The Summer Without Men (10 page)

Or: “I distinguished her step, restlessly measuring the floor, and she frequently broke the silence by a deep inspiration, resembling a groan. She muttered detached words; the only one I could catch was the name of Boris, coupled with some wild term of endearment or suffering, and spoken as one would speak to a person present—low and earnest, and wrung from the depth of her soul.” Mia as Heathcliff—a terrible, sneering corpse become ghost, who haunts a Manhattan apartment on East Seventieth Street, returning again and again to torment Izcovich and his Pause.

*   *   *

The whole story is in my head, isn’t it? I am not so philosophically naïve as to believe that one can establish some empirical reality of THE STORY. We can’t even agree on what we remember, for God’s sake. We were in a taxi when the ten-year-old Daisy announced her theatrical ambitions. No, we were in the subway. Cab. Subway. Cab! The problem was that any number of Borises were IN MY HEAD. He was running around all over the place. Even if I never saw him in the flesh again, Boris as thought machinery was inevitable. How many times had he rubbed my feet while we watched a film together, patiently kneading and stroking the soles and the toes and the once-badly-broken ankle pained by arthritis? How many times had he looked up at me after I had washed his hair in the bathtub with the expression of a happy child? How many times had he embraced and rocked me after a rejection letter arrived? That was Boris, too, you see. That was Boris, too.

*   *   *

I arrived a couple of minutes late to class. On the steps I heard peals of laughter, shrieks, and the familiar mocking singsong sound of “Oh my Gawd!” The instant I entered the room, the girls went silent. As I approached them, I saw that all eyes were on me and that there was something lying in the middle of the table: a spotty wad. What was it? A bloody Kleenex.

“Did someone have a bloody nose?”

Silence. I looked around at their seven closed faces and a phrase I hadn’t used since childhood came into my mind:
What gives?
No noses limpaired in any way. I took hold of a still pristine part of the soiled paper between my thumb and index finger and escorted it to the wastebasket. I then asked if anyone would like to enlighten me about the “the mystery of the bloody Kleenex,” while a mental image of Nancy Drew in her blue roadster zoomed by.

“We found it there,” Ashley said, “when we came in, but it was so gross no one wanted to touch it. The janitor or somebody must have put it there.”

I saw Jessie press her lips together hard.

“Disgusting,” Emma said. “How could anybody just leave it out like that?”

Alice stared rigidly at the table.

Nikki glanced at the wastebasket and made a face. “Some people just aren’t clean.”

Joan nodded in eager assent. Peyton looked embarrassed.

“There are many things worse than a Kleenex with a little blood on it. Let’s get to the real business of the day: nonsense.”

I was armed with poems: nursery rhymes, Ogden Nash, Christopher Isherwood, Lewis Carroll, Antonin Artaud, Edward Lear, Gerard Manley Hopkins. I hoped to move their attention from wastepaper to the pleasures of subverting meaning. We all wrote. The girls appeared to have fun, and I praised Peyton’s “tasty” poem.

Oohen the goohen in mouther sway

Licken and sticken and wulpen it im,

I dub the doben and dub the crim.

Luffen my muffin, foray!

Near the end of class, when Alice was reading her rather sad nonsense, “Lones in the wild ravage…,” Ashley began to cough, hard. She apologized, said she needed a drink, and left the room.

When class was over, they all rushed out, except Alice, who lingered. Although morose, she looked particularly pretty that day in a white T-shirt and shorts, and I walked over to her and was just about to speak when I heard someone behind me.

It turned out to be Jessie’s mother, a rotund woman in her thirties, her dark blond hair styled and sprayed. Her expression informed me instantly that she was on a mission of great seriousness. Neither Jessie’s mother nor Jessie herself, it seemed, had expected
my
kind of poetry class. It had come to her attention that I had given the girls a poem by, long breath, “D. H. Lawrence.” The writer’s name alone, it appeared, augured peril forhe goheretofore-unpollinated imaginations of the Bonden flowers. When I explained that “Snake” was a poem about a man attentively watching the animal and his guilt for frightening it, her jaw locked. “We have our beliefs,” she said. The woman did not look stupid. She looked dangerous. In Bonden, a rumor, a bit of gossip, even outright slander could spread with preternatural speed. I mollified her, asserting my great respect for beliefs of all kinds—an outright lie—and by the end of our conversation, I felt I had assuaged her worries. One sentence has stayed with me, however: “God is frowning on this, I tell you. He’s frowning.” I saw him, Mrs. Lorquat’s own God the Father filling the sky, a clean-shaven chap in a suit and tie, brow furrowed, implacably stern, an utterly humorless lover of mediocrity, God as the quintessential American reviewer.

