“Don’t do anything, then. Be a bum. I’d like you as a bum.”
He turns on me, his face blanched. “I can give my bobishe what she wants, don’t you see? She doesn’t want me. She just wants a doctor, any doctor. Okay. My mother too.”
“All this feeling guilty. I swear if I complain about the weather, you apologize. What use is it? You aren’t that important, my love. It snows whether you want it to or not. We are in this, all three of us, because we want each other. You aren’t getting away with anything. If we don’t want you, we are each free to depart by the many available exits.”
“I ought to choose. I know it. This isn’t any good.”
“I don’t think it’s so bad,” I say truthfully. “Half of you is worth two Peters and then some. But if you want to choose, choose, it’s your right. Even if you choose her, I affirm your right to want and each of our rights to want.” I bang my fist on the mattress. Not satisfactory. “Want! Demand! Choose! Choose everybody. But don’t sit there between us probing old guilt like a bad tooth.”
“Is that what you want, what you really want?” He takes hold of my shoulders in a bruising grip.
“I want you to do what you want. Because I sure do what I want.”
He stares a moment longer, then lets go, falling back again with his hands behind his neck. “For a person who hates to cause pain, I’m always getting into corners where the only way out is stepping on somebody’s head.”
The first daffodils of florist’s spring are artfully arranged in a cobalt vase on Alberta’s seldom-used television, which is on to the Channel 11 news. Alberta and I eat the chicken cacciatore I cooked in her kitchen in which I know better than she does where the garlic press and the clam knife are stored.
She grumbles, “Do we have to watch this?”
“Yes. We’re waiting…. Look, ay ay ay, it’s her!”
Alberta squints. “Don’t be absurd.”
“Yes. That’s Donna in the tutu.”
“It isn’t really a tutu.”
“Whether skies are blue or grey, we’re bringing you the weather today,” Donna murmurs in a breathy treble. “Tomorrow, folks, we can look forward to a nice sunny day, a little foretaste of spring and pleasant things to come. The high is expected to be in the mid-forties, with temperatures dropping into the low thirties in the nighttime. We can expect breezes of ten to fifteen miles an hour from the southeast. There’ll be a few wispy clouds but mostly the old sun will shine on us all day.” Her manner suggests this information is sexually exciting. She wears a low-cut blouse in which somehow they have produced excellent cleavage. Her skirt is not exactly a tutu but it is not exactly anything else. She wears stiletto heels and a lot of dark eye makeup. Her eyes look enormous.
I shut off the set. “Well, it’s better than sitting in a box in East Setauket,” I say. “Isn’t it?”
“I suppose so…. If she can move over into covering news …”
Alberta and I chew glumly on. Alberta is offended by the vulgarity of the costume and the performance, I by what I have to see as a total waste of Donna’s intelligence.
We are walking down a street in midtown, Donna and I, fresh from window-shopping and a pushcart lunch when I see us framed in a mirrored window. Donna is dressed like the mannequins: pencil skirt, wasp waist, gloves, matching hat, belt and purse, a matronly armored style hard as the carapace of a beetle, but too lacquered to bear wind or water while it proclaims that the woman within is immutable as marble. Beside her I look childish, wearing my student uniform of plaid skirt, sweater and loafers with dancer’s black tights. To be an adult woman means to be in pain, for that clothing hurts. When I see the Fifth Avenue bus and start to run for it, I have to stop, remembering Donna cannot run.
Donna’s clothing is part of being married and part of going to work at a television station, even though when she goes before the camera she puts on her absurd outfit. When I go to work in offices, I have to pin my hair up into a bun, for loose long hair seems immoral to people. Only Brigitte Bardot looks like that, rumpled, hair wild. I go in my student clothes or a wool flannel princess jumper out of a thrift shop. At home I have only to let my hair tumble down and I am no longer respectable. If we dip into Bonwit’s or Henri Bendel’s because Donna must have a new pair of gloves to reach halfway up her arms, the salesladies ask her at once what she wants. They never voluntarily speak to me. They look at me and glance away. The clothing they share speaks an extreme fear of the body, of flesh, of mortality, of desire. To be “well-groomed” is virtue itself. The clothing says a woman has nothing to do but maintain herself like a perfect white living room for company. The clothing says she is a lady: she doesn’t labor or sweat.
