‘What was it like?’ Mira was fascinated.
Val shrugged. ‘Nothing much. Neither of us got much out of it. We loved each other, but we had no passion for each other. We still laugh about it – or did, last time I saw her. She lives in Mississippi. I met her when I was doing civil rights stuff down there.’
Mira sat back, perplexed.
‘If you’re so fascinated, why don’t you try it?’
‘Yes,’ Mira said in a small voice. ‘But you can’t just do that, can you? Just go out and experiment.’
‘I have.’
‘I don’t think it’s right.’ She looked directly at Valerie. ‘Sex is too important, it touches us too closely. You haven’t the right to do that to someone else, just use them that way.’
Val smiled at her.
‘I couldn’t, anyway,’ Mira finished. ‘You could because you don’t think of it that way. Sex isn’t important to you.’
‘Oh, it’s important. It just isn’t sacred.’
‘It isn’t sacred to me either!’ Mira protested.
‘Sure it is,’ Val smiled.
16
To this day I feel uncomfortable about Valerie. I don’t know if she was simply the greatest egotist I ever knew, or whether her operations came out of a high energy level and as she said, a Messianic drive. She had everything organized in her head, as if she and she alone possessed secret knowledge about how and what things are. She could tick life off on her fingers like a laundry list. And I not only can’t do that, I don’t even believe life is open to such an organization. Still, I find the things she said coming back to me all the time. A situation will occur and Val’s comment on something that happened in the past returns to comment upon what is happening now. Her way of seeing did make sense.
But Mira somewhat resented her because she always thought she was right, she never seemed to feel unsure, and she expressed things so loudly that she was like a tidal wave coming at you. Every one of her experiences had been transformed into a theory: she was full of ideas. You had the choice of running or getting drowned in ideas. Yet it isn’t true that she never felt unsure. After she broke up with Tad, she went into a depression for a while, and sometimes when she drank too much, she would start to cry. She said the thing she was most afraid of was ending up like Judy Garland or Stella Dallas.
‘Oh, God! I’ll never forget that last scene, when her daughter is being married inside the big house with the high iron fence around it and she’s standing out there – I can’t even remember who it was, I saw it all when I was a little girl, and I may not even be remembering it right. But I’m remembering it – it made a tremendous impression on me – anyway, maybe it was Barbara Stanwyck. She’s standing there and it’s cold and raining and she’s wearing a thin little coat and shivering, and the rain is coming down on her poor head and streaming down her face with the tears, and she stands there watching the lights and hearing the music and then she just drifts away. How they got us to consent to our own eradication! I didn’t just feel pity for her; I felt that shock of recognition – you know, when you see what you sense is your own destiny up there on the screen or on the stage. You might say I’ve spent my whole life trying to arrange a different destiny!’
But she often made Mira feel as if she were some female Pope, and Mira just a child being given the Word. For instance, a few days after their conversation about Howard, Mira brought up the subject of sex
again. They were having lunch at the Toga, just the two of them, and Mira was loosened, having had two Dubonnets.
‘You know what we were saying the other day. I don’t mean to argue with you, you have much more experience than I do, but I think you put too much emphasis on sex.’
‘Not true. We spend half our lives thinking about sex. Say that the two mainsprings are sexuality and aggression. I don’t think that’s what they are, but say it’s true.’
‘What do you think they are?’ Mira interrupted.
