H
OW CAN YOU LOVE
a man like that? I ask you, how can you?
He’s not like that anymore. He’s suffered, he’s seen. Suffering makes a person more human.
Indeed. Does it occur to you that even Mach has probably suffered, that once upon a time he was four years old and had a round freckled face and eyes that looked straight at you? No doubt he did. No one escapes pain.
She hummed: The man I love belongs to somebody else. She rose. Not to Edith, no. To Mach and his machine. Victor’s machine too. Edith was in a wheelchair invented by Victor’s machine. How can you love a man like that?
Poor Anthony. Always wanted to belong to the machine, to feel he was part of it. Never quite made it. Why he hated me. But I loved what it was in him that would not allow him to become part of it. Always throwing a tantrum at the wrong time. Still, it’s failure for a man, not to belong to the machine.
The machine always wins. When World War III is over and the world is a huge pile of steaming rubble and the people are all dead, there, on the horizon, there, with its chimneys still smoking, will rise I. G. Farben and the robots it invented to save the cost and unpredictable behavior of human labor. Computer-controlled robots jerk across the floor pushing ingots into ovens with long shovels. The robots don’t know everybody’s dead. Even Mach’s or Blanchard’s Caribbean island is an ember now. Even Mach is an ash.
So are the rest of us.
Equal and opposite power, Victor says. How?
Still, he’s right. We’re all part of it, there’s no purity, only milk and butter can be pure, not people. What’s pure? One hundred percent pure TNT, napalm, margarine.
Who’s pure? The farmer, injecting his chickens to make them grow faster, giving them electric shock to make the egg happen? The clerk, stamping in quintuplicate forms to permit nerve gas to be transported across country in a rig? She, teaching in a college that owned stock in Blanchard Oil? She, whose books were published by Crosscutt, a company owned by a conglomerate that pushes sick white bread on America, that pushed nerve gas while it was legal, that still, in one of its subsidiaries, manufactures napalm?
Where can you go to get clean? Some little island in the South Pacific, white beaches, coral reefs, natives living by pulling taro from their front yards, shellfish from the coral, breadfruit and pineapple from the trees? Toothless by thirty, ignorant, yearning. For what? For a TV set, a washing machine, a refrigerator. Yes. And to make enough money to buy an occasional piece of cloth to cover your body, you have to work for one of Them, the Dutch traders, the Aussies, the New Zealanders, the Americans, the Germans, who trade, who wheel and deal, who complain as they sit in their air-conditioned offices about the lazy natives, as the thermometer outside registers 100 degrees and the humidity reaches 99 percent. The natives intelligently slouch from shadow to shadow in the midday sun, while on the beach a white-skinned visitor with no visible fat jogs on the beach, and later collapses of heat prostration.
Victor had spoken to her one day about right and wrong, explaining his frustration.
“The holding company was thinking about buying a strip-mining firm and I was supposed to look into it. I ordered a set of studies, from every possible point of view. The company wasn’t worried about the morality of strip mining, but they were worried about getting flak from the ecology freaks, and the increasing numbers of lawsuits being brought by citizens’ groups, people whose farms—they claimed—had been ruined by strip-mining operations. The company did not want to spend a lot of time and money in court.
“And I’m not going to say I was terribly concerned with the morality of it when I began either. It was a question of investment and risk versus possible profit: it was my job to analyze that, to evaluate it. But I got dragged into the morality of it, willy-nilly, because there’s no way not to.
“Well, I read the studies—they took months to complete—and I went down to Tennessee and West Virginia, out West to Colorado. I looked at what had been done, I even spoke to some of the farmers who were complaining. And there’s no question, none at all, that some of those mining operations left utter devastation behind them. Barren land, not a blade of grass to keep it from eroding at the next rainfall. Farms nearly buried in mud that had slid down from the mined slope. People’s wells full of mud, no water to drink. Unreplaceable plants and wildlife destroyed. Some of the flora in Appalachia is ancient, and exists nowhere else. I looked out at miles and miles of bleak sandy terrain, it looked like the moon. And at once-productive little farms, homes of independent self-reliant people, destroyed by the strip mines.
