"How appalling: the Midwest," someone far down the table muttered.
And the man who held the waiter's sleeve with the importance he might lavish on a mine detector said, "Now, there's a minority group!" Laughter embraced the table while I observed my hu
sband's journey through one more lost control he held on polite conversation: the stiff smile accompanied by the studied tossing off of his third cognac and the over-steady pouring of his fourth. I'd forgotten that he bought the bottle.
I was so full I felt I'd temporarily lost my cleavage, but I said, "I'd like dessert. Would anyone else have anything else?" I asked, watching the studied tossing off of my husband's fourth cognac and the fantastically deliberate pouring of his fifth.
The waiter remembered his job; he fled to fetch the menu. And the man who had sought in the waiter an ethnic kinship boldly faced Brennbar and said with unctuous condescension, "I was merely trying to establish that religious discrimination -- at least historically -- is of a more subtle and pervasive kind than those forms of discrimination we have all jumped on the bandwagon about lately, with our cries of racist, sexist --"
Brennbar belched: a sharp shot like a brass bedpost ball flung at random into the kitchenware. I was familiar with this phase, too; I knew now that the dessert would come too late and that my husband scarcely needed to pause before he would launch forth.
Brennbar began: "The first form of discrimination I encountered while growing up is so subtle and pervasive that even to this day no group has been able to organize to protest it, no politician has dared mention it, no civil-liberty case has been taken to the courts. In no major, nor in any minor, city is there even a suitable ghetto where these sufferers can support one another. Discrimination against them is so total that they even discriminate against one another; they are ashamed to be what they are, they are ashamed of it when they're alone -- and all the more ashamed to be seen together."
"Listen," said the woman next to Brennbar, "if you're talking about homosexuality, what you're saying is no longer the case --"
"I'm talking about pimples," Brennbar said. "Acne," he added, with a meaningful and hurting glance about the table. "Zits," Brennbar said. The others, those who dared, stared into my husband's deeply cratered face as if they were peeking into a disaster ward in a foreign hospital. Alongside that terrible evidence, the fact that we were ordering dessert after brandy and cigars was of little consequence. "You all knew people with pimples," Brennbar accused them. "And pimples disgusted you, didn't they?" The diners all looked away from him, but their memory of his pockmarks must have been severe. Those indentations, those pits, appeared to have been made by stones. My God, he was lovely.
Nearby, but coming no nearer, the waiter hovered and held back the dessert menus from this queer party as if he feared the menus could be consumed by our silence.
"Do you think it was easy to go into a drugstore?" Brennbar asked. "A whole cosmetic counter devoted to reminding you, the saleslady grinning at your zits and saying loudly, 'What can I do for you?' As if she didn't know. Even your own parents were ashamed of you! Subtle indications that your pillowcase was not washed with the rest of the laundry, and at breakfast your mother would say to you, 'Dear, you know, don't you, that the blue washcloth is yours?' Then watch your sister's face pale; she excuses herself from the table and rushes to rewash. Talk about myths involved with discrimination! God, you'd think pimples were more communicative than clap! Some kid after gym class asks if someone has a comb; you offer him yours, you see his mind melt -- praying for an alternative, imagining his precious scalp alive with your zits. It was a common fable: If you saw a pimple, you assumed dirt. People who produce pus never wash.
"I swear on my sister's sweet ass," Brennbar said (he has no sister), "I washed my entire body three times a day. One day I washed my face eleven times. Every morning I went to the mirror to read the news. Like a body count in a war. Maybe the acne plaster killed two overnight, but four more have arrived. You learn to expect the greatest humiliation at the worst time: The morning of the night you achieved that blind date, there's a new one pulling your lips askew. Then one day, out of misguided pity or a vast and unfathomable cruelty, those few people who pass for your friends secure you a date with another pimple freak! Mortified, you both wait for it to end. Did they expect we would exchange remedies or count our permanent scars?
