Wait—there was a topic at the party. Flitting from group to group, tête to tête. Sexual harassment. The term was novel, the idea alien. A first-year Spanish concentrator had complained to the dean that Professor Alvarez—like Genevieve, conspicuously absent from the party—had used his pedagogic leverage to extract sexual favors from a nineteen-year-old student, herself. That she had complained to the authorities and involved her parents (both of them, unhappily, lawyers) was the scandal, not that she had been seduced. It cast a chill into our seraglio, where consensual sex with starstruck maidens was taken as one of the implicit perks for male instructors [see this page]. Had not the younger wives among us made their way into marriage along this same academic track? Were not the female students at eighteen as legally adult as a grizzled guru of four decades? Was not the guru’s power as giver of assignments and grades as legitimately a charm as the dewy youth of his pupil? Is not clout, in short, what men have instead of beauty? What did it mean—harassment, coercion—in the free and open erotic market where every trader must have an asset? Might not the young señorita—Lydia Biddle, to be exact, a nondescript blonde of very average appeal and ability, those who had had her in class agreed—be with equal justice accused of harassing the professor with the textures and perfumes of her fresh ripeness? We were still just emerging from an era when shrieking adolescent girls sexually assaulted rock stars right on the stage, risking electrocution amid the tangle of wires. A good fuck, one of that era’s many gurus averred, never hurt anybody. [CK who? Abbie Hoffman? Bobby Seale? Timothy Leary?] Alvarez was a rather shy, slight man, with the usual Latin mustache and a large family he had left behind in Providence, where he had been an assistant professor at Brown, accepting the promotion in status and salary but not wishing to expose his children to the perils of New Hampshire’s tax-free educational environment. No doubt he had been affected by his pupil’s pallor and very Anglo name—aristocratic Nicholas Biddle, of course, had been Jackson’s chief enemy when the President made war upon the national bank on behalf of the common man and the Western speculator. Lydia Biddle’s charges portended the end of another era, the end of the free flow of love, fertilizing the tracts between races and classes and generations, and the arrival, heralded by the legalisms of the civil-rights battle, of society’s crystallization into strident blocs, all seeking to extend their power with legal threats. Always, in America, with its emphasis on spelled-out rights, there is this final recourse to the law, which lets lawyers rule us, sucking the money from our economy like aphids draining a rose bush. Lydia’s parents intended to sue for the loss of their daughter’s virginity, if that’s what it had been. A chill, I say, moved through the party. No less an evil presence than Brent Mueller sidled up to me, saying, “Didn’t you have the Biddle girl in ‘American Beginnings’?”
“Just in the ‘Robber Barons and Trust Busters’ seminar,” I told him. Somehow, out of some craven kink in my psychology, I was grateful to have the victim of my own sexual aggression seek me out. As her husband still of sorts, he had for me the fetishistic magic of Genevieve’s used underpants. Recklessly, even though he was my mortal foe and would have deconstructed me without a pang, I confided in him: “She struck me as asexual.”
He squinted at me through a veil; always between us hung Genevieve, her body torn into its parts, sorrowful and obscene, a carcass we hyenas were snarlingly subdividing. “Nobody’s asexual,” he told me. “If Alvarez is nailed for this, it means a whole new ball game. These kids have us all over a barrel—the possibilities for blackmail! Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”
I took up his tough-guy locutions. “I’ve never thought screwing these babies was a good idea. It fucks up your teaching—it has to. Stick to your own generation, that’s where the resonance is.” This was tactless, even for me, I realized—praising his own wife’s resonance to him. Not that she or he were exactly my generation, as an occasional flatness in their emanations reminded me. The paddle wheel of ongoing history hadn’t spilled us at quite the same angle: certain national moments, like Pearl Harbor, were legend to them and memory to me; certain prophets sacred to them, like Eugene McCarthy, had met in me a sensibility already jaded; and they took for granted certain freedoms that still excited me [see this page]. I hastily backtracked. “These kids, they could be Martians, from the crap that’s in their heads.”
