Don't Cry

The Agonized Face

A feminist author came to talk at the annual literary festival in Toronto, one of the good-looking types with expensive clothes who look younger than they are (which is irritating, even though it shouldn't be), the kind of person who plays with her hair when she talks, who always seems to be asking you to like her. She was like that, but she had something else, too, and it was that “something else” quality that made what she did so peculiarly aggravating.

Before I go any further, it must be said that I arrived at the festival tense and already prone to aggravation. I have been divorced for five years. I am the mother of a ten-year-old girl. My ex-husband is stalwart in his child-support payments, but he is a housepainter who is trying to be an artist, and out of respect for his dreams, his payments are not large. We met in graduate school, where I was studying creative writing, a dream-cum-memory rolling monotonously near the bottom of the subthought ocean. After years of writing in-brief book reviews, plus fact-checking and proofreading for an online magazine, I have recently begun writing full-length reviews (which means a little more money and a lot less time for playing “The Mighty Michelle” with Kira); for the first time, I have been assigned to “do” something light and funny on the social scene at the literary festival. The idea of proximity to so many actual authors may ve caused some more intense than usual subthought rolling, which is perhaps why a fight with my daughter got nastier than it had to this morning. It did not help that it was a fight about whether or not she can, at ten, bleach her hair “like Gwen Stefani,” and that the fight then had to turn into a discussion with Tom about how he had to be sure that while staying with him this afternoon, she did not somehow get hold of boxed bleach and take charge of the bathroom. Or, furthermore, that she not be allowed to persuade him that red might be okay if blond was not.

Still, for the most part, I was able to clear my mind of all this once I arrived at the festival. Writers from all over the world were there, people from Somalia, Greece, Israel, the United States, Italy and Britain. There were writers whod been forced to flee their countries, writers from police states, writers from places where everybody was starving; writers who wrote about the daily problems of ordinary people, the obscenity of politics and the pain of the lower classes, glamorous writers who wrote about the exciting torment of the fashionable classes. Writers with airs of gravity or triviality well-heeled or wearing suits they had probably rented for this event, standing at the bar with an air of hard-won triumph, or simply looking with childish delight at all the glowing bottles of delicious drinks and trays of foodstuffs. I glimpsed a smart blond woman on the arm of a popular author and fleetingly thought of my daughter: If she could see me here, she would feel curiosity and admiration.

But getting back to the “feminist author;” it is not really right to call her that, as she was not the only feminist there, as, in fact, her presence may have annoyed other, more serious feminists. She was a feminist who had apparently been a prostitute at some point in her colorful youth, and who had gone on record describing prostitutes as fighters against the patriarchy. She would say stupid things like that, but then she would write some good sentences that would make people say, “Wow, she's kind of intelligent!” Some people may ve said she should not have been at the festival at all, but why not? An event such as this is dazzling partly in its variety; it is a social blaze of little heads rolling by in a ball of light, and all the heads have something to say: “No one should ever write about the Holocaust again!” “Irony is ruining our culture!” Or in the case of the feminist ex-prostitute, “Women can enjoy sexual violence, too!” Well. I had been asked to write something funny, and the feminist author sounded pretty funny. I pictured her in a short skirt and big high heels, standing up on the balls of her feet with her legs bowed like a samurai, her fists and her arms flexed combatively, head cocked like she was on the lookout for some patriarchy to mount. An image you could look at and go, Okay, now for the author who says, “We live in an entertainment society and it's terrible!”

She was reading with two other people, a beautiful seventeen-year-old Vietnamese girl who wrote about rapes and massacres, and a middle-aged Canadian who wrote touching stories about his daughters. First the Vietnamese girl read about a massacre, then came the feminist writer. She immediately began complaining, but she did it in a way that made her complaint sound like a special treat we might like to have. Her voice was sweet, with a sparkling rhythm that made you imagine some shy and secret thing was being gradually revealed. I felt caught off guard; she wore a full-length skirt and little glasses and round-toed clog-style boots.

