Joss and Gold

Two

Two Cheerer taught in the social sciene," department at Seven Graces College, an exclusive all-girls institution with gray stone and red brick buildings above almost twenty acres of lawn overlooking the Hudson River. He taught sociology and one course of anthropology, although his real interest was anthropology. At first, he had been surprised that his young female students showed almost no curiosity about actual foreign countries . They traveled to Europe as a matter of course in the summers, but most of them, he complained, thought of Asia and Africa as primitive and unbearably savage. Mead's paean to adolescent freedom in Samoa and the photographs of bare-breasted women, which had fascinated him when he was a boy and which his eyes had fixed on not so much in lust as in the discovery of the freakishness of nature, did not interest them. After all, they stalked the beaches in strings of fabric , exposing their breasts to sun and public scrutiny as a matter of course. Chester described them to Meryl as handsome and intimidating . He did not tell her that their solid materiality repulsed him. He could not understand their emotional pain-confided in moments of weepy academic failure-or their glossy appetite, which could be quieted by secret feasts of Mallomars and Oreos, parental bribes of Corvettes and Hawaiian vacations, and the bodies of men as handsome as JOSS and GOLD themselves. He did not always like them, but he could not help admiring their concentration on their lives, their fixedness on the pursuit of pleasures. He had been teaching at Seven Graces College for as long as he had been married to Meryl, and sometimes he suffered a sense that he was lost in an intensely pagan country. He believed some of his students approached a BaskinRobbins ice cream with more voluptuousness than he was capable of feeling for anything, and he saw them enlarging into the future while he continued to drift among the shallows of his ever-lengthening present life. This morning, in particular, he found his students' purposeful rush unsettling. For the first time he admitted to himself that they reminded him ofhis wife: her resolute eagerness and determined grasping of the future, even her stocky tensility of shape, and her sharp sorrows that could be salved by a Bavarian torte. Standing by his office window on the top floor of the three-storied Higginsworth Hall, he studied the bunches of students as they crossed Bottom's Green to their eleven o'clock classes. He had never fantasized about his studentsthe kind of fantasies that Vitazelli and McMahon, both sociologists , had relished narrating. In the late March sunshine the young women were walking with swinging strides, their winter coats unfastened, chests swelling in the pastel sweaters they were all affecting this year like crocuses budding under his gaze. Strangely he saw them today as vulnerable, easily crushed under his heavy Frye boots, but this vision neither roused nor gladdened him; instead, he felt tired and sleepy. Rubbing his fingers on the side of his forehead-an action he had unconsciously repeated in the last two months, ever since he discovered his hairline receding perceptibly-he turned from the tall frame of blue sky and called the Holygrove Medical Center. He worried about how he was going to explain the reason for his call, but the cool female voice at the end of the line merely said, "Dr. Shelley? How about Friday at ten?" Suddenly he wanted to express his anxiety, and stammered into the phone that he wished to make an appointment for a vasectomy. The voice repeated, "A vasectomy. 116 CIRCLING Dr. Shelley, Friday at ten," and the line went dead. Feeling foolish, he yawned in embarrassment. His anxiety seemed to have no place in the luxuriously ordered universe, and again the uneasiness he had felt on Saturday night, like a memory of smoke, nudged at him. He went for his one o'clock lecture exhausted, and spent the hour clowning. It was a general all-purpose sociology course, Man and Society.The hour was slotted for a talk on kinship systems, and he had prepared his usual materials on changes in the American family based on recent census figures. Instead he spoke about substitute and ersatz kinship structures, including feelings for soap opera and movie stars, relationships with pets, sentiment over cars, houses, and other possessions . By the end...