Don't Cry Page 6

  After the reading, we all went for refreshments in the hospitality lounge. The Vietnamese girl and the Canadian father, as well as the feminist author, were there, signing books and talking with their readers. There were other authors present, too, including an especially celebrated Somali author known for an award-winning novel of war and social disintegration, and an American woman who had written a witty elegant, clearly autobiographical novella about a mother whose child is hit by a drunk driver and nearly killed. The feminist author appeared more relaxed in this setting than she had been onstage; she smiled easily and chatted with the mostly young women who approached her. And yet again I sensed a disturbing subliminal message bleeding through the presentation: a face of sex and woman's pain. The face had to do with disgrace and violence, dark orgasm, rape, with feeling so strong that it obviates the one who feels it. You could call it an exalted face, or an agonized face; in the context of the feminist author, I think I'm going to call it “the agonized face.” Although I don't know why— she doesn't look like she's ever made such a face in her life.

  There was only one more person waiting to talk to her, an animated girl with ardently sprouting red hair. I got in line behind her. When I got up close, I saw that the author's eyes were not sweet, innocent, or sparkling. They were wary and a little hard. As she signed the animate red girl's book, I heard her say, “Sex has been let out of the box, like everything is okay, but no one knows what ‘everything’ is.”

  “Exactly!” sprouted the ardent girl.

  Exactly. “I liked the talk you gave,” I said, “before the reading.”

  “Thank you,” she said, coldly answering my italics.

  “But I'm wondering why you chose to read what you read afterward. If you didn't like what they said about you in that brochure you mentioned. I didn't read it, but—”

  “What I read didn't have anything to do with what they said.”

  No? “I'd love to talk more with you about that. I'm here as a journalist for Quick! Would you be able to talk about it for our readers?”

  “No,” she said. “I'm not doing interviews.” And she turned her back on me to sign another book.

  I stood for a moment looking at her back, vaguely aware of the Somali author talking into someone's tape recorder. With a vertiginous feeling, I remembered the days right after graduation, when Tom was an artist and I was a freelance journalist hustling work at various small magazines. We slept on a Salvation Army mattress; we ate and wrote on a coffee table. “The grotesque has a history, a social parameter,” said the Somali author. “Indeed, one might say that the grotesque is a social parameter.”

  Indeed. I took a glass of wine from a traveling tray of glasses and drank it in a gulp. On one of those long-ago assignments, I had interviewed a topless dancer, a desiccated blonde with desperate intelligence burning in her otherwise-lusterless eyes. She was big on Hegel and Nietzsche, and she talked about the power of beautiful girls versus the power of men with money In the middle of this power talk, she told me a story about a customer who had said he would give her fifty dollars if she would get on her hands and knees with her butt facing him, pull down her G-string, and then turn around and smile at him. They had negotiated at length: “I made him promise that he wouldn't stick his finger in,” she said. “We went over it and over it and he promised me, like, three times. So I pulled down my G-string, and as soon as I turned around, his finger went right in. I was so mad!” Then bang, she was right back at the Hegel and Nietzsche. The combination was pathetic, and yet it had the dignity of awful truth. Not only because it was titillating— though, yes, it was—but because in the telling of it, a certain foundation of humanity was revealed; the crude cinder blocks of male and female down in the basement, holding up the house. Those of us who have spouses and/or children forget about this part—not because we have an aversion to those cinder blocks necessarily but because we are busy on the upper levels, building a home with furniture, decorations, and personalities in it. We are glad to have the topless dancer to remind us of that dark area in the basement where personality is irrelevant and crude truth prevails. Her philosophical patter even added to the power of her story because it created a stark polarity: intelligent words on one side, and mute genitals on the other. Between the poles, there was darkness and mystery, and the dancer respected the mystery with her ignorant and touching pretense.

  Which is exactly what the feminist author did not do. I drained my second glass of wine. The feminist author—she told and then read her disturbing stories as if she were a lady at a tea party as if there were no mystery no darkness, just her, the feminist author skipping along, swinging some charming little bag, and singing about penises, la la la la la!

  Another server wafted past, a young woman with her mind clearly on something else. I reached for another glass of wine, then changed my mind. Of course, someone might say—I can picture a well-dressed, intellectual lady saying it—well, why not? And rationally, there is no reason why not. These things are accepted now; these things are talked about in popular comedies on television. So why not? Because everyone knows such television shows are nonsense. Because glib acceptance does not respect the profound nature of the agonized face.

  I reconsidered having another wine; looking for a server, I noticed that the Somali author, momentarily unpestered, was looking at me with a kindly expression. He was handsome, well dressed, and elegant. Impulsively, I crossed the room and introduced myself His hand was long, dry, and warm. He had come from New York, not Somalia. He came every year. When I told him it was my first time, he smiled.

  “Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “though it's been a long time since I've had two quick drinks this early in the day”

  He laughed, raised his wineglass, and sipped from it.

  “And you?” I asked. “Do you enjoy this?”

  “Oh yes,” he said. “One meets such curious people. And, of course, interesting people, too.”

