He reached across and took her hand. “You know, sweetheart, what he did served its purpose. I’m not a worshiper of art. I like it, but I don’t think it’s sacred. It’s a kind of food, it nourishes a culture, gets digested, and when it’s lost its nutritiveness, it gets put into a museum—or a library. His poetry did what it could.”
“That’s a nice way of thinking about it,” she said thoughtfully.
They walked out of the tea shop into the bright blue day. They wandered away from the main street into little lanes dotted with small old houses, nestled in gardens, comfortable looking, charming.
Not a hovel in sight. “Maybe his poetry did that,” Dolores mused.
“I doubt it. I think it’s called industrialization.”
6
VICTOR WAITED UNTIL AFTER their return to Oxford Sunday evening, to tell her he’d be tied up and unable to see her for ten days or so. He was sitting with his shoes off, drinking a Scotch for the road—he was driving back to London that night—and smoking a cigarette. His body had that brisk, businesslike look. His voice was flat, without feeling, a business voice. She hated the look more than she hated the news.
Some muckety-muck of the holding company that owned IMO was coming to London with his wife and expected to be wined and dined and ushered and catered to. For ten days. They’d never been to England before, they were not travelers, they couldn’t take the unpredictable or the uncomfortable. They wanted to see Stonehenge and Canterbury Cathedral.
“They’re High Church,” Victor explained.
“Oh. I thought they might be druids.”
“Don’t be mad.”
“Why in hell shouldn’t I be mad? I’m going to miss you.”
He gave her that look, the one that got her on the train, an across-the-room intensity she couldn’t resist, so when he came to her, she held out her arms, and spoke no more of anger.
But she didn’t like it.
It wasn’t so much not seeing him for ten days. She saw him only on weekends most of the time anyway. It was all the other—the way he had waited until Sunday night to tell her, as if he thought she’d throw a tantrum and ruin their weekend. The weekend itself, in fact: had he dredged up a three-day holiday as a sop to keep her quiet about the ten-day absence? And the way he told her, turning again into his other self, the Businessman dealing with an unpredictable and emotional Circe.
Yes, that was it: She didn’t like what she felt he was feeling about her, was seeing her as. As volatile, uncontrollable, someone who had to be handled gently. Handled. Possessive, dependent, emotional. Yes.
But you can’t be sure about that, can you? It’s only a vague sense that you have. Besides you can’t tell people every little thing about them that bothers you, can you? So picky it would be. Such little things, vague suspicions.
So she decided to forget it and get lots of work done. She was way behind with her collation, and was coming to a point where she was ready to write a chapter.
Besides he probably wouldn’t understand. He’d think she was making a fuss about little things in order to disguise her real anger at his absence. It would be very hard to explain to him. Not worth the effort.
No. So get on with work. And she did, finishing the last of one group of manuals within a week, catching up with the collation nights and over the weekend. Monday she would start to write a chapter. But as she laid things out Sunday night, she saw that she had forgotten to record a reference, so Monday morning, she bicycled down to the Bod to get it. She stopped at Blackwell’s to order some books, then slowly wound back towards her house.
And saw Victor.
He was walking down towards Cornmarket from the direction of the Randolph Hotel, with a middle-aged man and woman, well-dressed in the American style. She stopped her bike at the corner. He did not see her, he was on the other side of the street. He was talking and being charming, but in his Businessman self, she could see that from where she stood. He had a map in his hand. He’d need it. What he knew about Oxford was mainly the way to her house from the Randolph.
The three passed into the crowded Cornmarket, and Dolores got back on her bike and headed in the other direction. Biting her lip. Victor in Oxford and he didn’t even call. Didn’t say to the muckety-mucks: there’s an American scholar here in Oxford, perhaps you’d like to meet her, perhaps we could all have dinner. He could have disguised things.
No. He was hiding her away.
The thought made her heart stop.