"Zitism!" Brennbar yelled. "That's what it is, zitism! And you're zitists, all of you, I'm sure of it," he muttered. "You couldn't begin to understand how awful..." His cigar was out; apparently shaken, he fumbled to relight it.
"No," said the man next to me. "I mean, yes ... I can understand how terrible that must have been for you, really."
"It's nothing like your problem," Brennbar said morosely.
"No, well, yes -- I mean, really, it is sort of what I mean," the man groped. "I can truly imagine how awful --"
"Imagine?" I said, my face alert, my mouth turning toward my best smile. "But what about what you said to me? You can't possibly feel it like he did. He had to live with it every day." I smiled at my husband. "Those were real pimples," I told my former attacker. "They're not to be imagined." Then I leaned across the table and touched Brennbar's hand affectionately. "Nice work, darling," I said. "You got him."
"Thanks," said Brennbar, totally relaxed. His cigar was relit; he passed the rim of his brandy snifter under his nose like a flower.
The woman next to Brennbar was unsure. She touched him gently, but urgently, and said to him, "Oh, I see, you were kidding -- sort of. Weren't you?" Brennbar consumed her in cigar smoke before she could read his eyes; I can always read his eyes.
"Well, not kidding, exactly -- were you, darling?" I said. "I think it was a metaphor," I told the others, and they looked at Brennbar with all the more suspicion. "It was a metaphor for growing up with intelligence in a stupid world. It meant that intelligence is so peculiar -- so rare -- that those of us with any real brains are constantly being discriminated against by the masses of stupidity around us." The entire table looked more pleased. Brennbar smoked; he could be an infuriating man.
"Of course," I went on, "people with intelligence really constitute one of the smallest minority groups. They have to endure the wallowing sheep-minded-ness and flagrant idiocy of what's forever being popular. Popularity is probably the greatest insult to an intelligent person. Hence," I said, with a gesture to Brennbar, who was resembling a still life, "acne is a perfect metaphor for the feeling of being unpopular, which every intelligent person must suffer. Intelligence is unpopular, of course. Nobody likes an intelligent person. Intelligent people are not to be trusted. We suspect that their intelligence hides a kind of perversity. It's a little like thinking that people with pimples are unclean."
"Well," began the man next to me -- he was warming up to the conversation, which he must have felt was returning to more comfortable ground. "Of course, the notion of the intellectual constituting a kind of ethnic group -- this is hardly new. America is predominantly anti-intellectual. Look at television. Professor types are all batty eccentrics with the sort of temperaments of grandmothers. All idealists are fanatics or saints, young Hitlers or young Christs. Children who read books wear glasses and secretly wish they could play baseball as well as the other kids. We prefer an armpit evaluation of a man. And we like his mind to be possessed by the kind of stubborn loyalty we admire in dogs. But I must say, Brennbar, to suggest that pimples are analogous to intellect --"
"Not intellect," I said. "Intelligence. There are as many stupid intellectuals as there are stupid baseball players. Intelligence simply means the perception of what is going on." But Brennbar was cloaked in an enigma of cigar smoke and even the woman next to him could not see through to his point of view.
The man who had momentarily experienced the illusion of returning to more comfortable ground said, "I would dispute with you, Mrs. Brennbar, that there are as many stupid intellectuals as there are stupid baseball players."
Brennbar released a warning belch: a long, tunneling, and muffled signal like a trash can thrown down an elevator shaft while you are far away, in a shower on the 31st floor ("Who's there?" you'd call out to your empty apartment).
"Dessert?" said the waiter, distributing menus. He must have tho
ught Brennbar had asked for one.
"I'll have the pommes normandes en belle vue, " said the faraway man who had found the Midwest appalling. His wife wanted the ponding alsacien, a cold dessert.
"I'd like the charlotte Malakoff aux fraises " said the woman next to Brennbar.
I said I'd have the mousseline au chocolat.