The Women's Room (80 page)

‘I tell you,’ Val’s voice dropped low, and full of fury, ‘I am sick of it. Shit, I used to pick up male hitchhikers! No more. Let them use their own feet, fight their own fucking battles, no man, ever again, in any way, will get any help from me. Never again will I treat a man as anything other than the enemy. I imagine Fetor, the state’s attorney who browbeat Chris, has a daughter, and I’ll lay you ten to one if she ever got raped, he’d treat her the way he treated Chris. I’m sorry.’ Val glanced at Mira’s face. ‘I know you have sons. That’s good. That will keep you able to live in the world, keep you,’ she drawled the word sarcastically, ‘sane.’

Mira’s face was drenched with pain. Val’s was clear, firm, she looked like a tough old soldier raising a standard. ‘As for me, I’m glad I don’t because he would interfere with my vision, I’d have to think about him and that would deflect me from the truth. A son would make me want not to see this, not to feel it, want to push it back down into my innards where it’s lain for so long, slowly poisoning me.’

‘But how can you live without men? I mean, you know, men are the bosses if you want to get a job, they control the foundations if you want to get a grant, a man is your dissertation adviser …’

‘I’ve dropped out of that world. I belong to all women’s groups now. I shop at a feminist market, bank in a women’s bank. I’ve joined a militant feminist organization, and in the future I will work only in that. Fuck the dissertation, the degree, Harvard. They’re all part of the male world. You can’t compromise with it. It eats you alive, rapes your body and soul …’

‘But, Val, how will you live?’

She shrugged. ‘I’m willing to live any way at all. There’s a bunch of women living in an old house in North Cambridge. They get by. I’ll join them soon. I don’t look for pleasure any more in life. It’s a luxury
I can’t afford. For forty-odd years I’ve been a member of an oppressed people consorting with the enemy, advancing the enemy’s cause. In some places that’s called slavery. I’m through with it. I want to work with these women, those who give their lives up for our cause.’

‘Give their lives up!’

‘Give their lives to. However you people in English want to put it.’

‘Sacrifice.’

‘It’s not sacrifice. It’s realization. Sacrifice is giving up something you value for something you value more. That’s not my state. Once I valued it – pleasure, joy, fun – but no matter what I did now, where I went, that is gone for me. There’s no way I could go back to it, don’t you see?’

She looked gravely at Mira. ‘You look agonized.’

Mira’s voice mourned, ‘But you were so great. The way you were.’

‘A great compromiser. What you see as my deformity, I see as my purification. Hate is a great definer. You lose something, but develop something else to fullness. Like blind people learning to hear with exquisite acuteness, or deaf people learning to read lips, eyebrows, faces. Hate has made me able to act as I should have been acting all along. My fucking love of mankind kept me from being a friend to womankind.’

Mira sighed. She wanted to cry, to turn Val back to what she had been, like a reel of film you could rerun and stop where you chose. She couldn’t bear what she saw, heard: she was exhausted. She leaned toward Val. ‘Let’s have a glass of wine. For old times’ sake,’ and her voice creaked.

Val really smiled for the first time. She got the bottle and poured out two glasses.

‘I feel as if this – all this new life of yours – will take you completely away from us – me,’ Mira said sadly.

‘Well,’ Val sighed, ‘not because I’ve stopped caring about you. But it would be hard. You wouldn’t want to listen to me much, I suspect. And we wouldn’t see things the same way anymore. You have two sons, Ben – you have to compromise. I’m serious, I’m not being patronizing. I’d seem fanatic to you, and you’d seem cowardly to me. I’m part of the lunatic fringe now,’ she laughed, ‘the lunatic fringe that gets the middle to move over a bit. It feels right to me.’

It was good-bye she was saying, Mira thought. Tears streamed down her face all the long walk home.

20

That summer seemed a period of renunciation for many of us. Was everybody playing Stella Dallas?

Kyla had been persuaded by Harley’s arguments into giving their marriage one more chance. She returned to him, and promised not to see Iso at all anymore. He was very angry about Iso this time. She was puzzled. ‘You were so understanding before.’

‘I didn’t take it seriously before.’

‘Why not? I told you I loved her.’

‘Kyla, she’s a woman, for God’s sake.’

‘So?’

