Kinflicks (33 page)

I scrambled to my feet and tore around to the far side of the bed. There on the floor, in the space between the bed and the wall, were Jerry and Marion, locked in furious anal intercourse. With a sigh of relief that Marion's sodomization was evidently voluntary, I picked up Jerry's impeccably creased and pressed blue jeans, extracted the key and left them — Ron in one whimpering heap, and Marion and Jerry in a second one.

By the time I got back to Worthley, I had settled on a topic for my physiology paper: ‘Venous Congestion and Edema as a Determining Factor in the Intensity of Human Orgasm.' I spent the remainder of the Princeton Spring Fling in the library researching and writing it.

The thrust of the paper, as it were, was that blood was the key factor in sexual response in humans. Blood, many ounces of it, surged into the areas involved. Or as one of my sources put it with regard to the female, ‘The bulbous vestibule, plexus pudendals, plexus uterovaginalis, and, questionably, the plexus vesi-calis and plexus hemorrhoidalis externus are all involved in a fulminating vasocongestive reaction.' The tissues, engorged with blood, pinched the veins so that none of the blood being pumped in along the arteries could drain away. Being a corpuscle in such a situation was equivalent to being an MTA passenger on a platform during rush hour with no trains appearing; more corpuscles kept arriving but none could depart. This state of affairs continued until the distention reached its outer limits and triggered a reflex stretch mechanism in the neighboring muscles. These muscles then contracted in spasms, which expelled the blood along the pinched veins in spurts. The collective experience of the muscular spasms and the blood expulsion was referred to as ‘orgasm.' The tissues and muscles involved in this female orgasm had their precise counterparts in the male.

In other words, the back-seat blue balls of high school days had been caused by the failure, for different sociocultural reasons, to trigger reflexive contractions of the bilateral bulbocavernosi, the transverse perineals, the external anal sphincter, the rectus abdominus, the levator ani, and the irschiocavernosi, which would have drained the congested venous erectile bodies of the corpora cavernosi of the penile shaft and the sinuslike cavities of the penile bulb, the glans, and the corpus spongiosum of the blood that had engorged them. This blood lingered on in oxygen-starved puddles. (Oh, Joe Bob, where are you now? I asked of the shelf of thirty-pound anatomy texts I was consulting.)

By why? What was the point of eternally filling those mysterious interconnected venous chambers with blood, and then pulling the plug and draining them — only to start filling them all over again almost immediately? It seemed like the task of Sisyphus. Luckily, I had learned from my philosophy paper about who made the world never to tack a ‘why' on to the end of my topics. I now limited myself to the ‘how'.

But this much I
did
know: Although my pudenda personally hadn't experienced much in the way of fulminating vasocongestion of the venous plexus, I had no intention of spending my life functioning as a hydraulic engineer. Miss Head apparently did without fulminating vasocongestion, and so could I. It was simply a question of channeling my energies in a more rarefied direction. I was delighted that I was at last having the great good sense to foreswear the whole ridiculous enterprise.

I tacked onto the paper a few arresting statistics about the relation of different coital positions to the degree of vasocongestion, and therefore the intensity of orgasm. Then I turned it in. It came back marked A. I had known that the scientific detachment I'd inherited from the Major would come in handy one day.

Miss Head invited me to a production of
Aida
in Boston, being given by the Metropolitan Opera Company on tour.

We were practically in Aia's lap when she sang her death aria while sealed in the tomb by the Nile. Being sealed in a tomb by a high priest and suffocating was one hazard Mother hadn't thought to warn me about. By this time, I had become quite attached to both Aida and Radames, and was appalled by their approaching deaths, by their hostile environment, by the perfidy of Princess Amneris, by Radames's moral dilemma over whether or not to reveal military secrets to his would-be father-in-law.

They pulled out all the stops for their final duet. Although I knew it was just a story, I found myself very moved. Tears, of all things, spilled from my eyes and ran down my cheeks, as the oxygen inside the tomb ran out.

Her eyes on the stage, Miss Head leaned over and said softly, ‘Notice how Verdi increases the atmosphere of doom and poignancy with the sharp drops in the soprano melody line, and by his insistent refusal to return to the tonic.'

Blotting my tears with a Kleenex, I did as I was instructed, and let Aida herself go hang.

