Hunger's Brides (88 page)
The open marriage experiment lasted less than a year. In the nine years since, our marriage has flourished on a strict regimen of secrecy and discreet cunning. To the principled ones I say Madeleine and I have an understanding. To the bold I hint at a breakdown in marital communication. The crazies, I tell as little as possible. But to none would I admit to having an active sex life with my wife.
Beulah was the last. Omega. No more covert dinners in fashionable clothes my wife had lovingly picked out for me. No more weekends in charming trysting places Madeleine would never visit. I had the impression I'd begun to repeat myself with these girls, and anyway the arrival of our first child would have complicated things further.
During the sexual abstinence that descends briefly on new parents I thought of Beulah often, and of the change I was now committed to. October, 1993. It had been finished between us by then for over two months. Since a meltdown in Banff that summer.
Fitful nights. Madeleine's exhaustion. Catherine's hungry cries and breathless silences. Confusing dreams. Flashes of the birthing, sex with Beulahâam I making that connection just now, or did it already occur to me more subtly then?
In lovemaking as in other things, there is something four-square about Madeleine. A rootedness, straight up from the pit of her. An acute and refreshing contrast to my own inner parentheticals and obliquities. She managedâwill manage still I hope, with someoneâto be startlingly forthright about her need yet light-hearted about her pleasure. Part of a Swedish inheritance on her mother's side that three generations in Canada have done nothing to erase. There was nothingâno role, no pose, no propâthat Madeleine would hesitate to try. My sex genie ever prompting me,
Tonight, Donald, who do you want us to be?
In writing of this I can only affect a certain light-heartedness myself, as marginally preferable to involuntary self-parody.
Madeleine used to take a perverse joy in dragging me, thrilled but protestant, to a love boutique in a strip mall near our home, to shop sex like a fishwife. Tips, discounts, free samples, demonstrations. To duel at close range in unbuttoned candours and naked curiositiesâcanny and veteran testimonialsâwith the proprietress, a heavy-lidded dominatrix with a predilection for snakeskin, who'd taken to meeting us at the door with a childlike eagerness.
I am given to worldly pleasures. As I say, it makes me an easy target. I am tempted to gloss over what follows, mask it at least in a codpiece of delicacy, but is this not to be the parody of a rapture? Better the parody intended than the one unseen. Describe the scene, describe the scene â¦
Typical Friday night at the mall. Family car parked in the sputtering glow of red neon. Window displays in the rich, red satin of casket linings and Halloween capes. To the proprietress Madeleine spins out a âlongtime fantasy of ours' that was still news to her bookish mate. While he stands in the next aisle, numb with fascination and thumbing something rubbery, she specifies dimensions, declensions, proclivities. When the kit is complete she will take it home to
try out on him, sharing out shock-resistant attachments and modelling slotted lingeries without the slightest reserve or trace of nervous over-acting
.
As the specifications become ever more fantastic he makes his way towards the back of the store, past snap-on clamps, collapsing o-rings. He goes deeper, ever deeper ⦠through a bristling of upstart prongs, the pucker of leather pursings, only to fetch up against a back wall of trusses, teetering towards the geriatric â¦
My wife is a gifted sexual comedienne, with a sharp eye for the farcical, implausible indignities that collaborating on the sex act calls for. All the swellings, gropings and clapping conjunctionsâthe creakings, jigglings and abject dribblings were just part of the game, the whole far-fetched package. She thought it was what I wanted. What we all wanted.
I did, Madeleine, it is.
I loved sex with my wife. I would never have given it up for anyone.
Catherine's arrival only added a deeper dimension. Madeleine put off weaning her for weeks. The pleasure of nursing was intense. Her eyes would roll mock-incredulous at the criminal ecstasies and tortures of being so barbarically suckled. She loved to be penetrated while she nursed. My function was to remain still, acting as a lightning rod to draw her pleasure down to a more decent seat.
Are you laughing somewhere still, Madeleine?
AZ
M
AYBE QUITTING SCHOOL
wasn't so terribly difficult for Beulah. She would have missed the Library's borrowing privileges but she didn't cultivate friendships. I can't think of a single friend I might have seen her with or heard her mention. Most people found her mind and manner intimidating. She loved music, it turns out, but discussing the latest pop stars or sitcoms would have provoked feelings of not just awkwardness but something like rage. I believe she saw herself as from another time. She pushed people away, perhaps for fear they would come to see her as she saw herself. Certainly she would not miss the overtly curious and overly sympathetic stares she occasionally received from people she'd shared a class with and who now had their own cautious graduate projects well in hand.
The only person in her life she admitted to caring about was her half-brother, Gavin, who'd put several hundred miles between himself and their parents by enrolling at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Well-heeled parents happy to keep their studious children's bank accounts topped up and considering the resulting tranquillity of their own lives more than worth the investment. At least, this seemed to be Beulah's point of view.
Did she tell them she'd quit school? Far from certain. For several months, she said nothing about having seen me out walking with my wife, about four months pregnant at the time. It was a discovery to which Beulah attached a more than casual importance.
