I Married a Communist (24 page)

"And Eve buys it, treats delightful young Pamela like her Hebrew princess and nothing more. The English accent washes away the Semitic stigma, and all in all she's so happy Sylphid has such a talented, well-behaved friend, she's so happy Sylphid has
any
friend, that she's deficient in sizing up the implications of Pamela's tuchas moving up and down the stairs inside the little-girl nightie.

"One night Eve and Sylphid went to a concert and Pamela happened to be staying over, and she wound up at home with Ira and they sat in the living room, alone together for the first time, and he asked Pamela about where she came from. His opening gambit with everyone. Pamela gave him a charming comical account of her proper family and the insufferable schools they sent her to. He asked about her job at Radio City. She was third flute-piccolo, a combined job. She was the one who got Sylphid her job subbing there. The girls would jabber together about the orchestra all the time—the politics, and the stupid conductor, and do you believe that tux he's wearing, and why doesn't he get a haircut, and nothing he does with his hands and his stick makes any sense at all. Kid stuff.

"To Ira, that night, she said, 'The principal cellist keeps flirting with me. I'm going out of my mind.' 'How many women in the orchestra?' 'Four.' 'Out of?' 'Seventy-four.' 'And how many of the men make passes at you? Seventy?' 'Uh-huh,' she said, and she laughed. 'Well, no, they don't all have the nerve, but anyone who
has
the nerve,' she told him. 'What do they say to you?' 'Oh—"That dress looks really great." "You always look so beautiful when you come to rehearsal." "I'm playing a concert next week, and I need a flutist." Things like that.' 'And what do you do about it?' 'I can take care of myself.' 'Do you have a boyfriend?' That's when Pamela told him that she had been having an affair for two years with the principal oboist.

'"A single man?' Ira asked her. 'No,' she told him, 'he's married.' 'It never bothers you that he's married?' And Pamela said, 'It's not the formal arrangement of life that interests me.' 'What about his wife?' 'I don't know his wife. I never met her. I never intend to meet her. I don't want to know anything about her particularly. It has nothing to do with his wife, it has nothing to do with his children. He loves his wife and he loves his children.' 'What does it have to do with?' 'It has to do with our pleasure. I do what I want to do for my own pleasure. Don't tell me you still believe in the sanctity of marriage. You think you take a vow and that's it, the two of you are faithful forever?' 'Yes,' he tells her, 'I believe that.' 'You've never—' 'Nope.' 'You're faithful to Eve.' 'Sure.' 'You intend to be faithful for the rest of your life?' 'Depends.' 'On what?' 'On you,' Ira said. Pamela laughs. They both laugh. 'It depends,' she says, 'on my convincing you that it's all right? That you're free to do so? That you're not the bourgeois proprietor of your wife and she's not the bourgeois proprietress of her husband?' 'Yes. Try to convince me.' 'Are you really such a hopelessly typical American that you're enslaved by middle-class American morality?' 'Yes, that's me—the hopelessly typical enslaved American. What are you?' 'What am I? I'm a musician.' 'What does that mean?' 'I'm given a score and I play it. I play what's given to me. I'm a player.'

"Now, Ira figured that he could be being set up by Sylphid, so that first night all he did when Pamela had finished showing off and started upstairs to bed was to take her hand and say, 'You're not a kid, are you? I had you down for a kid.' 'I'm a year older than Sylphid,' she tells him. 'I'm twenty-four. I'm an expatriate. I'll never go back to that idiotic country with its stupid subterranean emotional life. I love being in America. Here I'm free of all that showing-your-feelings-is-taboo crap. You can't imagine what it's like there. Here there's
life.
Here I have my own apartment in Greenwich Village. I work hard and I earn my own way in the world. I do six shows a day, six days a week. I am not a kid. Not in any way, Iron Rinn.'

"The scene went something like that. What there was to enkindle Ira is obvious. She was fresh, young, flirtatious, naive—and not naive, shrewd too. Off on her great American adventure. He admires the way this child of the upper middle class lives outside the bourgeois conventions. The squalid walk-up she lives in. Her coming alone to America. He admires the dexterity with which she adopts all her roles. For Eve she plays the sweet little girl, it's pajama-party stuff with Sylphid, at Radio City she's a flutist, a musician, a professional, and with him it's as though she'd been raised in England by the Fabians, a free, unfettered spirit, highly intelligent and unintimidated by respectable society. In other words, she's a human being—this with this one, that with that one, something else with the other one.

"And all of this is great. Interesting. Impressive. But falling in love? With Ira everything emotional had to be superabundant. When he found his target, Ira fired. He not only fell for her. That baby he'd wanted to have with Eve? He wanted now to have it with Pamela. But he was afraid of frightening Pamela away, so about this he said nothing right off.

"They just have their antibourgeois fling. She can explain to herself everything that she's doing. 'I'm a friend to Sylphid and I'm a friend to Eve, and I'd do anything for either of them, but, as long as it does them no harm, I don't see where being a friend involves the heroic self-sacrifice of my own inclinations.' She too has an ideology. But Ira is by then thirty-six, and he
wants.
Wants the child, the family, the home. The Communist wants everything that is at the
heart
of bourgeois. Wants to get from Pamela everything he thought he was getting from Eve when he got Sylphid instead.