She wasn't going to read, she said; instead, she was going to give a talk about the way she had been treated by the local media, as well as by the festival organizers, who had described her in an insulting, unfair way in their brochure. I had not even read the brochure — I perhaps should've read it, but the information in such pamphlets is usually worthless — and from the look on other people's faces, they hadn't read it, either. The author, however, didn't seem to realize this. The brochure was not only insulting to her, she continued; it was an insult to all women, to everyone, really. They had ignored the content of her work completely, focusing instead on the most sensational aspects of her life — the prostitution, the drug use, the stay in a mental hospital, the attempt on her father's life — in a way that was both salacious and puritanical. “It isn't that these things aren't true,” she said in her lilting voice. “They are. I was a prostitute for six months when I was sixteen and I spent two months in a mental hospital when I was eighteen. But I have also done a lot of other things. I have been a waitress, a factory worker, a proofreader, a journalist, a street vendor! I am forty-five years old and now I teach at Impala University West!”

There were cheers, applause; a woman in the back fiercely hollered, “You go, girl!” The author blinked rapidly and adjusted her glasses. “I can even understand it,” she continued. “It's exciting to imagine such a kooky person off somewhere doing unimaginable stuff! I like the idea myself! But I am not that person!” It seemed to me that she kind of was that person, but right then it didn't matter. “And when we do that,” she continued, “when we isolate qualities that seem exciting, but maybe a little scary, and we project them onto another person in an exaggerated form, we not only deny that person her humanity but we impoverish and cheat ourselves of life's complexity and tenderness!”

This wasn't funny This was something wholly unexpected. We were all feeling stirred, like we were really dealing with something here, something that had just been illustrated for us by a magical, elfish hand. We felt like we were being touched in a personal place, a little like our mothers would touch us — a touch that was emotionally erotic. Like a mother, she seemed potent, yet there was something of the daughter there, too, the innocent girl who has been badly teased by an importune boy and who comes to you, her upturned face looking at you with puzzlement. Yes, she seemed innocent, even with her sullied, catastrophic life placed before us for the purpose of selling her.

She must've sensed our feelings, because she cut short her speech. We had been so kind, she said, that she wanted to give us something. She was going to read to us after all — in fact, she had her book right there with her, and she even had a story picked out. It was a story about a middle-aged woman dressing in sexy clothes to attend a party for a woman who writes pornography, which is held in a bar decorated with various sex toys. A good-looking boy flirts with the middle-aged woman, who allows that she is “flattered.”

What had happened to the mother? Where was the injured girl? The voice of the author was still lilting and girlish, but her words were hard and sharp, the kind of words that think everything is funny. The middle-aged woman invites the young man to her home, gives him a drink, and then pulls his pants off while he lies there gaping. For the next several pages, she alternates between fellating him and chattering cleverly while he tries to leave.

This was the feminist author we had heard about, all right. Her readers smiled knowingly, while the readers of the Canadian and Vietnamese authors looked baffled — baffled, then angry And I was feeling angry, too.

I am not really a feminist, probably because, at forty I am too young to have fully experienced the kinetic surge of feminism that occurred in the seventies, that half-synthetic, half-organic creature with its smart, dry little mouth issuing books, speeches, TV shows, and pop songs. None of it is stylish anymore, and, in fact, feminists have come in for a lot of criticism from female pundits. Some of these pundits say that feminists have made girls think they have to have sex all the time, which, by going against their girlish nature, has destroyed their self-esteem, and made them anorexic and depressed. Feminists have made girls into sluts! Others, equally angry, say that feminists have imposed restrictive rules on nubile teens, making them into morbid neurasthenics who think they're being raped, when they're actually just having sex. Feminists have neutered girls by overprotecting them! I don't know what I think of any of it; it's mostly something I hear coming out of my radio on my way to work. But I do know this: When I hear that feminism is overprotecting girls, I am very sympathetic to it. When I see my fashion-conscious ten-year-old in her nylon nightie, peering spellbound before the beguiling screen at the fleeting queendom of some twelve-year-old manufactured pop star with the wardrobe of a hooker, a jerry-rigged personality and bulimia, it seems to me that she has a protection deficit that I may not be able to compensate for. When she comes home wild with tears because she lost the spelling contest, or her ex — best friend called her fat, or a boy said she's not the prettiest girl in class, and I press her to me, comforting her, even as that day's AMBER Alert flashes in my brain, it is hard for me to imagine this girl as “overprotected.”

