Yesterday, after a midday meal of tunafish, pickles and low-fat vichyssoise, I walked to the library. Everyone here can use the library, which is a simple, four-story brick building, with four large, similar rooms, three of which have chairs, benches, and tables, and one, a piano, lutes, two acoustic guitars, and chess sets. There is an empty birdcage in each room, a golf set and tennis racquets in one, a few sweaters near the fireplaces in all four, where mementos from former residents dot the rooms, and in three of the rooms, dark wood shelves are crammed with forgotten novels and poetry, an abundance of manuals, especially on fly fishing, cookbooks, how-to books, outdated encyclopedias, and musty dictionaries. Some people from the nearby town are permitted, if they have been issued visitors' cards, to use the library, though most don't, and occasionally I have run into one when I have gone in search of a hook that might help me. Yesterday, a disheveled, elderly woman emerged from the library's bathroom and inquired, brusquely, "Are you a teacher?" I told her I had taught American history and furniture and interior design occasionally, and then she asked, inserting herself into my day, "That's good, but do you have a man?" Quickly, I had to decide whether I'd answer her impertinent question, but then I wanted to, if only to see what might transpire, because I'm curious, lunch hadn't been exciting, pickles and tunafish are laughable, and I hope for novelty. I restrained myself from asking, Can you have a man? and instead answered:
— I did, recently.
— Dumb women don't have men.
— You really think that?
— Well, sometimes it's smart women who don't have men-
— How can you tell anyway?
— I'm not a mind reader.
— That's a relief.
— But I read. All my books burned in a fire, so I come here. I have good eyes. I can see what other people don't. Don't let that scare you.
Now the odd woman smiled, brushed off her tatty skirt and straightened her shoulders, all of which was appealing, because she had found a necessity to relate to me, another character, with some severity, and the encounter drew something from her, so she looked at me solemnly and announced:
— You have to use your time wisely, and then there's always chance.
— Yes, chance, you're right, there's always chance. And hope.
— Not hope, chance. People don't know when chance comes knocking. Mostly they're looking with blinders on…
She trailed off. When I said hope, I wasn't sure why, except that I wanted to hear what she'd say. The odd inquisitive woman scrutinized me again and rushed to the massive library door, opened it, the door yawning loudly, which it always does, no matter who opens it or how carefully, and turned:
— But what other subjects do you have than men?
With this question, she ran off, though I'm still pondering her and it, marrow in the bones, since how many subjects does a person have, she must know I have more, she reads, she seems worldly, but from a different world, and if you are a woman or a man, about which you have no choice, unless you elect surgery at a suitable age, but still you have to spend at least your adolescence and some of early adulthood in the sexed body into which you were born, you will undoubtedly spend some or much of your life absorbed in men or women, who are in a sense your subject, a singular and important one, no matter how general, no matter how you decide to dispense with it or them, if you feel you have a choice. There have been thousands of years of swamp-like argument about sex and the sexes, to which most succumb, since, for one thing, sex is often adventitious, taken on the run, and, to include it in the day, when it often isn't, some fold it between a hit of ordinary conversation during which the body is normally excluded, except for talk about illness, but then some experience sex as an illness or a rare occurrence like an acute disease, but anyway worthy to report about their day, or for some it's a healthy or perverse pleasure. Some here relish the flavors and smells of bodies, yet describe flesh with weak or pallid language, or dwell mostly on specific parts of bodies, breasts, penises, earlobes, necks, feet, toes; and I have conversed about sexual matters, about men and women, so, to be honest, the way a daughter of time must, I'd agree that men have been and remain a vast subject, which is also boring, especially when you have talked and listened for years, with an evermore rapid sense of the subject's inexhaustibility and futility, for everyone repeats the subject and their own behavior, too. Occasionally a person's sexual habits are unusual, such as Spike's, whose taste runs to much older men and has since she was twelve, when she attempted to seduce her sixty-year-old piano teacher, and, she says, wryly, she's the opposite of a pedophile, whose activity is illicit, while her disposition isn't, so she could work in an old-age home and prey upon the elderly. Instead, she, a math prodigy, born into a family of scientists, pursued mathematics, first, imaginary numbers and set theory, then the more abstract versions of the discipline, which include, she tells me, formulae elegant as drawings and so graceful the terms soar in the air before they disappear. She particularly follows the work of Frege and Abraham. Spike's affliction or desire, I must tell her, according to the Medical Sex Dictionary in the library, is gerontophilia. There is no equivalent for a deflowering mania, of a man or woman with hymen fever. Spike is not an arithomaniac, whose morbid obsession is to count constantly, she doesn't betray a hint of this, being, I suppose, well past real numbers. One day I will tell her I see numbers as colors and vice versa, she has already explained that sex is no substitute for mathematics, but mathematics does compensate during rare periods of celibacy, though sex is better for dinner talk, since few people understand abstract mathematics.
