She was about to be a spectacle, unless I helped. Her eyes were red and her left hand looked like one of those claw feet on nineteenth-century furniture clutching an orb, except that the orb in her case was composed of damp Kleenex. I realized that her safari coatlet was in fact perfect for her situation because of its accordion pockets. Even as I watched she reached into one for yet another Kleenex, which she passed across her nostrils before adding it to the orb she was creating. My first act was to gently relieve her of her collection and force it into a stoneware urn.
I want to go to my husband, she said. But I—
What? I said.
But I, they—
What? I said.
These men. There are men.
Be more consecutive, I said. I don’t know why I was so butch with her, but she elicited it, and she also seemed to respond to it. She seemed unsteady. Thank god the shrimp tree is empty, I thought, because it looked as though she might collapse into it.
Would you go with me? she said.
For a second I could see something a little ulterior in her distress, but I lost my grasp of it when she said she was Grace Denoon. Instantly I was her sister.
There was a party or gathering within the party, it seemed. Denoon was there. She knew where it was. She wanted to go there. She had a right to go there. Throughout she was making the correct assumption that the name Denoon would be a major thing not needing explication. Was I a person who would go with her? I was.
I was elated, but now I felt shabbily dressed, next to her. Nothing could be done about it. I perceived that her skirt was in fact expensive culottes. So definitely that night I was among the avec-culottes, a joculism I would later use on Denoon and that he would praise. She was wearing a very sheer lime green thing for an ascot, brilliantly obscuring her throat lines, if any. Her nostrils astounded me, they were so small, like watermelon seeds. How could she breathe?
Then will you go with me? she said.
Of course.
I’m not actually invited, she said.
All you have to do is show me where it is. You’re his wife. You have the right.
Thank god I found you, she said.
Z came up just as I was going off with her. He was holding out a just-popped Castle Lager with a knob of foam in the mouth, and saying that Denoon wasn’t coming after all, so far as he could tell.
Serious Men
Exactly what is it I enjoy about situations like finding myself the only or almost the only woman in a roomful of men trying to ignore me? They energize me no end. I used to fantasize about slipping into a burlesque show someday just to see how the rest of the audience took it. Anyway, at the door was a slight gauntlet of reserved personalities for us to run. I felt like a tugboat because Grace had physical hold of my waistband. It took a little effort to make her let go before we forged through. This is his wife, I said, to get us through the anteroom and into the symposium proper.
The venue was rather improvised, I thought. It was the guesthouse, deep at the rear of the property, with the regular furnishings removed and the living room set up with folding chairs for the audience and a big armchair for the man of the hour. It was a very bare white space in a concrete block building with windows standing open on three sides apropos the heat and the definite attar of mankind arising. The room wasn’t big enough for the thirty or so of us.
Spare me is what I said to myself when I got my first look at Nelson. I meant Spare me the heroic in all its guises.
Because here was a genuinely goodlooking man, alas. He was of course older than in the photographs of him I’d seen. The lower part of his face was softer. There were plenty of crowsfeet. He still wore his hair pulled back aboriginally in a short ponytail, which was brave because the style forfeits any camouflage for a receding hairline. His was still good. His hair was still black, although it had the slightly dusty look of hair that is going to be definitely gray someday soon. There was some distinct gray along his part. His cheekbones were still carrying him. Fullface he looked more Slavic than Cherokee now, but this was a matter of weight. This man is not vain, I thought, when I noted that on one side his hair went over his ear and on the other behind it: so here was a serious man, in all probability. Serious men are my type. That was why Martin Wade had been painful for me. But there was a difference between them, and of course a lot of this is retroanalytic, in that Martin’s seriousness was narrower and more guilt-driven. He had moments of definite irritation at his fate: there was no escape from his obligation, but he was so good at music it was unfair.
Possibly I should have been a sculptor specializing in busts. I appreciate the head as an aesthetic unit — the weight, the poise, the shape. Most women don’t. Or rather they respond subliminally, but at the conscious level they apply a hilarious planar aesthetic, as in Those eyes, Those lips, That smile. Denoon had a beautiful head. I date my more advanced sense of the head to my brief flirtation with physical anthropology, with all its front and sideview photographs and cephalic indices. I thought I was smart not choosing physical anthropology as my specialty. There had been openings. I think I can honestly say I was once even faintly solicited by what amounts to a star in the field. But I thought This is a doomed subfield if there ever was one. Everyone in it is suspected of having chosen it in order to prove something about the godly white race. I did know at least one unquestionable racist in the field. Also, every single male I met in the specialty was married. But I could have gone into it to wreak intellectual havoc, I suppose. This could have been one of my numerous career gaffes. I can get into throes of self-doubt and accuse myself of opting for nutritional anthropology for stupidly female generic reasons, because nurturance is natural to me as a woman, la la la, going the way I did for the same reason so many women in medicine wind up in obstetrics or clinical dietetics. Denoon was thicker through the neck and middle than he needed to be. He could be helped.