Which is, in some indirect way, why the feminist author was so affecting and so disappointing. She was a girl who needed to be protected, and a woman standing to protect the girl. But then she became the other thing — the feminist who made girls into sluts. She sprouted three heads and asked that we accept them all! She said she had been a prostitute, a mental patient, that she had tried to stab her father. She said it in a soft, reasonable voice — but these are not soft or reasonable things. These are terrible things. Anyone who has seen a street prostitute and looked into her face knows that. For her to admit these things, without describing the pain she had suffered, gave her dignity — because really, she didn't have to talk about it. We could imagine it. But the story she read made what had seemed like dignity look silly and obscene. Because the voice of the story was not soft. It was dry and smart as a dance step — but what it told of was neither dry nor smart. While the voice danced, making scenes that described the woman and the youth, an image slowly formed, taking subtle shape under the picture created by the scenes. It was like an advertisement for cigarettes where beautiful people are smoking in lounge chairs, and suddenly you see in the cobalt blue backdrop the subliminal image of a skull. Except the image behind the feminist author's words was stranger than the image of a skull, and less clear. It made you strain to see what it was, and in the straining you found yourself picturing things you did not want to picture. Of course, it can be fun to picture things you don't want to picture — but somehow the feminist author had ruined the fun.

After the reading, we all went for refreshments in the hospitality lounge. The Vietnamese girl and the Canadian father, as well as the feminist author, were there, signing books and talking with their readers. There were other authors present, too, including an especially celebrated Somali author known for an award-winning novel of war and social disintegration, and an American woman who had written a witty elegant, clearly autobiographical novella about a mother whose child is hit by a drunk driver and nearly killed. The feminist author appeared more relaxed in this setting than she had been onstage; she smiled easily and chatted with the mostly young women who approached her. And yet again I sensed a disturbing subliminal message bleeding through the presentation: a face of sex and woman's pain. The face had to do with disgrace and violence, dark orgasm, rape, with feeling so strong that it obviates the one who feels it. You could call it an exalted face, or an agonized face; in the context of the feminist author, I think I'm going to call it “the agonized face.” Although I don't know why— she doesn't look like she's ever made such a face in her life.

There was only one more person waiting to talk to her, an animated girl with ardently sprouting red hair. I got in line behind her. When I got up close, I saw that the author's eyes were not sweet, innocent, or sparkling. They were wary and a little hard. As she signed the animate red girl's book, I heard her say, “Sex has been let out of the box, like everything is okay, but no one knows what ‘everything’ is.”

“Exactly!” sprouted the ardent girl.

Exactly. “I liked the talk you gave,” I said, “before the reading.”

“Thank you,” she said, coldly answering my italics.

“But I'm wondering why you chose to read what you read afterward. If you didn't like what they said about you in that brochure you mentioned. I didn't read it, but—”

“What I read didn't have anything to do with what they said.”

No? “I'd love to talk more with you about that. I'm here as a journalist for Quick! Would you be able to talk about it for our readers?”

“No,” she said. “I'm not doing interviews.” And she turned her back on me to sign another book.

I stood for a moment looking at her back, vaguely aware of the Somali author talking into someone's tape recorder. With a vertiginous feeling, I remembered the days right after graduation, when Tom was an artist and I was a freelance journalist hustling work at various small magazines. We slept on a Salvation Army mattress; we ate and wrote on a coffee table. “The grotesque has a history, a social parameter,” said the Somali author. “Indeed, one might say that the grotesque is a social parameter.”

Indeed. I took a glass of wine from a traveling tray of glasses and drank it in a gulp. On one of those long-ago assignments, I had interviewed a topless dancer, a desiccated blonde with desperate intelligence burning in her otherwise-lusterless eyes. She was big on Hegel and Nietzsche, and she talked about the power of beautiful girls versus the power of men with money In the middle of this power talk, she told me a story about a customer who had said he would give her fifty dollars if she would get on her hands and knees with her butt facing him, pull down her G-string, and then turn around and smile at him. They had negotiated at length: “I made him promise that he wouldn't stick his finger in,” she said. “We went over it and over it and he promised me, like, three times. So I pulled down my G-string, and as soon as I turned around, his finger went right in. I was so mad!” Then bang, she was right back at the Hegel and Nietzsche. The combination was pathetic, and yet it had the dignity of awful truth. Not only because it was titillating— though, yes, it was — but because in the telling of it, a certain foundation of humanity was revealed; the crude cinder blocks of male and female down in the basement, holding up the house. Those of us who have spouses and/or children forget about this part — not because we have an aversion to those cinder blocks necessarily but because we are busy on the upper levels, building a home with furniture, decorations, and personalities in it. We are glad to have the topless dancer to remind us of that dark area in the basement where personality is irrelevant and crude truth prevails. Her philosophical patter even added to the power of her story because it created a stark polarity: intelligent words on one side, and mute genitals on the other. Between the poles, there was darkness and mystery, and the dancer respected the mystery with her ignorant and touching pretense.