  “What about her?” I indicated the feminist author, now chatting with her back to us. “What did you think?”

  “Oh!” The Somali author laughed. “I've heard what she has to say many times—it's nothing new. But I did admire the panache with which she said it. Did you see Binyavanga speak on cultural rationalism?”

  But we were interrupted by more people wanting his signature, and then it was time for his reading. “I hope you will come,” he said.

  The Somali author read from his award winner, the novel about civil war and familial bonds. He skipped through the book, reading excerpts from several chapters, starting with a tender love scene between a husband and his wife, who magically has two sets of breasts, the normal set augmented by a miniset located just under her rib cage. Their young son runs in and cries, “Are you going to give me a sibling?” Then the author jumped ahead, and suddenly there it was again: the agonized face. The son, now grown, is being pursued by a fat, whorish girl who claims he owes her a baby, even though she has AIDS and he is engaged to someone else. We learn that this very girl, an orphan who was briefly taken in by the family when she was fourteen, once sexually attacked the grandfather, who responded by righteously kicking her in the face. When the mother learns that this slut is back again, she decides to get a gun, humiliate the girl, and then kill her. The grandfather, though, does not want the mother on the street during the escalating civil unrest. “Leave her to me,” he counsels; “there is, after all, something unfinished between us.” He goes to the son's house to lie in wait, and sure enough, the slut comes calling. She's looking for the son, but when she finds grandpa, it doesn't matter; she wants his baby, too. He pretends to be asleep while she masturbates him. She thinks, How beautiful his penis is! She longs for his children! She mounts him, and the grandfather reports, with a certain gentlemanly discretion, that he and the slut “went somewhere together.” But nonetheless, almost as soon as they are done, the girl is mystically stricken with discharge and gross vaginal itching; she runs
down the road, scratching her crotch as she screams, “I itch! I smell!” The son is happily reunited with his fiancée, and the wife, his mother, finds new tenderness with her husband. The grandfather meditates on history.

  If he had been an American or a Canadian man saying these things, he might've been booed as a misogynist. But an African man—no. It was wonderful, especially the way he read it—with the earned hauteur of a man who has seen war, persecution, and the two sides of the agonized face: the mother who is poignant in her open-legged vulnerability and the visage of the female predator. Because for all its elegance, his voice—unlike the voice of the feminist author—did not try to hide reality: the pain and anger of the unsatisfied womb grown ill from lack of wholesome use, a fungal vector of want, thick with tumors, baby's teeth, and bits of hair inside each fibrous mass. Pitiful, yes, but also nasty though we in the antiseptic West don't say so.

  “Motherhood is the off-and-on light in the darkness of night,” concluded the author, “a firefly of joy and rejoicing, now here, now there, and everywhere. In fact, the crisis that is coming to a head in the shape of civil strife would not be breaking in on us if we'd offered women as mothers their due worth, respect, and affection; a brightness celebrating motherhood, a monument erected in worship of women.”

  The audience went wild.

  In the big reception hall, we celebrated the Somali author with more drinks, and I caught up with the American novelist whose son actually had been nearly killed by a drunk driver. She was a good egg, hawk-nosed and plainly dressed, and she was having a stiff one. When I asked her, she said she'd disliked writing about the accident, but that if she hadn't written about it, she never would've been able to pay the medical expenses. We gossiped; we admired the Somali author. “I can't imagine an American writer saying something like that,” she said. “ ‘A monument erected in worship of women.’ “

  “I know,” I said, “it was lovely.” As long as you're the right kind of woman, I didn't say. I glimpsed the feminist author across the room from us, standing by herself, eating a fistful of grapes. The American writer was saying something about how irony is the most human of artistic methods, but I was thinking of something else. I was thinking of a girl I had known in high school named Linda Phoenix. She was a thin girl with a stark, downy back, who fucked every boy plus some girls. Jeff Lyer, an angry fat kid, brought pictures to school of her drunk and sucking someone's penis, and people passed them around the cafeteria, laughing or feeling sorry or just looking.

  Across the room, two reporters approached the feminist author with their tape recorders. I thought of the blurred pictures of Linda Phoenix. I thought of my daughter, standing before the mirror, pushing her lower lip out, making seductive eyes. I thought of her sitting at the kitchen table, drawing scenes from her favorite book, Magic by the Lake. I thought of her frightened awake from a nightmare, crying, “Mommy, Mommy!” I remembered washing her as a baby, using the spray hose from the kitchen sink to rinse shit from the swollen petals of her infant slit—a hole she may fall down if she opens it too early, a dark Wonderland of teeth and bones and crushing force. The hole in life, a hole we cannot see into, no matter how closely we look.

  I had had too much to drink and too little to eat, and for a drunken instant the hall became a courtroom, the authors and journalists members of a jury overspilling the box to cry out: Now hold on a minute! Are you completely out of your mind? It is one thing to express disdain for this so-called feminist, who may deserve it. Even the muddled atavism about rotten wombs full of baby teeth—well, it is loony and gross, but in the locked closet of our inmost heart, we can see how you might feel that way But your daughter? What kind of mother are you? Leave her out of this grotesquerie, please!

