The Summer Without Men

followed by some mooning over Clark Gable and chatter about how films used to be so much better and, good grief, what had happened? I volunteered that Hollywood films were now made exclusively for fourteen-year-old boys, an audience of limited sophistication, which had drained the movies of even the hope of sprightly dialogue. Farts, vomit, and semen had taken its place.
    I seated myself beside Abigail then and held her hand for a little while. She asked me to come see her. The request was not casual. She had some urgent business to discuss, and it had to happen in the next couple of days. I promised, and Abigail began the protracted rigors of pulling her walker toward her, getting herself into a standing position, and then moving, one small, careful step after another, toward her apartment.
    Within minutes, the book club was over. And it had ended before I could say that there is no human subject outside the purview of literature. No immersion in the history of philosophy is needed for me to insist that there are NO RULES in art, and there is no ground under the feet of the Nitwits and Buffoons who think that there are rules and laws and forbidden territories, and no reason for a hierarchy that declares “broad” superior to “narrow” or “masculine” more desirable than “feminine.” Except by prejudice there is no sentiment in the arts banned from expression and no story that cannot be told. The enchantment is in the feeling and in the telling, and that is all.
    *   *   *
     

Daisy sent this:
     
Hi, Mom. Dinner with Dad was okay. He seems a little better. He was shaved at least. I think he’s really, really embarrassed. He said he hoped that you would be able to see his “interlude” for what it was. He also mentioned “temporary insanity.” I said that’s what you had, and he said, maybe he had it, too. Mom, I think he’s sincere. It’s been awful for me to have you two against each other, you know. Love and kisses, Daisy
    And yet, I could not leap at Daisy’s father. As I meditated on our story, I understood that there were multiple perspectives from which it could be viewed. Adultery is both ordinary and forgivable, as is the rage of the betrayed spouse. We are not unworldly, are we? I had endured my own French farce, starring my fickle, inconstant husband. Was it not time “to forgive and forget,” to use that inveterate cliche?” Forgiveness is one thing, forgetfulness another. I could not induce amnesia. What would it mean to live with Boris and the memory of the Pause or Interlude? Would it now be different between us? Would anything change? Can people change? Did I want it to be the same as it had been? Could it be the same? I would never forget the hospital. BRAIN SHARDS. For better or for worse, I had become so entwined with Boris that his departure had ruptured me, sent me screaming into the asylum. And wasn’t the fear I had felt old, the fear of rejection, of disapproval, of being unlovable, a fear that may be older even than my explicit memory? For months, I had drowned in anger and grief, but over the summer my mind had unconsciously, incrementally begun to change. Dr. S. had seen it. (How I missed her, by the way.) Reading Daisy’s letter, I felt those subliminal, not yet articulated thoughts rise upward, form sentences, and lodge themselves securely somewhere between my temples: Some part of me had been getting used to the idea that Boris was gone forever. No one could have been more shocked than I by this revelation.
    *   *   *
     
    And now the curtain must rise on the following Monday, when seven uncomfortable girls and a poet, laboring to hide her own anxiety, sat around a table at the Arts Guild. A torpor seemed to have taken hold of all seven young bodies, as if an invisible but potent gas had been unleashed in the room and was swiftly putting them all to sleep. Peyton had folded her arms on the table and laid her head down. Joan and Nikki, seated side by side as always, sat in heavy silence, eye-lined lids cast downward. Jessie, elbows propped on the table surface, rested her chin in her hands, a vacuous expression on her face. Emma, Ashley, and Alice all appeared limp with exhaustion.
    I looked at each of them for a moment and, on a sudden impulse, burst out singing. I sang them Brahms’s lullaby in German: “ Guten Abend, gute Nacht, mit Rosen bedacht…” I don’t have a sweet voice but my ear is good, and I let the vibrato go so it sounded