When I looked for Alice, she had disappeared.

*   *   *

I confess now that I had already entered into a correspondence with Mr. Nobody. In response to my inquiry as to who he was and what he wanted, he had written, “I am any one of your voices, take your pick, an oracular voice, a plebian voice, an orator-for-the-ages voice, a girl’s voice, a boy’s voice, a woof, a howl, a tweet. Hurtful, coddling, angry, kind, I am the voice from Nowhere come to speak to you.”

I fell for it, pushed by my loneliness, a particular kind of aching mental loneliness. Boris had been my husband, but he had also been my interlocutor. We taught each other and, without him, I had no one to dance with anymore. I wrote to poet friends, but most of them were locked into the poetry world as much as most of Boris’s colleagues had been neuro shut-ins. This Nobody fellow was a leaper and a twister. He hopped from Leibniz’s
Monadology
to Heisenberg and Bohr in Copenhagen to Wallace Stevens almost without taking a breath and, despite his loopiness, I found myself entertained and wrote back, coming at him with counterthoughts and new spiraling arguments. He was an adamant anti-materialist, that much I gathered. He spat on physicalists, such as Daniel Dennett and Patricia Churchland, touting a post-Newtonian world that had left substance in the dust. An intellectual omnivore who seemed to have pressed himself to the limits of his own whirling brain, he wasn’t well, but he was fun. When I wrote to him, I always saw a picture of Leonard. Most of us need an image, after all, a someone to see, and that was how I gave Mr. Nobody a face.

*   *   *

That night I dreamed I woke up in the bedroom with the Buddha on the dresser where I slept. I climbed out of bed, and although the light was dim, I noticed that the walls were wet and glistening. I reached out, touched the damp surface with my fingers, put them to my mouth, and tasted blood. Then, from the next room, I heard a child screaming. I rushed through the door, saw a bundle of white rags on the floor, and began pulling at them to unravel the cloth and uncover the child, but all I found were more and more wrappings. I woke up, breathing hard. I woke up in the room where the dream had begun, but the story did not stop. I heard screaming. Was I still asleep? No. With a racing heart, I understood that the sound was coming from next door. Good Go whihought, Pete. I threw on a robe and flew across the yard. Without knocking or ringing the bell, I ran into the house.

There was a wigless Flora, brown curls exposed, prostrate on the living room floor, shrieking. Her small face was purple with rage and her burning cheeks streamed with tears and snot as she kicked a chair with her heels and slammed her fists into the floor. Simon was emitting a series of desperate gasping wails from the bedroom upstairs and before me was Ashley. Standing only a foot or so away from Flora, she looked down at the child with blank, dead eyes, and I saw her mouth twitch once. When she understood someone had come in and, in the same moment, recognized me, I watched her expression change instantly to one of concern and helplessness. I swooped down on Flora, picked her up in my arms, and pressed her close to me. The fit didn’t end, but I started talking. “It’s Mia, sweetheart, Mia. What’s the matter?” That was when I realized she was screaming, “I want my air! Air!”

“Where’s her wig?”

Ashley looked at me. “I threw it away. It was gross.”

“Get it this instant!” I growled at her.

Flora stopped writhing the minute her “air” was restored, and with the sniffing child in my arms I mounted the steps to the bedroom to rescue Simon. Telling Flora I had to put her down in order to retrieve Simon, I instructed her to hug my leg. The baby’s little body was convulsing with sobs. I picked him up and began rocking him until he grew calmer. The three of us, now one three-headed body, lumbered slowly down the stairs into the living room.

The person I had first seen when I arrived had vanished. In her place was the Ashley I knew from class, a person who was relieved I had come, a person who had been overwhelmed, a person who hadn’t known what to do when Flora had smeared peanut butter in her wig, a person who had wanted to pick up Simon but was afraid to leave Flora. It all made perfect sense. Weren’t Lola and Pete dunderheads for leaving two children under four with a thirteen-year-old? I did not argue with her. I told her I understood. What was I to say? When I came in, I saw something in you that shocked me? I gleaned it from your eyes, your mouth? These insights do not count in social discourse; they may be true, but articulating them sounds insane. After I had settled the three of us onto the sofa, I asked Ashley to get me a bottle for Simon and sent her home.

The children were both exhausted. Simon collapsed after his food, his tiny curled hand pressed into my collarbone. Flora found a clinging spot a little lower on my body and rested her head on my abdomen. We slept.

