The Bride of Catastrophe (13 page)

“I mean to say, you'd have gone through with
it
?” she said finally.

I couldn't bear the suggestion that I didn't have the courage for something, especially something in the way of love.

“Of course, I would have ‘gone through' with
it
,” I declared. “I always follow my instincts, you know that.”

She looked down, shuffling her feet a little like a pitcher readying his curveball, and suddenly, in a voice as gruff and husky as that pitcher's, asked: “Well, what about it? Wanna fool around?”

“Oh, Philippa—I don't think … I'm not sure…”

I was surprised to hear myself demur, more surprised still to see my hand reach out by reflex and close around her wrist, as if she were a tuft of cotton, or bread, or cloud I was pulling off for myself, from the world of soft and beautiful and nourishing things. She was still arching an inquisitive brow and I was still shaking my head solemnly
no
as I sat her on my lap and kissed her.

But as our mouths met, she remembered which one of us was the teacher.

“Not like that!” she said. “No! You can't kiss that way right off, that's for later!” Her imperial confidence had returned and she pressed her lips tight together and gave me a hard little smooch.

“Have you had anything to drink?” she asked. I had not. She rummaged in the depths of her purse and pulled out a beer bottle—everyone should have a light sedative before lovemaking, she told me. She herself downed a little bottle of Bombay gin left over from her Christmas flight home, as if it was a nasty sirop prescribed for the nerves.

“There,” she said. “
Now
we can…” She was on top of me, and I was wondering what on earth I had done. I reminded myself that I adored her—no matter how numb I felt lying beneath her. I kissed her again.

“No!” she said irritably. “This is
not
the time for that kind of kiss!”

I tried to sit up, but it wasn't possible. “It is so!” I said. “I understand perfectly what you mean, it's horrible the way men try to stick their tongue down your throat and grab your breasts and claw their way into you right off the bat, but this isn't that way, it's a soft, longing kiss, a kiss of yearning, don't you see?”

“Lie back!” she said. “I am six years older than you are, I think I've learned something in those years, and the time for that kiss has not yet arrived!”

“Talk wrecks it, Philippa,” I said plaintively. Then I remembered that as a child she had enjoyed reenacting Napoleonic battles. I decided to follow her will.
Trust in the physical
, I admonished myself—the simple warmth of her body against mine would counteract my discomfort, I thought, if only she could stop lecturing.

She could not. It was like making love to an owl—great wings enfolding you, brilliant eyes spying out every thought—and the beak and talons to contend with. When I finally got her on her back, kissing her neck and her breasts and brushing my lips down the center of her, she sat up suddenly, and said, “No, no!”

“Philippa? What?” I laughed a little and traced my finger along her thigh.

“No,” she said, with finality. “This is your first time. That is
not
appropriate for the first time.”

But I wanted to transgress, to declare that I was on a mission and would go where I pleased, that nothing would stop me. There were things I needed to know about love, and I was going to discover them. I had to. “I want, I want…” I took her shoulders and pressed my hips into hers with clumsy fervency, as if I could break into her and steal what I needed.

“Now there's something,” she said, “
that
is quite enjoyable.”

Afterward, as I tried to slip into a dreamy postcoital satisfaction, she plucked a tissue from the bedside and blotted her lips as if she'd just enjoyed a rare delicacy. I couldn't keep from laughing: such a gesture is unusual in a bird of prey.

She sat bolt upright.

“This is what those bunnies are like!” she exclaimed, pulling the sheet up to her shoulders, which left me completely uncovered so she could look me up and down.

“What bunnies?” Having just compared her to an owl, I felt strange being thought of as a bunny. I tried to sit up too but she pushed me back down.

“Playboy bunnies! You know! Like, ‘Here she is, watering her plants!' and they'd have you bent over.” She giggled lasciviously. “‘She loves the warmth of the sun on her bare skin and goes through her yoga positions every morning to be sure of full exposure to the healthful rays.”

