The Bride of Catastrophe (7 page)

I did not think of this as a sexual passion—more religious. Education
was
equivalent to seduction for me; Philippa had, as usual, been right. As soon as I fell in love with the teacher, the book of the subject would fly open and I'd begin to understand. After all, it was the thing this teacher most loved, and you are what you love. My boyfriend would have read Faulkner aloud to me every night if he'd understood this, but for some reason he saw sex as a physical thing. I was reading modern novels in the hope of learning to fit in with him, with my times. I had no better grasp of
Goodbye, Columbus
than
Madame Bovary
, but I could
feel
it, and it felt
so
good. The New Jersey heat, the blazing blue suburban swimming pools, the cherries spilling out of the refrigerator … it was all about longing, just like everything else.

I'd just gotten to the place where Brenda says: “Make love to me on this cruddy, cruddy sofa…” when my mother came into my room with
Time
magazine rolled up in her hand and said, “If you want to have sex, go to the doctor and get something, but I don't want to hear anything more about it, do you understand?”

I did not. I was the age she'd been when she met my father; I hardly understood anything at all. But I nodded vigorously and called the gynecologist first thing in the morning, just as, if she'd offered me a plane ticket, I'd have called TWA. It seemed that the great true danger facing me was my longing for safety and comfort, for the peculiar stillness of home. If I gave in to it, I'd be lost, like my parents. I had to meet the world and let it change me, no matter how much it might hurt.

“I want to have sex,” I explained to the doctor. He was slightly hard of hearing. His eyes widened and he asked me to repeat myself. I looked past him to the huge needlepoint picture hanging on the wall: a storm at sea. He was working on a new one, of a night-blooming garden. It was folded on his desk.

I felt embarrassed, but considered this was because of my age and tried to speak up like an adult.
“I want to have sex,”
I proclaimed, loudly enough now I remembered how my mother had wanted to keep it all for herself.

He looked weary, as if there were no end to the demands people made on a country doctor.

“Actually, my boyfriend wants to,” I admitted.

Relieved, he peered inside me, wrote a prescription, and said in a courtly manner: “Your boyfriend is in luck.”

Hello, love! I liked sex, it made me feel grown up. I knew, from the movies, that the condition of true adulthood was cold desolation (being accustomed to molten desolation, I mistook the icy sort for maturity and poise), and my boyfriend knew an abandoned house with an unlocked window. I'd stand (gingerly; it was easy to put a foot through the floor) beside the torn curtain in the streetlight, to see how I moved him, before we sank into the old striped mattress together. We were both in love with my body, its happy buoyancy and smoothness, the way you could probe into it for secrets—but I loved it more than he did. Anatomy is destiny; I couldn't wait to see where mine would take me.

The silence of sex unnerved me, though, and I was always asking him what he was thinking, while he was sucking my nipple, or when he was just about to come.

“I'm
not
thinking,” he'd say, for the fiftieth time. I could not understand this. I'd be thinking of
Goodbye
,
Columbus
, their last embrace with the bulk of their winter coats between them, or of Levin in
Anna Karenina
, beating out the cadence of
will you marry me?
hoping Kitty would guess the words as they were too precious to be spoken aloud. There I lay, pondering, with a mildewed pillow under my ass to promote deeper penetration. Soon, he'd drive me home and go back to his own house, a neat colonial whose walls his mother had stenciled with grape and wisteria vines: a display of bourgeois enterprise that my mother viewed with absolute scorn.

Which just made me love him worse: I wanted to climb into his life, share his dinner—Hamburger Helper. I envied his mother's ironing board.

At our house, we'd forgotten we'd ever had furniture—we believed we didn't need any, because we lived in a world of pure feeling and spirit, not crowded with material goods. How cashiers must sneer as they rang up their sales—another poor fool with her hopes pinned on an ironing board.
We
ironed on a towel spread out on the floor, and tore up old clothing for menstrual rags. We were above
things
.

