Dry Your Smile (46 page)

Panic is rising at the back of my brain, because soon colleges close for vacation and the lecture season is over until mid-fall. I can't do the intensive free-lance work required to tide all this over during the summer while in transit, crouching in various friends' spare corners.
What will I do?

And how in the name of anything am I supposed to be writing a
book
in the middle of this? I haven't touched the suspended chapter in months, am falling way behind in delivery schedule, and can't extract more of the advance money until I have more chapters to deliver.

Panic. So much energy needed just to stave off the panic. What in hell am I going to
do?

May 27, 1983

Yes, there
is
a Goddess, after all—and not merely because, as Iliana claims, garlic was discovered to be good in cooking.

Dear magnificent munificent sold-out compromised Athena has offered me an in-house editing job for the summer. The salary is small, but they're hardly financially secure. Besides, it
is
a salary, and a steady one. Rescue! I start on the first of the month.

It looks like we've got a prospective buyer for the co-op. What's even better, he's a relative of somebody on the co-op building's board—which means the board probably won't take forever to clear him as a potential tenant.

Iliana and I have actually seen one tolerable nursing home, a place called Peacehaven. Right on Seventy-seventh Street, non-religious, almost humane—although by now my standards have been thoroughly humbled. But it's clean and the walls are painted bright cheerful colors. The admissions director referred to the women as “clients,” and “residents,” not as inmates, patients, girls, ladies, or “them.” The kitchen seemed spotless. They permit TV sets, radios, and phones in the rooms (all at extra charge, of course). Visiting hours are anytime between 9
A
.
M
. and 7
P
.
M
. The staff didn't look too tired, cynical, or sadistic, though you never can tell. Iliana and I have learned that if you can sneak away from the tour guides, you ask the women themselves whether they “like” the place. That's a risky business, because often they burst out crying that they want to go home, or they nod in silent terror. But sometimes they whisper facts about the kind of care they receive. At Peacehaven we were free to snoop where we chose, and the women we asked chatted openly about finding the place “not bad, for these places.” It's wildly expensive, naturally—$3200 a month. Breathtaking. The other catch is that there are no vacancies at present or foreseen in the immediate future. I find myself shamelessly walking around with my fingers crossed that one of the poor souls who live there will conveniently croak—but only in time for the co-op closing. I have no principles left.

Hope does have a mild case of pneumonia, but Grimes doesn't think it too alarming. They have her in an oxygen tent, though, to ease the breathing. Yesterday she smiled at me for a moment through the plastic.

Spring is in full exuberance. Iliana “abducted” me on a walk through Central Park to remind me that “magnolia exist, my dear.” I've got such a lightened heart today, I can hardly believe it. When Iliana and I were having dinner in a little Italian restaurant, complete with red-checked tablecloths and drippy candle-in-old-winebottle, we toasted the Garlic Goddess and then each other. Our eyes held in a long look, before I blinked mine away. But I thought
This is possibility, this is excitement, this is pleasure!

The next time our eyes caught, I held her gaze.

June 2, 1983

Started at Athena yesterday. A desk! A file cabinet! A phone! A typewriter! A steady salary! I reminded Iliana that the Garlic Goddess also blessed us with shallots.

I'm back at Charlotte's, since now Georgi's brother is visiting her (tight-knit siblings in that family). Charlotte and Zach always take their wedding anniversary as a vacation week to spend alone together at their country house (poor Charlotte?). I have figured out the way to deal with the poodles: separately. Walk (drag) Sido, return. Then walk (fly after) Phideaux, return. It makes for four dog-walks a day. Thank god it's summer. If it were still winter, I'd wring those dogs out over the sink.

Iliana is possibly the most
alive
human being I've ever met. Yesterday, to celebrate the Athena job, she sent a dozen exotic silvery lilies and a bottle of Moët to me—at the
office
. Quite a few eyebrows hit quite a few hairlines. I think I blushed for the first time in my whole life.

(I loved it.)

June 3, 1983

With only three more bags of Hope's papers to sort through, this evening at Iliana's I came across a black pocket-notebook filled with yellowing pages: entries about Hope's girlhood trip to Mexico. Iliana held me while I cried uncontrollably.

