Mating (76 page)

The demonic phase was on an adrenaline continuum with my lutte finale surprise party for Nelson. It almost arranged itself. Everyone wanted to come, the extraordinary Bronwen most of all. She was on the qui vive re Nelson after picking up on all the speculation at the embassy
concerning him. That was why she’d looked up
Development as the Death of Villages.

As an infernal device the party was perfect. Once I’d started issuing invitations the die was cast. I had to go through with it, however fainthearted I got. I’m not sure now what it was I really wanted, other than to see him either alter before my eyes or be confirmed as what I was afraid he had become. Just to have him infuriated with me, in a personal way, would have been a treasure. In the beginning I tried to honor my promise to Dineo to protect him from certain unfriendly characters in the donor community. But ultimately there was no way I could. They all heard about it—Brits, Boso people, a closet Trotskyite in the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. The Libyans call their embassy the Jamahiriya, meaning nonembassy or people’s bureau or whirlwind, I forget which: two of them were coming. Apparently Qaddafi had pervertedly incorporated some anarchist tenets into his political bible, The Green Book, an act which Nelson had found extremely offensive, so perhaps those embers would have a chance to reignite. I realized the guest list was very light on anyone who might be called Denoonisant, except for lustrous Bronwen. So much the better, I thought. With Bronwen I played a complex game of self-presentation intended to lead her to think of me as someone not necessarily happily associated with this great man, someone possibly coarse, possibly uncaring toward him, someone not legally married to him, in any event. I thought so often of Grace, Grace pushing me toward Nelson. There was even a full moon the night of the party.

One thing I made sure of was the alcohol supply. There would be ample hard liquor, good brands. The cook-maid who came with the house would emerge, in her green uniform, with salvers of samoosas and drumsticks from time to time, in the style usual in top-dog socializing.

At the lutte finale I was invisible, or, more accurately, visible only at the margins, never at the center. That was for Bronwen. Nelson came out from his late nap. The forty guests erupted from behind things, shouting what they were supposed to.

Of course all of the above is really about the phonecall and the What is to be done? question. Somewhere in everything I remember lies the answer to how I should decide. At this point, oddly enough, I have the money to do whatever I decide is required. Of course a month has passed since the call, and I haven’t decided. Instead I’ve done what I do best, made an academic study of myself centering on the last two years, made myself a field of academic study with only one specialist in it. The lutte finale was about resolving doubt, I thought, but it would be exactly doubt
that could wrench me out of here one more time. The reason Achilles can never lay hands on the tortoise is the same reason a month has passed while I’ve studied the question of why I have yet to act. There is always new material to be integrated into the study of me. Each moment of thought demands multiples of moments of classification, analysis, parsing. I tried to suppress the gravamen of the phonecall, which was so interesting of me, wasn’t it?

Nelson’s conceit about god being in control of the content of life and the devil being in control of the timing is so useful, especially as applied to the question of what to do about my phonecall. Normally my slender means would have decided for me. For most of my life that would have been the case. But right now everything is working for me, and paying too. I got a TA-ship right away. The Association of American University Women chapter in San Mateo heard about me and asked me to give a little talk. But I have no slides, I said, and I’m so busy that if I do it I’ll have to have an honorarium. Gosiame! They loved it that I had no slides, that I could paint word pictures and induce people to experience Africa the way I had, viz. not as a picture-taking robot only there to reduce everything to visual documentation while the gists and piths of authentic local life evanesced unnoticed. Other clubs are burning to get me. I attacked tourism, à la Nelson Denoon: Your warriors shall be bootblacks, your potmakers shall be chambermaids, and so on. Gosiame! I was quoting Nelson up and down. He sounded fascinating. He was still known. When I left the U.S. for Africa he was probably about even with Ivan Illich on the clerisy’s fame meter. The clerisy is a word I got from Nelson which turns out to be indispensable, like others of his. Now Denoon’s probably a point or two lower than he was, but his name still resonates nicely.

