Chapter 8

Act I, Scene III

Lights come up on Thomas McGrew IV, in his undershirt, holding his long sleeved shirt out in front of him.  Thomas McGrew III sits watching him. He is drinking a cup of tea.

TMGIII (Looking up the slide at TMGIV): What are you going to do?

Thomas McGrew IV scowls at the shirt, then sits down to tie one sleeve around his wrist.  This is a complicated procedure that entails pinching the body of the shirt between his knees. Then he stands and holds his arm in the air to judge how far the shirt hangs down. He scowls: it’s not long enough.  He pulls off his belt.

TMGIII: That won’t work.

Thomas McGrew IV loops a loose end of the shirt through the belt buckle and holds his arm up again.  The shirt and belt, tied together, hang down to his feet.

TMGIII (Holds up a tea pot): Have some tea.  It’ll calm your nerves.

Thomas McGrew IV takes off his pants.

TMGIII: Come on now.

In only his underwear, Thomas McGrew IV sits again to tie the pants to the belt.  When he stands and lifts his arm again, his clothing forms a long, floppy rope about twice as long as his body.  He nods.

TMGIV: Watch.

He tosses the end of his clothing-rope into the air.  The end of his pants leg hits a higher spot on the slide.  It rests there for a moment, then slides down slowly, at a creeping pace, until it has returned to him.

TMGIII: There’s nothing to attach it to.

TMGIV (Angry, embarrassed): Well, that’s extremely helpful. Don’t you think I know that?

TMGIII: Drink some tea and try to relax a bit.

TMGIV (Stomps his foot on the slide, sending vibrations up and down): I AM RELAXED.

TMGIII: Put your clothes on and have some tea.

* * *

Whenever Gavin needed to talk to Marjorie Mendelssohn—two dactyls, she joked—she wanted to meet at Café Firenze, not her office.  It was the artsier of the two undergraduate coffee shops on Main Street.  Students here wore thick knitted scarves and serious dark sweaters.   The ones in New Buffalo sweatshirts and baseball caps went to College Grounds, two doors over. 

She was always ten minutes late, but since she was one of Gavin’s dissertation advisors, he needed to show up on time and wait for her.  At least it was a nice place to sit.  Today they had a fire going and the air smelled like gingerbread lattes. He sipped his black coffee and pretended to read the photocopied article on the table in front of him.  But mostly he was watching Sinder’s advisor, Randy Ledbetter, across the room.  Jolly and white-bearded, he sat surrounded by philosophy undergrads at his regular table in the corner, holding forth like Socrates.

“I guess that depends on how you define Utilitarian,” he chortled, and all the undergrads burst out in peals of sardonic snickering.   One baby-faced freshman on the outskirts, earnest and nerdy, almost choked on her Italian soda.  

Marjorie Mendelssohn seated herself across from him (Gavin checked the clock, yes, ten past). She was tall with good posture and short, angry hair.  He had assumed she was a lesbian for years, but it turned out she was just one of those dykey-looking middle-aged feminists.  Seriously, she was married to a man and they had kids and everything.   

“I had a chance to skim this,” she said, laying an unstapled copy of his revised chapter on the table.  At his dissertation defense back in October, she had fumed: How can you have a chapter on abjection in Stump without any discussion of The Divine Sharpness?  Easy.  Because everyone wrote about abjection in The Divine Sharpness.  Grover Maloney alone had written about it in no fewer than four articles and two book chapters. It seems to be working out perfectly well for him, Marjorie had said.

Now he had revised it for her, as promised, had sent it to her over a week ago, they had set up this meeting to discuss it, and she had had a chance to skim it?  That was a bad sign.  That, and the fact that she hadn’t taken off her gloves or thick wool coat.  This wasn’t going to be a good meeting.  

“So, I have to tell you.” Marjorie pulled her extremely straight back up straighter, leaning her head out of striking distance.  “I still don’t buy your use of abjection here.”

Gavin looked past her at Randy Ledbetter, scratching his chin as he listened to the serious, dark-haired girl next to him.  Maybe I should grow a beard.

Marjorie flipped three pages into a sloppy pile before finding one that was scrawled over in purple pen.

“You say here that the study of abjection ‘has too often been directed towards abject substances—blood, vomit, feces—rather than to the correlative fears and anxieties they represent.’”

“Right,” Gavin said. “That’s the whole point of the chapter.”

She frowned and flipped a few more pages, looking for purple ink. 

