Ken Arnold Books || Zublinka Xcerpt

An Excerpt from Part One of Zublinka Among Women
by Robert Wexelblatt.

Graphology

Julia was knitting and did not look up at him. "Zublinka, you're a terrible flirt," she said.
"True, but only to a tiny extent. I'm always flirting with you, my dear."
Alexander peered censoriously over his Times. "Not just with Julia."
"Oh? So you think I flirt with George too?"
Alexander laughed. "With Georgina you're practically French."
Click, click. Julia stopped knitting. "Why do you insist on calling her that when you know I don't like it? Her name's Georgina."
"Yes, yes, I apologize. Still George is an honorable name," Zublinka protested. "There's Washington, Herbert, Gershwin...Jessel...Sand...the Third. Besides, she likes it." Zublinka called into the next room. "Don't you like being George, George?"
Julia was in earnest. "She's a little girl."
"Parents are prey to every right-wing prejudice."
Alexander laughed. "That's true. First you buy a crib, then life insurance and before you know it you're voting Republican. You've got to be armed to the teeth for family values. I'm thinking of joining the National Rifle Association."
"There, Julia, you see?"
"What's she up to anyway, Jule?"
"Georgina, what are you doing? Georgina?"
The child's slow trochee wafted in from the next room. "Noth-ing."
"You see?" said Zublinka. "George is up to noth-ing. Just like her old non-Sicilian godfather. And since to do nothing is the greatest accomplishment in the world, she's amazingly precocious."
"There's never been a time when you weren't up to something," Julia teased.
Alexander ruffled the paper. "Come on, Georgina. What're you doing in there?"
"Practicing."
"What?"
"You're disturbing me."
"Georgina! Don't talk to your father like that," called Julia, then added in a whisper, "That's my job."
Zublinka pushed himself up from the couch with an ostentatious groan and ambled into the dining room. "All right. Time for me to get down to some serious flirting."
Georgina was seated at the table concentrating hard on writing her name with a blue crayon. She had already written it three times, in yellow, red, and orange. A little girl at a big table.
Graphology in reverse, mused Zublinka to himself. The darling wants to create her personality by perfecting her signature. The magic of signifiers. Look at that courageous first G, how carefully she has drawn the diphthong, the decisiveness of that final ina. Brava, George!
"Well, well, here's something interesting," Alexander was saying back in the living room.
Zublinka pulled a chair over beside Georgina. Until just a few years ago the mahogany dining room set had been Julia's mother's. Who will get my CD's, Zublinka wondered for a moment, then chose a black crayon from the Reebok box. "May I?" he asked.
Georgina nodded solemnly, carefully tore off a sheet of paper from her pad and pushed it down the table to him.
He wrote his name in Greek.
"Look, George. That's my name. I can write it different ways. See? Zublinka in Greek letters."
The child shook her head without bothering to look up. "A person's name only comes one way." She sounded perfectly confident of the self-evidence of her assertion.
"Not at all, my dear. Many things in life come in different ways and yet they're still the same. Newspapers and green beans, for example. That's how it is with me, isn't it? Whether I come on Sunday morning or on Tuesday night, I'm still your same old Zublinka--fresh or frozen."
Georgina clucked her tongue like a maiden aunt. "You're so silly," she said, equally pleased and dismissive. Then she tore herself a new piece of paper and resumed the hard work of perfecting her signature, this time in vermilion.
Zublinka wrote Elvira Bennet in brown Gothic script, then, hesitating between a pink and green crayon, chose the former. In a punctilious cursive, with exceeding care, he wrote Hansi Szokoll.
Back in the living room Alexander raised his voice a little higher. "You really ought to take a look at this, Zublinka."
The tip of Georgina's tongue worked its way out the corner of her mouth like a new-born snake looking this way and that. "You see?" she said, pointing. "That's how my name looks. Always the same."
Zublinka picked the paper up and cleared his throat. "G-e-o-r-g-i-n-a. Or George," he announced grandly.
Julia came in with the book review. "I heard that and you're awful. Here," she said, laying the review on top of Zublinka's page of names. She tapped her finger on an article. "Look at this, please. In Obedience to The God by Maria Norma Uccello. The reviewer sounds like he was popping his rivets."
"Just at present George and I are engaged in writing, not reading," said Zublinka with mock roughness.
Alexander had followed his wife into the room. "Go on, read him some, Jule. Read him that bit about the personality profile."
