Mendocino Fire

Eros 101

Q: Examine the proposition that for each of us, however despairing over past erotic experience, there exists a soul mate.

A: Soul? In some fluorescent lab an egg’s embryonic smear cradles a lozenge of silicon, the vampiric chip electromagnetically quickened by a heartbeat, faux-alive, while in a Bauhaus bunker on the far side of campus, a researcher coaxes Chopin from a virtual violin, concluding with a bow to her audience of venture capitalists, but for true despair, please turn to Prof. Clio Mitsak, at a dinner party in her honor, lasting late this rainy winter night, nine other women at the table, women only, for the evening’s covert (and mistaken: you’ll see) premise is that the newly hired Woolf scholar will, from her angelic professional height and as homage to VW, scheme to advance all female futures, and the prevailing mood has been one of preemptive gratitude, gratitude as yet unencumbered by actual debt and therefore flirtatious, unirksome even to Clio, its object. Clio who, hours ago, hit the button for auto-charm, absenting her soul (there) from the ordeal of civility. Gone, virtually, until dessert. Set down before her, the wedge of cake, black as creek-bed mud parting under the tines of the fork, brings her to her senses, but then she’s sorry, because the whipped cream is an airy petrochemical quotation of real cream, and the licked-tire-tread aftertaste provokes an abrupt tumble into depression. It is an attribute of the profoundest despair not to realize it is despair. Kierkegaard. Mitsak. She’s vanished down that rabbit hole known as California, and her cell never cries Text me. Her past has gone dead quiet; her exes have adopted Chinese infants abandoned in train stations. This candlelit table, strewn with cigarettes ashed in saucers and wineglasses kissed in retro red, makes her want to cry out a warning. Nine hopefuls embarked on the long romance with academia’s rejections: she has everything they long for, and look at her! Old! Old! Old! Old! Old! Alone! Alone! Alone! Alone!

It’s not really there, is it, such stupidity, on the tip of her tongue? Yes it is — (she’s drunk) — but wait, she’s saved, struck dumb by a voice.

The voice can’t be described as

honeyed

It doesn’t intend to flatter. Neither gratitude nor the least career-driven taint of ingratiation figures in its tone. It belongs to the woman at Clio’s left, whom Clio has managed, since seating was reshuffled for dessert, not to notice. Such gaps or rifts in social obligation are the prerogative of charisma, with its sexy, butterfly-alighting attentiveness, its abrupt, invigorating

rudeness, the masochistically satisfying cold shoulder turned toward any less-than-stellar presence. Remorsefully, Clio concedes (as perhaps the voice, fractionally wounded, implies) that in doing so she has been ignoring beauty.

Q: Briefly explicate Rilke’s lines, “All of you undisturbed cities / haven’t you ever yearned for the Enemy?”

A: When that voice says, “Selfish us, we’ve kept you up too late. You’re tired,” Clio, not yet ready to confront the source, steadies the bowl of her wineglass between two fingers and a thumb, observing the rhythm of her pulse in the concentric wine rings. The voice qualifies, thoughtfully, “No, sad,” italicizing with the pleasure of nailing emotion to its right name, and for this ventured precision, Clio feels the agitated relief of the solitary, whose emotions, seldom articulated for another, mostly live and die nameless. Immediately following relief comes panic, not an unusual progression, for there’s no panic quite like the panic of having found something you’d hate to lose. Now we come to that oddly asocial moment when the inkblot of private gesture, proof of exigent emotion, stains the unfolding social contract: Clio can’t look at this woman. Not yet. Realizing it must appear rude, she closes her eyes. A person whose composure is not only a professional asset but an actual cast of mind may become a connoisseur of her own panic, just as, for a Japanese gardener, the chance scatteration of cherry petals on freshly raked gravel beautifully illumines the futility of control: so behind her closed eyes Clio experiences, as counterpart to panic, exaltation. The Enemy!

Q: The absurd and the erotic are mutually exclusive modes of perception. That is, no love object can be both ridiculous and beautiful. True or false?

