Don't Cry: Stories (7 page)

She wasn’t going to read, she said; instead, she was going to give a talk about the way she had been treated by the local media, as well-as by the festival organizers, who had described her in an insulting, unfair way in their brochure. I had not even read the brochure—I perhaps should’ve read it, but the information in such pamphlets is usually worthless—and from the look on other people’s faces, they

hadn’t read it, either. The author, however, didn’t seem to realize this. The brochure was not only insulting to her, she continued; it was an insult to all women, to everyone, really. They had ignored the content of her work completely, focusing instead on the most sensational aspects of her life—the prostitution, the drug use, the stay in a mental hospital, the attempt on her father’s life—in a way that was both salacious and puritanical. “It isn’t that these things aren’t true,” she said in her lilting voice. “They are. I was a prostitute for six months when I was sixteen and I spent two months in a mental hospital when I was eighteen. But I have also done a lot of other things. I have been a waitress, a factory worker, a proofreader, a journalist, a street vendor! I am forty-five years old and now I teach at Impala University West!”

There were cheers, applause; a woman in the back fiercely hollered, “You go, girl!” The author blinked rapidly and adjusted her glasses. “I can even understand it,” she continued. “It’s exciting to imagine such a kooky person off somewhere doing unimaginable stuff! I like the idea myself! But I am not that person!” It seemed to me that she kind of was that person, but right then it didn’t matter. “And when we do that,” she continued, “when we isolate qualities that seem exciting, but maybe a little scary, and we project them onto another person in an exaggerated form, we not only deny that person her humanity but we impoverish and cheat ourselves of life’s complexity and tenderness!”

This wasn’t funny. This was something wholly unexpected. We were all feeling stirred, like we were really dealing with something here, something that had just been illustrated for us by a magical, elfish hand. We felt like we were being touched in a personal place, a little like our mothers would touch us—a touch that was emotionally erotic. Like a mother, she seemed potent, yet there was something of the daughter there, too, the innocent girl who has been badly teased by an importune boy, and who comes to you, her upturned face looking at you with puzzlement. Yes, she seemed innocent, even with her sullied, catastrophic life placed before us for the purpose of selling her.

She must’ve sensed our feelings, because she cut short her speech. We had been so kind, she said, that she wanted to give us something. She was going to read to us after all—in fact, she had her book right there with her, and she even had a story picked out. It was a story about a middle-aged woman dressing in sexy clothes to attend a party for a woman who writes pornography, which is held in a bar decorated with various sex toys. A good-looking boy flirts with the middle-aged woman, who allows that she is “flattered.”

What had happened to the mother? Where was the injured girl? The voice of the author was still lilting and girlish, but her words were hard and sharp, the kind of words that think everything is funny. The middle-aged woman invites the young man to her home, gives him a drink, and then pulls his pants off while he lies there gaping.-For the next several pages, she alternates between fellating him and chattering cleverly while he tries to leave.

This was the feminist author we had heard about, all right. Her readers smiled knowingly, while the readers of the Canadian and Vietnamese authors looked baffled—baffled, then angry. And I was feeling angry, too.

I am not really a feminist, probably because, at forty, I am too young to have fully experienced the kinetic surge of feminism that occurred in the seventies, that half-synthetic, half-organic creature with its smart, dry little mouth issuing books, speeches, TV shows, and pop songs. None of it is stylish anymore, and, in fact, feminists have come in for a lot of criticism from female pundits. Some of these pundits say that feminists have made girls think they have to have sex all the time, which, by going against their girlish nature, has destroyed their self-esteem, and made them anorexic and depressed. Feminists have made girls into sluts! Others, equally angry, say that feminists have imposed restrictive rules on nubile teens, making them into morbid neurasthenics who think they’re being raped, when they’re actually just having sex. Feminists have neutered girls by overprotecting them! I don’t know what I think of any of it; it’s mostly something I hear coming out of my radio on my way to work. But I do know this: When I hear that feminism is overprotecting girls, I am very sympathetic to it. When I see my fashion-conscious ten-year-old in her nylon nightie, peering spellbound before the beguiling screen at the fleeting queendom of some twelve-year-old manufactured pop star with the wardrobe of a hooker, a jerry-rigged personality, and bulimia, it seems to me that she has a protection deficit that I may not be able to compensate for. When she comes home wild with tears because she lost the spelling contest, or her ex-best friend called her fat, or a boy said she’s not the prettiest girl in class, and I press her to me, comforting her, even as that day’s AMBER Alert flashes in my brain, it is hard for me to imagine this girl as “overprotected.”

Which is, in some indirect way, why the feminist author was so affecting and so disappointing. She was a girl who needed to be protected, and a woman standing to protect the girl. But then she became the other thing—the feminist who made girls into sluts. She sprouted three heads and asked that we accept them all! She said she had been a prostitute, a mental patient, that she had tried to stab her father. She said it in a soft, reasonable voice—but these are not soft or reasonable things. These are terrible things. Anyone who has seen a street prostitute and looked into her face knows that. For her to admit these things, without describing the pain she had suffered, gave her dignity—because really, she didn’t have to

talk about it. We could imagine it. But the story she read made what had seemed like dignity look silly and obscene. Because the voice of the story was not soft. It was dry and smart as a dance step—but what it told of was neither dry nor smart. While the voice danced, making scenes that described the woman and the youth, an image slowly formed, taking subtle shape under the picture created by the scenes. It was like an advertisement for cigarettes where beautiful people are smoking in lounge chairs, and suddenly you see in the cobalt blue backdrop the subliminal image of a skull. Except the image behind the feminist author’s words was stranger than the image of a skull, and less clear. It made you strain to see what it was, and in the straining you found yourself picturing! things you did not want to picture. Of course, it can be fun to picture things you don’t want to picture—but somehow the feminist author had ruined the fun.

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 womaii 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 presenta-tion: a face of sex and woman’s pain. The face had to do with dis-grace 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 exacdy what the feminist author did not do. I drained

_m
y 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! I?

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 grandfathe%| 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 sons 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 fiancee, and the wife, his mother, finds new tenderness with her husband. The grandfather meditates on history.