The Three Sisters (5 page)

She barely escaped college life single. Being security-conscious, she almost got married to one Tom Berrian, an up-and-coming English major who was destined for the halls of academia. She broke off the engagement when she realized what a mistake such a stifling marriage would have been, but if you ask me, she just wasn’t ready to accept
the responsibilities.

Theodora graduated honorably with a degree in history, but forced to work for a living outside of academia, she found few employers were interested in the impact of the Reformation on French literature. Her parents were Catholic and since Theodora knew a number of liberal-minded nuns, she decided to go into a convent. I would joke with her and tell her that since she had studied the past, she had decided she might as well live in it, but she would just respond that I missed the point. Without the prospect of a decent job before her, with selfless dedication, Theodora enlisted in the Church as a Consoler for Christ to serve
the poor.

Theodora did her time at the angel factory and eventually got her assignment: she was to work with a couple of other nuns helping people in Appalachia. To me, that would have been as depressing as being banished to Siberia, but she actually looked forward to it.

Poor little Theodora, the real world proved to be completely different from reading about it in books or listening to others tell her how wonderful it was to do good unto others. Her early fervency for helping others soon wore thin and after putting up with the underprivileged for a year or so, Theodora grew cynical about her mission in life. She became pessimistic and dejected. Four years of academia, two more years in a convent, and then a year in Appalachia had suffocated her imagination completely. She had become a confirmed pessimist and was too downtrodden to even have the guts to leave
her post.

I still wonder what her life would have been like if we had never chanced upon one another, but the important thing is that we did. On the day we met, one of Theodora’s tires had blown out and she was stuck on the road five miles from nowhere. Larry and I stopped to help, and while Larry changed the tire, she and I talked in our car.

I realized that I had met another poor victim of the Catholic Church, and it was my duty to save her. Seizing my chance, I talked her into quitting her calling (no mean task under the circumstances) and to join me in my travels across America. While Larry was changing the tire, Theodora and I drove off in his car, leaving hers
for him.

At this point, I think I was more qualified to turn into a character in a Russian novel than Theodora. I had been kicked out of college, left home and had no desire to return, had made the mistake of going into the convent, and then met someone whom I thought I had loved, but who turned out to just be another man who wanted to control me. It was so unfortunate. I had had such high hopes for Larry and me, but my intuition told me it wouldn’t have worked out. Maybe it was best that Theodora was such a sad sack at that point in time because it made me be as bright as a penny to cheer her up.

God, that first month with Theodora was murder. She was an impossible case to crack because we were two completely different people. I had to use every trick in the book to show her how to enjoy life, to convince her to rebel against her past, and even to do what was evil in the sight of the Lord. Sometimes I was ready to give her up for lost, but before long I saw a change gradually coming over her, and I knew there was hope. After two months, I had another convert. It was just like the good old days back in college.

It took time for Theodora to get over her depressing experiences in Appalachia; she fell into her clichéd artistic depressions with unforgivable regularity. Immediately I’d have to snap her out of it by providing cynical observations designed to leave her in paroxysms of laughter. All those times I spent in Catholic School cracking up the kiddies paid off. “K’s corrupting conversations cured me,” she admitted to others whom we met.

In the meantime we got to know each other’s every idiosyncrasy, and we became inseparable. We learned a lot from each other. She influenced me and imparted her Slonimskian love of polysyllabic English, and even got me to see the subtle delights of Shakespeare and other classic authors. She got me to enjoy Bach, especially pieces like the
Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue
, or Liszt, though I still preferred the modern masters to the
content classics.

Together Theodora and I had the time of our lives. We went back to New England and lived against the grain in a couple college towns for a while, where we could be with others who shared our passions. We always tried to make sure the boys didn’t get too serious. There were some we really could have gone for, but they rarely understood how important it was to us to be free.

During our stay in Massachusetts, we initiated a rite which we still practice today, the platonic orgy, in which the finest in intellectual discussion is mixed with every kind of licentiousness known to womankind. Members of eighteenth-century French salons would have paid a million livres to attend one of them. Once our current boyfriends were wore out from that evening’s exilient exercises and were fast asleep, Theodora and I could keep our conversations going until dawn with our latest witticisms. This is one reason why Theodora and I always felt closer to each other than any of the men we met both then and now. Our “in jokes” fed off each other, and the men in our lives just couldn’t
keep up.

With Theodora cured of her past, life was more fun than a barrel full of midget priests. We got into arguments on any and every subject, and after her intellectual conformity subsided, she and I disagreed frequently. We would argue for hours, taking every side of the question at hand and never resolve our differences, but then that would have ruined everything.

As we talked before and after our saturnalia, our conversations turned more and more to the most unnatural considerations of the ideas of our mentors, so that cynical analysis superseded scientific analysis. If only we had met some men who could have matched our wit and sexual appetites, we would have at last attained nirvana. We did find a few potential candidates, but they inevitably disappointed us. I soon realized our hope to meet our perfect foils might
never be.

Before long, Theodora’s depressions became less frequent, and our exchanges continued apace. Boschian evenings became the order of the day and life became an unbroken sequence of sexual experimentation and mental creation. God’s finest heaven couldn’t have pleased us more. Our conversations bounced from one subject to another as I made furtive attempts to completely destroy each field of
study’s credibility.

Theodora would usually try to fight back my attacks on everyone else’s ideas with her persistent rationalizations (as would our male companions), but most of the time my cynicism triumphed and left Theodora flustered. We hit every subject from Archaeology to Zoology and all in between. An agnostic is just an atheist who doesn’t have any balls, and I extended my cynicism to every field we discussed. At any given platonic orgy, our conversations were degenerate enough to wipe out a whole university of professors and their pisteological apostles with heart attacks shocked by the way we treated their sacred field
of study.

