Mira was gaping now. Isolde had returned and was pouring more wine, but she was silent, if grinning. Chris was sitting with her head bent over her half-full plate, playing with the food with her fork. She looked glum. Val was in full sail. Her face was a little pink from the wine and the cooking, she held her wine glass aloft and gesticulated with it, she was staring at a point on the wall just above Iso’s head.
‘You can’t think about stupid practical details like making money or going to school. It is as if the sensual surface of your skin and the innards of your body had a direct connection, and that was all the life there was. Nothing else matters. You go along like this for a long time, months, maybe, flunking courses, losing jobs, getting kicked out of your house, whatever. Nothing matters, because nothing else exists. You get a little paranoid, you think about the world versus lovers. You think it’s all horribly unfair, you think everybody else is stupid and crass and lumpy and doesn’t understand the flame that life is.
‘Then one day, the unthinkable happens. You are sitting together at the breakfast table and you’re a little hung over, and you look across at beloved, beautiful golden beloved, and beloved opens his lovely rosebud mouth showing his glistening white teeth, and beloved says something stupid. Your whole body stops in midstream: your temperature drops. Beloved has never said anything stupid before. You turn and look at him; you’re sure you misheard. You ask him to repeat. And he does. He says, “It’s raining out,” and you look outside and it is perfectly clear. And you say, “No, it isn’t raining out. Perhaps you’d better get your eyes checked. Or your ears.” You begin to doubt all his senses. It could only be a flaw in his sensory equipment that would make him say a thing like that. But even that flaw isn’t important. Love can’t be stopped by locksmiths, contact lenses, or hearing aids. It was just that you were hung over.
‘But that’s only the start. Because he keeps on, after that, saying stupid things. And you keep turning around and looking at him strangely, and my God, do you know what, you suddenly see that he’s skinny! Or flabby! Or fat! His teeth are crooked, and his toenails are dirty. You suddenly realize he farts in bed. He doesn’t, he really doesn’t understand Henry James! All this while, he’s been saying he doesn’t understand Henry James, and you’ve thought his odd, cast-off remarks about James showed brilliant perception, but suddenly you realize he’s missed the point entirely.
‘But that’s not the worst part. Because all these months you’ve been adoring him like a descended god, he’s been being convinced he is. And now he’s parading around with a smug superior expression on his face, cocksure and blind and insensitive, just like all the other males you rejected, but this time it’s your fault! You did it. You! All by yourself! My God, you created this monster! Then you think, well, he helped. I couldn’t have done it without cooperation. And you hate yourself for having deluded yourself about him (you tell yourself it was HIM you were deluded about – not love), and you hate him for having believed your delusions, and you feel guilty and responsible and you try, slowly, to disengage. But now, just try to get rid of him! He clutches, he clings, he doesn’t understand. How could you want to separate from a deity? He saved you, you told him that. He was – when was that, anyway? – the best lover you ever had. He keeps on believing all the things you told him, and he doesn’t believe when you try to untell. And after all, what can you say? He wasn’t the best lover you ever had? But he was, once. “So it’s just now,” he says, nodding his head judiciously. “I’ve become mechanical. It needs more thought. I’ve come to take you for granted, and women don’t like that.” What can you say without destroying his fragile male ego forever, or making yourself out a deluded fool or a liar?’
Val paused to drink. Mira was hanging on her. ‘What do you do?’ she asked, barely breathing.
Val swallowed and put down her glass, and spoke in the most matter-of-fact possible voice. ‘Why you bring in another man, of course. That’s the only thing they understand. Territoriality, you know. If you turn them down by yourself, that’s inconceivable and horribly ego-deflating. If you move to another man, that’s bad, but understandable. They always knew they weren’t up to par, that somebody else could beat them. And then you’re not rejecting them period, facing aloneness alone, you’re just one more promiscuous bitch of a female. It all fits that way. That’s the way the game is played. You must know that.’
