Outside the Gates of Eden

by Lewis Shiner

  “I don’t understand. If I like a woman, and enjoy being with her, and she’s attractive, and attracted to me, why would I not want to have sex with her?”

  “I have a gift for you,” Vivienne said. She burrowed into her purse and came up with a paperback of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, an English translation with a sexy naked blonde on the cover. Alex knew the name because she was Sartre’s mistress. Vivienne pushed it toward him. “It’s a lousy translation, and it’s abridged, though it says it isn’t, and that cover… but it’s what there is in English. If you try to read it in French it will take you a year and I want you to read it now, right away.”

  He felt petulant, like Vivienne had pulled a bait-and-switch on him. He reluctantly picked up the book and flipped through it.

  “You’re a brilliant student,” she said. “You have great insight and great compassion. But your insight and your compassion are, what is the word?” She cupped her hands to the sides of her head. “Blinkered. Reading this book will help your thesis. And it will make you a better person.”

  Alex started the book that night in anger. His intent to skim it as quickly as possible was thwarted by the dense and circuitous prose. The book had been published in 1949 and much of what Beauvoir had to say was now old hat. She overreached herself on some points and belabored others. He quibbled and quarreled with her all the way through the book, even as he recognized the connections to Debord and Vaneigem and saw how women themselves had been commodified. In the end he found himself changed, if for no other reason than for having spent so much time in the head of a brilliant, uncompromising human being who was so proudly female. The feeling was intimate, even sexy. Alex spent a couple of hours in the library looking at photos, reading about her affair with Nelson Algren. It would be a trip, he thought, to stay up late in cafés with her, drinking and arguing. He didn’t think that he wanted to be her lover.

  When he told all that to Vivienne, she said, “We are very lucky, you and I, because for us the act of reading can be revolutionary. It can change who we are. My wish for you is that you never lose that ability.”

  That same fall of 1970 he took his first film class, on the French Nouvelle Vague. His initial motivation had been to see Truffaut’s Baisers volés, which included scenes shot during the ’68 riots. The class opened with Goddard’s À bout de souffle, and Alex loved the combination of trivial, realistic dialog with heavy-handed portentousness, the relentlessly long takes, followed by weird jump cuts, Belmundo’s rubber-faced charisma and Seberg’s androgynous sexiness and American-accented French. Best of all was the voice in his head that said, “I can do this.”

  He was able to add the Intro course for the Radio-tv-Film program to his fall load, and, with Vivienne pulling a few strings, that allowed him to get into Film 1 in the spring. There he put together a series of still photos with an audio track, like La Jetée, and then an actual short Super 8 film.

  It all added up to a single thing in his head, the New Wave films and the Situationists and the French protesters and the teargas in Austin in the wake of Kent State, and even after he turned in his thesis he felt like he wasn’t finished.

  The Saturday before the last week of classes had arrived. His undergraduate career was all but over. Lonely, horny, thinking of Vivienne, he found himself in danger of drowning in regret. He’d only had a couple of chance encounters with Denise since he switched to French from Russian, momentary, but friendly enough. He dialed the last number he had for her and was surprised to find her home. “It’s Alex,” he said. “Want to get a pizza or something?”

  “What is this, a desperate bid for easy sex after striking out everywhere else?”

  Alex thought it over. “I think what I want is to apologize.”

  “Interesting,” Denise said. “Pick me up in half an hour.”

  Under the distinctly unromantic fluorescent lights of Mr. Gatti’s, Alex undertook his first self-criticism session. He told Denise that he’d been callous and selfish, that even though he had genuinely cared for her, he had nonetheless taken advantage of her and disregarded her own feelings.

  Denise didn’t answer right away. She looked out the front window, then looked down at her hands. “Well. Since you brought it up. I was in love with you pretty much from the start. But I was smart enough to see that you were too self-centered and too judgmental to reciprocate. So I kept it to myself and eventually it went away.”

