‘Why to see how well the computer can project, can predict. And to see how well we understand its uses.’
‘The opposite of the ends justify the means,’ she interrupted as he tried to talk further.
‘Pardon?’
‘The means is all. You have no end. You’re just playing with a big toy.’
‘Mira, this is serious stuff.’ His irritation was controlled.
Mira was grateful when Val came barging in, red-faced and pounding her chest. ‘At my age, at my weight, with three packs a day down my lungs, I should put away childish things!’ she announced, reaching into the refrigerator.
Avery, a sweet, soft-faced young man, slipped into the room and stood enthralled by a stack of cans of soup on a kitchen counter.
‘Admiring homemade pop art?’ Val intruded.
‘The configuration is … interesting.’ There were five cans on the bottom row, three on the next, and one on top.
‘Do you think Warhol could learn something?’
‘No, but maybe I can penetrate into the deep, mystic heart of things.’
‘You’re teaching Conrad,’ Mira concluded.
‘No. Mailer. Why Are We in Vietnam?’
‘Do you seem to hear a thunderous cry from inside those cans?’
‘Absolutely. “Fulfill my will! Go eat this swill!”’
People drifted into the kitchen. Harley and a strange bearded man came for beers. They stood there for a time talking. Mira listened to them, but she already knew better than to try to talk to Harley. He was probably as brilliant as Kyla said, and he was handsome in what Val called a ‘Swiss Alps Nazi’ way, tall, blond, severe, and usually wearing a ski sweater. But Harley could only talk about physics. He simply had no other conversation. He was interesting as long as he was explaining things that had some meaning to his audience, but like Duke he was essentially a monologuist, he would carry any talk far past his audience’s limits. He could not talk about the weather, or food, or movies, or people. He fell silent when others did. She listened, then, to see what kind of conversation he was carrying on with the stranger. He looked over at her.
‘Oh, hello, Mira. This is Don Evans. He’s from Princeton, here on a visit. We met last time I was out at Aspen.’
‘A physicist too, I take it,’ she smiled at him.
He smiled abstractly back, then turned again to Harley. He was talking. Suddenly Harley interrupted him and corrected something. He backtracked, explained, continued. Harley interrupted and spoke. This went on. It was not dialogue, it was one-upmanship. They were not talking to reach some common ground of experience or to find some limited truth, but to show off. It was two monologues carried on simultaneously. Disgusted, Mira turned away. Duke, still standing by the refrigerator, put something into the conversation. The two stopped, looked at him, then Harley said, ‘Let’s go into the bedroom, it’s quieter,’ and the three left.
The kitchen had become crowded. Clarissa and Kyla were talking to the gypsy. Mira approached them. They introduced her as Grete.
‘Yes, I saw you dancing with Howard Perkins,’ Mira smiled.
Grete made a face. ‘He follows me everywhere.’
‘Poor Howard,’ Kyla said. ‘Somebody ought to be kind to him. I’m going to be kind to him!’ she announced, and left the room.
Grete rolled her eyes. ‘I don’t think she knows what she’s in for.’
They talked about studying for generals, a subject of consuming interest to those presently studying for them. Mira noticed that none of the young women in the room wore bras. It seemed to be the new style, but she found it a little raw. You could actually see the outline of some of their breasts.
Clarissa was talking very soberly. ‘I mean it’s interesting, I enjoy literature, but sometimes it seems frivolous to be doing something like this when all around us things are in chaos, when you think you could do something that would help, something to advance change in the right direction, instead of leaving it to those who care only about power.’
‘I don’t think you can,’ Grete said. She had quick, penetrating eyes. ‘Nothing changes except styles.’
‘But styles are significant,’ Mira said. ‘They mean something. I have a stack of white gloves in my bottom drawer that are slowly turning yellow.’
‘And what does that mean?’ Grete asked.
‘Well – things are easier, more casual. We aren’t so much out to impress each other.’
‘I think we are just as eager to impress, but we have different ways of doing it,’ Grete argued.
