No, Madeleine’s silk underwear did not mean she was saying yes, or even wanting to be asked. Silk like cool water warming in my palm, slipping through my fingers, alive with fluid movement; a perfect pairing with the beauty it enclosed. It made no other statement than itself and held no meaning not taken on like body heat from Madeleine. No Andalusian rose to draw me down, her silken works of art were for herself.
A few years before I met Madeleine, I was an organizer for a democratic socialist fringe group. I’d been a straight-up Trotskyite during the Nixon years. Back then, dialectical materialism ordered my reality. Bourgeois relationships and sentimental attachments were decadent and reactionary. But my stridency faded with my liability for the draft, and when the Democrats got the White House in ‘76 it seemed to make more sense to go with electoral politics. I caught on with a economic democracy group led by a famous radical pol and his movie star wife. A lot more fun than being in the Spartacus League.
At the beginning of a major voter registration drive in Orange County, they threw a party for the workers. There were twenty or thirty of us at a mansion in Hacienda Heights. After a couple of drinks my fellow canvassers and I admitted to hoping the movie star would put in an appearance. As soon as Mr. Counterculture Hero arrived, his people cut the music and herded us into the biggest dining room I’d ever seen to hear him speak. In a pool of light at the end of a long, dark table, he extended his arms, palms down, and leaned forward, his receding chin almost touching the polished mahogany. He looked around at the expectant faces as if about to divulge a solemn secret, making eye contact with each one of us. He seemed to be making sure we understood that he was serious.
He began barely above a whisper. “The work you are doing is very important,” he said. “But I know most of you are here for another reason. And I want you to know that it’s okay.” A shuffle rippled through the room. The closing circle of faces angled forward. Did he really know what we were here for?
“I know that most of you are here to find someone and get laid.” Everyone in the room seemed to hiccough at the same time. A jolt of shock flashed all around and a few chuckles began, but his unmoved face silenced us as he continued. “As long as getting the job done is at least your number two concern, we’ll do just fine.”
So, the night I met Madeleine, the volunteer work at KPFA was priority number two.
We were on the phones, drumming up money from subscribers before the semi-annual pledge drive. We sat at adjoining desks for a couple of hours, giving the same scripted spiel over and over. I worked the list down from Abbot while she came up from Zymechus.
I’d tried to catch her eye when we were introduced, but she showed no interest. While we worked, she paid no attention to me. That gave me a chance to gaze without the usual pseudo-casual eye-darting men do when they are checking out a woman they suspect wouldn’t appreciate it.
I figured her to be about ten years older than me—pushing hard on forty. Her face was plain and strong, round and scrubbed a glowing pink. Cropped, shiny black hair curled in toward round, dark eyes, giving her the old-timey look of a flapper. Her face seemed sad, but settled and knowing; accepting, though with a reserve of hope so deep and quiet that it must have had its roots in faith. I didn’t know the meaning of any of this about Madeleine when I first saw it in her eyes. Much about Madeleine I only understood years later.
She continued avoiding my lingering invitation to interact, so my attention drifted back to the series of short, almost identical phone calls that were supposed to be the reason we were there. At one point I realized we were making a pitch in unison, both pausing the same few seconds for a response. ”Uh-huh,” we said together. Madeleine looked up at me and smiled. In the next moment, we were quoting the same catch line from the list of prompts, in sync and with the same inflection. “Any additional amount will help.” All too much, we started to laugh. Our hand sets hit the cradles together and she turned toward me for the first time. “One of us better change the tape,” she said, “or we’ll both be wasting our time.” Her voice sang high and warm like a kiss on the forehead.
The evening took off from there. As each of my calls ended, I would cheer her on with a smile and a nod. She began to do the same.
I hadn’t shared a bed with anyone for more than one night in over a year. My libido had subsisted on the five sisters of my right hand for the last three months. That in itself sharpened my interest in Madeleine, but she was also just my type.
