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JANE RULE
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
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FOR HELEN
Dulce
His nor Hers
The Real World
Joy
A Matter of Numbers
One Can of Soup at a Time
A Chair for George
Seaweed and Song
Musical Beds
A Migrant Christmas
You Cannot Judge a Pumpkin’s Happiness by the Smile Upon Its Face
More than Money
The Investment Years
A Good Kid in a Troubled World
Slogans
The End of Summer
The Pruning of the Apple Trees
Inland Passage
Blessed are the Dead
Power Failure
Puzzle
A Biography of Jane Rule
I WAS NOT PERFECTLY born, as Samuel Butler prescribed, wrapped in bank notes, but I was orphaned at twenty-one without other relatives to turn to and with no material need of them. I was, in a way everyone else envied, free of emotional and financial obligations. I did not have to do anything, not even choose a place to live since I had the small and lovely house in Vancouver where I had grown up to shelter me from as much as developing my own taste in furniture. I did not, of course, feel fortunate. Ingratitude is the besetting sin of the young.
If I had been rich rather than simply comfortable, I might have learned to give money away intelligently. What I tried to do instead was to give myself away, having no use of my own for it. It was not so reprehensible an aim for a young woman in the 50s as it is today. I was, again with a good fortune I was far from recognizing, unsuccessful.
My first and greatest insight as a child was being aware that I was innocent of my own motives. I did not know why I so often contrived to interrupt my father at his practicing. Now I understand that he, otherwise a quiet and pensive man, frightened me when he played his violin. Or the instrument itself frightened me, seeming to contain an electrical charge which flung my father’s body around helplessly the moment he laid hands on it. Though he died in a plane crash on tour for the troops in the Second World War when I was fifteen, I never quite believed it wasn’t his violin that had killed him.
Wilson C. Wilson, a boy several years older than I, lived down the block with his aunt and uncle who gave him dutiful but reluctant room among their own children because he had been orphaned as a baby. That fact, accompanied by his dark good looks, had made him a romantic figure for me, but I had never expected him to climb up into our steep north slope of a garden where I made a habit of brooding on a favorite rock and often spying on him through the fringe of laurel, dogwood, mountain ash, and alder which grew, and still does grow, down at the street. No handsome boy of my own age had ever paid the slightest attention to me.
If he had not come with such quick agility, I would have hidden from him and let him pay his respects to my grieving mother to whom I suspect he might have been more romantically drawn than he was to me. I was too terrified of him even to be self-conscious. I sat very still, hardly at first hearing what he had to say, waiting for him to leave, but he was so gentle with me and at the same time so eager that gradually I began to listen to him.
“Some day,” he said, “you’ll be glad you were old enough to remember his face.”
He offered his own grief as a way of sharing mine, but I had not had time to let my raw loss mellow into something speakable. He did not expect me to be adequate then or, I suppose, ever.
After that, once or twice a week he would come to find me. Sometimes he talked about his week-end job as an apprentice to a printer, but more often he talked about the books he was reading. He did not expect me to be older or more intelligent than I was, but he did begin to bring me books to read. When I asked him a question that pleased him, he would say, “Dulce, you have an old soul,” but he was normally content to have a good listener.
Sometimes he suggested a walk on the beach just several blocks below the house, even in winter weather. We both liked the mists that obscured the far views across Burrard Inlet to the north mountains and focused our attention on the salty debris at our feet. We liked finding puzzling objects and making up histories for them as we walked among gulls and crows, past ghostly trees emerging only a few feet from us.
Neither of us liked wearing a hat or hood, and we would come back as wet-headed as swimmers to a hearth fire and tea, to the personal questions my mother asked which always began, “If you don’t have to go…” or “If you’re not called up…” or “If the war’s over…” I never asked Wilson questions like that though I could see my mother’s concern for his peaceful future gave him more confidence in it. He wanted to go back to Toronto where he had been born. He wanted to study literature and philosophy.
“And after that?” Mother asked.
“I’ll be a philosopher…and a printer to feed myself.”
I watched him, his strong, dark hair glistening rather than flattened, as I knew mine was, by the damp, his dark eyes glistening, too, and wished he were my brother or at least in some way related to me.
Wilson was called up two weeks before the war was over. Then his orders were canceled, and he packed to go to Toronto. Before he left, he asked for my picture in exchange for his, taken for his high school graduation, on which he had written, “For a good listener, Wilson C. Wilson.”
“I so dislike my name,” he once told me, “that I’ll simply have to make it famous.”
“How?”
