The Players Come Again

by Amanda Cross

  Kate contemplated the top page of Gabrielle’s manuscript: “He is coming tonight, she thought; one more day of waiting,” read the opening sentence, the first sentence now of both Emmanuel’s and Gabrielle’s novels. But while Emmanuel’s first sentence had indicated anticipation, eagerness, a wild desire, Gabrielle’s rendition of her heroine’s thought was ironic, fearful, and desperate. The intruder was about to appear. Ariadne, as Foxx’s Artemisia was called in the beginning of Gabrielle’s novel, had been advised by Daedalus to give Theseus, when he should come, the thread of the labyrinth; he would then kill the Minotaur but not, it was to be hoped, her or her mother or sister. Greek men were violent: rapists, triumphant over women and weaker men whenever possible. Thwarted, Theseus might kill her whole family, seize the holy double ax, and murder everyone along with the Minotaur. Her only chance was to appear to have anticipated, with the fullest possible girlish glee, his coming. This was the only chance of escape, for her, for her mother, Pasiphaë, her sister, Phaedre, and the priestesses.

  “I thought the labyrinth was a double ax, the sign of the priestesses of Crete, and therefore not a labyrinth at all,” Kate muttered, inviting a quick glance from the steward and confirming his worst fears. Kate laughed to herself I am becoming dotty, she said. Gabrielle’s influence. I must try and collect myself before we arrive.

  Her question was soon cleared up: the labyrinth was the whole palace of Cnossus. That was how it was built, and the famous dance floor and place of acrobatics over the horns of bulls were all part of the labyrinth, part of the palace, all in the shape of the double-sided ax. Kate admired the skill with which Gabrielle embodied this in the novel: she must have read every morsel by Evans about his discoveries of the ancient Cretan civilization.

  Her Crete was a civilization that feared the violence and brutality of foreign men. Crete was a matriarchy in the sense that the priests and the queen were women; but its men flourished as well: they were neither slaves nor concubines nor housekeepers nor mere objects of affection or desire. Their life was full on Crete, athletic, artistic, gentle, and vibrant. Gabrielle was careful to demonstrate that maleness was not confirmed by violence, certainly not by violence against women or those weaker than themselves. By the beginning of Gabrielle’s novel, the civilization on Crete knew that other nations, and particularly Greece, honored male brutality and cruelty, and sent its men to find their rewards for war in the rape and carnage and destruction of other lands.

  Years earlier, Crete had demanded as price for passage through its waters a yearly tribute of youth—seven men and seven women—to emigrate to Crete and live among its people. These youths were not sacrifices; they were warmly welcomed strangers to the life and genetic stock of Crete. The need for new blood, what we would call a new gene stock, was known by the rulers of Crete, if not properly named. Those youths, women and men, the bull leapers who did their acrobatics on the horns of bulls—the male symbol of renewal on Crete, the original animal god and spouse of the queen—developed skills and confidence. They were not destined for destruction, nor a mindless tribute, as all the Greek myths recounted.

  Now the ancient Cretan culture at the palace of Cnossus faced destruction from violent Greek forces, to be led by Theseus. Could Ariadne outwit them? While Emmanuel’s modern plot had depended on but neither admitted nor expounded its Greek original, Gabrielle’s began with the exact prehistorical moment at which the Greek myth began. Kate had, meanwhile, glanced at enough of the manuscript to know that, after its beginnings in those prehistoric times rediscovered and reconstituted about a century ago by Evans, the main part of the novel moved to the mid-twentieth century when Ariadne, now renamed Artemisia, again waited for the character Emmanuel Foxx had modeled on Theseus.