Val came up behind them. ‘My God, things never change. The men are in one room planning the future of the world, and the women are in the other talking about styles.’
Clarissa laughed. ‘What men?’
‘Your husband for one. And Harley, and that guy from Princeton. They’re talking about computerized techniques for predicting the fate of the country. All of them want to be part of a think tank to plan the future of America. God save us from that!’
They all laughed, even Clarissa. Mira wondered what she thought of her husband. He seemed so different from her. ‘It would be a world of facts,’ Clarissa said smiling. ‘That’s all Duke knows.’
‘How did he get that name?’
Clarissa tilted her head confidentially. ‘He was christened Marmaduke, but that’s a deep, dark secret.’
They returned to the subject of style and whether it has meaning.
‘I insist there’s a difference in significance of various styles,’ Mira argued. ‘If a woman has to encase her body in a constricting corset, wear tottery high heels, spend hours dressing and powdering her hair and making up, just in order to go out, well, that says something about both the position of women and the class structure of a society.’
‘That’s true,’ Grete admitted frowning. She frowned whenever she thought hard, and had a deep line between her dark eyebrows. ‘But that styles become more casual doesn’t necessarily mean that no class structure exists, or that the position of women is very much changed.’
They all got into it and were talking with great animation, sending whoops of laughter out into the room, when, suddenly Ben appeared.
‘I gather this is where the party is,’ he smiled.
Mira smiled radiantly at him because she was happy and enjoying herself, then finished her statement. ‘It’s broadening, you can experience everything. You can put on blue jeans and let your hair hang loose and see what it’s like to be treated like a “hippie” or you can put on your fur coat and heels and go into Bonwit’s and see what it feels like to play society matron … it’s just freer, that’s all. Expansion.’
‘Expansion! That’s it!’ Val agreed. ‘The only possible progress. Everything we’ve called progress is just change, bringing its own horrors. But there is progress, it’s possible, it’s an increase in sensibility. I mean, imagine how the world seemed to cave people: it must have been full of terrors. We’ve domesticated a lot of those. Then along came Christianity …’
‘That’s quite a leap,’ Clarissa smiled.
Ben touched Mira’s arm lightly. ‘Would you like something to drink?’ he asked softly.
She turned to him and looked in his eyes. They were a warm golden brown. ‘I’d love something,’ she said feelingly.
‘Beer? Wine?’
Now, Christianity was a great step in progress: it made us feel guilty. The trouble was the guilt made us act worse than ever …’
Mira stood radiant. Her arm still tingled where Ben had touched it. He returned with her glass of wine and one for himself and stood beside her listening to Val.
‘What we have to do is get beyond the guilt to the real motivations of the things we do. Because the motivations aren’t evil: wishing harm on another is always a secondary, a substitute emotion for being unable to get what we want ourselves. If we could learn to figure out what it really is we want, and to forgive ourselves for wanting it, we would not have to do terrible things.’
‘
It sounds good,’ Clarissa grinned, ‘except for a few little leaps here and there. I imagine primitive people acted on their feelings –’
‘And primitive people don’t like to fight,’ Val interrupted.
‘What about war masks, war dances?’ Grete intruded.
‘Yes. Okay. They may not have liked fighting and had to psych themselves up for it – armies still do that,’ Clarissa thought out loud.
‘They fought because aggression is necessary for survival. It has an economic base.’
‘It has to have a psychological base as well or the race would have gone the way of the dinosaurs. And obviously it occurs in inappropriate contexts. I like aggression, I think it’s fun to be aggressive. That’s what I’m talking about. If we could figure out what cause aggression – or sexuality – serves, accept those emotions, stop trying to hide them, then we could find a way to use them that wouldn’t be so destructive.’
‘Just how do we manage to find out these basic motivations?’ Grete asked, unpersuaded by Val.
‘Experiment. Science. But I already know what they are.’
Everyone laughed.
