Though Jeanne also distrusted men, she disagreed with Polly on the proper method of dealing with them. If avoidance was impossible, she counseled guile. Polly’s instinctive preference, on the other hand, was for confrontation. When she did those interviews, she said now, she wanted to be open about her own feelings.
“Yes. Of course, you would want that.” Jeanne gave a small indulgent sigh. She had once suggested — and maybe correctly — that it was Polly’s openness about her feelings that had kept her an assistant curator for five years.
“That’s what seems natural to me.”
“Sure, it seems natural,” Jeanne agreed; her intonation suggested that there wasn’t all that much to be said for nature. “Confrontation is always natural for you. But if you want results, you’ve got to keep your cool.”
Jeanne often urged Polly to keep her cool, cool off, or simmer down — not always with success. Outwardly she herself was not particularly cool, but rather mildly warm. She appeared to most men to be a sweet, pretty, easygoing sort of woman. Inwardly, however, she concealed a revulsion that went back to her deprived and abused childhood.
“Look, Polly,” she reasoned, dragging on her cigarette. “You know you’re going to have to spend hours, perhaps days even, with those people. If you want them to talk to you, you’ll simply have to prevent them from guessing what’s in your mind.”
“I’m not sure I can do that.”
“Of course, it’s not going to be easy,” Jeanne continued. “I know you.” She smiled. Though several years younger than Polly, she habitually took toward her (and toward all her close friends) a stance of maternal experience. “I think maybe the best thing for you would be to resolve right now to say as little as possible. Next time, simply turn on your machine, ask your questions, and whatever they answer, you just nod and grin. Let them blather on and condemn themselves. ... And they will, I’m sure of that.”
“I don’t know.” Polly frowned and shoved her heavy mug away, splashing the table with lukewarm coffee.
“What don’t you know?”
“What you said — it just sounds wrong to me. I mean, women have been smiling and lying to men for centuries. I figure it’s time for us to stop all that crap. I want to make it clear that I know what those guys did to Lorin Jones; then they won’t be able to waffle.”
“Waffle?” Jeanne laughed. “They’ll waffle whatever you do. But the proper way to treat a waffle is with syrup.”
“I can’t sweet-talk people; it’s not my thing. I’ve got to let them see where I’m coming from.”
“Oh, Polly.” Jeanne sighed. “You know what your problem is? You still believe deep down that if men really understood how we felt they’d be surprised and sorry. They’d repent and reform, and we’d all live happily together ever after. You’ve got to realize that they already understand quite well how we feel. And none of them give an
S-H-I-T.
” Jeanne never uttered an obscenity; she preferred to spell out the words as if some invisible child were listening.
“Mm,” Polly murmured, accepting Jeanne’s account of her views but not Jeanne’s conclusions.
“You’ll have to be on your guard every minute. And prepared for the worst.”
“Yeah? And what’s the worst?”
“I know what men are like.” Jeanne put down her cigarette and turned to look at her friend. “I know they’ll all try to seduce you, figuratively. Or even perhaps literally.”
“Aw, come on.” Polly shook her head.
“It’s true. And for two reasons: first, because they’re all going to be in your book. Naturally they’ll want to go down in art history as good guys.”
“Well, maybe so,” Polly said, suddenly feeling powerful. “But that doesn’t mean they’ll make a pass at me.”
“I bet they will,” Jeanne said. “Some of them, anyhow. That’s the way men’s minds work. And second, they could try to seduce you just because that’s the traditional male response to an attractive unattached woman. It doesn’t matter if she’s gay or straight. A woman who doesn’t need men — they’ll do anything to destroy her, prove she doesn’t exist. When they hear of someone like you, or me, they say to each other: ‘All she needs is a good lay.’ ”
“Sure, some men do, but —”
“You remember what happened to Cathy when she was up in Vermont? If Ida hadn’t come back from the village in time, their redneck neighbor, that Cathy thought was such a nice guy, would have more or less raped her. He would have told himself she was asking for it, because she always invited him in and gave him a cup of coffee after he finished mowing their field.”
“Yeah,” Polly said. “Still, I figure I’m pretty safe. Paolo Carducci is over seventy and has a heart condition, and Garrett Jones is over seventy and married.” She laughed.
