You move from circle to circle. I had mystery going for me. At the faculty level I would say only a little about Nelson, on the grounds that Tsau was a sealed project, I was under an unofficial obligation not to say so much until Tsau was declared open, and so on. My exact relationship with Nelson I left vague. I dressed pretty much for the part, wearing ostrich-egg shell-chip chokers, for example. Circles interpenetrate. When word got around that Tsau was a female polity, then, voilà, feminist organizations lined up to book me. By the time they found me it was already established that I got respectable fees.
Before I could even begin to worry seriously about livelihood I was offered a halfway decent job, which I took and still have, at this moment. I am in the academic demimonde. I am an editor and manager for a marginal publisher of doctoral dissertations languishing because they’re too specialized or because they fall outside the desiderata of the regular university presses. I am in charge of Third World and Female Area acquisitions.
Maurice, who owns this business, has money he inherited, although he has less than he started with because Gretchen, the woman he formerly lived with and who persuaded him to start this enterprise so that she could fleece it discreetly, got a good deal out of him, that way and otherwise. He’s a very dreamy man interested in the Middle Ages, so interested that one of his first injunctions to me was to keep him from unbalancing the list in that direction: I am supposed to build up the more trendward side of things and to at all costs resist his antiquarianisms. I remind him of someone, and he spends a good deal of time in his office trying to think of who it is. He has an unpublished thesis which he won’t let me see. There’s a wonderful sound system in our suite, and one of the first things I was presented with when I took the job was a memo asking me to list any favorite classical recordings I might like to have played for us. Our offices, in Belmont, are in good taste. I did produce a list of old favorite records in self-defense, after I realized how unvarying the playlist was going to be, how much plainsong and continuo I was going to have to enjoy. I need a strong woman, he likes to say. He has once or twice complimented me on my shoulders. I may have a new fallback vocation as a dominatrix, at least if the current middleclass and higher decadence continues to unfurl at the present rate. I’m in control of my hours here. This is not precisely Guilty Repose, but it resembles it.
Being in America is like being stabbed to death with a butter knife by a weakling. Brazen Head is the most popular president ever. People think I have very interesting political slants. So much is siphoned from Nelson, so how should this make me feel? I seem to be all things to all women. Feminists like me because of Tsau, socialist feminists like me because of the cooperative side of Tsau, professional women, nonsocialist feminists, like me because of the private property and incentive side of Tsau, and lesbians like me because I never go around with men. There are no men, so far. People see me as women-identified, something new, and seem to be proud of me for it. The left is prolapsed, insofar as I can judge. I can’t find an enemy in my milieu anywhere. If you have ideas that rise above Power to the people! you qualify as someone who should write a book for the Monthly Review Press.
The below is all Denoon. These are my commodities. This is what I say, with attribution, in one form or another. There are three major, dire, world-historical processes going on that your ideologies — a word I always use in the pejorative, like my man — are not letting you pay attention to. I keep rediscovering how inadequate for analyzing the nature and depth of the impending general planetary crisis both class analysis and vulgar feminism are as exclusive filters, by the way. The main process going on could be called corporatism unbound, with the term corporatism understood to include the state corporations of the Eastern bloc, although these are turning out not to be competent variants of the main type. What is becoming sovereign in the world is not the people but the limited liability corporation, that particular invention: that’s what’s concentrating sovereign power to rape the world and overenrich the top minions who run these entities. The perfect medium for the corporation is an electoral democracy where nobody — in the mature systems — bothers to vote, parties disaggregate, labor unions decompose, corporations control who gets into parliament, accountability disappears. A second major world-historical process is the invisible war of states against nations, recognized states against nonstate tribal nations, a bitter war, bloody, one without rules, breaking out even in regions where everyone assumes the game is over: East Timor, Chittagong Hills, Roraima — there are so many sickening examples to give. Third is the destruction of nature accompanying the ascent to absolute power of the corporate system. Then I give my own emendation, a less pessimistic one, which is, slightly embarrassingly to me, seemingly the most popular. Mine is the jagged and belated but definite rise of women into positions of political authority. I take this seriously. I am embroidering a bit if I imply that Nelson ever took it as hopefully as I do, but he wanted to and was just afraid, I think, to really believe in it because of the implications of events like Margaret Thatcher monstrously sinking the Belgrano. He was afraid that the lateness of the rise of women was its own doom — not that he wasn’t trying to promote it nevertheless in his own molecular way at Tsau. So the above makes me interesting. I leave every group I speak to with at least this thought — that a true holocaust in the world is the thing we call development, which I tell them means the superimposition of market economies on traditional and unprepared third world cultures by force and fraud circa 1880 to the present, and that this has been the seedbed of the televised spectacle of famine, misery, and disease confronting us in the comfort of our homes.
They love me for it.
But back to my phonecall, because inhering in it is the cultural ghost of the whole perplex of women waiting in agony to be phoned by some man or other. I didn’t leave Africa to come back here with the covert purpose of waiting for a phonecall that would set me dancing and playing maracas. I left to leave. In junior high we were forced to read a short story about a girl who meets a boy when she goes ice skating and who then goes home and waits in agony for days for him to call. This is a famous story by a woman named Maureen Daly, who got elevated into the very top level of women’s magazines by it. The story is called Seventeen, and I think she was sixteen when she wrote it. The story won prizes. I had a very strong reaction to it. It sank into my soul and I vowed never to be her or anything like her. I vowed this. Also — and this is something I just now realized, thanks to the phonecall that’s driving me to the edge — it has to do with why, when I could have, I didn’t go after Nelson and stop him while he was still on his horse and heading for Tikwe. I had time. And I started to, but somehow I couldn’t do it. I realize that I was very moved, but in the wrong direction, by Jean Peters running out to stop Emiliano Zapata from going someplace he was determined to go. I may be confusing two different scenes, in one of which she presses a freshly ironed shirt on him, pleadingly, or tries to. I hated her. This would never be me. I wasn’t going to be Jean Peters in Viva Zapata when in fact the sensibility on the horse was who I really was. That was me.