Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [137]
So I replied pretty sharply, “I wouldn’t know. One of the quaint things about the Victorian sex life was that it was private. I doubt that they replayed every hand and rehashed all their honor count and playing tricks. They didn’t have all these compulsions to verbalize, they didn’t appear to get a sexual thrill out of words. The fact is, I haven’t the slightest idea how good a lay Grandmother was. I have no idea–yes, I do too, but not from anything she said or wrote–how she looked upon fellatio and the other delights. Is that what you miss?”
I jarred her. She looked like a dog that had just for the hell of it barked at a stone dog on a lawn, and been barked back at. In spite of that bass-baritone and that air of amused assurance, she is definitely female. She might under some circumstances be submissive, like these dreary girls you see padding along in the moccasin tracks of hippies. Had she been one of those? For a few seconds I entertained the possibility.
She blinked, but within a second she had recovered the ironic widening smile and the ironic glance of the gray eye. She shrugged up her shoulders, obviously just enjoying this discussion no end. “I didn’t mean, emancipate her from all her hangups. That wouldn’t be historically sound, would it? I just meant, couldn’t you give us a little more of the scene, then we’d understand all these artificial restraints for what they are.”
“What are they?”
“What are they? Conventions. Restraints. Inhibitions. Hangups.”
“Which of course she operated by. She had them. Her society had them.”
“But you could cut through them!” Shelly said. All eager to instruct me, she sat forward. “There are hints in the letters that give her away. She tells Augusta once that ‘that incorrigible shyness has passed,’ and another time she says, ‘Between my husband and me things are all right,’ underlined. You could extrapolate from hints like that.”
“Please,” I said. “You’ve been taking courses in these jargon pseudo-sciences that my son teaches. If I extrapolated, as you suggest, the resulting sex scenes would be mine, not hers. She valued her privacy, she would never in this life have extrapolated. Neither would I. I would no more extrapolate in public than I would go to the bathroom on the parlor rug.”
That brought out her big ho ho ho. She rocked forward, her hair fell over her breast and she threw it back with that irritating gesture. She was right where she wanted to be, digging up the roots of things, exposing all the shameful shams.
“That’s what I was telling you. It’s your inhibitions that are showing, not hers. I suppose she did have them, but that’s no reason you have to, in 1970. We’ve learned to accept things, and the words for things, and be honest about the way we are. We don’t need those purely cultural patterns of convention. Did you hear what you just said? ‘Go to the bathroom.’ Why?”
“Because I never learned to say shit before a lady,” I said, thoroughly irritated. “Because I don’t believe in progress in quite the way you seem to. You believe in it more than Grandmother did. As for those purely cultural patterns of convention you think I ought to escape from, they happen to add up to civilization, and I’d rather be civilized than tribal or uncouth.”
She is not utterly insensitive. She looked at me with her head tipped to one side, and said with her mouth pulled down, “I’ve made you mad.”
“Not personally,” I said. “Just culturally.”
The way I was sitting, talking at an angle, I was aimed at Grandmother’s portrait, pensive and downcast in the cool light that flooded the wall covered with letters from people she had admired and been admired by. “Look at her picture,” I said. “What’s in that face? Hypocrisy? Dishonesty? Prudery? Timidity? Or discipline, self-control, modesty? Modesty, there’s a word 1970 can’t even conceive. Is that a woman I want to show making awkward love on a camp cot? Do