Dry Your Smile (27 page)

Julian felt a squirm of suspicion that this tirade was indirectly aimed at her, then immediately felt paranoid for having entertained the suspicion.

“Nobody promised that the patriarchy would be unmade in a day, Charlotte. You folks wanted to be a bridge between the politics and the popularization of them. Admirable, but a bridge gets walked over. That's its function, you know. What's more, some politics—maybe the best kind—usually aren't ‘popularizable,' at least not until they've been around awhile: ‘What? Universal suffrage?
Insane
notion!' You know as well as I do that a progressive idea takes time to filter through a culture—”

“We don't
have
time.
We
have
stock
holders.”

“Yes. So you try to filter faster. Sometimes,” Julian blurted out, “that amounts to distorting, blanding out. Maxine Duncan Brewer.”

“Oh dear. Yet another lecture on our corruption. I notice we're not good enough to publish Julian Travis? She might stoop to
edit
for Athena, but she
publishes
with distinguished old Hamilton Press.”

For a moment, a question poised in the silence between them: how long would it be until Charlotte would yearn for the day, painful though it might seem when it arrived, when Julian would decline the jobs Charlotte dangled—or how long would it be until Julian would wish, however regretfully, that Charlotte wouldn't offer anymore? Then both women backed away from the confrontation, each still clinging to her side of a bargain they believed to be mature and constructive, one in which skills and fees were exchanged for the sake of a differently interpreted greater good.

“Athena doesn't print poetry, Charlotte,” Julian demurred, “and Hamilton does. You know my motto: Love me, love my poems; if you want my prose, you've got to take on the other along with it.” She threw in a submission gesture. “I'll never be properly ‘commercial,' anyway.”

Charlotte sighed and rearranged the pencils in her pottery mug.

“Well, maybe I'm just in a foul mood.” This time it was she who changed the subject. “So what did you think of the Preston?”

“It's—I—liked it. I mean, well, that sort of single-girl-swinger-stuff isn't usually my—but it's got a bright, sassy type of writing which I suppose … It's really a treat,” she finished lamely. Untenable to comment that there were so few flags because she'd given up on the manuscript in despair. Then, shifting into what she hoped wouldn't appear as too drastic a non sequitur, “Of course, I still haven't got over my fan-like reaction to the last book I did for you. The Graham biography of Katherine Mansfield? Damn, but that was good. Feminist but not jargonistic. Well researched. Doesn't ignore the New Zealand years in favor of the English ones. Well written. Long overdue. It was a pleasure to copy-edit.”

Charlotte beamed. As if on cue, one of the poodles woke, wagged over to Julian, and licked her shoe.

“Oh that's music to my ears. Particularly from you, Julian. Your less than subtle hoity-toity literary judgments give me indigestion sometimes.”

Nettled, Julian offered a smile in response. Charlotte smiled back. For the sake of the bargain, Charlotte would swallow her humiliation at what she assumed to be Julian's contempt. For the sake of the bargain, Julian would swallow
hers
at feeling grateful for Charlotte's forbearance and patronage. They might differ on whether the contempt or the gratitude was voluntary as well as deserved, but they shared a confusion over whether the attendant humiliation was as deserved as it was voluntary. Charlotte thrust out her chin in an unconscious gesture of pride.

“You know that the Graham was rejected by twelve houses before it came to us? Leonora fought hard for us to take it on. Books like that revive my faith in what we're doing here. Of course it'll bomb commercially.”

“
Wait
a minute, Charlotte. Not necessarily. Why?”

“A literary biography? Of a woman? And a foreigner? In the Reign of Reagan? Are you kidding?”

“But
why?
” Julian sounded to herself like Jeremy.

“
Because
, that's why. We'll lose money on it. But that's all right once in a while. The sales of Maxine Duncan Brewer allow us to publish people like Joy Graham.” She had regained her dignity and her good humor returned with it. “How about lunch? Have you got time? Athena will treat.”

Julian thought longingly of her plans for revising the new sonnet sequence that afternoon; it was to have been a self-reward for having endured copy-editing the Preston. She knew that a make-nice lunch would be helpful, though not necessary, to guarantee further work. Lies and pretense. You
are
a hypocrite, Baby, she thought. A confused hypocrite, too, because she missed their old camaraderie. She missed Charlotte.