He shrugged, but I wasn’t really surprised when he sent me the first of his poems to be published in an eastern magazine. Some few of the images in them were ones we had found together, which made it easier for me to comment on them. Now that we were exchanging letters, I discovered that being a good listener by mail was learning to ask interesting rather than personal questions.
When Wilson came back the following summer to take up work with the printer, his aunt and uncle asked him to pay room and board. I was shocked by their lack of generosity, particularly since it would mean Wilson could not afford to go east again.
“My uncle points out that my cousins are perfectly satisfied to go to UBC.”
“He doesn’t charge them room and board, does he?”
“They’re his own children,” Wilson explained reasonably.
“You could pitch a tent in our garden,” I suggested, “and you could pay Mother just the bit it costs to feed you.”
“Don’t make offers for your mother,” he said.
“Are you in love with Wilson?” my mother asked me.
“I don’t think so,” I answered, both surprised and embarrassed by the question. “I just want us to help him.”
“Is he in love with you?”
That I knew was preposterous. “I’m just a good listener,” I answered.
The tent did go up on the flat square of lawn by the roses on the understanding that I would not visit Wilson in it. I would not have dreamed of invading his privacy.
More like a grown man, he assigned himself chores about the place without being asked. Mother and I had been used to a man who protected his hands and anyway had no eye or ear for the complaints of a house. By the end of the summer, nothing squeaked or dripped, and I had decided to go away to college myself and major in English.
I liked the idea of a women’s college, for boys, except for Wilson, began to alarm me, taking on sudden height all around me, their noses and fingers thickening, their chins growing mossy, their voices cracking to new depths. I walked as defensively among them as I would through thickets of gorse or blackberry.
I chose Mills College in California partly because it was in the Bay Area, and I liked San Francisco, the city of my mother’s girlhood. Though my mother had been sent to the Conservatory of Music and attended concerts with her handsome and handsomely dressed parents, they hadn’t approved of her marriage to a fellow student who wanted to sit on the stage instead of in the prosperous audience.
“They said, ‘he’ll never buy you diamonds,’” my mother told me.
“Did you mind?”
“About the diamonds?”
“About their not approving.”
“Yes, but it gave me the courage to do it.”
I found it hard to associate courage with love.
Wilson did not come back to Vancouver the summer I graduated from high school. He had found a printing job in Toronto, a less expensive solution than living in a tent in our garden. I sent him my high school graduation picture without signing it because I didn’t know what to say. I signed my letters “As ever.” He signed his “Yours” which I understood to be a formality.
Two of the poems he had published that year were love poems, dark and constrained, which made me unhappy for him and a little bewildered, too, for I could not imagine anyone incapable of returning his love. Since he wasn’t in the habit of confiding in me about his personal affairs, I could hardly answer or question a poem. He wrote to me that his first collection of poems was about to be published, sent me a picture to be used on the cover, and asked permission to dedicate the book to me.
“Does it mean anything, Mother? I mean, anything in particular?”
“It’s not a proposal, if that’s what you mean,” Mother said. “But it certainly does mean you are important to him. It’s all right to accept if he’s important to you.”
I accepted, feeling a new self-conscious place in his life which I did not really understand. Surely, if he’d been in love with me, I would know. I studied the picture and saw simply his familiar intent and handsome face. Experimentally I kissed it, a kiss as chaste as any I gave my mother. Then quite crossly I thought, “If I’m so important to him, he could at least have come to my graduation and taken me to the dance.”
Yet who of my school friends could boast of having a book dedicated to her? Wilson would never have taken me to a dance. Nor would I have asked him to. He did not belong to my silly social world. Even I had outgrown it and longed to begin my own serious education in a part of the world nearly as beautiful and far more sophisticated than my own.
To the relief of some of my disgruntled, liberal professors, I shunned the child development and dietary courses newly introduced to make servantless wives out of my post-war generation and to redomesticate those few female veterans who had returned. Instead I chose traditional art history, religious history, and philosophy courses as electives around my requirements in literature. If there had been a history of science, I would have chosen that over biology, the least mathematical of the sciences available. In that lab, cutting up flat worms, crayfish and cats, I came as close to domestic experience as I would get in college. I sent my laundry out every week to a war widow, left not as well off as my mother.
Thanks to Wilson, I was better read than many of the other incoming freshmen, and, though I rarely offered an opinion in class, I asked very good questions. My written assignments were not immediately successful, but again Wilson had trained me to listen and comprehend not only the material but the mood and bias of the instructor before me. Once I got the hang of being a logical positivist in philosophy, a new critic in contemporary literature, a pro-pounder of history of ideas in Milton, my grades bounded upwards.
