Sleeping with Cats (15 page)

When we moved to Hyde Park, the racially mixed neighborhood around the University of Chicago, where Michel was studying, Tam went with us. Now we had a much bigger apartment, unfurnished in a run-down building. Tam could run and jump and climb up on the ledges and see pigeons and sparrows in the trees outside. She was a lithe cat, completely black. Her eyes were an amazing yellow green, deep, more green than yellow. We had her altered. She was thin, as were we, partly because we had been living mostly on my fellowship and now on what I made as an underpaid secretary. Once we lived on smelt for ten days because it was the cheapest thing on sale and I bought an enormous quantity of it frozen. We ate a lot of rice, and I used food coloring on it to make it more interesting: blue rice, anyone? One night while I was still studying at Northwestern, I invited my favorite professor, a Shakespeare scholar, and his wife to supper. What I served them must have been astonishing, if not frightening. One tiny lamb chop apiece, lots of blue rice, frozen beans and some kind of pudding from a package. After they had left, Michel and I took a walk and saw them in a Chinese restaurant near the El, eating ravenously. They were both very polite.

I had no idea how to cook, but since I was expected to, I soon bought a cookbook and tried. I developed a repertoire based on the inner organs
of cows and chickens and seventeen ways of cooking kosher hot dogs. My early attempts were limited by the one cookbook (I now own a hundred), our meager finances and my severely limited knowledge of food, not to mention how little time I had when I got home from work. I went through the usual period of dumping a can of soup on everything to make a sauce. What I produced was barely edible, but we were always hungry, and food was unimportant to Michel. The vet said Tamburlaine was malnourished also, but we could not afford much. I shared my food with her, all I could do. She was particularly my cat, and as my life began to fill me with despair, I cried into her fur. We would lie on the double bed together, its sagging mattress sloping to a ravine, and I would hold her and weep.

Michel and I fought more and more. I began to try to have some influence on the course of our marriage, and I wanted our sex to improve. Michel went to a psychiatrist who told him I was immature sexually if I could not have an orgasm during our brief and perfunctory intercourse, and that I was pursuing what Michel called a chimera. Having had a good deal of quite satisfactory sex, I could hardly argue that I knew what good sex was without hurting his feelings, but neither Michel nor his psychiatrist nor his family could dissuade me of what I knew I desired. I began to realize he had little desire to please me but wanted me to “behave correctly” in all things, including sex. These were the days of the Freudian ideal in which a woman was supposed to come on demand as soon as a penis was inserted, and both partners would go off together in a simultaneous big bang. Always when I tried to talk to him, he would put off the conversation by saying he had some pressing thing in graduate school. He was angry with me but expressed it in withdrawal. He adopted a superior tone, as if dealing with an irrational child who had to be firmly disciplined. The whole last summer we were together, he refused to discuss our marriage at all until he had finished his experiments and the cyclotron run.

I began to have vivid symbolic dreams about freedom, about escaping. I was excavating a tomb, finding a sarcophagus from which the light was pouring. When I opened it, I saw myself inside. I'm alive, I thought as I
sat up. Why had I doubted it? I was writing feverishly, aware that if I succumbed to his wishes, I would soon stop, perhaps permanently. I could feel my life closing upon me, and I clutched Tamburlaine to me and talked incessantly of what I should do. I was stifling. In my dreams, I was in danger of being buried alive; when I woke, I thought my life was narrow as a grave and growing darker. I tried to speak to him in spite of his prohibition, but he turned away and glowered. He spent more and more time in the lab. I scarcely saw him. He would come home for supper and then he would go back. I knew his experiments were consuming, but I also suspected he found it pleasanter in the lab than in our apartment. I was a loud demand he wasn't about to meet. The guys using the cyclotron were a jolly lot, an elite, a club of the chosen who were careless with the danger. They held occasional parties there, drinking beer and dancing around the cyclotron.

After one of our really bitter, bitter fights, Tamburlaine pushed out the screen and ran off into the night. I put up handmade posters on every tree. I ran through the streets calling her. It was not until a year later I was walking down Woodlawn Avenue in Hyde Park and heard a cat meowing loudly. She came running up to me. With her came a boy of six. Tamburlaine was now his cat. She was sleek, well fed, friendly but not about to go off with me. She remembered me, but she had given herself to this family, a professor's family with a nice brick house and a big backyard. She was allowed outside, but the boy said she never left the yard. Tamburlaine had moved up in the world. I had moved on down.

