The Women's Room (52 page)

‘How could you when what she wanted was to dance?’

Iso nodded. ‘I know, but I felt there was more she wanted, I wanted to give it, I wanted to be able to give it, and I resented her because I couldn’t, because she needed it so much. For the last year, practically all we’ve done is fight.’

But that wasn’t all. Except for a few casual ‘flings,’ they had been only with each other. ‘We knew, nobody else, it was our secret, it kept
us together and the world outside, it kept us glued together, like having a deformed child, as if each of us had a limb that had to be strapped on and off that nobody else knew about except each other. And if we split up, either we’d have to let other people know or we’d have to live alone, isolated, completely cut off …’

Val ordered sandwiches. Iso stopped when the waitress brought them. Val ordered another round of drinks. Nobody ate.

‘We never went to Alabama. We didn’t go anyplace. Ava didn’t go to work. We went late at night to the market and didn’t answer the phone. We’ve been sitting in that apartment for two months, arguing, talking, pacing, fighting, accusing …’ She put her forehead in her hand. ‘It was crazy, I thought I was going crazy, maybe I did, maybe we both did.’ She looked up again, appealing to them with her eyes. ‘Is everything in life like that?’

Ava wanted to go, wanted the chance; she did not want to go and leave Iso; she felt guilty about wanting to go, so accused Iso of wanting to be rid of her; she resented Iso’s unwillingness to leave Harvard and go with her when she had left every place to be with Iso; she was frightened of going alone; she wanted to go alone, she was sick of their fights, their hopeless circle of accusations.

‘And me too, it was the same for me. I wanted her to go for her own sake, but I didn’t want to lose her. But I didn’t want to leave Harvard, it’s taken me so long to settle down to something and besides, I love what I’m doing. And I felt angry that she wanted to go off without me, and frightened for her: how will she get along without me? She’s so … vulnerable, so fragile. We went around and around and around. There was no solution. Except night before last we had a real bang-up, blast-out fight and she packed her bags and called the woman and said she was coming. Then we both cried and held hands. It was finished. Like a war. It ends when everybody’s dead.’

She stood up suddenly, clumsily, and walked swiftly across the room to the toilet. Mira fiddled with her glass.

‘Val … did you know?’

‘I knew they loved each other.’

‘I’m so dense. I have cutoff points in my head. I just won’t think about things beyond a certain point.’

Iso returned. Her hair was restored to order, but her face was splotchy, and the red blotches emphasized her freckles, usually invisible in her pallor. Her eyes were pale and very dead. She lighted a cigarette.

‘And now?’ Val began.

Iso spread her hands and shrugged. ‘Nothing. Just nothing.’ She puffed nervously. ‘Although I’m sure Ava will find someone to take care of her fast enough,’ she added grudgingly.

‘Was that part of the problem?’

Iso nodded, eyes lowered. ‘It’s embarrassing. It’s humiliating to be jealous. And of course she claimed that I was just dying to be rid of her so I could get involved with a whole flock of women …’ She pursed her lips tightly. ‘I’m much too old to start being promiscuous. Besides … She twisted her mouth again and sipped her drink.

‘Besides, anything might happen,’ Val laughed.

Iso looked up surprised.

‘I remember when I divorced Neil. I was too young, even younger than you, to imagine living a celibate life for the rest of my years, but I had Chris and couldn’t quite figure how to handle just the mechanical arrangements, you know? Because I loathe lying and sneaking. And I set my lips the way you’re doing now –’

Iso instantly untwisted her mouth.

‘– and said I wasn’t going to be promiscuous, and I’d worry about finding the One and Only when I found him. Actually, I was dying to screw around. Everybody looked attractive to me. And if a guy came onto me, I wanted to try him even if he wasn’t all that attractive to me. I was really hungry for experience.

‘And I had it. Once, I remember, for about six months. I had five lovers at once. The thing is, it’s just too time-consuming. You can ignore a husband, but you have to spend time with a lover – talking, eating, touching, making love all afternoon or all night. You can’t get anything else done. So after a while, I cut it out. Nowadays, apart from a casual encounter – they’re always nice, sort of sweet – I only see Grant. And not that much of him, the grouch.’

Iso was staring hard at her drink. There were two tiny pink spots on the corners of her cheeks. Her mouth was tight, almost angry. When Val finished, she looked up; her eyes were hard, hurt.