There were students at the college who actually engaged in the arts, notably in music, but I avoided the rich offering of concerts. In fact, any performing art was difficult for me to deal with; for, like my father, the performers all seemed in the grip of an energy which made spastic victims of them, leaping inexplicably around the stage, shouting in unrecognizable voices, faces either entirely expressionless or distorted in unimaginable pain. Poetry was for me a superior art. I had never had to watch Wilson write a poem. It was a relief to me to study Shakespeare on the page, a prejudice I shared with my professor who considered any available production a defiler of the poetry of the bard.
At a performance of MacBeth, put on by St. Mary’s, a men’s college in the neighborhood, the wife of a faculty member played Lady MacBeth in the same red housecoat even after she’d become queen; the wind for the witches’ scene was her vacuum cleaner. MacBeth himself was a speech major with a lisp, who murdered more than sleep. His severed head was presented at the end of the play in a paper bag which looked like someone’s forgotten lunch and perhaps was.
Granting the limitations of amateurs, I could not imagine even great actors tastefully gouging out eyes on stage on the way to a climax of corpses. The blood and gore were a convention of a barbarous time, which the poetry transcended.
In my letters to Wilson, both of whose pictures sat framed on my desk, I sometimes confided academic puzzlement. Though styles of poetry changed through the ages, particular poems were recognizably great in each period. Prose, on the other hand, seemed to improve, become more economical, lucid and beautiful. “Are you going to make an idol out of Hemingway,” Wilson demanded, “at the expense of Donne and Milton?” I’d had F. Scott Fitzgerald in mind. I went back to Donne’s sermons, and, when I imagined them, as instructed by Wilson, recited by the Dean of St. Paul’s with tears streaming down his face, their excesses seemed more appropriate; yet I also had to admit that a man in tears would embarrass more than move me.
I found few fellow students with whom I could raise such questions. Only a small band of rather aggressive scholarship students discussed their studies. The more acceptable topics of conversation were menstrual cramps, other people’s sexual habits, the foibles of parents and professors, and God. Nor were academic subjects acceptable topics on dates. Any conversation was impossible over the noise at fraternity parties, football games, and bars. The only virtue of the gross abuse of alcohol at such gatherings was that, more often than not, my young man of the evening was incapable of a sexual ending in the back seat of a dangerously driven car.
At first I was uneasy at the status my pictures of Wilson gave me. When I confessed that he had also dedicated a book of poems to me, it was simply assumed that I was unofficially engaged to the handsome young man with the unhandsome name. He wrote me letters, which was more than could be said for some who had even presented diamond rings.
“Are you going to see Wilson at Christmas?”
“Oh, he probably can’t afford the trip. He’s putting himself through…”
Explanations true enough, but I did not think of myself as the object of Wilson’s romantic interest. There were more love poems, flickering with unredeeming fire which certainly had nothing to do with me, but they gave rise to shocked and admiring speculations among my friends who read them.
Gradually I used Wilson as the protection I wanted from a social life too barbarous to bear, even if it meant remaining among the humiliated on Saturday nights. If I was not writing love letters to Wilson, I was writing loving ones, for he was the one human being, aside from my mother, with whom I could really talk.
To Wilson’s great disappointment, the only fellowship open to him for graduate studies was at UBC. He frankly confessed that it would be all right with him if he never laid eyes on Vancouver again. The university was inferior, the city really not a city at all, for it was without cultural reality, and he had been personally unhappy there. He did kindly add, “Except for that summer in your garden.” But he was competing with too many men older than himself, more mature in their judgments, with Americans and Englishmen as well as his own countrymen, and he had to take what he could get.
Wilson met me at the airport when I came home to bury my mother. It was the first time we had seen each other in four years, and we embraced in the way we signed our letters because we had to do something. Wilson seemed to me more substantial and attentive in those few days, but my need was also extraordinary. It was Wilson who would not hear of my simply staying there, moving into the house to begin a grief-dazed life. He put me back on the plane to finish my education.
In the next year and a half, Wilson became my unofficial guardian. He rented the house for me, effectively preventing me from coming home in the summer, which he said I should spend in Europe where he had not yet been himself.
He outlined a trip he would like to have taken, but I was far too timid to travel alone, and, since he didn’t offer to come with me, I elected instead to take the Shakespeare summer session at Stratford.
Younger than most of the other international students and not as well prepared for the work, I was at first intimidated, but my listening, question-asking habits soon provided me with a couple of unofficial tutors, also willing to indulge my uncertain sensibilities at the theatre.
