The Women's Room (81 page)

Mira decided then that the situation between Duke and Clarissa was really serious. Clarissa stopped talking about Duke, though, after that. It was only through Iso, in whom Clarissa had begun confiding, that Mira and Grete learned that things were bad indeed. Iso did not go into detail, but apparently Clarissa had shown up several nights in July with a tear-swollen face and eyes. Clarissa did not mention these things when the women were together. Mira felt hurt: she felt the whole point of the group was to be a group, to provide a community for each other. She sensed that Clarissa’s withdrawal from the group, after Val’s and Kyla’s, would in time lead to its disintegration.

Clarissa’s withdrawal, however, had less to do with a reluctance to share her experiences with them all than with her feelings about Iso. She felt in close rapport with her friend; she felt utter trust in her, and utter comfort with her. It was easier when she was alone with Iso, easier and somehow better. Many nights she would storm out after an argument with Duke and walk the five blocks to Iso’s. Sometimes she would sleep there on Iso’s lumpy couch. Duke was bewildered, he did not understand what was happening to them. He kept trying to grab Clarissa back. The conviction had grown in his mind that it was those women who were somehow taking her away from him, and he sought for any way to discredit them, to snipe at them. His hate and fear of the group expanded to include what he called women’s lib; in time his remarks were directed just at women, period. Clarissa would flare up: ‘I’m a woman’; he would rage, ‘But you’re different!’ And Clarissa would storm out again. The harder he pulled, the harder
she pulled. Duke was frantic, but there was no one he could talk to. Twice he went out himself, late, and picked up prostitutes and went to their rooms. Both times, he was unable to perform sexually. What he really wanted was to talk. His sense of potency was undermined, and one night he tried to force himself on Clarissa. She fought him off; he slapped her; she socked him in the jaw, hard, and he sat there a little stunned, wondering how this could be happening, happening to them, who loved each other; she gazed coldly at him and turned away and walked out. She closed the door softly, instead of slamming it as she usually did after an argument. Duke sat there, rubbing his jaw, blinking at the door, sensing that something final had happened.

Clarissa’s evenings with Iso had grown more and more intimate. They would kiss hello; they would frequently put an arm about each other. When Clarissa was especially tense, Iso would rub her back. Clarissa let herself relax into her friend, and ramble on, giving up the need she had always had to remain in control and to make logical sense out of things. She felt she did not have to worry about boring Iso, and she rambled about the trivialities that express the dissolution of a marriage. When she was especially upset, Iso would make her a drink, and stroke her head as she spoke, sitting on a chair beside the couch where Clarissa lay.

Clarissa did not know what was happening to Duke and her, or why. She tried to get past the surface irritations to the real issue, but every time she thought she saw it, she would draw back in horror, sure that couldn’t be it. It couldn’t be, not with Duke and her, it couldn’t be the same trite fucking shit everybody else talked about. Surely they were better than that, larger, smarter. But over and over again, in these terrific arguments about dishes and cooking and her work – ‘He says reading all day is not work. It was when he was finishing up at the Point, of course’ – the same pattern emerged. ‘He’s trying to make a housewife out of me!’ she gasped to Iso. ‘Why? Why? I thought one of the things he loved about me was my mind, my independence, my personality. Why is he trying to turn me into the thing he claims, always claimed, bores him? Why?’

It did not make sense. It was beyond answer.

Clarissa sat up. She sipped her drink soberly. ‘Something just came into my head. Val – I remember disliking her that night – talking about how the institutions get you in the end. No matter how you struggle.’

Iso nodded. ‘I was angry with her for that too, not because what she said isn’t true, but because she was being insensitive to you and Kyla and Mira. I mean there are times you shouldn’t tell the truth.’

Clarissa looked at her and they both laughed. ‘Not even to your best friend?’ Clarissa glinted.

‘If you tell the truth all the time, you won’t have any best friends.’

There was a silence. ‘Do you tell me the truth?’

Iso paused. ‘Yes. As far as I can claim to know it.’

Clarissa looked deep into Iso’s face. ‘I tell you the truth.’

‘I know,’ Iso smiled tenderly at her, stroking her face.

‘I had a horrible dream last night. Horrible.’

