Hunters and Gatherers (8 page)

“I’m Enzio,” said their waiter, a strikingly handsome person of somewhat indeterminate racial origin and gender. He (that much was fairly certain) addressed himself to Gretta and smiled into her eyes, as if they were deeply in love. Would he notice Martha if she were dressed, like Gretta, in perfect fawn-colored cashmere that kept slipping off one plump shoulder?

Martha was wearing the wrong clothes. And what was even worse was that she was wasting her lunch with her friend, worrying about what she was wearing. For someone with such grand ideas about the meaning of fashion, Martha had a lot of trouble just getting dressed in the morning. How perfect that she should wind up at
Mode
, where the attitude toward style was at once superior, ironic, detached, and obsessive. O lucky Goddess women, marching to the beat of a different drummer!

“Martha,” Gretta said. “Are you listening? Enzio’s just told us the specials.”

Already it was Enzio! Gretta’s new best friend! One thing to be said for the Goddess women was that they didn’t compete for men. In fact, they didn’t seem to know that there were any men to compete for. But when had the Goddess group become a source of reassurance, something to put her mind on to make herself feel better? Martha had been planning to ask Gretta for reassurance that her new friendship with the Goddess women didn’t mean she’d lost her mind completely.

Since Dennis, Martha had felt like Alice, tumbling down the rabbit hole. But the Goddess women had broken her fall or at least distracted her enough so that hours might go by, precious intervals during which she almost forgot that she was falling. These past weeks were the first time that Martha had ever felt included, gathered into an inner circle. She was dazzled by the speed with which she’d been accepted. It was so flattering, so pleasant to be taken up by a community that it seemed ungrateful to wonder if it was a group you wanted to join. She liked it that the women—especially Isis—seemed to want her around, though she recognized disturbing echos of the mind-control techniques that suckered unstable teens into cults. But the Goddess women weren’t Moonies or Hare Krishnas. They were Jungian therapists, writers, scientists, academics…

“Earth to Martha,” said Gretta. “What is
with
you today?”

“What are you having?” said Martha.

“The pasta with pine nuts and sun-dried tomatoes,” said Gretta. “The grilled vegetables.
And
the green bean salad.”

“Make that two,” said Martha.

“Two it is,” Enzio told Gretta.

“And bring that wine now, please,” said Gretta.

“Pronto.” Enzio danced away, turning to wink at Gretta.

“This is something new,” said Gretta. “Some kind of foreign-guy charisma. It must have something to do with Xavier. Something’s rubbing off.”

“What’s the matter?” Martha said. “You look sort of tense.”

“Oh, nothing,” Gretta answered. Enzio brought her a glass of wine and grudgingly gave one to Martha.

Gretta took three large gulps and then told Martha a story about how they’d gone to a party last week, and Xavier had spent the evening flirting with another woman. It was a very long story and contained many details about the party and the woman, and many pauses during which Gretta waited for Martha to say that Xavier really did love her, but he was just being Xavier. Finally Gretta paused and said, “So how are the Wicca women?”

“Not Wicca women,” Martha said. “Goddess worshippers.”

“Same difference,” said Gretta.

“Not really,” said Martha. “They’re not really such flakes. Listen, I stopped at a bookstore, and there was a huge selection of Goddess books.”

Martha knew she was signaling Gretta that Goddess worship was a happening thing, so Gretta wouldn’t think that it was just Martha and one lone coven of crazies. This was how Martha used to convince her mother that something was all right: lots of people did it, especially popular kids. It was also how
Mode
decided that a subject had interest and value. The right people were doing it, and doing it right this minute.

Gretta lunged her empty wine glass at a passing waiter, not theirs. “Goddess books are out of my department, my sub-department, and any sub-subdepartment I could imagine getting into.” Gretta was assistant publicity director at a publishing house. Every Monday—for as long as they didn’t catch her, she said—she took Martha to lunch.

Martha said, “Isis has five books in print. Bernie’s written a big trade paperback about Jungian archetypes. I even found Freya’s overproduced coffee-table book about the Goddess in art history, culminating in Freya’s work.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Gretta. “Lord, oh Lord. How can you read that dreck?”

