Unaccompanied Women Read online

  “In Europe,” Xenia tells me, “men and women come together in cafés or each other’s homes, and they talk. And they talk about important stuff.” She puts a finger on her pretty lips and says, “Hmm . . . I think it’s that they smoke. Everyone lights up. They’re equal right there, and they relax behind their little streams of smoke, and they just talk.”

  “Here, in this country” I say, eager to be a part of Xenia’s wisdom and good fortune, “we have to get drunk. Not necessarily drunk, but we have to have enough wine or beer or booze to disinhibit us, and then we don’t listen very well, do we?”

  “No, and pretty soon the men go off to the backyard and the women stay in the kitchen, and where’s the fun in that?”

  Xenia is hooked up intercontinentally by her computer. She has this neat gizmo for her Apple, this Ichat AV program that connects her to the world. She has this little microphone she clips on to her computer, and as she talks, real-time pictures of the other person appear on her screen! It’s amazing! Her new husband—I got to talk to him today—looks and sounds like a nice man, and Xenia is so happy with the beginning of her new life that I think, Hmm, maybe I ought to try that. You have to have OS X, or something like that, and it costs over a hundred dollars. Besides, with a real-time picture I wouldn’t be able to send the third-best.

  Before Karl, Xenia had had tons of dates by way of the computer. After her entirely amicable divorce and after two of her three kids went off to college, she wandered around in her sizable house, shopped, and did good works. But then, why not? Why not try this online dating thing? James broke her heart: A professor with a messy divorce-to-be was wonderful in bed, where they went not long into their online exchange. They traveled well together, they talked well together, but then . . . The divorce stayed messy and never turned into an actual divorce—surprise, surprise. It took Xenia some time to understand that she was not going to be a bride, and at fifty-six Xenia wanted to marry again, to be with someone forever. Her forever, unlike mine, being quite a long time.

  I hope Xenia is right in her judgments of this country. Well, no, not right, but convinced enough to keep her happy. I did wonder, “Why is Karl moving here if European social behavior is so superior?” Xenia explains that she needs to see her last son into college; then she and Karl will move to Germany, and when this happens, this country will have lost a bright spirit and a warm heart.

  I hear that a lot these days: Susan, my friend, and her husband moved to Paris; Georgeanne left California for Ireland. Georgeanne suffered the dot-com bust in Silicon Valley and, as a single woman in charge of making a living for the rest of her life, believed chances for a career were better in Ireland, along with a more reasonable cost of living. As for Susan, she spent every summer of her long teaching life in Paris and loved it so that each year on her return home she went into a deep depression, emerging from her house only to exchange one French video for the next. So on retirement she and her husband moved to Paris, where she is happy, although, for the first few months of her emigration she stayed inside their flat for fear her misuse of the French language would make her a figure of fun. When she came out, it didn’t, and now only the Parisians can tell that Susan’s first language is American English. Canada, of course, is full of Americans fed up with this country’s political misbehavior. I hear that Toronto has become what Paris was in the twenties when Fitzgerald and Hemingway expatriated themselves in order to live on the cheap and write. Mexico harbors some of our young and not-so-young émigrés. But most of us stay here, our romantic enthusiasms dulled by the descent of the dollar. We remind ourselves that there are worse places to be, that while we threatened to move to Canada after the last presidential election, we didn’t, did we?

  One day there in the post office is Tanya, who seemed so defeated by her life, who thought perhaps she might try to have a bit of fun by way of Match.com. She looks terrific. Her blue eyes sparkle, her smile is wide, she is slim and cute in Levi’s and a sweater. “I did it,” she says. “I went online and I met someone.” Her smile is wider. “We got together and had a fairly decent sex life, and well . . . You know what?” She doesn’t wait for me to answer. “He wants me to retire from my job and travel with him, and I’ve decided I like my job and my friends, and actually, I’ve decided I like my life better the way it was before I met him.” She takes a breath. “So I told him no.”