‘I don’t know if I’ve ever been in love,’ Mira said doubtfully, ‘or if I was, I was so young …’
Chris looked at Mira sympathetically. She turned to her mother. ‘Not everybody’s like you, Mom.’
‘Sure they are,’ Val said cheerfully. ‘They just don’t know it.’
That’s the way Val was. Absolute. There was no point in arguing with her. And in fact she was so right so often that one simply shrugged off her gigantic arrogances. They were part of her, like the sprawly way she sat, her large movements of arm as she spoke, the way she held her cigarettes high in the air. And in time one came to feel that Val’s extravagances of statement were harmless. She did not impose her categories on other people any more than anyone else does: she was simply louder in announcing them.
11
October is the month in which Cambridge is most beautiful. The brilliant gold and crimson leaves tint the sunlight dusky and soft on the redbrick sidewalks and the sky is very blue. The soft, ashy, burning sad autumn air, the sad sound of brittle leaves crushed underfoot that makes autumn a dying time in most places is offset here by the thousands of new young faces, bodies hurrying to a thousand events planned for one more new year.
Mira found her classes uninspiring, but the reading lists a challenge. She spent hours in Widener or Child library, poring through bookstores, and felt her mind expanding with this opportunity to read in depth, as well as width. The emphasis was on primary texts; anthologies were regarded as no more than study guides. It was a pleasant change from what she was used to.
She hung her curtains and bought some throw pillows and a few more plants, and planned her first dinner party. She invited Iso and Ava, Val and Chris, and struggled in the tiny kitchen over the blackened stove to do something as graceful as what they had done. She was not able to think of anything more exotic than baked chicken, but they all acted as if she had created a feast, and when it was over, she was flushed with pleasure. She had bought red carnations for the kitchen table, and Ava oohed and hung over them, saying how much she loved them, saying it as if the flowers had taken root in her soul and her body was enveloped by them.
‘Please, take them home with you.’
Ava’s eyes widened. ‘Me? Ooh, Mira, I couldn’t. It’s just that I love them so.’
‘It would make me happy if you took them.’
‘Really? Oh, Mira, thank you!’ Ava acted as if Mira had given her something large and valuable. She embraced Mira, buried her face in the flowers, thanked Mira over and over. Ava’s mannerisms were so extreme that it was hard to believe them, but it was clear, even in the short time Mira had known her, that she believed them, that somehow they really expressed her.
After dinner they sat in the living room drinking wine.
‘Well, look at your life, for instance,’ Val was saying to Iso. ‘You grew up on an orange plantation, or whatever they call them, you surfed, swam, skied, you’ve been all over the world with a pack on your back, you’ve done white water canoeing, you bicycled across Kenya. Or me: my life hasn’t been that glamorous, but I’ve been everywhere. Chris and I traveled through Europe in a VW bus; we helped register voters in the South; we’ve lived on Indian reservations doing teaching and rudimentary nursing; we worked in Appalachia trying to mobilize opposition to the strip mining companies; we’ve been working with the peace movement, with Cambridge school and city problems, for years now …’
‘You have, not me, Mom.’
‘Or Ava …’
She raised her eyes from the flowers. ‘Oh, I haven’t done anything.’
‘You have. You’ve b
een living on your own for years now, working, supporting yourself at a boring nine-to-five job and living in ratholes so you’d have money to study ballet four nights a week and all day Saturday. That takes courage, energy …’
‘It’s just all I care about,’ Ava demurred in a tiny voice.
‘But what do you find in the movies, in TV? The same old figures, the sex bomb and the housewife – that is, when they even bother to have female characters …’
‘They come in three types: the heroine, the villainess, and the crossbreed. The heroine has blonde hair, is utterly moral, and has as much personality as a soft roll; the villainess has dark hair and gets killed in the end. Her crime is sex. The crossbreed is a good woman who goes bad or a bad woman who goes good. She always gets killed too, one way or another,’ Iso laughed.
‘I always wanted to be the villainess,’ Ava said. ‘But sometimes the heroine has dark hair.’
