Prize of Gor (3 page)

It was with great satisfaction, and with no small bit of pleasure, that she had assigned him his failing grade.

So many years ago!

It could not be he, of course, seemingly so young, after all these years. But the coincidence was unsettling. The resemblance was remarkable.

It had been a performance of Richard Strauss’s
Salomé
, based on a short story by Oscar Wilde. The lead role had been sung by a famous Italian soprano, a visiting artist. The performance had been by the older, and most famous, of the two major opera companies in the city. Both are fine companies, and either, in her view, would have been capable of mounting splendid productions of the work performed. She wonders if the preceding few sentences will be excised from the manuscript, as perhaps too revealing, or if they, perhaps in their amusement, will permit them to remain, perhaps as an intriguing, almost insolent detail. She does not know.

She was alone, as she often was, not that she did not have friends, colleagues, professional associates, and such. She was invited to parties, occasionally, her academic post assured that, and was the recipient of various academic courtesies, received reprints, invitations to participate in colloquia, and such. She had never married, and had never had a serious relationship with a male. Her background, training and scholarship had not been conducive to such relationships. She was regarded as severe, inhibited, cool, intellectual, professional. She no longer found herself attractive. The beauty she had once professed to scorn, and had upon occasion demeaned, was faded, if not gone, and was missed. She was idolized by young feminists, and regarded by some in the “movement” as an ideal, as presenting a superlative role model for young women. She feared men, for no reason she clearly understood, and distanced herself from them. When younger she had repelled the occasional advances of men, partly by habit, partly by disposition, sometimes because of a sense of the inferiority of the sort of men, professed male feminists, for example, who were most likely to approach her, plaintively assuring her of their profound sense of guilt for their maleness and their wholehearted support for her ideological commitments. And she was terrified by virile men, but few of them had seemed to find her of any interest; some such, who might have found her of interest, she had fled from in a sense, discouraging them, treating them with contempt, trying to chill and demean them. She had sensed, you see, that their intentions might have been physical, at least in part, and thus to be resisted and deplored. It was rather as though, if they were interested in her as a woman, their intentions could not be honorable, and she rejected, and feared, them; and if they were such that she had little doubt of the honorableness of their intentions, she had found them inferior, despicable, repulsive, hypocritical and boring. She had, through the years, thus, dutifully preserved the independence and integrity of her personness. As her body grew older, and began to dry, and wither, and tire, and began to regard her ever more reproachfully, and sadly, in the mirror, and she went through her change of life, which had been a terrible and troubling time for her, in her loneliness, and in her lack of love and children, she remained aloof, severe, unsexual, professional, virginal. She realized she was growing old, and was alone. She was disappointed with her life. And she saw nothing much before her to look forward to. She insisted to herself, naturally, that she was happy, content, and had no regrets. She insisted on that, angrily in her privacy drying gainsaying tears. What else could she dare to say to herself? What else could such as she tell themselves, in private, grievous, insistent moments? One could scarcely acknowledge an emptiness, a whole frightening, oppressive, looming reproach on a misspent life; it was not well to look into the emptiness, the threatening abyss, the void, and, too, she assured herself, such things, the void, and such, being nothing, could not even exist. And yet few things existed more obdurately, more outspokenly, more terribly, deeply within her, than that silent, vocal, unrepudiable, proclamatory, denunciatory nothingness. It seems clear that she, despite what she would tell herself, despite the lies, the carefully constructed, defensive fabrications with which she sought to delude herself, had many regrets, a great many sources of sadness, that there was in her much that was only half articulated, or scarcely sensed, much that was hidden, much concealed and put aside as too painful to be recognized, so much that she refused to face, and yet which, upon occasion, would visit her in the loneliness of her night, as her head lay thrust against its pillow, whispering in her ear that what might have been could now no longer be, or, upon occasion, it would reveal itself to her, in her mirror, as she looked upon the image of a weeping, aging woman. But she did not suppose, really, that she, in such respects, was much different from many others. What was there, truly, for she, and others, such as she, to look forward to? Another honor, another paper published, another conference attended, another point made, another small dinner, prepared by herself, another lonely evening in the apartment?