  I am impressed. Not many women would dump a man who could give her a fairly decent sex life and trips to faraway places. But Tanya, well, she had a choice, and she chose the life she wanted, and here she is happy and as bouncy as a june bug. Ah, that Online works in mysterious ways.

  CHAPTER 11

  the snows of yesteryear

  Seek not, . . . endlessly to know

  where now they are, why time has passed.

  —FRANÇOIS VILLON, “Ballad of the Ladies of Old”

  HOW DO I know this stuff? How is it that I can tell you about the lives and loves of all these people from all over everywhere? It’s because they tell me. Here in Berkeley I am recognized by people wherever I go, and then pretty much ignored, as the good people of Berkeley are sophisticated enough to do. I don’t mind being recognized; people are nice to me and, for the most part, pleased with my success. One day as I walked down the sidewalk in front of my landlord’s house, a pleasant-looking woman came toward me, in her hand a book, my book. She came closer, looked hard at me, and threw her hand over her mouth: “Omigod,” she said, “it’s you! I’m reading your book! I like it, I even bought it, I didn’t even get it at the library.” Words tumble from her: “Did you know there’s a long waiting list for it at the library?” That was nice; she was nice; I felt good.

  On another day, as I was leaving the post office, a woman strode purposefully toward me. Now, I knew this woman, or rather I knew of her; she lived in a big house a few blocks away; she intimidated the hell out of me. She knew just about everything there was to know about any subject anyone might bring up—politics, gardening, the Seine, the Grand Canyon, not to mention Chopin and George Sand—and the way I knew this was that I had been trapped in an airport van with her and her husband, an understandably taciturn fellow, who spoke not a word during this very long van ride, though neither did I, there being no need or opportunity. Forceful, that’s what she was, and now here she came right at me. “You wrote that book, didn’t you,” she accused. “I read it.” Uh-oh, here it comes. She stood before me, eyes blazing, and shook her index finger in my face. “Don’t ever,” she said, “don’t ever leave the neighborhood. We need you.”

  Did my landlord and my landlady hear that? Things are a little dicey right now because the media have come to call and have brought cameras and lights and microphones, and my landlords like their privacy, understandable of course, and No! I call to the photographer from Oprah who is at this minute photographing my landlord’s house. “Stop!” and I motion for them to, tiptoe—hah—up the drive, push gently on the gate; then they can set up, then they can stay forever if that’s what they wish, just don’t bother my new landlords.

  Another woman, whose name I will probably never know, passed by in her car one morning as I wandered along the sidewalk on my way to my café for my morning low-fat latte. Suddenly she stopped, didn’t matter that it was in the middle of the street, in a cross-walk. She got out of the car, called my name, and gave an energetic thumbs-up. “Loved it!” Traffic at a standstill, honking its loudest, she returned to her car. Even now, whenever she sees me from her car, she calls, “Great book!” or “Loved it.” Though lately she has ceased stopping traffic. Every time something like this happens, I am surprised and pleased all over again that women have found the book useful or comforting or encouraging or simply a good read.

  And it still goes on. Today, in fact, a woman walking her dog passed by me, looked closely, and said, “You wrote that book.” She put her hand over her mouth. “It has meant so much to so many women.” I thanked her, we walked on, and suddenly she turned as if she had just th
ought of something. “You know,” she said, “it’s probably the influence of your book, but tomorrow I leave for four weeks in Europe—alone—and my husband doesn’t even enter into my consideration.”

  Encounters like these make up for the rare though always frightening “You’re a fucking whore!” They balance out the letters that urge me to find god, that express dismay over the downturn of my life. So reading e-mails and letters and answering the phone keeps me busy, but not busy enough to stifle the truth—some days I curse my former analyst for making me dredge up the truth and then pay attention to it—that there is no man nearby who will touch me, who will wrap me up and like doing it, who will buy me a house of my very own, who will be, in Katharine Hepburn’s words, the perfect lover: “Lives nearby; visits often.” Oh, there are men who offer; I am not without opportunity.

