How Aliens Think: Stories by Judith Grossman

Chapter One

The Two of You

* * *

You have this character on your hands, and her name is Clara Diamant. Starting right there, she's a character you've been generous to, insofar as the operating rules permit you to be generous. Perhaps it's because you imagine you'd really like to have been born a Ms. Diamant, in another place, time, or gene pool. It's O.K. to be envious of a fiction, isn't it? Certainly, you think, better than being envious of your own child.

    Brilliantly endowed is Clara, a rising academic star in her early thirties, just now granted early tenure at Adams University, and scheduled to spend next year as a visiting scholar at Princeton. Her current studies are in Passion and Desire, oh—and the Body, that site of perennial contest between objective and subjective understandings. Clara has also (and why not?—for these things are not forbidden under the rules.) the dark, quicksilver beauty of a new-generation Paulette Goddard. She wears a standard eighties warm-up suit, but her hair's washed and shining with a touch of gel, her nails shaped to an oval and buffed.

    This morning, Clara sits in her modest saltbox-style house outside of Boston. Winter sunshine causes small avalanches of snow to slip off the pine branches, which toss up a flurry of wet, green needles and a bright spray of crystals. Clara catches the movement outside her window, looks up for a second absently, then goes back to work on the draft of her chapter concerning what's commonly called "perversion." Beside her is Roland Barthes'scelebration of the alternatives to standard heterosexual and procreative practice, on the grounds that they render one simply more happy.

    Barthes has made a potent observation, she thinks. No one can fail to be moved by the prospect of ways to become more happy. On the other hand, here's this opposing view from Luce Irigaray: Perversion, says Irigaray, which is often touted as a means of escape from repressive morality, remains the slave to a morality of sexual difference that's traditionally organized in a hierarchy....

    Well yes, it's true that what worked for the gay Roland Barthes may not work for the heterosexual woman. Clara's own experience comes back to her suddenly, of living under the rule of an ancient male fear of women's genital strangeness. Growing up in a rabbinical household, she learned about concealment of all things to do with menstruation, and the shame of admitting each month precisely when she became untouchable. She understands, too, what Irigaray's talking about here—the delegation to women of certain "tasks" of sexual fulfilment. The more she reflects, the more considerations arise for her to figure in, and she searches intently along her bookshelves, pulling down Lacan on female sexuality, plus her sunflower-colored copy of Differences: The Phallus Issue (a collector's item, that one). There'll be a bow also to Freud, who has contrived to stay scandalous for almost a century now, first for his insights, later for his magnificent inventiveness.

    As for her data from the American cultural side, she has a wild mix laid out on the desk. A piece from Playboy, detailing the essentials of a good blow job, and how that operation keeps Hollywood running. Mailer's The Deer Park, Roth's Portnoy, well decorated with Post-its; and Updike's Couples, with its celebration of cunnilingus in terms of Christian self-abnegation, a mystical rising up, through descent. These guys are no problem, however: a head like hers, well versed in Talmudic interpretation, should have no trouble sorting them out.

    But hurry! you're telling yourself now, as you explore Clara's academic idyll. Because time's going by, and whenever your imagination slows down for a moment, the pack of mental wolves that's been so long on your trail starts closing in, as it always does. And now because there's this dream, this nightmare, that's been forcing its way into your waking life ...

You are sitting in a van, which, it seems, is taking patients just released from a remote mental hospital back to civilization. The driver has missed his way and followed an unpaved road that dead ends here, between a great oak tree and somebody's homestead, between pastures and a garden of vegetables and flowers. The van stops for the driver to get directions. As you get out with the rest, still wearing your striped lunatic's pajamas, you notice a tall blond man with an ax in his hand, walking from the garden.

    The task of this blond man is, simply put, to kill you. It makes perfect sense of course, because he looks just like Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner. But all the same, it seems unfair just when you're getting your life back, your freedom!

    So, you dash for the oak tree, and in a burst of adrenaline you haul yourself up into the high branches that'll never bear his weight. He stands on a lower branch, laughing at you, because where else can you go now? At that you start swinging yourself, like an inspired gibbon, hand-by-hand down the far side of the tree, and jump to the ground at a safe distance. Now you're laughing, because you know you can get away.

    Only it's not over. The guy with the ax is standing there beside the tree. He rests the ax head on the ground, looks at you, and beckons.

    No no, you think, forget it! But he walks very deliberately over to a raised bed of flowering pansies, looks at you again, and lays himself face down upon it, as if to demonstrate something. Then you observe another bed of pansies, next to the first. It appears to be just your size. Covered with velvety purple flowers, it invites you, no doubt. You walk slowly over to it and, suddenly tired, lie face down in it, feeling everywhere on your skin the cool petals, breathing the smell of plants, and of earth.

    The dream goes dark.

    It's true, it stands to reason, that your own father was a man of strikingly blond, Nordic looks. He was raised as a boy by his widowed mother, in poverty, and you remember well the moments when his rage against women's authority peeped through the bars. Sad father, who wrote on your tenth birthday card: Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever. (But you already knew you couldn't be good, so what was the alternative?) Father who informed you, in your teens, that he would never read any book written by a woman. Father who attempted to remove you from college, on the grounds that you had become sexually immoral. And who died, too soon after that last debacle, for you to try and pacify his resentful ashes, scattered anonymously among the dour evergreens of the Bexley Garden of Remembrance.

