Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

After a not entirely dull discussion of color and feeling — bitter, mean green; glum or soothing or huge blue; hot, yelling red; bursting yellow; blank, cold white; grumpy brown; scary, deadly black; and airy, sweet-tasting pink — they departed, and I, self-anointed adult spy, stood on the sultry front steps of the small building and watched.

There unfolded before me a kind of dance, a jostling, animated shuffle of approaches, withdrawals, and various doublings, triplings, and quadruplings. I could see, only yards away, at the end of the short block, a group of five boys, happily pounding, slapping, pushing, and tripping one another as they exclaimed, “You fuck, what’d’ya think yer doin’?” and “Get your hands off me, homo!” With a single exception — a tall boy in wide shorts and a baseball cap turned backward on his head — they were runty amours, much shorter than most of the girls, but all five — towering boy included — were engaged in what appeared to be a clumsy, testosterone-infused form of group gymnastics. Meanwhile, my seven were also in performance mode. Nikki, Joan, Emma, and Jessie shrieked with self-conscious laughter, glancing over their shoulders at their stumpy suitors. Peyton’s drowsiness seemed to have lifted. I saw her aggressively insert herself between Nikki and Joan, lean down, and whisper some thought into Nikki’s ear, which instantly produced in the listener another high-pitched squeal. Ashley, rod straight, breasts up, out, and forward, shook her hair onto her back with two little twists of her neck, before she moved confidingly toward Alice. The latter listened, rapt, to the former, and immediately afterward, I saw Emma glance at Ashley. It was a glittering, facetious look, but also, I realized, with a flash of discomfort, a servile one.

As they wandered off in a loose pack toward the still-raucous savages on the corner, I felt a mixture of pity and dread — pity, quite simply, because I was remembering not any particular day, any particular boy or girl, not even the gloomy period when I was pushed out by Julia and her disciples. Rather, I remembered that time of life when most of what matters can be summed up by the phrase “the other kids,” and it struck me as pitiful. The dread was more complex. In his journals, Kierkegaard writes that dread is an attraction, and he is right. Dread is a lure, and I could feel its tug, but why? What had I actually seen or heard that created this mild but definite pull in me? Perception is never passive. We are not only receivers of the world; we also actively produce it. There is a hallucinatory quality to all perception, and illusions are easy to create. Even you, Dear Reader, can easily be persuaded that a rubber arm is your own by a charming neurologist with a few tricks either up his sleeves or in the pockets of his white coat. I had to ask myself if my circumstances, my own unwanted pause from “real” life, my own postpsychotic state had affected me in ways I wasn’t aware of and couldn’t predict.

* * *

The two further amusements Abigail revealed to me that Thursday were as follows:

One floral, hand-knit tea cozy, which, when turned inside out, exposed a tapestry lining of female monsters with oozing eyes, flaming breath, breasts with spears, and long swordlike talons.

One long green table runner embroidered with white Christmas trees. When reversed and unzipped, it displayed (moving from left to right) five finely rendered female onanists on a black background. (Onan, the disgraced Biblical character, got into trouble for spilling his seed on the ground. As I examined the row of voluptuaries, I wondered if the term could apply to those of us who are seedless but egg-full. We waste those eggs like crazy, of course, flushing them out every month in days of bleeding, but then most sperm are wholly useless as well, a thought to be considered elsewhere at greater length.)

Slender sylph reclines in easy chair, strategically dandling a feather between her open legs.

Dark lady lies at edge of bed, legs in the air, two hands hidden beneath disordered petticoats.

Chunky redhead straddles the bar of a trapeze, head thrown back, mouth open in orgasmic extremity.

Grinning blonde with shower nozzle — spray stitched in neat fanning lines of blue thread.

And, finally, a white-haired woman lying in bed clad in a long nightgown, her hands pressed over the cloth against her genitals. This last character changed the work entirely. The jocularity of the four younger revelers turned suddenly poignant, and I thought about the loneliness of masturbatory consolations, of my own lonely consolations.

