“I’d expect that Peter is afraid for his job.”
“Of course he is. And of course we’re going to have to leave. That’s inevitable. If it wasn’t when Michael decided to kill himself, it was as soon as that poisonous Mark DeAvecca starting flopping around Sheldon’s bathroom like a rag doll. That woman came to see Peter this morning, you know. Mark’s mother.”
“Liz Toliver. I’ve seen her on television.”
“Yes, well, so have I. That hardly matters, does it? Anyway, she’s breathing fire and when she breathes fire, The New York Times breathes fire along with her. The whole thing is such a mess, I don’t know where to start. That’s why I came. Maybe you can tell me where to start.”
“Where to start what?” Philip asked. “Explaining yourself? Getting Peter another job?”
“People come to you and tell you things. I know that. Everybody knows that. You’re everybody’s father confessor, except mine.”
“That’s quite all right, Alice. I wouldn’t want to be your father confessor.”
“I don’t have one,” Alice said, “I know better. But people talk to you, which means you know what they’re thinking.”
“They don’t talk to me as much as you think, Alice. And they don’t tell me their secrets. If that’s the kind of thing you want, hire a private detective and have them bugged.”
“I want to know what they’re saying. About Michael. About me.”
“Like I said, have them bugged.”
“It wouldn’t do any good to have them bugged now, would it? They’ve already done their talking. I don’t think you realize the seriousness of what’s been going on here.”
“Oh, I realize the seriousness, Alice,” Philip said, “I just don’t evaluate it the same way you do. Are people talking about the affair you had with Michael Feyre—”
“I didn’t have an ‘affair’ with Michael Feyre.”
“—then yes, they’re talking about that. They’ve been talking about it for months. Why should it matter to you that they’re talking about it now?”
“People don’t understand the problems a boy like Michael has finding himself,” Alice said. “They’re used to their own comfortable lives, and they just don’t realize how repressed somebody like Michael is. How oppressed. Oppressed by false consciousness, really, thinking that the system is just fine, really, it’s all their own fault if they constantly screw up. You have to give them back their self-respect if you’re going to teach them to see the world clearly, if you’re going to make them understand that they’re the victims here.”
“And you do that by fucking them in broom closets in the off-hours on weekends? Alice, try to make sense for once. You like to star in your own movie. You like to be the center of attention. You do it every year, and you’re only going to stop doing it when those lines on your face get deep enough so that the boys can’t help noticing.”
“I don’t have lines on my face.”
“Yes, Alice, you do, and in a year or two you’re going to face the choice all fair-skinned women do. You’re either going to have to go in for surgery or Retin-A, or you’re going to have to give it up. I’m betting on the surgery myself. You’ll never give it up, and Retin-A would mean no more long afternoon walks in the sun.”
“Michael,” Alice said, choosing her words carefully, “was a misguided but very intelligent boy. He could have become a great leader, a truly authentic leader—”
“Michael,” Philip said, “was a thug. He was a thug when he came to Windsor, and he was a thug when he hung himself. His mother could see him for what he was. He was a thug without pretensions, at least until you got to him. He was better off where he was.”
“He was better off as a thug?”
“Yes,” Philip said, “thugs rehabilitate themselves sometimes. I’ve seen it happen. Thugs with pretensions, though, they’re hooked worse than any junkie ever was.”
“If he was hooked, as you put it, why would he have killed himself?”
“I have no idea why he killed himself.”
“You really don’t understand,” Alice said. She was pacing. Philip thought she had been pacing for a long time, but he hadn’t noticed. His eyes were always going on and off the gun. It was fully loaded by now. She could pick it up and use it. He knew she wouldn’t.
She stopped at the wall mirror and checked herself out. She kept her back to him and said, “There’s a whole world out there that has nothing to do with the trivialities you concern yourself with. There’s a whole world that has nothing to do with equations and geometry proofs and logic templates or whatever it is you call them. There’s a world of people.”