Sleeping Your Way To The Top - A Woman's Birthright

 'Watch your P's and Q's', Roberta Allen's mother said to her as she always had, but this time as her daughter was about to join the working world, she was more concerned.  Bobbi Allen had always been a precocious child - a Lolita, a girl who even before puberty was aware of her femininity, her sexuality, and her allure, and this could lead to trouble; but Mrs. Allen never needed to worry.  Her daughter despite or because of her precocity would not only find her way, but find the best way.  

Roberta's sexual awareness came early.  There was the time that she held Johnny Vibberts' hand and led him to 'my secret lair', a bower of soft pine needles on a bed of moss where she enticed the eight-year old and stood there naked, drops of water like jewels on her skin, a warm smile on her face, and arms open to embrace him just as she had seen a hundred times before on As The World Turns, the soap opera her mother watched every evening, a clandestine lesson for the young girl who, supposed to be in bed, leaned over the banister and caught glimpses of Lance kissing Etheria. 

Johnny stood there as dumb as a stone, flummoxed by a sight he couldn't imagine, so tightly corseted and primly bound was his mother.  In fact he knew there was supposed to be a difference between boys and girls, something to do with 'equipment' as his father referred to it; but nothing more, no details, no descriptions of the work site, the machinery, or its purpose. 

If anything, it all had to do with God's creation and its multiplication, but that concept was too vague and indistinct for a second-grader, so when Bobbi Allen stood there naked without the equipment that Johnny had, he had a glimmering of what his father meant.  Still, he was unsure of what to do. Gawking was not the right response, especially when she unbuttoned his shirt. 

Bobbi stormed out of the woods, startling a partridge in the hemlocks which flapped up and roosted on the tall oak that towered over all else in the woods.  That she had picked  a piece of tired fruit from the bushel didn't mean they were all tired. 

A learning experience - some men are born with sexual awareness and others are not.  Some just stand there like dumb Johnny Vibberts while others are fascinated, can't look away, and want more.  There is a bell curve for everything, and sexual sentience, desire, and vulnerability are no different. Picking the right man for sexual pleasure, support, well-being and above all success is a matter of discernment; and of all Bobbi Allen's many talents, that was her finest. 

Roberta Allen was a trifecta, the perfect storm for making her way in the world.  She was intelligent, willful, and sexually aware - more than any of the boys in her class or her school, dullards for the most part. Ironically those that were alert and eager for sex were often half-wits and retards no different than the barnyard animals she saw rutting on her Uncle Martin's farm. Those that were attractive were diffident, uninterested in girly things but sexual adventurers, self-confident and tough competitors, not easily manipulated and used. 

Most others fell under the arc of the bell curve, boys who had been brought up in stable nuclear families, raised to respect their mothers for their solicitude and love, and their fathers for their discipline and ambition.  These were Bobbi's targets - the ones that would be successful, patient with women, and eager to please. 

One should not get the impression that Roberta had a one-track mind, a sexually obsessive one.  On the contrary, she had an early aptitude for mathematics and before she was out of middle school she was toying with imaginary numbers and infinite series.  Her interest was not in sex per se but as an instrument of success.  The strongest men could be invincible in the boardroom, but when it came to women, they were as docile, complaisant, and eager as a starstruck knight. 

Shakespeare understood this best, and the women of his Comedies all could run rings around the hapless suitors who came calling.  Portia knew that she was the desirable, sweet stamen to the bees buzzing around her flower and knew that they couldn't keep away.  So one by one they came to win her hand and were asked only to guess where her maidenhood lay - in a silver, gold, or lead casket - and one by one they made absolute fools of themselves, tangled in poetic excess, self-assured inspiration, and downright stupidity. 

Rosalind, Beatrice, and Viola, heroines in Shakespeare's other Comedies were no different.  Men were helpless at their hands.  There was little that their status, patriarchy, or inherited wealth could do when matched against these canny women. 

Now, the cheesy little tarts of Hollywood who will bed a producer after an incidental meeting have nothing in common with these Shakespearean ladies - or Roberta for that matter who knew that sexual favors were part of a woman's arsenal, but only deployed when strategically necessary and only to produce the intimidating results desired. 

