“It doesn’t take chance, it takes thought.”
“It takes
room!
The room to choose, the room to entertain possibilities. Some Indian woman in a sleepy Guatemalan town can’t see beyond her own dusty village, can’t see any future for herself beyond the one her mother, her aunts, her sisters, her friends must live.”
“And what’s wrong with that?”
“What’s wrong with it is that she may be miserable!”
“Nonsense. Her expectations aren’t great, so she’s probably less unhappy than a middle-class woman with pretensions. And when your woman’s sleepy Guatemalan town is ready for progress, it will find it.”
Dolores clenched her hands so tightly her nails dug her palms.
“Apathy,” Victor continued. “Most people live in apathy. I can’t spare a sigh for them.”
Nor spare a sigh/Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie.
She spoke calmly, sadly. “You sound as if you believed that all people need is ambition and will. But there are millions of people whose ambition and will have been sapped before they’re five years old. Who will never have room enough to choose because they can’t see enough, who don’t have energy because they weren’t fed enough. People are slotted into their positions in life.”
“We’re doing what we can about that.” Coldly. “There are social programs….”
He fished for a cigarette. She did not offer to help him. He found one, found his lighter, and tried to light it, but the wind blew out the flame.
“There are social programs,” she repeated, cold too, as he waited for the car lighter to pop out. “Most of them are useless. Band-Aids. You can’t cure a disease by cutting off the symptoms, you have to get at the root. And the root is our system of values.”
“Capitalism, I suppose,” he drawled nastily.
“No. Socialism is bad too. Better in some ways, worse in others. I see little difference between them. Both see people as means to ends. If the end is called by different names, that doesn’t make it necessarily a different thing. Production is the great aim, production and power. Not felicitous life.”
“What the hell do you think the production and power are supposed to do but help people live more pleasantly?”
“Supposed! Supposed! In fact, the end of power is power and more power!”
“That’s the thinking of a person who doesn’t know anything about power! Goddamned ivory-tower academics! I’m sorry, Lorie, I don’t mean to be unkind, but the people you work with have infected your thinking.”
“Maybe I’ve infected theirs,” she shot in angrily.
He ignored her. “Winning is wonderful! Success is wonderful! There’s nothing like it! That’s felicitous life!”
She rubbed her forehead. “Victor, this is hopeless. Winning is wonderful, yes—if you don’t have to pay too much for it. To win money and lose your emotional life is not to win. Success too—it isn’t success after all, is it, if it isn’t an expression of your deepest energies? You know that old Greek recipe for happiness? Happiness is the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope.”
“Okay, okay.” He nodded agreement, nodded eagerly. He
wanted
them to find some common language, wanted to agree. She watched him carefully. “I’ll buy that,” he nodded.
“But my point is that few people are permitted the scope even to discover what their vital powers might be. Scope is given to very few, and most of them are men.”
“Now that’s not true! It’s just that most women don’t want what men want! Look at you: you’ve had success, you’ve had books published.”
“I haven’t had success in your terms.”
“My terms?”
“My books have earned me about five thousand dollars—if that—in the last five years. The best thing they did was get me out of The Swamp.”
He looked at her puzzled.
“Place I used to teach. Our Lady of The Swamp.”
He burst out laughing. “Really?”
“No. I just call it that. Intellectually, it’s appropriate.”
They smiled at each other. He put his right hand on the wheel and his left hand on her knee. He thought they were friends again.
“Anyway, Victor, I don’t count. I’m one of the fortunate ones. I had a chance for an education, I grew up with lots of kinds of nourishment. That’s not the case for most people.”
“Jesus!” He removed his hand. “What do you expect me to do about that, Lorie?”
“Think about it! I expect you to think about it! How can you walk around in the world thinking the way you do when it’s so patently false? How can you sit there complacently and say people get what they want? Just because you were slotted into alpha doesn’t make you essentially superior, just luckier!”
