You think I am making him up. You think: Aha! A symbolic figure in what turns out to be after all an invented story. Alack, alas, I wish he were. Then he would be my failure, not life’s. I’d much prefer to think that Norm is a stick figure, more because I am not much of a writer than because Norm is a stick figure.
I have, over the years, read a lot of novels by male novelists, and there is no question in my mind that their female characters – except for those of Henry James – are stick figures with padding in certain places. So maybe the problem is just that we don’t know each other very well, men and women. Maybe we need each other too much to be able to know each other. But the truth is, I don’t think men knew Norm any better than I did. And it’s not just Norm. I don’t think anyone knew Carl either, or Paul, or Bill, or even poor Simp, although I have more of a sense of him than of the others. When you slip out of respectability, when you fall below the line, somehow you become clearer. Do you know what I mean? It’s as though being a white middle-class male is a full-time occupation, like being a colonel in the army who was trained at West Point. Even when you aren’t wearing your fancy costume you have to stand like a ramrod and talk without opening your mouth too wide and make jokes about booze and broads and walk like a machine. And the only way out is if you get kicked out for some terrible breach and end up on skid row talking to some kid in a Salvation Army soup kitchen; then you can afford to let yourself show. Simp slid down: that’s an unforgivable sin to the other white middle-class males – almost as bad as going gay. And so I can imagine him sitting there in the bars he still frequents with his mother’s money, sitting elegantly with his second double martini, talking easily about the big killing he expects to make this afternoon, expecting a call at three (in the bar? you wonder) that should do it, and he’s no more hollow than the others who sound the same way except in his case you know it isn’t true and you peer in at him and figure that somehow he doesn’t know it isn’t true, he isn’t clever enough to be a good liar; he bought an image and it was all he bought and now it’s all he has, and he is going round and round in it, living in it the way children live in daydreams.
Anyway, the others kept their uniforms, and so that was all anyone ever knew of them. Soldiers, like niggers and chinks, all look alike.
Still, I’ll try to tell you what I do know about Norm.
He was a happy baby. His father was a pharmacist, his mother a housewife, and gregarious. He had a younger brother who became a dentist. Both Norm and his brother were fairly bright at school, fairly athletic, fairly social. They were not extreme in any way that I know of, and it is that very moderateness that makes it so hard to talk about them.
He was not much devoted to sex. His mother had seen to it, from his earliest years, that he slept with his hands on top of the blankets, even going so far as to pull them out if they slid under during his sleep. She never, never permitted her boys to lie abed in the mornings and warned Mira often and direly of the dangers of such indulgence. When Norm was five, he engaged in a contest with some other boys in the neighborhood to see which of them could pee farthest. His mother caught him and threatened him with the loss of his organ if he ever did such a thing again: the threat probably made less of an impression on him than her white face and her gasps for breath as she dragged him home. He fell in love when he was nineteen, with the first girl he’d ever dated. They became engaged, but while he was away at college, she eloped with the mechanic at the Esso station in their town. Norm carried his tragic betrayal for many years after that. A group of his friends set him up with Antoinette, the town pump, and he lost his virginity on the back seat of a ’39 Ford. The experience was accompanied with enough guilt and a variety of unknown unpleasant sensations or emotions that he did not actively seek it again. There was in Norm, in those days at least, a certain delicacy: he laughed along with his friends about the experience, and about Antoinette, but he had a vague sense that somehow that wasn’t the way it should have been, wasn’t the way he would have chosen it to be.
When he was a child, he loved to draw, but his family did not encourage such activity. They did not actively forbid it either. It was just that the entire family was geared in a different direction. The only pictures they hung were Currier and Ives prints; they neither read nor listened to music. And they felt no lack. Such things simply did not exist in their world. Norm was given riding lessons – his father had been in the cavalry in the First War. He was encouraged in his desire to go to West Point. His temper tantrums were always of the same variety: he kicked in the radio every time West Point lost a game. It was hard on their radios, but somehow this was accepted by the family, which permitted no other expression of anger. Any other rage was treated as an aberration, and Norm was sent coldly to his room and given no dinner.