Feminists who felt that women were really not the independent, strong creatures they had envisaged but weak, vulnerable, and needing protection, created and promoted a culture of 'sexual abuse' - the abasement of women by thought, word, and deed.  The workplace, once a fertile ground for sexual liaisons, was turned into a gulag.  A man who merely looked at a woman the wrong way was dunned, castigated, and released. 

Women, however, because of this new, unfettered environment, became tartier than ever - low-cut dresses, mini-skirts, baubles and jangles, perfume, and the makeup of Rue St. Denis hookers. It all was both provocative and punitive, and no one gained a thing.  Women wondered where all the good men had gone, and men whose balance sheet favored keeping their job, deferred sexual intimacy and went elsewhere. 

Of course savvy men were not intimidated by all this, and knew that women were still women, no matter how insistent the cant.  They wanted attention, to be pursued, and to be loved; so it was not difficult for these men to navigate the penitential waters of the office and make their overtures which were always received with a smile. 

And savvy women like Roberta Alden worked the same system to her advantage. There were no accusatory fingers pointed at a woman who made overtures to a man regardless of his position; and the responsibility for engaging in an office affair was always on him, never her. 

So the game that she and her male partners played was a high stakes, high reward one.  If she successfully seduced a man who was in a position to afford her both comfort and access to the levers of power, more laurel wreaths and garlands for her.   

It was a game of chess for Roberta once she had set her sights on an opponent/benefactor - pawn openings, knights forward, bishops in defense, rooks at the ready.  In addition to such strategies she, like all successful women, had an abundant armory of charm, seductive allure, and an irresistible caring generosity that few men could resist. 

She did all this with the legerdemain of a magician.  The men she seduced for profit were actually convinced that she loved them, and hence saw no reason not to reward them.  These benefactors had been so mentally seduced that they were convinced that she left them because of something they did, some inattentiveness or lack of concern.  Former lovers were never angry, resentful, or vengeful.  On the contrary, they were as congenial as could be. 

Few women have this trifecta, this perfect storm.  Few combine intelligence, will, and sexual allure in such an irresistible package as Robert Allen.  Especially in today's environment of sexual suspicion and accusation, it is remarkable that a woman could so easily make her way to the top never hesitating to use her sexual favors. 

Roberta Allen was a champion who never gloated or condescended.  She looked at the trail of adoring men who had helped her on her way up like a conquering general overlooking the scene of a battle - casualties of war. 

At the same time she was known as a consistently fair, reasonable, and just manager, and men who initially might have resented working for a woman sang her praises.  This too was part of her game, her scheme.  Men, whether potential sexual patrons or soldiers in her battalion were ineluctably drawn to her. She had no prejudices except one - men were all easy marks.  

Obsession From Donald Trump To A Glass Menagerie - The Fungible Hysteria Of A Needy Woman

Vicki Bennett lived a quiet, peaceful, and uncomplicated life - house and garden, an immaculate kitchen, sundowners on the back porch, and tea parties in the Spring and Fall - unless the applecart was upset by Donald J Trump, President of the United States, demagogue, destroyer, devilish man of evil intentions. 

Despite the sinecure of a happy home in Bethesda, a faithful husband, and dutiful children, once the thought of The Madman of Pennsylvania Avenue niggled its way into her consciousness, she became as rabid as a hyena, a fiendish, feral, violent animal.  And once the thought took hold, rooted itself and started to grow, there was not shaking it loose.  It festered, rotted, and infected her, body and soul.  There was no way that she could go back to her geraniums or the evening's pot roast.  She was in its clutches and felt  herself being transported to the gates of hell. 

Vicki had always been a liberal, and was old enough to have suckled at the breasts of moderates - Republicanism was wrong for the country what with its Wild West individualism, Wall Street capitalist greed, and indifference to the plight of the working man and the poor; but it was a matter for democracy to resolve, a change of the guard, an upswelling of liberal opinion, a wave of progressive electoral victories. 

In the early days she had worked towards this democratic resolution - the good people of America on both sides of the aisle would eventually come together for the common weal in a nation of reformed ambitions, consideration, and consistent goodness. 

