The Bride of Catastrophe (10 page)

I want you, and I will have you
, I thought, and when he left, I hurried to catch up and made my sex/love apology just as we'd rehearsed it. He looked surprised, but said he was proud I'd recognized my problem. In time, I'd toughen up and learn to conquer my jealousy, he was sure. I nodded enthusiastically, looked him full in the eye, smiling clearly, and repeated
I want you, and I will have you
, in my mind.

A few weeks later, I found him standing in my doorway with his guitar: he'd learned to play the whole Chaconne, and he sat on my bed and went through it very, very carefully, without feeling, but true to every note. As he passed over the place where he used to stumble as my dream carried him on, my eyes filled with tears—that melody seemed the exact sound of the project of belief I'd undertaken when I fell in love with him. But he hadn't, I reminded myself sternly, fallen in love with me.

“Congratulations,” I said, with an appropriate amount of feeling—about one percent of the feeling I had.
I want you, and I will have you
.

“Thanks,” he said, terribly shy suddenly, so I had the inkling he recognized the fragile thing that had grown between us, and still wanted it to flower.

“Would you like a back rub?” It was hard work for him to say this but he got it out.

“No, thank you.” (I managed to speak drily here; Philippa and I had practiced.) “No, no, I'm fine.”

“I've got patchouli massage oil.”

“No, no, really.”
I want you, and I will have you
.

“It's just that you look so tense.”

“Oh, well, you know me.” I laughed, and he looked up, our eyes met. “I've got a class, actually.” I went on, lying, praying he'd go before I lost my resolve. “Oh, I'm late, late,” I said
(I want you, and I will have you)
, backing away down the hall.

The next day he came again, and asked me to follow him back to his room. As we went down the hall, I looked out the window and saw the sensual type and some others lined up to get on a chartered bus; they were going to protest the new nuclear power plant, and it had been suggested—nearly been promised—that they would spend the night in jail. They were paying grim attention as someone demonstrated the use of Vaseline against tear gas, but it had an air of make-believe and I thought how sad it was that we had nothing more than nuclear power to protest when the generation before us had lived in such beautiful solidarity against an evil war.

Sid threw his door open: he'd turned the room literally on its head—the bureau, the bed, his desk, and bookshelf with all the books neatly upside down. On the turntable a bowl of red Jell-O was revolving at 33 rpm. Sid went into the closet and emerged a few minutes later wearing every single thing that had been hanging there.

“You mean to say you're sorry,” I said.

He nodded, silent and baleful. A wonderful pride swelled in me—this, I thought, was my real gift: I could find my way into even the strangest heart. I would join the great explorers—Lewis, Clark, and that gang. They sought the source of the Nile, the Hudson, whatever—I just wanted to find the one secret in each human heart. I went to Sid, felt his arms, stiffened by all the shirts and sweaters he was wearing, close around me, told myself to take courage and venture on.

“I'd never looked at it the way you do,” Sid said, and then, in such a low whisper that I felt he was trying to keep it a secret even from himself: “But, the more I think about it—I'd like to get sex and love all mixed up too.”

The record on which the Jell-O was jiggling was Louis Armstrong, and Sid sang with him suddenly, in a deep bass that shocked me: “I'm putting all my eggs in one basket … I'm betting everything I've got on you.”

He'd turned his life upside down, just so I'd feel more at home in it. He loved me and I knew it, which meant I'd escaped my mother's fate. I pulled him in and held him tightly as I could through all his layers, and we heaved the bed right side up and burrowed into it together.

But as badly as I wanted to fall into a mutual dream with him, I couldn't help feeling that he wasn't the man I'd expected him to be. He touched me with great precision, the way he played the Chaconne. He was proud of his acquired skill, but there was no anguish, no prayer in it. I threw my head back and cried out, most artfully aroused: I was skillful too. We fell asleep the minute we were done with each other, and when we woke up, it was dark and everyone else was up in the dining hall. I jumped up and got my clothes on. I wanted to catch Philippa while she was still in her office. It was as much her triumph as mine.

