He can see Dean Brautegam and others fussing around his mother now, trying to smooth things over. After all they have invested, they want her to go home thinking well of them and of the college. But they must be glancing ahead too to 1997, hoping that the 1997 jury will come up with a more winning winner.
We skip the rest of the foyer scene, move to the hotel.
Elizabeth Costello retires for the night. For a while her son watches television in his room. Then he grows restless and goes down to the lounge, where the first person he sees is the woman who interviewed his mother for the radio, Susan Moebius. She waves him over. She is with a companion, but the companion soon departs, leaving the two of them alone.
He finds Susan Moebius attractive. She dresses well, better than the conventions of the academy usually allow. She has long, golden-blonde hair; she sits upright in her chair, squaring her shoulders; when she tosses her hair the movement is quite queenly.
They skirt the events of the evening. Instead they speak about the revival of radio as a cultural medium. 'An interesting session you had with my mother,' says John. 'I know you have written a book on her, which unfortunately I haven't read. Do you have good things to say about her?'
'I believe I do. Elizabeth Costello has been a key writer for our times. My book isn't about her alone, but she figures strongly in it.'
'A key writer… Is she a key writer for all of us, would you say, or just for women? I got the feeling during the interview that you see her solely as a woman writer or a woman's writer. Would you still consider her a key writer if she were a man?'
'If she were a man?'
'All right: if you were a man?'
'If I were a man? I don't know. I have never been a man. I will let you know when I have tried it.'
They smile. There is definitely something in the air.
'But my mother has been a man,' he persists. 'She has also been a dog. She can think her way into other people, into other existences. I have read her; I know. It is within her powers. Isn't that what is most important about fiction: that it takes us out of ourselves, into other lives?'
'Perhaps. But your mother remains a woman all the same. Whatever she does, she does as a woman. She inhabits her characters as a woman does, not a man.'
'I don't see that. I find her men perfectly believable.'
'You don't see because you wouldn't see. Only a woman would see. It is something between women. If her men are believable, good, I am glad to hear so, but finally it is just mimicry. Women are good at mimicry, better at it than men. At parody, even. Our touch is lighter.'
She is smiling again.
'If there is parody in her,' he says, 'I confess it is too subtle for me to pick up.' There is a long silence. 'So is that what you think,' he says at last: 'that we live parallel lives, men and women, that we never really meet?'
The drift of the conversation has changed. They are no longer speaking about writing, if they ever were.
'What do you think?' she says. 'What does your experience tell you? And is difference such a bad thing? If there were no difference, what would become of desire?'
She looks him candidly in the eye. It is time to move. He stands up; she puts her glass down, slowly stands up too. As she passes him he takes her elbow, and at the touch a shock runs through him, dizzying him. Difference; opposite poles. Midnight in Pennsylvania: what is the time back in Melbourne? What is he doing on this foreign continent?
They are alone in the elevator. Not the elevator he and his mother used: a different shaft. Which is north, which south in this hexagon of a hotel, this beehive? He presses the woman against the wall, kisses her, tasting smoke on her breath.
They exit on the thirteenth floor; he follows her down the corridor, turning right and left until he loses track. The core of the hive: is that what they are seeking? His mother's room is 1254. His is 1220. Hers is 1307. He is surprised there is such a number. He thought that floors went twelve-fourteen, that that was the rule in the hotel world. Where is 1307 in relation to 1254: north, south, west, east?
We skip ahead again, a skip this time in the text rather than in the performance.
When he thinks back over those hours, one moment returns with sudden force, the moment when her knee slips under his arm and folds into his armpit. Curious that the memory of an entire scene should be dominated by one moment, not obviously significant, yet so vivid that he can still almost feel the ghostly thigh against his skin. Does the mind by nature prefer sensations to ideas, the tangible to the abstract? Or is the folding of the woman's knee just a mnemonic, from which will unfold the rest of the night?