“I heard about fishy contracts and forceful takeovers by some of the mining companies, cheating the fanners who sold out, pressuring those who wouldn’t. The evidence seemed clear to me—although it wouldn’t easily hold up in a conservative court. I know how corporations work. There had been deceit and political power involved in getting them what they wanted.
“And then I looked at statistics about under-the-surface mining—the number of lives lost every year, the incidence of black lung and other diseases, the bad conditions in the mines—health wise and safety wise. And the cost of getting a ton of coal out of the earth.
“And then I looked at the political situation and the problems we are going to be having, increasingly, with foreign oil, and its cost, and the consequence of its cost to the American dollar. And what that meant to the average American, not even people like you who travel abroad, but average people, in terms of buying power. Knowing that if money gets tight it will be human programs, the social programs you support, that will be cut back, not the budget for the military.
“And when I was all through, I tossed all that out and made my recommendation on a basis purely of possible risk, possible profit, possible loss. There was no way to do it otherwise.”
“But those were your priorities in the first place.”
“And in the last place.”
She grimaced.
“Some people say we should have no growth. They say a little poverty is better than destroying the earth. But a notch in the belt for those people is the loss of sustenance for people lower on the economic scale than they are. They don’t think about that. They think poverty is having to drink jug wine. Even those who live really simply don’t know what poverty is because they’ve
adopted
it. My father’s father lived in a shack with five sisters and brothers and his mother. Every morning the mother woke up the three oldest kids—my grandfather and two sisters—and sent them out with sacks. They lived near the coal mines, and they’d go to the slag heaps and fish through them finding tiny bits of coal that had escaped the sorter. They knew better than to go home without a full sack. They’d get home hours later, black and ashy from head to foot, and sometimes she’d smack them anyway, their mother. She was so desperate, so frantic….
“She used the coal the kids found to heat the shack. She and the next oldest children would spend the morning in the woods, finding edible plants, something to eat. The littler one tagged behind. One of them died from eating a poisonous mushroom. I don’t imagine she wept too long. One less to feed.
“All of the children except my grandfather grew up to be idiots. Stupid benighted bigoted hateful people. Poverty is not good for the soul or the body or the mind. My grandfather ran away from home, he found shoes somehow, he got a job in a factory, he got someone to teach him to read. He drove, he was a bit of a bastard, I guess, at least to his children. But he became a storekeeper, he married a woman who had a store, and they ran it together and they fed themselves and their children.
“And when it comes to things like that—to survival, to sheer enduring—morality is a joke, a middle-class luxury, like white gloves and silver coffeepots. As far as I’m concerned.”
“Yes,” Dolores agreed, “I understand. But that’s because of the kind of morality you’re talking about. A true morality, an honest one, would begin with that, survival. Survival, not the luxury of deciding on moral grounds that you will not have iceberg lettuce this week. With what people really need and really feel. When you talk about survival, sometimes it sounds terribly close to sounding like the survival of the world’s highest standard of living, not real survival.”
“Ah, Dolores, who knows what people really need, really feel?”
Yes. Who knows? Antony drank urine of horses if he had to. Whereas she, Dolores, felt deprived if someone entered her compartment on the London to Oxford run, and intruded on her privacy. And Victor would have had what even he would have to call a hysterical fit if he ever ran out of Scotch.
There is no way to be right, Dolores knew that. But there is righter and wronger, isn’t there? And to be able to say that, you had to have some notion of what was good, what was bad.
She tried to smooth out her brow with her hand.
How could you love a man who had done that to his wife?
How could you live in a world that did what this world did to its people?
What other world could you live in?
Join a nunnery, say beads all day, blank it out, say
AAAUUUMMM
.
And even then, how could you live with yourself?