  “I’m sorry,” Alex said. This was proving to be even less fun than he’d imagined. Struggle sessions, he remembered, were used in Mao’s China as torture. He let Denise talk, didn’t interrupt when she began to repeat herself, and didn’t try to justify himself, just tried to understand what it was he was apologizing for. Neither of them, he thought, was getting a lot of relief from the conversation, yet when it finally ran out of gas, Denise put her hand on top of his. “Thanks. I appreciate that you did this.”

  On the drive to her dorm, Denise brought up Tupelo Joe. “You know he’s home, right?”

  “No,” Alex said. “Is he okay?”

  “As far as I can tell. I hear from his mother every once in a while, on the sly. He still won’t talk to me. I sent him a couple of letters and they came back refused.”

  “I was so sure he was going to get himself blown up.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Maybe,” Alex said, “if I drove down there. He wouldn’t refuse to see me if I was on his doorstep.”

  “From what his mother says, I think he would.”

  Alex brought her up to date on Cole and Madelyn, and by that time they were parked on the street in front of her dorm. “She doesn’t graduate till June,” he said, without thinking it through in advance. “Why don’t we go out there for it? My treat.”

  “Separate hotel rooms?” Denise asked.

  “Whatever terms you’re comfortable with,” Alex said, his throat tightening. “I’m still not in love with you. But I’m not going to pretend I don’t want you, either.”

  “And I’m still over you. But we actually talked tonight, and honestly, that’s left me a little hot and bothered. I don’t want to do anything tonight, because I don’t want to wake up and question your motives for calling me. But yes, I would love to see Madelyn, and I imagine two rooms would be a needless expense.”

  She got out of the car and blew him a kiss. “I’ll call you.”

  *

  Madelyn got everyone settled and put out glasses and a couple of half-finished bottles of wine. They’d no sooner drunk a toast to old friends than Julia shocked her by pulling out a pair of joints and a book of matches. Without asking, she lit one and passed it to Alex, whom she’d somehow ended up next to on the couch. Alex took a long hit and then passed it to Denise, sitting cross-legged on the shag carpet.

  Madelyn, reluctant to speak frankly in front of Julia, decided that Alex was the one who had invited her and so it was on his head. “Straight up this time,” she said. “What happens to you now? You said you were, quote, accepted into the mba program at ut, endquote, which is not the same as ‘I’m going to get an mba.’”

  Alex laughed. “Smart, aren’t you?”

  “No,” Madelyn said, “but I’ve developed a pretty good ear for bullshit.”

  “Okay, the truth is I have also been accepted into a fast-track Bachelor of Science program in rtf, which is Radio-tv-Film for those of you who are not at ut. Since I’ve got all my university requirements already, I’ll finish in two years. Madelyn, your mouth is open.”

  “I’m remembering the three of us walking out of Blow-Up and you saying the only thing good about it was the Yardbirds.” Neither Alex nor Denise, she noted with gratitude, saw the need to remind her that there had been four of them.

  “I still basically think that,” Alex said. “Antonioni’s early stuff is okay, I guess. Blow-Up is like a Hollywood blockbuster compared to what I’m into.”

  “What does your father think of all this?” Madelyn asked.

  “Yeah, we
ll,” Alex said. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? I haven’t told him yet.”

  “Oh lord,” Madelyn said.

  “Exactly. This is not a good time to drop any bombshells on him, either. Jimmy’s having to go to summer school because of bad grades—due to ‘attitude problems,’ apparently. And Susan’s getting divorced.”

  “You’re kidding. I thought she was seriously Catholic.”

  “More or less. But Jesse got heavy into cocaine up in Oke City, and after he went through all of their money he started dealing, and one night Susan woke up and found him in the living room on the tail end of a three-day binge, cleaning his .45 service automatic. She waited until he crashed and took a cab to the airport and flew home. She’s been living there for the last month.”

  Madelyn shook her head. “Your poor father.”

  “It’s not what he had in mind,” Alex said, “for any of us. But it’s not like I haven’t been trying to tell him my whole life that I don’t want to be J. Paul Getty. And now with this film thing, I’ve found what I really want to do.”

