Dry Your Smile (51 page)

But the eagle perched on the nursing-home portal, to hover over Julian the moment she stepped out through the door. Guilt about Laurence. Guilt now about Iliana. Guilt about myriad details which seemed daily to sift through her fingers.

She had not been able to do a penny's worth of fundraising for Jenny's state-assembly campaign. She was late on her deadline in writing the promised foreword for Sabrina's book. She had reneged on attending the press conference for the Reproductive Technology Alert Network and even forgotten to send a statement of support. She had declined countless invitations to lunch, dinner, coffee, “just talk.” She did manage to get out to Staten Island to visit Anna, recovering from a hysterectomy, only to find Anna accusing her of being anti-social, withdrawn from everyone: “You've
changed
, Julian.” It made her wonder whether the grapevine was onto her relationship with Iliana—“another heterosexual bites the dust”—but decided that was paranoid and attributed the accusational tone to Anna's depression. There was no way to explain her own crises without still further exposure, further provocation of advice. Besides, Julian was finally bored with talking about her own crises.

Had
she changed so much? She told herself she was not being irresponsible, that there were other priorities, that she was merely trying to survive, that the sheer expenditure of energy involved in juggling emotional and physical demands depleted her. As much for practical support as for affection, she spent more time now at Iliana's, which contented her lover but increased Julian's guilt—especially whenever she saw Laurence. The Independence Day revelations already had faded dim as if they were epiphanies of a previous incarnation. She told herself that her salvation would be honesty, so she kept Iliana informed about the relaxation of tension with Laurence. But this was done at the cost of increasing tension with Iliana. There was only so much space for air in the balloon; if you compressed it in one place it bulged in another. There was neither time nor space to integrate all these rapid, drastic rites of passage. Obsessively, futilely, Julian interrogated herself. How had she got herself into this triangle? Did she secretly relish it? Was she reenacting center-stage melodrama at the cost of real people's real pain? Which brought her full circle under the beak and wings of guilt again, until she looked forward to those sheltered moments at Hope's bedside, where the priority of performing Friend convincingly was so great as to cleanse her awareness for a time of all other considerations.

“Home. Go home.”
Julian knew it was the cry of an old woman wanting to return to cluttered rooms that no longer existed, to walls no longer bedecked with images of The Baby but now freshly painted and hung with artifacts of new inhabitants who walked the scraped and gleaming parquet floors. Yet despite Julian's knowledge, “Home, go home,” sounded like a mantra of wisdom mystically communicated from one who stood now at the final gates of awe, one who no longer had any need to lie.

But where was home for her? Not with Iliana, at least not yet, not for a long time. Not the briefly dreamt-of apartment of her own: no money, no time to apartment-hunt, no energy or vision for the enormity of such an endeavor. Back to Laurence, then, and the loft which had been home for so long? She was afraid. Just that, afraid—of more scenes, more possession, more repetition. But Laurence had changed …

There would be one step, perhaps, a test of both herself and him, which might hint a prognosis about their marriage. There would be one step—simultaneously a defiance of Iliana's advice, a gesture of the sort Laurence claimed she no longer offered him, and an act of ethical integrity. There would be one step, she told herself, which might show her if only by default the direction she really wanted to follow—the way a child plays chance counting games when unable to make a decision, and discovers in the process what was desired all along. Not until the last number falls does the child realize that this choice confirms or disappoints the real wish—and if the latter, the child can always count again, until coincidence and desire cohere. She would take the step. She would tell Laurence about Iliana.

It was a Saturday afternoon, when she had come back to the loft to pick up a book from her study. Laurence was home. He asked if she wanted some coffee. So they sat in her old study, drinking coffee and chatting amiably, as if at home together again. The atmosphere was peaceful, the tone intimate. She told him.