    Coincidentally, our lovely Clara's father, the distinguished Rabbi, prohibited his favorite daughter from taking up graduate studies in religion. She has repaid him for this offense by marrying a non-Jew, and at present her parents and she barely communicate with each other. So, you and Clara might have something to discuss, between the two of you. Why, for instance, given those bitter quarrels with the father, are both of you committed heterosexuals—indeed, married with children? (Clara has two sons, by the way.)

    One answer: in these matters, the body's response is the independent, undeniable, and final judge. Presented with a possible suitor here, another there, it says No to this one, and Yes to that, and there is no appeal once the trial's been made. A second answer might be the curiosity that drives Clara in her profession, and you in yours. That tropism towards the unknown, the stranger, has always been irresistible to both of you. Clara, no doubt, would recognize here what Irigaray calls "the passion of wonder," in the encounter with the Other whose sexual difference will always renew his strangeness.

    You would add, for yourself, a third answer: It's essential for the chosen one to show the marks of some bitter suffering, through which the image of your first-loved mother is also affirmed—and they must be real scars, on which you find yourself compelled to lay consoling and desiring hands. (Here, you remember a perpetually unhealed sore on one man's leg, carried for all the years you knew him in token of a guilty memory: his failure to get a drink of gin on a Sunday night for his father, in pain from terminal liver cancer—the glass of gin that was the only thing the dying man thought could help him; and the boy went asking in the neighborhood, but to no use, and in the wet evening he fell down some unlighted steps, scraped his leg, and gave up; and his father was gone before morning. You remember too, from another time, a desolate look that called your name.)

    But you don't intend to lay these troubles on your Clara. She's the lucky one, and she will, she must, enjoy all the freedoms of the generation that succeeded your own. Except that you know the rules demand ... a little something, just a minor problem here.

    You notice that Clara sometimes rubs the right side of her jaw as she works. She's had TMJ syndrome ever since a minor car accident that you gave her in her teens (well, those things are so common ...), and that left her with a chronic tension around the jaw. Not improved, of course, by her own tendency towards perfectionism. The net result is a certain erotic disability, awkwardly relevant to this chapter she has in hand: to be brutal about it, Clara's just no good at fellatio. She can scarcely get her picture-perfect set of teeth far enough apart for the purpose, or sustain that minimum degree of stretch for longer than a minute or two at a time (which is guaranteed to mess up a partner's rhythm, let alone the way that a sensitive organ takes fright at the mere scrape of a canine). And, frankly, no amount of practice with a banana or a Coke bottle is likely to change the situation.

    Clara's luck has reasserted itself in the fact that Terry, her husband, is British and can live quite contentedly on a modest ration of oral stimulation. It's a pleasant feature of Europeans that they don't entertain unlimited expectations; you rarely find them crying for the moon. More of a concern is Clara's own hesitation: Can she overcome the consciousness of her own deficiency and reassert mastery through this alternative head-work of analysis and theoretical discourse? Such are the concealed hazards of intellectual production.

    Early afternoon in New England, and a thaw has set in motion innumerable trickling threads of snowmelt, converging towards a musical fall into the roadside storm drain, or spreading quietly into shallow pools among the screen of pines and hemlocks between these houses: a springtime wetland. The children will be home from school soon, and Clara is making a list of headings on her pad, to take up tomorrow.

    1. Orality and Narcissism. Has anyone correlated the circumstance of bottle-fed cultures vs. nursing cultures with later sexual practices? Easier to see transition from bottle- to penis-sucking (and cf. Irigaray's point on sex-and-technology links).

    2. N.B. patterns of American puritanism and permissiveness, within which certain practices "count less." Also, the assumption of a male sexual drive requiring outlet vs. the residual valuing of female virginity. The woman trades away her own satisfaction for greater control over her partner, & fate. Example: Marlene Dietrich et al.

    3. Political implications—yes. Where reciprocal sexual practices speak of complementarity, equalizing of difference—the ethos of the '60s and after—our '80s reversion to conservative hierarchies should predict a return of dominance and submission: the one person down on her knees, silenced by her laboring on the singular pleasure of the other ...

Here the children are at the door, and Clara has eaten nothing since eight this morning, living on coffee and the liquid protein mix that helps keep her a perfect size 6. It's quitting time. She stretches up and outward in her chair, with the wind and no wolves at her back, sure of her ability to do the work, and the rightness of it. And when Clara stands, the room becomes magnetized around her.

    For you, of course, it feels otherwise: one's self appears always among a plurality of beings, as a tree stands in a grove with other trees. Nor have you ever felt yourself to be more than a technically separate organism. Consciousness is perpetually under compromise, as in the way your voice, speaking on the telephone, involuntarily assimilates to the voice on the other end, or in the way your expression adapts silently to that of your companion.

    As R. said, in 1964, I can look into your face in the morning, and tell exactly how I am feeling that day.