  Julia fired up the second joint and passed it around. “I’m in Broadcast/Film too,” she said. “I’m studying acting at smu.”

  As usual, Julia displayed prodigious amounts of cleavage, though she was leaner in the face than she’d been at Christmas, older than her years, a little hard.

  “Cool,” Alex said politely. “That’s a good school.”

  Madelyn went to the kitchen to see what she could scare up for snacks. She had leftovers from an opening a few days before—brie, grapes, some fancy Swiss crackers. As she put it on plates, Denise came in to help.

  “What’s with you and Alex?” Madelyn asked in a whisper. “Are you two an item again?”

  “Definitely not an item. A matter of convenience. After this trip, who knows when we’ll see each other again?”

  “Just be careful, okay?”

  “Don’t worry. I can handle it.”

  Madelyn nodded, unconvinced.

  “What about you?” Denise said. “Any affairs of the heart?”

  Madelyn shrugged. “Matters of convenience for me too. And not a lot of them. Most of my social life is gallery parties, and the straight guys are all off limits. They’re either our artists or somebody else’s artists, or they’re critics or patrons, and despite the fact that other people do it, I refuse to be gossiped about or accused of conflict of interest.”

  “This sounds much too serious.”

  Madelyn sighed. “I never was big on fun.”

  She brought out more wine, also left over from the opening, all of it quality stock from a Kindred family winery in Napa Valley. Before Madelyn quite realized what was happening, the dope had subverted her resistance to the wine, and then she was too drunk to want to stop drinking.

  They’d successfully walked a high wire over the past all night, and now alcohol threatened their balance. Julia inadvertently destabilized the conversation when she said, “Wow, I’m pretty drunk. Though this is nothing like the punch I had one night at this frat party? One glass and all kinds of terrible things were happening to me.”

  Madelyn, desperate to change the subject, said to Denise, “Remember that frat party we crashed, so we could hear the guys play? We were like a couple of pieces of raw meat in a shark tank.”

  “Oh, my word,” Denise said. “I didn’t know if we were going to get out of there alive.”

  “That was profoundly dumb,” Alex said.

  “Cole was so pissed off,” Madelyn said, and the memories piled up in a chain-reaction collision: walking heartsick up to the Castle at dawn, falling asleep on the couch, Cole finding her there and taking her upstairs…

  Rushing to change the subject again, she looked at Alex and said the first thing that came into her head. “Or the time you guys did your mariachi act under our dorm windows?”

  “My roommate was so jealous,” Denise said. “She said, ‘If you don’t want him, I do.’”

  “El Mariachi Montoya,” Alex said, “separating girls from their underwear since 1966.”

  “Alex!” Denise said. “Shame on you!”

  “I never heard Cole’s record,” Julia said. She got unsteadily to her feet and made her way to the albums lined up on the floor next to the stereo. “Is it in here?”

  Before Madelyn could say no, Alex got up. “You’re drunk,” he said. “I’ll do it.” Julia pretended to push him away and lost her balance. When Alex reached out to steady her, she managed to press her breasts against his forearm. Alex guided her to the couch and then began to flip through the records. Stop, Madelyn wanted to say. The word failed to come out.

  “Ah, here it is.” A moment of hiss was followed by two guitars chasing each other around the melody of “Wang Dang Doodle.”

  “Louder,” Julia said.

  “The neighbors,” Madelyn said, in vain.

  She’d only listened to it once since Cole disappeared. That had been a year and some ago, in the grip of spring fever and a couple of glasses of wine. It sounded good, she thought, and here they were, like grownups, able to sit and appreciate it simply as a pleasing collection of songs.

  Yet somehow the conversation had gotten derailed and they were unable to get it back on track. Denise tried to talk about some movie she’d just seen called Billy Jack, where the hippies were the heroes, and Alex kept disparaging the Hollywood “machine,” though Denise tried to explain that it wasn’t Hollywood, it was independent, and at that point Madelyn realized that everybody else was pretty blasted as well, and that it wasn’t really a movie that Alex and Denise were at odds over. That made Madelyn pull away from the conversation and into the music, and about that time “Gold” came on, and then all she could think of was the first time Cole played the song for her at the Vulcan.