She was, implicitly and beyond her control, a scarlet woman, a person branded illegitimate, forbidden to walk in the light. Victor was permitted to have her and even to keep her, on this condition. As long as he was secretive, furtive. That way he offers tacit assent to the prevailing morality.
But she, Dolores, did not assent to the prevailing morality. Yet she was in its power. She was the Mistress, the Other Woman, the woman with no rights, the one who had to be hidden away, like poor Rosamund, kept by Henry II of England in a palace that could be reached only by tracing a labyrinth, kept there forever out of the sunlight to serve his desire and his jealousy…. A prisoner.
No, no, I am not a prisoner, of course not.
She reached home with a throbbing head and sat down, just dumped her body in a chair, couldn’t work. Lighted a cigar. Getting as bad as Victor. This is silly. There are terms, bargains. This is one of them. It’s not that he wants to hide me, it’s that he’s worried about his job.
But why is it always the same old story? Always the woman who pays? Always, despite anyone’s best intentions. She was the hidden one, not he. When the Carriers had invited Dolores to dinner one Saturday night, she’d asked if she could bring along an American friend who was visiting her. They’d had fun, Leonard with his grim ironic British humor, Jane with her equally ironic but livelier Bronx Jewish wit. Victor had, thank God, refrained from discussing politics. Yes, but the Carriers were sophisticated. You couldn’t have taken Victor with you to dinner at high table in New College. Well, but that was on a week night, he wasn’t here. And besides, you’re not married.
Her mind whirled, and she could not get it in order.
Of course she wouldn’t want him to flaunt her (but even the word shows bias!), to cause ripples of gossip in his company, to damage him, maybe even reach his wife, hurt her.
Maybe she, Edith, was loving someone else too while Victor was away. She should, after all, why not? But she’d have to be even more furtive than he, a woman, and living in a small town.
Yes, women always pay more.
She rubbed her forehead so hard that bits of skin began to flake in her fingers. She didn’t want to feel this. But it wouldn’t go away.
Victor did call, late that night, to say he was in Oxford and felt desolate that he couldn’t see her. She was cool; their conversation was brief. “I’ll see you this weekend, darling,” he said placatingly. As if she were cool because she was angry at his absence. Just assumed she was eager to see him. Arrogant male.
But she said nothing.
7
AND NEVER DID SAY anything. She was ecstatic by Friday, having written a rough draft of her chapter in just four days, having written with fire and conciseness, fueled, perhaps, by her anger. Yes: Women and Suffering. The right subject for her. A set of chapters on the way feeling, every feeling except anger, had increasingly been associated with women, and suffering above all. All those paintings of the Pieta, all those Hecubas and Niobes. At some point, feeling (except anger) had been declared unmanly. Then a set of chapters on the way women had been taught their suffering role, taught to accept their dependent status, subservience, patient endurance. And the way it had been justified, this role decreed for women. And the concluding chapters—the ones she was frightened of, hard to do—showing the effects of this dumping of emotion onto the one-half of the human race and declaring it off limits for the other half. No clear material there: she’d have to hunt and cull and pull things together from many fields. And there, she’d enter the
realm of the subjective: always dangerous for a scholar.
But the thirty pages she had written were good, very good for a first draft, and she was high, dancing as she moved around the apartment. And Victor, almost as if he’d known, showed up without calling, at two o’clock on a Friday afternoon, and caught her high.
And was high himself, having turned some fine piece of business by getting the American muckety-muck’s approval. “Worth the damned ten days of boredom!” he exclaimed. “If I had to listen once more to a complaint about the soggy English toast, the tasteless—read sugarless—salad dressing, the lack of American efficiency in the hotels … ! Once more, and I was going to puke. Let them go back to Howard Johnson’s or the Ramada Inn, that’s where they belong!”
High as she was, high as he was, and glad as she was to see him again, glad as her body was to have his body close to it, it was impossible to be angry. “What we have to do before it gets cold is buy you a bike,” she said.
“I haven’t been on a bike since I was sixteen!”
