Any Woman's Blues (26 page)

“I was born in a trunk in a silversmith’s shop on Eighth Street,” I began, “to an alcoholic mother, an alcoholic father, and a life of living by my wits.”

I paused and looked out at the faces of my listeners. Where but here can one be heard? If loving is listening, then I was loved, even though I did not deserve it.

“The strain of living by my wits seemed so desperate that I tried in every way I knew to eradicate my wits—pot, coke, drugs—until I could feel nothing . . . nothing but the love leaching through my fingertips onto the canvas, nothing but the ache of my soul moving toward God.”

I shut my eyes and went on.

“It’s a strange thing to start from nothing and make your future through what you do with your hands, your eyes, your brain—although, of course, we all do it. You need to make these constant leaps of faith. You need, above all, to believe in yourself. But how can you believe in yourself when you know yourself to be a frail human being, when you never know when inspiration will start or stop, when you have to wait for God to come through your fingertips?”

I opened my eyes; the room was still there.

“In my clearest moments, I would get on my knees before the easel, open my palms, and invoke God, Goddess, my muse. But always there were days when I could not pray, could not meditate, could not paint; and then I would try to stoke the fires with pot, with wine, with coke—or with my real drug, my main drug: men.”

Go on. Go on.

“Art is a connection, a matter of making circles, a saying yes to the universe. I needed to feel that connection, that flesh connection, in order to blossom. Or so I thought. I needed a man to power my art, to approve it, to give me permission for the hubris of being a woman creator. Somewhere deep inside I did not feel I
had
that permission. I felt I was daring the gods by being so bold. So I would cling to a lover as if the force came through him, and after a while I would come to believe that it was he, not I, who made the work come true.

“Then, inevitably, he would start to abuse me. Or perhaps I would start to abuse myself. I would give myself over to him, believe that he made the work possible, and I would obsess whenever he went away, lose myself for work, for meditation, for my children, and finally, having given the work away, I would not be able to do it unless he was there. And he, knowing I had given away all my power, would leave me and find another woman who was tougher, who set more definite limits, and who therefore made him feel more secure.”

Now I was comfortable. The words were flowing.

“My alcoholism is a conundrum to me. I’m what you call a ‘high-bottom’ drunk. I never lost everything—my house, my car, my bank account, my kids. I never crashed into a tree and wound up in intensive care. But I did allow myself to be beaten—to
seek
it, even—and I did allow myself to be raped financially. When I see pictures of battered women in the newspapers, I know that I am one of them, and that but for the grace of God, my eyes could be sealed over with bruises, my mouth could be swollen and blue. I
feel
like a battered woman. I know that drunk, I have banged my head on the floor till it was bloody, and I know that drunk, I have turned out the headlights and driven home in the dark, hoping to be relieved of the horrible burden of being alive. I know that I spend money like a drunk, fuck like a drunk, seek abuse like a drunk. I know that I would do almost anything for skinlessness, for ecstasy, even if it meant self-annihilation—and sometimes it did.”

I looked into the blue eyes of one woman whose face always comforted me.

“I’ve been a lousy member of the Program. I float in and out. When I first stopped drinking, I was given a great, great gift—a new series of paintings. Then my lover peeled off, and I fell off the wagon and off the edge of the world. I haven’t even put together a month of sobriety. I haven’t even got the first step together. I constantly deny my alcoholism, tell myself that I can do it alone, that I don’t need the group, don’t need a sponsor. I even went and fell in love with a wine collector to prove I wasn’t tempted.”

(Laughter in the room.)

“How’s that for denial? I feel grateful that you let me speak today, because the love in this room tells me that I don’t have to do it all alone. I don’t even deserve to qualify. I’m barely on the first step.”

I stopped, looked down, and saw that the palms of my hands were open on the trestle table in the way they are when I am praying.

“Well,” I added, “I guess I finally got to the first step. I admit I’m powerless. I surrender.” And there was a loud burst of applause in the room.