Norm learned to be what his father would have called a gentleman. He did everything, but nothing extraordinarily well. He did nothing with passion. He studied, and made C’s. He played ball, but rarely first string. His social life was pleasant, but not wild. He dated, but was not sexually aggressive.
He met Mira through their families. She seemed to him very pretty, fragile, and innocent, yet at the same time somehow sophisticated. It was probably her mind that seemed sophisticated to him, because she had thought about things and he had not; but as he became more involved with her, he began to hear things about her from his friends at the university, and got the impression that Mira was not the innocent he thought. He never tried to resolve the conflict of two impressions: when he wanted to keep her to himself, he mentioned the outside world as the mass of teeming aggressive maleness he felt it to be and that he knew frightened her. When he was angry with her, he hurled at her accusations of whoredom. For him she had the mythic quality of virgin/whore in one, although that is not the way he thought about it. He did not think about it at all. He did not think about anything dangerous. His feelings toward his parents, about his profession, about the world he moved in, were always proper, tinged with humor, shrugged off. This avoidance of penetration into the difficult, the dangerous, was as characteristic of him as his moderation. He walked always on the wide, the beaten path and found those who chose narrower ones either crazy or unmannerly. Those words, in fact, were almost synonymous in his vocabulary, craziness being only a heightened degree of lack of manners. In a sense, he was the ideal gentleman of an age older than the fifties.
Mira seemed the perfect partner for him. He was the scientist, the one who dealt with facts, understanding the worldly areas of sports, money, and status; she was artistic, literary. She could play the piano a little, knew something about art and theater. She had a refined quality that seemed to be inborn. She would reflect well on him. It never occurred to him, despite her two years at the university, that she would act differently from his mother: she would care for him and their children, and she could provide the cultural note, the finish, so absent in his own family. And in all surface ways, their marriage was acceptable. Both came from middle-class, Republican families. If she had had some training in Catholicism, neither she nor her family was now religious, and would not evoke his own family’s contempt for non-protestants. She had some education, she was healthy, she had not been brought up with wealth and would not object to the labor required of her in the early years. And besides, Mira had a helplessness, a vulnerability that touched his deepest core. It seemed perfect.
And indeed it was. They had been married for fourteen years, and Norm would avow that they had no serious problems. She was a wonderful mother, an excellent housekeeper, a good hostess. She was not very sexual, but Norm respected that in her. He felt that his choice of her had been wise and looked down complacently at those of his colleagues who had domestic problems. He felt good about himself and his life, good about Mira. His face had set over the years, in good, kindly lines. They had lived out the life that had been expected of them, and for Norm, it was fairly fulfilling. Only sometimes, when they went to a movie or a musical comedy playing on Broadway, and an
attractive woman moved her body in a certain way – not just any attractive woman, but one who had a certain helplessness and vulnerability about her even as she wiggled her flesh – then something would rise in him like a cry, a longing to reach out and grab hard, to hold and pull even over objections, to – but he never even thought the word – to rape, to overcome and possess and keep in possession. It had been his earliest feeling about Mira, but he had never acted upon it. Nor would he now. He would laugh at himself and his cosmic desires, laugh them away into absurdity, and go home and insist quietly and factually on having sex with the reluctant Mira, and never equate the act with the feeling.
18
What is a man, anyway? Everything I see around me in popular culture tells me a man is he who screws and kills. But everything I see around me in life tells me a man is he who makes money. Maybe these two are related, because making money in our world often requires careful avoidance of screwing and killing, so maybe the culture provides the unlived part. I don’t claim to know, and I don’t even care much. I figure that’s their problem. Women are trying hard these days to get out from under the images that have been imposed on them. The difficulty is there is just enough truth in the images that to repudiate them often involves repudiating also part of what you really are. Maybe men are in the same boat, but I don’t think so. I think they rather like their images, find them serviceable. If they don’t, it’s up to them to change them. I do know that if that is what men are, I’m willing to dispense with them forever and have children only through parthenogenesis, which would mean I’d have only female children, which would suit me fine. But the other side of the image, the reality, is just as bad. Because if the men I’ve known haven’t much indulged in killing and are no great shakes at screwing and have made money (for the most part) in only moderate amounts, they haven’t been anything else either. They’re just dull. Maybe that’s the price of being on the winning side. Because the women I know have gotten fucked, literally and figuratively, and they’re great.