That summer, I read Simone de Beauvoir's
The Second Sex,
which clarified my thinking and gave me an analysis I could share with no one but found illuminating. She gave me a way to think about being a woman, about marriage, about sex roles, about expectations, about freedom. I tentatively began an affair with a man I met in a writing group, loved him as I tended always to love anybody I was close to. The sex with the fellow writer was good and strengthened me, although I did not take the relationship as seriously as I was supposed to. He was southern and much older. At least he listened to me when I spoke, and he understood I was serious about writing. Both of us were in a group of Black and white
writers on the South Side who met once a week and shared our work. Several other writers came out of that group, including Harry Mark Petrakis and Robert Coover—but none of us were published yet, all wanna-bes. My lover went out of town to visit his ex-wife and children, and I resumed brooding about what I should do. Then quite simply I decided.

Why had I chosen to be unfaithful? It was partly out of simple sexual frustration, but mostly to force myself to a decision, to pry myself out of a relationship with a man I did love but with whom I could see only slow diminution, the loss of everything about myself I valued.

As soon as the cyclotron run was over, Michel finally agreed to talk with me. It was September in Chicago, almost hot, sticky. We sat in the living room of our apartment. We had a big mission oak table we were keeping for a friend whose husband had committed suicide and who never came to claim it. She disappeared. The big table filled most of the room, with a makeshift couch on one side and plank-and-brick student bookcases against the other wall. We sat elbows on the table, glaring at each other.

“What is so important you have to pester me with it?” he asked.

“I'm moving out. I want a divorce.”

He was hurt and furious. He did not ask why. He simply said, “You've never had a better relationship.”

“Perhaps not.”

“You go on and on about sex, but you don't know what you want.”

Ah, but I did. Still, I had no desire to wound him more than I had to for my own survival. He agreed to a divorce, more out of sore pride than any desire for separation. I left him everything, took my few clothes, books and papers and moved into a rooming house. Now I had only myself to support and I began to work only part-time, writing furiously. Everyone I knew thought I was crazy to leave Michel, a handsome physicist with a brilliant future and never likely to have to worry about money, but I knew my mistake had been in marrying him, not in abandoning him.

A friend told me a month later she had a long conversation with
Michel about me and was shocked to learn how little he knew of me, how little he understood of what I wanted. He saw me as an immature demanding American woman pursuing fantasies of fulfillment that did not exist. Never having read the stories or poetry I was writing, even the few things that were published, he had no notion of my work and what it meant to me. To Michel, my writing was a hobby, like stamp collecting. It had no importance, no validity. He knew little about my previous life. What I had told him he could not put into any context that was meaningful, so he simply ignored it. I had done what my mother had done, married into sexual frustration and a complete lack of understanding.

Michel argued fiercely with me for three painful and acrimonious meetings at the old apartment. He considered me a silly adolescent who did not understand what I was doing. He tried to make the divorce contingent upon my going to his psychiatrist or another at the same institute. I refused. I did not trust any psychiatrist, analyst or therapist I had met or with whom I had watched my friends try to solve their problems. I knew the Freudian and official psychiatric line on women like me, and I wasn't interested in becoming the sort of women Freudians found acceptable. There was much good in our marriage, yet it was a box for me where I experienced a gradual diminishing of self. Before I began to make demands that summer, our daily patterns were gentle and harmonious, which after my contentious home life, I valued. We were mostly considerate of each other. But I had learned that trying to write in a corner of my life didn't work.

I had several very hard years in the bottom of Chicago ahead of me, and I deserved them. I should never have come close enough to Michel to hurt him. I carried around a worm of guilt that gnawed at me. I acted nonchalant. The lawyer representing both of us took a dislike to me because of my apparent indifference and attempted to persuade Michel to track me and divorce me for infidelity. Michel did not believe I was having an affair—he had never met my lover—and the lawyer was guessing. I was not indifferent, but rather poleaxed by guilt and motivated by a fierce and consuming desire to be free to write. My attempt to draw my identity from someone else was a complete failure. No wonder Tam
burlaine had run away from us. She too wanted to be fully alive, to be free.

