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y college roommate married a yummy Argentine. The family had property in Buenos Aires, a beach-front villa on the Costa del Sol and a townhouse in London. The guy traveled the world playing polo. The trouble was that, in addition to being handsome and charming and rich, the guy was a cruel bastard, screwed anything. . . no everything that wore a skirt and was constantly setting new standards for drug absorption. Her life was hell. One night they came back from a party here in New York; they were staying at the Plaza. He was completely stupefied on alcohol and drugs. She'd found him banging some bimbo in a linen closet at the party and he'd refused to even be embarrassed. Instead he started bragging to her about his womanizing--isn't that a funny word. He used to carry a little .32 pistol everywhere, his `social' gun. They came back to their suite and he passed out. She took his pistol out of his jacket pocket. She said that suddenly it was just there, in front of her. She shot him and made it look like a suicide. Sometimes life shows you the way."
"Is that story supposed to be uplifting, to give us hope. Should we hear strains of `Somewhere Over the Rainbow' behind you as you tell it. Do you intend it to be poetic or what?"
"It's just meant to be an illustration. That life isn't always what it seems."
"How comforting."
"Anyone have a happy story?"
"Happy and noble are two qualities I distrust categorically."
"Then what do you expect in life?"
"I believe happiness is possible and nobility is imperative. I just don't trust other people parading them in my face. When they do, quite the opposite is usually true."
"What happened to the roommate after fate provided her so neatly with the means to excuse herself from her unhappiness?"
"She came out with a little money. She bought a nice place in Florida, plays golf and tennis, sails, doesn't look for life to be so cosmopolitan or dramatic."
"She's grateful it isn't, I should think."
"One can't look to get away with murder very often, can one?"
"Unless you're a lawyer. Those bastards get away with murder for a living."
"Julia's husband's a lawyer too. Is it fair to generalize or are you just talking about yours?"
"Mine specializes in influence and advice, which I believe translates in English to bribery and corruption. It isn't murder but, from what I can see, law isn't a pretty endeavor."
"I thought it was supposed to be noble."
"I told you I distrusted nobility. I distrust lawyers categorically, too."
"I think a lot of lawyers are upper-middle class cowards--or cowards of upper middle class aspiration--who realized they couldn't create wealth so they'd have to steal it. If you're going to steal it, what better way than to use the law. The law is just legitimized force--the John Stuart Mill theoretic monopoly on force. They become progressively bigger assholes--grinning bullies using, riding, hiding behind and selling the form of the law."
"Polished and eloquent."
"I've had enough time to study the matter at first hand."
"A little bitter, are we?"
"I'm married to the bastard."
"Does the Argentine solution make you jealous?"
"Don't get me started."
"It's really all a matter of power."
"Jung said that many people prefer power to pleasure, that they sought pleasure because they couldn't be powerful."
"Men like power; it's fun, like a toy, but they aren't interested in control. Control takes too much work. Control is too constant for most men's taste. They get bored with a situation, as they would with a toy. Women, on the other hand, are built for control; that's just how we are. In some unconscious way men sense this and it frightens them. That's why they like to keep us away from their corporate games--to protect themselves. In a way their behavior makes sense but a really feminine perspective could be used to everyone's advantage.
"If they'd permit it."
"Instead of forcing women to act like men to be part of any of their structures."
"Don't you think that power is an illusion? The corporate and political powerhouses I've met are all terrified people. They're running so hard and so long to-- I don't know what--stay in front, ahead of events, ahead of other people's perceptions?
"Ahead of other people's demands. Who was the man who said, `Tell me where the people are going, so that I can lead them.' Politicians are usually assholes and lawyers.
"Cute. Is it true?"
"Why do you think so many lawyers can't keep their dicks in their pants? Pleasure as a substitute for power."
"Why do you think men are fascinated with lesbians? I think it's peculiar."
"They think it's peculiar."
"They're confused. It's a syllogism that leads to a contradiction. Men lust for women. Now women lust for women. Therefore now women are men. It's like that Pirenesi drawing drawing of water that flows downhill and winds up at the top again. It's fascinating."
"Pirenesi didn't do that."
"They're afraid that they're little things are being replaced, like their jobs. And if their power is diminished and they look for pleasure to replace it and their power in pleasure is precisely what's been replaced, then they're stuck without either. I think they're terrified and I think it's fun!"
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* * * * *
Plaster ceiling-cherubs cavorted. By day they were decorative, inanimate, fleshy, innocuous. Now, by the implacable amber of street lamps, the migrant whites of headlights, and the frenetic reds and blues of transient emergencies, they spun in shadowed, triple-glazed-silent circles - haunted, hunting, porcine prototypes of love's ceaseless labor.
Peter Ericson stared and shuddered. His wife, Julia, slept the sleep of the calmly righteous beside him, her breathing the clock-like counterpoint to Peter's own ragged ruminations.
The finely machined and finely oiled gears of the lawyerly side of his brain told Peter what it had told him a hundred thousand times, that all was well. Their health was good. The family finances were conservatively managed and sound. His partnership came through early, always a good sign; the money was all right and getting better. His marriage, qua institution, was strong. They were both reconciled to the absence of children, both secretly relieved as though life as they knew it was what they wanted despite the manifest social and biological imperative of inheritance.
The other, less ruly, side of his brain was not at all convinced. Was it the city? The city had its charm, its logic, its moments, but life in the city wasn't what he intended for himself. One could only blind and deafen oneself to the exigencies and importunities of the city for only so long before making oneself, in fact, blind and deaf. His job was easy, silly, really. He acted as middleman in the conveyance of information, access and influence that his clients desperately sought, in transactions that ennobled neither buyer nor seller. He did not share the avarice of his clients or the pious venality of those who sold their power, and so the process had some of the aspects of administering to the sick when one was not oneself sick and some of the aspects of theater. It was, in fact, absurd.
In the night, at times like this, life made no sense. All of it was absurd. And Peter would tell himself that life wasn't supposed to make inherent sense; man was supposed to make sense of life. "Truth is a raft man uses to cross the river of life and, once across, it drifts away and withers." Was that the Buddha or the Bagavad Gita? Two years earning a doctorate in Geneva taught him that international diplomacy was the art of creating an artificial frame of reference from the shape of the conference table and the position of the semicolons - precisely because there often is no real frame of reference. Everything was absurd. These were absurdities in general.
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