house one night in the summertime. He must have been about thirty-five or forty years old. Sharon opened the door to her friend’s parents’ bedroom in the morning, mistaking it for the door to the bathroom. There was that particularly early stillness, the clockwork pause before life resumes. The mother was asleep, and the father was just getting up. He stood, in profile to Sharon, stretching his arms overhead, and then sat down on the edge of the bed, holding a pair of shorts in one hand. He seemed to be daydreaming.
He was a depressed man. Years later he committed suicide. In those days, though, he was only eccentric and moody, given to sardonic remarks that were hurtful to others. Sharon was afraid of him in an instinctive way; he had never been cruel to her, had hardly noticed her.
But in that quick and brilliant moment—she is sure she remembers sunlight in the bedroom—she saw his melancholy in the droop of his genitals, and felt a rush of knowledge and of anguish.
She hurries from the plane as if she is going to be met by friends or loved ones. Other passengers are greeted and she moves past their pleasured cries and embraces to an exit from the terminal and a taxi.
She gives the driver the name of the motel and sits back.
“Well, hello, hello!” he says, and bending one sunburned and tattooed arm onto the ledge of his open window, he pulls away from the curb with the tires screeching.
In the past, Sharon had been mildly annoyed by this kind of silly attention from men, the construction-worker syndrome of whistles, catcalls, and general showing off. It was a kind of harmless, universal foreplay. But now it seems like such Stone Age behavior, one step beyond chest-thumping. She feels much worse than annoyed––imposed upon. Who asked for this?
The cab driver sings, leans on the horn needlessly, and watches Sharon in the rearview mirror so that he has to brake sharply for a squirrel that decides to cross the road. “Fucker,” he mutters, and goes forward again, but more slowly this time, his spirit tamed.
The motel is the same one Michael had gone to, after, and where he was arrested. Dick had made reservations for himself and her there, but it is not a thoughtless choice. The rented Ford is still parked there, and the place is clean and convenient to the jail where Michael is being held. Early tomorrow, she and Dick will go there together for the only visitation permitted before arraignment.
The motel manager’s face gives nothing away when she claims her reservation. Behind him, a door opens briefly and she can see a living room and two small children watching television before it closes again. She signs the registration slip and has an urge to ask to see the one Michael must have signed the day before. How does a man feel after such an act? Frightened? Exhilarated? So deeply affected perhaps that his handwriting is irrevocably altered. And there is the keener fantasy that it will be another man’s signature altogether, one of those wonderful minor news stories about mistaken identity. Families of men killed in the war and sent home in sealed coffins must suffer that possibility over and over again.
But she asks for nothing but the key to her room and the one to the car.
The room is shabbily genteel and telescopically smaller than the one depicted on the postcards for sale in the motel office. There are twin beds with green covers, and matching drapes that transform the last of an Ohio sunset into a Martian luminescence.
Dick’s flight won’t be in until seven thirty, and he has instructed her to stay put, not to drive to the airport to meet him; he will come directly to the motel and they can go out for dinner and talk about the next day.
There are almost two hours ahead during which she will be alone in this place and she contemplates them with increasing nervousness. She rejects the idea of smoking pot, losing confidence in its shamanistic powers to thwart loneliness. She knows intuitively that this is a dangerous time of day when, for some people, blood sugar plummets, and fatigue is a marauder. If records were to be checked, she is sure there would be a disproportionate number of suicides, automobile accidents, and violent crimes committed just before dusk. Brooders begin to gather evidence for their brooding. Insomniacs think of scary darkness, depressives of death.
Sharon opens the drapes and her room faces a small swimming pool surrounded by a locked cyclone fence. A few children run crazily around it, shrieking and hurling scraps of paper at one another that blow back into their own faces. She wonders what Michael is doing at this moment and thinks how awkward it will be to see him in that place, with this new knowledge between them. She feels that changes are taking place inside her, as mysterious and involuntary as metabolism and circulation. What if she experiences a complete failure of love, even of charity? She closes the drapes, making the room green again, and lies down on the bed nearest the window. Now she regrets not having brought along something to read, even the complimentary magazine from the seat pocket in the plane.
On the night table next to her, a pictorial breakfast menu from the motel’s coffee shop is propped against an ashtray. Glorified color photos of eggs and sausage, of waffles and pancakes, looking more like Oldenburg sculptures of food than like real food, are advertised at irregular prices, as if they had been marked down: $1.79 for The Sunrise Special, $2.05 for Old Macdonald’s Choice. She reads a printed message from the maid thanking her for being such a wonderful guest, and it is hand signed in a childishly broad scrawl: Sincerely, Wanda.
