The Odd Woman and the City (14 page)

“Of all the thoughts which rushed upon my savage and undeveloped little brain at this crisis,” Gosse writes, “the most curious was that I had found a companion and a confidant in myself. There was a secret in this world and it belonged to me and to a somebody who lived in the same body with me. There were two of us, and we could talk with one another … It was a great solace to me to find a sympathizer in my own breast.”

*   *   *

In the late nineteenth century, great books about women in modern times were written by men of literary genius. Within twenty years there had been Thomas Hardy's
Jude the Obscure
, Henry James's
The Portrait of a Lady
, George Meredith's
Diana of the Crossways
; but penetrating as these novels were, it was George Gissing's
The Odd Women
that spoke most directly to me. His were the characters I could see and hear as if they were women and men of my own acquaintance. What's more, I recognized myself as one of the “odd” women. Every fifty years from the time of the French Revolution, feminists had been described as “new” women, “free” women, “liberated” women—but Gissing had gotten it just right. We were the “odd” women.

The novel is set in London in 1887. Mary Barfoot, a gentlewoman in her fifties, is running a secretarial school to prepare middle-class girls for occupations other than that of teacher or governess. Her colleague is Rhoda Nunn, thirty years old, darkly handsome, highly intelligent, uncompromising in her open scorn for what she calls the slavery of love and marriage; there isn't an argument to be made in favor of legal union for which Rhoda doesn't have an instant comeback.

Enter Everard Barfoot, Mary's clever, well-to-do, strong-willed cousin whose intellectual sparring with Rhoda (the glory of the book) becomes steadily and mutually eroticized. The story of these two is the one that Gissing tracks with skill, patience, and understanding. What, his book asks, are men and women to be, both for themselves and for one another?

Rhoda and Everard both imagine themselves dedicated to the proposition of true partnership between the sexes, but in the final analysis, both take a two-steps-forward, one-step-back journey into self-knowledge that accounts for the snail's pace at which social change progresses.

Barfoot's intelligence persuades him that he seeks companionateness in marriage: “For him marriage must … mean … the mutual incitement of vigorous minds … Be a woman what else she may, let her have brains and the power of using them … intellect was his first requirement.” Yet at the same time, an appetite for mastery exerts an even stronger pull on him. Side by side with the pleasure Rhoda's intelligence gives him, his thoughts linger on how much “a contest between his will and hers would be an amusement decidedly to his taste … It would delight him to enrage Rhoda and then to detain her by strength, to overcome her senses, to watch her long lashes droop over the eloquent eyes.”

As for Rhoda—absolute in her conviction that women first and foremost must become “rational and responsible human beings”—she pronounces regularly on her position with a defensive bluntness that betrays her own emotional ignorance. When Barfoot chides her proud severity—“Perhaps you make too little allowance for human weakness”—she replies coldly, “Human weakness is a plea that has been much abused, and generally in an interested spirit.” Everard thrills to this response, but it also makes him smile. The smile frightens Rhoda into rudeness—“Mr. Barfoot … if you are practicing your powers of irony, I had rather you chose some other person”—but in truth the exchange excites them both.

The attraction between them is rooted in the classical antagonism of sexual infatuation at its most compelling and its most exhausting. Bereft of tenderness or sympathy, it wears away at the nerves; consumes itself ultimately in self-division and self-regard. A year and many astonishing conversations later, when his feeling for Rhoda is considerably advanced, Barfoot is yet of two minds: “Loving her as he had never thought to love, there still remained with him so much of the temper in which he first wooed her that he could be satisfied with nothing short of unconditional surrender.” Concomitantly, Rhoda—her senses fully aroused for the first time in her life—is rapidly losing the comfort of her brash certainties. Now openly drawn to Everard, she is gripped by anxiety at the thought of yielding to desire. Insecurity and trepidation become her daily companions.

In the end, however many words are spilled between them, Everard is undone by the need to master, and Rhoda by the humiliation of self-doubt. He retreats into a conventional marriage, and she achieves a sexless independence. For one brief moment only, a small part of each of these people had reached out to embrace the difficulty of struggling toward the integrity required to form a “new” alliance—and had then fallen back to that place in the spirit where it is acceptable to no longer go on making the effort.