“I assumed as much, Jule,” he said hoarsely, “and if it's what you want, I'm glad for you. Honest … But I wish—” He looked up at her from where he'd been staring into his coffee cup. For a moment, intensity radiated from his eyes the way his lust to change the world once had. He took a deep breath. “I wish,” his words spilled out, “that you'd give
us
another chance. At least as much a chance as anybody new, even if it
is
a woman. We've come so far, changed so much, together
and
apart. What a loss. That there's no Kent Campbell around to introduce us. That the person you are now and the person I am now won't even get a chance to meet.”

Whether it was her own lack of marginal strength, or Hope's chanted instruction, or what shone through his eyes in that appeal, Julian didn't know and no longer cared. A sense of inevitability, a fatalistic optimism, were at work in her. That evening, in tears, she told her lover she would be returning to her husband.

Iliana smiled and shrugged, not trying to hide her attempt to hide her pain.

“I expected this. I knew it. Well … you must try again if you feel you must. Whatever you suspect about me, Juliana, I do want to love you in freedom, not in captivity.” Iliana permitted herself a philosophical laugh, but it emerged trailing an afterbirth of sarcasm. “How I do abhor clichés, and how I've walked right into one.”

“You could never be anything but an absolute original,” Julian cut in fiercely.

“Oh no, my love. A cliché as tedious as a photograph of a baby nose-to-nose with a kitten. The lesbian lover who infuses her heterosexual belovèd with energy—which. then gets drained from that relationship and reinvested in the belovèd's worn out marriage.” Iliana laughed again, openly bitter this time.

Julian cast an unconscious, desperate look around her, searching for a way out. “That's not what's happened—I never meant—I never promised—”

Her anguish seduced Iliana away from her own. Iliana felt the strengthening self-preoccupation of irony ebb from her like a donation of blood for transfusion. She reached for Julian, knowing herself a battlefield between warring armies of lofty and base love, but unsure which was which.

“I know,
mi sueño
, I know. You never promised. You never meant. Forget what I said. We're neither of us clichés. It's just that … I will worry about you. You will be careful regarding Larry?”

Fresh tears, a more urgent clinging.

“I'll be careful, yes. I love him, Iliana. But not in the old way. It will take a long time, I'm afraid, to build back my trust of him. But I've got to give it one more try, 'Yana. And I'm too tired to run anymore. I want to go home.”

The silence was a din of words checked, reined, unsaid.

“You—You will call me?”

“I will call you every single day, 'Yana, if you permit it. I can't endure the thought of not seeing you, of not—May I?
May
I continue to see you during this … whatever, this trial period?… As a friend?”

“As whatever you see when you look at me,
mi amada.
”

So they had wept together in each other's arms.
Another mourning
, Julian thought,
another murder, more pain I've caused. Another stereotype enacted, another straight woman returning to her man after playing with a woman who loved her
. But there were other ghostly refrains, too.
I made you, I taught you, I showed you
. Then Julian would think of her desk, her bookshelves gleaming in the lamplight, her own doorkey. If it was all to turn out the same, then why not the familiar mode? Why fly to others that we know not of?

At first it did feel like coming home. At first she and Laurence talked—about everything: Hope and Iliana and the money burdens, the politics and pain and caring and the waste it would be if they failed one another. At first they tried making love, awkwardly, finding their way back to one another like strangers, but lacking the armor of superficiality strangers wear. At first, when she met Iliana for coffee, she had to admit that yes, they were really trying and yes, it seemed to be working. At first, when her friends at Athena congratulated her on having “worked it out,” that felt good.

Never to know or comprehend why knowing and comprehension weren't enough; when or how it began to dissolve. Never to fathom how, so swiftly, toward the end of September, it already was re-enacting a quiet hell. Reopening the scabs. Debridement.

By then, when they talked, she and Laurence talked
at
each other, then in circles, then in accusation, finally in monosyllables. By then, when they walked together on the street and passed a child, their silence turned palpable, an ice-scrim between them. By then, when they tried to make love, he felt her body trying not to fight his; she felt her brain impose itself between them, shrilling through every pore for some denied limbspread freedom each part of her had tasted and could not now forget. By then, he began to take late-night solitary walks again. By then, she knew Iliana could read the desolation in her face each time they met. By then, the repeated expressions of support by Athenians for the reconciliation of her marriage began to appear excessive, vehement, homophobic.

