So when she got the grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, she could let her apartment, pack her bag, and pick herself up and come to England for a year, a whole year. No one to placate, argue with, cry over, feel guilty towards, about. Yes, that was the killer—guilt.
Berenice’s story about the day John Kennedy was killed: she’d planned to have dinner with two Catholic friends. Tearful on phone, they decided to go ahead—better to be together than alone on such a night. But they’d done nothing but lament all through the meal.
“But one thing is a blessing,” Anne said. “At least Jackie was with him. You know she hasn’t been well she hasn’t been going on trips with him recently. Thank God she was there! Imagine how she’d feel if she hadn’t been with him!”
Berenice raised Jewish eyebrows.
“
If I were she, I’d be sure it was
because
I was with him that it happened.”
“Oh,” Gail said knowingly, “that’s Jewish guilt.”
Jewish or Catholic, it was women’s guilt, one way
and
another. No way out of it. No way except hers: if you don’t get involved, you don’t feel guilt. If you do, you do, no matter how you act. Women were supposed to be whatever men needed, were supposed never to fail them, were supposed to be everything for them. It was impossible. Why was it that men didn’t have to be the same things?
Well, it was all academic now, she shouldn’t need to rationalize what was in any case an accomplished fact, and her life. And a fine life it was too, her time her own, her emotions her own, her space too. Five whole rooms, not big, but enough for one person. No arguments about open or closed windows, who snatches the blankets, TV blare, grilled cheese sandwiches instead of meat loaf. Arguments, of course, wonderful and uproarious, with a set of friends who went quite crackers at the mention of Con Edison or nuclear plants or Joseph Califano or the Bible Belt or strip mining or Phyllis Schlafly or or or. Eccentrics they were, she supposed, her friends, but fun. They had minds that had not been downed, had never given in to the prevailing motion.
On the other hand, maybe they
were
the prevailing motion. Who could tell?
But you couldn’t sit until five in the morning talking about sex or religion or love unless your friend came and knew the two of you didn’t have to deal in the politenesses imposed by coupledom. Her aloneness was an opening, a chink in a wall. People came and said things they said to no one else. They raged, they lamented, they tore out their intestines over lost love, betrayed friendship, failures. They grieved and raged most about their parents, it was astonishing, fifty-year-old people weeping because father never and mother did and then I tried but it didn’t work and I wanted to show them but then they died and now forever it is too late. And she will never forgive he will never know I can never say. Parents. Children.
Her eyes were clouding and she pulled herself up. Paddington.
S
HE WAS EARLY FOR
her train, and chose an empty smoking compartment Generally, she permitted herself four slim cigars a day, but whenever she took this trip, allowed herself one extra. She loved to sit back comfortably in an empty compartment, smoking without worrying about bothering anyone else, and gaze out at the London-Oxford run. It was not, as she had long ago expected it to be, an orderly progression from city to country. It was, like all of England, she felt, just things happening. Such a socially ordered country it was that things were simply allowed to happen at random.
Leaving London there would be warehouses and factories, sooty row houses, but each with a garden, and each garden held roses. Then suddenly, canals and the river, trees, horses, cows grazing under huge metal power poles. Sometimes a small barge on a canal, which would always make her lean forward, yearn towards it like a plant towards sun. She wanted to be sitting on the deck as the barge slid along the smooth waters, and try to catch sight of small game in the fields, to name the wild flowers. She wanted to be sitting there plump in a heavy holey sweater, saying to the stocky bargeman, “Would you like a cup of tea, luv?” and watch him turn and smile, showing a few gaps in his uppers, and say, “I would, old girl,” the sex between them still alive despite the years, their pillowed bodies, hair grey and wispy in the light wind.
A dream: he drinks; she nags. She stays at home, ostensibly because of the rheumatism, but really because the silence between them oppresses her, and she has nothing to do on the wretched boat but make him stupid cups of tea. He listens to the football on a transistor radio, and on his stops he eyes the occasional barmaid or waitress and drinks his pint. At home, he spends his evenings in the pub, arguing scores, players.
Why is it that the miserable always sounds truer than the felicitous?
Because it is, dope.
