Gibbon's Decline and Fall

  “Now they are. An’ they have an inner—interesting platform.” He stared at her blearily, the drink dissolving his normally well-defined features, turning him sodden. “And maybe you’re right, I need somebody a little younger.…”

  “All right, Pat. If you say so.”

  “You don’t even sound like you care!”

  She laughed, truly amused. “I’m up on the social and mating habits of primates, Pat, so they don’t surprise me much. Any more than Bettiann’s baby boy looking a lot like you surprised me much. If you really want a son, adopt him. I understand William would let him go cheap.”

  He said furiously, “Goddamn. You didn’ say a word, and you knew all along!”

  Had he really thought she hadn’t? She wasn’t stupid, or blind. Bettiann had had miscarriages, one after the other. William had a low sperm count, so she said. And then, suddenly, February 4, 1970, nine months after their first meeting in San Francisco, a fine red-haired baby boy. So let it alone. She shouldn’t have mentioned it.

  Pat wouldn’t leave it alone. “You didn’t say anything! You never even acted upset!”

  “Pat, if you want the honest-to-God truth, I had mixed emotions. I was a tiny bit angry for me. I was a tiny bit glad for Bettiann, because she wanted so badly to give William a son. And I was a tiny bit curious as to how you managed it, considering Bettiann’s problem with intimacy. What did you do? Get her drunk? Convince her you could cure her? Or did you do it with your clothes on?”

  The anger leaked away, leaving his face vacant and rather foolish. “All right,” he mumbled. “So you knew. So all right.”

  Abruptly, he heaved himself up and ran for the bathroom off the front hall. She heard him vomiting noisily, heard water running. He’d gone right through nasty to sick without stopping at the weepy stage, where he usually complained about his mother’s having preferred Pat’s sister to him. Thank God for small favors. She laughed, cried a little, shook her head at herself, unable to decide whether this was tragedy or farce.

  Whatever it was, finish it. Don’t let it die a lingering, painful death. Put an end to it. When he didn’t return to the kitchen, she went looking for him, finding him supine on his bed, arm over his eyes.

  “Do you feel like talking?”

  He arummed at her, gave what passed for a nod.

  “We’ve got some money in the bank. You should take half that. The insurance money for the California house went into this house, and even though this house is too big for me, I’d rather not move just now, so if you don’t mind, I’ll refinance it to make up the difference.”

  Again that nod.

  “The jewelry you’ve given me, Peg should have that.”

  “All right.” He fumbled for her hand, fettering her wrist. She let him hold it, passively.

  “Pat, can I ask you something?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Three years ago, the last time the club met in San Francisco. Before … you know. Despite the fact that we’re all past the usual age of seduction, you went after my friends, all but Aggie.…”

  “I don’t do nuns,” he laughed beneath his arm. “I went to parochial school! What do you think I am, Jessy?”

  She knew very well what he was. He was Don Juan or Priapus, with better posture and less hair. “Bettiann I can understand. You’d found the key to her needs a long time before, but you went after the others. Why?”

  “Shit, I don’t know. You always seemed so tight, the bunch of you. Tighter with them than with me. I figured maybe light a firecracker under it.…”

  “Just for fun? Like when you were a kid at Halloween, blowing up mailboxes?”

  “Sure. Why else?”

  “Did it matter to you that the DFC mattered to me?”

  “I told you, that’s why.…”

  He couldn’t realize what he’d just said. Surely he couldn’t have meant it just the way he’d said it? “What did Sophy say when you went after her?”

  A stillness at that. A rigidity. “I didn’t get too far with her.”

  “Meaning you did with others?”

  “Meaning … ah, hell, I was drunker than I shoulda been. I was seeing things.”

  “What things?”

  “Dragons,” he said, laughing at himself, moving uneasily at the memory. “I opened the door to her room. I heard the shower going. I started to go toward the bathroom door, and there was this dragon. Or maybe it was a dinosaur.”

  “You’re joking!”

