Stolen Pleasures (20 page)

Maybe I ought to have a cup of hot tea to warm me up and catch my breath. My breath nowhere around when I wanted it, I went up the backstairs. Wusto! he opened the door with his brown hair up
in tufts as if he or she had been running fingers through, with a dish towel tied around his waist, with a puzzled look on his face that said, Who comes up the backstairs? Who? “You forgot to feed your cats and they beg at my door. Cats,” I said, “got to eat regular, like human beings.” That humbled him. It's always wise to forget the formalities if you feel yourself ill at ease and begin with the attack. “Oh my, oh my!” he cried, striking his brow with the back of his hand. “The cats! I forgot to feed them!” and he turned sideways to say to the girl, “I forgot to feed them!” and I got a fair look at her from a distance. She was sitting at the table by the window, and the paper lantern of a lamp above the table glowed off her buttersilk blouse and off her red hair. I saw her dimly because my eyes had come up the twisty dark of the backstairs. She was sipping wine from a tumbler and reading a magazine and she gazed at me, that girl, with a little bit of interest and a little bit of puzzlement and that was all. She gazed at me, that girl, with no kinship in her eyes, creature of my own sex but oh so different from me, so young and so well fed with love and the stares of strangers. Maybe she's a clerk behind a jewelry counter, maybe she types all day in a tight little office, but she's only beginning. But me, even when I was a child, with the pitcher lip that was just a quaint child's lip, even then I knew that someday I'd come knocking at a back door to have a young man open it and let me see what kind of woman was privileged to sit at his table and swing her foot and sip his wine and make herself at home, at home, at home. “When you see them next time tell them to come up,” he said just as the two cats ran in, and to the cats he cried, “Forgive me! Forgive me!” and smiling and nodding, nodding and smiling, he closed the door, opened it again
instantly. “Can you see? Can you see?” he cried. “Here, I'll leave it open until you get down,” and he did and the light was on the stairs until I got to my own door. That was kind of him, he was somebody else's kind lover who leaves the door open for an old woman to get her light by as she retreats down the backstairs on her love-shaken legs.... One of the upstairs cats came down again and scratched at my door and now it's walking over my journal leaving paw prints made of something resembling licorice gum. Upstairs all is still, all is shuddering with love.

Maybe I'm feeling magnanimous tonight because in last Sunday's paper which I picked up yesterday on the backstairs I read an article by an eminent psychologist in New York by the name of Reik who said in the title that Men Love Work But Women Love Men, and down in the article about how When Women Claim Equality Then They Renounce Their Superiority. That made me feel good for an hour or less. It made me feel superior. But after a while I began to suspect that statement. I wondered what it was I ought to feel superior about because I didn't seem to have what he implied I had. So I went to bed sad and lay there wondering why I've always been afraid of them if I was superior. I look the other way and always have, all my life, because even when I was young they looked right through me. I was afraid of their indifference which is a worse kind of cruelty than laughing at a woman because she's odd. At least being odd you're being something more than nothing. So I went to bed sad and slept sad, but this morning I got up and began to count my superiorities because I find it upsetting to
be at loggerheads with an eminent man in the Sunday papers. So I counted twenty-six paperbacks, a can of evaporated milk, a loaf of bread, and five withery apples. These are not special superiorities belonging to women alone but they were the only superiorities I could find so I counted them.

