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Authors: Jane Juska

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BOOK: A Round-Heeled Woman
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“No, Graham is much smarter than I am. Than anyone I have ever met.” I answered her question, “If he doesn't call me, I'll call him.” Caroline slammed the door to her bedroom.

Now I had done it. Evil distortions of my brain had made me think that Caroline—and everybody else, rational or not— could share the delight, the wonder, the fun, of Graham. Months ago, when I had told Caroline's mother, my sister, whom I adored and admired, that I was writing to this young, this very young, man, she had said, “I'm sending you money for a psychiatrist. Or him. He's the one who really needs help.” I do this, you know. I assume that because I like something or someone, so will everybody else. It's so naïve. When I taught all those high school kids, I thought, of course, they would love
The Merchant of
Venice;
I did, so would they. I am such a slow learner. Still, I have had a long, long time to catch up with sensible people, so I ought to know that it is not just common sense that tells a person when to shut up, when to keep quiet, it is courtesy, as in Thinking of Others. Not everyone wants to know about you, Jane; in fact, a lot of people don't. I had fucked up this time. Seventy-five dollars to change my plane reservation to an earlier time. Better do it.

Instead, I went to the movies. I saw Ethan Hawke's
Hamlet.
It was the best
Hamlet
I had ever seen. I smiled all the way through it. As I walked back to my ex-niece's apartment the thought jumped into my brain: It's not Graham Caroline finds disgusting. It's me. Of course. I must be even uglier than I thought. I considered going back to the hotel, but my Visa bill must surely have hit
bankrupt
by now, so what was a little crow. I could just shut up. I would try.

Caroline was quieter but not terribly friendly. I missed her calling me Aunt Jane. No more Aunt, my fault, my fault. She plopped down on the couch next to me and said, “We have to watch my favorite program. I never miss it if I can help it. The guy in it is adorable, wait'll you see him.” David Duchovny in The X-Files. “See what I mean?”

And I, having promised myself and the world to grow up, said, “Want to see what Graham looks like?” I pointed to David Duchovny on the screen.

Caroline raised her eyes to the heavens. Would this visit never end?

Late that night, I lay on my air mattress in Caroline's living room and listened to New York clattering, banging, humming its way toward morning. I wondered: Was a night with Graham worth the loss of my niece and probably my sister and maybe even my son? From my memory came Edna St. Vincent Millay, who, not so long ago, lived a riotous and beautiful life in Greenwich Village, not so far from here:

It well may be that in a difficult hour . . .
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

From the corner of the room, just behind my left ear, came another voice. My, it was getting crowded in here. The voice, deep and sonorous, melded with mine; in the past it was so querulous and tentative, but now it was so steady and sure, it was impossible to tell one from the other: “Do you like Graham?” Yes. “Does Graham like you?” Yes. “Then I fail to see the problem.”

Graham has an old soul in a young body, I the reverse. We are a perfect fit.

NINETEEN

A Wink and a Smile

Time gnaws on our necks like a dog gnaws on a stew bone.
It whittles us down with its white teeth,
It sends us packing, leaving no footprints on the dust-dour road.
That's one way of putting it.
Time, like a golden coin, lies on our tongue's another.
We slide it between our teeth on the black water ready
for what's next.

—CHARLES WRIGHT, from “Nine-Panel Yaak River Screen”

And so I left Bach at Carnegie Hall and Sidney in his office on the twenty-fifth floor and Graham on the greensward of Battery Park and everybody else and everybody else. You don't even need to ask if I cried on United Airlines Flight 91, departing 9:00 A.M. JFK, arriving 2:00 P.M. SFO.

THE PROBLEM WITH coming home is that there's no one in the next room. Oh, yes, it's nice that all the dresser drawers are for your underwear only, nice to sleep on sheets as clean as you want to keep them, nice to shit in a bathroom where the pubic hairs are yours alone. But then seven P.M. comes. Until then, I am busy. But at seven I am alone and terribly lonely. What do I do until I fall asleep? A friend, a young husband and father, once asked me, “What's it like to live alone? It must be hard.” I answered, “It's like living with another person; it's just that the other person is me. Most of the time we get along fine; other times, we argue and get angry, but eventually we make up.” My friend liked that answer, and so did I except now me, myself, and I are all of us separately and together lonely. How does one grow old alone? In sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, until death do us part.