Which is exactly what the feminist author did not do. I drained my second glass of wine. The feminist author — she told and then read her disturbing stories as if she were a lady at a tea party as if there were no mystery no darkness, just her, the feminist author skipping along, swinging some charming little bag, and singing about penises, la la la la la!

Another server wafted past, a young woman with her mind clearly on something else. I reached for another glass of wine, then changed my mind. Of course, someone might say — I can picture a well-dressed, intellectual lady saying it — well, why not? And rationally, there is no reason why not. These things are accepted now; these things are talked about in popular comedies on television. So why not? Because everyone knows such television shows are nonsense. Because glib acceptance does not respect the profound nature of the agonized face.

I reconsidered having another wine; looking for a server, I noticed that the Somali author, momentarily unpestered, was looking at me with a kindly expression. He was handsome, well dressed, and elegant. Impulsively, I crossed the room and introduced myself His hand was long, dry, and warm. He had come from New York, not Somalia. He came every year. When I told him it was my first time, he smiled.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, “though it's been a long time since I've had two quick drinks this early in the day”

He laughed, raised his wineglass, and sipped from it.

“And you?” I asked. “Do you enjoy this?”

“Oh yes,” he said. “One meets such curious people. And, of course, interesting people, too.”

“What about her?” I indicated the feminist author, now chatting with her back to us. “What did you think?”

“Oh!” The Somali author laughed. “I've heard what she has to say many times — it's nothing new. But I did admire the panache with which she said it. Did you see Binyavanga speak on cultural rationalism?”

But we were interrupted by more people wanting his signature, and then it was time for his reading. “I hope you will come,” he said.

The Somali author read from his award winner, the novel about civil war and familial bonds. He skipped through the book, reading excerpts from several chapters, starting with a tender love scene between a husband and his wife, who magically has two sets of breasts, the normal set augmented by a miniset located just under her rib cage. Their young son runs in and cries, “Are you going to give me a sibling?” Then the author jumped ahead, and suddenly there it was again: the agonized face. The son, now grown, is being pursued by a fat, whorish girl who claims he owes her a baby, even though she has AIDS and he is engaged to someone else. We learn that this very girl, an orphan who was briefly taken in by the family when she was fourteen, once sexually attacked the grandfather, who responded by righteously kicking her in the face. When the mother learns that this slut is back again, she decides to get a gun, humiliate the girl, and then kill her. The grandfather, though, does not want the mother on the street during the escalating civil unrest. “Leave her to me,” he counsels; “there is, after all, something unfinished between us.” He goes to the son's house to lie in wait, and sure enough, the slut comes calling. She's looking for the son, but when she finds grandpa, it doesn't matter; she wants his baby, too. He pretends to be asleep while she masturbates him. She thinks, How beautiful his penis is! She longs for his children! She mounts him, and the grandfather reports, with a certain gentlemanly discretion, that he and the slut “went somewhere together.” But nonetheless, almost as soon as they are done, the girl is mystically stricken with discharge and gross vaginal itching; she runs down the road, scratching her crotch as she screams, “I itch! I smell!” The son is happily reunited with his fiancée, and the wife, his mother, finds new tenderness with her husband. The grandfather meditates on history.

If he had been an American or a Canadian man saying these things, he might've been booed as a misogynist. But an African man — no. It was wonderful, especially the way he read it — with the earned hauteur of a man who has seen war, persecution, and the two sides of the agonized face: the mother who is poignant in her open-legged vulnerability and the visage of the female predator. Because for all its elegance, his voice — unlike the voice of the feminist author — did not try to hide reality: the pain and anger of the unsatisfied womb grown ill from lack of wholesome use, a fungal vector of want, thick with tumors, baby's teeth, and bits of hair inside each fibrous mass. Pitiful, yes, but also nasty though we in the antiseptic West don't say so.

