The Rise & Fall of Great Powers (21 page)

Her other pal there was Emerson’s girlfriend, Noeline, often found marking essays in the living room. A recently appointed assistant professor in the English department at Columbia, she was about thirty, with multiple earrings, a discreet nose stud, platform sandals, and toe rings. She and Tooly shared cigarettes on the fire escape, taking them from a soggy pack of Camel Lights, although Emerson—a health freak—made it known that the stench of smoke on Noeline disgusted him. Born to a Dutch mother and an American father, she’d grown up shutting between The Hague and Houston. Her parents were biologists who had conceived her while at Harvard, only to find university positions on opposite sides of the Atlantic. As an undergrad at Smith College, Noeline had engaged in a three-year affair with a female professor. For grad school, she attended Columbia for comparative literature, embarking on her first romances with men there, with
a mixture of misgivings and enthusiasm. She’d met Emerson at a graduate seminar, and maintained that it was just a fling, their relationship a feminist irony: with all the clichés about the older male prof seducing the co-ed student, she had reversed roles. (Though, as her ex-lover at Smith observed, in that cliché the professor spirals into disgrace and ruination.)

As for Emerson, he believed he was certain to follow her path to a faculty position. But he was more cocksure than scholarly. To save time, he avoided reading books, preferring reviews, especially vicious ones, which filled him with relief, while raves made him sullen and sent him to Yonkers and back for a restorative bike ride. (He ran, biked, and swam unworldly distances.) In Emerson’s view, every important thinker had one key work, and he sought to own a copy. However, his chief activity seemed to be arguing with Noeline. “Either address the issue or don’t,” he said. “But, please, spare me your drive-by bitching.”

That such a bright and layered woman had fallen for Emerson—a mediocrity in search of an admiration society—was a cosmic vote for pessimism. So Tooly avoided talking to Noeline about him, dwelling instead on what linked them: books. They had read hundreds of the same works, yet in a completely different way. Tooly took a book as the creation of one particular brain, while Noeline viewed text as context, each work the fruit of its times, sown by manifestos, fertilized by historical events, harvested in orchards that petered out, burst forth again, producing a landscape known as the Culture. Such classification, Tooly argued, wrecked a work—akin to seeking the soul of a girl by dissecting her body.

Thankfully, Duncan had no objection to Tooly’s extended sojourn there—if anything, it offered relief from his terror of the December exams. Casebooks rose on his desk, higher than his hairline. “I am, quite literally, over my head,” he said, surfacing every few hours with an attempted witticism about
Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railway Company v. Illinois
, then returning to what he called “my pit of litigated despair.”

Despite (or because of) his anxiety, Duncan wrote his exams without apparent disaster. Afterward, he swore that he wouldn’t read another word of case law until the end of the millennium, by which he meant just over two weeks.

Soon everyone would be leaving for winter break, and Tooly suggested a year-end meal. All were invited, warring parties included. Duncan insisted on cooking, since she had fed him throughout his exam period. Xavi was responsible for bringing strawberry cheesecake. Emerson and Noeline provided the Merlot.

The apartment assumed an air of goodwill that had been absent in preceding weeks. With the worst of their stress gone, the students recalled their status: they belonged to the educated elite, damn it, and it was time someone cleaned the toilet! Gallantly, Emerson volunteered, yellow rubber gloves up to his elbows. Xavi did his part, too, scrubbing the kitchen, while Duncan swept the common areas, disposing of soda cans, take-out menus, month-old sections of
The New York Times
. They set up Emerson’s boom box in the living room and played Prince’s “1999,” whose chorus prompted Duncan to request that they
not
party like it was 1999. “I didn’t party at all this year.”

“If you party like it’s 1999,” Xavi said, “we all leave, and you log on to a chatroom with people from Finland.”

Noeline uncorked the wine and everyone gathered to inspect the label, playing at being grown-up. Perhaps that was all adults did anyway, only some of them convincingly.

Duncan banned everyone from the kitchen, his pasta sauce faintly bubbling. Tooly leaned in, offering assistance—but only if needed!

“Actually,” he replied, pulling her in.

She tucked her hair behind her ears, clasped her hands behind her back, and looked over Duncan’s shoulder into the pot, where his sauce had reduced into a tomato glue. She tapped her lower lip, turned to him, and, overwhelmed by affection, kissed his cheek.