All my life I never gave Life serious thought, like the people who write books about it. Oh, they get all wound up, they write 1,000 pages or they condense it down into four lines in a poem. That's the way I used to feel when I was young, that I had a lot to say. But I couldn't say it like the others and that turned me against them, it turned me away because they had so much to say that was so complicated I felt like a simpleton. Worse, like an eavesdropper. So I read only a few things in my life. But now I feel the opposite, I'm not intimidated anymore. That's a laugh, trying to find out what I'm doing here when I've already been here sixty-three years. The basement of the City Lights is a good place. You can read down there, they have tables and chairs, and you don't have to buy anything, nobody bothers you. Down there I read lots of great people. Not that I read them from cover to cover. I read a page and then when I lose track of a man's thoughts I skip a page, but I manage to collect a lot of insights for myself. For instance, one poet I was reading, one of his lines hit me between the eyes, I felt as if I should have read that line when I was born. It went He Never Supposed Divine Things Might Not Look Divine. There's more before and after to support that line but that's the part I remember, that's the part that made me feel not so queer all of a sudden. “Hell!” I said
to everybody who all my life had looked through me as if I wasn't there. “You don't know the Divine when you're looking right at it!” Today I read a philosopher, and maybe it's really my own idea but I've got to give credit to somebody else because it's too good an idea for me to have made up myself. But this is the picture I came up with, that made me feel complicated and calm at the same time. I got a picture of my Soul. Suppose there are three heads, and the one in the middle has two faces, like Janus. The two-facer in the middle is the Soul, and one face is looking at The Person You Are and the other face is looking at The Person You Might Have Been, and both the other faces are looking at the Soul. All these heads are contained within you, but you're not the first head and you're not the third, you're the two-facer in the middle looking at both. The Soul is me. I'm not the woman I might have been under more congenial circumstances and I'm not the woman I am, old growlygut who can't look anybody in the eyes because she's ashamed of who she is and ashamed for them for not seeing her Soul instead of her. I was able to keep this picture of my Soul intact until I got home, but once I got here and smelled the old magazines and the cat spray and the cold rubbish smell that comes up from the basement and saw I had one last tea bag, some dried beans, and seven prunes that I found at the bottom of a canister it was hard to remain the observing Soul. I found myself becoming the old woman again with her stiff hands and her hunger and the next minute becoming the person I might have been, a smart old lady with lots of antique rings, my place of residence the mansion across the street, up on the corner of Chestnut and Grant, that nobody lives in, that belongs to somebody in Italy. The macaroni factory is at the lower corner of
the block and the mansion is at the upper corner and in between is some vacant earth that's as high as the roof of the factory, with long slicks of grass and clumps of ferny fennel and Scotch broom. One day I climbed up that mound to peer through a wrought-iron gate in the stucco wall at the back of the mansion and saw a little statue of a youth above a waterless fountain in a tiled courtyard. On top of the high walls are little arches like afterthoughts loaded on, and stuck in the walls are lions' heads that gaze out over the mound and the macaroni factory and the bay. That's where the woman I might have been would live, with her wisdom and wealth and eminence. I try to believe I am the Soul in the middle but the other two keep getting the upper hand.... The cats are driving me crazy. They're yowling on the backstairs of the building next door because there they can look into my kitchen window and me at the table. Maybe they think they press me more with their hunger when they stare in from outside like the poor children in Hans Christian Andersen staring in at the rich eating their feasts. They yowl at me, begging and begging, and their yowls are magnified in between the buildings like in a cavern.

How pale I look whenever I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror over the basin. Sometimes I splash warm water on my face but I purposely avoid looking into the mirror when I do that. I only catch glimpses going by. Every time I glance in I'm reminded of something I read by a French woman philosopher who was very religious and wrote about God, and she said When A Beautiful Woman Looks Into The Mirror She May Think The Image Is Herself. An
Ugly Woman Knows That It Is Not. So that way I try to make myself feel better whenever I look, but I make myself feel worse again by suspecting that the girl upstairs looks in the mirror and knows the image is not herself. Yes, I grant that further advantage to her, that she is not taken in, every time, by the image. Sometimes I feel that woman philosopher by my side whispering to me how human is my face and sometimes that humanness is nothing that does me any good. No, I feel too many ways whenever I glance into the mirror, so I try to avoid it. Mirrors should never have been invented. Maybe the thing to do is hang a towel over it.

If I lived in the Middle Ages they would have burned me for a witch. But they would have made a mistake. I'm the extreme opposite of a witch. That's what I'd like to be, a witch—things would be at my mercy instead of me being at their mercy.

