Kinflicks (39 page)

I don't know how long we'd been lying like that, me listening to her pounding heart and timing my breathing to it. It might have been minutes or hours. In any case, at some point, we heard a rapid flapping sound. And soon our bodies were being swept by great swirling eddies of air.

Above us hovered a heliocopter from the nearby air force base. A shaven male head leaned out and shouted through cupped hands at the top of his voice, ‘You goddam Worthley dykes!' Then a hand reached out with a can of some sort, and soon Eddie and I were splattered with showers of Coca-Cola.

Eddie leapt up in all her nude magnificence and raised both arms high above her head and shook her middle fingers. ‘Pigs!' she screamed. ‘Goddam fucking fascist pigs!'

The copter swept off on its other missions of national defense. The rehearsal in the courtyard was a shambles as the May Court stood staring skyward at Eddie's gorgeous body, poised on the roof five floors above them.

‘Don't jump!' someone screamed, and the courtyard erupted in a flurry of activity, people racing for the doors to take the elevator to the roof to restrain Eddie.

‘Well!' Eddie said with a grin, ‘shall we be licking the Coke off each other when they arrive?'

We crawled rapidly to her window and scrambled through it. As we raced, hand in sticky hand, to the bathroom, we heard the whir of ascending elevators.

I hesitated at the bathroom door.

‘It's been cleaned up,' Eddie assured me grimly.

I walked in with all the enthusiasm of a plane crash survivor boarding a new plane. I sniffed and thought I could smell sour vomit. I began shivering as I looked in the tub enclosure.

Eddie pulled me into the shower stall. She lathered me with soap. Then I lathered her. Then we held each other and kissed in the spray. We stayed there until we'd used up all the hot water in the dorm; the pipes began clanking furiously.

We spent that night in Eddie's narrow lumpy institutional bed, sleeping in each other's arms until after lunch. I woke up delighted finally to know who put what where in physical love between women.

When I got up and had dressed in my tweed suit, I descended in the elevator to the first floor. It was 3:25. I knew Miss Head would be just finishing her afternoon cello practice and settling down to work on her book.

I paused outside her door, under the stern gaze of the Worthley hall of fame, and tried to decide exactly why I was there. Unsuccessful, I knocked on the thick door. Miss Head opened it and inspected me with a mixture of pleasure and irritation at having her careful afternoon schedule interrupted, and by someone who knew how important it was to her.

‘Come in,' she invited reluctandy.

I marched in and stood awkwardly in her living room shifting from one low-heeled pump to the other.

‘Sit down,' she suggested, looking at me curiously. ‘Tea?'

‘Yes, thanks.'

‘Well! What can I do for you, Miss Babcock?' she asked as she handed me a cup and saucer.

I braced myself and waited for my words to flow. I even opened my mouth. But nothing came out. The speech centers of my brain were betraying me. ‘Nothing much. Just passing by.'

‘How nice,' she said, with a forced smile. I knew how it upset her to have her routine disturbed because I had experienced the same irritation two nights ago when Bev had asked me to drop everything and have supper with her.

‘Excuse me,' she said, after a long wait to see what I wanted, ‘but I was just finishing up work on some Schubert lieder. Let me run through one to be sure I've got it.'

She set the metronome to ticking at a slow pace. Then she picked up her bow and positioned her cello. After one measure, she stopped and said, ‘Be sure to notice the exquisite coloratura, Miss Babcock. A young man is singing. It's spring and the flowers are blooming and the birds are singing and building their nests. But he is distraught, unable to participate in this sense of renewal because his true love has died during the winter. I suggest you observe the ways in which Schubert manipulates his melodies so as to set up this tension between the living and the dead.' She nodded at me sternly.

I gritted my teeth, but she didn't notice my anger. Nodding to pick up the beat from the metronome, she began again, swaying on her antique chair. The song alternated between a sweeping soulful line in the lower registers, and a high, light dancing line that suggested flickering sunlight and fluttering leaves and warbling birds. Miss Head started singing the German words sofdy. She closed her eyes and rested her head against the neck of the cello as she fingered the strings with a trembling pressure. As I watched, her knees tightened their grip on the curved cello sides, and a flush rose into her pallid face.

I jumped up and stalked over and stood in front of her trembling.

