Dry Your Smile (17 page)

And then there she was—a strange, fey child with shrewd eyes. An anomaly, reading Camus's philosophy, Marvell's poetry, Hegel's theory, smack in the middle of that hilarious apartment of her mother's where even the toilet bowl was pink and you expected after you shat to find little pink turds floating around in it. She stood in the midst of that static barococco paradise like a young rebel angel, blazing for the chance to join Lucifer and fall into freedom, a current of promise swirling around her like a storm warning in the airless room. Young enough not to be confused with any of the other women he'd loved, and free of their bourgeois pretensions. But old enough, given her peculiar context, to move through the world's maze of shopkeepers and headwaiters with just the right touch of cordial haughtiness. Unformed enough for him to shape; sophisticated enough for him to feel blessedly protected. Perfect for stereotype-smashing. Defiance, oh yes.

He wandered back toward the livingroom. The table was set, with flowers and candles. He glanced at his watch again. It seemed he now spent most of his life waiting. Not only for Julian—though that, yes, a lot of the time. For her to appear, for her to decide … whatever. For her to notice. This was what they meant, women, about lives spent in waiting. He raised his glass to the air.

“Take that, Tillie. The ‘feminist prince' is a male spy in the harem. He's learned what it is you suffer. He's had waiting and watching and shutting-up and putting-someone-else's-needs-first engraved on his skin like Kafka's penal colony prisoner under the needles of the Harrow. To you and me, Tillie. To us.”

Dimly, he could remember a time when he had acted, not reacted, initiated, not waited. The lovely lustful years with Joyce, seizing that supple dancer's body with eyes and hands and mouth. Finding the Chelsea loft. Daring to juxtapose culture and politics long before the hippies—his spiritual offspring—brought that juxtaposition into mainstream consciousness. Christ, how he had loved the Sixties. Excitement. Possibility. Rock music in everybody's rhythms, a mellow sharing of grass everywhere you went, the crazy funny colorful way people dressed themselves up—every meeting or march a carnival. Costumes. Beads and headbands and dashikis. India-print jackets and tie-dyed pants, Nehru and Mao coats, motorcycle helmets plastered with slogans. A walking gallery of refusal and celebration. All those people sharing the same vision of rebellion, the same summer of love. All those people …

“I'm coming I'm
coming
forchrissake,” he yelled to the telephone's tyrannical summons, but his irritation couldn't cover the itch of fear he felt whenever she was late and the phone rang, an unmentionable fear because it might seem the protectionism of a fuddy-duddy hubby.

“Yes? Hello?”

“Hello. Uh, is Julian Travis there?”

Laurence automatically reached for the pencil and pad religiously kept by the phone.

“No, I'm sorry, she's not in at the moment. May I take a message?”

“Who's this?”

What the hell business is it of yours, buddy, he wanted to spit back; this is her secretary-housekeeper-male-nanny. This is the Best Supporting Actor here.

“This is Laurence Millman, her husband. May I take a message?”

“Larry! I'll be damned!” the voice boomed, “Haven't heard that infamous baritone in years! Hey, Larry, this is Tim. Tim Monahan.” Inconceivable to Tim Monahan that anyone wouldn't remember
him
.

“Tim. Oh yeah. It sure has been a long time. Not since the Media Watch Committee fell apart—”

“Back in the Year One, by god. Well I'll be damned,” Tim repeated. Still the same fatuous clod. “So, Larry, what are you—”

“How're you these days, Tim?” Laurence interrupted.

“Terrific, just doing terrific. Once I decided to trade in the torn Levi's for the three-piece suit and join the media instead of monitoring it, I did terrific. Infiltration and all that, you know.” Tim offered a hearty laugh.

“Yeah, I can imagine. Infiltration.”

“Right. Right. I mean, times change and we've gotta be able to move with 'em, Larry, gotta survive. Can't just sit out the Big R Revolution on the radical sidelines, ya know. A few years, a few maneuvres, time to learn the lingo, the way things get done, yeah okay so a few compromises maybe. But the upshot is that little Timmy here is the producer of the most watched public affairs show on network telly, boy. Not that
any
public affairs show has what you'd call a mass audience. But we do okay, we do okay. Quality show, good ratings, make an impact. Your old comrade here can't complain. Own a co-op and a beach shack out in the Hamptons, a Porsche, a terrific wife, two terrific kids. You gotta make the Big R Rev for yourself
while
you change the world, comrade.” Laurence closed his eyes and swallowed. “So. What are
you
doing these days? What's the ol' Red Menace up to in the Eighties?”