“Phooey,” Donna says in my living room, her crossed leg vibrating annoyance. “I’m damned lucky to get the job. Without Emil, my analyst, I’d never have gotten my foot in the door. Really! You and Alberta are naive. Are you under the illusion I could walk in and say, I’d like to try out for John Cameron Swayze’s job? Not only am I doing the Weather Girl slots Monday through Friday, but I’m working on the kiddie show at five.”
“In the same costume?”
“No, a long blond ringlet wig and a lot of white gauze. I’m the good fairy Tintoretto.”
“Tintoretto?”
“You imagine no one has a sense of humor around there.” Donna gives me her old crooked grin. “Look, it beats any other job I’ve had. Would you believe I get fan mail?”
“Your analyst got you the job?” I wish I could remember when he went from being Dr. Evans to plain Emil.
“Just the interview. I won the job myself. He has dozens of patients in the media. The Weather Girl before me was an actress and she got the lead in a road company production of Kiss Me Kate.”
“So how come Peter finally let you take a job?”
She grins again. “We’re three thousand in debt.”
I whistle. “How did that happen?”
“Partly because his old man faked him out and persuaded him to reinvest the income on the trust fund automatically. Which I think is pretty dumb, but nobody asked me. Partly because I let it happen. It was easy.”
“Are you saying you did it intentionally?”
“Not exactly and not on the record.” She kicks off her spike heels to massage the bottoms of her feet sensuously. “But I didn’t kill myself to keep it from happening. He’s used to spending money, face it. We can’t live on his salary in any kind of comfort. I just let him find that out without trying too hard to put off the inevitable.”
I can’t believe they have trouble on Peter’s salary. I am paid a dollar fifty an hour, more when I pose, and work an average of twenty-four hours a week. I don’t save much but after the rigors of putting myself through college, I feel I live quite comfortably. I have privacy, time to write, sex, food, even some pretty dresses. “What costs so much?”
“Everything! Our analysts. He’ll eat hamburger once every couple of weeks if I barbecue it. But basically he believes in steak and prime ribs. And I went through the gourmet fantasy and out the other side. You spend two hours shopping, six hours cooking and it’s all over twenty minutes after you put it out…. Both cars cost a hundred dollars whenever a mechanic does a laying on of hands. Insurance. Scotch. Decent clothes.”
I shake my hands limberly. “Didn’t take you long to get used to Peter’s standard of living.”
“Damned right. About five minutes, I think.”
“But you’re working for the freedom, not the money.”
“The money means something. A lot in fact. And they like me at the studio, they really do. My producer Guy says they’ve had very good response to me. I have high viewer recognition already. Jill, Monday for the first time, a boy recognized me on the street. I was trying to hail a taxi to get down to Emil’s from the studio in between my five o’clock and my seven o’clock, and I was running late as usual.”
“To tell you the truth, I think you’re doing okay. It’s just so exotic, as
a job.”
“Nonsense.” She paces. Her energy level has risen to what it was at eighteen. She has burned off fifteen pounds to leave her slight frame bone-thin. While she is in my apartment this afternoon, the phone rings for her twice. She speaks in that breathless seductive voice. “Yes, this is a perfect place to call me. You can always leave a message here for me, angel. It’s my old roommate from college.”
She could at least have said cousin. She does not want to claim me fully. Yet I don’t think she is talking to a lover. Her calls have to do with internal maneuvering for place and position. Her job has given her a microcosm she finds more vibrant than that of her marriage. If I guess that so readily, Peter will guess it too.
“What does he think of all this?”
“I try to keep it out of the house.” She grimaces. With her nose screwed up, she is a rebellious awkward child. “I try not to take my calls there. I don’t talk about the studio—I pretend to think it’s silly and only good for the money.”
“But you don’t think that.”
“No, Jill. In our little bohemian enclave, maybe people don’t adore the tube, but everybody else does. It touches people’s lives like nothing else. I mean to make a career in television. For once my face has got me something besides laid. I’m told I look vulnerable.”
“Hey, Donna. Eh, where does the seven o’clock cleavage come from?”