“Why, it’s meant to be vulgar!” I exclaimed after a performance of Measure for Measure. “All that bawdy fooling around.”
If it hadn’t been for Wilson, I might have fallen in love with either of the two young men, one English, one American, who also took me punting on the Avon, day tripping to Oxford, to Wales, pub crawling, and simply walking country lanes in the late summer light. While both of them talked nearly as well as Wilson about matters literary and historical, they were also flirtatious and entertaining. Instead I fell in love with England and wrote to tell Wilson that we had both been born on the wrong continent. We were not after all freaks, simply freaks in the new world.
“This bloke of yours back in Canada, are you going to marry him them?” the Englishman asked.
“Oh, eventually,” I answered, and I found that I believed what I said.
I spent my final year at college in a postponing aura of serene industry, my essays enlivened by new insights that were my own, for I had been in that green and pleasant land and knew that birds do sing.
But at last I did have to go home to discover that my mother really was dead, that I was alone. If the house had been on an ordinary street in an ordinary city, I might have been persuaded to sell it and live the more vagabond life of my contemporaries, brash and brave among the new ruins of Europe, before returning to mow lawns and pay taxes. But it was built sturdily on a high piece of ground overlooking the inlet, the mountains and the growing city of Vancouver, and it contained my childhood which was prematurely precious to me as my parents were.
Wilson had not met my plane, nor did he come to see me until I’d had several days of blank passivity. I did not think it odd at the time. When he did arrive, I greeted him less shyly than before and felt him pull back. His Dulce was still not a woman but a docile, intelligent child in need of his guidance.
I could not ask him, as I very much wanted to, “What are we going to do with the rest of our lives?” He considered his to be publicly disposed, as a poet and teacher. He would give up printing, though he might one day use that practical knowledge if he founded a literary press.
“Vancouver is changing,” Wilson admitted as we looked together at the view, the skyline altered by the first of so many high rises which would eventually make it look more like New York than itself.
Then he asked, as if an uninvolved spectator, “What are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know.”
“You haven’t thought about it?”
“I wondered if I’d get a dog…no, I haven’t.”
“Why?”
“Do I have to do anything?”
“Well, eventually,” Wilson said. “You haven’t got enough capital to live on, not the way you’d like to live.”
I was furious with him for speaking as if I might never marry him or anyone else; yet I knew he would think it beneath me to leave my life to such an eventuality. I must be held accountable for my future.
All the girls I had known at school were either locked in combat with their parents or already married. Only two had jobs, chosen for their proximity to marriable men, which, of course, Wilson was not and would not be for some time until he could translate his years of learning into a modest academic salary. If I had to mark time until then, I might as well do it with him. I could get a teaching assistantship and take my M.A.
At first, witness to all the fawning young women who surrounded Wilson, I was both daunted and repelled, but, as I watched him treat them like bodies on a crowded bus, I was reassured. He was a little aloof from me, too, at first, as if he did not want any display of our friendship, but gradually we formed the habit of having lunch together several times a week. For his birthday, I gave him season tickets next to my own for the theatre and the foreign film series. We became in public rather than in private a pair.
Wilson had rooms in a widow’s house on the second floor with only a hotplate to cook on and a glimpse of view through a small, stained glass window in his bathroom which I saw only in the lines of one of his poems. He never invited me there, in deference to the widow’s sensibilities perhaps but in keeping with his appetite for privacy.
He visited me comfortably enough, and he did the same things for me that he had done for Mother as well as advising me about my ownerly responsibilities. But we almost always went out after the simple meals I was learning to prepare under his direction and with his help.
To my relief, Wilson did not want to go to poetry readings. He said he had nothing in common with the other students who claimed to be poets and brought out a magazine called Tish. “It’s not really necessary to spell it backwards,” Wilson said. To focus on the human breath and the heartbeat for a theory of aesthetics was simply an excuse to ignore the great traditions of poetry. For Wilson the roots of poetry were in knowledge, discipline, and concentration. He admired Auden, Eliot, the best of Dylan Thomas, a good reason for avoiding the drunken bellowings of that undersized bull on the stage. About giving readings of his own, Wilson was non-committal. “I’m not ready.”
We went instead to the Art Gallery for every visiting show. Wilson was fascinated by the question of great subjects. I was more interested in paint and stone and metal; therefore I didn’t have the trouble with modern art which often daunted Wilson, fearful of being tricked by fads and imposters. How could he judge technique without subject matter, he wanted to know. “Think of it as more like music,” I suggested.
