Kinflicks (36 page)

‘What do you think of it?'

‘Of what?'

‘Of sucking.'

‘What does that have to do with Descartes?'

‘Absolutely nothing!' she declared triumphantly. ‘That's my whole point. I suck, therefore I am. What do you think?'

‘Man
happens
to be more than…'

‘Man —
shit
! I don't even
talk
to people who try to tell me what “man” is or isn't. If you want to talk about some one particular action of one particular person, okay. But don't hand me any of this pompous “Mankind is this or that” garbage because I'm not interested. Go see your Miss Head.' She turned back to her desk.

I skulked to my room and brooded on into the night. The citadels constructed by Miss Head were clearly under attack.

Miss Head left a note in my mailbox inviting me to a production of Wagner's
Das Rheingold.
I hadn't seen her very much since the term began because I wasn't taking one of her courses, and because we were both so busy otherwise. So I accepted with delight.

We met in the downstairs hall. She looked almost pretty, despite her gray bun and her shapeless loden coat. In my pleasure at seeing her, I reached out and hugged her with one arm. She stiffened and drew back, blushing and searching for her watch underneath her coat. ‘My car's outside. We're late. We'd better rush.'

Even being late didn't prevent my inspecting the back floor of her car for hidden murderers, as the Major had always advised. On the way to the opera, we took a wrong turn. As we wound through strange streets, the neighborhood got more and more seedy. Trash filled the gutters, and the shop fronts needed painting. The MTA rumbled past on grimy overhead tracks, and the people on the streets were mostly black. I realized that we were in Roxbury. The fast that Eddie had organized had been for the purpose of busing schoolchildren out of here.

‘I don't know,' I said hesitantly. ‘Maybe we should have fasted that night. This is a pretty grim setting for children, don't you think?'

Miss Head glanced at me impatiently. ‘Please spare me your sentimentalizing, Miss Babcock. You've clearly been reading too many editorials by that Holzer girl.'

‘Well, but don't you find it a little depressing?' We were driving down a block of crumbling row houses, where a group of black children were poking with sticks at candy wrappers and newspapers that floated sluggishly in the murky water around a clogged gutter drain.

‘You can't generalize. Squalid circumstances can sometimes produce outstanding achievers.'

She was clearly referring to herself and her Dust Bowl origins. “Well, you got
out
of Morgan. But what about those who didn't?'

‘My childhood friends aren't unhappy with their lives. Or not any more so than anyone else. After all, they have nothing to compare Morgan
with.'

‘But isn't that in itself a shame? That they were never exposed to any other possibilities for themselves?'

‘What makes you so sure that Worthley beats Morgan?' she asked with a faint ironic smile. ‘It is so
condescending
of you, Miss Babcock. It shows a basic lack of respect for the dignity of people different from yourself. That's what irritates me so much about Miss Holzer's half-baked editorials. It never occurs to her that there might be anything in Roxbury for the children of value equivalent to a white middle-class education.'

‘But
I
haven't said that Worthley beats Morgan. Or Hullsport. If you'll recall,
I
didn't even want to leave Hullsport. I had to be dragged up here by my father. But
you,
Miss Head,
have
said that Worthley beats Morgan.'

‘For me, as I am now, it does,' she said patiently. ‘But if I had stayed in Morgan, I'd have been a different person than I am now, and Morgan would suit me better.'

‘A
better
person than you are now?'

‘I didn't say better or worse, I said different. Really, Miss Babcock, you must work on your objectivity. It's nonsense using words like “good” and “bad.” What happens happens. That's not
your
concern.'

‘You mean no one course of action is any better or worse than another?' I demanded, scandalized to see where Miss Head's line of thought — and mine insofar as I had taken her as my mentor — was leading.

