The Golden Calves

by Louis Auchincloss

  He cackled with pleasure. “So that’s it! Here I’ve been wasting my time talking about ancient tribes, and all the while you could be had for some crêpes suzettes and a bottle of bubbly.”

  “You might try them, anyway.”

  “But I will! Shall we adjourn to some high-cost nightery? Before going to my apartment?”

  “I’m not going to your apartment, Carol. Please understand that.”

  “You find me so unattractive?”

  “I don’t sleep with every man I find not unattractive.”

  “Do you sleep with any men?”

  “That’s my business.”

  He looked at her critically. “I shouldn’t be at all surprised if you were still a virgin. That’s not a fashionable quality, you know.”

  “Nor am I a fashionable woman.”

  “Then you are a virgin!” When she made no answer he pursued: “Seriously, Anita, I find you attractive. I can think of no reason that you and I should not enjoy a discreet and decorous affair.”

  “There is no reason. Except that I do not wish it. Let’s leave it at that, shall we? I find your company amusing. And I admire you professionally. Isn’t that enough?”

  “For a beginning, yes.”

  “Well, let us always be beginning.”

  “You’ll go out with me again?”

  “If you’ll take me to a better place. We can go Dutch, if it’s not too much better.”

  “Never! I’m an old-fashioned man.”

  “Which is why you want to seduce virgins, no doubt.”

  Carol’s interest in her, not unsurprisingly, was stimulated by her resistance, so much so that she became apprehensive that he might infer that she was trying to allure him. She knew that the only effective step would have been to refuse to go out with him altogether, but she was afraid of incurring his terrible wrath, and besides, when he was not being libidinous, he could be extremely entertaining, and who else was making any effort to entertain her? On their next date he took her to a French restaurant in the East Fifties.

  “I wonder if there’s not something in your idea that every man, deep down, hankers for a virgin bride.”

  “I never expressed any such idea. There was no question of marriage that I remember in the relationship that you proposed.”

  “Ah, but if there had been?”

  “But there wasn’t. Nor was I looking for one.”

  “All right, then call it my idea. A virgin bride might have some of the charm of a new car. So many girls today have mileage.”

  After this, abruptly and much to her relief, he changed the subject, and for the rest of their very good meal he talked entrancingly about personalities at the museum. He knew everything about everyone and seemed perfectly willing to trust her with the most flagrant indiscretions. She would not have believed how much was going on under the dull, flat surface of cultural institutional life. But she could not help laughing, even when rather shocked, and when he took her home and did not even suggest that he should come upstairs for a nightcap, she allowed him to implant a warm, wet kiss on her still reluctant lips.

  There were times now when he seemed almost content to let things go on indefinitely as they had been going, with a scholastic companionship at the office and an occasional “platonic” lunch or dinner. But he always insisted on paying for the latter, and she could not believe that a man so innately stingy would not expect an ultimate compensation. Sometimes, in his bad moods, he would wax so nasty as to seem to relieve her of the smallest obligation to him, but she had grown immune to the barbs of his wit, no matter how pointed and vile—and she knew that he knew this. He seemed to be counting on her being attracted to his very repulsiveness, and was he counting altogether in vain? She could not be sure. And there was another thing: she suffered from a sense of having beguiled him under false pretenses. For she was not, as she had half-implied, a virgin.

  In graduate school she had had an affair that lasted a month with a fellow student, a pale, scrawny, oily-haired young man with a bad complexion and a desperate intensity, who had been distressingly open about wanting to prove to himself that he was not homosexual. They had confided everything about their unhappy childhoods to each other during sandwich lunches on park benches, and he had pounced on the idea that she too needed reassurance—reassurance that her feeling of rejection by her adoptive parents had not permanently frozen her in the conviction that she was impossible to love. Might they not each gain emotional emancipation by burning away the husk of a paralyzing neurosis in the deliberately kindled fire of sexual intercourse? And who was to say? Maybe they would find love, “true love,” whatever that might be, while they were at it.