‘I don’t know,’ Clarissa said reflectively. ‘The conflict I see as basic is between spontaneous and free feelings and feelings requiring order, imposed order, structures, habits …’
‘Order is ugly in the face of feeling,’ Mira said fervently, too fervently, but not even embarrassed, so intensely conscious was she of Ben’s body beside her, of his dark arms covered with dark hair, emerging from the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt. She could almost feel his body warmth, could almost smell him. ‘But on the other hand, everything is order. What else is there? There are simply different kinds. I can’t conceive of such a thing as anarchy.’
‘Anarchy,’ Ben said to her, ‘is a cubist painting.’
Everyone cried out in delight. ‘Explain, exegesis, explication de texte!’
‘It’s true that anarchy is simply a variation of order. You know, gangs of black-jacketed motorcyclists tearing up little towns might be a horror, but that isn’t anarchy; each of those gangs has a leader, each of those towns does, too. It’s a conflict of two different orders. Most threats about anarchy are fears of an order different from the one presently constituted. I’ll admit that it’s easier to live with one order than with two or three different ones, but not necessarily if the one order is a totalitarian state, say. Anyway, anarchy – I looked it up –’ he grinned, ‘means without ruler. That’s hard to envision politically. But if we move to another discipline, we can imagine it.’
Everyone was listening with interest, but Mira was losing much of what Ben said. She was looking, under her eyes, at his arms, and at his hand on his glass. His shoulders, under the thin white shirt, looked broad and tanned. His hands were large, with a little dark hair on their backs. The fingers were broad and stubby-ended yet delicate at the same time. His hair was full and dark. She did not dare as yet to look at his face.
‘Think about a traditional painting – of a table, say. Most of what you see is the top, the things piled on it, the cloth, or a bowl of fruit, a vase of flowers, the bread and cheese – you know. Say it’s a painting of the entire table, not just a still life. If there’s a long cloth, you may not even see the legs. Or take another example – a building. You see the façade: you don’t see the back unless you walk around it, and if it’s a working building, chances are the back isn’t attractive, it has sliding garage doors and ramps, it’s the receiving and warehouse part of the building. But even if you see the back, you never see the foundation, the basement, the part that holds everything else up. Well, that’s our usual view of society.’
Mira raised her eyes. His face was brilliant, his eyes were light. He was enjoying himself and his audience’s attention. He had a large round face with prominent cheekbones and dark eyebrows. He looked intense.
‘We are aware of the people at the top – in our present society and in those of the past. We know about the wealthy, the powerful, the famous. They make the rules, their standards and manners and styles set the tone. It’s as though they are the flower the whole plant was designed to produce. But in fact, the flower is only one phase of the process that is a plant, and the purpose of the plant is to endure and to reproduce. Production of a flower is only one step in the process. The stem, the supports of the table, the foundation pillars of a building are also essential to the whole. So are the roots, the feet of the table, the basement walls. These are like the lower classes of a society: they are necessary, but they don’t get much attention, they are not often seen as beautiful, they are taken for granted.
‘But in cubist painting, everything is important, everything is paid attention to. Even the underside of the table, the insides of desk drawers, the space around the table – each thing is seen and seen in the round, each is shown in its essentiality, each is given room to exist. What dominates the painting is not the top, the flower, but the whole, the design of the whole. Well, society could be like that. With laws designed for people rather than for property, we could have a government without a single dominating ruler. There is no single thing in a cubist painting that dominates the whole, yet the whole coheres. It might be possible that each group, each person, could be granted its own inherent autonomy, its space. The foundations would be admitted to be as important as the top.’
‘If there were a top,’ Grete said.
‘Well, there will always be a top if it is a table, a façade in a building, people who are better known than others. But each would have only its own space and would stay in it.’
‘But in cubist painting,’ Mira argued, ‘things don’t stay in their own space. That’s one of its main points. Each little section infringes on every other around it, everything overlaps.’
‘Is that right?’ Ben gave a delighted gasp. ‘That’s even better! Because we do violate, intrude upon, each other’s space all the time – life would be awfully sterile and boring if we didn’t. We do it in speech and in action – we do it when we touch each other. So we learn to violate each other’s space a little, but we know when to return to our own. There is contact without conflict.’