“Yes; but from what you told me, he used to have quite a reputation. All I’m saying is, watch out.” Jeanne extinguished her cigarette delicately in her saucer.
“Okay, I will.”
“That’s right. Well, I guess I better be getting back to Brooklyn before the muggers start their night’s work.” Jeanne gave a long sigh.
“You could stay over if you liked,” Polly said. “Stevie’s room’s free now.” She sighed in her turn; Stevie, now thirteen, had just left to visit his father in Colorado.
“Oh, thank you; I’d love to, it’s so peaceful here. But I can’t tonight. I think Betsy’s going to call.” Jeanne stood up; her usual serene expression had been replaced by one of tension and anxiety. She had recently become involved with a young married woman who taught part-time at her college, and who had what Jeanne described as a neurotic, abusive husband.
“Good luck,” Polly said.
“Thank you,” Jeanne replied distractedly. “Maybe some other time.”
Alone, Polly scraped tabbouli into a bowl and covered it with plastic wrap. As she opened the fridge to put it away she was reminded that somehow she had to use up the crunchy peanut butter, grape jelly, raisin bread, milk, Pepsi, and hot dogs left behind yesterday by Stevie. There was no use saving any of it as she’d ordinarily do, because this time he wouldn’t be home in a week or so; he’d be gone the whole fall term. Logically, Polly could see the point of this. It would give Stevie a chance to know his father better, and free her to travel and do research for her book. But illogically she felt awful about it. Her son had been gone only twenty-four hours, and already she missed him terribly.
And what would happen to Stevie while he was away? Raising her eyes from the sink, Polly stared past the smudged glass in the direction of Colorado. Her view was restricted, for though the building was on Central Park West, her apartment didn’t face it, but confronted another building the color of birdshit and a vacant lot littered with broken glass and stunted sumac.
When Stevie looked out of the windows of his father’s new architect-designed split-level in Colorado (clearly pictured in the background of a snapshot of him taken earlier that summer), he wouldn’t see a dirty brick wall and piles of trash, but a wide-open vista of mountains and plains and long drifting Ansel Adams clouds. Would New York, and this apartment, seem cramped and dirty then, a place he didn’t want to come home to?
Jeanne thought it was a good idea for Stevie to stay in Colorado for four months. She believed he needed a maturing experience; also she believed that Polly had invested too much in him emotionally. She thought it was a mistake to care too deeply for male children, or become too close to them, since they would inevitably grow into men — that is, into aliens.
But whatever Jeanne said, Polly couldn’t think of Stevie as an alien. He wasn’t like most males; he had been raised on nonsexist principles from birth, read aloud to from
Stories for Free Children,
given dolls as well as trucks to play with, taken to women doctors and dentists. For years his freedom from prejudice had been Polly’s greatest pride. Over Christmas and spring vacations, and for two weeks in July when he went to stay with his father, she held her breath, fearing that he would come back infected with ugly paternalist ideas; but he never had. But what would happen when he was exposed to these psychological germs not for a week or two, but for nearly four months?
Jeanne didn’t understand what she felt about Stevie, and she probably never would, Polly thought, because she had no children of her own. She didn’t understand, either, what it meant to be married; how much you invested, how long and desperately you tried to make things work out. Often, when Polly related something Jim had once done or said, she saw a particular look, between amusement and impatience, cross her friend’s gentle, rounded features.
Rather slow, weren’t you? Rather dense?
this look said.
What if Jeanne was right? Polly thought as she rinsed a plate. What if even now the child she loved was turning into a man like other men?
There were so goddamn many dangers in this culture. Magazines, books, newspapers, television were heavy with overt and covert sexist propaganda, and Polly wouldn’t be around now to point it out to Stevie. Some of the kids he played with had already been brainwashed, she’d seen the signs. And Stevie’s father, Jim Meyer, was in many ways the most dangerous companion he could have, because his sexism was so well concealed. After all, Polly herself, though an adult, had been deceived by him. For fourteen years she had believed him to be a decent, generous, sensitive, nonchauvinist man.