‘Actually, there’s another type,’ Iso said thoughtfully, ‘The asexual. You know, asexual Doris Day acting like a little boy clowning around with asexual Rock Hudson acting like a little bigger boy. Presley is like that too, and the Beatles.’
‘That’s true,’ Mira agreed. ‘Asexuality or maybe androgyny. Like Katharine Hepburn.’
‘Or Garbo. Or Dietrich.’
‘Or Judy Garland with that child’s face, wearing tails.’
‘Or Fred Astaire. You could never imagine him screwing.’
‘Why is that, do you suppose?’ Mira asked them.
‘Maybe because real women have to be either angels or devils. And real men have to be macho, can’t be sweet. Maybe the inbetween figures, the asexuals and androgynes are freed from the moral imperative,’ Iso suggested.
‘I always knew I was a devil,’ Ava murmured.
‘You act more like an angel,’ Mira smiled.
‘When I was five, I had a new party dress and I went out to the yard to show it to my daddy and I was so happy, I felt so pretty, and I swung all around to show him and my skirt flew out and my panties showed and my daddy picked me up and carried me into the house and beat me with his belt.’
They gazed at her. Val’s forehead was furrowed, as if she were in pain. ‘How do you feel about him now?’ she asked.
‘Oh, I love my daddy. But we fight a lot. I don’t go home much because we always fight and that upsets Momma. Last time I was home was Christmas two years ago and Daddy hit me because I said I didn’t like Lyndon Johnson, he just reached across and smacked me in the face real hard, it stung, you know, it brought tears to my eyes, so I picked up a fork that was lying on the counter, one of those long ones that you turn meat with, and I stabbed him in the stomach.’ She said this in her soft-edged Alabama voice, confiding the events the way a child would, her long-lashed eyes trusting, questioning.
‘Did you hurt him?’ Mira asked horrified.
Did you kill him?’ Val laughed.
‘No.’ Ava’s eyes danced. ‘But I sure made him bleed a lot!’ She burst into giggling, and kept laughing. She doubled over with laughter. ‘He was sure shocked!’ she added, pulling herself erect again. ‘And I told him if he ever hit me again, I’d kill him. But now I’m afraid to go home, because if he hit me – and he might, he’s such a bull – I’d have to do it. I’d have to kill him.’
‘Does he hit your mother too?’
‘No. Or my brother either. Anyway, not since my brother got bigger than him. But he always hit me the most.’
‘Love pats,’ Val said dryly.
‘That’s true,’ Ava looked up at Val. ‘That’s it. He always loved me the most, and I knew it.’
‘Training,’ Val added.
Ava was sitting cross-legged on the floor, holding the jar of carnations. She buried her face in the flowers. ‘Well, I don’t know what it trained me for, because I’m not good for anything.’
‘Ava, that’s not true!’ Iso protested.
‘I’m not! I’m really not! I want to play the piano but I get too scared to play for people, and I want to dance, but I’m too old. All I can do is pound on that old typewriter all day, and I do that pretty good, but it gets boring.’
Iso spoke to Val and Mira. ‘Ava only had a few years of lessons, when she was around twelve, and then again in college for two years. But she was so good, they put her on the stage and let her play with the Cleveland Symphony.’
‘Oh, Iso, I won a contest,’ Ava corrected irritably. ‘You make it sound so great. It was just a contest.’
‘But that’s great!’ Mira exclaimed.
‘No, it wasn’t,’ Ava curled her head down, examining the flowers. ‘Because I got so scared I knew I could never do it again. I couldn’t go through that again. It was too terrible. So that was the end of the piano.’
‘And why can’t you dance?’ Mira continued. ‘You aren’t old.’
Ava looked up at her. ‘Oh, yes I am, Mira, I’m twenty-eight. I only started dancing a couple of years ago …’
‘She’s great,’ Iso interrupted.
‘Well,’ she glanced at Iso briefly, then back at Mira, ‘I think I do pretty well for a beginner, but it’s too late.’
