Beyond Romance

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It was the early '70s, an exciting time, and a great many women shared the excitement. We had become converts to the women's movement. When we met, all of us, in public places, coming together again and again for the pleasure of elaborating the insight and repeating the analysis, the world expanded into an extended companionateness of extraordinary dimension. This companionateness exhilarated and sustained. Coming home from a meeting I experienced my rooms as warm and welcoming, the orderliness and the quiet a pleasure and a relief, the conversation still buzzing in my head. There was no one in the room but me, and I was far from alone. I had brought home company, wonderful company, and company gave me back myself.

But the closeness was a function of the moment--that moment when feminism had felt revolutionary--and when the moment passed, the comradeliness passed with it. Then it was as though I knew a great many people, but none of them knew each other. The illusion of an integrated life evaporated. It was back to urban social life as I had known it before my marriage: fragmented and highly strung, marked by the tensions and withdrawals of intense lives and personalities, friendships that were always in and out of phase. Without domestic companionship, it startled me to see, daily connection was by no means a given.

One day I realized I was alone, not only in the apartment but in the world. If I didn't pick up that phone and make at least one call . . . And even when I did pick up the phone, the times without number when, no matter how many calls I made, everyone was occupied, no one was available. . . . The quiet pressed in on me. The apartment resonated with its own silence. The silence deepened. Solitude was now problematic.

Loneliness, when it came, came--then as now--like a surge of physical illness. It began with a pressure behind the eyes that forced a frown onto my face. In a matter of minutes I'd be struck down, sick and sweating, misery washing through my chest, fear radiating out in waves from the pit of my stomach. I'd lie down on the couch with an open book in my hands and wait for the seizure to pass. Sometimes, though, it would go on for days, especially in the warm and dreamy seasons of the year. I can recall a thousand mornings when I've awakened into the piercing sweetness of a summer day feeling as though my bed was anchored to a gray, unpeopled landscape, while just outside the window the world is bathed in a fluid element and all the people in it are splashing about, brilliant with color, in pairs and in groups.

So here I was, no longer alone and pleased to be alone, now alone and in pain. I did the obvious then: made those phone calls, went wherever I was invited, cultivated acquaintanceships indiscriminately; and shortly, if I wished, I could be out every night of the week. When mere sociability became intolerable, I'd give myself a little lecture on the former joys of solitude, urging myself to spend the evening reading as I had done so frequently throughout the years of my life. Then I'd lie down on the couch, barely getting through 50 pages in three hours, reading the same sentence three times before I absorbed its content, but on the couch all the same, toughing it out.

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