Down below, an American guy tells Cordelia: “You are the muse!”
Cordelia pouts disdainfully, and Simon guesses she has practiced this expression to show off her voluptuous lips: “That’s not enough.”
This is the moment Simon chooses to approach her, in front of all her friends, with the resolve of an Acapulco diver. Feigning a cool spontaneity, as if he just happened to be passing, he says that having overheard her remark he couldn’t help responding: “Well, sure, who wants to be an object?” Silence. He reads in Cordelia’s eyes: “Okay, now you have my attention.” He knows he must not only show himself to be urbane and cultivated but must pique her curiosity, provoke her without shocking her, demonstrate his spirit in order to arouse hers, mix lightheartedness with profundity while avoiding pedantry and pretentiousness, indulge the comedy of social life but suggest that neither of them is fooled by it, and, naturally, immediately eroticize the relationship.
“You are made for powerful physical love and you love the iterability of photocopiers, right? A sublimated fantasy is nothing other than a fantasy fulfilled. Anyone who claims the opposite is a liar, a priest and an exploiter of the people.” He hands her one of the two glasses he is holding. “You like gin and tonic?”
The stereo plays “Sexy Eyes” by Dr. Hook. Cordelia takes the glass.
She raises it for a toast and says: “We are lies of trust.” Simon lifts his glass and drinks it almost in a single gulp. He knows he has passed the first test.
Instinctively, he scans the room and spots Slimane, leaning with one hand on the banister of the staircase, on the half-landing, surveying the crowd in the hall, making a V-for-victory sign with his free hand, then using both hands to draw a sort of cross, the hand forming the horizontal bar slightly above the midpoint of the vertical hand. Simon tries to make out who he is addressing the sign to, but all he can see are students and professors drinking and dancing and flirting to Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America,” and he senses that something is wrong, though he can’t tell what. And the increasingly tight group forming around Derrida: it is him Slimane is looking at.
He does not see Kristeva or the old man with the bush hair and the wool tie, but they are there, all the same, and if he could see them, if they weren’t hidden in different but equally concealed positions, he would see that both had their eyes fixed on Slimane and he would know that both had intercepted the sign Slimane was making with his hands and he would guess that both had guessed that the sign was addressed to Derrida, hidden, too, behind his admirers.
Nor does he see the man with the bull’s neck who fucked Cordelia on the photocopier, but he is there too, staring at her with his bull’s eyes.
He searches for Bayard in the crowd but doesn’t find him, for the very good reason that Bayard is in a bedroom upstairs, beer in hand, unidentified chemical substance coursing through his veins, discussing pornography and feminism with his new friends.
He hears Cordelia say: “The Church, in the goodness of its heart, did at least ask the council of Mâcon in 585 if a woman had a soul…,” so to please her, he adds: “… and was very careful not to find a response.”
The tall Egyptian girl quotes a line of Wordsworth whose provenance Simon does not manage to pinpoint. The short Asian girl explains to an Italian man from Brooklyn that she is writing her thesis on the queer in Racine.
Someone says: “Everyone knows that psychoanalysts don’t even talk anymore, and they don’t do much interpreting either.”
Camille Paglia screams: “French go home! Lacan is a tyrant who must be driven from our shores.”
Morris Zapp laughs and yells across the halclass="underline" “You’re damn right, General Custer!”
Gayatri Spivak thinks: “You’re not Aristotle’s granddaughter, you know.”
In the bedroom, Judith asks Bayard: “So where do you work, actually?” Bayard, taken by surprise, replies dumbly, immediately hoping that Cixous does not pick up on it: “I do research … at Vincennes.” But Cixous, of course, raises an eyebrow, so he looks her in the eye and says: “In law.” Cixous raises her other eyebrow. Not only has she never seen Bayard at Vincennes, but the university has no law department. To create a diversion, Bayard puts a hand under her blouse and squeezes a breast through her bra. Cixous suppresses a look of surprise but decides not to react, then Judith puts a hand on her other breast.
An undergrad named Donna has joined Cordelia’s group, and the Carthaginian princess asks her: “How’s Greek life so far?” In fact, Donna and her sorority sisters are planning to stage a bacchanal. Cordelia is excited and amused by the idea. Simon thinks that Slimane must have been arranging to meet Derrida. Maybe the sign he made was not a V for victory, but the time of the meeting. Two o’clock, but where? Had it been a church, Slimane would have made a standard sign of the cross, rather than that bizarre gesture. He asks: “Is there a cemetery nearby?” Young Donna claps her hands: “Oh yeah! That’s a great idea! Let’s go to the cemetery!” Simon is about to say that that was not what he meant, but Cordelia and her friends seem so thrilled by the proposal that in the end he says nothing.
Donna says she’ll go and fetch the stuff. The stereo plays “Call Me” by Blondie.
It is already almost one o’clock.
He hears someone say: “The interpretative priest, the soothsayer, is one of the despot-god’s bureaucrats, you see? Here’s another aspect of the priest’s treachery, damn it: the interpretation goes on forever and never finds anything to interpret that is not itself already an interpretation!” It’s Guattari, clearly quite drunk, hitting on an innocent postgrad from Illinois.
He has to tell Bayard.
The stereo sends Debbie Harry’s voice ricocheting from the walls: “When you’re ready, we can share the wine.”
Donna returns with a toiletry bag and says they can go now.
Simon rushes upstairs to tell Bayard to meet them at the cemetery at two o’clock. He opens all the doors, finding all kinds of stoned students, some more active than others. He finds Foucault jerking off in front of a poster of Mick Jagger, finds Andy Warhol writing poems (in fact, it’s Jonathan Culler filling out pay stubs), finds a greenhouse with marijuana plants growing up to the ceiling, even finds some well-behaved students watching baseball on a sports channel while they smoke crack, then finally locates Bayard.
“Oh? Sorry!”
He quickly closes the door, but he has time to see Bayard wedged between the legs of a woman he is unable to identify while Judith fucks him with a strap-on, yelling: “I am a man and I fuck you! Now you feel my performative, don’t you?”
Impressed by this vision, he doesn’t have the presence of mind to leave a message and rushes downstairs to join Cordelia’s group.
He passes Kristeva on the stairs, but pays no attention to her.
He is well aware that he is not following the emergency protocol, but his attraction to Cordelia’s white skin is too strong. After all, he’ll be at the meeting place, he thinks, legitimizing a plan he knows full well is driven only by the logic of his desire.
Kristeva knocks on the door with the strange growling noises behind it. Searle opens it. She does not go in, but whispers something to him. Then she heads for the room she saw Bayard go into with his two friends.
The cemetery in Ithaca is on a wooded hillside, and the gravestones look as if they have been scattered randomly between the trees. The only sources of light are the moon and the city. The group gathers around the tomb of a woman who died very young. Donna explains that she is going to recite the secrets of the Sibyl, but that they must prepare the “birth ceremony of the new man,” and that they need a volunteer. Cordelia volunteers Simon. He would like to ask for more details, but when she starts undressing him, he lets her do it. Around them, a dozen people have come to watch the spectacle, and this seems like a crowd to Simon. When he is completely naked, she lays him down in the grass, at the foot of the gravestone, and whispers in his ear: “Relax. We’re going to kill the former man.”