Sharon looks at her watch and then holds it to her ear to confirm its function. With her splendid vision she can read the sign on the back of the door at least eight feet from the bed. Checkout time, she learns, is at 11:00 A.M., and there is a map showing the locations of the laundry room and the ice machine.
In the drawer of the night table Sharon finds a thin phone book for the local area, and the mandatory Bible. She opens the phone book to see if there is anyone listed with the same name as Michael or herself. If there is, she decides, she will take that as a good omen for tomorrow. There isn’t, but she finds a Richard Schaffner and someone with a spelling variation of her father’s name living on Sharon Court. That could mean something, couldn’t it? She wonders about the woman who saw Michael in the parking lot the day before, and if she is listed in the telephone book, too. Sharon imagines calling the number just to hear her voice, and then hanging up again without speaking.
Michael had called her a few hours after his mother’s funeral. He sounded fine at first and then his voice became softer and fainter as if he were traveling swiftly away on a boat or a train, and twice she had to ask him to speak louder. He said that a few neighbors had come to the chapel, and the woman his mother lived with, another practical nurse, had gone to the cemetery with him. She wore her uniform and those rubber-soled shoes. She said that his mother had died from the babies, from sleeping in those small rooms they gave you, and the babies used up all the air. She complained bitterly about eating tainted luncheon meat while the family ate steak, about having only a tiny corner of a closet in which to hang her uniforms, next to stored luggage, ironing boards, and folded bridge tables.
She was crazy. She said she dreamed of poisoning babies or drowning them and what was she supposed to do now that his mother wouldn’t be sharing the rent on their apartment; she couldn’t afford it. And young couples didn’t even wait six weeks postpartum anymore she could hear them going at it through the walls at night.
When he left, she followed right behind him, her shoes squeaking. He gave her some money for a taxi that she tucked into her pocket without even looking at it, and she kept walking alongside the car and talking to him as he drove slowly away. He was afraid she would fall under the wheels.
“I should have come with you,” Sharon said. “You should have let me.”
“No,” he insisted. “It’s all right. I handled it. You had a deadline anyway—”
“But I wanted to,” she said, which wasn’t really true. Maybe she still resented his mother for not protecting him from his father.
“Well, it’s fine, it’s all settled now. I’m on my way,” he told her. “I’ll be home soon.”
The telephone book slides to the floor and Sharon opens the Bible to Ecclesiastes and reads. “Sorrow is better than laughter, for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better.”
When Beau was packing his books, she watched him silently for a while, still reflexively aiming to please. Then she said, in her new, diminished voice, “And what did you admire about her, first?”
One of his hands rested on a volume of John Donne; with the other he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “The usual,” he said. “Her breasts, her skin.”
She closes the Bible and puts it back into the night table drawer. Her hand goes to her heart, to her breast, and then up to the dependable pulse of her throat.
Last year, when her aunt had her breast removed, Sharon went to the hospital to visit her. And they did not talk about the breast, as if it were a mutual friend who had done something offensive and was suddenly in disfavor. They talked about Sharon and Michael instead, and her aunt confessed shyly that she had never liked the other fellow, that poet Sharon used to go out with, and that she was relieved when Sharon and Michael were safely married. And Sharon had begun to brag, exaggerating Michael’s virtues. She told her aunt that it was she who had broken up with Beau and that he had begged and pleaded for another chance. She took extraordinary pleasure in her aunt’s approval, in the lying itself, and in her own intact flesh later that night.
There is a knocking at the door and she realizes she has been asleep. It is past eight o’clock. Dick comes into the room and hugs her. His large mustache scrapes her face and his embrace is amazingly solid.
They drive to a restaurant in the rented car, and Sharon’s appetite is much better than she expected. In fact, she eats everything on her plate and some of Dick’s dinner, too. He’s confident things will work out well the next day. They share a full bottle of Chablis, and there is an inappropriate air of celebration. Dick has done some research. He’s been reading up on the subject and has even called a couple of shrinks he knows. A single, isolated episode of exhibitionism, he tells her, especially following a trauma like the death of one’s mother, doesn’t have to be pathological in origin. He was standing next to his car. There is reasonable consideration about his wish to be apprehended through license plate identification. And did she know that indecent exposure occurs most frequently in the spring?
“A young man’s fancy?” she says, and is further loosened by Dick’s laughter. Oh oh, she thinks.
Back at the motel, she asks him to come to her room to continue talking.
He looks at her speculatively and then follows her inside. “Only for a few minutes,” he says. “I want to be sparkling in the morning. So you won’t be sorry you didn’t bring F. Lee Bailey instead.”
She takes the pack of cigarettes from her purse and empties it carefully onto one of the beds. She selects the joints and shows them to Dick.
