Lydia Millet - Magnificence

She condescended to the sexes of men, but it wasn’t personal. Clearly they also condescended to hers. They had their own opinions about the sex of a woman, and those opinions were not all positive. That much was obvious — from, say, pornography, which almost every man loved, from the purest young boy to the jaded defiler. In other words small secrets were also held against her, and she did not need to know them.

Pornography, she thought. Degradation and debasement. A man liked to degrade a woman, in pornography. It made perfect sense. If she were male, she’d like it too. Because a man might not know he was tragic, but he often suspected it. On a subconscious level, a man suspected himself of pathos. A man walked around bearing that half-aware, weary load; it was more stressful to suspect than to know for certain. Women were oppressed from the outside, via the patriarchy — girls raped in various African cultures, for instance, then put to death for their trouble. But men were oppressed from inside their own skin. She saw it this way: the testosterone was a constant barrage, not unlike an artillery shelling. They had doubtless needed it, in, say, prehistory, to run around spearing meat, build up muscles that impressed the breeding-age females, etc., much as baboons made their loud wahoo calls or sported shocking pink anuses.

But now that the men were deprived of the endorphins of the chase and the butchering, the hormones were a call with no response, a ceaseless, useless siege upon the male psyche. Naturally the men, held hostage in bunkers of flesh, sought refuge in pornography and violence. It was just self-expression.

At the airport she would see T., who had disappeared in the jungle and then, a miracle, been found again. She had thought he was gone and then he rose up like Lazarus — her employer, a real estate developer who fetishized his Mercedes and wore no suits retailing at less than 5K, had been discovered a few weeks ago living on a tropical island with poor hygiene, ribs showing, and a hut made of twigs. Despite these choices her husband, who had found him, somehow claimed he was in robust mental health.

Admittedly it had been generous of Hal to fly down to Central America to search for T., a man he barely knew. Admittedly she was grateful. Even if the trip had been an excuse to get away from her, even if it was his answer to an unpleasant discovery, namely her having sex with a coworker on the floor of her office. (She was still mystified as to exactly how he’d been a witness to that encounter: the front door to the office had been locked, the blinds, she was almost sure, closed tight?) Anyway a hard conversation was pending between them re: infidelity.

And his evaluation of the situation with T. could not be taken at face value. He had no history with the man. According to Hal her employer had reevaluated his life while he was wandering, starved and exhausted, in the rainforest, and this no doubt careful and rational appraisal had resulted in a decision to reside, for a time, as a hermit on a remote island with no indoor plumbing. Which Hal had tried to justify, over the phone, as a moment of growth, a sort of premature midlife crisis that headed in the monklike/whole grains/meditation direction instead of the more popular red sportscar/divorce/trophy wife. He harked back to his sixties roots: in his view T. had been seeking enlightenment.

But T. had lost a girlfriend recently, lost her to sudden death. And Hal was not perceptive, when it came to human interactions. Susan’s husband was not what, in job interviews, you called a people person. Herself she thought T.’s condition resembled a schizoaffective disorder. She was no shrink, but she’d done some reading in the DSM-IV. She liked the Case Studies.

Casey’s excitement was simple. T. was her friend and to her all that mattered was that he was rescued. If he was unfit for business that meant nothing to her. And it should mean nothing to Susan either; she should be thinking first of his long-term welfare. After all she and T. were also friends, beyond the work arrangement, and no matter what there was no risk for her: he would cover her salary.

But stress had worn her down, making financial decisions without him. She had never intended to sign up for a job that required actual thought. She’d become a secretary, after decades of thankless teaching in the L.A. Unified School District, in a half-relaxed and half-perverse gesture — purely for the anonymity it offered and the straightness. She had put her energy into other pursuits until recently, with a sleek and methodical urgency. T.’s disappearance had obstructed that. She needed relief. She needed him to come in and issue directions. “Do this. Do that.” She longed to be absolved of agency. For all she knew she’d made bad decisions already, decisions that were draining his coffers.

But if he was insane he could not effect her rescue. He would lack the power to reassure.

“So hey, when Daddy settles in? He’s probably going to want to talk to you about something,” said Casey.

Susan hadn’t talked to Hal for two nights now. It was T. who had called and left their flight number on her machine — sounding even farther away than he was, over their staticky connection, farther away than the tropics. Likely exhausted by his mania.

T., who had always seemed the most solid of young men. It went to show you. The madness lurked in all of them. Smack a man down in nature and he returned to his Cro-Magnon roots.

Casey was looking at her sidelong, waiting.

“What something?”

Could she know what Hal knew, could Hal have told her? He wouldn’t. He would not .

“My job.”

Relief.

“The telemarketing thing?”

“Yeah. The deal is, it’s phone sex.”

Susan’s head jerked to the left. Her neck hurt, it was so sudden. Past Casey’s profile the side of a moving truck read STARVING STUDENTS.

“Case, please. You almost gave me whiplash. Can people get, like, sideways whiplash?”

“I’m serious, it’s a 900 number.”

The set of her lips was the confirmation: the lips and the chin, its slight lift. Even as a toddler she had lifted her chin like that when she was being stubborn.

“You actually mean it.”

“Sleazy, yeah. That’s what I like about it. I wanted to give you a heads-up, is all.”

“Tell me you just connect the calls, or something.”

“Come on. That wouldn’t be any fun.”

She found her eyes were watering annoyingly — couldn’t she even take a joke? Damn it. Big deal. Laugh it off.

She turned away and looked out her window.

“And your father already knows this?” she asked, her gaze still steadily averted. Another truck; they were boxed in. This one was yellow and read PURITAN.

She looked to her left again, then back to the right: STARVING STUDENTS. PURITAN. STARVING STUDENTS. PURITAN. And here they were, between the two. It was a clear rebuke. A rebuke from the world, which knew them both and knew everything. Oh how the world reflected you in its unending streams of atoms, churning atoms out of which significance beamed — significance, but not purpose. The great collective knowingness of the world was a library of the hidden, a vast repository. But it was not meaning. It was the sum of an infinitude of parts, was all. There was the paint on the sides of trucks, the trucks themselves, which commerce and roads had brought beside her like this. . in Casey’s car, the car between the trucks, they were neither starving students nor puritans. They were sluts.

She was a bad mother and a slut; her daughter was a bad daughter and a slut. Two sluts.

The traffic started to move again.

Of course, personally she wanted to be a slut. She rejoiced in it. It was the sole creative gesture of her life.