  “Hell, Jessy. It wouldn’t be the first time I was drunk enough to see things. Pink elephants, blue snakes. When I looked again, it wasn’t there, but it shook me up some. I still remember it, eyes, scales, something strange. Just the liquor, but it stopped me. I didn’t bother your friend Sophy.”

  “But you did some of the others?”

  “That’s for me to know. Give you something to think about.”

  She didn’t need to think about it. Aggie and Faye were lesbians, even though Aggie didn’t admit it. Ophy and Carolyn were happily, faithfully married. That left only Bettiann, whose weakness Patrick hadn’t been above using for his own amusement.

  He interrupted her thoughts. “You’ve asked your question. Now I’ll ask mine.”

  “All right.”

  “You never were really committed to me, were you, Jessy?”

  “As a husband?” she asked, surprised.

  “As a person. You never really gave yourself to me.”

  His choice of words was unfortunate. Anger, thus far withheld, was just under the surface. “How do you mean, Pat?”

  “Well, you know. You always had other things in your life besides me. Work. Friends that were more yours than mine.”

  “Didn’t you always have work? And friends I didn’t even know? And love affairs, as well, which is something I never had?”

  “It’s different for men.” He said it scornfully. “I’ve pretended to buy that equality stuff for years, but it’s bullshit, Jess. The Alliance people, they have the right scope on—”

  Her anger erupted. “Do they really! So we go back to men doing what they want and women also doing what men want, right? You’ve never heard the story of David. Maybe it’s time I told you about David.”

  “David? Who the hell is David?”

  “Was, Pat. Who the hell was David. I was sixteen when I met him. He was a college boy; he roomed with our neighbor’s son; our neighbor introduced him to me. He was extremely handsome, dark eyes, a slender, muscular build, a very sexy body, and intense, rather scary eyes. He bought me an ice-cream soda. He bought me flowers. He flirted with me, all just in the neighborhood, visiting his roommate’s family. Being around him was like being on a roller coaster, all that intensity, focused on me. It was exciting.

  “After a few weeks he asked me to go out with him, on a real date. Of course, at that age, in the fifties, I had to ask Mother, and Mother wanted to meet him. So he came to the house and Mother looked him over. When he left, she took me into her bedroom. She shut the door, pulled the shades, sat beside me on her bed, almost whispering. ‘Get away from him,’ she said.…”

  “Get away from him?”

  “Just listen, Pat. She said, ‘Get away from him. I watched him watching you, Jessamine. He’s a slaver. Get away from him, do it gently, if you can, but quickly, quick as you can, get away. He eats you with his eyes.’

  “I didn’t want to send him away, but she frightened me and I had never once disobeyed her. We had a loyalty, Mother and I. We were the only women in the family—we two stood together against the world of father and brothers and uncles and boy cousins. Mother was quiet, and my father told her when she could breathe, and my brothers ate her up with their needs and wants, and I was the only person she had to share with, to be a woman with.

  “So I did what she asked. I told David that my mother thought I was too young. It was already too late. He wouldn’t let go. He went on calling me, visiting next door, meeting me on the way to or from school. Back then, in the fifties, t
here were no laws against stalking, and he stalked me, day after day. He told me I was not to do anything, not to go anywhere, not to be with anyone unless he gave permission. He said he controlled me, that he owned me.”

  “Jessy.…”

  “I cried at him, no, no, I wouldn’t be anyone’s property, not like that, but he wouldn’t listen. Everywhere I went, he was there. Everyone I saw, he was watching. And one day, on my way home from school, he jumped out of the bushes along the road and dragged me behind them, into a sort of thicket. I thought to myself no, no, this can’t be happening, it can’t, but he tore my clothes, he held me down, he pushed himself into me, red in the face, panting, eyes bulging out, banging me, biting my breasts, choking me.…

  “And when he was finished he put a gun against my breast and told me I belonged to him and would never belong to anyone else. He had made me his own, he said, and now he was going to kill me so no one else could ever touch me.

  “All I remember happening next is I went crazy. I bucked and screamed and somehow the gun went off.” She unbuttoned her blouse, pulled her bra down to show him the livid track, like the track of a whip.

