Georges had wheeled in a portable bar cart and Miller, sunk deep in one of the big muslin chairs, was just getting comfortable with a large scotch-and-soda and enjoying the harsh, smoked-licorice taste of his duty-free Gaulois when a woman Miller hadn’t noticed before stood up. Miller thought she was about to play the piano for them when, inexplicably, in his lap-robed, civilized circumstances, he suddenly started to cry. (Because if they could just see me now, he thought. Because just look at me, he thought, the kid from Indy. Because, he thought, this is the life. Listening to high-class lieder, art songs, words in languages he wouldn’t understand set to melodies he probably wouldn’t be able to follow. This is, this is the life, thought Miller in Arles, his stock-still ego laced with awe, no hero but a dilettante of idyll. Because if they could, if they only could. See him now.) And was about to snuff out his cigarette for the singer’s sweet sake when abruptly, without even moving toward the piano, the woman began to speak.
She said her name was Anita Smynea and that she taught theological psychiatry at the London School of Economics. (Miller figured it was an elective.) Her project in Arles, she said, would be to put together the raw data for a monograph she was preparing on a psychological profile of the saints and martyrs.
Miller listened fascinated as she reeled off evidence for her conclusion that the downside of their spirituality and devoutness was a zealotry even more off-putting and unpleasant than their self-rightousness.
“Oh, come now, really,” one of the Fellows said, “off- putting? Unpleasant?”
“Are you serious?” Ms. Smynea said. “Those people couldn’t get past the lowliest reservations clerk at Heathrow, let alone a metal detector!”
A man who identified himself as a political geographer spoke next, addressing the group in the music room from a wheelchair. He discussed his theories about why world-class cities were almost never found on mountaintops. From what Miller understood of his ideas it had less to do with the mechanical difficulties involved in hauling material up their steep, perilous slopes than with some notion about “Man’s innate fear of the sky and of exposure to most astronomical phenomena.” Further arguing that the concept of shelter had as much to do with physical contact and sexual enterprise as it did with a need to protect oneself from the elements, he advanced the theory that from a child’s security blanket on up the chain of architecture to the floor, the ceiling, the room, the apartment and neighborhood, one had before one the very type of the Platonic idea of “comfort.” Thus, cities, mimicking lovemaking, were constitutionally “horizontal” rather than “vertical,” and did not get built on the tops of mountains.
Miller, floundering, foundering, losing track, dropping behind, dropping out, was overcome with sadness. His interest, which was still high, availeth not. Unconsciously, he looked toward Russell for a sign of corroborative impatience. Russell was contemplative and serene inside his huge head.
It was someone else entirely who grew fitful, lost patience. “What is the point, please?” Paul Hartshine (now, for dinner, in a dinner jacket) demanded irritably.
“I’m a political geographer,” said the cripple. “The point, of course, is that because of the synergy between the fear of sky-nakedness and sexual guilt there can be no such thing as a ‘shining city on a hill.’”
“Denver!” Hartshine challenged.
“Denver is foothills.”
A scholar from Hebrew University spoke about slang in the sacred texts.
Myra Gynt, a composer from the University of Michigan, explained how it was her intention to set the lyrics of various Broadway showstoppers to the more formal music of the twelve-tone scale— serial composition, she called it. Miller watched closely as Ms. Gynt adjusted the piano bench and, inclining her neck first right, then left, repeatedly pressed certain keys at the high and low ends of the keyboard and played two chords to either side of its center. She was averaging, she said, testing to see if the piano was tuned. Her mouth turned sourly down at the corners, and though Miller could hear nothing wrong, she professed profound dissatisfaction with the instrument.
Miller sat back, luxuriating in the high-mindedness of his colleagues, taking pleasure in the word, the privileged, lofty fellowship of the communal it radiated, their joint fraternal, sororal mutuality of mission, dedicate, pledged to service history, as if there were something vaguely legislative about scholarship, the life of mind; at once neutral and senatorian in some wise old Roman way; there to learn, to sift, to consider, and then to choose. He’d been in the business maybe eleven years, but until that moment in France he had denied something noble and honorable in himself and hadn’t realized what he should all along have taken for granted— the collegiality of their enterprise, the professional courtesy one life owed another. He looked toward Russell, toward Hartshine, even toward the lame political geographer in the wheelchair, and smiled, certain that the look on his face at that moment matched Russell’s own almost godlike benignity.
When Myra Gynt began to sing (he hadn’t been wrong, the lyric she’d chosen to transpose into her queer, discordant, cryptic, rigorous new music was “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” and was just as difficult for him to follow as he’d anticipated the lieder would be), he felt a flush of pleasure. If they could, he thought, bearing up under what he was certain was good for him, ready at that moment, if a dish of them had been passed round, to chew on the rubbery arms of the squid, to lick from his fingers its black, bilelike ink, if they only could. See him now.
And still luxuriated in his cozy aura of well-being and pride when the famous Roland de Schulte of Harvard, modest and humble as the day was long (“Some of you may have seen articles in a few of the scientific journals about work being done in the pharmacological field to study a variety of marine pathogens”), a shoo-in for the Nobel Prize in chemistry if the FDA ever got off its ass and approved any of a number of Professor de Schulte’s promising homeopathic preparations from sick sea creatures— sharks that were HIV positive, tubercular whales, cancerous eels, arteriosclerotic plaice. (Miller knew it sounded ridiculous, even satiric. But what did he know? What? Any idiot could follow the line of least resistance and laugh at what seemed farfetched to the touch and spirit. Any fool could send up what he didn’t love or understand. Myra Gynt’s atonal music; Professor Smynea’s psychological profiles of the saints and martyrs; Schiff’s, the geographer’s, wild analogies about cities and making love. The Hebrew University guy’s thesis about Biblical slang, how the tetragrammaton itself was merely coy, even facetious, coinage for all the not-to-be- pronounced names of God.
And was still luxuriating, calm and at peace with himself as a man in his tub, only less passive than that, beaming, sending these messages of actual, active goodwill, this sort of silly facial semaphore of the heartfelts and placables, while Farrell Jones held forth regarding his conclusions about the parallels between the mood swings of manic-depressives and babies, and Dr. Arthur Barber, Distinguished University Professor in Theoretical Mathematics at the University of Chicago, speaking in formulas, in signs and symbols, explained the implications of his research not only into the philosophic impossibility of the infinite number but of the high probability that a dozen could not exist in nature.