She turned to me. “No, thank you,” I said. I ducked to open a route of escape for her tray. She jostled past us. I looked at Soft, who was chewing with his mouth open. “You were saying something about Lack.”
“Yes,” he said, swallowing. “Braxia told me this afternoon that he thought it would close up. Lack, that is. So I went down an hour ago and took some measurements. Sure enough. He’s attenuating. I estimate another week or so.”
He lifted his cup, beaming. I raised mine, and we drank.
“Attenuating,” I said.
Soft nodded.
So Braxia was right. Lack would go away. It didn’t change my plan, only made it more urgent and absolute. A shudder of fear went through me. I tipped my cup back, and drained away the last of my eggnog, then let a piece of ice slip into my mouth and sucked it clean of the sweet residue.
Soft finished his own nog and smiled at me dizzily, a smear of cream on his upper lip. It clearly wasn’t his first glass. He was drunker than I was. And happier. Maybe that was the answer for now. I should be as drunk and happy as Soft.
“He’s fabulous when he gets behind the wheel,” came a voice out of the crowd. Then a roar of admiring laughter. I took Soft’s cup away with mine, to get a refill. The bartender was one of my students. He filled the cups from a bowl, then made a show of splashing in an extra portion of rum from a concealed bottle. He winked, and I winked back. I was planning to fail him. He handed me the cups. They were too full to carry. I took a sip from the top of each and inadvertently slurped off the two mouthfuls of undiluted rum that floated there.
I brought them back to Soft. He smiled. I leaned in close to his pale, small face, and whispered, “Let’s turn this party on its ear.”
He raised his eyebrows, looking stricken. “I don’t know how,” he said.
“Just follow me.”
“Okay.”
“The key is women. To talk to women.”
“Women.”
“Yes, the largest possible group of women. The male personality expands in the company of women.”
“Okay.”
“Then once we’ve become large we can take on mixed groups, or just men. But only after we’ve expanded.”
Soft nodded.
I stood on tiptoe and surveyed the party. It was thickening, becoming insoluble. There was a bustle at the door as a series of students entered costumed as sheep. A woman behind me whined, “Where? I can’t even see him. How can I fuck him if I can’t even see him?” Laughter bubbled up like clouds of smoke. The music switched to something relentless, the soundtrack to a robot’s headache. A female literature professor danced in a corner, sweaty and self-absorbed, ringed by men in suits who clapped and cheered viciously. Her T-shirt read MY HEART IS FILLED WITH LOVE FOR ALL CREATURES. Smoke bubbled up like clouds of laughter. A strobe flickered briefly, reducing all movement to Keatonesque tableau. Bubbles smoked up like the laughter of clouds. I imagined the bobbing heads that made up the maze as balloons, tied to the floor by the strings of our bodies. Then I pictured them cut loose, to bob and roll, still laughing and smoking, along the surface of the ceiling.
Past Soft’s shoulder I spotted a group of three women, standing, holding drinks, looking bored. I recognized one, the new professor of macroeconomics. She met my eye. I nodded, gulped, and smiled. I was still on tiptoe. I dropped down. Soft looked at me quizzically. “Don’t look now,” I said. “But right behind us. But ixnay on the ooklay.”
Soft seemed baffled. I took his shoulder and turned him, so he broke into the group of women. “Here,” I said. “You—” I waved my cup at the macroeconomist, my eye-contactee. She was thirtyish, with glasses that reflected bluish light. “I forgot your name,” I said, making it sound like it was her fault.
“Umdoris Umfield,” she said. Sounding like she accepted the blame.
“Umfield, of course. You’re in economics.”
“Field. Umright.”
I leaned in, smiled dangerously. “I can’t hear you,” I said. “This is Professor Soft.”
Field or Umfield took his hand and smiled. Her two companions shifted their weight back and forth, waiting either to be included, so that they could finally join the general gabbling and barking, or else be freed to wander the maze. The one facing Soft was tall and limber, almost knock-kneed. Her long blond hair fell around her face like a hospital bed-curtain. When Soft got too close the hair reached up, drawn by static electricity, and clung to the front of his turtleneck. The third woman, nearer to me, was shorter, and fat or thin according to how she stood, with black hair that was pulled into a knot, and a ring on every visible finger. She wore an orange scarf, not a decorative scarf, but a long, woolen skier’s scarf. Blue eyeshadow. Her face was severe and enthralling.
“Work at the university?” I said, gesturing to include us all. Nog sloshed to the edge of my cup, almost over. I switched hands and tried again, but confused, I gestured a second time with the drink, my empty hand in my pocket.
“Athabasca,” said the woman in the scarf. “Gender studies. And this is Ms. Anderfander, admissions.”
“Gender, admissions,” I said and nodded, avoiding their troubling, indistinct names. “This is Professor Soft, of hard sciences. And Professor Hard, of floppy, or more properly, flaccid sciences.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Soft of hard. Hard of flaccid. The study of the flaccid. How do you do.”
“You’re not Professor Hard,” said the woman in the scarf.
“Yes I am,” said Soft.
“No, I mean you. You’re not Hard. You’re Engstrand. The one with Alice Coombs.”
“Not anymore,” I said. “That’s ancient history.”
“Do you teach ancient history?”
“No it isn’t,” said the woman in the scarf. “Not from what I understand. You won’t leave her alone, that’s what I’ve heard.”
“Where is Alice, anyway?” said Soft woozily. He made it sound like he’d finally worked up the nerve to pinch her ass.
“Oh, she’s around here someplace,” I lied. I stood on tiptoe again to mime a search. But then, victim of my own charade, I thought I saw her, slipping away through the maze. My heart lurched.
But the hair I’d spotted was long, and Alice’s long hair was gone, chopped off. I was wrong.
I rejoined Soft and the women. “Who told you that?” I said. “Anyway, how do you know she wants to be left alone?”
The woman with the scarf gave me a frank and confident smile. “I know more than you think. I’ve become quite interested in Alice’s story.”
“How intensely horrible,” I said. I looked to the others for help. Addlemaddle stood wobbling on her odd knees, listening attentively, her hair accumulating strand by strand on Soft’s seemingly electromagnetic chest. Umfield was sipping at her drink patiently, her gaze distant. And Soft? He looked hopeless, his eyes spongy, his mouth limp.
“Yes, Alice’s hegira is quite remarkable,” said the woman with the scarf. “She’s echoed a profound archetype, I think, with her silence. Her refusal. The language we use is constructed by males, you know, for male use. Female powerlessness is built in, it’s intrinsic. So the language can’t be reclaimed. To even speak it, as I am, is to employ the instrument of repression against myself. Understand?”
“Like Superman trying to build his house out of kryptonite,” I suggested. I hoped it would throw her off stride.
“Right,” she said, undaunted. “So Alice’s silence is the paradigmatic feminist statement. A refusal to be co-opted.”
“There’s actually more to it than that,” I said. “It’s complicated.”
“Lack, you mean.”
“Yes, Lack. I didn’t just talk Alice to death. Something else happened.”