Ramparts and Roses

To set Ned in motion, she says:

“I want to be moved onto something I may take for an altar.”

She longs to be led — so that she, in turn, may stage leadership, perform it, invert it, if she can.Topping from the bottom.

I want to be moved. Four small words. Enough to ignite a mutual surge. They accommodate Ned’s desire to seize Nana, to bring her pageantry to a decisive, physical end. Nana summons his desperation and feeds on it. He must never feel safe. Safety would soften him. Safety would slow him. Safety would halve his effort where she requires it doubled. Nana trains him the way a coach trains an athlete — at the threshold, at the breaking point.

And still, he is fading. Something catches, grinds, resists within their charged orbit. Nana cannot yet name it. But she feels the tilt — the subtle vertigo of imbalance.

Ned lectures on Foucault. Education, he says, is the answer to uncertainty. Foucault approaches something like this at the far end of his excavation of the Nile-sources ofThe History of Sexuality, in the fourth volume. Christianity, Foucault suggests, becomes a post-antique project of human refinement through faith and renunciation. Yet the economizing of sexuality — its translation into systems of regulation, discipline, accounting — predates Christianity. Apostolic doctrine rests on social compacts forged in a world not yet Christian.

At the threshold of a long unraveling, Foucault shows how the early Church Fathers copied Stoic imperatives. He tracks the administrative machinery of baptism, sin, and penance through the community of believers.

Human “multiplicity and instability” demand regulation.Through reduction, simplification — one arrives at asceticism.

Nana feeds Ned with fuel for arousal. Not generosity. Strategy. She concedes no territory. The ramparts are polished smooth. Now she raises new fortifications.

Goya is useful in every possible way. A magnificent peacock — if not the most magnificent — within her reach. His manner of social movement veils Ned’s advantages. The friction between Goya’s wealth and Nana’s cultivated solidity electrifies the erotic field.

She indulges her devotion to silent dialogue everywhere academia allows concealment. She writes:

We are masters of manifestation. We draw from imagination and reality alike. We build what is perfect for us. Let red roses rain for us. (Hildegard Knef.) There is no prêt-à-porter for us.Only haute couture. How do you want me — now, in this moment? You know I cannot resist you.Against my will my hand moves toward my cunt. It is alchemy. Beyond discipline. I am dripping in a room of thirty people. Imaginationlessness reeks. Spiritual poverty reeks.

Ned answers him with a diluted echo of his fervor — flat, almost offensive in its inadequacy, measured against her willingness to burn herself out for him, against his desire to position her on a terrace just beneath the summit of his private pyramid.

Let us be brief. Let us name it plainly.For hours now, Ned has labored under a late, corrosive realization: Nana could expose him at any time.

And suddenly Nana sees it — the fracture line.Caution means nothing to her.She longs for the way his words once came: raw, unfiltered, fearless, saturated with hormone and heat.

“I place my life in your hand, to calm you,” she writes in the late afternoon.

They are in the same institute, in different rooms. In thirty minutes they will meet for cheese rolls. The woman who runs the cafeteria is famous for her cheese rolls, and for her cocoa. The students adore Mrs. Schneider.

Let’s keep playing, Nana begs silently.

Ned bites immediately. The answer arrives with the speed of instinct, the speed of trust.

“And if I ...”

Nana answers, serene in her certainty:

“Then you will do exactly that. And I will remember it even when I am an old relic, when no one wants to do that with me anymore.”