I came back to myself from the land of trance.

A forest of raised hands waving in the smoky air. “Yes,” I said, recognizing the pretty blue-eyed woman I always stared at.

“I’m Mary, an alcoholic. I always identify with battered women too. You know those pictures in the paper of that woman—what’s her name?—who let her little girl be beaten to death by her lover? I identify with her too.”

One by one, the waving hands were translated into little volleys of words. Whatever I had felt was kinkiest, strangest, most shameful about what I had said, was seized on by a member of the group as a familiar feeling. Nothing human was alien. Nothing human could not be forgiven. We were not human beings going through spiritual experiences; we were spiritual beings going through human experiences, in order to grow.

I thought of Christ’s message of forgiveness, of Job’s message of humility, of Thomas Merton’s assertion that the deepest religious experience is essentially incommunicable. Impossible to convey what goes on in “the Rooms.” The banality of it. The transcendence of it. The transcendent banality.

And yet it works. If you say why it works, how it works, your tongue stops in the cavity of your mouth and you utter platitudes.

Perhaps it is finally a question of acceptance. Of being loved unconditionally. The Rooms are one place where you do not have to
deserve
to be loved. Because none of us really deserves to be loved. And all of us deserve to be loved. Loved unconditionally.

The summer wore on—green, leafy, celibate. Full of Thomas Merton and Lao-tzu, Thoreau, meetings, sessions with Sybille, and berry picking with the twins.

I tried to paint but hadn’t much luck. My motor was gone. The group love could not power me as Dart had done. I was becalmed.

Always in my life, men had appeared as if by magic. Bad magic. Black if not white magic. Now they did not. Dart did not call. Danny did not call. The force of my wishing for Dart was diminished. I could not make him call anymore by wishing. Anyway, the first woman who perfects that technique is going to win the Nobel Prize for Women. How to create dynamite by the sheer force of longing. Waiting by the phone—that old female pastime—has got to be of all distaff griefs the worst. It is the powerlessness, the sense of being out of control, that annihilates. Breathe on the phone. Make it ring. Pull on the old umbilicus and make it pulse.

Of course you could call him—if you knew where he was. But he has departed to another country, a country to which you have no visa, the country of regrets.

And then suddenly you realize with a pang, with a missed heartbeat, that another telephone call has not come in a long time—a red telephone has not rung, a certain heavy earthward pull has not been felt: your period is late.

At forty-four, your periods anyway are not so reliable as once they were. You used to be able to set your clock by them, keep your travel diary by them: a month-long trip began and ended with a period—that red marker, that crimson blot on the white pages of your Filofax. “P-1” you used to write for the first day. And “I” for you-know-what. (Odd that you didn’t write “F.” Was it residual prudery?) And then the number of times. And then the initials of the prick in question.

You long since gave that up, feeling your fertility is not so foolproof by now. Five years with an IUD (after the birth of the twins) spoiled you rotten. Sex with Dart six and seven times a day did not have to be recorded. (Who
could
have recorded it anyway? There was too much of it to even
try
to keep track.) And nobody worried about diseases in those days—though perhaps you should have, knowing Dart.

You missed herpes. You missed—thank the Goddess—AIDS. You lucked out, fucked out. And now sex is such a sometime thing that you’d be lucky to even have something to
worry
about. But your period—your “monthly flowers,” as they called them in the days of Vigée-Lebrun and Adelaide Labille-Guiard, your “perennial visitor,” your fall from the roof—is long overdue. And your nipples feel a bit tender and surely are more brown than pink. And a faint ribbon of brownish pigment runs from your navel to your pussy. Can you be—at forty-four—pregnant?

Mongoloid twins!

And are they Dart’s or Danny’s? One of each? One blond Adonis? One bald antiques dealer? Stranger things have happened in the annals of ob-gyn!

