Cannibals and Missionaries (8 page)

It would not have surprised Aileen if her Mamma had married again; she had gentlemen friends who sat on the porch or in the “den” with her and took her out riding on Sundays. At seventy-six, she did not feel too old for sex, apparently: she had had it with Aileen’s father right up to the end, she confided, and still “missed him that way.” But you did not need to get married for that, fortunately. There was always somebody who wanted to sleep with you, Aileen had found. That was one of the surprises of middle age—she would never have imagined when she was young that if you put some perfume on and left your room door on the latch in the Statler Hilton during the MLA meeting, a distinguished Russian specialist would come gliding to your bed. It had happened just this Christmas.

As Aileen saw it, sex gave a woman only two problems. Contraception was no longer a worry, thanks to the menopause, which she had completed, with gratitude, last summer, but, as that problem had receded, the other—taking care with whom you did it and where—had become more acute. Permissiveness did not extend to older females—even Mamma was criticized if she pulled the shades when entertaining—still less to older heads of female institutions. Most married men could be relied on for discretion; they had their own motives for concealment. Nevertheless she had made it a rule not to be tempted by a member of the faculty, no matter how attractive, and in the case of a visiting lecturer to respect the prohibition laid down for students—not on college property. Her classicist had been an exception. The first time, it had happened in her house, and the next morning, before the maid came, she had had to wash the sheet and iron it by hand—taking it to the laundromat would have been too risky. After that they had met in Boston hotels.

In general nowadays she kept sex for vacations and the professional conferences that figured more and more on her calendar. Some of her nicest memories were of “stolen” interludes during forums and panels with interesting men whom she never expected to see again. And if sometimes their paths did cross a second time, at another round table, there was seldom any further question of sex. Yet she remembered and, meeting their eyes in the course of some boring presentation, she knew they remembered too.

Thanks to her mother, she did not have to feel tied to Lucy Skinner. Mamma had made a home for her. She had her room, with her familiar things; her old trunks were stored in the cellar; in the den were her photograph albums. There were files of her correspondence in the attic, her doctoral thesis, programs of seminars she had attended, with the papers that had been read. Her summer dresses were waiting for her, hung up in bags, with lavender. But that was another thing: her mother was getting on. When she went, Aileen would be alone, with no center to her life. A room at one of her sisters’ with full-grown children under foot would not be the same at all. It was Mamma’s fault that she had never been domestic. She had mastered a few French and Mexican recipes for entertaining, and her sisters had taught her to iron. But housekeeping was Mamma’s sphere, so that Aileen had not been able to develop her own touch and style, except in clothes. The President’s house at Lucy Skinner bore few marks of her occupancy beyond some gay pillows she had scattered about, for students to sit on the floor on, some old prints of French cities, and her record collection. Buildings and Grounds supplied flowers twice a week and arranged them—she did not have Mamma’s “hand” with bouquets—and the china and glassware she used reflected the taste of old Miss Smith, her predecessor. Even if Aileen had known how, she would not have tried to make the impersonal house homey.

She spent most of her time in her office, surrounded by the clacketing of typewriters and the ringing of telephones in the anteroom. At night, when she was not invited out to dinner or entertaining officially, she would eat in one of the student dining-halls or sit down at a table in the college snack bar, where a group would immediately join her. She dropped in on classes, films, exhibitions, lectures, and could usually be counted on to rise in the audience, wrapped in a bright shawl, and ask the first question. After college events, she would have students and faculty in for drinks. These habits had made her popular; Miss Smith, a shy academic woman, had been almost a recluse.

No one would have guessed—she thought—that underneath her liveliness was an awful fear of loneliness. Though she had been living by herself for nearly thirty years, she was seldom, in practice, alone. If she had to be alone for a whole evening, she poured herself a bourbon, listened to the news, telephoned, played the phonograph. She had lost the feeling she had had as a girl that a book could be a companion, which meant that she read less and less. She hated silence and sitting still and when she sank into meditation (as now perforce, on the plane), her thoughts were a kind of noise she kept going in her head. But she was getting a bit cracked, she feared. After a few drinks recently, playing
Carmen
one night, she had danced all by herself, clicking a pair of castanets she had brought back years ago from Mexico and stamping her heels, forgetful of how grotesque she would have looked if anyone had peeked in. Fortunately, the President’s house was in an isolated position, on a hillock.

