Sleeping with Cats (14 page)

We were pointed to a sort of hostel in an old orphanage, which stank too badly even for us. We ended up lying on the ground on a mountain above the town. We had traveled all night and we slept where we were with the rising sun beginning to beat down on us. I woke with a high
fever, burning up with sunstroke. We had no ice. I had taken a Red Cross emergency course at some point, so I knew what was wrong with me and that I was in danger. We found a creek and I simply climbed in and sat there, lowering my body temperature until my brain was no longer boiling in my skull. Now I always wear a hat or a scarf, for I have had sunstroke twice. My black hair heats up like a stove top.

We took a bus down to the Rhône, even wilder than the train. It bounded and bounced down the narrow mountain road, squealing around the turns. Everybody who got on seemed to have produce or an animal in tow. Dogs, sheep and many goats, rabbits, chickens, a rooster, even a calf. We went hurtling down the mountainside much too fast for the road and pitched high in the air with every rock and pothole. I was too young and foolhardy to be scared. I thought it all marvelous.

I liked the Rhône Valley enormously and would have gladly stayed in one of those towns like Montélimar, where we ate nougat. We kept wandering till we got to Avignon. We played in the Villeneuve, which in spite of its name was a well-preserved medieval ruin. There were not many tourists anyplace we had gone so far (none at all in Le Puy), and we had the ruins to ourselves. Michel lightened up away from Paris. He was once again charming and less judgmental, less instructional. The Rhône fascinated me. It was a fast powerful river like the Detroit River, although not as wide. As a treat, I bought a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape that we drank picnicking.

We went on to the Riviera, to Menton. I know we went to the beach. I know we saw Roman ruins, but for some reason, Nice impressed me more. I thought it charming and livable, halfway French and halfway Italian. I had my first pizza in a restaurant on a date my freshman year in college: here it was street food and cheap. Here when I spoke to people, they did not first correct my grammar but answered me back. I found it easy to understand their melodic French and easy to communicate with waiters and fruit sellers and people standing waiting for buses. We slept in a park one night and then located a youth hostel up on the mountain in Villefranche.

A few days later, we went on to Pisa and then stayed for two weeks in a little dusty pension in Florence, in the studio of a sculptor on vacation. Michel talked of marriage but was not sure. I got caught up in persuading him. What a tangled weave of intentions and fears and unlikely desires. I was far more experienced sexually, and it did not occur to me I could not make him enjoy sex with me, could not waken him sensually. Sex came easily to me. It was years before I understood it does not come so easily or naturally to everybody else. It was the natural language of my body, but not of his. I could give him an orgasm, but I could not really give him pleasure. He doubted the body too much. I should have understood our differences would not only refuse to mesh but grate on one another, but I was too naive, too eager, too confident. I was like a poker player convinced I could bluff my way to the pot on two tens.

His speaking voice was deep and pleasant, as was his singing voice. He had quite a repertoire of songs, most in French but some in Hebrew. I am not a polite person myself—too greedy, too blunt, too much in a hurry—but I greatly appreciate true politeness in others, particularly in intimate situations, and I appreciated Michel's polite manner. Michel was gentle and kind, but rigid in his ideas and expectations. His early life had been chaotic and terrifying. His parents, upon leaving Germany, were not permitted to practice medicine in France; immigrant Jews were barred from the professions. They had to survive as shopkeepers. After the Germans invaded, things grew rapidly worse. He remembered his mother running with him from one of the roundups of French Jews—the notorious
rafles
—and he remembered the clandestine trip to Switzerland, the difficulty crossing the border. His early childhood had been marked by danger and terror.