Seven

“A
N APT
metaphor, as far as it goes. But Lewis and Clark merely tried to enter the unknown; you are trying to let the unknown enter you!” said Philippa. “
Yours
is the more daring project,” she added, with satisfaction—she saw herself, and anyone close to herself, as engaged in great endeavors.

The fact was, my courage was failing. I worked against myself to trust Sid, and I did manage to act properly, never seeming suspicious if he was out late, making sure he had plenty of time to console the abandoned girlfriends. But there was no more blurring of the boundaries between us, and his silence, which I'd assumed was filled with thoughts too deep for words, just felt like emptiness now. When his guitar faltered, I was secretly pleased; he'd hurt me and I wanted him to stumble at the same chord forever. At night I'd lie awake remembering those first days, praying we could find our way back, but seeing the cold stars out the window, I remembered how lonely I'd been, and I didn't dare risk relying on Sid again. Trying to love him was like trying to put my hand into a flame.

I'd come to see him as a specimen of manhood, rather than a man. Philippa and I were going to figure him out—with that we'd be on our way to mapping the territory of heterosexual love. I
had to
do this, to figure out where my parents made their wrong turn.

“Men!” Philippa said. “You—
yes, you
—gotta love 'em.” She didn't, but she had to study them, if only to turn the tables. The poster over her desk was a Brassaï photograph of Henri Matisse studying his model. Impossibly lush, her one arm crooked behind her head, her hair falling in a thick dark wave, nipples wide and deeply colored, curves of breast, abdomen, inner thigh complementing each other, her lips soft, her eyes bored, and Matisse? A sharp beard and pencil, narrow little glasses, his lips pressed tight as he considered exactly how to distill her to a line. He would not be dreaming her dreams that night; he couldn't care less what they were.

“Typical,”
I said, telling Philippa how Sid was rereading all the same sci-fi novels he'd read the year before.

“It's the natural male genre,” she said. “In science fiction
technology
is the dynamic force, there's none of this relationship stuff. It's all about … oh,
you know
…” (She whisked her left hand around in the air) “… escaping the atmosphere, if you know what I mean. Docking in space and all.” She laughed. “It's a relief for them! Docking modules do not entice them, confuse them, docking modules do not ask for understanding, nor offer it … no, docking modules just do what
men
made them to do and then drift into some other orbit and spin.”

“Yes, I'm sure it's restful,” I said grimly, though I felt anything but grim. It was late winter, early evening, and the sun shone pale behind the low wet clouds. A blank canvas, ready for spring. The radiators were ticking and I felt drowsy and content, ready to talk the afternoon away.

“Where would we be, without them?” she asked suddenly, with a cackle.

“It's true,” I said. “You wake up in the middle of the night and there's a snowplow going by, the lights are flashing on the ceiling, and the whole rest of the world is cozy in bed and…”

“
Men
are out there, working to keep you safe!” she said.

“Men Working!” I crowed. “My favorite street sign on earth!”

The conversation was arrested momentarily while she considered which was her favorite street sign, and whether everyone has a favorite street sign, and concluded, “But no, it's women who think like that; men just turn left or right or whatever.” And we burst into laughter, me shaking my head at the hopelessness, she crowing at her victory over it—
it
being the arduous project of trying to love a man.

A man. Not Sid, whose metallic coldness I'd used to know for timidity, and taken into my heart along with his terrors and his persistence at the guitar. A man, a romance, a story for Philippa, to whom the heterosexual world was exotic as Tangier.

“Keep me informed!” she called down the hall after me, and that night, while Sid and I made love, I couldn't help noticing the way he kept his finger in me while he entered as if he was holding open a page; nor my disappointment that he couldn't catch me up and pull me under, overwhelm me like a wave. It was the wave I was looking for; Philippa understood. Of course, she'd said, one wants the incontrovertible force that holds you tight, pulls you under, tosses you onto the shore again, exhilarated, changed. Yes,
she
understood me, I was thinking, as I came; crying out: “Sid, Sid, oh Sid!”