A: The voice’s owner, perceiving an invitation in Clio’s half-empty glass, leans in with the bottle, startling Clio, whose closed eyes have prevented awareness of her proximity. Clio jumps, diverting the airborne artery of wine, which leaps about, bathing her wrist, spattering her dessert plate, splashing from the table’s edge into her black silk lap. The voice’s owner fails to right the bottle until wine rains from the table’s edge, pattering into flexing amoeba shapes on the polished floor, the voice’s owner apologizing manically — yet as if she anticipated some need for apology? — and setting the bottle down with a thump. I’m so so sorrrrry. It is Clio’s lap that the voice’s owner bends toward, still uttering wild sorries, so that Clio’s first image of her is of her hair, red and in torment, copious, strenuous, anarchic hair, writhing, heavy, ardent, gorgeous hair tricked into confinement, knotted at the nape of a neck so smooth and white its single mole seems to cast a tiny shadow. The tip of Clio’s tongue so covets the mole, which stands out like one of the beads of Beaujolais stippling her wrist, that she scarcely experiences the swabbing of the napkin at her lap — thus, for the sake of the imagined, missing out on the thrill of the actual, and immediately repenting this, the first loss within the kingdom of true love.

“This is

so

not working,” says the woman, turning to blot at Clio’s wrist while Clio memorizes every detail of the profile of her future. Too much forehead, baldish and vulnerable-looking, as is often true of redheads, a long nose with a bump at its tip, the smart arch of the lifted eyebrow, thick eyelashes

dark at their roots, fair to invisibility at their tips. A fine chin. A neat and somehow boyish ear exposed by the tension of the trammeled hair. Why boyish? Unearringed, Clio notes, not even pierced, a sexy virgin petal of lobe. Under the fine chin, the hint of a double, a faint softening in a line that should ideally run tensely along the jaw to the downcurve of the throat. This is true of redheads as well, Clio thinks, this appearance of laxness in certain secret places, as if the body, where it can, resists the severity of the contrast between pale skin and vivid hair, and asserts a passivity, a private entropy, counter to the flamey energy of red. Clio is forty-two to the other’s twenty-something: fact. Fearful fact.

“Don’t worry, we can get you cleaned up,” says the younger woman, “so come on,” standing to take Clio’s wrist, leading Clio down a long and shadowed hallway, the din of apologies — everyone’s, chorused yet random, like Apache war cries — fading behind the two of them, then gone entirely, Clio surrendering to the sexiness of being

led

, for the other hasn’t released her wrist and hasn’t turned around, and for the length of that fatal hallway Clio obediently pursues this most unexpected of persons, the Beloved. Under Clio’s hot gaze the knot of passionate hair at the Beloved’s nape, screwed so tight in its coil, releases red-gold strands flaring with electricity.

Q: The following quotation is taken from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations:

. . a face which inspires fear or delight (the object of fear or delight) is not on that account its cause, but — one might say — its target.

Discuss.

A: Prof. Mitsak’s new condominium comes with its own scrap of California, backyard enough for two spindly fruit trees, a futon of gopher-harrowed turf, and an inherited compost heap. It’s still winter, the trees’ tracery of bare branches unreadable as to kind, but Prof. Mitsak thinks of them as plum trees because sex, for her, was born with a theft: of her grandmother’s plum jam, the old woman watching, from the corner of an eye, the child’s fingers crooking over the jar’s rim, sliding into lumpish, yielding sweetness, the old woman giving the plaintive laugh peculiar to that kind of vicarious delight, witnessing a pleasure one essentially disapproves of, which costs one something — in her grandmother’s case, a steely domestic rigor and a wicked Methodist conviction about the virtue of self-deprivation.

It will be spring by the time the trees, if their blossoming proves they’re not plum, can disappoint Clio, and by spring she hopes to be eating and sleeping again, done with writing and rewriting letters, actual, insane, ink-and-paper letters that she never sends, done with twisting herself into yoga asanas meant to impress the younger, suppler Beloved, who will never observe her contortions. In Clio’s previous experience of heartbreak, she’s been its cause. On heartbreak’s receiving end, she proves hapless, self-pitying, wincing, vindictive. A forgetter of goddaughters’ birthdays, a serial umbrella-loser. Winter rains down on her head, pelting her with the icy spite of finality: she will never tip a baby bottle toward the mouth of a Mei or Ming, or click wedding ring against steering wheel in time to Mozart. Her most parodied gesture becomes the convulsive shake of the head with which she assumes the lectern, flicking raindrops across her notes, rousing the microphone to a squalling tantrum as

water pings against electronics. In each lecture Clio seems to be trailing after some earlier, more brilliant Clio, even as she had followed the Beloved, she of the

sturm und drang

hair, down the fatal hallway. How can love do this, alienate one from oneself? One’s necessary, tenured self? All winter, this is the lone relief built into every pitiless week: white-knuckling it at the podium, Clio suffers the loss of something other than the Beloved.