“Motherhood is the off-and-on light in the darkness of night,” concluded the author, “a firefly of joy and rejoicing, now here, now there, and everywhere. In fact, the crisis that is coming to a head in the shape of civil strife would not be breaking in on us if we'd offered women as mothers their due worth, respect, and affection; a brightness celebrating motherhood, a monument erected in worship of women.”

The audience went wild.

In the big reception hall, we celebrated the Somali author with more drinks, and I caught up with the American novelist whose son actually had been nearly killed by a drunk driver. She was a good egg, hawk-nosed and plainly dressed, and she was having a stiff one. When I asked her, she said she'd disliked writing about the accident, but that if she hadn't written about it, she never would've been able to pay the medical expenses. We gossiped; we admired the Somali author. “I can't imagine an American writer saying something like that,” she said. “ ‘A monument erected in worship of women.’ “

“I know,” I said, “it was lovely.” As long as you're the right kind of woman, I didn't say. I glimpsed the feminist author across the room from us, standing by herself, eating a fistful of grapes. The American writer was saying something about how irony is the most human of artistic methods, but I was thinking of something else. I was thinking of a girl I had known in high school named Linda Phoenix. She was a thin girl with a stark, downy back, who fucked every boy plus some girls. Jeff Lyer, an angry fat kid, brought pictures to school of her drunk and sucking someone's penis, and people passed them around the cafeteria, laughing or feeling sorry or just looking.

Across the room, two reporters approached the feminist author with their tape recorders. I thought of the blurred pictures of Linda Phoenix. I thought of my daughter, standing before the mirror, pushing her lower lip out, making seductive eyes. I thought of her sitting at the kitchen table, drawing scenes from her favorite book, Magic by the Lake. I thought of her frightened awake from a nightmare, crying, “Mommy, Mommy!” I remembered washing her as a baby, using the spray hose from the kitchen sink to rinse shit from the swollen petals of her infant slit — a hole she may fall down if she opens it too early, a dark Wonderland of teeth and bones and crushing force. The hole in life, a hole we cannot see into, no matter how closely we look.

I had had too much to drink and too little to eat, and for a drunken instant the hall became a courtroom, the authors and journalists members of a jury overspilling the box to cry out: Now hold on a minute! Are you completely out of your mind? It is one thing to express disdain for this so-called feminist, who may deserve it. Even the muddled atavism about rotten wombs full of baby teeth — well, it is loony and gross, but in the locked closet of our inmost heart, we can see how you might feel that way But your daughter? What kind of mother are you? Leave her out of this grotesquerie, please!

And of course the imaginary jury was right. I would love Kira no matter how many boys she did what with, or girls, for that matter. Things are not like they once were. Sex and the City is on TV Still, when I think of her as she will be — dripping with hormones and feelings, nursing the secret hurt of a seed about to burst into flower — it makes me uneasy. To think of her opening her warm spring darkness to any lout who wants it makes me feel sadness, followed by a surprising surge of anger (anger that includes an even more surprising burst of sympathy for my mother's anger, sympathy even for the time she slapped my face after she caught me and Donald Parker doing it in the rec room). But even as I feel the anger, even with my mother's anger crowding behind it — my mother, also single, now a mild alcoholic in old age, calling me to give me a piece of her mind about the latest nonsense on the news — even as I feel the anger, love rises up to enclose it. Inside love, anger still secretly burns — but it is a tiny flame. I can hold it like I once held my daughter in my body, a world within a world.

But just now I allowed myself to enter the little flame and feel it all the way. I did it in the spirit of the feminist author — and to show her up, too. So, she can be the innocent girl and the prostitute and the author, eh? Well, imagine a full deck of cards, each card painted with symbols of woman — the waif, the harlot, the mother, the warrior, the queen — until the last card, on which we see Medea, a knife in her raised, implacable hand. Yes, there I am and there any woman can be, even though we don't stand up on stages and make a fuss about it. And we can skip lightly back through the deck, carelessly touching each card as we do, before returning to the card of the good mother, or the lover, or, in my case at this moment, the stolid female worker in my brown skirt and flat shoes. Every woman knows all about everything on those cards, even if her knowledge is wordless and half-conscious. It is wordless knowledge because it is too big for words. Sometimes, it is too big for us. Stand up onstage and put words on it and you make it small — and then you say it's sexist when people don't like it.