You move from circle to circle. I had mystery going for me. At the faculty level I would say only a little about Nelson, on the grounds that Tsau was a sealed project, I was under an unofficial obligation not to say so much until Tsau was declared open, and so on. My exact relationship with Nelson I left vague. I dressed pretty much for the part, wearing ostrich-egg shell-chip chokers, for example. Circles interpenetrate. When word got around that Tsau was a female polity, then, voilà, feminist organizations lined up to book me. By the time they found me it was already established that I got respectable fees.

Before I could even begin to worry seriously about livelihood I was offered a halfway decent job, which I took and still have, at this moment. I am in the academic demimonde. I am an editor and manager for a
marginal publisher of doctoral dissertations languishing because they’re too specialized or because they fall outside the desiderata of the regular university presses. I am in charge of Third World and Female Area acquisitions.

Maurice, who owns this business, has money he inherited, although he has less than he started with because Gretchen, the woman he formerly lived with and who persuaded him to start this enterprise so that she could fleece it discreetly, got a good deal out of him, that way and otherwise. He’s a very dreamy man interested in the Middle Ages, so interested that one of his first injunctions to me was to keep him from unbalancing the list in that direction: I am supposed to build up the more trendward side of things and to at all costs resist his antiquarianisms. I remind him of someone, and he spends a good deal of time in his office trying to think of who it is. He has an unpublished thesis which he won’t let me see. There’s a wonderful sound system in our suite, and one of the first things I was presented with when I took the job was a memo asking me to list any favorite classical recordings I might like to have played for us. Our offices, in Belmont, are in good taste. I did produce a list of old favorite records in self-defense, after I realized how unvarying the playlist was going to be, how much plainsong and continuo I was going to have to enjoy. I need a strong woman, he likes to say. He has once or twice complimented me on my shoulders. I may have a new fallback vocation as a dominatrix, at least if the current middleclass and higher decadence continues to unfurl at the present rate. I’m in control of my hours here. This is not precisely Guilty Repose, but it resembles it.

Being in America is like being stabbed to death with a butter knife by a weakling. Brazen Head is the most popular president ever. People think I have very interesting political slants. So much is siphoned from Nelson, so how should this make me feel? I seem to be all things to all women. Feminists like me because of Tsau, socialist feminists like me because of the cooperative side of Tsau, professional women, nonsocialist feminists, like me because of the private property and incentive side of Tsau, and lesbians like me because I never go around with men. There are no men, so far. People see me as women-identified, something new, and seem to be proud of me for it. The left is prolapsed, insofar as I can judge. I can’t find an enemy in my milieu anywhere. If you have ideas that rise above Power to the people! you qualify as someone who should write a book for the Monthly Review Press.

The below is all Denoon. These are my commodities. This is what I say, with attribution, in one form or another. There are three major,
dire, world-historical processes going on that your ideologies—a word I always use in the pejorative, like my man—are not letting you pay attention to. I keep rediscovering how inadequate for analyzing the nature and depth of the impending general planetary crisis both class analysis and vulgar feminism are as exclusive filters, by the way. The main process going on could be called corporatism unbound, with the term corporatism understood to include the state corporations of the Eastern bloc, although these are turning out not to be competent variants of the main type. What is becoming sovereign in the world is not the people but the limited liability corporation, that particular invention: that’s what’s concentrating sovereign power to rape the world and overenrich the top minions who run these entities. The perfect medium for the corporation is an electoral democracy where nobody—in the mature systems—bothers to vote, parties disaggregate, labor unions decompose, corporations control who gets into parliament, accountability disappears. A second major world-historical process is the invisible war of states against nations, recognized states against nonstate tribal nations, a bitter war, bloody, one without rules, breaking out even in regions where everyone assumes the game is over: East Timor, Chittagong Hills, Roraima—there are so many sickening examples to give. Third is the destruction of nature accompanying the ascent to absolute power of the corporate system. Then I give my own emendation, a less pessimistic one, which is, slightly embarrassingly to me, seemingly the most popular. Mine is the jagged and belated but definite rise of women into positions of political authority. I take this seriously. I am embroidering a bit if I imply that Nelson ever took it as hopefully as I do, but he wanted to and was just afraid, I think, to really believe in it because of the implications of events like Margaret Thatcher monstrously sinking the Belgrano. He was afraid that the lateness of the rise of women was its own doom—not that he wasn’t trying to promote it nevertheless in his own molecular way at Tsau. So the above makes me interesting. I leave every group I speak to with at least this thought—that a true holocaust in the world is the thing we call development, which I tell them means the superimposition of market economies on traditional and unprepared third world cultures by force and fraud circa 1880 to the present, and that this has been the seedbed of the televised spectacle of famine, misery, and disease confronting us in the comfort of our homes.

