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Sixty Seven 

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It may be that the beloved object must be capable of causing acute suffering so that, in the intervals, when the pain abates, she may be able to provide that calmness of mind which is more accurately to be described as a modification of suffering rather than as happiness...

                                                            Proust

            Both Margie and Victoria called Judy tonight.  They are old maids.  They have an unreachable quality.  They make me think of all the men and women that I have known who have never "achieved a long term relationship with a member of the opposite sex."  And those that HAVE seem to have been forced to compromise horribly.  The terrible mismatches!   

            And then I think of Judy's story.  How could I not love a woman with such an unfortunate past and precarious future, and with a daughter like Andy?   

            And what chance does Soheila have in a world like this?  She isn't even pretty.  But she must be!  Why else would I fall in love with her?  I love beauty only.  But I am very lucky because what is beautiful for me is ugliness for others.  The gods are not completely against me after all!   

            She saw me talking with my beautiful Polynesian student.  And it's true, I am tempted by her.  She is in extreme need because her mother is dying of cancer, and her father is already dead.  She is alone.  And Soheila had just walked by me, 10 minutes earlier, pretending not to see me!  I won’t fall in love with another woman because I want to save myself for Soheila.  But Jina's need is overwhelming.  I was almost overcome.  And then, just as Jina was leaving, I turned around to see Soheila coming back from the bookstore.  She looked hurt. And I knew that she would ignore me again.  So when she got near me, I turned my back on her.   

            I have to either make love to her or forget her.  But it is probably simple: she is a copy of my mother, and I can't be happy unless I am arguing and fighting with a woman like my mother: Soheila has a sister who is three years younger than her, a sister who is a year older, and a brother who is five years older.  That is almost identical to my mother's family!   

            What never ceases to amaze me is how FAR I can get from those simple heroic virtues that are so few and so sufficient: will, application, courage.  What exactly did Napoleon say?  Will, application, and AUDACITY!   

            Odysseus.  Dante.  It isn't difficult to lose oneself in the thicket that is the world.  A hero must create a heroic destiny out of the dust of the world.  I am tired.   

            Nietzsche said that to fight one's instincts is a sign of decadence.  Would that life were as simple as that.  Yet I know that there will come a time in her life when she will gather her pain to herself and say, "God, why didn't I go to this man?  Why didn't I fall down in front of him and beg him for forgiveness, why didn't I sacrifice EVERYTHING for him?"  I, in my wisdom, MUST give her one more chance, even though I know that only the greatest luck, only a smile from one of the gods, will give me success.  But I owe it to her, to life, to me, to the gods themselves, to give her another chance, and to give her everything that I have.    

            I saw Vida Nazafarin and she said, after the conversation had progressed a bit and after I had shown my usual concern for her, "I think about you."  And I know that means she has talked to Soheila and Soheila has told her that she won’t go out with me because I would think about her too much.  So Vida is telling me that SHE doesn't mind, that SHE thinks about me too.  So I smiled affectionately, and said, "good."  Then I said, "I think about you too."    

            I can almost hear Vida talking to Soheila and saying to her, "he said he thinks about me too," and Soheila looking somewhat disdainfully at her and yet hurt too!  What an odd lot these Iranians are.  

Sixty Eight 

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The marriage of contrasting elements is the law of life, the principle of fecundation, and the cause of much unhappiness.

                                                            Proust

            I am sitting on the lawn in front of the women's gymnasium in Berkeley.  I just completed a count of man/woman couples.  Those walking alone outnumber couples by 65 to 35!  And same sex couples outnumber man/woman couples by 5 to 1!!  It seems incredible that in Berkeley there should be such a distance between men and women.    

They turned on the sprinklers.  I had to run down the hill.  My notebook is wet.  They probably did it on purpose.  Oh well, they're all lesbians anyway.  I moved to the cafe.

            I suddenly remember a remark that I made in French class to Courant. I discovered an aphorism of Paul Valéry's: "The foolish things that he has done and the foolish things that he hasn't done make up a man's regrets." (Les bétises s qu'il a faites et les bétises qu'il n'a pas faites se partagent les regrets de l'homme.)  Soheila's French isn't very good.  She could feel Courant's emotion, and his desire to quickly change the subject.  I was certain, from her reaction, that she thought I said: the female beasts that a man has "made" and those that he hasn't "made" are both regrettable to him.  It seems incredible, but it is the kind of remark that a Persian man could make about women.  The next class meeting she was cold to me.  But it was also the same day that.... So I can't really be sure why she was cold to me for the last few weeks of class.  Then, on the day of our final examination, it was like the sun coming out from behind the clouds.  My love, which had all but died, was reborn in all of its force.  And to complicate matters I learned from Hossein, at about that time, that in Persian, "to have a class with someone" is slang for making love to him!  We sat there for two hours.  And I think that it might qualify for two more hours in our relationship!  Every time I looked at that sunny face, I saw a whole world.  It seemed that there was as much beauty and sweetness in her face as in any that I had ever seen.  I am such a beggar in front of her beauty!  I feel privileged just to be near her!  How can I ever seduce her when I feel like that?  Why can't she see how much I need her?  How clear it is that I am nothing but a fool.  Can a man in love ever really get what he desires?  Is it always that either he or she wants something more than just love?  