“Listen, Lorie, I am aware of that. I also believe that people’s disappointments are commensurate with their expectations, and that failure by my standards may not be failure by theirs.”
“But maybe you’re wrong. Maybe people’s disappointments are commensurate with their essential abilities, abilities never fully discovered, never trained, unusable, lying there atrophying year by year. I think that must hurt as much as the twisted feet of an adolescent Chinese girl back in the days when they still bound them. Every day the natural easy growth of her feet is stunted a little more; every day the bone is deformed a little more. Agony: years of agony. I’ve seen this happen in people’s minds. They can’t speak of it anymore than that Chinese girl could: they can only cry, like her, every night when the binding is removed for a few blessed minutes. What could she say? Whom could she complain to? It was the way things were. It is the way things are for lots of people.”
He twisted his mouth. “Okay,” he protested. “It’s just that I find it distasteful to look down on people. That’s why I hate the liberal party line, it’s such a god damned knee-jerk response….”
“The bleeding hearts, you mean?”
He glanced at her swiftly. “I didn’t say that. And I’m not talking about not having sympathy for people. It’s just that to look at a whole class of people as if they were helpless children seems to me to harm them and to teach them to see themselves the same way. And it’s bad for those who look down, too: it allows them such an easily earned superiority. In the short term, my view may seem hardhearted, but in the long term, you get better results if you expect people to take care of themselves, to produce, to be responsible for themselves.”
“All the while conveniently overlooking the fact that the distribution of wealth and the laws that support it, the traditions and attitudes of our culture, make it impossible for some people to take care of themselves.”
“No! I agree those should be changed.”
“But they can’t be changed unless we first look at people as classes and see that the different classes are permitted different privileges, and some no privileges at all.”
He hit the steering wheel with his hand. He sighed.
Dolores lighted a cigar.
“You never give up,” he lamented.
“I can’t,” she said quietly.
Y
ES, THEIR DIFFERENCES WERE
wide, abysmal, even.
Dolores spent much time in the sitting room of her flat, thinking. She wasn’t working as hard as she used to. It was almost as if she were intentionally leaving the collation, so she’d have something to do if he had to take another trip….
Insidious, love. Not
his
fault, she was doing this of her own accord. Still, he’d been so disappointed when she said she wouldn’t always go with him. That was pressure, wasn’t it?
Yes, but she didn’t have to give in to it.
She sighed and lighted her third cigar of the day. One after lunch, one midafternoon when she needed a break from the books, one after dinner, and one before bed. Discipline. Victor was undisciplined. He smoked too much, drank too much, drove too fast. Those were the smallest of their differences.
The thing is, she thought, I couldn’t take him home. And then felt shock at the thought. When was the last time you
wanted
to take someone home? Jack, probably. Ten years ago.
Dolores had spent most of her adult life not just in academia, but in
Boston
academia, which was a special world. Victor was a businessman, successful in the world, working for an American corporation which might, as far as she knew, produce napalm. A corporation which was controlled by a multinational corporation, and which was almost certainly producing industrial waste. Victor represented everything Dolores’s society most despised. Although, heaven knows, MIT didn’t quibble about little things like napalm or sending aid and assistance to the Shah of Iran. But her friends did.
Victor had a fine, if lifeless, London flat, an expense account that permitted them, when they traveled, to sleep and eat in whatever luxury a town provided. Dolores was used to cheap pensione, bedsitters, a glass of vin ordinaire at the local. She suspected he cared more about money than he did about people. She only suspected this because it was not something you could ask someone: who would admit that they cared more about money—or power—than about people? Still, there were those who did. And perhaps Victor was one of them.
That’s how insidious love was. It made you betray your principles.
Yes. And while he claimed he did not trust the military, he believed strongly in what he called a “ready defense.” He had been known to vote Republican.
If she tried to take him home, no one would speak to him.
Of course, there were probably lots of people in Cambridge who wouldn’t speak to
her.