The Sixties turned the tables - its revolutionary fervor was just what young people like Vicki needed to shake off the sedentarism of the Fifties - the homespun treacle, the patronizing religion, the arrogance of middle class satisfaction. 

She became an activist, a woman on fire always first at the barricades, first to be hauled off by jack-booted police, and last to be released from jail.  She was a political vixen, a loud, shrewish partisan, the Mad Woman of Chaillot. 

Like for most of her compatriots such adolescent idolatry could not last.  Times change, youth matures, and the old allure of Kinder, Kirche, Kuchen is hard to resist.  For them and her, politics was not an obsession, just a unifying youthful jamboree.  One went to Woodstock and marched on the Mall.  It was the zeitgeist of a demographic - for the first time in American history the under-25s were a majority, and all the hoopla was a playground romp.  

Yes, the Movement had incidental agency. LBJ resigned, the Civil Rights Bill was passed, and the old pillars of satiated, fat, happy America came down; but for Vicki it was just a walk in the park. She believed, but not all that much.  It had not been an obsession, and in many ways she was just as happy that it faded and was folded into her familiar, predictable suburban life. 

Until Donald Trump that is.  What was it about the man that so riled women up? That awakened them from their decades-long slumber and brought them back to life?  Vicki herself was surprised at her reaction.  When she saw him on television, her heart started pounding, her mouth went dry, her fists involuntarily clenched, and she started to shake.  

She felt like the Peter Finch character in the Paddy Chayefsky movie Network who addled with anger, resentment, and frustration at the state of television, looks into the camera and shouts, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it any more'.  A man obsessed, a man whose reason has left him, a madman, but a prophet. 

This possession happens, Vicki a good but now ex-Catholic knew. The Old Testament prophets were visited by God, possessed by his spirit and obedient to his will.  The infidels of Judah might have thought them crazy, but they were the emissaries of the true, one, and only God. 

Of course Vicki did not consider herself crazed or even possessed.  The evil of Donald Trump was secular, and as vile as he was, he could be brought down by concerned, concentrated defiance.  Yet this time around she felt different.  His image did indeed provoke a kind of ironic euphoria.  She felt a strange but satisfying transformation. 

She did not try to calm herself down, to recover that old equanimity and moral poise she once had  It felt too good to generate this fulminating hate, this rich and tempestuous anger.  Without realizing it, she had become obsessed; but even more surprising was her complete surrender to obsession and the almost orgasmic feelings it produced. 

Whereas the youthful gatherings on the Mall in the old days were jamborees of camaraderie and good feelings, those now in opposition to Donald Trump were psychic, emotionally pure, devastatingly exhausting.  Being among those who felt exactly the same - a thousand obsessed harridans howling at the top of their voices, releasing the hatred and vile passions that had strangled them until now - was liberating and fulfilling. 

But obsession is a psychological disorder that has only indirect relation to the cause espoused. Donald Trump was only the catalyst for Vicki's obsession, the trigger for her pent-up psychological animus, the spark that set it all aflame.  Once the conflagration began, it became comprehensive, universally applied. 

Because obsession is a hungry animal and impatient in its hunt, Vicki soon found herself foundering.  She hated Donald Trump just as much, but the feral howls had stopped, the shaking and trembling were absent, and to be honest, she had become distracted.  An insidious 'let it be' perfume seduced her into quiescence. 

However, as Professor of Psychiatry, Donaldson Parker of Johns Hopkins noted,

Obsession can be muted but never cured in the true obsessive.  It is viral, infecting each and every cell, synapse, organ, and fluid in the body. It is a drug more powerful than Fentanyl, more addictive than heroin, and with a psychological hold on individual like no other

'As importantly' he continued, it needs to be fed fresh meat' by which he meant new obsessively capturing causes; and so it was that Vicki turned her attention to climate change.  Her house was now strewn with oceanographic maps, tidal coordinates, the variations in the Humboldt and Gulf Stream currents, solar activity, melting and freezing on the Ross Ice Shelf, trans-Atlantic hurricane trajectories, temperatures in the Sargasso Sea, and the weather in the Great Plains.  She was no longer the passive observer of the past, but a woman determined to conclude without a shadow of a doubt that the earth was disastrously warming and to tell the world about it. 

