Chapter 33: Monday, Dec. 18

In which Korky and Norman attend a ball, but don't dance (with each other), and Mr. Dearth tears into lawyers.

By Alfred Alcorn

Sep 26, 2001 | Diantha has not returned home since Friday, and frankly, I have become concerned for her welfare. She did call yesterday, mostly to tell me she wouldn't be going with me to the Curatorial Ball, which was held last night. She hinted that she come and bring Freddie Bain and Celeste Tangent. I hesitated a moment, but said no. I could imagine Herr Bain with a few drinks waxing theological with the Reverend Lopes.

My evening at that grotesque fortress cum mansion still resounds within me. I want, of course, to dismiss everything that madman said, but all of it lingers, like an intellectual infection. I keep running it around in my head. If we are made in the image and likeness of God, what percentage of our DNA, ontologically speaking, overlaps? Is God a joker? I'm sure the question is hardly a novel one, but I have wrestled with it repeatedly since that weird evening. Did God simply set in motion the awesome machinery of natural selection, then sit back and watch? Does He laugh?

It would have been worse, I'm sure, had I spent the night. But I sometimes wonder. Miss Tangent, her eyes, her hair, her touch, also hovers, so that I suffer a kind of low-grade erotomania in which she and Diantha and Elsbeth tease and tempt and leave me. They invest my sleeping dreams, night visions bizarre and poignant, from which I awake in torments of lust and heartache. I would have thought grief something pure, a kind of suffering that makes one innocent.

It's all mangled and mingled with my work-a-day life, the heavy routine of being a museum director. Not to mention my role as a part-time murder investigator. Who is Freddie Bain? Had I stayed there Friday night, might I have found out? Is he Moshe ben Rovich? It hardly seems likely, given his proclivities. How does Celeste Tangent fit into all this? It's obvious she works for him as a seductress. Ossmann. Penrood. And myself, had I not suffered the rectitude of indignation that night. What does he want with a powerful aphrodisiac if that is what he wants? To sell it as an illegal drug, obviously. What might Diantha be able to tell me when she comes back? If she comes back.

Korky and I went to the ball together, not as dates, of course. I certainly didn't dance with him. Still, we raised a few eyebrows when we came in. I could hear their thoughts. Is Norman coming out or just swinging on the closet door? But as times goes by, I find myself caring less and less what other people think. It has occurred to me, finally, that the standards of yesteryear, for better or worse, no longer apply.

Korky appears to be doing better, considering what he's been through. We had a drink at my house before setting out. Elsbeth's absence shouted at us from every cornice and corner. We clung together for a small tearful moment. But said nothing. One word and neither of us would have shut up for the evening. Which may have been cathartic in its own way.

As we drove over together, he confessed he suffers bouts of acute depression. He said he is still very interested in what he calls "the marvelous world of fine food," but that he can no longer tolerate the thought of anyone going hungry in the world. "I'm torn, Norman, about what to do with the rest of my life. I feel like volunteering for an international relief agency, you know, where you fly into one of those wretched African villages to hand out food to the starving. But it wouldn't be me."

"A man doesn't live by bread alone," I murmured inanely.

Which made him laugh. "No, he needs, baguettes, bagels, boules, franchese, focaccio. It's the difference between feeding and eating. But I still can't write about it. I don't know what I'm going to do now."

The Curatorial Ball wouldn't have been the same anyway. Rather than dismantle the Diorama of Paleolithic Life in Neanderthal Hall, as we've done for the past couple of years, we decided to hold the party in one of the function halls of the Miranda Hotel. We decorated it ourselves with streamers and those collapsible ornaments. We had a papier-mbchi menorah, some Kwanza symbols, and a pagan display provided by a local coven. We moved Herman the Neanderthal into the foyer and decked him out in a Santa suit. And the Warblers, getting just a bit creaky, sang all the old favorites. But it wasn't the same.

Indeed, few people seemed to care for the festivities at all, except as a setting to talk about Ariel Dearth and the news conference he held Saturday at the Law School.

"I think he just cracked," Lotte Landes told me, as we danced to "White Christmas." I refrained from telling her or anyone else how I had castigated him over the Jones-Spronger affair. Not that I think I had anything directly to do with Mr. Dearth's transformation. But it's not every day that a lawyer of substantial reputation publicly resigns from the state bar and denounces his profession at a press conference. I would have missed it myself, had Izzy not called me at home to tell me it was about to happen.

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