I GOT USED to being around another person. I got to like sliding behind Robert to get to the kitchen. I liked hurrying to Wall Street to meet Graham for lunch. I liked Caroline's coming through the door of her apartment. I liked Sidney's nightly phone call, his gravelly voice asking, “Tell me about your day.” I am obviously feeling sorry for myself when, in fact, not one of them has abandoned me. Sidney will call every week and talk about politics and theater and my “magnificent breasts.” Robert and I will write, as friends, often two and three times a day. Graham will write from wherever in the world he is. But gee, while it's sort of touching, it's not the real thing. Maybe I should have tried to get married. I would have gone about this whole thing differently: no Graham for sure, and what a loss that would be; and, of course, the ad in the
New York Review
would have read differently—something about a lasting relationship. But I didn't want marriage; I wanted exactly what I said I wanted and I got it: a lot of sex with a man I liked—who would have thought it would be so plural? Maybe I should have specified the region, “San Francisco Bay Area,” adding eighteen dollars to the cost of the ad, but perhaps giving me a man in the next room. But then I wouldn't have entered into what will be the longest-lasting love affair of my life—with New York. “Why don't you move to New York?” Sidney asked. Because my son is here in California, my work is here, my money is not up to New York comfort, and, with few exceptions, I like my life here. It's just that I love New York.

SO I BUMP around my cottage, read, write, see friends, and wonder what use I am to anybody, for it is summertime and school's out, the chorale is out, and I am out of work and play. Seeing friends is interesting. Some know about my doings, others not. Sometimes, when I am in the midst of an uninteresting conversation with people who have become uninteresting— why is it that aging is so often accompanied by a loss of curiosity?—I listen for the question “So, tell us, Jane, what have you been up to?” My answer raises eyebrows, opens mouths, and, always from women, elicits something like “Have you found Mr. Right?” And I answer, “Yes, I have; he comes in four different bodies.” The husbands, for the most part, are quiet, though they look at me differently; they are curious, what would it be like to . . . and at the end of the evening the good-to-see-you embrace, once a brushing of cheeks or a pat on the back, is now warmer, with sometimes a murmured “I admire what you've done.” Only a very few of my friends, all of them women, have known about this from the very start. They have encouraged me, been interested in this life I have led, and are curious now. I tell them stories that are true but that leave out the sad parts. Only to one or two do I confess the whole truth. I do not cry, though my voice shakes a lot. I save up for United Airlines. And I masturbate a lot. Not to Philip Roth's music, Schubert, Mozart, and the like—Mr. Roth is a high-class onanist, though spilling his seed all over his piano keys must make a mess—but to the cast recording of
Wonderful Town,
to the museum buttons from the Metropolitan and the Morgan I have affixed to the hood of my stove, to Bob Herbert's column in the
Times,
and sometimes, more often than all the rest, to the memory of Robert's touching me to the music of
Tosca.
It is said that the strongest orgasms are the ones we give ourselves. I deserve a medal.

Willa Cather says it right, as she so often does: “Human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; they can never be wholly satisfactory, every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.”

In the beginning of all this, I had thought to make my life fuller, not just happier. I had thought that my passion, which had served so many people so well when I was a teacher, might find a place to put itself before it subsided into the contentment of old age. I thought right; I got what I hoped for. What is just as far away as ever is the contentment of old age. I doubt that it comes, ever. There is the inevitable falling off of energy, I suppose, certainly the falling away of flesh from the bone, and in some of us a flagging of the spirit. It's called dying. But contentment? Peace? I think we just get tired, and people who write junk about us, because contentment makes better greeting cards, mistake fatigue for serenity.

I'M NOT TIRED hardly at all, so I take pleasure in the memory of lying next to a man who knew what to do with me. I recall with equal pleasure the conversations with intelligent men who were lively and curious and thoughtful and who liked to talk with me. That was a surprise. I never thought we would actually, as my ad offered, “talk first.” But we did, first and last and, sometimes, in the middle. All my parts have been fed by these men. They have made me a rich woman. But rich doesn't mean full, and rich as I am, I am not full.

The thing is, once you have had a lot of sex with a man you like, how do you stop wanting him?

