A woman came into the shop. She looks around. But I know she's not here to shop. She doesn't touch a thing.
Finally she must figure enough time has past.
“Are you married to John Chambers?”
She isn't bad looking. Too much silk but not too much flesh so the silk lies flat. She takes care of her body. Her shoes are fine, they shine like a black apple. With straps that start up her calves because she knows she's got good legs. She's not my type. I mean she's not one of me. But I can see Johnny with
her. East Side. Short hair too but blond. This is definitely not Cosima who I picture with curly hair and unenviable eyebrows and by this time, 12 years after the fact, a fat ass.
“Yes,” I say.
She looks at my left hand. Don't you just love women who can't help searching for the evidence. If God came down like Zeus for a quick one they'd ask It for a sign. Make the wind blow. Calm the seas.
“Poor thing,” she says.
“Why do you say that?”
“I used to date him.”
“Oh really.”
“If you could call it that.”
“I wouldn't know. I never dated him. I just married him.”
“So I heard. It was very fast. I don't suppose you're pregnant.”
“Not yet.”
“I wouldn't think so.”
“Why?”
“He's hardly the most virile man I've ever met.”
“Did you try?”
Finally she touches a quilt. She rubs the back of her hand along it the way her mother must have done with her. “I don't see what business that is of yours.”
“It's not.”
Now I think she's about to touch me. “Admit it. He's the strangest man you've ever met.”
“Absolutely.”
She does touch me! Her cardinal nails come to rest on my sleeve. “I knew it! God, how can you stand him?”
“Sometimes I can't.”
“Oh you poor thing.”
“Sometimes he's too much for me.”
“For me too! A friend of mine fixed us up. He's rich, she said. He's handsome, she said. He's got 16 rooms in the 60s, she said. Great, I said. I was ready, believe me. Aren't we all. I should have listened to my father. Before he died he ran a brokerage house and the only thing he ever taught us because he said it was the only thing we'd ever have to know was if something's too good to be true it's too good to be true. And of course he was right. He drove me crazy.”
“Your father?”
“Of course not my father. Him. Your husband. John Chambers.”
“How so?”
“How so! How can you of all people ask me that! He's from another planet, that man. He's up in the stratosphere. He's so busy looking for the meaning of life that he doesn't have a life. I tried everything. I cooked meals for him. I went to Merkin Hall with him. I opened up a charge at Brooks Brothers. I spent hours sneezing from the dust on the bottles at Garnet. I read Thus Spake whatever his name is. I even asked him to marry me.”
“Why did you do that?”
“To see what he'd say.”
“And what did he say?”
“He said he couldn't.”
“Did he say why?”
“Oh yes he certainly said why. He said he couldn't because he'd already had sex!”
I shouldn't have laughed.
“It's not funny,” she said.
“Maybe it wasn't then but it is now.”
“I pity you,” she said.
Not as much as I pity you.
“Why did you come here?”
“I thought you might need someone to talk to.”
“I have someone to talk to.”
“A shrink I hope.”
I thought that was her exit line until she said from the door, “So what is he like to be married to?”
“Too good to be true,” I said.
I showed my diary to Ike.
“What the hell is this, Clara?”
“My diary.”
“What happened to it?”
“What do you mean?”
“It looks like you wrote it with your toes.”
“That's my handwriting.”
“Just keep using the computer, Clara.”
“Don't you want to read it?”
“Nobody could read this, Clara. It's sick. I don't know what it says in here but you ought to marry the first man who can read it. You'd be meant for each other.”
“That's ridiculous. I want to marry you.”
“That's impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because I love you too much.”
Is it possible to be so happy that you want to destroy either yourself or the person who makes you so?
Johnny told me the story of a political philosopher named Louis Althusser who strangled his wife to death. He said he had always loved her.
Johnny says he can't understand that. But I can. There is something about being married that sometimes makes me want to kill him. I don't know if it's to make him go away or to keep him forever.
I look at him next to me and I try to imagine life without him. I blot him out. I don't see him. He's not there. And I feel a terrible mixture of sadness and relief.
I gave myself to him forever because I thought he was the only innocent person left on earth. I am haunted by him. I am in love with his suffering. And his silence. No matter how much he talks there's always that silence, somewhere behind his voice. I can climb inside my husband and find peace. He's my grave.
Why is it so painful to love somebody? Why is it so easy to imagine losing the most precious thing you have that you think you would rather destroy it than lose it?
I stopped on the way home today at Crotch Veneer on West Broadway and bought Johnny some new underpants. They're plain. They're white. They're briefs.
“I can't wear these,” he said when he unwrapped them. I could see from the pain in his eyes l. that he was trying hard not to hurt my feelings and 2. that he was frightened of his new underwear.
“Why can't you?”
“Because I've never worn anything like this in my life. I've always worn the same kind of underwear.”
I couldn't stand it any more. He is so conservative. He is so old-fashioned. He is so unaware of how beautiful he is. All I really wanted was to see him in a normal pair of underpants
with his buns outlined and his basket full.
So I said, “Well I hate your underwear.”
“You hate my underwear?”
“Yes. I have always hated your underwear.”
“You have? But why?”
“Because they're so drab. So boring. So ugly.”
“I see.” He looked down at himself with a painful expression in his eyes. Like he can see his underwear right through his pants.
“At least try them on.”
“Am I allowed to return them if I don't care for them?”
“Of course not! God, are all rich people like you. Don't worry. If you don't like them, I'll wear them.”
The fear left his eyes. He smiled. “Now I understand what this is about.”
“What?”
“You know as well as I.”
“No I don't. And get that smug look off your face.”