My God! Pregnant! You are secretly elated. Terror and gladness commingle in your blood.

“Whose baby is it?” they’d ask.

“Mine,” you’d say, smiling like Mona Lisa. The singleton you long for, the pal to equalize your tender battle with the twins—can he finally be here? For it is, you know, if not mongoloid twins, then a little boy. You have seen mothers with their little boys, and you envy their lifelong love affair. Girls you cherish—sisters, little women, clone of your bone and blood and uterus. But boys you lust for—peg o’ your heart, little penis astride your maternal hip, erect manhood in a diaper—your little boy.

Happy. There’s no mistaking how happy you are. The womb, in the eleventh hour of its life, chiming like a cuckoo clock.

People telephone. Not Dart or Danny, but André, Lionel, your old friend Julian from L.A. You burst to tell them, but hold back. You tell no one. Not even Emmie. Not even Sybille. Nor do you go to see the ob-gyn. Good old Dr. Letitia Hyman, M.D., the jokily named lesbian gynecologist, who practices in Bridgewater. She wears Space Shoes and has frizzy orange hair. She’s built like a sack of grapefruits and lives with an oncologist named Dr. Eleanor Q. Oliphant. You wonder what the “Q” stands for. Questa, Quintana, Quisling, Quixote? You wish them luck. And love. Two old dames living free lives in a world not made for women. You’ve reached the point in life where you admire every woman who hasn’t given up and died. Who hasn’t drunk herself to death. Who grows old roses (Musk, Bourbon, Alba) amid her hybrid teas and doesn’t give a fuck what the world thinks of her or how she makes it through the night. Let the lesbians flourish! Let the womb flower! If women ruled the world, there’d be medals for every baby a woman bore and medals for every menopausal milestone! (There’d surely be medals for every menopause that didn’t end in suicide.) Hard enough to be a good girl and a pretty young woman—but try being old and female in a culture that hates the latter even more than the former. Here’s to Quixotic Letitia and her darling Quintana! But still I did not drive to Bridgewater. Perhaps I suspected the worst.

Then one night—I was expecting Lionel the next day, in fact, to chopper up to my neck of the woods—the worst happened.

I was standing in the silo, staring at a sketch of the twins (who had grudgingly consented to pose on the floor amid flocks of pastel-colored little toy ponies), and a sudden cramping in my gut told me I was in trouble. I willed the cramp away, but it returned. I ran to the bathroom mirror, stripped off my skirt, and took another admiring look at my big, round, brown-nippled tits, my brown-striped belly. And then I broke down and cried.

By 3:00 A.M. it was all over. I was sitting on the toilet seat, hemorrhaging into the bowl, the bright-red arterial blood mingling with the darker clots, the tears falling with the blood.

Fascinated, horrified, I captured a large clot on a piece of white toilet tissue and probed it, looking for my lost son. I put on a Maxipad and went out in the moonlight to bury my never-to-be-begotten male heir.

Full moon again. Blue moon. The hillside sloping down from the silo, the wild grass waving, hair of unmarked graves. I dug a little hollow in the moonlight and buried him among the grubs and slugs.

Born, died, never begotten—what is the difference, really, if all is one? The moon is dead yet gives light. Dolph and Theda are dead, yet they stomp through my Connecticut woods at will. Even all my old dogs—Renascence, Robbie, Tara—come sniveling at the silo door on rainy nights, begging to be let in. The dead and the living are all here in a primal dance. Psychics see them, hear them. We only pretend not to, so as to keep our heads. Too much static! Too much input! We screen the dead out and embrace the night.

Goodbye.

 

 

I wander into the twins’ room and sit on the edge of Ed’s bed, watching her breath move, feeling her hot cheeks with my lips. Then I move to Mike’s bed and say a prayer over her sleeping head. I smell her neck—brownish, pre-pubescent, premenstrual, puppyish, premoon. Her dead brother’s soul flies into her.