Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [36]
The seniors and their families and the rest of the faculty were having lunch in the Pavilion. Everybody got a lobster which had been boiled alive.
I NEVER CONSIDERED making a pass at Marilyn, although she was reasonably attractive and unattached. I don’t know why that is. There may have been some sort of incest taboo operating, as though we were brother and sister, since we had both been in Vietnam.
She is dead now, buried next to the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun goes down. She was evidently hit by a stray bullet. Who in his right mind would have taken dead aim at her?
Remembering her now, I wonder if I wasn’t in love with her, even though we avoided talking to each other as much as possible.
MAYBE I SHOULD put her on a very short list indeed: all the women I loved. That would be Marilyn, I think, and Margaret during the first 4 years or so of our marriage, before I came home with the clap. I was also very fond of Harriet Gummer, the war correspondent for The Des Moines Register, who, it turns out, bore me a son after our love affair in Manila. I think I felt what could be called love for Zuzu Johnson, whose husband was crucified. And I had a deep, thoroughly reciprocated, multidimensioned friendship with Muriel Peck, who was a bar-tender at the Black Cat Café the day I was fired, who later became a member of the English Department.
End of list.
Muriel, too, is buried next to the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun goes down.
Harriet Gummer is also dead, but out in Iowa.
Hey, girls, wait for me, wait for me.
I DON’T EXPECT to break a world’s record with the number of women I made love to, whether I loved them or not. As far as I am concerned, the record set by Georges Simenon, the French mystery writer, can stand for all time. According to his obituary in The New York Times, he copulated with 3 different women a day for years and years.
MARILYN SHAW AND I hadn’t known each other in Vietnam, but we had a friend in common there, Sam Wakefield. Afterward, he had hired both of us for Tarkington, and then committed suicide for reasons unclear even to himself, judging from the plagiarized note he left on his bedside table.
He and his wife, who would become Tarkington’s Dean of Women, were sleeping in separate rooms by then.
SAM WAKEFIELD, IN my opinion, saved Marilyn’s and my lives before he gave up on his own. If he hadn’t hired both of us for Tarkington, where we both became very good teachers of the learning-disabled, I don’t know what would have become of either of us. When we passed yet again like ships in the night on the Quadrangle, with me on my way to get fired, I was, incredibly, a tenured Full Professor of Physics and she was a tenured Full Professor of Life Sciences!
When I was still a teacher here, I asked GRIOT™, the most popular computer game at the Pahlavi Pavilion, what might have become of me after the war instead of what really happened. The way you play GRIOT™, of course, is to tell the computer the age and race and degree of education and present situation and drug use, if any, and so on of a person. The person doesn’t have to be real. The computer doesn’t ask if the person is real or not. It doesn’t care about anything. It especially doesn’t care about hurting people’s feelings. You load it up with details about a life, real or imagined, and then it spits out a story about what was likely to happen to him or her. This story is based on what has happened to real persons with the same general specifications.
GRIOT™ won’t work without certain pieces of information. If you leave out race, for instance, it flashes the words “ethnic origin” on its screen, and stops cold. If it doesn’t know that, it can’t go on. The same with education.
I didn’t tell GRIOT™ that I had landed a job I loved here. I told it only about my life up to the