I woke to Lola’s touch. Her hand was moving over my forehead and into my hair. I heard footsteps in the front hall, the bullying or to-be-pitied Pete (depending on my mood), and felt Lola lift Simon from my arms. She smelled of liquor, and her eyes had a watery, sentimental look. I gave her a brief synopsis. All she did was smile, my Madonna of the Split-Level, in her low-necked sparkly top, her tight jeans, and her own golden earrings—two Eiffel towers swaying slightly as she ld down at me.

*   *   *

Dr. S. and I talked at length about Boris’s housing arrangement, during which I leaked a small bucket of tears, and then I told her about the bloody Kleenex, Alice slipping away, Mrs. Lorquat’s complaint, and Ashley’s face. I used the sentence “I feel something is brewing” and saw witches steaming toads on their Sabbath. Dr. S. agreed that it was entirely possible that the girls were engaged in popularity politics, but the evidence of anything more sinister was, well, nonexistent. My blood dream interested her more. Rags. The Change. No more children. The babes next door. There is a wistful sadness when fertility ends, a longing, not to return to the days of bleeding, but a longing for the repetition itself, for the steady monthly rhythms, for the invisible tug of the Moon herself, to whom you once belonged: Diana, Ishtar, Mardoll, Artemis, Luna, Albion, Galata—waxing and waning—maiden, mother, crone.

*   *   *

In class, I found myself examining Ashley’s face for some sign of the frightening babysitter, but there was no trace of her. The other girls were slightly withheld, I noticed, but cooperative, and I did not have to confiscate any phones. And Alice, Alice looked happy, more than happy. She looked elated. I had never seen her in a radiant state before. Her eyes gleamed, and the poem she wrote had a jazzy tone I would have thought was completely out of character. “I’m banging out my thoughts today / Singing on a comet / Yelling in the clouds / Dancing on the sun.” Something has happened, I said to myself. Alice left last, as was often the case. She stood over the table, carefully depositing her notebook and pens into her bag, and she hummed a few notes from an unrecognizable tune.

“You’re in a good mood.”

She looked up at me and smiled; her braces shone silver for an instant in the light from the window.

“Have you had good news?”

Alice nodded.

I looked at her young face encouragingly.

“You might find it silly,” she said. “But I’ve had a message, a nice message, from a boy I like.”

“That’s not silly,” I said. “I remember. I remember how nice that was.”

As we walked to the door, I told her she should keep writing. She laughed. It may have been the first time I had heard her laugh. Outside, she jumped down the steps, turned to wave at me, and started to run. Farther down the block, she slowed her pace, but her joy remained visible in the added bounce she gave to her walk.

*   *   *

It was the title that got me thinking.
Persuasion.
My mother was reading it for her next book club with the other Swans and they had invited me, Mia, Mistress Degree, to say a few words of introduction. A story of love postponed, of love found, lost, and refound. Austen’s heroine is persuaded to give HIM up. Persuasion: to influence, sway, move, induce, soft-pedal, weigh upon, cajole, convince, the work of words, mostly, words that play on weakness, on a vulnerable spot. Honeyed tongues wag as men sweet-talk women into parting their thighs, the smooth palaver that breaks down feminine resistance. Wily women urge men toward this or that crime; the cool seductress of cinema with a teeny little pearl-handled revolver in her purse. Speed-talking Rosalind Russell snaps lines at Cary Grant in
His Girl Friday.
Love as verbal war. Scheherazade keeps on talking and stays alive one more night. The troubadours moon and croon for a lady’s favor. I will win her with words and music. I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and seas. I will dissect the Beloved’s body in metaphor. I will compliment her. I will lure her with wit. “Had we but world enough, and time…” I will tell stories. I will stay alive one more night. Comedies end in marriage, tragedies in death. Otherwise they aren’t so different. In the end, Scheherazade gets the man who wanted to kill her, but he’s besotted by then. Anne Elliot gets Captain Wentworth. The wrap-up is swift. It is the getting him back that counts and the marrying, but in spirit, Austen knows, they were wed before and suffered the emptiness of separation for six long years. This story of Mia and Boris begins deep in a marriage, after years of sex and talk and fights. If it is to be a comedy, then it must fall into Stanley Cavell’s territory, the comedies of repetition, of the already-married coming together again. The philosopher gives us a trenchant parenthesis: “(Can human beings change? The humor, and the sadness, of remarriage comedies can be said to result from the fact that we have no good answer to that question.)”