‘Courses of action aren't your concern, Miss Babcock. Your concern is to understand, to locate the Truth in a situation. Which is done, as Spinoza told you last year if you were paying attention, by stilling your emotions, your passions, and functioning as an instrument of pure thought. Detachment is
everything,
Miss Babcock, believe me. Evil is always with us, Spinoza says. “Things are not more or less perfect, according as they delight or offend human senses, or according as they are serviceable or repugnant to mankind…Matter was not lacking to God for the creation of every degree of perfection from highest to lowest. The laws of His nature are so vast as to suffice for the production of everything conceivable by an infinite intelligence.”'

‘But Miss Head, I don't know if I
agree
with that. I mean, look what Nietzsche says about the possibility of there even being such a thing as detachment or “pure thought.”'

She blanched in the dim streetlight through the car window. ‘Well, course, if you're going to fall under the spell of that miserable neurotic mystic, there's not a great deal that Descartes can do for you, Miss Babcock. Do you know that Mussolini adored Nietzsche? No, of course you don't. I'd look into Nietzsche's pedigree before enrolling myself under his banner if I were you, Miss Babcock.'

I reflected that for someone who had supposedly scaled the heights of detachment, Miss Head was sounding suspiciously angry.

During the opera, I developed a special sympathy for the poor dwarfs who were being whipped to shreds by the wicked Alberich. They were so small that his demands — that they mine minerals for him with their minuscule picks — were impossible to fulfill. Yet they struggled on faithfully and industriously. My heart went out to them. I imagined that Eddie, had she been there, would have leapt onto the stage and started unionizing them. Beads of sweat were popping out on my upper lip as I strained with them in their agony.

Miss Head leaned over and whispered, ‘Notice the incessant recurrence of the dwarfs' leitmotif, the ways in which its tonal structure hints at the futility of their attempts.'

I gritted my teeth and whirled toward her. Miss Head was serenely watching the stage over the tops of her lenses and was nodding slightly to the rhythm of the leitmotif.

When I went into Eddie's room the next night, she was sitting on her window seat, in a spot cleared out among stacks of newspapers, playing her guitar and singing ‘Mr. Tambourine Man.' She saw me and nodded pleasantly but kept on singing, determined to finish out the song. She had a very appealing husky alto singing voice.

I glanced around the room. There was a new reddish clay model of something or other sitting on her bookcase. I walked over to it. Two nude women were lying on their sides facing each other. Their arms were wrapped around each other, and their legs were entwined. On both faces were expressions of ecstasy.

Finishing the song with a loud self-mocking strum, Eddie laid the guitar on the stacks of paper and stood up and stretched her statuesque body languidly like a cat. ‘Do you like it?' she asked me, nodding toward the model. ‘I just finished it.'

‘Uh, yes. The pattern of the lines is fascinating.'

‘Yes, I know. It's brilliant technically. But what I
asked
is whether you like it.'

‘Sure. Yeah. It's very nice.'

‘How do you feel about the subject matter?'

Detaching myself in my best Spinozan fashion from the fleeting sense of panic I'd felt upon my first seeing it, I said calmly, ‘I feel it's a valid form of sexual expression. After all, Freud says that man is essentially bisexual and is channeled in one direction or the other by his conditioning.'

‘Screw Freud and screw that “man is” crap. What emotions does this particular clay model elicit from you, Ginny Babcock?'

I drew a deep breath. “Well, frankly, Eddie, I'm not very interested in sexuality in any of its forms.'

‘I see.'

‘I had too much inept sex at too early an age, and I'm fed up with it, that's all. I have more important things to think about.'

‘Indeed,' Eddie said gravely, tucking in her chin and looking out over imaginary glasses in a good imitation of Miss Head. ‘By the way,' she asked brightly, ‘would you be interested in signing my petition to President Johnson demanding that he end our military involvement in southeast Asia?'

‘Why do you bother asking me when you know what I'll say?'

‘Just trying to give you a chance to save your soul.'

‘Thanks, but no thanks.'

‘Why not? Don't you
want
to save your soul?'

‘You say it's a civil war and we shouldn't interfere. My father says it's the vanguard of the world-wide Communist take-over and has to be nipped in the bud. You feel sorry for the innocent people who are being maimed and killed by American troops. He feels sorry for the innocent people who are getting other people's theories crammed into their brains, and who are being maimed and killed by Communist troops. How do I know which of you is right?'