Julia picked up the magazine, cleared her throat and read. "'A typical Western philosopher may be easily described. He is an unmarried middle-aged male with a secure income, a derisory libido, so detached from diapers and disease that he can grasp reality only as a theoretical concept.'"
Zublinka looked around at Alexander and scowled. "I can see why she called her book In Obedience to The God."
"Oh, can you?"
Julia was wearing a plain denim jumper over the Chinese silk blouse Zublinka had chosen for her birthday. It was purple and suited her. Zublinka grinned up at her. She smiled over him in the self-contained fashion of young matrons who are prepared to be everyone's mother, even an old man's. He could see she was anticipating some bon mot. He liked to perform for her; it was indeed a way of flirting just as she had said, and maybe even more than flirting. He assumed his pedagogic voice and tuned up his notorious accent.
"An ambiguous and ironical title. On the one hand, she alludes to Socrates' excuse at his trial for having all his life followed the trade of philosopher, a story which is itself the greatest piece of irony in intellectual history. On the other hand, I imagine the title is intended to suggest that the author has herself appropriated Socrates' mission, that she is his true heir and not all those deceased men."
"Appropriated?"
"Appropriation--to make one's own. What Socrates loved best was to get his hands around the throat of anyone who thought he knew something. I presume that Ms. . . ?"
Julia pounded twice with her finger on the review. "Uccello. Maria Norma Uccello."
"--that Ms. Uccello--"
"Doctor Uccello."
"--that Dr. Uccello is determined to attack somebody."
"According to the review it's pretty much everybody," chuckled Alexander.
"You see?" said Zublinka, shrugging.
"We were at college together," Julia said simply.
"You and this Uccello? Now that is interesting," said Zublinka turning in his seat. "Then I really must read the review."
"Still flirting," complained Alexander.
"Why not read the book?"
Zublinka turned all the way around. "You have a copy? Already?"
"A signed complimentary one, actually. I've been waiting to give it to you."
"You know, Zublinka, Maria was my most dangerous rival. Prior to you, that is," said Alexander. "I'll go upstairs and get the book."
Zublinka happened to be looking up at Julia's face at that moment and was shocked by what he saw. He had so much invested in the Greenbergs' marriage that it had never occurred to him to question its solvency, as if it were federally insured. In common with many bachelors he had the tendency to underestimate the strains between married people he liked. It was a kind of systematic error. Having neglected to get married himself, he regarded the wedding vow as final. Of course Zublinka knew this was quixotic of him, even foolish, and he was aware that every marriage contract carries a tacit escape clause; nevertheless, he could not help himself. Divorces always surprised him, if only for an instant or two. But the case of the Greenbergs was special. Here any breach would amount to a personal threat. Brick by brick, since the evening that Alexander first had him to dinner, Zublinka had constructed a tidy cottage on the foundation of the Greenberg marriage and into it he had more and more retired as, one by one, his colleagues did to their graves or, alternatively, their condos in Boynton Beach and Sun City. The esteem and affection he felt for Alexander, his love for Julia and his adoration of Georgina--these were the furnishings of his pleasant abode. In an instant the cottage had quaked, not from Alexander's remark, but from what he had glimpsed on Julia's face.
"So," he said hurriedly, "I take it the book is a Uccello-eye-view of philosophy?"
"Of philosophers," said Julia.
Zublinka's mind was now racing along two tracks. Was it possible that Julia could be less than perfectly happy? Had something happened, or was he just overreading things? Did Alexander really mean to suggest there had once been something between Julia and this Uccello woman? What nonsense! And yet hadn't he been taught enough lessons?
Moved by an association of ideas, Zublinka fumbled in his pocket for the letter Kennedy had handed to him only the day before, making a fuss over the copybook handwriting of the address on the envelope. Seeing it had given Zublinka a start. After so many years it was almost a shock to hear from his old university. They wanted him to come back, to deliver a special lecture on a subject of his own choosing, forsooth. Annihilating decades and oceans, wiping out history and age, it bore him all the way back to where he had come from. He had thought of showing the letter to Julia and Alexander but now he decided not to.
"Look, Mommy," said Georgina suddenly.
They both looked. She had drawn a blue box around her red name.