  It was not a success for either, and they ended on a sorry note of mutual recrimination. Anita could not avoid considering the possible deduction that her suspicion of her own unlovableness might be more than a suspicion, as his, of his homosexuality, soon proved an exact prognostication. Was it not safer, was it not happier, was it not even nobler to relegate all thoughts of romance to the iron cupboard of fantasy, where, no matter how lurid, how throbbing with the unmentionable, the almost unthinkable, they could still be kept mysteriously un-contaminating and clean?

  Carol embarked at length on a new tack. He urged her to introduce him to her family. For a while she resisted the idea, but at last, before a weekend that she was to spend with her mother, now married to a real estate broker in Rye, she agreed to let him come up on Sunday and drive her back to town. Supposing he found the family atmosphere as Babbitty as he undoubtedly expected he would? Would it not solve her problem? When she told her mother, the latter, delighted, insisted that Carol come for Sunday lunch.

  The Tudor dormered house, the stepfather full of political and baseball chatter, the married stepbrothers and their spouses, so clean, immaculate, beaming, indifferent and unread, the spoiled, shouting children, seemed to be having the effect on the smiling and affable Carol that she had expected. Oh, she knew how to read behind his laughing eyes! But her mother seemed almost too tacky; it was a case of overkill. Her red hair was too red, her laugh too eager, her desire to show off her thin sprinkle of culture to a “real” museum curator too painfully evident. Obviously, she was intent on making up for three decades of benign neglect by charming “dear Dr. Sweeters” into marrying her waif.

  Only when Carol had taken the family cat onto his lap and was stroking it did her mother sound a genuine note.

  “Oh, you like cats, Dr. Sweeters? I can tell that by the way you stroke Dido. I always think it a sigh of sensitivity and intelligence in a man to like cats. I suppose you have one at home?”

  “I had one with me last summer for my vacation. In Newport.”

  “In Newport? Really? You go there? It must be so lovely. And I suppose you swim at Bailey’s Beach and watch the tennis at the Casino?”

  “My dear lady, I do no such things. I scamper like a mouse at the first approach of a member of what I call the leper colony. No, no, I rent for my scant month of freedom a tiny box of a house in the charming eighteenth-century section of Newport. There I and my cat dream of Rochambeau and Lafayette and walk to the old stone tower and pretend that the Vikings really built it, after all.”

  Anita glanced at her stepbrothers; of course they weren’t listening.

  “Lafayette?” her mother queried. “Did he spend his summers there?”

  Anita had to say something. “What ever happened to your cat, Carol? Did it die?”

  “Not that I know of. But I couldn’t keep it in New York. I have no one to care for it when the museum sends me on trips.”

  “You left it with a friend?”

  “I didn’t know anyone who wanted it.”

  “Then what did you do with it?”

  “I just left it.”

  “In the house?”

  “Of course not.” Carol began to show impatience. “I had to leave the house broom-clean. I left it outside.”

  “In the street?” Anita closed her eyes as he
r heart seemed to miss a beat. “You locked it out? Oh, Carol, you didn’t! Tell me you didn’t.”

  “What else was I to do?”

  “But how was it to live?”

  At this point her mother, sensing that the issue was becoming touchy, intervened. “Oh, cats are full of resources. It probably found mice and things.”

  “Lots of summer people do that,” Anita’s stepfather observed. ‘They buy a puppy or a kitten for the kiddies when they go to the lake and leave it there when it’s time to go home.”

  “Leave it to starve!”

  “Oh, Anita, you’re just being dramatic,” interposed the older stepbrother. “Meg and I did that with a cat in Vermont last summer. As Ma says, a cat can live off the land.”

  “I’d like to see you living off the land in Newport in the middle of winter!”