They love me for it.

But back to my phonecall, because inhering in it is the cultural ghost of the whole perplex of women waiting in agony to be phoned by some
man or other. I didn’t leave Africa to come back here with the covert purpose of waiting for a phonecall that would set me dancing and playing maracas. I left to leave. In junior high we were forced to read a short story about a girl who meets a boy when she goes ice skating and who then goes home and waits in agony for days for him to call. This is a famous story by a woman named Maureen Daly, who got elevated into the very top level of women’s magazines by it. The story is called Seventeen, and I think she was sixteen when she wrote it. The story won prizes. I had a very strong reaction to it. It sank into my soul and I vowed never to be her or anything like her. I vowed this. Also—and this is something I just now realized, thanks to the phonecall that’s driving me to the edge—it has to do with why, when I could have, I didn’t go after Nelson and stop him while he was still on his horse and heading for Tikwe. I had time. And I started to, but somehow I couldn’t do it. I realize that I was very moved, but in the wrong direction, by Jean Peters running out to stop Emiliano Zapata from going someplace he was determined to go. I may be confusing two different scenes, in one of which she presses a freshly ironed shirt on him, pleadingly, or tries to. I hated her. This would never be me. I wasn’t going to be Jean Peters in
Viva Zapata
when in fact the sensibility on the horse was who I really was. That was me.

Of course when I say my phonecall I should be saying message instead, which is all I have, because I was out when my mysterious friend called. Text is literally all I have. The call came to the office, and why the call came to the office is unmysterious, because I’ve written to enough people on business stationery for this number to get into circulation. There was the money order I sent for the Enfield. There were my notes to Adelah and to Mma Isang. The receptionist thought the call was from a woman but wasn’t absolutely positive. It wasn’t a clear line. The caller’s accent wasn’t American. There was no identification given. There was no request for a return call. And there’s nothing more to be gotten out of the receptionist. She’s sick of being quizzed. What is to be done? as Lenin so aptly put it. I think I need a maxim of some kind. Nelson’s—insofar as they’re apposite to this situation—are all so uniformly nothing but wry, as in Nothing ventured nothing lost, that they don’t help me.

Why do I still regard it as surprising that he turned to her, even though I had deserted and I had thrust them together and we all know how absolute his need is for the eternal feminine when he gets into trouble, such as being stalked by lions, or a lion, to be fair. Why, just
because I had left him naked to his enemies? They were being civil enough, actually. Was it just that I’d let in so many of them? He could have called out for me, of course, something that might have made all the difference. I could have swung in like Wonder Woman and cleared the place and said everything was my mistake, the party was off. But no, he was going to be the unmoved mover. I was actually observing the proceedings, on and off, from within the draperies and other demeaning vantages. Hell is closed and all the demons are here, he liked to quote from Marlowe. I was febrile. I was thinking So this is what he wants! Not only is she beautiful and not only are there bookmarks hanging out all over from her copy of
Development as the Death of,
but she’s punctual. It was, as usual, difficult to read him, expert though I am. He was sweating lightly, more than the warmth of the room called for. He could have sent someone to find me, detach me from my duties masterminding the finger food relays. Of course at times I was outside looking at the moon. Even when it ended no one came to look for me. I could have been found. She went into our bedroom with him, conducted him. I sat in a rocking chair the rest of the night. I began cleaning up toward dawn, picking up each beer can and ashtray individually, delicately, trying not to make a sound. I thought of Grace and finding her and suggesting we move in together.