Ellis Weiner - Atlas Slugged AGAIN - The Secret Sequel to the Towering Masterpiece

“ She ? Remarkable?” he laughed bitterly. “Has she fooled you, too, then?”

She was suddenly aware of not knowing what he meant, and succumbed to an inner urge to question him accordingly. “What do you mean?” she asked.

He turned a page with casual ruthlessness. “Nothing. Only that she is a self-centered, hypocritical, loathsome harpy and I detest her with every fiber of my being.”

She found herself surprised at his precocious eloquence—surprised and, in some distant point of her awareness at the center of her being, strangely aroused. He spoke urgently, as though words mattered. He spoke concisely, as though opinions mattered. He spoke offhandedly, as though nothing mattered.

“Then you may be interested in why I’ve come here,” Dragnie said. She explained her purpose: the proposed inspection tour of the country to determine the effects of the Strike against the People’s States of the People, her need of an assistant, and her suggestion that he might find the position interesting. Banden listened impassively, his expression unreadable save for the mockery visible in his blue eyes and the contempt implicit in his hair.

Finally he smiled coolly. “It sounds rather tedious. When would we start?”

To her astonishment she reacted to his skepticism with something verging on panic. It suddenly seemed very important that he be persuaded to agree to her proposition. “In a month. But I would like you to move in with me and Mr. Glatt as soon as possible, to prepare for it.”

All trace of amusement vanished from his face. “I accept, Miss Tagbord.”

She smiled lightly and hoped her reaction did not make visible the flood of relief she felt within her emotions. “Please. Call me Dragnie.”

They began that afternoon. Nathan quickly packed several bags, bade his mother good-bye, and told her to explain everything to his father, who was out of town attending an important meeting with some of the nation’s top meeting-attenders. A moment later they were in Dragnie’s limousine, cruising toward the city. They did not speak. Nathan gazed out the window and affected an attitude of nonchalance, as though the entire event were of no consequence. Dragnie busied herself with documents pertaining to Tagbord Rail but, from time to time, cast glances his way, partly in casual curiosity about her young charge and his comfort during the trip, but partly for some more obscure reason. It was as though in order to see him she was compelled to look at him. She wondered what that meant and, whenever she did so, she quickly dismissed the matter from her mind after first asking herself, with ruthless introspection, what she was doing and why she was asking, and why.

By the time they reached the city, and the Johnsonwood Building, and Nathan had unpacked and settled in, it was early evening. New York stretched out across the vista visible from the dining room’s great windows like a model train diorama of a city, with distant lights twinkling in remote windows and cars creeping along serpentine expressways with astonishing realism. Glatt was late; Dragnie and Nathan were chatting over dinner when he arrived. Dragnie introduced him to the young man.

“It’s an honor, sir,” Nathan said.

“Hello,” Glatt said. He ate quickly, with the quiet ferocity and intense focus of a jungle animal, as if still responsive to instincts born ten million years earlier, when competition for food was fierce, and an individual’s chances of survival depended on making the most of an ability to take advantage of eating as many orders of eggplant rollatini as possible.

“I’m very excited about what Dragnie’s told me about our project.”

“Good.”

“Making the American way of life seem undesirable is the only way to show the world how desirable it is and how much it would miss us if we weren’t here.”

“Exactly.” Glatt, finished, placed his utensils on his plate with a deliberate gesture, as if obedient to an impulse requiring him to signal to the world: I have completed the eating of my meal. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”

Glatt left the dining room. Dragnie felt Banden’s eyes on her as she watched him leave. “It must be difficult for you,” the young man said. “To have a husband to whom you are not married, and who is so busy.”

Dragnie’s head jerked back in surprise. The accuracy of his statement came as both a gift and an intrusion. She did not know whether to praise his powers of observation or slap him for his presumptuousness, or perhaps both, or perhaps half of one and half of the other, a response she considered weak and conciliatory and which she despised in herself even as she adored that part of her that found the other part so despicable. “Difficult? Why?”