"Out together at the shack they used to talk a lot about Sylphid. 'What is her gripe?' Ira asks Pamela. Money. Status. Privilege. Harp lessons from birth. Twenty-three and her laundry is done for her, her meals are prepared for her, her bills are paid for her. 'You know the way I was brought up? Left home at fifteen. Dug ditches. I was
never
a kid.' But Pamela explains to him that when Sylphid was only twelve years old, Eve left Sylphid's father for the coarsest savior she could find, an immigrant dynamo with a hard-on who was going to make her rich, and her mother was so intoxicated by him that Sylphid lost her for all those years, and then they moved to New York and Sylphid lost her California friends, and she didn't know anybody and she started to get fat.

"Psychiatric bullshit to Ira. 'Sylphid sees Eve as a movie star who abandoned her to the nannies,' Pamela tells him, 'who dumped her for men and her man craziness, who betrayed her at every turn. Sylphid sees Eve as someone who keeps throwing herself at men so as not to stand on her own two feet.' 'Is Sylphid a lesbian?' 'No. Her motto is, Sex makes you powerless. Look at her mother. She tells me never to get involved with anybody sexually. She hates her mother for giving her up for all these men. Sylphid has a notion of absolute autonomy. She's going to be beholden to no one. She's tough.' 'Tough? Yeah? So how come,' Ira asks, 'she doesn't leave her mother if she's so tough? Why doesn't she go out on her own? You're not making sense. Toughness in a vacuum. Autonomy in a vacuum. Independence in a vacuum. You want to know the answer to Sylphid? Sylphid is a sadist—
sadist
in a vacuum. Every night this Juilliard graduate rubs her finger through the leavings at the edge of her dinner plate, round and round the edge of her dinner plate till it squeaks, and then, the better to drive her mother round the bend, she puts the finger in her mouth and licks it till it's clean. Sylphid is there because her mother's afraid of her. And Eve will never
stop
being afraid of her because she doesn't want Sylphid to leave her, and that's
why
Sylphid won't leave her—until she finds a still better way to torture her. Sylphid is the one wielding the whip.'

"So, you see, Ira repeated to Pamela that stuff I'd told him at the outset about Sylphid but that he'd refused to take seriously coming from me. He repeated it to his beloved as though he'd figured it out himself. As people will. The two of them had a lot of these conversations. Pamela liked these conversations. They excited her. It made her feel strong to talk freely like that with Ira about Sylphid and Eve.

"One night something peculiar happened with Eve. She and Ira were lying in bed with the lights out, ready for sleep, when she began to weep uncontrollably. Ira said, 'What's the matter?' She wouldn't answer him. 'What are you crying about? What's happened now?' 'Sometimes I think ... Oh, I can't,' she said. She couldn't speak, and she also couldn't stop crying. He turned the light on. Told her to go ahead and get it out of her system. To say it. 'Sometimes I feel,' she said, 'that
Pamela
should have been my child. Sometimes,' she said, 'it seems more natural.' 'Why Pamela?' 'The easy way we get along. Though maybe that's because she
isn't
my daughter.' 'Maybe it is, maybe it isn't,' he said. 'Her airiness,' Eve said, 'her lightness.' And she started weeping again. Out of guilt, more than likely, for having allowed herself that harmless fairy-tale wish, the wish to have a daughter who didn't remind her every second of her failure.

"By lightness I don't think Eve necessarily meant only physical lightness, the displacement of the fat by the thin. She was pointing to something else, to some kind of excitement in Pamela.
Inner
lightness. I thought she meant that in Pamela she could recognize, almost despite herself, the susceptibility that had once vibrated beneath her own demure surface. Recognized it however childishly Pamela behaved in her presence, however maidenly she acted. After that night, Eve never said anything like this again. It happened only that one time, just when Ira's passion for Pamela, when the illegitimacy of their reckless affair, was generating its greatest heat.

"So, each lays claim to the spirited young flutist as the pleasure-piping dream creature each had failed to obtain: the daughter denied Eve, the wife denied Ira.

