Element 79

A Play’s the Thing

The dinner had been elegantly cooked. The three who had eaten it formed an elegant trio, a handsome man in his early forties, a perhaps still more handsome woman in her middle thirties, and a girl of twenty. The girl was fair with long hair the color of ripe corn. The woman was dark with a finely chiseled nose and large, arresting eyes.

“Coffee, I think,” murmured the woman.

“Excellent, my dear,” said the man, “coffee would be exactly right. I had no idea you were so splendid a cook.”

“I do most things well. When I have a mind to.”

The girl was on her feet. “I’ll fetch it.”

“Let me. It would be the least I could do,” offered the man.

“It would indeed be the least you could do. But let Cynthia go.”

The girl with hair the color of ripe corn left the man and woman together. Nothing was said while the girl was absent. The woman seated herself against one end of a long couch, placing her well-shaped legs along the length of the couch. She was still adjusting the cushions behind her back when Cynthia returned with the coffee. It was in a fashioned silver pot. The cups were of delicate china. The girl poured the coffee and served the man and woman. Then she seated herself comfortably, the three of them forming a triangle facing each other.

The woman tasted the coffee. “Mm, almost right, a touch of salt perhaps was needed.”

She sipped again reflectively, and then announced in a loud firm voice, “John, darling, you are a lousy sod.”

“Not literally, I can assure you.”

“Not literally, I would agree. Figuratively, shall we say?”

“You have every reason to be annoyed, I suppose.”

“Darling, annoyed is scarcely the word for it. Bloody furious is much more the way I feel.”

“My dear, we can’t put the clock back. ‘The moving finger writes,’ and all that sort of thing.”

“If the moving finger had confined itself to writing, we’d hardly be in this very murky situation, would we?”

“I mean, we’ve got to face up to things, like rational human beings.”

“I fully intend to face up to things. Very rationally, my dear John, as you will presently discover. But facing up to things still doesn’t stop me from being bloody furious.”

“Helen,” said the girl, “I just don’t see how getting mad about it is going to help.”

“What is going to help?” asked the woman.

“Nothing really, I suppose,” admitted the girl.

“Time, perhaps? Is that the view you would both like me to take?”

“Oh, come now, Helen. It’s not as bad as all that.”

“It’s happened before. It’s not the end of the world.”

The woman turned from the girl toward the man. She threw back her head and laughed, “Of course it’s not the end of the world. I never said it was. I’m complaining much more about the way it was done than about what was done.”

“You goaded me for long enough.”

“Goad or no goad, there is a certain well-defined moral level below which a man in your position is not expected to stoop.”

“A great deal depends on the direction from which you look at it.”

“No doubt.”

“I mean, you can’t possibly blame me for everything.”

“I blame the crucial moment on you. So I’m going to make you suffer for it, darling.”

The girl fidgeted and shook her head. “I can’t see any one of us being particularly to blame. We’re all to blame. I asked for it and I got it.”

The woman laughed again. “I didn’t ask for it, yet I’ve got it, too, my dear.”

There was a short silence. Then the woman shuffled along the couch to where she could stare directly into the man’s face.

“Well, are you satisfied with what you’ve done to both of us, you bloody great bull?”

“Very well satisfied.”

“I wonder what your academic colleagues are going to say when it all comes out? You’ll smirk on the other side of your face when they chuck you out.”

“Nonsense, these are private matters, outside the university’s competence. If everybody were thrown out for this sort of thing, every faculty in every university in the world would be decimated tomorrow.”

“There’s one thing you forget. Cynthia was your student. The university won’t take kindly to that, my dear John. It’s morally equivalent to incest, seducing a student. They’ll bounce you good and hard for it.”

“But I didn’t seduce Cynthia! Damn it all, there wasn’t the smallest question of seduction.”

The man lifted his hands toward the girl. “I said I’d look after things but you said you’d see to it.”

“I said I would but I never intended to.”

“In heaven’s name, why not?”

“Because I wanted it to happen. I wanted you to give me a child. So it would commit me. So it would commit both of us.”

“Marriage would commit both of us.”

“Marriage isn’t possible, not now.”

“Why not?”

“Because of Helen.”

“Look, Helen isn’t that sort, the marrying sort. She’s played the game her way. Well, she’s lost for once, that’s all.”

“Don’t be so sure,” interposed the woman calmly, “the game isn’t played out yet.”

“You’d wanted to make Helen for a long time, hadn’t you?” the girl asked the man.

“I suppose so,” he admitted.

“For how long, ten years?”

“Perhaps, a long time, certainly.”

“But she’s the other kind, so you didn’t get anywhere at all until I came along.”

The girl stopped and looked to the woman. “He still doesn’t understand the way it is.”

“He soon will,” smiled the woman. With evident pleasure, she leaned across to the man and put a hand on his knee. “Don’t you see? She’s the other kind, too, my kind. Cynthia is my kind. When she tricked you into making her pregnant she was trying to break it. She knew you’d have to marry her, being her teacher. She knew she’d got you in the sensitive places.”

The man sucked in his breath and scowled. The woman patted his knee. “That hits your self-esteem, doesn’t it? It wasn’t your sex power what did it, darling. It was Cynthia thinking she’d extend the range of her interests a bit.”

The girl was dreamy and reflective. “I would have tried, of course, but I don’t know whether it could ever have worked. I’d probably have regressed in the long run.”

“You didn’t know it was this way with Cynthia?” the man asked the woman.

For answer, she laughed deeply and quite genuinely. “Don’t be such an idiot. Do you think I’d have gone off to bed with you if I’d known. I could have cut you out with a snap of the fingers if only I’d known.”

“Exactly what happened between the two of you?” asked the girl.

“We’ve already been over it twenty times.”

“I’d like to hear the story his way though.”

“Oh, Helen was white-hot for you,” began the man. “That can’t be any news. But she thought you were hot for me.”

“So you made a trade. You’d give her a chance with me, put me in her path, as it were. In exchange, she allowed you to make her.”

“It was like that, more or less.”

“How do you mean, more or less?” thundered the woman. “There was plenty more to it. He said he would take care of things and by God he did. If he’d been aiming to make me pregnant he couldn’t have done it better.”

“Then here’s a surprise for you,” interjected the man. “That’s exactly what I was aiming to do. I’d waited long enough. You’d teased me long enough.”

The woman drew in a deep breath. “Then hang on to your hat, my dear. The wind is really going to blow now.”

The girl lost her dreamy look. She sat up alertly, her chin cupped in her hands. “Even so, I’d have thought it would have taken more than one weekend—unless he was very lucky.”

The woman looked gravely across at the girl. “He discovered the right time of the month. I’m sure of it. That’s the thing which makes me so mad about it all.”

The girl whistled between her teeth. “That is pretty ultimate. He must have felt an intense need to justify himself. Biologically, I mean. I bet it’s done him a world of good, getting himself rid of a bad infertility psychosis.”

“Cynthia, darling, will you please be a little less ready to see his point of view? Try to develop a sense of majestic rage.”

“It would go well with her coloring,” agreed the man.

“Stop smirking!” rapped the woman. “Our time is still six months away. But for you, my dear John, the sands have already run out.”

The girl continued her reverie. “We’re all pretty ultimate, aren’t we? I didn’t give him much of a chance, you know. It’s really pretty much like shooting a sitting bird. Seducing a man of his age. Just as I was beginning to develop an affection for him, he sells me to you. He trades my body, in order to gratify his own overwhelming lust.”

The woman was indignant. “I resent the suggestion that I have deceived anybody. I made a bargain and I kept faithfully to it.”

“A bargain to seduce an apparently innocent girl.”

“I am discussing the issue of deception, not the morality of sex. In any case, you were a party to the seduction of this apparently innocent girl.”

“I didn’t suggest it.”

“No, but you jumped at the chance, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I admit I jumped at the chance. I’d jump again.”

“Is that intended as a compliment?”

“Yes, it is.”

The woman stopped the rapid-fire barrage and said slowly and pointedly, “Perhaps we should return to your academic friends, Professor. What exactly are you going to tell them?”

“I shall insist on a thorough investigation of the whole thing.”

“Would that be wise? Is there anything in this business that would profit from thorough investigation? How you purloined my diary in order to discover my condition on a certain day of the month? Would that make a favorable headline in the daily press, do you think?”

“I suppose it will give you great satisfaction to see me chucked out—wasn’t that the way you put it?”

“It will give me no satisfaction at all. Quite the contrary. You are not going to be chucked out, for the good and sufficient reason that we—Cynthia and I—have need of financial support.”

“What the hell do you mean by that?”

“Simply this. You will sign a statement admitting the paternity of Cynthia’s child. The statement will never be produced so long as your income is properly diverted to us, to Cynthia and me. And by your income, my dear John, I do not mean your academic salary. I also mean all the profitable little side lines. I mean your income as your accountant sees it.”

“Well, of all the bitches in creation, you’re just about the last!”

The woman smiled at the girl. “Didn’t I say I’d make him suffer?”

“What am I supposed to live on?” asked the man in furious indignation.

“Naturally you will live here with us. What else?”

“Think of the scandal, woman.”

“Scandal, yes. Scandal most horrible. But since it cannot be proved that Cynthia’s child is your child, the university will take no steps. You said so yourself.”

“But, good God, do you think I’m going to slave my guts out for a couple of women like you, together all the time, together and laughing in my face? I’ll clear out once and for all if you push me too far. I’m warning you, Helen.”

“Rubbish, hysterical nonsense. A few minutes ago you admitted to waiting ten years to make me—actually it was twelve years. If you tried to run away, I could bring you back, just by raising my little finger—like that!”

The woman held up a fist, but with the fifth finger extended. The man pondered the implications of this remark. Then he burst out again, “I’m not going to have the two of you going off…”

“Off to bed, is that what you mean? Leaving you to your own little solitary. What other prospect is there, my poor John, unless Cynthia or I should take pity on you? You see, with women like us, there is only one difficult problem, children. Happily, you have provided for us in this regard, just as you are going to provide for us financially speaking. Happily also, you will be able to help with the children, to wash them when they stagger about the house with appallingly dirty hands, the little dears you have imposed on us with such biological ferocity.”

The woman smiled from the couch on both the man and the girl. “Now, with all this unpleasantness settled and concluded, how shall we proceed to amuse ourselves? I believe television is offering one of its more popular domestic dramas.”

The author’s fingers were streaked with ink as he came to the end of his crass little story. He read it through from the beginning, a satisfied smile on his face. Coming along nicely, he thought to himself, although two of the characters, the man and the girl, still needed development. He’d better say what the man was a professor of. Best to choose something in the sciences, so as to put things on the right side of the two cultures.

The author left his desk to make himself a cup of coffee. While waiting for the kettle, it struck him like a thunderclap. He hit his forehead with the palm of his hand, symbolically in the classical theatrical gesture. Obviously, oh, so obviously, this must be a play, not a story. How much easier to strengthen the professor on the stage, to strengthen him into a formidable bullish creature, merely stage business. He could lengthen out the initial dinner party. He’d have it strange and obscure, with a lot of oblique remarks. All the girl need do, right through, would be to look mysterious. The older woman would carry the show quite easily. He’d already got her well in hand. At the beginning he’d mislead everybody into thinking it was the usual triangle problem, with the man and woman married and with the man just on the point of running off with the young bit of stuff. He could keep it going this way right up to the end of the first act. How about bringing down the curtain by letting it out that both women were pregnant? A good dramatic punch, that. It would mislead an audience into thinking the play turned on the dilemma of whether the man could leave his wife, now she was pregnant.

In the second act he’d pull out all the stops, twisting things in a way nobody expected. My God, what a story it was, when he came to think about it dispassionately. Two Lesbians, both pregnant by the same man, with the delicious idea of one of them trading herself to him in order to get at the other. It had never been thought of before, not even by the great men, not even by Boccaccio, so far as he could remember, let alone by the ordinary run of modern writers. It was brilliant, even if he said it only to himself. Another thing, wasn’t it superb the way he needed only three characters? It should be possible for any theater to afford the hundred-and-fifty-a-week class. This would take a lot of the strain off, because actors and actresses in that class can make bricks out of straw, not that there need be much straw in this thing. It couldn’t miss, not with the sex craze in the theater running so strongly. He could see it just running and running, maybe five years?

In a fine frenzy, the author rushed back to his desk. On a new pad he began rapidly to sketch in the opening of his first act. It never occurred to him that his characters supplied a subconscious need for something to dominate. The writer interested in plot follows the path of structure and order. The writer interested in the pathological aspects of humanity has rarely anything of logic or of structure. He is seeking to satisfy the basic human instinct to dominate, if not real flesh and blood, well, at least the figments of his own imagination.