She seemed like a woman who would be flattered by careful romantic attention. A little heavy by the ridiculous standards of the day, she seemed at home with her body. Bralessness was a Berkeley standard of the decade, and she seemed comfortable with it, but I assumed that, like most women, Madeleine was not satisfied with the way she looked. To me, though, she looked beautiful; big-boned, soft-fleshed, the roundness of her upper arms plumping out from the constriction of short sleeves. Her girlish breasts rounded the fabric above the high waist of the floral cotton dress that spread to her knees around generous, patient hips. She wore no wedding ring. I pegged her as an old-school feminist, ideologically suspicious of marriage, but with a commitment to being single that secretly stemmed from believing she would never find an acceptable partner.
I had dated younger versions of Madeleine before. They were so much easier to take than many of the so-called beautiful women I’d known, playing hard-to-get and militant with their boots and lipstick-butch attitudes, all the while looking for a macho stud with the right philosophical rap and a source of money.
For all their feminist rhetoric, the Movement people I knew—both women and men—still clung to a hierarchy based on beauty. I don’t know what combination of radical-chic, pop-commercial, Euro-art culture informed the aesthetic, but those who adhered to it, enforced it. A straight woman who stuck to her guns on sexual politics could end up middle-aged, single, and celibate not by choice.
I sought out women like that—like Madeleine, as I’d hoped for her to be. I was their male reflection—the unacceptable partner. I wasn’t able—and so pretended I didn’t choose—to make the grade in the competition for women: money, handsome face, toned body, self-assured and capable, yet sensitive and caring (don’t forget sensitive and caring). An average guy with sub-par looks at best, not good enough to be wanted by so-called attractive women at all—not by any woman for long—I had developed a calculating sexual desperation.
Bitter? Oh yeah. Cynical? You bet.
“Where do you work?” Madeleine asked.
We’d been walking around downtown Berkeley for an hour swapping rumors and gossip about station politics. Now we were eating falafels in a tiny shop on Telegraph Avenue.
“County Social Welfare. Adoption case worker.” The jargon drum-rolled from my mouth. It cannot be overstated what a great come-on line that was for me among women in political groups—even before it was true.
“Oh, really? MSW?”
“No, not yet. Still an intern.” I tried not to sound as deflated as I felt admitting that.
Strolling side by side, talking about other people, we’d kept a certain distance. Her eyes met mine at the right moments in the conversation, but were evasive. Now, as we spoke about ourselves across the table, she faced me with a steady, assessing gaze that challenged me with its honesty.
“So, where do you work?” I asked.
“At home,” she said.
“Okay… so… do you mean you’re a housewife?” I said to tease her.
This seemed so funny to her she belly-laughed. “No,” she said a breath or two later. The high, sweet clarity of her voice touched me again in a way I did not understand. “No way. Never been married.” She smiled at the pita bread she held in her hands as if it were an amusing book. She seemed to be waiting for me to ask the right question.
“OK, so what do you do… at home?”
“I sew.” Her pursed lips hinted at a smile like a secret, holding back a punch line.
“Oh, you’ve got a little sweatshop going.” I glanced about in mock suspicion and whispered, “INS trouble?”
“No, it’s just me. Solemente.”
I questioned with a knit brow.
“Actually, I make my own designs and sell them.”
“Wow.” I said, impressed. But by the way she sucked in a breath in around her teeth I knew there was something more. “But what kind of stuff do you do that you can make a living at it?”
“I work with silk.”
“Silk?”
“Yes, it brings a good price because, well, it’s silk—it’s hard to work with, you know—you need special machines and most people don’t know how to do it right.” Her smile widened, she took in a big breath and let go a rapid stream of words that seemed to have been pent-up. “I’ve gotten really good. I started out doing a lot of resewing for people, salvaging imports that were coming apart, but now I do my own designs, and put them together myself better than any of the commercial clothes mills, and they sell faster than I can make them—I’ve got orders months ahead, but I’m not going to sacrifice quality, or my independence for volume and more money. I don’t want to be an employer, and that keeps my prices low for the quality of the work.” She settling back in her seat, arms crossed, with a self-satisfied smile and a bit of a blush. This display of ego warmed me.
