My God.
So he didn’t mean it, not a thing he said, not a thing he did.
She had slowed down as she considered this, directly in front of the Randolph. Averting her head, she speeded up again and turned down Broad Street, The Broad, as they said here, towards the library.
Who could understand it?
Just forget it. Wipe it out, she ordered herself.
She set her bicycle in the rack and locked it
Try to concentrate on something else. Look around you, isn’t it wonderful?
But it didn’t look wonderful today. Some days Oxford just looked like an elitist mausoleum. She mounted the old wooden steps to Duke Humfrey’s Library with her head down, feeling tired, very tired. And her legs ached.
But once she entered the ancient library, her spirits lifted. She loved this room, loved working in it. It had been reconstructed with scrupulous fidelity to its fifteenth-century origins: it had old wooden floors that creaked when people walked down the center aisle, old wooden carrels filled with ancient flaking leather-bound volumes, huge things with dry heavy pages. There was a wonderful ceiling held up by carved wooden arches, and painted with ancient seals. The windows were arched, and decorated with roundels of pale stained glass. She always sat by the windows that looked down into Exeter Garden, not the best garden in Oxford, of course, but lovely enough for her, sun on the chrysanthemums and asters, on all the burning flowers of the fall.
She wished Victor could see it, this room.
Not going to think about him. He’s not thinking about you.
But she did: as she waited for her books to be delivered; when she walked downstairs to look something up in the old handwritten book catalogue; each time she looked up from her book to glance at the garden or at some passing creaker.
She could not disbelieve the part of him that had loved her. But she could not either disbelieve the part of him that had blanked her out, had turned her into a piece of furniture, or a servant from whom leavetaking is business, can be brusque. And she did not know which of these sides was dominant in him, although she guessed it was the businessman. The other side would no doubt surface again, perhaps tonight, perhaps not for a few days, when he felt the need, when it was convenient.
Convenient: Anthony’s favorite word. It’s more convenient if we go to my mother’s: she has more room. It’s more convenient if we stay home during my vacation. It’s more convenient if I drive.
And the question was: did she want to be involved with a man who could turn her off when it was convenient for him, and who gave no thought to how she felt? Did she want to be even in the slightest degree involved with such a man?
The answer was clear: No.
S
O THAT WAS THAT
. And even if she did see him again, there was no point in going into all of this with him, because he simply wouldn’t understand. Men tended not to understand because, of course, it was more convenient not to. She’d have to work at it, explain, maybe even argue, to make him see. She might have to get angry. And she didn’t want to get angry, to try to convert him. She was tired of that, sick of it.
So if he did somehow find her again, she’d say she was busy.
She returned to her books, forcing herself to concentrate. She reviewed the notes she had taken today:
No woman ever thinks abstractly. Man’s intelligence is abstract; woman’s concrete. Men love principles; women, persons. No woman ever really understands herself. (1899)
Woman was appointed by God to be inferior to man in authority and power. This arrived because Eve assumed a place which did not belong to her. And since Eve, the lot of woman was made hard and bitter by the oppression of man. Women’s inferiority to man in respect of authority and rule is a memorial of past transgression. It is a proof that humanity is under a curse for sin, and it is a good reminder to man that he is not perfect. (1875)
Never forget that a man is a selfish being. Keep that little fact in view continually; and if you want to please him, pander to it. Don’t cry, don’t make a fuss, and certainly don’t be quick-tempered. Be sweet above all, but your sweetness must be real. A man never wants to be controlled.
You must learn to hide your feelings. You must never allow a man to sacrifice his comfort for you.
Let this ever be in your mind: “I am a creature formed to give pleasure.”
And never lose your temper: it ruins the face. (1895)
The sphere of woman’s influence is domestic; she wins her master by sweet submission. (1844)
Woman is man’s tempter and misleader. Her true place is at once the lowest and highest in creation. All women have an instinctive desire to be wives, even if they deny it. In being sweet servants to their husbands, they fulfill what is highest in them. (1878)
In Woman, weakness itself is the true charter of power; it is an absolute attraction. All independence is unfeminine. The more dependent, the more cherished. (1835)
She shut the last book, sighing. It was a strain to work on this subject. She kept being dragged into emotions she did not choose to feel. Still, she felt the subject was important, and no one else would write this book if she didn’t:
Lot’s Wife: A Study of the Identification of Women with Suffering.
This stage involved reading eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manuals and sermons which were concerned with women’s role, either meditating upon it or prescribing female behavior. Many of the writers complacently justified women’s suffering, even gloried in it. Some of them said that women’s suffering was shameful, that it was unfair that men were so beastly to women, but alas! it had been decreed by God. Some said that women deserved it. Kindly clergymen had written these things. The writers were not strong in logic, but probably their readers had not noticed.
If only I had more distance, if only I were less involved.
Cal’s voice, droning on and on. He didn’t have to bother to make himself sound interesting, people followed him breathlessly. The Great Cal Taylor.
“It is, of course, in the highest sense
interesting
,” he gave
interesting
a special emphasis, a special expressiveness, it was his highest word of praise, “but it is, after all, part of a dead time. Your job—as a historian, which as a scholar you must be—is first of all to
see
the interest, and then to trace its connections. You should have no more emotion about it than a zoologist cataloguing toe shapes.
Your
work, my dear Dolores, is marred by your … well …
passion.
And your bias. Women, after all, were simply not important to the Renaissance, and your concentration on them, it seems to me, distorts the entire period.”
“Women were important to Shakespeare. Science wasn’t important to the Renaissance, but people write about that.”
“But my dear Dolores, you write about morality! It is, you know, one thing to document the moral standards of the Renaissance—although one thinks that this has quite amply been done already—and quite another to treat that morality as if it were a living one, as if you had a present response to it, as indeed, you seem to. As if it affected you. That is historically naive.”