The young man shrugged. “A wife likes to spend time with her husband.” He laughed bitterly. “Or so I assume. It’s not as though I’ve learned that from my parents’ example. They seem to detest one another.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why? It’s not your fault. And I assume each of them finds… other people to take up the slack.” Banden sat back and leveled his gaze at hers. “As, indeed, you might.”

“Why, you—“ she began. But then her words seem to catch in her throat, and she found it difficult to breathe, and her mouth hung half-open as she stood up and sent her chair falling to the floor behind her. Then Banden, too, stood up, assigning to his chair a similar fate, and a moment later he was there, beside her, looking down into her eyes from his masculinely superior height. She groped for something to say, some pretext to decline or forbid what she knew was about to happen, what she wanted to happen, what she knew he knew was about to happen, but none appeared in the consciousness of her mind’s awareness. And then he had with violence and a proprietary sense of ownership pressed his mouth to hers, and she, raised to the exalted height of femininity both by her shortness and by virtue of having been transformed into an object for his casual use, could do nothing other than respond in like manner. They fell to the floor, tearing off their own and each other’s clothes until, to her surprise, he, then and there, without further preamble, instituted the ultimate act of possession, destroying in a moment every category that had differentiated them, including age, personal interests, yearly income, gender, and medical history, until a moment later he succumbed to a soaring triumph that left her gasping with amazement. Then they rested, lying on the rug half-under the dining table and half-surrounded by chairs, trusting in the discretion of the footman who had served their dinner not to interrupt them. Suddenly, after what seemed at most ten minutes, she was shocked to witness him rousing himself and taking her again, as they re-enacted that earlier drama, and she noted with interest and a faint, dawning hope that, while his ardor was undiminished from its first expression, his endurance was improved, and Dragnie felt herself approaching that state of inexpressible pleasure which derived from the assuaging of the ultimate greed but which, as again he sought and obtained the supreme release, she was once more doomed to fail to attain.

She stood up, entirely naked, and took his hand and drew him to his feet. He, too, was entirely naked. “Come with me,” she said.

He let her lead him down the hall to a lighted room where John Glatt sat a desk, poring over documents and jotting notes. Glatt looked up. His face, gaunt and sharp-planed in the light of the desk lamp, betrayed no emotion other than a contemptuously amused contempt.

“John,” Dragnie said. “Nathan and I are going to have a sexual relationship. I know you will have no objection to such an arrangement. He can be no competition, let alone a threat, to you as my lover, or as my friend, or as the husband to whom I am not married. You know my feelings for you are inviolate and cannot be usurped by a youth twenty-five years my junior. Indeed, it is this very disparity in our ages that makes such a liaison desirable for each of us and recommends its indulgence and consent on your part. Nathan shall benefit from the experience and wisdom I am able to impart to him as a (so-called) ‘older woman,’ and also conceivably enjoy a frisson of Oedipal conquest and satisfaction in engaging in the sexual act with a woman symbolically old enough to be his mother. (Although I mention this strictly for the sake of completeness and without any real endorsement of the concept, since neither you nor I, as fully rational beings, ascribe any reality to the notion of the unconscious, and reject out of hand its ability to affect conscious human cognition, perception, thought, action, volition, feeling, or belief.) I, for my part, will enjoy not only the vigor and enthusiasm he brings to the physical act of love by virtue of his youth, but will greatly appreciate the access it will afford me to his viewpoints, opinions, and values, offering a first-hand encounter with what ‘the kids’ are ‘into’ these days. Moreover, let me point out that this is not betrayal but its opposite—the betrayal would consist in keeping our affair a secret, in treating you, not like the rational adult you are, but like an authority figure to be feared and, therefore, deceived. It goes without saying that this setup will have no effect on the sexual relations between you and me. Don’t you agree, dearest?”