As I dizzily rattled on, impelled by my kink, which made me love my enemy, Brent studied me with an alert and fishy eye. “Jennifer Arthrop,” he said. “She was a Martian?”
“Never laid a finger on her,” I boasted. “As she must have told you. Unless she’s a more pathological liar than I think.”
“A very responsible and sincere girl,” he said, still watching my face with an alertness that made me wonder if my jaws were smeared with cheese-puff crumbs. “Her mother’s her only problem,” he ventured. His slant smile revealed his teeth one by one, like computer bytes emerging from the depths of an arduous number-crunching.
“Her mother?” I echoed. A pit opened up in the spot where, seconds before, my stomach had been innocently digesting a few of Madame President’s piping-hot cheese puffs, on platelets of Melba toast. Ann Arthrop: her big naked body as pale and serviceable as a thumb, her slangy careless way of speaking about her life. Not a great keeper of secrets. Truly, our lives are like the universe: nothing is lost, only transformed, in the slide toward disorder.
“You’ve met her mother, I think,” Brent insisted, his smile revealing in its left-hand corner a molar blackened by old fillings. There was a strange shiny knob of muscle at the hinge of his jaw, under his ear, like a nut that had been fleshed over.
“Briefly.”
“But affectingly, perhaps.”
That room of hers, 508, with its view of the French Fry. Its furniture, including that dim lamp with scattering ducks on its base, and the thunderously flushing john, and an oatmeal-colored wallpaper of vaguely “historical” design, arose from their tiny place of neural storage to swamp me, like a giant pair of earmuffs. He was saying things I could not hear. The muscle at the angle of his jaw, where it turns up toward the ear, kept bulging, I could see. It seemed as though his fluctuating smile was a small gray headline that one of those compulsive obligations in nightmares forced me to keep trying and trying to read. He knows, I thought, and my brain, accepting a belt of adrenaline, ran a series of lightning-fast estimates of possible damage. Great. Moderate. Non-existent. I still, aided by another vodka-and-tonic scooped from a passing silver tray, enjoyed a warm sensation of pervasive love in which Brent and I were immersed all rosily, all bloodily, like twins slithering down the birth canal.
“She seemed a pleasant enough woman,” I fended. “She was with Jennifer, fresh from a Lysistrata rehearsal last spring. We sat at a table in the SC for a second. She conveyed, Mrs., the information that at Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut she had had a more major role, in fact the major role, in the same play and suggested that she played it better.” Women against war. Women at war. “What do you think Lysistrata is signifying really?” I asked him, hoping to deflect him into his specialty. “What values is Aristophanes really endorsing, showing these women bargaining with their cunts like that? My feeling is Aristophanes was a terrible misogynist. And loved the pants off of war.”
Brent would not be deflected. “A very overpowering woman,” he prissily went on, having been acculturated to a concept of personal fields of power that to my old-fashioned sense had too tactical and schematic a sound. “Flaunts her infidelities in front of the daughter, to keep the father in his place. Even sleeps with Jennifer’s boy friends, to keep her in her place. The girl gets back the best way she can. She steals.”
“Steals?”
“Shoplifts, you know. Not from her mother’s store, that would be too directly hostile. But from other stores. Little things. And then throws them away.”
“How do you know so much?”
“She tells me. I’m her faculty adviser. She tells me whateve
r I need to know to clear away her garbage.” His unpleasant slant smile stretched to include one more molar. “That’s my shtik, Alf. To cut through the garbage. Not you. You roll around in the garbage. Speaking of Jennifer, how’s my Gen doing? How’s her ulcer?”
I stiffened with something like nineteenth-century hauteur. “Genevieve is lovely, as always. A perfect woman, as you know.”
