Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

The transience of human feeling is nothing short of ludicrous. My mercurial fluctuations in the course of a single evening made me feel as if I had a character made of chewing gum. I had fallen into the ugly depths of self-pity, a terrain just above the even more hideous lowlands of despair. Then, easily distracted twit that I am, I had, soon after, found myself on maternal heights, where I had practically swooned with pleasure as I bobbed and fondled the borrowed homunculus next door. I had eaten well, drunk too much wine, and embraced a young woman I hardly knew. In short, I had thoroughly enjoyed myself and had every intention of doing so again.

* * *

It may come as no surprise to you that brains are not all that different from those of our mammalian cousins the rats. My own rat man has spent his life championing a subcortical primal affective self across species, heralding our shared brain areas and neurochemistries. Only in later years has he begun to relate this core spot to the puzzle of higher levels of reflection, mirroring, and self-consciousness — in monkeys, dolphins, elephants, human beings, and pigeons, too (most recently) — publishing papers on the various systems of this mysterious thing we call selfness, enriching his understanding with phenomenology, with quotes from the luminous Merleau-Ponty and the murkier Edmund Husserl, courtesy of HIS WIFE, who walked him through the philosophy step by step, retreating to Hegel, Kant, and Hume when needed (although the old man has less use for them, his interest is in embodiment, yes, Leib, schéma corporel ), and read over each word carefully, painstakingly correcting errors and smoothing prose. No, you moan, not she, not she of the small stature, red curls, and comely bosom! Not the lady poet! Yes, it is so, I tell you in all gravity. The great Boris Izcovich has repeatedly gone marauding for ideas in the brain of his own wife, has even acknowledged her contributions. So? So? you say. Isn’t that all right then? It is NOT all right because THEY do not believe him. He is the Philosopher King and Man of Rat Science. After all, Dear Reader, I ask you how many men have thanked their wives for this or that service, usually at the very end of a long list of colleagues and foundations? “Without the unflagging support and inestimable patience of Muffin Pickle, my wife, as well as my children, Jimmy Junior and Topsy Pickle, this book never could have been written.”

* * *

Without the bilateral prefrontal cortex of my wife, Mia Fredricksen, this book would not exist.

* * *

“That period is over,” my mother said when I asked her about men in her life. “I don’t want to take care of a man again.” I was behind her when she said this, massaging her back, and saw only the line of her straight clipped white hair. “I miss your father,” she said. “I miss our friendship, our talks. He could, after all, talk about many things, but, no, I can’t see the advantages of taking up with someone now. Widowers marry again because it makes their lives easier. Widows often don’t, because it makes their lives harder. Regina is an exception. I suspect she needs the attention. She flirts with everyone.”

My mother, her chin lowered as I gently pressed my fingers into her neck, continued the theme of relations between the sexes with a story: Returning from her book club the night before, she had run into Oscar Busley, one of a dwindling number of Rolling’s male residents. Although his peripatetic days were behind him, Oscar had retained kinesis and increased his personal velocity by means of an Electric Mobility Scooter. Busley had whirred beside my mother down the corridor, chatting amiably, as they headed in the direction of her apartment. When they reached her door, she stopped to take her keys from her bag. The man must have unclenched his fists from the Mobility’s handlebars and lunged precipitously, because my mother was amazed to discover that Oscar had attached himself to her midsection. He had tric Mobild his arms firmly around her as he nestled his pate just beneath her breasts. With equal suddenness and probably greater force (she lifted weights twice a week), my mother had disengaged herself from the unwelcome embrace, rushed into her apartment, and slammed the door.

There followed a brief discussion between us about the disinhibition that sometimes occurs in cases of dementia. My mother, however, insisted that the man was “quite all right in his mind”; it was the rest of him that needed restraining. She then countered the Oscar Busley tale with the Robert Springer story. She had attended a dinner in St. Paul and met one of my father’s old law acquaintances, Springer, “a tall handsome man” with “a nice head of hair,” who was there with Mrs. Springer. This entirely nonviolent encounter consisted of a handshake accompanied by a meaningful gaze. By then, back rub over, my mother had moved into a chair and was facing me. She made an opening gesture with both hands, palms up. “He held it too long, you understand, just a little longer than was appropriate.”

“And?” I said.

“And I nearly swooned. The pressure of his hand went right through me. I was weak in the knees. Mia, it was lovely.”

Yes, I thought, the electric air.

… lift your fingers white

And strip me naked, touch me light,

Light, light all over.

Lawrence in my head. Touch me light.

My mother’s wrinkled, slender face looked thoughtful. Our minds moved along parallel paths. She said, “I make a point of touching my friends, you know, a pat, a hug. It’s a problem. In a place like this, many people aren’t touched enough.”

* * *

The girls were out of sorts. It may have been the heat. We were cool inside, but outside the day was muggy — swamp weather. Alice looked especially wilted, and her large brown eyes had a rheumy glaze to them. When I asked her if she was unwell, she said her allergies were bothering her. They chattered about Facebook, and boys’ names were mentioned: Andrew, Sean, Brandon, Dylan, Zack. I heard the phrase “later at the pool” several times, “bikinis,” and lots of whispering and hushing. But beyond the titillating expectation of meeting members of the other sex, there was an additional tension among them, not without excitement, but that turbulence, whatever it was, had a smothered, invidious quality I could feel as surely as the humidity beyond the room. Nikki, especially, seemed discomposed. She was unable to stop herself from simpering at every possible interval. Jessie’s pale blue eyes were heavy with significance, and once she mouthed a word to Emma, but I couldn’t rher lips. Peyton repeatedly laid her head down on the table as if she were suffering from a sudden onset of narcolepsy. Although her expression was illegible, Ashley’s always erect posture had an extra rigidity, and she applied lip gloss to her already shining mouth three times in a single hour. Emma, too, appeared preoccupied with some unknown, only half-suppressed joke. I had a powerful sensation of a text inscribed beneath it all, but I was looking at a palimpsest so thick with writings that nothing was legible.

As the class continued, I had to disguise my irritation. Nikki’s pudgy face, with its sparkling eye shadow and heavy mascara, which only two days earlier had struck me as good-humored, now looked merely moronic. Joan’s barely visible grin and similar makeup rankled rather than amused me. While they were writing their poems about color, I had to remind myself that some of the girls hadn’t turned thirteen — that their self-control was limited and that if I allowed myself to become alienated the whole class would sour. I also knew that my hypersensitivity to the atmospheric nuances around the table, combined with my own sorry experience at their age, could easily distort my perceptions. How many times had Boris said, “Mia, you’re blowing this way out of proportion,” and how many times had I seen myself holding a flaccid balloon between my lips, breathing into it as it slowly expanded into a great pear or long wiener, thereby changing it from one thing into another? No, the same thing, only bigger: more air.