Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) Read online

  “You’ve got my sister going to mush over this,” Adam continues. “She thinks hand kisses are the shit.”

  Profoundly romantic were Hannah’s exact words.

  Adam steers us down the exit ramp. “Watch what you do to pregnant ladies. All the gushiness is going to turn that fetus into a girl.” We leave the highway for a smaller road, where we sit in line at a light. Above us is an enormous billboard on which a woman’s slender hand is practically dwarfed by the diamond ring it bears. “YES,” SHE SAID, TREMBLING WITH EXCITEMENT. The image towers over the stalled traffic: iconography of a civic religion. Below the caption someone has spray-painted GET A LIFE. Through the open windows, the warm gritty exhaust of a nearby truck lays siege to our car.

  “So,” I venture. “You think he didn’t want to kiss me? I mean—”

  “Whoooooeeeee!” Adam sticks his head out the window and sends a howl to the pollution-tinged heavens. The driver inching forward past in the next lane slams her brakes and turns, with an expression of panic, to find the source of the noise. His head back inside the car, Adam grins at me. “Let me get this straight. You’re actually asking me for advice.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So, what’s your offer? What fabulous prizes await me if I share my brilliant—my walk-on-water—observations?” His expression—part wry, part barbed—defies me to compliment him again. Traffic begins to flow. He zips us forward. The car ahead of us brakes, and we lurch to a halt just in time to avoid a fender-bender.

  “I don’t negotiate with terrorists.”

  “I’ll advise you on one condition,” he says.

  “Which is?”

  “Quit driving.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He makes a bare gesture with his knuckles toward the well where my flexed foot hovers over the floor mat. “You’re braking right now. You drive even when you’re not driving. If you don’t stop you’re going to get muscle spasms in your foot.”

  “I’m not—”

  “And if you keep denying it you’re going to get carpal ego syndrome.”

  “Look.”

  He looks.

  “Look,” I repeat. “It’s just, maybe you could leave a little more following distance.”

  He makes a face.

  “For my sake. I know you’re a safe driver.” I don’t know that he’s a safe driver but am willing to make this concession in the interest of peace.

  He makes a worse face.

  I flex my toes, kick off my flats, and prop a foot on the dashboard.

  Adam laughs, a laugh with mercy in it. “Tracy, you want to know what I really think about the hand kiss?” He lowers the sunglasses to the tip of his nose. “If you like this guy, then you must have had, you know, connection. And you’re smart enough to be able to tell when connection is two-sided.” He brings the car to another juddering halt. “So if you think he likes you, then he does. Now the only question is, Why no real kiss? Okay. So. Possibility numero uno: he’s shy.”

  I recall the paper plate on its way down to the carpet, scattering tabouli like a spinning Milky Way. “I don’t think it’s shyness,” I say.

  “So that leaves two other possibilities. Either he’s into you, but you gave him the vibe that you weren’t into him. Or else the chemistry isn’t there.”

  “Hannah thinks it’s romantic that he only kissed my hand.”

  “No offense to my sister, but which of us do you think knows guys better? I’m telling you, you’ll know everything on the next date. There is the remote possibility he was just doing the gentleman thing for first-impression’s sake. But no matter what, lips must lock by date numero two. Nerves or chivalry can muck up date one, but if there’s no serious lip mosh by the second date, then forget it. Either the guy’s not interested, or else he’s too much of a gent. In which case you don’t want him.”

  We inch forward in traffic once more.

  “You actually like this one, huh, Trace?”

  I release my breath. “I think so.”

  “Well, good luck.”

  I look at him, silently communicating my appreciation.

  With a yelp, Adam punches the sunglasses back up over his eyes. “Jesus, give me a little warning next time you’re going to do that.”

  Later, as an act of appreciation and charity, I dissuade Adam from buying black sheets, a black comforter, black dishes, and black plasticware, on the theory that he will not need to wash them.

  George phones at five o’clock to firm up plans.

  “You’re sure you want to do this?” I say. “Yolanda is good, she really is. But the play itself may not be a winner. You may regret coming. Maybe we ought to hold off, and plan something else.”

