“When,” I asked, “did you conclude socialism was the answer?”
“I’ve always assumed it was.” She spoke softly with a quizzical look, as if to say, “You mean it’s not the answer?”
I was tempted go into my pro-capitalist lecture, but decided against it. I didn’t want to spoil our friendship, and I had grown tired of debating with the local left, many of whom were regulars at the laundromat. Socialism wasn’t their only faith. Proselytizing Krishnas, Maharishis, Zen Masters, Maulvis, and other Swamis had spilled out over Brightown, as though they had parachuted from the same airplane. The laundromat bulletin board was a favorite place for posting their notices. From time to time, I would see their followers sitting cross-legged with eyes closed, or standing stock still, hypnotized by their own newly clean underwear.
Alice Mary was a Christian, but with one reservation. “I don’t believe there’s an inherent Christian morality.”
“What about the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule? — and the Beatitudes?”
“Morality protects the interests of the ruling class — it preserves the social order.”
“Well, of course — commonly held values are the basis for any social order — any community. But that doesn’t address the important question—the validity of the moral values.”
“That’s all relative.”
I frowned briefly and considered a response, but then simply changed the subject.
Our long dinner ended with a second round of smoothies, after which I saw Alice Mary home. She lived in a great wooden box of a house that had once belonged to a tobacco baron. It was now partitioned into apartments, and hers was a cubbyhole just off the driveway. She had hung her walls with family pictures, including one of Lorelei and her thick-bearded husband. There was a picture of her family home, a sturdy house on a farm in southern Illinois. Her bookcase contained the C. S. Lewis fantasies, but I didn’t see The Abolition of Man. I did notice Marx, Freud, Marcuse, Foucault, and each of these had several protruding bookmarks.
She was a graduate student in philosophy, and I thought perhaps she had put off studying just to break bread with me. Anyway, I was careful not to overstay. Soon after she nudged me over the threshold, I took her hands and kissed them lightly and kissed her lips lightly and took my leave. On my way to the boss’s car, I passed her Honda Civic, a tiny car in those days — a cubbyhole on wheels.
My own neighborhood included rows of wooden duplexes and bungalows built ninety years earlier for textile and tobacco workers. My immediate neighbors were kindly bohemians, who considered me one of them. Settled on the same street were poor students, aging townies, a group of communists, and a couple of drug dealers. Brightown, once the textile and tobacco capital of the world, was now just a college town and a junkie’s paradise. Once or twice a week, the drug dealers had late-night visitors. Processions of cars, including pricey models with Brightown University stickers, formed lines halfway round the block. Still, I had my shelter from the storm, warm and well ventilated, with a small wine rack and a modest stereo to go with my books.
And now, I could look forward to seeing Alice Mary. I called her during the week, and we decided to cook dinner at my place. Striving for perfection, I cleaned the entire half-a-house — dusting, mopping, straightening — picturing her in my world. I picked her up in my old Volkswagen — the ride was brief — and between us, working in my humble kitchen, we fixed a creative antipasto, a huge pile of spaghetti, and a comparable pot of sauce with lots of meat and mushrooms. I uncorked a decent Chianti, and as we dined, we listened to Bach, Schumann, and Rachmaninoff, getting mellow on the wine and swaying to the sounds. Later we waltzed to the Rhenish, and I kissed her cheek several times.
In response, she said something that surprised me. “I stopped playing kissyface when I was nineteen.”
That, I gathered, was the moment in the great expanse of time when she surrendered her innocence, perhaps to some campus Casanova, and now expected less trivial lovemaking. By that time, for the American male, the bed had become, not a hidden place for secret love, but a proving ground — a social Aberdeen. It had replaced the dance floor, though the dance floor was trying hard to catch up.
I walked Alice Mary home in the cool evening, having sampled a bit of passion. We made a date to see a Saturday night movie — a Bergman film with the usual cast of introverted Swedes. Yes, we had a Saturday date, and I was looking forward to more intimacy and — so help me — to Sunday morning and its ritual brunch. But on the way to the theater, she seemed subdued, distant. Perhaps she didn’t like my old Volkswagen, which I had brought at her urging. After Bergman, as we walked to the car, I couldn’t make her smile, let alone laugh. I suggested that she was tired and perhaps we should call it an evening. She agreed, and I was stung, though I assumed her mood was simply a woman’s monthly woe.
But alas, she broke our next date — she just came to the laundromat and announced she was going to the beach — though she did say she hoped this wouldn’t be “a blight on our friendship.” No — nothing like that. I recall sitting on my front steps that Saturday night gazing at the big round moon, wondering whether she was gazing at it, too, and who was beside her. Good Lord, I had descended into a mawkish state — lured into melancholy by a lovely flower of careless womanhood.
About Robert Watts Lamon