Fridays can be very bad. As junior faculty, the Beloved isn’t always required to attend faculty meetings, but sometimes she must. So there is this torment, certain Fridays, of having to sit on the far side of a slab of exotic wood from some plundered rainforest, studying the span of the Beloved’s cheekbone, a revelation of human perfection. Like human perfection, shadowed. The corner of the Beloved’s mouth has an unwarranted tendency to break Clio’s heart. That is, the corner of this mouth now and then deepens into a near smile. Suppose everyone were capable of disarming everyone else thus, by the merest turn of a head, by the flicker of an eyelid or the premonition of a smile: then all relations would be grounded in wonder, then everyone would be taken hostage by the immensity of what it is possible to feel.

Q: True or false: In narrative, desire is scarcely born before it encounters an obstacle; neither can exist without the other.

A: Following the Beloved down that fatal hallway, you, in your Questioner’s detachment, would have kept your wits about you, and would have observed, on the fourth finger of the Beloved’s left hand, the diamond whose flash was hidden by the wonder veiling Clio’s mind. Well: she is only a character, much of her own story is lost on her.

In that multiply mirrored ladies’ designed for blissful immersion in one’s reflection the Beloved rinses Clio’s trousers under a golden faucet. She twists and wrings out the trousers, then carries them to a dryer on the wall, tapping its round silver button, dangling the black legs in the sirocco so they weave happily, gusting into the Beloved’s own body, then fainting away.

“Really, you don’t have to do this. You should be out with the others.”

“

I

spilled the wine all over you.”

This washerwomanly penance is cute, they both think.

“Why did you say, before, ‘sad’?” Clio asks.

“Maybe everyone is, when a dinner party drags on and on. If we had a reason to leave, we’d leave. If we don’t have a reason, that’s sad. You don’t seem to have a reason. Or”—she catches herself—“is it rude to say that?”

When she turns Clio makes a fig leaf of her hands. “No, honest.”

“And I was surprised, you know? One always thinks of famous people as having everything figured out. Here. I think you can try these now.”

Q: Susan Stewart writes:

The face becomes a text, a space which must be “read” and interpreted in order to exist. The body of a woman, particularly constituted by a mirror and thus particularly subject to an existence constrained by the nexus of external images, is spoken by her face, by the articulation of another’s reading. Apprehending the face’s image becomes a mode of possession. . The face is what belongs to the other. It is unavailable to the woman herself.

A: What was the question?

Q: What do you make of that?

A: Clio, hiking her trousers up, finds the Beloved stretching lazily, her real and mirrored arms uplifted, fingers interlaced, palms ceilingward, fox-red tufts of underarm hair bristling, black dress hiked midthigh-high: flirtatiousness or ravishing unself-consciousness, and for her watcher, no knowing which. So exigent is Clio’s confusion that she cracks her knuckles and then remembers how she had hated it when her mother did that. The memory stamps out several little wildfires of desire, Mother’s is so derisive a shade, and Clio was never out to her. The perfect antidote to desire, skinny Mother materializing, upright backbone and the witty incision of her neat, ungiving Methodist smile. Just try thinking back through this woman.

It’s then that two blazing wings of sensation touch down on Clio’s nape, and the Beloved’s palms begin to move in circles, massaging, worrying at the tension they discover, digging in, the Beloved’s thumbs bookending the axial vertebra, so that Clio feels the three-dimensional puzzle-piece of bone turn as distinct as if newly wedged in place, her entire skull balanced upon the knife’s point of sexual alertness, Clio afraid to move or make a sound for fear of dislodging the hands, startling them into flight. She is aware that

savage loss is the counterpart and shadow of this raw arousal and yearning, which she can scarcely trust even as she leans into it, wondering what this means, this sensual charity.

“Shiatsu.”

“Shiatsu,” echoes Clio.

“Mmm. Good for what ails you.”

The Beloved’s reflection squints at the real-world Clio over her shoulder, to which she administers a comradely slap. Dismissed.

What ails me?

Clio wonders.

Loss. Aging. Regret.

So this is Eros’ dark side. Always before it was Clio who inflicted the first reality check. The pangs foreshadowing abandonment, the subtly poisonous forewarning: Clio dealt those out.