‘Well, I don’t mind having a complement. But I don’t want to be supplanted.’ He made his anger sound like jealousy, and she was more pleased than not. He couldn’t be jealous if he didn’t love her, could he? She arranged to sublet the apartment, and began the packing. Harley helped her more than usual, but still, life began to feel empty. She took to stopping at Iso’s in the afternoons, full of guilt, but unable to help herself. She did not tell Harley about these visits. She told herself that in Aspen she would not be able to see Iso at all. Somehow that justified the deception.

She was searching for a dissertation subject, but half-heartedly. She sat in Child leafing through books. She sat at home, rereading the Romantic poets. Suddenly Romantic poetry seemed everything Harley said it was: self-indulgent embroidery on the real business of life. She could not muster her old excited reactions to Wordsworth’s peculiar value-structures, or Keats’s language. Coleridge had come to seem a bore, Byron a spoiled child in a tantrum, Shelley an adolescent in a continual wet dream. She read more and more, but the more she read and reread, the more she saw all of them as adolescents, exalting their own sensuality or declaiming pretentious self-aggrandizing wisdom. She wondered how she had ever been able to take them seriously. Every day, she closed her book in disgust. When it was time to pack their books for Aspen, she added to Harley’s stacks only a complete Shakespeare. She decided she would spend the summer baking bread and growing flowers, and perhaps getting pregnant. She did not think of this as an abandonment but as a rest, a hiatus. Nevertheless, as they set off in the car for their first stop, Ohio and her parents’ house, she did
not feel light and free, like a person starting on a vacation. She glanced at Harley’s profile, feeling the same rush of love she always felt when she looked at him without his knowing it, the same distant admiration for his excellence, yet she felt also diminished, even abject. She had a vague sense she was driving off to prison. But she brushed it away, and her spirits lightened as soon as Harley needed navigational help. Kyla loved to read maps.

After Kyla left, Iso languished for a few days, but with her spectacular flexibility had within a week made new friends and was as busy as ever. And instead of daily visits from Kyla, she had daily visits from Clarissa.

Clarissa and Duke were having continual squabbles. She did not want to talk about them. ‘It’s the same old shit, you know, who’s going to do the dishes. The trouble is, I guess, I don’t ever want to do them. I hate all that, cooking, cleaning. I can’t stand it. When Duke was away, I heated up TV dinners and threw the tray in the garbage. The silverware would pile up and I wouldn’t wash that until there wasn’t anymore. And I only cleaned up when he was coming home – if then. I don’t care about food. Why should I have to cook?’

‘Yeah. How about a housekeeper? I don’t mind cleaning, Clarissa,’ Iso grinned. ‘And I need money. I’ll do it for you for – let’s see – three bucks an hour.’

Clarissa did not smile. ‘That would just mask the problem.’

‘It sounds serious,’ Mira said.

‘Oh, I guess it’s manageable.’ She would brush it off and return to other subjects. But the next time the women were together, it would come up again, and be brushed off again.

These days, Grete was often part of the group at Iso’s. She would show up around four carrying a bottle of wine, wearing some outlandish costume or other and looking like the princess in a fairy-tale book. She found oddly embroidered blouses, used sari fabric to make something flowing, found strange beads and jewelry with great heavy stones, and wore them all as if they were her native dress. She tied her dark hair in kerchiefs and put heavy elaborate earrings on. Iso said Grete raised dress into a fine art. Grete was interested in art, and was planning a dissertation on the relations between a set of late eighteenth-century sketches and poetic images of the same period. She revitalized the group, and all summer the talk was wonderful.

Clarissa’s problem continued. One day, when they were talking about
reciprocity in politics, she broke in: ‘That’s what Duke’s doing! I just realized it.’

‘I guess from General Motors to Duke isn’t such a leap,’ Grete said. Grete had come from a poor family, and was prejudiced – her own word – against anybody with money.

‘Okay. I see it now. Every time Duke goes to a Harvard party – and he hates them – or if he listens to a new album, and admits a rock group 1 like is good, or if he buys a particularly fancy shirt, he acts afterward as if he has the right to expect something in return, as if I owe him something. He’ll sit on the couch while I clean up the dinner dishes alone, and when I complain, he gets really irritated, he says he never even has time to read the papers. And I’ve been getting angry at this, but you know you hate to turn into a continual nagger. And I haven’t understood what was going on.’