“Well, okay. Yes. I'd enjoy that, in fact.”

“Great!” Charlotte exclaimed. Then, a touch embarrassed at the pleasure in her voice, she added, “Just let me make out a payment slip to you for the Preston so I can drop it off at the business office on our way out. Then you might actually have a check by the end of the month, or at least before you're eligible for a senior citizens' bus pass.”

“Oh. Thanks. Yes, sure,” Julian tossed back casually, sitting down on the sofa again to wait while Charlotte typed up the form. They exchanged a quick glance, unanticipated, unsettling. A fidelity resonated between them, potent as nostalgia, a cranky recognition that they were still on the same side—though neither could have said with confidence of what—stuck with each other like family members who congregate only at births and funerals, who snarl over Grandma's silver teapot being left to this cousin instead of that one, but who are there (grudgingly) when they are (grudgingly) needed. Athena was, for Julian, like the proverb about home: the place where, when you had to go there, they had to take you in. If the banner of this particular sisterhood was somewhat frayed, Julian reflected, still it fluttered in the storm, brave and bonny.

Over vegetarian won-ton soup in the kosher Chinese restaurant, Charlotte sighed,

“Sorry about the place. As you know, this neighborhood isn't the greatest for choices in cuisine. There's the dairy restaurant, the kosher takeout hot-dog stand, the kosher pizza shop, the deli—where the food's fabulous, actually, but you emerge deaf from the noise—and dear old Mamaleh Yin Chow's.”

“It's fine, Charlotte,” Julian laughed. “So long as we stick to beef or chicken. The ersatz shrimp does me in. The first time I came here, I ordered Mu Shu Pork without thinking. The waiter almost expired with horror on the spot.”

“I yearn for the day when Athena changes neighborhoods. I
abhor
our building. Always have and always will.”

“Spoken like a good apostate New York Jew.” She toasted Charlotte with a glass of tea.

“You got it. Listen, if I'd stayed on as an editor at Knopf we'd be lunching at the Four Seasons.” Charlotte rummaged in her purse, came up with a bottle of extra-strength aspirin, popped two into her mouth, and downed a swig of her tea.

“You look tired, Charlotte. And it's only Monday. Couldn't you and Zach get to the country house for the weekend?”

“That, my dear, was the problem. We
did
get to the country house for the weekend. With neither of his Ivy League brats glowering at the evil stepmother. Just the two of us.”

“Oh. I see. Was this a shouting-match one or an intensive let's-struggle-this-through one or a deadly silences one where communication runs the gamut from ‘Have you seen the newspaper?' to ‘I'm going for a walk'?”

“This was
all
of the above. This was a peach. This started with my apparently pernicious question as to why, after seven years of our having the country house, Zach still has to ask me where the plastic garbage bags are kept, when they have been in the same cupboard under the same sink for all seven years. It escalated rapidly to his unsolicited on-the-spot analysis of why I am such a hostile and neurotic person. What
is
the matter with these people?”

“You mean psychiatrists?” Julian suppressed a laugh about the long-lost Jack Erdman of her youth.

“I mean men. I know shrinks are particularly risky to be married to, but I mean the generic category itself. Don't forget I was married before, to a humble engineer. But he too alas was a man. Maybe they're really another species? A different life form, possibly? Not necessarily an intelligent one?”

“Aha. Yea, verily. This, I have frequently mused to myself, is a distinct possibility. In fact, had you asked me yesterday, I would unhesitatingly have replied in the affirmative.”

“Oh. You and Larry had a fun weekend, too.”

“Smashing. And I do mean smashing. He got smashed. Also some dinnerware. Revolutionary vanguardists can, when it comes down to it, find a common brotherhood with engineers and psychiatrists.”

“On what grounds? Their penises?”

They both burst out laughing, and a second wave of cackles hit them when a passing waiter shot Charlotte an indignant glance at her overheard question, as he shuffled by bearing a tray of vegetarian spare ribs.

