Dry Your Smile (36 page)

Iliana brushed the thanks aside with an indifferent wave of her hand which betrayed none of that hand's yearning to stroke the wisps of hair beckoning from Julian's forehead. She contented herself instead with a shrug, and settled down beside her friend, handing Julian the magni-viewer and saying casually,

“I wouldn't have volunteered the session if I had not wanted to do it. It gave me pleasure. So do the results. I hope they please you, too.”

To watch the profile of that face, the neck like a lily stem bearing its small graceful head, light brown fronds of hair—that strange hair which in certain light, like this November dusk, was hazed through with a greengold gleaming …
mi corazón, mi sueño
. Little martyr, innocent of pleasures foregone as yet untasted, little ondine of the seagreen hair. What a luxury, this, to watch freely with justification expressions play across that face as it bent to perceive
her
perceiving of it, a wordlessly provocative communication. Julian began to smile. Then she laughed, then became grave, then smiled again. She glanced up at Iliana, her eyebrows raised in respect, then looked down again, drawn back to this irresistibly alluring cast of all the Julians as perceived by all the Ilianas. She began to murmur how fine they were, how remarkable, how extraordinary, how hard it would be to choose one for the jacket. Then she stopped her chatter and peered more keenly through the viewer, her body language changing, her surprise palpable. It was precisely the sequence Iliana had anticipated. There, yes, she saw it. She saw what Iliana had seen. Undeniable now. The photograph worth not only a thousand words but the one which cannot lie.

“My god,” Julian murmured, “I've never seen this face before. I—I don't know this woman. It's—it's like a double. Can this—Is this really me? I mean, I know it's me, of course, but …” She looked up in awe. “I've seen literally thousands of pictures of me, 'Yana. From gurgling age two straight up through simpering sixteen, from young married matron to police mug-shot, feminist militant to studious poet. But I've never seen this woman. She's … she's beautiful,” Julian's whisper was barely audible, “She's … she looks so
happy.
”

Break, my heart, not to touch her, enfold her utterly at this proximity, Iliana thought. She is seeing herself, penetrating herself with the eye of someone who has loved her for so long, in such silence. This may be the one offering she ever will accept from you, oh break my heart, break with this joy and this torture.

Julian's eyes were moist when she looked up again. “Thank you,” she said quietly, “oh, thank you. I—it'll take me a bit of living with them to choose one for the jacket. What's here is, well, quite a lot to digest all at once. Oh, but thank you,” she whispered again, “I'm … so surprised at what you saw.”

“I've seen that for some time, my dear,” Iliana answered lightly, “and also known that you had never seen it. That was one reason why I wanted to shoot the session. Perhaps I shall always see in you what you have not yet perceived in yourself. Perhaps the eye of de Costa, or just the eye of your … old friend and sister 'Yana, yes?”

“Yes,” Julian nodded, her gaze returning magnetized to the images of a joyous, voluptuous woman who wore her own features but expressed no emotion she could recall feeling. “Yes,” she repeated, “perhaps all of the above.”

“Today, for example, I see sorrow shadowing the eyes, a hunger that cannot be pacified with fresh bread, no? A hunger for serenity. Do you want,” Iliana probed, “to talk about it? Or better at this stage to not?”

She poured two cups of coffee and handed one to Julian. This simple kindness seemed to unhinge its recipient, who put down the cup and burst into tears. Iliana fetched a box of tissues, placed it on the table, and sat down again on the sofa, restricting herself to putting an arm around Julian's shoulders.

“What,
mi niña?
What is the worst of it? Is it Laurence?”

“Larry?” came the muffled reply. “Oh hell, poor Larry, what an unholy mess
that
is. We were going to change the world. We can't even free each other from our own ghosts. Intellectual and political equals, the new revolutionary woman and man. Don't make me laugh. At this point, he'd probably regard a gesture of love from me as pity and I'd probably construe one from him as need. Oh Christ, what I've done to poor Larry!”

“Julian. Forgive me, but I say this from the heart. And remember I have always liked Laurence immensely. From the first, he reminded me of my brother, the one who was ‘disappeared.'”