ONE RESTLESS NIGHT, I woke, my nightshirt damp from twisting and turning, my arms caught in the sheet that had pulled out of the end of the bed. The clock read 4:35. I rose, walked the three steps to my computer, sat down, and began to write. “Dear Graham, I have rented a cabin, a cottage, a house on a lake in the Sierras. The first week in August it will be filled with my family, the second only with me. I can offer you mountains and lakes and as much of me as will make you happy.” Then I wrote the dates and returned to my bed, where I fell sound asleep.

LIFE JUST KEEPS COMING at you. Make no mistake, it's out to get you, and in the end it will. But every so often, you can catch a piece of it and make it do what you want it to, at least for a little while. You've got to stay alert, though. Heads up so you don't get caught off base, though if you do, what the hell, it's not the ninth inning, until it is.

NEXT DAY BRINGS Graham's answer: “Paint your wagon, I'm coming.”

A Round-Heeled Woman

JANE JUSKA

A Reader's Guide

To print out copies of this or other
Random House Reader's Guides, visit us at
www.atrandom.com/rgg

Making It Personal: A Non-Guide to Discussion

My editor at Villard urged me to write some discussion questions for reading groups—a sort of thinking guide is what I'd call it—and I'm opposed to it. For my last fifteen years as an English teacher, the most productive years of my career, I refused to write study/discussion questions; I refused to pass out any questions put together by textbook writers or the teacher down the hall. Instead, believing that a good question is worth more than a dozen answers, I asked the kids to write them themselves. So I will not toss out my principles now. Here, then, is my compromise:

Write five questions you (the reader) would like to ask Jane.

Write five answers you (the reader) think Jane would make. (You can trade papers here.)

Role-play: Take turns being Jane. Do a Q & A with each of you as her.

Talk about three people you would give this book to and why. Talk about three people you would not give this book to and why not.

Pretend you are Dr. Phil, and Jane is a guest on your show.

Draw a picture of Graham. Share.

Write your own personal ad. Have a contest.

Write a personal ad for someone else. Explain where you will send it and why.

Make a calendar featuring the men in the book. Choose appropriate months for a) Robert, b) Josh, c) Jonah, d) John, and e) Graham.

Cast this book for a movie. You can be in it.

EXTRA CREDIT: Design “Jane: The Video Game.” See that she gets what she deserves.

What We Talk About When We Don't Talk About Sex

I have been told by many of my readers that
A Round-Heeled Woman
has given them permission to talk about sex—theirs and others', past and present. It has even, so I've heard, given women permission to go out and get some. I never in my long lifetime talked about sex; as you now know, I didn't have very much. And neither, if the absence of sex in our conversations was any indication, did my friends, married or not. I think one of the reasons I wrote the book was that I couldn't talk about the intimacies of sleeping with a man, those sometimes wonderful, sometimes painful experiences. A few times I tried with a friend of many years, who finally answered, “I'm supportive of you in all things, just don't tell me about the sex.” So I gave up; I talked to the computer screen in the privacy of my own home. Even now, when I do readings, I avoid the more graphic sections. Even now, when I make love, I prefer to do it in the dark.

So I am not as liberated as you may think. Questions persist: Why didn't I ever talk about sex? How old was I before anybody even mentioned it? What about my mother? Would it have made any difference if someone—a teacher, a parent, a friend—had been knowledgeable and straightforward? Would I have had an orgasm before I was twenty-five? Why was sex a forbidden topic? Why was it kept mysterious and secretive? And why, once I hit college, did my friends and I talk about everything
but
sex?

Thank god for Betty Friedan and Helen Gurley Brown. Good lord, a clitoral orgasm was okay! My goodness, a vaginal orgasm was rare! But, while I got information from books, I never got company, I never got comfort from other women, and certainly not from men. I got silence.

A month or so ago, I had a drink with two young women friends—ages twenty-six and twenty-seven—in San Francisco. They are fans of my book and of martinis, and so I felt free to ask them if they, the two of them, talk about sex. Indeed, yes! And before you know it, we were sharing our favorite positions and why. Leila likes to be on top, Patricia champions the missionary position. I loved that conversation. It was my first like it with other women. Now, too, I've begun talking about sex with my lovers. They are kind and thoughtful and articulate, and they remain curious.

Times, for me, have changed for the better. And not a moment too soon.

Jane Juska
October 2003

BOOK: A Round-Heeled Woman
5.46Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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