becoming more and more accelerated; he was popping in and out of the kitchen like the cuckoo in a cuckoo-clock. Marian glanced at Fish. Apparently he had missed several times with the soup: his beard was becoming glutinous with spilled food. He looked like a highchaired and bewhiskered baby; Marian wished someone would tie a bib around his neck.
Trevor made an entrance with clean plates, and another exit. She could hear him fidgeting about the kitchen, in the background of Fish’s voice: “And so then consequently the poet also thought of himself as the same kind of natural producer; his poem was something begotten so to speak on him by the Muses, or let’s say maybe Apollo, hence the term ‘inspiration,’ the instilling of breath as it were into; the poet was pregnant with his work, the poem went through a period of gestation, often a long one, and when it was finally ready to see the light of day the poet was delivered of it often with much painful labour. In this way the very process of artistic creation was itself an imitation of Nature, of the thing in nature that was most important to the survival of Mankind. I mean birth; birth. But what do we have nowadays?”
There was a fizzling sound, and Trevor appeared dramatically in the doorway, holding a flaming blue sword in either hand. Marian was the only person who even looked at him.
“Oh my goodness,” she said appreciatively. “That’s quite an effect!”
“Yes, isn’t it? I just love things flambe. It’s not really shish kebab of course, it’s a little more French, not so blatant as the Greek kind…”
When he dexterously slid whatever was impaled on the skewers onto her plate, she could see that most of it was meat. Well, now her back was to the wall. She would have to think of something. Trevor poured the wine, explaining how hard it was to find really fresh tarragon in this city.
“What we have now, I say, is a society in which all the values are anti-birth. Birth control, they all say, and, It’s the population explosion not the atomic explosion that we must all worry about. Malthus, you see, except that war no longer exists as a means of seriously diminishing the population. It’s easy to see in this context that the rise of Romanticism…”
The other dishes contained rice with something in it, an aromatic sauce which went on the meat, and an unidentifiable vegetable. Trevor passed them round. Marian put some of the dark green vegetable substance into her mouth, tentatively, as one would make an offering to a possibly angry god. It was accepted.
“… coincides most informatively with the population increase which had started of course some time earlier but which was reaching almost epidemic proportions. The poet could no longer see himself with any self-congratulation as a surrogate mother-figure, giving birth to his works, delivering as it were another child to society. He had to become a something else, and what really is this emphasis on individual expression, notice it’s expression, a pressing out, this emphasis on spontaneity, the instantaneous creation? Not only does the twentieth century have…”
Trevor was in the kitchen again. Marian surveyed the chunks of meat on her plate with growing desperation. She thought of sliding them under the tablecloth – but they would be discovered. She would have been able to put them into her purse if only she hadn’t left it over by the chair. Perhaps she could slip them down the front of her blouse or up her sleeves…
“… painters who splatter the paint all over the canvas in practically an orgasm of energy but we have writers thinking the same way about themselves…”
She reached under the table with her foot and prodded Duncan gently on the shin. He started, and looked across at her. For a moment his eyes held no recognition whatsoever; but then he watched, curious.
She scraped most of the sauce from one of the hunks of meat, picked it up between thumb and finger, and tossed it to him over the candles. He caught it, put it on his plate, and began to cut it up. She started to scrape another piece.
“… no longer as giving birth however; no, long meditation and bringing forth are things of the past. The act of Nature that Art now chooses to imitate, yes is
Marian flung the second chunk, which was also neatly caught. Maybe they should quickly exchange plates, she thought; but no, that would be noticed, he had finished his before Trevor left the room.
“What we need is a cataclysm,” Fish was saying. His voice had become almost a chant, and was swelling in volume; he seemed to be building up to some kind of crescendo. “A cataclysm. Another Black Death, a vast explosion, millions wiped from the face of the earth, civilization as we know it all but obliterated, then Birth would be essential again, then we could return to the tribe, the old gods, the dark earthgods, the earth goddess, the goddess of waters, the goddess of birth and growth and death. We need a new Venus, a lush Venus of warmth and vegetation and generation, a new Venus, big-bellied, teeming with life, potential, about to give birth to a new world in all its plenitude, a new Venus rising from the sea…”
Fischer decided to stand up, perhaps to give rhetorical emphasis to his last words. To lift himself he placed his hands on the card table, two of whose legs jackknifed, sending Fish’s plate slithering into his lap. At that moment the chunk of meat which Marian had just hurled was in mid-air; it caught Duncan squarely in the side of the head, then deflected, bounced across the floor, and landed on a pile of term papers.
Trevor, a small salad dish in either hand, had stepped through the doorway just in time to witness both events. His jaw dropped.
“At last I know what I really want to be,” Duncan said into the suddenly quiet room. He was gazing serenely at the ceiling, a whitish-grey trace of sauce in his hair. “An amoeba.”
Duncan had said he would walk her partway home: he needed a breath of fresh air.
Luckily none of Trevor’s dishes had been broken, although several things had been spilled; and when the table had been straightened and Fischer had subsided, muttering to himself, Trevor had gracefully dismissed the whole incident, though for the remainder of the meal, through the salad and the
Now, crunching along the snowy street, they were discussing the fact that Fischer had eaten the slice of lemon out of his finger bowl. “Trevor doesn’t like it, of course,” Duncan said, “and I told him once that if he doesn’t like Fish eating it he shouldn’t put one in. But he insists on doing these things properly, though as he says, nobody appreciates his efforts much. I generally eat mine, too, but I didn’t today: we had company.”
“It was all very… interesting,” Marian said. She was considering the total absence all evening of any reference to or question about herself, though she had assumed she was invited because the two roommates wanted to know more about her. Now, however, she thought it more than likely that they were merely desperate for new audiences.
Duncan looked at her with a sardonic smile. “Well, now you know what it’s like for me at home.”
“You might move out,” she suggested.
“Oh no. Actually I sort of like it. Besides, who else would take such good care of me? And worry about me so much? They do, you know, when they aren’t engrossed in their hobbies or off on some other tangent. They spend so much time fussing about my identity that I really shouldn’t have to bother with it myself at all. In the long run they ought to make it a lot easier for me to turn into an amoeba.”
“Why are you so interested in amoebas?”
“Oh, they’re immortal,” he said, “and sort of shapeless and flexible. Being a person is getting too complicated.”
They had reached the top of the asphalt ramp that led down to the baseball park. Duncan sat down on the snowbank at one side and lit a cigarette; he never seemed to mind the cold. After a moment she sat down beside him. Since he made no attempt to put his arm around her, she put hers around him.
“The thing is,” he said after a while, “I’d like something to be real. Not everything, that’s impossible, but maybe one or two things. I mean Dr. Johnson refuted the theory of the unreality of matter by kicking a stone, but I can’t go around kicking my roommates. Or my professors. Besides, maybe my foot’s unreal anyway.” He threw the stub of his cigarette into the snow and lit another. “I thought maybe you would be. I mean if we went to bed, god knows you’re unreal enough now, all I can think of is those layers and layers of woolly clothes you wear, coats and sweaters and so on. Sometimes I wonder whether it goes on and on, maybe you’re woollen all the way through. It would be sort of nice if you weren’t…”
Marian couldn’t resist this appeal. She knew she wasn’t woollen. “All right, suppose we did,” she said, speculating. “We can’t go to my place though.”
