George Washington
Excerpt: "Banting at Yale"
CHAPTER 9. THE IMMORTAL WORDS of GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON
That thought had no place on such a sunny October morning, but Banting gloomily noted that people were doomed to repeat the lives of all that lived before, the themes and challenges revisited, and the same bad decisions suffered yet again.
Original ideas were a myth.
Much in the same way a man is born, grows to know the ways of the world, becomes bitter and dies, Banting acknowledged this fate as inescapable. For all their imagined uniqueness, men were far too common in their devices and desires, the perceptions and their fate. Nor were the details or circumstances necessarily that different. Each on occasion was deluded by some temporary loss of contact with his reality and current surroundings that he might be unusual but when the tale had run its course, the endings were and would be ever the same.
Banting visualized life, his own life, as the continual attempt to transcend his time-worn biological program. He was by all evidence that he could garner, a scientist. Scientists were supposed to remain in cloistered ivory towers and know little of the world of the street, yet Banting would create the fantasy based on what he read, ignoring what he experienced to the contrary.
Would a testament disguised as fiction crafted from the experience of a young scientist, meet the rancor that greeted the dilettante author of fiction posing as a scientist? Banting sniffed at the literary and liberal arts establishment as men whose wells had dried long since, and so sought words hauled up from wells other than their own. Banting was born to his native language, as all free men were, and would not suffer the dictates of any seeking to divert his success or his sense of style or taste.
The telephone rang.
Banting knew it could only be a few people, and so answered it.
“Hello?”
“Hello, it’s me.”
Banting wondered what the Hell that meant except that women would always favor the personal pronoun me over their given names for some obscure reason beyond his comprehension.
“Pafka?”
“Oh I got some pictures of your puss…” she started.
“Puss? What do you mean? The damn cat you gave me has the nasty habit of staring me in the face until I relent and wake up. You know what I mean. And when I do sit-ups next to the bed, it’s game time…The cat luxuriates with her head upside down over the side of the bed and swats as my sweating, grunting head comes up and…”
“Your face, Dummy…” Pafka was making an excuse for calling him about the Biology Department reception that evening. She then went on and on about her photography clients, rich Jewish women who wanted to be professional models, but had not been discovered.
Banting, once into the slapstick spirit of the call, implied, half facetiously, she modify her business card to read Headed for stardom/ Beautiful People: by Appointment Only.
“Hey, can I help it if only beautiful, sexy women want to sit for my lens?” she laughed, knowing that he knew and ignored her personal romantic preferences. Perhaps portrait photography was her best shot at getting a date, but kidding aside, she was as brilliant at her craft as she was hilarious.
“Right! Or on the flip side of that same business card, Pafka/Big Game Hunter: I only Shoot for Trophies.” For the briefest instant, the shade of Hemingway crossed his mind, resurrected in its most modern reincarnation as a great lesbian photographer with a hidden agenda and a stable of spectacular but as yet unknown rising and ambitious starlets in tow.
“So I went over to this woman’s house,” she began. “She’s good-looking but nothing great. She wants to be a star and figures all she needs is the right angle and the right photographer. We hit it off pretty well, and she liked the sitting. When the shots of her and her kid came back, the kid looked like a thalidomide baby, but Jaynie said ‘Just wait, the mother will love them..’ Well, she was right, she did. She really liked all the portraits. Y’know I took sixty and printed the best eight. This woman really wants to be a star. She loved being the center of attention, and y’know what? She wants to do it again, something more dramatic. I said, forget the dramatic, why don’t we just dress up…”
Banting had to interrupt but was hesitant as he knew Suzy’s stories always got better if you let ‘er go.
He could imagine Pafka dressing up and wondered how soon after that the handcuffs and velvet-lined chains might come out.
It was suddenly clear why she called Banting that Saturday. She wanted to be invited to the Biology reception as Banting’s date, which he had refused to do. However, he would meet her there. Then she assumed the mock-shy tone of a woman who begs a compliment and reassurance. Banting said nothing about her hair looking like Bozo, however she was by far a more brilliant and funny conversationalist than any circus clown who ever lived, bar none, and he delighted in her company.
Except, “…Well, you could, wear very long shoes to match your outlook…”
Suzy giggled too and came to realize that a forced invitation was hopeless, and that the most she could expect was some outrageous conversation and an incessant and mutual barrage of insults and one-upmanship if they both attended that evening.
It irritated Banting that several of the women at the lab had hinted at the upcoming reception. He was safely engaged and felt no inclination in any manner but properly single and shortly married in due course. A brief, fashionably late cameo appearance, as Banting would have it. There was nothing so inelegant as to press one’s company on others, to arrive too early and too eagerly or to stay past late at such events. The ideal was to arrive when an audience had already gathered to mark and witness an entrance, preferably accompanied by some arm candy with a scandalously patent cleavage and leg, make the rounds, perhaps cause a minor disturbance of the kind attendees would later gossip about, then to leave early, as if pressed by more important engagements too important to miss.
There was a social protocol to such occasions, and a definite pecking order to be observed. One must not, as a Fellow, speak too openly with students unless they were attractive young women. One must in the immortal and pragmatic words of George Washington himself, treat equals with condescension and inferiors with politeness and seem on familiar terms with full time faculty, especially the prominent ones like Frank. It was, of course, unfortunate and inconvenient that Frank himself was recuperating in the hospital and would have to miss his own party as Chairman of the Biology Department.
Banting was by then aware that just such gatherings were staged to establish unseen dominance relationships among academic professionals. If one had status, here was an event to assert it. Going stag had the benefit of bringing attention, but the liability that some might consider him unworthy of a stunning companion that fit the occasion. This did not bother him. He had sustained and abetted the reputation as somewhat antisocial, cynical and generally unpleasant unless he was drinking in which case he might make an exception and revert to being outrageous.
He had planned to abstain from drinking to bring attention upon his reputation. His nonappearance at dinner Thursday night had great value as a minor scandal among the laboratory staff.
He had mentioned he might attend, and in spite of Mikie’s good-natured derision, had the attention to his own benefit, an assertion of his own independence if not contempt for some company present.
Such behavior, Banting reasoned, made a man’s time of greater value in the eyes of others. If he would always appear on demand, and always appear generally available, people would hold him in contempt for familiarity. This was the secret of leaders, to be nominally available and agreeable at all times, but to appear too busy to be taken for granted. He would take no responsibility to appear at all times and designated places.
The other element of such occasions was to arrive stag but to leave escorted. He had no seductive intentions in mind but realized just how valuable such behavior would be toward the establishment of his name in the department, much as was Mikie’s enviable reputation and well established, too.
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