Renata Adler: Pitch Dark

I wonder whether he will ever ask himself, say to himself, Well, she wasn’t asking all the earth, why did I let her go?

Here’s how it is now, at the women’s college, which is still scholarly, still feminist. There has been a compromise with the nearest all male college, which had threatened, otherwise, to go co-ed. Ten percent of the male students now live at the women’s college. Ten percent of the female students live at the men’s college. Since some of the feminist dormitories have chosen to admit males, while others have chosen not to, the campus is now divided into two groups, which refer to each other, solely on the basis of the single-sex or co-ed dormitory issue, as the lesbians and the whores. The antipathy between the groups is deep. Students are “coming out” as lesbians, who, in the old days, would have been thought of as shy, or bold, or having crushes, or simply loyal in their friendships, but who would not have been, probably are not now, lesbians at all. And students are declaring themselves whores as though that were the only heterosexual choice. The dean’s office believes that to the degree that it still has responsibilities in loco parentis it ought not to act but just sympathetically abide, providing a benign place for things to sort themselves out. The latest, now, is this: whores and lesbians have found an issue on which they are united, unanimous in fact. The issue involves shower curtains at the gym. Male gyms do not have shower curtains. Male athletes are not hidden in the showers from one another. As a symptom, a residue of shame about the female body, the shower curtains, the students say, as with one voice, must be removed.

Those of us who remembered how relatively worried for our privacy we were, in those years, suspected campus-wide intimidation. Those of us who are of an age to be trustees, and to have young daughters, and those daughters timid, asked the most timid daughters what they thought of the shower-curtain crisis. And with one voice, though their mothers asked them separately, they said: Remove the shower curtains. So that’s what we’ll do. And, whatever may become of the declared whores and lesbians, what will happen if someday, somewhere, they are asked, Are you now or have you ever been one or the other, about the shower curtains, and that unforced unanimity, well, we know it’s fine.

Baby’s all right, Uncle Jacques and Aunt Zabeth used to say in times of worry or of crisis. Baby’s all right. A friend of theirs, an only child, had always said it, like a little incantation, when he was alone in the dark and frightened, from his babyhood, through his childhood, all his life. His friends took it up. Think of the RAF, my mother would say, for the same reason, at such times. Think of the RAF. Baby’s all right.

The world is everything that is the case. And in the second place because. In the sixth year, I went to New Orleans by myself. Look, I can’t. The relation between storytelling and eroticism is always close. I mean, it’s not just a matter of spinning yarns.

Yes it is. Spinning yarns.

Not any more, I think. Not even in thrillers, which is the path the purest storytelling impulse took. Not even in thrillers. Where stories are, there is always sex, and sometimes mortal danger.

You mean in stories.

I mean in telling them. Sex, mortal danger, and sometimes reprieve. For a woman, it is always, don’t you see, Scheherazade. For a man, it may be the Virginian. There he goes, then, striding through the dust of midday toward his confrontation. Here I am, of an evening, wondering whether I can hold his interest yet a while.

Did I throw the most important thing, by accident, away?

There was this about the infestation. First, the tent caterpillars, clustered black in grey-white webs at the clefts where trunk and branch, twigs and branches met, loathsome gossamer, sticking to hands, eyebrows, hair, as one tried with a broom or a branch to disengage them, everywhere, filmy, hopeless, travesty of silk. Sprayed them. Blasted them with torches. Must have missed a few or, more likely, they came again, borne by the wind. The crab apple was bare of leaves. The birches dangled leaves half-eaten, covered now with creatures advancing by hump and stretch, never seen to eat, only seen to crawl and rest, leaving devastation, overnight. Then, new buds, new leaves, a second growth. Within days more, the gypsy moths. Little beige egg casings all over the bark of every tree; hanging from stringy webs, at the same time, capsules, lacquered, layered, like some strange dessert, eggs in the cases, caterpillars in the hanging pupae, powdered wings on the night air, so prolific an infestation that we had three simultaneous generations of gypsy moths. They ate nothing, of course, that summer, just left their progeny to sleep and wait, on virtually every surface, on the fence, the firewood, the wisteria, webs, adobe casings, pupae, waiting all winter as we brought in and burned the firewood, sleeping, repellent, waiting, just as we waited, I suppose, for spring.

And if I had a complaint about the matter, it was only this: that you did not help me with it. Not that you needed to help me, not that I even needed help. In the end, I called the agriculture station, and they told me what to do. But the point is that, at the time, your land, your many acres of trees were being sprayed against the infestation. And when I asked you the name of the people who were spraying your land, so that they might spray my acre and a half as well, you said you could not remember their name. Then, I asked where I ought to look in the yellow pages, and you said, and I’m afraid you said this with some small satisfaction, that it was probably in any event too late to look, because the infestation this year had been so widespread and intense that all professional sprayers would by this time be booked up. Can this be as I am telling it? That was certainly not, at the time, how I perceived it, though I know that at the time I felt dimly, more than dimly but for obscure reasons, sad. And when the builders came to make the addition, the huge addition to your new house, with much digging, and blasting, and refilling, and moving of the earth, and you praised, rather daily praised, the young Irish contractor in charge, and I asked whether he might know someone who, when his job with you was done, could dredge the silt that has accumulated in my pond, you said, No, you thought the job too small for him. Months later, when you praised and praised two brothers, Finns, who had come with their backhoe to dredge for some source of water at your place, and I asked whether they might have or know someone who had a backhoe for my pond, you said you had forgotten their names as well, and they were gone. I thought for a time this was on your part some fastidiousness, some discretion, in not wanting to have the same workmen engaged at your house as at mine. Weeks later, though, you had no hesitation in asking Paul and his son, while they were working on my land and on my time, whether and under what circumstances they might come to cut, and split, and stack your firewood. You had asked me for Paul’s name, and I had given it, but you talked with him at my place. You did not call him at home.

It may still all be all right. I think I have found someone to spray my trees, and even someone to dredge the pond. All last night, an immense backhoe at rest towered over my house, and this morning it is at work, ringing and thundering out there. The contractor is unknown. I mean, no one around here seems to know him. It may all be more expensive than it might have been. That is, when the kind old professor came to visit, and suggested that, since I would have anyway to dredge the silt, I might as well at the same time construct a little island in the pond, he also said to be sure to have a man arrange things, because contractors are somehow disinclined to work as well or as honestly for women as for men; and when I told you what he had said, you agreed that it was so. After the dredging is done, I suppose, the place will really look much better, and the danger of floods will have abated. But I guess I also know that the time has come, and that I ought to sell my house. And there it is. Because if these were not failures of love, on your part or on mine, or failures of generosity, or at least of imagination or attention, well, of course, they were, and I didn’t want to know. And though I know my heart cannot have been broken in these things, these things of my house and of yours, no, it can’t have been, I’m sure it was not, I find that I am crying as I write, because, it cannot either, can it? have cost so much to say in some of these things, or in some others sometime, not grudgingly, and without reluctance, Yes.