A Plea for Eros

her low-cut gown. Jane Eyre’s plain dress is a tonic against the frippery of the silly females who visit Rochester. And all these images are taken from moments in larger stories that captivate us, stories about people who are living out their lives and their romantic entanglements, both comic and tragic.
    My daughter dresses up. She is a rich woman, then a poor one, starving in the streets. She is an old peasant woman selling apples. She is on the phone saying, “Let’s have lunch,” in an English accent. She sashays down the stairs snapping her gum and practicing her Brooklyn voice. She is wearing my shoes and singing “Adelaide’s Lament.” She is always somebody else. My husband says I have two personas at least, the stooped four-eyed scholar and the elegant lady. One lives more at home. The other goes out. Thinking collapses my body, and 1 forget what I look like anyway. In a good dress, I stand up straight and never slump. I live up to the dress I know I am wearing even though 1 do not see myself wearing it. Others see me more often than I see myself. My family knows what I look like better than I do. I offer the mirror a placid face like an inanimate statue, and from time to time that frozen image may frighten me. But I also laugh a lot and smile. I wrinkle my face in concern, and I wave my hands when I talk, and this I never see.
    In the end, wearing clothes is an act of the imagination, an invention of self, a fiction. Several years ago, I was sitting in the Carlyle Hotel with my husband having a drink. I was wearing a beautiful dress. I remember that he looked across the table at me with pleasure and said, “When you were a little girl growing up in the sticks of Minnesota, did you ever imagine you would be sitting in this elegant hotel wearing that extraordinary dress?”
    And I said, “Yes.” Because of course, I did.
    1996

Being a Man

    IN MY WAKING LIFE I’M A WOMAN, BUT SOMETIMES IN MY dreams I’m a man. My masculinity is rarely a question of simple anatomy. I don’t discover that I’ve sprouted a penis and am growing a beard, but rather I realize that I’m a man in the same moment I am troubled by the vague memory that I was once a woman. My sex becomes important in the dream only when it’s called into doubt. It is doubt, not certainty, that produces first the question of my sexual identity and second the need to be one thing or the other, man or woman. Although it is now fashionable to dismiss dreams as meaningless neurological chatter, I’ve discovered too much in my own sleep to believe that. It is obvious that my dreams of manliness, which turn on a moment of confusion, illuminate recesses of my own muddled psyche, but I also think they can be used as a key to understanding the larger cultural terrain where the boundary between femininity and masculinity is articulated.
    Most of us accept the biological realities of our sex and live with them more or less comfortably, but there are times when the body feels like a limitation. For a woman it may come when she hears a note of condescension in a man’s voice and she must confront the fact that it isn’t what she has said that has produced this tone; it’s her sex. Of course, such a moment isn’t easy to analyze because every social encounter is laden with the unsaid and the unseen. Two people inevitably create a third realm between them in which sex is only one of the myriad forces at work, and yet, like envy, resentment, class snobbery, or racism, sexual prejudice can be detected like an odor in the room, and if the smell gets too strong, it prompts a fantasy of escape: What would he have said if he had seen me as a man? I’m sure that my dreams of maleness are at least partly about escaping the cultural expectations that burden femininity, but I also think they are something more complex, that the dreams recognize a truth that there is a man in me as well as a woman and that this duality is in fact part of being human, but not one that is always easy to reconcile.
    In my dreams, my real body doesn’t restrain me. I fly and have powers of telekinesis. I’ve grown fur, suffered gaping wounds, lost my teeth, and shed enough blood to drown in. When I write fiction, I also leave my real body behind and become someone else, another woman or a man if I wish. For me, making art has always been a kind of conscious dreaming. The material for a story comes not from what I know but from what I don’t know, from impulses and images