Finally she lay back down. I waited a few moments, then I said, "Can you define vocation for me? Think a minute."
"It's not just making a living."
"Correct."
"It's a whole scene that gets you excited. It's your thing."
"What about your father's vocation?"
"My father counsels his clients. He's a friend to a lot of them. He does contracts for them. He's sort of a general consultant in the guise of a lawyer."
"Guise?"
"His work doesn't excite him."
"What does then?" Besides you, I thought.
"I don't know," she said. "Perhaps nothing does. He could do lots of things."
"Such as?"
"He could have been a businessman or an ambassador, something like that."
"Listen carefully. What would he enjoy being?"
"Someone else."
She knew she had said something terrible. I gave her a moment to reflect, then said, "The other lawyer. Thomassy. Do you think he wants to be somebody else?"
"You've gotta be crazy, he loves doing what he does so much he doesn't want to have anything to do with anyone else!"
"Meaning you?"
"Anyone."
"Do you feel he is a competent lawyer?"
"He's a fucking genius. He's a fanatic about manipulating people, cases, laws."
"To what end?"
"It's an end in itself, he loves it!"
"He has a vocation."
"It's an obsession with him."
"Yes."
Then she said, "You don't like George."
"I wouldn't say that."
"I'll say it. You don't like George."
"My likes are not relevant. It happens I am not a policeman or a criminal. I live outside those things that obsess Mr. Thomassy. I do not need him in my life. Do you?"
"You're giving me the willies."
"How?"
"You make me think maybe I'm not like George."
"You want to be more like George?"
"It's his vitality."
"You have vitality. Don't you like your work?"
"I like some of the things I do at the job."
"Would Mr. Thomassy say that about his work?"
"No. He's a zealot about the whole lot."
"He has a vocation."
"All right! I don't! And I am about to fuck up my life by attaching it to his, living off the excitement of his drive. I don't want to do that. I want to be my own man."
We lingered in the silence that followed. Finally, she said, "I meant my own woman."
"There is nothing to be embarrassed about. Saying 'your own man' doesn't make you homosexual. The terms of our language are male. That is the only significance of your remark."
"You mean I'm not suddenly turning queer."
"Not suddenly."
"Now what the hell do you mean by that?"
"You spoke of yourself once or twice as having a crazy side. Tell me about that."
Experience has taught me to expect a long silence before she answers.
"Ever since I was a kid, every once in a while I just let all my crazy thoughts and words hang out, like I was letting some other nature out of me, some…"
"Uncontrolled?"
"My mother and father never let any crazy side of them show."
"Concealment?"
"Yes. To be decorous. Proper. Unexcitable. It's the essence of Waspdom."
"You were saying before that excitement was part of vocation."
"Yes," she said. "My vocation is not to be a Wasp. Like needling people, shocking the bourgeoisie, fucking blacks, you know."
"Or Turks?"
"What do you mean?"
"I meant Armenians."
"But they were enemies."
"Of whom?"
"Of each other."
"And?"
"My parents. They don't want to know people who are emotional, who dance wildly, who kill, who…"
"Say it."
"Who rape. They think the ethnics, all of them, are raping our world."
"Whose world?"
"My parents' fucking world!"
"Not yours?"
"I want out of that world. Look, Dr. Koch, there was a world of people before my mother and father and me, before any Wasps. It's a temporary stage. Their time is up."
"You fled from your parents into Cambridge, you befriended all sorts of types, talents, eccentrics, lunatics."
"Weirdos."
"You want to be like them?"
"I want to be like myself. Only…"
"Yes?"
"I want to be obsessed like George."
"Vocation. Yes. Well, I think that's all for today."
"Jesus, it's like coitus interruptus, right when I'm getting somewhere, you stop."
"Yes."
"It's part of the technique, right?"
She was sitting up, looking at me. I nodded.
"There aren't a lot of Wasps in your profession, are there?"
"Some," I said.
"Not many, I'll bet. Too embarrassing."
"Is your car parked nearby?"
"Just a couple of blocks away."
"I need some exercise after sitting all day. I will walk downstairs with you."
She looked at me, a slight smile subverting her countenance for the first time that day.
"Our antlers aren't locked any more?" she said.
I shook my head.
In the street she said, "It's like coming out of a movie into real life." She turned left. I went with her.
"Were there Spanish-speaking people in the area when you moved here?"
"It was a very long time ago. Maybe a few. I never noticed. Now it is the lingua franca."
"Lingua hispanica," she said, laughing.
"Yes."
So soon the tables turn. Before me, I think, came generations of refugees whose children wanted only to look and act and feel more like the ruling Wasps than their parents. Now the Francines are slithering out of the Wasp compound, finding their way out into the world, looking for the other inhabitants of the planet. She is becoming a European. She has been raped by a Slovak. We are two refugees in this West Side mini-ghetto of mine that shrinks every day like a grape drying. All around we hear the language of Torquemada. Look at those three young toughs eyeing us, sucking machismo from cigarettes, laughing. I feel the fibrillating panic: the bars on the cages are being lifted, the animals are being let loose, the holocaust is coming again.
"Are you all right. Dr. Koch?"
"Fine, fine." Dear God, I have lived in this neighborhood for twenty-six years, with Marta and after Marta, will I have to move, become a refugee once more?
As she reaches her car, she says, "It's a very colorful neighborhood you live in."
"Yes. Full of life." And death.
She shakes my hand. "Thank you for accompanying me."
"De nada," I say in the language of the enemy, as she gets in and I close the door. She ignites the engine, backs up turning the wheel, then pulls away from the curb with a roar, my Francine, waving with one hand. I walk to the corner newsstand, and amidst the Spanish magazines, I find the evening paper, and walk warily back across no man's land to where, I suppose, I live.
Twenty-seven
Thomassy
Making love to Francine isn't a commitment! I don't want to get on an emotional roller coaster, or get trapped in those phone calls, hanging on to each other like spider spit. I need to get this over with by getting the case closed my way quick.
The excuse for a lot of her phone calls to me was what was happening at the Grand Jury. I phoned Lefkowitz to volunteer some help to whoever was presenting the case, and all I could get was his secretary saying he had left a message that if I wanted any information I had to call Mr. Cunham directly. So I called Gary and all I could get was his secretary saying her beloved Mr. Cunham could not speak to me at the present time. Of course the runaround was deliberate. I kept checking the Daily News, which is a more reliable place than the Times to get the first flash of a rape indictment, especially white on white. Could Cunham be stalling? Was he testing to see if I would do what I said I would? Was he setting a trap for me?