“Oy,” he says, clapping his forehead. “Do you want to get us busted, too?” Then he takes matches from his pocket and lights one.
It’s potent stuff, as promised, or perhaps the wine has eased the way. They become high quickly. Sharon feels uncommonly happy and hopeful. But even as she considers this blissful new state, she senses a sobering one approaching from a great distance, like a storm.
What if I come down too quickly? she thinks. What if Dick’s optimism is artificially induced, too? She tries to remember if he was this cheerful and reassuring before dinner. What if he wants to make love to me? And she knows that it is her own desire she contemplates.
Dick takes off his jacket and falls into a chair, lifting his feet onto the bed. He is barrel-chested, growing a little portly.
Sharon is touched by what she sees as the body’s first small concession to aging. She takes off her shoes and lies down on the bed, her feet almost touching Dick’s.
“Freud gave up sex at forty,” Dick says. “My friend Marshall says he was probably screwing his own sister-in-law.”
They both laugh.
“Wow,” Sharon says, and they laugh again.
Dick tells her a joke about a woman who goes to a psychiatrist because she has repeated dreams about long, pointed objects. “You know, like swords, pencils, arrows. ‘That’s very simple, dear lady,’ the psychiatrist says. ‘You are obsessed by phallic symbols.’ ‘By what?’ the woman asks. ‘By symbols of the phallus,’ the psychiatrist tells her. ‘Huh?’ the woman says, and he can see she doesn’t get it. He decides to do something really drastic. So, he gets up and opens his fly. ‘There,’ he says. ‘That’s a phallus!’ ‘Ohhhh,’ says the woman, ‘like a penis, only smaller.’ ” Neither of them laughs.
“I love Anna,” Sharon says. “I really do.”
“Me, too,” Dick says. He stands, picks up his jacket and, leaning precariously over her, kisses her sweetly on the mouth.
After he leaves, Sharon feels restless and she lies awake for a long time. She thinks of an editor she knows who insists she remembers being born. She claims to have understood instantly her mother’s profound sorrow at learning her baby was a girl.
Sharon thinks it’s only hysteria induced by the editor’s own disappointment in her life as a woman, and she argued that such early memory isn’t possible, before language, before the ability to form concepts.
“Listen,” the other woman said. “Dreaming begins in utero.”
What a notion—a tiny, crouched, and floating dreamer! The image has always appealed to Sharon, and thinking of it now, she floats, too, then starts to feel sleepy, the way Beau did whenever she wanted to talk in bed.
Floating. Once, when he was coming, Michael called out, “Oh, Sharon, your legs are holding me like arms!”
She meets Dick in the coffee shop for breakfast. “How do you feel?” he asks, and it is not a perfunctory question. He wants to know.
“Afraid of how I feel,” Sharon answers. “Maybe more angry than sympathetic. Not loving enough, not Christian. Michael had such a rotten childhood, didn’t he? I mean, his parents should have been arrested. It’s a miracle that he’s such a good person, really, isn’t it? I’m like an evil-minded child in church, trying hard to have holy thoughts. And I feel so selfish now, as if the only crimes that matter are the ones committed against me.”
She is exhausted, self-conscious. It was like a courtroom speech, or one made on a deathbed. “And I’m a little nauseous, besides,” she adds.
Dick signals the waitress for the check.
At the car, he takes the driver’s seat. Leaving the motor running, he gets out and goes into the motel office. When he comes back, he hands her a morning newspaper.
On the front page, there is a photograph of a baby who was born with his heart on the outside of his chest. Not the first recorded case, but still a medical phenomenon. Temporary surgical repair has been done to keep the baby alive until the cavity enlarges enough to hold the heart. Skin taken from his little legs and back has been used to build a thin wall against that terrible beating.
On the way to the jail, Sharon massages her cold hands and thinks about men and how they always wear their parts on the surface of their bodies, indecently exposed and vulnerable, appendages of their joy and their despair. She realizes that she has never regretted being female, as a girl or as a woman. If she were given another shot at it, she wouldn’t choose a different animal form, either, not even a bird’s with its feathered grace and alleged freedom. And she would never be a man for anything.
Except for the barred windows, the jail looks like a schoolhouse. There is a flag flapping outside, and on the corner a policeman, middle-aged and plump, like the friendly ones in children’s primers, directs traffic.
They are taken to a room with a square table and four hard chairs in it. The door is left open, so that they hear the footsteps when a guard approaches with Michael, and she looks up and sees him immediately. He is attempting to smile, and about to weep.
Dick remains seated as Sharon stands and goes to Michael. When he puts his hands on her, she can feel the burning of his palms, and she goes into him, pressing the place where the flowers bloom.
(1979)