“Tape. Besides, everybody looks fatter on television.” She eyes herself critically, probing with a hard middle finger at her midriff. She refuses my offer of supper or even cheese. Tea with lemon is all she takes. “That and white wine. I drink only white wine. It’s non-fattening.”
One night I go with Alberta to a reading of beat poetry, mostly because we heard through our civil liberties group about the attempt to ban Howl in San Francisco. We have seen enough parodies of beat poetry to give us a simulacrum of familiarity. We think we know it because we have read about it in Time. Bolognese is scornful and uninterested. If it were not that Sarah Altweiler is in jail in Georgia and thus cannot address the Young Progressives Forum, we would not be sitting in this large audience. I have attended many poetry readings at the university where a hundred people was a good crowd. Eight was a small crowd. Here we have six hundred people, some of whom are as overdressed as if going to the opera.
There are several readers, loud rather than good, but you are about to witness a conversion experience. The last reader is Allen Ginsberg, thin and clean-shaven. He wears a plaid lumberjack shirt and radiates gentleness, patience, an almost motherly caring. I like him, although I recognize whenever he mentions women in his poems, it is with a casual and unexamined disgust. The subject matter is not the hook that snags my vitals. I have been afraid of drugs since a friend ODed on horse when I was thirteen and she was fifteen. The mysticism bores me. But certain poems cause me to sit bolt upright, breathe rapidly and experience the lifting of iron bars from my brain.
The meter moves me. I begin to think critically about what I’ve been taught about prosody. I begin to wonder about an English education for an American poet. The conversion experience, the sense of fire descending, strikes because I realize as I listen that it is possible to write with the whole entire live self. My self. It is possible to dare to write poems starting immediately tomorrow morning about what I care most for.
I sit there stunned. I started out doing that. Yes, in high school, when I first came to Ann Arbor, yes. But I unlearned to. I was taught to distance myself from my work. To write with a tiny part of my intellectual and emotional equipment. I was taught to see poems as complicated intellectual constructions full of carefully layered ambiguities, ironies and ironically treated myths, alluding in a complex web to other similar works. But you can write about fucking, you can write about supermarkets, you can write about your mother, you can write about the Bomb. You can write your politics. You can actually write poems that say what you feel and think.
I cannot speak. I want to run off and stare into my brain, opened suddenly from above and shining blue. I rush out followed by Alberta and cannot even take the subway. We walk miles downtown through the spring night. I have to work off the energy that chafes me.
Will I ever be visible? Will I ever be real? I want to be discovered into reality; yet I have not created my self, my work. I am inchoate, unborn. Who am I to assume that what I feel and think and experience matters to anyone else or ever could? I am too weird and strange to shape the dreams of others. My professors droned on of the universal in college, but they seemed to mean only notions, emotions, interests common to white men with money. I carry hope, born from a man who proclaims himself proudly Jew and queer, that I can write out of me, that I do not have to pretend to be an English gentleman to create.
Spring 1982, Bloodstone Review
Miss Stuart’s seventh volume of poetry is crammed with reductionist simplistic snippets of women’s lib cant. In describing a series of male/female encounters in which women are injured, raped, maimed, Stuart is unsympathetic to male needs. Individual poems stress only the woman’s role and anguish, instead of taking a balanced view. Only the poems about good sex transcend this morbid polemical bias. When we men denigrate women, compare them to mud, death, meat, sows, sloughs, sewers, traps, toilets, when we equate them with mortality, contingency, nature, when we put down women who put out and women who don’t, we are merely being universal. Miss Stuart is guilty of special pleading. In art there can be no special pleading for women. Her poetry is uterine and devoid of thrust. Her volume is wet, menstruates and carries a purse in which it can’t find anything.
Sydney Craw
Howie could be considered the center of our triangle, the obvious fulcrum of desire. Stephanie could be seen as the center, the sensitive and often sore spot. She feels most put upon and must be catered to, pleased, courted. In another sense I am the center: as the most content in the triangle, I put the most effort into making it work. I try to monitor everyone’s level of conflict and annoyance. I negotiate. I tell Howie that Stephanie needs more time with him that week. I tell Stephanie that Howie is frantic with his exams, meaning we should let him take a vacation from both of us.
