Thomas Disch - 334

“Well, for my first marriage I relied on my own judgment. This time …”

He laughed. “Actually, confess it, you just wanted me out of the bathtub so you could do the dishes.”

“Actually, not.” (Though she was aware, even as she said this, that the squeeze bottle of disinfectant was in her hand.)

“I’m done anyhow. No, don’t bother with the syphon. Or the dishes. We’ve established a partnership—remember?”

That night as they lay next to each other in bed, sharing each other’s warmth but not touching, she fell into a landscape, half nightmare and half purposed reverie. The villa had been stripped of its furnishings. The air was urgent with smoke and a continual cheng-cheng of finger cymbals. The mystae waited for her to lead them into the city. As they stumbled down Broadway, past heaps of junked-out cars, they chanted the praise of the god in thin, terrified voices—Alexa first, then the god-bearer and the cista-bearer, the neatherd and the guardian of the cave, and then the whole rout of Bacchae and mutes: “Woo-woo-woo, a-woo-woo-woo!” Her fawnskin kept slipping between her legs and tripping her. At 93rd Street, and again at 87th, unwanted children mouldered on compost heaps. It was one of the scandals of the present administration that these little corpses should be left to rot where anyone walking by could see them.

At last they came to the Met (so they couldn’t have been going down Broadway, after all) and she mounted the crisp stone steps with dignity. A great crowd had gathered in anticipation—many of them the same Christians who had been clamoring for the destruction of the temple and its idols. Once inside, the noise and the stench disappeared, as though some obliging servant had whisked a rain-drenched cloak from her shoulders. She sat, in the semidarkness of the Great Hall, beside her old favorite, a late Roman candybox of a sarcophagus from Tarsus (the first gift the Museum had ever received). Stone garlands drooped from the walls of the tiny, doorless bungalow; just below the eaves winged children, Erotes, pantomimed a hunt. The back and lid were unfinished, the tablet for the inscription blank. (She had always filled it in with her own name and an epitaph borrowed from Synesius, who, praising the wife of Aurelian, had said: “The chief virtue of a woman is that neither her body nor her name should ever cross the threshold.”)

The other priests had fled the city at the first rumor of the barbarians’ approach, and only Alexa, with a tambourine and a few silk ribbons, now was left. Everything was collapsing—civilizations, cities, minds—while she was constrained to wait for the end inside this dreary tomb (for the Met is really more a charnelhouse than a temple), without friends, without faith, and pretend for the sake of those who waited outside, to perform whatever sacrifice their terror demanded.

The teaching assistant, a brisk, muscular boy in tights and a cowboy hat, left Alexa alone in an office no larger than the second bedroom, so-called, of a MODICUM apartment. She suspected that Loretta was punishing her for her absence the day before yesterday, so she might as well settle down and watch the reels the assistant had left with her. The first was a pious, somber account of the genius and tribulations of Wilhelm Reich, Alexander Lowen, and Kate Wilkenson, foundress and still titular president of the Lowen School.

The second reel presented itself as being the work of the students themselves. Things wobbled, faces were cerise and magenta, the blurry children were always intensely aware of the camera. All this candid-seeming footage was cunningly edited to suggest that (at least here at the Lowen School): “Learning is a side-effect of joy.” Unquote, Kate Wilkenson. The children danced, the children prattled, the children made (so gently, so unproblematically) love, of sorts. Even mathematics, if not an out-and-out ecstasy, became an entertainment. Here, for instance, sat a little fellow about Tank’s age in front of a teaching machine. On the screen a frantic Mickey Mouse, caught in the cleft of a steep, slippery parabola, was shrieking to be saved: “Help! oh help me, I’m trapped!”

Doctor Smilax chuckled and the parabolas began filling with water, inexorably. It rose above Mickey’s ankles, above his knees, above the two white buttons on his shorts.

Alexa felt an uncomfortable tickle of memory.

“Y equals x-squared plus 2, does it?” In his anger the evil scientist’s flesh-shield flickered, revealing glimpses of the infamous skull beneath. “Then, try this on for size, Earthling!” Using his fingerbone as chalk, he scribbled on the magic blackboard (it was actually a computer): Y = x2 - 2.

The parabola tightened. The water rose level with Mickey’s chin, and when he opened his mouth a final wave diminished his would-have-been scream to a mere, silly gargle.

(It had been thirty years ago, or longer. The blackboard was wiped clean and she had punched the keys for a final equation: x2, and then 8, and then the operant key for Subtract. She had actually clapped her hands with glee when the pathetic little Mickey Mouse had been crushed to death by the tightening of the parabola.)

As, in the movie, he was crushed to death now, as he had been crushed to death each day for decades all about the world. It was a fantastically successful textbook.

“There is a lesson in that,” said Loretta Dickens Couplard, entering the room and filling it.

“But not about parabolas especially,” had replied before she’d turned round. They looked at each other.

The thought that came, unexpected and so dissembled, was: How old she looks! how altered! The twenty years that had merely nibbled at Alexa (twenty-four, in fact) had simply heaped themselves on Loretta Couplard like a blizzard. In ’02 she had been a passably pretty girl. Now she was a fat old hen.

Dissembling, Alexa stood up and bent forward to kiss the pink doughy cheek (they would not, so long as a kiss lasted, see each other’s dismay), but the earphones reined her in inches short of her goal.

Loretta completed the gesture.

“Well then—” (after this memento mori) “—let’s go into my shambles, shall we?” Alexa, smiling, disconnected herself from the viewer.

“It’s out the door and around the corner. The school is spread out over four buildings. Three of them official landmarks.” She led the way, lumbering down the dark hall and chattering about architecture. When she opened the door to the street the wind reached into her dress and made a sail of it. There seemed to be enough orange Wooly© on her to rig up a fair-sized yawl.

East 77th was innocent of traffic except for a narrow, not very busy, bicycle path. Potted ginkgos dotted the concrete and real grass pressedup voluptuously through the cracks. Rarely did the city afford the pleasure of ruins, and Alexa drank it in.

(Somewhere she had seen a wall, all built of massive blocks of stone. Birds rested in the cracks where mortar had been chipped away and looked down at her. It had been the underside of a bridge—a bridge that had lost its river.)

“Such weather,” she said, lingering beside one of the benches.

“Yes, April.” Loretta, who was still being blown apart, was reluctant to take the hint.

“It’s the only time, except for maybe a week in October, that New York is even viable.”

“Mm. Why don’t we talk out here then? At least until the children claim it for their own.” Then, once they’d plunked themselves down: “Sometimes, you know, I almost think I’d like the street rezoned again. Cars make such a soothing noise. Not to mention the graft I have to pay.” She made a honking sound through her nose, expressive of cynicism.

“Graft?” Alexa asked, feeling it was expected of her.