The Women's Room (7 page)

Increasingly, people regarded her strangely and made odd remarks. It was, however, not her mind or her manners that they criticized; it was her morals. She was loose, but a bitch, whatever that meant. It was clear that people believed she was sleeping not only with Lanny but with others as well. She applied for a job in the college bookstore and was told by the manager, a thin-necked, pimply-faced man in his twenties, that he not only wouldn’t hire her, but he felt sorry for the man she married. She was astonished by this, since she had never met him before, but he shook his head knowingly at her: He had heard plenty about her, he said. She was a castrater, domineering. Some people told her that others thought she was a snob. One day a young man from her history class came up to her on campus, smoking a pipe. He seemed to want to talk, and she was glad. She liked him – he seemed a gentle, intelligent fellow. He asked her a few questions: were her parents divorced? had she ever been taught Christian doctrine? As she grew wary and gazed at him intently, he pointed to her cigarette and told her that she should know she was not supposed to be smoking while walking across campus. It was forbidden to women, he said.

The presumption of these males in telling her what she was supposed to be enraged her, but beneath the anger and contempt was a profound sense of discomfort, wrongness in the world. She felt that people were in league against her, trying to force her to give up what she had gone on calling ‘myself.’ However, she had some good friends – Lanny, Biff, Tommy, Dan – who were unfailingly kind and respectful, and with whom she felt easy and had fun. She did not care at all what people said behind her back, and although she wished they would
not say such things to her face, she dismissed the people and their comments as stupid and insignificant.

Nor did she worry about what people might be saying about her to Lanny. She was sure he knew she loved him, and also that she mistrusted him; she was sure he knew that if she would not sleep with him, she would not sleep with anyone. But their friendship soured. They had several bad fights. When they did not openly fight, they pulled against each other, as if they tugged at different ends of a one-foot rope, neither moving far in any direction. He called her rarely now; he told her that because of her he had been forced to resort to dating Ada, the campus prostitute. For the first time in her life, Mira felt jealous.

Still, she could not give in. She didn’t want to be in a power struggle with him, but each of his actions convinced her of the rightness of her original judgment of him as untrustworthy. She was too frightened of sex to risk it without a sense that he was, and would be, there for her. Now, when they were together, he talked only about how much fun he had with his male friends; and pressured her toward sex. He seemed to have no other interest in her; when she spoke he barely listened. He never asked her about herself. Eventually, he stopped calling altogether.

She was miserable. She curled in on herself. She felt she had to withdraw, feeling defeated, feeling that it was, after all, the world that she wanted and the world that she was repudiating. But she had no choice. She tried to tell herself that the life she wanted would someday be possible, that someday she would have it all, adventure and excitement and independence. But she also knew that such a life had, for her, to include sex, and there was no way she could reconcile that danger and those aspirations. She saw her choice clearly as being between sex and independence, and she was paralysed by that. Since she always risked pregnancy, which meant dependence, a sexual woman lived with Damocles’ sword always over her head. Sex meant surrender to the male. If Mira wanted the independent life, she would have to give up being sexual. The situation was a terrible incarnation of her masochistic fantasies. Women were indeed victims by nature.

11

Young men like to say that young women want to be raped; no doubt this statement is intended partly to alleviate their guilt about the kinds of pressure they place on women, but there is a germ of truth in it. Young women caught in psychological bonds like Mira’s probably, at moments, half welcome a violent solution to the dilemma. But the kind of rape they imagine is like the one in
The Fountainhead:
it springs from passion and love, and it has no consequences more serious than the consequences for Justine’s body of all her whippings and torture. No broken bones, scars, destroyed tissue. Act without consequence, arrows with rubber tips, comedy: like the cartoons they make for children in which the cat or bear or whatever gets smashed over and over, but always rises from its own ashes. Revocability is an ideal, it frees us from the grimness of puritanical insistence on the seriousness of all things.