‘Which do you
feel
is right?'

‘Neither. I feel nothing. I'm not interested. I'm interested in fact, not opinion. I happen to feel that the degree of a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting attitudes she can bring to bear on the same topic,' I announced, resolutely parroting Miss Head.

‘Intelligence,
garbage!
You're talking about
paralysis,
moral paralysis! The way you live your life is a political act, whether you like it or not. You're taking a stand by the very fact of refusing to take a stand.'

For several moments, we glared at each other with ideological contempt.

‘But to what elevated purpose do I owe the honor of your presence in my humble garret?' Eddie asked.

“Well, actually, I came in to ask how the Roxbury busing is going.'

She glanced at me quickly. ‘What's it to you, fascist?'

‘I went through Roxbury last night on the way to the opera with Miss Head, and I sort of saw your point.' I was appearing to yield now in order to gain more yardage later.

‘Big of you. It's going quite well, no thanks to you and your Miss Head.'

‘But I do have a question,' I said innocently.

Eddie raised her hands, palms up, and bowed her head to indicate that her ears were at my service.

‘Don't you think it's patronizing of you to assume that our way of life is so superior to theirs that they should be given the opportunity to ape us?' I was hoping against hope that Eddie wouldn't have an answer for this argument of Miss Head's.

Eddie shrugged impatiently. ‘It's patronizing to want to give someone the skills and attitudes necessary to earn enough money so that his children won't have to be gnawed by rats when they go to sleep at night?'

‘But don't you think that the cream will rise to the top anyway?'

‘Perhaps. But a lot of perfectly adequate whole milk goes sour in the meantime.'

‘How do you know that the people in Roxbury aren't just as content with their lives as people anywhere else?'

‘I'll tell you how I know,' she said, turning on me with fervor. ‘I know because I grew up in a slum in Boston. Do you
know
who my father was?'

I hesitated, feeling as though I
should
know. So many people here had diplomats, famous academicians, important businessmen for fathers. Holzer, Holzer. Who was Eddie's father, and why on earth would he have raised her in a Boston slum? ‘No, I don't.'

‘Well, we're even. I don't either. He was a rapist. He dragged my mother into a cellar hole and stuffed a rag in her mouth and tied her wrists with his belt and beat her black and blue and then raped her.'

I stared at her with horror. ‘I'm — sorry.'

‘Oh,
I'm
not,' Eddie said harshly. ‘I mean, if it hadn't happened, I wouldn't be here, would I? Or at least not in my current configuration. But your cream rising bit is crap. Cream
doesn't
rise under constant agitation, or when the fucking bottle is smashed to bits.'

‘But it
does,'
I insisted, holding out my hand illustratively.
‘Look
at you.'

‘You know why I'm at Worthley? I'm here because one lousy teacher at that hellhole where I went to school took a special interest in me and loaded me down with books and devoted herself to my progress. But there weren't enough of her to go around. In fact, I was the only one in my whole class who benefited like that.' She looked at me defiantly, waiting to see what sort of half-baked notions I would come up with next for her to refute from her position of superior experience.

‘Well! I guess that only proves my point — that rational people stay clear of politics. I mean, you can't understand a situation and know how to approach it until all the facts are in — and how many situations are like that in life?'

‘Rubbish!' Eddie shrieked. ‘Reactionary rubbish! Your head is just packed full of
shit
by that Head bitch, Ginny! Go ahead, model yourself after her! Spend your life with a clock tacked to your boob — everything safe and neat and orderly. No risks, therefore no mistakes. No mate, no children, no animals to interfere with her precious schedules. Her cello to wrap her legs around when she's lonely, and her magnum opus on Descartes to occupy her busy little brain. Ideal, you would say. So go ahead!'

‘It's not such a bad life she has. It beats the hell out of careening from one disaster to the next, as I did before I came to Worthley.'