Gerard’s and my courtship had consisted of Sunday chamber music, rock concerts, and driving out into the cornfields surrounding Fitchville to sing “I Loves You, Porgy,” loud and misremembered, up at the sky. Then we’d come back to my apartment, lift off each other’s clothes, and stick our tongues in each other’s ears. In the morning we’d go to a coffee shop. “You’re not Czechoslovakian, I hope,” he would say, always the same joke, and point to the sign on the cash register which said, SORRY, NO CHECKS.
“He’d look great, legless and propped in a cart,” said Eleanor.
Actually Eleanor was pleasant when he was around. Even flirtatious. Sometimes they talked on the phone: He asked her questions about The Aeneid. I liked to see them get along. Later he would say to me in a swoon of originality, “Eleanor would be beautiful if she only lost weight.”
“It’s in the wing of your breast,” said the surgeon.
I hadn’t known breasts had wings, and now I had something waiting in them. “Oh,” I said.
“Let’s assume for now that it’s cystic,” said the surgeon. “Let’s not immediately disfigure the breast.”
“Yes,” I said. “Let’s not.”
And then the nurse-practitioner told me that if I had a child it might straighten out my internal machinery a bit. Prevent “Career Women’s Diseases.” Lumps often disappear during pregnancy. “Can I extend my prescription on the sedatives?” I asked. With each menstrual cycle, she went on to explain, the body is like a battered boxer, staggering back from its corner into the ring, and as the years go by, the body does this with increasing difficulty. Its will gets broken. It screws up. A woman’s body is so busy preparing to make babies that every year that goes by without one is another year of rejection that is harder and harder for it to recover from. Soon it could go completely crazy.
I suspected it was talk like this that had gotten women out of the factories and started immediately on the baby boom. “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”
One problem with teaching aerobics was that I didn’t like Jane Fonda. I felt she was a fickle, camera-wise, overconfident half-heart who had become rich and famous taking commercial advantage of America’s spiritual crises. And she had done it with such self-assurance. “You just want people to be less convinced of themselves,” said Gerard.
“Yes, I do,” I said. “I think a few well-considered and prominently displayed uncertainties are always in order.” And uncertainty and fuzziness were certainly my mirrors then.
Barney adored Jane Fonda. “That woman,” Barney’d say to me after class. “You know, she used to be just one of those sex queens. Now she’s helping America.”
“You mean helping herself to America.” Oddly enough Jane Fonda was one of the few things in the world I did feel certain about, and she made me prone to such uncharacteristically bald pronouncements. I should beware of such baldness, I thought. I should think hedge, think fuzz, like the rest of my life.
“Aw go on,” said Barney, and then he filled me in on the latest regarding Zenia, who was chairing a League of Women Voters committee on child abuse.
I packed up my tape deck, took a sedative at the urinal-like water fountain in the hall, trudged downstairs and home. I went into Gerard’s apartment and spread out on his bed, to wait for him to come home from work. I looked at a black and white print he had on the wall opposite the bed. Close up it was a landscape, a dreamily etched lake, tree, and mountain scene, but from far away it was a ghoulish face, vacant and gouged like a tragedy mask. And from where I was, neither close nor far, I could see both lake and face, one melting into the other and then back again, competing for my perception until finally I just closed my eyes, tight so as to see colors.
Loving Gerard, I realized, was like owning a tomcat, or having a teenaged son. He was out five nights a week and in the day was sleepy and hungry and sprawled, eating a lot of cold cereal and leaving the bowls around. Rehearsals for Dido and Aeneas were growing more frequent, and on other nights he was playing solo jazz gigs in town, mostly at fern bars (one was called The Smokey Fern) with four-armed ceiling fans torpid as winter insects, and ferns that were spidery and crisp. He played guitar on a platform up front, and there was always a group of women at a ringside table who giggled, applauded adoringly, and bought him drinks. When I went out to see him at gigs, I would come in and sit alone at a table way in the back. I felt like a stray groupie, a devoted next-door neighbor. He would come talk to me on his breaks, but he talked to almost everybody who was there. Everyone got equal time, equal access. He was public. He was no longer mine. I felt foolish and phobic. I felt spermicidal. I drank and smoked too much. I started staying home. I would do things like watch science specials and Bible movies on TV: Stacy Keach as Barabbas, Rod Steiger as Pontius Pilate, James Farentino as Simon Peter. My body became increasingly strange to me. I became very aware of its edges as I peered out from it: my shoulders, hands, strands of hair, invading the boundaries of my vision like branches that are made to jut into the camera’s view to decorate and sentimentalize the picture. The sea turtles’ need to lay eggs on land, said the television, makes them vulnerable.