'"So sad. So sad,' Eve tells him. 'So very, very sad.' She holds on to him all that night. Right through to the morning, weeping, sighing, whimpering; all the pain, the confusion, the contradiction, the longing, the delusion, all the incoherence pouring out of her. He never felt sorrier for her—what with the affair with Pamela, he never felt farther from her either. 'Everything's gone all wrong. I tried and I tried,' she says, 'and nothing comes out quite right. I tried with Sylphid's father. I tried with jumbo. I tried to give her stability and connection and a mother she could look up to. I tried to be a good mother. And then I had to be a good father. And she's had too many fathers. All I thought about was myself.' 'You haven't thought just about yourself,' he says. 'I have. My career. My careers. My acting. I always had to take care of my acting. I tried. She had good schools and good tutors and a good nanny. But maybe I should have just been with her all the time. She's inconsolable. She eats and she eats and she eats. That's her only consolation for something I didn't give her.' 'Maybe,' he says, 'that's just the way she is.' 'But there are plenty of girls who eat too much, and then they lose some weight—they don't just eat and eat and eat. I've tried everything. I've taken her to doctors, to specialists. She just keeps eating. She keeps eating to hate me.' 'Then maybe,' he says, 'if that is true, it's time for her to go out on her own.' 'What does that have to do with anything? Why should she be on her own? She's happy here. This is her house. No matter what other disruption I brought into her life, this is her house, it's always been her house, and it will be her house for as long as she wants. There's no reason that she should leave any sooner than she's ready to.' 'Suppose,' he says, 'her leaving were a way of getting her to stop eating.' 'I don't see how eating and living where she does have anything to do with each other! You're not making any sense! This is my daughter we're talking about!' 'Okay. Okay. But you just expressed a certain amount of disappointment...' 'I said she was eating to console herself. If she leaves here, she'll have to console herself
twice
as much. She'll have to console herself that much more. Oh, there's something terribly wrong. I should have stayed with Carlton. He was a homosexual, but he was her father. I just should have stayed with him. I don't know what I was thinking. I would never have met Jumbo, I would have never gotten involved with you, she would have had a father, and she wouldn't always be eating so much.' 'Why didn't you stay with him?' 'I know it seems as though it was selfish, as though it was for me. So that I could find satisfaction and companionship. But really I wanted
him
to be freed. Why should he be confined by family life and with this wife that he couldn't find attractive or interesting? Every time we were together I thought he must be thinking about the next busboy or waiter. I wanted him not to have to lie so much anymore.' 'But he didn't lie about that.' 'Oh, I knew it, and he knew I knew it, and everybody in Hollywood knew it, but he was still always skulking around and planning. Phone calls and disappearing and excuses as to why he was late and why he wasn't at Sylphid's party—I couldn't take another sorry excuse. He didn't care, and yet he continued to lie anyway. I wanted to relieve him of that, I wanted to relieve me of that. It wasn't for my own personal happiness, really. It was more for his.' 'Why didn't you go off by yourself, then? Why did you go off with Jumbo?' 'Well ... that was an easy way to do it. To not be alone. To make the decision but to not be alone. But I could have stayed. And Sylphid would have had a father, and she wouldn't have known the truth about him, and we wouldn't have had the years with Jumbo, and we wouldn't have these dreadful trips to France that are just a nightmare. I could have stayed, and she could have just had an absent father like everyone else's absent father. So what if he was queer? Yes, some of it was jumbo, and the passion. But I couldn't take the lies anymore, the false deception. It was fake deceit. Because Carlton
didn't
care, but for some modicum of dignity, of decency, he would pretend to hide it. Oh, I love Sylphid so! I love my daughter. I'd do anything for my daughter. But if it could be lighter and easier and more natural—more
like
a daughter. She's here, and I love her, but every little decision is a struggle, and her power ... She doesn't treat me like a mother, and it makes it hard to treat her like a daughter. Though I'd do
anything
for her,
anything.
' 'Why don't you let her go away, then?' 'You keep bringing that up! She doesn't
want
to go away. Why do you think the solution is for her to go? The solution is for her to stay. She didn't get enough of me. If she were ready to go, she would have gone by now. She's not ready. She looks mature, but she isn't. I'm her mother. I'm her supporter. I love her. She needs me. I know it doesn't look as if she needs me, but she needs me.' 'But you're so unhappy,' he says. 'You don't understand. It's not me, it's Sylphid I worry about. Me, I'll get through. I always get through.' 'What do you worry about with her?' 'I want her to find a nice man. Somebody she can love and who'll take care of her. She's not dating that much,' Eve says. 'She doesn't date at all,' Ira says. 'That's not true. There was a boy.' 'When? Nine years ago?' 'A lot of men are very interested in her. At the Music Hall. A lot of musicians. She's just taking her time.' 'I don't understand what you're talking about. You have to go to sleep. Close your eyes and try to sleep.' 'I can't. I close my eyes and I think, What is going to happen to her? What is going to happen to me? So much trying and so much trying ... and so little peace. So little peace of mind. Each day is a new ... I know it may look like happiness to other people. I know she looks very happy and I know we look very happy together, and we really are very happy together, but each day just gets harder.' 'You look happy together?' 'Well, she loves me. She loves me. I'm her mummy. Of course we look happy together. She's beautiful. She's beautiful.' 'Who is?' he asks her. 'Sylphid. Sylphid is beautiful.' He had thought she was going to say 'Pamela.' 'Look deep into her eyes and her face. The beauty,' Eve says, 'and the strength there. It doesn't come out at you in that superficial look-at-me way. But there's deep beauty there. Very deep. She's a beautiful girl. She's my daughter. She's remarkable. She's a brilliant musician. She's a beautiful girl. She's my daughter.'