The Women's Room (56 page)

It was a tiring dance, and in time, Mira left the floor to find a beer. The kitchen stood nearly empty. Only Duke, Clarissa’s husband, stood leaning against the refrigerator, and two people she did not know talked quietly in a corner. Mira had to ask Duke to move in order to get her beer.

‘You look a little lost,’ she said, understanding the feeling.

Duke was a large heavyset man. He would be fat in a few years. He was pinkish and puffy; he looked like an aging football players In fact, he was a West Pointer. He had recently returned from Vietnam and was stationed now in New England.

‘Well, a Harvard party isn’t exactly my idea of the best way to spend a weekend pass,’ he said.

‘How do you feel when you come here? I guess Cambridge is the center of the peace movement.’

‘That doesn’t bother me,’ he said seriously. ‘I wish the war would end.’

‘How did you feel when you were over there?’

His face betrayed nothing. ‘I was doing my job. I wasn’t near the front. But I don’t like this war.’

Although Mira had not liked him simply because of the way he looked, she felt now a sympathy for him. He too was trapped. She wondered how he felt.

‘It must have been hard for you,’ she said sympathetically.

He shrugged. No. You just have to keep things in separate categories. I believe in this country. I believe in a well-trained army. Sometimes the politicians make a mistake. You just have to do your job and hope the politicians will find a way to correct it.’

‘But suppose your job had involved killing? Suppose you felt it to be morally wrong?’

He looked puzzled. ‘I didn’t sign on as guardian of the morals of the world. Who knows when something is morally wrong?’

‘Suppose you lived in Germany and they assigned you to putting Jews on trains?’

He looked annoyed. ‘This isn’t the same thing at all. These things are always so simple for you people. It’s a bad war because a lot of Americans are getting killed, and there’s nothing to be gained by it. It’s costing us millions and we’re getting nothing for our money.’

‘I see. Do you plan to stay in the army?’

‘Maybe. It’s a good life. I enjoy it. I even enjoyed Vietnam. I bought some great stuff there, you have to come over some time and we’ll show it to you. Sculptures, some rugs, and wonderful prints. I have one print …’ He launched into a precise description of one print after another, enumerating subject matter, color, linear rhythms. ‘They’re really great.’

‘Yes. They get beyond facts, which are always so false.’ She sipped her beer.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that.’ Then he launched into a long argument supporting factualness. He talked about things like sightings in bombsights and rifles, mapmaking, charts, graphs, and inventories of men and arms. He spoke long, and perhaps even well. Mira could not judge. But he spoke from a height. It was clear in his tone and his language that he was speaking from authority and knowledge to a simpleton who knew nothing of such things. Since this was indeed the case, his tone was all the more offensive. She wondered if he would listen for ten minutes while she explained the subtleties of English prosody.

‘Yes, but my point is that what you like about the prints is that they get beyond the facts.’

‘Hell, those prints are worth a fortune,’ he exclaimed. Then he launched into a precise explanation of how much he had paid for each one, and how much they had been evaluated for after he returned to the States. ‘The rugs, too,’ he continued. ‘I took each of them to three different dealers …’

Mira felt a little numb. Duke was incapable of conversation. He was
a monologuist. He was probably incapable of dialogue with any equal. He could talk down, and since he was in the army, no doubt he could talk up: ‘Yes, sir. The enemy are deployed at …’

She looked around. The kitchen was completely empty now. She reached for another beer. She did not know how to get away. Duke was now talking about the uses of computers. He talked long and intricately, and she tried to listen. After a long time, she asked, ‘But what’s the point? I mean, what is it you’re trying to do?’

He did not seem to understand the question. He continued talking, but what he said made no sense to her.

‘I mean, you must have a project. An aim. What is the goal of all these manipulations?’

‘Why to see how well the computer can project, can predict. And to see how well we understand its uses.’

‘The opposite of the ends justify the means,’ she interrupted as he tried to talk further.

‘Pardon?’

‘The means is all. You have no end. You’re just playing with a big toy.’

‘Mira, this is serious stuff.’ His irritation was controlled.

Mira was grateful when Val came barging in, red-faced and pounding her chest. ‘At my age, at my weight, with three packs a day down my lungs, I should put away childish things!’ she announced, reaching into the refrigerator.