Following Rhoda Nunn as her polemics flare and her emotions terrify, we see that she could never have managed the consequences that the conflict between her and Barfoot have set in motion. It is her confusion that makes her so real. Hardy's Sue Bridehead, James's Isabel Archer, Meredith's Diana of the Crossways, are all magnificent creatures—and all similarly confused, if you will—but it is in Rhoda that I see myself and others of my generation, plain. No other writer has captured the progress of our smarts, our anxieties, our bravado, as exactly as has Gissing by putting Rhoda Nunn through some very recognizable paces. Imagine (as I can all too readily) the ignorance behind that cold passion with which she, having seen the feminist light, so proudly pronounces, No equality in love? I'll do without! Children and motherhood? Unnecessary! Social castigation? Nonsense! Between the ardor of Rhoda's rhetoric and the dictates of flesh-and-blood reality lies a no-man's-land of untested conviction. How easy it was—for us as well as Rhoda—to call out angrily, To hell with all that! How chastening to experience the uncontrollable force of feeling that steadily undermines these defiant simplicities. As Rhoda moves inexorably toward the moment when she fails herself, she becomes a walking embodiment of the gap between theory and practice: the place in which so many of us have found ourselves, time and again.

Sometimes I think that for me the gap has become a deep divide at the bottom of which I wander, as though on a pilgrim's progress, still hoping to climb its side to level ground before I die.

*   *   *

A church in my neighborhood runs a soup kitchen. Every morning a line of men (I never see women on the line) stretches from the church door to the end of the block and around the corner. So many of these men are barely standing on their feet—this morning I saw one with an eye half out of its socket, another partly naked under a raincoat too tight to button—yet invariably they speak quietly among themselves, exchange newspapers, honor one another's places on the line if one drops out for a moment, all the while glancing with such patience in their eyes toward the open church door.

In the mid-1930s, a journalist named Orville John covered a fruit pickers' strike in the Imperial Valley in California and was so moved by the dignity of the strikers that he wrote of them as men bearing “ruined faces worthy of Michelangelo.” Today the line outside the church brought that memorable phrase floating back into my head.

*   *   *

Last night at dinner I was telling Leonard that I'd just seen an early-thirties movie in which the leading lady plays an aviatrix (that's what she's called, an aviatrix) with whom a wealthy businessman falls desperately in love. Her spirit, her courage, her passion for flying: all undo him. At first, the pilot is in heaven: she's going to have it all; but no sooner are she and her lover married than he demands that she stop flying. Now that she's his wife, she's too valuable to risk. It develops that for the businessman, the wife's ability to pilot a plane had been the equivalent of good looks in other women: an advantageous card she held in every woman's competition to attract a worthy husband and protector. Now that
that
had been accomplished, there was no further need for her to go on flying.

Made before the code of decency took effect, the movie was wonderfully written—that is, the script was grown-up—and acted with just the right amount of grit, glamour, and pain. How come, I ask Leonard, now that we're forty years into liberationist politics we can't come up with anything nearly as artful as this? There isn't a movie, play, or novel with dialogue as good as this about the way we live now.

“That's simple,” Leonard says. “Once the conflict goes public, politics thrives and art goes south. People like us are left staring at an Internet post of a raised fist, a pink ribbon, a ‘right on' tattoo.”

*   *   *

My mother received her invitation to the annual benefactors' luncheon at the Philharmonic and asked me to come along as her guest. Her attendance at this luncheon is a family joke.

When she had passed the thirty-year mark as a subscriber to the Philharmonic's Friday afternoon concerts, she—who lived on Social Security and a tiny union pension—was invited out to lunch by the orchestra's PR man. She thought she was being thanked for having been a loyal music lover, but as it turned out she was being wooed as a potential donor who would remember the Philharmonic in her will. When she realized what was up, she said, “Oh, it's my
money
you're after! Okay, I'll leave you two hundred.”

The PR man, accustomed to being left thousands, blinked at her. “Two
hundred
?” he echoed in disbelief.

“All right,” she replied disgustedly, “five hundred.”

