Her Mother's Daughter (68 page)

On the way back, I worried the adventure might be my last: Mike had three more bourbon old-fashioneds with dinner, and although he drove back a lot slower than he drove there, the road seemed even more treacherous. But the canvas top of the Jeep was down, and Mike kept glancing up and saying “Will you look at that goddamned sky?” and I leaned my head back and stared. The sky here is huge and black and the stars stand out against it so brilliantly that they reach out and include you—you feel part of the same universe with them…. And I thought, I have never seen stars before. I didn't say it, though. I didn't want to seem touched, or touchable….

The motel lobby was empty when we returned; there were no sounds even from the bar. I turned to shake Mike's hand, to thank him for the dinner, and he looked at me and pulled me—hard—toward him and held me close against his body. For the first time in my life, a man's acting proprietary did not offend me. My body didn't stiffen, it didn't pull away. I remember when boys—for they were boys, back then—acted this way, how I became stiff-spined as a cactus tree, how I pushed them away. But it was different this time, and what was different was my
body.
It let itself be held, it leaned into his, it thrilled to his. My mind let itself down into dark warmth, a smell of body, and the rhythm of pulses. We stood together for what felt like a long time. I knew he wanted me to ask him to come with me to my room. But I didn't. I said I was tired and walked down the long hall alone, feeling him watching me, feeling his body chilled by the loss of mine.

I guess I was feeling desirable, desired, self-conscious, but all I was aware of as I walked away from him and into my room was what I imagined
he
was feeling. I put myself into his mind, what I imagined was his mind. I fantasized him fantasizing about me—about pushing me hard against the wall, taking the key from my hand and opening the door and insisting, in an urgency of desire, on deep kisses rooted all the way down in my clitoris….I don't know what I would have done had he done that. I don't know why I turned away. It's true, I am tired, but here it is after midnight and I'm still writing.

JANUARY
16. 2 AM. Emplaned.

Well, of course the next night I did and he did and we did and now I am on the plane again reeling from exhaustion, from too little sleep, I feel I've aged ten years in three days. And now I'm numb. They've served some rotgut in tinfoil, and my belly's full so now I'm going to sleep all the way to New York.

I
BARELY REMEMBER THAT
trip. What surprises me most as I read this diary is the excitement, the flush, the thrill. I don't remember myself ever feeling such things. Probably I was just high with the new experience. Maybe I was infatuated with the idea of being desired—it was new to me then. I didn't yet know that women fall in love with themselves through the agency of male desire—see themselves gorgeous, taunting, challenging men into uncontrollable passion; or that men fall in love with themselves through the agency of female admiration—see themselves powerful, wise, knowing, in control, twice their size in the mirrors of women's eyes; that most of what we call love, romance, desire, happens in a mirror, is a kind of cooperative masturbation. I was still a child at thirty.

Still, she's not so bad, that girl, she's kind of sweet. So why have I gone to such lengths to bury her? To hide her under my present truly cool and assured exterior, the facade of a person who has never known fear or embarrassment, who knows herself too well to fall in love with herself, and men too well to look up to them. Some of that facade is true, though, all the way through. Is it reality itself that has made me old and tired?

What is really embarrassing is the way I bought the whole message—Man Against Nature, Progress, Better Lives Through Industry. Oh, I suppose even that is understandable. That
World
should, in 1960, think enough of a new hydroelectric plant (it wasn't the first, after all) to send me on such an expensive trip gave the project huge importance in my eyes. I didn't know then that
World
regarded my expenses and wages as peanuts, that they had and would discard material for which they had paid five times as much if it didn't suit them. To me, in 1960, a plane ticket in coach, a motel for five nights, meals and cab fare and eighty rolls of film represented a significant investment, even utter commitment. I also knew that my work on this assignment would determine my future at
World.
And that must have influenced me, led me to feel what they wanted me to feel. I was bought. I let myself be bought.