‘You act as if it were the same thing. As if I don’t have special problems.’

‘You have a problem whether you do anything or not. As you no doubt know. If people are going to snipe at you as a lesbian, they’ll do it whether you’re involved with anyone or not.’

Iso’s flush deepened. ‘I have the name so I might as well have the game?’ Her voice was hard, cold.

‘I don’t know if you have the name. I’ve never heard anyone say anything. Besides, around here, who can tell what anyone is?’

They all giggled: it was a sad truth.

‘I’m talking about the long run.’

Iso relaxed a little. She picked up her sandwich and took a bite.

‘It’s a matter of costs,’ Val resumed. ‘Aloneness, careful watchfulness, suspicion – it’s a horrible way to live. Always squelching impulses for fear the truth may show.’

‘But the risk,’ Iso objected.

‘Gossip? It can be damaging, I suppose.’

‘Oh, if that were all!’

‘Why? What do you think?’

‘Survival.’

Iso trudged off, when they parted, toward her home. She was in hiding, she told them, and came out only to attend Wharton’s class – she’d made peace with him – and to see them. Mira had tears in her eyes as she watched her go, head bent forward, hands plunged deep in the pockets of her old pea coat, loping along as if she were never precisely sure she wanted to go in the direction she was going in. She was going home alone, to think about all of this alone, to decide or avoid decision alone. Like me sitting with my brandy, she thought, and felt gushy and sentimental, thinking that everyone must do that, face alone the worst truths, the worst terrors. Yet we do do something for each other, she protested, we can help. How? a grim voice insisted. She meditated on this on her swift walk home through the biting February cold. As she neared her house, she saw a small figure sitting on her front steps, reading. It was Kyla.

‘Aren’t you freezing?’

‘Well, I had just two hours between my class and a meeting, and I wanted to see you so when you weren’t home I thought I might as well wait, you might come in and if you didn’t I didn’t have anyplace else to go anyway, of course I could have sat in Widener or Boylston, but my meeting’s up this way anyway and besides, you might come home,’ she announced smiling.

She came in, lugging the heavy green bookbag she always carried, and got warmed up with two gin and tonics which she gulped down like water. She chattered about the differences between German and English Romanticism, and a paper she was writing. ‘It’s so
interesting
, Mira, almost as if you could talk about differences in German and English souls, as if you could define national characteristics. I don’t
believe it, yet I do. Like Harley and me, you know? He’s really German, despite the name, and I’m really English, well, with a little Scots, both Teutonic, I guess, but so different!’

‘Are your differences like those between English and German Romanticism?’ Mira laughed.

Kyla paused, taking this seriously. ‘No, no, well, I don’t know. I haven’t tried to align us with them. But that’s a thought, you know? It might be illuminating. It might help.’

And she burst into tears.

She tried, but she could not stop crying. She kept gasping, and raising her head, and blowing her nose, and drawing in sighs, and sipping her third drink, and talking, but through it all, she sobbed. Harley was brilliant, so brilliant, Mira should meet him, he was really wonderful, his work, his professors had said, no question about it, someday the Nobel Prize, nuclear physics such a difficult thing, a consuming thing, it was understandable, she was a dog to complain, she should be proud, she was proud, to be even the smallest part of it, if she just made his life the teensiest bit easier, happier, more comfortable, it was enough, she should be grateful just to have the chance, she was a rotten complaining bitch. And why should she complain? She was so busy herself, a member of four organizations, president of one, studying for generals, taking two seminars and Hooten’s demanding conference course, she had so much to do in the house, of course Harley helped, she had to say that, he was really wonderful, he always made breakfast, but there was the shopping and the cleaning and the cooking and it seemed too much, but that wasn’t the problem, she could do it, she could do everything, she wouldn’t have minded, if only if only if only.

‘If only he’d talk to me!’ she burst out in a sob, leaped up, and ran into the toilet and shut the door.

Mira waited. After some minutes, she stood up and walked to the bathroom door and stood there. After another minute or two, she knocked. She could hear Kyla sobbing. She opened the door. Kyla lunged at her, threw her arms around Mira’s waist, buried her head in her bosom and cried. They stood like that for a long time. Mira had never heard anyone cry so long so hard. She thought that Kyla’s heart must really be broken, and then thought that the old worn-out phrase did mean something. Kyla’s heart was not broken, but breaking. After the break, there is silence. She thought too that she had never loved anyone as much
as Kyla loved Harley, and she felt humbled, awed in the face of such love.

