“Don’t interrupt me.” Alexis snapped it out, impatient. Even while I watched for remorse to appear on her face and noted a distinct lack of it, she went on. “It has nothing to do with what’s just. It has to do with what’s effective.”
“What is it you’re saying, economics is the moral absolute?”
That stopped her. She put a bite of lobster salad into her mouth, and chewed, and thought.
I wondered if we were having a fight. If so, I wondered whether I could take that as a good sign.
“Why is it,” she asked, “that we think morality is so simple? No,” and she raised her hand to keep me from answering. “We do, we think it’s simple, and we think that ours is the right one. It’s an historic premise in this country. Is that because people don’t want to think things out, they just want to feel in the right?”
She was asking me. I tried to think of the answer to her question. Later, I promised myself, I would think about what had happened to the compliant woman I had been lunching with, before I’d made an offhand remark about economic sanctions.
“Speaking for myself,” I said carefully, “morality seems the essence of civilization. To act rightly is what makes civilized life possible. Or, at least, to intend to act rightly.”
“This from a man who walked away from his home, what? how long ago?”
It was like a punch in the stomach. “Fifteen years.”
“And have you been back?” I shook my head. “Told them where you are?” I shook my head.
She waited.
“You don’t know—” I began, but she brushed my words aside before I’d given them utterance.
“And you sit there condemning me for being a moral relativist. Don’t deny it, it’s what you were thinking.”
“Most relativists are easier to get along with than you are,” I snapped back.
“You could only think that if you haven’t ever thought about relativity. I mean really thought.”
“All right.” I took a breath and tried to steer the conversation back to a less lively topic. “If rather than withdrawing economic supports in order to use the power of money to control attitudes of another nation—and I do see your argument—if instead you invest more heavily so that you can have more influence, that may take longer but might work better, I’ll grant you that. What’s the difference though? Isn’t it the ends justifying the means? Which is the essence of moral relativity?”
I don’t know if women tend to move from the abstract to the personal as a general rule; in this instance Alexis did. “You’re right, of course,” she said. “So give me your justification for leaving home.”
“That wasn’t what I was talking about,” I protested. I hadn’t suspected her of arrogance. “There’s a difference between personal and public morality, you know that. You can’t just dismiss that.”
“Yes, I can,” she countered, and then she grinned at me. “I shouldn’t, and I don’t want to, but I can. I won’t, but that doesn’t mean I can’t.”
Utterly unselfconscious, entirely confident: this was not the woman I’d thought her. The fluffy hair, the pastel wardrobe—they were like those amusement park photographic setups where you step behind the cowboy, or astronaut, and put your face through. Half my mind was engaged in the parry and thrust of the conversation; the other half was wondering what it would be like to lie on a pillow beside her mind.
I wondered what she thought of Warhol. I wanted to talk to her about alternative energy and alternative schooling and alternative lifestyles. I thought she might well have made her way through Adam Smith and could make him comprehensible to me. How did she explain herself to herself? I wondered, curious.
“You’re an unusual woman, aren’t you?”
And she withdrew. Somehow. Like a day lily folding up at evening, becoming limp and pallid. Because of what I said, although not because of me. I could see it happening, in her face, in her groping at the side of her chair for the little purse she’d set down there.
“I have to go.” Her purse perched on her lap.
“So we aren’t going to spend the afternoon together?”
“I’m sorry.”
I could have persuaded her, I think, and I thought that she might have wanted me to. But I suspected that I shouldn’t, because of what she might think when she had time to think it over.
“I’m sorry too,” I said. I paid, we rose, we went outside to find a taxi, I put her into it and held the door open. “Have dinner with me, a week from Sunday. I’ll let you know where, but in the meantime, think about this. I’m hoping to marry you. I’m going to ask you about that.”
“But Gregor—”
“You’ve got ten days to think it over,” I said, and bent down to kiss her good-bye. When I lifted my mouth from hers, she was smiling.
“It’s eleven days,” she said.