“I mean it, Julian,” she went on, lowering her voice with a giggle, “and they seem to have another thing in common. They're all Jekyll-and-Hydes, have you noticed? It's like … well, the reason I fell in love with Zach was
because
, in a way, he
was
a shrink. Certainly Ted—he was the engineer, you never knew him, lucky you—Ted responsed to any discussion about thoughts or feelings, any attempt to talk about what might be lying underneath one's actions, with a glaze of sphinx-like disinterest. Zach was willing, even eager to discuss all that. I thought, ‘Here is a man who is willing to probe, who wants to know the inner me, who's not afraid of emotion.' So the flip side of the coin is that if I happen to put on a red scarf in the morning I get asked, ‘Feeling confrontative today, are you?'”

Julian rose to their old atmosphere of conspiracy.

“One of the reasons I married Larry was the
intensity
he gave off. Gentle
and
intense, I thought, wow. So gentle can flip over to passive and intense can display itself in shattered dishes.”

“Uh, Julian, you think maybe Larry should see somebody? I mean a shrink? Throwing things … well, that's sort of on another level …”

“Oh no,
no
. This weekend was an exception. And don't be silly. Larry would never raise a finger against me, if that's what you're thinking. Besides, he thinks all shrinks are brainwashing agents of the System. Anyway, you are suggesting maybe our eminently sane friend Zachary perhaps?”

“God no. But don't you get frightened—”

“Not really. I mean, this is
Larry
we're talking about. No, it's the yo-yo effect that gets me. You're never quite sure who'll be there in the morning—or night, for that matter.”

“You mean: Dr. Jekyll or—”

“—Mr. Hyde, exactly. Oh, Charlotte, you
are
a relief. I mean, you under
stand
. The trouble with bitching about one's husband to a woman friend who isn't married—or who hasn't been married long
enough
—is that you get a blank look or else you feel creepy and disloyal or else she says something insightfully idiotic like ‘So why don't you leave him?'”

“Oh, do I know!” Charlotte, too, settled into the excitement of airing emotions stamped Classified. “See, you want the understanding and the sympathy. But you also want to know that the friend you're bitching
to
knows you
love
him. I can't
stand
the oversimplifications of the movement anymore. They drive me bananas!”

Julian toyed with her chopsticks.

“Well, I know you love Zach. And I know I love Larry. It's just that it gets so … exhausting. If only this thing we call ‘consciousness' didn't expose every level, from housework to jobs to sex to—”

“—to everything, let's face it. Maybe men are hopeless. At least at this point in history. At least to live with. Maybe the separatists are right. Maybe we should all become lesbians. Or just use men and discard them, like Kleenex, the way some men use women.”

“Well, I can show you scars from years of Q–and–A after lectures, when some of my lesbian sisters made me feel like a walking oxymoron: the married feminist. I'd hate to admit they were right. I'd hate to give up. Anyway, I seem to be hopelessly heterosexual. Or hopelessly … Larryosexual. See, it isn't ‘men' I want, it's
Larry
. He was the first person I went to bed with, you know. When I was all of, oh, nineteen. It's been Larry all along. For keeps.”

Charlotte looked up, her mouth full, shocked.

“You don't mean to tell me he's the only man you've ever screwed!”

“No,” Julian shifted uncomfortably in her seat, “there
was
one bona fide affair.”

“Does he know?”

“Larry? Oh, of course.”

“How'd he take it? When was this? Did I know you then? Who was the guy?” The new respect in Charlotte's voice made Julian even more uneasy, but was seductive enough to compensate for the prying.

“About two years ago. Yes, we knew each other then. My month at that artists' colony, remember? A painter. Tall, dark, handsome, good in bed—that is, I
think
so, out of my hilariously vast non-experience—and staggeringly dumb. Every time he opened his mouth, he confirmed that what I was feeling was plain lust, that I was in no danger of love.”

“But it—Was it—”

“It was
quite
pleasurable. Lots of getting carried away, so long as we didn't try to talk about anything challenging—like art, politics, humanity, the weather, or that the world was round. His paintings were masterpieces of boredom: splashy blobs of gray hurled against white. ‘Me Tarzan, you canvas' seemed his way of relating to his work.”