An Emergence of Green (10 page)

“Then try to look at the why of it, not the what of it. Great art, no matter what the form, is complexity reduced to simplicity. A novel like
Ulysses
takes work on the part of the reader—”

She was delivering another damn lecture. He opened his mouth to interrupt but Carolyn said, “Paul, I want to hear this.”

Val addressed Carolyn, having given up on Paul Blake. “Any time you say yes to a work of art, you validate the artist. Artists in any medium are happy for whatever value is found in their work. Artists like to reach a comprehending audience, but that happens rarely. And I truly believe,” she added, “that a fully realized work of art has no definitive interpretation, anyway.”

Neal asked, “Is it okay if I go swimming?”

Poor Neal must be bored to death
, Carolyn thought. She said, “Why don’t I go in the pool with you?” She was proud that Val was so easily holding her own with Paul. She would give both of them more opportunity to become better acquainted without the distraction of her own presence. “I can float around on my raft and keep an eye on him.” She caught Val’s amused glance and grinned. “Or vice versa.”

Paul mentally cursed Neal Hunter and his lousy timing. He would not have the opportunity to rectify his position with this woman in front of his wife—at least not immediately. “Go ahead,” he said in an easy tone, refilling his martini from the pitcher. “I want to listen to Val more. Besides, I haven’t seen you in a bathing suit for weeks, Princess.”

Princess. Save us, Gloria Steinem. The man calls her Princess.

“Let me take care of putting the potatoes on the coals,” he said to Val. “In the meantime, think about justifying how a bunch of colored squares can be beautiful.”

He got up and went to the barbecue, and watched from there as Val Hunter’s eyes followed Carolyn and Neal into the house. He scrutinized Val Hunter carefully: it seemed to him that she was looking—staring—at Carolyn, not her son; but he could not be certain.

He returned and Val Hunter uncrossed her legs, stretched them out before her. Somehow this gesture was more offensive to him than when she had crossed them.

She answered his question. “Art may be the most subjective of all the art forms.” With him, she thought, this was surely true—no one is more subjective than a blind man who will not see. “For some people, viewing work such as Rothko’s squares can be a highly aesthetic experience. It requires a discriminating sensitivity to interaction of color, the distinctions between hues and values of color, the way color areas seem to change in relation to other areas, knowledge of the way the artist has controlled all these factors.”

He was a fool. He had made the basic tactical error of encountering this woman on her own turf. Perhaps she was spouting the rote theories of the art world…but she felt comfortable and secure, this independent woman who was without a man. He should be more conciliatory, make more effort to see what kind of woman she really was, what influence, beyond selling her work to Carolyn, she might have.

Meaningless small talk was a waste of this opportunity. He cast about for a subject. He said, “I heard on the news the latest Supreme Court ruling, the Jaycees can’t keep females out anymore. Another victory for you women.”

To his surprise she laughed, soft, amused laughter. Then she said, “A victory?”

“What would you call it?”

“A joke.”

Carolyn and Neal came out of the house. Carolyn’s glance was quizzical. He answered with a smiling nod and covered his affirmative signal that all was well between him and Val Hunter with a low whistle: “Princess, you look gorgeous.”

He turned back to Val Hunter. Obviously, politics would hardly do as a conciliatory subject. He sipped his martini, refilled it from the pitcher, and glanced over to watch Neal Hunter and Carolyn lift the two rafts leaning against the fence and carry them to the pool, Neal dwarfed by his dark blue raft.

From the steps at the shallow end of the pool, Carolyn slid onto her raft, looking over to see if Paul had noticed her new expertise; but he seemed intent on his conversation with Val Hunter. Well, that was good. She turned her attention to Val’s son. His sun-streaked hair was much lighter than his mother’s, finer textured; but his eyes were Val’s eyes, dark brown, alert, perceptive.

“Ma says I have to call you Mrs. Blake unless I’m asked not to.”

“If you want to call me Carolyn, then you can,” she said firmly.

He cast a glance of pure triumph at his mother. He stood next to Carolyn’s raft, his body submerged except for the bony shoulders she found so endearingly vulnerable on young boys. She smiled at him. “I understand you go to day camp. Why don’t you tell me about it?”

“Know anything about sports?”

“Hardly anything,” she confessed.

He crossed his arms and said matter-of-factly, “Then you won’t be interested.”

She remembered Val’s remarks about the sanctimoniousness of ten-year-olds, but she smothered her amusement, sensing that laughter would be a mistake. “Then let’s talk about something you’d like to talk about.”

“Okay.” His eyes were bright with challenge. “I think your living room looks like it comes from the Emerald City.”

This time she did laugh, knowing it was all right to do so, unable to prevent herself in any case. “Well, I definitely know this isn’t Kansas. It may even be Munchkinland. But home is where your heart is.”

“Hey,” Neal whooped, “that’s good.”

“It’s my favorite movie,” she said, thinking that it might very well be; at this moment she could not think of any she loved more. She added with a grin, “Who knows? I might even like sports if I only had a brain.”

He was beaming, rocking her raft back and forth in his exuberance. “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?”

“A bad witch, of course. What fun is it to be a good witch? But if you’re not careful you’ll dump me in the water and melt all my beautiful wickedness.”

“I like you,” Neal said, and slid onto his raft.

He said to Val Hunter, “You must find it difficult raising your son by yourself.”

“Actually, less difficult.” She chuckled, rattled the ice cubes in her drink, took a swallow. “I don’t mean that to be facetious—Richard died two years ago.” She held up a hand to prevent his offer of condolences. “He left me for good five years before that. Even when he was with us he was a drifter, never staying long on any job. He was in a high-demand profession—chemical engineering. He left whenever he felt like it, went wherever his feet took him.”

