The Odd Woman and the City (3 page)

“For God's sake! What's wrong now?”

“What's wrong
now
? What's right now? What's ever right for Lorenzo?”

“Can't you talk to him? You know him so well.”

“I
do
talk to him. He nods along with me as I speak. I know, I know, he says, you're right, I've got to pull it together, thanks so much for saying this, I'm so grateful, I don't know why I fuck up, I just don't know.”

“Why
does
he fuck up?”

“Why? Because if he's not fucking up he doesn't know who he is.”

Leonard's voice has become charged.

“It's unbelievable,” he swears on, “the muddle in his mind. I say to him, What do you want, what is it you
want
?”

“Tell me,” I cut in, “what do
you
want?”

“Touch
é
.” Leonard laughs drily.

There follows a few long seconds of vital silence.

“In my life,” he says, “I have known only what I
don't
want. I've always had a thorn in my side, and I've always thought, When this thorn is removed I'll think about what I want. But then that particular thorn would be removed, and I'd be left feeling emptied out. In a short time another thorn would be inserted into my side. Then, once again, all I had to think about was being free of the thorn in my side. I've never had time to think about what I
want
.”

“Maybe somewhere in there is a clue to why Lorenzo drinks.”

“It's disgusting,” Leonard says softly. “To be this old and have so little information. Now,
there's
something Krista K could write about that would interest me. The only problem is she thinks information is what the KGB was after.”

*   *   *

In the drugstore I run into ninety-year-old Vera, a Trotskyist from way back who lives in a fourth-floor walk-up in my neighborhood and whose voice is always pitched at the level of soapbox urgency. She is waiting for a prescription to be filled, and as I haven't seen her in a long while, on impulse I offer to wait with her. We sit down in two of the three chairs lined up near the prescription counter, me in the middle, Vera on my left, and on my right a pleasant-looking man reading a book.

“Still living in the same place?” I ask.

“Where'm I gonna go?” she says, loudly enough for a man on the pickup line to turn in our direction. “But y'know, dolling? The stairs keep me strong.”

“And your husband? How's he taking the stairs?”

“Oh, him,” she says. “He died.”

“I'm so sorry,” I murmur.

Her hand pushes away the air.

“It wasn't a good marriage,” she announces. Three people on the line turn around. “But, y'know? In the end it doesn't really matter.”

I nod my head. I understand. The apartment is empty.

“One thing I gotta say,” she goes on, “he was a no-good husband, but he was a great lover.”

I can feel a slight jolt in the body of the man sitting beside me.

“Well, that's certainly important,” I say.

“Boy, was it ever! I met him in Detroit during the Second World War. We were organizing. In those days, everybody slept with everybody, so I did, too. But you wouldn't believe it…” And here she lowers her voice dramatically, as though she has a secret of some importance to relate. “Most of the guys I slept with? They were no good in bed. I mean, they were bad, really
bad
.”

Now I feel the man on my right stifling a laugh.

“So when you found a good one”—Vera shrugs—“you held on to him.”

“I know just what you mean,” I say.

“Do you, dolling?”

“Of course I do.”

“You mean they're still bad?”

“Listen to us,” I say. “Two old women talking about lousy lovers.”

This time the man beside me laughs out loud. I turn and take a good long look at him.

“We're sleeping with the same guys, right?” I say.

Yes, he nods. “And with the same ratio of satisfaction.”

For a split second the three of us look at one another, and then, all at once, we begin to howl. When the howling stops, we are all beaming. Together we have performed, and separately we have been received.

*   *   *

No one is more surprised than me that I turned out to be who I am. Take love, for instance. I had always assumed that, in this regard, I was like every other girl of my generation. While motherhood and marriage had never held my interest, and daydreaming myself on some revolutionary barricade was peculiar among my classmates, I always knew that one day Prince Passion would come along, and when he did, life would assume its ultimate shape:
ultimate
being the operative word. As it happened, a number of PP look-alikes did appear, but there was no ultimate anything. Before I was thirty-five I had been as much bedded as any of my friends, and I had also been twice married, twice divorced. Each marriage lasted two and a half years, and each was undertaken by a woman I didn't know (me) to a man I also didn't know (the figure on the wedding cake).

It was only after these marriages were over that I matured sexually—that is, I became conscious of myself as a person preoccupied with desiring rather than being desired; and
that
development gave me an education. I learned that I was sensual but not a sensualist; that I blissed out on orgasm but the earth didn't move; that I could be strung out on erotic obsession for six months or so but was always waiting for the nervous excitement to die down. In a word: Lovemaking was sublime, but it wasn't where I lived. And then I learned something more.

In my late thirties I had an affair with a man I cared for and who cared for me. This man and I were both drawn to the energy of mind and spirit that each of us felt in the other. But for this man, too—intelligent, educated, politically passionate as he was—the exercise of his sexual will was central to any connection he made with a woman. There was not a moment when we were together that he wasn't touching me. He never walked into my house that his hand wasn't immediately on my breast; never embraced me that he wasn't reaching for my genitals; never lay beside me that he wasn't trying to make me come. When, after we'd been together some months, I began to object to what had started to feel like an on-automatic practice, he would invariably put his arms around me, nuzzle my neck, and whisper in my ear, “C'mon, you know you like it.” As I did genuinely love him and he me—we had memorable times together—I would stare at him at such moments, shake my head in exasperation, but then let it go.

One day he suggested that I let him sodomize me, something we'd not done before. I demurred. Next day he made the same suggestion. Again, I demurred. “How do you know you won't like it,” he persisted, “if you've never done it?” He wore me down: I agreed to try it once. No, no, he said, I must agree to do it three times and
then
if I said no it would be no. So we did it three times, and truth to tell, I didn't hate the physical sensation as much as I had thought I would—almost against my will, my body responded—but I definitely did not like it.