When he went with me to openings of local galleries, Wilson stood back from the conversations I got into, I suppose because he was more comfortable with answers than with questions, but he did listen, and occasionally he would go with me to parties held after the shows for the artist and his friends.
Wilson would have preferred me to invest in something like first editions, about which he was relatively well informed, but the only first editions I’ve ever bought are new books. I have no taste for books as objects. What I wanted were paintings. For me they were as pure as poems.
In asserting that aesthetic independence, I did not feel so much Wilson’s equal as a better, more independent companion, one he would some day come to see as a woman rather than a fifteen-year-old with an old soul. He dedicated his second book of poems to me with the words, “For Dulce, my muse.”
Just the other day I came upon a metaphorical distinction between the romantic and classical poets in Northop Fry: “Warm mammalians who tenderly suckle their living creations and the cold reptilian intellectuals who lay abstract eggs.” There were no love poems at all in this second collection. Like the canvases Wilson was drawn to, they were about great subjects. The title came from the longest and most difficult poem in the book, Exercises in War. Trained as I had been, it didn’t occur to me to wonder whether or not I liked Wilson’s poetry. I admired it as intellectually requiring and courageously cruel about the nature of man.
Three months before Wilson received his PhD, he accepted a graduate fellowship in England.
“You’ll never come back,” I said.
“I hope not.”
“Wilson, what about me?”
The eyes turned to me were brilliant with unshed tears. “I’m sorry, Dulce.”
Now that Wilson C. Wilson has made his name attractive with international honors, occasionally a graduate student comes to me to ask what Wilson was like as a young man. I can only say what he tried to be like as a young man in order to become what he now actually is, a very good poet whose poems I can’t bear to read.
If Wilson was a coward, he wasn’t coward enough to marry me. I was coward enough to have married him to seal myself away forever from learning either to live alone or truly with another. Instead, he left me when I was twenty-four in the cocoon of my independence which exposed rather than hid my humiliation, for very soon after Wilson left, Oscar Kaufman, a sculptor at whose studio we had often been, said to me, “I thought at least he’d marry you for the view you’ve got here.”
Perhaps because Oscar was as unlike Wilson as it is possible for a man to be, I was not so much attracted to him as resigned to him for the medicine I needed as a kill or cure remedy for the past ten years of my life.
He was, as most of our friends were in those days, older. Wilson felt safer among people settled in marriage and the raising of children than among other teaching assistants like ourselves who were marrying in nervous numbers and moving into the ugly and cramped married quarters on campus. Perhaps Wilson thought I might be as put off as he obviously was by family life if I could witness first hand the emotional and physical squalor of it.
Oscar and Anita had three children under five years old. “Catching up after the war,” Oscar explained. He was both efficient and tender with them, and he gave Anita a day off every Saturday in exchange for a Saturday night for himself, no questions asked.
When he first stopped by, he had the children with him, and I discovered very quickly how inappropriate my house was for any child neither tied up nor caged. The baby was putting an ant trap in his mouth before anyone had taken a coat off, and Mother’s favorite lamp was smashed on the hearth in the next five minutes. After that, Oscar got ahead of them, kid-proofing the room while I got out cookies.
While the children climbed all over him, covering him with enough crumbs to feed every bird in the garden, he said to me, “You know, Dulce, what you’ve needed for a long time is a real man.”
“What’s unreal about Wilson?”
“He’s a faggot.” When I looked blank, Oscar explained, “A queer, a homosexual.”
“How do you know such a thing?”
“Don’t get mad at me,” Oscar said. “Do you have any better explanation? Did he ever take you to bed?”
If it hadn’t been for the presence of the children, I would have ordered Oscar out of the house. Instead, we both used them as a distraction, and Oscar didn’t speak of Wilson again then or ever.
When he had gone, I took down Wilson’s first volume of poems and turned to the love poems which had always bewildered me. What I thought had been about unrequited love was instead forbidden, I could quite clearly see, but nothing prevented the reader from supposing the object to be a female, married or otherwise lost to him. It was not, however, a better explanation. Had they been, in a perverse way, poems also for me, the only way Wilson knew how to tell me that he was incapable of loving me?
I had ignored his absolute lack of expressions of physical affection, rationalizing it as part of his extreme sensitivity or a peculiarity of his being raised without tenderness or his sense of honor or some lack in myself because I had loathed those aggressive and drunken young men when I was in college. And I had been relieved that I didn’t have to compete with other women for his attention, but there had been no man in his life, of that I was sure. Was Oscar suggesting that Wilson was the kind of man who sought sex in parks and public washrooms? Such an accusation made Oscar rather than Wilson disgusting. If Oscar thought Wilson was queer, why did he also suppose Wilson might have married me?
