The Women's Room (49 page)

What is real beyond the muscle, bone, and blood, beyond body? The image can become intrinsic, can shape the mouth, the vision, the posture. If you’re a waiter all your life, maybe you always stand a little bent forward. But it’s disconnectable too; Galileo didn’t see himself burning. And even body is not fixed. There’s age, weight, accident, nose bob, hair dye, colored contact lenses.

I see us as all sitting around naked, shivering, in a huge circle, looking up as the sky turns black and the stars flare out and somebody starts to tell a story, claims to see a pattern in the stars. And then someone else tells a story about the eye of the hurricane, the eye of the tiger. And the stories, the images, become the truth and we will kill each other rather than change one word of the story. But every once in a while, someone sees a new star, or claims to see it, a star in the North that changes the pattern, and that is devastating. People are outraged, they start up grunting in fury, they turn on the one who noticed it and club her to death. They sit back down, muttering. They take up smoking. They turn away from the North, not wanting it to be thought that they might be trying to catch sight of her hallucination. Some of them, however, are true believers, they can look straight north and never see even a glimpse of what she pointed to. The foresighted gather together and whisper. They already know that if that star is accepted, all the stories will have to be changed. They turn suspiciously to sniff out any of the others who might surreptitiously turn their heads to peer at the spot where this star is supposed to be. They catch a few they think are doing this; despite their protests, they are killed. The thing must be stopped at the root. But the elders have to keep watching, and their watching convinces the others that there’s really something there, so more and more people start to turn, and in time everyone sees it, or imagines they see it, and those that don’t claim they do.

So earth feels the wound, and Nature from her seat sighing through all her Works, gives signs of woe, that all is lost. The stories all have to be changed: the whole world shudders. People sigh and weep and say how peaceful it was before in the happy golden age when everyone believed the old stories. But actually nothing whatever has changed except the stories.

I guess the stories are all we have, all that makes us different from lion, ox, or those snails on the rock. I’m not sure I want to be different
from those snails. The essential human act is the lie, the creation or invention of a fiction. For instance, here in my corner of the world, a major story is that it is possible to live without pain. They are removing hooks from noses and psyches, gray from hair, gaps from teeth, organs from bodies. They are trying to remove hunger and ignorance, or so they say. They are working on a pitless peach, a thornless rose.

Is there a thornless rose? I’m confused. I’m confused because part of me thinks a thornless rose would be really nice, while another part of me grips puritanically the thorn, even as blood drips down my palm. And all of me thinks it would be nice if there were no hunger or ignorance – the latter a bit of a joke, I fear: One man’s ignorance is another man’s wisdom. And I don’t want to insist on suffering, that self-realizing prophecy. It must be that the snows wash it away, or rain, or wind. Otherwise, how could the world get about with all those scars, those mutilations on its body? We have forgotten the Siege of Paris, the Albigensians, and hundreds of other old stories. The pennons, the decked-out, high-stepping horses, the ermines and velvets are all part of fairy tale now.

The point is that if only what endures is real – something Shakespeare, say, believed – then only death is real. All the rest is image, transient, mutable. Even our stories, although they last longer than we do. So what makes them – what makes anything – worth dying for? When everything but death is a lie, a fiction.

People on both sides claimed ideas were worth dying for back then in 1968, although the ones who made the loudest claims were rarely the ones who died. One day in Lehman Hall, which was festering with talk of revolution, Mira dared to suggest that revolutions weren’t especially fun. Brad Barnes, who had lately joined SDS, sat beneath chandeliers, a cheeseburger and French fries before him, his Coke halfway to his mouth, stopped, stared at her, and said: ‘Well, Mira, when the revolution comes, I’ll try to prevent them from lining you up against the wall. I know you’re well-intentioned, after all.’