Sex, being what it is, is pretty drab for young people. Val used to say it was wasted on the young. She said they combined the utmost in desire with the utmost in ineptitude. I told her she’d been reading too much Shaw. She didn’t even smile. Earnestly, she went on, amending her statement: the males had the utmost in desire. Females, she said, whether it was from fear or physiology, wouldn’t reach the utmost in desire until their thirties. It was nature, she thought, that had made humans strangely; it had intended young men to rape and impregnate young women and then go their way, as the gods did in Greek myth. The young women were supposed to have the babies and bring them up alone. Then, in their thirties, the young women became sexually charged – if they hadn’t died along the way – at which point they become terrifying to the male of the species. The men sniff the female’s revenge, and identify such women with forbidden mothers, or scorpions, witches, and sibyls. By this time, most of the older males were dead from their adventures or dissipations, so the older women tried to seduce young men, although without the violence young men used on women. She said the ideal marriage was between exhausted middle-aged men and young women, or between middle-aged women and young men. The young woman would get pregnant by a young man, and then the older man would take over and take care of her without giving her too hard a time with sexual demands, and when he
did make love, would have some idea of what he was about, and would give her at least some pleasure. Then, when she was older and the old geezer had kicked the bucket, she’d send her kids out into the world and take in some struggling young guy who could satisfy her sexually, after she’d taught him all of what she’d learned from her years with the old geezer.

Val amused us with many such evening entertainments, but I thought it made sense, at least as much sense as the way things are presently ordered. I said the major problem was for the young women to bring up the children. It was different when everyone lived on the land, and a woman could grow her crops and kids at the same time. She said if a society wanted children, it would have to pay for them the same as it paid for guns and bombers. She said that if it paid for them, it might value them a little more and spoil them a little less.

At any rate, it does seem true that a young woman may sometimes behave in a way that can be called titillating, and that men take such behavior as being directed entirely at them. Now there’s no doubt that most of us are a little finer, a little more attractive and electric when there’s someone in the room who appeals to us sexually. I’ve often seen blushing young men with shining eyes behave in the same way, but no one says of them that they want to be raped. If, after taking a few steps forward, they then decide to retreat, no one accuses them of being cunt teasers. In fact, the disappointed woman probably thinks it’s all her fault. The mating game is as complicated as the dances derived from it – that terrible, wonderful, macho flamenco, for instance. Maybe it was easier back in the old days when it was performed with bodyguards called chaperons: the girls could be as free and gay and thoughtless as the boys without having to worry about consequences. Now we have the pill, but that doesn’t work quite the same way. It might have helped poor Mira though. There was just no rational way out of her dilemma; all the alternatives rot. Like being in a burning building, the fire beyond you, two windows in front of you, one looking down on a tiny bunch of firemen holding a canvas that looks no bigger than your thumb, the other looking down on the filthy Hudson River. When you are in situations like that, the only thing you can do is close your eyes and plunge. No amount of ratiocination can help you decide whether the fire is only a corridor deep and you could reach the staircase beyond, whether your chances are better with the water or the net.

12

One evening, after a long silence, Lanny called and asked Mira to go out. Her heart fluttered a little, like a bird long grounded, whose broken wing has healed, and who is tentatively trying it out. Perhaps he would be willing to try it her way – to be friends, to stay close and loving until someday she would be ready to risk. And she knew, as soon as she opened the door to him, that she, or at least her body, loved the gangling awkward figure with the pale disconnected eyes and the smooth long hands. But he was stiff and polite; in the car, he barely spoke.

‘You seem angry?’ she ventured.

‘Why should I be angry?’ But there was a sarcastic twang in his voice. It silenced her.

After a long pause, she asked coolly: ‘Why did you call me, then?’

He did not answer. She glanced at him. His mouth was working.

‘Why?’ she pursued.

‘I don’t know,’ he said in a dull voice.