Loving you is a warm room

so I remember

how I lived on the moon.

Ash and jagged craters

cold bright place under

a black steel sky.

The stars pierced me

stabbing my secret

aches and itches.

Torture of the witch with needles.

Am I worthy, eyes?

Never. Objects

came out of the silence

bizarre as medals

for unknown services:

chocolate cherries

rolling down from Sinai,

rosebuds pink as

girls' first lipsticks.

When I lay down

head on a rock,

the rock

recited tirelessly

as a language record

my sins and errors.

The months bled slowly out

of us.

The landscape went bald.

The cold stayed.

One morning there

were regulations posted.

Where I had not known

boundaries existed,

first hedges, then stakes,

finally barbed wire.

His cock crowed

I know you not,

repent, and other homilies.

My bones knocked.

Chessboard of dead volcanoes.

I had to go.

The only thing to do

with the corpse

was to eat it.

A
fter my divorce,
I lived in a rooming house overrun with mice, water bugs (the Chicago equivalent of roaches) and bad smells. There were mice in the cabinets, in the closet, even in the refrigerator. I could not keep cereal on hand. I finally set traps. Every morning I would find one dead mouse in each trap, and every evening when I returned from work as a secretary in the department of sociology at the University of Chicago, I would find two more. I dreamed of a cat, but I could scarcely feed myself.

One morning I was wakened by something thumping against the furniture. I saw a large brown rat wearing a mousetrap. It was mostly uninjured, but the trap had closed around its leg. It was trying to knock the trap off against the furniture. I jumped out of bed, grabbed the rat by the tail with a wad of tissues and tried to stab it with a kitchen knife. I failed. The rat was snapping at me and wriggling all over the place. I ran across the hall and into the bathroom I shared with my floor. All I could think to do was to drop the rat, trap and all, into the toilet. I forgot that rats swim very well. I slammed down the toilet seat, pissed in the sink, grabbed my purse and left, leaving notice under my landlady's door. I found a woman graduate student in the mathematics department who wanted a roommate and I moved that day. I had so little, I only had to
carry boxes four blocks in three trips, plus my typewriter and suitcase of clothes. I don't know what happened with the rat, the plumbing or the other tenants. I was out of there.

My roommate, from a tight Greek family, and I began sharing a large run-down five-room apartment over a row of stores on Fifty-fifth Street in Hyde Park. Beneath us was a place that distributed newspapers, so it was noisy in the early morning, but I had never lived anyplace comfortable. I was used to making do and slept on a mattress on the floor. The dining room had a lurid antiwar mural left over from the Korean War, rife with vultures and exploding bombs. It reminded me of the movie of
The Horse's Mouth,
about a mural painter always in trouble with the law. I identified with the con man–artist and his willingness to sacrifice anything or anyone to his painting. I had just sacrificed a marriage to my writing.

Right across Fifty-fifth Street was the Compass, the bar where Elaine May and Mike Nichols, Shelley Berman and countless others had begun their comedy and improv careers. It was my bar of choice until the University of Chicago had it torn down. They were urban-renewing the neighborhood. Our building would be demolished eventually, one reason the rent was low and the landlord uninterested in repairs. We lived in a disappearing neighborhood.

The demolition began across the street. I stopped work on my novel, quit everything except watching the four-story apartment building being eaten by a crane. The crane, tall as a six-story building, opened its jaws and fed. Bricks cascaded in a rising cloud of plaster dust. Timbers, doors, pipes stuck crossways out of the crane's teeth. I thought of it as “she” because there was something delicate about her nibbling; a female dinosaur. The crane operator was white. The men who did the manual demolition were Black. All that remained beyond the fence of varicolored doors of what had been the Compass was a wall inscribed in huge jagged letters
MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN,
from the Book of Daniel. The real estate powers and the university had decreed that the Compass should go but that Jimmy's, the bar where jocks and frat boys
hung out, should endure. After the Compass fell into rubble, all us fringe types piled into Jimmy's, and it changed but not into the cultural icon the Compass had been.

