Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

“Yes, we certainly do not forget you so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions.”

With the exception of myself, there wasn’t a woman in the room under seventy-five. The two schoolteachers, three housewives, and part-time greeting card wit may all have been born in the Land of Opportunity, but that opportunity had been heavily dependent on the character of their private parts. I remembered my mother’s words: “I always thought I’d go on and get at least a master’s degree, but there was so little time and not enough money.” A sudden image of my mother at the kitchen table with her French grammar book came back to me, her lips moving as she silently repeated the verb conjugations to herself.

Harville brings out the BIG GUNS to refute Anne, albeit in a highly civil manner.

“… I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy. Song and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.”

“Perhaps I shall. — Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”

Of course, the pen that inscribed those words was in Austen’s hand, and a neat hand it was, too. The woman’s handwriting had all the clarity and precision of her prose. And the pen, as it were, Dear Reader, is now in my hand, and I am claiming the advantage, taking it for myself, for you will notice that the written word hides the body of the one who writes. For all you know, I might be a MAN in disguise. Unlikely, you say, with all this feminist prattle flying out here and there and everywhere, but can you be sure? Daisy had a feminist professor at Sarah Lawrence, most decidedly a man, married, too, with children and a Yorkie, and on the rampage for women, a noble defender of the second sex. Mia might really be Morton for all you know. I, your own personal narrator, might be wearing a pseudonymous mask.

But back to our story: Not surprisingly, the women of Rolling Meadows are in Anne’s corner. Even our Peg of Permanent Sunshine allows that there were times at home with her five “wonderful children” when she longed for some diversion, when her feelings preyed upon her, and then, in a moment of startling revelation, the resident optimist confesses that there had been days when she had been “pretty darned tired and blue,” and that in her experience far more men have the gift for forgetting women than women have for forgetting men. Weren’t they the ones who turned around and got married just months after their wives “passed away”? (I suppressed comment that Boris hadn’t even waited for me to die.)

Betty offers humorous quote: “I am woman. I am invincible. I am pooped!”

Laughter.

Rosemary notes the exception to the rule of women waiting, pining, hoping: Regina.

Titters.

My mother rises to fellow Swan’s defense: “She had fun, though!”

Abigail nods, regards my mother lovingly, and says in a loud, if hoarse voice, “Who’s to say we shouldn’t all have had more fun!”

Who is to say? Not I surely. Not my mother, not Dorothy, not Betty, not Rosemary, not even Peg, although the latter proffers the buoyant comment that they are having fun, well, aren’t they, right now, at this “very minute”? And the carpe diem sentiment does, in fact, brighten the entire room, if not literally, then figuratively.

After that, there was some pleased nodding, some silent sipping, and some tangents onto the movie being shown in the screening room at seven, It Happened One Night, followed by some mooning over Clark Gable and chatter about how films used to be so much better and, good grief, what had happened? I volunteered that Hollywood films were now made exclusively for fourteen-year-old boys, an audience of limited sophistication, which had drained the movies of even the hope of sprightly dialogue. Farts, vomit, and semen had taken its place.

I seated myself beside Abigail then and held her hand for a little while. She asked me to come see her. The request was not casual. She had some urgent business to discuss, and it had to happen in the next couple of days. I promised, and Abigail began the protracted rigors of pulling her walker toward her, getting herself into a standing position, and then moving, one small, careful step after another, toward her apartment.

Within minutes, the book club was over. And it had ended before I could say that there is no human subject outside the purview of literature. No immersion in the history of philosophy is needed for me to insist that there are NO RULES in art, and there is no ground under the feet of the Nitwits and Buffoons who think that there are rules and laws and forbidden territories, and no reason for a hierarchy that declares “broad” superior to “narrow” or “masculine” more desirable than “feminine.” Except by prejudice there is no sentiment in the arts banned from expression and no story that cannot be told. The enchantment is in the feeling and in the telling, and that is all.

* * *

Daisy sent this:

Hi, Mom. Dinner with Dad was okay. He seems a little better. He was shaved at least. I think he’s really, really embarrassed. He said he hoped that you would be able to see his “interlude” for what it was. He also mentioned “temporary insanity.” I said that’s what you had, and he said, maybe he had it, too. Mom, I think he’s sincere. It’s been awful for me to have you two against each other, you know. Love and kisses, Daisy

And yet, I could not leap at Daisy’s father. As I meditated on our story, I understood that there were multiple perspectives from which it could be viewed. Adultery is both ordinary and forgivable, as is the rage of the betrayed spouse. We are not unworldly, are we? I had endured my own French farce, starring my fickle, inconstant husband. Was it not time “to forgive and forget,” to use that inveterate cliche?” Forgiveness is one thing, forgetfulness another. I could not induce amnesia. What would it mean to live with Boris and the memory of the Pause or Interlude? Would it now be different between us? Would anything change? Can people change? Did I want it to be the same as it had been? Could it be the same? I would never forget the hospital. BRAIN SHARDS. For better or for worse, I had become so entwined with Boris that his departure had ruptured me, sent me screaming into the asylum. And wasn’t the fear I had felt old, the fear of rejection, of disapproval, of being unlovable, a fear that may be older even than my explicit memory? For months, I had drowned in anger and grief, but over the summer my mind had unconsciously, incrementally begun to change. Dr. S. had seen it. (How I missed her, by the way.) Reading Daisy’s letter, I felt those subliminal, not yet articulated thoughts rise upward, form sentences, and lodge themselves securely somewhere between my temples: Some part of me had been getting used to the idea that Boris was gone forever. No one could have been more shocked than I by this revelation.

* * *

And now the curtain must rise on the following Monday, when seven uncomfortable girls and a poet, laboring to hide her own anxiety, sat around a table at the Arts Guild. A torpor seemed to have taken hold of all seven young bodies, as if an invisible but potent gas had been unleashed in the room and was swiftly putting them all to sleep. Peyton had folded her arms on the table and laid her head down. Joan and Nikki, seated side by side as always, sat in heavy silence, eye-lined lids cast downward. Jessie, elbows propped on the table surface, rested her chin in her hands, a vacuous expression on her face. Emma, Ashley, and Alice all appeared limp with exhaustion.