Dry Your Smile (10 page)

His current style, a compromise between his private vision and survival in the art world, managed to be arresting, yet to sing. For me, it gave back to my eyes and touch what no external objects had: my own interior landscape
.

Because Laurence worked with masks and mirrors
.

The masks weren't derivative of African or Eastern or Native American art; they were wood or plaster faces of ordinary people—subway riders, salespersons, people at checkout counters—but the expressions were stretched in a torsion of extremity, joy or anguish. The eyes were sometimes mirrored, sometimes blank, but always open. Tiny shards of mirror would appear unexpectedly—in the corner of a smile or grimace, or the ears would be totally mirrored, or the lips. In one unforgettable mask of a child's face, a sharp icicle of mirror was plunged straight down through the top of the head. My favorite was a double mask, a work in layers, where the grinning top face was totally covered with a mirror mosaic except for the blank holes of eyes; this layer was hinged to the face beneath and, when raised, disclosed a bare plaster face, expressionless, with glittering mirror eyes and one mirror teardrop on the left cheek. His gallery had derided this one as “corny,” but that single work pierced my loneliness with what seemed a perception as penetrating as a spear in the childmask brain
.

I was impaled. I loved him
.

With this person, I decided, I could dare rid myself of my virginity. And I could be proud that I would not merely be receiving some god-knew-what concept of womanhood from him but would at the same moment be bestowing on him some god-knew-what concept of manhood, because, although he had had his share of affairs, he had never bedded a virgin
.

And so, after months of agitated plotting and playing to him-on my part, we became lovers. It was after a party at his loft, after the poets and choreographers and painters had drifted off, happily drunk and stoned. I stayed behind to help clean up. He put Dvořák's “New World Symphony” on his tinny phonograph and began dancing to it, a broom as his partner. I cut in. And then I was at last on the mattress and our clothes were coming off and the ghostly audience of faces dangling from the ceiling gleamed with mirror-flecks of glittering candlelight
.

Afterward, he said I had screamed as he felt the hymen break. But I had no memory of that scream. I felt only the triumph of my own rite of passage, which something in me observed as dispassionately as if I too looked down from the loft ceiling. He whispered
,

“Did you come?”

“No,” I smiled to the darkness, wanting to reassure him, “but I didn't expect to, the first time.”

So are all lovers saved from a knowledge that they exchange cliché dialogue by some deeper knowledge that they communicate archetypal messages
.

And we entered the affair. It was a physical communication at first innocently unconcerned with its awkwardness, its (surely temporary) lack of a satisfaction I had known with no one anyway. Besides, where brain, spirit, and heart were so engaged, could flesh be far behind?

I didn't tell Hope for months, until after I'd got my own apartment. We'd been in a state of open warfare anyway, because she disapproved intensely of my working in an office job, knowing it was so I could save money to make the move. We inflicted hideous screaming fights on one another almost every evening. But the crisis came sooner than I'd planned, the day she demanded half of my weekly salary (take-home sixty-two dollars and twenty-seven cents) for “room and board” at Sutton Place. Within forty-eight hours I had found a place of my own—a gloriously squalid six-flight-walkup studio apartment in Yorkville—and moved. Two suitcases, two shopping bags, one carton of books: it could be managed in a single taxi. It was all she'd let me take of my own things. Still, I was free. Loving Laurence had freed me
.

I didn't intend to marry him, nor he me. But neither of us counted on the emotional tide of that summer, the way events in our two lives kept breaking epiphanies over us, drawing us closer to what would be that fateful walk over the Brooklyn Bridge. And neither of us counted on the murderous intensity of Hope's rage, when I finally did tell her that Laurence and I were lovers. At least we had not expected that the rage would be bent toward such a surprising end: her insistence that he must marry me
.

At first Laurence and I laughed about it. It was so Victorian a reaction. Even when she threatened to file a complaint and have him arrested “for impairing the morals of a minor,” it seemed absurd, melodramatic, hilarious
.

“But Momma,” I would say, “this is 1961! I just got my own apartment. I want to live in it.”

“How do you know that goddamned pervert didn't get you pregnant?” she would snarl
.

