But the thirty pages she had written were good, very good for a first draft, and she was high, dancing as she moved around the apartment. And Victor, almost as if he’d known, showed up without calling, at two o’clock on a Friday afternoon, and caught her high.
And was high himself, having turned some fine piece of business by getting the American muckety-muck’s approval. “Worth the damned ten days of boredom!” he exclaimed. “If I had to listen once more to a complaint about the soggy English toast, the tasteless—read sugarless—salad dressing, the lack of American efficiency in the hotels … ! Once more, and I was going to puke. Let them go back to Howard Johnson’s or the Ramada Inn, that’s where they belong!”
High as she was, high as he was, and glad as she was to see him again, glad as her body was to have his body close to it, it was impossible to be angry. “What we have to do before it gets cold is buy you a bike,” she said.
“I haven’t been on a bike since I was sixteen!”
“Good for you.” She placidly put on her jacket. “Put some air in your lungs instead of smoke. Tighten up your thigh muscles.”
“Are they loose?” Worried.
“They’re lovely. But loosening.”
“Oh, those loosening thighs, those great big beautiful thighs …” he sang, and kept humming it, despite her elbow shoves, all the way to the bicycle shop.
And very shakily, anxiously watching the motor traffic, slowly, he rode back to her house on a shiny ten-speeder. By the time she had unlocked her door and wheeled her own bike out, he was riding in circles in the street with no hands.
“Look …” he began.
“You call me Mom and I’ll Pop you!” she cried.
And in the grey-blue dusk, they rode off to the countryside, down curved lanes, to the river.
It was impossible to be angry.
Next day, he said: “You know, I don’t know anything about this place. Oxford. I felt like a fool trying to show the Buswells around. Not that they noticed. How about giving me a tour?”
They rode their bikes to town, locked them in the yard outside the Bod, and looking at him with a just-you-wait glint, she led him into the library and up the old creaky wooden stairs. As they entered Duke Humfrey’s Library, she kept watching his face. He glowed. She glowed. She took him past the railing that excludes guests, she whispered its history to him as he took in the wood, the stained glass, the ceiling, the old books. He kept glowing.
That mattered. Very much. Time she took Harry Hunter Harter Herter, something like that, to see the unicorn tapestries at the Cloisters and he hadn’t seen anything. He just looked at them, smiled at her, asked
what else?
She refused to go out with him again, although he’d kept calling for months. He couldn’t understand what was wrong, and how could you tell a person a thing like that? I won’t go out with you because you did not respond, you did not stretch out and glow at something so beautiful, so wondrous. If you can’t see that, the wonder and beauty of that, how can you see anything? How can you see me, who am not always wondrous or beautiful?
But Victor saw. She took his hand as they descended, and laid it against her cheek. He was still (mentally) in the library, he was talking about old books.
“I always loved them, I used to collect them….”
He paused.
“I inherited a few from my mother’s mother’s father. I have a small collection….” Again, the odd pause, but then they were out in the sunlight, and walking. Dolores talked, pointed, talked: teacher, a role she enjoyed, but wasn’t sure Victor would. They went to New College Chapel to see the old stained-glass windows and the Epstein statue of Lazarus. Then to Trinity Chapel. Then to lunch at the Turf, a tiny low-ceilinged pub that was built in the thirteenth century. They ate sausage standing up, drank their pints looking at each other, unable to speak in the crowded, noisy, smoky room, people packed in, their heads nearly reaching the ceiling. Victor had to duck through a doorway, which delighted him, and he grabbed her hand as they left through the little garden, and out into a little lane that led back to the street. They walked holding hands, swinging them.
They walked to High Street—The High—and crossed and went down towards Christ Church, where they saw the lovely Wren “Tom Tower,” and heard Great Tom, the great old bells inside it, strike the hour. They went to the cathedral, then walked over to Magdalen Grove and stood there for a long time watching the serene tender red deer, feeling serene and tender themselves.
“First time I came to Oxford, I hated it,” Dolores said. “That was years ago, and in the summer, it wasn’t term time, and the place was empty. And it seemed so fucking
monastic.
