So: as often during a week as I could manage it, I “took the sacrament,” conquering neither my fearful repugnance nor the shame I felt at being repelled, and neither believing nor disbelieving the somber reverberations.
During the first months of my love affair with Lydia, I continued to receive letters and, on occasion, telephone calls from Sharon Shatzky, the junior at Pembroke with whom I had concluded a passionate romance prior to my return to Chicago. Sharon was a tall, handsome, auburn-haired girl, studious, enthusiastic, and lively, an honor student in literature, and the daughter of a successful zipper manufacturer with country-club affiliations and a hundred-thousand-dollar suburban home who had been impressed with my credentials and entirely hospitable to me, until I began to suffer from migraines. Then Mr. Shatzky grew fearful that if he did not intervene, his daughter might one day find herself married to a man she would have to nurse and support for the rest of her life. Sharon was enraged by her father’s “lack of compassion.” “He thinks of my life,” she said, angrily, “as a business investment.” It enraged her even more when I came to her father’s defense. I said that it was as much his paternal duty to make clear to a young daughter what might be the long-range consequences of my ailment as it had been years before to see that she was inoculated against smallpox; he did not want her to suffer for no reason. “But I love you,” Sharon said, “that’s my ‘reason.’ I want to be with you if you’re ill. I don’t want to run out on you then, I want to take care of you.” “But he’s saying that you don’t know all that ‘taking care of could entail.” “But I’m telling you-I love you.”
Had I wanted to marry Sharon (or her family’s money) as much as her father assumed I did, I might not have been so tolerant of his opposition. But as I was just into my twenties then, the prospect of marriage, even to a lovely young woman toward whom I had so strong an erotic attachment, did not speak to the range of my ambitions. I should say, particularly because of this strong erotic attachment was I suspicious of an enduring union. For without that admittedly powerful bond, what was there of consequence, of importance, between Sharon and myself? Only three years my junior, Sharon seemed to me vastly younger, and to stand too much in my shadow, with few attitudes or interests that were her own; she read the books I recommended to her, devouring them by the dozen the summer we met, and repeated to her friends and teachers, as hers, judgments she had borrowed from me; she had even switched from a government to a literature major under my influence, a satisfaction to me at first, in the fatherly stage of my infatuation, but afterward a sign, among others, of what seemed to me an excess of submissiveness and malleability.
It did not, at that time, occur to me to find evidence of character, intelligence, and imagination in the bounteousness of her sexuality or in the balance she managed to maintain between a bold and vivacious animality and a tender, compliant nature. Nor did I begin to understand that it was in that tension, rather than in the sexuality alone, that her appeal resided. Rather, I would think, with something like despair, “That’s all we really have,” as though unselfconsciously fervent lovemaking, sustained over a period of several years, was a commonplace phenomenon.
One night, when Lydia and I were already asleep in my apartment, Sharon telephoned to speak with me. She was in tears and didn’t try to hide it. She could not bear any longer the stupidity of my decision. Surely I could not hold her accountable for her father’s cold-blooded behavior, if that was the explanation for what I was doing. What was I doing anyway? And how was I doing? Was I well? Was I ill? How was my writing, my teaching -I had to let her fly to Chicago…But I told her she must stay where she was. I remained throughout calm and firm. No, I did not hold her accountable for anybody’s behavior but her own, which was exemplary. I reminded her that it was not I who had judged her father “cold-blooded.” When she continued to appeal to me to come to “my senses,” I said that it was she who had better face facts, especially as they were not so unpleasant as she was making them out to be: she was a beautiful, intelligent, passionate young woman, and if she would stop this theatrical grieving and make herself available to life once again-
“But if I’m all those things, then why are you throwing me away like this? Please, I don’t understand-make it clear to me! If I’m so exemplary, why don’t you want me? Oh, Nathan,” she said, now openly weeping again, “you know what I think? That underneath all that scrupulousness and fairness and reasonableness, you’re a madman! Sometimes I think that underneath all that ‘maturity’ you’re just a crazy little boy!”
When I returned from the kitchen phone to the living room, Lydia was sitting up in my sofa bed. “It was that girl, wasn’t it?” But without a trace of jealousy, though I knew she hated her, if only abstractly. “You want to go back to her, don’t you?”
“No.”
“But you know you’re sorry you ever started up with me. 1 know it. Only now you can’t figure how to get out of it. You’re afraid you’ll disappoint me, or hurt me, and so you let the weeks go by-and I can’t stand the suspense, Nathan, or the confusion. If you’re going to leave me, please do it now, tonight, this minute. Send me packing, please, I beg you-because I don’t want to be endured, or pitied, or rescued, or whatever it is that’s going on here! What are you doing with me-what am I doing with someone like you! You’ve got success written all over-it’s in every breath you take! So what is this all about? You know you’d rather sleep with that girl than with me-so stop pretending otherwise, and go back to her, and do it!”
Now she cried, as hopeless and bewildered as Sharon. I kissed her, I tried to comfort her. I told her that nothing she was saying was so, when of course it was true in every detaiclass="underline" I loathed making love to her, I wished to be rid of her, I couldn’t bear the thought of hurting her, and following the phone call, I did indeed want more than ever to go back to the one Lydia referred to always as “that girl.” Yet I refused to confess to such feelings or act upon them.
“She’s sexy, young, Jewish, rich-“
“Lydia, you’re only torturing yourself-“
“But I’m so hideous. I have nothing.”
No, if anyone was “hideous,” it was I, yearning for Sharon’s sweet lewdness, her playful and brazen sensuality, for what I used to think of as her perfect pitch, that unfailingly precise responsiveness to whatever our erotic mood-wanting, remembering, envisioning all this, even as I labored over Lydia’s flesh, with its contrasting memories of physical misery. What was “hideous” was to be so queasy and finicky about the imperfections of a woman’s body, to find oneself an adherent of the most Hollywoodish, cold-blooded notions of what is desirable and what is not; what was “hideous”-alarming, shameful, astonishing-was the significance that a young man of my pretensions should attach to his lust.