Except that, if I am going to be honest, I have to admit something that weighs in on the side of the feminist author just slightly. The anger and upset that I let myself feel, that mere hot pinprick in the ardent wetness of love — when you let yourself feel it, when I let myself feel it, it is, was, very strong. Strong and primitive. Enter in through that tiny spot of fire and come out in a hell of shape-shifting and destruction. In that hell lives a beast that will devour anything in front of it, and that beast is especially partial to woman. Why not split her open all the way, just for the pure animal joy of rending and tearing? For a woman even to skirt this place is dangerous because she has the open part. She needs rules, structures, intact shapes to make sure the openness doesn't get too open. For a man, it is different — he can align his strength with the monster and tear the prey with its teeth. For a second, he can walk triumphant in a place of no place. Then he can say the woman lured him there.

That is why the grandfather in the Somali author's book wants to fuck the slut. He tells his son that because she has no children, he feels sorry for her, that he is fucking her out of sympathy. But he does not seem to feel sorry for her. He wants her; you could even say he needs her, for through her he can descend into a terrible, thrilling world and then come back in his suit and tie and be good. The Somali author almost acknowledges this in his frank fascination with the slut. For if she were not there, how could he go to that place of no place? He would have to discharge his anger and contempt on Mom with Double Boobs, and this would be more than anybody could bear — for, like me, he has more love than anger. How unfair that men get to go to this mysterious place and come back whole. How noble that the feminist author stands up onstage and tries to speak for the sluts they go there with, even if she fails. Even if her story makes something terrible into something light and silly, even if she herself is light and silly.

This is what I was thinking as I sat in the hospitality lounge, nursing a seltzer water with lemon, after attending a reading by a man from the prairies who had written a prizewinning novel about a heroic woman who rescues an orphan from an abusive foster parent. I was sitting by the window, and, in the sunlight, the room seemed composed of impossible purple and mahogany hues. Caterers discreetly moved in and out, replacing platters of food and trays of drinks.

Soon I would leave, pick up my daughter, and take her for pizza. We would go home and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And then maybe that strange anime show, the one we stumbled on last week — a show where the heroine, the good girl, has no arms and the sexy villainess is powerful and crude. It looked like the cartoon slut was trying to kill the heroine and steal her boyfriend. But instead, in the middle of a gun battle between hero and villain, the slut (admiring the armless girl's purity) took a bullet to save her and died with the heroine in her arms. When the embrace broke, the good girl magically stood up with arms of her own and proceeded to beat the crap out of the bad guy. “Yeah, there's gonna be some changes around here!” she announced. Rock music played.

“Weird,” said Kira, and, yes, it was.

I drank my seltzer water and reviewed my notes.

Early in my career, I did a piece on the then-burgeoning phenomenon of TV talk shows, focusing on a particular show, a show that at the time had made its reputation by sympathetically telling the stories of victims, stories that had once been too shameful to tell. Rape was a mainstay of the show, and I was present on the set for an episode that featured two women who had been raped by coworkers in the workplace, one of whom had succeeded in pressing charges, while the other had lost her case. The successful woman was a flamboyant redheaded beauty who came on yelling, “I just want to say I've got a shotgun ready for any sumbitch who tries it again!”

But first came the defeated one, a chubby middle-aged woman who tried to hide her identity by sitting with her back to the camera and wearing an ill-fitting wig. The man she'd accused of raping her was there, too, and he had a lot to say “She go like this,” he said, “on the desk!” He stood up and bent over, putting his hands out as if bracing himself. “And I say, ‘No! I don't want that!’ “

The awful thing was, you could totally picture her bent over the desk. Even viewing her from the back, we could see her bending nature — the mild, gentle slope of her shoulders, the sweetness of her excess flesh, the way she turned in her chair to yell, “No! That's not the truth!” Her anger was like a clumsy animal, and you could hear in it the soft puzzlement of a person who does not understand cruelty.