  “I won’t prosecute if the show is a flop. Besides, I love theater. And didn’t you say you’re not free any other evening this week? And that your friend gave you an extra ticket?”

  In fact Yolanda phoned this weekend to insist I invite that George guy to the opening—a gesture I found brave given her current emotional state. The thought of what George and Yolanda might make of each other, especially with Yolanda poised to vaporize all unrepentant males, makes me anxious. But I’m out of arguments. We agree that he’ll come by my apartment and we’ll take the subway to the theater. Remembering Adam’s caution that I might have discouraged George on our first date, I hesitate before getting off the phone. “I’m looking forward to it,” I say.

  There’s a substantial pause before George replies. “I’ll see you at seven.” From the street comes the long honk of an irate driver. The phone line is silent. I rise and, with ripening dismay, shut my window.

  “Meanwhile,” says George, “I’ll phone the Canadian embassy to find out whether it’s a violation of international trade laws to give my heart to an American.”

  My giggle makes me sound like a fourteen-year-old.

  At six-thirty I dress. The miniskirt and top are maroon and tight, a gift from Yolanda: If you’ve got the body, wear the clothes. If you don’t, you’ll regret it when you’re fifty.

  I turn grimly before the mirror.

  Being a proponent of difference feminism rather than equality feminism, I am not in principle alarmed by miniskirts. But I’m accustomed to seeing a scholar in the mirror, not a pair of legs. The outfit isn’t me—or rather, it’s more of me than I usually display. On the plus side, though, it definitely gives the vibe that I’m into the guy. I add a gauzy black scarf, which produces a more brooding, dramatic look than I’d intended; the effect, a little more Edna St. Vincent Millay than my usual, is definitely bold.

  On the other hand, sexual boldness didn’t exactly guarantee her happiness.

  I exchange miniskirt and scarf for a pair of black pants.

  If I were a postmodernist, I’d say St. Vincent Millay never had a chance at what she wanted. I’d say that all love is revisionist history. That totalitarian governments should take lessons from lovers. That I will rewrite this moment depending on the events of the future. In retrospect, it will be the moment I stood in front of the mirror and knew, despite wanting to believe otherwise, that George was a dead end, or worse, a black hole into which I’d pour months of my life. Or else I’ll hail it as the moment I understood, in some indefinable way, that George was for me. Either way, though, I’d have to concede that the whole thing was a construct. Postmodernists can’t believe in love. It’s illegal.

  As a modernist I can, technically, believe in love—but only as reconstituted from the fragments of shattered cultural ideals. Facing down the mirror, I remind myself that I was, for most of graduate school, a Romanticist, specializing in the shapely narrative, the honest hero, love as destiny. This seems to brighten my prospects until I recall how in college I once heard my Romanticism TA, when he thought no one was listening, say to another grad student Love is shit.

  Shit.

  I change into jeans. And a slightly snug blouse. The buzzer sounds. I drop my hairbrush, grab my handbag, and, flushed, stride my way through
the hall and into the elevator.

  At the door he kisses me. It’s a soft, long kiss, and when he’s finished I’m not. I slide my fingers into his fine straight hair and greet him again. New York City shrugs and looks elsewhere; on this wide concrete stoop two conspirators can query and reply secure in the knowledge that, like children with hands over our own eyes, we’ve stepped outside the world.

  We approach the theater together on the narrow sidewalk, our shoulders occasionally brushing. Fishing the tickets from my pocketbook, I lead George toward the small marquee, brightly lit: WHY THE FLOWER LOVES THE ROD. Below this, in smaller letters, reads: A PLAY OF PASSION POLITICS & POETRY.

  “Thanks again for coming,” I say to George, and swing open the narrow black door.

  The theater is dingy inside. George and I take our seats at the front and wait as the small capacity crowd assembles. I barely glance at the audience, aware instead of George’s steady breathing, his expectant expression as he surveys the theater. The difference in our heights even seated.

  The theater darkens. There is a long silence. Gradually a vibrant blue light fills the stage. Sound effects of traffic on a rainy day.