‘It’s his idea of compromise,’ Mira laughed.

‘Yes. Quid pro quo. There’s something wrong with it, logically. I can’t put my finger on it, though.’

‘He’s expecting you to adopt the traditional role,’ Grete began, ‘while he …’

‘Yes. While he what?’

‘Dabbles in your values.’

Clarissa raised her chin and began clicking off points. ‘Okay. So a proper quid pro quo would be my dabbling in his values. But I do. I went to a party given by his fellow officers and never once criticized Nixon. I visited his Rhinebeck relatives and drank after-dinner coffee with the women in the living room while the men sat drinking brandy in the dining room and talking politics.’

‘People still
do
that!’ Grete gasped.

‘I don’t know about people:
they
do. Okay. I was looking for a line of attack: got it. Thanks.’

That was the end of Duke for the day.

Another time Clarissa was discussing the effect of social structures on the nineteenth-century English novel, which was her dissertation subject. ‘It starts early, of course it’s there in the eighteenth century – in Defoe, say – in a subliminal way, but in people like Crabbe and Austen it becomes a full-blown subject: money, money, money. It’s at the root of everything else. Just like Duke these days,’ she added, then stopped short. Her head was bent forward, her hair hanging down almost covering her face, but Mira could see the little frown on her forehead, almost see the mind ticking away the realization that
she never made these discoveries alone, only when she was with the women, talking about something else, as if they could come into her mind only unbidden, and as if that bothered her. She said nothing about it, however.

‘Money! I love money!’ Grete cried, waving her braceleted arms in the air. ‘But not too much money.’

Clarissa raised her head soberly. ‘Yes, I like it too. But not like Duke. He talks about it all the time, he’s obsessed with it. Ever since he has been living here. We go out and he looks in all the shops and he wants everything. He wants to buy some pictures from David, not because he likes them so much, but because he thinks David’s going to be famous someday, and he wants an investment. He’s talking about leaving the army – although he really loves it – and joining up with some guys at MIT whom he met through Harley. They’re talking about using computers to do urban planning. It’s a lucrative field these days, apparently. They want to set up a consulting firm even though they’re still in school.’

‘A consulting firm to do what?’ Iso was sitting under the window, the light shining on her hair, one long leg dangling over the chair arm, one slender hand holding the small cigar she had recently taken to.

‘You look just like Katharine Ross.’

‘I don’t!’

‘You do.’

‘Do you like Katharine Ross?’

‘Ummmm,’ Clarissa grinned and licked her lips.

‘Then it’s okay,’ Iso laughed. ‘I’ll look like her.’

‘They want to solve problems. They think cities and institutions would come to them and they would get together all the relevant data and feed it into the computer and tell the city what to do about pollution, say, or school systems, or cross-country migrations, or the birth-rate. They think they can plan our future. They believe the reason things are such a mess is because they are never planned, they always happen haphazardly.’

Grete groaned. Mira said, ‘Ugh.’ Iso giggled: ‘Thank heaven for the failure of human planning.’

‘Duke thinks he’ll make a fortune. I don’t care whether he does it or not – that’s his decision. But all this emphasis on money. I don’t understand it. He used to be so idealistic.’

‘It’s true,’ Iso said thoughtfully. ‘Like last night at dinner, when he got on the subject, it was a little scary. As if he feels he’s against a wall and
only money is going to keep those soldiers out there from shooting their rifles at him. There’s a desperateness about him, you can’t call it greed, although it sounds like greed. But I always think of greed as an avidity for something you don’t need just for the sake of possession. Duke acts as if he needs money horribly, as if he were being hounded by duns.’ She turned to Clarissa. ‘Maybe he’s taken up secret gambling.’

‘Maybe,’ Mira said remembering Norm, ‘that’s how men feel.’

‘What I find appalling,’ Grete waved her arm, ‘is that the very people who understand nothing about living are the ones who are presumptuous enough to imagine they can plan our lives.’

Mira glanced swiftly at Clarissa. She knew that Clarissa was a little edgy about Duke, that one could not say too much about him without offending her. But Clarissa smiled at Grete. ‘Yeah. I told them if they were going to do this, they’d better get a few poets, preferably women, to join them.’