He couldn’t find her an apron but offered a dish towel, which she had him tuck into the top of her sweater. To preserve herself from
Humphrey’s cooking, Tooly had taught herself dishes over the years, typically from cookbooks collected at charity shops. She set to work now, dicing and sautéing and simmering, he watching with elbows on the counter, chin cradled in his palms, thanking her repeatedly, muttering that he was an idiot, then falling silent and frowning like a little boy. So much did he convey this impression that she reached over and touched his nose with her fingertip.

“Sorry,” he said.

“For?” She returned to the pot. “I’m not promising deliciousness, given the limited ingredients. But edible, I can predict.” The meal was meatless spaghetti bolognese since Emerson had recently become a vegan.

She had Duncan deliver the serving bowl to the table, at which point there was a belated scramble for the vinyl chairs, with textbooks and mail-order catalogs flung to the floor.

The chatty bunch of them fell quiet while blunting the sharp edge of appetite. Tooly plunged her fork into a tangle of spaghetti, left it upright, throat clenching as she swallowed saliva. She watched them eating for a moment, relishing her role, the capable cook, really part of this place.

Xavi opened his full mouth to tell Duncan, “I love you, brother, but you did not have a hand in making this. It is highly good.”

Only Emerson offered no praise, nose wrinkled as he picked out flakes of dried oregano. “I know this is vegan, supposedly. But were any animal products used at all?”

“Do you consider the onion an animal?” Xavi asked.

“I don’t.”

“You may be safe, then.”

As their inebriation increased, Xavi pinged Emerson with provocative questions, urging him to tell the table about his upcoming seminar: “Originary and Beyond: The Gap in Alterity Discourse.”

“And by ‘The Gap,’ ” Xavi asked, deadpan, “you mean the clothing company?”

“Not the store, you cretin. The figurative gap: gaps on the page, gaps between words, the gap between the thing and the originary.” With anyone outside the department, Emerson spoke slowly, as if English were their second language. “The gap in the Lacanian mirror.”

“The gap in your teeth in the mirror?”

“I don’t have a gap in my teeth, you dick. Look,” he continued, “all gaps are essential, in the true sense of the word ‘essence,’ when we presuppose an overarching gap between the Self and the Other.”

“The other what?”

“
The
Other.
L’autre
,” he said. “You can go back to Hegel on this. Look at the master-slave dialectic; it’s all right there. You need to sit down with Heidegger, Badiou, and the Marxist psychoanalytics for a few hours. Otherwise, what is there to talk about?” For him, opinion gained validity only if footnoted by one of the university-press pinups—Kristeva, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Saussure, Lacan, Derrida, and others whose careers offered hope to those seeking gainful employment without communicating a single clear thought. He yearned to be venerated for brilliance but lacked it, so found support among others with similar needs. Theirs was a religion of obfuscation, composed of several gods and many priests, but not a single ordinary believer.

As Emerson prattled on, Xavi clapped and laughed, his face hidden behind his long fingers. Impressively, Emerson persisted, moving on to his doctoral thesis, of which he had produced two hundred eighty-three pages, meaning that he was still miles from finishing. His work had something to do with the hermeneutics of roller-coasters in Continental literature.

“Do you spend a lot of time riding them?” Tooly asked.

“Why would I?”

At first, Emerson had toyed with writing his thesis without the letter
e
, in tribute to Georges Perec, the wild-eyed Frenchman known for composing a novel without that devilishly useful letter.

“You should write it without any vowels at all,” Xavi suggested. “Without any letters even. Just numbers.”

“You idiot. You’re totally missing the point,” Emerson said.

Noeline had the capacity to shut down this silliness within seconds. What she lacked was the floor: each time she spoke, Emerson talked over her. Only when the conversation drifted to politics did she sit up straighter, lean forward, make her voice heard. “You don’t really believe that,” she told Xavi.

“Of course I do,” he confirmed, smiling. “I love this mayor.”

“You’re not allowed,” Emerson said. “Giuliani is a fascist. Amadou Diallo could’ve been you,
mon frère
. I’m sorry, but a black man cannot be a Republican. You know what those guys stand for?” He pushed on, lecturing Xavi about right-wing isolationism and racist indifference to the developing world.

