“It’s so sad,” Patty said.
“Sad?”
“Look,” she said, “look at the arrangement of the chairs. Look at the round tables.”
“So?”
“Ringside seats, Ben. It’s a play. They’ve pettied the mountains, turned them into a kind of nightclub act. They’ve made them a spectacle. Our rooms,” she said, “they’re rooms with a view, I suppose.”
“Yes,” Ben said, “we have a suite in the new building.”
“How European!”
Ben agreed, though he had never been to Europe. There was a Marienbad quality to the place, a sense of spa. It wasn’t what she meant. She meant that the idea of rooms with views was European, that the practice of pegging rates to one’s proximity to a mountain, or, as in the case of hotels and apartments lining Central Park, was, not so much a matter of commerce — surely hotels could fix the price of their rooms and suites so that they could make just as much money without charging extra for a view — as a throwback to an aristocratic principle that had, she supposed, its source in some notion of succession, a crown prince higher than a duke, a duke higher than a count.
“Certainly,” she declared. “Now I see! It comes from the Court and the seating arrangements at table. The greater the revenues one could provide the royal treasuries, the closer one got to the king.”
“Gee,” Ben said.
“But it’s all so unnecessary. With the advances of architecture all rooms could have views. Rectangles are the enemy of democracy, concavity is its best friend.”
“I’m sick,” Ben said.
“What a lovely tie, Ben.”
“They told me I have multiple sclerosis. I got into my car and just started driving.”
“Men’s ties are a sort of male brassiere, of course. In the phallic sense of straightening the chest. I don’t go much for the plumage theory. What’s more interesting is that ties complete the circle of the throat, much as a priest’s collar does. Shirts, open at the throat, are arrows to the genitals. Do you suppose there can be a correspondence between the tie and the hangman’s noose? Idiom says ‘necktie party,’ but the operative word is ‘party,’ I should think, with its comic insistence on the collaboration between the celebrational formality and seriousness of death. Then there’s the notion of the knot, a clear adumbration of the Adam’s apple. But overriding all is the tie’s tattoo symbolism.”
“Overriding all, yes,” Ben said.
“To suggest the throat’s tattoo. Marvelous. And to do it in silk, wools, the softer cottons. Pleasure/pain. Velvet bondage. God!”
“Maybe we’d better go up.”
“When they told you,” she said, turning to him, “did you ask, ‘Why me?’ ”
“No.”
“Listen,” she said, “this is important. Later, during your mad dash about the country, did you say it? Did you ever think it?”
“No,” he said, “not once.”
“Good for you, Ben,” she said. “Let’s go up. I want to make love.”
“Why me?”
As she unpacked, hanging her pantsuits so they would not wrinkle, carefully arranging her blouses and dresses on the hangers as one might tug and fluff clothing on a dressmaker’s form, making a chorus line of her shoes in the closet, setting out her lotions and creams on the counter, her combs and her brushes, like one setting out plants in a garden, putting her jewelry in the drawer like a shopkeeper seeding his cash register in the morning, Ben lay in the center of the king-size bed and watched her, another’s chores tranquillizing to him, soothing, seductive. The FM played softly and the insights poured from her as she moved about the room.
“ ‘La la la’ in songs is code for ‘love.’ Music is missionary. The church has its hymns, nations their anthems, every song is a serenade. Don’t kid yourself. Every song. And I’m not talking sombreros now, or greasers beneath the baked brick or near the stucco. What, you never heard the expression ‘They’re playing our song’? Music is primal salesmanship, Ben. Its most basic terms—‘note’ and ‘scales’—can be traced back to banking and commerce. What’s the commonest word in a lyric? ‘Gold.’ Consider musical comedy, Ben. The kind of song that made the Finsberg fortune. ‘I Found a Million Dollar Baby in a Five-and-Ten-Cent Store’; ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business.’ ‘There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow, there’s a bright golden haze on the meadow.’ (And a gold record, incidentally.) Or”—here she broke into song—“ ‘Longing to tell you but afraid and shy, I’d let my golden chances pass me by.’ And ‘by,’ incidentally, is a play on words. ‘I’ll get by as long as I have you.’ By — buy.”
Bye-bye, Ben thought.
“And ‘have,’ Ben, ‘have.’ Good Lord, Ben, wake up. Think things through. ‘Pennies from Heaven.’ ”
“ ‘He’s just my Bill,’ ” Ben said.
“That’s it, that’s it. You’re making fun, of course, but subliminally that’s precisely what’s going on in that song. Remember, Showboat wasn’t written until America went off the gold standard and paper money came in. ‘I bought you violets for your furs.’ ‘A kiss on the lips can be quite sentimental, but diamonds are a girl’s best friend.’ ”
“You know a lot of songs,” he said.
“Oh, Ben,” she said, “I know everything.”
They made love. Her cries during orgasm were insights.
“I wonder,” she moaned, “why the group photograph has always been a convention? It must be because the group is aware that the next minute one of them could be dead. We are good. We are.”
“Oh. Oh,” Ben cried.
“Have you ever noticed,” she squealed, “how bottles of salad dressing are all the same shape, tall necks and wide, bell-shaped t-t-torsos?”
“Oh, God,” Ben shivered. “Oh, God.”
“And how,” she panted, “the la-labels are the-these little co-collars at the neck, and the-these sh-shield shapes on the front and back, and how there’s al-always a r-recipe?”
“Oh oh,” Ben raptured.
“That’s,” she groaned, “so they can all be sh-shelved to-together, so they may com-com-compete oh oh openly on the oh oh open market.”
“Uhnn. Oooh. Ahnn,” Ben whined.
“State capitols are legislative surrogates for the church architecture of Europe,” she keened.
Afterward they smoked some marijuana Patty had brought with her from New York. They passed it back and forth wordlessly. Ben was grateful for the silence.
“You know,” she said after a while, “you have this amazing insight into our bodies.” She meant hers and her sisters’.
“Yes,” he said, “by now I know exactly what you’ll do if I do this or that.”
“Why are you so stuck on us, Ben? Why are we so stuck on you?”
“You’re the Insight Lady.”
“The greatest neologism in the history of the English language is Tarzan’s cry when he’s swinging on vines—‘Awawawawawaw!’ What else could Burroughs have put in his mouth? ‘Gee!’? Believe me, it was a stroke of genius, Ben. You can demonstrate the reactionariness of reactionaries by showing how liberal they are about the distant. Policies that have them up in arms in their own country are a matter of indifference to them in underdeveloped nations. This is also true, incidentally, of people’s attitudes toward death. The best sentence is made out of the best combination of tenses, not out of the best words. Likewise the great work is the great action. Plots are more important than language. Plot is the language of time. How pompous pomp in a new country! The aristocracy, the army, and the pecking order in General Motors are all alike. All organizations equal all other organizations. Parliament and Barnum and Bailey. A Harvard professor I once saw on the Today show showed me that genius seems to have thought about what it has only just now been asked and, speaking beautifully about a subject, is actually inventing what it seems merely to be remembering. Other people’s lives are art. That’s why there’s a Broadway and a West End, why there’s literature. Spartacus was an antipacifist preaching exactly what Martin Luther King preached, but in reverse. Thus, ends are justified by means, since all means, if they work, are ultimately equal, that is, efficient. It is only ends which are unequal. We would both agree that some ends are nobler than others. Since means are interchangeable then, it is only ends which ever need to be justified. Oh, Ben,” she cried passionately, “I’m only this archaeologist of the daily. I read the quotidian is all. To me today’s newspaper is already nostalgia. Don’t look to me for the secret of your life!”