“Come on,” said Martha. “It’s interesting, sort of. Don’t you wonder what the world would be like if women ran it? The Goddess women say we’d be nicer and more loving. But when you mention Margaret Thatcher or Indira Gandhi, they say: Those are women with male values, and we can’t know what we’ll do until we evolve past that. But what if they’re right? How could things be any more screwed up than they are right now?”

Why was Martha making the Goddess women sound like a bunch of philosophy graduate students and leaving out the embarrassing rituals, the Talking Stick and so forth, the truly bizarre discussions of whether rapists deserve to be hexed, the charged allusions to some ritual with a pomegranate and a dagger? Martha had plenty of doubts about their corny rites and wacky historical notions. But to listen to Martha defending them to Gretta, anyone would have thought that she was just like Hegwitha, happy to be accepted, without reservations or doubts, and with a total, unwavering faith in a kindly nurturant Goddess.

“They’re not so bad,” said Martha. “They’re kind of smart. They’re strange. They seem to like me.”

“That’s pathetic,” said Gretta. “Lots of people like you. I like you.”

“Name someone else,” said Martha. Was she hoping that Gretta would, despite everything, say Dennis?

“My parents,” said Gretta. “They said to tell you that they really liked your visit.”

Was Gretta lying? Had her parents lied? Martha said, “I felt so badly for them. They were so sweet but so terribly lonely.”

Martha stopped. She’d seen Gretta flinch, and she was instantly sorry. What was the use of empathy if it came after the fact, too late to prevent you from hurting your best friend? What had Gretta done to deserve being made to feel guilty about her parents? Poor Gretta was the only person Martha knew well enough to treat badly—not counting Martha’s mother, whom she hardly saw and who was, in any case, too fragile to withstand the mildest abuse.

Enzio appeared out of nowhere, and now Martha was grateful as he chivalrously offered Gretta her vegetables and flung Martha’s across the table.

“They’re mostly nice to each other,” Martha said. “The Goddess women, I mean.”

“
We’re
nice to each other,” Gretta said. “Nicer than guys are to us. With the exception of Xavier, who can be very nice.”

“We’re not the issue,” Martha said. “And neither is Xavier.”

“How refreshing,” said Gretta. “As far as Xavier’s concerned, Xavier is always the issue.”

“With Dennis—” said Martha.

“Oh, spare me.” Gretta held up one hand to silence Martha till the waiter had finished sprinkling their plates with pepper. After he left she counted the items of food on her dish. “It’s a good thing we each got our own salads and grilled vegetables. Otherwise we’d have got exactly three
haricot verts
apiece. Some
sous-chef
back there is counting. I thought pricey starvation went out with the eighties, and the nineties were about meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and gravy. God, don’t you hate those places that pretend to be like a diner, or Mom’s, except organic and very expensive?”

Martha bit through the creamy eggplant flesh to the oily succulent skin. “Of course, the Goddess women are nuts on the subject of food. Freya and Sonoma struggle over every bite Sonoma eats; Joy’s always on Diana’s back about her anorexia; Titania says Isis has graduate-student food-and-wine tastes…”

“Titania?” Gretta snapped up a green bean thin as a blade of grass. “Which one is she? Which reminds me: who are we today? For the purposes of today’s Amex receipt, you are: Editor,
Mode
.”

Martha hated being reminded that she wasn’t an editor. She wished Gretta could take her out to lunch without playing this game of figuring out what sort of business expense Martha could pass for that day. She resented being made to feel compelled to work for her food.

“I heard a joke,” she said.

“Goody,” Gretta said.

“What do you do when a pit bull humps your leg?”

“Tell me,” said Gretta.

“Fake orgasm,” Martha said.

Martha waited for Gretta’s loony laugh. “That’s funny,” Gretta said coolly. “Is that New Age feminist-separatist witch-goddess humor?”

Martha supposed that’s what it was and liked the joke a little less. She’d heard it in Joy’s minivan on the way to Isis’s apartment.

Every Thursday evening Joy picked up the women in her old VW van with its bumper sticker
MY OTHER CAR IS A BROOMSTICK.
The trip started at Joy and Diana’s apartment in Park Slope, stopped in Brooklyn Heights for Freya and Sonoma, on West Eleventh for Bernie, Twenty-eighth and Lex for Martha, and then snaked around the Upper West Side, where the others lived, before winding up at Isis’s West Seventy-sixth Street brownstone floor-through.