Now we come, though it’s timed wrong, to our epiphany, for Clio, academe’s androgynous roué, contriver of seductions, far-flung affairs, and prolonged breakdowns — here and now, Clio encounters a possibility never before entertained: she’s been unkind. Careless with others’ hearts. A waster of time, a despoiler of affection. As of this moment, that Prof. Mitsak is dead. Just ask Clio, absorbed in this mirror’s vision, herself and her at-last true love, the radiant-haired object of all future dreams, now rubbing a finger across a front tooth. Clio puts her hands on those shoulders and turns the slender black-sheathed body around. She feels the weird cessation of her breath in her throat — heart-stopping, she thinks — and then all self-narration, even the stabs at description that accompany the worst emergencies, stops. Though the red mouth tilts toward her, lips parting, the eyes remain open. Dazzling, desirous, repelled, unreadable.

Q: Compare/contrast the roles of “body” and “soul” in the act of kissing.

A: This eyes-open kiss is clumsy: neither body nor soul can readily forgive that. Seduction, it turns out, requires an almost Questioner-like detachment to ensure grace. To become a character in the story is to fall from grace. It’s as if Clio, in her previous affairs, was always narrator, never simply down in the story, at the muddy, helpless level where she understood only as much as anyone else. Or less. It could be that the Beloved needs a narrator, not simply a floundering fellow character. Clio’s teeth grate against the Beloved’s, a terrible, nails-on-blackboard sound from which they both recoil.

Q: Comment briefly on the following quotation:

Perhaps it was to that hour of anguish that there must be attributed the importance which Odette had since assumed in his life. Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of our lives a vast expanse, quick with sensation, on which that person and ourselves are ever more or less in contact.

A: All that drear winter of La Niña, Clio feels as if she’s trying to keep a wine cork submerged in a bathtub using only one thumb, so dodgy and unpredictable is this love. Tamped-down love means not only sublimated energy but also ranting, pointless impatience: before long, she’s sick of obsession’s two-lane Nebraska highway. She welcomes any distraction, even this folder, thwacked down on her desk by a junior colleague, younger even than the Beloved. Fading back toward the doorway, this colleague announces in an injured tone: “We really need to talk at some point after you’ve read this.” “About?” “About Nadia.” The Beloved, up for tenure. While junior faculty can’t vote on tenure decisions, they do a fair amount of lobbying — if that’s what this is — on behalf of favored candidates. Renee strains for ease, a gauche, brain-driven woman whose particular mix of ethnicity baffles Clio. African American? Vietnamese? And Czech? Irish? Dutch? Some unprecedented cat’s cradle of deoxyribonucleic acid granted her that shapely mouth, pugilist’s menacing nose with flaring nostrils, oily fawn skin marred across the cheekbones by an orange-peel stippling of adolescent acne. That acne, severe and untreated, suggests a raisin-in-the-sun, down-home poverty, valiantly tackled and, at this point in her young career, stringently repudiated. If Renee ever had an accent, it’s gone. Or not quite: some suggestion of backwater lulls and daydreamy delta vowels remains, despite that impressive will. To suggest a chic she’s far from possessing, Renee’s left ear is multiply pierced; adorned with wires and rings, it seems more alert than the other, more attuned to signals and nuances. It is to this ear that Clio says, “I’ll read it. We’ll talk.”

“You don’t

get

it. We expected so much from you.”

We

, the nine who held the dinner in her honor, that memorable evening.

In this chilly pause, Clio, love’s insomniac, fails to suppress a yawn. Renee, fervent with insult, closes in, hurling herself into Clio’s office’s only unoccupied seat, a meanly proportioned straight-backed chair designed to discommode students who would otherwise linger in Clio’s aura of disdainful indifference. Throwing one leg over the other,

leaning in, slapping the folder, Renee begins, “You were supposed to—”

Clio says, “‘To’?”

What the hell

is the expression stamped on those fine, ethnically inscrutable features. “To change things! To, not

mother

exactly, but at least

care

about our careers. If you hear the word going around that ‘Nadia’s publications are a little

scanty

to qualify for tenure,’ you’re supposed to have her back, but no one’s heard a peep from you, and Nadia — Nadia’s some kind of demoralized shadow of her former self.”

“Shadow?”

“Me, I fantasize obsessively about burning down this building.”

“But Nadia? She’s a demoralized shadow?”

“Even to confess this fantasy probably gets me on about five different lists right now.”

“I haven’t noticed anything wrong with Nadia.”

“Well: you seem to be avoiding her.”

“No. No, no. Not avoiding her. Why would I avoid Nadia? No.”

“Avoiding all of us, then.”

“You appear to have found me.”

“Right at home in this building I burn down ten or eleven times a day.”

“If you burn it down, what will you do?”