  I hardly recognize Yolanda when she steps onto the stage. She’s regal, worn. Tragic. She taps across the stage swiftly in low heels and a tweed skirt, stopping at its very edge. She faces the audience. Her voice is hoarse like a smoker’s. “I’d been through every sort of war. The war of marriage. The war of divorce. The war of childbirth. And the war of wars. The Great War. I let life fling me. Almost break me. But I would not be broken.” She pauses to scan the audience. She sees me in the front row, and directs a slow nod my way, like a queen granting audience. “So he would be the one. Yes. He would understand. He would save me. And I would save him. But not before we’d set each other’s worlds on end.” She turns in profile. “Up the curved stone stairs to his office. There he sat, like an owl.”

  Under the stage lights, Yolanda has a ravaged dignity I’ve never noticed. I understand now why the playwright jumped to cast her. Onstage, Yolanda’s grievances are epic. Perhaps, I think, I judged this production too quickly.

  A spot comes up on Freud/Bill, seated at the far right corner of the stage, also in profile. And herein lies the first problem. In reality, Freud was old enough to be Hilda Doolittle’s father. By the time they met, he was battling illness and apprehensive about the mounting dangers of Nazism. But this Freud is a chisel-jawed hunk. The only concessions to historical reality are a trim snowy beard and wig that manage to look only like accessories on a remarkably pretty man.

  Freud/Bill lights a cigar. The smoke he blows lingers in the stage lights.

  In parallel monologues on opposite sides of the stage, Yolanda and Bill begin to speak, their lines alternating.

  H.D./YOLANDA: “I’d let a man name me once before.”

  FREUD/BILL: “Not many are able to understand the true depth of my philosophy.”

  H.D./YOLANDA: “I swore I wouldn’t do it again.”

  FREUD/BILL: “When she came she was a battered psyche.”

  H.D./YOLANDA: “I was at the end of my rope. I had nowhere else to turn, nobody who understood me.”

  This isn’t twenty-first-century Manhattan; it’s Vienna in 1933. And this isn’t a self-help show, it’s one of the most politically and emotionally fraught meeting of minds in intellectual history. It’s beyond me why the playwright didn’t use H.D.’s own words—Doolittle wrote beautiful, poetic volumes about her analysis with Freud.

  I resist the temptation to look at George. Let him draw his own conclusions without my interference.

  Freud says, “The female is of course defined and limited by her biology.”

  Yolanda turns downstage and eyes Bill. Then she faces the audience. “Despite his views of women I knew he was brilliant.” She hits the word like a pothole.

  “She came to me because she was incapable of understanding her life,” Freud intones. “Hysteria lurked in her shadows.”

  The two continue in this vein, immobile on the stage, long past the point where one would expect this prologue to end and some sort of scene begin. The audience begins to shift in the theater’s narrow seats.

  I stop paying attention to the words. I’ve read Yolanda’s script and know what’s coming: the muddily sketched analysis, a prurient attention to the details of H.D.’s engagement to Ezra Pound, a précis of her failed marriage to Richard Aldington and later the family she shaped with Bryher—all related in dialogue that reduces two passionate human beings to ideological caricatures. In reality, Freud’s work with H.D. was hardly the pure misogynist trap this play is about to make it out to be. Freud was of course sexist, but he also thought H.D. was extraordinary. She in turn felt, despite their disagreements, that he’d saved her—and repaid the favor by helping him escape from Vienna before Hitler could seal his fate.

  This playwright, though, uses the story of H.D.’s analysis as a vehicle for demonstrating yet again what a disaster Freud was for the entirety of womankind—an axe I’d thought had been thoroughly ground by the time I was in graduate school, leaving feminist scholars free to acknowledge that there may be one or two things to learn from Freud regardless. The playwright has also, ad-libbing off H.D.’s actual poetry, included a scene in which H.D. is transformed, through an onstage costume change, into Helen of Troy, while a double-entendre-spouting Freud narrates her wartime torments against a backdrop of battle sound effects. None of which is as bad as the play’s penultimate scene, in which the two share a demeaning and completely ahistorical kiss . . . which would have been at least more plausible between the real Freud and H.D., who actually seemed to respect each other, than between the two speechifying figures of this overwrought play.