Then another entry, after a lot of blank pages, right at the end.

So much to do, learn, become. Maybe it's not too late to begin singing again. If I work hard enough and I'm strong enough, I can be anything I want to be. There's talk about war but I refuse to believe it. I'm so full of hope that today I decided to call
myself
“Hope” from here on in. I'm going to create a whole new me. Today is the start of a fresh chapter in my life. It's going to be a perfectly
beautiful
life.

September 15, 1938

June 4, 1983

Went to the hospital directly after work, filled with love for her. She's out of the oxygen tent. She sometimes talks to me now, though not always to
me
, it turns out, but to Yetta or Esther. I don't contradict her anymore. When she does speak to
me
, just the garbled “Julian,” or even “Baby” lisping out of the side of her mouth is a triumph for both of us.

But today she was drooling a lot, and I kept blotting it away as gently as I could, each of us sending out shy smiles to the other. Then—and I meant it as a little joke, god forgive me I thought she'd chuckle with recognition about it—I wiped up another dribble and I said encouragingly, “Come on, Little Momma, dry your smile.”

Horror spread over her face as though I'd struck her. She squeezed her eyes shut and wrenched her head away from me. For the next two hours I pled with her. I wept, tried to explain the joke, apologized, tried to coax her back to me, told her how much I loved her. But she sealed off completely. I couldn't get through. Then I was forced to leave because visiting hours were over.

Coming down from her floor in the elevator, I felt like a monster. I called Iliana from the lobby phone booth. It all poured out. When I was finished, Iliana said simply,

“She knows.”

I didn't understand, and began to repeat that I'd humiliated Hope hideously, that I'd rubbed in the fact of her disease by way of a long-ago reference she didn't even remember. But Iliana's voice rang firm over the phone:

“Juliana. I tell you she knows. Not just the reference to your childhood saying, though she knows very well where that comes from. That's why she can't face you.
She knows what she's done to you.
”

As I walked out of the hospital, the realization of what Iliana meant hit me. Then, almost simultaneously, it dawned on me that Hope would eventually die, and I would live. I would outlive her. I was alive in the young summer evening.

It was odious because I thought I'd reached the other side of forgiveness. But this didn't feel like revenge, only exuberance. It came as a shock—which is idiotic, because most children do outlive their parents. It's not that I'd really believed I
wouldn't;
more that she and I couldn't both be genuinely
alive
at the same time. Now that she begins to fade, I begin to
be
. Is that vampirism or rebirth? There was some anger along with the euphoria, but it tasted clean. Not a ready-to-dance-on-her-grave anger, because it contained no celebration of her dying. It felt instead like a ritual festival, the breaking of an old spell. It's hard to put my finger on it. I was appalled at the intensity of my elation. But strangest of all, I felt no guilt.

I think I don't want to return to Larry.

I think I want to get my own apartment.

I think I'm falling in love with Iliana de Costa.

June 9, 1983

Miracles fluttering down all over the place, like magnolia blossoms from the trees in the park. The co-op's been sold. A vacancy opened up at Peacehaven. Hope's recovered from the pneumonia, though she still won't look at me or talk to me. Charlotte says I can have the Athena job for as long as I want it. I'm back at Georgi's in the J.T. Memorial Den and Georgi's going to Europe on the fifteenth for an entire month so I can have the apartment all to myself. That means I can begin to write again. I can pay Hope's bills and she can be moved into Peacehaven day after tomorrow. I've been trying to prepare her for that, to explain she won't be going back to the co-op and why. But she won't respond in any way, not since the “dry your smile” day, not even with fury.

Last night, after Iliana and I had a celebratory dinner with champagne (every fragment of good news is an excuse for her to declare another celebration), we walked arm-in-arm through the Village. When I left her at the street door to her apartment, I kissed her full on the lips. Then I raced off and leapt into a taxi. All the way up here to Georgi's in the cab, I trembled as if Parkinson's were a hereditary disease.

I think I definitely want my own apartment, and a more permanent separation from Larry. In fact, I think I'll have to tell him that as of July first I won't be able to shoulder the loft bills any more, because I've got to start saving for a place of my own. It's time he was nudged out of the nest, too.

