Gina Barriault - Women In Their Beds

WOMEN IN THEIR BEDS

New and Selected Stories

Gina Berriault

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

The author gratefully acknowledges financial assistance from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Many of the stories in this selection were published originally by American Short Fiction, Contact, Esquire, Genesis West, Harpers Bazaar, The Kenyon Review, Mademoiselle, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Redbook, San Francisco Review, The Saturday Evening Post, The Sound of Writing, The Threepenny Review, ZYZZYVA, E. P. Dutton, and Charles Scribners Sons. The author gratefully acknowledges their permission to reprint.

Again for Julie Elena

Contents

Women in Their Beds

Who Is It Can Tell Me Who I Am?

A Dream of Fair Women

Soul and Money

The Island of Ven

Lives of the Saints

Stolen Pleasures

The Overcoat

Zenobia

The Woman in the Rose-Colored Dress

The Infinite Passion of Expectation

Nights in the Gardens of Spain

Bastille Day

God and the Article Writer

Wilderness Fire

The Bystander

Death of a Lesser Man

The Search for J. Kruper

The Birthday Party

The Cove

Sublime Child

Around the Dear Ruin

The Diary of K. W.

The Stone Boy

Anna Lisas Nose

Works of the Imagination

The Mistress

Lonesome Road

Myra

The Houses of the City

Nocturne

Like a Motherless Child

The Science of Life

Felis Catus

The Light at Birth

Dr. Zhivago...

Over the hospitals paging system the three pranksters sent their solemnly urgent voices along the corridors and into the wards, imbuing each name with a reverential depth.

Dr. Jekyll...

They were actors and playwrights, these three, Angela and Dan and Lew, social workers only temporary, offering their wit as a lightening agent to the dread air in this formidable row of faded-brick buildings, grime the mortar. Out of place, this rowit belonged in another part of the country, more north, more east, under slanting rain in Seattle or slashed by cold winds in Chicago or on that penal island off New York, someplace where the weathers punish the inmates even more.

Yet here it was, in San Franciscos warmest neighborhood and only a short walk from the broad grassy slopes and flourishing trees of Dolores Park where, on Sundays in summer, their troupe, their quick-change dozen actors, set up their shaky stage and satirized the times with their outrageous comedies, their own Commedia dellArte, come alive again now in the Sixties. Their high-flung voices, along with the noises they made that thumped and banged on the neighborhood doors, might even have reached the hospitals murky windows, sounding within like the mutterings inside the head of the patient in the next bed.

Dan held a masters in political science and Lew a bachelor of arts in drama, but Angela, a small-time, odd-job actress, bold on stage but not as herself, had no degree whatsoever.

Say you do, Dan insisted. Give yourself an M.S. in sociology and a B.A. in psychology. Imagine youre speaking the truth. You do it all the time on stage.

I dont know how long Ill last, she said.

Nobody knows that, said Lew. Theyre all wondering the same thing in there.

I mean I may not last more than a couple of days.

Angela Anson, her name in a plastic badge on her blouse, confidante without credentials, passed up and down the womens ward, telling those on her list where theyd be going, what haven with its ominously pretty name or the bed that was waiting at home, whether longed for or not.

Unlike the mens ward where, she was told, men cursed and struck the air and straggled out into the halls on their thwarted way home, this womens ward was a quiet one. Three long rows of beds, one row along each long wall and one row along the back and, on overcrowded days, another row down the center. Narrow beds with rails that went up and down, white sheets sliding on rods for each womans very own curtains when the doctors came by. Earthquake-prone, each morning the womens ward appeared to have undergone a quake in the night. The row of beds down the center gone, or the back row gone, and the shocked atmosphere like that after a quake. Whats happening here? The question on each face upon a pillow. A quake of the mind, a quake of the heart.

Dr. Curie... Dans good morning to Angela.

Bad dreams at night, shed told him. My mother berating me for what? It must be because I never knew enough about her. She may have wanted to unfold herself for me and never could. Their lives must be unfolding before their eyes, in there, and theyre unfolding mine. Theyre unfolding me. Do you know what I mean?

Dan said he sort of knew. So she was... Dr. Curie... discoverer of so much that was undetectable and that might not even exist.

Her step, always a light step, was even lighter here, a step for museums and churches, sanctified places that always made her feel unworthy. The county hospital is not a holy place, Dan said, and you were not hired for the role of St. Teresa of Avila. She kissed the lepers lesions and thats not in your line of duty. Her step was light for another reason. She wished to disappear from this unfolding scene as the women did, overnight, two, three, or an entire row at a time, gone to places called home or gone for reasons unknown to her, and as the interns also disappeared and were replaced by lookalikes.

The illustrious doctors, long dead or never alive, whom Dan and Lew were calling for, seemed more solidly in person than these young interns who stepped from bed to narrow bed, graceless, at a loss, not yet adept in the presence of women in their beds, maybe any woman in any bed, any where. Dan called these interns by their first names, drank coffee with them, gave them his dissident view of Vietnam, and, more often than not, he was the one calling for the imaginary doctors, convinced theyd be around long after the real ones, the sleep-deprived, baffled fledglings, were gone a thousand times over.

An Audience of One who never blinked. They had to imagine that

God was watching, or thats what Angela had to imagine for them, these women in this pale ward, so theyd not be overlooked. So many persons in rowsit was a common enough sight across the world in Vietnam, on the television screens that seemed invented for just that repetition of wars and disasters that laid people out in rows. Over the other scenes there was always a terrible struggle in the air, but in this womens ward there was a yielding to whoever was watching over them and to the medication that must seem like a persuasive stranger entering their most intimate being for their own good. What an unbearably rude intrusion, thenAngela appearing at bedside to tell them where theyd be going next.

Where?

This one, this woman, fifty, pink-champagne hair, must have run away from home at nine and kept on running away. The nights of her life on a barstool till 2:00 A.M. and the last hours of the morning with a new-found friend, down in the dubious comfort of his bed. A chic hat and a string of pearls and a job, all that to begin, and then the nylons bagging at the knees and ankles and the high heels bending inward.

Where?

Laguna Honda. And Angela saw this womans face draw up from her frightened heart a small girls look of daring to flee.