“I loved you, too,” mutters James. “Like a . . . niece.”
She is crying for real now, but she marches onward, powered by a whole year of fury. “If that was your version of love, no wonder—no wonder your marriage was dead on arrival, no wonder you were dying to fuck a teenager. I bet you’ve reduced your own daughters to narcissistic supply. I bet they feel it. I bet they prefer their mother. Who would trust you with their friends? Did you suddenly realize that you would die, James? Is that why you asked me to stay late?”
He accepts these blows with only a touch of messianic righteousness.
“You know the only thing your kid told me about you?” says Blandine. “She said you overbought toothbrushes. If you need proof that you are a standin for the bourgeoisie, the dominant class, the owner of both the means and fruits of production, look no further than this—a rich man stockpiling material goods that he did not create and does not need to compensate for an accurately perceived character deficiency. Toothbrushes, God. And I thought it was cute.”
“While I admire your passion,” says James, “I think this argument is getting a little sloppy. You’ve read The Communist Manifesto, I presume. And probably the Wikipedia pages for Marxism, Democratic Socialism, Social Democracy. And I trust that you know about the many brutal dictators who’ve weaponized communism and socialism to gain despotic control. I’m sure you would argue that they misapplied these ideologies, that a truly Marxist society has never existed. But have you even perused the first volume of Capital? You don’t strike me as someone who would trust anyone with authoritarian control. And you’re too brilliant to believe that any mortal could bring a classless, moneyless, stateless society into being.”
“That’s not the point,” retorts Blandine. “I’m not arguing for anything. I’m just arguing against you, and this is the best framework I have for it. I’m not smart enough to lead a revolution, okay? I’m very aware of that. All I know is that we fucking need one.”
James studies her, saying nothing.
She turns to examine the bags of goat goods, which now strike her as innocent children caught in a fight between their parents on a road trip. She takes another hit.
“I’m already high,” says Blandine. “Fuck.”
“Me, too.”
Blandine squints at a seventies modernist building across the highway, which resembles a parking garage but is in fact the headquarters of an obituary website. “I wish all modernist fucking architects would have just fucking reconciled with their fucking fathers instead of littering our fucking country with their shit fucking erections.”
James smirks.
“What?” she asks.
“It’s just that modern architecture was supposed to represent the tastes and needs of a rising middle class,” he says. “A reaction to the elitism and oppression of the regimes that propagated classical architecture.”
Blandine blushes, feeling stupid. She didn’t know that. She doesn’t know anything. “Whatever. It’s ugly and full of hubris and anti-pedestrian and pro-car. Maybe some modernism is pretty, but not this purgatorial shit all over our town.”
They sit in silence for a few minutes.
“It smells like a campfire,” he says eventually. “Do you smell that?”
“It’s just the weed.”
“No, it’s not—it’s coming from downtown. I wonder what they’re burning?”
Blandine tears the remaining crescent of fingernail from her pinkie. “The future.”
He looks at her as though searching for an emotion he misplaced. Fervor, perhaps. Or affection. He has the appearance of a man who has weathered many internal sandstorms and whose convictions—once sharp and exquisite—have lost their definition. Observing James, Blandine is reminded of a swan she saw last February. It had resigned itself to a puddle in the parking lot of a megastore.
“You’re very young,” observes James.
“Am I?” she snaps. “How young am I, James?”
He looks away. “But you don’t seem eighteen,” he mumbles.
At this, a primal scream builds inside her. She quarantines it. Clears her throat. “When Hildegard depicted the virtues and the vices together in this play she wrote, the vices got to be grotesque and physical and there. But the virtues were invisible. Just voices.”
“Huh.” He looks at her. Against her will, she reacts to James’s attention like an iguana to a heat lamp. “What made you think of that?”
“I just wish—sometimes I look out at my life, everything I’ve seen so far, and it all looks so—so grotesque. I look for the virtue, I don’t see any. I’m dying for proof of it, you know, proof of something good—something like divinity. But I don’t see it. I look at my life, and I see this warehouse of—of gargoyles. Why do vices get to be physical? Why do they get to clutter up the world? Why can’t I see any fucking virtues?”
This is the part that has made her cry the hardest. She’s too upset to be embarrassed, too upset to hate him as he touches her arm.
“Maybe you have to listen.”
“Well, that was obviously my implication,” she whispers, “but it sounds histrionic and asinine when you say it out loud.”
“Maybe the truth is histrionic and asinine.”
“Then I want nothing to do with it.”
He removes his hand, then rummages in the car to find a packet of tissues. He offers her one, and she takes it, blowing her nose as prettily as possible, although she knows that she is repulsive.
“Should I take you back?” he asks.
She looks at him, heart pounding and face wet. “What?”
“I mean,” he says, “to your apartment. You’ve got that goat, now, and I don’t want to—”
Of course that’s what he meant. Of course. Why does Blandine feel crushing disappointment? What is wrong with her?
“Don’t use Hildegard as an emergency exit.”
“No, I’m talking about the goat.”
She says nothing. She didn’t mean to reveal the goat’s name to him.
“You said we weren’t individuals, just concepts,” says James. “But we were people. You and I are people. I hurt you, and I think it’s as simple as that. I hurt you—that’s the appropriate syntax for what happened. I. Hurt. You. You make it sound like you had the same control over the matter that I did, like even though our dynamic was messed up, you were still some kind of totally free agent—and I don’t want to infantilize you, either, but I have to tell you—whatever you wanted to happen should have been irrelevant. You’re so angry, Tiffany. I can see that. You have every right to be angry at me. But it sounds like you’re angry at yourself for supposedly choosing this, and your choice should have been moot, don’t you see? You could’ve showed up at my house in lingerie and thrown yourself at me—it wouldn’t have mattered. It was my responsibility to make sure nothing happened between us. I was entrusted with you as a student, and it was my responsibility to protect you. I was the one who should have enforced the boundaries, and I failed. I may not have taught you anything, but I was your teacher. You were only—you were only seventeen.” He covers his face in his hands. His voice breaks. “For fuck’s sake.”
Blandine clenches her fists. “I have one request.”
He looks at her with some exhausted hope. “Tell me.”
“My brain is addicted to the unresolved, and I’ll never get free if I don’t—if we don’t—if we can’t resolve this. Somehow. Please.”
Now he appears sorrowful. “I don’t know if it’s possible to resolve this, Tiffany.”
Blandine panics. “Not possible?”
“Well, I leave that up to you.”
She tugs a lock of her starched hair. “I hate it when the superior party pretends to be inferior. That’s just a more pernicious abuse of power. Up to me. Bullshit.”
“Look, I would love to resolve it. I really would. I just—”
“Please, James. Resolve it. I leave it up to you.”
He gives her a pained expression. “Maybe by accepting that it is unresolvable?”
She scoffs. “Great. Rich.”
“Do you want me to quit my job?” he asks. “Invent a time machine? Turn myself in to the police?”
He seems willing to take these measures.
Abruptly, Blandine gets out of the car.
“Where are you going?” asks James. “Let me drive you home, at least.”
She pauses, kicks the tire, then walks to his side.
“Are you going to beat me up?” he asks.
She opens his door, pulls him out of the driver’s seat. He obliges, standing limply in the nascent rain. Drops fall every so often, as though hoping not to be noticed. Electricity prowls in the air.
“Please,” he says, “beat me up.”
She considers it. “You are not a good person.”
“I agree.”
“You’re a narcissist.”
“I agree.”