One advantage to being a despised species is that you have freedom, freedom to be any crazy thing you want. If you listen to a group of housewives talk, you’ll hear a lot of nonsense, some of it really crazy. This comes, I think, from being alone so much, and pursuing your own odd train of thought without impediment, which some call discipline. The result is craziness, but also brilliance. Ordinary women come out with the damnedest truth. You ignore them at your own risk. And they’re permitted to go on making wild statements without being put in one kind of jail or another (some of them, anyway) because everyone knows they’re crazy and powerless too. If a woman is religious or earthy, passive or wildly assertive, loving or hating, she doesn’t get much more flak than if she isn’t: her choices lie between being castigated as a ball and chain or as a whore. What I don’t understand is where women suddenly get power. Because they do. The kids, who almost always turn out to be a pile of shit, are, we all know, Mommy’s fault. Well, how did she manage that, this powerless creature? Where was all her power during the years she was doing five loads of laundry a week and worrying about mixing the whites with the colors? How was she able to offset Daddy’s positive influence? How come she never knows she has this power until afterward, when it gets called responsibility?
What I’m trying to understand is winning and losing. Now the rule of the game is that men win as long as they keep their noses comparatively clean, and women lose, always, even extraordinary women. The Edith Piafs and Judy Garlands of the world become great by capitalizing on their losing. That part is clear. What is not clear is what game we’re playing. What do you win when you win? I know what you lose, having some experience with that side. What I don’t know is what rewards are involved with winning besides money. Maybe that’s it; maybe that’s all there is. I guess so, because when I look at all the winners, all the Norms of the world, I can’t see much else: money and a certain ease in the world, a sense of legitimacy.
You think I hate men. I guess I do, although some of my best friends … I don’t like this position. I mistrust generalized hatred. I feel like one of those twelfth-century monks raving on about how evil women are and how they must cover themselves up completely when they go out lest they lead men into evil thoughts. The assumption that the men are the ones who matter, and that the women exist only in relation to them, is so silent and underrunning that even we never picked it up until recently. But after all, look at what we read. I read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and Freud and Erikson; I read de Montherlant and Joyce and Lawrence and sillier people like Miller and Mailer and Roth and Philip Wylie. I read the Bible and Greek myths and didn’t question why all later redactions relegated Gaea-Tellus and Lilith to a footnote and made Saturn the creator of the world. I read or read about, without much question, the Hindus and the Jews, Pythagoras and Aristotle, Seneca, Cato, St Paul, Luther, Sam Johnson, Rousseau, Swift … well, you understand. For years I didn’t take it personally.
So now it is difficult for me to call others bigots when I am one myself. I tell people at once, to warn them, that I suffer from deformation of character. But the truth is I am sick unto death of four thousand years of males telling me how rotten my sex is. Especially it makes me sick when I look around and see such rotten men and such magnificent women, all of whom have a sneaking suspicion that the four thousand years of remarks are correct. These days I feel like an outlaw, a criminal. Maybe that’s what the people perceive who look at me so strangely as I walk the beach. I feel like an outlaw not only because I think that men are rotten and women are great, but because I have come to believe that oppressed people have the right to use criminal means to survive. Criminal means being, of course, defying the laws passed by the oppressors to keep the oppressed in line. Such a position takes you scarily close to advocating oppression itself, though. We are bound in by the terms of the sentence. Subject-verb-object. The best we can do is turn it around. And that’s no answer, is it?
Well, answers I leave to others, to a newer generation perhaps, lacking the deformities mine suffered. My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don’t even need to shrug. I simply don’t care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don’t matter. It is too late for me to care. Once upon a time I could have cared.