After the performance, I suggested we go eat at a pizza parlor.

‘Well, pizza is Italian, isn't it?' I protested, as Miss Head dragged me toward a Pakistani restaurant. Haltingly, I was absorbing this strange new set of tastes and standards. I had figured out that anything American — hamburgers, fried chicken, steaks — wasn't
comme il faut.
Colonel Sanders and Bonanza Beef were out. Small crowded foreign restaurants were in, preferably those featuring foods of an under-developed nation. So be it. But what was wrong with pizza?

“How did you like the opera?' Miss Head asked, as we ate murgh musallam and sanzi seeni and bushels of rice.

‘It was wild!'

‘Wild?'
she asked, closing her eyes and raising her eyebrows. ‘Indeed.'

‘Neat.
You
know.'

‘Yes, of course. Neat, as it were. In other words, you found the performance satisfying?'

‘Right. Sure. Did you?' Suddenly I was hesitant about my enthusiasm. After all, I'd never seen an opera before. How was I to know whether or not this one had been neat? I had nothing to compare it to.

‘I don't know. I thought the baritone left a lot to be desired. And the staging was overdone, as it tends to be for
Aida.
Otherwise, it was adequate.'

‘Of course.' Adequate. That was like getting a C on a paper. When would I develop the ability to distinguish, as Miss Head did with such ease, between the merely adequate and the excellent?

‘The soprano was very good, though. Did you notice how she was able to change the emotional coloration of a line simply by varying the harmonics of her voice?'

I nodded yes, lying shamelessly.

‘Excellent, she was. Superb.'

The reason I couldn't distinguish between excellence and mere adequacy, I concluded as I lay in my bed the next morning waiting for my alarm to go off so that I could officially wake up, was that I had allowed my emotions to swamp my intellect. I had permitted myself the indulgence of becoming personally involved in Aida's and Radames's deaths in a neurotic process of identification. I had failed Miss Head.

In propitiation, I went that afternoon to biology lab and scraped some cells from inside my cheek, smeared them on a slide, and dripped some water on them. Under high magnification, I zeroed in on one cell. Then I watched. Gradually the tiny inclusions in the cell body began bobbing around. Then the cytoplasm itself began puffing up as it imbibed water from outside the cell. The nucleus ruptured next and released its material into the cytoplasm. Although I couldn't actually see it happening, I knew from my reading that now the ionic equilibrium was collapsing and that sodium ions were rushing into the cell and upsetting the potassium balance.

The entire process I'd been witnessing was the death of the cell. The final act of dying was merely a formality: It occurred when the cell wall burst open with a sickening gasp of bubbles and the cytoplasm with its dancing inclusions streamed out. What remained on my slide now, of the formerly living and functioning cell from my own body, was nothing but an undifferentiated mass of denatured proteins with small amounts of degraded nucleic acids mixed in. I knew that if I stood over this eyepiece watching for long enough, the material would eventually curl up and crumble into its molecular components.

This cell of mine was an intermediate step between two worlds. On the atomic level, protons were busy swapping electrons, like kids trading marbles; in the process, they would transform the proteins into their constituent amino acids, and the amino acids into their component elements — hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen. If the amino acids were the letters of the alphabet that combined to form word proteins, proteins in turn formed sentences — cells like this one. The paragraphs in the book of life and death were multicelled organisms. Cells were dying continuously in this same fashion in Aida's body, in my body, in Miss Head's body.

When cell death got out of hand, though, and the forces of chaos won out over those of elaboration and order, what happened? Those cells synthesizing the most protein burst first -the adrenals, the testes, the pancreas, the gastrointestinal tract; then the liver, kidneys, endocrine glands. The more inert substances like skin and muscle and bone and cartilage held up for a comparatively long time — so that a body could look normal from without, but inside consist solely of a bubbling soup of collapsing cytoplasm.

I washed the slide and put away my equipment. Miss Head was working on her book when I reached her apartment, it being precisely 4:40, according to my Lady Bulova. Reluctantly, she put it aside to play Aida's death aria on her cello, at my insistence. I listened with detachment, without the faintest twinge of fear or sorrow. I had spent my afternoon productively. I had seen Death, and it was no big deal. Only the unfamiliar had the power to stir neurotic emotions. So I reasoned.