‘Miss Head, I…I…' I was trying to tell her that I loved her, or something equally ill-thought-out. I yearned to grab away her infernal red cello and enfold the dear misguided woman in my strong, alive flesh. Because of my tutelage under Eddie last night, I felt it my mission to save Miss Head from her own plodding brain.

Her eyes flew open, and she stared at me with alarm as I stood quivering with repressed fervor before her.

“Why, Miss Babcock, whatever
is
the matter?' she demanded, letting her bow drop to the floor. The metronome ticked on slowly. The hot spring sun beat down through her leaded glass windows and onto her Oriental rugs.

‘It's not possible,' I insisted in a low anguished voice. ‘What you want — it isn't possible. You have to plunge in and make messes and risk rejection — and stuff.' My sermonette wasn't coming off as I'd intended.

She sat up stiffly in her chair and inquired coolly, “What
are
you talking about, Miss Babcock? You're not making sense.'

I looked at her helplessly as the metronome ticked slower and slower; either it was running down, or time was telescoping. ‘I…I…I'm not going to finish out my independent study with you this term!'

‘Nonsense. Of course you are, Miss Babcock.'

‘But I'm not.'

‘Don't be ridiculous.'

‘I
can't.'

‘Of course you can.'

‘I
won't!'

‘You will!'

‘Miss Head, I'm a lesbian,' I announced defiantly.

She sat perfectly still and said nothing.

I cleared my throat. ‘I spent all last night making love with Eddie Holzer, and it was wonderful.'

Eventually Miss Head looked up. ‘Indeed,' she said. ‘And would you like some more tea?'

I grabbed the metronome and wrenched off the pendulum and hurled it to the floor. ‘Will you stop this goddam thing and
listen
to me?'

‘My dear Miss Babcock,' she replied evenly, looking at her wrecked metronome, ‘I am
not
your mother. Don't come to me for approval.'

‘I
haven't
come to you for approval! I don't give a
shit
what you think!'

‘Then why are you here?'

She had me there. I thought about it for a few moments. ‘I'm here, Miss Head, to try to save you from yourself before it's too late. Don't you
see
where you're heading? You're so goddam detached that you're morally paralyzed! You're so busy with your fucking ideas that you never have time for
people!
This is a living
death
!' I gestured expansively around her apartment.

‘I'm afraid I shall have to ask you to leave, Miss Babcock.'

Aha! I
knew
it! I
knew
she would reject me if I failed to conform to her way of life. I stalked triumphantly to the door.

At the door I faltered. I turned around, and Miss Head and I gazed at each other with pain. I retained enough tattered objectivity to recognize what I had just said as a lie. I was projecting shamelessly, pinning my own failings with regard to Bev onto Miss Head. Miss Head, to the contrary,
had
involved herself — with me. She loved me almost as though I were her daughter, and I knew it. But she had served her purpose. She had been the thesis to Eddie's antithesis. The show had to go on — however ruthlessly.

I looked at her helplessly. She seemed numb — gray and tired there in the spring sun. Did she understand what was taking place — that it was necessary to my development that I reject her by manipulating her into rejecting me? (I hadn't taken Psychology 101 for nothing.) I almost ran back over to her to apologize, to explain this Hegelian phenomenon to which I was apparently a puppet. But
she
was the professor. And Eddie was waiting.

My face contorted with anguish, I spun around and strode out.

Eddie sat on her own window seat in the sun. She had her carving of the female torso in her lap and was lovingly rubbing linseed oil into it. I watched as she ran her hands up and down it, smoothing the oil over the breasts and down the thighs and into the crotch. My breathing quickened. Smiling with mixed delight and embarrassment at my new state of affairs, I curled up with Heidegger's
Being and Time
on the foot of Eddie's bed.

At some point I realized that I had been reading the same paragraph over and over again for several minutes without understanding any of it. I frowned. Finally I screamed, ‘Jesus! This doesn't make any
sense!'

Eddie looked up from her mahogany torso.
‘What
doesn't?'

