“You live in San Diego?” he asked.
She managed not to answer that. He had asked it before, when they were going to the parking lot, and she had managed not to answer it then, either. Now she was drifting around the place, agog at his library: a considerable data resource, he had to admit, cubes and tapes and chip-clusters and disks and even books, good old ancient-but-not-yet-obsolete books.
“Look!” she cried. “You’ve got Kroeber! And Mead! And Levi-Strauss, and Haverford, and Schapiro, and everybody. I’ve never seen anything like this except in a library! Do you mind?” She was pulling things off the shelves, caressing them, fondling them, the books, the tapes, the cubes. Then she turned to him. Her eyes were bright and glowing.
Jaspin had seen that look of rapture before, from girls in his classes, in the days when he had had classes. It was pure love, abstract love. It had nothing particularly to do with him, the real him; they adored him because he was the fount of learning, because he walked daily with Aristotle and Plato. And also because he was older than they were and could, if he cared to, open the gates of wisdom for them with the merest gesture of his finger. Jaspin had used his finger on a number of them, and not just his finger, either, and he suspected that some of them had actually come away the wiser for it, though perhaps not in the way they had been expecting. He figured he was past all that stuff now.
“Look, Jill,” he wanted to say into that adoring gaze, “it’s a real mistake to romanticize me like this. Whatever you may think I might have to offer, it just isn’t there. Honestly.” But he couldn’t bring himself to say it.
Instead he went toward her as if he meant to sweep her into his arms; but at the last moment he simply took the book she was holding from her and fondled it as she had been doing. A true rarity, Cordry on Mexican masks, a hundred thirty years old and the color plates still bright. He was gradually selling off his library to a professor at the La Jolla campus to pay for food and rent, the same way he had acquired most of this stuff ten and fifteen years ago when he was the one with money and somebody else had been down and out.
“It’s one of my great treasures,” Jaspin said. “Look at these masks!” He flipped the pages. Diabolical horned faces, nightmare creatures.Chungirá-He-Will-Come? Maguali-ga? He heard the drums beginning to beat in his head again.
“And this. And this. And this.” She was going into ecstasy. “Such a wonderful library! What an amazing person you must be, to have gathered all this knowledge, Dr. Jaspin!”
“Barry.”
“Barry.”
She went out on the terrace, reached into the hibiscus, pulled off a bright red flower to stick into her hair. Just a waif, he thought, a stray. Probably a little older than he had first guessed—twenty-seven, maybe. “You live in a very nice place,” she said. “For times like these. We’re lucky, aren’t we, being in coastal California? It’s not so good inland, is it?”
“They say it’s pretty rough in there. And the farther from the coast you get, the worse it is. Of course the worst is the states on the edge of the dusted zone. I hear that’s an absolute jungle, bandidos everywhere and nobody gives a damn, everyone dying of radiation sickness anyway.” He shook his head. It sickened him to think of it, the mess that the Dust War had made. No bombs, not a single bomb dropped, you couldn’t use bombs without touching off the ultimate holocaust that everybody agreed would mean mutual annihilation, so they just used the controlled radiation clouds instead, taking out the agricultural states, wiping out the whole heartland, breaking the country in half, in thirds, even. As we did to them, only worse. And now thirty years later we crawl around in the remains of western civilization, pruning our bougainvilleas and playing our music cubes and going to anthropology class and pretending that we have rebuilt the world out here in the sunshine of California while for all we know people have turned into cannibals five hundred miles east of here. He said aloud, “That’s what I was going to write about. The modern world from an anthropological view: almost sociology, sort of. The world as high-tech jungle. Of course I won’t do that now.”
“You won’t?”
“I doubt it. I’m not with the university any longer. I have no sponsorship. Sponsorship’s important.”
“You could do it on your own, Barry. I know you could.”
“That’s very kind,” he said. “Listen, are you hungry? I’ve got a little stuff here, and the prickly pears growing on that cactus in the courtyard are actually edible, so we could—”
“Do you mind if I just take a shower? I feel real sticky, and there’s this paint all over me, the Maguali-ga markings—”
“Sure,” he said. “What day is it? Friday? Sure, we have shower water on Fridays”
She was out of her clothing in a moment. No shame. No breasts, either, no hips, buttocks flat as a boy’s. What the hell. She was female, anyway. He was pretty sure of that, although you couldn’t always tell for certain, the way they did transplants and implants and such nowadays. He showed her into the shower cubicle and found a towel for her. Then—what the hell—he stripped off and went in with her. “We don’t have much of a water quota,” he said. “We’d better double up.”
She turned to him when they were under the spray and wrapped her legs around him, and he backed her up against the tiled wall, holding her with his hands under her buttocks. His eyes were closed most of the time, but once he opened them and he saw that hers were open and that she still had that adoring glowing rapturous look. Like he was putting fifty encyclopedias into her with each thrust.
It was all very fast, but very satisfying, too. There was no getting away from that, the satisfaction of it. But afterward came the sadness, the guilt, the shame, and there was no getting away from that, either. Making love, somebody had called it, long ago. What love, where? Two pathetic strangers, jamming parts of their bodies together for a few minutes: love?
Jaspin thought, I have to try to be honest with this girl. It would have been nicer if I had tried to be honest before we did it, but then maybe we wouldn’t have done it, and I guess I wanted to do it too much. That’s honest too, isn’t it? Isn’t it?
Leaning calm and dejected on the edge of the sink, he said, looking at her little pink-tipped breasts, her boyish hips, her damp stringy hair, “I’ve got to tell you this flat out. You think I’m some sort of noble romantic intellectual figure, don’t you? Well, I’m not, okay? I’m nobody. I’m a phony. I’m a failure, Jill.”
“So am I,” she said.
He looked at her, startled. It was the first authentic thing he had heard out of her mouth since he had met her.
He said, “I used to be somebody. Bright kid, rich L.A. family, lots of promise. Going to be one of the great anthropologists, but somewhere along the way I became farblondjet. ” A mystified look. “You don’t know it? Yiddish word. Means confused, bewildered, totally mixed up. The cafard of the soul, the great early-twenty-second-century disease, what I think they’re calling Gelbard’s syndrome now. I fell apart, is what I did. And I didn’t even know why. It became too much trouble to get up in the morning. It became much too much trouble to go to classes. I wasn’t exactly depressed, you understand—Gelbard’s syndrome is something a little different from clinical depression, they tell me, it’s deeper, it’s a response to the whole human mess, a sort of cultural exhaustion, a burnout phenomenon—but I was farblondjet Still am. I have no career. I have no future. I am not the heroic demigod of culture that you probably imagine me to be.”