Well, you see what I mean. Every new person you meet and really take in violates your psyche to some degree. You have to juggle your categories to fit the person in. Here where I am, people see me some way – I don’t know exactly how. Middle-aged matron, rabid feminist, nice lady, madwoman: I don’t know. But they can’t see me who I am. So I’m lonely. I guess maybe I wouldn’t be able to say who I am myself. One needs some reflection from the outside to get an image of oneself. Sometimes, when I am really low, the words of Pyotr Stephanovich come into my mind: You must love God because He is the only one you can love for Eternity. That sounds very profound to me, and tears come into my eyes whenever I say it. I never heard anyone else say it. But I don’t believe in God and if I did I couldn’t love Him/Her/It. I couldn’t love anyone I thought had created this world.
Oh God. (Metaphorically speaking.) So people handle loneliness by putting themselves into something larger than they are, some framework or purpose. But those big exterior things – I don’t know, they just don’t seem as important to me as what Norm said to Mira or Bliss to Adele. I mean, do you really care about 1066? Val would scream that it was significant, but my students don’t care about 1066. They don’t even care about World War II or the Holocaust. They don’t even remember Jean Arthur. For them, Elvis Presley is part of the quaint, irrelevant past. No, it’s the little things that matter. But when you’re dealing with a lot of insignificant lives, how do you put things together? When you look back on your life, are there places where you can put your finger, like crossroads on a map or a scholar’s crux in Shakespeare, where you can say, ‘There! That is the place where everything changed, the word upon which everything hinged!’
I find that difficult. I feel like a madwoman. I walk around my apartment, which is a shithouse, full of landlord’s odds and ends of
leftover furniture and a few dying plants on the windowsills. I talk to myself, myself, myself. Now I am smart enough to provide a fairly good running dialogue, but the problem is there’s no response, no voice but mine. I want to hear another’s truth, but I insist it be a truth. I talk to the plants but they shrivel and die.
I wanted my life to be a work of art, but when I try to look at it, it swells and shrinks like the walls you glean in a delirious daze. My life sprawls and sags, like an old pair of baggy slacks that still, somehow, fits you.
Like Mira, Val, and lots of others, I went back to the university late in life. I went with despair and expectations. It was a new life, it was supposed to revitalize you, to send you radiant to new planes of experience where you would get tight with Beatrice Portinari and be led to an earthly paradise. In literature, new lives, second chances, lead to visions of the City of God. But I have been suspecting for a while now that everything I ever read was lies. You can believe the first four acts, but not the fifth. Lear really turned into a babbling old fool drooling over his oatmeal and happy for a place by the fire in Regan’s house in Scarsdale. Hamlet took over the corporation by bribing the board and ousting Claudius, and then took to wearing a black leather jacket and German Army boots and sending out proclamations that everyone would refrain from fornication upon pain of death. He wrote letters to his cousin Angelo and together they decided to purify the whole East Coast, so they have joined with the Mafia, the Marines, and the CIA to outlaw sex. Romeo and Juliet marry and have some kids, then separate when she wants to go back to graduate school and he wants to go live on a commune in New Mexico. She is on welfare now and he has long hair and an Indian headband and says
Oooom
a lot.
Camille lives: she runs a small popular hotel in Bordeaux. I’ve met her. She has bleached blonde hair, thick orange makeup, and a hard mouth, and she knows everything about the price of vermouth, clean sheets, bottled orange drink, and certain available female bodies. She’s thicker all around than she used to be, but she still has a shape. She meanders around in a shiny pale blue pantsuit, and sits in her bar laughing with friends and keeping an eye out for Bernard, the married man who is her latest lover. Except for her passion for Bernard, she is tough and fun. Don’t ask what it is about Bernard that makes her so adore him. It is not Bernard, but love itself. She believes in love, goes on believing in it against all odds. Therefore, Bernard is a little
bored. It is boring to be adored. At thirty-eight, she should be tough and fun, not adoring. When he leaves her, a month or two from now, she will contemplate suicide. Whereas, if she had been able to bring herself to stop believing in love, she would have been tough and fun and he would have adored her forever. Which would have bored her. She then would have had to be the one to tell him to clear out. It is a choice to give one pause.