‘Fear and desire for pleasure. Aggressiveness comes out of fear, predominantly, and sexuality predominantly out of the other. But they mix in the middle. Anyway, both of these impulses can destroy order, which comes out of both drives, and which is another human need I haven’t yet fit into my scheme. So both have to be controlled. But in fact, despite religious commands to the contrary, aggressiveness has never really been condemned. It’s been exalted, from the Bible through Homer and Virgil right down to Humbert Hemingway. Have you ever heard of a John Wayne movie being censored? Did you ever see them take war books off the bookstands? They leave the genitals off Barbie and Ken, but they manufacture every kind of war toy. Because sex is more threatening to us than aggression. There have been strict rules about sex since the beginning of written rules, and even before, if we can believe myth. I think that’s because it’s in sex that men feel most vulnerable. In war they can hype themselves up, or they have a weapon. Sex means being literally naked and exposing your feelings. And that’s more terrifying to most men than the risk of dying while fighting a bear or a soldier. Look at the rules! You can have sex if you’re married, and you have to marry a person of the opposite gender, the same color and religion, an age close to your own, of the right social and economic background, even the right height, for God’s sake, or else everybody gets up in arms, they disinherit you or threaten not to come to the wedding or they make nasty cracks behind your back. Or worse, if you cross color or gender lines. And once you’re married, you’re supposed to do only certain things when you make love: the others all have nasty names. When after all, sex itself, in itself, is harmless, and aggression is harmful. Sex never hurt anyone.’
‘That’s not true, Val! What about rape, or seduction? Lucrece was destroyed by sex.’
‘Lucrece was destroyed by aggression. The line does cross.
Tarquin’s aggression against her, and her own aggression against herself. If she could stick a knife in herself, I don’t know why she couldn’t stick one in him. Rape is aggression that happens to involve the genitals. There are methods of torture that do that too. But those are not primarily sexual acts.’
‘What about sexual depravity? …’
Val leaped at her. ‘What is sexual depravity?’
Mira sat in shock.
‘What is it? Is it homosexuality? Cunnilingus? Fellatio? Masturbation?’
Sophisticated Mira, who had experienced only one of these, shook her head.
‘Then what is it? What sexual act can you name that is depraved? That is harmful?’
‘Well … in pornography … well, pornography itself … and parties where men wear lipstick … well, heavens, Val, you know!’
Val sat back. ‘I don’t know. Are you talking about S and M?’
Mira, pink-faced, nodded.
‘S and M is only the expression in the bedroom of an oppressive-submissive relation which can happen also in the kitchen or at the factory, can happen between people of any gender. There is obviously something titillating about these relationships, but it isn’t the sexual component that makes them ugly, they’re uglier elsewhere. Nothing sexual is depraved. Only cruelty is depraved, and that’s another matter.’
Val lighted a cigarette and continued. She talked about polymorphous perversity, and how the whole world was just like a litter of puppies who want to curl up together and lick each other and smell each other, and about exogamy and endogamy and the absurdity and destructiveness of notions like racial purity, and about the ways property, the whole idea of property, had infected and corrupted sexual relationships.
Mira had another drink and listened uneasily. She was overwhelmed. It wasn’t just Val’s readiness with words and arguments, but the enormous energy she put into them, the energy radiated by her mere physical presence, her voice, her face. She closed her mind to Val. Val was extreme, she was a fanatic, she was like Lily, talking on and on about the same thing as if it were as inexhaustibly interesting to others as it was to her. She felt small, silenced: Valerie’s power nullified her own.
‘You’d like to nullify the world,’ she muttered. ‘You’d like to be Dictator of the World.’
Nothing fazed the woman. ‘Who wouldn’t?’ she laughed.
‘I wouldn’t.’
‘Actually, I’m really an old-fashioned preacher at heart. I’d like to get up in a pulpit every week and teach the world how to save itself.’
‘And you really believe you know how.’
‘Of course!’ Valerie crowed, laughing.
Mira went home smoldering.
Nevertheless, she thought about what Val said, and sometimes it helped her. Val really did know a lot about sex, partly because she had had so much experience and partly because she was intelligent and thought about it. For her, sex was almost a philosophy. She saw the whole world in terms of it. She used to say that only Blake had known what the world was really about. She used to read Blake at night: the book lay always on her bedside table. She said that even if he was an mcp, he knew what wholeness comprised. Val slept with people the way other people go out for dinner with a friend. She liked them, she liked sex. She rarely expected anything from it beyond the pleasure of the moment. At the same time, she said it was overrated: it had been so tabooed, she claimed, that we had come to expect paradise from it. It was only fun, great fun, but not paradise.