He was getting up now, and assisting his companion with her wrap. How she hated that young woman for some reason, the blond-haired, simple, surely stupid-looking one, how could he be interested in her, and yet there was a certain something about her, in the fullness of her lush, painted lips, how frightful, she used make-up, the sweet width but suggested softness of her shoulders, the roundedness of her bared forearms, something animal-like there, and, in her way of carrying herself, even sensual, primitive. Doubtless she granted him sexual favors, the whore, the slut! And he so naive and undisciplined as to accept them, to permit her to be such, not to call her to her higher self, had she one, and reform her, if it were possible with such as she! She had no right to be with one such as he! She was not an intellectual! Surely she knew nothing! Yet there was a vitality, and sensuousness, about her, and consider that vital, well-curved figure, even buxom, so animal-like, one of the sort which might attract lower men, or perhaps even excite unwary, better men in moments of weakness, men were so weak, and note that movement of the shoulders, just then, and, there, now, that way of looking about, over her shoulder, that cunning motion which might deter them from noting the absence of cultivated, worthy personness.

How she hated the woman!

When the woman turned about, she seemed for a moment surprised to find herself the object of such a regard, one so disapproving, so severe. Then the lips of the younger woman curled and her eyes flickered for an instant with amusement. Perhaps she had met such gazes before from such as the older woman, gazes, and stares, and such, perhaps of envy, hatred, and hostility, the cold, fixed gazes and stares of women whose youth and beauty were behind them, and who seemed to wish to do little now but resent and castigate, and scorn, the possessors of the treasures now forever lost to themselves, the pleasures, fruits and ecstasies of which they, in their own time, had been denied, or had denied themselves; perhaps they had been the unwitting victims of politically motivated secular asceticisms; perhaps they had been tricked out of their own birthright, having been led to accept a voluntary unrealized incarceration, taught to make themselves miserable, grieving, self-congratulating prisoners, required to pretend to contentment within the bars, within the cold walls, of an inhibitory value system; perhaps they were merely the unhappy, cruelly shaped, psychologically deformed products of an engineered apparatus, one designed to take natural organisms, bred for open fields, and grass and sunlight, and force them into the prepared, procrustean niches of a pervasive, self-perpetuating, invisible social mechanism, into a titanic, neuteristic architecture of human deprivation, and social expediency.

The younger woman was then coming up the aisle, toward the exit.

How their eyes had locked together for that moment, the eyes of the older woman bright with hatred, and cold hostility, the eyes of the younger woman sparkling with a secure, insouciant amusement.

The older woman had seen in that moment that the eyes of the younger, those of the charming, stupid-looking slut, as she saw her, were blue. Her hair then might be naturally blond, not that that mattered in the least. She was a low sort. Her hair was long, rich, and silky, the sort in which a man’s hands might idly play. It was probably dyed, false, dyed! She had no right to be with such a man!

The young man had followed his companion into the aisle.

Their eyes met, and the older woman shrank back. She trembled. She almost fell. She turned and seized the top of a seat, with both hands, to steady herself. It seemed the same! He was so close! The resemblance was uncanny, shocking, indescribable.

He looked at her with no sign of recognition.

“Excuse me,” he said, and moved about her.

The voice, she thought. It is the same! The same! But it could not be the same, of course. Yet it seemed so much the same!

He was moving away.

Unaccountably, unable to restrain herself, she hurried after him, and pathetically seized at his sleeve.

He turned about, seeming puzzled.

She stammered. “Did you enjoy the performance? I thought I once knew someone like you. Long ago!”

“Do I know you?” he asked.

“Do you, do you?” she begged.