14

Grief and revolt notwithstanding, ordinary life went on, classes and parties which Mira dutifully attended. Graduate student parties were noisy, centerless, and disconnected. They were held in shabby apartments decorated with posters. One room was usually emptied of furniture except for the stereo which blasted the usual Stones or Joplin songs. The grad students might go without food, but they had music. Sometimes there was a strobe light in the room, and always people danced. In the kitchen there would be beer and wine, pretzels, potato chips, sometimes cheese and crackers. One bedroom door was always closed. Mira thought people went into that room to, as she put it, ‘neck.’ This seemed strange, since a number of them were in there at once, and all of them could simply have gone someplace else and had privacy. It was several months before she was invited into the room and discovered what was really going on. They were smoking, passing the joint or pipe in a casual, indifferent way that was betrayed every time they heard a police siren, or whenever the music grew too loud. Someone would open the door then and yell: ‘Hey, keep it down, you want the pigs to come?’

Grass seemed to send each of them into their own private circle of senses. They inhaled deeply, sitting on the floor or lolling on the bed; they gazed outward, but did not seem to be looking outward. They were calm, talked desultorily in low voices. It seemed to her that they were together only because they were in the same room and were participating together in something that was called a crime: it was ‘Us’ against ‘Them.’ It was just like their dancing, she thought. They danced together to the same music, but no one touched anyone else, no one led, no one followed, you could not call any pair a unit. Cambridge seemed a world of complete disconnection and isolation.

She would leave the smoking room and wander through the other rooms. Some apartments were large, shared by three or four students. There were people everywhere, but everywhere they were saying the same things they said at every other party. She passed Steve Hoffer giving one of his monologues:

‘It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Superbreath! Here he comes, with a sound like thunder, his aim to relieve the oppressed and defeat evil
and to establish Daddy Warbucks as King of the Universe! He flies into the room where Dr Caligari bends over the inert form of who else but … Barbarella! He opens his supermouth and blows. Pow! Everyone in the room passes out, unfortunately including Barbarella. Careful to close his mouth, he leaps to her side and snatches the beautiful woman from the torture table. In a flash he is gone, wafting her high above skyscrapers. The gorgeous woman recovers and opens her eyes, twittering delicately her six-inch eyelashes (aided in their length by her indispensable Belliball eyeliner and mascara), and perceiving her rescuer’s handsome face, presses her mouth warmly and wetly against his: only to pass out again! Poor Superbreath! A tear mists his eye: the terrible curse laid upon his powers cannot be evaded! Never can he know the love of woman! Forever and ever he will fly the skies seeking out evil and establishing the Kingdom of Daddy Warbucks so that the world may be covered with busily humming factories and sprinkled with happy workers and dotted with even happier millionaires! But until the day the world is secure, when he will resign his cape, he cannot enjoy the pleasures of mere mortals. But when that day comes, boys and girls, when he has firmly and forever established the kingdom of money and machines, he will finally be allowed to brush his teeth with Crest and gargle with Listerine – something, you, boys and girls, can do right now! – and live a normal life in a ranch house in Levittown with Barbarella in a little white apron and nothing else …’

‘Natura naturans,’ Dorothy said.

‘No,
naturata,’
Tina argued.

‘I’m going to scream,’ said Chuck Spinelli mildly.

‘First cause is the same as final cause, no? I mean metaphysically, or if you go beyond ordinary categories into mystic reality …’

‘It wouldn’t be efficient cause.’

‘It’s sufficient cause to leave,’ Chuck said.

‘Hi, Mira!’ said Howard Perkins, as if he were really glad to see her. He was a skinny young man with an eye twitch. He curved and dangled his body. Thin and tall as he was, his body seemed a particular burden to him, as if it were a long string of cooked spaghetti and he could not find a way to make it stand upright. He was always draping himself over or around something.

‘I can’t believe half a year is over. Only six months to go. This has been the worst year of my life.’

Mira gave a motherly murmur.

‘You’re so lucky.’

‘Why?’

‘You’re older, you’re sure of yourself. The rest of us … oh, it’s been horrible.’

‘Do you mean you were afraid you wouldn’t get through?’

