Julia was looking agony in my direction. The sky at dusk is so luminous, she said, and wandered off and out into the courtyard as though to look at it, despite the fact that night had fallen and I had batteries of candles going. I never drink, Denoon said to Harold, then drank hungrily. He was transformed with his first couple of swallows. I could tell. His sensitivity to alcohol had to be genetic. Julia called me out into the yard.
Give them some starters, she said. The oysters could be starters, I proposed, but that was no good because Harold disliked seafood unless it was plaice fried stiff. Then she wanted to know when we could get soup out, at the soonest. I estimated it would be twenty minutes and this seemed to send her into distraction. She stood in the doorway, looking in at Harold and Nelson, then came back and went so far as to get down on her hands and knees in order to blow into the firebox of the yard stove, to forward the soup, as she put it.
Are they getting on? I asked.
More than well, she said. Then: I think he would eat cashews, if you have some about.
I didn’t have any.
Several times she said Well, I must tell you. But she stopped each time before saying anything more. I had to stop her from, in her agitation, pushing more sticks into the fire than made sense.
I don’t know about your husband, she said, but Harold is very susceptible to drink. This is so wretched for me, but I am very worried. Harold likes your husband very much, and he might say something I am very worried could, er, flow back. To the British Council.
Nelson is not my husband, I said. I didn’t want to go further into it than that. She gave me a long look, a surprised look.
How do you conclude he likes Nelson? I asked her. They seem so opposite. Before she could explain, I remembered I had a Gouda cheese, not too old, sitting in its carapace on a shelf somewhere. Gouda is durable. I ran to get it. This could be the answer to the appetizer question. But something had penetrated its red shell. The cheese was hard, a kernel of its former self, wizened. That was my news for her.
She said You see, when we finish a booking we have an agreement that, all right, he can — er — be himself, um. But because we like you so very much, well, and this is more drink than he, you see, I worry, we must eat, truly, how are they? She was as disjunct as that.
I said I was there long enough to hear Nelson explaining the origin of his bête noire World War I, where history went wrong.
Harold loves history, she said.
I said Well, he is getting an explanation of why the war that ruined everything began. I had heard this one before. The proposition was that the Czar had caused the war by calling for a general mobilization intended to stop a general strike going on in St. Petersburg. The Germans and everybody else had misread the mobilization, and voilà. Nelson collected historical inadvertencies, the accidents underlying the supposedly inevitable or foreordained. I can’t remember them all. One had to do with the supposed historical enigma of the persistence of Judaism as an entity in a world so hostile to it. There were two parts to this. One was that the existence of Judaism as a distinct religion was attributable to the accident of the Seleucids overthrowing the Ptolemies, because if the Ptolemies had kept control of Palestine the hellenizing process which had already captured the town elites would have worked its way out to the rustics and run its course. But the Seleucids with their fanatical confrontationalism had radicalized the Jews, and the rest is history. The second part of this is lost.
It’s a very poor idea, trying to instruct Harold in anything, especially the historical, Julia said.
She was right. I said At this very moment your husband is taking the position that if Nelson is correct about the First World War then it’s the socialists after all who’re really to blame for it by going on strike when they did, which is hardly Nelson’s interpretation.
Denoon came out with a flashlight, and I thought for a moment he was about to help us with the fine detail of cooking in the dark, but no, he wavered off into the bush, walking not quite as I was used to.
She saw something in my expression, because she clutched my hand with both hands and said And nor is he my husband, Harold. England is hard. I don’t think you know. There is no regional theater, nothing like. So we do this. My husband is dead. Harold is a homosexualist, you see, and we agreed we would say we were married. There was a ceremony of sorts. Because you see the British Council prefer very much to make use of the married for overseas work like this. Nelson slid past and into the house, carrying something.
She wanted to tell me everything. I tried to listen. There was a tortuous story about favoritism at the BBC. I had things on my mind. The main one was the question of whether Nelson would hold to his promise to stay off the subject of the Catholic Church. The Church fascinated him, and his thesis about it was that through stumbling into the celibacy requirement for priests it had created an accidental sanctuary for homosexuals whose concentrated talents would result in a capital-accumulation mechanism second to none, since the assets of the Church could never be in danger of being dispersed to the heirs of its dramatis personae. Thus, through celibacy to temporal power and invincibility. He loved to talk about the Church, and I was afraid drinking would erode whatever barrier his promise to me constituted. It was institutional permanency that fascinated him, the unmoved movers historically. And Harold was so floridly Catholic. The irony involved in the Church both stigmatizing homosexuals and covertly and brilliantly exploiting their energies was going to recur to Nelson and be difficult to resist. And it occurred to me that another angle of attack might be suggested by Harold’s also florid antisocialism. Nelson had a teasing analysis of the Church as a model socialist institution that I’d heard him trot out before. This would be more manageable on my part, if in fact he succumbed to temptation.
Julia was dishing up soup before my very eyes. It wasn’t as hot or as married as I like French onion soup to be, but I deferred to her anxiety.
We went in with the soup. It seemed to me that both Harold and Nelson were responding benignly to the alcohol. In fact brotherhood was in full flower. Our men had found common ground on an astounding issue, Shakespeare, agreeing that whoever wrote the plays was amazing because for any of the credible candidates, including Shaxpur, writing was a part-time activity, subsidiary in his case to acting and wool gathering, as Denoon put it. He meant, of course, wool factoring. They were even beginning to agree to disagree, I gathered, about men in relation to women, sequent to an exchange of pleasantries about the Lamentations spectacle. Harold wanted a hearing for his denial that men were harder on women than they were on other men, only a hearing. In other words, denying the reality of gynophobia, I thought to myself. Go ahead, Denoon said, fairness incarnate. Also coming up was a hearing for the proposition that women were as bad as men, given the opportunity, as indicated by the fact that the most murderous and depraved period in Turkish history was the wellknown socalled Rule of Women, when concubines ruled various sultans from behind the curtain of the seraglio. We adore women, Harold was maintaining.
I got us all seated and ready to address the soup. Harold and Nelson had ravished the Oban. It wasn’t clear to me that later on I would still be able to get myself heard. I had been through scenes not unlike this in my other life. Before it was too late I wanted to register myself on the subject of gynophobia, so I told a story I told Harold he might find illuminating on the subject, something to think about, at least. I said I’d once lived in a co-op house at Stanford with nineteen other people, male and female. One of the members of the house had been a woman named Betty. Then a man joined the house who owned a dog named Betty. So naturally the practice grew up of making clear, when it was apposite, which Betty we might be referring to by saying, if we meant the dog, Betty the dog. I was subconsciously waiting for what happened to happen, and it did: in an exchange in which someone mentioned Betty the dog a guy said Which Betty the dog? Was this anything but seizing an opportunity to express freefloating hostility arising from some primal substrate? It so happens that Betty the woman was probably the best-liked and best-looking woman in our house, and in fact the guy who was insulting her had gone out with her a couple of times.