  “You said … you got that in an accident, a car accident.…”

  “The bullet went across me, into his neck, his jaw. I felt the gush of blood all over me, it was hot. I pushed him off me and watched him while he died, still reaching for me—stood there, watching, glad he was dying, hating him, hating his wanting me.

  “After David I was damned careful about ‘giving’ myself, Patrick! I saw my mother give herself to my dad. The only part of herself she kept separate was the part that was there for me when I got home all soaked in blood, the part that cried and held on to me at night when I had nightmares, the part that waited for my period with me, praying with me that he hadn’t made me pregnant. That, and the part that went on putting money away for my education, the part that whispered to me when we were alone, ‘Get an education, daughter. Be your own person. Don’t do what I did, what that man would have had you do. Don’t fall into this trap.’ ”

  “You kept it from me! You never told me this, not any of it.” His voice held no sympathy, only outrage.

  “What would you have done if I had?”

  “I wouldn’t have married you, for one thing,” he shouted. “I thought you were a virgin.”

  There was silence. He heard his own words and flushed, eyes darting, perhaps wondering where they had come from. Had he even meant them?

  He had meant them. Perhaps in vino veritas, but still, at some level, he had chosen to be unforgivable. She rose and went to the door.

  He tried offense: “I suppose your club knew,” he shouted at her back. “Your precious club.”

  She answered him without turning. “Yes. They knew.” She had been almost forty before she’d found the courage to tell them, and she’d never told Bettiann, because she was afraid Bettiann would tell Patrick. Perhaps even then she’d foreseen Pat’s reaction. She shut the door on his raging voice.

  In the bedroom she’d moved into months ago, when Patrick’s penchant for daytime napping, late-night wanderings, and endless porn on TV had begun to interfere with her sleep, she shut the door and slumped onto the bed, feeling a slow leak of tears. It felt like postpartum depression. This feeling had that same looseness, that enormous emptiness. Anger would be better than this vacancy. Times like this were a lot easier if one could be angry.

  Anger had been her succor when the David thing had happened. Anger had enabled her to tell the story to the DFC, eventually, and she hadn’t been the only angry one. Faye had been furious:

  “Pity the bastard is dead. He should have been castrated.”

  Castrating rapists was one of Faye’s more militant causes, and it wasn’t the first time one of her causes had set them off.

  Aggie, as usual, had argued merciful incarceration: “All the feminist material I read defines rape as a crime of violence. And even eunuchs can be violent and cruel.”

  Ophy had been wiping Jessamine’s tearstained face, and she had turned, the towel in her outthrust hand flapping like a battle flag. “That’s only the feminist party line, Aggie. Eunuchs can be cruel, sure. No regime ever had any trouble recruiting torturers, or creating them out of anybody, even kids. People can be taught not to be cruel, however, but you can’t teach a sexual predator not to be predatory. There’s more than one cause of rape.”

  Aggie had said in her kindly, nunny way, “Is that a fact, Ophy? Or is it just your opinion?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Aggie, it’s not opinion. Testosterone doesn’t cause rape or violence, but it implements both. It’s just like guns. Guns don’t make people want to kill each other, they just enable it to happen very quickly. Nine times out of ten, if the killer hadn’t had a gun, he wouldn’t have killed the other guy. Testosterone is the same. A man predisposed to kill, abuse, or rape is very unlikely to do it without some testosterone, say around 20% of whatever his natural level is. Take all his testosterone away through castration, and he may still hate women or think of sexually abusing children, but he won’t act on it.”

  Jessamine said, “Don’t forget serotonin, which seems to govern self esteem. Primates with low serotonin are at the bottom of the pecking order. They have all that reproductive system pushing at them, they have no position to lose, and the pressure builds until they explode, risking everything, grabbing the nearest female and dragging her behind a bush.”

  Ophy shook her head. “It still won’t happen without testosterone. Even with men who hate women, pure sociopaths, nothing is likely to happen without testosterone. Even with a man who acts out his fantasies and believes the victim really wants him, the pure nutcase, or the man who uses violence to excite himself then kills the woman, not because he hates her but because she’s an inconvenient witness, it’s extremely unlikely to happen without testosterone. This despite the fact that when I was in med school, the standard wisdom was that women, including little girls of six or seven, caused rape by being seductive.”

