Saturday's Child (36 page)

The first threesome was only two months and a day after Persephone embarked on her stately black-veiled journey to wed her chosen netherworld lord. It was followed by encores, and by foursomes, and by various numerical combinations with other people (always with Kenneth present)—ordeals my memory still can neither purge itself of nor fully grasp. I know I partly dissociated my consciousness in order to survive them, an attempt to compartmentalize and contain the experience of violation. It hadn't struck me that there would be such an exorbitant cost to this brand of “free love,” one that would beggar my emotions for years to come. I did understand I was jealous of Thatcher in a way I'd not been of Bob, and in time that intensified to a loathing for his grinning ignorance, the way he treated his chorus-girl dates, the sexual power he knew he held over Ken. To me, my husband's Greek ephebe was a male dumb blond.

But hadn't I married an openly gay man with complete knowledge and acceptance? Hadn't we often discussed “pansexuality” as a goal for being “truly human”? (Had bisexuality seemed too limited or what?) Hadn't I insisted that I lose my virginity to Kenneth, even when he was reluctant to be my deflowerer? Hadn't I, for that matter, then done what any good 1950s girl was raised to do: marry the first man I went to bed with? Hadn't I known, after all, what I was getting into? (Well, yes and no. That's a book in itself, one I intend never to write.) More to the point, I was now
in
this situation—so what to do?

The reply came resonating up from a place so deep in me I'd forgotten who'd put it there:
Wasn't I a competitor?
If I was facing the avant-garde version of keeping up with the Joneses, by god
I'd
show 'em. Sexually, I was desolate. My sin, if such, in this was never lust. But pride? Arrogance? Oh yes.
I
could handle it,
I
could be the ideal American
swinger
if necessary.
I
could be “
anything anybody wanted me to be
”—except that I still
wasn't even
one
of the people doing the defining of who this latest-model Galatea would become.

It would take me almost four years of self-loathing, bouts of nausea, mysterious hives, eyelid twitches, nightmares, writing poems that were trying to tell me what I refused to acknowledge I knew, and other unconscious acts of resistance, until one evening, as Kenneth and I stood in the kitchen washing and drying dishes together, I said quietly,

“I never want to have group sex again, Kenny. I hate it. I feel that's my failure, but it's the truth. I believe in Lawrence's ideal and all that. Really. It's just that I'm not up to it. I don't want other men—or other women. I don't want to go to bed with people you choose for me. I don't even want to choose other people for myself. Maybe I'm hopelessly heterosexual. But I just want you. I want our marriage. I don't want my limitations to crimp your style, though. Monogamy was never part of our bargain, I know. So you're free to sleep with whomever you like, and I'll still love you and still be your wife. I hope you can accept that. I'm sorry, I can't do the other. I
won't
do it, not anymore.”

I spoke calmly, but I was trembling so much I was afraid I'd drop the soapy pottery bowl in my hands. I was terrified of losing the marriage but even more terrified of losing my mind if we continued as we had been. I wonder, now, where the courage came from. Utter desperation, probably, because there was in our social world no external validation for my “prudery”—though some years later, as feminism trickled into and then flooded all our lives, one of the first hypocrisies to be exposed was the “sexual revolution” that had happened for men but had exploited women. Today a friend, woman
or
man, might cry out to that young wife washing dishes, “What
were
you, an emotional masochist, apologizing for
your
limitations? Why in hell didn't you say
NO
and just tell him to
stuff it
?!”

Today is not 1962. I knew no such friend then, and that kind of counsel would have come only from people who hated sex, not people who hated sexism. One barometer of how profoundly this consciousness has changed all our lives—including the lives of those who dismiss it, disown it, or take it for granted—is how difficult it is today even to conceive of the isolation, the self-condemnation, the feelings of madness, despair, and dread inherent in such an individual act of ungainly valor as I attempted that precarious evening. In time, Kenneth would try to understand and try
to take responsibility for his part in this small domestic tragedy, asking forgiveness for and from himself. I gave it gladly, even if neither of us yet understood that something had been permanently shattered in me, and even if I was as yet unable to forgive myself for what felt like collaboration in my own debasement.