Only once, and very late at night, did I run downstairs and out into the street with my pajamas on, gasping and watering, waiting for something—a car? an angel?—to come rescue or kill me, but there was nothing, only streetlights and a cat.
At The Shirley School we wondered aloud about male hunters and female nesters. “Do you think there’s something after all to this male-as-wanderer stuff?” I asked Eleanor.
She made something of a speech. She said she could buy the social diagram of woman as nestmaker (large, round, see ovum) and man as wanderer, invader, traveler in gangs (see spermatozoa), but that if she were minding the fort, she wanted some guests, a charging, grinning cavalry. Her life was misaligned, she said. The cavalry bypassed her altogether, as if the roadmaps were faulty, and she was forced to holler after them, “Hey, where’s everybody going?” Or a few deserters managed to stroll by, but then mostly just sat on the curb to talk about how difficult it was to save money nowadays. Her D.N.A. was in danger of extinction. What lovers she’d had had always depressed her. She preferred being with friends.
“Sex used to console me,” I said. “It was my anti-coma coma.”
Eleanor shrugged, gulped vermouth. She liked to yell out her car window at couples holding hands on the street. “Cut it out! Just cut it out!”
“How’s Gerard?” she said.
“I don’t think he loves me anymore.” I bit my fist in mock melodrama.
“Give that man a mustache to twirl and a girl to tie down to the railroad tracks. Look, you’re going to be fine. You’re going to end up with Perry.” Perry was a man she’d invented for my future. He was from Harvard, loved children, and believed in Marriage Equivalents. The only problem was that he was an epileptic and had had fits at two consecutive dinner parties. “Me,” said Eleanor, “I’ll probably end up with some guy named Opie who collects Pinocchio memorabilia and says things like ‘Holy-moley-pole.’ He’ll want me to dress up in sailor suits.”
In the senior citizens’ class it was hard to concentrate. One of the women there, Pat, had stained and streaked her legs orange with Q-T or something. Barney kept having trouble with his hearing aid. Lodeme spent a lot of time in the back row taking everyone’s pulse the way I had shown them: two fingers placed on the side of the neck. “Holy Jesus,” she shouted at them. “You must be hibernating!”
This was my fear: that someone would have a stroke in there and die.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s begin with the ‘Dance Madness’ routine. Remember: It’s important not to be afraid of looking like an idiot.” This was my motto in life. I slapped in the cassette and started up with some easy lunges, step-digs, and a slow Charleston.
“Are we healthy yet?” yelled Pat over the music, her legs like sepia sunsets, her face the split-apple face of an owl. “Are we healthy yet?”
“Le
t me feel your breast again,” said Gerard. “Is this the lump?”
“Yes,” I said. “Be careful.”
“It’s not muscular?” His fingers pressed against the outside wall of my breast.
“No, Gerard. It’s not muscular. It’s floating like fruit in Jell-O. Remember fruited Jell-O? There’s no muscle in Jell-O.” Although of course there was. I’d learned that long ago from a friend in junior high school who’d told me that Jell-O was made from horses’ hooves and various dried bones and muscles. She had also told me that breasts were simply displaced buttocks.
Gerard slipped his hand back out from beneath my bra. He leaned back into the sofa. We were listening to Fauré. “Listen to the strings,” Gerard murmured, and his face went beatific. The world, all matter, I knew, was made up of strings. I had learned this on television. Physicists used to believe that the universe was made up of particles. But recently they had found out they’d been wrong: The world, unsuspectedly, was made up of little tiny strings.
“Yes,” I said. “They’re lovely.”
