The Summer Without Men by Siri Hustvedt Read Free Book Online Page B

sex journal was not providing me with the release I had hoped for. Recording my early, furtive masturbatory journeys up a mountain that had rather suddenly presented itself as something to climb; the tongue dives with M.B. that had left my mouth sore in the morning because neither I nor said youth had dared venture into territories farther south; the later, daring advances by J.Q. under bras and into jeans as he pressed on despite colonial resistance, the forces of which admittedly weakened over time, had accumulated a bathetic quality I found hard to ignore. Who cares? I thought. And yet, why did the mature woman look back at the girl with such coolness, such lack of sympathy? Why did the aging persona produce only expeditions into irony? Hadn’t I sighed and heaved and longed and wept? Hadn’t I lost my virginity in a heated but deeply confused state, still unaware, despite my adventures with M.B. and J.Q., of how exactly it all worked? I remember the wooden stairs to the second floor, the bunched sheets and blankets, but no color or details. Only that there was a dim light that shone through the window and that the branches of the tree outside moved and the light moved with them. There was some pain, but no blood and no orgasm.
    *   *   *
     
    The second message read simply:
     
Looney.
Mr. Somebody.
    Although it was unsettling, I decided not to worry. These missives had a puerile ring to them, and what harm could they really do? Without an answer, the sender would tire and disappear into the nebula from which he had come. He was no more threatening than the presence behind the door—nothing but a felt absence.
    *   *   *
     
    From time to time my neighbors on the left, the parents of the diminutive Harpo who had turned up on my small lawn, quarreled loudly. The content of these disputes was mostly inaudible. What carried into my domain was anger: the screech of her voice that changed register when it cracked into sobs, and his booming tenor—both of which were occasionally punctuated by a crash. The crashes were frightening, and I found myself looking closely at the house and its residents. They were a young, pink, pudgy pair. I saw little of him. He drove off in the morning to some job in a Toyota and sometimes didn’t return for days, a young man who must have traveled here a there for work. The young woman stayed home with her Marx brother and an infant no more than six weeks old—a person in the still floppy, stunned by visual stimuli, sucking, arm and foot waving, grunting, grimacing phase of life. How I had loved that stage in my own Daisy’s path of becoming. One afternoon, while I sat outside on the rickety chaise longue that had become my reading furniture, I saw the mother through a gap in the bushes. As she held the flailing, screaming baby in her arms, she leaned over her bewigged three-year-old, deeply engaged in fierce, if controlled, negotiations about the false hair: “You can’t wear it every minute. Your head must be sweating. What about your own hair? I can hardly remember what it looks like anymore.” “It’s not sweaty! It’s not sweaty!” I put down my copy of Repetition, which I was reading for the sixth time, and wandered a few yards to offer my help.
    My intervention meant that the fright wig remained on the young head. The mother was Lola, Harpo was actually Flora, and the person in a paper diaper was Simon, with whom I had a conversation of coos, nods, and smiles I found extremely gratifying. The four of us ended up in the professors’ yard drinking lemonade, and I discovered that Lola had attended Swedenborg College as an art major, made jewelry and sold it, that her husband, Pete, worked for a company in Minneapolis, which had been steadily cutting back its workforce, a fact Lola found “kinda scary,” that he did indeed travel a lot, and that Lola was tired. She did not say she was tired, but exhaustion was written all over her soft, round twenty-six-year-old face.