“Are you well?” he asked.

“Yes, yes,” she stammered. “I just wondered if you enjoyed the performance.”

“Why?” he asked.

“I thought I knew you,” she whispered, “I mean, someone like you, once, long ago.”

“It was adequate,” he remarked. “I must be going now. My friend will be waiting.”

“I thought the performance was powerful,” she whispered.

He shrugged, the same shrug, it seemed!

“Do you attend the opera often?” she asked, pressingly.

“Sometimes,” he said. “Next Saturday we may see the new staging of
La Bohème
.”

A husband and wife, interestingly, were to sing Rodolfo and Mimi in that production.

“Good-day,” he said, and turned away, moving toward the exit.

She felt herself a fool, and how annoyed he must have been, though his demeanor was the image of forbearance and courtesy itself. Perhaps, she thought, she should run after him, to apologize, she, in her fifties, and despite her status as an academician, one not unknown in her field, surely one with suitable publications, one with, too, impeccable credentials. But that would not do, of course. She should not run after him.

It was only an oddity, a coincidence, something to be forgotten by tomorrow.

But she did hurry after him, not to approach him, of course.

That would not have done, at all. But, somehow, she did not want to lose sight of him. She did not understand the importance of this to her, or fully, but doubtless it had to do with the oddity of the resemblance, so remarkable, to the student, from so many years ago, he who was never forgotten, he who was recollected with ever fresh humiliation and anger, but, too, invariably, with fascination. This was at least, she told herself, a small mystery, whose denouement, however predictable and disappointing, might prove to be of interest.

In the outer lobby she was momentarily disconcerted, even frightened, that he was gone. But then she saw him to one side, waiting to buy an opera book, an account of the history and staging of the piece. His companion was waiting some yards away, looking toward the exit.

She approached the younger woman. It did not seem courageous to do so, but, somehow, necessary. She would have been terrified to approach the young man again, after their first interlude, for beneath the facade of his politeness there had seemed a subtle severity and power in him, but the other was merely a woman, and she did not much care what transpired between them. It was as though the blond woman did not really matter in these things, save in so far as she might prove useful.

She would later revise her view on these matters.

“Excuse me,” said the older woman, approaching the blond, younger woman, she holding her wrap about her. How well she stood, how well-figured she was, thought the older woman, with a touch of envy. That was doubtless the sort of body that men might seek. She herself, the older woman, in her youth, had not been so large, so buxom. She had been small, and delicate, and exquisitely, but not amply, figured. She had been sometimes thought of as “dainty,” but she hated that word, which seemed so demeaning, so minimizing. It had suggested that she might be no more than a biological, sexual confection of sorts, a bit of fluff, of interest perhaps, but unimportant, negligible in a way, as a human being. She had once thought of ballet, when she was quite young, before being brought in her young majority into the higher, sterner duties and understandings of the movement. But, too, she had been, in her way, interestingly, though not buxom, or obtrusively so, a bit too excitingly figured for that. Small as she was, and slim as she had been, there had been no doubt about, in its lovely proportions, the loveliness of her bosom, the narrowness of her waist, the delightful, flaring width of her hips, the sweetness of her thighs. She was, as thousands, and millions of others, though perhaps a bit short, and a little slim, a normal human female, of a sort greedily selected for in countless generations of matings and prizings. So, it seems, she was neither excessively buxom, nor, neither, tall, linear, flat-chested and boyish, a variety often praised and recommended for imitation in cultures which encourage the denial or blurring of sexual differences. Rather, she was much like most women, the normal human female, though perhaps a little shorter, and a tiny bit slimmer, that of course on the brink of her early womanhood and beauty.

The fact that she might have bit a little shorter, and a little lighter, a little slimmer, than many women had given her from a very early age a deep, internal understanding, more than that of many other women, of the size and power of men. To be sure, this can be brought home to all women, and with perfection.

The blond woman turned about, surprised.