            Judy told me the story of her aunt's encounter, as a young woman, with one of the richest men in Houston.  She said her aunt remembers every detail of it after more than 40 years.  The man begged her to marry him, but she refused.  Instead, she married a man who betrayed her after only a few months of marriage, and "turned out to be a poor provider."  She claimed that she didn't love the rich man.  But she remembers every detail of their encounter.  Judy said that only women remember details of relationships that well.  I disagreed with her.  But she is right.  Soheila too remembers everything.  For example, I asked her why she ignored me, "that time," and she asked me "when?"  I answered, "in the fall," but it was a slip, I meant to say, "in the spring."  She answered, indignantly, that she didn't ignore me then.  I said, "I mean the time you were wearing your red blouse."  She instinctively allowed me, a man, to make a mistake like that, without thinking it unusual.  When I corrected myself, she remembered immediately and said, "I was emotional."  This interchanged occurred while we were talking, last fall, in front of the bookstore.  She had just said that she wouldn't go out with me.

Sixty Nine 

                                                Lenin

            She is unworthy of me, but the little coquette has stolen my heart.  She still has it, and she is treating it roughly.  I am curious enough now to want to know if she really IS a kind of tart, or hypocrite, or if all of this is just what it seems to be?  Is she an inviolate Persian virgin hiding behind her veil of chastity?  Or is she just a consummate hypocrite who thinks of me as a Romantic fool, and therefore is cynically playing with me?   

            She is influenced, I am sure, profoundly, by American culture.  And that necessarily translates for her into American soap opera.  Because soap opera is the American woman's will-to-power.  "Beauty all their means, power all their ends," as Pope said.  It is the feminine counterpart of Playboy magazine.  Cheap sensationalism wedded to an exchange: body for goods.  Mr. Perfect has his success and money and is more scarce than a Playbunny.  Even Playbunny has little chance of winning his heart for any length of time.  And all the other men and women just dream, and male beauty and female worth are stillborn or starve to death.  One sees the skeletons of male beauty and female ability all around.

            Two young women, 22 or 23 years old, were sitting next to me on a bench outside of Boalt Hall, one of the most prestigious law schools in the United States.  They were obviously law students and they talked about law for about five minutes.  It sounded strained and artificial.  Then they began talking about what Ortega claims is the most passionate interest of women: matchmaking!  They began talking animatedly about various relationships, and then one said to the other that their families would be vacationing in Palm Springs at the same time and that it would be a perfect opportunity for her friend's sister to meet her brother.  They talked about their soap opera lives for several more minutes and then seemed to get self-conscious, and left.  Nothing seemed more irrelevant than the Law.   

            And male beauty -- I mean charm, attractiveness, and style as opposed to power, confidence, egoism, self-centeredness --  male beauty is always stifled by women.   

            Ortega called him "the Interesting Man."  His book On Love seems to be nothing more than a long-winded lament that women only find the most prosaic men interesting, and that they ignore the really interesting men like Ortega himself.  So at bottom he is complaining about his own case.  Women flock to karate experts, pimps, tough guys, movie stars, athletes, rock stars.  They dedicate themselves to men who spend all of their time building their muscles, who devote all of their energy to playing tennis or learning how to kick other men in the groin, or who are just lucky in the national "talent" lottery.   

            It is during her late twenties and early thirties that an unmarried woman is most desperately driven by her reproductive needs, and it is then that one sees this blind movement towards the powerful man in its ugliest and most destructive form.  It is only when they are in their late thirties and beyond, and have their child, that women become interested in the charming, quiet, beautiful, "interesting man" again.  It is only after they have run over the earth with the rich and the powerful and the obnoxious. 

            And some women spend their young lives obliterating the beautiful young man by worshipping their own cunts in that odd self-mirroring posture of cunt licking narcissism that they call lesbianism.   I wonder if, it is often true that when an older man contemptuously rejects a woman of his own age for a younger woman, he is taking revenge on one of these?

            I feel like I should take pains never to see her or talk to her again.  But I know that it is just pride talking.   

            The POWER of woman is so apparent in this.  Soheila is REALLY powerless, yet she assumes she has, and takes, all of the power.  I am a professor, in her eyes, and yet she has all of the power.  And I am "experienced" with women while she seems, at least, to be a virgin without any experience.

            We  have a great passion, but without any physical contact.  The explanation must be that she is a Moslem woman.  She is wearing a psychological veil.  In Iran their power comes from their ability to inspire great passion from a distance.  From letting the veil drop, occasionally, propitiously.

            Hossein said that when he was a boy, barely into puberty, he would spy on women to find out where their daily errands led them, so that he could surprise them, alone.  He said, in his village, they dressed in chadors, or black "tents," and they would drop their veils and flash their faces to him in a kind of abandon that he agreed might be similar, in feeling, to a Western woman flashing her cunt.  He said he followed them to a remote place so that he could be alone with them.  Once alone, they would sometimes let him climb into their Chadors and fondle and suck their breasts and he would come in his pants.  He said that he lost his virginity this way, at thirteen.