Yesterday at noon I saw her again. I heard them come down the stairs and waited behind my curtain to catch them when they reached the sidewalk. She walked from the lowest step to his car and I saw that she had her red hair done up in a pouf with a big, sharp curl on each cheek pointing to her especial face like a finger saying I'll Have That One, and I saw that she had a tiny waist with roundy hips, and pointed shoes whose heels had made a feminine click and clatter on the stairs for how many weeks now? Made them going up at suppertime and coming down late or the next morning but never at noon on a weekday. I began to think about
those curls on her cheeks and for the fun of it I made myself a cardboard hand, one of those old-fashioned hands you used to see pointing, and I pinned it on my straw hat with a safety pin so that it was pointed down at me. Maybe it was God's finger pointing, maybe it was God saying Look At This Woman. She's Got A Soul Because I Gave It To Her. She's Not Dead Yet Even If Some People Look Right Through Her As If She Was. She's One Of My Living Souls. But I didn't get up enough courage to wear my hand of God until today when I went out for a minute, not any longer because my legs don't carry me. I was weak from hunger and my eyes were dazzled by the daylight on the pavement. I went around the block with my hat on, down Francisco, up Stockton, and down Pfeiffer to Grant again and into my door again, so weak that I fell onto my bed and couldn't rise again for an hour. There was one of those Matson liners blowing its horn before it sailed, a blasty, bleary blow. One of those sending-off parties was going on and the horn sounded tricky as if somebody was having fun while he was warning people to get off or get on. The blowing accompanied me around the block and I took it that God was blowing a trumpet for me on my journey, or asked Archangel Gabriel to blow it for Him, so people would look at me as I walked around the block with His hand on my hat pointing at me. But what was happening was the opposite. The Dutch architect and the girl were on that ship taking off for Hawaii. I knew this because he came down last night and knocked at my door and asked me if I'd be kind enough to look after the two cats until the other couple got back from Europe, and I said that I would. Here I had dreamed, in spite of the girl, in spite of knowing he wouldn't, of him standing there kind and forward
and noble and asking me if my initials were KW, at last. But all he wanted was for me to take care of the cats for another two weeks until the couple got back and he didn't even offer to give me the money for the cat food.

She knocked at my door with lilacs. The mouse woman from upstairs. She said the florist got a whole big bunch, and she wanted to give me some. “You can paint a real pretty picture of them,” she said, but this time I knew what she meant by pretty, and I was sorry that I'd been so uppity the first time she said it on the stairs. Maybe she's only got a few words at her disposal and maybe pretty means wonderful to her. I said “thank you” and said I'd paint a picture for her of the lilacs, but I don't have the strength even if I had enough paint in the tubes. I put the lilacs in a mason jar. The thing about flowers is that when you inhale them it's like putting your face into perfumed water.

Carpenters are working on the roof of the macaroni factory. On the roof there is a small frame structure that looks like a square house with one door in it and they hammer inside the door, they draw up their lumber to the roof and into the door. If they're up there tomorrow and if one of them glances across the street and into my window he'll think I'm napping, an old woman lying on her bed napping. Tonight I'll leave the curtains open so in case I can't get out of bed in the morning whoever is on the roof can see in. The caretaker at the mansion can see in if he wants to, and the boy with
the spade who climbs the little hill after school can, and the people who take their dogs up there and look out over the bay and down at the ships between the piers fanning out into the water. I've been up there myself to pry around and I know it's a view to see while they wait for their poodles to relieve themselves. Anybody up there will be able to see the woman lying on her bed and someone may say to himself that the old woman has been lying in there for three, four, five days.... Or maybe nobody will think anything's wrong because that thought would disturb the even tenor of their days. Maybe it will have to wait until the young couple come downstairs with their gifts. When nobody answers they'll come back the next day and then begin to make inquiries about me from the Hungarian couple, then from the landlord to see if I moved out as they have friends who would like to move in. The landlord will come over from his house with his key and as he is turning the key in the lock the girl will get a premonition and take her husband's arm and wonder if she ought to tell their friends about the apartment or not tell, because if a person died in there they might not care to be the ones to move in right after and that would be putting them in an embarrassing position.