“That dress is cotton, though, right? Do you make, like, super fancy stuff that you’d never wear yourself?”
“No, well, yes, it is pretty fancy, I am wearing one of my pieces, but, you know, it’s all lingerie and underwear.” Her cheeks darkened a shade.
In the span of a breath I read her blush and knew that Madeleine wasn’t thinking of me as a colleague or a client—with whom I know she could have talked underwear without a blush for hours. “Oh. Yeah. Very cool,” I crooned.
We talked of other things for a while, pretending I wasn’t interested in Madeleine’s underwear and that she hadn’t been blushing. As we talked our eyes stopped playing contact tag and we shared a moment when our eyes met and we held them in silence for seconds that seemed like minutes. We were both startled by this and began to eat in earnest, our foreheads nearly touching as we leaned over paper plates on the tiny table between us to bite our dripping falafels.
She trusted me enough to let me walk her home. Enough to invite me in. I drew her trust along by seeing her only to the front door of the subdivided Victorian where she lived. I suggested a time and place for us to meet the next day. She trusted me enough to agree.
When we got to her flat the next night, the first thing she wanted me to see was her work.
“This is my little sweatshop,” she said, switching on a blare of work lights as I emerged from the top of the pull-down attic stairs. With a stoic crew of dress dummies and mannequins crowding around long, wide work tables piled with shining fabric, it had the appearance of a busy workshop in still-life. Only Madeleine animated this world.
She must have been used to people being dumb-struck when first seeing her attic. My mouth formed a continuous “Wow” as she intoned in a tour-guide voice the name of each strange-looking sewing machine and pointed out the finished products that adorned the mannequins: bras and panties, sleepwear, camisoles and tap pants—from the lightest pinks to the deepest purples and black. I had never imagined silk could have so many facets, like jewels.
“In the last couple of years I’ve gotten ahead enough to invest in top-of-the-line equipment and material. Now I can pretty much make anything I can design—and fast enough to make it worth the effort.” She stood before me, awaiting my reaction.
The musky scent of the silk, the intimacy of the narrow space in the dormer attic, Madeleine’s searching face, the suggestion of the silken shapes, my loneliness—all combined to induce an unexpected arousal.
“Madeleine, Madeleine, this is so…cool,” I whispered, returning her searching look.
It may have been my expression, something in my voice, or she may have noticed the erection distorting my jeans, but she ended the tour without another word. I never entered her attic again.
Over the next few weeks we spent many evenings together in her living room. The “parlor,” as she liked to call it was a curated mix of craftsman antiques and polished redwood burl. The cozy comfort of the quilt-and-pillow nest on the window seat, a velour-covered couch, and an overstuffed chair—each in its own sphere of warm lamplight—surrounded a black and gold Persian rug at the center. The shelves that hid the lath-and-plaster walls were hidden themselves by blooms of books, their spines obscured in turn by framed family black-and-whites.
We listened to old Bob Dylan records over and over—Freewheelin’, Highway 61, Blonde on Blonde—I Shall Be Released, Sweet Jane, Positively 4th Street—songs, we discovered, that had filled both of our lives. Neither of us much liked the newer stuff.
We talked politics and told our stories.
My story was of drug-induced road trips and street life. Our hero survives the post-Viet Nam collapse of phony hippie idealism and emerges as a neo-progressive, pragmatic feminist, ready to fight the good fight but no longer willing to die on the barricades. Her empathy and interest in my shaggy-dog saga heightened my interest in her.
She reeled out an epic of her father fighting in Spain with the Lincoln Brigade, of being raised in a community of card-carrying communists, of the political and personal rebuilding required of them as they came to grips with the reality of Stalinism. She told me about Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement, about trips to the south with SNCC, and of starting a commune in Sonoma, of farming and textile art. I was enthralled.