Her mind was in tumult. He had called her, it seemed, against his will. What could that be but love, something beyond simple desire? She wanted to go someplace quiet, where they could talk, but he drove to Kelley’s, a college hangout near the campus where they had often gone. It was a saloon: knotty pine paneling and college pennants, a long bar in front, a few tables and a jukebox in back: red-checkered tablecloths, blaring music, and the smell of beer. As usual on Saturday nights, the place was mobbed; they were standing four deep at the bar. She did not like standing at bars, and Lanny took her to the rear, and unusually polite, helped her with her coat. She sat down; he went to the bar to get their drinks. There was a bartender who waited table, but with such a crowd, they would have to wait long for him. Lanny disappeared into the mob at the bar. Mira lighted a cigarette. She sat. She smoked another cigarette. Men paused and gave her the once-over on their way to the toilet. She was humiliated and anxious. He had met some friends, no doubt. She glanced at the crowd, but she could not spot him. She smoked another cigarette.

She was tamping it out when Biff and Tommy came in through the back door and saw her. They came to the table, asked where Lanny was, stood around talking. Tommy went up to the bar and came back
in a few minutes with a pitcher of beer, and he and Biff sat down with her. She talked with them, but she was stiff and the corners of her mouth were trembling. After the pitcher was nearly empty, Lanny suddenly appeared, carrying one glass – her Canadian Club. He stared coldly at his friends, then at her, plunked the glass down in front of her, and stalked stiffly back to the bar. Biff and Tommy looked at each other and at her: all three shrugged questioningly. They went on talking.

Mira’s innards were quivering. She was angry with Lanny, but much more she was confused, uneasy, and even frightened. Why had he called her in the first place? Had he intended to take her out and ignore her all night? She remembered, miserably, many nights when he had done that, but there had always been a group of friends with them. She felt, above all, humiliated, and that gave her strength. The hell with him. She would act as if she didn’t care. She would act as if she were having fun. She would have fun. She grew very animated, and her friends responded with high spirits.

Other people joined them. Biff got another pitcher of beer, and brought her a Canadian. She was touched. Biff was so poor. She smiled at him and he glowed at her. Biff always treated her as if she were fragile and innocent; he hovered, protecting her, but never tried to make a claim on her. His haggard cheeks, his tattered jacket cuffs hurt her. She wanted to give him something. She knew he would never approach her sexually. Because of his limp, probably: he was in college by virtue of a scholarship given to poor children with disabilities. Biff had had polio. So, bright as he was, attractive as he could have been if he’d had enough to eat, he never made the first move with women. And because she felt safe with him, she could afford to love him. She smiled her love at him and he smiled love back. Tommy was gleaming at her too, and Dan. They were all singing together now, over a third or fourth pitcher, she had lost count, being on her third Canadian.

She no longer had to act: she
was
having fun. She was having more fun than she did when Lanny was around. He always made her feel as if she didn’t belong, as if she should not be joining in, but should be sitting in a chair against the dining room wall, faintly smiling, watching the men around the table eat and drink. It was sex, she thought, that caused the problem. With these friends, that didn’t come up, so they could be just friends, could have fun together. They were her comrades, her brothers, she loved them all. They had crisscrossed arms and were holding hands around the table, singing ‘The Whiffenpoof Song.’

Lanny did not return. People were playing the jukebox, and Tommy
asked her to dance. She agreed: they were playing an old Glenn Miller record that she liked. They kept playing. They put on ‘Sentimental Journey,’ ‘String of Pearls,’ and ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside.’ She kept dancing. They kept buying pitchers of beer, and a fourth Canadian sat melting and sweating on the table. Other people arrived, people she didn’t know well but who were in her class and knew her name. They were playing Stan Kenton now; the music, like her head, seemed louder, wilder. She noticed while she was dancing that there was no other girl in the back, that she was the only one dancing, that the guys were standing around almost as if they were lined up, waiting. But it seemed all right, because, she reasoned, there was only one guy dancing at a time, too.