The evidence is there in the notebook, in the wide scudding handwriting, in pages of excited descriptions replete with exclamation points and underlinings, of underground generators, geyser fields, machines; there are even drawings of machines with the names of their parts attached by sloppy swiftly drawn arrows. Excitement was the form my nervousness took. I had never, in school, felt frightened of failure; nor did I now. But fear fueled my interest, my absorption in the material.

And that rhapsody about the housing development planned for a huge tract a few miles from the dam, that ideal community of neat little houses for the maintenance crew, larger houses for the managers, schools, shops, an enclosed swimming pool, a movie house. My heart was moved to an outpouring of praise for the men who thought this up, who planned and designed it, for the happy people who would live in it, this community made of papier mâché complete with tricycles in the driveways and wading pools in the backyards.

It is embarrassing. But how could I have known then the kind of lives that would in fact be lived in those developments, the blank stupor that was the realization of the American Dream: alcohol, drugs, and TV to numb empty hearts, empty heads…. I was too young to know then that when people plan the lives of other people, the result can only be a robot world. No one knew. They thought they were doing something good.

Strangely, what I do remember is what I
didn't
write about—the mountains, one after another, on into eternity, all different colors—sienna, purple, deep grey-brown, black. Sun-bleached or shadowed, they were still and empty and majestic against a sky blue and empty as a slate, things given, not to be argued with. Yet what was happening there, then, was that men
were
arguing with them, manipulating them, altering them, calling it Progress. Maybe it was progress. Maybe those little houses are better than wherever else the people who bought them might have lived. I do know that it was ugly, all of it, and that I no longer believe that anything ugly can benefit humankind. My first reaction endures: that splendid vast landscape with a huge white concrete bathtub broad as a town set in its middle.

Wallace Stevens wrote about a jar in Tennessee—about man's art giving meaning to meaningless nature. Insurance executive. That has to do something to you, to spend your life in an insurance office. Well, I've spent mine as a photographer, and I know that the intentions of the maker are imprinted on the thing made as clearly as fingerprints on a murder gun, or character on a forty-year-old face. And that dam even in unfinished state revealed the heavy fistprint of the conqueror who claims to be bringing water to the wasteland, but who is actually branding with his own insignia the rumps of the slaves who pass the buckets. The water comes with his name on it, writ in water, that's true triumph, conquering nature. So massive, so seemingly impregnable, so intimidating, like the tombs of the pharaohs decorated with massive statues of the man, his face imprinted upon the desert.

I don't recall Mike What's-his-face either. He must have been the first man I screwed after Brad…. He's gone. I can't even summon up his face. Doesn't matter. He wasn't important.

T
UESDAY,
J
ANUARY
20. Lynbrook.

I've decided to keep up this habit of writing at night even when I'm not traveling. It's a relief, like talking to an adult in the evening. Of course, there's no response from a blank page. Still, it
feels
almost as if there were. As if the act of writing things down on a piece of paper summoned some other presence, critical, carping, the voice of a gargoyle, saying Liar, Liar, forcing you to sit up straighter, correct yourself, abandon all pretense….

These last few days have been chaotic. I'll try to recoup them….

Friday, yes, I got in at nine New York time, having succeeded in sleeping most of the way from LA, and went straight to the film lab. I took a cab from the airport: it was
World
's money, but I still felt guilty. From the lab I walked to the subway, drooping. It was six AM for me and my equipment seemed to have put on a huge amount of weight in the past week. Horrible Long Island Railroad home. Awful!