    On the other hand, you don't fear the existence of the Other in the world—the sense that having the mere status of one among Others, instead of occupying the throne of unchallenged Subject, could produce a loss of all meaning in your life. Your terrors are more practical, concerning what the unlimited acquisitive drive of corporate power can do to drive you and yours under. And that someone out there, to whom you represent a hated version of the Other, may care enough to destroy you ...

Oh, now you do wish that you were Clara, safe in her pristine, fictive world, splendidly equipped the way Thetis prepared her Achilles, armed and equal to anything. Only the rules don't work that way; and as Thetis might have known, they never did. Clouds are gathering over the future of Clara's story: next summer, while she goes off traveling, giving papers and receiving applause, her husband will begin an affair with their neighbor, the charming ex-dancer. When it comes out, things could go very wrong, very quickly, given Clara's rapid-fire temperament. She'll be off to Princeton; and with her husband's record of caring for the boys while she travels, who'd give much for her chances of custody? And so on ...

    But there's still time for you to make a pause, to decide that Clara will stay right on course. Her book will be widely acclaimed, professional success continues, her marriage comes through, and prospers. The only cost is that she'll remain a minor character, forever.

    A career path is not a story.

    All you can offer her is a parting gift, in consolation. It will arrive twelve years into her future, when she's canceled a summer conference date to attend her younger son's concert at music camp, deep in the Berkshire hills. The program runs from Haydn and Mozart to Mendelssohn and Brahms, including duets, trios, quartets, and more, for strings and piano. She sits in the audience, in an old barn with its doors open to the mild air, wearing a pink suit, stockings, and pumps—an outfit she now realizes is too hot and formal for the occasion. Dusk is already gathering when the first chamber group comes on; it will be nearly midnight when the last is rapturously applauded.

    The performers are a mix of girls, their dark or blond hair tied back or floating loose, their uniformly long white skirts evoking portraits of Victorian maidens, and boys, blond, russet, or dark, whose all-white shirts and trousers turn them into luminous swains, grouped under the dim hayloft. It's a kind of musical bridal feast. But if Clara looks down, she'll see that many of the players have bare feet, a little mudstained from the afternoon shower, and all the more adorable; and others wear, as adorably, white crew socks with stained white sneakers. They'll play as if their hearts and lives are to be given away entirely, this night. Some girls have the features of young warriors, swinging their violins up to their necks as one might raise a crossbow to shoot; some boys have the slimness of birches and a delicacy of gesture that makes everyone hush and lean forward.

    Clara's life has been so focused in another context, she doesn't know anybody here except her Mark, the violist son in question—not even his friends (and her husband went to the conference in her place). At the reception earlier, she talked a little with Mark, who told her it'd been a great time, but he was thinking he'd switch to playing guitar once he finished high school. Clara expressed sorrow and complete surprise. Why would he want to throw away such talent, ten years of learning—and all this besides? Mark only rolled his eyes and went into the old routine of anti-violist jokes:

    How can you tell when the stage is level? When the violist is drooling out of both sides of his mouth.

    How do you know when a violist is playing out of tune? When the bow's moving.

    A conductor and a violist are standing in the middle of the road. Which one do you run over first? The conductor. Business comes before pleasure.

    Give her credit, Clara not only loves Mark dearly but can acknowledge where her command of the world, of information, ends. Mark showed her the boundary right there; and minutes later she was still painfully figuring: business before pleasure? He was pulled away then, by one of these proud girls sweeping their white skirts carelessly through the grass, even before she could tell him—break a leg.

    Clara takes her place here in the audience, yet as usual, set apart from the ambient conversation by her own poise, containment—the whole carapace of her disciplined, professional self. But what she feels most keenly is how hard it is for her, suddenly, to feel this—the wild intimacy of those lovely adolescents: the intense aura of so much unguarded feeling, such hotly whispered sexuality. She is used to students, after all. But out here, in the hills—what it is, is something else.

    Early in the concert, a quartet sweeps in, takes up position, and holds its gaze intently on the red-headed first violin for the slight nod of a cue. Then, in unison, they break into this baroque palace of a piece, like playful barbarians. Now they glance up from the music to make rapid eye contact, verifying their place in the dance; and again, one of the players flips a page quickly, at a pause. Equally partners and challengers of each other, they continue raising the drama of every tonal shift, until with the final movement, the red-headed violinist's arrogance pushes reckless speed to the edge of chaos. But they make it, they reach the final chord, hold it to the very end, and rise for the ceremonial bow—once, twice—before falling apart into disbelieving laughter.

    Clara applauds as long as possible, for that's her son, the violist, and so far as she can tell, he's done all right. Then they're gone, and in their place are an impossibly handsome Russian boy at the piano with a very young Korean girl violinist. No smiles, this time, nothing but the sombre dedication of late Brahms. But Clara has already surrendered, in the darkness of the dark-timbered barn, filled with such an endless harvesting of sound and feeling. Clara, who at forty-two hasn't cried since before graduate school, who takes immense pride in the fact that she's kept composure in the face of the world at all times, lays down her arms and takes your gift of tears gratefully, in silence.