  I glance at George, who wears a slightly pained expression. He may not know the extent to which history is being abused. But it’s clear he knows a bad play when he sees it.

  I force myself to focus on Yolanda’s voice, which rises and falls with increasingly convincing hysteria and a certain brittle eloquence. And to Bill’s smug commentary emerging from the cigar smoke. By intermission H.D. looks like she hates Freud’s guts.

  Ten minutes until act 2. Yolanda has insisted on a visit during intermission—she doesn’t care how colossally unprofessional it looks, let Bill see she’s got a social life too. George follows me backstage, where Yolanda grabs my arm and leads us into the single cramped bathroom-dressing room. She locks the door behind us. “That asshole is stepping all over my lines,” she says. “He can’t bear to listen to me.”

  George extends a hand. “I’m George.”

  “Hi,” says Yolanda emptily, shaking it. She turns back to me. “Did you see her? She was the one changing my costume for the Helen of Troy sequence. I don’t want her touching me. Next time I’ll do the goddamn buttons myself. Next time I’ll punch her in the head.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I say. I squeeze her shoulder. “But you’re powerful up there. You’re completely convincing as Hilda.” It’s true: Yolanda as H.D. carries herself with an undeniable, desperate majesty. Despite the script.

  “I second that,” says George.

  “I just wish”—Yolanda shakes out her hands, then her arms, loosening tension so vigorously that George and I step back against the wall—“that he would treat me with goddamn respect.”

  “I told George the Bill story,” I offer.

  Yolanda rounds on George. “You’re a guy. You explain Bill to me.” She picks up a program and slaps it down on the vanity. “What an asshole.”

  “I can’t,” George says, “though I have a suggestion.”

  “What?” The hostility in her voice makes me cringe.

  But George appears unfazed. “You have to change how you say it,” he tells her. “Don’t say, ‘I wish he would treat me with respect.’ It’s ‘I wish he were the kind of guy who’d treat me with respect.’ But he’s not. So you better go find that other guy.”

  There’s a long silence. Then Yolanda si
ghs out more air than I would have thought human lungs could hold. She says to George, “Come back to see the show again tomorrow. Make that every night.” To me, she says, “Marry him.”

  There is a single, loud, knuckle rap on the door. It’s Freud. “Some of us have to empty our bladders before act two,” he calls.

  Yolanda fumbles with the lock. “I wish he were the kind of guy who’d drop dead.” She yanks open the door. We follow as she exits with a haughty glance at Bill, who hardly seems to notice.

  The play’s final scene, set seven years after Freud’s death, depicts the moment of H.D.’s psychotic break. The script, unsurprisingly, implies the culprit is Freud, rather than the two world wars and the personal upheavals H.D. had already lived through. But the scene is brightened by Yolanda’s closing recitation of an actual poem by H.D. After, there is sustained applause—more than I expected, even from a friend-and-family-filled opening-night house. The applause crests for Yolanda’s bow. George and I don’t speak. Neither of us, I think, wants to say a word about the play until we’re outside.

  We wait until the theater is practically empty, then go backstage to find Yolanda. Taking my arm, a flushed and now grinning Yolanda walks us over to the playwright—a diminutive, elated Jewish woman of about thirty who sets to telling Yolanda how fabulous she was.

  When Yolanda can get in a word, she says, “Tracy is the literature professor I was telling you about. I’ve wanted you two to meet forever.”

  The playwright turns to me.

  “You’ve done a real service,” I manage. “It’s about time someone wrote about Hilda Doolittle. It’s long overdue.”

  The playwright thanks me politely and then waits, apparently expecting more. I struggle to formulate some further compliment that’s not a lie.

  George looks at me for only a second. Then he turns to the playwright and pumps her hand. “Now that,” he enunciates, “was a play.”

  She beams.

  As I walk out of the elevator, a daytime TV announcer’s voice greets me. Eileen is at her desk, mini-television blaring. She glances up at the sound of the elevator opening, sees me, and turns back to her screen, irritated by the interruption. The announcer’s excited tones waft through the reception area. “In a dramatic incident at this Hollywood mansion . . .”