Paul said enviously, “That was great—for him.”

“To be footloose—that seems to be prime male mythology. It’s understandable, I suppose, in young men or women. But for all of us, romanticism should be tempered by some maturity.”

“Think you’d like to marry again?” he probed. He felt probed in return, her swift glance gauging him. Then her eyes became remote, focusing on the palm tree facing her.

“Marry again,” she repeated, as if testing the words. “I see no reason why. But there are few absolutes in this life.”
Why do men always ask,
she thought,
and women seldom do? And why do I always have to be careful how
I
answer men?

He realized that if he asked would she like to live with someone, he would invite the same evasiveness. “Don’t you think a male presence is important to a boy’s development?”

More ground that was totally familiar. Give the same old safe answers you always have, she told herself. But she said, “Maleness by itself doesn’t make for a good role model, Paul. You’d have to know my two husbands to understand,” she added in an attempt at humor. “Neal has good models in his grandfather, several of his teachers. His baseball coach is a splendid, gentle man.”

Splendid? Gentle? That’s masculinity? “But Neal’s home life is all maternal,” he said. “All the divorces today, these new moral standards, how can young boys get the proper idea of masculinity?”

The target was too exposed, too inviting. “That so-called proper idea of masculinity is what’s wrong with this world.”

He felt in control, as if conducting a job interview in which the candidate had suddenly begun giving only wrong answers. “So you believe in androgyny? Unisex?”

She shrugged. “I can’t attach value judgments to those labels—I really don’t care. As long as those roles aren’t forced on anyone, either.” Logically, her answer was correct; why did she feel uncomfortable with it?

“You mean you wouldn’t care if your son turned out to be a faggot?”

She winced less at the term than at the withering tone. “Any parent would prefer to have life made as easy as possible for a child. But children do go their own way; I certainly did. I doubt that I’m anywhere close to what my parents expected. Are you?”

“I don’t know what my parents expected, but it was much less than what I’ve accomplished. I grew up dirt poor and put myself through college.”

“When I was college age, opportunities were so limited that there was very little reason for women to bother going to college.”

More poor me. God, he was so tired of hearing poor me from women. He took a drink from his martini and said aggressively, “The changes in the past ten years are astounding. I’ve seen so many women and minorities moving into positions never open to them before—”

She knew better than to argue, she knew enough to mouth the usual safe things, the platitudes. Don’t upset him, don’t alienate him—not if she expected to keep Carolyn’s friendship. But all her life there had been a reason not to speak her feelings or knowledge: She needed a job, or to be accepted into art classes, or to have her work looked at. To take care of Neal. Always there had been a reason, and always the same price.

She said, “I’ve heard this conversation from so many men. You think we’re doing so well. Stop talking to other men, stop looking at the tokens around you. Read the statistics. There’s been almost no gain for blacks since the Civil Rights Act. Women as an economic class are even worse off than before. In four years this government has made a direct frontal attack on every gain minority groups have ever won, from abortion to—”

“Crap,” he cut in, reckless with anger. “Don’t lecture me with that feminist bullshit. If you women had your way we’d take some black washroom attendant and make her company president, make some secretary chairman of the board. Women want everything now, without competing for it, without earning it. You want to turn this country into a socialist swamp. Gender gap, my ass. We aren’t against women, we want qualified women, like the one on the Supreme Court—”

“You should be proud of that one,” she interrupted acidly. “You have a man on the Supreme Court now who looks exactly like a woman.”

“You say that because she doesn’t agree with all the bleeding heart liberal crap. Sanity is coming back to this country, political balance, the pendulum’s swinging back—”

“Pendulum,” she repeated. “Such a nice bloodless word. Now we learn the truth. You’ll give us all the lip service we can swallow about being born equal and having equal opportunity, but you’re keeping the power. You’ll never give any of it up. Women have to understand their own power, women will have to take it themselves—”

“Crap,” he spat. “You feed this bullshit to my wife?”

His question sobered her, calmed her. “Actually, we’ve never even talked about these issues.”

He took another swallow from his drink. This uncontrollably widening channel of anger in him, was it from the vodka? He did not care. “What
do
you talk about?”

Again, instantly, her fury rose to its previous height. “Ask her.”

“I will. What do you
want
with my wife?”

She faced him belligerently. “Meaning what?”

“Meaning she’s married and you’re not. Meaning she’s married and damn happy about it. Meaning since you’ve got all this feminist shit down pat, are you a lesbian too?”

She remembered Gloria Steinem saying:
Are you my alternative?
She mustered all her sarcasm. “Not before this evening.”

Neal had been sitting on the steps in the shallow end, water up to his neck, watching Paul and Val. He came dog-paddling up to Carolyn. “Ma’s really mad about something.”

Alarmed, Carolyn stared at Paul and Val. They were leaning toward each other; Paul’s face was tight and closed, but seemed calm; Val was obviously making several points to him, ticking them off so forcefully that each finger bent back as she jabbed at it. Carolyn watched for a few more seconds. “I don’t think so, honey. They’re arguing about something but—”

“Ma’s really mad. I can tell.”

Neal dog-paddled back to the pool steps. Carolyn steered her raft after him.

“The whole trouble with women like you,” Paul said, “is simple.” He grabbed his crotch. “You don’t have this. You want one. Deny biology till you turn blue. Only
men
can fuck—you got that? Women don’t have the cocks to do the fucking that needs to be done in this world. They know it and you know it. Most women don’t want what you feminists think they want. The women’s movement is over. Women have had a good look and they don’t want it.”

“How would you know? You’re a Neanderthal who still thinks everything should be done with a club or a cock.” She pointed scornfully at his crotch. “You’re
stuck
with that.”