Julian moved into her study, sleeping on a rolled-out piece of foam rubber on the floor. No time now, for a repeat flight. No will. No energy for anything but Hope, who had begun eating less again, and sleeping more. The nurses and Dr. Grimes confirmed her growing weakness. Then, on the first of October, the pace accelerated. The fall lectures began. Another chapter was due on the book. Athena's schedule intensified for the winter and spring lists. What Julian had estimated as the outer reaches of tolerable pressure expanded to a seemingly limitless terrain in which she dwelt, disbelieving in the possibility of rescue, able only to react from day to day. Iliana would just let her sit in silence when she came to visit, or sometimes Julian would fall asleep, her head in Iliana's lap, Iliana's hand lightly stroking her hair.

It was in the middle of the night when Larry knocked and then pounded at her study door, opening it before she could reply, and thrusting himself inside. He was sobbing. She raised herself up to one elbow from her pallet.

“Larry! What is it?”

“It's you. Me. Us. Jule, I can't stand it anymore. I can't stand any of it—your wheeling and dealing to try and get me jobs, the way I know you really want to be with
her
but stay with me, the way—”

“Please, Larry, have mercy on both of us. It's three in the morning. We've been over and over this.”

“—I never get
heard
. Can't breathe, can't speak. No forum. Why'd you come back? Lemme
go.
”

“For crying out loud, Laurence, will you stop your self-pity for a minute? You deserve better. From yourself, from the world—”

“Lemme
go
. Stop pursuing me with this death's-head deathless love of yours. Enough of the tests. I'm a dead man, a guy who drowned one day a long time ago in a mysterious leap off Brooklyn Bridge. I'm not even identifiable now, washed up on some midnight dock. I can't—I can't—”

Julian sliced through his appeal, indifferent to whether outraged love or the nausea of repetition was forging this new adamance that made the incision.

“Go to bed, Laurence. You're drunk. I'm too empty to have another scene. I've got to get up in four hours to catch a plane.”

He stared at her. “I'm in real trouble,” he whispered, baffled, “I—I'm scared I'm not gonna get through this alive. I'm scared I'm—”

Julian lay back down and closed her eyes. “Laurence,” she sighed, “I don't want to hear your emotional blackmail. Go away, Laurence. Go to bed.”

She heard him murmur, “There's no more ‘us.' It's you or me. Gotta practice losing you. Gotta.” Then she heard the door close behind him.

Empty, she thought. Like the Yeats line, “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.”

There was no more respite in sleep that night. She tossed on her pallet like a dazed shipwreck adrift on a raft, visions assaulting her in punishing waves. This death's-head deathless love of yours. I can't afford this, she prayed to herself, I can't afford a nervous breakdown. If there were only a way to halt the cacophony, to stop the brain from its obsessive pattering to one blocked exit after another. Then it was morning, and the brain was commandeered to drive the body again.

When she stepped off the plane in New Mexico that afternoon, the women who met her—without knowing anything about her other than her public self—saw their guest speaker near collapse. The pre-lecture events were canceled. No book signing, no poetry reading, no guest class, no faculty dinner, no women's center reception.

But that night, she mounted the podium to speak about the institution of the family in patriarchal society. Her voice rose and fell in familiar cadences and phrases.

“The average North American homemaker works a 99.6-hour work-week with no pay and no respect; it's not even considered a job … One out of every four women experiences sexual abuse before she's four years old … 40 percent of all women killed in the United States are murdered by their spouses … Every eighteen seconds a woman is beaten by her husband seriously enough to require hospitalization … the Reagan Administration's assault on reproductive freedom … the infant mortality rate in Detroit now has passed that of Honduras, due to social-welfare cutbacks … needed re-definitions of ‘family' … freedom of sexual choice … custody rights of lesbian mothers … children's suffrage … rights of the elderly … internationally … child marriage, forced marriage, polygyny … dowry murders … divorce rights … marital rape …”