Seemingly at the same moment, each realized the magnitude of the misunderstanding and both began to guffaw. On the spot, the PR man made my mother a Friend of the Philharmonic and she had received an invitation to the annual benefactors' luncheon ever since.

In the dining room at Lincoln Center, the presentation is already under way. This same PR man stands before a blackboard covered with numbers; he has a pointer in his hand and is speaking to the room at large. At small round tables sit men and women in blue suits and silk dresses, nonetheless looking very much like my mother, who is dressed in polyester. Age is the great leveler here.

My mother sits down in an empty seat, pulls me into the one beside her, and signals the waiter imperiously for her chicken salad.

“And after your death,” the man at the blackboard is saying, “the Philharmonic can get this money you've bestowed on it with these tax breaks I'm now outlining. If you choose plan B, your children may complain that under this plan they'll be losing forty thousand dollars in IRS costs. But”—he smiles broadly at the company—“you can take care of that complaint easily. Just take out an insurance policy, and
leave
them an extra forty thousand.”

My mother looks at me in open amusement; then she snorts, then laughs out loud as the PR man goes on giving instructions on how to leave a clear hundred thousand to the famous orchestra. People turn to look at her, but no matter, she's enjoying herself hugely. I've learned to stay calm at these moments.

The meal over, she rises quickly and hustles onto the reception line filing past the PR man, whose hand everyone wants to shake. When he sees her, he grasps her hand and calls out, “Hello! How are
you
?”

“Do you know who I am?” she asks coyly.

“Indeed I do,” comes the hearty reply.

She stands there beaming. He knows who she is. She's the woman who's beat the system. She has no money, yet here she is, keeping a gimlet eye on the hoi polloi as they sprinkle some of their ill-gotten gains on culture. It is the high point of the morning, the triumph of the day; after this, all is anticlimax. I tried hard to make my mother a feminist, but this morning I see that for her, nothing in this life will trump class. No matter. In the vitalizing end, one is as good as the other.

*   *   *

On a rainy afternoon in midweek I purchase a ticket for a Broadway revival of
Gypsy
. Inflation being what it is, I'm still sitting in the balcony. No matter. From the second the score comes surging out of the pit and I hear again its romantic antiromantic sound—the sound, as Leonard used to say, of every musical that was never written—I begin to melt into the delicious warmth of nostalgia, preparing myself for a good wallow. To my surprise I find the pleasure slow in coming, and as the show goes on, something like withdrawal pains begins replacing the expectation of pleasure. I seem to have forgotten how raw
Gypsy
is, how visceral its resentments and unrelenting its bitter drumbeat. On second thought, perhaps it's not that I've forgotten; perhaps it is rather that I'm no longer the audience for this piece of theater I've always regarded as iconic.

The first time I saw
Gypsy
I was in my twenties and Ethel Merman was playing Rose, the most infamous stage mother on record. Merman was one of the great belters of our time, with an acting style to match. In her performance there was no shading, no nuance, no second thoughts. She was a natural force onstage—crude and overwhelming—and I loved it. I loved it with a hard, pressing love that frightened and exhilarated me. The shocking, gutsy, no-holds-barred sound of that vulgar insistence, the sheer drive of it! I knew it well. I'd grown up with it. Rose was a monster—Leonard calls her the Jewish Hedda Gabler—I could see that, anyone could see that: fierce, ignorant, hungry. Yes, yes, yes. Here I was, this college girl barely out of the immigrant ghetto, with a sense of the world belonging to everyone but me, and I'm suffocating on an energy that comes from so far down inside it makes its own laws; provides me with a sense of nature denied that could urge an anarchist to throw a bomb. When “Rose's Turn” reached the balcony, my head was bursting with a joy of recognition that nothing could diminish or ever make seem unjustified. Rose was a monster? So what. She was
my
monster. She was up there doing it for me. Years later I sat in a movie theater, watching some black exploitation movie, and as the protagonist on the screen mowed down everyone in sight, and I heard everyone around me scream, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” I understood in my bones the murderous glee of the audience. After all, I'd seen Ethel Merman mowing them down and felt the same.