After a time, a long time, Kyla’s sobs subsided. She asked to be left alone, and Mira went back to the kitchen, where they had been sitting, feeling dizzy from so much emotion and so much drinking in one day, and put on a pot of coffee. Kyla came out, her face somewhat smoothed out, her bouncy manner returned.

‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t drink.’

‘I’m making coffee.’

‘Good. I have to give a report at the meeting, and I’d like to be in control.’ She looked at her watch. ‘God, I have only forty minutes.’ She gulped down the rest of her drink, and tossing her hair over her shoulder with a shake of her head, began to tell Mira about her first experiments with alcohol back in Canton, Ohio, in her teenybopper days. She had been a cheerleader, the most popular girl in the class, twice vice-president of it, ‘never president, they always gave that to a guy,’ and had been nicknamed Lightning. Her parents were wonderful, purely wonderful, her father a professor in a local college, her mother a champion baker of pies, their house in the middle of farm country looking out over hills and sunsets, wonderful, wonderful, peaceful. But then she had gone to college in Chicago, so different but wonderful too, but suddenly it had become harder to go home.

‘I don’t know why. They’re so wonderful, they love me so much. Then when I married Harley! Oh, they adore Harley! Dad builds a fire and Mom sets a little table in front of it all done up with a lace-edged cloth and silver, you know, late Christmas night, then Dad plays the piano and we sing and Mom brings out all sorts of wonderful things, they have such a nice life, they’re so happy, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, why I hate to go there …’

She broke off, her head full of tears again, but this time she did not sob, but merely blew her nose for a while. ‘And last Christmas it was really terrible – all my fault, I’m sure, I shouldn’t drink, I had three eggnogs and I gulp so, just an alcoholic at heart, I have to watch it, but somebody – oh, I suppose it was me – brought up the Democratic convention, I was so upset by it, Daley and his white gestapo and Humphrey complaining about the whiffs of tear gas he was getting up there in his protected hotel suite, and my father blew his stack, he screamed and raved about the unwashed hippies, the ungrateful filthy wastrels … oh, all that sort of thing, you know. And Harley was wonderful, he kept coming in as interpreter, and he made me
shut up and by then I couldn’t hear what anybody was saying, I was screaming at my father. I wasn’t even talking about Chicago anymore, I was talking about something he’d done when I was little – I can’t even remember, and my mother was very angry with me, her face was so big, I could see it glaring, and my father was shouting, and Harley got it all under control, I don’t know what he did, he made me go to bed, when we left everything seemed to be okay, everybody was smiling and my father kept clapping Harley on the back and saying, “I’m glad she’s got someone like you to look after her, she needs a level head,” and I was still confused, because I’m the practical one, Harley’s always off at his lab or in his study, I look after him, and besides I’m more articulate than Harley and he and I agree totally on politics, so I couldn’t understand what was happening, it was as if everything I knew was shifting under my feet, as if nothing was what I thought it was, so I decided I just couldn’t drink anymore, I just can’t, but here I went and did it again, so now you know, and I’m terribly sorry.’

She overstayed her time, and left, almost literally flying out the door, her green bookbag in the air behind her, ten minutes late for her meeting. Before she went she hugged Mira. ‘Oh, thank you, Mira, thank you so much, you’re so wonderful, I feel so much better, you are wonderful, thank you, thanks!’

Mira took a nap, woke, heated a TV dinner, and prepared to study late into the night to make up for what she called a wasted day. She read for several hours, but her concentration was poor, and around one in the morning she stopped, carried her brandy bottle into the living room, and sat by the window huddled in flannel pajamas, a wool robe, and a blanket pulled up around her chin – the landlord turned the heat down at ten. She sat as still inside as she could, trying to let whatever it was she was feeling rise up and show itself. What kept coming into her mind was a scene in Lehman Hall a week or two ago, when Val had embarrassed her horribly. A group of them were sitting around talking about the months, or year, or two years ago when women had not been permitted in Lamont Library, or in the main dining room of the Faculty Club.