There it was.

“Fine, fine. Doing great, too.”

“Yeah? Doing what?” So Tim was still unable to resist the baiting tone he had once used to taunt cops during supposedly non-violent protests. There always was a Tim, ready to provoke a bust.

“I'm, uh, into radio stuff, actually. I figure you reach more people that way. I mean, TV's wonderful but, well, there still are folks who can't afford one, believe it or not. And then all the captive radio audience in cars and with headsets. So I—”

“Well, that's terrific, Larry, terrific,” Tim cut in. It was not an act of mercy; it was boredom with inconsequential details. “Thing is, Larry, I'm a little rushed right now. Maybe we can get together sometime and talk about the old days, huh? Thing is, I was calling—”

“—for Julian. I know.”

“Right. Right. Terrific how she turned out, isn't it? You're some Pygmalion, Larry. Must be real proud of her.”

“I am. Would you like to leave a message for her?”

“Right. Thing is, we're planning a show around the last gasps of the Equal Rights Amendment. Everybody knows it'll croak next year. I'd like Julian on the panel. I've got a green light from Phyllis Schlafly, we'll pull in one of the women congressmen, get some average Mrs. Mom type for mainstream, and then maybe one of the Establishment libbers. But we need Julian for some flash and fire, ya' know? Some sexy radical pizzazz on ERA. Ya know?”

“Sure, Tim. The Big R Rev.”

“Right. You got it. Terrific. So have her call me at the office tomorrow. She knows the number, she just did the show a few months ago—that special on the bombings of abortion clinics? She was terrific, nice and bitchy, lotta flash and fire, called it ‘Reagan-sanctioned terrorism.' Brought in a lotta mail on that one.”

The oven began to sizzle ominously. Laurence was desperate to get off the phone, but Tim Monahan was not somebody to whom you could plead that your baked dish might be burning.

“Well, Tim, I'll pass it along to Julian and she'll probably give you a call.”

“Thanks, you old hellion. Terrific talking to you. Might do a show one of these days on whatever happened to liberated couples, an update. Anyway, we'll get together—”

“Sure Tim sure. Look, I've got to run. I'm late for an appointment.”

“Right. So you tell Julian I called, okay?”

“I'll tell her. Goodbye, Tim.”

He hung up the phone with the trace of a slam and hurried to the kitchen. The Baked Dish was only bubbling. He turned down the oven and poured himself a glass of wine.

“Don't let it get to you, ol' Larry comrade hellion,” he whispered between clenched teeth. “You've been
living
the Big R Rev in ways costlier than the Tim Monahans can wrap their tattered brains around.” Loving flash-and-fire Julian for all these years has been a front-line Big R act of courage. From the very start. He took a deep breath to exhale the anger, then deliberately steered himself back toward the livingroom, away from the kitchen.

Front-line all the way. Daring to take that virginal plump body in his arms. To seek her through all her terrors, lies, carefully dropped clues. To fight off Hope, her shadow beating its huge wings over them. To haul Julian out in the middle of a blizzard—a plain snowstorm by Colorado standards—and roll in the snow of the park and teach her how you could lie there and carve snow angels by waving your arms along the ground as if you were flying, then take her for hot chocolate and watch her face glow with excitement and cold and reborn heat. His Julian. Now she belonged to everybody; when you belonged to everybody you belonged to nobody.

“My child,” he whispered to himself. “The first, last, and only child I ever got to love.” The child he had brought to womanhood. The child who now swept rapidly through airports and meetingrooms and podiums and this loft in a honeddown body, lean as a predatory bird. The child now in total control.