  But at the beginning of Gabrielle’s novel, the Cretan Ariadne, aware through her prophetic powers of the imminent destruction of her home and her civilization, consulted Daedalus as her mother had before her. Daedalus wanted no part in the emerging Greek male-centered world. His son, Icarus, had found the possibility of patriarchy and war exhilarating, and Daedalus had had to watch his son, swollen with his new-learned manly pride, fly too near the sun and melt the wax wings he had stolen from his father. Daedalus had known he had stolen them, had known that Icarus, allowed to live, would betray them all. The lesson Ariadne learned from this was that Greek men and their ilk would, in time, destroy themselves, but not perhaps until they had destroyed the whole earth with them.

  Daedalus did not have much time to tell Ariadne all he knew. Crete would be conquered; there was no chance of avoiding that. The old ways were gone, women would be enslaved or made into objects of male desire, largely powerless. Other races too, believed to be of less valor and worth than Greeks, would likewise be enslaved. Listening to him, Ariadne despaired.

  Daedalus explained that there was no present help, except to let Theseus believe that he had conquered easily, conquered because of Ariadne’s lust for him. He would take her and Phaedre away. Phaedre’s part would come soon enough; she would cause Theseus to kill his son, the embodiment of masculine self-aggrandizement, thus preventing much suffering and avenging Hippolyta, whose son he also was. Hippolyta, too, would await the future, in spite of any story Greek myth might tell of her.

  Ariadne must pretend lust for Theseus, and allow him to take her away. But once on the ship, she must sufficiently horrify him to force him to put her ashore at Dia, a Cretan island, where Dionysus would come to her rescue and assure her survival and her eventual return. Very eventual, Daedalus said, but certain. Not certain to succeed, but certain to try.

  And Ariadne did as he advised. To frighten Theseus and make him desert her, she pretended a frenzy, such as he had heard women were prone to, and pleaded for male flesh to feast upon. Her act was good; so good it frightened even her. He sailed near to the shore at night, carried her onto the island of Dia, and told his crew that he would return for her next day. Next day, he pretended to have forgotten her. The crew, equally horrified at what they had seen, or at what others had described, did not remind Theseus. Was it Ariadne who made him forget to change his black sails to white to tell his father he was returning alive? No, it was not Ariadne, it was Theseus himself, eager to take his father’s place, eager to sail under the colors of manhood.

  So ended the first part. Kate plunged immediately into the second part, which began again as Emmanuel’s novel had begun, with the modern heroine awaiting the arrival of the Theseus figure. Gabrielle’s modern heroine, Artemisia, knew that the time for the revival of the Micean civilization had come. Like Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, Artemisia prayed: “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.” She borrowed Joyce’s words to say: “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

  Gabrielle had read Joyce too.

  Some days after Kate had returned home, taken up the strands of her former, by now quite strangely unfamiliar, life, answered countless letters, returned time-consuming phone calls, devoted days to restoring some sort of order to her affairs, she settled down to tell Reed all about the decision before her. She had by now reread all of Gabrielle’s novel and felt strangely empowered by it. She tried to explain this to Reed.

  “I’m probably gaga, a sensation I have become quite used to since encountering Gabrielle and her connections however far-flung. I mean, even Simon Pearlstine seemed like a figure out of nowhere, a visitor from another planet.”

  “Conclusions first,” Reed said. “Explanations and excuses later.”

  “Conclusions are what I don’t have. If I leave out explanations and excuses, all I have left is a question.”

  “Ask it.”

  “Ought I to edit this crazy book and write a biographical portrait and what shall I tell Simon?”

  “That’s three questions. Do you want to edit the book? No, let me ask it
differently. What do you think the book is about?”

  “I hate people who ask what novels are ‘about,’ ” Kate rather irritably responded.

  “What is it about the novel that strikes you as either brilliant or terrifying or ridiculous depending on your mood and state of sobriety?”

  “It’s so incredibly ahead of its time. It’s a book written after all at the height of high modernism, or not long after—we can’t really know when she wrote it, except not before the 1920s, when Emmanuel Foxx was working on Ariadne, and not after 1955, when Anne visited her and spirited the papers away. My guess is that it was mostly written in the thirties and forties, maybe with time out for the war, maybe not. She may have polished it up in the early fifties in London. What was your question?”

