Meanwhile Susan remains under the care of her mother in Princeton, and I remain up here, under my own.
3. MARRIAGE À LA MODE
Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
Let down your hair.
– from the Grimms’ fairy tale
For those young men who reached their maturity in the fifties, and who aspired to be grown-up during that decade, when as one participant has written, everyone wanted to be thirty, there was considerable moral prestige in taking a wife, and hardly because a wife was going to be one’s maidservant or “sexual object.” Decency and Maturity, a young man’s “seriousness,” were at issue precisely because it was thought to be the other way around: in that the great world was so obviously a man’s, it was only within marriage that an ordinary woman could hope to find equality and dignity. Indeed, we were led to believe by the defenders of womankind of our era that we were exploiting and degrading the women we didn’t marry, rather than the ones we did. Unattached and on her own, a woman was supposedly not even able to go to the movies or out to a restaurant by herself, let alone perform an appendectomy or drive a truck. It was up to us then to give them the value and the purpose that society at large withheld-by marrying them. If we didn’t marry women, who would? Ours, alas, was the only sex available for the job: the draft was on.
No wonder then that a young college-educated bourgeois male of my generation who scoffed at the idea of marriage for himself, who would just as soon eat out of cans or in cafeterias, sweep his own floor, make his own bed, and come and go with no binding legal attachments, finding female friendship and sexual adventure where and when he could and for no longer than he liked, laid himself open to the charge of “immaturity,” if not “latent” or blatant “homosexuality.” Or he was just plain “selfish.” Or he was “frightened of responsibility.” Or he could not “commit himself” (nice institutional phrase, that) to “a permanent relationship.” Worst of all, most shameful of all, the chances were that this person who thought he was perfectly able to take care of himself on his own was in actuality “unable to love.”
An awful lot of worrying was done in the fifties about whether people were able to love or not-I venture to say, much of it by young women in behalf of the young men who didn’t particularly want them to wash their socks and cook their meals and bear their children and then tend them for the rest of their natural days. “But aren’t you capable of loving anyone? Can’t you think of anyone but yourself?” when translated from desperate fifties-feminese into plain English, generally meant “I want to get married and I want you to get married to.”
Now I am sure that many of the young women of that period who set themselves up as specialists in loving hadn’t a very clear idea of how strong a charge their emotions got from the instinct for survival-or how much those emotions arose out of the yearning to own and be owned, rather than from a reservoir of pure and selfless love that was the special property of themselves and their gender. After all, how lovable are men? Particularly men “unable to love”? No, there was more to all that talk about “commitment” and “permanent relationships” than many young women (and their chosen mates) were able to talk about or able at that time fully to understand: the more was the fact of female dependence, defenselessness, and vulnerability.
This hard fact of life was of course experienced and dealt with by women in accordance with personal endowments of intelligence and sanity and character. One imagines that there were brave and genuinely self-sacrificing decisions made by women who refused to accede to those profoundest of self-delusions, the ones that come cloaked in the guise of love; likewise, there was much misery in store for those who were never able to surrender their romantic illusions about the arrangement they had made in behalf of their helplessness, until they reached the lawyer’s office, and he threw their way that buoy known as alimony. It has been said that those ferocious alimony battles that have raged in the courtrooms of this country during the last few decades, the way religious wars raged throughout Europe in the seventeenth century, were really “symbolic” in nature. My guess is that rather than serving as a symbol around which to organize other grievances and heartaches, the alimony battle frequently tended to clarify what was generally obscured by the metaphors with which marital arrangements were camouflaged by the partners themselves. The extent of the panic and rage aroused by the issue of alimony, the ferocity displayed by people who were otherwise sane and civilized enough, testifies, I think, to the shocking-and humiliating-realization that came to couples in the courtroom about the fundamental role that each may actually have played in the other’s life. “So, it has descended to this,” the enraged contestants might say, glaring in hatred at one another-but even that was only an attempt to continue to hide from the most humiliating fact of alclass="underline" that it really was this, all along.
Now I realize that it is possible to dismiss these generalizations as a manifestation of my bitterness and cynicism, an unfortunate consequence of my own horrific marriage and of the affair that recently ended so unhappily. Furthermore, it can be said that, having chosen women like Maureen and Susan (or, if you prefer, having had them chosen for me by my own aberrant, if not pathological, nature), I for one should not generalize, even loosely, about what men want (and get) from women, or what women want and get out of men. Well, I grant that I do not find myself feeling very “typical” at this moment, nor am I telling this story in order to argue that my life is representative of anything; nonetheless, I am naturally interested in looking around to see how much of my experience with women has been special to me and-if you must have it that way-my pathology, and how much is symptomatic of a more extensive social malaise. And looking around, I conclude this: in Maureen and Susan I came in contact with two of the more virulent strains of a virus to which only a few women among us are immune.
Outwardly, of course, Maureen and Susan couldn’t have been more dissimilar, nor could either have had a stronger antipathy for the “type” she took the other to be. However, what drew them together as women-which is to say, what drew me to them, for that is the subject here-was that in her own extreme and vivid way, each of these antipathetic originals demonstrated that sense of defenselessness and vulnerability that has come to be a mark of their sex and is often at the core of their relations with men. That I came to be bound to Maureen by my helplessness does not mean that either of us ever really stopped envisioning her as the helpless victim and myself as the victimizer who had only to desist in his brutishness for everything to be put right and sexual justice to be done. So strong was the myth of male inviolability, of male dominance and potency, not only in Maureen’s mind but in mine, that even when I went so far as to dress myself in a woman’s clothes and thus concede that as a man I surrendered, even then I could never fully assent to the idea that in our household conventional assumptions about the strong and the weak did not adequately describe the situation. Right down to the end, I still saw Maureen, and she saw herself, as the damsel in distress; and in point of fact, beneath all that tough exterior, all those claims to being “in business for herself” and nobody’s patsy, Maureen was actually more of a Susan than Susan was, and. to herself no less than to me.