Our apartment wound around a courtyard with a tree of heaven growing out of the roof. We sunbathed there, for it was enclosed on every side, until we acquired a voyeur. I can close my eyes and see him standing or squatting on the roof watching us. We called the police, but the police felt more dangerous than the voyeur. One of them would come upstairs, plunk himself down with his gun clanking and regale us with stories of rapes and murders of young women. We hung improvised curtains and put up with the voyeur.

When Michel, who continued to see me as an immature neurotic American girl, returned to France, I acquired furniture. He had asked me to take the dining room table, since we still thought the woman who had left it with us might return. It was a handsome mission oak table big enough for eight. I was astonished when I returned to the apartment where I had lived with him to pick up the furniture. It was meant, I think, as an indictment: full of fast-food containers, dishes on which some meal had been eaten, pots in which food had burned, trash and garbage. Water bugs and ants swarmed over the rancid food. With the help of my roommate, my boyfriend and hers, I took the table, the chairs and a small desk, then fled. If the state of the flat was supposed to indicate to me that I had not taken care of him properly, the message was wasted, since I wasn't much wanting to take care of anyone. I was barely surviving. I was trying to learn to write the kind of fiction and poetry I needed to write. I was a wee bit more successful in getting poetry published than prose. I did have a couple of short stories accepted by literary zines, but my novels came back as quickly as they went out. I was working part-time so that I could write the rest of the time, but I lived mostly on rice, pasta and potatoes and bought my clothes at rummage sales.

I went on seeing the man I had been having the affair with—saw him steadily for the next year and a half. He bought me a couple of dresses; as his taste was surer than mine had the opportunity to be, I learned a little
about how to dress from him. He was fourteen years older than me, a pleasantly ugly man with prematurely gray hair and a great body from roadwork in the Virgin Islands, where he had lived for years until his divorce, and where his ex-wife still lived with their daughters. After growing up in North Carolina, he had gone through World War II in the signal corps in India, Burma and China. In college on the GI Bill, he had developed the desire to write and had also met a young poet he married. In some ways with me, he was replicating that, for I was about the age she had been, and he considered me primarily a poet. But she was far less driven than I was. Our differences became clearer as time went on, as did my writing. He was taking his degree for high school teaching.

The hostility of everyone who had known Michel made it unpleasant to run into them. An acquaintance of his came to visit my roommate one evening while I was collating a story on the dining room table. He picked up a page, read it with a sneer and said, “Jason, Jason. Who ever heard of somebody named Jason?”

I said I had gone to school with a Jason from third grade through eighth, a skinny graceful Afro-American boy who lived not far from me, with a talent for throwing balls and knives. It was insufferable that I should have pretensions to be a writer, a badly dressed secretary who had divorced a graduate student in physics. I did receive encouragement from my boyfriend and other members of that racially mixed group of writers who met in Hyde Park every week. The most talented of us, a very tall very dark man from Trinidad named Clyde with a voice of honey and a lyrical style applied to tough material, had to give up writing to support his family back home. He went into real estate instead. I have always wondered if he ever returned to writing. Without the group, I do not in the least doubt I would have continued writing, but I would have done so more slowly and with more despair. Feedback was essential. The group was run by a couple of would-be literary agents who had taken Henry James far too seriously, but the writers in the group were what mattered. We were a bright underappreciated contentious lot with delusions of grandeur some of us eventually fulfilled.

The other day on the treadmill I was exercising to Dvorák's
New
World Symphony
—I use
everything,
from world music to rock to rap to classical to Shakrit chanting—when a memory remnant surfaced. A bunch of us—Mark Petrakis, Robert Coover, Clyde—were making a recording of Benét's
The Devil and Daniel Webster
for some project of my boyfriend's. There were no good parts for women, so I volunteered to do sound effects. I chose the Dvorák for intro music. I remember making crickets with a pocket comb and using beanbags for footsteps. Clyde was the Devil and Mark was Daniel Webster. We had to stop frequently because we broke each other up. We had a lot of games going in that group.