Boys on bikes with their academic gowns flying out behind them, soft-faced, protected, arrogant boys. All that tawny stone, the enclosed gardens, the spires, the gates, everywhere gates! Oh, that’s still true—those buildings we couldn’t get inside of, the windows I wanted to show you. Someone took me there one day, but one can’t just walk in, one has to be taken by somebody who belongs. Well, almost everything is pure and white and austere on the outside. And rich and ornate and comfortable inside. You know, like priests taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and then going in to a banquet, five courses, each with wine. I went to an ordination party once, a huge affair and very lavish, and my friend John went up to the newly ordained priest and said, ‘Bob, if this is poverty, what’s chastity?’”
Victor laughed.
“Anyway, I felt at that time that it had no place for me. I felt like a scarlet woman just walking around in it, as if I befouled it by simply being there, as if I were emanating sex all over the place.”
“You emanate, you emanate,” he teased.
“I felt as if,” she went on seriously, unresponsive to him, “I was the very person, the One the whole place had been built to exclude. And that my presence here was so serious a breach of its decorum that it was powerful enough to contaminate the whole university. I felt like a bad smell.”
Victor was gazing at her in incomprehension. “Why? Why should you? I’ve never felt like that in my life.”
She grimaced. “Of course you haven’t, you’re male!”
He shrugged, abandoning the discussion. He gazed around them, standing in Radcliffe Camera square. “Well, I don’t know. The library’s nice, inside. But on the whole the place seems pretty dead to me. It’s a museum, that’s all.”
“Don’t you think it’s beautiful?”
“I think it’s great, tremendous! Magnificent, really. Impressive. But I can’t imagine feeling that I could do anything to it—that you could do anything to it. It’s so huge and impervious. The stone just stands, high, silent, dwarfing the people….” He drifted into contemplation, and she observed him with a smile, thinking he must be exhausted and perhaps even embarrassed by his small foray into lyricism. She gazed at the Radcliffe Camera. High, silent, dwarfing the people. Yes. Built to do that. Built to testify to something conceived of as larger than the mere puny humans who walked in and out bearing their own smell of sweat and glands, bearing their own mortality. Blind stone, unwitnessing, nonsignifying. No. Not true. Testifying to something. She caught Victor’s arm.
“Why
do
you like it? I mean, what do you like about it?”
He looked at her a little surprised. “Well, it’s grand, of course! I mean, the glorious British Empire and all that. Created on the playing fields of Eton, you know. It’s damned impressive, we haven’t got anything that can compare to it, even though we’ve tried….” He took her hand and pulled her arm, linked through his, close to his body, and began to walk towards the high iron gates. “Maybe I do understand, a little. It makes me feel a bit like a crude American, you know?”
“Oh, well, that’s just an affirmation of a reality,” she teased, and he squeezed her hand to hurt it, for just a moment.
“Breaking my fingers in a place like this would really prove your crude Americanism,” she said, high and mighty but smiling.
He was reduced to glaring. Some young people, three boys and two girls, were walking their bikes through the gates. They looked pink and white and innocent and unintimidated. To them, all that white or sand-colored stone was simply the housing of rooms to which they went to listen to their betters, the Authorities. In lecture, or on the printed page, or turning the ancient heavy leaves of a manuscript: the voices of the past, wisdom. She stopped and withdrew her arm from Victor’s. She looked at the buildings. The light was high, the air was still, the buildings stood, silent. Young people listening to their betters, their elders, learning from them how to be. How to be what? Victories of empire won on the playing fields of Eton, yes. The cruelties of patriarchal education vindicated, reaffirmed: they and only they could produce the hero-warriors necessary for the wars patriarchal society produced. Vicious circle.
She glanced at Victor. No, he would not understand. He was frowning. “Did I really hurt your hand?”
She leaned to him and kissed him lightly. (Was that forbidden in the square? Once, no doubt. Once her mere presence here would probably have been forbidden.)
“Of course not,” she lied. (Lying so that he should not feel bad, or lying so that he should not feel powerful?)
They linked arms and left the square and walked down the street past the grandeur, towards the town.
