61
SHE GLANCED AT HER WATCH, took a deep breath, and, with a particularly mischievous twinkle in her eye, said, “A few nights ago, I walked into my living room—from the kitchen, carrying a drink—some scotch, on the rocks, in a low glass—and stood for a moment, looking at the phone, trying to decide whether or not to make a call—a call that I had been thinking about making for some time. Maybe some of you were here, maybe you saw this. Finally, I gave a shrug, rolled my hips as if I were about to go out on a dance floor and show my stuff, took a large swallow of my drink, set the glass down, and picked up the phone. I dialed a number. I held the phone with both hands, and I grinned a grin with something impish in it—”
“Like the impish grin you’re grinning now?”
“Very like it,” she said. “As if I had something up my sleeve, a surprise for the guy at the other end of the line.”
“Me,” I said.
“Yes,” said Ariane. “You.”
“And you summoned me.”
“I asked you to come. And I rewarded you for coming, remember. When you arrived here, at my place, I greeted you with a kiss—”
“—a wet kiss—”
“—quite a kiss—”
“—lascivious—”
“—shameless—”
“—dizzying—”
“—the very kiss you dreamed of when you were a boy—”
“—except for the scotch—”
“—as all the little boys dreamed of kisses from Tootsie Koochikov.”
“I had forgotten that they—”
“Yes, yes, yes.”
She sighed. She dropped to the sofa, and now she seemed weary of it all.
“We’ve been through all that,” she said.
“In labyrinths, one often goes in circles.”
“We’ve been through that, too,” she said. “We’ve covered labyrinths, Ariadne and Theseus, my name, my parents, my brothers, my uncles, my little school chums, Denny, my job at Captain White’s, my clam hat—”
She picked the hat up from the end of the sofa, where it had been watching us now for several evenings, never blinking, always grinning. She put it on her head, pulled it down to make it secure, adjusted the angle, and said, “As I said—you may recall—a few evenings ago—I have sat here many nights, right here, on this sofa, alone—well, sort of alone—”
She indicated the audience with a sweep of her hand.
“—alone in my fashion—and I have asked myself why I did some of the things I did. For example, why did I allow myself to be made ridiculous—wearing this stupid hat?”
She tilted her head and it rolled its googly eyes. “Well?” she said. “What do you think?”
She looked at me as if she expected me to have the answer. I didn’t.
“I don’t know. I—”
“Haven’t thought about it, huh? Well, I have. The unexamined life is not worth living, you know, so here’s what I think. I think I wore that hat to punish myself. Listen to this: since the world offers us countless ready-made punishments for our mistakes, it is astonishing to think that we should find it necessary to invent new ones of our own, but we do, and the ways that we find to punish ourselves are harsher than the ones fate dishes out. The pain they inflict is sharper and finer, more focused, and much, much nastier, because these punishments are our own, and we design them to inflict upon us exactly the pain that we knew would hurt us most.”
“Wow. Where did that come from?”
“You mean did I read it somewhere? Hell, no. That’s from me, one of the fruits of my introspection, an original thought from the former Tootsie Koochikov.” She held her hands out toward the audience and said, “See? That’s the kind of thing I’m doing when you can’t tell what I’m up to.”
“What were you punishing yourself for?” I asked.
“Back then?” she said. “For allowing people to call me names.”
“And now?” I asked.
“Hmm?”
“What are you punishing yourself for now?”
“You mean here?”
“Yes.”
“You think this is a punishment, being here, being here on display?”
“I think it might be.”
“It wasn’t intended as a punishment. I’m not a prisoner, after all. I’ve never felt like a prisoner. Obviously, I can walk away. At any time. I am not a prisoner. The prisoners in the panopticon, Bentham’s panopticon, remember, were arranged around the outside. The jailer was in the center—”
She began slowly to turn.
“—and could see all the prisoners, just by turning around and around. I am at the center, folks. You are arranged around me. In fact, I’ve always felt secure here, at the center of my audience, wrapped in my audience.” She held her arms out to them. “You insulate me. You protect me. Having you around me has allowed me great stretches of time when I haven’t had to deal with the world, and in that time I’ve been able to think. You have also enriched me. And I’m not talking merely about my soul, you know. My popularity has had its ups and downs, but my expenses have always been small, and I’ve managed to put quite a lot of money away, enough to allow me to do nothing for a while—quite a while. I can travel, wander, find a place where I can enjoy myself—”
She continued turning, very slowly, away from the audience and toward me, and added, with a jerk of her thumb over her shoulder, “—but without having them watch me all the time.”
[to be continued]
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