I did not speak of my calcifying cynicism, my bitterness, and the emotional dishonesty that led to my loneliness.
She did not tell the more personal stories that I imagined had led to her solitary life—of struggling with the male domination of the movement, of fights with former lovers, or of breakups.
Every evening, after the Dylan and storytelling, we sat on the couch and listened to KJAZ, getting closer in the quiet of the music.
There are times when everything happens with the first touch—when both people know from the start that the preliminaries are just building up the potential they know will explode on contact—when the car, the hall, or the kitchen floor will become the scene of urgent consummation. But I could tell that Madeleine needed me to court her.
We went from listening to snuggling within a few nights, but we never moved on to kissing. I saw in her face a reflection of the anxiety I felt. Who would take the lead? Would our intensity match, or would one of us feel embarrassed, disappointed, and guilty, the other distant, stingy, and guilty? We avoided the problem without words by giving each other massages. Using back rubs and foot massages, we danced around the edges of sex. We became intimate without a commitment beyond the massage itself, keeping an emotional distance. Both of us were excited, but neither wanted it to be obvious; I cultivated her trust, while she took care of herself by testing me.
We avoided conversation while we touched, using only our hands, moving wider and deeper, releasing the will of the muscles, the tension of fear. But each night around midnight, as we made plans for the next day and said our reserved good-byes, our faces were nearer, our pauses longer.
As Madeleine became more trusting, we shed more of our clothes for our massage sessions. Within a week we were down to our underwear. I stripped to my boxers at Madeleine’s first indication, but accepted a slower process for her—the slipping down of a cotton shoulder here, the drawing up of a silk hem there, some unbuttoning and unzipping now and then—every step taken with silent request and approval. Beneath Madeleine’s simple dresses were the camisoles and tap pants I had seen in the attic. No mannequin wore them now, and the liquid silk, black one night, red the next, tickled my eyes and the backs my hands, my palms and finger tips absorbing her warmth, and more than once by body conspired to give away the excitement I tried to conceal.
My willingness and ability to be so patient confused me. In the midst of client home visits and intake interviews I found myself yearning for our time together, planning on it as with a lover. But what was going on? We weren’t even sleeping together, and I began to think we probably never would. I had never spent this much time with a woman I desired without a sexual payoff. That’s what I had been thinking of with Madeleine at first, but my feelings changed. I found myself thinking that if we started having sex, she would soon become wise to me and discover that sex was all I wanted in the first place—all I ever aspired to in a relationship—that the rest was just a ruse.
This way of thinking about women had never troubled me before. Just trying to get laid, after all, I played the game in an ethical way, to my mind. But something about the way I felt when we were together made me want things to be different this time. So, I didn’t press the issue as I always had in the past. I’d been pressing the issue since the age of fifteen. I just thought that’s just the way men are, right? Advise and hope for consent. But now I thought somehow things could be different. Maybe Madeleine and I would work out in a way I had always thought could never be.
Early one evening Madeleine startled me at the end of the massage. Just as she seemed to be drifting into sleep, her eyes slashed and she flipped herself over on her back, nearly toppling me into the antique tea table.
“I want us to read together.” Propped on an elbow, she craned her neck to face me, eyebrows arched as with a brilliant idea.
I narrowed my eyes and tucked my chin in a question-face. Through the music and backstory chats we’d had only the What-are-you-reading, What-are-you-reading exchange—nothing more about literature. She’d mentioned a few titles and authors I’d heard of—Woolf, Lessing, Joyce—but “Hadn’t had a chance to read, yet.” I offered 1984, Lord of the Flies, and Brave New World—all I could remember from what I’d skimmed in English classes—finally asserting the practical rationalization that being a full-time student with a full-time job, I only had time for non-fiction. We hadn’t had a book-talk until that night.
Before I could respond to her declaration, she eased back and rolled her face to the side, in the direction of one of her bookshelves. “Well, you don’t have to read,” she said, then locked her eyes on me again. “But I think I want to read to you.”
