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I laugh. I’m exhilarated today. Today I’m a street performer. I’ve always admired the guts, the skill, the command of the one who plays successfully to the passing New York crowd. Last night I spoke at a large public meeting in the city: on the barricades for radical feminism, also not passing the hat. I spoke easily and well, and I had the crowd in my hand. Sometimes I don’t, but last night I did. Last night all the skill I’ve acquired at this sort of thing was there at my command, and I knew it. It was the knowing it that made me clear-headed, lucid, expansive and expressive. The crowd was being stirred. I felt it, and then I had confirmed what I felt.
<3
Yet those years were a true beginning for me. I did actually try to sit at the desk and think. Mostly, I failed miserably. Mostly, not always. In the second year of my marriage the rectangular space made its first appearance inside me. I was writing an essay, a piece of graduate-student criticism that had flowered without warning into thought, radiant shapely thought. The sentences began pushing up in me, struggling to get out, each one moving swiftly to add itself to the one that preceded it. I realised suddenly that an image had taken control of me: I saw its shape and its outline clearly. The sentences were trying to fill in the shape. The image was the wholeness of my thought. In that instant I felt myself open wide. My insides cleared out into a rectangle, all clean air and uncluttered space, that began in my forehead and ended in my groin. In the middle of the rectangle only my image, waiting patiently to clarify itself. I experienced a joy then I knew nothing else would ever equal. Not an ‘I love you’ in the world could touch it. Inside that joy I was safe and erotic, excited and at peace, beyond threat or influence. I understood everything I needed to understand in order that I might act, live, be.
We lived together five years. Then one day Stefan left the house and he didn’t come back. Our marriage was ended. And indeed, why not? We had each wearied of the struggle between us. We each wanted to take a breath in rooms free of that oppressive tension. We wanted that more than we wanted to be together. I dismantled the flat, sold everything in it, left graduate school (always an abstraction to me), and returned to New York. I was thirty years old, and I was relieved to be alone. I moved into the little tenement apartment on First Avenue and got myself a job writing for a weekly newspaper. I fixed up the apartment. In no time at all the place was cosy. The colours all worked this time: no surprises between the can and the wall. I had a desk built that was just right for me: high enough, slim enough, manageable enough. I worked during the day, and in the evening I lay down on the couch to read. Often, however, I lost the concentration for reading rather quickly, and then I’d find myself lying there for hours on end, staring into space.
These were years when women like myself were being called New, Liberated, Odd (myself I preferred Odd, I still do), and indeed, I was new, liberated, odd during the day when I sat at the desk, but at night when I lay on the couch staring into space my mother materialised in the air before me, as if to say, ‘Not so fast, my dear. All is not done between us.’
<3
Two years after I left Davey Levinson sitting in the restaurant on East Broadway I interviewed Joe Durbin for a story I was writing on a rent strike. He was a labour organiser on the left, and a throwback to the romantic figures of my earliest life. The union movement was Joe’s passion. He had been an official in the CIO, known every labour leader from John L. Lewis to Walter Reuther, and had organised all over the historical map: California in the thirties, Michigan in the forties, New York in the fifties. He was twenty years older than me, and he was married. The age difference gave me my control. A week after the interview he called to suggest dinner. We were together six years.
AHHHHH
One day, when we had been together six or eight months, we went for a walk and met a school friend of mine. She suggested a cup of coffee. Joe, thinking to be socially responsible and to charm my friend, took over the conversation. That is, he did not allow conversation to develop. If one of us said, ‘There’s a banana peel on the sidewalk,’ Joe said, ‘Speaking of banana peels, that reminds me of the time in Flint, Michigan, when …’ and he was off on a twenty-minute labour story. My friend looked puzzled. Joe did not notice. In a few minutes he repeated the performance. If we had been alone I would have exploded at him. As it was, I kept my mouth shut and watched. I began to see him through my friend’s eyes. I heard him as I thought she heard him. I imagined her thinking: Here’s an overbearing blusterer one doesn’t engage with, one simply walks away from, too exhausting to try to make terms here.
lmao
‘What about his wife,’ my mother said. ‘What about you,’ my friends said. I ran into an acquaintance on the street. She wore silver earrings and curly grey hair, her eyes danced with interest, her smile was warm and knowing. ‘You’ll need a lot of stamina and a lot of self-control,’ she said. This woman understood the issues better.
