As I drove Pat to the airport the next day she called me selfish and inconsiderate, a real egotist. I sought pleasure for my own ends and hadn’t included her. I couldn’t hear a word she was saying; I justified my sex with Tove as natural and said I couldn’t help it if I were turned on to only one person at a time. But I hadn’t let myself go, let myself be free to love two at the same time; I had reverted to the old and familiar habit of the subject-object sentence pattern, life pattern. You could diagram it, the patterned behavior, it was so simple. I hadn’t expanded my life form one bit by excluding her. I was an isolate, an egoist, and for me, life did center around my needs. I had never lived any other way. Was I capable of change?
She sat in the passenger seat with her head staring directly into my face which was concentrated on driving.
“I think you are very selfish,” she reiterated; her red head and her tight red face made me see she was very serious. “I feel like you and Tove were using me so you could get it on,” her lips were drawn together and cracking with pressure. “I don’t want anything to do with you anymore.” Her face was impossible.
Pat and I failed to work it out, and although she promised me a second chance over a Bloody Mary in the airport cocktail lounge before she left, we never got it on again. The next time I saw her was at the Lesbian Conference in Los Angeles. We started out on rather bad terms; she had promised to put two of my paintings in the art show, and I had given her the dimensions so she could save space. She didn’t save any space for them or me, and I wondered then if this was a petty way of getting back at me. For sure I was angry, for I had gone to some trouble to transport two canvases down in the backseat of my car. Given the chance, one of them would have been the scandal of the show, if art can be a scandal in the lesbian community. When I saw Pat at the bar in Hollywood and suggested we get together again she said she would think it over, then told me fifteen minutes later that she’d rather not.
I WAS SEXIST. THERE WAS NO ANSWERING BUT YES TO that charge. The second night in the new house with Tove I left her sleeping in the living room and went to the “therapy room to smoke a joint, watch a late night TV show, and talk Spanish, generally getting it on with an attractive Costa Rican woman, a psychologist from Illinois, a woman of extra-sensory perception, a distraught and brilliant woman. Patience is the only person I know who can stay in a bad situation and let it remain just as bad for the longest time.
“Yo quiero ir a Costa Rica y generalmente, La America Central.”
“Está muy bonita; hay muchas montañas y la compaña es verde. En verano hay lluvias pequeñas pero muy fuerte. Visité hace dos años mi casa. Mi madre es muy seductiva. Es mala por mí, she spoke in rapid Spanish and I was just able to catch the gist of it.
She was sitting across from me with her legs stretched out on the wooden PG&E spool that yet again served as another lesbian kitchen table. I felt our closeness had already been established, yet she was holding back somewhere and for some reason, that way people do who are slow to warm.
“You know there is a certain point past which I will not go,” she said, “and furthermore, I think there is something in your head that isn’t in mine. Would you tell me what you have been thinking but not saying?” she asked with a smirk.
My confessionary self would not hold back in response to the therapist. Although she said later she did not want to be my therapist, but my friend, I doubted that she could separate one part of her life from another.
“I was thinking about how attracted I am to you, how fresh and enthusiastic I feel, how passionate, how I am feeling like making love to you,” I told her directly, at the same time heading toward the door. That ambivalence of words and action was to become the center of the relationship that developed between Patience and myself.
The next night we went to a quiet bar. I held her hand and looked intently at her across our drinks. I confided. Her face was impassive, and though she held my hand, it was with clearly drawn distance. That night as we entered our house I told her of the fire she started in me, and what a difficult time I had sleeping as I was awake for hours thinking of her.
“You can’t push a river,” she responded. I wondered, did that mean her flow was intense and we would arrive at the source together? Did that mean she was sluggish like the Missouri and would take a long time coming? I thought of hydraulic dams and the massing of power; I thought of the dynamo and the virgin. Finally, I understood. This feminine consciousness was one of flow, and my eager attempt to rush things was out of place.
A week later while I was preparing dinner for the four of us in the house she came into the kitchen, leaned back against the stove, and asked how I was.
“As good as one can be who is frustrated.”
Her manner was serious, as though she’d been thinking of changes.
“I have decided we should sleep together. That is best. So now you can stop being frustrated and know that the next time there is a chance we will take advantage of it.” She said it to me as though she was conducting a business meeting.
I was dumbfounded. Just like that! Rationality and planning in matters of love had not been my forte, but I accepted answering her cool, brash manner with my own.
“Fine, I’m glad to hear about it, and you can count on it that I will be ready.”
I don’t know exactly when it was after that, but we were in bed shortly. The moon was full and beaming through her window. She lay on my breasts supported by one arm and stared and stared at me. We would kiss and touch and then she would look at me again. That went on all night without our total involvement. Her moonlit face appeared and reappeared during my school day, in the middle of a speech I was making in a seminar, or while I was walking across campus. The face was ashen grey and serious. The eyes were questioning. The dark hair framed an oval face of immense complexity and insecurity. The faint mustache on her upper lip echoed a trace of the intent dark brows. What any of her looks meant I didn’t know, and was too frightened to ask. Frightened because this relationship was so tenuous and dependent on her will that I couldn’t move in any direction.
One night, in the midst of an embrace, I thought I heard her say, “Move away.” I did.
“Why did you move away?” she asked.
“Because you asked me to.”
At this she broke out laughing, as was her way. I was a source of amusement to her with my blundering.
“You’re crazy,” she laughed.
“I am not. I heard you say it,” I proclaimed, wondering whether I had or not.
“You’re projecting,” I tried.
She only laughed harder, convinced that I was the loonier of us.
After that, although Patience and I slept together several times, we never got it on. I was confused by the attraction-rejection syndrome I continually reenacted with her. She had hurt me once by admitting to not wanting to go with me to a show, and I had foolishly wanted her company enough not to leave the spoiled child home. We were on our way, of all things, to see male-made, heterosexual rapist pornography in the form of a movie that I was to criticize in a public panel. By the time we were seated in the audience made up of well-suited business-type men, Patience had forgotten that she hadn’t wanted to come. She made gross and apt comments in my ear on content and meaning and reason, telling me she could not get it on with a man for the next five years because of this movie. I was stifling laughter and trying to write down her comments as fast as I could in the dark theater. When the final, slow-motion ejaculation came on in great flinging wonder we were both nearly sick. A woman’s mouth lay horizontal in the screen eager for the catch. Gag. What a place to take a ladyfriend.
A strange thing, the attraction between us. It did not exist genitally. We didn’t trust each other enough to give ourselves the freedom to relax and let go in a sexual relationship. It was doomed to constriction, although we made half-hearted attempts at loving. I eventually moved out of the house, which was becoming a bad dream for me. Patience made me promise I would keep in touch by phone,