For Ma's thirty-fifth birthday, Pop bought her a gift, a big, store-wrapped gift such as we had rarely seen. She took it with a wondering smile, praising the paper and ribbon, exclaiming at its weight—it was one of those times when her rages abated and she seemed like a little girl. Opening it, she looked surprised at first—it was a cut crystal punch bowl—but she blinked back her skepticism and smiled up at him, too grateful, her eyes welling. She understood, he was trying to show her that he did love her, that he had all along. She was ready to take him back into her heart, to pour her hopes and griefs out to him finally, to do anything, anything at all for his love's sake … but that was how it always went: one drop started a flood with her, one spark and the world exploded.

Pop froze, as one endangered, and became warily casual. When she said, “Why this one? Why a punch bowl?” he shrugged and said the salesman had told him punch bowls were all the rage.

He must have been as stupid as she said. Or maybe he really was an emotional Nazi, because he could hardly have found a more effective way to remind her what heights he'd fallen from in marrying her.

“Yes, the Academy girls all drink their
punch
this way, don't they?” she said, “punch” coming out as an epithet somehow. “Tell me, how do they pop their pills? I wish to God you'd married an Academy girl, so you could have lived the empty life you were
destined
for, and left me alone!”

And out she went through the kitchen door, where, as we gathered at the window, she lifted the bowl over her head and dashed it on the stone path with all her considerable strength.

It almost seemed to bounce, and Sylvie and I looked at each other with horror, because we barely remembered which were our feelings and which hers … and we knew nothing infuriated her more than things that refused to shatter. On the third try it cracked down the middle and she gave up, looking at it with absolute disgust. Had he deprived her even of this, a full annihilation?

“Lead crystal is certainly durable,” he remarked, heading upstairs. As if he'd given up on her, on us. Who'd have blamed him? Or her?

*   *   *

“
BUT THEY
were stuck with each other less out of love than suspense,” I told Philippa. “They wanted to know what would happen.” It was sacrilege to talk about them this way, but Philippa made me bold, and every time she laughed, she reduced their power a little.

She was shaking her head—“God, these people who want to make sex nice and tidy,” she said. “As if it wasn't pure unconscious mayhem, just barely under control!”

“It's not sex,” I said.

She darted me an amused look and asked: “No?”

“No,” I persisted, without certainty. Philippa was always sure of things; she was standing on her father's solid brick foundation.

The 1972 election—Pop stuck with Nixon, Ma was a Democrat in a micromini. As it was ten miles to the polls, they agreed not to vote; they'd only cancel each other out. At a quarter to eight, when he went up the back path to shut the chickens in for the night, I saw the old Jeep fishtail out of the front driveway and peel out down the dirt road. Pop just sat at the kitchen table and laughed.… It was November, of course, but Ma's defiance felt like spring in the air. She was going to chop a hole in the wall around our family and let us out, blinking, into the light.

And then it was 1973 and I was standing, in my llama skin coat, at the edge of an abyss. Watergate was seeping out into view, and, Pop having meant to vote for Nixon, Ma was now able to trace a direct line from Hitler to the White House, and now she who had disdained the television realized it was our civic responsibility to learn from it every nuance of Republican depravity.

“Never forget,” she intoned. They decided, finally, to divorce, put the house up for sale, go forward in some new way. But at the first breezy phone call, announcing a prospective buyer, Ma's face went white, and the next thing I knew, she was backing down the hill with a handful of cracked corn, to lure the chickens into the house. She would keep her family sheltered and whole, until such time as she cared to destroy it.

My father showed me the doomsday clock on the cover of
Harper's
. Four minutes to nuclear destruction, did I understand? We live to no purpose. Even the dearest hope, realized, would be dust soon enough, so why bother? Have another! Live to enjoy! The ping-pong ball orders piled up but he wasn't in the mood to fill them. He was in the mood to plan a family trip to the Seychelles. He believed in existential hedonism, not existential despair.