“Okay,” I said, “I've done it three times, and I don't want to do it anymore.”

We were lying in bed. He nuzzled my neck and whispered in my ear, “C'mon. Just one more time. You know you like it.”

I drew away then and looked directly into his face. “No,” I said, and was startled by the finality in my own voice.

“What an unnatural woman you are!” he exploded at me. “You know you want to do it.
I
know you want to do it. Yet you fight it. Or is it me you're fighting?”

Once again, I stared at him: only this stare was different from those other stares. A man was pressing me to do something I did not want to do, and pressing me in a manner he would never have applied to another man: by telling me that I didn't know what I wanted. I felt my eyes narrowing and my heart going cold. For the first—but not the last—time, I consciously felt men to be members of a species separate from myself. Separate and foreign. It was as though an invisible membrane had fallen between me and my lover, one fine enough to be penetrated by desire but opaque enough to obscure human fellowship. The person on the other side of the membrane seemed as unreal to me as I felt myself to be to him. At that moment I didn't care if I never again got into bed with a man.

I did of course get into bed with them—love, quarrel, and bliss out many more times after this man and I parted—but the memory of that fine, invisible separation haunted me; and more often than I like to remember, I saw it glistening as I gazed into the face of a man who loved me but was not persuaded that I needed what he needed to feel like a human being.

In time, I came to know other women who would have analyzed the experience differently but immediately understood what I was talking about when I described the invisible curtain. It comes with the territory, most of them said, shrugging. They had made their peace with an arrangement that was as it had ever been. I saw that I could not. For me, it had become the pea beneath the twenty mattresses: an irritation of the soul that I could not accommodate.

Work, I said to myself, work. If I worked, I thought, pressing myself against my newly hardened heart, I'd be a person in the world. What would it matter then that I was giving up “love”?

As it turned out, it mattered more than I had ever dreamed it would. As the years went on, I saw that romantic love was injected like dye into the nervous system of my emotions, laced through the entire fabric of longing, fantasy, and sentiment. It haunted the psyche, was an ache in the bones; so deeply embedded in the makeup of the spirit, it hurt the eyes to look directly into its influence. It would be a cause of pain and conflict for the rest of my life. I prize my hardened heart—I have prized it all these years—but the loss of romantic love can still tear at it.

*   *   *

A wooden barrier has been erected on my street around two squares of pavement whose concrete has been newly poured. Beside the barrier is a single wooden plank laid out for pedestrians, and beside that, a flimsy railing. On an icy morning in midwinter I am about to grasp the railing and pull myself along the plank when, at the other end, a man appears, attempting the same negotiation. This man is tall, painfully thin, and fearfully old. Instinctively, I lean in far enough to hold out my hand to him. Instinctively, he grasps it. Neither of us speaks a word until he is safely across the plank, standing beside me. “Thank you,” he says. “Thank you very much.” A thrill runs through me. “You're welcome,” I say, in a tone that I hope is as plain as his. We each then go our separate ways, but I feel that “thank you” running through my veins all the rest of the day.

It was his voice that had done it. That voice! Strong, vibrant, self-possessed: it did not know it belonged to an old man. There was in it not a hint of that beseeching tone one hears so often in the voice of an old person when small courtesies are shown—“You're so kind, so kind, so very kind,” when all you're doing is hailing a cab or helping to unload a shopping cart—as though the person is apologizing for the room he or she is taking up in the world. This man realized that I had not been inordinately helpful; and he need not be inordinately thankful. He was recalling for both of us the ordinary recognition that every person in trouble has a right to expect, and every witness an obligation to extend. I had held out my hand, he had taken it. For thirty seconds we had stood together—he not pleading, I not patronizing—the mask of old age slipped from his face, the mask of vigor dropped from mine. In the midst of American dysfunction, global brutality, and personal defensiveness, we had, each of us, simply come into full view, one of the other.

*   *   *

Leonard has a friend, Tom, who is a great collector of parables. For Tom, the mere act of waking in the morning is a source of apprehension; the parables comfort and refresh him. The other day Leonard repeated two of Tom's newest to me. In the first, “A woman falls off an ocean liner. Hours later, she is missed. The crew turns the ship around. They go back and they find her because she's still swimming.” In the second, “A man decides to kill himself, jumps off a high bridge, changes his mind in midair, shapes his body into a dive, and survives.” Life is hell, the species is doomed, but ya gotta keep swimming.

“Why do you think in the first story the protagonist is a woman, in the second a man?” I asked Leonard.

“But the man is gay, dummy!” he replied. “The woman has fallen off the boat, she hasn't jumped, and she'll be damned if an accident is going to do her in; she starts swimming
immediately
. The man, on the other hand, is all suicidal indecisiveness. He's more than halfway into his plunge before he decides it's better to live than to die. Gay, definitely.”

*   *   *

There are two categories of friendship: those in which people enliven one another and those in which people must be enlivened to be with one another. In the first category one clears the decks to be together; in the second one looks for an empty space in the schedule.

I used to think this distinction more a matter of one-on-one relationships than I now do. These days I look upon it more as a matter of temperament. That is, there are people who are temperamentally inclined to be enlivened, and others for whom it is work. Those who are inclined are eager to feel expressive; those for whom it's work are more receptive to melancholia.

New York friendships are an education in the struggle between devotion to the melancholy and attraction to the expressive. The pavements are filled with those longing to escape the prison sentence of the one into the promise of the other. There are times when the city seems to reel beneath its impact.