She ran a hand over me, starting with the arch of my foot and going up over the whole moonlit landscape, fitting her palm to every curve, in wonder, as I looked on in even greater wonder. I thought she must be mad, but it was a madness I didn't mind submitting to. I'd never had any real idea what I looked like, in spite of the hours I spent at the mirror. Maybe I was ugly, or
maybe
 … I stretched and reflected on my own beauty until, as she dusted down the side of my breast to my arm, she found a sticking point.

“Beatrice,” she said, and I recognized the irascible humor she showed to a tardy or unprepared student. “Beatrice, there is
hair
under your arm. Why?”

Because we lived in a world that considered shaving one's underarm as the first misstep on that slippery slope that would eventually land one in the suburbs, barbecuing enormous steaks for some enormous husband, waxing floors, shaking martinis, and probably in the end even voting Republican. So this question came as a shock.

“Philippa!” I said, sitting up again.

“Lie down,” she replied. “
Lie down
. A woman is supposed to be
smooth
, Beatrice. Sweetriver lacks depth in the art history department, so it's unfair to expect you to know this, but from the earliest days of classical antiquity, the smoothness of women has been one of the keys of our civilization.”

So there, in the same moment that she was examining me with all the greed of a thief with a stolen jewel, she spied a flaw! So began the book of her disappointment in me, which, like everything of hers, was long and complex and comprised of thousands of details.

Well, I wanted nothing more than to be made over. I
knew
the ways I'd learned at home were wrong, that I'd have to shed them if I wanted to escape. And here she was, my teacher, and my lover, a woman who stood above the world, looking over it, into it, seeing it whole, instead of cowering in the crevices, weeping and raging by turns.

She was my inspiration, provenance, and terror. And I remembered how shy she'd seemed, knocking at my door. She
was
absurd, talking and talking, her mad firefly intelligence lightning now against this leaf, now there, and there, until the pattern of illumination, more vivid than the firmament it played against, was all that seemed to matter.

Of course. I was a lesbian, why hadn't I seen it before? The strangeness, the separation from the world, the bottomless yearnings—it all made sense now, as did the fact that I'd spent four years crammed into a dormitory phone booth, ruminating with Philippa. I'd be safe with her; she would school me until I was truly able to please her. Ross wouldn't be able to hold me in his arms and slash at my heart with his qualms anymore.

And I could leave Sid without seeming to do wrong. I made the devastating announcement the next morning. I have, I said, discovered my true way. Not the cruel, “I've fallen in love with another man,” but “I've fallen in love with another species.” It was a fact of nature: the climate had simply changed.

*   *   *

COMEDY, AS
Philippa had explained in that freshman English seminar so many eons ago, is what happens when the body tries to follow the mind. Her mind was on the move between Aristotle's Athens, Paris in the twenties, and the Hollywood of Yvette Mimieux. Her body was stuck in the seventies in bed with mine. This ought to have been perfect: I was twenty-one, I had that fleshly springiness one wants in women and muffins, and I was her own creature, fed solely on her wisdoms these four years, bathed in the light of her favorite films, shaved by her own chosen razor, offering her exactly the type of kiss officially sanctioned by herself.

So, what was it that grated, that didn't quite fit? Twelve nights after our first, she came in through the doorway and some anxiety overtook her. “I don't think I'd better stay,” she said. “It's that parking lot—someone's going to scratch the car.”

“You park there every night,” I said. My thesis, lurid or not, had gotten an A from the committee, and I had a bottle of champagne on my dresser. I was wearing a silk nightgown I'd gotten at the thrift shop that morning—someone's bridal nightgown, faded like old rose petals, with a dove embroidered on it, and fluttering from the dove's beak, a banner that read
GRACE
. Champagne, silk, petals, doves, grace—there was a lot of longing, magnetic longing, in that room, especially as it was only a small dormitory single. Philippa kept a vigilant hand on the doorknob so as not to be drawn farther in.

“Where are you going next week, by the way?” she asked suddenly.

Next week? But of course, I was graduating. Sid and I had planned to go back to Chicago together, but obviously that was off.