Tristan and Isolde got married after Issy got a divorce from Mark, who was anyhow turned on to a groupie at that point. And they discovered the joys of comfortable marriage can’t hold a candle to the thrills of taboo, so they have placed an ad in the Boston
Phoenix
asking for a third, fourth, or even fifth party of any gender to join them in tasting taboo joys. They will smoke, they will even snort a little coke, just to assure a degree of fear about being intruded upon by the local police. Don’t judge: they, at least, are trying to hold their marriage together. And you?
The problem with the great literature of the past is that it doesn’t tell you how to live with real endings. In the great literature of the past you either get married and live happily ever after, or you die. But the fact is, neither is what actually happens. Oh, you do die, but never at the right time, never with great language floating all around you, and a whole theater full of witnesses to your agony. What actually happens is that you do get married or you don’t, and you don’t live happily ever after, but you do live. And that’s the problem. I mean, think about it. Suppose Antigone had lived. An Antigone who goes on being an Antigone year after year would be not only ludicrous but a bore. The cave and the rope are essential.
It isn’t just the endings. In a real life, how can you tell when you’re in Book I or Book III, or Act II or Act V? No stagehands come charging in to haul down the curtain at an appropriate moment. So how do I know whether I’m living in the middle of Act III and heading toward a great climax, or at the end of Act V and finished? I don’t even know who I am. I might be Hester Prynne, or Dorothea Brooke, or I might be the heroine of a TV drama of some seasons back – what was her name? – Mrs Muir! Yes, she walked on the beach and was in love with a ghost and originally she looked like Gene Tierney. I always wanted to look like Gene Tierney. I sit in a chair and I have no one to knit woolen stockings for so it’s irrelevant that I don’t know how to knit. (Val could, oddly. Nothing works the way it does in books. Can you imagine Penthesilea knitting?) I’m just sitting here living out even to
the edge of doom – what? Valerie’s vision? Except she forgot to tell me what comes next.
3
Mira had a new life. It was supposed to be glorious, it was supposed to be what all those hard years in the two-or-three-room apartments were for. This was what it was all about. Norm had worked hard for long hours, so had she: for this. Not everyone who worked hard for long hours achieved this; they were lucky. She had her own car – Norm’s old one; he bought a new little MG for himself – and a house with four bathrooms. She also had (after some wrestling with her conscience and some tense discussion with Norm, who did not want to say straight out that he did not want to pay for help in the house, so said instead that they could only get a colored woman and she would no doubt rob them blind – as if they had anything to steal) a washer-dryer, a dishwasher, a man to wax the kitchen floor every two weeks, and a laundry to do the sheets and Norm’s shirts. Never again, frozen sheets in January.
She told herself this as she paced the large, mostly empty rooms. She stood in the wide foyer, with its impressive chandelier and the winding staircase, and told herself she must be happy, she had to be. She had no other choice: there was a moral imperative on her to be happy. She was not actively unhappy. She was just – nothing.
The rhythms of life were different in Beau Reve. She would get up at seven with Norm, and make coffee while he showered and shaved. He no longer ate breakfast at home. She would sit with him over the coffee for a few minutes while he gave her her chores for the day – suits to be cleaned, shoes to be mended, some business at the bank, a telephone call to the insurance agent about the dent in his car. Then he left her and she woke the children, who dressed as she prepared the eggs. She dressed as they ate them, then she drove them the mile to the school bus stop. Everyone but Norm was grouchy in the morning and they spoke little. Then she returned to the house.
That was the worst time. She would come in through the door from the garage to the kitchen and the house would smell of bacon and toast. The greasy frying pan sat on the stove, the spattered coffeepot behind it. Dirty dishes lay on the kitchen table. The four beds were unmade and there was soiled underwear lying about. There was dust in the living
and dining rooms, the family room held used soda glasses and potato chip crumbs from the night before.