‘Sure! All of us! I still am. You know, we were all superstars in undergrad school. Straight A’s and all that. Never failed anything. But all the while, in the back of your mind, you know you’re really stupid, because you know how much you don’t know. The teachers – even the best ones – don’t know because they haven’t thought to ask you those questions, and so they keep on giving you A’s. But you know the day of retribution is coming. Then you get it, the acceptance to Harvard! You got it because those teachers recommended you, the teachers who don’t know. But you can feel in your bones that it’s coming. When you get to Harvard, they’ll find out. You’ll fail miserably. Then everyone will know.’ He groaned.

‘So you study like hell to make up for your stupidity.’

‘Of course.’ He looked at her appealingly, trustingly. ‘When do you think they’ll find me out? At the general exam?’

She laughed. ‘When I was little I thought my father knew everything. That was because he wasn’t around very much. It was upsetting because I knew he would know who made those muddy footprints down the hall. Then, when I got a little older, I figured anybody would have known who made them since there was only one person in the house who wore a size five shoe. I also figured that my father didn’t know much at all, because my mother told him everything, and she was the one to be feared. But then I discovered that neither of them could multiply twenty-seven by fifty-six as quickly as I could, and I cast both of them off in contempt. I thought that it was the teacher who knew everything. Well, that didn’t last too long, but by then I was in college, and I really figured the professors were the ones who knew everything. That doesn’t last too long either. When you get your first A, you’re overjoyed, then you get another, another, and another. You are convinced by now that none of those professors knows anything at all. You keep going, you move through the minefield on tiptoe, waiting for the explosion. But it never comes. Years and years go by and nothing happens, nobody finds out. You keep being successful, you keep getting promoted. One day you wake up and you’re President, and then you’re
really scared. Because by then you know that nobody knows anything and they think you do. It’s at that point that you begin to worry about the future of mankind.’

He laughed, a full rich unselfconscious laugh, and everybody turned around to look at them. Then his face fell again.

‘Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing here,’ he moaned.

God. Again. ‘What else could you be doing?’

‘I could be out killing gooks.’

‘Yes.’

‘That might be better.’

‘If you enjoy that sort of thing.’

‘Maybe I’ll join the Peace Corps.’

‘How would you like a diet of fishheads and rice?’

‘All I eat is brown rice and beans and yoghurt. I have to get out of here. This place is full of walking-around zombies. Everybody tries to compete with each other and tries to impress Hooten hoping he’ll be impressed enough to recommend them for the Harvard appointment, or maybe to Yale or Princeton. Nobody’s real.’

‘Maybe that’s what real is.’

‘No. You’re real. You say what you really feel.’

No, I don’t, she thought. Or I’d tell you how bored I am.

‘I think I’ll get some more wine,’ she said. That’s how you get to be an alcoholic, she thought, always heading for the booze when the party gets dull.

A young woman with long straight red hair was standing at the table pouring wine into her glass. She kept pouring until the glass overflowed.

‘Oh, Christ!’ She looked up at Mira and laughed nervously. ‘I don’t know why I’m drinking this stuff, I’m zonked already.’

‘Well, if you enjoy pouring for its own sake, here’s another glass.’

Kyla laughed. ‘I never see you anymore, Mira.’ She filled Mira’s glass, managing to spill only a little. Mira saw that her hands were shaking.

‘No. I guess I don’t go to Lehman Hall as often as I used to.’

‘I don’t go at all. God, I hate this place!’ She turned her head and looked around nervously. Her eyes were anxious.

‘Yeah.’ Mira offered her a cigarette.

She tapped it for some seconds on the kitchen table. ‘You’re so wonderful, though, so calm. As if it just meant nothing to you, you just sail through it.’

Mira was surprised. ‘Someone else just said something like that. It’s strange. The impressions other people get of us, I mean.’

‘Don’t you feel calm?’

‘Well, I suppose so, yes, I don’t feel nervous. But I’m not very happy here.’

‘Not very happy here. Well, of course, who could be? But you have the whole thing in perspective, you know what’s important.’

‘Me?’ She looked closely at Kyla.

‘Yes!’ Kyla insisted. ‘The rest of us run around like idiots worrying, terrified. It’s our whole future, our lives.’

‘Is what you’re saying that your entire sense of self-worth depends on your doing well here?’