Yes, testifying to all that. To the erection of permanences, the power and glory of God who was really the king, and those who did His work on earth, who were really the male aristocracy. To transcendence, erected on the backs of the undeserving poor, on the sinful bodies of women.
What did the young women studying there now feel? What did she feel for that matter, being invited to give a lecture, being asked to have dinner at high table? Uncomfortable, but flattered, yes, the truth now, tell the truth, flattered to be included at all.
God.
They walked in silence to Cornmarket. “Now I’ll show you the real Oxford,” she laughed. “Although you’ve already seen it.” (Without seeing.)
Cornmarket is a street only two blocks long, and it is the real center of Oxford. And another world. It is lined with cheap shops selling clothes, handbags, shoes, books. And it is thronged with women.
“When I first came and saw it, I thought: so
this
is where the women are! The men get to have the colleges; the women get to do the marketing.”
They stood, then walked slowly down one side of the street and up the other. They passed the crowded cut-rate drugstore, the five-and-dime. The street was dominated by young women who sauntered in pairs, arm in arm, conscious of their stylishness. They were shopgirls and secretaries, out for a Saturday jaunt. Almost all of them had haloes of frizzed hair, long full skirts in flowery cotton prints, frilly blouses and short jackets, nothing warm enough for this brisk day. They trotted along on five-inch heels strapped to their ankles. Their faces had blobs of rouge at the cheeks and dark, almost purple lips. They were all very thin.
Only after you got used to the girls did you see the older women scurrying from shop to shop carrying string bags. They were uniformly shapeless and dowdy, whether they were plump or thin, tall or short. They did not seem to look out at the world at all, they seemed driven by some inner meter that never stopped ticking (forty p, that’s three pound ten, and I still have to buy a bit of fish for supper, Joe’s shoes will have to wait until next week or perhaps a fortnight it’s four o’clock already how the time goes such lines in the five-and-dime the children will be getting in and I still have to roll out the pie dough).
After that, you noticed that there were some men in the street, a few young ones: dark, rough, embarrassed. They did not walk together the way the girls did. When there were two or three in a group, they jostled and teased, they were uncomfortable with themselves, their bodies, their energy.
And finally, you saw the older couples. They walked together in a peaceful comfort one rarely saw in America, as if something important had been settled between them.
Or for them.
Still the girls dominated the street like brilliant-colored birds darting among sparrows and squirrels. And there didn’t seem to be any in between. You were young or you were ageless; you were flitting or you were settled.
“This is where the women are. Over here the girls—an infinitely replaceable generation—shine for their hour and give the place its animation, its vividness. Then they turn into the anxious housewives.”
“And over there the stone. Standing.”
O
NE DAY AFTER MARKETING
they stopped at the Wykeham, a shop on narrow old Holywell Street, for a cream tea. It is a tiny place, with small tables placed close together.
“Clotted cream. It sounds disgusting.”
“Call it Devon cream. Then you can like it.”
“What is it, anyway?”
“Just cream that’s been set near warmth and allowed to get thick, almost like butter. You spread it on scones. You’ll like it.”
A young couple sat at the next table talking in low voices. The boy looked like a student—he had that tender-faced pink-and-white protected look, toney. A bit sulky perhaps, but very genteel. The girl looked vigorous, healthy, not as toney as he. Her accent, when Dolores could catch her words, wasn’t quite as U as his. They were both pretty, but distressed about something. Victor and Dolores glanced at each other with patronizing parental smiles: Sweet, aren’t they? their smiles said.
The young couple’s tea arrived. The waitress put the teapot down in front of the young man, the scones and cream near the young woman.
The two of them gazed at the things, then at each other. They hesitated. They seemed baffled. Then the young woman lifted the plate of scones and held it out to the young man. He looked at her in alarm. There was no room on the tiny table for the scones unless the teapot were moved.
He stared at the teapot.
Dolores and Victor glanced at each other with parental amusement: Funny, aren’t they? their eyes said. “Come on,” the girl said, wiggling the plate. Finally, with revulsion, as if lifting the pot would pollute him, he picked up the teapot and handed it to her, took the scones and set them down.