“Because I'm not, that's how. Because I went and got myself a diaphragm and learned how to use it. That's how.”

“And what about the first time? It can take a while to notice, you know. Some women go on having periods and don't even realize that—”

“Because. I was lucky, I guess. But that's beside the point. Neither of us want to be mar—”

“Lucky,” she spat out bitterly. “Always you've been lucky, you don't know how much. Always you've been loved, you don't know how much. The golden girl. Oh God help me what did I do to have this happen to me? Why did you do this to me, Julian, why?”

“Jesus, Momma, I didn't do it to you! Can't you imagine one action I might ever take that isn't in reaction to you? I did it for me, do you understand? For me. And because I love Laurence. I love his life. What he stands for. His work.”

“What in hell do you know about love? I'll tell you about love! I loved you more than anything in the world. I gave up my whole life for you. Everything was for you. So you could live and breathe and burst on the world like a flaming meteor. So you could be rich and famous and do whatever you damned wanted. It's the only way out for a woman, the only way to independence. If you were some little black boy in Harlem maybe you'd have to make it through boxing or something like that. But you're not. You're a girl and white and lovely and smart as a whip. You'd never have to marry if you didn't want to. Or if you wanted to marry you could've had anyone. A millionaire. A prince. They always want beautiful actresses. Anyone you wanted. So what do you find yourself? A bohemian. A bastard who can barely make a living because he's too busy chipping away at pieces of stone. A weakling. He's weak, Julian, you'll find that out. A con-man who knows a good thing when he sees it, who thinks he'll get his hands on your money!”

“What money, Momma? I don't have any of my money! I live in a one-room walk-up and work every day as a secretary because you won't let me have any of my so-called fortune for myself! All I have left from having worked nonstop since I was two years old is a bunch of scrapbooks you won't even let me have, and a trained memory that lets me fake not having shorthand by writing down just a few clue words. You wouldn't even give me money for secretarial school! Christ! My fortune!”

“You wouldn't know how to handle all that money. Besides, you could move back here tomorrow, give up that ridiculous job—”

“But I don't want to move back here, Momma. That's the point. I want my own life. So why are you bent on my marrying Laurence if you hate his guts? He's not stopping me from living my life, Momma. You are!”

She had never, in all our years of fights, struck me. But now she reached for the nearest thing she could use as a weapon, and her fingers closed round the brass desk clock that sat incongruously on her cardtable. The face she turned toward me was one I had never seen before, the face of a woman maniacly transfixed by hatred. The clock came flying at my head, and I ducked just in time. It hit the doorjamb behind me and took a chunk of wood out as it flew through. I ran from the apartment, but her voice pursued me through the hall and into the elevator:

“He'll marry you, Julian! By god, he'll marry you, or I'll see him dead! I swear to you that you'll be married to this man!”

She was right—though not because of the reasons she thought. Or perhaps because of them, although it would take years for Laurence or me to suspect that. All we knew then was the sense of promise he said I brought him, the sense of freedom I said he brought me, the adventure
.

We came to stand, one rainy autumn evening, before a maverick all-denominational minister who would accept less payment than the two judges we had approached for a civil ceremony. We stood in a small side chapel of the People's Community Church, decorated only by four candles burning on an otherwise stripped altar. I wore a five-year-old black velvet dress. Larry wore his good suit, which was brown. And so we were married
.

Later that night, I lay awake beside his slow breathing and thought, this is freedom. What I'm feeling now—a confusion of fear and safety—this must be real. I'm truly experiencing these moments. I'm cut loose from Hope at last. It was she who snapped the thread by refusing, despite all my pleas, to come to the wedding she herself had demanded. I'm a married woman. Not playing adult. Being it
.

