Dying Inside

Tuesday. Election Day. For months the clamor of the campaign has fouled the air. The free world is choosing its new maximum leader. The sound-trucks rumble along Broadway, belching slogans. Our next President! The man for all America! Vote! Vote! Vote! Vote for X! Vote for Y! The hollow words merge and blur and flow. Republocrat. Demican. Boum. Why should I vote? I will not vote. I do not vote. I am not plugged in. I am not part of the circuit. Voting is for them. Once, in the late autumn of 1968, I think it was, I was standing outside Carnegie Hall, thinking of going over to the paperback bookshop on the other side of the street, when suddenly all traffic halted on 57th and scores of policemen sprang up from the pavement like the dragon’s-teeth warriors sown by Cadmus, and a motorcade came rumbling out of the east, and lo! in a dark black limousine rode Richard M. Nixon, President-Elect of the United States of America, waving jovially to the assembled populace. My big chance at last, I thought. I will look into his mind and make myself privy to great secrets of state; I will discover what it is about our leaders that sets them apart from ordinary mortals. And I looked into his mind, and what I found in there I will not tell you, except to say that it was more or less what I should have expected to find. And since that day I have had nothing to do with politics or politicians. Today I stay home from the polls. Let them elect the next President without my help.

* * *

Wednesday. I doodle with Yahya Lumumba’s half-finished term paper and other such projects, a few futile lines on each. Getting nowhere. Judith calls. “A party,” she says. “You’re invited. Everybody’ll be there.”

“A party? Who? Where? Why? When?”

“Saturday night. Near Columbia. The host is Claude Guermantes. Do you know him? Professor of French Literature.” No, the name is not Guermantes. I have changed the name to protect the guilty. “He’s one of those charismatic new professors. Young, dynamic, handsome, a friend of Simone de Beauvoir, of Genet. Karl and I are coming. And a lot of others. He always invites the most interesting people.”

“Genet? Simone de Beauvoir? Will they be there?”

“No, silly, not them. But it’ll be worth your time. Claude gives the best parties of anybody I know. Brilliant combinations of people.”

“Sounds like a vampire to me.”

“He gives as well as takes, Duv. He specifically asked me to invite you.”

“How does he know me at all?”

“Through me,” she says. “I’ve talked of you. He’s dying to meet you.”

“I don’t like parties.”

“Duv—”

I know that warning tone of voice. I have no stomach for a hassle just now. “All right,” I say, sighing. “Saturday night. Give me the address.” Why am I so pliable? Why do I let Judith manipulate me? Is this how I build my love for her, through these surrenders?

* * *