Clarissa shook her head. ‘I’d like to believe such a thing is possible, Ben, but I can’t imagine eliminating conflict.’
‘We don’t want to eliminate it. It’s a wonderful thing. We grow by it. We just learn to contain it. We learn to jiggle!’ he laughed, carried away by his own high spirits.
Clarissa was thinking. ‘Yes, okay. But isn’t that exactly what the human race has been trying to do for centuries? Games, sports, debates – that sort of thing. Provide sublimation for aggressiveness?’
‘Yes,’ Val shot in, ‘but all the while it has been piously mouthing that aggression is wrong, it has been exalting the hero, the warrior, the man who kills.’
‘That’s true.’ Thoughtfully said, but Clarissa was not persuaded.
‘You think it’s time we got our shit together and stopped being moral schizophrenics,’ Val said to Ben. ‘A man after my own heart!’
Everyone began to talk at once then. Mira touched Ben lightly on his arm to get his attention, then pulled her hand away instantly, as if she had been burned. He looked at her smiling. He had seen.
‘That was wonderful, Ben,’ she said.
21
Mira got a little high that night, and so did Ben, and somehow – later she could not remember whose suggestion it was, or if there had been no suggestion at all, but simple single purpose – he ended up in her car, driving her to her apartment and when they arrived, he got out and saw her to the door and of course she asked him in for a nightcap and of course he came.
They were laughing as they climbed the steps, and they had their arms around each other. They were designing the perfect world, trying to outdo each other in silliness, and giggling to the point of tears at their own jokes. Mira fumbled with her key, Ben took it from her, dropped it, both of them giggling, picked it up and opened the door.
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sp; She poured them brandies. Ben following her to the kitchen, leaning over the counter and gazing at her as she prepared the drinks, talking, talking. He followed her out of the kitchen and right into the bathroom, until she turned with a little surprise and he caught himself, cried ‘Oh!’ and laughed, and stepped out, but stood right beside the closed door talking to her through it while she peed. Then sat close beside her on the couch, talking, talking, laughing, smiling at her with shining eyes. And when he got up to get refills, she followed him into the kitchen and leaned across the counter gazing at him as he prepared the drinks, and he kept looking at her as he did it, and poured too much water in her glass. And they sat even closer this time, and there needed no forethought or calculation for the moment when they reached across and took each other’s hands and it was only a few moments later that Ben was on her, leaning against her, his face searching in her face for something madly wanted that did not reside in faces, but searched, kept searching, and she too, in his. His body was lying on her now, his chest against her breasts, and the closeness of their bodies felt like completion. Her breasts were pressed flat under him: they felt soft and hard at once. Their faces stayed together, mouths searching, probing, opening as if to devour, or rubbing softly together. Their cheeks too rubbed softly like the cheeks of tiny children just trying to feel another flesh, and hard, his beard, shaved though he was, harsh and hurtful on her cheek. He had her head in his hands, and he held it firmly, possessively, and gently, all at once, and he dipped his face into hers, searching for nourishment, hungry, hungry. They rose together, like one body, and like one body walked into the bedroom, not separating even in the narrow hallway, just squeezing through together.
For Mira, Ben’s lovemaking was the discovery of a new dimension. He loved her body. Her pleasure in this alone was so extreme that it felt like the discovery of a new ocean, mountain, continent. He loved it. He crowed over it as he helped her to undress, he kissed it and caressed it and exclaimed, and she was quieter, but adored his with her eyes as she helped him to undress, ran her hands over the smooth skin of his back, grabbed him from behind around the waist and kissed his back, the back of his neck, his shoulders. She was shy of his penis at first, but when he held her close and nestled against her, he pressed his penis against her body, and her hand went out to it, held it, caressed it. Then he wrapped his legs around her, covered her, holding on to her tightly, and kissed her eyes, her cheeks, her hair. She pulled away from him gently and took his hands and kissed them, and he took hers and kissed the tips of her fingers.