‘She should have had lessons when she was a child. She sat down in second grade and played the piano. Just played something. The teacher thought she’d had lessons.’
‘Well, I’d heard it on the radio.’
‘You should have had lessons.’
‘Well, Momma and Daddy, they weren’t always doing too well. And I don’t think they ever thought about it. You know? It just never occurred to them.’
‘I wish my mother was like that. When I was seven, I used to draw a lot so my mother goes tearing out and gets me an art teacher, some creepy guy who lived down the block and did it in exchange for a meal. What a creep!’ Chris held her forehead.
‘That was one of my few mistakes,’ Val admitted.
‘It was your mistake, but I had to suffer for it,’ Chris threw back banteringly. ‘The sins of the fathers …’
‘I’m not your father.’
Chris shrugged. ‘You have to admit, Mommy, you’re the only father I have permanently. The rest are just father figures – Dave, Angie, Fudge, Tim, Grant …’ She was counting on her fingers, grinning wickedly at Val.
‘Maybe you’re better off,’ Ava said wistfully. ‘Do you ever wish you had a father?’
Chris looked at her seriously. ‘Sometimes. Sometimes I sort of imagine, you know, somebody coming home at night with the paper under his arm,’ She giggled. ‘You know, like hugging you and shit.’ She giggled again.
‘That’s called a lover, Chris,’ Iso laughed.
‘Well, to take me places, you know, not like my mother, taking me on marches against the war, but real places, like the zoo.’
‘I never knew you wanted to go to the zoo.’
‘I don’t. It’s just a place.’
‘Good, because I hate zoos.’
‘Well, what about the circus?’
‘I hate circuses.’
‘You hate everything that doesn’t have words in it.’
‘That’s true.’
‘I love circuses,’ Iso said. ‘I’ll take you, Chris.’
‘Really?’
‘Promise. Next time it’s in Boston.’
‘Great!’
‘Oh, can I go too? I love circuses,’ Ava sighed.
‘Sure. We’ll all go.’
‘I was a real devil when I was little. I used to sneak into the circus without paying,’ Ava giggled.
‘You really do feel like a devil,’ Val murmured.
‘Her real name is Delilah. How would you feel if you were named after Delilah?’ Iso grinned.
‘Iso!’ Ava pulled herself up and glared briefly at Iso. Then she turned to the others. ‘It’s true. I changed it to Ava after Ava Gardner. My momma called me Delilah Lee.’
‘It’s who you are,’ Iso said lovingly. ‘A cross between Delilah the temptress and Annabel Lee.’
‘I’d rather be Margo
t Fonteyn,’ she said swiftly, in anger, her back like flexible steel, her eyes flaming at Iso. ‘It’s you who want me to be those things, it’s you who think I’m a temptress. Do you think I’m dying too?’
‘You are a temptress, Ava! You flirt all the time, you bat your eyelashes, you really do, and you smile and act coy. You even get your car greased for nothing. The whole gas station stops work when you come in.’
‘Good!’ came the flaming reply. ‘What else are they good for? Men are only vehicles for getting things. If I know how to use them, good for me!’ Her body was taut, her fist clenched, and her face looked suddenly ravaged, the pretty pouty shy look gone. She looked noble and powerful and beaten all at once.
‘Well, you sure know how to use them,’ Iso said grudgingly.
Ava bent her head back down into her carnations. ‘You make it sound as if I was always trying to get something from men. I’m not. That’s not very nice of you. You know it’s men always at me, even when I don’t look at them. You know what it’s like on the subway. Or that guy yesterday when we were walking to the grocery store. Or the guy in the downstairs apartment. I don’t ask them for anything. I don’t need them. I don’t need men, mostly. All I need is music.’
They were all silent, gazing at her.
‘And I’m uncomfortable because everybody’s looking at me,’ she added without looking up.
‘If you could do anything in the world, what would you do?’ Iso said in a new, cheery tone.
‘Dance. In a real ballet. On a real stage.’
Iso turned to Val. ‘What would you do?’