And she was a happy person; she was one of the happiest people I ever knew. Not happy in the sense of smiling and gay: she was a crank. She loved to crank about politics and morals and intellectual idiocy. She enjoyed cranking. There was a wholeness in her, I guess. She went breezing through, and even though she was sensitive and aware of what was going on around her most of the time, it rarely flapped her. She laughed at absurdities, went home and cooked a great meal, had a good talk with somebody, then made love until two in the morning and next day got down to the books again. She was unflappable. Until the end.
17
Ava had gone home to Alabama for the holidays; Iso went with her ‘to make sure nobody kills anybody,’ she laughed. They did not return in two weeks, as Ava had been supposed to. At the end of January, their phone still went unanswered. Mira was worried about Iso, who was supposed to assist Wharton in the medieval course. It was strange: close as they were, none of them would have known how to find another, to contact parents or family. If Iso and Ava had never returned, Mira would simply have lost them. In mid-February, when the new semester had already begun, Brad Barnes said he had seen Iso coming out of Wharton’s office. But the phone still rang empty.
The following week Iso called sounding tight, almost curt, and Mira agreed to have lunch with her and Val the next day. She stood on the street near the back gate of Widener, where they’d agreed to meet. Gazing down Mass Ave, she saw Iso walking, a couple of blocks away. She had a long stride, but she paused in her step as if with each one she were debating turning back. This gave her a loping, sideways walk, ungainly. Her head was down, her hands plunged in the deep pockets of the shapeless pea jacket she wore, a remnant from her adolescence. As she came nearer, Mira studied the tight face. Her mouth was pursed, her cheekbones looked more prominent than ever, and the skin stretched tight across them as if the tight, pulled-back hair were drawing the skin too. She looked like a middle-aged nun worrying about coal for the school as she walked swiftly to her next duty.
Val came up behind Mira, greeting her. When Iso saw them, she stopped still. She did not smile. They approached her without haste, cautiously, both understanding without any communication that it was important not to rush over to her. She looked as if she were swaying, standing there. When they reached her, Val put a large arm lightly around her and said to Mira, ‘Let’s go to Jack’s,’ a bar that served food and was always deserted during the day. They sat at a back booth. A few people stood at the bar in the front of the place, and music was playing, but the back was empty.
Iso sipped the whiskey sour Val had ordered for her, and looked at them. Her mouth was twitching. There were dark circles under her eyes and her hair looked as if it would pull all the skin off her face. It was tight and smooth and tied in a tight, smooth little knot on top.
She looked like an aging schoolmarm who has just been fired. ‘Ava’s gone,’ she said.
In the fall, Ava’s dance school had held a recital. Just before Christmas, Iso told them, a woman who had attended the recital had called Ava and offered her a ‘scholarship’ to her ballet school in New York. This meant free lessons, and the possibility of dancing in the corps de ballet of an opera company with which the woman was connected. It also meant Ava would have to move to New York, find an apartment, a new job, a new life.
‘But that’s wonderful!’ Mira exclaimed.
‘When did she leave?’
‘Yesterday.’ Iso kept looking at her drink, rolling it in her hands.
‘How long have you two been together?’ Val continued.
‘Four years off and on. Steadily for the last three years.’ She tried to pull her mouth back into shape.
‘You can still see each other,’ Mira suggested uneasily, unsure about what was going on.
Iso shook her head. ‘No. No.’
‘It’s really a divorce,’ Val said gently, and Iso nodded yes, vigorously, as tears began to splash down the tight cheeks. Controlling her weeping, she tried to tell them, gasping out phrases, blowing her nose, sipping her drink, pulling at her hair until its smooth front was a mass of webbing. Intense, passionate, all-consuming, their love had sprung up instantly. They had tried to fight it off, Iso going around the world, Ava moving to a new place, a new job. But always they returned to each other, and three years ago had given in, had decided to live together, to brazen it out, although pretending, always pretending that they were mere roommates. Ava curled up inside Iso’s mothering like a kitten, but she clawed like a cat when she wanted to jump down, when the arms grew too warm, when the nest felt oppressive.
‘I could never give her what she wanted. I could never be right. She pounded on me all the time, demanding, pleading that somehow I do something, something to make things all right.’