But fairyland is back beyond the door. Forever and forever I will hate Nazis, even if you can prove to me that they too were victims, that they were subject to illusion, brainwashed with images. The stone in my stomach is like an oyster’s pearl – it is the accumulation of defense against an irritation. My pearl is my hatred: my hatred is learned from experience: that is not prejudice. I wish it were prejudice. Then, perhaps, I could unlearn it.
19
I guess I should get back to the story, but I turn in that direction with such weariness. Oh, those lives, those lives! Those years. You know how you feel when someone whispers to you that so-and-so is ill and you say, ‘Too bad,’ and ask what the matter is and they whisper ‘Women’s troubles’? You never pursue it. You have this vague sense of oozings and drippings, blood that insists on pouring out of assorted holes, organs that drip down with all the other goo and try to depart, breasts that get saggy or lumpy and sometimes have to be cut off. Above all there is the sense of a rank cave that never gets fresh air, dark and smelly, its floor a foot thick with sticky disgusting mulch.
Yes. And for every story I’m telling you, I’m leaving out three. For instance, I didn’t tell you all of what happened to Doris and Roger, or Paula and Brett, or Sandra and Tom, or poor Geraldine. I know, but I’m not telling. There’s no point in telling, it is all just more of the same. I’m not going in detail into what happened to Oriane, although I will tell you that after they cut off her breast, Sean went to see her in the hospital and turned his beautiful
face away with disgust.
‘Don’t let Timmy see that thing when you get home,’ he said with a twisting mouth. ‘It’s disgusting.’
He shouldn’t have worried. When she got home, she committed suicide. Not his fault, though: she just shouldn’t have loved him as much as she did, shouldn’t have let his opinion matter so much to her. Should. Shouldn’t. For every great woman I know now, there’s an Oriane, an Adele, a Lily, or an Ava. Someplace.
Wrecked, wrecked. All survivors, all of us. We survived the battlefield of our own lives, and the only help we got came from each other. It was Alice who sat night after night with Samantha until she got over the hysteria, the sense of betrayal, the awful hurting hate. It was Martha who came and found Mira lying on the floor with her wrists slit. It was Mira who put Martha to bed and got rid of the rest of the sleeping pills and sat with her as she realized that she would live. No one could save Lily, though. She was beyond us.
Do you believe any of this? It is not the stuff of fiction. It has no shape, it hasn’t the balances so important in art. You know, if one line goes this way, another must go that way. All these lines are the same. These lives are like threads that get woven into a carpet and when it’s done the weaver is surprised that the colors all blend: shades of blood, shades of tears, smell of sweat. Even the lives that don’t fit, fit. Ethel, for instance. You don’t know Ethel, but she was a college friend of mine who wanted to be a sculptor. She got married, of course. She’s gone quite queer in the head and collects shells. Her house is full of them and she doesn’t talk about anything else. No one visits her anymore.
Sometimes as I try to write this all down, I feel as if all I’m doing is a thing I used to do as a child, draw paper dolls. They all looked pretty much the same except one had blond hair, one red, one black. And I’d draw sets and sets of clothes, all of them interchangeable: evening gowns, tailored suits, slacks, shorts, negligees. When I’d much rather be able to draw a Medea or an Antigone. But they, you see, had sharp edges and endings, and the people I know don’t. And their lives don’t. I see, I saw, the slow wearing down of the years. Not lives lived in quiet desperation: no, there was nothing quiet in these lives. There was passion, and extremity, screeching, and lacerations of the flesh – one’s own, of course. And all of us ended up wrecked. So it seems more a general than an individual problem. Oh, if you are looking for flaws, they are there, but this is not tragedy, after all. Or is it? I mean, Mira’s prissiness and smugness and superiority and coldness, or Samantha’s dependency, her childlike leaving of everything to Simp until it was too late, or Martha’s arrogant assumption that she could live the way she wanted to and have what she wanted, or Oriane’s intense and undeviating love for Sean, or Paula’s driving ambition … Yes, those were all there.