  “But that’s silly,” Sophy responded. “That’s ridiculous.”

  Ophy stared at Aggie, daring her to disagree. “It’s what this country believed a few years ago. It’s what much of the Muslim world believes right now. Rape isn’t men’s fault. Men want to have sex, and what men want, men should have, so any woman who provokes male urges by showing her face or hair, or who is defenseless for any reason, or who just happens to be in the vicinity, why, she obviously asked for it. If she hadn’t wanted sex, she would have stayed home, behind high walls, protected by her menfolk. Since she didn’t, she has obviously dishonored her family and may, therefore, be raped and then killed with impunity.”

  “That’s sick,” said Faye.

  “To us it’s sick, but much of the male world believes it, nonetheless. All around the Mediterranean you’ll find cultures that believe men can’t control themselves and shouldn’t have to try. And damn it, Aggie, a lot of the ones that aren’t Muslim are Catholic.”

  Jessamine wiped at her cheeks. “Ophy’s right. God, I’ve read everything that’s been written about it. Testosterone’s part of it. Serotonin’s part of it. Hate is part of it, and mental illness and even religious attitudes. Should we castrate to lower testosterone? Should we treat with Prozac to increase self-esteem? Or should we lock up all deviates and conduct a religious war to wipe out the paternalistic religions that lay the blame on the women?”

  Sophy had shocked them all:

  “But it isn’t only men,” she’d cried. “I know those feelings. I feel them, too.”

  They had glanced at one another uncertainly.

  “No, I do feel them,” she said. “This push inside. This hunger. Sometimes this anger. I think and I think, but still I feel it. I have felt it driving me.”

  Faye shook her head, smiling. “You’re just horny, honey. We all are, from time to time.”

  Aggie shook her head. “You mustn’t dwell on the feelings, Sophy. You must set them aside—??
?

  Sophy threw up her hands. “Oh, Agnes! Set them aside! Your poetry, your songs, your drama, your dance, your books, all your arts speak incessantly of the struggle between your minds and your bodies! Set them aside? Men want to possess women, but their wanting often comes to frustration and indignity, so they regret their wanting, some of them come to hate their wanting. We women want to possess men, but our wanting often brings pain and loss, so some of us come to hate our wanting as well. Even the men and women who are lucky, who enjoy one another and have affection for one another, even those whose passion and wisdom are in the same pocket, watch their children with anxiety and their grandchildren with despair, for they, too, will be at war with themselves.”

  Jessamine laughed. “Among my bonobos everyone wants everyone all the time, and everyone has everyone all the time, and no one cares. Pity we’re more like regular chimps, where the alpha male gets his pick and everyone else sneaks around.”

  Sophy cried, “Yes. It is a pity. We live like the torrent duck, buffeted this way and that, all our lives spent battling the flow only to stay where we are. If we could choose, is that what we would want? Only to stay where we are?” Her voice rose, almost to a scream. “How do we fight it? How do we grow to become wise persons with all this aching and pushing going on?”

  Ophy went to her, hugged her, calmed her. “Shhh, Soph. Here we are after a couple million years of natural selection has produced a race that overpopulates and makes war and dominates and rapes, and you want to know about wisdom! Natural selection doesn’t select for wisdom!”

  Faye found her voice and remarked, somewhat tartly, “Sophy, my mom used to say you get wise when you get old, when your body slows down and gives your mind some room. Maybe that’s the best we can hope for.”

  The conversation had stayed with Jessamine. She shook her head at the memory. When she’d married Patrick, she’d thought he was the best she could hope for. After David, being around a man, almost any man, had alarmed her, but Patrick had set off no alarms. The Pat she’d known before they were married might occasionally strike with words, but never with his fists. He could woo with words, he could make love elegantly, and he had not seemed possessive. He had offered a safe haven. If he had been ill, she would have cared deeply. If he had died, she would have grieved honestly. She could relax around Pat. If it hadn’t been love, it had been close to it.