“Ha! Even in daydreams I blow out the match. Even in my head, where you’d think I’d have no fear, I can’t touch the flame to the shitty carpet. This place! Can’t you get a little more involved? Unless you’re willing to get your hands dirty, her tenure meeting’s gonna go in a truly ugly direction. ‘Scanty’! She has two books! Would you like the figures

on just how many junior female faculty this place has

ever

tenured? Because I find that figure impressive. It’s a very round number. Zero! And, excuse me for noticing, but the last male this department gave tenure to had only one — uninteresting, I think — book and a couple of

derivative

articles, yet his shit was never called ‘scanty.’”

“Okay,” Clio says.

“Okay what?”

Down the hallway, a door opens, closes, and is locked, the homeward-bound deconstructionist whistling, the melody trailing down the floor before vanishing into the elevator, not before lodging itself in Clio’s mind.

Miss my clean white linen, and my fancy French cologne.

“I’ll peep,” Clio says distractedly. “I’ll get Nadia’s back.”

“Her books are

really good

You’ve read them, right? Look, did I—?”

“Did you?”

“Offend you.”

“There’s truth in what you said. I haven’t been very engaged.” Gently, but sick of gentleness, disliking the baiting way this woman hangs her sentences in the air.

“Your advocacy will be a game changer, you know that, right?” A pause while this antagonist wonders how far she can push her luck. “Nadia

really needs you

, is the thing.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

But it’s really not my ho-ome.

“I would open a florist shop,” Renee says. “After I burned this building down. Since you ask.”

“You know what I think about?” Clio says — not, in the moment, even faintly surprised, though in retrospect she will marvel at this question, at having done, next, something so unlike herself, telling a truth, and why, when no good comes

of such slips? “A bookstore on a downtown corner in some rinky-dinky town. Rare books, first editions.”

“But you’re famous. You can make waves. You’re not at their mercy.”

You have everything I want.

“There are days, lately, when I don’t love books.”

“You’re losing your soul.”

Clio reflects on the justness of this observation. “People open bookstores because they want their souls back.”

“It works. I know bookstores whose owners have

gotten

them back.”

They laugh, and then don’t know what to do with the silence that follows.

“Does Nadia know you came to me?”

“Nadia. Girl is

losing

it. Sleepless, skinnier than ever, keeps printing out articles about former professors who end up homeless or hoarding cats or whatever. But, no, we’ve never talked about you. I think she thinks you’ve got reservations about her work.”

“What gave her that idea?” In fact, it’s true: in the cool scholarly part of her soul Clio doesn’t much like Nadia’s books. Trusting this secret assessment, with the rest of her judgment compromised by love, would be unwise, and Clio has intended all along to vote yes, has meant, in short, to do the right thing, or at least the least

wrong

thing. Whichever way it goes, next week’s meeting will cause pain: either the pain of Nadia’s being granted tenure and remaining near but unpossessable, or the pain of her being refused tenure, thus vanishing forever from Clio’s life. If not even a starry glimpse of the object of fear and desire is possible, what will become of that life?

And yet, freed on this, the first afternoon in our story

that can safely be called

spring

, lugging her laden briefcase, Clio surrenders to the lightness of soul hidden within each Friday, taking the stairs in long-legged, traipsing descent, her voice pitching

up!

and

up!

precariously, caroming off cinderblock as if the stairwell were a gigantic cement shower stall, quick with resonance, echoing and amplifying:

“Oh, I

“Could drink

“A case

“Of you!”

You!

flung into the rainy outer world as Joni Mitchell, trailing rags of her ethereal voice, charges across the asphalt only to find, wading in a slow circle around a rusted-out wreck of a car in the flooding parking lot, Nadia, head bent under the assault of the rain, carrying something, now and then pausing to hammer with her fist at the car’s Bondodappled hood. Clio suffers a twist of emotion she can’t at first recognize. Before, encountering Nadia unexpectedly, she has experienced a number of emotions — shame of a particularly rich, basking intensity, or a pitiless, wired kind of happiness — but never before has any response to Nadia been as temperate as this: disappointment.

“This is all I can

fuck. Ing.

Take.”

Fuck

and

ing

are blows.

It’s been two months since they have exchanged more than cautious

hi

’s, passing in the hall.

“Keep doing that, you’ll hurt your hand.”

“I locked myself out, can you believe it?”

“Come get in my car. You can use my cell.”

“This had to happen in front of you.” Nadia begins to cry. “When all I want—”

“All you want—?” More baiting sentences? Did the junior women catch this from each other?