Avery, a sweet, soft-faced young man, slipped into the room and stood enthralled by a stack of cans of soup on a kitchen counter.

‘Admiring homemade pop art?’ Val intruded.

‘The configuration is … interesting.’ There were five cans on the bottom row, three on the next, and one on top.

‘Do you think Warhol could learn something?’

‘No, but maybe I can penetrate into the deep, mystic heart of things.’

‘You’re teaching Conrad,’ Mira concluded.

‘No. Mailer.
Why Are We in Vietnam?’

‘Do you seem to hear a thunderous cry from inside those cans?’

‘Absolutely. “Fulfill my will! Go eat this swill!”’

People drifted into the kitchen. Harley and a strange bearded man came for beers. They stood there for a time talking. Mira listened to them, but she already knew better than to try to talk to Harley. He was probably as brilliant as Kyla said, and he was handsome in what
Val called a ‘Swiss Alps Nazi’ way, tall, blond, severe, and usually wearing a ski sweater. But Harley could only talk about physics. He simply had no other conversation. He was interesting as long as he was explaining things that had some meaning to his audience, but like Duke he was essentially a monologuist, he would carry any talk far past his audience’s limits. He could not talk about the weather, or food, or movies, or people. He fell silent when others did. She listened, then, to see what kind of conversation he was carrying on with the stranger. He looked over at her.

‘Oh, hello, Mira. This is Don Evans. He’s from Princeton, here on a visit. We met last time I was out at Aspen.’

‘A physicist too, I take it,’ she smiled at him.

He smiled abstractly back, then turned again to Harley. He was talking. Suddenly Harley interrupted him and corrected something. He backtracked, explained, continued. Harley interrupted and spoke. This went on. It was not dialogue, it was one-upmanship. They were not talking to reach some common ground of experience or to find some limited truth, but to show off. It was two monologues carried on simultaneously. Disgusted, Mira turned away. Duke, still standing by the refrigerator, put something into the conversation. The two stopped, looked at him, then Harley said, ‘Let’s go into the bedroom, it’s quieter,’ and the three left.

The kitchen had become crowded. Clarissa and Kyla were talking to the gypsy. Mira approached them. They introduced her as Grete.

‘Yes, I saw you dancing with Howard Perkins,’ Mira smiled.

Grete made a face. ‘He follows me everywhere.’

‘Poor Howard,’ Kyla said. ‘Somebody ought to be kind to him. I’m going to be kind to him!’ she announced, and left the room.

Grete rolled her eyes. ‘I don’t think she knows what she’s in for.’

They talked about studying for generals, a subject of consuming interest to those presently studying for them. Mira noticed that none of the young women in the room wore bras. It seemed to be the new style, but she found it a little raw. You could actually see the outline of some of their breasts.

Clarissa was talking very soberly. ‘I mean it’s interesting, I enjoy literature, but sometimes it seems frivolous to be doing something like this when all around us things are in chaos, when you think you could do something that would help, something to advance change in the right direction, instead of leaving it to those who care only about power.’

‘I don’t think you can,’ Grete said. She had quick, penetrating eyes. ‘Nothing changes except styles.’

‘But styles are significant,’ Mira said. ‘They mean something. I have a stack of white gloves in my bottom drawer that are slowly turning yellow.’

‘And what does that mean?’ Grete asked.

‘Well – things are easier, more casual. We aren’t so much out to impress each other.’

‘I think we are just as eager to impress, but we have different ways of doing it,’ Grete argued.

Val came up behind them. ‘My God, things never change. The men are in one room planning the future of the world, and the women are in the other talking about styles.’

Clarissa laughed. ‘What men?’

‘Your husband for one. And Harley, and that guy from Princeton. They’re talking about computerized techniques for predicting the fate of the country. All of them want to be part of a think tank to plan the future of America. God save us from that!’

They all laughed, even Clarissa. Mira wondered what she thought of her husband. He seemed so different from her. ‘It would be a world of facts,’ Clarissa said smiling. ‘That’s all Duke knows.’

‘How did he get that name?’

Clarissa tilted her head confidentially. ‘He was christened Marmaduke, but that’s a deep, dark secret.’

They returned to the subject of style and whether it has meaning.

‘I insist there’s a difference in significance of various styles,’ Mira argued. ‘If a woman has to encase her body in a constricting corset, wear tottery high heels, spend hours dressing and powdering her hair and making up, just in order to go out, well, that says something about both the position of women and the class structure of a society.’