“Good for you.” She placidly put on her jacket. “Put some air in your lungs instead of smoke. Tighten up your thigh muscles.”
“Are they loose?” Worried.
“They’re lovely. But loosening.”
“Oh, those loosening thighs, those great big beautiful thighs …” he sang, and kept humming it, despite her elbow shoves, all the way to the bicycle shop.
And very shakily, anxiously watching the motor traffic, slowly, he rode back to her house on a shiny ten-speeder. By the time she had unlocked her door and wheeled her own bike out, he was riding in circles in the street with no hands.
“Look …” he began.
“You call me Mom and I’ll Pop you!” she cried.
And in the grey-blue dusk, they rode off to the countryside, down curved lanes, to the river.
It was impossible to be angry.
Next day, he said: “You know, I don’t know anything about this place. Oxford. I felt like a fool trying to show the Buswells around. Not that they noticed. How about giving me a tour?”
They rode their bikes to town, locked them in the yard outside the Bod, and looking at him with a just-you-wait glint, she led him into the library and up the old creaky wooden stairs. As they entered Duke Humfrey’s Library, she kept watching his face. He glowed. She glowed. She took him past the railing that excludes guests, she whispered its history to him as he took in the wood, the stained glass, the ceiling, the old books. He kept glowing.
That mattered. Very much. Time she took Harry Hunter Harter Herter, something like that, to see the unicorn tapestries at the Cloisters and he hadn’t seen anything. He just looked at them, smiled at her, asked what else? She refused to go out with him again, although he’d kept calling for months. He couldn’t understand what was wrong, and how could you tell a person a thing like that? I won’t go out with you because you did not respond, you did not stretch out and glow at something so beautiful, so wondrous. If you can’t see that, the wonder and beauty of that, how can you see anything? How can you see me, who am not always wondrous or beautiful?
But Victor saw. She took his hand as they descended, and laid it against her cheek. He was still (mentally) in the library, he was talking about old books.
“I always loved them, I used to collect them….”
He paused.
“I inherited a few from my mother’s mother’s father. I have a small collection….” Again, the odd pause, but then they were out in the sunlight, and walking. Dolores talked, pointed, talked: teacher, a role she enjoyed, but wasn’t sure Victor would. They went to New College Chapel to see the old stained-glass windows and the Epstein statue of Lazarus. Then to Trinity Chapel. Then to lunch at the Turf, a tiny low-ceilinged pub that was built in the thirteenth century. They ate sausage standing up, drank their pints looking at each other, unable to speak in the crowded, noisy, smoky room, people packed in, their heads nearly reaching the ceiling. Victor had to duck through a doorway, which delighted him, and he grabbed her hand as they left through the little garden, and out into a little lane that led back to the street. They walked holding hands, swinging them.
They walked to High Street—The High—and crossed and went down towards Christ Church, where they saw the lovely Wren “Tom Tower,” and heard Great Tom, the great old bells inside it, strike the hour. They went to the cathedral, then walked over to Magdalen Grove and stood there for a long time watching the serene tender red deer, feeling serene and tender themselves.
“First time I came to Oxford, I hated it,” Dolores said. “That was years ago, and in the summer, it wasn’t term time, and the place was empty. And it seemed so fucking monastic. Boys on bikes with their academic gowns flying out behind them, soft-faced, protected, arrogant boys. All that tawny stone, the enclosed gardens, the spires, the gates, everywhere gates! Oh, that’s still true—those buildings we couldn’t get inside of, the windows I wanted to show you. Someone took me there one day, but one can’t just walk in, one has to be taken by somebody who belongs. Well, almost everything is pure and white and austere on the outside. And rich and ornate and comfortable inside. You know, like priests taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and then going in to a banquet, five courses, each with wine. I went to an ordination party once, a huge affair and very lavish, and my friend John went up to the newly ordained priest and said, ‘Bob, if this is poverty, what’s chastity?’”
Victor laughed.
