I sometimes study my wedding portrait and contemplate that vanished person who used to be me when I was a young American bride in the forties. The picture, now turning yellow around the edge, shows a slender teenager afloat in torrents of white tulle under a crown of forget-me-nots. I carried a bouquet of pink rosebuds, which, I remember, exactly matched the enamel on my long fingernails. I remember carefully applying tan-rose pancake makeup over my flawless but rather sallow skin, a glistening orange lipstick and pointed eyebrow pencil. The groom, a theatrical producer twice my age, had been making love to me for more than a year, but that did not lessen my bridal spirit. I regarded my marriage as a victory.
When we’d been married for a while, I expected my husband to say “I love you,” which he’d never said except on the inside of my wedding ring. Instead he told me he thought I really liked women and encouraged me to listen to my instinctive self.
I followed his advice and developed passionate attachments to beautiful girls like Francoise. Both of us studied dancing with the great Francisca Boas, who had a studio in Greenwich Village. Every evening at six o’clock, Francoise and I met barefoot in a room of amber light. Her honey blond hair stood out above her black leotard, as when one portion of a developing photograph comes up faster than the rest. I danced without my glasses in the spell of the glowing mane above her marvelous shoulders — a flower, a burning fire, a lost sun. Then the lights came on and Francisca Boas said, “You and Francoise dance well together.” And I saw that my golden galaxy, my fire star, was a sturdy, blue-eyed farm girl from Montreal.
“What was I to you?” I asked her later.
“I don’t know,” she said. “When I dance, I just dance.”
After class, Francoise and I used to go to her room four flights up in an old brownstone on West Twenty-third Street and sit close together, eating yogurt. She told me, in her hesitant, shy manner, of her disasters with men and her love for me. There seemed to be a direct connection between the two. I said I loved her too. She asked me to tell her stories because I read books and she never read at all. She liked Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales and Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid. Sex did not seem to go with these tales of childhood, so we just sat and held hands, close enough to breathe in the coldness of the yogurt on each other’s breath. I did not have the heart to disappoint my husband by telling him of our innocence.
Sometimes he took us out to dinner. Our six feet would ring along the frozen sidewalks of the East Fifties as we walked along, my husband in the middle. I wore a dark blue cashmere coat with mother-of-pearl buttons. Francoise wore a shabby muskrat jacket left over from her school days. She still managed to be beautiful, her blond hair blowing across her pink cheeks. The absence of conversation among us didn’t concern my husband, who knew how to get to the core of a scene. The core of our scene was supposedly the sexual rapport between Francoise and me. My husband had the self-confidence of one who would pay for dinner, plus the knowledge that it was his script to which we were playing.
I’m not saying that I was an innocent victim in my marriage. My husband’s fantasies were not totally alien to me. I was right for him. Only not then. It takes years for some traits to assert themselves, and it wasn’t until I was middle-aged and doing industrial photography in the Persian Gulf that I realized I was all my husband had wanted me to be.
My moment of insight came at the end of a summer romance with a handsome, young Arab. I had met him on my first day at the palace and found my way to his bed several years later. His skin was slightly darker than my own, he was delicately made, and his penis had a sculpted look, rosily pale, like fine porcelain. I liked the picture of us together when I lay beneath him, my flesh smoothly white, like one of Ingres’s Turkish bathers. He would caress my body as if it were a wonderful landscape he wanted to explore, and he could bring me to orgasm in six separate acts of love in one night. Only sex, yes, and why not?
The torrid summer ended. His wife was due back from Beirut. I threw myself on my bed and thought about the snapshot of her I’d seen. A slight girl with soulful, dark eyes, an abundance of black hair, and fair skin. He told me he didn’t love her very much. He didn’t love me either.
I pictured his hand on her, expecting pain, but instead it was terribly exciting. I gave myself over to this curious daydream. I wished he would come to me soon after making love to her so that I might feel the shadow of her touch.
Would it have made any difference if I had been more fully aware of my own sexuality as a young wife? Maybe it was for the best that this kind of self-discovery showed up in a late-summer affair.