Late at night often, she would pick up the telephone and call her mother or one of her sisters; with the time difference, they would not be asleep yet. This lifeline to Arkansas, at arm’s reach when all else failed, had made her neglectful of the fact that her youth had gone while she was looking the other way. Of course fifty today was not old. There were examples of women older than herself who got husbands: George Eliot was sixty when she married Mr. Cross. But George Eliot was an exception for whom the laws of probability did not count. Aileen knew herself to be no such awesome phenomenon; lacking fame and a big brain, she was subject to the ordinary hazards of competition: unlike George Eliot, she was not even exceptionally homely, which had probably been some sort of advantage. Men were not afraid of ugly women. On the other hand, she lacked the
je ne sais quoi
that came from having been a beauty; she was betwixt and between, even though her appearance had benefited from the sharpening that age and wiser make-up had brought to her features, and she had kept her pert figure. In any case, at fifty, whatever you looked like, you could not expect a
coup de foudre;
time and proximity were necessary. But meanwhile you were being crowded not only by your coevals, entering the market via death or divorce, but by the oncoming generations, who were not looking for marriage necessarily—which made it doubly unfair.

Sophie Weil, for instance. Calmly deciding to attach herself to their group, she had never given a thought probably to how Aileen as the only woman would feel. Now they were two, and Aileen’s chances of “making time” with the Senator were reduced to a forlorn hope. With a glamorous journalist in her thirties available for a “flirt,” he would not have a minute for a still attractive female of his own age—four whole years younger, actually. Unless he was a very unusual politician, he would soon be eagerly carrying the sullen
New Yorker
correspondent’s suitcases and deploying his Irish charm. And the meanness, the waste, of it was that the girl had no need of a silver-haired widower for a husband; if she was like most of her kind, she would be opposed to the entire concept of marriage, and it would not cross her mind that she was standing in the way of somebody who felt otherwise. To her, it would be inconceivable that a fifty-year-old educator could be any kind of rival.

So that made one motive less for the voyage to Teheran. Nevertheless Aileen found herself slowly cheering up. Eliminating the Senator from her computations meant that she would be relieved of the labor of devising strategies to throw herself in his way: maneuvering to sit next to him on tomorrow’s flight, lurking in the hotel lobby to catch him as he alighted from the elevator, arranging to have herself appointed the group’s chairman so that she would have occasion to stop by his room on committee business, leave little notes in his box…. If she could swallow her disappointment now, she would be spared a host of future disappointments and humiliating setbacks. She could enjoy the time in Iran as a working vacation that might even benefit a few of her fellow-men. Not waiting for the movie to end, she opened Asad’s folder and switched on the overhead light. The awful torture-descriptions made her wince as she thoughtfully turned the pages, underlining the paragraphs that seemed most promising for the committee to follow up.

It was extraordinary how altruism, a decision to focus on others, could put you at peace with yourself. Aileen was accustomed to thinking of herself as a good person (while always resolving to be better) but lately she had been having some doubts. Her quick sympathy with the Shah’s victims reassured her: cruelty appalled her, and that was the main thing to watch out for in yourself—any tendency to be insensitive to suffering, if it was only a headache. Cruelty, she had read once, was the only sin a modern mind recognized as such, and she went out of her way therefore to be considerate, which was the reason her staff loved her. And want of consideration, when she observed it in someone else, could afflict her like the drilling of a tooth.

Even in little things, like her neighbor’s lofty rejection of the Air France questionnaire—
“Aidez-nous à vous mieux connaître”—
which somebody had taken trouble to frame. It had actually hurt her to watch, out of the corner of her eye, as the green-printed card was tossed as if derisively onto the seat between them. She had been indignant for the card, which, like Aileen, was only asking for some innocent information: “Help us to know you better.”