“Anyway, I felt at that time that it had no place for me. I felt like a scarlet woman just walking around in it, as if I befouled it by simply being there, as if I were emanating sex all over the place.”
“You emanate, you emanate,” he teased.
“I felt as if,” she went on seriously, unresponsive to him, “I was the very person, the One the whole place had been built to exclude. And that my presence here was so serious a breach of its decorum that it was powerful enough to contaminate the whole university. I felt like a bad smell.”
Victor was gazing at her in incomprehension. “Why? Why should you? I’ve never felt like that in my life.”
She grimaced. “Of course you haven’t, you’re male!”
He shrugged, abandoning the discussion. He gazed around them, standing in Radcliffe Camera square. “Well, I don’t know. The library’s nice, inside. But on the whole the place seems pretty dead to me. It’s a museum, that’s all.”
“Don’t you think it’s beautiful?”
“I think it’s great, tremendous! Magnificent, really. Impressive. But I can’t imagine feeling that I could do anything to it—that you could do anything to it. It’s so huge and impervious. The stone just stands, high, silent, dwarfing the people….” He drifted into contemplation, and she observed him with a smile, thinking he must be exhausted and perhaps even embarrassed by his small foray into lyricism. She gazed at the Radcliffe Camera. High, silent, dwarfing the people. Yes. Built to do that. Built to testify to something conceived of as larger than the mere puny humans who walked in and out bearing their own smell of sweat and glands, bearing their own mortality. Blind stone, unwitnessing, nonsignifying. No. Not true. Testifying to something. She caught Victor’s arm.
“Why do you like it? I mean, what do you like about it?”
He looked at her a little surprised. “Well, it’s grand, of course! I mean, the glorious British Empire and all that. Created on the playing fields of Eton, you know. It’s damned impressive, we haven’t got anything that can compare to it, even though we’ve tried….” He took her hand and pulled her arm, linked through his, close to his body, and began to walk towards the high iron gates. “Maybe I do understand, a little. It makes me feel a bit like a crude American, you know?”
“Oh, well, that’s just an affirmation of a reality,” she teased, and he squeezed her hand to hurt it, for just a moment.
“Breaking my fingers in a place like this would really prove your crude Americanism,” she said, high and mighty but smiling.
&nb
sp; He was reduced to glaring. Some young people, three boys and two girls, were walking their bikes through the gates. They looked pink and white and innocent and unintimidated. To them, all that white or sand-colored stone was simply the housing of rooms to which they went to listen to their betters, the Authorities. In lecture, or on the printed page, or turning the ancient heavy leaves of a manuscript: the voices of the past, wisdom. She stopped and withdrew her arm from Victor’s. She looked at the buildings. The light was high, the air was still, the buildings stood, silent. Young people listening to their betters, their elders, learning from them how to be. How to be what? Victories of empire won on the playing fields of Eton, yes. The cruelties of patriarchal education vindicated, reaffirmed: they and only they could produce the hero-warriors necessary for the wars patriarchal society produced. Vicious circle.
She glanced at Victor. No, he would not understand. He was frowning. “Did I really hurt your hand?”
She leaned to him and kissed him lightly. (Was that forbidden in the square? Once, no doubt. Once her mere presence here would probably have been forbidden.)
“Of course not,” she lied. (Lying so that he should not feel bad, or lying so that he should not feel powerful?)
They linked arms and left the square and walked down the street past the grandeur, towards the town.
Yes, testifying to all that. To the erection of permanences, the power and glory of God who was really the king, and those who did His work on earth, who were really the male aristocracy. To transcendence, erected on the backs of the undeserving poor, on the sinful bodies of women.
What did the young women studying there now feel? What did she feel for that matter, being invited to give a lecture, being asked to have dinner at high table? Uncomfortable, but flattered, yes, the truth now, tell the truth, flattered to be included at all.
God.
They walked in silence to Cornmarket. “Now I’ll show you the real Oxford,” she laughed. “Although you’ve already seen it.” (Without seeing.)