I threw away nearly all the pictures of my husband when I got divorced (on the polite grounds that he caused me mental anguish by criticizing my cooking in front of company). But I dreamed of him for many years both before and after the divorce. It was as if my feelings for him were much stronger than our actual marriage.
I found the props for my dreams in religious archetypes: an apple tree, a snake, a primal man and woman. But no fig leaves. We’d be seated under the tree in slacks and shirts, facing each other over small piles of apples. We would busily stack them, each pausing now and again to check on what the other was doing.
I would think: the last time we spent the day under this tree, I expected him to say he loved me. Instead he told me it was all right not to enjoy intercourse as much as foreplay.
In my waking hours, I recalled scenes from our life together. Like the time he took a picture of my clitoris (which could have been grounds for divorce in any state in the Union). He had it enlarged a thousand times and hung it in our dining room. People thought it was a linoleum pattern until he told them what it was. Why did he tell them?
I took my clitoris down from the wall shortly after our first child was born and said, “I want to be fucked, not as a bonus, but as the main thing.”
He turned pale and said, “You’re sick. You need analysis.”
His desire for me lessened from that time on. He felt tired. He had headaches. He suffered from allergies and said it was my perfume.
He threatened divorce if I didn’t enter therapy. The most superficial analysis would take two years, but my husband was in no hurry. He just wanted to get me back on the road to Sodom and Gomorrah (although he might not have thought of it that way). When I saw the analyst, tall, blond, and poetic looking, I was in no hurry either. And for the next two years I dreamed of him instead of my husband under that same tree.
“My husband calls you the big white worm,” I said in one dream.
“And why do you think he does that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you divorce your husband, since that’s clearly what he wants?”
I thought, And marry you?
The psychoanalyst, who was once a mind reader in a carnival, ran away in a panic.
“But I love my husband,” I said to the snake still curled at my feet.
“Apple sauce,” it said, coiling up whitely.
And then my analysis ended. I started dreaming about my husband again.
I met my analyst on the street years later, and he asked me to have dinner with him. It seemed a long time since I had been his patient, and he was now divorced like me. We had filet mignon and green salad by candlelight. Then we went to his flat and lay together on his bed. A vase of roses sat on his night stand, and the fragrance overwhelmed me. I thought of my bridal bouquet but knew better than to mention it; never remind a man that there ever was another before him. Now I had achieved the goal of all his female patients, and I lay beside him. I felt I was still his student, come to the test of tests. There were butterflies behind my navel.
“One of the drawbacks of being a shrink is that I don’t get time to play my cello,” he said, pulling off a sock, which he’d forgotten he was still wearing until it got caught on one of my toenails.
His cello! I hadn’t known he was a musician. I wasn’t sure I would have been willing to entrust important decisions of my life or even one little secret to a musician.
He leaned over and kissed me. “You look like a child without your lipstick. In fact, you look like your daughter. She’s very pretty. And only thirteen. Do you think she’s been laid yet?”
What kind of pillow talk was that? Should he have been saying whatever came to his mind? Shouldn’t he rather, like me, have done his free-associating at another time, some other place? He had sat like a god behind his desk, the personification of benign detachment, and here he was, lusting after my daughter as a preliminary to fucking me. Should he even mention my daughter if I was not equally free to mention her father?
I functioned with an ease that would have done any therapist proud. It was partly the energy generated by leftover transference emotion and partly because he was six feet and four inches of Viking splendor. I reached climax three times. Unfortunately, the doctor was not doing so well and failed to make it even once. He pumped away gallantly enough and only revealed his despair by saying Go Go Go when he should have said Come Come Come.
That Go Go Go rings in my ears every time I look at his picture. And a dozen more negativities every time I look at my husband’s. Only Francoise’s still arouses feelings of tenderness in me. I keep Francoise in a private corner of my mind, where no man’s shadow ever falls.
This essay, from Sarajane Archdeacon’s unpublished Arabian Memoir, was first published in Debonair.
— Ed.