This morning, when I insensitively rushed past the two disconsolate young women, though they may not have noticed, since they were engrossed in their own lives and each other's happiness or misery, I noted that one of them, the skinnier of the two, was in her pajamas, which was unusual, and her image has now returned to me. People generally don't come to breakfast or dinner in pajamas. This signaled, in a small way, her distress, though it might also have indicated the lack of it and her contentment with herself, her indifference or even immunity to others' opinions. The other woman was dressed, and it looked as if they'd been talking all through the night, and immediately I wondered what they could have said to each other that would carry them from day to night to day. One of them has a selfish female lover, the other a narcissistic male lover who had recently returned home, and she has an eating disorder, as well as psoriasis, and now it is apparent that though in a long-term relationship with the man who recently left, she's enthralled by the tall balding man, who bends down farther each day, with bemusement, worry or despair, and it is his indefatigable anxiety and her anorexia and psoriasis that interest me, since she forces herself to move food around on her plate and take a few abject bites in his presence. The outbreak on her hands may have a subliminal effect upon him, but whether it will be one that marries him to her or causes a figurative divorce, time will tell, since time is abundant in certain ways, though its always an elusive guide, which gets shorter, and characteristically leaves people wanting or short, too.
Psoriasis is a common, chronic, recurrent, inflammatory disease of the skin, causing the formation of dry, scaly patches of various sizes, mostly on the elbows, hands, scalp, nails, the surfaces of the limbs, like shins, and the sacral region, and the patches increase in size, and then stop, and become hard at the centers; old patches may be thickened, tough and very scaly, so that they resemble the outside of an oyster shell. Its course is inconstant, but it usually begins on the scalp or the elbows, and remains in those areas and doesn't spread for a long period of time, or it might disappear. Or it might begin at the sacrum, but I don't know if the young woman has ever had psoriasis there. There is even psoriasis of the penis. One of the disease's chief features is its tendency to return. The skin actually grows too fast. The young woman's hands and elbows were sometimes free of the tough, scaly flesh, which, when present, was in flagrant contrast to the pallor of her cheeks, though they became flushed when she drank wine, which wasn't often, since she feared gaining weight, though she was painfully thin. She couldn't stand to feed herself, she courted weakness, and when the psoriasis struck, she took pains to hide it, as she did her reluctance to nourish herself. If an outbreak occurred on the bottoms of her feet, she wouldn't have to hide it. Psoriasis may occur on the soles of feet, but its onset is usually in middle-aged adults who have no history of psoriasis or any other skin trouble. There may have been focal infections of the tonsils, teeth, or sinuses, and there may have been a causal relationship through an internal usage of antibiotics. But there is no resemblance to psoriasis histologically, only the presence of large, unilocular pustules deep in the epidermis and very little inflammation. I've had difficult, inflammatory friendships with women and men, some of whom have eating disorders, like anorexia nervosa and bulimia, slipped discs, bleeding ulcers, migraines, colitis, pernicious anemia, or who have a variety of other illnesses and complaints, and who have been subject, like myself, to fainting spells, nausea, pneumonia, tooth decay, yeast infections, colds, a nonorganic pressure on the heart, sciatica, nervous stomach, pulled muscles, disturbed bowels, strep throat, infected cuts, flu, or viral infections, and others who have been subject to chronic backaches, recurrent acne, vision loss, cataracts, shingles, herpes complex and simplex, seasonal and other allergies, asthma, arthritis, hypertension and stroke, heart attacks, cancer, digestive disorders, memory loss, auto immune diseases, including AIDS, or gum inflammation, gum loss, heroin, cocaine, nicotine, amphetamine and other dependencies or addictions. About psoriasis, one of its friendly sufferers here once remarked, "Please, always remember to mention the heartbreak of psoriasis."