“You are an alcoholic!” yelled the accused rapist. “Everybody knows!”

“I offered you one drink!” she cried. “I thought you were lonely!”

“You are a whore! You give VD!”

“No!” cried the woman. “No!” And then she just wept.

A stout little woman came on to talk about rape. She planted her feet, set her small barrel body in a “no bull” stance, and gave it to us straight: Rape was bad, and she was prepared to duke it out with anyone who said it wasn't.

“I agree!” screamed the accused rapist. “I agree!”

The wigged woman continued to weep. Nobody looked at her. In swept the triumphant redhead, who bellowed about her rights. “And I just hope the rapists who are watching the show right now understand that we aren't going to take it anymore!” she cried. The audience cheered. The wig woman wept. The talk-show hostess strode about the set, blond and bristling with savoir faire. She had featured progress, but she had not forgotten the agonized face. Unlike the feminist author, she had put it right up there on the screen.

But wait! The feminist author was not talking about rape, was she? Being a prostitute is not the same thing as being raped, is it? And of course they are not the same. But for the purposes of my discussion here — for the deepest layer of my discussion — they are close enough! The rape victim on TV was treated like a prostitute on an official pro-victim show, and the feminist author — well, it probably wasn't fair to talk about her that way in the pamphlet, even if nobody read it, even if it was true. Can you blame her for not wanting to be like the poor, hurt woman on the talk show, preferring to prance around, swinging her little handbag, instead? Can you blame her for trying to put a good face on it? For talking so loudly about things that have been used to shame women for centuries?

Wordless knowledge can be heavy and dark as the bottom of the ocean. Sometimes you want the relief of dryness, of light, bright words. Sometimes you might be on the side of a smart-aleck middle-aged woman who thumbs her nose at the agonized face and fellates a snotty sexy man, just for a dumb little thrill. Sometimes you wish it could be that easy.

I looked at my watch. I drank my seltzer and felt myself return to sobriety I listened to the prairie author entertain a group with a story about how he had been so drunk the previous night that, in a muddled attempt to find the bathroom, he had left his hotel room naked and had roamed the halls until a “beautiful woman” from room service had escorted him back. Everyone laughed. A harried caterer wiped her hand on her rumpled white shirt and made a disgusted face. I looked out the window; people strolled the sidewalks like sensitive grazing animals, full of trust that what they needed was to be found there on the grounds of the hotel. I heard the prairie writer cry, “And she had the most incredible ass!” There was delighted laughter.

Suddenly, I was flooded with goodwill toward the feminist author. I didn't even care that she had refused to speak with me. She wrote well enough and she was an articulate, perhaps even socially significant, figure. Why should she be dismissed, while a man who ran around naked in public and yelled about people's asses was coddled? And yet … some part of me was still troubled by the issue of the agonized face. Because the face is not only about rape and pain.

I remember how it was with my husband sometimes, or, rather, how it was on occasion, or, really, maybe just once. It was before I became pregnant with Kira. We had not been getting along, and we were trying to have a special time together. We lit a candle and we undressed and lay on the bed, outside the covers. We rubbed each other with oil. It was relaxing, and awkward, too — it would feel really good and then he would have a sneezing fit. Or I would turn his foot at a strange angle during the foot massage and he would open his eyes and tactfully try to pull it a more comfortable way. When he touched between my legs, I wasn't even thinking about sex anymore. His presence was physical and insistent, like the smell of a wild animal, like a bear, grunting and searching for food, picking berries with the elegant black finger of its tongue — but my mind had wandered away It wandered like someone browsing a junk store, its attention taken this way and that by each gewgaw, the faded, painted face of each figurine: an argument with my sister, a birthday gift for a friend, the novel I was supposed to review, and, like a tiny reflection on the curve of a glass, a scene from the novel (hero and heroine in tense conversation on a fire escape at dusk, red flowers climbing the wall, traffic darting below). Every few moments, my attention would return to my husband, and I would feel what he was doing, and caress his rough fur and then dart away again. Except with each return, I darted away more slowly, and then I didn't dart at all. His touch had entered my nervous system without my knowing it. The images in my head softened and ran together, colorful, semi-coherent, and still subtly flavored with the novel. The blunt feelings of my lower body came rolling up in dark, choppy waves. He put his hand on my abdomen and said, “Breathe into here.” I did. He didn't have to touch me anymore; the flesh between my legs was hot and fat. He touched me with his genitals. I took his large bony head in my hands. We kissed, and we entered a small place sealed away from every other place. In that place, my genitals were pierced by a ring attached to a light chain. He held the chain in his hand and we both looked at it, smiling and abashed—Whoa! How did that get there? Then I became an animal and he led me by the chain. We entered into stunning emptiness; we emerged. He moaned and bit my shoulder with his hot, wet mouth.