            This has given her prestige among the Iranians.  Has she told them everything?  Isn't that why Vida Nazafarin told me that SHE thinks about me?  There is a humorous side to all of this, isn't there?  

This wasn't meant to be a living literary experiment, because I don't live my life that way.  But it seems that it has turned out to be one.  It is about woman as sexual object: "Me sex, you power."   

            Lenin said that only fools learn from experience, but I say that only scholars learn JUST from books.  A city is more than a map, no matter how elaborate the map is.  What is life if one doesn't live it?  

Chapter Menu 

            "When all the Temple is prepared within,

Why nods the drowsy Worshipper outside?"

                                    Omar Khayyam

            I saw an extraordinarily beautiful blond girl in the Employment Office this morning.  Her skin was flawless, luminous.  I had that overwhelming emotion that I feel lucky to experience only twice in a year.  My instinct is to dissemble at first and then later to feign a kind of controlled interest.  But her black pimp noticed my reaction, and a few minutes later she was flirting with me while he gave a guarded and slightly fearful approval.  She seemed genuinely interested in me, as if I could be her savior.  There must have been a hundred black men and women in that room, all of them watching us, and all of them with sneers on their faces.   

            Sometimes I feel that if I could totally dominate a woman like that for just a few hours or days, if I could live on an island with her, for a few weeks, like the aristocrat and peasant in Wertmuller's film, Swept Away, if I could fuck her and love her more than anything else in the world, more than the grass, the sea, the sunset, more than the campfire at night, more than the food that we eat, the sand, the wind, that I could be finished with all of this forever.   

            But I know that I would never forget an experience like that.  That I would spend the rest of my days in some prison for a crime of passion, not knowing whether to regret the crime, or to thank the gods for that last opportunity for love.    

            This morning in the coffee shop I saw an old woman that I thought was a Hindu. She had dark skin, and she was very dignified looking.  I tried to catch her eye but she wouldn't allow it.  She seemed too self-possessed to be an American.  Yet she was aware of my gaze, and there was an aura of sex about her.  But her hair was very gray, actually white with streaks of black in it.  Her hands had age spots on them, and she was 30 or 40 pounds overweight.   

Very abruptly, she got up from her chair and handed the owner of the cafe, a black former all-American football player, a Christmas card.  He took it perfunctorily, almost impolitely.  It was a very sunny morning, and my brother and I were sitting at a table in the shade.  She had been sitting at a table that was in full sunlight.  She sat down there again but it was too hot for her to sit there very long.  Suddenly she got up, and she came over to us, and sat down at our table!  And she began to talk.  It was a continuous stream.  She seemed childish, even stupid.  At best, she was simple.   She talked with a rapturous happiness about a Manger Scene that she was going to set up on her front lawn.  She said that she put it up every Christmas and she was going to put it up tonight.  Her animation contrasted with my brother's sadness and lack of emotion.  She said she was 55, but it was obvious that she was older.  She said that she had been raised by the Catholic Sisters, and that she had been orphaned at 6.  Her ecstatic happiness bordered on madness.  She poured herself into us.  Or, I should say, into ME.  My brother was impassive.  He simply wouldn't respond to her.  She said that she was out of money, but that she knew where to borrow it: that the owner of her apartment building was rich, and that he was always good for a loan.  Then she looked at me with a kind of world-weary lecherousness!  The old bag is still selling herself!  The lesson for me is that, without words, it is difficult to interpret a look in a woman's eyes.  And that the difference between a whore and a saint is very little.  

            I fell asleep on the couch this afternoon and had a dream.  I was looking into Soheila's eyes and feeling that I loved her more than anything else in the world, but I was telling her that I didn't love her, that she had let me project my love into her, and that I didn't really know her and therefore couldn't possibly love her.  Her eyes filled with a kind of mute and passionate terror, as if she too loved me more than anything else in existence and was imploring me to take her in my arms and make love to her right there in front of the old woman and the young prostitute, before it was too late.  The young blond girl then began to plead with me that she was more worthy of my love than Soheila, who is a foreigner.  She then told me the story of her misfortunes.  Her father had been rich, but had lost all of his money in the stock market and committed suicide.  Her mother, who was a saint, had died earlier in an automobile accident and so she was forced to go to live in an orphanage, where they turned her into a prostitute.  Then the old whore said that she wasn't really Indian but Persian, and had known Soheila's mother, back in Iran.  She said that Soheila's mother too was a whore, that her father had loved the mother desperately, but that she had died giving birth to Soheila.  The father then loved Soheila, secretly, more than his other children and even his new wife.  Like her mother, Soheila was very beautiful and, out of jealousy, the rest of the family predicted that Soheila would turn out like her mother.  She admitted that Soheila had tried very hard to live up to the high expectations of her father but she had failed and was just like her mother and lived a double life.  All the whores knew her.  She said that Soheila even allowed black men to "beat on her," which seemed to disgust both of them immensely.  They looked at me with compassionate eyes and said that Soheila had begged them not to tell me, but when they heard that I was planning to ask her to marry me, they felt that they had to tell me the truth for my own good.  

Seventy One  

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