Original Sins (57 page)

It was strange feeling sympathy for a man again. She thought she'd recovered from her need to do that. All her life she'd been at it. With Raymond through his high school harangues about the iniquities of Newland. With Earl about her inability to devote her life to his service. Her mother and Sally and Kathryn and Ruby and she had knocked themselves out sympathizing with her father about his hard days at the mill. And then of course there was Justin's unending appetite for sympathy.

She recalled the day she first began to realize she was all sympathized out. She'd woken up before the alarm, rolling out of bed, careful not to disturb the sleeping Justin. She glanced out the window and down the street toward the Hudson. Smog was shrouding the high-rises in New Jersey. She fed and dressed Matt, then herself.

As she walked Matt to the day-care place, he wailed that he didn't see her enough, other kids didn't have to be at the center as much, other kids had really nice mothers. The usual. It always worked. A Real Mother should be: forever at home, eternally available, unquenchably interested. A Real Mother will: bake cookies, stew vats of hot chocolate, make Christmas tree ornaments, play Monopoly on demand. This was the model Emily was stuck with from her own childhood, and from too many years of glancing through
Ladies' Home Journals
in dentists' office. And she suffered about her inability to conform. Once a month she'd crawl into bed, pull the covers over her head, and weep. Loudly. Boo hoo hoo, yes, you're right, I'm failing you. But she usually managed to deliver
some
sympathy to Matt, knowing that he required lots, in order to grow into an adult male with an insatiable need for it.

As she descended into the subway at Eighty-sixth Street, a man in tattered clothes accosted her and began an elaborate story about his dying mother. She reached in her pocketbook for change. But when she handed it over, he handed it back. “Listen, lady, I don't want your money!”

“Well, what
do
you want?”

“I want you to listen to what I'm telling you!”

“But I'm late for work.”

He started yelling, calling her a bitch and a cunt and a whore and a dyke. Emily had begun to catch on: Either you played the Great Ear, or you accepted the label of Festering Hole. One way or another, men were determined to fill your orifices.

As she sat at her typewriter high atop attractive East Forty-third Street and answered her boss's morning mail, he stomped in and delivered a tirade against the Erie-Lackawanna for making him an hour late and forcing him to stand in the aisle in a steamy car all the way from Teaneck when he had a sore throat that might very well turn into pneumonia. He looked at her, waiting for—sympathy. She even opened her mouth. But nothing came out.

Glancing at her uneasily, he discussed the unfortunate character formation of his bratty children, his wife's eagerness to charge unnecessary items at the new Saks near their house, the defects in the transmission of his new Volvo. Again he awaited Sympathy—which seemed to be assuming the proportions of the Holy Grail. He was paying Emily to deliver. If she didn't, she'd lose her job. Her child would starve in the streets. She opened her mouth. Again, nothing came out.

He stormed to his desk, on which lay letters and contracts awaiting his signature.

“I'm sorry,” Emily croaked—in terror. Please, don't put me out to graze. See? I can sympathize with the best of them. After she'd phoned an agent to postpone her boss's lunch, and as she strolled to the coffee wagon to get him his fix, she thought, The fucker! He had her to do his crap here, his wife and a maid to do it at home. Emily was paid fifty-five hundred dollars to his twenty-seven five. Yet he had the gall to come to
her
for sympathy?

She glanced around nervously, to see if anyone had overheard these subversive thoughts.

As she staggered back through the apartment door with her arms full of groceries and laundry and manuscripts, Justin was lying in the middle of the hall floor. Rather than drop her packages to straddle him and give him a back rub, she stepped over him and went into the kitchen. From the corner of her eye, she saw him raise his head and stare at the Great Ear with surprise. She began putting groceries away. He started talking in a dull monotone about his latest failure to get his outdated articles on draft resistance published, about the difficulties of being pure in an impure world.

