Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

I praised Joan’s lines.

You think I’m bland and a little silly.

But inside I’m a red-hot chili.

Emma compared her inner self to mud, but it was Peyton who produced the most startling image. She wrote that on the inside she was a “chipped piece of a door that looks like an island on a map.” When she read this, Peyton’s thin, narrow face had a pensive, taut expression. She hesitated, then explained. When she was eight, she told us, her parents had a terrible shouting fight while she was lying in bed. Her father left the house in a fury and slammed the door so hard, a part of it loosened and a chip fell off. The next morning she took the piece that had fallen and kept it. We were silent for a few seconds. Then I said that sometimes a small thing, even a bit of debris, can come to signify a whole world of feeling. “Nothing was the same after that,” she said quietly.

As I walked toward the open doors after class, I noticed that Ashley and Alice were in deep conversation on the steps just outside the building. I saw Alice nod and smile, then hand over a book or notebook. After that, Ashley stepped to one side and began to type madly on her telephone. When I passed her as I left, she looked up at me and smiled. “Really good class.”

“Thanks, Ashley,” I said.

That night as I lay in bed, a June storm rolled in over town, and it thundered loudly, sharp cracks like a series of detonations mingled with resonant booms above me, echoing again and again. Soon after came the rushing noise of thick, fast rain outside. I remembered the great winds of my childhood, remembered waking up in the morning to see that branches had fallen all over the street. I remembered the enchanted stillness that came before the twister or tempest, as if the whole earth were holding its breath, and the eerie green color that tinged the sky. I remembered the immensity of the world.

* * *

Dr. S. said, “You sound like you’re enjoying yourself.”

I was shocked. How could I enjoy myself? A woman who had been abandoned by her husband and gone bananas in the bargain, however “briefly”; how could she enjoy herself?

“You seem to have struck a chord with your young poets.” (I heard a chord on a guitar — metaphors often do this to me, even the deadest of the dead.) “You seem to like being with your mother. Abigail sounds very interesting. You’ve met the neighbors. You’re writing well. You answered Boris’s e-mail.” She paused. “I hear it in your voice.”

Feeling stubborn, I made a sound of dismissal.

Dr. S. waited.

I thought, Could she be right? Had I been clinging to an idea of wretchedness while I was secretly enjoying myself? Secret amusements. Unconscious knowledge. There was a little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, she was very, very good … “You might be right.”

I could hear her breathe.

“There was a storm last night,” I said, “a big one. I liked it.” I was rambling, but that was good, free association. “It was like listening to my own rage, but rage with real power, big, masculine, godlike, magisterial, paternal bangs in the heavens, the kind of thundering rage that makes the lackeys hop to, a baritone roar shaking the sky. I could almost feel the town move.”

“You think if your anger had power, paternal power, you could shape things in your life more to your liking. Is that what you mean?”

Is that what I meant? “I don’t know.”

“Is it perhaps that you felt your father’s emotions had power in the family, power over your mother, your sister, and you, and you were always stepping around his feelings, trying not to upset him. And you’ve felt the same thing in your marriage, perhaps reproduced the same story, and all the while you’ve gotten angrier and angrier?”

Lord, the woman is sharp, I thought. I answered her with a small, meek “Yes.”

* * *

Try at another sex entry:

It started in the library with Kant. Libraries are sexual dream factories. The languor brings it on. The body must adjust its position — a leg crossed, a palm leaned upon, a back stretched — but the body is going nowhere. The reading and the looking up from one’s reading brings it on; the mind leaves the book and meanders onto a thigh or an elbow, real or imagined. The gloom of the stacks brings it on with its suggestion of the hidden. The dry odor of paper and bindings and very possibly the smell of old glue bring it on. It wasn’t difficult Kant: The Critique of Practical Reason, much easier than Pure, but I was twenty, and Practical was quite difficult enough, and he leaned over me to see which book it was. His warm breath, his beard, very close. Professor B. in his white shirt, his shoulder an inch from mine. My whole body stiffened, and I said nothing. Then he was reading in a low voice, but the only word I remember is tutelage . He said it slowly, enunciating each syllable, and I was his. It ended badly, as they say, whoever they are, but his eyes watching me as I undressed— No, your blouse first. Now your skirt. Slowly —his long fingers moving into my pubic hair, then withdrawing, teasing me, smiling, creating desration — these wanton pleasures in the library after it had closed, these I keep safe in memory.

* * *

“George is dead,” my mother said, and pressed her index finger to her mouth for a moment. “They found her this morning on the floor in the bathroom.”

“Poor George,” Regina said. She pursed her lips. “I doubt I’ll get to one hundred and two; it’s really extraordinary when you contemplate it, even for a moment.”

Did people contemplate for a moment?

“Not with my leg,” she continued. “I had never heard of what I have, you know. The doctor told me if I’m not careful, one day it goes right to your brain or your lungs or somewhere and you’re dead, instantly.” Her eyes looked moist. “If I forget the Coumadin, then, well, it’s over.”

“She loved to tell people her age.” Abigail was steadying her hunched self with one hand on the edge of the table. She turned her head in my direction. “Never tired of it. Her oldest daughter’s seventy-nine.” She breathed in. “It seems another one goes every day. Alive one minute. Dead the next.”

Peg examined her hands on the table. They were heavily spotted and lined with great protruding veins. “She’s with her Maker.” Peg had a true warble in her voice, like the throaty sound of a pigeon. “And Alvin,” she added.

“Unless they’ve remade the man in heaven, God save her from Alvin,” Abigail said forcefully. “The most persnickety little tyrant I’ve ever seen. His pens had to lie just so, an inch apart, his collars had to be ironed flat, flat, flat. The bed, Lord, the bed and its corners. George was lucky to be rid of him. Had twenty-seven blessed years without that bald, nasty little despot.”

“Abigail, it’s not right to speak like that about the dead,” Peg said, her voice lilting sweetly.

Abigail was not listening. She was pressing a piece of paper into my hand under the table. I closed my hand around it and tucked into my pocket.

My mother shook her head. “I’ve never thought it was right to turn people into paragons of virtue after their deaths, either.”

I murmured an agreement.

“Nothing wrong with looking on the bright side.” Peg’s voice lifted a whole octave on the penultimate word. She smiled.

“Not at all,” Regina said in her oddly accented voice. “With my leg I must His pens n bright and hopeful. What else can I do? If it bursts, that’s it, straight to my brain or my heart, dead in a second.”

We were sitting in the game room, around the bridge table. The summer light came through the window and I looked out at the clouds, one of which drifted upward like a smoke ring. I heard a dryer flapping clothes somewhere down the hallway and the low sound of a motorized scooter, but that was all.