The Bride of Catastrophe (11 page)

That dispatched, we went on to the next subject, which was My Summer at Sid's. I'd called him late that first night and told him I missed him too desperately to spend the whole summer away from him—soon I was on a train to Chicago, where his parents happily welcomed the chance to prove their progressive values by letting us shack up. They had mock orange bushes too, but when I bent into them I found they had no perfume.

“Really? There's a scented type?” Sid's mother said, trying to seem interested, as she had all summer, while I followed her from room to room describing the fragrances and enchantments of the home she had rescued me from. I was so grateful to be away from them, so I could love them properly.

Though being away from them meant I had to be
with
Sid, and his sci-fi, and his guitar … emblems of his coldness, reminders that I shouldn't dare open my heart. I'd learned, though, that it was possible to keep the legs open and the heart closed, and so we made our way.

“I don't know, I think I may be done with him,” I said to Philippa, with studied ennui … feeling very superior to poor weak souls—like my old self. The threads between me and my family seemed stretched to breaking: Ma felt I'd abandoned her, and she could barely manage a few civil words to me on the phone. Pop was glad to be rid of me. Dolly and Teddy were young enough that I'd simply floated out of their consciousness. Even with Sylvie, the connection was fraying. She was there, immersed in the life I was trying to wrench myself free of, so we began to see everything differently and it was hard for us to talk. I was proud that I didn't need those parents anymore; I felt it set me above Sylvie. Now I had to learn to do without Sid too—to become cool and perfect, beyond love.

“
Done
with him?? Good
God
, after all we went through…!” But Philippa recovered instantly, saying, “Well then, on to the next!” with relish. We each glanced quickly, secretly, at the other, and so caught each other's eyes by accident, and laughed.

“Who shall it be?” she asked, scanning out the window for a likely subject. “Blond or dark? Artist, or critic? Student, or … You know, I'd think you might cast about among the junior faculty. Yes, that would provide the necessary substance; you need a guiding hand.”

Of all of Philippa's qualities, the one I valued most was her sense that people might fall in love with me. She gazed into my face now, as … well, as a seer gazes into the entrails of a sacrificed chicken; she could not be passive, even when gazing. But whatever she saw there pleased her, and this, naturally, pleased me.

“Yes, junior faculty,” she decided, glancing quickly away. She herself was junior faculty. I pictured a quick, serious man in a dark overcoat, who was opening a door for me—a door under a brick arch, such as you might find at Oxford.

“Why would someone like that want to go out with me?” I asked.

She cocked her head, and frowned. “Your
farm
,” she said, “There weren't a lot of movie theaters close by, were there?”

“Well, there's one in Dover Plains.” I'd been there two or three times, most notably to see
Gone With the Wind
, during which my mother kept pointing out how bold and dashing Scarlett was, just the way I was going to be. I'd sunk further into my seat, a Mole Who Would Be Queen.

“Have you seen
La Religieuse
? Of course not.
Les Biches
?
Persona
?”

I shook my head.

A terrible little smile played on her face. My ignorance, it was such a gorgeous, seductive thing.

“We have work to do,” she declared. “The movies have taken up where literature left off, after modernism.” She took a breath.

“My child, you have
many
pleasures ahead,” she said, in a richly affected voice, and I started to laugh for some reason I didn't quite understand. I looked up at Matisse with his pencil scratching, and his model, whose job was simply to be fully, nakedly, herself. Then to Philippa, her oxford shirt … her eyes, resting momentarily on my collarbone.

She,
my teacher
, was studying
me
.

Eight

A
FTER
PERSONA,
I was standing at the mirror and Dotsy came up behind me, swept up my hair, and kissed my neck. I gasped.

“Does it make you nervous?” she asked me, steadily, as if she were the daughter not of Mr. and Mrs. Schuyler T. Maven III, but Mr. and Mrs. Man Ray.

“No, no! But it might make Sid nervous!” I laughed, skillfully deflecting the blame, and accepting a cigarette from the slim silver case Dotsy had bought after seeing
Notorious
.