“So I should go crazy for your big buddy Bill Clinton?” Xavi responded.

“At least he believes in humane globalization,” Noeline said. “Say what you like, but we’re living under the most principled leader this country has known in ages.”

“So principled,” Duncan quipped, “that you can pay cash to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom.”

“Once you put aside the right-wing smear campaigns, what is there?” Noeline continued. “This administration is presiding over the biggest boom in the postwar period. Clinton has evolved the United States from a fundamentally self-interested state to one that intervenes morally around the world. No one in history has promoted the human right to democracy like he has.”

“President Clinton bombed countries to distract people from impeachment,” Xavi rejoined. “If he is such a humanitarian, why do nothing to stop the genocide in Rwanda?”

“Hey,” Emerson interjected, “Clinton apologized to Africa for that.”

“He was honest enough to act in Kosovo
despite
impeachment,” Noeline argued.

“Got so boring in the end,” Duncan said. “Lewinsky and her beret—please don’t make me watch that clip again.”

“I’m on your side; that was insanely cruel,” Noeline said, though this wasn’t quite his point. “The Republicans obsess over tawdry bullshit because they’ve got nothing. They actually
want
stuff to get bad for the country. Seriously, you cannot support these people.”

“What do you think?” Duncan asked Tooly.

Events of the present day felt so distant to her. She’d been taught (by Humphrey, though she never mentioned him here) that the truth about humanity had been revealed in the rise of the Nazis, in the Holocaust, Soviet totalitarianism, the mindlessness of groupthink. Only outsiders had a chance at decency. The nature of any group was to annihilate the integrity of its members. “I always wonder what it’d be like if we were in wartime,” she said. “I mean, if we’d been living back then. Like you guys were students at a university and you were teaching at one, Noeline. Except that this was Nazi Germany, and I didn’t tell you anything about who I was because—”

“You
already
don’t tell us anything about who you are,” Xavi said, causing the others to laugh, since she had a deserved reputation for secrecy, evading questions about where in Brooklyn she lived, whom she lived with, what she did beyond hanging around here.

But Noeline wanted to hear this out. “Let her finish. So the scenario is Nazi Germany?”

“Right. And imagine that I was secretly Jewish. But during the meal you found out. That’s the sort of thing I wonder: Who would turn me in? I ask myself that about practically everyone I meet.”

“So,” Xavi asked, “would we?”

They all looked at her.

Tooly sat higher in her chair, flattered by the attention. “Okay, I’ll tell you.” She turned first to Emerson.

“I am one of the righteous Gentiles,” he said.

“You, I think, would not save me. Actually, you’d turn people in.”

“Fucking cow!”

Xavi clapped and laughed. “Me next. Come on.”

“I think that … you would protect me if it wasn’t too dangerous. If it was really risky, then no.”

“That’s fair. I can accept that.”

Noeline said, “Afraid to hear what you think of me.”

“Yes, you’d help me,” Tooly said. “You’d stand up for me. I’m pretty sure.”

“Hope so; I think so.”

“Me?” Duncan asked.

Her mouth went dry. Tooly had been so vain about their interest that she’d failed to know her answers beforehand. She realized what the next would be, and couldn’t stop it. “No,” she told Duncan. “In honesty, I don’t know that you would.”

He gave a short fake laugh.

She added, “But I don’t know.”

It was too late. She had wounded him, and knew it by the smile he tried to raise.

The conversation continued. Emerson took the floor again, droning on about kairos and chronos, Nietzsche and Bergson’s
fonction fabulatrice
. “Eschatological fictions of modernism require action. Just as—speaking of the Nazis again—Hitler’s myths required the purging of the Jews.”

“Required the purging?” Tooly said. “That’s a casually unpleasant thing to say.”

“You’re not Jewish for real, are you?”

“That’s not the point.”

“Have I offended you?”

“You have.”

“So,” he concluded, “you
are
Jewish.”

Noeline, avoiding eye contact, stood. “I’m doing the cleaning-up tonight.” She carried their plates into the kitchen, failing to upbraid Emerson, which she could have done so effectively. It was true—when you joined a group, even a couple, you lost integrity.