  Anita said no more after this because she couldn’t; it was as if she had turned into a pebble of muted horror in a puddle of alien frogs. Carol and her family seemed suddenly to belong to the same species of fauna; in such a jungle one could only yearn for the immunity of the inanimate. Carol, taking her silence as the signal they were through with a subject that was of no basic importance, proceeded to divert the table, even her brothers, with theories of why the civilization of the Mayas had crumbled so suddenly and inexplicably.

  In the car going back to the city she complained of the onset of a migraine headache, and he switched on the radio for the Philharmonic concert. When they heard the acrid blast of the Boléro, he offered to turn to a milder station, but she insisted that he leave it on, that it distracted her from the pain. And as her heart pounded to the throbbing rhythms, she closed her eyes for a vision of giddy reds and blacks alternating like a flashing night club sign in the empty dome of her mind and wondered whether she would not always loathe the man who was driving the car. At her house she fled without a word of thanks or farewell.

  ***

  By the following day, after a night of sleepless reflection, she was ready for anything he could say to her. She was even ready for what he actually offered: a mock proposal of marriage. Of course it might even have been serious; she was well aware how necessary it was for him to screen his gravest intentions behind a bristling hedge of irony. He came to her little office and seated himself solemnly before her desk.

  “Do you realize we have been acting out a novel, my dear Anita? And that truth is once again proven to be stranger than fiction? Only I had flattered myself that if such a thing happened to one so well read as I, it might be in the form of prose by Dostoyevski or Flaubert. But not at all. I find myself following the lines of the great Jane herself. It is in that favorite novel of the weaker sex, Pride and Prejudice, that I discover my banal little tale. For Darcy and Eliza agree no more about the vulgar Mrs. Bennet than you and I about the deplorable woman who is redeemed only by the good taste that she showed in choosing so rare a bundle from the adoption agency. Darcy looked with no more gloom at an alliance with Mrs. Bennet than I at one with your ma. But like him I must confess: ‘In vain have I struggled … My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.’ ”

  Anita found, despite her pounding heart, that she was able to fix her eyes with a newfound calmness on that sneering countenance. After a few moments she replied: “Let me answer you as if you were speaking in all seriousness. For I give you my solemn word that my response would be the same. I could never even think of marrying a man who could lock out in the cold the creature that had been his pet and friend.”

  Carol’s high shriek of a laugh told her that her thrust had gone home. “You might at least reply to a joke with a joke!”

  “If yours was a joke, so much the better. But I had rather make a fool of myself than leave you trader a false impression. What I said I meant and shall always mean.”

  “Well, I guess unless the gods bring back that eminent cat lover and trainer Clyde Beatty, you are doomed to a life of chaste spinsterhood.”

  “That is my affair. And now, if you will forgive…”

  But she knew, as he stamped out of the room, that he never would.

  Communications between them thereafter were kept to a minimum. Anita made a particular point to report to him only when absolutely necessary, for he never lost the chance to denigrate either her work or her character or, if neither of these availed, her person. She could usually manage to scuttle away before the flash of his ugly temper came to the attention of others. But there was one terrible occasion when he took a revenge so cruel that she seriously considered resigning her post.

  She happened to be studying the weird figures painted on the side of a Mayan pot, a new acquisition, when Carol walked in, purportedly to consult one of her books on pre-Columbian art, and peered over her shoulder. When he saw what she was looking at, he chuckled in a nasty way.

  “Can you make out what he’s doing?” He jabbed a finger at the male figure, whose beady eye and hooked nose suggested some organic connection with his eagle headdress.

  “Doing? Is he doing anything?”

  “Look at his hands.”

  “They seem to be in his lap.”

  Carol’s laugh shrilled to a high cackle. “That is one way of putting it, I suppose. The way Anita Vogel would put it. But those hands, I’m afraid, are engaged in a good deal more than resting in his lap. Those hands are engaged, very neatly, in slitting his penis.”

  Anita started up in horror. “Oh, no!”

  “Oh, yes, dear. We have excellent evidence that that is precisely what he is doing. And do you know what his lady consort is up to?” He paused while she stared at the pot as if he had turned it into a tarantula. “Well, look, silly.”

