Glatt left the dining room. Dragnie felt Banden’s eyes on her as she watched him leave. “It must be difficult for you,” the young man said. “To have a husband to whom you are not married, and who is so busy.”
Dragnie’s head jerked back in surprise. The accuracy of his statement came as both a gift and an intrusion. She did not know whether to praise his powers of observation or slap him for his presumptuousness, or perhaps both, or perhaps half of one and half of the other, a response she considered weak and conciliatory and which she despised in herself even as she adored that part of her that found the other part so despicable. “Difficult? Why?”
The young man shrugged. “A wife likes to spend time with her husband.” He laughed bitterly. “Or so I assume. It’s not as though I’ve learned that from my parents’ example. They seem to detest one another.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why? It’s not your fault. And I assume each of them finds… other people to take up the slack.” Banden sat back and leveled his gaze at hers. “As, indeed, you might.”
“Why, you—“ she began. But then her words seem to catch in her throat, and she found it difficult to breathe, and her mouth hung half-open as she stood up and sent her chair falling to the floor behind her. Then Banden, too, stood up, assigning to his chair a similar fate, and a moment later he was there, beside her, looking down into her eyes from his masculinely superior height. She groped for something to say, some pretext to decline or forbid what she knew was about to happen, what she wanted to happen, what she knew he knew was about to happen, but none appeared in the consciousness of her mind’s awareness. And then he had with violence and a proprietary sense of ownership pressed his mouth to hers, and she, raised to the exalted height of femininity both by her shortness and by virtue of having been transformed into an object for his casual use, could do nothing other than respond in like manner. They fell to the floor, tearing off their own and each other’s clothes until, to her surprise, he, then and there, without further preamble, instituted the ultimate act of possession, destroying in a moment every category that had differentiated them, including age, personal interests, yearly income, gender, and medical history, until a moment later he succumbed to a soaring triumph that left her gasping with amazement. Then they rested, lying on the rug half-under the dining table and half-surrounded by chairs, trusting in the discretion of the footman who had served their dinner not to interrupt them. Suddenly, after what seemed at most ten minutes, she was shocked to witness him rousing himself and taking her again, as they re-enacted that earlier drama, and she noted with interest and a faint, dawning hope that, while his ardor was undiminished from its first expression, his endurance was improved, and Dragnie felt herself approaching that state of inexpressible pleasure which derived from the assuaging of the ultimate greed but which, as again he sought and obtained the supreme release, she was once more doomed to fail to attain.
She stood up, entirely naked, and took his hand and drew him to his feet. He, too, was entirely naked. “Come with me,” she said.
He let her lead him down the hall to a lighted room where John Glatt sat a desk, poring over documents and jotting notes. Glatt looked up. His face, gaunt and sharp-planed in the light of the desk lamp, betrayed no emotion other than a contemptuously amused contempt.
“John,” Dragnie said. “Nathan and I are going to have a sexual relationship. I know you will have no objection to such an arrangement. He can be no competition, let alone a threat, to you as my lover, or as my friend, or as the husband to whom I am not married. You know my feelings for you are inviolate and cannot be usurped by a youth twenty-five years my junior. Indeed, it is this very disparity in our ages that makes such a liaison desirable for each of us and recommends its indulgence and consent on your part. Nathan shall benefit from the experience and wisdom I am able to impart to him as a (so-called) ‘older woman,’ and also conceivably enjoy a frisson of Oedipal conquest and satisfaction in engaging in the sexual act with a woman symbolically old enough to be his mother. (Although I mention this strictly for the sake of completeness and without any real endorsement of the concept, since neither you nor I, as fully rational beings, ascribe any reality to the notion of the unconscious, and reject out of hand its ability to affect conscious human cognition, perception, thought, action, volition, feeling, or belief.) I, for my part, will enjoy not only the vigor and enthusiasm he brings to the physical act of love by virtue of his youth, but will greatly appreciate the access it will afford me to his viewpoints, opinions, and values, offering a first-hand encounter with what ‘the kids’ are ‘into’ these days. Moreover, let me point out that this is not betrayal but its opposite—the betrayal would consist in keeping our affair a secret, in treating you, not like the rational adult you are, but like an authority figure to be feared and, therefore, deceived. It goes without saying that this setup will have no effect on the sexual relations between you and me. Don’t you agree, dearest?”
Glatt shifted his gaze over each of them. “All right,” he said.
Chapter 6
The Strike
The train, dubbed by the press boys “The Tagbord Special,” raced through the evening twilight past lonely farms and smug towns and stoic road crossings like a living thing intent on attaining the destination that would fulfill its highest purpose. Its passenger manifest contained only two names: Miss Dragnie Tagbord, and Mr. Nathan A. Banden.
Its destination this night was Chicago, where Dragnie was scheduled the next day to attend a meeting of the openly racist National Association for the Abolition of Colored People in the morning and, that evening, a rally for the Student Violent Coordinating Committee. Each organization was barely two weeks old. Each was the consequence of a new ruling passed summarily into law by John Glatt’s Strike Committee. “To deny the world the America of its dreams,” he had proclaimed, “We will pull off a switch-back and un-do America.” The first new law, known as the Pro-Be Nasty to People You Don’t Like Act, made it a crime to prevent, inhibit, or protest expressions of disapproval or enmity about any racial or religious group or organization. “The very word ‘tolerance’ is patronizing and insulting,’ announced Communique No. 2 as issued by the Strike Committee. “If Americans cannot be free to hate whomever they want, then they cannot be free in anything.” The result was an immediate proliferation of openly racist and religiously bigoted op-ed columns, hate groups, publications, tracts, speeches, pageants, parades, Off-Broadway musicals, and half-time shows. This drew the predictable criticisms from individuals and groups for whom “brotherly love” was the highest form of man’s achievement—the same groups, many noted, whose sympathies lay more with the empty abstraction of “humanity” than with the actual American people. “With this ruling encouraging bigotry and hate, America has betrayed her proud heritage and taken a large step back toward the Dark Ages,” announced the Prime Minister of the People’s State of the People of Great Britain, a short, sweaty man with perennially unkempt fingernails. It was noticed, however, that applications for immigration to the U.S. from Muslim, Latin American, African, and Asian countries dropped by 68%.
Dragnie was seated in the office car, putting the finishing touches on her speech, when Banden entered. “We’re pulling into Centerville to take on water,” he said. “Care to stretch your legs?”
She smiled with a hint of a smile. She did not mention the familiarity he had acquired with her legs. She did not feel it necessary to remind him that they would be sharing her executive car that night, as they had every night since the journey began. “Yes,” she said.