  She wondered why on earth she had ever thought she could listen to the record objectively. She got up quietly and went into the kitchen, where the first thing she saw was a pair of wine bottles, one white, one red, Lancaster and York, two roses on her desk in Russian class, and she stood over the sink and listened to her big, fat tears thud into the stainless steel.

  She felt a hand on her shoulder, and when she turned around, Alex pulled her into an enveloping embrace and she surrendered to it. “He really loved you,” Alex said. “Like nobody else, ever, in his life. Don’t ever forget that.”

  Oddly, it was exactly what she needed to hear, and she let herself have a good minute and a half of crying her eyes out.

  That ended the party. Madelyn made a half-hearted offer to put everyone up on the couch and the floor. Alex insisted he was perfectly fine to drive and Madelyn chose to believe him.

  After they were gone, she opened the balcony doors to clear out the odors of dope, wine, and Julia’s perfume. She refilled her wine glass, got a box of Kleenex, turned the stereo down, and started the Quirq album again from the beginning.

  *

  Alex had planned his return trip to include an overnight layover in Dallas. Denise had left her car in long term parking and dropped him at his parents’ house on her way to Denton.

  That night he took his father to Tupinamba’s by Bachman Lake, the best Mexican restaurant in Dallas. He stumbled through the lines he’d rehearsed on the plane, explaining what he wanted, that he was determined to get the rtf degree, whether his father supported him or not. The sight of his father’s disappointment hurt him worse than he’d imagined.

  They ate in silence for a while, then his father said, “When Jesús was eighteen, he’d already been working for Cuauhtémoc for two years, and I knew he hated it. We were still in Monterrey then. I was sixteen and was running errands at the plant after school. One day Jesús made me come with him when he went to talk to our father, for protection. You look at your grandfather now, skinny and old and dignified, you can’t imagine how afraid of him we were. Jesús says he’s got a chance to apprentice to this guy who makes guitars and violins and that he would never be happy working in the factory. And our father says,
‘Happy?’ This was late 1945. Mexico had been through the Revolution, the Cristeros, the Depression, one hard time after another. The war was over but there were still a lot of shortages, and inflation was bad because the US had invested a lot in Mexico so they could take our oil and resources for their manufacturing, and we were drowning in debt. So our father says, ‘To think that following your own selfish desires is the path to happiness is the stupidity of a child. Marrying for “love,” chasing daydreams, setting yourself against God and tradition and family, where is the happiness in that?’ Jesús was determined and he left the house and moved in with the violin maker and married his daughter and we didn’t see him anymore, and my father put the whole weight of his expectations on me. He was very, very Catholic and he hated the US, and the day came when I knew I had to get divorced and move to the States and start my own import/export business, and I had to go to my father and tell him, knowing he would disown me too. I was never so afraid in my life. To my surprise he got very sad and said, ‘I miss Jesús every day. I know what you’re doing is wrong and you’ll be sorry in the end, and I also know you’re not going to listen to me, and I don’t want to lose you too.’ So he gave me his blessing, more or less, and helped talk Cuauhtémoc into investing in my business, and I made so much money that I was able to bring him in as a partner and he was able to buy the house in Guanajuato and move Susan’s mother and Jesús and his family there too. And to this day he doesn’t treat your mother with the respect she’s due, and if the subject comes up he will tell you without blinking that I’m going to burn in hell for getting divorced, and that we should never have split off from Cuauhtémoc, and that Jesús never grew up and is wasting his time making guitars, though people play them all over the world.”

  Through the whole speech Alex had felt his hopes rising. “Does this mean you’ll help?”

  “What it means is that I have more sympathy for my father than I ever had before.” Alex wished his father had smiled when he said that. “It means that even with the example of my father in front of me, I still think you’re making a terrible mistake.”