‘Listen
to this! “The running-ahead reveals to Being-there the lostness into Oneself and brings it before the possibility…of Being itself — itself, however, in the passionate
freedom for death
which has rid itself of the illusion of the One, become factual, certain of itself, and full of anxiety. The of-what of anxiety is Being-in-the-world as such. That that which is threatening is
nowhere,
is characteristic of the of-what of anxiety. Dying shows that death is constituted ontologically by always-mineness and existence. It is in the Being
(Seiri)
of the things-that-are that the nihilation of Nothing (das
Nichten des Nichte)
recurs!”'

I was shivering by the time I finished, and I could hardly read the last sentence for the chattering of my teeth. A billowing black curtain was being drawn across my mind. Logic, pushed to its extreme, was about to short-circuit my brain.

Eddie wiped the linseed oil off her hands and onto her jeans. She took the book from me and threw it across the room and sat down and took my head in her lap and stroked my face and hair. Slowly, as though waiting for me to stop her, she pulled my hairpins out and undid my tight Helena Head bun. She ran her hands through my hair and covered my face with it playfully. Then she divided it into three clumps and began plaiting it into one large braid down my back. ‘We've got to get out of this place,' she said quietly, as the May Court danced around Artemis in the courtyard. ‘It's a goddam madhouse.'

8
Tuesday, June 27

Mrs. Babcock could see nothing. It was pitch black and quiet as a tomb. Where was she? Her body was chilled. She was shivering, and her teeth were chattering. She couldn't think where she was. She felt around her with her hands. She was clearly in a bed, on a mattress. She began enumerating the various beds in her life — the narrow cot at the farm cabin when she was a small child, the king-sized bed she had shared with Wesley…This bed was too wide to be the cot, too narrow to be the king-sized bed. Where
was
she?

She felt something clammy and sticky on the sheets. Panic flared up in her. Oh God, it was so cold and dark! Was she alone here, wherever she was? She listened intently, but heard nothing. She could taste blood as she swallowed. She thrashed out in terror, and in doing so found the light switch against her headboard.

Light flooded her hospital room. She sighed with relief. Until she looked down and discovered that her pillow and sheets were soaked with dark blood. She studied the blood with detachment, as though it had nothing to do with her. It looked like anyone else's blood. It looked exactly as her own blood had always looked. What then was wrong with it, that it was gushing out like this? She rubbed an index finger in a congealing splotch and brought it to her tongue. The blood tasted as salty as usual. She joined her thumb and index finger, and then pulled them gently apart. It seemed as sticky as ever.
Why
was it failing her like this?

She pressed her call button. Soon she heard steps. In bustled Miss Sturgill, who froze halfway across the room, staring with concealed horror at Mrs. Babcock's bedding. ‘Oh dear!' she said. ‘Oh my!'

‘I'm sorry. I'm afraid I've made a mess.'

‘Oh goodness.'

Miss Sturgill helped Mrs. Babcock to the bathroom and handed her a sanitary pad. ‘Wait a minute. Let me get you some tampons too.'

When Mrs. Babcock emerged, Miss Sturgill had changed the bed. The stained sheets lay in a heap. Miss Sturgill helped her back into bed and then pulled the saturated cotton from her nose and into a pan. Mrs. Babcock lay back exhausted, with blood trickling down her throat, while Miss Sturgill repacked her nostrils and scrubbed the caked blood off her cheeks and chin and thighs with a sponge.

There!' Miss Sturgill said briskly, as though to a child. ‘Doesn't it feel nice having fresh clean sheets?'

‘Not
in the middle of the night.' She'd intended the remark to sound wry and witty. Instead it came out whiny and pathetic. ‘Thank you, Miss Sturgill,' she added, trying to redeem herself.

Miss Sturgill rushed out to call Dr. Vogel. She rushed back in and gave Mrs. Babcock half a sleeping pill. ‘He wants you to sleep until he comes in to do his rounds in a couple of hours.'

Dr. Vogel dragged her from her drug-induced slumber by inquiring with forced cheer, ‘And how are we this morning, Mrs. Babcock?'

Mrs. Babcock explored her body mentally and decided that ‘we' felt pretty well, all in all, considering that she'd nearly bled to death in the night. Dr. Vogel examined her chart and poked at the cotton in her nostrils and inspected the pad between her legs and took her pulse and blood pressure and temperature. Occasionally he muttered, ‘Hmmm, yes, hmmm.'