‘Tell.’

‘Duke and I are sitting in our living room when Kevin Callahan knocks and enters. Kevin is a real person. In the dream he’s a young man about three years older than I am, but in real life I haven’t seen him since I was a kid, maybe eight or nine. Last time I was home, my mother told me that he and his wife had adopted a child. I didn’t ask her about it but I think I just assumed at the time that the reason they adopted a child was that Kevin was impotent. I don’t know why I thought that. Maybe because when he was a kid, Kevin was very feminine. Anyway, Kevin notices that the house is a mess and tells Duke he should demand that I do a better job as a housewife. I get furious, I tell Kevin to go to hell, and I stomp off to the bedroom thinking that only an impotent male would insist on rigid sex roles.

‘But once I’m in the bedroom, I begin to feel sorry about my outburst. I ask Duke to explain to Kevin that I have taken a pill which is altering my behavior. I have taken this pill because Duke and I are to be married in forty-eight hours. This pill will eventually put me in a comatose state almost identical to death. When the pill has its full effect, I will be shipped to some distant place where the wedding ceremony will take place.

‘The time for shipping arrives. Drugged, I am placed in a boxcar where I lie down on a laser beam. I’m in a deathlike trance. Eventually – I don’t know if I’ve forgotten anything there – we arrive at the place for the wedding. A friend of my parents, who happens in real life to be an undertaker, takes over the arrangements for the ceremony. He is modeling a manikin/corpse of me, paying much attention to small details – the texture of my skin, the different colors of my hair. The doll he creates can walk, blink her eyelashes, and do whatever is demanded of a bride in a wedding. Somehow, it is decided that the bride/corpse/manikin will go through the ceremony instead of me. The audience will think it is me, and I will be able to escape the ceremony. The undertaker is also making an intricately carved bed/coffin which
is to be placed on the altar. At the end of the ceremony, the couple will lie down on the bed/coffin as the audience watches.

‘The whole thing happens – the wedding, the lying down. But meantime, Duke and I run off to New York together. We aren’t even missed.’

‘“It can sew, it can cook, it can talk, talk, talk,”’ Iso quoted. ‘But you do escape, you and Duke.’

‘I feel as if I’ve been sleepwalking through my life. As if I’m Sleeping Beauty and still haven’t wakened up.’

Iso gazed at Clarissa’s round, child’s face, still sweet despite new darkenings, the beginnings of lines. ‘Well, it was such a nice dream there in the rose arbor. Mummy and Daddy loved their little princess, and she never needed to need anything because before she could even ask, the good fairy whisked it in with her magic wand. And school was the same way. And Duke. And look at you, a bright, handsome young couple, well-connected, sure to have marvelous children, a marvelous future. An apartment full of gorgeous prints, rugs, vases, all picked up for peanuts on the Vietnamese black market –’

‘Iso!’

‘Related to a former muckamuck and another former muckamuck, families with places in Rhinebeck and Newport, apartments in the Dakota –’

‘Iso!’

‘You wanted me to tell you the truth. You thought you could get away from your values by burying yourself in Roxbury, but you always knew you’d come back and that you could come back.’

Clarissa jumped up and flung herself out of Iso’s apartment. She didn’t even close the door. She ran all the way down the stairs.

Iso sat there until Clarissa’s footsteps had vanished. She didn’t even get up and close the door. She felt pounded on, abused, used. She finished her cigar, then slowly, like an old person, walked to the door and shut it and locked it, all three bolts. For over a year now, she had been feeling good about herself, had felt she could be herself. And herself felt like a pair of open arms. And all that had happened was that people had treated her house like a restaurant, had drunk her drinks and eaten her food and basked in her kindness and sometimes, her love, and then, when they were healed, restored to self-respect, they had left. There were always more where they came from, of course. There would always be more, as long as she left her heart and door open, kept her refrigerator full.

She remembered a day she had spent with Kyla, a day they had planned, saved up for emotionally. Kyla had the car and they drove out to Concord, parked, got out and walked. They walked far beyond the public places, invading fenced meadows and fields. Kyla was nervous and jerky, she was biting her lip again, she tripped over branches. Finally, she ducked through a wire fence and got her hair caught. Iso ran to her and tried to unsnag her, and Kyla began to shriek, scream, curse at her.