  My phone number, although I pay to get it unlisted, is apparently available to all, either from old phone books, which pursuers find in the library, or from Google, god bless its great big engine that could and does. “Hey,” says Larry from somewhere in Alabama, “I am sixty-two and self-unemployed and I enjoyed your book.” I thank him and give him my e-mail address, not wanting to spend more time on the phone. Next day he calls again to tell me about his last relationship. (Lots of men want to tell me about their last relationships.) Larry wishes to impress me with his generosity. “For her birthday I gave her one Chippendale,” he says, his Alabama accent a fascination in itself. How nice, I think, to give what was surely a very expensive piece of furniture. Larry continues: “For her next birthday I gave her two Chippendales.” Wow. “And for her next birthday I gave her three!” I imagine a dining room table surrounded by those graceful chairs, with perhaps a sideboard against the wall. Then I hear, “And if you think I felt left out, no way, José, cuz I got to watch.” Hmm. Something’s askew here. I thank him for his call and hang up, bemused.

  My son calls from way up north, from way far away in the mountains. I tell him about Larry and his generous birthday gifts. My son laughs. “Chippendales are male dancers, Mom.” Oh. Well, that’s still generous.

  Larry’s subsequent e-mail tells me that he becomes most sexually excited watching and being watched. Orgies are good, he tells me, and adds that people living in tribal societies overcame their sense of separation through sex orgies, and likewise for him—especially threesomes “(m-m-f)” doing oral sex. Larry promises to make a meeting between him and me “very special for the both of us.” Until then, how about sharing erotic e-mail? Gee, I could be somewhere in Alabama right now with lord knows how many Chippendales in attendance and Larry watching. A less appealing scenario I cannot imagine.

  However, if truth be told, I am not a Chippendale virgin. It’s just that when I was familiar with male dancers, way back in the roaring seventies, they were not called Chippendales, probably because the ones called that had barely been born. In the early seventies the ones who stripped for me and screaming audiences of women in the clubs of North Beach in San Francisco were named Here He Is, Michael! and Let’s Welcome Steve! and Put Your Hands Together for Greg!, and the music pounded and split our ears along with our pocketbooks as we watched to see how far these adorable young men would go, whether their you-know-whats would pop out when they did those incredible backbends or when, hands shaking all the while, we tucked oh so many bills into their G-strings. We screamed and cheered, all of us who sort of looked like each other in from the suburbs for lunch. Lunchtime made it all just plain fun; had it been dinnertime—or nighttime—we and our strippers would have slipped into the shadows that close over just plain fun and turn everything dark. After dark we stayed home. Our strippers kept on stripping.

  Down the street from “our” club the topless clubs grew fat and happy. They, too, offered lunchtime specials for businessmen whose offices were not far away. The waitresses were topless and their breasts enviable. I know because I went there, too, with a male acquaintance who was curious, who wanted to have a little harmless fun. These were real breasts, breasts before silicone had become de rigueur for nude dancers, when Carol Doda, a tiny dancer at the Condor, grew her breasts by way of silicone implants to a 44DD, and then the silicone hardened and she had to have surgery to get it out of there, but then she went and did it again, so much did her career depend on her breasts. Most dancers avoided implants if they could because the surgery was expensive and not at all guaranteed. So in the heyday of the topless clubs the breasts were all sizes and shapes. What they had in common was that none of them drooped; they jiggled ever so slightly as if they were having a good time, loosed from the constraints of brassieres. Perhaps at dinner some of the customers, a few drinks in them, felt compelled to touch. Maybe at night in a back room lap dancing went on. Maybe in booths somewhere out of sight all-nude girls performed behind glass for men who watched and took their pleasure alone. Those activities go on today and probably did forty years ago. But there was in the sixties and seventies an innocent enjoyment of bodies, too, that is no longer part of the seamy clubs of North Beach in San Francisco or the blatantly aggressive sex shops of London.