“I know,” Julian interrupted, stalling whatever Iliana's forthcoming insight might be. “He used to say you were the only one of the CR group with whom it was possible to have a civilized conversation. I remember,” she sniffled, blowing her nose into another offered tissue, “the night I finally gave up and stomped off to bed while you and Larry sat up for hours dissecting Latin American politics.” Julian hiccupped. “I was so glad, too. That he had a peer to talk with. That you respected him and—
understood
why I was married to such a person. Especially since … Oh hell, 'Yana, you know the trouncing some lesbian feminists have given me for being a corrupt married woman.”

“I know. You have been praised and you have been slandered. With me I would like for you to just be yourself. So that is why I tell you—reminding you that I have always liked Larry—that you have things sometimes out of perspective, and it does no good to either one of you. Remember that I too have loved certain men, so it is hardly for me to judge you. All this sophomoric Anglo-Saxon either/or bird-holing about sex—so tedious! Such a failure of imagination!” She paused. How to say this? How to say that homelessness was preferable to a denial of hunger, that freedom was no abstract concept but a sequence of exactitudes which included loving yourself—and whomever else you chose to love, when and where you chose—without guilt? How to avoid old misunderstandings and new exilings for insisting that a woman's intellect, aesthetics, and sexuality were inextricable—a traditional enough idea, Iliana thought wryly, where a man was concerned? How to say this to Julian, of all people? As a friend. Carefully. Lightly. She adopted a conspiratorial tone. “You know, sometimes I think a secret heresy: that heterosexuality is a sign of youth, of altruism. A rite of passage. Every woman should indulge in it for a time—before she is ready to mature into the complexity of loving a woman.” Carefully. As a friend. “But be that as it may—and Santa María strike me dead if
that
should become a political ‘correct line'!—I must tell you that you are too hard on yourself. You defend Laurence, always Laurence. One must approach a subject from different angles. It takes two to destroy a relationship, you know.”

Julian wiped her eyes. “Yes, but to paraphrase Solon or some other Greek, ‘To a really good woman everything is her own fault.' Who said that? Socrates? Larry would know …”

“Whoever it was said ‘man,' not ‘woman'—and that
is
different, since most men do
not
assume responsibility and most women do. Beware Greeks bearing axioms, my dear.”

Julian chuckled. A sign of life again.
I am good for her
, Iliana realized, a pod of sweetness bursting inside her with the discovery: thank you God for letting it be that I am good for her.

“What I try to say is,” she continued, “that you have been defending him for years—way back in the group, remember? At first it was how wonderful and easy the egalitarian marriage was—”

“Oh but I—”

“No, let me finish. What an exception he was. Even when you finally spoke some of your other feelings, still you accused yourself, insisted
you
must be failing in some way. It was classic.”

“But also true. He never meant—”

“
Juliana
. You forget that you and I were among the so-called pioneers of this thing called consciousness-raising? Don't pull this, what you call, bullshit, on Iliana. Listen, my friend, sometimes you are so into martyrdom I think you must have been secretly baptized Roman Catholic!”

This time they both laughed, but Iliana raised her hand to forestall another interruption.

“When you wrote me in Venice about your affair with the beautiful dummy—forgive me, I mean no disrespect to your art colony boy. But my dear,
really
. Well, I was amused—and glad—that you had at last exploded in some healthy human lust, little workaholic. But I admit I was also astonished that you wrote Laurence received the news so badly. No, wait, first I was astonished that you had to go and babble all to him. Again, my dear, really. All this whoring after honesty. Sometimes I want to scream, ‘Hypocrisy, where are you? Come back, kind, sympathetic Hypocrisy, all is forgiven!' I might add that Europeans and Latins know how to do this sort of thing more gracefully. Still, you told him. That was shock to me enough. Then, the shock was compounded by his reaction.
Tiens!
I had believed this was the modern-day Bloomsbury couple! How can the standards be so different for
her?
Is then my old bohemian radical friend Laurence just as sauce-for-the-duck-but-not-for-the-hen, or whatever the saying is, as the average macho Argentinian male?
Holá!
”

Julian's shoulders tightened, and when she raised her head this time her eyes flashed with defensiveness. “You can't just simplify it to men, dammit, 'Yana. In certain ways of course you can. But don't let's pretend between you and me that women are paragons. We both know that relationships between women can involve the same agonies—possessiveness, jealousy, power imbalance—the same old what my dear departed Aunt Essie would have called ‘dreck.'”