She'd never really liked the Sixties. Hairy beards and sandaled dirty feet, she'd complain. Well, the music, okay—until rock lyrics became certified as a sexist no-no. The silly wonderful costume-clothes? Not on her; a stripped-down-for-the-revolution blue jeans, boots, and sweater kid, her. Always the pro. No long hair—a cop could drag you off by it. No earrings—the same. No—but there had been no excuse for her taking off her wedding ring. Just like the one he still wore, the one he now twisted aimlessly. She had said it was “an act of solidarity with single women, and with married women too poor to afford rings, and with prostitutes, and with” … That was already later, when she took off the ring. That was feminism. And then, the ring got lost somewhere. That had made her sad. She looked and looked for it. But it … got lost.

“Like me,” he muttered. “Lost. Like the child she used to be.” The child who now earned more money than he did. The child about whom people now said, in introductions, “This is Julian Travis—and-her-husband.” She suffered at that, he knew, feeling her pain feeling his feeling hers in a sympathetic circular agony of guilt. Trapped.

But at least a new challenge had been discovered against which both of them could gamely brace themselves:
“They”
may think we're hurt by “role reversal,” but “
We
” know otherwise.
We're
the vanguard of revolutionary relationships between women and men. We defy, therefore we are.

Are we? he wondered. He was getting on. As his uneducated wacky deceased mother would have said, he was no spring chicken. Fifty years and more—and for once he wasn't thinking about how long it took to pass women's suffrage. Definitely gray now, all those distinguished silver swatches at the temples. They colonized the whole head of once carroty hair that had, along with his radicalism, inspired the press to nickname him “the Red Menace.” So what was he waiting for? What big or little R revolution could happen for him now? And what was
she
waiting for? For him to come alive again, to free them both? Was this the one thing she couldn't do for them? But didn't she understand this to be the one thing he no longer was capable of doing?

He paced back to the kitchen and poured another glass of cola. The Baked Dish fragrantly announced its readiness from the oven. Once, she used to call and say she'd be late, but that too had disappeared somewhere along the way.

Deforestation. Erosion. Desertification. The fight over the blue enamel paint-can cover. The fight over being overdrawn at the bank. The fight over forgetting to turn off the electric blanket. The fights over her chronic headaches, his chronic insomnia. The stalemates about love-making; poignant, ritual reachings out to each other, blunders, withdrawals, silences. Conversation strip-mined down to exchanges of function, concern, news. So much for defiance. The petty battles, sulks, grievances, and reconciliations they endured were identical with those of other married couples, including those of the same age, class, even gender. How commonplace. How humiliating.

Worse: they had been adopted, in the habit of America, as a New Commodity. The revolutionary whose khaki fatigues become chic, the ascetic flocked to by religious pilgrims, the vindicated explorer now safely bemedaled. With their own collaboration, they had become fashionable—an “egalitarian couple.” Private misery packaged under brand names. And a market for the product.

Until finally they were exhausted by swimming against a tide that swept them into its current. Until finally no new escalation of the “level of struggle” could breath life into what had become the candy bride and groom on the wedding cake.

Stuck with what we now represent, he thought: the New Improved Jumbo-Size Couple. The latest trend, the “in” thing, from the folks who brought you—

He heard the downstairs street door open and close. Julian. Julian was home.

He moved quickly, as if he were afraid—which was absurd—to the oven, grabbed the potholders, and lifted the Baked Dish to the top of the stove. From where he stood he could see straight through to the loft door, watching it as her footsteps rose on the stairs.

He grinned as she entered. She dropped her suitcase.

“Hi! You timed it just right, even if the plane was late. Supper's ready. Or did you eat on the flight?”

She came over to him. They embraced gingerly.

“Eat on the plane? Are you kidding? The glamor of travel: Toy airline food on toy trays eaten with toy utensils. An endless stream of Sleeptite Motels. Sometimes a treat—organically grown beansprouts for the dinner in my honor at the Women's Center.”

She peeked into the pot.

Only he would have noticed the fragment of hesitation before she exclaimed,

“Baked Dish! Great! I'm starved.”

“I put your mail on the hall table, as usual.”

“Mmm,” she murmured. She was already peeling off her blazer and making for the hall table. “Thanks,” she called back absent-mindedly.

He hefted the large pot and carried it to the table, returned and brought the jug wine. She came drifting back, sorting the mail as she walked.