The film series was a success, and from then on it, like my scholarship, was built into the Sweetriver budget. Every winter, as the snow damped us into quiet, we would gather in the auditorium to fall deeper into Philippa's black-and-silver world, infected with an erotic miasma which caused us to helplessly fill vases with calla lilies, wear tuxedo jackets with nothing beneath, carry whiskey in flasks, and gesture with ebony cigarette holders. How lovely we were, in our disaffection! We didn't
want
—not men, not anything. We were subject to no one. We drifted across the campus like so many smoke rings on the air, wearing the white silk scarves called Isadora scarves, twenty dollars apiece as advertised in the back of
The New Yorker
, and so long that you could wrap one thrice around your neck and the other end of it was still back there in Paris at the dawn of the modern age.

Esmé, the film projectionist, became fascinating by accident. Seeing her skillful fingers thread the film, we all fell in love with her. She could do something that kept us in thrall. Tall and certain, broad-shouldered, her thick dark hair cut like a man's, she had all the glamour of an RAF pilot, and it was hard to keep facing forward during the film.

Very early, the morning after
Salome
, the dorm phone rang and I shuffled out of Sid's room to hear a very husky-voiced Philippa, laughing and saying, “Well, Beatrice, I'm afraid the unforeseen has…”

“The Unforeseen” became our code name for Esmé, whose moods no RAF pilot could imagine, and who bedeviled Philippa for the next two years. Esmé had style, which is to say that about some things—her jeans, her boots, her slicked-up hair—she was enviably certain. About other things—her feeling for Philippa was one—she changed her mind every minute, but this only sharpened her allure.

“She's like Joan Crawford,” Philippa would say to excuse her. If you were like Joan Crawford, you had license to transgress, because with every transgression you created a new story, you lifted your mistreated lover up with you onto the silver screen, and the thing would last, it wouldn't just evaporate like ordinary loves and angers.…

I, styleless, had to rub angry shoulders with the little people, in the cheap seats. Even if it was possible for me to become like Esmé, it would have meant treading perilously close to becoming like my mother. So I was not sorry when Esmé went to New York for the weekend and returned wearing a wedding ring.

“Back to her high school boyfriend!” Philippa sputtered. “This is
regression
, Beatrice, and I do not intend to be tormented by someone else's regression.
Some of us
do not allow romantic troubles to stand in our way. I mean, one is reeling, one is seeing double. But, is one weeping?”

She was not. In fact, she was rereading
The Importance of Being Earnest
, because she was my thesis adviser and the subject was Oscar Wilde. I loved him because he made sense of life by turning it upside down, and Philippa agreed that given the times we lived in (how the Puritans must have smiled, looking down to see their efforts bear fruit in the seventies: all the tight-lipped, denim-clad goodwives, pious about recycling and whole grains and sex!), Oscar was the right guiding star. Philippa was impatient with him for wimping out and becoming a Christian during his years in prison, but she could quote him, chapter and verse, and as the year went by, we could slap lines down on each other like kids playing cards.

I was still with Sid, still trying for some kind of purity in myself, a full openness to the world which would atone for my parents' withdrawal from it. At night, when Sid had put his guitar away, finished his quarks, and just wanted to swarm over me in the dark, I tried to offer myself wholly. He adored me in the dark, when his face couldn't betray his need. He was cold, so I redoubled my tenderness, determined that his strangeness would dissolve in my warmth, if only I could let him in deep enough. This had not, and would not, happen, but as long as I was narrating my quest for Sid's inner self to Philippa, it seemed within reach. She laughed about it—her own quest was to impose her will on Western civilization, and she'd never once thought about Esmé the way I did about Sid.

“But she's a woman, her essence is available,” she said. “I mean,
was
available…” She laughed a little, and banished the thought. “She's already aging, losing her edge,” she said with a shrug. “She's not what she was that first night.

“Wilde engineered his own fate,” she said suddenly. “He had a thousand chances to avoid it and he let every one go past.”

We were driving into Troy, New York—home of Boxers and Briefs, the nearest gay bar. Things are rough when your idea of excitement is going out for a drink in Troy, New York, but there it was.

Boxers and Briefs was up a back staircase above a pizza joint, a huge room with all the necessities: mirrored ball, a few plastic tables and chairs, four speakers, all larger than I was, and a few men and women scattered in small, awkward-looking groups around the sides of the empty floor.