“Is to be like you. So to

gether

So far above the shit and disarray.”

Nadia wants not to

have

but to

be

Clio, it seems. “I lose keys,” she says, and tries to catch Nadia’s wrist before she can bang on the old car again, but too late: a racket of reverberating metal, and the rain drumming on the Chevy’s roof and hood, Clio sheltering Nadia’s head, now, under an impromptu roof of briefcase.

“Get in my car and we’ll figure out what you should do.”

“I can’t get in, I’m soaked, I’m a mess.”

“You’re shivering. Come on.”

In Clio’s BMW, with its kid-glove leather and customized quiet, German engineering exerts its power to heal the psyche, and Nadia grows calmer. As she ducked into the passenger side after Clio unlocks its door, she had absently relinquished an old shoebox with bulging sides, wound around with duct tape and curiously heavy. Covertly, Clio tries shaking the box.

“Hey!” Nadia cries, and snatches the box away, giving Clio a look full of accusation and darkening sorrow. “This box has my heart in it,” she confesses.

“Your

what

in it?”

Nadia bends forward in her seat and rests her forehead against the lid of the box, communing with whatever’s inside. After a moment she says clearly, “My cat.” Droplets chase down the spiraling madrone twigs of wet red hair to patter onto the box’s cardboard, where they appear as fuzzy, dilating dots. “Who loved me for

me

.”

There is nothing to dry either of them with, Clio the

bad, the negligent mother in this impromptu family in the quasi-domesticity of the car’s interior. Wanting to help but unable to think how, Clio sets the wipers going. Fans of visibility flash open and swipe shut, melodically. Around them, the drenched and shining asphalt reveals streaks of brilliance, as if light were drilling down into a medium infinitely soft and black, and the other cars stranded here and there across the lot possess a wet, sharp-edged distinctness. Clio turns on the heat, not just because Nadia is still shivering; suddenly it seems important that they not be fogged in by breath, and she’s worried about the weirdness of Nadia’s behavior. “The cat is,” Clio says delicately, “

in

the box?”

“Dead,” Nadia says to the box.

“Nadia, I’m sorry.”

“Fuck, what a word,” Nadia says. “

Dead.

Onomatopoetic.”

“I’m so sorry.”

At last, to Clio’s relief, Nadia sits up. “I sensed something was wrong all night, and I took her in first thing this morning. To the vet. It was an okay experience, really. They give her this shot and she goes limp in my hands. This little velvet sack from which all fear just,

sssst

, leaks away. I’m holding her, I’m stroking her. They give her the other shot then. The death shot.”

Q: In the light of your answers to the previous questions, formulate a definition of “beauty.”

A: “I’m sorry,” Clio says again, meaning to convey empathy, though she can’t help it: such grief seems ridiculous to her. Is there a fugitive whiff — carnal, musky? — of decay in the car? She hadn’t known Nadia had a cat, but in her experience cats, belonging to lovers or exes or lovers’ exes’ exes, come with relationships — never before sealed in a box, though. Clio longs to apply the balm of her cool hand to Nadia’s forehead, to the temple, where new hair grows in a minute clockwise whorl, like the illustration of the birth of a star, the tiny hairs strung with fine condensation. For no reason a phrase of Woolf’s comes to Clio: “‘Reality’. . beside which nothing matters.” Reality for Clio seems born of that fine, nearly invisible star on the Beloved’s temple, and if she wants more than anything to touch it, for the sake of what the other must be feeling, she resists.

Q: “At the center of each person,” D. W. Winnicott writes, “is an incommunicado element and this is sacred and most worthy of preservation.” Can this belief be reconciled with erotic love, and if so, how?

A: She resists. “Where can I take you?” she asks, hating to interrupt this communing silence, which, however dreary, is still the easiest closeness they are ever likely to achieve.

Provoked by sympathy, her instinct to redeem herself in Clio’s eyes warring with the wretchedness of grief, Nadia begins to cry again. “Hey, hey, come on, it’s all right, it really is,” Clio says. “I can take you wherever you need to go.”

Monotonously, Nadia weeps, not with her hands clasped to her face but rubbing and swiping at it compulsively, as if her hands wanted to

work

on grief, to knead and knuckle it out. This at least — the loss or death of cats being a staple of lesbian discourse—

is

familiar.

“I don’t know where to go. Or what to do with her.”