Victor called the next day, sounding extremely gloomy. (How could he know? When I caressed him, when I smoothed his forehead, I smiled.) He had to go to Brussels, it would be a terribly busy trip and he couldn’t promise he’d be there for her much, but would she like to come along? It might mean dinners alone in strange hotels. He had to see important people, money people, he could not fudge this one.
He did not want her to come: she would be a burden. She sensed it. Did he sound relieved when she said she was just this moment in the middle of an important segment of her work and could not leave it? Or did she want him to sound relieved?
He accepted the refusal easily. He would call when he got back, he said.
A week later, he had not called. Two weeks later, he had not called. She, nervous, developed a rash on her hands and wondered what she would say when he did call. Then, when he didn’t, the rash got worse.
Images kept flashing in her brain: Victor, scolding Edith across the bridge table, mocking her. Victor, scolding Edith about an unrecorded check, an unbalanced checkbook. Victor, coming home late from a rendezvous (clean, showered) and finding Edith sitting in bed reading. She looks up, smiles, takes off her glasses. She asks him how the meeting was and he has to recall quickly what meeting it was supposed to be, says fine, fine, offhandedly, the way he would if there had really been a meeting. He finds it easier to answer her in monosyllables, he’s tired. I’m tired, Edith. Long day.
The trouble was that when these pictures appeared in her mind, it was she, not Edith who lay in the bed, who sat across the bridge table, who had tears in her eyes over the checkbook. Because it was so hard to maintain yourself, so easy to slide back into seeing it his way, their way, the dominant way. To stay true to yourself, you had to hold yourself erect and stiff, you couldn’t give an inch. No.
By the middle of the second week, Dolores began to talk to Mary. Mary couldn’t listen very well, she was terrified, her oral was in two weeks. Her hands fluttered across the table, she kept repeating the same things: “Yes, well, this all-male board of doctors, the kind who belittle women, who even when they think they’re being kind, automatically look down. And who don’t test women the same way they test men, although they think they do, but they can’t because they don’t
see
the genders the same way. They claim they use the same standards, but how is that possible when your mind shifts gears depending on the body shape of the person entering the room? They failed the last three women who came up.”
“Did they deserve to fail?”
“It’s so hard to know, you see. The women seemed intelligent to me, and I know they worked hard, but who can tell? I mean, you’re not
there,
in the examination room, and even if you were, you can’t see the pressures in their heads, the fear of failing just because they’re women, which might
make
them fail, you see….”
“Is there no recourse for them?”
“Oh, they can take it again. But it’s so devastating, you see, to fail at all. After all those years of study, all that effort, feeling you’ve tried as hard as you can…. It undermines you, makes you think perhaps you’re really not clever after all. And then that damned examiner who’s Roger’s friend …”
“He should disqualify himself.”
“Yes, but of course he won’t. They are so bloody sure they can keep things separate. So sure they’re fair, objective. When any woman, any woman at all, can see they’re not. All you have to do is listen to them talk. But they have the power, there’s no way you can convince them….”
Mary gazed at her. “But listen to me babbling on, you must be sick of listening to this. You’re upset, I can see it. Is it Victor?”
So Dolores told her the whole story.
“Oh, dear,” Mary said in a little sad voice. “Oh, dear.”
Dolores stared at her drink. It was late Friday afternoon. Mary had neither children nor Gordon coming this weekend. Dolores had no one coming this weekend.
“Would you like it if he divorced his wife and married you?”
“No. Not at all. He’d be the same to me, in time. Anyway, I’d never marry again.”
“Nor I. Gordon comes on weekends twice a month and it’s quite wonderful. The other weekends he spends with his children. When he had a sabbatical last year, he came and stayed here for the entire time and his children visited him here. It was lovely. But marriage—being a wife—the very thought is appalling.”
Dolores laughed. “I heard the same sentiments from a young German woman in a railroad carriage one long dark journey. We were together for twenty-four hours on that train. We barely spoke the other’s language, but we were able to communicate
that.
Maybe it’s a new international movement!”
“With three members,” Mary laughed. “Still, I think one wants to have been married. Once.”