Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

* * *

That night I dreamed I woke up in the bedroom with the Buddha on the dresser where I slept. I climbed out of bed, and although the light was dim, I noticed that the walls were wet and glistening. I reached out, touched the damp surface with my fingers, put them to my mouth, and tasted blood. Then, from the next room, I heard a child screaming. I rushed through the door, saw a bundle of white rags on the floor, and began pulling at them to unravel the cloth and uncover the child, but all I found were more and more wrappings. I woke up, breathing hard. I woke up in the room where the dream had begun, but the story did not stop. I heard screaming. Was I still asleep? No. With a racing heart, I understood that the sound was coming from next door. Good Go whihought, Pete. I threw on a robe and flew across the yard. Without knocking or ringing the bell, I ran into the house.

There was a wigless Flora, brown curls exposed, prostrate on the living room floor, shrieking. Her small face was purple with rage and her burning cheeks streamed with tears and snot as she kicked a chair with her heels and slammed her fists into the floor. Simon was emitting a series of desperate gasping wails from the bedroom upstairs and before me was Ashley. Standing only a foot or so away from Flora, she looked down at the child with blank, dead eyes, and I saw her mouth twitch once. When she understood someone had come in and, in the same moment, recognized me, I watched her expression change instantly to one of concern and helplessness. I swooped down on Flora, picked her up in my arms, and pressed her close to me. The fit didn’t end, but I started talking. “It’s Mia, sweetheart, Mia. What’s the matter?” That was when I realized she was screaming, “I want my air! Air!”

“Where’s her wig?”

Ashley looked at me. “I threw it away. It was gross.”

“Get it this instant!” I growled at her.

Flora stopped writhing the minute her “air” was restored, and with the sniffing child in my arms I mounted the steps to the bedroom to rescue Simon. Telling Flora I had to put her down in order to retrieve Simon, I instructed her to hug my leg. The baby’s little body was convulsing with sobs. I picked him up and began rocking him until he grew calmer. The three of us, now one three-headed body, lumbered slowly down the stairs into the living room.

The person I had first seen when I arrived had vanished. In her place was the Ashley I knew from class, a person who was relieved I had come, a person who had been overwhelmed, a person who hadn’t known what to do when Flora had smeared peanut butter in her wig, a person who had wanted to pick up Simon but was afraid to leave Flora. It all made perfect sense. Weren’t Lola and Pete dunderheads for leaving two children under four with a thirteen-year-old? I did not argue with her. I told her I understood. What was I to say? When I came in, I saw something in you that shocked me? I gleaned it from your eyes, your mouth? These insights do not count in social discourse; they may be true, but articulating them sounds insane. After I had settled the three of us onto the sofa, I asked Ashley to get me a bottle for Simon and sent her home.

The children were both exhausted. Simon collapsed after his food, his tiny curled hand pressed into my collarbone. Flora found a clinging spot a little lower on my body and rested her head on my abdomen. We slept.

I woke to Lola’s touch. Her hand was moving over my forehead and into my hair. I heard footsteps in the front hall, the bullying or to-be-pitied Pete (depending on my mood), and felt Lola lift Simon from my arms. She smelled of liquor, and her eyes had a watery, sentimental look. I gave her a brief synopsis. All she did was smile, my Madonna of the Split-Level, in her low-necked sparkly top, her tight jeans, and her own golden earrings — two Eiffel towers swaying slightly as she ld down at me.

* * *

Dr. S. and I talked at length about Boris’s housing arrangement, during which I leaked a small bucket of tears, and then I told her about the bloody Kleenex, Alice slipping away, Mrs. Lorquat’s complaint, and Ashley’s face. I used the sentence “I feel something is brewing” and saw witches steaming toads on their Sabbath. Dr. S. agreed that it was entirely possible that the girls were engaged in popularity politics, but the evidence of anything more sinister was, well, nonexistent. My blood dream interested her more. Rags. The Change. No more children. The babes next door. There is a wistful sadness when fertility ends, a longing, not to return to the days of bleeding, but a longing for the repetition itself, for the steady monthly rhythms, for the invisible tug of the Moon herself, to whom you once belonged: Diana, Ishtar, Mardoll, Artemis, Luna, Albion, Galata — waxing and waning — maiden, mother, crone.

* * *

In class, I found myself examining Ashley’s face for some sign of the frightening babysitter, but there was no trace of her. The other girls were slightly withheld, I noticed, but cooperative, and I did not have to confiscate any phones. And Alice, Alice looked happy, more than happy. She looked elated. I had never seen her in a radiant state before. Her eyes gleamed, and the poem she wrote had a jazzy tone I would have thought was completely out of character. “I’m banging out my thoughts today / Singing on a comet / Yelling in the clouds / Dancing on the sun.” Something has happened, I said to myself. Alice left last, as was often the case. She stood over the table, carefully depositing her notebook and pens into her bag, and she hummed a few notes from an unrecognizable tune.

“You’re in a good mood.”

She looked up at me and smiled; her braces shone silver for an instant in the light from the window.

“Have you had good news?”

Alice nodded.

I looked at her young face encouragingly.

“You might find it silly,” she said. “But I’ve had a message, a nice message, from a boy I like.”

“That’s not silly,” I said. “I remember. I remember how nice that was.”

As we walked to the door, I told her she should keep writing. She laughed. It may have been the first time I had heard her laugh. Outside, she jumped down the steps, turned to wave at me, and started to run. Farther down the block, she slowed her pace, but her joy remained visible in the added bounce she gave to her walk.

* * *

It was the title that got me thinking. Persuasion. My mother was reading it for her next book club with the other Swans and they had invited me, Mia, Mistress Degree, to say a few words of introduction. A story of love postponed, of love found, lost, and refound. Austen’s heroine is persuaded to give HIM up. Persuasion: to influence, sway, move, induce, soft-pedal, weigh upon, cajole, convince, the work of words, mostly, words that play on weakness, on a vulnerable spot. Honeyed tongues wag as men sweet-talk women into parting their thighs, the smooth palaver that breaks down feminine resistance. Wily women urge men toward this or that crime; the cool seductress of cinema with a teeny little pearl-handled revolver in her purse. Speed-talking Rosalind Russell snaps lines at Cary Grant in His Girl Friday. Love as verbal war. Scheherazade keeps on talking and stays alive one more night. The troubadours moon and croon for a lady’s favor. I will win her with words and music. I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and seas. I will dissect the Beloved’s body in metaphor. I will compliment her. I will lure her with wit. “Had we but world enough, and time…” I will tell stories. I will stay alive one more night. Comedies end in marriage, tragedies in death. Otherwise they aren’t so different. In the end, Scheherazade gets the man who wanted to kill her, but he’s besotted by then. Anne Elliot gets Captain Wentworth. The wrap-up is swift. It is the getting him back that counts and the marrying, but in spirit, Austen knows, they were wed before and suffered the emptiness of separation for six long years. This story of Mia and Boris begins deep in a marriage, after years of sex and talk and fights. If it is to be a comedy, then it must fall into Stanley Cavell’s territory, the comedies of repetition, of the already-married coming together again. The philosopher gives us a trenchant parenthesis: “(Can human beings change? The humor, and the sadness, of remarriage comedies can be said to result from the fact that we have no good answer to that question.)”