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she said matter-of-factly, "it would
be.
wearing athletic supporters.
Jock straps, you know."
"That's nothing more than locker-room transvestitism," said
Murray, "but I'll guess it is you Tibby, because everybody else in the
room sees you as anal-oriented. You at least know yourself."
"What does that mean?" asked Merle.
'~Probably
she thinks she harbors homosexual feelings, and the
way to defeat them is to talk about them," answered Murray.
At this point, Lil, who had been crouching in the corner of the
couch, said, "I think this whole business is perverse. How everybody
enjoys it."
"Verbal sublimation may be a way of ridding oneself of a com–
pulsion neurosis toward societally taboo sex feelings," said Lisa.
"But where is love in all this?" asked Lil.
Larry said,
"As
an old Stalinist friend would say: love is a
romantic excrescence of bankrupt bourgeois capitalism."
Everybody laughed, and right in the middle, Tibby farted.
"Oops," she said, and before she could blush we doubled up with
laugh~er.
Except Lil.
"I think it's a stupid game. Let's talk about something else."
But that finished it. We were all ready to go home.
"Now that Larry is back are you going to stay?" I asked Lil.
I offered to take her to my place. She agreed and as soon as we got
home she showered and went right to sleep. I thought she was faking
it, but when I jostled her, she murmured, "Mommy," and began to
snore a little.
I told Ben the story some days later. He was back over the meat
market on Hudson Street. "You know," he said, "Lil is really all
right. I mean that Marsha Weinstein crowd, I hate it." He stared
soupily at a glass of warm Scotch. "I read an article in this week's
Reporter
about the fragmented man. This guy said, I think it was
Oscar Jones, who wrote that study of the light-skinned Negro as
the
symbol of the alienated man. He's up at Columbia in C. Wright
Mills's place. Wasn't that a tragic thing? Anyway, Jones discussed the
possibility that we have lost a real work tradition and are seeking
substitute gratification through the arts. He calls it cultural tunneliqg,
whereby the true emotions of man, work-directed, have gone under-