“Nobody’s perfect.” Who else had I heard this from, within memory? “If she were perfect, she wouldn’t have let you give her an ulcer.” Brent nudged closer. “Aren’t you curious, to know what Jennifer told me lately about her mom? There was this boy—”
“No,” I told him, at last beginning to feel, through the cozy mist of metabolizing vodka, the clammy touch of true enmity. War happens. Forces compete. Death, so abstract in the graveyard and demographic charts, will truly come for you. “I’m not interested in her mom, or in Jennifer, either. Little Jen, let’s call her. First you had Big Gen, now you have Little Jen. Why ask me about Genevieve?” I asked him. “You see her. You visit the girls.”
“We don’t talk,” he told me. “We’re separated. We’re not like you and Norma, pretending nothing has happened. But maybe we should. Talk. Maybe it’s time. Yeah, I’d like to talk to Gen.”
He was trying to scare me, only this was clear. “Go ahead,” I said.
“You wouldn’t mind?”
“She’s your wife. Go ahead. Chat her up.”
“What are you two talking about?” It was Norma, come up to the two of us out of the buzzing blur of the party. She looked a little pink beneath her freckles, flushed with alcohol. Her hair in its natural kinkiness was escaping her party coiffure and giving her a bushy youthful look, even if she was my generation. She glanced from one to the other of us. “I thought I heard my name mentioned. Good evening, Brent. Hello, you.”
We chatted. How strangely charming it was to be standing with one’s estranged wife and one’s mistress’s estranged husband, all very civilized in our party clothes, in this provincial pocket of Western civilization, Northeast American branch, in a gracious brick mansion in the twilight of a lovely early-fall day, the sugar maples turning, the swamp maples turned, the oaks still holding their chlorophyll. The days and nights now were of equal length. Brent and Norma were the same height, their eyes—vermouth green, dead-fish blue—at the level of my worried, busy mouth. The pit within my stomach began to seal shut, and the work of digestion rumblingly to resume, now that Norma made our duo a trio. The effect of massing—in an airline terminal, say—is to give an illusion of safety. Surely so many casually, even clownishly, dressed prospective passengers, fussing with their baby slings and chewing on their newspapers, will not crash. Surely at a party like this the bottom cannot fall out of one’s newly renovated life. The buried escapade with ample and appetitive Ann Arthrop—it seemed quite possible, as nonchalant, know-nothing Norma joined us, that it had never happened. After all, doesn’t history demonstrate over and over how hard it is to say what actually did happen, so that even the Nazis’ fanatically documented extermination of six million Jews and Lee Harvey Oswald’s broad-daylight shooting of John F. Kennedy and (let’s not forget) Patrolman J. D. Tippitt are still seriously debated?
I forget what happened next. Brent must have slunk off, muttering Iagoesque asides. I and the deeply familiar Norma were left alone, shyly islanded in the party like a man and woman just met. She looked tousled, with a silk scarf the size of a baby blanket arranged over her shoulders, but not unhappy—adjusting, my eye was eager to conclude, to the life single, the pink flush on her cheeks a sign of thriving, a sign that soon she could stand alone at last. I must have asked her how she and her lawyer were coming, now that his summer vacation was over, for I can see her in the mists of dim recall gazing into the distance beyond my shoulder, toward the Presidential mansion’s egg-and-dart ceiling molding, and saying something like, “He keeps asking me to provide all these financial facts and figures, and I have no idea where they are, and I keep meaning to call you at your apartment, but you’re never there when I do try, and then I keep forgetting.”
I said, rather sternly, “Everything that’s not in the safe-deposit box is in the middle right-hand drawer of my old desk on the third floor. There may be a savings-bank book in one of the pigeonholes up top.”
“I think I’ve looked, and all the bank statements frightened me. Some of them should be thrown away, but which? It would be just like the tax people to want just the ones that aren’t there. And it makes me too sad, to go up there and see your old desk, that you used to be at all weekend. I don’t like the safe-deposit box, either. The last time I went into it, it actually made me cry—the children’s three birth certificates and ours all together. We both have those old-fashioned kind of birth certificates hospitals used to give you, with the little baby footprints in ink, they don’t do that any more. And our marriage license, and those life-insurance policies our parents took out for us, for a thousand dollars each, it seems like such a pathetic amount now, but I guess it wasn’t then. And stacks of the slides you used to take of my paintings, in case the house burned down. The box even smells of our place in Hanover—remember that mousy smell when we came in the front door?”