We are a minor scandal among our friends. Alberta puts up with it, for my sake, but it strikes her as unaesthetic. As a divorce lawyer she passionately believes in monogamy. The more she unglues couples by day and ministers to the problems of the incompatible, the brutalized and the rejected, the more firmly committed she is in her evening and weekend life to the search for Mr. Right. Sometimes when we are sipping bourbon on a quiet night she tells me she will never meet the man for her. Gerrit was It.
Bolognese is ribaldly amused. Donna is fascinated, half frightened, half intrigued. As June heats up the city, our primary problem is Stephanie’s job. She has been working as secretary to her second cousin who owns a furniture store in Queens. She wants a job in Manhattan and I go to work on Donna.
“But why?” Donna asks me. “How about we get her a job in Alaska instead?”
“She wouldn’t go. Besides, you have to understand. If one person in a family is unhappy, everybody in a family is unhappy.”
Donna eyes me with a faint smile. Ever since she took the job at Channel 11, she is more at ease with me than she has been since she fell for Peter. I wish I could understand why his cold mercury presence no longer pollutes our communication, but I accept the miracle. She says, “You want to bribe her not to fight you for Howie. You think you couldn’t win.”
“Wrong guess. I don’t want to think about winning. After a year of lusting after him futilely, a piece of the action is amazing grace. I rather like the triangle. I know I’m not supposed to, but it gives me a lot of time to write.”
She laughs. “Don’t ever say that to Howie. He’d never forgive you. I can’t imagine any man who would.”
“I should seem to be suffering? But that ought to be guilt-provoking. He can feel guilty about anything—the gross national product. The average mean income in Tobago. I
’d like to iron the guilt right out of him.”
The phone rings. It is for her. She takes the receiver from me. “Ta, Liz, you’re an angel! Give me the address. How should I dress? No, I won’t be recognizable. Two twenty-two Lex?” She motions wildly at me, pointing to her purse. “Appointment book,” she mouths off-phone. “Who do I ask for?”
With the privilege of old friendship I open her purse and hand her the red leather appointment book. The purse is crammed with vials and jars and compacts of makeup and various pills: diet, headache, whatever. When she hangs up she turns to me insistently. “I’m trying out for a commercial. Should I? I’m curious. But, Stu, isn’t that completely selling out?”
“What’s the difference between being Weather Girl and selling … what is it?”
“Floor polish.”
“So what’s the difference?”
“Weather’s a service, Stu. I’m just the visual equivalent of dialing weather on the phone. Lots of people depend on that information. Travelers. Bus drivers. Baseball teams. Farmers. People planning picnics.” She paces to the window, looks out at nothing, paces back. Her face is painted into hard edges, precise sculpture of shadow and light; her hair is a fluffy cloud. “I’m studying meteorology on my own time. What’s the difference between giving accurate forecasts in a long skirt or a short skirt? But a commercial …”
“Look, half the time when you get me to watch, I can’t tell the difference between commercials and programs anyhow, except that a lot of the time the commercials are better photographed.”
She seems disappointed, as if she wanted me to talk her out of going. “But, Stu, for the first time in my life, I’m somebody.”
“I see that. Donna, your ideas haven’t caught up with your life. You keep talking about fulfilling yourself as a woman and adjusting to sex roles, and yet, when you stayed home and did nothing, you were bored silly. You like working.”
She gathers herself to leave. I frighten her if I challenge the ideology she is supposed to live by, but clearly doesn’t. She has a need to pretend that her job is a temporary aberration to be washed away with all other neuroses when she is healthy, which is defined as wanting nothing but Peter and domesticity. Maybe she has to pretend that with him, but with herself? With me? Looking at the door she has just departed at full speed, I ponder and shrug. After all, that ideology is no different from the religions of most people, pious moralities shielded from the abrasion of actual use. If she want to go on believing in tran-substantiation or the immaculate conception of Mary or the Freudian biological destiny of women, what difference can it make when she is careful to live her daily life by quite practical criteria? She shares that set of beliefs with Peter and perhaps to unravel that fabric would threaten their marriage. As long as her ideas don’t interfere with her activities, what harm can they do?