Crossings Read Online Free PDF Page B

his
friend
! He defended him for years. He stood up for him!’
    â€˜You’re a terrible nepotist, Carla,’ I say, trying to make a joke.
    â€˜I don’t care! I’m loyal to my friends! I love my friends. I’m going to destroy the bastard!’
    â€˜But what has he …’
    â€˜Oh Vicky,’ says Linda, smiling at me. ‘Don’t try to be logical.’
    â€˜You’re so cerebral,’ says Judy.
    â€˜But you’ve read William James.’
    â€˜What’s William James got to do with Kate Millett?’
    â€˜No, I mean
The Varieties
.’ I feel horribly embarrassed for Judy, an honours graduate in philosophy, up for promotion to assistant professor. ‘You know, you can’t invalidate St. Theresa’s vision just because she imagines St. Michael or who­ever doing it to her with a great ruddy sword.’
    â€˜But Kate Millett is a bisexual!’ says Judy again. ‘It said so in
Time. She
said so. You can’t take a woman like that seriously. I mean, here she is, explaining
my
nature to me and she’s a bisexual.’
    I feel such anger that I do say it after all: ‘That’s an
ad hominem
,’ grinding it out, smiling fiercely, expecting her to drop dead with shame.
    â€˜So I’m illogical. I don’t care. That’s just part of my feminine nature.’
    Linda’s husband, the turd poet, says: ‘You know your trouble? As a writer? You know where you go wrong? You’re a rationalist.’
    Â 
    â€˜WE SHOULD SIMPLY PLEDGE ourselves to each other at the top of a mountain,’ says Ben. The wedding has cost forty dollars and he is put out about this. We should have gone, simply, to the top of a mountain and pledged ourselves to live honourably together: I pledge to allow him/her to pursue self-actualization (but this can’t be; this is from Maslow); I pledge never to become dependent, emotionally or financially, upon him/her; I pledge never to have children.
    We did go later, that summer, to the top of Mount Rundle. On the shale near the top, Ben froze, clinging to the rock. ‘I can’t,’ he says, between clenched teeth. ‘I can’t move.’
    I go on, leaving him there. I am afraid too, but I am more afraid of being afraid. I go on and I come to the rim. I cling there, peer­ing over the edge, a mile below to the forest and the river. Through the bright clear air I fall, lazily, turning over and over slowly, down to the diamond river and the velvet forest. The wind tears at me, and I cling to the rock. This is only the lower cairn. Up above me is the real cairn. Really to have made it, I must go up there. But I am afraid, and, behind me, below me, Ben has his eyes closed. We do not get to the topmost cairn. We do not pledge ourselves to anything. I go back, pry his fingers loose, help him down.
    No. I do say something. Yes. I don’t want to remember. Yes. I call back to him from the edge: ‘It’s only twenty feet!’ Willing him to come. Shooting back down the shale the force of my will. ‘Come on, Ben. It’s only twenty feet. You can’t give up
now.
’
    I wanted him so much the day of my wedding.
    I was eighteen and a virgin. Ben was twenty-eight. Ten years older than I to the day. And a virgin.
    Seven years later, Ben said, his voice shaking with indignation, ‘But you
agreed.
You
agreed
not to have children.’
    And he took his sketches and tore them across. Throwing the thick creamy paper into the fireplace. The worst thing he could do. All his work. All those months. And on top of the paper he poured out his glass of tequila.
    â€˜But if you wanted a baby,’ said Edna later, ‘why didn’t you just trick him?’
    I wanted to ask how, but I said, lofty, ethical, disdainful of women who cheated and lied, who manipulated men, women without dignity, lives without honour, ‘I couldn’t trick Ben. I’ve never lied to