It'll be hard, telling him that. He'll storm and rave about me destroying him all over again. It'll be specially painful, because in just the last three or four phone calls, he's been quite understanding. Like the original Laurence. He even came to see Hope at the hospital one evening, not that she recognized him. But then, she hasn't seen him in years. Or maybe she did recognize him but wouldn't concede that. In any event, he and I went for coffee after. There we were, Laurence and Julian, sitting in the hospital coffee-shop talking politics, deploring the latest round of Administration cutbacks in social services, trading bewilderment over Reagan's grip on the public imagination. I reminded Larry that Reagan was an actor, albeit a lousy one, and we both started laughing. I'll always love Laurence Millman. He might never believe that, but there it is. Just as Hope will never understand or believe that I'll always love her, but there
it
is.

I told all this to Iliana at dinner tonight and her reply was, “Not surprising. Julian Travis might never understand or believe it, but perhaps you're beginning to love
her.
”

My god. I hope she's right.

June 18, 1983

Stunned, exultant confusion.

I've been to bed with Iliana.

Utterly different. Eerily
familiar
. Absolutely astounding. Totally “natural.”

Explosions going off in my brain:

How startling, at my age, to encounter this whole new sexual terrain in myself—as if I'd been color-blind to certain parts of the spectrum, and now, suddenly, can see shades and vibrancies of unnameable intensity but undeniable reality. It makes me furious that I missed so much for so long, lost so much time. It makes me giddy, childishly gleeful—that this gift of savage delight came to me at all, that I escaped going to my grave in ignorance of its existence. It makes me mournful beyond outrage—that the organic
normalcy
of this state of loving, its
ease
, its (there again, I can't think of any other way to describe it:)
familiarity
, is a target for fear, hatred, bigotry.

I don't understand the force of this “epiphany,” for me especially, since I've been to bed with women before, and it failed abysmally. I think back to all those years, particularly during the 1970's whirl of organizing and traveling, where I'd wind up in a sleeping bag or on a spare mattress or sofa at some women's collective after a day of meetings and demonstrations. There was inevitably at least one young woman who'd been at my elbow for hours, struggling with having contracted a severe crush but not wanting to come on as a “fan” or as what Larry used to nastily term “your lesbian groupies.” I developed my own brand of feminist diplomacy to handle such situations with as much tact, evasion, and delicacy as I could muster. But after years of this, I began to feel cowardly and narrow-minded. What's more, my old approval-desire syndrome was being activated by what felt like a steady assault on me as a publicly heterosexual feminist (“How dare you call yourself …”). I just got tired of saying No. So there I'd be, huddled in the sleeping bag, satisfied with what I'd accomplished, but desperate for five hours of sleep before catching an early plane for the next town. Suddenly there
she'd
be: a young woman filled with longing and loneliness and a hunger for the feminist energy I guess I represented to her. She'd sit on the floor and tell her life story and we'd both begin to cry with a mutual yearning for some other way of living. I'd hold her while she cried, and then she'd ask—so vulnerably—if she could crawl in with me. Out of pity or embarrassment or tiredness (like god knows how many wives to how many husbands), I'd sometimes give in. It was easier than saying no. Though I sensed it wasn't me who was being desired, but Julian Travis. Though I felt nothing but tenderness and a sorrow for both of us as women. Though I knew I might experience a residual bitterness—at finding myself a feather in someone's cap, a notch in someone's belt. Though I knew
she
might experience a residual bitterness—that I didn't fall in love with her, that I left in the morning.

It didn't happen often. Perhaps five or six times over all those years. And sometimes we'd just sleep. But it happened enough to convince me that I must be an unregenerate heterosexual, despite what was my search maybe for it to work, and despite my fine intellectual beliefs that sexuality was a single continuum, that society was the culprit for devising categories and pigeon-holing people into either/or boxes. When I told Larry, he said he understood—though during the later fights he'd ammo it up in terms of my being incapable of saying no to anyone except him (untrue). He even wondered aloud whether it might be interesting to try for a “threesome”—him and me and another woman—a proposal which seemed sickeningly close to a harem scenario, though he floated it as an exotic experiment in “sexual revolution.” I declined to organize such a meeting.