Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black Read Online Free PDF Page B

demeaning of fellow humans. Affirmative action has created a gender elite which behaves as the male one did, high positions for pals just as the men awarded whether the individual was or was not qualified except by what was between the legs.’
    Someone—might have been I—said, ‘Muslim women—still behind the black veil—men suffer from them.’ It’s taken as rhetorical.
    I’m no match for Susan.
    â€˜See them trailing the wives and mothers grandmothers matriarchs aunts sisters along with endless children: that’s the power behind the burka.
Their
men—don’t forget the possessive—carry the whole female burden through entire male lives, bearing women who know that to come out and fend for yourself means competing economically, politically, psychologically in the reality of the world. The black rag’s an iron curtain.’
    â€˜And gay men?’ Anthony’s a known lover of women but his sense of justice is alert and quizzical as anyone’s.
    Susan looks him over: maybe she’s mistaken his obviousheterosexuality, his confidence that he’s needed no defence in his relations with females. She’s addressing us all.
    â€˜When the gay bar closes, it’s the lesbians who get the jobs—open to their gender
as women
. Gay men aren’t even acceptable for that last resort of traditional male
amour propre
, the army, in many countries. Unfit even to be slaughtered.’
    Meanwhile Edward’s found his appetite, he’s considering this dish, then that, in choice of which promises the subtlety that appeals to him as (oh unworthy comparison I’m making) he might consider between the performance of one musician and another at the piano. As the left hand pronounces a chord and the right hand answers higher. But the discrimination of taste buds’ pleasures does not temper his demand, ‘What’s happened to penis envy?’
    Nevertheless, Susan gives him the advice he clearly needs, not duck, the prawns are better, no, no, that chicken concoction is for dull palates.
    The waiter is already swaying servilely this way and that with a discreet offer of the dessert menu; some of us have done with the main spread. Maybe we’re ready for what I remember comes next in this place which is just as it was, the trolleys of bounty will never empty. Fortune cookies. Sorbet with litchis; mangoes? Perhaps it’s the names of tropical fruits that remind us of Anthony’s form of dress. ‘What are you up to?’ It’s Edward. ‘Whose international corporate anatomy are you dissecting.’ As if the African robe must be some kind of journalist surgeon’s operating garb. Oracular Edward recalls, ‘Who would have foreseen even the most powerful in the world come to fear of running dry—except you, of course, when you wrote your
Seven Sisters
. . . that was . . .’ The readers of his book about the oil industry, the writer himself, ignore reference tothe memory museum, its temporal documentation. ‘Who foresaw it was those oilfields witches’ brew that fuels the world which was going to be more pricey than gold, platinum, uranium, yes! —Yes!—in terms of military strategy for power, the violent grab for spheres of supply, never mind political influence. Who saw it was going to be guns for oil, blood for oil.
You did!
’
    I don’t know at what stage the continuing oil crisis exists in the awareness of the Chinese restaurant Empyrean.
    Anthony is shrugging and laughing embarrassedly under an accolade. Now—forever—he’s proved prophet but there’s only the British tribe’s understatement, coming from him. ‘Anybody could have known it.’
    Susan takes up with her flourish, Edward’s imagery. ‘Double, double, toil and trouble, the cauldron that received what gushed from earth and seabed? They didn’t.’
    Edward and Susan enjoy