Yes. After the bargeman there would be open farms, then suddenly, inexplicably, high-rise apartments. Then warehouses. Warehouses? Granaries, perhaps. Then again farms, wonderful old ones with walled courtyards dusty with chickens, old brick walls dusty with roses, like the farms in Normandy and Brittany. Then Reading, full of soot and chimneys, people rushing on and off. Then green farmland threaded by the river and then! Of course it had to be sham, and was, but there it rose in the sunlight, all medieval tracery, spires, and towers: Oxford. It looked older than the buildings really were: it looked like fairyland and it shone in the sun. The first time she’d come, she had entered the town warily, as if it might turn to Disney if she put her glasses on.
She did not light her cigar. She would wait until the train started. Deferred gratification is good for you, she told herself. All the little games you learn to play as you grow older, things designed to make life more pleasant, to stretch the little pleasures out like a thin swatch of flowered fabric stretched out to cover an open wound. Smoking is bad for you, so you smoke less and look forward to it more. Obscene, somehow, life measured out in coffee-spoons. But what else could you do?
Her students, sitting cross-legged on her living-room floor drinking wine, smoking grass, listening to her jazz records as if the music were an ancient foreign mode. Leaning back and scratching a taut belly, or twisting a strand of long straight hair, and asking, asking, “Dolores, tell me. Tell us.” The question was always phrased differently, but it was always the same question. Tell me, tell me, how can I live without pain?
I don’t know.
You do! You do! I know you do! Look at you! You have it made! A great pad, two books published, tenure at Emmings, two kids, Europe in the summers, and all those jazz records! How can I get to live like you?
You can be me if you want, she wanted to say. All you have to do is pay for it with lines, as I have. This line along my mouth, now, that was a particularly expensive one. “The only prescriptions I know for life without pain are early death, daily skiing, or smoking dope,” she’d grin.
Impossible to tell them much truth. Didn’t want to. Why poison life for them before they’d barely begun? Weary, she’d send them home feeling full although not full enough (never full enough), and sigh her way to bed alone and lie there feeling it, the pain that was with her always, so familiar and accustomed a guest that it could be ignored for long stretches. It shuffled around her house in bedroom slippers, and made its own tea.
Dolores the walking robot: push the button and the creature weeps. Her eyes and throat would fill with tears even watching TV photos of famine victims, reading newspaper interviews with parents whose children had been violently snatched to death, being handed, in Brattle Square, a leaflet describing the torture of political prisoners in the Philippines. God knows there was never a dearth of things to cry about. And she, she was like one of Pavlov’s dogs, salivating at every gong. Hard to say which was worse—the fact that the horrors of the world aroused in her nothing more forceful than a tear, or that every one of its horrors aroused that same tear. Something indiscriminate about her. Weeping, of course, really for herself, as Homer knew. Something terribly female about that. But men did it too, didn’t they? She’d read some survey recently: men in huge numbers watch the soaps. But did they cry? The surveyor hadn’t asked that.
She had tears even for success. Sydney had called her the other night all the way from New Hampshire, had paid for it herself. (Of course, you can’t call transatlantic collect.) Crying, saying
Mommy
the way she had when she was a little girl. Devastated by her latest affair: can I come to England and stay with you for a little while? Sydney’s latest lover had done so-and-so, what was she to think about that? What was she to think about herself, why did she drown with every hurt, every failure? It must be that she lacked character. Why did life hurt so much? Was there something wrong with her? There must be. Life wasn’t supposed to hurt so much. She must be weak, or selfish, or insane.
I took her pain and shaped it, I turned it into an obstacle course, a clear run with victory at its end. I listened, and slowly, as she spoke, I kneaded her words in my hands, giving them form, and since form is finite, an end. I made pain linear by giving it a purpose, like some king in legend, assigning tasks: when these are accomplished, you will be a knight of the Round Table Holy Grail Valhalla Elysian fields. You must live through this to learn and grow.
Sydney felt better with every sentence. I could hear her voice lightening, laughter and confidence seeping back, courage firming. I transformed an insane agony that was agony and insanity because she saw no end into a sane linear process with a knowable goal: when you grow up, you will be an adult. Read, invulnerable. Or calloused. The suffering of z added to knowledge z equals strength, harmony, and wisdom: z. Oh, my child felt better, stronger: she felt full of heart.
I felt like the mother of lies.
Dolores gazed blankly at the train platform. Well, what was I supposed to do? Tell her, sorry, kid, that’s life, might as well get used to it? Twenty-one and just embarking. After such a past. She needs all the lies she can get.