‘Leave me alone, fuck it! Leave me alone! I can do it myself!’

Iso dropped her hair and retreated a few feet and sat down in the grass with her back to Kyla. There were tears in her eyes. Kyla got free in time, she marched up to Iso, faced her, and when she saw her, plopped down opposite her and sobbed. Her face broke out in blotches. ‘I don’t need you! I don’t want to need you!’

Iso’s eyes dried. She looked at Kyla sadly. She knew that Kyla was crying because she was being cruel to her, Iso, and because she didn’t want to be cruel and she couldn’t help it. It was her own round robin, a circle of emotions only tangentially related to Iso. It was Kyla’s trip.

‘But what about me?’ she asked quietly after a while. ‘I am a person who has learned to demand nothing. Don’t I count at all?’

‘You! You! What about you! It’s all pure pleasure with you, it’s love, I owe you nothing!’

She leaned back and lighted another cigar, and watched the smoke circle around her. She felt utterly empty. She had poured herself out for them and they had drunk her. They would go on drinking her up as long as she poured herself out. But if she stopped, who would come to her, why would they come? She, with her strangeness. Men came because they wanted to screw her; women, because she offered them love. It never occurred to anyone that she wanted something too. But then she had not acted as if she wanted something too.

She stood up and began to pace, walking around the shabby room that had held so much dramatic life, straightening pictures, books, emptying ashtrays that had lain there for a week.

She felt completely isolated. She was a loving mother whose children had all grown up healthy and left. She thought: I am just as alone as if they had never existed, as if I had never poured them glasses of love and sympathy, spent myself on them. She sat down, her back erect, her head at attention. This was the nature of things. She was the woman for everyone; she played the woman to women’s men. And suffered the way women suffered from men. Illegitimate of illegitimates, servant of
servants. It was good; it was better than it had been; but it was not good enough. She would have to find a little man in her, whatever that meant. It did not mean being a champion sailor, or canoeing in white water, or being able to fence, all of which she did very well. It meant insisting on self, not the way they did, God forbid, but a little. Otherwise you were the tramping ground of the world. A little. But how did one do that?

She sat up late, thinking about it. She would have liked to talk to Val; and dialed her number several times, but there was no answer. Val had the secret, she really had things knocked. Tomorrow.

She went to bed with her mouth firmly set. But she could not decide anything about how to live. All she had decided was to close her door. From now on, she was going to spend more time with her work. She loved it, it was always a wrench for her to stop, but a wrench she had not minded for their sakes, her friends. No more. Let them knock.

But it was only a few nights later that Clarissa knocked, late, around ten, and without thinking, Iso went to open the door, glancing back at the last sentence she had written.

She stood at the door looking coolly at her friend. Clarissa stood there with intense eyes. ‘I came to apologize,’ she said. Iso opened the door. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said fervently. ‘You’ve been true to me and a friend to me and I – it was just that I couldn’t stand it, it was too painful, and I blamed you, I know that’s ridiculous …’

Iso tried not to smile, but she was delighted, and ended by returning Clarissa’s embrace.

‘Oh, well, I was tired anyway. It’s about time to quit. How about a drink?’

Clarissa handed her a paper bag. ‘I stopped and bought us some Scotch.’

They settled themselves in the living room with their drinks. The old rapport was there, the old comfort, but something subtle had changed. Iso was less affectionate, less demonstrative. She seemed to keep back part of herself.

‘I came back to ask you if I can sleep here. I’m not going back to Duke. I’d be glad to pay the expenses if you’ll let me stay here until I find a new apartment.’

‘Sure.’ She almost said, ‘You don’t have to pay anything,’ but stopped herself.

‘What I don’t understand, what I can’t forgive myself for, is having been blind for so long.’

Iso smiled. ‘Shall I call Mira? She has you beat by some ten or so years. You can sing the lament chorus.’

‘But it undermines your confidence in your own intellect, your own perceptions.’

‘And we all go through it.’

Clarissa leaned forward grinning. ‘Shit!’ she said and reached for Iso’s hand. ‘Can I sleep with you tonight?’