When I looked up from the tapestry of self-pleasuring women, Abigail’s expression was both shrewd and sad. She told me she had not shown the masturbators to anyone but me. I asked her why. “Too risky” was her curt response.

It was strange how quickly I had become accustomed to the woman’s jackknife posture and how little I thought about it as we talked. I noticed, however, that her hands were shaking more than when we were last together. She told me three times that no one had seen “the runner” but me, as if to be sure of my confidence. I said I would never speak of it without her permission. Abigail’s sharp eyes gave me the strong impression that choosing me as a repository for her artistic secrets was not caprice. She had a reason, and she knew it. Nevertheless, she explained little and conducted a roving, shapeless conversation with me that afternoon over lemon cookies and tea, moving from her visit to New York in 1938 and her love for the Frick Collection to the fact that she was six years old when women got the vote to the poor supplies that were offered to art teachers in her day and how she had had to buy her own or deprive her pupils. I listened patiently to her, aware that despite the insignificance of what she was telling me, an urgency in her tone held me in my seat. After an hour of this, I felt she was tiring and suggested we make another date.

When we parted, Abigail grasped both my hands in hers. The squeeze she gave them was weak and tremulous. Then, lifting my hands to her lips, she kissed them, turned her head to one side, and pressed her cheek hard against the skin of my knuckles. Outside her door, I leaned against the wall in the corridor and felt tears come into my eyes, but whether they were for Abigail or for me, I had no idea.

* * *

I knew Pete was back because I heard him. Now that I had befriended Lola, I felt worse about the noise. I was sitting in the backyard on my chair after a long talk with Daisy on the telephone, my up-and-coming comedienne with the kind but overly possessive boyfriend “who wants to be with me every minute when he’s not at work.” She had called because she needed to discuss diplomacy. Daisy wanted to find the perfect way to tell him, “I need my space.” When I suggested that the phrase she had just used seemed inoffensive, she moaned, “He’ll hate that.” Pete was hating something, too, but fortunately after only minutes his bellowing stopped, and the house next door went quiet. Perhaps the combatants had taken to the wordless thrusts and parries of copulation. My father had not been a yeller, Boris was not a yeller, but there can be power in silences, too, more power sometimes. The silence draws you into the mystery of the man. What goes on in there? Why don’t you tell me? Are you glad or sad or mad? We must be careful, very careful with you. Your moods are our weather and we want it always to be sunny. I want to please you, Dad, to do tricks and dance and tell stories and sing songs and make you laugh. I want you to see me, see Mia. Esse est percipi . I am. It was so easy with Mama, her hands holding my face, her eyes with mine. She could roar at me, too, at my mess and disorderly ways, my crying jags and my eruptions, and then I was so sorry, and it was easy to get her back. And with Bea, too, but you were too far, and I couldn’t find your eyes or, if I did find them, they turned inward and there was gloom in that mental sky. Harold Fredricksen, Attorney at Law. It was a great joke in the family that when I was four, I had recited the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father who art in Heaven, Harold be thy name.” And Boris, yes, Boris, too, husband, father, father, husband. A repetition of the pull. What goes on in thre? Why don’t you tell me? Your silences pull me toward you but then there are clouds in your eyes. I want to ram the fortress of that gaze, blast beyond it to find you. I am the fighting Spirit of Communion. But you are afraid of being broken into, or maybe you are afraid of being eaten. The seductive Dora, glamour-puss mother weighted down by the myriad gestures and accoutrements of femininity, the sulks and coos and eyelash batting and shoulder rolling and hints and around-the-bend methods that will get her what she wants. I can hear her gold bracelets jingling. How she loved you, her bubeleh, her boychik, her darling, but there was something cloying in that love, something theatrical and selfish, and you knew it and, as soon as you were big enough, you kept her at a safe distance. Stefan knew, and he also knew that for her he came second in all things. Two boys with a father in heaven. And so it was, Boris, that we carried them, our parents, with us to each other. The Pause, too, must have them, father and mother, but I cannot think of her. I don’t want to think of her.