  “Kate, you grow wordier and less coherent by the minute, the very second. You are often this way when your cases show signs of reaching a solution which is usually, in the way of solutions, a compromise and unsatisfactory, but I’ve never known you to babble on like this when it was merely a matter of literature. Sorry: I withdraw the ‘merely.’ When it was a matter of literature. My question was: what about the novel disturbs you?”

  “Good novels are supposed to disturb you. All right, I’ll stick to this one, don’t go into your prosecuting-attorney act, leaping to your feet to object every time I open my mouth.”

  “It isn’t just prosecutors who do that,” Reed mildly said. “Go on.”

  “Look here, as you may have noticed, being a feminist or at least suggesting that patriarchy is not the most divinely perfect scheme ever devised hardly leaves me unassaulted and unridiculed even in these more or less feminist times. It’s clear that Gabrielle had no illusions about remaining unattacked at worst, or ignored at best, if she published anything as radical, as revolutionary, as her novel. She might have published it and hoped to be ignored in her lifetime and rediscovered at a later date if she had not been Foxx’s wife. As it was, she was sure to be discovered, if only because her novel so clearly took off from his, and maybe she wasn’t a watching-the-shit-hit-the-fan type, to put it crudely.”

  “At least it’s clear,” Reed acknowledged. “But that was then. Won’t the novel be seen now in an altogether different light, won’t its importance be obvious! And since you’re in no way connected with Gabrielle, what onus can be ascribed to you?”

  “I teach literature. This novel attempts to subvert, hell, to show up Emmanuel Foxx’s masterpiece, to say nothing of bringing into question the whole masculine bias of high modernism. And by the wife and inspiration of one of the highest of modernists. My God, Reed, it will probably make People magazine. I can hear all the critics already. Don’t you see?”

  “I think you ought to present it. Edit it where necessary, write a snappy but elegant account of her life, leaving out the steamy bits, and send it all off. If Simon Pearlstine doesn’t want to publish it, somebody will for certain. Give him back his advance, the part you’ve already received, and Bob’s your uncle.”

  “Do I want to be the center of a maelstrom, an academic and literary debate that will probably go on for years? It will make the question of whether the governess in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw was fantasizing look like nothing.”

  “That is a question I seem to have managed to live a not uneventful life of many years without confronting. I’m the sort who might even not notice Gabrielle’s novel if I weren’t married to you. All right, I know that’s not the point. Are you afraid, Kate? Is that what it comes down to?”

  “I’m the retiring type, though you may not have noticed.”

  “I have noticed. Types who seem retiring usually resemble Uriah Heep. You see, a literary allusion.”

  “Suppose I don’t do it?”

  “Get someone else to. I’m sure it would be the making of most on-the-make academic careers.”

  “I would have to persuade Anne and Dorinda and Nellie.”

  “No persuasion would be necessary. You have only to persuade yourself You can tell Anne and Dorinda and Nellie. Now tell me I’m not being helpful.”

  “You’re being horribly helpful, like a Spartan mother telling her son to come home with his shield or on it.”

  “I always understood you had no interest in men who told you what you wanted to hear if they didn’t agree with it.”

  “So glad you know what I want to hear; do you mind telling me?”

  “You want to hear that you must do this, are under a moral obligation to do it, have no choice.”

  “And you believe?”

  “I believe you have a choice. I think you should estimate the risks and the benefits, and decide on that basis. If you want to be shoved into doing it, let your obvious desire shove you. If you want to be prevented by fear of the brouhaha, don’t look for comfort from me. I think there probably will be a wild brouhaha, Gabrielle will be accused of Utopian, ridiculous schemes to undermine the patriarchy, to say nothing of every religion in sight, and you will be seen as an unfeminine, man-devouring, balls-crushing, lesbian, strident, shrill women’s libber.”

  “No one uses that phrase anymore.”