He kept right on smiling and put on the underpants. “These are monumentally uncomfortable,” he said. “I think my testicles are becoming one. Here, you wear them.”
He put them on me. “How do I look?”
“Ridiculous,” he said. “May I?”
He put his hand in through the fly. Oh my.
“I'm sorry,” I said.
“But you're a woman.”
“I meant that we had our first fight.”
“We did?”
“Over underpants no less.”
“I like these,” he said.
“But I thought ⦔
“On you.”
“So do I.” The fly is like a door that's meant to be opened from the inside only. Why don't they make these for women.
This guy knows more things. He thinks I'm a Bell so he tells me about the Bells. I know I once read A Room Of My Own by Virginia Woolf just because of the title. But now I don't remember anything else about it. That's what happens to me with books. It's completely different with things I see. Or even things I think I see. Or things I see on the inside that don't even exist on the outside. I see them once and never forget them. Beautiful things, I mean. Ugly things I don't see even once. I can stop them between my eyes and my brain. They never register. But beautiful things last forever. I remember every good quilt I've ever seen. Even ratty ones. If you ask me about a pre-Depression Bullseye made in Pennsylvania by Alverba Herb I can tell you that it's got a green and red little circle in the middle that's a bullseye exploding into either 8 or 9 concentric circles of diamonds and triangles. What I like best about it is the contrast of the simple appliqued flowerpots in the corners. It has a cyan blue ground and a rope-stitched murrey border. There are hearts in the ground quilting. It will go with me to the grave.
I don't remember words the same way. He does. But he doesn't seem very good with images. His mind's a blank. Which I notice is what scares him. Blankness, I mean. Like the quarter he told me about with nothing on it. Like the silence he went through. He talks a mile a minute now, but it's that silence I keep thinking about. How it must have purified him. He's like a saint. I want him to save me.
After Virginia Woolf's sister Vanessa married Clive Bell,
Virginia said, “God made her for marriage. And she basks there like an old seal on a rock.”
“She makes it sound so comfortable,” I say.
“Well,” he says, “Clive Bell was in love with Virginia. His sister-in-law. They had an affair. And Virginia was in love with Vanessa. Her sister. And Vanessa encouraged Clive and Virginia in their passion. But they never actually made love.”
“Vanessa and Virginia?”
“Virginia and Clive Bell.”
I love these stories he tells me. Where do they come from. I wonder if a mind can hold all these things and still have room for me.
Johnny freaked when he unfolded his new quilt.
“It's a swastika!” he screamed. “We can't put this on the wall!”
“Why not?”
“A swastika? What will people say!”
“What people? Nobody ever comes in here except Elspeth and delivery boys.”
“I wasn't referring to other people. I meant ourselves.”
It is so like Johnny to make the world out of nobody but us. Is it any wonder I feel so safe with him.
“Help me hang it,” I said.
He did. And while we hung it, I told him all about it. That it was made in the 1890s and was an Indian symbol and was supposed to signify good luck. All it is is a cross with arms, but it was a shape that went back far earlier than the time of Christ. It has appeared in many cultures. Quilts like this go by many names. The Chinese 10000 Perfections. The Battle Axe of Thor. Wind Power of the Osages. Favorite of the Peruvians.
(When I mentioned that one he said that his favorite of the Peruvians is our little man with the big dick) The Pure Symbol of Right Doctrine. Even Heart's Seal, whatever that may be, the best or worst of things, depending on when you seal it.
“How do you feel about it now?” I asked him when we got it up on the wall and adjusted the lights.
“Confused.”
“Good.”
I wanted him to know that pictures can be like words and destroy their own meaning.
He's not the only one here who longs for something stable.
It's funny how you can be married to a guy and live with him sleep with him eat with him talk with him laugh with him cry with him joke with him shop with him drink with him drive with him suck him off in the shower and you still don't know who he is.
Thank goodness.
We went up to the Cloisters today. It's still his favorite museum in the city. I tell him that's because after I've been dragging him around to every art museum big and small in the city for the past 2 years so he can learn how to look at art what he still likes to do most is lie down on the grass and neck and how many museums in the city can you do that at. (Outside the Egyptian Room at the Met is one place!) But he told me today that the reason he likes to go to the Cloisters is because it has his favorite work of art.
“And what might that be?” I ask him.
“St. Jerome Tempted By Visions Of Maidens,” he answers.
It was done in the early 15th century and looks a little like the Cloisters with its arches and columns. St. Jerome is a narrow-eyed man with women's hands. The maidens are in the “city” (in other words the place of sin) and wear beautiful dresses low on their tits and tight on their hips. One of them is looking at another one like a woman about to get it on with a woman (St. Jerome was not very original with his visions!) And the second one is looking right at old Jerome, P. F. as we used to say in junior high (“Pussy Forward”). I point this out to Johnny. “That's called lordosis,” he says. “You mean it's something religious,” I answer. He laughs. “Not precisely. Lordosis is the name for the pushing forward of the genitals, the offering up of one's edea, one's
sex
to a desired partner.” “So it
is
religious” is what I offer. “Not to St. Jerome,” says Johnny.
We neck on the grass.
This is the first time we're reading the same writer at the same time. I'm reading The Stranger. He's reading The Notebooks. The day we met he quoted Camus to me. I wonder if he remembers. I do. I also remember that one of my first boyfriends in New York read Camus. In French. I loved the way those books looked. They were white paperbacks with black and red printing. I used to borrow them and pretend to read them on the bus. It was a good way to meet other boys but only on certain buses. Fifth Avenue practically anywhere. Lexington but only around Hunter. Broadway near Lincoln Center and then up around Columbia. And the crosstown buses through Central Park, always the crosstown buses, except you had to work a lot faster than you did on the avenues.