There were many things she proved capable of concealing. Not that she seemed ordinary, but I wasn't the only one who failed to notice, to really
see
. Your first impressions were not of her beauty, but rather its mutability. Vitally to wanly luminous from one day to the next. Icy to darkly erotic just as quicklyâ¦. Fine features, skin easily bruised. A full-lipped mouth with a determined set, as though in rebuff to its own sensuality. The changeability was mostly in her eyes I suppose, ranging from hazel to grey, flecked with green and gold.
Ojos de miel
, a Spanish term. It all depended on her inner weather.
There was a susceptibility to cold sores ⦠and yes she'd lost some weight. But when a man of forty discovers that his exquisite twenty-year-old lover is developing the body of a small runway model he can
be forgiven, perhaps, for being just a bit slow to investigate. Or perhaps not.
Either way, if I'm to pursue a little while longer this fiction of the redemptive value of truth, I must be prepared to submit myself to a full accounting, even if the testimony may at times seem harsh. How in god's name could I not see what was happening to her? First,
no one
guessed, not for a long time. Second, we were already seeing one another less often. By the time she left school we'd decided it was mostly about sex, anyway. And leading up to that time, I had a strong suspicion that her threatening to drop out was calculated to manipulate meâ
calculation
, not anguish, not affliction, not the approaches of madness. Why didn't I
do anything?
some of the same crowd will ask. Others would reply that I'd already done quite enough.
I gave her the wrong advice. I refused to help. Rather I offered her only the help I wanted her to have, not what she needed. I failed her as a lover and teacher. I was a fool. There. A few hard truths I'm determined not to turn away from. For the record.
But repeatedly I
did
try to discuss her project, then later tried more than once to persuade her to return to the university, but the whole subject became too hot to handle. She was convinced I'd fobbed her off on lesser scholars.
Time, now, to move on to other topics.
In the past half-century much has been made of Sor Juana's âemotional instability,' and more recently of her sexual orientation, or orientations. In an earlier chapter we bore witness toâin all its clinical rigourâLudwig Pfandl's interest in the penitential practices of nuns; yet this interest forms but the backdrop to his main theatre of operations: Sor Juana. Unabashed by a quite perfect lack of psychiatric training, Pfandl unleashes upon Sor Juana a torrent of diagnostic speculation as he proceeds to dine out on her accomplishments.
But a book written by Nobel laureate Octavio Paz,
35
coming into Beulah's hands when it did, armed her to defend Sor Juana against the interrogations of her twentieth-century inquisitors. The book was the magisterial
Sor Juana, Or the Traps of Faith
. In it, in response to Pfandl's conclusions about Sor Juana's final capitulation, Octavio Paz comments:
Pfandl writes with astounding assurance that the âenigma is resolved': she was the victim of psychosomatic disturbance. A neurotic constitution, menopause ⦠her case was aggravated by asthenia and thinness of physiqueâ¦. The clinical portrait is completed with her immoderate tendency to brood, her masculinity, her narcissism ⦠her masochistic tendencies.
We may at least be thankful that in lavishing his attentions on a patient three hundred years dead, he had commensurately less time to inflict his interests on the living. At times Beulah must have felt oppressed by the sheer momentum of Pfandl's diagnostic élan; whereas in Paz she found a feather-light touch and subtle, poignant glimpses of
her
Juana:
Solitary amid the flurry of San Jerónimo, wilful and independent; one day inspired and the next spiritless; frequently afflicted by imaginary ills that were nonetheless as tormenting as physical illnessâher true, her only, companions were the ghosts in her books.
Beulah marvelled at how easily Paz moved through the world of ideas, turning effortlessly from science to philosophy to history to poetry and, finally, to love:
Love is a passion, a longing that forces us outside ourselves in search of the desired one and then back to search within ourselves for the trace of the beloved, or to contemplate the beloved's ghost in silence. Sor Juana's poetry reproduces this dialectic movement with extraordinary authenticity.
And though on occasion Paz too had recourse to Freud, through Paz's eyes Beulah saw confirmed Sor Juana's palpable eroticism.
In terms of psychic economyâto use Freud's expressionâSor Juana's malady was not poverty but riches: a powerful but unused libido. That profusion, and its lack of object, are evident in the frequency with which images of female and male bodies appear in her poems, almost always converted into phantasmal apparitions. Sor Juana lived among erotic shadows.
Perhaps it was at that moment, during that very passage, that Beulah first began to wonder about Octavio Paz the man, the lover. Did she see him then at the breakfast table, hair ruffled, sharing a single cup of coffee and a cigarette with a sleepy-eyed fellow Olympian? Or did she spare him the acid emulsion of
her
eroticism?
Sor Juana has a keen awareness of the âthus far and no farther.' That awareness is both existential and aesthetic. Existentially, love borders on melancholy, that is, on absence, solitude and self-reflection. Sor Juana constantly questions herself and the images of her solitary musings: love is knowledge. And the art made with that knowledge is neither excess nor verbal extravagance but rigor, restraint.
Reading this, one wonders whether Beulah didn't feel even slightly chastened by Sor Juana's rigorous example.
We must nevertheless concede that in startling contrast to her intellectual rigour and polished manners Sor Juana's writing offers rich servings of guilty brooding and self-absorption to analysts like Pfandl hungry to find autobiography in a poet's verses. In fairness, this contrast verging on total disjuncture would likely have jolted and dazed even those who knew her best. But in Paz, Beulah finds a powerful response:
