As She Climbed Across The Table Part 12

Cynthia Jalter nodded.

"Another couple therapist?"

"v.a.g.i.n.a ecologist."

"What?"

She repeated it.

"You mean a gynecologist."

"Yes and no. Gavin prefers to break it into the root words to capture a meaning he feels is lost. The ecology of the v.a.g.i.n.a, the v.a.g.i.n.a as environment, rather than just negative s.p.a.ce."

"And himself as what? E.P.A. official?"

Cynthia Jalter laughed. The wind blew a strand of black hair into her mouth, and she ran it back out with a finger.

I thought of Lack as cosmic v.a.g.i.n.a, laid out across that cold steel table for examination. Unable to close his legs. Peered into by dozens of white-coated experts. Maybe Alice just wanted to shelter this v.a.g.i.n.al ent.i.ty.

Cynthia Jalter squeezed my hand. She blinked as the wind whipped her hair across her face. "You don't have to stay with Alice anymore," she said, apparently reading my thoughts. "You've been patient enough. It's not your fault. You're free now to do anything you want."

Though it was cold, a layer of moisture was forming between our clenched hands.

"What if I want to stay with Alice?" I said.

She smiled. "Just don't forget that there are other options. That your life can change. People do forget." She tugged my hand and drew me close enough to kiss. Her lips were dry and cool. I thought I could feel her smiling around my mouth.

It only lasted an instant. Just long enough for me to wonder if I was numb to Cynthia Jalter the way Alice was numb to me, the way Lack was numb to Alice. Were we links in a chain?

More important, if I woke to Cynthia Jalter, entered her embrace, would that start a chain reaction-would Lack embrace Alice?

The kiss was over before I could puzzle it out. Our lips stuck together slightly as we separated. Whatever else, I'd have a small secret now. This kiss would be with me, invisible badge or scar, when I went back to the apartment.

I opened my eyes. A tiny plane droned overhead, low against the fluffy clouds, trailing a banner that read CELESTE WILL YOU MARRY ME MAYNARD CELESTE WILL YOU MARRY ME MAYNARD. A simple message conveyed across vast distance. Admirable. The answer could only be yes. The plane circled the patch of sky above the courtyard, then vanished.

I looked at Cynthia Jalter.

"I need time to think," I said. "I'm living with two men who can't see and a woman who won't talk. She's painting self-portraits now. She only eats toast. It's tempting to think I can just walk away, but I can't. Lack is part of my life at this point. I have to see it through to the end. I'm as bound to it as Alice."

Cynthia Jalter took me by the shoulder and kissed me again, quickly, almost furtively, on the corner of my mouth. I was left puckering in the cold air, late.

"I understand," she said. She seemed confident.

What did she know that I didn't?

"Relax," she said. "There's nothing wrong with a slow, awkward beginning. The text for the whole relations.h.i.+p, the sustaining mythos, is built in the first few encounters. The whirl of emotions, the push and pull. So the more of this kind of material we generate, the better."

I couldn't speak.

"We're sitting pretty," she said.

My knees were locked. I had no voice. A tendril of her hair floated loose and swept against my cheek. I tucked it back behind her ear, and came awfully close to grabbing her and kissing her again. But the impulse tangled into knots. Instead I raised my hand and pointed to the parking lot, indicating my small brown Datsun.

"You have to go," she said.

I made a steering wheel shape with my hands.

Georges De Tooth was our resident deconstructionist, a tiny, horse-faced man who dressed in impeccable pinstriped suits, spoke in a feigned poly-European accent, and wore an overlarge, ill-fitting, white-blond wig. He could be seen hurrying between the English department and his car, an enormous leather briefcase gripped in both arms as if it were the cover of a manhole from which he had just emerged. Or sitting in faculty meetings, silent and pensive, chewing on the stem of an unloaded pipe, often held with the bowl facing sideways or down. The library housed a dozen or so of his slim, unreadable volumes, as well as a thick anthology of savage attacks by his enemies. He lived in a room at the YMCA. He had for fifteen years.

When I ushered De Tooth into Soft's office it was, as far as I knew, the first meeting between the two great men. It wasn't auspicious. They clutched quickly at each other's hands, mumbled in unison, and retreated together into silence. I offered De Tooth a seat and he took it, trapping himself underneath his briefcase, his nose and wig peeking out over the top, his feet dangling above the floor. Soft leaned back in his chair, caught my eye, and screwed up his eyebrows in a frown. I smiled back.

De Tooth was my version of Braxia. The European surrogate, the trump card. I'd spent the past week wooing him, baiting his interest in Lack. When I captured it I began priming him for this encounter. This was my own particle collision, my chance to b.u.mp together incompatible fields. Now I would observe the event.

"Professor De Tooth and I have conceived an approach to Lack," I said. "As I said on the phone, I wanted to run it by you. Otherwise we're all ready to go. We just need some lab time."

"You know you have my support, Philip. You know I want to see you in there."

"Yes, well. We're proposing something unorthodox, but very exciting. It's not as though we'll be in the way of the other teams. There shouldn't be any problem."

"Unorthodox."

"Yes." I turned to look at De Tooth. He'd slid the briefcase to his knees, though he still gripped the handle with both hands. He was studying Soft. "A contemporary critical approach," I went on. "Very fertile. We want to treat Lack as a self-contained text. A sign. We want to read him."

Soft paled slightly.

"In this field we speak of the text, in this case Lack, as possessing an independent life, free of context," I went on. "We derive our descriptive standards, our critical vocabulary, from the source. Lack again. The idea is that any given text contains its own decryption kit, if we approach it free of bias."

"Interesting," said Soft. He closed his eyes.

"Have you heard," said De Tooth, "of the death of the author?" When he spoke he arched his eyebrows, and they disappeared into the yellow wig.

Soft looked at De Tooth. I could practically see the interference pattern in the s.p.a.ce between the two men. The bad splice.

"I may have," said Soft.

"It's quite simple," said De Tooth. "We admit the presence of no author, no oeuvre, and no genre. The text stands bare. We discard biography, psychology, historicism-these things impede clear vision. We admit nothing outside of the text. Lack is no different. In his case the irrelevant genre is physics, and the irrelevant author is yourself. We will study Lack as if he auth.o.r.ed himself."

Soft smiled weakly. "Your study consisting of what?"

"More text," said De Tooth. "The only possible response."

"Georges will create a corresponding artifact," I explained. "The correct approach to a text as dense and self-consistent and original as Lack is a criticism with all the same qualities."

"You mean you'll sit in the chamber and write?" Soft sounded uncomfortable.

De Tooth shrugged. "In or out of the chamber, I will compose a doc.u.ment. Perhaps it will not mention Lack. Perhaps it will only consist of the word Lack Lack. And my students, in turn, will study my text. Without access to Lack. We should use up a minimum of your precious time."

"With all due respect," said Soft, "Lack isn't exactly a work of art."

"Leave that to me to determine. Meaning accrues in unexpected places. And drains unexpectedly out of others. Your physics, for example, has proven insufficient."

I had a sudden inspiration. "Maybe we can offer the new text to Lack, to see if he'll take it in."

"Lack is is physics," protested Soft feebly. "You can't separate the two." physics," protested Soft feebly. "You can't separate the two."

"Lack, Mr. Soft, is a singular monument transcending any ba.n.a.l explanation. Lack has a prodigious propensity to meaning. He seems to attract it like a lightning rod. For a lover of signification like myself, an irresistible phenomenon. Pure signifier. Lack is a verb both active and pa.s.sive; an object and a s.p.a.ce at once, a symbol. He is no single thing. Physics seeks to dismantle the surface, perceive beyond it, to a truth comprised of particles; I argue against depth wherever I find it. Lack's meaning is all on the surface, and his surface appears to be infinite. Your approach is useless."

De Tooth rattled on, his distended lips forming the brittle sentences. Soft withered, and turned pea yellow. I started to feel protective. I wanted to hurry De Tooth away. The point had been made. But the little man, his tiny knuckles clenched white on the handle of his briefcase, was unstoppable.

"Perhaps my text and yours will cancel each other out. They so often do, you know. It is possible Lack is no more than an a.s.sertion that has gone, until now, unanswered. Or perhaps Lack is a tool, a method, whose use has so far remained undiscovered. Certainly, in fact, Lack is all of these, and more. Lack is the inevitable: the virtually empty sign. The sign that means everything it is possible to mean, to any reader."

Soft put his hand against his pale, sticky forehead. "Does it seem a little warm in here?"

There was no reply. Soft tugged at the knot of his tie. "Go on," he said finally. "I didn't mean to interrupt."

"Perhaps we shall prove that Lack does not exist," said De Tooth. Soft looked at me plaintively from beneath his hand. "And perhaps we shall prove that we ourselves do not exist. Perhaps Lack is editing the world for us, sorting it into those things that truly exist and those that do not; we who fail to exist may only peer with nostalgia across the threshold into reality; we may not cross."

Soft got out of his seat and went to the open window. He was breathing through his mouth.

"Are you okay?" I said.

Soft shook his head.

I got up and took him by the shoulder, and guided him through the door and into the hallway, where he slumped against the wall. He slid his hand from his panic-stricken eyes and used it to cover his mouth. His face had turned a brackish green. De Tooth hopped off his chair and dragged his briefcase out to where we stood in the hall.

"Perhaps Lack has dreamed us, and we are only now, due to some scientific blunder, encountering the mind's eye of our dreamer."

Soft choked and doubled up, pencils spilling from his s.h.i.+rt pocket and scattering on the floor. When he straightened there was spittle hanging from between his fingers. "I'm sorry," he gasped. He hobbled down the hall, into the men's room. I heard a retching sound echoing faintly off the tile.

I looked at De Tooth. He arched his eyebrows into his wig.

Three nights later, Alice loaded up the back of her Toyota with fifteen or twenty dashed-off paintings, and drove the short distance to the physics facility. She parked in the faculty lot, then piled the paintings through the main entrance and into the elevator.

I followed at a safe distance in my Datsun, and then on foot. Unseen.

The canvases were mostly self-portraits, painted in nervous, choppy brush strokes, images hacked out of the murk. There were a few abstractions, and a few still lifes. One painting of Evan and Garth. I liked her new work, actually. It was better than the earlier stuff. Maybe the emotional strain had freed her inhibitions, pushed her closer to the edge where art occurs. She'd certainly perfected a kind of 1950s painter's temperament: surly, nonverbal, and permanently strung out.

But would Lack like them?

We were going to find out.

When the elevator doors closed, I took the stairs, feeling like a spy. The stairwell, with its bare concrete walls, fallout-shelter notices, and unadorned light bulbs glaring from within iron cages, was perfect for espionage fantasies. It went on and on. There were three landings, three twists of stair, for every numbered floor. The building had extra depths, layers the elevator skipped. I wondered if the building contained its own opposite, an anti-building where anti-physicists collided anti-particles. Anti-men who paused only to wonder at the odd sounds coming from the floors and ceilings.

At Lack's floor I opened the emergency exit. I was alone in the corridor-no Alice. I went into the observation room and found Braxia, dressed in a lab coat, eating an apple, chewing with his mouth open.

He tilted his head to indicate the chamber. "She wants privacy," he said.

"She took the paintings in?"

He nodded.

So Alice was alone inside, with Lack. The fundamental situation. This was the closest I'd come to it. I was annoyed to have Braxia there.

"She's offering the paintings to Lack," I said. "They're self-portraits. Surrogate selves."

Braxia smiled, crunched, swallowed. "Is something like physics, I think. To paint a self-portrait. You look at this thing, and it moves. You try to portray it, and it changes. You look out of the corner of your eye, it eludes you. You stare straight, you widen your eyes, and it makes a face at you."

I slumped down against the wall, across from the entrance to the chamber, fixing my gaze on Braxia's kneecaps.

"Okay," he said. "You can't talk now, about interesting things. You have to be worried and serious. I understand. So, if you will stay and be worried, I will go home and take a nap. You think I want to stay down here all night? I'll watch television."

"I'll stay," I said.

"It could be a long time," he said. "You want to get some dinner, come back? I'll wait."

"I'm fine."

Braxia shrugged, and went out. A moment later I heard the gurgle of the elevator as it ferried him up to the lobby.

Leaving me alone, on AliceWatch.

I stretched out my legs, checked the time, took a deep breath. This was what I wanted, supposedly, to have her under my care. So I settled down to wait.

I started by listening intently, then realized there was nothing to hear.

I tensed my body for action. Then untensed it. There wasn't any action.

My brain composed another bright dialogue. But I knew Alice wouldn't provide the responses needed to cue my witticisms.

Alice was alone with her Lack. I was alone with mine. Mine was less interesting than hers, I realized. She was obsessed, and I was bored. Bored and hungry and lonely.

I was lonely for anyone, lonely for a human voice. Cynthia Jalter, maybe. Or Evan and Garth. I was lonely enough to wish Braxia would come back and jabber at me.

The pay phone was just out of sight around the curve of the hallway. I could order food. I'd only abandon Alice for a moment. I went to the phone. The directory had been half-shredded out of its protective binder, but I found the number of a pizzeria near campus.

"I want a small pizza and a bottle of beer," I explained to the boyish voice on the other end of the line. "But no cheese. Can you give me a small pizza without cheese?"

"That's unusual," said the voice. "Let me check. I'll put you on hold."

He came back. "One small pizza, no cheese. Any specials?"