Nadia’s voice has a rasp in it, deprivation meeting and marrying remorse, the tone of the truly, bitterly disconsolate. The dead-cat smell is stronger now. Nadia says, “I live in this apartment, seventh floor, there’s no garden, not even really a lawn. No place she can go into the ground.” She clears her throat. “I thought of trying to sneak in to bury her on campus, maybe in one of those old eucalyptus groves. That’s why I brought her. I was actually walking around with her under my arm, looking. But I thought, what if the campus police find me burying this little box of cat? Won’t it be ludicrous, won’t it get me in trouble, won’t they just anyway stop me? Plus what can I dig with? It’s not like I own a shovel. What a fucked-up

life

I hate my

life

I can’t even call someone and say, ‘My cat died,’ because everyone I know would feel some kind of irony about the situation, like they would never be caught driving around with their cat in a box. Even Billy. He wouldn’t mean to, but he’d convey his — I’m sorry, I’m ruining your beautiful leather.”

Billy, Clio remembers, is the boyfriend, who teaches at Columbia and seems to be mostly a phone presence in Nadia’s existence but, as such, sufficient to thwart other entanglements. For example, with Clio.

“He would convey his what?” She can’t help this little viper of voyeurism, uncoiling.

“He never liked the cat. So — his re

lief

.”

“Oh, no.”

“He’s going to try not to show it, but he’s going to be

glad

.”

“Surely not, Nadia.”

“He’s going to think, ah, now we can live together, no impediments.”

“The cat can’t have been much of an impediment.”

“He can be

fussy

The cat liked peeing in his shoes.”

Doesn’t the cat have a name? Clio wonders. “Listen, I think we should go to my place. I have a backyard. Maybe you’d like to bury your cat there. It’s a nice backyard. With plum trees.”

“You’d want my cat in your backyard? Why?”

“You need to get her into the ground, right? I don’t mind if your cat gets a tiny piece of my backyard. I think it’s a good use for it.”

“How can we bury her in rain like this?”

“Under umbrellas?”

Umbrellas are what they use, taking turns digging and sheltering, Clio glad to break in her Smith & Hawken spade, the soil yielding pebbles of asphalt and shards of glass but mostly giving way easily enough, not difficult to excavate a fair-sized hole in, though the bottom has begun to seep before Nadia lowers the sodden box, and because she begins to cry again, it’s Clio who shucks the first spadeful onto the darkening coffin, petals, borne in by a gust, sticking to the cardboard, Nadia crying harder, Clio’s lower back beginning to ache and her own eyes to brim.

When Clio is done tamping the earth over the little grave, she asks Nadia if she’d like to come in, and Nadia assents. Barefoot, she prowls past the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves with scarcely a sideways glance. Clio can’t help registering her failure to read titles or pull out a single one of the Woolf firsts, with their fragile, charming Vanessa Bell jackets. In the kitchen Nadia pauses at the refrigerator door. “Wow. Chinese babies.”

“My godchildren.” Each morning, with her first cup of coffee, she stands before the collage of fat-cheeked faces, snowsuits and tutus, trying to make sure she’s not forgetting another birthday.

“All girls?”

“In China girls get abandoned so the parents can try for a boy.”

“Do you like kids?”

“Only those.”

“I can’t imagine what it would feel like, abandoning your baby.” She imagines: “Like tearing your heart out with your bare hands.” She taps several pictures. “These are cute, these tiny violins.”

“Suzuki method.”

“I want kids.”

“Why don’t you get out the wine? But let me pour.”

“Ha.”

Bringing two wineglasses filled to the brim, she sets one down by Clio and sits in the nearer of two cubes of chrome and black leather.

Clio says, “I’ll make a fire. Get you warmed up.” Thinks

Dolt!

for the double entendre. She busies herself with crumpling newspaper and arranging kindling into a tipsy pyramid — reminded, as the lit match wavers, of Renee — and she’s in luck, the fire catches nicely, and Nadia comes to sit cross-legged beside her, the bath towel now slung over her shoulders boxer-style. She rubs the back of a freckled hand across her cheekbone, leaving a streak of wet grittiness. Clio looks away so she won’t be tempted to take the towel’s corner and erase that streak. She doesn’t want to ask if she can, but simply for things to unfold,

or not, as Nadia wishes. Nadia hugs her shins, fire-gazing, and says, “I was crazy, out there in the rain. You came along and saved me.” In her voice, the definite note of flirtation.

“I want something for you.”

“Something

for

me? What?”

“You might not understand this, or think it has anything to do with me — and probably it doesn’t — but what I want is your happiness. However you want to go about obtaining it. Whatever shape it takes in your imagination. The funny thing is, I can want this without knowing the specifics. How you’d define happiness. Whether you even think it exists.”