I try to explain what happened in terms not only of my own ignorance but of the ignorant intolerance of that time. Oh, I had heard rumors of homosexuality in some of Shakespeare’s sonnets, but I had dismissed them as I did suggestions that Bacon had really written the plays. I had heard a couple of very masculine girls at college referred to as lesbian, but I associated that with the inappropriateness of their style and manner, rather than with their sexual tastes. The only homosexual male I had ever been aware of was a very effeminate brother of a high-school friend of mine who cried because someone had called him a fairy.
Wilson was entirely masculine. Even in his good looks there was nothing pretty about him. His body was hard and competent, his voice deep. If there was an error in his manner it was an occasional hint of arrogance. There was nothing of the passive or sycophantic about him. He wasn’t exactly a man’s man either, without interest in either sports or dirty jokes. He was a loner, learning to command respect rather than affection. Yet who could call a man of such intense feelings cold?
I had never pretended to understand Wilson, but he was realer to me than anyone else, both gentler and stronger. My first wish about him, that he could have been my brother, probably most accurately described what we had been for each other and might have gone on being if I had not tried to break the taboo with one question which created the irrevocable separation and silence between us.
Compared to Wilson, Oscar was transparent, his work hugely, joyously sexual, his needs blatant, his morality patriarchal. He worshipped his wife as the mother of his children; he loved his children, and as a man and an artist he deserved me, but I was also his good deed, part of a sexual altruism he had worked out for himself which drew him to unhappy women. Often in his life he has been bewildered to leave them even unhappier. For some years I let him come to me to be comforted when he was suffering their unreasonable demands and accusations. I can explain that only by my horror at ever again shutting a final door between me and someone I have cared about.
Oscar was from the first completely open with me. Anita didn’t mind this sort of thing as long as she didn’t have to know about it. His relationship with me was restricted to Saturday nights and would be as entirely private as mine with Wilson had been entirely public. It would end with summer when he was free of his university teaching responsibilities to concentrate on his work. By then I should have become a competent sexual being ready for the open market. No, he didn’t put it that way. He was never again as blunt as he had been about Wilson. Oscar knew how to be kind and funny about not quite savory arrangements so that raising any objection seemed a regression to grammar school morality.
Used to Wilson’s spartan taste in food, I was unprepared for Oscar’s appetite, and he did not expect to help me in the kitchen or with any other domestic problem. He wanted to leave all husbandly and fatherly responsibilities behind him. He left whatever personal problems he might have had behind him, too. I’ve never known anyone as resolutely and often maddeningly cheerful as Oscar.
“I made a bargain,” he told me once. “If I made it through the war, I’d spend the rest of my life celebrating it.”
As he pointed out to me, I could have done worse than to offer my overdue virginity to Oscar. He did not rush me, and he was patient with my timidity and squeamishness. I felt rather like a child being taught to ride a bicycle, that is until he mounted me, and then I became my father’s violin, a thing seemingly of wood and strings, that charged Oscar with crazed energy. I did not know whether I was terrified of him or myself for the power I apparently had to call up such a rutting.
He did not neglect my ‘pleasure,’ as he called it, so much as never clearly locate it. From his caresses, I thought I should gradually learn to purr like a cat, but I was too tense in my ignorance to feel the heat he called up as anything more than flashes of ambiguous feeling somewhere between pleasure and pain.
After he left, I often cried hysterically, a response that misled me to think I was in love with Oscar in a way I didn’t consciously comprehend, for I also came to dread his arrival on Saturday night, and I was giddy with freedom the few times he was unable to get away.
I did have the sense to refuse Anita’s invitation to spend Christmas day with the family. Wilson and I had always planned something to circumvent rather than celebrate that holiday, he not wishing to be politely tolerated in the house where he had grown up, I not wanting to be reminded of the central delight I had been to my parents on such occasions. I had never even explored the cupboard where I supposed the Christmas decorations were stored.
I did what I had wanted to do when I first came home. I went to the Animal Shelter and picked out an already house-broken and spayed young dog, short-haired and black but not as large as a Lab. Then on whim I picked up a black kitten as well. The major part of my Christmas buying, after I’d chosen extravagant presents for Oscar’s children (nothing for Oscar at his request), was done in a pet shop.
