The Female Man

sympathize with The Man

flatter The Man

understand The Man

defer to The Man

entertain The Man

keep The Man

live for The Man.

Then a new interest entered my life. After I called up Janet, out of nothing, or she called up me (don’t read between the lines; there’s nothing there) I began to gain weight, my appetite improved, friends commented on my renewed zest for life, and a nagging scoliosis of the ankle that had tortured me for years simply vanished overnight. I don’t even remember the last time I had to go to the aquarium and stifle my sobs by watching the sharks. I rode in closed limousines with Janet to television appearances much like the one you already saw in the last chapter; I answered her questions; I bought her a pocket dictionary; I took her to the zoo; I pointed out New York’s skyline at night as if I owned it.

Oh, I made that woman up; you can believe it!

Now in the opera scenario that governs our lives, Janet would have gone to a party and at that party she would have met a man and there would have been something about that man; he would not have seemed to her like any other man she had ever met. Later he would have complimented her on her eyes and she would have blushed with pleasure; she would have felt that compliment was somehow unlike any other compliment she had ever received because it had come from that man; she would have wanted to please that man, and at the same time she would have felt the compliment enter the marrow of her bones; she would have gone out and bought mascara for the eyes that had been complimented by that man. And later still they would have gone for walks, and later still for dinners; and little dinners tete-a-tete with that man would have been like no other dinners Janet had ever had; and over the coffee and brandy he would have taken her hand; and later still Janet would have melted back against the black leather couch in his apartment and thrown her arm across the cocktail table (which would have been made of elegant teak-wood) and put down her drink of expensive Scotch and swooned; she would have simply swooned. She would have said: I Am In Love With That Man. That Is The Meaning Of My Life. And then, of course, you know what would have happened.

I made her up. I did everything but find a typical family for her; if you will remember, she found them herself. But I taught her how to use a bath-tub and I corrected her English (calm, slow, a hint of whisper in the “s,” guardedly ironic). I took her out of her workingwoman’s suit and murmured (as I soaped her hair) fragments of sentences that I could somehow never finish: “Janet you must? Janet, we don’t? but one always?”

That’s different, I said, that’s different .

I couldn’t, I said, oh, I couldn’t.

What I want to say is, I tried; I’m a good girl; I’ll do it if you’ll show me.

But what can you do when this woman puts her hand through the wall? (Actually the plasterboard partition between the kitchenette and the living room.)

Janet, sit down.

Janet, don’t do that.

Janet, don’t kick Jeannine.

Janet!

Janet, don’t!

I imagine her: civil, reserved, impenetrably formulaic. She was on her company manners for months. Then, I think, she decided that she could get away with having no manners; or rather, that we didn’t honor the ones she had, so why not? It must have been new to someone from Whileaway, the official tolerance of everything she did or tried to do, the leisure, the attention that was so close to adulation. I have the feeling that any of them can blossom out like that (and lucky they don’t, eh?) with the smooth kinship web of home centuries away, surrounded by barbarians, celibate for months, coping with a culture and a language that I think she—in her heart—must have despised.

I was housed with her for six and a half months in a hotel suite ordinarily used to entertain visiting diplomats. I put shoes on that woman’s feet. I had fulfilled one of my dreams—to show Manhattan to a foreigner—and I waited for Janet to go to a party and meet that man; I waited and waited. She walked around the suite nude. She has an awfully big ass. She used to practice her yoga on the white living room rug, callouses on her feet actually catching in the fuzz, if you can believe it. I would put lipstick on Janet and ten minutes later it would have vanished; I clothed her and she shed like a three-year-old: courteous, kind, irreproachably polite; I shied at her atrocious jokes and she made them worse.

She never communicated with her home, as far as I know.

She wanted to see a man naked (we got pictures).

She wanted to see a baby man naked (we got somebody’s nephew).

She wanted newspapers, novels, histories, magazines, people to interview, television programs, statistics on clove production in the East Indies, textbooks on wheat farming, to visit a bridge (we did). She wanted the blueprints (we got them).

She was neat but lazy—I never caught her doing anything.

She held the baby like an expert, cooing and trundling, bouncing him up and down so that he stopped screaming and stared at her chin the way babies do. She uncovered him. “Tsk.”

“My goodness.” She was astonished.

She scrubbed my back and asked me to scrub hers; she took the lipstick I gave her and made pictures on the yellow damask walls. ('You mean it’s not washable?)” I got her girlie magazines and she said she couldn’t make head or tail of them; I said, “Janet, stop joking” and she was surprised; she hadn’t meant to. She wanted a dictionary of slang. One day I caught her playing games with Room Service; she was calling up the different numbers on the white hotel phone and giving them contradictory instructions. This woman was dialing the numbers with her feet. I slammed the phone across one of the double beds.

“Joanna,” she said, “I do not understand you. Why not play? Nobody is going to be hurt and nobody is going to blame you; why not take advantage?”

“You fake!” I said; “You fake, you rotten fake!” Somehow that was all I could think of to say. She tried looking injured and did not succeed—she only looked smug—so she wiped her face clean of all expression and started again.

“If we make perhaps an hypothetical assumption—”

“Go to hell,” I said; “Put your clothes on.”

“Perhaps about this sex business you can tell me,” she said, “why is this hypothetical assumption—”

“Why the devil do you run around in the nude!”

“My child,” she said gently, “you must understand. I’m far from home; I want to keep myself cheerful, eh? And about this men thing, you must remember that to me they are a particularly foreign species; one can make love with a dog, yes? But not with something so unfortunately close to oneself. You see how I can feel this way?”

My ruffled dignity. She submitted to the lipstick again. We got her dressed. She looked all right except for that unfortunate habit of whirling around with a grin on her face and her hands out in the judo crouch. Well, well! I got reasonably decent shoes on Janet Evason’s feet. She smiled. She put her arm around me.

Oh, I couldn’t!

?

That’s different.

(You’ll hear a lot of those two sentences in life, if you listen for them. I see Janet Evason finally dressing herself, a study in purest awe as she holds up to the light, one after the other, semi-transparent garments of nylon and lace, fairy webs, rose-colored elastic puttees—“Oh, my.” “Oh, my goodness,” she says—and finally, completely stupefied, wraps one of them around her head.)

She bent down to kiss me, looking kind, looking perplexed, and I kicked her.

That’s when she put her fist through the wall.