Jim Meyer had first appeared one afternoon at the auction gallery where Polly then worked. He was a tall, solid man about her own age, with regular features and wide gray eyes rimmed with sooty, transparent skin, giving him an intriguingly — and as it turned out, deceptively — sophisticated and world-weary air. (Stevie had inherited this characteristic; even after nine hours of sleep he and his father both looked as if they’d been up all night.)
Jim had come in to arrange the sale of some valuable but not very interesting nineteenth-century paintings and furniture that belonged to his grandmother, who was moving to a nursing home. Polly was drawn to him at once, not only by his looks, but by his good manners. Since she was obviously working for a living, and not a society girl amusing herself while she waited to make a good marriage, many of the people Polly had to deal with at the gallery treated her like a typist or even like a housemaid. But Jim was considerate, even deferential. As it turned out, he was incapable of being rude to anyone.
Though she was attracted to Jim Meyer, Polly didn’t expect much to come of it, partly because he was a medical researcher. From years of living with her stepfather, Bob Milner, she had formed the false opinion that scientists were like icebergs. Nine-tenths of them was under the surface, and most of that nine-tenths was ice. She didn’t get her hopes up when Jim kept returning to the gallery on various excuses; she assumed that he came to see his grandmother’s paintings and furniture before they disappeared forever. His attachment to them made her both sad and impatient — though of course she’d seen the same thing in other consignors.
“That big shipwreck picture, you know, it used to hang over the hall table in the Maine house, next to the barometer,” he told her one day, for the second time. “You see the woman screaming and drowning there in the corner, and the big wave coming for her? When I was a kid I used to imagine I was just outside the painting, in a rowboat, and I was going to throw her a rope —”
“Listen.” Unable to stop herself, Polly interrupted the story, though the sale catalogue in which this picture appeared was already at the printers. “Excuse my asking, but why are you selling this painting, if you like it so much? ... I mean,” she went on when Jim didn’t answer, “couldn’t you work something out with your grandmother? For instance, maybe you could have it appraised, and then buy it from her gradually.”
“I guess I could. But the thing is, I don’t figure I have a right to a picture like this. It ought to be in a museum or somewhere it could be appreciated properly. I don’t really know anything about paintings.”
“Says who?” Polly asked, turning around from the shipwreck to confront Jim.
“I don’t know. I guess it was my mother who pointed it out first. ‘Jim’s a scientist,’ she always said. ‘He has no feeling for the arts.’ ”
“Oh, bullshit. Listen, it’s not like that. There isn’t any race of special privileged people who deserve to own paintings because they’re so damned sensitive and aware. You like this picture, you should hang on to it.”
Jim Meyer, typically, gave no sign that her argument had convinced him; but the following day, to the great irritation of Polly’s boss, he withdrew three of his grandmother’s pictures from the sale. He also invited Polly to dinner to thank her; and that was how the whole thing started.
All Polly’s feminist friends liked Jim because he was so agreeable and good-looking and well informed, so obviously crazy about her, so respectful of her work. When she admitted that back in high school and college she’d wanted to be a painter herself, he was impressed and enthusiastic. It was a goddamn shame that she’d never had the time to go on with it, he said.
For the first time in nearly twenty years, as Polly had later explained to her therapist, she felt really happy and secure. Jim appeared to be all any liberated woman could want. He read the books and articles Polly lent him, and agreed with their conclusions; he supported the hiring and promotion of women at his lab. He tried unfamiliar dishes, and went with her to look at the work of new artists.
In return Polly made an effort not to shock Jim’s colleagues and family with her language, or lose her temper. In fact, Jim was so patient with her outbursts that she gradually gave them up. Yelling at him was like punching the tan beanbag chair in their bedroom; he didn’t argue or answer back, only sagged and looked deflated.
There was only one problem: though she loved and trusted Jim, he didn’t always turn her on. His gentle and affectionate lovemaking was sometimes almost on the verge of boring her.
For years, Polly tried with some success not to notice this. She blamed herself for still being susceptible to a stupid false adolescent idea of the desirable male — the Gothic myth of the Dark Stranger: reckless, willful, undependable. In the daylight hours she mocked this myth, deploring those of her friends who seemed to have bought into it. But sometimes late at night, as she lay in bed beside Jim Meyer and listened to his regular, almost apologetic snoring, the phantasm returned, and carried her into hot, windy, luridly lit regions whose existence her husband did not suspect.