The dog already had a name, “Rocket,” suggesting a male child’s brief infatuation with a puppy. I didn’t like it, but she was old enough to be used to it. The kitten I named Maud, as all vain, bright and beguiling females should be. From the first night they slept together in the laundry room by the back door.
Rocket’s occasional growl and brief, sharp bark woke me several times during the night. Only someone who has lived years alone can know the absolute pleasure of those animal sounds in the no longer empty house.
“What’s this, Dulce?” Oscar exclaimed when Rocket raised her hackles and growled at him and Maud clawed to her highest perch on the bookcase. “A zoo?”
Oscar didn’t seem able to like an animal he didn’t own. Either Rocket had been abused by a male or she was jealous because, even when I insisted on her good manners, she was sullen about them. She tried to keep herself between me and Oscar, and his slightest affectionate gesture started up a hostile singing in her throat. I finally had to tie her up on the back porch, but just as Oscar went into his fit of passion, Rocket began to howl. I had to disengage myself and go speak to her in my firmest tones.
When Oscar left that night, I had hysterical giggles.
“You’re turning yourself into a witch,” Oscar decided. “Next it will be a black minah bird.”
Neither the image nor the idea of the bird was distasteful to me. But Rocket’s continued hostility was becoming a real problem.
“Look, Dulce, you have to get rid of her before you become too attached to her. You can’t have a dog around that doesn’t like people.”
I did not tell him that Rocket was not only polite but quite friendly with the friends I occasionally had in for drinks or dinner, but I did not take Oscar’s advice.
Finally he laid down his ultimatum, “Me or that dog.”
When I chose the dog, he thought I was joking.
“I know it’s shameful to admit it, Oscar, but what I need are pets, not a lover.”
“But that’s crazy.”
I did not argue with him though I knew Rocket and Maud were my first investments in sanity, creatures with whom I could exchange affection and loyalty, about whom I could be ordinarily responsible. How many bad whims and potential disasters can be more simply avoided than with the words, “I have to go home to feed the animals?”
Later I understood that Oscar didn’t have the time or energy for more than one woman a winter, and he had to sulk through the rest of that one until he could return to sculpting and to being my friend.
That summer he introduced into his group of huge phallic and pregnant shapes some less voluptuous figures, empty at the center. I bought one and placed it in the garden by the roses where Wilson had once pitched his impregnable tent.
I would have liked to declare my independence of Wilson’s influence by dropping out of the PhD program since there was no longer any point in winning his approval. I was, I think, worried that having such a degree might intimidate another more ordinary sort of man who might make friends with my animals, like my view and marry me. I began research for my thesis simply because I didn’t know what else to do.
Conception and development of character fascinated me in Shakespeare where in the early plays crude models of the later great characters could be found. Left to myself, I would not have spent months locating other scholars who had noted and explored that subject to see if there were any observations left to be made. But it was a more humane topic than many with teasing application to life.
I wondered if Wilson and Oscar were early, crude models of extremes of male influence in my life or the great characters before whom others would pale. I waffled between a sense that my life was already over and that it had not really begun. I was so much more settled than most of the other people I knew, yet my commitments seemed to have dwindled rather than increased.
My fellow students worried about money and pregnancy and the constant irritation of intimacy in ugly surroundings. My artist friends were old enough not to have outgrown those concerns but to simplify the last of them to the constant irritation of intimacy anywhere.
I didn’t have to keep late hours to get my work done, and Rocket encouraged me to take long walks on the beach, which have always been one of my greatest pleasures. With her protective company I was also free to explore the university grant land bush, trails intersecting for miles through scrub forest edged with berries and wild flowers. At home Maud’s antics often made me laugh aloud, and her warmth in my lap as I sat reading was a simple comfort.
After Oscar, I didn’t encourage already attached men to come to call without their wives or girl friends. I deflected any domestic complaints offered over public coffee at the university or a glass of wine at an opening. I did sometimes listen to their wives as an antidote to my envy. Very few of them seemed content with their lives. In those old days I thought, though never said, that they should be. I was surprised at how many of them envied me.
“You’re the only one of us the men ever listen to,” one wife observed, a woman both brighter and more committed to her own mind than I was, but she was delayed in her studies by two small children and her husband’s academic needs.
The men did listen to me for the simple reason that I asked good questions. Their wives wanted equal time for giving answers. Even quiet men can’t tolerate that; they stop listening.
Men married to artistic rather than academic women fared little better. To the complaint that time at home was eaten up with everyone else’s needs, husbands were apt to shout, “God, if I had some time at home, I’d have a poem to show for it!” This was before the time that men did stay home, even the best of them, more than once a week. Though some did laundromat duty and food shopping, they thought of these tasks as interim measures until they could make enough money not to feel humble in their expectations of service. Yet their wives also looked forward to a time when life would be made more tolerable with money.
