Aeaea

Aeaea · Jascha Kessler The Three Virgins, they called us at Vassar. I don'tknow, even now, ifwe were wise or foolish. But we've each seen something of life: one in New York, one in Chicago, and one in Beverly Hills. We meet up often enough, passing over this wide wilderness, to and from on the career trails, the marriage and separation trails, wandering from sacking and slaughter with our booty, from conquest and humiliations, wedding banquets and sanatoria, fatfarms, dude ranches and communes, islands en route, and adventures. The Three Virgins are now divorcees again. And I have been trying recuperation at a fortnight's seminar of sensitivity-training in the mountains of California over the Pacific. My gyroscope's almost reset again: after the last breakup, which left me stripped and drifting, I feel like I've been refitted for another journey. But where to? What god have I offended, I ask myself, that such stormy mischance rules my way? It's a question that has no answer, I think, because I am not, after all, the only one in these straits. Each ofus has suffered her trials. When my plane landed in Chicago I called Cissie. And it seems Celia had flown in today too. We could have another reunion: it had been a year. I knew there was nothing we'd have to say: it had all been said over and over, for ten years now and more. Cissie as much as indicated that when I came in, by telling me to get my fancy things on right away: we were off to a party. Celia was almost ready now, and then in she walked from the bedroom, pale and shining. I showered and dressed and made up. Then we had our brandy toast, the same one as ever, "Bon Voyage!" The buzzer rang, and Cissie said, "My date, our escort and driver. Be nice to him, girls, he's shy—and loaded." She called into the intercom that we were just descending to him. "Made 10 million before he was forty. Corn futures and hog bellies. Retired. Went into training. Now he's a rabbi." The party's in a penthouse on the Drive: forty stories up, all glass wall. Behind us, Chicago stretches glittering to the west and out of sight over the horizon. Below, Lake Michigan steaming and heaving as the evening lengthens out. Toward midnight it turns utterly black, nearly invisible, because the July sky is hot and full of low stagnant thunderclouds. These affairs are all the same: white fur wall-to-wall, fifth-rate paintings signed by modern masters on all the walls, ditto lithos in frames that cost far more than the prints, heavy plastic constructions with shifting fluorescent colors inside, cubes or spheres or tall oblongs, and glass and chromed steel abstractions that get in the way. 57 varieties of hors d'oeuvres. Cissie and her sweet, plump little rabbi are old hands up here in speculators' heaven. They introduce Celia and me quickly to the possibles among the swillers and boasters. Most of them are not from Chicago, it seems, but had stopped off on their wanderings, and found what they wanted. The great grain terminal and The Missouri Review ¦ 65 hogbutcher has enough to hold them fast, and make them rich in less time than it takes to raise a child to the age when it canbe shipped off to college on its own. A loud party. Celia settled on a black lawyer about six feet and a halfhigh, and had gotten far along and down to cases with him by midnight. "He's part man, part The Machine," she hissed at me on a pass to the John. Sounds okay. He's handsome, walnut-colored, poised, and looks extra good among this demotic crass bunch of males, half-bearded, scragglyhaired, paunchjowly, pudgypinkies, all snorting at the trays—but all-confident and dangerous. These didn't seem ready yet for the mineral baths and ego-revitalization sessions the same types huddle at on the Coast. I don't know if it's better for them or not: I'd just spent the last days, as I...