Gabriele had not been able to concentrate on the volleyball game with Hilda from thinking of her son; and exploiting this weakness through unscrupulous serves, Hilda had won the game. Now, riding on the bus, she was no less irritated than before. It was an irritation at being reminded of her own negligence. By bringing a being into the world one was contractually obligated to nature to care for him and to see that his life came to good. Such a woman was obligated to forfeit her own growth to grow offspring. This was her own moral code gained from contemplative reason and she had violated it.
Gabriele stared at a couple of college students dressed in their uniforms. The male was comparing his large dark hand to the female's smaller and lighter one. This hand-play caused Gabriele's face to cringe in repulsion. This rapacious need to extend beyond oneself in mergers with other persons violated human decency. To want to know more, be more, in all life's activities was the precept of Aristotle; and certainly this girl wanted to know what it would be like to wear the man, to share his thoughts, and to merge with him. And her body was telling her there was intimacy in this most intense lowly pleasure and pain of him riding within her. Still, the lesser knowledge that it was, it was repugnant by being so void of anything wise. These human beings linked their cars so as to be declared a train as if a car alone really were so small. The linking of a series of defective cars running along on a defective track surely was not a successful attempt at extension; and from now on, she vowed, her caboose would not be banged into such links.
A woman who was standing with her child moved up to the front of the bus and sat the child on a padded hump of the transmission near the bus driver's gear shift. It was obviously difficult for her to keep the girl seated and the mother applied reasoning with admirable patience and self-restraint. Although Gabriele could not hear what the mother was whispering to the fidgeting child, she heard the child's responses of "Si" and this appeal to reason seemed lovely. It was the length of the talk and the delicacy by which the woman addressed the child's sensitivities that saturated Gabriele in beauty. She was beginning to see motherhood in a new light. She was beginning to think that these preconceived notions that housed her were houses of straw and could easily be blown away.
Perhaps, she thought, beyond conveniences, vaccines, and modern gadgets that often reduced "mental prostitution" to a 5 day affair, on rare occasions one stumbled across enlightenment in modern society that heretofore rested in voluminous, rarely read publications of deceased sages. Perhaps "God," this unfathomable entity who reacted indifferently to human affairs including thousands perishing hideously in the World Trade Center, was now sticking his tongue out at her and calling her a "know-it-all" in such an invigorating event; but it defied logic that a deity who would smash entire civilizations in the palms of its hands as if humans were mosquitoes would think her, this lone individual, worthy of the contempt and enlightenment of the tongue gesture. Even more, why should she believe that God sat her on the bus to see this mother and child as if she were the honored guest in the audience of a great symposium. Not being satisfied with her atheistic conclusions in this strange world, she was again left with the conclusion that something did exist out there, that permanent substance that was the entity or the prime mover, and it existed outside human logic.
A couple hours later, still in shorts and sunglasses (bathing suits worn underneath), she and Hilda sat down at an outdoor table of the lesbian pub. They were in the middle of dinner and a fourth shot of undiluted tequila when a woman uneventfully passed by their table and went inside. "Nice ass!" said Hilda.
"Huh? For Heaven's sake it is a padded seat and tool for excrement. Really, Hilda, is there nice and mean, nice and ugly, nice and not useful to such things unless a fluke happens where one was born without an ass." It was then that she decided to return to America.
In her sleep on an American Airlines flight from San Diego to Albany Gabriele dreamed that she was with Hilda once again on the beach. They were in front of a volleyball net witnessing the descending sun when Hilda broke the ineffable silence.
"You say bullshit all the time. The things you say are so true and so false. You are so profound about temporary families, selfish children, marriage as weak people running away from the solitude that is part of inhabiting one's head, that work is prostitution, things as ball and chains to carry around, claiming one's essence, blah blah, but life isn't objective. It is subjective — so you miss your husband, son, and things because being without them would make you naked."
Gabriele then took off her shirt in protest. With icy eyes, and bouncing boobs, she attempted successful counter maneuvers against Hilda' slam dunk serves. Her hardness crackled through the air beyond an impassively proud countenance; but she justified it in her own mind, the only mind that mattered in such petty but necessary judgment calls. She told herself that even if this wariness of social situations were an imperfect instinct of primitive man to quickly assess the danger of a given social situation its having persisted to present to free one of her social instinct was to its merit.
She woke up from a tray of food being passed unto her. She felt a peculiar sense of being unsettled and wanting to know what was real and what was unreal. She wanted to find out how to keep from being swept up into one illusion or another—she who in recreation flitted facts in her imagination from biographical profiles of the cabinet members of Germany and the names of successive presidents of Moldavia to the characteristics of albino frogs, myriad owls, and Henry and William James. Was the present moment best celebrated in thought and contemplation, in action, in study, a shot of tequila and glib, frivolous talk with Hilda at the lesbian pub, a swim, and a movement of limbs? Was it possible to live life without being in its illusions? Hilda began to fade away and Nathaniel ("Adagio") and the Man With the Unmemorable Name became stronger.