What bothered her was not that the tasks that had to be done were exerting. It was not even that they were tedious. It was that she felt that the three others lived their lives and she went around after them cleaning up their mess. She was an unpaid servant, expected to do a superlative job. In return, she was permitted to call this house hers. But so did they. Most of the time she did not think about it: only every morning, when she returned from dropping the kids at the bus. She made up little rewards for herself: I will do this and that, then I will sit and read the paper. She charged into it, sticking a batch of washing in the machine, cleaning the kitchen, making up beds and straightening rooms, and then attacked the rest of the house, in which something had to be done every day, it was so big. Down on her hands and knees in one of the endless bathrooms, she would tell herself that in a way she was fortunate. Washing the toilet used by three males, and the floor and walls around it, is, Mira thought, coming face to face with necessity. And that was why women were saner than men, did not come up with the mad, absurd schemes men developed: they were in touch with necessity, they had to wash the toilet bowl and floor. She kept telling herself that.
About eleven thirty, she made a fresh pot of coffee and sat down with
The New York Times
, which (another new luxury) she had delivered. She sat for an hour at least, savoring it. In the afternoon, she did her errands or on days when there were no errands, she might visit Lily or Samantha or Martha. But she had to be home by three, when the boys got in. They were not yet old enough to be left alone. She didn’t mind that too much, although it would have been nice, just once in a while, to feel free to stay out as long as she wanted. She didn’t know what she would have done with such freedom – Lily’s, Martha’s, and Samantha’s children came in around then too, and the women were involved with children. It was just a feeling of freedom she craved. But she enjoyed talking to the boys when they got in. They were smart and funny, and she hugged them a lot. They would talk over a snack, then change their clothes and go out. She had another hour to herself. She would take the laundry out of the dryer and fold it carefully, patiently. She would take something out of the freezer to defrost. Then she would take a book and sit down. The boys ran in and out and she was frequently interrupted, so she read only light things in the afternoons. Then it was time to prepare dinner. Norm usually got in about six thirty, and
nowadays they all ate together. But Norm continually picked on the boys at the dinner table: they were using the wrong fork, they had their elbows on the table, they were chewing with their mouths open. So dinnertime was always tense. Afterward, the boys would go off to do homework, Norm would settle in the family room with the paper, and Mira would clean up the kitchen. The boys took their own baths now, and all she had to do was to remind them about it, keep track that they did it, and wash the tubs afterward. They would come in to watch TV for a while before bed, but they had to watch what Norm wanted to see. Once she insisted they be allowed to see a children’s special, and Norm had sulked the rest of the night. She would sit with them, reading or mending. Then they would go to bed. Norm would sit for a while longer, and by ten he would be asleep in the chair. She would go over and shake him: ‘Norm, don’t fall asleep in the chair.’ He would awake and stand and stumble groggily to the bedroom.
Then Mira would switch off the TV set. She was too tired now to read seriously, but she did not want to go to bed. She would pour a snifter of brandy and turn out all the lights and sit in the corner of the family room, by the window – sit and drink and smoke until eleven or twelve, then go to bed.
She was living the American Dream, she knew that, and she tried to get her mask on straight. She had her hair done at the right shop and when they saw gray and advised dye, she let them dye it. She bought expensive three-piece knit suits: she had her nails manicured. She had a holder full of charge cards.
There were moments of beauty. Sometimes, before she made the boy’s beds, she would think about them, and love would gush into her heart, and she would lie down on their beds and smell the sheets, bury her face in them. Their beds smelled just like the boys. Sometimes, when she was having her coffee and reading her paper, the sun would slant in through the big kitchen window and pour across the wooden table and her heart would walk slowly through the large house and feel its cleanliness and order and would think that the comfort of order might after all be the best one could hope for, might even be enough.
She was not unhappy. She lived much through her friends, all of whom were having troubles. After listening to Lily or Sam or Martha all afternoon, it felt good to come home to her peaceful and orderly house. Given what she knew about others’ lives, how could she complain about her own?