She lay between my legs in a maroon camisole, eyes darting from one bookshelf to the other, browsing titles. Taking in her elegant beauty and feeling the sexual nature of our position, I lost the thread of what was being said and felt blood flow to my penis as I’d tried not to allow since our moment in the attic. Feeling it move like an independent entity and find the hem of my boxers, my voice thickened. “I’m reading you right now. Am I reading you correctly?”
Certain to have felt me, but without looking down she said, “No, we’re not ready yet,” and elbow-crab-walked out from between my legs.
The next night, the Sunday before a staff retreat in Monterey, was the last of our ease and comfort together.
She massaged me first, as I lay stretched out on the parlor rug. A blissful half-hour later, Madeleine warm with exertion, I began on her. A sheen of sweat dampened the wisps of hair on the nape of her neck and moistened my hands as I worked her back beneath her camisole. She relaxed just short of sleep.
When I moved down and began firm, kneading strokes up her thighs, she seemed to enliven, moving her legs to the rhythm of my hands. Her eyes closed as usual, cheek against the back of her hand, she raised her hips in a way she’d never had before. Her lips glistened with saliva and her nostrils widened, taking in long, slow breaths, releasing sighs like whispered wind. The sweetness of her breath reached my face, mint tea mingling with warm-body odors that enveloped us both.
Angling her hips still higher, she seemed to draw my hand toward the space between the purple silk and the ivory-pink of her skin. I became aware of the scent of her sex. I held my breath and entered. Eyes closed, the memory in my fingertips I found the edges of her vulva and the pulpit of her clitoris. With her wordless guidance I followed the motion of her body in an easy, quickening rhythm until she came with rain and tremors in my hand. Elated, I finished the massage by stroking her with the tips of my fingernails from head to foot while she drifted in and out of sleep.
At the door before I left, we kissed for the first time—a lingering kiss, parting lips, an exploration without intrusion or urgency. We spoke of where and when we would meet when I returned from Monterey on Friday, then we held each other quietly for a few last moments.
At the retreat I met Julie, the woman I would live with for the next four years. Like something from a cheap novel, we met at the reception, went from casual conversation and a couple of drinks, straight to her room, and blew off most of the retreat fucking whenever we got the chance.
I had been pacing while I told Madeleine of my misdeed. She did not speak or react in any way. She simply sat on the arm of the couch eyeing me with the same sad, knowing look I had noticed but not understood when we’d met. I still did not understand.
Then, without a word, she leapt to her feet and walked out the front door. She stopped on the stairs at the flat below. I heard a knock. At the murmur of voices, I thought for the first time of her having an emotional ally, a friend at hand. Something I did not have.
Deflated of the righteous energy of my honesty, I slumped to the floor in front of the couch. I stared at the ceiling, my mind playing a game of strategic ambivalence. I did not consider leaving. On one hand, hanging in there and allowing Madeleine to ream me before she told me she never wanted to see me again would be cleansing penance for my cheating. In fact, the more anger she showed, the sooner I would feel better about having betrayed her. In that case I would be calling Julie when I left. But I also hoped she would forgive me. After all, jealousy is a bourgeois affect—a remnant of patriarchy. As long as I came clean, we could pick up where we left off, right?
Madeleine was gone long enough for me to slide into a dreamless sleep. Into the blank of my mind as I awakened, the old self-loathing oozed like puss from an infection. I was just reorganizing my defensive rationalizations when Madeleine returned.
“I wasn’t at the station that night to meet someone. You were an accident.” She said, standing over me, speaking in a matter-of-fact voice that belied her puffy, red eyes. She was not about to show me any tears.
I started to get up, relieved at my imminent dismissal. She thrust her hand out above my forehead in a gesture like a shove and I fell back against the couch. “Stay there. I’m going to read you something before you go.” She turned and went down the hall to her bedroom—a room she had never invited me into, and one that I would never see.
