I think the main reason I was passive to her shoving was because I felt sorry for Denoon that this was his wife. He hardly needed the embarrassment of a scene such as my turning and punching her lights out. And also something else tranquilized me. The other thing that saved her from the disaster she was ignorant she was flirting with was a feeling of fatedness I was undergoing. The feeling was that this was supposed to happen, according to the stars in their courses.
When I think of being pushed toward Denoon it feels dreamlike and slow, and like the reverse of a short story whose title has to be The Kiss. I always remember titles and authors, unlike women in general. I make a point of it. I slipped up in this case because I thought The Kiss would be something I would always be stumbling across in anthologies. But it vanished, and now when I tell people about it they think it’s some kind of feminist canard of mine. The Kiss is short, a two-page account of what a man sees when he keeps his eyes open as his face gets closer and closer to the woman he is kissing. Her eyes are of course closed per the custom. When he begins the descent to the kiss her face is a seamless mask of beauty. Then as he gets closer and keeps scrutinizing, it turns into the surface of the moon, cratered, with points of oil glittering and her lanugo showing up. Of course this is quintessential hatred of the female. Her metamorphosis into ugliness is a result of sheer proximity and nothing else: she is a normal beauty. I’ve tried to recapture where I read this and who wrote it. The author was British, I’m sure. When I ask women if they’ve read it and I mention that I think the author is British, they say Oh, then this has to be a gay thing.
Nelson had great difficulty adapting to my thesis anxiety. He was so far beyond that kind of question. And he was so antiacademic. And it had all been so easy for him. Once he stopped trying to shut me up with facetious suggestions for alternative fields of study and thesis topics, he could make an interesting suggestion now and then. He thought somebody could surely get a thesis out of the fact that if you ran a computer through the corpus of murder mysteries written since the genre began you would find a rising curve for female as opposed to male victims, which meant something. I objected that this was a paper and not a thesis. Then I could expand into other vital statistics, was his idea. He was convinced that the average number of killings per title had also gone up. And he was insensitive at first to something he refused to consider an issue in doing a thesis these days: that is, you do your thesis and discover that due to the enormous volume of theses being produced, you’ve duplicated a half or a third of somebody else’s thesis. I said But you say that because you’re an original thinker. This annoyed him.
In any case my slow progress toward Denoon was The Kiss in reverse. He looked better the closer I got. His jaws looked bluer, although this may have been the result of seeing him more directly under the peculiar fluorescent doughnut that lit that part of the room. His superfices were good. The whites of his eyes were models of whiteness. He was smiling at Kgosetlemang — the event was to be considered over with, clearly — and I could tell that his gingivae were as good as mine, which is saying a lot. I attend to my gums. People in the bush don’t always attend to their oral hygiene, not to mention other niceties. There was no sign of that here. I of course am fanatical about my gums because my idea of what the movie I Wake Up Screaming is about is a woman who has to keep dating to find her soulmate and she’s had to get dentures. I have very long-range anxieties.
He was appropriate for me and the reverse. I felt it and hated it because it was true despite his being around fifteen years older than me. What did that mean about me? I also hated it because I hate assortative mating, the idea of it. One of my most imperishable objections to the world is the existence of assortative mating, how everyone at some level ends up physically with just who they deserve, at least to the eye of some ideal observer, unless money or power deforms the process. This is equivalent to being irritated at photosynthesis or at inhabiting a body that has to defecate periodically, I am well aware. Mostly it comes down to the matching of faces. When I first encountered the literature, I even referred to it privately as faceism. I will never adapt to it, probably. Why can’t every mating in the world be on the basis of souls instead of inevitably and fundamentally on the match between physical envelopes? Of course we all know the answer, which is that otherwise we would be throwing evolution into disarray. Still it distresses me. We know what we are.
He was in a state of health. His reflexes showed it. There was aplomb in the way he juggled getting closure with Kgosetlemang and turning to deal with a juggernaut consisting of me being driven into his very face by his crazed wife.
Being able to tell if someone is in a state of health is a knack or delusion I acquired when I was working as a receptionist for a charlatan nutrition therapist in Belmont. I predicted Denoon would have sweet breath, and that was right. By this time I was wanting Denoon to be what he appeared to be, or better. The only remaining question was his midsection. I wanted the power of impresarios or whoever they are who tell women trying out for places in the chorus line to lift up their skirts so their thighs can be checked out. A dashiki can cover a multitude of sins. A tense scene like the one that was developing makes you hold your belly in. I wanted to know how thick he was there, if I could. Knowing the extent of his problem would be calming. I am unbelievably cathected when it comes to fat, which works out well in that it impels me to be a good influence on friends who need to lose weight. But beneath it all is the undersea mountain of my mother and what her size is going to mean, ultimately, to me. A dashiki is like a smock. My mother always wore smocks, even long after she was persona non grata in the kindergartens of southern Minnesota for repeatedly eating food meant for the toddlers.
Grace had stopped shoving. I was kind. I provided cover by giving her a complicit or prankish look, which took fortitude on my part.
He said Hello, Grace. His voice was perfect for the occasion. It was wary, but also kind and faintly threatening. He was looking past me. So far he was barely cognizing my presence.
Here’s someone you should meet, she said, in a ravished voice. Like him she was the lucky owner of an above average voice. Did this mean they had been meant for each other at one point? If only their voices could live together, I thought, and let their envelopes go their separate ways. I hadn’t noticed her voice earlier.
One thing at least was clear: I was in the presence of a smashed mechanism: their relationship was over, whether she was ready to admit it or not. I was sorry for both of them, but also alas exhilarated, to tell the absolute truth.
We were now an appropriately spaced triangle.
She liked you tonight, Grace said.
Did you? Nelson said directly to me.
I love a tirade, I said. It came to me on the spur of the moment and once it was said I knew I was being shameless and attempting almost self-evidently to pander to his demonstrated weakness for wordplay. I blushed, it was so obvious. But I was also thinking To hell with it. The fact is you have about ten seconds to impress yourself on someone you meet de novo. People decide up or down almost instantaneously, without even knowing it. And the great and near great decide even quicker, because part of their eminence is based on a facility at classifying the people who are bothering them almost instantly into those who can do something for them and those who can’t. So I struck. I also was aware I was not going to overwhelm anybody with sheer loveliness at the weight I was just then at. The iron was hot. I was the first to arrive at the scene of the accident, namely the wreck of their marriage. I know I flushed. My coloring is a strong point, so that was all right too.