In fact the dream revolved around a lecture, and I knew who the lecturer was. She was a woman I’d known in California whose fate had made an impression on me. Initially she was interesting to me purely because she was a French émigré, of which there are not so many, nothing like for example the number of Israelis piling up on the two coasts. She was also interesting because she was in a ménage in which the union had to be based entirely on an uncanny parity of physical beauty. Her lover of many years was handsome and perfectly proportioned, the kind of type who models Norfolk jackets and handcarved pipes, but an absolute jerk. She was both beautiful and substantive but, hélas, nearly forty and therefore in terror of finding herself alone and having to start over in the search for companionship. She was an accomplished paste-up person and very much in demand among people who put out newsletters in the days before desktop publishing. He was intermittently a cad toward her. He was vaguely a creative person in magazine publishing. He had lost his touch. His career was disintegrating when I got to know Yliane, although he was disguising it by being on the phone interminably, talking to contacts and lining up minuscule freelance projects at greatly separated intervals. Maybe a bond between them was that he was Francophile. He was sickeningly Francophile, to the point that one of his projects was to write a uchronia based on the premise that the Louisiana Purchase had fallen through. This project meant that whenever she asked him where he had been when she needed him for something the answer was The library. How this most appeasing of women managed to irritate him so badly that he drove her out of their apartment in her bathrobe while lashing her with a straightened coathanger I have no idea. Drink played some role. Possibly one of her superb culinary efforts came in below par. It was the middle of the night and she was driven out without a sou, and ultimately she had to let herself be fucked by the cabdriver who took her some distance to a friend’s house where she had expected to borrow the fare but where nobody was home. She spent the rest of the night cowering and crying in the rhododendra, waiting for her friend to return from the Mi Carême Ball or wherever she was.
So they stayed apart for a while. Then he showed up abject and swearing he wanted her back, would contain his drinking henceforward, would be decent. So he talked her back in. But there was just one thing he asked, as they were setting the ménage up once again, which was that she give up recycling for a month. She was a forerunner in ecological sensitivity and was serious about recycling. This would somehow make everything perfect between them. It had nothing to do with anything except power. He had no objection to recycling — not that he would ever bother with it himself. He sprung this codicil on her after she had already moved back in and he had begun being decent, so she negotiated. She wouldn’t recycle for two weeks. That would do, he decided. Then things continued as horribly as before. I pondered this transaction inordinately at the time. She bore him a child, a boy, angelic-looking and destined to be a burnt offering if I was any judge. I lost touch with Yliane after this.
The message of the dream lecture was that there was something I had to avoid. It was a strain to formulate it. There was something I should beware, something that was not good enough.
What was not good enough was the usual form that mating takes.
I had to realize that the male idea of successful love is to get a woman into a state of secure dependency which the male can renew by a touch or pat or gesture now and then while he reserves his major attention for his work in the world or the contemplation of the various forms of surrogate combat men find so transfixing. I had to realize that female-style love is servile and petitionary and moves in the direction of greater and greater displays of servility whose object is to elicit from the male partner a surplus — the word was emphasized in some way — of face-to-face attention. So on the distaff side the object is to reduce the quantity of servile display needed to keep the pacified state between the mates in being. Equilibrium or perfect mating will come when the male is convinced he is giving less than he feels is really required to maintain dependency and the woman feels she is getting more from him than her servile displays should merit. In the dream this seemed to me like a burning insight and I concentrated fiercely to hold on to it when I woke up: I should remember this inescapable dyad at the heart of mating because it was not what I had come this far to get.
It was impossible not to sleep more.
You Should Be an Assassin
In all I must have slept for more than twenty-four hours.
Suddenly I was slept out. Unfortunately it was still in the middle of some night or other, either the one during which I’d had my homiletic dream or the one following. I lay there staring at nothing, being hungry.
I decided to use my time constructively by trying to figure my way out of the cleft stick of wanting to have Nelson think both that my expedition was a reckless ordeal undertaken under the influence of un-masterable feelings toward him and that an exploit like this was nothing extraordinary for someone of my experience and grit. But there was something amiss in my immediate vicinity.
I could hear someone breathing. This was not Mma Isang: it was excited breathing. I felt to see that I was modest. I felt around for the thermal blanket, but it must have been on the floor. My shift came just below the knee. I would have been happier with my underthings on underneath it, but this was all right.
I inched up to a sitting position and held my forearms in an X in front of my face. I held my breath so that I could hear where my intruder was.
Someone dove for me and got a hand across my mouth before I could yell. I knew it was Denoon and I was astounded. His hand was very hard and smelled of diesel and smoke, but his person smelled of soap. He had washed up before coming over to assault me, at least. He was pressing me hard against the wall and trying to tell me something in a whisper. My mind was blank with shock, but I remember managing to note that there was indeed garlic in Tsau. His fear was that I would thrash around in resisting and knock something over. He was tremendously strong and I sensed he was trying not to hurt me. He had me pinned to the wall, with his left arm stretched behind my shoulders and left hand gripping my arm at the elbow and his right hand clapped over my mouth. Once he had me bundled together the way he wanted, he held me that way and continued to whisper apologies into my ear, and then entreaties to say nothing, to promise to be silent while he explained something urgent to me.
The proof that I am a basically empathetic person is that I complied instantly. My essential nature is inclined to violence when someone touches me without being invited, and I am also physically strong. There were things I could have done. However, they would have prolonged the wrestling imbroglio we were in, which would have been okay with me except that the male constitution is a problem, or rather friction is a problem for it. The human penis is a thing like a marmoset or some other unruly small pet they carry around with them. An erection would hardly mean Denoon was in love with me or even desired me qua me, in all my wondrous dimensions. I wanted to spare us embarrassment. Also there would have been something faintly promissory in his getting an erection, which would have been unwelcome to me and unfair to him. If I was going to elicit an erection it should be nonaccidental. So in my enormous delicacy I went limp and began nodding violently yes to the question Will you be silent when I take my hand off your mouth?