The Summer Without Men

you want from me now?
B.I.:  Hope.
    I couldn’t answer “hope” until the next day. The reversal I had dreamed of had come, and I felt as hard as a piece of flint. My answer to the big B. arrived in the morning: “Woo me.”
    And he, in high Romantic style, wrote back, “Okay.”
    *   *   *
     
    Mr. Nobody had not written in some time, and I began to worry. We had been lobbing balls back and forth on the subject of play, that is, playing with play. He threw me a Derridian fastball first, the endless play of logos, round and round we go without end and without resolution, and it’s all in the text, the doing and the undoing, then I threw back Freud’s “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,” in which the esteemed doctor tells us that transference, the spooky place between analyst and patient, is like a spielplatz, a playground, a terrain somewhere between illness and real life, where one can become the other, and then he hurled back a beautiful quote from the great mountain himself: “If anyone tells me that it is degrading to the Muses to use them only as a plaything and a pastime, he does not know, as I do, the value of pleasure, play, and pastime. I would almost say that any other aim is ridiculous.” I fired back with Winnicott and Vygotsky, the latter dead since 1934 but a brand-new love of mine, and after that, my spouting phantom went silent.
    I decided too much time had passed: “Everything okay? I’m thinking of you. Mia.”
    *   *   *
     
    The book club is big. It has been sprouting up like proverbial fungi all over the place, and it is a cultural fm dominated almost entirely by women. In fact, reading fiction is often regarded as a womanly pursuit these days. Lots of women read fiction. Most men don’t. Women read fiction written by women and by men. Most men don’t. If a man opens a novel, he likes to have a masculine name on the cover; it’s reassuring somehow. You never know what might happen to that external genitalia if you immerse yourself in imaginary doings concocted by someone with the goods on the inside. Moreover, men like to boast about their neglect of fiction: “I don’t read fiction, but my wife does.” The contemporary literary imagination, it seems, emanates a distinctly feminine perfume. Recall Sabbatini: we women have the gift of gab. But truth be told, we have been enthusiastic consumers of the novel since its birth in the late seventeenth century and, at that time, novel reading gave off an aroma of the clandestine. The delicate feminine mind, as you will remember from past rants inside this selfsame book, could be easily dented by exposure to literature, the novel especially, with its stories of passion and betrayal, with its mad monks and libertines, its heaving bosoms and Mr. B.’s, its ravagers and ravagees. As a pastime for young ladies, reading novels was flushed pink for the risqué. The logic: Reading is a private pursuit, one that often takes place behind closed doors. A young lady might retreat with a book, might even take it into her boudoir, and there, reclining on her silken sheets, imbibing the thrills and chills manufactured by writerly quills, one of her hands, one not absolutely needed to grip the little volume, might wander. The fear, in short, was one-handed reading.
    On Saturday at five in the afternoon, the Rolling Meadows Book Club met in the library over small sandwiches and even smaller glasses of wine to discuss the novelist Jane Austen, author of Persuasion, ironic observer, precise dissector of human feeling, stylist from heaven, and an author who did away with perverted monks but retained her own version of virtue rewarded. Both loved and detested, she has kept her critics hopping. “Any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen,” said America’s literary darling Mark Twain. “Even if it contains no other book.” Carlyle called her books “dismal trash.” But today, too, she is accused of “narrowness” and “claustrophobia” and dismissed as a writer for women. Life in the provinces, unworthy of remark? Women’s travails, of no import? It’s okay when it’s Flaubert, of course. Pity the idiots.
    You may recall that I had been asked to introduce the proceedings. With some editing here and there and taming of my prose from the incendiary to the palatable, as well as additional rigmarole about the Great Jane teetering between two literary eras and inventing a new road for the