He leaned back in his chair (How does he get a desk chair like that? All I have is a wooden one, with a hard seat) and smiled, his great pale forehead shining at her.
“I don’t understand why you can write about any trivial subject—someone just published a book about animal imagery in Shakespeare—and it is respected. But if you write about women, you’re being …”
“Ideological. Quite simply, my dear, because you are.”
“But it is
not
ideological to write about men?”
He whooped a laugh. “I see you are becoming quite a fanatic!”
“I’m serious, Cal. I want an answer.”
He leaned forward. He tossed her essay across his desk towards her, and his famous kindly face became a sneer. “I can only suggest that you send this to one of them feminist journals,” he said.
She stood up stiffly, feeling utterly humiliated. How dare he speak to a colleague like that? How dare he speak to anyone like that? Everything was behind him, the weight of thousands of years of tradition. No one else would question his right to treat her this way. But where had he earned that right? Who conferred it upon him?
She looked at him coldly. “You know, Cal, you and your ilk will die too, someday,” and strode out of the office with as much dignity as she could muster.
Cal snubbed her ever after when they passed each other on the campus. She’d lost the assistance of her most eminent colleague. She’d lost—nothing. Nothing he could do, even were he willing, could ever help her. His mind was set in a different place from hers, and it was a place that declared her point of view illegitimate.
She sighed and stood up. She picked up her books, standing for a few minutes in the soft pale light of the afternoon, wishing there were still sun, wishing she could feel something warm containing her, embracing her. Sunlight. But there was none.
She walked down the aisle and turned in her books, then turned around to look back at the room. The past ought to be burned, Ziggy said. Not just some of the books, but all of them.
Yes, if you could bury it that easily. But then you’d lose this too, this room, soft and gold even without sunlight. What a room! Can you imagine building such a room for yourself? Built to house his library, Humfrey, the king’s brother. It must once have held great scrolls, manuscripts. He could sit and read and watch the sun burnish the wood, smell the parchment, hold it in his hands, trace the illuminations with his fingers. He could watch the light shift from window to window as the day slowly died, see the blazoning of the stained glass. Silent room, smelling of true things: wood and wax and leather and parchment and ink and quills. And bodies and bad teeth, rotting in the mouth.
Still, there was something so human about its size, its proportions. Before man,
Man
, decided to transcend. Could transcend only in heaven. Oh, that’s not true, Dolores. What in hell else were they doing, starving themselves, denying themselves sex when they were going mad for lack of it?
Don’t sentimentalize. There was far more human misery then than there is now, the daily sort, cold wet hungry toothless smelly people walking around, losing legs, dying, dying all around you. Most of us have never known anyone hungry, really hungry. Most of us have never seen anyone die.
The lucky ones.
She sighed. She heard St. Mary’s bells and turned and descended the wide creaky old staircase. Her whole body ached, her mind ached too. It came on her at moments, this depression, and felt like an enormous, wet, heavy canvas just sinking on top of her. As if everything were useless, as if life were misery for everyone in every place and at every time, and there was simply nothing anyone could do about it. You could delude yourself that you were aiding the cause of humankind by—what?—discovering penicillin, or writing a book. But it was only delusion. A delusion we’d invented, the way we invented the gods, to make things
seem
bearable. So as the torturer turns the rack that final screw and the body screams in agony, you can die with a smile on your face, dying for the glory of God. And, in truth, if you could do that, maybe you really didn’t feel it, weren’t aware of the pain.
Transcendence. Invulnerability.
She unlocked her bike and wheeled it to the Broad Street gate. And only then did she remember her plan: to stay out late. But it was only five. The pubs around here weren’t open yet. It was far too early to go to dinner. She was tired. And besides, she had her bike.
Christ, what did it matter? She could go home, she could answer the telephone, he’d come or he wouldn’t, what did it matter? She wasn’t going to see him again, that was that.
No. It didn’t matter.
S
HE WAS IN HER
warm robe, sitting at the table in the living room, collating her notes, when the phone rang.
And she leaped up, her body did it, her mind wasn’t functioning.
When she heard Victor’s voice, her heart started to pound, further impeding her thinking processes. She realized she’d managed to forget about him, which was good, but also that his mere voice was capable of doing something curious to the hairs along her arms and back, which wasn’t so good. And to her head. He had to repeat himself twice before she took in what he was saying.
Had to have dinner with the automobile people, had called earlier, had called on and off all day, had been thinking of her all day, but she was a gadabout it seemed, never home, and now it was late, he’d just got in, but he yearned to see her, was she tired?
“How did you get my number?” Her voice sounded cold, strange in her ears.
He was silent for an instant. “I took it from your phone when I was there. You said it wasn’t listed. Why?”
“I just wondered.”
His voice became more formal. “I suppose you’re tired.”
“What time
is
it?”
“After ten.” Apologetic.
Late. Too late. He’s tired, I’m tired. Not a good time for me to get my wits in order enough to explain to him why I can’t see him again. Not a good time for him to understand what I’m saying. No. Won’t see him. Besides, he’s expecting me to say
no.
“It’s all right. You can come if you like,” she said.
“You sure?”
She wasn’t imagining the joy, was she? “Sure.”
“Great. I’ll take a cab. I’ll be right there.”
Oh boy. She went back to the sitting room and let herself down gingerly into a chair. I’ve lost control. I’ve given him entirely the wrong idea. All my body’s fault. Damned thing insisted on having its own way.
Ever since puberty when she had first felt sexual longing, and sensed it as a surrender of the transcendent mind to the base body (so her philosophers taught her), she had resented sexuality as slavery to the body.
On the other hand, she had learned over the years of her life to trust her body. It was the only thing that always told you the truth. The mind lied; the body did not.