Afterward, we smiled, rolling in each other's arms, laughing at ourselves, laughing at the agonized face. But we couldn't laugh at the emptiness. It was like entering an electrical current, passing first into a landscape of animate light, and then into pitch-darkness, warm with invisible life, the whispering voices, the dissolving, re-forming faces of ghosts and the excited unborn. Everything horrible to us, everything nice to us. We did not conceive Kira at that time; I think that happened one sleepy morning when, without even realizing it, we entered emptiness again and brought a tiny female out of it.

My husband and I are not friends, but we are amicable. Once, after we split up, I called him late at night, after I'd had a terrible dream, and I was glad for his kind response. But I have never called him like that since, and I'm sure he is glad of it. He is now another wholly separate creature with whom I can negotiate, chat, joke, fight, cooperate with or not. But I remember that moment between us, and it is represented to me by the agonized face. It is easy to be ashamed of the face — and sometimes the face is shameful. But it is also inextricably bound up with the royalty of female nature. It symbolizes our entry into emptiness because it is a humiliation of our personal particularity the cherished definition of our personal features. Men don't go there because they can't or because they are too scared. (Okay maybe gay men go there. I'm sure they'd say they go there. But somehow I doubt it.) So they pretend to look down on us for it — but really they know better.

It is this weird combination of pride and shame that makes you want to snap at the feminist author, like a dog in a pack. Perhaps it is also what gives her an audience; I don't know. But for her to raise the issues that she sweetly raised in her earnest elf voice — the middle-aged woman pretending that humiliation is an especially smart kind of game, together with the casual mention of her experience with prostitution — and yet to leave out the agonized face? No way. If she had told the same story, even with the prostitution attached, and let us see the face — that would've been one thing. We could've sat back and nodded to ourselves, a little contemptuous maybe, yet respecting the truth of it. But to tell those stories and pretend there's no agony — it makes you want to pinch her, like a boy in a gang, following her down the street while she tries to act like nothing's wrong, hurrying her step while someone else reaches out for another pinch. It makes you want to chase her down an alley, to stone her, to force her to show the face she denies.

Which in a metaphorical sense is what I did with my article. When I turned it in, the managing editor said, “Whew! She sure pissed you off, didn't she?” And I said, “Do you think it's too much?” And the editor said, “No, if that's what you feel …” Although, of course, I didn't say what I “feel.” I couldn't, because it could not be printed in a newspaper. I had to speak in the fast brute code of public discourse and count on people to see the subtler shapes moving in the depths below the conventional grid of my words.

The day after my piece appeared, there was some discussion among the younger girls at Quick! who did not like it that I had failed to “support” a woman artist, who felt that I used unfair, sexist language. And, privately, when I think of the feminist author, standing there at the podium in her long skirt and her glasses, blinking nervously, I almost agree that it was not fair. But fair or not, I was right. The agonized face and all it means is one of the few mysteries left to us on this ragged, gutted planet. It must be protected, even if someone must on occasion be “stoned.” Even if that person is someone for whom we feel secret sympathy and regard.

And besides, she wasn't really stoned. She will go on writing her books, making her money, standing up on stages. She will probably do better than I. I think of the night Kira and I watched the strange anime story about the armless heroine, and the villainess who dies. As Kira was getting ready for bed, I asked her if she found the story scary.

“No,” she said, yawning. “But it was sad the other girl had to die.” She paused, climbing into bed. I bent to pull the covers up to her chin. “But even if she died, she won anyway,” she continued. “Because it was her arms that beat the bad guy”

“That's right,” I said, and kissed her. That's right. As I turned out the light, I thought fleetingly about an article I might write on what you can learn from your children. Then I went to make myself a drink before preparing to get started on the next day's work.