She lost weight and much of her hair.  She shut herself in for days at a time, poring over ships' logs, NOAA predictions, meteorological models, and arcane articles from Zanzibar.  Her obsession, already at a fever pitch with Trump hatred, was even hotter and more commanding.  The same endorphins flowed through her veins and she was ecstatic. 

The neighbors were worried and then frightened when this haggard witch came to the door. 

When climate change had run its course - that is when the obsession had fed itself to satiety - Vicki looked for something to take its place, but now so disoriented after months alone in her house living only with millibars and temperature differentials, she hesitated to go out.  Instead, she took to cleaning the house, scrubbing, vacuuming, wiping, disinfecting, sweeping, and scouring until her hands and knees were red, cracked, and bleeding.  She stood for a moment in her now gleaming kitchen, sparkling and bright; but it still wanted polish, and so she began waxing and buffing until it was like a sunrise on a Florida beach. 

Unfortunately there was no one in her life to keep her frenzy in check - her husband had died recently, and her adult children were in Chad and Borneo - so it was only when Montgomery County after repeated concerned calls from neighbors, broke in to the house. 

There was Vicki playing with her glass menagerie, a childhood plaything she had always kept.  It was a replica of Laura's in Tennessee Williams' vision - an array of delicate fantasy animals in glass and crystal.  There was no way of knowing of course, but the attending psychiatrist in Baltimore suspected that, typical of her particular obsessive disorder, she had been moving, arranging, and rearranging the figures ad infinitum. 

So, one must have at least a scintilla of sympathy for the rabid women shouting and howling in front of the White House. If the staff at the Hopkins Psychiatric Center can be believed when true belief becomes an obsession, it is a disease. 

The Exhilaration Of War - The Passion Of An Affair In The Tribal Violence Of An African Jungle

Peter Benchley had not expected war to break out any time soon, or he would have cancelled his trip.  The central African country for which he, as senior program officer for the World Bank, was responsible had been involved in violent border skirmishes with its neighbor off and on for years, and no military analyst expected a full-scale conflict. 

The Air France flight was full, and First Class passengers were treated to the Beaujolais Nouveau of the new season, a drink that brought back memories of his youth in Paris, at Rubis, a bistro in the Latin Quarter.  'Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé!' announced the posters on every lamp post on Rue Bouchard, and Rubis on opening day spilled out onto the sidewalk up; and down the avenue.  Mme. Picot, the owner's wife made trays of canapes - caviar, foie gras, and Camembert - and M. Franchot, the baker at the boulangerie next door, supplied loaves of freshly baked baguette. 

It was hard to leave the plane after it set down at the international airport after its long flight from Charles de Gaulle - the atmosphere had become just like Rubis or more like a Sunday meal at Le Rouge et Le Noir restaurant in Nouakchott, a redoubt of la France profonde in the middle of the desert, filled with all the ex-colons and their families who had found ways to stay on after independence. Live lobsters from Brittany, Belon oysters, and the best vintages of vin ordinaire. 

The airport was as Benchley remembered it - dark, airless, rank and nasty, a chaotic jumble of lost luggage, shifting immigration queues, and fights for yellow immunization cards.  He looked for his fixer, an African he paid well to meet him and facilitate his transit through immigration and customs.  At first he didn't see him - a moment of anxiety - but then he was spotted pushing his way through the crowds towards him. 

As always once he had made it outside to his waiting car, he felt relieved.  Many were the times when the fixer had been restrained, held, arrested, and Benchley had to fend for himself, negotiating the most intimidating, brutal incivility never held in check, only delayed. 

All along the route to the hotel there were military convoys and security checkpoint.  At least five times his car was stopped, the driver pulled out and spread-eagled against a half-track while he handed over copies of his papers.  No foreigner in Africa ever handed over the originals - the illiterate recruits would never know the difference.

The hotel was cordoned with a ring of armored vehicles and a phalanx of heavily-armed soldiers.  Again he was asked for his papers, frisked and only then allowed to enter the hotel.  He had sorely misjudged the situation and relied on sanguine appraisals from the Bank and the French Foreign Ministry.  The US Embassy and the CIA had seen something else and were preparing for an imminent evacuation.  The World Bank, affiliated with the UN did not routinely consult American sources, and so his trip had been approved. 