“Predation is a part of gay culture,” Philippa explained. “Yours is an agrarian attitude. You want to
farm
a love, grow it, tend it, and finally, pluck it. Not surprising, considering your background.
I
am more of a hunter-gatherer. I swoop down at midnight and return with my prey.”

I nodded.

“Now,” she said, “Have you ever cruised?”

“Cruised?”

“Yes, you know, cruising?”

“I think of it as kind of a man thing.”

She drew back, one eye wide and incredulous, the other narrowed and calculating. This was her characteristic expression—a thing was only allowed to surprise her for a second before it went under the microscope, to see where it would fit into her theories.

“A ‘man' thing, exactly. Because it's an eye thing. A woman's eye is the window of her soul … a man's is a
crowbar
. Do you see?”

She stood up and rearranged herself, adjusting a bra strap and pulling up her corduroys. “Watch closely,” she said, and tromped off around the dance floor, stopping every few steps to cock her head like a robin listening for a worm. The only people dancing were two women in late middle age, both done up in perfect high-cowboy style, with brass-tipped boots and wide belts, doing a careful, slow swing to Donna Summer. The women our age looked wretchedly awkward, either gawky or massive, clinging to each other in the shadows.

“Nuns!”
Philippa said to me as she passed. “They're a bunch of
nuns
.”

We watched a woman in a shiny polyester shirt as she crossed the floor to the bar, looking so self-conscious she seemed to have forgotten how to walk.

“Dowdy. Aggressively dowdy,” Philippa cried. “Why?”

“Well, it's not exactly the Champs Élysées,” I said.

“It ought to be the working-class version,” she said, taking a long and morose pull on her Scotch. “They've been in the factories all day. This is their chance to express themselves, and look … Honestly, I think women become lesbians to
get away
from sex. I am
not
going to be able to demonstrate hunting and gathering here tonight.”

A poignant slow song came on and the Westerners held each other like kids at a waltz lesson and box-stepped conscientiously.

“Straight out of the fifties,” Philippa said, rolling her eyes.

“It's sweet,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, as if I had just tapped the definitive nail into some coffin. “Ready to go?”

There was a strange sort of claustrophobia in that room, the feeling that no one of real interest was ever going to walk into it, that nothing would ever change there. I felt crazily restless. What was happening back at school? Suppose Esmé had changed her mind and was sitting on Philippa's doorstep right now, or Dotsy had gotten a buzz cut? What if Sid had finally conquered the Chaconne?

We slouched away down the stairs. Even the fluorescent glare of the pizzeria looked cheerful now.

“Is there any hope?” I asked in the car. “Is it just foolishness to even imagine some deep, whole love?”

“If it is,” she said, “everyone's a fool.”

She sounded exhausted and resigned. “Work, you can rely on,” she said. “Love …
fffft
.” She sounded too tired to lecture me. I almost felt like patting her shoulder, though I knew that if there was one thing Philippa hated, it was consolation. Dissolve the grain of sand before she had the chance to make a pearl of it? Certainly not.

“There are many feelings that take the name of love, but once you give it the name, it's no more than an idea,” she said grimly. “
You
have your pastoral thing—you're infested by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Which puts you in step with the rest of the country, God knows … it's not a bad thing. But…”

“But I'm trying to make a dream come true…” I said. “Without a wand.”

“You do expect a lot,” she said. She had too, once, and I was furious to think she'd been disappointed. Sweetriver had been one long ordeal for me—from that first day, it had been clear I would never be chic or bored enough to fit in. I wasn't yet a modernist, and the rest of them were postmodern already. I should have realized the night I dreamed I was spooning up a revolting bowlful of Jackson Pollock (turned out to be a stomach flu) that I'd always be on the wrong side, the naive side, of everything. But Philippa had looked so closely at me, and where everyone else wanted to see how small and dull I was, in order to feel bigger and shinier himself, Philippa had looked for exact, subtle truths. There was more in her than in most people, so she had seen more in me. And a ray of her intellect had glanced off the jewel of my ambition, lying there where I'd left it so no one would guess how it mattered to me—and in that light, I saw it, possessed it again.