Ever since the Revolution had failed to arrive, he had been directing his organizing energies inward. Five years on civil rights, and about all that had been accomplished was that he'd been arrested for speeding by a black state trooper the last time he'd driven through Georgia. Three years of organizing among Appalachian migrants in Cincinnati, and slum housing and infant malnutrition still existed. Three years of draft resistance work, and a report had just come out that the United States had finally pulled out of Vietnam because of diminishing oil supplies. Justin had concluded the individual was powerless to control socio-economic situations, but that one
could
control one's personal intake. Since control was what it had always been about with him, he began wearing a surgical mask to filter the air that entered his lungs. He also had Emily and Matt drinking a concoction of brewer's yeast and carrot juice. When Matt would refuse, Justin would tie him to a chair, placed on a square of plastic, and dribble it into his mouth. Matt would let it trickle from the corner of his mouth until his clothes, Justin, the chair, and the plastic were drenched. Eventually one or the other would give in. Emily tried to reason with Justin: “Isn't this what the British do to the IRA?”

“It's for his own good.”

“But it tastes like dire-rear, Mom,” Matt would shriek. Once she tried punching Justin, which was a big mistake. He hurled her across the room, and she hit her head on his ionizer, which was replacing the negative ions air pollution had destroyed.

Matt got even more upset and ordered in a brave little squeak, “Stay out of this, Mom. This is between Dad and me.”

Emily began using these times to go out shopping for lecithin, mung beans, bottled spring water, and various other staples.

Justin had also chosen this moment in history to “get in touch with his feelings,” having concluded the Revolution failed because everyone was “headtripping.” Each morning upon awakening he'd deliver a lengthy description of how he felt that day, and why. Like a psychic weather report. The problem was that most of his feelings turned out to be either hostile or helpless. Emily never knew from one day to the next whether she'd be greeted from work by a bully or a baby. Today it was the latter.

She stepped over him on her way to the bathroom. As she sat on the toilet, he came in and continued his lamentation, his voice muffled by his surgical mask. He glanced at her dolefully and waited for—Sympathy.

“Why don't you just go get stuffed then?” she suggested amicably. She was starting to feel like one of those vomit bags on an airplane.

“What?”

Emily was seized with panic: If she didn't give Justin what he needed, he'd get it elsewhere. She'd be reduced to a lifetime of lonely masturbation. She forced a smile.

Deciding he'd misheard, Justin continued his description of the insensitive ranks of publishing executives who had once again failed to recognize his virtue and talent.

If she could just grit her teeth and emit sympathetic sounds, like radar bleeps, if she then rubbed his back or fucked him, and cooked him a nice macrobiotic supper, she could get him to do the dishes and put Matt to bed. He might even be enticed to help clean the apartment. It was potentially a nice place—high ceilings, parquet floors, elaborate molding, rent-controlled in a once-elegant townhouse. She'd already explained to him that by picking up the apartment, one could control one's visual intake. But he remained unimpressed and pointed out that Emily was trying to impose her standards of cleanliness on him, which was a form of domestic imperialism. And besides, he had to go to the Village for his course in Body Language II: From the Neck Up.

At supper Emily said, “I've just understood that it's not fair. Harold goes to martini lunches with authors and agents, while I file and fend off phone calls and answer his mail. And he gets paid five times what I do.”

Justin shrugged. “So switch jobs.”

“To what? Where would it be any different?”

“Christ, how should I know?”

The Great Ear wasn't supposed to appeal for sympathy herself. “Justin, what I don't understand is why it's politically acceptable for your wife to work within the System and support you, but it's not OK for you to.” She was sure there was a rationale that, silly her, she just couldn't see. Justin always had politically correct explanations on tap. If Emily couldn't see his point, he'd inform her that she didn't have a “political analysis.” This was partly why she'd married him. As a Southerner in the North during the civil rights era, she'd needed all the help toward political correctness she could get.