Only one out of all those graduate school marriages survives into the 80s. Among male artists and their wives, the odds are better (or worse, of course, depending on one’s point of view). I speculate that wives of artists don’t expect life to get better, early on resign themselves to or embrace a role of cherishing genius without rationalization. My mother lived that way with my father, not expecting diamonds or a plumber either.
“If only men were superior,” wailed one young wife, “it would make life so much easier.”
For all their difficulties, for their envy of my freedom and serenity, I knew those women also pitied me, particularly on those occasions when I needed an escort, the more for their remembering the years of Wilson. I tried not to feel sorry for myself. I knew the Oscars of this world are worse than nothing. About the Wilsons of this world I wasn’t entirely sure.
As a young woman of the 80s I might not have waited until I was thirty to consider what my own sexual tastes actually were. Perhaps I was backward even for my own generation. I didn’t give friends the opportunity to tell me so. Lee Fair was the first person, aside from my mother, in whom I ever confided. The impulse took me by surprise, for she was not only younger than I but one of my students.
Like Wilson, Lee had published a book of poems in her early twenties. Unlike him, she had then married and had a child, a choice no wiser for her than it would have been for him. Yet she defended what she had done on the grounds that motherhood is central to the female vision. No woman without that experience could have very much to say. She was too fiercely vulnerable for me to point out how few of our well known women writers had children. The Brontës, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein were all childless.
I had assumed rather than thought about children myself. I was not particularly interested in those belonging to my friends, but I did not read that as a dislike of children. Mine would be well brought up as I had been.
Lee’s child, Carol, was both remarkably quiet and watchful compared to other five-year-olds I had known. I did not actively dislike her, but I was unnerved by the critical appraisal in her gaze. Any time she was due to arrive with her mother, I took as much care about my appearance as I would for a lover.
She asked odd questions, too, like “Were you a sad little girl?” She was attracted to sorrow, as Wilson had been. She told me, “My daddie didn’t die. He just went away.”
Some of my childhood books were still on the shelves, and I found some of my old dolls, stuffed animals, and games in the cupboard with the neglected Christmas ornaments. As Carol became accustomed to the place, she spent less time suspiciously staring, though she went on asking questions.
“Did you always play by yourself?”
“A lot of the time,” I said. “I liked to. I liked to play in the garden.”
Sometimes I stood by the window watching her climb among the rocks as I had done, and I supposed my mother often watched me when I was unaware of it. Then Carol would turn, look up and wave. I waved back and turned away, not wanting to seem to spy.
“You should have a child,” Lee said. “Why don’t you have one?”
“I manage better with animals,” I replied, wondering for how many years I’d used self deprecation as a way to defend myself against personal questions.
“You mother your students.”
“Do I mother you? You don’t seem to me that much younger than I am.”
“I’m not,” Lee said. “And at the rate I’m going, I’ll be twenty years older than you are by the time I finish my MA.”
Lee’s face was dark and strained, and there was already a lot of grey in her mane of black hair. She was always exhausted, working as a cocktail waitress on week-ends, studying late into week nights, finding time for Carol.
“I don’t have your stamina,” I said.
“I don’t have it either. I just don’t have any choice…now.”
Like so many other women I knew, Lee made me feel guilty, but the others all had men to stand between them and any altruism I felt. Lee was alone, and I did want to do things for her to make her life easier.
“Don’t offer to do things for me,” she warned, “because I’ll let you.”
“Is there anything immoral about doing your laundry here while you have a meal rather than down at the laundromat?”
“Not yet,” Lee said.
Her guardedness, her fear of dependence, made me at first more careful of her feelings than I would otherwise have been and perhaps less aware of my own.
One afternoon, when I offered to pick Carol up at kindergarten to give Lee an extra hour at the library, she said, “Don’t get indispensible.”
“Oh, sometimes you seem to me as impossible as a man,” I said in sudden irritation.
“Sometimes you seem as insensitive as one,” she retorted.
That exchange, as I thought about it, seemed to me basically funny.
“Does neither of us like men very much?” I asked her over coffee, after Carol had been settled in my study with some books.
“I don’t have anything against them as long as they leave me alone,” Lee said.
“You don’t want to remarry ever?”
“No,” she said. “Why do I seem to you impossible?”
“You don’t. It’s only that I don’t expect to have to be as careful with you as…”