The time came for Bill and Grace to enact a kind of divestiture service in which Bill’s virgin state would be renounced, shattered. His virginity existed differently from hers. His was a lack of experience, the sense that he was not really a man, that he was not aggressive enough, not daring, perhaps a coward, or a fag. He had not made a conquest. While hers, she reminded herself, had been a moral burden, something to worry about giving, indicating loss when given. And she was considered to have been a conquest for someone else. A passive gift, whether she moved or not. A given. Surrender and surrender again. But how could something physically surrendered mean that she, Grace, had really given in. She prided herself on her ability to separate neatly body from mind, self that was hers from self that she gave away. She was not given when she gave, she always held back and drew satisfaction from distance.
The night Bill brought her back to his room, she took her place in the center of it, feeling very certain that she would make the conquest, she would take it from him. He turned on the record player and she undressed. He lay his head on her breast and kissed the nipple many times, licking it like her dog would’ve, she thought, and she waited for him to make the move. For his penis to become erect the way every penis she’d ever encountered had. He rubbed himself against her and she moved her hand, down there, and Bill caught it and held it, not letting Grace, the way she hadn’t let boys when she used to stop them. Engaging in a wordless struggle, Grace moved more violently to grip his cock, which lay there small and soft and malleable. Impotence became dangerous. The room looked ugly. His penis was useless and its absence felt like an attack. And then he cried that he did really love her. Fear turns quickly to disgust. Why hadn’t Poe ever written about impotence? Or was it there somehow, disguised in the terror? Look for castration, Mark pounced, that’s what you’ll find, if you look hard enough. Or soft, he laughed. But soft? What light through yonder window breaks…
Dear Celia, I have a boyfriend who can’t get it up, so I’m going to stop seeing him, because I can’t stand it. It’s too weird. He always cries and says that he loves me, but I can’t help him and it drives me crazy and I don’t want…I mean, I want. Grace tore the letter up and went looking for what she might determine later was trouble.
Chapter 5
There is nothing to fear but fear itself, Emily mused as she put on her clothes. The cheap record player, which she turned on the moment she turned off her alarm clock, having punched the snooze alarm five times, got stuck on that part in “Baby Love” where it goes “breaking up…making up…” It’s better never to have reasoned than to have reasoned badly. She wanted to conduct her life through the mail. The phone was ringing in its insistent way. She knew it would be Christine, needing her help with something or other. Okay, Emily said, I’ll be over soon. Breaking up with Richard had happened at a distance, through letters, so perhaps she shouldn’t trust her personal life to the vagaries of correspondence. Their breakup was civilized, she supposed someone might say that about it, and while she liked the notion in an abstract way, the idea was better suited to English movies celebrating WW II that came on at 3 A.M.
Lying on Edith’s bed, the television on, Emily was explaining to Edith what had happened in art class. While she didn’t consider herself an artist, or consider that she might become one, Emily liked to draw and to paint. It’s a different way of thinking, she continued during the commercial. She told Edith that the handsome male drawing teacher — there were no women teachers in the art department — had asked the class to copy two drawings of interiors from their Janson History of Art book. I copied one of a room, I forget who did it, and the other one I chose was by Leonardo, of a fetus in a womb. When I showed them to my teacher he stared at the womb one for a while, and then he gave me a look. He said, “I said interior.” I said, this is an interior. He didn’t say anything for a minute and then he said, “When you’re an old woman, you’re going to be very eccentric.” Emily laughed as she told Edith. Edith took another cracker and didn’t speak. The commercial ended and the movie came back on. Emily was supposed to be reading seventeenth-century poetry for her 8 A.M. class and Edith should have been reading her friend’s book on raising children, though he hadn’t, a fact that Emily held against him. Young people could be such purists, Edith thought — the womb as an interior. It made her smile inwardly. She liked being around young Emily, but she was happy not to be young, a feeling that she thought she’d never have, having heard about it years before, when she was young. Is this the way the body prepares for death, she thought as she rubbed hand cream on her fingers and economically patted the excess on both elbows.
Christine phoned Emily. Emily went right over. He’s violent, she reported of Peter, her Slavic lover, as she called him. To Christine, Slavic itself implied violence, or if not real violence, then excitement and volatility, terms very different from those with which she described herself. Just one of the few poor whites from Westchester. “What do you mean, violent?” Emily asked. “Did he hit you?” Christine showed Emily the bruises on the upper part of her body. “I’m afraid of him,” Christine said. “Of course you are,” Emily reassured her, “he’s crazy,” Christine had already lived with a man, though the two young women were only nineteen, and because they were only nineteen and Emily a young nineteen, Edith told her, it seemed a mark of great maturity to have already lived with a man, a man ten years older, too, who was a sculptor. But then, considered Emily, Christine had lost her father when she was eleven, and he had been a painter, and so it made sense that she would quickly live with a man. At nineteen things seem very simple. “You don’t know what this is like,” Christine continued. “I’m afraid of what he’ll do.” “Can’t you stop seeing him?” Emily asked sensibly, pouring herself a glass of wine, drinking and pulling at single strands of her hair. “You don’t understand,” Christine uttered in a kind of moan, and looked at Emily as if she were just a visitor. “I guess I don’t,” Emily responded. And she didn’t. Was she going to cry, thought Emily, at a loss, desperate to return to her small room and read. Christine often chided Emily for wanting to avoid life. I have plenty of time for that, Emily thought as she walked home from Christine’s apartment which was only five houses from hers, closer even than Nora’s had been. Is proximity the best basis for a friendship, she wondered.
Her parents said she didn’t call them enough or visit them enough. It wasn’t normal, they said. Emily had a hard time remembering she had parents; they weren’t in the picture, as no one from her former life, as she liked to put it, was, as if she had led a dangerous one. While she had been fastidious in high school, Emily lost all concern for what she looked like, she said. The tyranny of changing clothes, of wearing something different each day to school, was overthrown. It’s not exactly criminal, Edith thought, although that very phrase did come tomind; she was sure that Emily could be such a pretty girl, if she wanted to. She didn’t say this to Emily; she would of course have said that to her own daughter.
Christine was to do battle with Peter one night and Edith and Emily took in a movie, Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel. Christine never minded if Emily went out with Edith, because Edith was so much older, but she bristled when Emily wanted to see any of her other friends, and gradually Emily stopped seeing them. She spoke to them on the phone. Edith said nothing about this either. They didn’t go out together often, but Edith especially enjoyed it when they did, especially because Emily could have been her daughter and wasn’t, a fact which meant more to her than she thought it should. She felt a certain irresponsibility, almost collusion with her young tenant. She felt they made a bizarre pair and when they bumped into people Edith knew, she introduced Emily proudly, as my tenant, the poet or the student, a young person who was visibly different from people she had known for thirty years. She wondered if her husband would understand this enjoyment and decided he would. Emily was struck by The Exterminating Angel, figuring it had to do with neurosis in general, and that maybe she too couldn’t leave her room in the way that Buñuel meant. You think there’s something out there and there isn’t, except for what you think is there stopping you. She turned to Edith as they entered the dark apartment and quoted Kafka. “My education has damaged me in ways I do not even know.” Edith argued briefly, defending the necessity of education, then let it go, glad that she didn’t think about Kafka anymore, and never had just before bed.