Zandy's Bride

"It is helpful to follow Kant's lead, and to think about the Enlightenment as a series of interlocking, and sometimes warring problems and debates."--Dorinda Outram

There is a fleeting moment in Nicolas Le Floch, in or around the 2010 series where young Louis has yet to meet the guillotine, where Jerome, in costume, lying on the grass, is in process of proposing marriage to the casting director's vision of Nicolas's true love, an admiral's daughter, if I am not mistaken, and both actors momentarily merge irony and come out of character with a shared complicity between them, and if I was even seven years younger and healthier, Jerome Robart would have my shallow exuberance of candy gloss lust stalking his heels because of his ability to seduce with such imperfect witticism, such beautiful eyes, so prospective, limpid almond irises reminiscent of my puppy love for the instructor who wanted to upper track me for Harvard, I can never allow myself to long like that again, but remember. Where were we, John and I? Chance meeting in the dim murky interior of the library. He sat, as I am always sitting-- what is it like to walk? I can never know-- I said something, one of my spastic things before my contorted sensibilities fell over themselves in my dormitory bunk. I said something that amused the Tassoni with a fuller mane on his head, weird hair, almost frizzy, and his his eyes too held what a man's eyes hold and any woman worth her salt wants and dared to hope.

No one thinks about dropping acid at such times, or his alcoholism, or the belabored cutting of rejection curdled into bitterness, or his pedagogical dryness so easily settled into in middle age. I don't know Gail at all, but can easily project myself into their relationship and hold my nose apace while she tugs John along by his nose ring. (I knew him well enough once to know that all his intellectual efforts as a good environmentalist are to please her, and part of me says "ew!")

I never had that look that Jerome projects with such tasty poignancy. I've had men, and Frank, but Frank is too stupid to realize, within himself, that he wanted me so that I would pamper, baby him, and let him manhandle my body like an impotent rapist; as a half bred pig, that was neither desire nor love, and the very fact that he didn't fight to keep me says enough about that, in our fickle human hearts, why an invalid dared to aspire to that level of normalcy in her youth, still does, not partial, barring sensory deficits like blindness or hearing loss, to disabled men, not accepting the reality of ableism, that I can't say. Activists, like the ailing Cassie James, might say it is a delusional escape valve, but neither masculine class ever really chose to see me before they saw the spastic savant, and as Jerome said, with a trill of bemusement, relieved that the take was concluding, "C'est dure!"

Clarity Media sent me my severance commission, and that too is an irony of embittered circumstance, wondering if I'm waiting for a final breaking point despite the shattering crises of the turn of the century's fresh decade. What do we have left within the embers?