I had done it at last—I was wed to everything I believed in, locked by choice into it so I could never desert it: a world where people felt authentic emotions, truly said what they truly thought, forged genuine art, suffered for being nonconformist or poor or homosexual or dark-skinned. People who drank jug wine indifferent to vintages while they argued into dawn about politics and poetry, rejected plastic artifacts and attitudes, were blithely unconcerned about appearances or other people's approval. Laurence was real as the sleeping stranger beside me, frighteningly real as his sculptures that bore witness around us, blessedly real as the stranger I could now become. Under the burning-glass of his ferocious truth, I could learn to feel, think, and act without plotting how each emotion, thought, or gesture would be viewed. This was all onstage and there was no possible rehearsal for it. Like his sculptures, this was the nude torso of life itself, uncostumed. As for the fear—I would love him enough, and that would make everything possible
.

Not quite everything
.

Not the flaw at dead center.

Not the lie that was to become
—

Julian stopped writing. She re-read the pages just scribbled, then sat back, spent. The in-flight movie screen glowed with a series of soundless tableaux: a woman and a man were arguing; the woman's body language betrayed whatever vituperation the channel five earphones might be verbalizing; she was crying through a face distorted with anger, her outstretched hands open in a plea from which the man turned away.

Julian looked at the last page she had written.

Not the flaw at dead center
.

Not the lie that was to become
—

Slowly and deliberately, she tore all of the written pages, first in half, then in quarters, then again and again until a small pile of paper flakes lay on her tray-table. She carefully stuffed them into the empty Bloody Mary glass for handing to the next flight attendant who passed. Aware that Polly Esther actually had been distracted from her family homilies by this display, Julian coolly switched off her overhead light again, plumped her pillow, and settled sideways, her back to her seatmate. She glanced out the pressure-resistant window. Below, the East Coast USA already advanced, spreading its urban tentacles like seams of light in all directions until the sequins studding the dark would gradually densify into one blaze solid as a closely beaded fabric.

The flaw at dead center, the lie, she thought. For almost twenty years—half of her life—a dogged endeavor to love and live with each other had held out against every pressure. In fact, at the first hint of pressure cessation, either Laurence or Julian in an unspoken bargain could be relied upon to seek out more pressure, as if each sensed that without relentless forces battering against the membrane of their life together, the pressurized cabin within would be unnecessary, even dangerous for permanent habitation.

But inside the cabin, what hijackings to unplanned destinations? What had they done to one another, beyond what Hope could have done to them? Julian stared at her dim reflection in the window.

For how many years had Larry's sculptures borne mute evidence to that pressure? Long ago gone into storage his gleaming marble torsos, his masks and mirrors. A sole block of Carrara remained in a corner of his studio, unchiseled, a rosetta stone he would never decode. For how many years now had he built “dwarf environments” consisting of bent iron bars, blackened and rusting like dollhouse prison cells abandoned by even the most sadistic of authorities as unfit housing for the most violent of criminals? For how many years had Julian herself been writing in cipher, with the justification that “struggle” in a marriage could be a useful subject for the women's movement if universalized into generalization, anecdotal at times but still safe from offscreen specifics? For how many years had their relationship, and their work which had held the relationship together, been barren—as Laurence believed she was?

The flaw at the core, the lie: that they could have no child. She winced to remember all the early arguments about it, his eagerness, her insistence on postponement, his disappointment again and again, her irritation. Until one day it just seemed easier to tell him she'd seen a doctor and learned she couldn't have a child, ever.

Did I fear then that he'd leave me? she silently asked the window-woman. Did I secretly hope so? Did I just as intensely hope he'd see through me? But he never did—and whatever he sensed or wished for, he never raised the issue of adoption.

Only Julian knew the truth. Only Julian would have been capable of such complex and intimate deception for years: the humiliation of a wretched abortion in secret; the caution that made sure the pill prescription was at a pharmacy across town, different from the one they both used; hiding the pills in a bottle labeled for menstrual cramps; the continual alert, the guilt, resolve, fear, self-disgust. So much for honesty, for the revelations of Julian Travis the writer, the fiery self-determination of Julian Travis the feminist. A
real
feminist would have laid it on the line: I never intend to have a child, that's it, take it or leave it, take
me
or leave
me;
it's my body and my decision and those are my terms. A feminist wouldn't have skulked, connived, shuffled. Only a Julian would have been capable of decades-long double-agent contrivance—all the while waiting for Laurence to name, at whatever cost, the truth.