“Since when have women ever hurt you as much as men have?” Iliana countered, pouring out another round of by now tepid coffee and not noticing the temperature of the pot, preoccupied by the heat generated between herself and her companion.

“Women have hurt me more, in some ways. Because I'm no longer vulnerable to men. Except to Larry. But I don't think of him, somehow, as a man.”

“That,” Iliana snorted, “might be the problem. But perhaps you are just suffering from feminist burn-up?”

“Burn-out,” Julian corrected listlessly. “Oh, you don't know, Iliana. That …
trust
from the early days, it's … I don't know where it went. Forced into externals; necessary ones, maybe. Into marching, I guess, and lobbying. Legislating. Building battery and rape shelters, fundraising, godknows-whatall. But at what cost. It's rare these days that I can talk to a woman the way you and I talk. With no … hidden agendas. I miss that. Terribly.”

“The way you and I talked was always rare, I thought,” Iliana submitted, stirring her cold black coffee with a gratuitous spoon.

“Sorry. You're right. But you know what I mean.
Women.
” Julian spat out the word as if it were a clot lodged in her lungs.

So it wasn't about Larry after all. Not the worst of it. It was older, more noxious than that.

“There are as many subtle tortures as there are torturers and victims,” Iliana hazarded. “Tell me, if you can. If you wish to,” she added softly.

“I'll tell you,” Julian said in a rush, turning full face to her friend, “It's the hypocrisy everywhere. Go away hypocrisy all is
not
forgiven. Like at Athena. Their hypocrisy in how they survive, in why and what they publish. And mine, by god, in why and how I relate to them, and collaborate and reinforce and justify that. It's my own hypocrisy about—and
to
—Larry. It's my hypocrisy in knowing that you're attracted to me and have been for years—and my taking refuge in thinking that for me to name that would be megalomania. But
not
to name it is to play the cliché heterosexual woman who invites yet eludes the issue in counterfeit innocence. Hidden agendas. Damn right. It's my dying mother's hypocrisy—for years and years now—lying about my birth, my name, my age, her age, her illness, our ‘fortune.' Which I at least thought would safely keep her in creature comfort until she died, never mind whether any was left over or not. So then, through my channels of spying on her since she won't see me, I learned two little stunners of fact: first, she has to go into a nursing home. The woman who looks in on her says she's worsening rapidly and that the doctor insists she have continual supervision. Second, I learned today—after two weeks of phone calls and meetings with her brokers and attorneys about which I won't bore you—that there is barely a penny left of my childhood earnings, which were according to her in the millions. Though if Hope stumbled and fell flat over a truth she wouldn't recognize it; for all I know I earned fifty cents total. Which has gone over the years into bad investments, apparently. The upshot—if you want hypocrisy—is that Julian, this loving wife who has destroyed her hubby, is now about to become the filial daughter who must sell her mother's apartment right out from under that lady, to pay for a nursing home and the medical bills. What's more, Regan-Goneril here must first
find
a suitable nursing home by touring one of the grimmest circuits of all: every old women's home in this city. Because I
won't
put her someplace where I can't visit her every day. If—” here the rage gave way and the voice broke into shards of pain “—
if
she'll see me, that is.
If
she'll recognize me.
If
I can find a place that's decent, humane …”

The sobs broke out again, but this time Iliana gathered Julian full into her arms, rocking her against her breast as she might have rocked a child. Be still, my heart, she thought, leave be for now the middle part of what your Juliana said aloud—that she knew, that she has known for a long time, that she loves her Iliana anyway. Be still, be still. Something stronger, more lustrous than desire, was kindling in that heart—a love she had whole lives and continents ago given up feeling, something chaste as her iconic childhood angels, something that glowed annunciation at her now through soot-streaked windows, a nimbus of
caritas
enveloping their
pietà
, suffusing her, widening her soul. Juliana.