The pathetic fallacy at work! Cards did not have feelings. In the disdainful gesture she must have sensed a rejection of her middle-class self and her values, among which was the duty to be helpful and do as you were asked when no possible harm was involved. By her offhand act, Miss Weil was scorning Aileen for having filled
hers
out. But that scarcely explained—or did it?—the positive hatred Aileen had felt well up in her, almost like a physical thing. And now it was rising again as she tried to concentrate on the folder.
“Pig,”
she said under her breath, using one of
their
epithets. “Stupid, arrogant pig.”

It was not the first time this had happened to her recently. In her office, she would watch poor harmless stolid Miss Meloney, who adored her, and catch herself thinking “Bag!” or even “Old bag!” though Miss Meloney was younger than she was and a virtuous spinster, so far as Aileen knew, and the only connection there appeared to be was that the secretary, too broad in the beam already, had the habit of bringing her lunch to her desk and wrapping the unfinished morsels—a half-eaten browning apple or a mustard-oozing sandwich—in one of those plastic tissues called “Baggies,” a package of which stood next to her typewriter. She had come to hate Miss Meloney and did not know why. The sole therapy she knew for that was to hug her a great deal and smile warmly whenever she caught her eye and send thoughtful little things to the poor girl’s mother, who was a shut-in.

Yet where was the common factor between Miss Meloney and Sophie? Perhaps it was just her time of life and having a silent female body so close to her in a confined space. But there had been other signs of a growing divergence between her behavior and her feelings, which she found quite upsetting, especially as there could be no question of altering one to match the other: she could not change her feelings, and if she stopped sending Miss Meloney’s mother presents or struck Miss Weil, it might make her a whole person but not a person she would like better. Her best hope was that actions might occasionally prompt the appropriate emotions: a hug could sometimes make her feel warm. She would try to remember that with Sophie.

The No Smoking sign went on. The plane was starting its descent. “Paree!” she called to the Bishop, who was peering out the window. Then, distinctly, they heard a hostess scream. Aileen closed her eyes tight. They were being hijacked, she supposed. She heard someone running down the aisle. A hostess raced past. A male voice was shouting angrily. Aileen peeked through her fingers. The pilot, or the co-pilot, was standing in front of the curtain that shut off first class. She could not see a hijacker. Then, toward the front, someone laughed. A word was passing along.
“Le chat!”
“It’s a cat.” “Sapphire,” needlessly explained the Reverend. “Keep your seats, please!” the officer ordered. “Everyone be seated.
Attachez vos ceintures.”
The hostesses and the steward were chasing the cat up and down the aisle.

Aileen rose half out of her seat to see what was happening. It looked as if the animal might have escaped into first class. “But
why
did he let it out of its cage, Reverend? Mr. Lenz! How could you do such a wicked, dangerous thing?”
“Asseyez-vous, madame! Et vous, monsieur, retournez à votre siège!”
Paying no heed, Lenz was creeping down the aisle, making coaxing sounds. The cat was hiding, as they did when they were frightened.
“Regagnez votre siège,”
repeated the steward, not adding
“monsieur”
this time.
“Dépê chez-vous.” A
hostess came by, looking under the seats.
“Minou, minou,”
she wheedled. “Here, kitty, kitty,” essayed the Reverend. “I guess it doesn’t understand French,” he added to the hostess with a foolish laugh. “Oh, sir,” she replied, “you do not imagine the trouble that gentleman has made. He have taken
minou
from her box and hold her on his knees. I tell him he must not do that; it is forbidden. But he say the cat is crying. I have to call the steward. Then when no one is looking, he take her out again.” “Totally irresponsible!” Aileen declared. “You are right,” said the hostess. “And
en plus
he smoked in the toilet.” Aileen clapped her hand to her head.

Sophie’s boot was exploring the floor. Her long arm reached down. “Why, it’s Sapphire; hello, Sapphire.” She scooped up the blue Persian and set her on her lap, rubbing her cheek against the long fur. “We must find you some catnip.” The passengers applauded as the hostess came to retrieve the now purring animal. The crew took their places against the wall. There was a bump, and the flight was over.