COWBOYS ARE MY WEAKNESS
by
Pam Houston
W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.
Paper, 171 pages
ISBN 0-393-32635-7
If the complex web between men and women is more yin-yang than anything else, it would be difficult find a more telling study of this than in Pam Houston’s Cowboys Are My Weakness. How such a Western subject has anything to do with Chinese philosophy could be questioned, and the words in these stories won’t state any direct connection. But what you will find is the masculine drawn to the feminine, the feminine drawn to the masculine, and how a women finds more than attraction in the risks and dangers inherent in a man’s world fueled by testosterone—as in Selway, the story of running rapids during the spring runoff at high-water. There a widow tells the woman that if she didn’t have to fight for a man, she would never know he was hers.
She said the wild ones were the
only ones worth having and that I had to let him do whatever it took to keep
him wild. She said I wouldn’t love him
if he ever gave in, and the harder I looked at my life, the more I saw a series
of men—wild in their own way—who thought because I said I wanted security and
commitment, I did. Sometimes it seems
this simple: I tamed them and made them
dull as fence posts and left each one for someone wilder than the last. Jack is the wildest so far, and the hardest,
and even though I’ve been proposed to sixteen times, five times by men I’ve
never made love to, I want him all to myself and at home more than I’ve ever
wanted anything.
While the narrator may seek what is wild and dangerous more than most, there is something true in what she says, something true in what she seeks, and something even more true about what she can’t have or understand, and also what a man can’t understand.
I knew I was crazy to take a boat through that rapid and I knew I’d do
it anyway but I didn’t any longer know why.
Jack said I had to do it for myself to make it worth anything, and at
first I thought I was there because I loved danger, but sitting on the rock I
knew I was there because I loved Jack.
And maybe I went because his old girlfriends wouldn’t, and maybe I went
because I wanted him for mine, and maybe it didn’t matter at all whY I went
because doing it for me and doing it for him amounted, finally, to exactly the
same thing. And even though I knew in my
head there’s nothing a man can do that a woman can’t, I also knew in my heart
we can’t help doing it for different reasons.
And just like a man will never understand exactly how a woman feels when
she has a baby, or an orgasm, or the reasons why she’ll fight so hard to be
loved, a woman can’t know in what way a man satisfies himself, what question he
answers for himself, when he looks right at death.
When the rapids flip their boat, nearly killing them, and Jack must go back into the river to get the boat while she watches him risk his life to do it, she realizes one more thing:
I realized then that more than any other reason for being on that trip,
I was there because I thought I could take care of him, and maybe there’s
something women want to protect after all.
And maybe Jack’s old girlfriends were trying to protect him by making
him stay home, and maybe I thought I could if I was there, but as he dropped
out of sight and into the water I knew there’s always be places he’d go that I
couldn’t, and that I’d have to let him go, just like the widow said.
All this seems to boil down to what another woman dreams in the story Symphony—that a man becomes a wolf with tufts of hair across his back and shoulders. And as much as a woman seeks masculinity of a man, and a man seeks the femininity of a woman, a man remains a man, often incapable of understanding what a woman needs, and woman remains a woman, often not comprehending why a man must take risks. This is the frustration In My Next Life where the narrator wonders if some women don’t “wake up tired of trying to bridge the unbridgeable gap” between men and women, wanting to be held by another woman, someone who knows what it means to be held.
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