The women in the class were suggesting that I get my face sanded. I had had acne as a teenager, a rough slice of pizza face, and it had scarred my skin. Gerard had once said he loved my skin, that it didn’t look pitted and old, but that it looked sexy, a tough, craggy sexy.
I sunk into one hip and fluttered my eyelashes at Betty and Pat and Lodeme. “Gee, I thought my face looked sort of scrappy,” I said.
“You look like a caveman,” said Lodeme, her voice half gravel, half gavel. “Get your face sanded.”
In bed I tried to be simple and straightforward. “Gerard, I need to know this: Do you love me?”
“I love being with you,” he said, as if this were even better.
“Oh,” I said. And then he reached for my hand under the covers, lifted his head toward mine, and kissed me, his lips outside then inside, back and forth like polyps. The heel of his hand ran up my side beneath my nightgown, and he moved me, belly up, on top of him. His penis was soft against my buttocks and his arms were clasped tight around my waist. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, offered up to the ceiling like that. So I just lay there and let Gerard figure things out. He lay very still beneath me. I whispered finally: “What are we supposed to be doing, Gerard?”
“You don’t understand me,” he sighed. “You just don’t understand me at all.”
The senior citizens’ class was only eight weeks in duration but by about the sixth week the smallness of the class, and whatever makeshift intimacy had sprung up there, became suddenly oppressive to me. Perhaps I was becoming like Gerard. Suddenly I wanted the big, doughnut-faced anonymity of a large class, where class members did not really have faces and names and problems. In six weeks with Susan, Lodeme, Betty, Valerie, Ellen, Frances, Pat, Marie, Bridget, and Barney, I felt we’d gotten to know each other too well, or rather, brought to the stubborn limits of our knowability, we were now left with the jagged scrape of our differences, our unknowability laid glisteningly bare. I developed a woodlands metaphor—“swirls before pine,” I told Eleanor. Aerobics in front of a forest took much less courage than the other way around, aerobics before a few individuated trees. A forest would leave you alone, but trees could come at you. They witnessed things. When you could see them, they could see you. They could see there were certain things about you. You were not a serious person. You were not a serious dancer. I didn’t want my life to show. At a distance, I was sure, it couldn’t possibly.
Moreover, it was hard being close to these women who, I realized, had exactly what I wanted: grandchildren, stability, a post-menopausal grace, some mysterious, hard-won truce with men. They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.
And so the sadnesses started to ricochet around and zap me right in the heart, right in the middle of the Michael Jackson tape. I was, I knew, unconvinced of myself. I wanted to stop. I wanted to fall dead as a leaf. Which I tried to turn into a move for the rest of the class: “One-two and crumple, one-two and crumple.” Once in Modern Dance class in college one sunny September afternoon we had been requested to be leaves tumbling ourselves across the arts quad. I knew how to perform it in a way that prevented embarrassment and indignity: One became a dead leaf, a cement leaf. One lay down on the dying grass of the arts quad and refused to blow and float and tumble. One merely crumpled. One was no fool. One did not listen to the teacher. One did not want to be spotted fluttering around on campus, like the others who were clearly psychotics. One did not like this college. One wanted only to fall in love and get a Marriage Equivalent. One just lay there.
I looked up into the mirror. Behind me Lodeme, Bridget, Pat, Barney, everyone was stiffly though obediently crumpling. I loved them, in a way, but I didn’t want them, their nippled fist-faces, their beauty advice, their voices old, low, and scratchy. I wanted them to recede into some lifeless blur. I didn’t want to hear about Zenia or about how I could use a good pair of hips. I didn’t want to be responsible for their hearts.
We got back up on our tiptoes. “Good! Good! Punch the air, three-four. Punch the air.” In the mirror we looked as if we had melted—puddles that shimmered and shimmied.