I’d heard of it long before I ever knew what it was. I knew of it as something for the record books—like antidisestablishmentarianism; a curio, a road side attraction, World’s Longest. At thirteen I thought Ulysses was The Odyssey. I imagined Kirk Douglas battling the Cyclops in a movie I’d seen on television. Joyce was an older girl who lived down the block. Even that last night in Madeleine’s flat I was ignorant of Leopold and Molly Bloom, and Stephen Daedalus.
Madeleine stood above me with a small book, thick as a Bible. On its dark green cover I could see no writing. She held it just below her breasts with two hands, like a prayerbook, elbows at her sides. She began reading in a practiced voice somewhere near the end, a place at which the book fell open out of habit.
“…well I suppose he won’t find many like me where softly sighs of love the light guitar…” she began. I did not know what I was hearing, but her surging, releasing tone enveloped me.
“… or if the woman was going her rounds with the watercress and something nice and tasty…” Now Madeleine was the one pacing the room as the rhythm of the words expanded to rolling waves sustained through a series of images that overlapped and interwove until they seemed to enter me and mingle with my own memories.
In a dream without time, Madeleine’s voice drew me through a cascade of overlapping déjà vus. “…first I must clean the keys of the piano with milk…”
Scenes and feelings from my past surfaced and receded, riding the power of the unfolding tapestry that filled the room. “…and all the kinds of splendid fruits all coming in lovely and fresh…” I was stealing from my brother, vandalizing a school room, raiding my mother’s purse.
“…I don’t care what anybody says itd be much better for the world to be governed by the women in it you wouldnt see women going and killing one another and slaughtering…”
A montage of previous transgressions—moments of decision, error, buried shame streamed by like a highlight reel of moral bloopers, each one familiar and accompanied by its own echoing excuses and compensating lies.
“…and the sea, the sea, crimson, sometimes like fire, and the glorious sunsets, and the fig trees in the alameda gardens, yes…” Madeleine’s energy rose, filling the room above and all around me.
“…and all the queer little streets, and pink and blue and yellow houses…” I began to see images of our brief time together. But they were immediately intruded upon by memories of every girl or woman I ever pushed, prodded, or pressured into compromise. I was the older boy, despoiling freshman girls, supplying the liquor, feigning love for the night, “…where I was a child of the mountains, yes…” a room full of sleeping bags, “…when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used…” ignoring the protests of a girl who had trusted me, “…and how she kissed me under the Moorish wall…” slipping into her bag, hearing her whisper no, into my ear and not caring as I came on her leg in spite of her whimpering pleas, “ …and I thought, well, as well him as another…” feeling the sickness in my stomach that would overtake my life, only after rolling off and turning my back to her quiet sobs in the dark.
“…and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again, yes…” Curled up on the kitchen floor, in front of the sink, I recognized the sound of a bird calling from far away as my own convulsive keening. As my eyes began to see again, Madeleine was leaning over me, close to my snotty face. With a low, measured voice, the open book now pressed against her chest, she delivered the final tide of text, “…and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume, yes, and his heart was going like mad, and yes, I said, yes, I will, yes.”
I saw Madeleine walking toward me on the street the other day. I hid as from a vengeful enemy, though I know she isn’t the kind of person who ever hated anyone. Through the years I don’t believe she’s given me more than a passing thought. But I’d thought of her every day as I struggled—rededicating myself to my work, to the families and the children, to being a good partner to Julie, and reading, reading, reading—to overcome the things she helped me see were true about myself.
Seeing her again was as if I’d seen my light come shining.
I watched through a café window as she passed with two men and a woman. They could have all been single, or any configuration of couples. I couldn’t tell and I’ll never know. She strolled by a few feet away in a vintage summer dress that made the sidewalk glow. The man behind her spoke into her ear. She stopped and belly-laughed, hands on hips, mouth open to the sky. They embraced and were gone. Gratitude swelled within me like laughter. Then something else stilled my heart and drew my breath—something that I now believe was grace.