The next day in class Miss Head called on me to summarize Spinoza's attitude toward the human passions.

‘Spinoza feels,' I stated confidently, ‘that in order to achieve virtue, a man must detach himself from the transitory passions that he suffers, so as to gain an understanding, through reason, of the nature and origin of those passions. Only by struggling to develop his intellect so as to attain this knowledge can he make himself free.'

‘Free?' she prompted, with a pleased smile.

‘Free from his passions, which are simply a form of misunderstanding. Because to view the world as a whole, with all its interconnected necessities, is to extinguish such fleeting personal whims. Free, in the sense of choosing to accept the inevitable.'

Miss Head nodded, her face glazed with surprised pride.

On my way back to the dorm for lunch, a green VW pulled over next to me. A pleasant male voice asked, ‘Can you please tell me how to get to Castle? I've never come in this entrance before and I seem to be lost.'

Castle was my dorm. ‘I'm going there now. If you'll give me a ride, I'll direct you.' I climbed in and inspected the driver. He was tall, thin, pleasant-looking, had brown hair and eyes that squinted in amusement as he talked.

‘Who are you looking for?' I asked.

‘Marion Marshall.' I regarded Marion with new respect. This man clearly wasn't her Jerry. She had admirers all across the Northeast?

‘She's on my hall.'

‘She's my sister.'

‘Oh.'

He parked the VW, and we walked through the vaulted stone porte-cochere and into the dorm. In the waiting room, I buzzed Marion on the PA system. There was no answer. ‘Was she expecting you?'

“Not really. I'm at Harvard. I just thought it was too pretty a day to study so I decided to drive out and get her to give me some lunch and take me around your lake. But I guess I've struck out.'

I hesitated. I had a biology lab that afternoon, and a paper to write for the end of the week. But it seemed only civil to offer him lunch until Marion appeared. After all, she was more or less a friend of mine — as close to being my friend as anyone at Worthley, except for Miss Head. Also, until her brother mentioned it, I hadn't been aware of what kind of day it was. But since he'd brought it up, I had to acknowledge that there was a gorgeous sunny spring afternoon outside, the kind of overpoweringly sunny day that I hadn't seen since last September. The grass was greening up, some early flowers were blooming, foolhardy robins were trickling back in from the South.

‘You could have lunch with me. Marion's bound to be back soon.'

‘Oh, no, I don't want to bother you.'

‘It's no bother. I was going to eat anyway.'

We ate asparagus tips on toast with Hollandaise sauce. He chatted amiably about himself, about being from Michigan and liking to sail and fly planes. He was studying architecture and described his projects and some of the interesting new buildings in Cambridge.

‘Come in sometime. I'll take you around to see them,' he offered, in response to my very genuine interest.

After lunch Marion still hadn't appeared. Her brother and I strolled around the lake. Birds were warbling in the trees as they built their nests. Tree branches were covered with swelling buds. Gusty breezes blew patterns of ripples across the lake surface and rustled last fall's dried rushes. I talked about Hullsport and Miss Head and my various academic difficulties.

‘I know,' he said with a laugh. ‘It's a whole different vocabulary these professors have. They're like a subspecies of the human race. The trick to getting along with them is to become schizophrenic: Talk their jargon when you're with them, be yourself when you're not.'

I looked at him closely. He said that with such deceptive ease: Be yourself when you're not. Did anyone really know that effortlessly what his real self was? I was almost convinced by now that my ‘real self' was in fact that aspect of me that most resembled Miss Head. But I was willing to listen to arguments from the opposition.

By the time we had completed our circuit of the lake, he was no longer concerned about finding Marion, and I was no longer concerned about my biology lab. We lay in the grass by the edge of the lake and exchanged memories dredged up from early childhood. The spring sun beat down on our pallid faces and baked our winter-weary bodies. I felt as though a huge chunk of ice located inside my abdomen were thawing. Fluffy clouds drifted overhead, assuming all sorts of fabulous shapes. On a hill across the lake were half a dozen small children. Two flew colorful kites out over the lake. The others tumbled around in the new grass and rolled down the face of the hill like small puppies. I sighed with contentment. As I did so, I found my hand being held. Delicious sensations of warmth began creeping up my arm, and my fingers trembled in his.