Afterward, Barney came up and told me more about Zenia. I tried to be minimally attentive, packing up the cassettes, waving good night to the other women who were leaving. Barney’s voice seemed to have a new sort of gobble and snort. “I saw a program on child abuse,” he was saying, “and now I realize I was an abused child myself, though I didn’t know it.” I looked at him and he smiled and shook his head. I didn’t want to hear this. Christ, I thought. “My sister Zenia was fourteen and I was six and she climbed into bed with me once and we didn’t know no better. But technically that’s abuse, that. And funny thing is is that I …” He wanted badly to be telling someone this. He followed me around the studio as I switched off lights and locked windows. “I never would have watched that show but for the committee she’s heading. She’s my sister, I’ve got to love her, but—”
“No you don’t,” I snapped at the old man. The world was a carnival of fiends and Zenia was right in there with everyone else. “Good night, Barney,” I said, locking the studio door and leaving him standing at the top of the stairs. “Good night,” he mumbled, not moving. I did a fast bounce down the three flights, the cassettes rattling in my bag, out into the cool drink of the night. If only this were some other city, I would go exploring in it! If only this were someplace, if there were someplace, new in the world.
In a single week four things happened: Barney stopped coming to class; Gerard announced he was thinking of spending a year in Europe on a special fellowship (“Sounds like a good opportunity,” I said, trying to keep my voice out of his way, like a mother); I got a letter from a friend asking me if I wanted to come to New York and work in a health club that she and her husband were partners in; I did a home-kit pregnancy test, which came out positive. I tried to recall when last Gerard and I had even made love. I double-checked the kit. I re-read the instructions. I waited, hopelessly, as I had in the ninth grade, for my period to come like a magic trick.
“New York, eh?” said Eleanor.
“I’d be teaching yuppies,” I complained. Despite our various ways of resembling yuppies (Eleanor was a wine snob, and I owned too many pairs of sneakers), we hated yuppies. We hated the word yuppie, though we used it. Eleanor would walk down the street looking at people she passed and deciding whether or not they qualified for this ignominy. “Yup, yup, nope,” she would say out loud, as in a game of Duck, Duck, Goose. Yuppies, we knew, were greedy, shallow, and small. They made their own pasta. They would rather play racquetball than read Middlemarch. “Go home and read Middlemarch,” Eleanor once shouted at a pastel jogger, who glanced sideways to see Eleanor and me zipping by in Eleanor’s car. We renamed the seven dwarves: Artsy, Fartsy, Cranky, Sleazy, Beasty, Dud, and Yuppie.
“Well,” said Eleanor, “if you’re in New York, it’s either yu
ppies or mimes. That’s all New York’s got. Yuppies or mimes.”
I loved Dido and Aeneas. It had electric guitars, electric pianos, Aeneas in leather and Dido in blue sequins, sexily metallic as a disco queen. The whole thing resembled MTV, replete with loud guitar solos. Aeneas shouldered his guitar and riffed and whined after Dido throughout the whole show: “Don’t you see why I have to go to Europe? / I must ignore the sentiment you stir up.” Actually it was awful. But nonetheless I sniffled at her suicide, and when she sang at Aeneas, “Just go then! Go if you must! / My heart will surely turn to dust,” and Aeneas indeed left, I sat in my seat, thinking, “You ass, Aeneas, you don’t have to be so literal.” Eleanor, sitting next to me, nudged me and whispered, “Shirley’s gonna turn her heart to dust.”
“I doubt it will be Shirley,” I said.
Gerard, as Aeneas and director, got a standing ovation and a long-stemmed rose. In my mind I gave Dido a handful of tiger lilies, a bouquet of floral gargoyles.
Afterward, Eleanor had to go home and nurse a headache, so I went backstage and shook hands with Susan Fitzbaum. She was out of her sparkles and crown. She was wearing a plaid skirt and loafers. She had a large head. “So nice to meet you,” she said in a low, tired voice.
I kissed Gerard. He seemed anxious to go. “I need a beer,” he said. “The cast party’s not until midnight. Let’s go and come back.”
In the car he said, “So what did you really think?” and I told him the show was terrific, but he didn’t necessarily have to leave someone just because they told him to, and he smiled and said, “Thanks,” and kissed my temple and then I told him I was pregnant and what did he think we should do.
We sat for a long time in a nearby bar with our fingers drawing grids and diagonals in the frost of the beer glasses. “I’m going back to the cast party,” Gerard eventually said. “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.” He got up and put down cash for half the check.