Sin still existed in Cambridge, Mass., abounded, in fact, far more than grace. There were people who looked askance at you if you ate meat, or drank liquor, or smoked anything but pot. If you drove a big car, you were exposed to daily dirty looks. There were people who saw you as an Enemy Nation if you did not run every day.
Dolores had managed to slide through such standards, not having owned a car since 1970 (the real mark of a true believer), smoking only four cigars a day when she didn’t cheat, and eating little meat. She drank mostly wine, and little of that. And she had never never never voted Republican. In the game of “how pure are you?” often played subtly at Cambridge parties, Dolores came off as at least not among the damned, if not among the chosen. But Victor, who had stocked her kitchen with a dozen bottles of Scotch, who ate huge steaks and roast beef, who chainsmoked, Victor would be outcast.
But that was not a problem since she was not taking him home.
If he took her home, it would be far worse. Dolores at the Scarsdale Country Club? With her hair hanging straight, its grey flecks showing? No makeup at all? And her funny clothes, Indian shirts and jeans, bare feet whenever possible, and never, under any circumstances, high heels? She owned two skirts: one, long and multicolored, which she wore to the rare formal affairs she had to attend; the other a mini, long out of style, in light pink cotton. She wore it in the summer because it was cool and she did not feel comfortable on the street in shorts.
At a Scarsdale cocktail party, she would be at someone’s throat within five minutes. She had to admit she was not noted for her tolerance. She would attack something, anything. If she could not get a rise out of them (because of course they were terribly polite) yakking about recent Supreme Court decisions, the Bakke case, the First Amendment stuff, increasing withdrawal of federal funds for abortion, the policies of industry, spreading shit over the earth and sea and sky, no, not shit, shit was recyclable, poison; yes, if she could not get a rise out of them with any of that, she would attack their complacency, their elitism, their easy assumption that they were entitled to their privilege.
No, it wouldn’t work.
But it wasn’t a problem, since Victor was not taking her home.
She had never in her life permitted herself to love someone who came from the world Victor came from. She had never even permitted herself to know such a person very well. Not only that, but when she was with him, she sometimes smoked a cigarette. And drank Scotch.
Worst of all: she missed him when he wasn’t with her.
Principles compromised, all the way down the line. And after all these years. Not that being celibate was a matter of principle. It had just happened, but life was better that way. So it was a shock to be involved with a man, any man at all, but especially a man who was her opposite in almost everything. It was like consorting with the enemy. They shaved your head for that and paraded you naked through the streets.
How had it happened anyway, her becoming celibate? When did it begin, when did the faces start to fade, the mouths to open and close by themselves mindlessly, saying I, I, I, saying
my
car, that ball game, the best restaurant in London Paris New York Milwaukee, the same things over and over, hardware hardhat hardsell? When did my ears begin to close? Was it after Saul, who took two steps forward and three back, or Doug, who screwed with fervor and retired in shame?
Or was it that every time she had a bad experience with a man, she’d say: never again will I do
that
—drive someone to Princeton, listen to a boy’s problems with his parents, not show my anger when I’m angry, make cassoulet. And each “never again” had led to longer and longer spaces between lovers. And finally to no lovers at all.
Because she was clever, she could read faces and manners, and she could tell when one of them wanted to be mothered, nursed, doctored, shrinked, educated, placated, fed, stroked, curried. Given given given to. Always.
Just as well. Slavery to the body, sex. And besides, it wasn’t really sex women wanted men for. Do it better themselves. It was something else, it was wanting a body that stood there behind you that you could rest your head against, and trust not to move, not to slit the throat, or cut off the head, or pull the hair. It was to be together with someone who was there. Carol, saying in a dull voice: “Oh, yes, twenty-five years. It’s a long time. It’s not much of a marriage, it’s pretty dead. We don’t talk, we just inhabit the same house. But there’s one thing that keeps me here, it’s worth all the boredom, the routine. Lying in bed with John, I’m not talking about screwing. Just lying there together with him, his body warm and solid next to me. It’s nice. It’s comfortable.”