It was assumed by everyone I knew that Joe’s wife was the wife, and I the other woman, and Joe the prize slated to fall to one or the other of us, but such was not the case. Why, I thought, would I want him to leave his wife? What would I do then? Take him into my apartment? It’s too small. Besides, I may not like sleeping alone, but I like waking up alone. Yes, it’s painful when he leaves, but it’s not that painful. The situation suits me. And then again, it’s interesting.
Joe’s wife was an abstraction to me. I felt neither guilt nor jealousy toward her. This because I did not feel jealous of Joe, whose gifts for life (gifts he made use of in union organising as well as in love affairs) included thoroughgoing reliability and a remarkable constancy of mood. A man of immense appetite and energy, Joe had quality time for all. When he was there he was so thoroughly and unreservedly there I felt neither deprived nor possessive when he wasn’t. For the first time, what a lover did when he was not with me was of no real concern; in fact, it was none of my business. This was an experience.
Imagine. I was living entirely in the moment, with no formal assurance beyond tomorrow morning’s telephone call, and I found myself interested; not sad tearful frightened or resentful, only interested. Here, I reasoned, is a circumstance where you clearly cannot make terms. The truth is, one never makes terms. This affair is only the bare, unfiltered truth. Can you take it in or will you founder on the absence of illusion? Indeed, it was stamina and self-control that were required to answer the question. I rose to the task. I began to grasp the idea of living without a future: we had few moments to waste on bad behaviour. I saw errant impulses die before they could make trouble. I saw reflexive anger give way to analytic understanding. I saw petty indulgence stifle itself and a kind of rough emotional justice prevail. All this I saw, and all this I was pleased to see. Then a day came when I also saw that learning to live without a future is a sterile exercise: what looks like life within a walled garden is really life inside a renovated prison yard. Joe’s wife remained an abstraction, but Joe’s marriage became a stunning confinement.
We occupied a universe composed of one room in one season: my bedroom on weekday afternoons. As time went on, we occupied this universe more and more fully. Hunger multiplied on hunger, desire on desire. We couldn’t get enough. Because we didn’t get enough. I was always wanting more. ‘Not more,’ a friend said evenly. ‘Enough. You want enough.’ In a year or two I realised that it wasn’t exactly more I wanted, or even enough. It was a larger world for our feelings to walk about in. Life requires space as well as air and light, room for exploration and self-discovery. The limits of exploration on the life of our feelings were set by Joe’s marriage, and those limits were close in. However deeply we might feel, our love could not make laws or map territory. There was no country of experience for it to cross, no coast to reach, no centre to penetrate. We were in possession of a small interior space somewhere in the midst of a fertile region of unknown proportion. Around this space stood boundaries of rigid stability. Love might intensify, but it could never expand to occupy a territory made in its own shape. The reality of the predetermined limit bit into me.
We flew down to the Caribbean on a Tuesday afternoon. That night we ate dinner on a terrace that hung out over a blue-green bay and made love in a whitewashed room with the night air coming through open shutters, soft and sweet. Bliss. Tuesday night bliss. Wednesday all day bliss. Thursday also bliss. On Friday morning we prepared to leave for New York. We packed up, checked out, and drove our rented car out to the airport. Suddenly I couldn’t bear the thought of going back. I laid my hand on Joe’s arm and pleaded, ‘Let’s stay over the weekend. Call your wife and tell her you need another day or two for the boat.’
Joe turned his head halfway toward me. I saw the frown forming on his forehead, and I saw his eyes narrow. ‘Sweetie, I’m not going back with you,’ he said. ‘My wife is coming down this evening.’
nooooo
‘You manipulated me. You held back information. Decided on your own it was more important we have a good time than that I know everything there was to know. The situation was more important to you than I was.’
‘That’s not true,’ he said.
But it was true. For Joe, the situation was always more important than anyone in it. Because we spent our lives in the bedroom, I’d not had a chance until now to feel in the flesh what I had long known in the intellect.