As soon as he fell asleep, I'd be feeling around on the dresser for a dime—Philippa would be waiting for my call.

So, life stabilized. I had the man I loved after all, I had to consider myself happy. Spring broke up through the mud, patches of green appeared, and then apple blossoms and, by some miracle, they continued my scholarship. “I can't believe it,” I said to Philippa, “I thought they wanted to be rid of me.”

She managed to look knowing and mystified at once and I went home for the summer with the knowledge I'd be back in the fall.

*   *   *

AND THERE
they were, all of them—the cats hissing at me from the roof, Teddy and Dolly regarding me with huge eyes as if I were a member of that fabled species, the Visitors from the Outer World. The bedroom window was boarded over where the tree had fallen in. “Oh, we get the north light,” Pop said breezily. “It might not be enough for a Sweetriver girl, but it'll do.” He'd given up trying to placate Ma; now he was baiting her—she'd have her view over the marshland back the minute hell froze over. Valu-Spot was using our ping-pong balls as their in-store brand. Did I know how many thousands of sales that guaranteed? In no time we'd be on top of the world.

Meanwhile, my bedroom was full to the ceiling with ping-pong balls. “Don't make a
scene
about it, for God's sake,” Ma said.

“Well, it's not like I could sleep on
the couch
,” I sniffed. The living room was still empty, except for a baby rabbit Sylvie was keeping in a cardboard box (as one of the cats had eaten its mother), and a new concert grand piano. Ma wouldn't accept less than a concert grand, though our collective musical ability could have found full expression with a glass and spoon. The piano stood for possibility, on its wide ebony legs. Ma was taking lessons; she played “Danny Boy” by the hour, tears spilling down along her nose.

Who
were
these people? I'd expected to be welcomed back into this big loving family—the family we so
wanted
to be. Instead, I felt less at home among them than I had at Sweetriver, and I thought longingly of Charles, my Poet-in-the-Schools, of Philippa, and even of Sid.

“Listen to me,” Ma said. “Just because
you're
having a love affair—”

A love affair? How romantic that sounded, how full of hope, of envy! I looked over at her—she was thirty-eight, she was well-nigh on fire. She had the car keys in her hand—she was going to pick Sylvie up at the ball field, wearing a halter top and a pair of cutoffs, though the decade of childbearing had exhausted her body. Her hair was raked back by her angry hand, her crow's-feet must have been deepening right then, so narrowly was she squinting; and there was such determination in her stance that she was absolutely beautiful.

I'd never seen this so clearly before—she didn't draw herself up this way with us, only with outsiders. With her rivals. I'd broken the circle and joined them and there was no going back. Tears rose in my throat but I was not going to let her see me in pain, so I turned to watch the bumblebees work in the mock orange.
June
—I knew it by the smell of mock orange. And if I woke from a decade's sleep and looked out to see spruce trees in silhouette against a red and purple sky, I'd know it was early December, around Teddy's birthday. The things we absorb, through the earth of home.

“Things fall apart, the center will not hold,” said I to myself while I tried to cook dinner on the one stove burner that was still working. All over the world, families were in disarray, centers were not holding. It wasn't just us, it was a Subject of Literature. So, it was all right then, my pulse slowed a little. At dinner I told Pop that I thought they'd continued my scholarship because I was such a good student.

“It's an interesting question,” he replied. “Does one prefer a smart woman, or a nice woman? I've always leaned toward the nice ones myself.” It had never occurred to him that a woman might be more than the sum of the pleasure she gave to a man. But then, what chance had he had, for such thoughts to occur? Some guys went to school on the GI bill, but he couldn't; he'd had a new baby. I hung my head.

*   *   *

“
HAH!
”
SAID
Philippa, when I reported this and the rest of the summer's stories to her in September. “In fact, he does NOT, on the face of it, choose his women on that basis. Has your mother ever been described as
nice
?”