The Picture of Dorian Gray or something.”
“Yeah. And somewhere there’s a very bad photo of Angelica, with her mascara running and no lipstick. Very scary.”
I laughed. “So she’s a best-seller now, huh? I had no idea. I’ll have to get her book. You know anything about it?”
“Not really. But I’ll fax you that interview.”
We exchanged a few scurrilous remarks, and I told him about the Aditi.
“Sounds pretty wild. I bet the food’s good—”
“It’s great. You should come down and check it out.”
“Do they have baluts?”
“What’s baluts?”
“Filipino specialty. You take these embryonic chickens and bury ’em in the dirt for a couple months, and then—”
“That’s enough. No, I’m pretty sure there’s no baluts.”
“Too bad. Don’t you ever do any work down there?”
“Nah. This is the government. Mostly we just take turns answering the phone and going to lunch.”
I heard someone calling to Baby Joe in the background. “Listen, hija, I gotta go. I may have something else for you later. You gonna be there?”
“I guess—”
“Okay”
He hung up. I sat for several minutes staring at my desk.
“Katherine?”
I turned to see Dr. Dvorkin framed in the doorway. “Robert! Come on in.”
“Thanks—I can’t stay, Jack left me some paperwork I’ve got to fill out for his fire-eaters.”
He grimaced: a small round man, with white hair and a neatly trimmed white goatee, wrinkled and kindly and smartly dressed as an F.A.O. Schwarz Santa doing time in a fancy law firm. Even now, in D.C.’s broiling summer, he wore an immaculate grey three-piece suit, complete with testosterone yellow tie and matching pocket handkerchief.
“Katherine, I have to attend a Regent’s Supper at the Castle tonight. Would you mind checking in on the cats for me?”
In addition to being my boss at the museum, Dr. Dvorkin was my landlord. For the last eight years I’d rented the tiny brick carriage house in his back garden on the Hill. It was the most wonderful place I’d ever lived. The only place I could even imagine might be nicer was Dr. Dvorkin’s own town house.
“Of course not. Should I be looking for white smoke rising from the tower?”
Dr. Dvorkin sighed. For several months now the search had been on for a new Regent; three months earlier one had died at the age of ninety-seven and his replacement had yet to be named. “Not yet, I’m afraid. We’re meeting someone else this evening. I hope to god this thing doesn’t take all night. I think there’s some basil in my refrigerator, you should take it when you come over, it’s about to go bad.”
“Thanks, Robert.”
“Thank you.” He turned to go, then stopped. “I almost forgot—you got a fax.”
I took the pages, tossed away the cover sheet, and settled back into my chair to read.
ANGELICA FURIANO: WAKING THE GODDESS WITHIN US ALL It wasn’t what you’d call an in-depth piece—the New York Beacon wasn’t exactly noted for its coverage of Nobel Prize winners—but it seemed like a pretty decent matching of journal and subject. While there wasn’t a photo of Angelica accompanying the interview (and that seemed a mistake), there was a loving description of one of her homes, in the canyons north of Hollywood, and a rather breathless listing of the original artwork hanging there: Frida Khalo, Mary Cassatt, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe’s polaroids of Patti Smith, an ancient vase fragment depicting Sappho’s lament for the virgin Gorgo.
The (female) interviewer was obviously bewitched by Angelica. It was easy to see why—Angelica was so charming, her answers to even personal questions funny and self-deprecating. I could just imagine her, lounging on her white leather sofa with the picture windows overlooking the canyon. She wore expensively tasteful clothes: Italian sandals, pleated cream-colored skirt, jade green silk blouse. The interviewer noted that she wore simple jewelry, silver earrings shaped like crescent moons, and a moon-shaped silver pendant around her neck.
I learned that her husband the duke had been eighteen years her senior, and had died during a sailing trip in the Aegean five years ago. Following his death, Angelica returned to the States and began writing in earnest. Her first two books, The Nysean Fields and Amazons in America, had been published as trade paperbacks by a small New Age press. The books had become surprise best-sellers, and a cause celebre in both New Age and small press circles. After Amazons in America turned up on the New York Times best- seller list, Angelica started giving workshops stressing the same things she invoked in her books: how women should avoid becoming victims, how they should take responsibility for their own failures as well as successes; how they should learn to recognize the Goddess within themselves. There was a strong occult slant to all of this, with the Goddess (whom Angelica called Othiym) standing in for that ubiquitous Greater Power favored by adherents of AA and its ilk.
And, unlike any Twelve-Step program or women’s self-help group that I’d ever heard of, there were some genuinely disturbing elements in Angelica’s Goddess-worship. The emphasis on the division between the sexes, rather than their union; a certain disregard for the importance of family or any other ties except for those between the Goddess and her followers. In the little I’d read of other, similar, female gurus —Shirley MacLaine, Lynn Andrews, Marianne Williamson—there was always an emphasis on the powers of love and forgiveness, of the importance of loving yourself so you could better love someone else.
Angelica didn’t buy it.
“That’s condescending to women.” Furiano’s brilliant green eyes narrowed as she reached for her Limoges teacup. “For thousands of years, women have wasted their lives taking care of men—tending their homes and their children and their castles and their farms, tending their offices and corporations and schools, making sure they look young enough and beautiful enough to keep a man—and why? Because we have been brainwashed into thinking that men are necessary for our happiness and self-esteem—”
The reporter gently suggested that perhaps it wasn’t as bad as all that. Dr. Furiano bristled.
[Dr. Furiano: I was impressed.]
“Come now—you’re a woman, you know what it’s like! I say, “Enough.” We’ve all put in our time being Aphrodite and Hera”—the goddesses of Love and the Hearth respectively—“we’ve all been the dutiful daughters and good mothers and noble prostitutes and loyal secretaries. It’s time to acknowledge that there are other roles for us to play. That we can be warriors, not just in the skies and in the armed services, but on the home front, where most of the battles are fought anyway. That we can be lovers but also leaders; that we are not victims! Everybody knows that women really are the stronger sex—you read accounts of shipwrecks and accidents, the journals from the Donner Party… it’s the men who go down whimpering, and the women who walk out of the jungle alive. If men had menstrual periods, they’d have ten paid sick days a month! And can you imagine a man having a baby? Why, we would have discovered a cure for childbirth a hundred years ago!
I laughed. This sounded like the old Angelica.
Dr. Furiano offered me more tea; a young man (a graduate student in cultural anthropology,