The young woman standing next to him at the reception desk looked afraid, lost, and desperate.  The hotel did not have her reservation and all rooms were spoken for.  The air conditioning was not working, the small fans fitfully moving the increasingly stale, humid air made little difference, and the young woman's blouse was drenched with sweat.  'Perhaps I can help you', Peter said, and a look of absolute relief crossed her face. 

The Bank always assured its official staff suites of rooms at this, the best hotel in town, and there would be ample room for the young woman to make herself comfortable until she was able to sort things out in the morning.  Benchley assured her that she would be no burden and her privacy would be respected. 

That is how the affair started, as most do - convenient circumstances, the immediate camaraderie of foreigners in a desperately foreign place, and the trust assured between European visitors.  They had a simple dinner together and an early breakfast and parted company for the day. 

It was only that evening after they both had come home from work that the gunfire erupted, convoys of tanks shook the foundations and rattled the ironwork of the buildings along their route, and the sky over the capital was thick with black smoke. 

The city went dark, the hotel was without power, and the few guests who had not been evacuated sat on the poolside terrace.  The employees of the hotel had all abandoned ship, and guests were on their own.  The most enterprising found the kitchen and brought out cases of beer still cold.  Talk was only of rescue - how long would they be isolated in the hotel before their embassies could manage to bring them out?

The only source of news was the BBC World Service short wave, intermittent and indistinct, but clear enough to state that full scale war had broken out and that France had not yet decided whether or not to intervene. 

The young woman was Danish, sent by her national development agency to work at the capital's general hospital as a management consultant to help rationalize the inventory and supply chain system, woefully inadequate and inefficient.  It was her first trip to Africa, and she was afraid. 

An outsider - one who has never been either in Africa or in these situations, might well think that romance would be the last thing on anyone's minds; but nothing could be further from the truth.  There is something unifying about being strangers in a strange land and even more so in times like these.  Intimacy, whatever the level, is the emotional balm, the anodyne, the tranquilizer to give some reality to a world which seems hopelessly lost. 

Suddenly the firing ceased and the grinding of tank tracks on the rutted streets was heard no longer.  With no electricity and no traffic in the streets, all that could be heard from the dark terrace were the sounds of the surrounding jungle.  No one knew which was worse, the awful sound of mortars and cannonade or the primitive sounds from the darkness beyond the perimeter. 

It was at this moment that Benchley and the Danish woman went to their suite, undressed, opened the windows, and lay together under the canopied, netted bed. 

The silence of the thousands of miles of jungle with only animal and wild bird sounds in the distance or a roll of thunder was stifling and frightening.  The sound of gunfire was almost a relief - at least that meant civilization, or at least a consort of human activity - but as it increased in intensity, they wished for the quiet and peace of the forest. 

They were both married, but time, distance, danger, and circumstances make such ordinariness remote. Affairs in the jungle are always about unalloyed irresponsibility.  Home, family, children disappear; and then reappear as though nothing had happened. 

Affairs in wartime are even more unique as Ondaatje wrote in The English Patient: 'Betrayals during war are childlike compared with betrayals during peace.  New lovers are nervous and tender, but smash everything, for the heart is an organ of fire'. 

 

Graham Greene set his The End of the Affair in wartime London, and the affair between Bendrix and Sarah Miles lives and dies under the blitzkrieg of London. 

A temporary pause in military action brokered by France and Great Britain allowed for the evacuation of foreign nationals, and Benchley and Birthe said their goodbyes on the tarmac.  As for Bendrix and Sarah it was the end of their affair, but as all those lived in foreign places, they would never be forgotten. 

The heart of darkness - that primal, savage place so well understood by Conrad is the scene for the most human of all events.  When Kurtz says on his deathbed, 'the horror...the horror', he has understood that his  unholy, barbaric tribal world was simply an unfettered and untethered expression of human nature. 

It was within that world that affairs begin and end.  There is something unique, frightening, and irresistibly exciting about the jungle