In Switzerland, his parents were put in a detention camp and he was placed with a Swiss family, where he was forced to practice the Christian religion. He felt that his parents did not love him as much as his younger brother, for Daniel was with them in the camp and here he was, farmed out to people who, if not cruel, were certainly not warm or kind. He had many psychic scars even though he had experienced, comparatively
speaking, “a good war,” as they said in his family. Close friends of his family were in the Jewish Resistance, as perhaps his father was before they had to flee to Switzerland. They only got in because his parents kept all their passports and papers. They had originally been Polish, gone to Germany for schooling and a better life and then fled to France early in Hitler's regime. They were more like German Jewish families I had met in college than like Polish or Russian Jews I knew from childhood on. They belonged to a very tight group of friends who had gone through the war together, protecting one another. They were people who had counted on one another for their very lives, and they had a strength to their friendship I have only known with a few friends with whom I went through the antiwar movement: someone to whom you can absolutely trust your back, who will not betray you, with whom you take risks and hope to survive, together.

I learned many things in France and with Michel. I learned how Jewish I am. I learned how American I am. These two realizations caused a rethinking of my identity. Michel was extremely French. The things he said oftenest to me were:
One does not do that. One does not do it like that. That is not how it is done
. He had secured a small fellowship at the University of Chicago, since I was to go to Northwestern. We were married upon our return to the States, in Detroit.

My mother in a fit of pique refused to attend. I could not understand what she was furious about. I could have been married in Europe. It wasn't costing them anything. Michel did not believe in Jewish ceremonies, so we were married by a justice of the peace. There wasn't even a wedding supper at a restaurant. My father too acted annoyed. I had imagined that they would understand that a physicist was a reasonably exalted occupation, like a doctor or a lawyer, but neither of them seemed to grasp that. Besides, they mistrusted doctors and lawyers. They acted as if I were marrying a hit man or a pimp. I was embarrassed for Michel, to have to go through this ugliness, and I promised him we need see little of them for the next few years.

Once we married, slowly I became aware that he expected me to put
my writing aside like a childish hobby when we returned to France. It took a while for this to sink in, because for the first nine months, I was going to Northwestern up the El in one direction, while he was going to the University of Chicago down the El in the other direction. We lived on Wilson Avenue in Chicago in the Granada apartment hotel—cheap, cheap, twenty dollars a week—between the Friendly Tap and the Backstage Bar, which had a sign out front
CONTINUOUS ENTERTAINMENT BACKSTAGE.
It was a neighborhood of transients, pawnshops, dark beery bars, check-cashing storefronts, secondhand stores and Pentecostal churches. We were three blocks from Lake Michigan and two blocks from the El. Michel was preparing for his prelims for his doctorate, as well as working on the cyclotron. We got on well. Our time together was precious, perhaps because there was so little of it.

The El fascinated me. It was not a from-above maplike view of a city, nor immersion in traffic of the streets. Instead I sat looking into private lives, glimpses of people similar to those that had engrossed me in our summer sublet on the Lower East Side of New York. Now, however, instead of watching dramas slowly unfold day by day, I caught glimpses of lives, snapshots in passing. Every day I passed from the urban grime and electric bustle of Chicago across a frontier marked by a line of bars and liquor stores flashing neon day and night into mostly prosperous spacious tree-lined Evanston, which was dry. I found the students at Northwestern bland and boring, for the most part. They seemed cast all from the same mold.

Early in our marriage, the super found a tiny black kitten. We took her in. She had a fierce, avid disposition, a great desire to survive, a purr bigger than she was. Since I was writing on Marlowe in graduate school, I named her Tamburlaine, after the protagonist of one of his plays, a fierce Mongol leader.

She was just a cold lonely kitten and wanted to sleep with us, but Michel, who had never had a pet, insisted she must sleep in the kitchen. She managed with her tiny weight to open the swinging door. He put down pans of water—an improvised moat—to form a barrier. She slogged
through them to the bed, arriving wet, half drowned and coughing. I felt as if I were a child again, having to endure my parents' ideas about how cats should be kept. This cat never went out, was living in a two-room apartment and I was still weaning her. Why couldn't she take comfort from the warmth of our bodies and snuggle with us? It is not done to sleep with animals, Michel said. We had our first serious fight.