“Maybe I'll stay in town for a while,” I said. “We…”

“
We
, like you and me?” she said. “Together?” She looked mortally puzzled. “But, what would you do here? Surely you're off to the city, or … wherever … aren't you?” Then, suspiciously: “Beatrice, have you been boasting about me? Have you told other people we might be staying together?”

“No!” I said. “I mean, I hadn't even spoken to
you
about it.”

“If this were me I'd have been boasting and had to cover my tracks.”

“Well, as it's
me
,” I sniffed—

“You want to live with me?” She was beaming all her hummingbird's concentration now on the strange idea that I might love her, as if it were the drop of nectar in a lily's throat.

“I think that is most unlikely,” she said, with incontrovertible authority, so that I had to reconsider. Who
would
want to live with Philippa? She was a dictator in bed, barking orders just when I felt most tender, so that by now I felt tender at the very sound of her barking an order, which was, yes, unlikely, but didn't it prove
my
point? I adored her! And she—just that morning she'd turned up outside my economics class, saying that as she had nothing to do except comment on these last fifty essays, she'd looked up my schedule so she could walk me to lunch. Then, as we stepped over a drainage ditch, she stopped still, peered in, and accidentally delivered a lecture on the Roman aqueducts. How would such a thing happen, if not from love?

But she knew so much, about aqueducts and everything—she must know what we ought to do. She stood there cocking her head to the left and to the right, as if the idea that we might stay together was such a revolutionary upending of the laws of physics that she felt a pedagogical responsibility to follow out the whole equation, lest she overlook the sort of astounding new theory that would escape a more conventional mind.

Then she nodded, quickly and definitely—yes, I was absolutely wrong.

“I really have to go,” she said. “These dorm parking lots are like bumper car rinks. Students are terrible drivers!”

So ardent, so vigorous, full of belief, full of longing—we made terrible drivers, but as lovers, well, that was another thing.

“Philippa, are you saying that you're leaving me because you're afraid your car will get scratched in the parking lot?”

She thought for a moment. “Well … yes.”

I started to cry. I thought this was what one did under the circumstances. “But Philippa, I love you!” I said.

She smiled involuntarily, a sudden flash which was instantly put out. Maybe she was touched, or maybe mocking, but whatever, those words had sealed my fate, because she picked up her teaching manner where she had thrown it twelve days ago, and proceeded to demolish my quaint little notion as quickly as if I'd tried some deconstructionist foolery in class.

“We've had an affair, Beatrice,” she said. “It was very nice. But there's no real match here. It's in the pheromones, you know that. The nose knows.”

She paused appropriately but I refused to laugh. “Pheromones!” she said, throwing up her hands, “What can we do about them? Nothing! We'll still be friends of course!”

“Of course,” I said, taking a deep breath. I knew that what came naturally to me was invariably wrong. After all, I'd learned it all from my parents. Philippa was a woman of the world, so if she thought crying was inappropriate the tears would have to go.

“Okay, okay, 'bye!” she said, seeing headlights come down the drive and fearing her bright little convertible was about to suffer an insult. “We'll talk!”

“Okay, 'bye,” I said. I felt dazed, as if a hummingbird had flown in one of my ears and out the other. I couldn't feel sad, though—Philippa had said not to, and she was my North Star. I sat still on the bed for a long time, until I realized I was waiting for her to come back. Then I got the champagne out of the sink, popped the cork, and drank some out of bottle, congratulating myself, though my A seemed meaningless suddenly. I'd only wanted it for her.

Nine

A
ND THEN,
there it was, commencement. I'd arrived at the end of the journey I'd set out on that day fifteen years ago, when I'd hidden in my mother's skirt to peer out at the real children learning real things. Now, waking up to hear the tents go up, gears groaning to lift the poles and then the snap of canvas over commons lawn, I lay in bed breathing the June air as if it were a perfect drug, light and cool and scented faintly of mock orange. My education—my suffering—was over, my life was about to begin.