  And of course the imaginary jury was right. I would love Kira no matter how many boys she did what with, or girls, for that matter. Things are not like they once were. Sex and the City is on TV Still, when I think of her as she will be—dripping with hormones and feelings, nursing the secret hurt of a seed about to burst into flower—it makes me uneasy. To think of her opening her warm spring darkness to any lout who wants it makes me feel sadness, followed by a surprising surge of anger (anger that includes an even more surprising burst of sympathy for my mother's anger, sympathy even for the time she slapped my face after she caught me and Donald Parker doing it in the rec room). But even as I feel the anger, even with my mother's anger crowding behind it—my mother, also single, now a mild alcoholic in old age, calling me to give me a piece of her mind about the latest nonsense on the news—even as I feel the anger, love rises up to enclose it. Inside love, anger still secretly burns—but it is a tiny flame. I can hold it like I once held my daughter in my body, a world within a world.

  But just now I allowed myself to enter the little flame and feel it all the way. I did it in the spirit of the feminist author—and to show her up, too. So, she can be the innocent girl and the prostitute and the author, eh? Well, imagine a full deck of cards, each card painted with symbols of woman—the waif, the harlot, the mother, the warrior, the queen—until the last card, on which we see Medea, a knife in her raised, implacable hand. Yes, there I am and there any woman can be, even though we don't stand up on stages and make a fuss about it. And we can skip lightly back through the deck, carelessly touching each card as we do, before returning to the card of the good mother, or the lover, or, in my case at this moment, the stolid female worker in my brown skirt and flat shoes. Every woman knows all about everything on those cards, even if her knowledge is wordless and half-conscious. It is wordless knowledge because it is too big for words. Sometimes, it is too big for us. Stand up onstage and put words on it and you make it small—and then you say it's sexist when people don't like it.

  Except that, if I am going to be honest, I have to admit something that weighs in on the side of the feminist author just slightly. The anger and upset that I let myself feel, that mere hot pinprick in the ardent wetness of love—when you let yourself feel it, when I let myself feel it, it is, was, very strong. Strong and primitive. Enter in through that tiny spot of fire and come out in a hell of shape-shifting and destruction. In that hell lives a beast that will devour anything in front of it, and that beast is especially partial to woman. Why not split her open all the way, just for the pure animal joy of rending and tearing? For a woman even to skirt this place is dangerous because she has the open part. She needs rules, structures, intact shapes to make sure the openness doesn't get too open. For a man, it is different—he can align his strength with the monster and tear the prey with its teeth. For a second, he can walk triumphant in a place of no place. Then he can say the woman lured him there.

  That is why the grandfather in the Somali author's book wants to fuck the slut. He tells his son that because she has no children, he feels sorry for her, that he is fucking her out of sympathy. But he does not seem to feel sorry for her. He wants her; you could even say he needs her, for through her he can descend into a terrible, thrilling world and then come back in his suit and tie and be good. The Somali author almost acknowledges this in his frank fascination with the slut. For if she were not there, how could he go to that place of no place? He would have to discharge his anger and contempt on Mom with Double Boobs, and this would be more than anybody could bear—for, like me, he has more love than anger. How unfair that men get to go to this mysterious place and come back whole. How noble that the feminist author stands up onstage and tries to speak for the sluts they go there with, even if she fails. Even if her story makes something terrible into something light and silly, even if she herself is light and silly.

  This is what I was thinking as I sat in the hospitality lounge, nursing a seltzer water with lemon, after attending a reading by a man from the prairies who had written a prizewinning novel about a heroic woman who rescues an orphan from an abusive foster parent. I was sitting by the window, and, in the sunlight, the room seemed composed of impossible purple and mahogany hues. Caterers discreetly moved in and out,
replacing platters of food and trays of drinks.

  Soon I would leave, pick up my daughter, and take her for pizza. We would go home and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And then maybe that strange anime show, the one we stumbled on last week—a show where the heroine, the good girl, has no arms and the sexy villainess is powerful and crude. It looked like the cartoon slut was trying to kill the heroine and steal her boyfriend. But instead, in the middle of a gun battle between hero and villain, the slut (admiring the armless girl's purity) took a bullet to save her and died with the heroine in her arms. When the embrace broke, the good girl magically stood up with arms of her own and proceeded to beat the crap out of the bad guy. “Yeah, there's gonna be some changes around here!” she announced. Rock music played.

  “Weird,” said Kira, and, yes, it was.

  I drank my seltzer water and reviewed my notes.

  Early in my career, I did a piece on the then-burgeoning phenomenon of TV talk shows, focusing on a particular show, a show that at the time had made its reputation by sympathetically telling the stories of victims, stories that had once been too shameful to tell. Rape was a mainstay of the show, and I was present on the set for an episode that featured two women who had been raped by coworkers in the workplace, one of whom had succeeded in pressing charges, while the other had lost her case. The successful woman was a flamboyant redheaded beauty who came on yelling, “I just want to say I've got a shotgun ready for any sumbitch who tries it again!”