Today my heart can finally go out to that young woman who had already spent her few paltry No's on her mother in order to come as far as she had, and who had so longed to shower her husband-liberator with a cornucopia of Yesses. Today I can forgive and even respect her, not for being a victim but for refusing to remain one, for standing alone as so many women of my generation had to, literally shaking with the intensity of trying to bite out those words.

Kenneth seemed shocked and confused: “But if you didn't
like
it, why'd you do it, Rob?” And I was too much the ingenue to challenge his reaction as disingenuous.

But he said he'd accept my decision regarding my own behavior. He even chuckled and candidly admitted to being flattered by it. Indeed, in flight from one (modernist) double standard of sexual practice, I had taken refuge in another (traditionalist) double standard. My proscription, being focused solely on
my
actions, wouldn't limit his behavior—except possibly with Thatcher, who was beginning to show tin patches under the golden-boy plating anyway. Still, Thatcher stuck around for years, sometimes managing to be sexually available even without the cover of a woman. But Thatcher, it would turn out, was merely Charon rowing the boat in a general direction.

I had no way of knowing then that my own capacity for sexual passion would be hibernating through a very long winter. One of life's questionable little mercies is that you don't miss what you haven't had, and I settled like so many others into a routine of joyless but usually amicable lovemaking (helped along by my active fantasy life), thinking, “Well, that's just marriage,” while grieving guiltily. I knew that such pedestrian physicality was a great disappointment to Kenneth, too, though he at least enjoyed alternatives. But like me he'd co-cherished a romantic vision of us more in the impassioned mode of Barrett and Browning than in the discreet arrangement of Virginia and Leonard, so each of us mourned the
same loss with a separate grief. Over the years, we would both come to assume that—as he lamented and I agreed—”Robin is just not a very sensual person.” Neither of us noticed that this verdict conflicted oddly with my lust for backrubs, garlic homefries, Schumann, bubble baths, sueded silk, winter beaches, and a thousand other sensualities modest or major.

We simply tried to do our best. For us, this meant turning it all into poetry. It's a fair question to ask if we had lived this drama in the first place in order to provide ourselves with subject matter, and I wouldn't put it past artists to do so. (This may have been a sub-agenda of the original Bloomsbury, come to think of it.) But in truth I don't think we would have been quite so brutish or stupid.

When my first book of poems,
Monster
, came out in 1972, it would be both celebrated and denounced for its “rabid” feminist poems, some of which, like the title poem and “The Invisible Woman,” were fated to become poetry-anthology staples as well as instant classics with women; lines from these poems showed up on T-shirts, stationery, bumper stickers, and picket signs. Other poems, like “Arraignment”—which accused Ted Hughes of intentionally causing the death of Sylvia Plath—became causes célèbres and/or scandals in their own right, about which more later. But what got noticed less or not at all, yet what I now find most moving, are the poems at the beginning of that collection: tightly crafted poems (perhaps too much so) on which I'd been working well before the kitchen announcement and which I continued to write over the following five or six years. It amazes me now that I could so effectively deny the depth of my pain by convincing myself I was transcending it.

In such poems as “The Improvisers,” “Twins,” and especially “War Games: A Mescaline Quartet,” my flat-out rage and anguish at our sexual predicament are unmistakably clear. “Static,” “The Invisible Woman,” and “Revolucinations” read like smuggled-out notes calling for help from a sensibility believing itself at the edge of breakdown. “Annunciation” reeks of displaced fury, false militance, and the familiar earth-mother stance—in this case protecting and defending Kenneth's sexuality. “Rendez-Vous” and “Quotations from Charwoman Me” resonate with longing for what might have been “if only.” And “Satellite” is a shocker. The identification
with other women, including Plath, erupts here for the first time. The sexual damage is openly articulated:

Effortlessly faithful

I wax toward curves he charts himself

for straying. I couldn't care more. No woman, either, smiles back

sleeping in my arms. Not even

I—not now—lie there. He has no rivals.