Then home, finally. The kids were at school so the house was quiet. Pani, of course, wanted to talk, but it's always easy to escape from her, it takes only a kind word. The fridge held the remains of Pani's wonderful meals and I munched on cold kielbasa, dipping it into a container of beets and horseradish. Then I went to bed and slept until the kids came home. They were really happy to see me! They asked questions, I told them about the plane trip and the little table and the meals in aluminum foil, and the mountains and the arrow shot across the gorge and the truck hoist and my brilliant camerawork. They didn't even go out to play that afternoon, just hung around me. Their news—98 on a math test (Arden), 95 on a science test (Billy), Joan got a dog, can we get one? Mrs. Morton, the second-grade teacher, was pregnant and refused to say whether she wanted a boy or a girl—led climactically up to its heart: what Pani let them do (
MOM, TAKE NOTE
): stay up to see the eleven o'clock news, have dessert even if they didn't eat their carrots; leave their shoes in the living room overnight; and what she didn't let them do (
MOM, DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS!):
go out to play without sitting to chat with her over
chruściki
and milk; leave for school on a cloudy morning without galoshes; sleep over at a friend's house on a school night (something they know perfectly well I don't let them do either).

I couldn't keep my hands off them, I kept touching their shoulders and stroking their heads and rubbing their cheeks and hugging them. I let them have as many cookies as they wanted, I broke my own rules. And they babbled on, eyes glistening, cheeks pink and a little chafed from the cold. I smoothed almond cream on their cheeks. I felt we were closer than we'd been in months—maybe ever—and that my guilts were unwarranted. I asked them what they wanted to do over the weekend. I suggested ice skating on Silver Lake, sledding in Hempstead Park. Their faces fell: actually, they had plans to do just those things, but with their friends. They didn't come out and say I wasn't welcome to join them, but the message was clear. I subsided back into motherhood.

Guilt reasserted itself: of course you can't expect to go off and leave them for five days and have them hang around waiting for you to go ice skating. It was no more than I deserved that they should desert me over the weekend. I reminded myself that they usually spent weekends with their friends, that it was good for them to do that, and that for the most part I welcomed those desertions because I could go out by myself too and photograph. But some vague anxiety seemed to have just settled in me, like the dull ache of arthritis.

As it turned out, it was just as well they were gone all day Saturday. Lou Gluck, Farrell's assistant, called around ten to say the contact sheets had been delivered to
World
and that he'd glanced at them but was waiting for the color prints, and that Farrell would call me on Monday. He said nothing about them. This planted an insane anxiety in me. Did Lou like them or not? Would I be dropped by
World
as swiftly as I'd been picked up? I couldn't be sure myself how the pictures had turned out. I sat on my bed, my hand still gripping the telephone receiver, the dial tone buzz screeching in the empty room.

I imagined pictures of blurry machines, sunburned streaky film, fogged mountains, distorted human figures. I kept hearing Lou's noncommittal voice tinged with disapproval, even contempt: stupid broad can't even hold a camera right. I imagined a heap of contact sheets, forty rolls worth, all worthless. My heart kept panging as if the Sierra Nevada archer were sending arrows all the way from California. I should never have slept with Mike, it made me too tired, I wasn't as sharp as I could be, I should have stayed more alert….

I tried to pull myself together. First, I put the phone down. Then I started to unpack, but every item of soiled clothing I pulled from my smelly bag made me sink down on the floor. I was gasping, I could hear my own breath. Maybe I was having a heart attack.

In the next hours, I managed to get the laundry together and pile it near the stairs. I didn't want to go downstairs where I might meet Pani, who would want to talk. I didn't feel capable of speech. My heart hurt from all the banging going on inside it. I straightened the living room a little, and washed the breakfast dishes. Then I sank into a chair and sat. I didn't notice when it got dark; I didn't realize the children still weren't home. They did come in eventually, happy with bellies full of soda Joyce's mother had bought them after the skating, and they made enough noise and had such high spirits that my stupor just got steamrolled and I was able to go through the motions of getting dinner and cleaning up after it.

All Sunday morning I was a cranky wreck. I couldn't concentrate, I couldn't even read
The Times.
I did the laundry and started to iron. The kids went sledding; Tim Moroney's mother drove them and I was to pick them up at four. I turned on the radio. I was standing there, the heat from the iron rising into my face, listening to a soupy WPAT rendition of “Somebody Loves Me” when it occurred to me that somebody did. Into my poor battered mind slides the memory of this gorgeous man who had looked at me with urgent hunger, with passion.