She was a bright cat but confined to our tiny furnished apartment. She had an imperious disposition and liked to be played with, amused. Many evenings we would both be studying, and she would select one of us, usually me, and pull the plug from my floor lamp out of the wall. She had learned that made me put my book down. After we taped the plugs to the wall, she learned to turn off the lights by taking the pull chain in her teeth. When I would sit at the kitchen table working, she would often sit in the chair opposite me, only her eyes and sharp black ears visible over the tabletop.

I worked hard at Northwestern and established a perfect record. My one friend there, besides my professor in Elizabethan drama, was Charlotte, an Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn, also a graduate student. She and I had come to Northwestern to study with Richard Ellmann, the Yeats and Joyce scholar. As he had gone off on a Guggenheim that year to Europe, we found ourselves forced to take a seminar in Keats instead. We made up for our disappointment by reading
Ulysses
aloud together and sharing our reactions to all the critics we ploughed through for our seminar. We once had the police called on us for doing Israeli dancing in the Evanston streets to blow off steam after a particularly boring seminar.

I took my master's degree at Northwestern and passed the exam with the highest score they ever had up to that point. They offered me a better fellowship. I had only to complete the Anglo-Saxon requirement and write my thesis. But Michel and his family saw no reason for me to continue. We had, they said, to get together key money to buy an apartment in Paris. That was, Michel iterated, the way it was done. I liked some of my professors in graduate school, but the scholarship alienated me. I felt as if we were killing the poems we dissected. The work was boring, boring, boring. My head was being stuffed with stale cornflakes. I did not
want to be a scholar; I wanted to be a writer. I suspected that if I continued graduate school, I would begin to get ideas for papers for MLA conferences instead of poems or stories. Security lay that way, but not the work I was put into the world to do. I would never be the writer I wanted to be if I continued for my Ph.D., I was convinced. I went to work as a secretary—first to a project studying urban renewal, then at the University of Chicago in the sociology department—to support Michel and the distant apartment.

My desire to write had not diminished, in spite of setbacks, including a friend's losing the only copy of a novel I had just completed. He was saving money by sending it parcel post instead of first class, as I had requested. After that, I would never again have only one copy of
anything
I wrote. I sometimes kept carbons of letters, out of a compulsion to make sure nothing disappeared—which proved useful in writing this memoir, frankly.

Michel's parents purchased an apartment for us, and his mother proceeded to furnish it in the style of her choosing: large formal bourgeois interiors of heavy wood, massive, respectable, depressing. We were living on what I made, and now we were in debt thousands of dollars to purchase an apartment I did not want, because that was what one did. Somewhere in Paris was a six-room apartment we were paying for, that I was expected to go to work to support in France at some extremely menial and ill-paid job, while Michel was off in Algeria in the army fighting a war he opposed. When we returned, he made clear, he wanted to start a family at once. We would visit his parents every Sunday. We would live in that damned flat with its hideous furniture.

What I wanted did not enter into the equation. He simply ignored it, not arrogantly, but backed up by his family. That was the way things were done; that was how it must be. There was only one path, and we must walk it, me several feet in the rear. I had not expected this, in my idiocy. I thought how things were when we were both university students was how things would be when we were married. I thought this in spite of everything I had seen all of my life about sex roles in marriage. I expected it to be different for me.

I experienced something interesting. As a student at Michigan and again at Northwestern, I was highly visible. I was loud, opinionated, noisy and sought as a friend and earlier as a sexual partner. I was known as a poet and a fiction writer and as a political person. I was used to being listened to, argued with, fought, followed. I was used to walking into a party and being instantly noticed.

The moment I became a married secretary, I experienced a loss of visibility. I would speak and no one would hear me. It was as if my voice had been swallowed by the air. I moved through rooms as if on castors, as if in purdah. At first, I rather enjoyed being invisible, although I found no pleasure in being inaudible. I came to resent my nonpersonhood. I got louder, shriller. It did not matter. I spoke, but the conversation went on over my head in waves that broke over me. I was of no more consequence in a conversation than Tamburlaine.