  “Then they’ll reinvent it, or worse. If that all sounds rather terrifying, which it does, let someone take the rap for whom the academic and media rewards of success and fame will be welcome, even desired.”

  “But Anne and Dorinda and Nellie . . .”

  “I don’t even believe they exist, if you want to know the truth.” Reed marched into the kitchen to gather the makings of drinks. “Single-malt scotch?” he asked, rattling ice trays.

  “They exist.”

  “Not for the purposes of this decision.”

  “They trusted me.”

  “The number of people who have trusted you since we met, and no doubt before, challenge enumeration. That didn’t entice you into publishing lost manuscripts and writing truncated biographies. Damn it, Kate, sleep on it. When you wake up you’ll know what you want to do. Now, we’ve kicked it around enough to satisfy anyone’s unconscious and conscious scruples. Do you want to hear about my day? Law students are beginning to doubt the value of the Socratic method. The world as I knew it is fast passing away, and a good thing too.”

  “My governess used to read me a fairy story in which a woman keeps saying: ‘Morning is wiser than evening,’ ” Kate announced.

  “I knew your governess would agree with me,” Reed said. “We got you at different times of life, but we both knew the right thing to say. Don’t worry. You’ll know in the morning. Skoal!”

  And he raised his glass to hers.

  He was right. In the morning Kate called Simon Pearlstine and said that she had to see him immediately. He was booked for lunch, but agreed to meet her for a drink at six at The Stanhope. Kate spent the day girding her loins in a manner she hoped Ariadne and Daedalus would have approved. And Gabrielle.

  And Anne and Dorinda and Nellie. Who, Kate decided, she would have to see together and all at once before much more time had passed. Nellie would have to be enticed to New York and away from Geneva as soon as possible.

  Simon first.

  Chapter Eleven

  Kate approached The Stanhope warily; it was not the sort of meeting place she preferred; it wanted only the “right” people to occupy its tables and generally indicated that it was conferring rather than receiving a favor while acquiescing in one’s presence. Kate disliked cultivating headwaiters for the right to patronize their establishment, but Simon had clearly got the cultivation of maître d’s down to a science, for he was there at a ringside seat when she arrived. Rising, and helping her to get seated, he gazed at her with apprehension.

  “You look at me as though I were about to pull a rabbit out of my pocketbook,” Kate finally said.

  “Good description. I was waiting for you to pull out the advance so far paid, in cash. Are you about to do that?”

 
“You are prepared for a dramatic moment.”

  “Shouldn’t I be?”

  “Yes, in a way. Let me tell you what has happened, and then, if that seems proper, I shall gladly return the advance, though not in cash. Sorry not to play the scene with sufficient drama. Actually, though, it’s dramatic enough. Scotch and soda,” she added, as the waiter hovered. “Small scotch, large soda.”

  “Two scotch and sodas,” Simon told the waiter, naming the brand. “Soda on the side. And may we have something to munch on?”

  “Certainly, sir,” the man said, as though Simon had caught him out unfairly. Kate thought with a certain pleasure of the café in Geneva where she and Nellie had sat and no one had tried to impress, hurry, or embarrass them. Now, was she being quite fair? Perhaps she was only projecting her own discomfort onto this ambience. All the same, people clearly came here more for a matter of status than pleasure. Kate never believed in forgoing pleasure for any but the most profound reasons, and certainly not for anything as ephemeral and useless as status . . . Then suddenly, for no discernible reason, she knew it was going to be all right. And after all, why shouldn’t Simon have a drink at The Stanhope? He lived around the corner somewhere, and it really was a pleasant place to sit in the late afternoon.

  “When you’re finished woolgathering,” Simon said, “you might put me out of my misery. Just say ‘no biography’ if that’s the horrible message, as I fear it is, and you can explain everything later. Here’s your drink. If you have bad news, I can always have another scotch, larger and laced with bicarbonate of soda. Is it ‘no biography’?”