“The play’s true sense of abjection,” she read, using one of those scare-quote voices, “is evoked by the strained relations between Bo (the body) and Mi (the mind), each initially unwilling to acknowledge the other’s existence, then increasingly desperate to subsume him.  Only by dominating his counterpart can Bo or Mi resolve the anxiety of duality and achieve a stable, comforting monism.  And yet for the spectator, as for Bo and Mi themselves, the resolution of their palpable tension can only bring further horror and a deepened sense of abjection, as we recognize our own sublimated desires to obliterate those parts of ourselves that defy orderly categorization. Indeed, what could be more grotesque than a body attempting to devour a mind, or a mind to devour a body?”

She lowered the paper and stared at him, her unplucked eyebrows furrowed, pleading, like having to read his chapter was causing her physical pain.

“You don’t see the problem,” she said.

Gavin shook his head.  Why don’t you just fucking tell me.

She slapped the pages down on the table and spread her leather-clad hands across them.  The surface of Gavin’s coffee shook from the impact.  It was the only drink on the table. Marjorie hadn’t ordered anything.

“Why,” she asked, her mouth twisted in a kind of triumphant sneer, “are you so afraid to write about bodies?”

No, no, no. This was all wrong.  Didn’t she understand?  I did this for you. He hadn’t even wanted to write about The Divine Sharpness.  This part of the chapter was a gift, the revision he had written for no purpose at all except to please her.  

 “I am writing about bodies.”  He tried to sound normal, unaffected, like her rhetorical question hadn’t chilled his blood to an iciness even the roaring fire couldn’t penetrate. Just a question. “I’m writing about mind/body dualism and the fundamental instability of the—”

“Actual bodies!  Has it even occurred to you that you are writing about a play whose final scene depicts two protagonists using their teeth and fingernails to tear a giant, bloody heart into shreds of raw meat?”

Gavin studied the fury in her eyes, cold like murder, and realized: she hates me.  How had he never noticed it before, during the past two years that they had worked together?  He thought she was bitchy, for sure, prone to lash out.  But none of that was anything personal.

“And what you want to discuss is the conflict between the mind and the body?” She rolled her eyes, like this was the stupidest thing anyone had ever wanted to discuss, and not, you know, one of the most enduring conundrums in the history of human thought. “How are you going to write about the abject without writing about the stuff of abjection?  It's cowardly, and it seems to be missing the point.”

You’re missing the point! The point of what all that physical stuff represents: the void, the fear of death, the human condition!

Gavin looked over at Randy Ledbetter’s corner, hoping to make eye contact, to send a telepathic plea for help.  Most of the undergrads had left, but Randy was still talking to the last of them, two skinny guys clutching books on symbolic logic. 

“You perform the most convoluted rhetorical acrobatics, all to avoid discussing the specificity of actual people’s physical bodies. Your fear of the body, especially your squeamishness about blood, strikes me as deeply misogynistic.”  

She was lifting her bag over her shoulder now, about to stand up and leave, nothing more to say to him. 

“So, then…” Gavin said.

“Listen.”  She didn’t put her bag down, but at least she stayed seated.  “I’m going to approve your dissertation.  Clearly you’ve worked very hard on it, and Frick seems to buy your argument.  God knows there are probably all kinds of jobs waiting for people like you.”

“Thanks.”  His voice was barely a whisper.  He had to force it.

Then, as though she had given him some kind of socially acceptable goodbye, she was gone, leaving Gavin’s rejected chapter on the table.  He picked it up, shook the papers into a neat stack,  and shoved it under the article he was reading.

“Bad meeting?”

It was Randy Ledbetter, bundled in a ski parka and sheepskin hat.  He had appeared across the table in the seat Marjorie had just vacated, smiling and rosy-cheeked.  They had never really met, never been formally introduced at any rate.  But at this moment, Gavin kind of wanted to climb into his lap and curl up in his puffy jacket.

“She hates my dissertation.”

“You know,” Randy said, pulling on his gloves. “When I studied with John Rawls at Harvard, he told me the secret to surviving as an academic.  Never complain.  Things are only going badly if you think they are. This stuff is all a game, isn’t it, and you can win it with your mind.”

“Okay,” Gavin said. “I guess it’s going all right then.”

Randy winked a wise, wrinkly eye at him. “That’s the spirit.” He stood, lifted his gloved hand and gave Gavin a manly clap on the shoulder before he turned and left. 

<Chapter 7
Chapter 9>