Shakespeare was Theodora’s favorite playwright, and she persisted in requesting that we visit the Folger Shakespeare Library. Eventually, I agreed to go to Washington, D.C., with her. A fellow participant at one of our platonic orgies had suggested that we visit Victor Virga while we were in D.C. because he was looking for people like us who would work at his new place of business. Until then capitalism had failed to recognize my unique talents, and consequently, I had been forced to live a less than luxurious life. I wanted the life of a poor, suffering artist to be a cliché, not
a reality.

Victor had just opened up the Kennedy Center for the Performing Parts a few months before, and he was having only moderate success. Victor had held numerous jobs with various companies before then, but had rarely stayed with one for more than a few years because he didn’t follow the rules like he should have. Verily, here was a man after my own heart. He had gotten tired of working for others and this time was running his own business. Victor’s forté was in being able to sniff out a market, create a product or service, and provide that famous American managerial know-how to turn a profit.

He knew plenty of people from the upper crusts of society, one happy consequence of going to the right schools, and of getting fired too many times, and he was determined to use this knowledge to his advantage. Victor was corporate handsome, not model handsome, and was slim, both because he kept in shape and because he was constantly, frenetically moving around. He was headstrong with a temper, something I could easily identify with. When he was angry, he could launch into a tolutiloquent tirade that would tax anyone’s tolerance of him. He seemed to edit words out of his sentences so as not to waste time. Like the Russians, he found definite and indefinite articles to be a waste of time and rarely used them, but other than that, this capitalist had little in common with his communistic counterparts.

Some people thought Victor worshipped Mammon as others worshipped Christ, but to Victor money was just a way of keeping score. He thrived on the whole process of competition and the creative destruction that drove it. Victor knew where to build, whom to hire, how to lure the elites in, and what the elites
really wanted.

Victor’s inspiration for the Kennedy Center came from one of his visits to the Bohemian Grove in upstate California which he had been invited to through his contacts in the government and in the motion picture industry. His idea was to create a year-round Bohemian Grove, though with women available, where the elites could gather. “Great nations of past had cultured
demi-mondes
for the rich—Japan, France, Rome. Sign of high cultural achievement. Why shouldn’t we?” Victor asked Theodora and me.

To get ideas for my artistic creations, I asked myself, what did Washingtonians want from life? Why were they in the nation’s capital? What services could we provide that would draw them in like lemmings? A visitor only has to be in Washington for a few minutes and see the marble and stone Cathedrals of Government Power that the politolatrous Bureaucrats built to themselves to realize that most of Washington’s automatons probably think God is just another taxpayer to serve them. It was quite obvious to me why there was no official Patron Saint of
Government Workers.

After spending a month in the capital, the answer to my Marketing
101
questions seemed obvious. Washingtonians are a bunch of cultured, egotistical, lumpen-elitist snobs who live in their own dream world completely divorced from the rest of the country. Everything they do had to show that they The Bureaucrats are superior to the poor miserable souls in the rest of the country who only exist to pay for their masters’ existence. To ensure this, the government provides cultural events galore for its workers. One need only visit the city and see all the galleries, theaters, orchestras, ballets, and other centers of artistic creation, happily supported by government grants, to discover how true
this is.

What is the essential nature of a Washingtonian? (God, I’m beginning to sound like Aquinas). Whether they are politicians, members of the military, businessmen, foreign diplomats, reporters or lobbyists, Washingtonians want power. They want to be at the center of action where they can control and manipulate their chosen area of
political interference

The Kennedy Center was created as a mollitious Mecca for millionaires and politicians where all their dreams could come true. We created an ersatz cultural milieu at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Parts so visitors could escape their dull bureaucratic lives and the pressures of daily power plays to live in the aristocratic world they knew they deserved. Who in Washington wouldn’t want to bethink themselves a member of royalty served by artists who could provide mental and sexual stimulation? Money created a world of fantasy that had never existed, but which the customers wanted to believe in. Thus the Kennedy Center, which never received any money from the National Endowment for the Arts, took on those inveterate values of good taste, elegance, and culture that were the secrets of
its success.

The officials and bureaucrats in Washington wanted to change the world, and I wanted to change them. At last I had the forum I needed to convert Washington to my
Weltanshauung
. As I saw it, in America, there was a revolving door of power between Washington, Wall Street and the Ivy League academics. Influence one and you influence
them all.

Because our ideas for the Kennedy Center were successful, Victor let Theodora and me do what we wanted. He knew that if I didn’t have my freedom, I wouldn’t produce. Not that he and I never had our differences, and I have yet to figure out which one of us is more stubborn, but we usually managed to work things out.

Rarely have Victor and I completely agreed on a project, but with him holding the purse he had an unfair advantage in any of our disagreements. On more than one occasion, I quit or he fired me, though Theodora stepped in the breech and resolved our differences. Like two warring Siamese Twins, Victor and I managed to get things done, despite wanting to move in opposite directions much of
the time.

I would try to sneak some avant-garde play or music into one of my productions, but too often Victor would water it down or refuse, and instead choose one of Theodora’s classical or some popular culture ideas for the presentation, supposedly because the audience wouldn’t like my “weird” tastes. My influence also came in making changes in projects others had originated, or in getting my own projects started. True, I didn’t always get my way, but this was work that left me more freedom than any other job would have. I was busier than a one-armed paperhanger, and I loved every minute
of it.