‘That’s true,’ Grete admitted frowning. She frowned whenever she thought hard, and had a deep line between her dark eyebrows. ‘But that styles become more casual doesn’t necessarily mean that no class structure exists, or that the position of women is very much changed.’

They all got into it and were talking with great animation, sending whoops of laughter out into the room, when, suddenly Ben appeared.

‘I gather this is where the party is,’ he smiled.

Mira smiled radiantly at him because she was happy and enjoying herself, then finished her statement. ‘It’s broadening, you can experience everything. You can put on blue jeans and let your hair hang loose
and see what it’s like to be treated like a “hippie” or you can put on your fur coat and heels and go into Bonwit’s and see what it feels like to play society matron … it’s just freer, that’s all. Expansion.’

‘Expansion! That’s it!’ Val agreed. ‘The only possible progress. Everything we’ve called progress is just change, bringing its own horrors. But there is progress, it’s possible, it’s an increase in sensibility. I mean, imagine how the world seemed to cave people: it must have been full of terrors. We’ve domesticated a lot of those. Then along came Christianity …’

‘That’s quite a leap,’ Clarissa smiled.

Ben touched Mira’s arm lightly. ‘Would you like something to drink?’ he asked softly.

She turned to him and looked in his eyes. They were a warm golden brown. ‘I’d love something,’ she said feelingly.

‘Beer? Wine?’

Now, Christianity was a great step in progress: it made us feel guilty. The trouble was the guilt made us act worse than ever …’

Mira stood radiant. Her arm still tingled where Ben had touched it. He returned with her glass of wine and one for himself and stood beside her listening to Val.

‘What we have to do is get beyond the guilt to the real motivations of the things we do. Because the motivations aren’t evil: wishing harm on another is always a secondary, a substitute emotion for being unable to get what we want ourselves. If we could learn to figure out what it really is we want, and to forgive ourselves for wanting it, we would not have to do terrible things.’

‘It sounds good,’ Clarissa grinned, ‘except for a few little leaps here and there. I imagine primitive people acted on their feelings –’

‘And primitive people don’t like to fight,’ Val interrupted.

‘What about war masks, war dances?’ Grete intruded.

‘Yes. Okay. They may not have liked fighting and had to psych themselves up for it – armies still do that,’ Clarissa thought out loud.

‘They fought because aggression is necessary for survival. It has an economic base.’

‘It has to have a psychological base as well or the race would have gone the way of the dinosaurs. And obviously it occurs in inappropriate contexts. I like aggression, I think it’s fun to be aggressive. That’s what I’m talking about. If we could figure out what cause aggression – or sexuality – serves, accept those emotions, stop trying to hide them, then we could find a way to use them that wouldn’t be so destructive.’

‘Just how do we manage to find out these basic motivations?’ Grete asked, unpersuaded by Val.

‘Experiment. Science. But I already know what they are.’

Everyone laughed.

‘I don’t know,’ Clarissa said reflectively. ‘The conflict I see as basic is between spontaneous and free feelings and feelings requiring order, imposed order, structures, habits …’

‘Order is ugly in the face of feeling,’ Mira said fervently, too fervently, but not even embarrassed, so intensely conscious was she of Ben’s body beside her, of his dark arms covered with dark hair, emerging from the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt. She could almost feel his body warmth, could almost smell him. ‘But on the other hand, everything is order. What else is there? There are simply different kinds. I can’t conceive of such a thing as anarchy.’

‘Anarchy,’ Ben said to her, ‘is a cubist painting.’

Everyone cried out in delight. ‘Explain, exegesis,
explication de texte!’

‘It’s true that anarchy is simply a variation of order. You know, gangs of black-jacketed motorcyclists tearing up little towns might be a horror, but that isn’t anarchy; each of those gangs has a leader, each of those towns does, too. It’s a conflict of two different orders. Most threats about anarchy are fears of an order different from the one presently constituted. I’ll admit that it’s easier to live with one order than with two or three different ones, but not necessarily if the one order is a totalitarian state, say. Anyway, anarchy – I looked it up –’ he grinned, ‘means
without ruler
. That’s hard to envision politically. But if we move to another discipline, we can imagine it.’