What happened with the boyfriend was that I began suddenly to write better fiction. I abandoned the made-up thriller I was attempting and began to use my own experience and perceptions. He didn't mind that my poetry was improving rapidly, but when the fiction began to harden and shape, it shook him. Things were not going well with his writing, and for me to suddenly begin to write as well or better turned off his sexuality. I was sorry about that. I liked the sex with him, and I liked the company. I liked being able to talk about writing with someone I was involved with. I had known it would not be a permanent relationship. I was only willing to stay in Chicago perhaps another year, and then I wanted to go to New York or San Francisco. He had no intention of leaving Chicago. He felt that given his ex-wife's health, both physical and mental, he might have to take the children. He was still emotionally entangled with his ex-wife, to the extent that whenever she came to Chicago, he could scarcely relate to me. I respected him for being responsible. The relationship was good for me while it lasted, and it ended without rancor.

What had also hurt my relationship with my writer-boyfriend was that Louise died suddenly. The official line was that she had died of a perforated ulcer, but I heard from a friend in New York that they suspected she had died of a botched abortion. She had been my best friend the first years of college, a real intimacy such as I had never before known. She married someone I had been involved with, one reason she broke off our relationship. Yet there was always a connection. Sometimes all the theatrical animosity would simply vanish and we would talk richly, honestly.
News of her death cut through me, leveling the terrain. I had always assumed there would be plenty of time to revive our friendship. I had always assumed that we would be close again.

Now the time was gone. Now there were no more chances. She was dead at twenty-three and I was paralyzed with grief and guilt. Somehow I should have prevented her death. My grieving seemed excessive to everyone around me, boring really. None of them had ever met her or could understand what she had meant to me, how close we had been, how strongly I had cared for her. I withdrew into silence. Slowly I returned to normal life, but nothing was ever the same again. I have never been able to endure a quarrel with someone I love that is not made up. To this day, I have a compulsion to make things right, because there might not be another chance.

I got a job teaching freshman comp at the Gary extension of Indiana University. The next year and a half were filled with my peripheral involvement in civil rights, attending rallies, demonstrations, various actions around Chicago, attempts at integrating restaurants or beaches. I had good friends in the civil rights movement—indeed, this was one of the times in my life I lived in a truly racially mixed milieu. In Hyde Park, there was a lot of socializing across race boundaries, and that was certainly true in the civil rights movement. It was one of the few good aspects of my life, pretty grim in general. I was poor. I was invisible as a writer. Nobody except people in my writing group gave me encouragement. Once again, I had no idea what was going to become of me, how I would ever get published.

During the presidential campaign of 1960, I was a precinct captain. Most nights I went around talking to “my” voters, laden with literature and my booklet of names. I liked it. I found going into people's apartments and houses fascinating. Here were all these buildings I had passed fifty times, and now I knew who lived in them and what colors their walls were painted and what pictures hung on those walls. My endless curiosity was fed, and I spent longer with most of them than I needed to, getting them to talk with me. My friends all asked me how I could bear to do something like that, but the truth was, I had fun and I was a good
precinct captain—rewarded by a brief close-up glimpse when Kennedy came to Chicago.

Teaching at Gary was depressing, because we were in an area like the part of Detroit where I had grown up, and African-American students had received little education. We were expected to maintain a 33 percent flunk rate. I salved my conscience by picking out a couple of students to tutor each semester. I brought them up an average of a point and a half, usually from D to B, but it was a gesture, and I knew it. I was a good teacher and they rewarded me by giving me freshman lit to teach, sort of Great Books. I loved teaching Homer, Job, Sophocles. I tried to give them a little extra in every course, because I felt bad about their prospects. Another poet, Henry, taught there, and we became good friends. He was part friend, part lover, part would-be shrink.

I had gone on being close to Nadine after Michigan: she was one of the people with whom I regularly exchanged manuscripts and criticism. She had gone to the Iowa MFA program, where I visited to decide whether to enroll. We spent a lot of time with an African-American writer from St. Louis who was also an outsider in the program. He drove a white Caddy convertible he had paid blood for in the ghetto, and it meant a great deal to him. It was in a way the symbol of what he had given up to become a writer, the easy but violent drug life. The guys who ran the writing program told him halfway through his year that they wouldn't renew his fellowship if he didn't sell the car. Why should he have a Cadillac when they didn't? We bugged everybody by riding around in it the whole time I was visiting, but I knew that program was not for me. They simply could not empathize with him. I would fare no better with them, and the classes I sat in on were competitive and wanted to impose a type of writing I had little interest in doing.