“Baby Joe,” I hissed, but still Baby Joe didn’t hear. He was staring absently into space, nodding in time to some private music. Between his fingers the cigarette had burned out. I started to reach for him, then stopped.
This was crazy. Whether it was the vodka or nerves or just bad vibes, I was acting like I’d lost my mind, or at least the part of it that should tell me how to behave at a party I’d crashed. I took a deep breath and forced myself to look up.
Professor Warnick and his companion were gone. In their place stood a group of boisterous undergraduates who seemed to have all just come from the same boozy pregame show. I glanced around, certain that I’d be able to find that towering emaciated figure; but it was gone. It might never have been there at all.
My fear faded into drunken ennui. I watched the laughing students and tried not to feel envious and stupid and headachy. Finally I turned to Baby Joe and asked, “So. You live in D.C?”
“Huh?” Baby Joe started, gazing in surprise at his dead cigarette and then looking suspiciously at the crowd. “Hey, hija—isn’t that Barbie Doll? Over there with that famous lady professor—?”
I turned. For a moment I glimpsed Angelica between waves of black tie and silk, her auburn hair shimmering. She was talking excitedly to a woman who kept glancing over her shoulder and motioning Angelica closer to her.
“Her?”
Baby Joe nodded. “Yeah—you know, that archaeologist. I forget her name.”
I tried to get a better look at the famous lady professor archaeologist. She was maybe in her forties, brown-haired and sexy in a scholarly kind of way. Not exactly pretty but interesting-looking, with intense dark eyes and a Mary Quant haircut and probably the same frosted lipstick she’d been wearing since grad school. The same minidress too: a sleeveless black-and-white sheath with big eyes on it. A little weird, but the sort of thing I could imagine an archaeologist might think was appropriate formal wear. Whoever she was, Angelica looked more excited than I’d seen her all day I thought of joining them, but another wave of partiers swept through and I lost sight of them.
“You want a drink, hija?” Baby Joe pulled at his shirt collar to expose where it had been repaired with black thread. “Sweeney? You look like you need one.”
“Yeah, I guess I do. Thanks.”
He started for the bar, pausing to stare at my T-shirt and boots. “Blue Cheer. Well, fuck me. Di ba, okay, maybe you’ll be okay…”
I walked with him, this time accepting the Pall Mall he offered me, and for good measure ordered two vodka tonics.
Magda Kurtz, the famous lady professor of European Archaeology, had come tonight against her better judgment. It meant canceling her flight back to the West Coast, which was an expensive indulgence, and now she wouldn’t get enough sleep, which was always annoying.
But mostly, it was dangerous. All summer she’d been playing fox and hounds with the Benandanti, tiptoeing around the Divine like the renegade student she still felt like. While her own students here treated her like the prophet of a new age, the other teachers were more circumspect. Distant, at best, like Balthazar Warnick—and why were so many of them at the Divine still men! You’d think they’d at least make some recruitment effort!—at worst, cavalier or disdainful or even suspicious of her work. So different from Berkeley, where her theories were already part of the core curriculum.
But then the Divine had always been like that—so far ahead of its time in many ways, positively medieval in others. The Anthropology Department especially seemed hardly to have changed at all since she’d left. Sometimes, she thought wryly, it seemed like it hadn’t changed since Malinowski’s day.
A lot of that was Balthazar’s doing, of course. He’d been the one to approve her summer term here—it had been his suggestion, in fact, and Magda still wasn’t sure why the invitation had come. But once offered the chance to return, she’d been surprised at how strong her feelings were for the place, how very much she wanted to be here again, even in the middle of the summer.
So Magda had come. She hadn’t been back since the disastrous Çaril Kytur expedition. That was how they all still referred to it, even Magda herself. As in the words of the Washington Post article that had heralded her return this summer—
“…that disastrous Çaril Kytur expedition from which, like a phoenix from the ashes, Magda Kurtz arose with her landmark theories of the matristic cultures of ancient Europe.”
Here at the Divine the students loved her. Professor Kurtz, with her wry, rather droll teaching style. And, of course, her theories, and her books—the trade paperback edition of Daughters of the Setting Sun had recently become a campus best-seller. And the legendary parties she held in her tower room on campus, where a few of the chosen would pass around Magda’s ancient ivory opium pipe with its embellishment of tiny grinning evil-eyed lions, and smoke opium—Real opium! from Nepal! She was Too Much!—and where, as the night burned to dawn, one (and sometimes two) of the more comely undergraduate boys might be discreetly steered toward the little back room, while the rest of her admirers were directed to the door. Oh yes: Professor Kurtz was famous.
But always she was aware of how the other, older members of the Benandanti regarded her. Not quite, not necessarily, as a traitor. Certainly there had been others before Magda Kurtz who left the Divine, to carry on the Benandanti’s work in the government and the arts and even at other places of learning. But Magda’s work had reawakened an old, old feud, perhaps the very oldest one of all.
So this summer she had kept to her students, and to her tower room. Her little romances and necromancies helped pass the time, and the Divine’s extraordinary library, and of course all the other pleasures of the City on the Hill. She avoided the other faculty members as much as she could, especially Balthazar Warnick; but it had been difficult. As always she found herself falling under the diminutive Balthazar’s spell, his peculiar blend of wistfulness and melancholy and biting wit.
I might have fallen in love with him, she thought, slightly wistful herself now as she sipped her champagne and gazed absently across the crowded reception room of Garvey Hall. It might have all been different then, it might have—
But really it could never have been anything but the way it was.
“We serve at different temples now. Different temples, different gods,” Balthazar had said a few weeks earlier, over lunch in one of the sunlit upper rooms of the Old Ebbitt Grill. It had always been one of Magda’s favorite places in the city. Balthazar had taken her there when they first met, awkward student and ageless mentor, and ordered her a Clyde’s omelet—bacon and spinach and sour cream—and kir in a round goblet. It was the most sophisticated meal she had ever eaten, and the first time she’d drunk wine from a wineglass.
“Different gods,” he repeated, and his voice sounded sad.
Outside the afternoon traffic strained past, inching toward the Old Executive Office Building and the White House. Magda sipped her kir. Balthazar continued to stare at her with those piercing electric blue eyes.
“Perhaps we always have,” he added.
Magda answered smoothly, pretending to misunderstand.
“Oh, but it’s always the same old ivory tower, Balthazar, you know that! And you’ll see, I’ve been right all along. Soon every student at the Divine will have read Tristes Tropiques and Of Grammatology—”