“We'll be together, we'll really have gotten away from it all,” he said, leaning back in his low chair, pushing his dinner plate away. He didn't look at us; he wanted to imagine us rapt at his idea, though it seemed to me he was inviting us into his grave. He didn't see that we were growing up, we were going to go away and start our own lives. Or maybe he saw it quite clearly. “Curieuse, for instance, was a leper colony until the middle of the century,” he said. “Now the population is—well—it's mostly sea turtles. We'd have the place completely to ourselves, wouldn't have to see another soul except when we went into Mahé for provisions once a month.”

His fingers were laced behind his head, and he was smiling with perfect satisfaction and closed eyes. Sylvie and Dolly were pretending to wash their hair under a waterfall. My heart beat like it was about to be caged. Any day now I was going to be a woman, one of those utterly alluring creatures you saw in the movies, so soft and beautiful that love protected them everywhere they went. But he wanted to take me where there would be no one to love me, and if I said I didn't want to go, he'd count it as a betrayal, a new reason to despise me.

“And the world could do what it wanted,” he finished. “As long as we had a source of fresh water, we could live for months there, for years.”

I dreamed that night of a strange, ragged boy from school, a boy who, being an outcast, struck me somehow as kin. He just barely touched his mouth to mine, and at this shock I woke with the ancient cry in my throat and a great electrical tree branching along my nerves, and I understood finally about sexual desire, and what my boyfriend had been “thinking” all that time. A door sprang open, into a magical world, the world of dreams that had always been there, in those summer evenings thick with fireflies, in the cold swirl of the rain-swollen brook over the stones.… It had been there, but I'd known it only as a picture, not a dimension. One entered it (of course!) through touch.

The cats were on the roof outside the window, tearing apart a chicken carcass, and a june bug banged against the screen. I lay there expecting a dark angel to fly in and possess me. Instead, something—a mouse probably—dashed across my bed and down the hall. For the first time, I was sure I'd be leaving that house, and the minute I realized this, I was swept by a fierce wave of love for it. The neglect that let us grow wild there, the drama that whisked every thunderstorm into a tempest and had made an operatic cycle out of the rabbit question, the utter brokenhearted wrongness we lived in: against these things, every beauty blazed more vivid, and this seemed to me a blessing for which it was worth suffering the rest.

Four

“Y
ES, BILL
Canterbridge
is
my father, but that does
not
make me a modernist.”

It was our first day at Sweetriver. We were sitting in a circle in Dove House living room, introducing ourselves. Olney Canterbridge, having made the effort to speak, balled his white linen jacket into a pillow, rested his head against it, and closed his eyes. He was so widely experienced as to be bored already, on the first day of school.

I was in awe. Who could guess, who could believe that I was at college, and not just any college, but Sweetriver. “The
right
place for
my
Beatrice,” Ma had said, in her Voice of Great Importance, which was usually used for describing men other than my father. After all, look at the people who had taught at Sweetriver, when they were still alive. Here they were in the catalogue, the poets, painters, composers, dancers, whose ferocious originality had fueled a century of art—the Leninites and the Trotskyites, the beats, the bohemians—anyone who had raged against convention. The name Sweetriver had been synonymous with sex, whiskey, and irony, in an age when these were magnificently daring things. Just walking into a dorm room, you could feel the ghost of someone like Mary McCarthy sitting at the end of the bed, legs crossed, spitting an occasional nail.

God knows what she'd have spat if she'd seen the place when I got there. By the seventies, Sweetriver's ideals had been taken up by the very bourgeoisie they'd been developed to
épater
: you could grow marijuana in your windowbox at Wellesley; you could live in the gay dorm at Smith. Sweetriver went coed to avoid going under and still they had to accept almost everyone who applied. Which was good because, for some reason my mother could
not
figure out, I'd been rejected from Wellesley and Smith and all the other places whose names would have served Ma and wounded Pop (Not Yale, there I'd simply said to the interviewer: “I won't get in here, will I?” and had felt, as he mournfully shook his head, a rare happiness: the knowledge that I, unlike my parents, had some sense of reality).