The joke about the pit bull was funnier in the van, in the dark, in the rain, in the company of women who were either gay or celibate by default or choice. Some of them actively hated men, others had just given up, and with blighted affection or genuine rancor, they joked about the male body and brain.

Did Gretta think that laughing at the joke would be disloyal to Xavier? When Martha fell in love with Dennis, Gretta had been between boyfriends. Now Martha wished she’d gloated less and been more sympathetic. One thing she remembered about love was that it narrowed the population to two: two lone humans on a planet of unfeeling robots. Once, when they’d first got together, Dennis and Martha spent a country weekend with friends and, when their hostess stepped out, they made love all over the house, ending up on the living room couch. Well, not friends, exactly: their hostess was Dennis’s former girlfriend.

Now that Martha was no longer in love—correction, no longer loved—her higher sympathies had returned, working overtime and retroactively back to consider how Gretta must have felt when Martha had just met Dennis. No wonder the Goddess women had no patience for romantic passion. It was like a cult of two, and one had to be deprogrammed.

“I don’t know,” said Martha. “The Goddess women make me feel less miserable. Even about Dennis…”

“Dennis Dennis Dennis,” said Gretta.

Martha had broken up with men, she should know better by now. But in this case repeated exposure had failed to make Martha immune; on the contrary, it left her more vulnerable and more gravely ill. There were nights when she lay awake, thinking of Dennis and weeping. And Gretta was tired of hearing about it…

“At this Goddess meeting the other week, I brought up the subject of Dennis, and Isis said how crazy it was to choose to feel so much pain when it was so much smarter to be with friends who valued and appreciated you. She asked, Why would anyone
want
to suffer like that? And the minute she said that, it just made so much sense.”

In fact, when Martha awoke at night, the clean simplicity of that question sliced through the mists of regret, if only for a minute, till the fog rolled in again. Still, in that brief clearing, Martha could sometimes fall asleep. It was better than Valium, with its guilt-inducing visions of prescription-drug dependence.

“I’ve been telling you that for years,” Gretta said.

“Months,” Martha corrected her.

“Months,” said Gretta. “Where’s Enzio? Are we having dessert?”

Martha said, “The Goddess women even help me deal with Eleanor.”

Gretta gave a little shudder and speared a last thin oval of grilled zucchini remaining on her plate. Her feelings about Martha’s boss mirrored her attitude toward Dennis. Martha’s complaints were justified—but really, enough was enough.

“Yesterday Eleanor made me call a writer and ask where he’d got the idea that our ordinary social exchanges were like baboon dominance rituals. The writer said, ‘It’s my opinion. Just say it’s my opinion.’”

“Oh, humiliating!” said Gretta.

“I said I’d figured that, I was just checking. Eleanor was standing over me while I made the call. Usually I’d have wanted to kill her, but now I looked up at Eleanor’s face…”

Eleanor’s husband was leaving her after a long marriage; a teenage son was in a pricey boarding-school dry-out clinic. “I saw that Eleanor was in pain. And I understood that her making me call was her primitive magic, her way of imposing order on the chaos around her.”

“This is nothing new,” said Gretta. “You’ve always had sympathy for Eleanor. Too much sympathy, actually. Lack of sympathy is not your problem. Too much sympathy is your problem. You’ve got so much sympathy for Dennis that you would be the first to explain why he
had
to treat you like shit.”

Startled, Martha sat up straight. She couldn’t remember telling Gretta about those white nights when just before dawn she realized that Dennis was right: anyone would have gotten sick of Martha’s plodding fact-checker’s soul, her chilly cerebral remove, her skinny aging body, the cocker-spaniel eagerness with which she had listened, practically panting, to Dennis’s every word, her hypersensitivity to imagined slights, her braying equine laugh. Not once, with the Goddess women, had her laugh sounded like a snort. Long ago, Martha’s mother advised her that whenever she saw her friends, afterward she should ask herself, Did she feel better or worse? That was a simple formula to tell her who her real friends were. Martha thought of her mother, drinking vodka, watching TV, the whispery husk of the energetic woman who used to tuck her into bed…

“Martha?” said Gretta. “Are you okay?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Martha said. “Maybe none of it makes any sense. But maybe that’s the point. Isis says the first step is accepting the irrational, embracing things that don’t add up.”