I didn’t elicit much with my anecdote. There was some pro forma nodding. I don’t know how closely anyone was listening. But I didn’t have to feel like a fool for very long. Denoon was being peculiarly agreeable and passive. Shortly I saw why. He was ashamed of something, and here it was: two bottles of Cape Riesling with bits of earth still clinging to the labels. They dated back to the Italian construction workers and had been cached against a special occasion rising. It was hard for me not to think of special occasions in the past involving just the two of us when a taste of wine would have made a nice addition, but no, instead the wine was unearthed in honor of a visiting male no one would be likely to mistake for a comrade of his. There was no justification for it other than Denoon’s feeling that he had to reciprocate for the Oban. I was not happy.
Denoon began pouring generously all around. Almost as though it were a chore he swallowed down whatever Oban remained in his mug, so that he could get properly going with the wine. Julia nudged me under the table. She declined wine until I signaled her that it might be a good idea for her to assist me in diminishing the supply, as feebly attempted before with the Oban. I was making the assumption that these two bottles were all there was. Nelson was indicating that that was the case. But how could I be sure? Wasn’t it just as possible that he was trying to reassure me that however tonight developed I wasn’t going to have to endure something like it ever again? I felt traces of pity, his shame was so patent.
Harold was developing the standard canard about the ingratitude of women regarding the unappreciated efforts of men to provide for them, even knowing that women in the long run are going to outlive them by a long chalk. Where was the hatred in that, on the part of men? Everything men accomplished in society was for women, for acquiring the attributes of all kinds needed to attract them and maintain them in as much comfort as could be managed. And was it not illuminating that, as much as women might complain, when they had got the suffrage, what was the result? Giving the vote to women had been the one thing needful to bring about a new and perfect world, so the previous generation had been told, but what have we here? Women voting to affirm the world as men have made it in every respect, albeit with something a little more for crèches. You endorse us, really, he said, do you not?
I had my artillery ready, but I was waiting for Nelson. I thought, he knows reams more than I do on this. Where was he, while Harold ruled the waves with half-baked vignettes of women in power behaving exactly like men? A man should be rebutting Harold. Of course Nelson didn’t know it, but Harold was acting, playing sort of paterfamilias. Speak, I was thinking toward Nelson, or forever hold your peace.
Then Nelson came up with Do you happen to know which country in Western Europe has the fewest women in parliament and cabinet, both? He sipped wine vigorously while he waited for Harold to guess. Harold wouldn’t. Greece, Nelson said, and a close number two, the United Kingdom, very close. Nelson’s expression told me that this feeble thrust was supposed to calm me. But this statistic was nowhere near the point Harold was making. If this was Denoon inter pocula I needed to know it.
This in no way refutes me, Harold said. Julia asked me on the side if it was true, and I told her that Denoon was always right on his facts and figures.
Ultimately it was my continuing silence that got Denoon to realize he had to perorate. Nelson roused himself. He really let fly, and all for me. I knew he was encyclopedic on the woman question and that night he proved it. He said to Harold You mention Turkey groaning under the rule of women, which is an old chestnut, but I wonder if you know that all during this supposed reign of terror the kadeins, that is, the favored concubines, even the most favored and sovereign ones, had to join the nominal sultans in bed by crawling from the bedroom doorway on hands and knees, over to the bed, then kiss the coverlet, and then crawl up underneath it from the foot until they got level with the sultan? This was nota bene for me because Nelson had come to bed that way a couple of times and I had not known there was a referent, I had been under the impression he was just being funny. I think I prided myself that his playful side was developing under my benevolent influence. But his being able to strike back so specifically against one of Harold’s major canards was the main thing. I loved that. I lose detail here because I had to organize more food for us. The men had eaten about as much of the soup as they were going to. It was unlikely Julia would be much help. Thanks to her pitching in with the wine reduction strategy, she was becoming visibly more relaxed.
Nelson was masterly. He drove home two theses. One was that despite apparent differences every society can be analyzed to show that women are in essence being shaped to function as vehicles for male imperatives and the physical reproduction of male power. He didn’t carry this thesis into its most perfected form, in which he shows that in strictly biological terms man is a parasite on woman. This would have been too much for Harold. The second thesis was that because of the history of crushing and molding of women, men have no idea what women are or what they might be if they were left alone. One proof of this was the spectacle of male marxism searching high and low for the liberatory class that would lift human arrangements into a redeemed state — the proletariat, the students, the lumpen, third world nationalists — in short, every group around except for the most promising one, a majority group at that, a necessary and sufficient class an sich, the mass of women, women suitably enlightened and thus für sich. Then he brought out a pet contention, which was that among the thousands of credit and producer coops in Africa, the ones that tended not to be looted by their officers or to have fallen deeply into debt were the ones controlled by women. Then he rested.
Nelson was not succinct. And he was repetitive. But the power was there and Julia, for one, was seemingly getting it. Nelson knew his audience. He was gingerly with religion, barely treating it as causative in the case of female circumcision. She made him repeat the estimate of seventy-five million victims alive and suffering as of then, not seventy-five million since the origins of the outrage. I think the only other reference to religion in that whole segment had been in his windup, in which the Trinity of Plunder — Church, State, Capital — got alluded to. Julia seemed mildly spellbound. I saw her repeat rather wonderingly to herself certain phrases, of which Trinity of Plunder was one.
It was a ringing finish. Even I was moved, as much of all this as I’d already heard. As always there was something new, which served to remind me how lucky I was to have someone so encyclopedic for my own. This time it was the image of Chinese brides under the old regime lying in bed and waiting for the groom to descend on them while hundreds of banners fluttered over the marriage bed saying May you produce a hundred sons and a thousand grandsons.