Besides, she thought at the time he was the most wonderful man she'd ever met. She remembered sitting across from him at the West End Grill on upper Broadway after a planning session for a fund-raising concert. Their coffee sat untouched. She studied the lines on his face, etched by the acid of human misery, which he was working so valiantly to eradicate. He held both her hands on the scratched wooden table top. She gazed into his eyes and sang along with the jukebox:
“And I'll be yours till the stars fall from the sky
…” She vowed that evening she'd devote her life to assisting Justin and comforting him in his struggles on behalf of all the downtrodden peoples of the world.

Tears began to fill Emily's eyes as Justin lectured on about the System, which occupations were inside it, and which outside. It was like a cowboy movie—it turned out there was Good Money and Ba-a-a-d Money. Justin's trust fund had been Bad Money because it was based on stocks in defense industries and interest from banks that were slumlords, the capital having originated from the slave trade. But it became transformed into Good Money because he spent it on behalf of those who'd been exploited to earn it. The problem by now had ceased to exist on more than a theoretical level, however. In Cincinnati one night he overheard another organizer: “I'll say this for Justin: He never touches his capital.” Defiantly, he gave it all away in upcoming years. In doing so, he became what he'd been working to do away with—jobless and broke.

Matt began talking in tandem. “You know what happened today during nap, Mommy? Andrew took the white mouse out of his cage and put it in with the boa constrictor, and Janie said …”

“… state socialism …”

“… kicked and bit her arm …”

“… let the People decide …”

“Damn it, I can't listen to you both at once!” Emily took a deep breath and tried to calm herself, while they looked at her with shock. She regarded herself with shock. The Great Ear was not supposed to talk, particularly in a less than loving tone. “Decide between you who gets the floor,” she requested.

“Matthew, don't interrupt!”

“But he …” The poor kid hadn't spoken for hours. Besides, Emily was tired of state socialism. She wanted to hear about the boa constrictor. But could she challenge Matt's father in front of Matt. She felt she was a rag doll being ripped in two by competing children.

After Matt was in bed, Emily went to Maria's apartment on Broadway and Ninety-fifth for her women's group. Several members had worked together on a parents' cooperative day-care center, which in most cases meant “mothers' cooperative.” The center, held in the church basement that housed workshops on nonviolence during the sixties, included children of every hue, relics of the Revolution: mocha children of black-white unions; Maria's daughter, Cleo, who'd been conceived to keep her father out of Vietnam; adopted American Indian and Vietnamese children. Instead of cowboys and Indians, the children played Capitalists and Workers.

Emily had lost track of Lou after her freshman year when she'd concluded Lou was an Oreo, but one morning at the center they found themselves face to face. Lou's greying hair was cut short and looked like steel wool. She wore a khaki army shirt and sunglasses. Her hands rested on the heads of two small dark children; she explained later they were to have been soldiers for the Black Nation. Her husband apparently spent most of his time stockpiling weapons. She was in law school on a grant and was in love with a white woman law student. They stared at each other for a long time. Finally Lou smiled and drawled, “Hey, gal. How you making it?”

When Emily first started going to the women's group, Justin asked, “What do you girls do—swap recipes?” He chortled.

Emily smiled, pinchedly. “No, we examine the ways in which this society has conditioned us to put up with remarks like that. I mean, really, Justin. Would you say to a Black Panther, ‘What do you do, eat watermelon?'”

“The lady talks back! Well, my dear, you're getting there.”

“Don't you patronize me, Justin Lawson.”

“You're quite right,” he said with a grin. “And I'm proud of you for not letting me get away with it.”

The first meetings consisted of discussions of why they were meeting. Unable to come to a unanimous conclusion, they decided just to meet and not worry about it. For the next several months they discussed what the format should be, given that they all loathed the hierarchical pattern bequeathed them by the patriarchy. Should they rotate discussion leaders, or do without leaders altogether? Should they pick a topic for each week, read the same book? Or should topics just evolve? They could never make up their collective mind. They finally decided whoever was having the meeting in her apartment would be responsible for the structure of that meeting.

Justin, meanwhile, was less than enchanted. “Next thing you know, you girls will be referring to yourselves as Third World. Colonized by male imperialists!” He crowed from where he lay with his parachutist boots on the couch.