“What about your happiness?” Nadia says. “You know, supposing something happened with us. Would you be all right if it happened only once?” So, when it comes down to it, she’s a person who likes to know what she’s getting into. Clio had believed, wrongly, that she would prefer not-knowing, risk, improvisation.

“I don’t know.” She rues her honesty. “Yes.”

“You would? Even if we can’t see each other after this?”

“Yes.”

“Because this can’t turn into a

thing

.” Nadia sticks to interrogation: reluctantly, Clio realizes she might be good at it. “I don’t want you to get hurt, do you see that?”

“I’m fine.”

“Because I’m straight.”

“The essence is that I love you,” Clio says, “that I loved you the moment I saw you,” and then she says, “and that’s never happened to me before,” and hugs her own shins, the two of them fire-gazing in parallel universes, waiting for what will come next.

Q: Tell me.

A: The Beloved’s nipples are terra cotta, her vagina is coral, her hair, floating as it dries, a torrent freed from gravity, roams the air around her face with an unruly will of its own, her high forehead serene in spite of this changeling hair, her small breasts swinging and bumping her whippet rib cage, the mole on her neck vivid, her kneecaps flushed bright pink by the fire’s heat as she crouches above Clio, and if Clio wants to believe this night the most beautiful she will ever live through, who can disagree? All conspires to ensure the Beloved’s tenure, Clio’s argument (“The last male this department gave tenure to had only one — uninteresting, I think — book and a couple of derivative articles”), the yes Clio scrawls on a slip of paper, one of several dozen slips collected by the chair, doubly, triply inevitable. Let’s agree that no love should be judged by its duration, and that what Clio learned that isolated night, never before having experienced its like, is of incalculable worth in what Keats calls the school for souls. But there is another vantage point, the future, which finds Clio dreaming she’s lost something and can’t regain it, no matter how she searches. She wakes to find she has bitten her lip until it bleeds. Spots of blood dapple the pillow slip, and when, later that day, Clio discovers the wedding invitation lurking in her departmental mailbox, she tears it to pieces, only to end up taping them together and magnetting the frankenstein card among her goddaughters. Nadia’s bridegroom is composedly handsome in his tux — maybe there is, in fact, a slight fussiness in the shine of his shoes and the primly satisfied set of his mouth; of the two of them, bride and groom, his is the more conventional prettiness. After a boomingly musical interval, all heads turn to follow the bride’s progress down the aisle, getting farther and farther away, and the only thing Clio wants to do, there in her pew, is claw at her arms, bare for the beautiful May weather, to smear ashes across her face, to maul and mark her body forever, but a hand clasps hers. This clasp conveys restraint, forbearance, calm. It’s Renee’s hand, for not long after Clio sat down, Renee slid into the pew beside her, craning her neck to take in the fanciness of the flowers at the altar, concluding, “Swanky.” Then, in a whisper: “Mimosa. Unusual choice.”

The two trees in Clio’s yard prove to be not plum but cherry, merely ravishing. Even the inexhaustible Woolf, in the following days and weeks, holds no fascination for Clio. Much, much later it will occur to Clio that though the box seemed to her to possess sufficient weight, and seemed to hold something both lolling and stiff, she had never actually seen the cat. The lid had been taped down, the box wound around and around again with duct tape. Did Nadia, unaware her conniving was redundant, scheme for Clio’s

yes

? If it wasn’t the cat in the box, what else can it have been? Something with the density of the once-alive, with a certain compactness, the weight of dark muscle — say, Clio’s heart. It might as well have been her heart, she parted with it so completely that night, and it’s so long — so bitterly long — before she sees

that

again.

Q: Does she ever see it again?

A: Sweet Questioner, you care. If we skip ahead to the morning two years later when, rolling over in bed, lifting herself on an elbow to gaze down her pugilist’s nose at Clio, Renee reels off the ingredients for her fawn skin, handsome mouth, and eerie green eyes — African American, Lakota Sioux, Welsh, some Norwegian — we can call that the moment Clio sees it again. And, look, beyond the ken of this exam they never run out of things to say to each other, though one spends her days leafing through old books, the other up to her elbows in sweet peas and tuberose, cattleya and quince.

Q: Read the following quotation from Simone Weil’s “On Human Personality.”

If a child is doing a sum and does it wrong, this mistake bears the stamp of his personality. If he does the sum exactly right, his personality does not enter into it at all.

Argue that this does, or does not, have implications for love.