A shadow darkened the window in the compartment door. Dolores turned away towards the outside window, hoping the presence would move on. The door opened, however. She heard it and turned her head slightly and saw out of the corner of her eye a man with a suitcase. She turned away again. Fuck. Maybe her coldness would repel him. It happened sometimes. People could feel what you feel—electricity, sound waves, fields of force? We pick up so much more than we can process with what we arrogantly exalt as intellect—little things, things we know without knowing we know them. She had pulled people towards her when she needed them, pushed them away when she did not: by what invisible wires, what imperceptible magnetism? She exerted it now, sending out cold waves.
But the man came in anyhow. Dense or aggressive, she decided. His back to her, he lifted his suitcase to the overhead rack, removed his raincoat, then sat down holding a newspaper. She glared at him, but he barely glanced at her. He opened his newspaper.
Dolores looked out the window. She felt tremulous, as if she were going to cry. Her whole lovely trip ruined by someone too dense to know he wasn’t wanted. It wasn’t as if the train were crowded. Now the whole time would be spoiled by a pair of eyes to be avoided; movements and breathing to be blanked out, perfunctory eye-meetings leading to perfunctory and uncomfortable facial expressions—a smile? a leer?
The train started up. She reached in her purse and pulled out her cigar case. She would light up without even asking if he minded. That’s all he deserved, the bastard. And if he looked at her full face, damn it, she’d glare at him!
And glancing at him as she prepared to light her cigar, she found he was, the fucker, was looking at her, straight at her. She looked back coldly and puffed the cigar to life. Still, the cigar was half-ruined for her. Since she allowed herself so few, and waited so long for each one, she felt, as she lighted them, a deep sensuous pleasure, a surrender to the welcome aroma, the hot smoke in her mouth and nose, the feel of the fine smooth shape against her lips. But’ she could not let herself feel this now, with him watching. Her surrender to pleasure would show, and somehow it seemed shameful that someone else should see that. It was too personal, intimate, even. He leaned back and pulled his newspaper up, hiding his eyes. She closed her eyes and leaned back and let herself feel the pleasure of the cigar after all. Apparently he had
some
decency.
Smoking, she gazed out the window. But she barely noticed the landscape as it passed. That was what happened when someone invaded your space: you were too conscious of them to feel fully, see fully, be. You couldn’t just
be
, you had to be
something
; sloppy, correct, flirtatious, friendly, proper. Skirt pulled down? Be careful not to pick your nose or scratch your groin or spread your legs. Not, she had to admit, that she usually did such things in a train compartment even alone, but knowing she couldn’t constricted her, made her feel self-conscious. Oh, well: retreat inward. What was I thinking about? My life, solitude, yes. (Why isn’t he turning the pages of his newspaper?) Yes, it was a good life, it went on being good and vivid although a certain sameness had set in. But that happened to everyone, together or alone, didn’t it? (Why is he so still?) Still, there were things that never palled. A fine fall day in Cambridge, the burnished leaves, the smell of them in the nose, dusty and acrid and sweet, the light on the brick sidewalks; or mornings when she didn’t have to teach and had time for breakfast and boiled a two-day-old egg and smeared a fresh sisal rye-bread slice with fresh sweet butter and smelled the freshly ground bourbon Santos coffee slowly dripping through the filter, and drank it with just a dollop of cream…. (Even not looking at him, she could sense he was utterly still. It felt as if he was looking at her. Damn him!)
Yes, and friends and dinners and parties and wonderful arguments and coming home late and simply collapsing in bed with a smile pasted on her idiot face. And special moments, like that first morning in Madrid when they could not sleep despite the seven long wakeful hours on the plane and had charged out into the city like horses freed from a corral, she and Sydney and Tony, and had rushed to the Plaza Mayor and stopped and Tony stopped and looked at it (his first time abroad) and she looked at his face and her heart stopped because he was seeing it, really seeing it, and she could see him seeing it. What was he seeing? Ah, but she knew, it was what was there to be seen—a different world, a different century, and that time, the eighteenth century, was still there somehow, hanging, the way they say sound waves linger in the atmosphere forever. The women with their high white wigs and hooped satin skirts, the men in their satin coats and white silk stockings, the carriages and footmen, the rolling bump of the wooden wheels, the maids and beggars, the blood, the flirtations, the foolishness. The lovely formal square, decorous, bowing, brilliant, had also been home to horseshit and straw, urchins skipping past the urine-filled gutters, to a stray cow and its offal. And which was the real, which was the life, if not both? She had watched Tony’s face: it was shining. Everything on it was open—the eyes, the mouth, the very pores.