Yet “Satellite” manages to connect the sexual distress with everyday life (where playing superhousewife had clearly lost its allure), and in a bitterly ironic tone tries to imagine a politics that didn't yet exist:

“We are equal,” he says and says. I will write

my poems in indelible ink on the laundry then

while lost buttons roll where green-marbled meat

molds books unfinished, unvacuumed ovaries, self-pity.

Women ought to be born one-breasted or male

or mindless. “We are equal,” he says. We find me wanting.

It makes me wonder if I ever bothered to read—to myself, that is, not just aloud to others—what I'd written. This same poem begins with the line “I wonder if I hate him yet” and ends,

Who set me orbiting this bed?

My two escapes: to kneel before the oven

or hang his wrung-out love to dry,

each leaving these windows unwashed of that moon—unless

I turn to rouse his sleepless fear

with mine. I wonder if he hates me yet.

The answer was probably yes.

Ken meanwhile had of course begun writing his side of the story—a story of his own fears, longing, guilt, anger, conflicting selves. But there was a double catch to all this revelation. First, our refusal to settle for a mere confessional mode, trying instead to transform our subjective truths,
through craft's crucible, into poetry, felt like a joint triumph of our circumstance—one so strong it might be capable of transforming
us
. Second, given our aesthetic ethics and mutual loyalty to each other's work, we each insisted that the other's poems be published, no matter how discomfiting. That's easy to call crazy but hard not to admire. Such a principled stand was one reason we stayed together. This was our way of turning the sorrow inward into art, and simultaneously turning outward to face the world in a united, brazen defense of our choices.

Kenneth, I came to realize, had actually had very little sexual experience with women; in me he faced what was for him uncharted territory. (Well might we ask, “Then what excuse do
heterosexual
men have?” Not until I was six months into my first consciousness-raising group did I realize the women there were enduring almost identical frustrations with their husbands and boyfriends, none of whom were gay.) But while Kenneth's brain and soul were those of a brave cartographer, his heart was home-bound to the loves and lusts of the terrain he'd known lifelong.

And I? I also had a familiar terrain on which I ran true to form: I refused to be stopped. (Ned nailed it in his
Nantucket Diary
: “Robin finds what she seeks, whether it's there or not.”) Leaving the marriage was out of the question. It would be tantamount to giving up. It might also mean Faith had been correct. And I was haunted by a skill that had nothing to do with writing poetry. “You can do this,” I told myself. “You're an actor. You can do this
well
.”

Such neurotic reasons for staying were obvious. But there's something else, and it mustn't be denied or discounted. The ferocity of Kenneth's spirit, authenticity of his talent, and breadth of his intellect were real, and absolutely lovely—and I was not a fool for choosing, as I did a few years later, to mingle my chromosomes with his; that was, in fact, a
wise
decision. Besides, I still
loved
him: Kenneth the poet, Ken the friend, Kenny the Minnesota kid who laughingly dismissed the New York cold that first winter of our discontent, who showed me how to make snow angels in Stuyvesant Park, who brought me hot chocolate while I thawed out afterward in front of the crackling hearthfire of the home we'd created with our own hands.

So fifteen more years would have to pass before I'd be willing to discover that what I was sure was my whole life was after all merely a phase
of it. I wouldn't realize for all those years, and wouldn't admit for even longer, that there was another reason I refused to be stopped: I still believed in perfection, in
willing
things to be perfect, in insisting I could love enough, bear enough, do enough, to
be
perfect myself—because then surely I would be loved. It never dawned on me that fallibility is what's lovable.

¹
In his book
Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals
(Simon & Schuster, 1999), David Laskin charts the standard use and abuse of Mary McCarthy, Jean Stafford, Caroline Gordon, Diana Trilling, and other women writers of the period at the hands of (respectively and sometimes revolvingly) Philip Rahv, Edmund Wilson, Robert Lowell, Allen Tate, Lionel Trilling, and their brotherhood.