“Norma, for God’s sake, you must get organized. It’s been two fucking years since I left, and you’re mooning about baby footprints.”
“You sound just like my lawyer. Except for him it’s all time he can chalk up on his expense log. Speaking of sexual harassment, he’s invited me out to dinner.”
My stomach reclaimed its hollow spot, as if I were walking planks across high steel and had inadvertently glanced down.
“Did you accept?”
She passed the back of the hand not holding her drink across one especially stray piece of hair, with no visible effect. “Why not? He’s young and pushy and married, but those people have to eat, too.”
“You’d actually go? Out to dinner with your married lawyer? Doesn’t the invitation strike you as a bit unethical? He’s taking advantage of you.”
“Oh well,” she said, “if you’re a woman, you get used to that. Maybe, on the financial stuff, if you came back now you could show me the drawer and get me started.”
“For God’s sake, it’ll produce just the same figures my lawyer already has. All your lawyer has to do to move this thing along is get on the phone to mine. He shouldn’t be expecting you to know anything.”
“Also,” the Queen of Disorder said in her gentle, unhurried voice, “Daphne has been running a fever.”
“For how long? How high?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Two or three days. Over a hundred, depending on how you hold the thermometer in the light. I can’t get her to keep her lips closed when it’s in her mouth.”
“You must get her to the doctor!”
“I thought she was too sick to go out, and they never come to the house any more.”
“I can’t believe you’re being so neglectful!”
“And Andy put a scratch on the Volvo maybe you should look at sometime. He says ever since the accident happened the car pulls to the left. Doesn’t that mean the tires will wear unevenly?”
“When did this happen? Whose fault was it?”
“You don’t have to yell, sweetie. At that corner where the river road meets 1A and there’s a lot of traffic from the new mall. He says some blind old lady pulled out of the supermarket lot right in front of him, but I suspect he was going too fast. He drives very angrily now, now that he’s confident.”
I was nearly speechless, yet not entirely unhappy, still floating on the vodka and that cozy airport feeling the party was giving me. Her casual sideways approach to disaster felt familiar. A fresh drink, transparent and cold, had appeared in my hand. The lime slice was clinging to the rim by a clever effort, it seemed. “How long a scratch?”
Norma’s eyes, the pale green of beach glass, flicked past my face. “Not exactly a scratch,” she said. “More of a gouge. But the headlights sti
ll work, more or less. Alf, I don’t understand why you’re never in your apartment, the way you were at first, working on that book about that President whose name I keep forgetting.”
“Buchanan. I’m stuck, momentarily. I’m in the library a lot, doing more research. The first half of the nineteenth century, the bastard was all over the lot. He virtually ran the country.”
“Or at least you should be there at night, shacking up with your little bijou. Or do you two use the woods now? It’s nice, isn’t it? Like nymphs and satyrs.”
“She has her little girls to take care of,” said I stiffly. “She just can’t wander off at night like you evidently do. We’re fine. Don’t you worry about us. Genevieve is still fantastic.”
She didn’t seem to hear, and said, after a pause, “I’m sorry you’re stuck. You can have your old desk back if you want it.”
Now the Wadleighs came up to us, Ben allowing his pupil to tinkle away on automatic pilot. Wendy had cut her hair short, just like the other athletic coaches, and in her frilly yellow frock looked like a pixie in a buttercup. Couples who stay together in spite of all have a curious merriment about them, as of daredevils shooting the rapids, or of defiantly healthy alcoholics. “You two shouldn’t be talking,” Wendy said gaily, adding with shining eyes, “Alfred et ux.”