  I have my own nostalgia, my own naïveté to sort through, but when I do, it seems that the cover of night is no longer so mysterious and inviting as it was; with the advent of AIDS in the eighties, night came to cover the day and tarnish us all with the reality of sex as death, of sex as business, where performers unionize, where hookers are called sex workers. It’s the economy, stupid, that renders the most delicious fantasies banal and turns sex into a commodity. Of course, sex always was a commodity, something to be bought and sold; but the scrim of let’s pretend has been rent by the need of performers for money and the greed of owners who don’t want to give it. Chaucer reminds us, in his Canterbury Tales, that “Radix malorum est Cupiditas”: It is greed, not money, that is the root of all evil.

  Then, too, Almost Nude Girls! are no longer restricted to clubs; they stroll the streets of cities and towns every day now, today’s fashion dictating that girls and women show the belly, bind breasts and butts with industrial fabric that outlines every curve, every bulge, every bend and corner. It’s fashion over the top and below the belt, skin spilled in both directions, the new look-but-don’t-touch. It’s ugly. On almost everybody.

  There are exceptions: On a flight into the Deep South I sat next to a young woman, up to date in dress and demeanor, for whom current fashion had been created. This young woman, in hip-huggers and a wisp of a top that skimmed the bottom of her breasts, should have been naked. She was a joy for all of us on that flight when she rose to collect her duffel bag from the overhead compartment, revealing with no self-consciousness whatsoever a torso of cream, her navel a flower in a field of toned and gently muscled belly. Conversation revealed that she had seen The Passion of the Christ five times and planned for her boyfriend to accompany her on her sixth so that he could witness true suffering. Now twenty, she intended to remain a virgin until marriage. Which, I thought, better happen soon or her boyfriend, if he didn’t know suffering already, would have his own really big cross to bear. What does a young man do about all this in-your-face sexuality? Get used to it? Or go at night to a club where a young woman rocks and rolls her nudity on the other side of the glass until he spills his seed upon the ground and pays through the nose?

  In the sixties and seventies—at lunch—it was look but that’s all and sit back and enjoy what happens when the pert blond waitress leans over to fill your water glass. I envied those girls, not only the look of them but the power they had over the men at their tables. I had never before seen men drained of everything but desire, but here they were, the captains of industry come down from their offices for lunch. They were quieter than the women in the male stripper club up the street, but their hunger was evident in the slackness of jaw, the eyes that never made it to the faces of the waitresses but dwelled on the rosiness of the—at least at lunch—unattainable. On top (so to speak) of it all, I relished the freedom these girls seemed to feel about their
bodies; they looked to me as if they were having fun. I wanted them to be having fun, because I wanted that kind of fun, not the fun of serving sandwiches naked but the fun of liking my body, maybe even being proud of it. Never happened.

  Forty years later, with a body to match, I have become a sex symbol, though one fully clothed to all but a chosen few. So Walter calls. Walter is seventy-two and for the last several years has lived with his sister Anna. Last month Anna died. “Could we meet for a cup of coffee?” he wants to know. “I am so very lonely.” How do I forgive myself for turning him down? What harm could a cup of coffee do? Oh, I was too busy, too busy, and of course Walter understood that I was so very, very busy. But I wasn’t too busy; I was just selfish. I didn’t want to comfort the lonely, heal the sick, or soothe the needy. Perhaps it was the headiness of the attention I received that crowded out compassion, when a few European editors and journalists, thinking that I represented the new senior sexuality in America, took me to lunch and photographed me posing beneath a willow tree or the Golden Gate Bridge. Perhaps it was the memory of my men in New York, against whom any man I could imagine paled in comparison. Whatever it was, I am not proud of my response to Walter. A cup of coffee. No big deal.