  “She seems to be pulling something out of her mouth.”

  “She is pulling a thorned rope through a hole that she has cut in her tongue.”

  Anita had to stifle a scream. “But how can they be doing such frightful things to themselves? They don’t even seem to be suffering.”

  “Good point. We don’t know why that is. Was it the artist’s incapacity to depict suffering, or were the self-mutilators under drugs, or was it considered lise-majesti to show royal persons in agony? For you understand, I’m sure, that what this lord and lady are doing was entirely voluntary. Indeed, it was considered one of the high privileges of their office. In the sacred ceremony of bloodletting the leaders of the nation were propitiating the gods for the benefit of their people. It was similar, of course, to our own deity assuming the crown of thorns and suffering the agony of the cross.”

  “And I thought theirs was a peaceful agrarian society,” she murmured.

  “How like you! You’ve been reading Morley, of course. Bowdlerized history. All that peace business has been long superseded. We now know the Mayas had one of the bloodiest civilizations known to history. Because they made war, not for defense or trade or territorial gain, but simply to collect captives to be sacrificed to their insatiable gods. It was not enough, you see, for them to mutilate themselves. They had to invade their neighbors to bring home victims to be castrated, disemboweled and then flung to the flames. Even in their sports they had to serve their hungry deities. The losing team of the ball game, their favorite sport, were sacrificed to the last man. It must have made for lively playing!”

  “But you can’t be sure of all that!”

  “You mean you can’t be sure of it, dear Anita. Because it doesn’t fit in with your vision of the world as a flower garden where the devil himself is nothing worse than a man who abandoned his cat. Just take a look at this.” He reached for one of the volumes on her desk, skipped through the pages of plates and slammed it down open before her. “You see that little carved figure of a naked man? He’s a kind of box, really; he probably served as a reliquary. Something precious was kept in him, inserted through that hole in his belly. But he’s not just a cute figurine d la Chinoise. He represents a sacrificial victim. Only this time the victim is not a stoical volunteer but a wre
tched captive. That is why his mouth is wide open, a black circle of shrieking agony. And why not? He has lost not only his genitalia but his intestines. We may safely assume that a merciful death spared him the final cruelty of the fire.”

  “Oh, please let me be!” Anita cried out, covering her ears. But she could still hear his satanic laugh as he left the room. She slammed the hateful book shut, but nothing, she knew, was ever going to erase that small figure from the flames Carol had lit in her morbid mind.

  Of course, she could get no sleep that night, or even very much the night after. He had opened new depths of horror in the seemingly endless saga of man’s inhumanity to man. It was one thing to have to contemplate histories where men killed for a purpose: for conquest or glory or even revenge; but here was something that had not existed even in the darkest chambers of her imagination. Here was a world where men existed only to kill; where wars were fought solely for that purpose; where daily life even in peacetime was subordinated to the ritual of bloodletting; where if you had not an enemy to butcher, you could only turn the knife of mayhem on yourself.

  “Civilization!” she cried aloud, sitting up in bed and staring down at the moonlit, lamplit, yellow and milky street. “They call that a civilization! Better that it be obliterated from the books. Why even keep a record of it in a museum? Oh, but what does it matter? Are we any better, really?”

  A morning came when she felt she simply could not go to work, and she called in sick. The next day she did the same thing, and the next. When the personnel director telephoned to ask whether she needed help, she invented family troubles and pleaded for a leave of absence; he offered her a week. The registrar, Miss Nesbit, a kindly soul who took a motherly interest in the women on the staff, rang up to ask if she might visit her, and Anita, distraught at the idea of seeing anyone, told her she was just on her way to Rye to stay with her mother. After that the telephone was silent, and she was free to spend her mornings in the park and her afternoons playing and replaying her few records. There were periods when she felt an odd lightness in her head and a painful heaviness in her feet.