The Cosmopolitans Read Online Free PDF Page A

be fun to be married to you. I mean, this isn’t a proposal, I’m only twenty-three, it’s more — a proclamation. Yeah, a proclamation. Of love.”
    Milla thought to look at herself in the mirror. It was her there, not a raw klezmer singer, not a model, but her own face, crazed with happiness.

     
     
     
     
    Yana
     
 
Since I drank of the cup of love,
I shall love forever secretly.
    “The roots of the modern-day ‘love discourse’ first appeared in medieval France, where troubadours such as Raimbaut d’Aurenga (cited above) found that both common and noble audiences preferred songs of heterosexual” — what? Strivings? Yana rose and strode about the room. She’d use her old favorite: “ limning heterosexuality, and so decided to ‘produce’ these ballads in large quantities. Commercial considerations, then, have always been behind the perpetuation of the idea of romantic love.”
    Yana sat back and looked at her paragraph. Was that a Marxist- feminist critique, or what? Her professor edited a journal of advanced studies. She imagined whispers following her across campus, “only undergraduate ever to publish…”
    Or, was she being “tendentious, sophistic and repetitive” again? That was what the professor had written, in small, embarrassed letters, on the back of her last paper. She wished her parents could help her, that she had the kind of parents who’d been doled out to so many of her college classmates (although not to the few who’d agreed to be her friends), parents who read and debated their children’s papers over Thai, and contributed to progressive judges’ re-election campaigns, and paid psychiatrists to help their children figure out where their parenting had failed. Yana would have settled for parents who didn’t either laugh (Stalina) or become enraged (Osip) that she was trying to write like a Marxist. Instead, she was on her own, basically, and she had yet to answer the question: Why did audiences keep asking for love songs?
    Milla bounced into the room, apparently in the manic stage of the bipolar disorder she’d acquired upon meeting Malcolm. “He’s going to marry me!”
    So he’s going to do the honor of making you his domestic slave? So he’s generously agreed to depress you, to load you up with stress- and childbirth-related illnesses, to ensure you die approximately five years earlier? Milla waited, frozen into her smile. Yana imitated the freshman girls who’d stopped to eat the chocolate and caramel cookies at the Women’s Center table at orientation, before they’d realized what the cookies represented, but after Yana had begun telling them about an upcoming all-woman dance. “Uh-huh?” she said, and she probably gave the same pained smile the freshman girls had.
    “It wasn’t a formal proposal, that’ll be later.” Milla found, almost with relief, several worries: sure, Malcolm wanted to marry her now, but what if something happened between now and the engagement? Had Yana ever heard of promise rings? Did she think Malcolm had heard of them? If he had, and wasn’t planning on buying Milla one, wasn’t that weird? Was that weird, or was she being too demanding?
    Yana said, “You know, marriage as the fulfillment of romantic love is a nineteenth-century construct.”
    Milla wound a curl around her finger. “That can’t be true.”
    Yana found evidence on the Internet, but Milla just kept asking the same questions over and over again, until Yana surrendered. “You look good in white.”
    Worrying about whether she’d be able to get to sleep, Milla returned to her room, and Yana opened her book to a lyric by Arnaut Daniel:
And when I see her blond hair,
her body lean and fresh
I love her more than I love one
who’d give me Luzerne.
    A skinny blonde. Of course. Not that it was necessarily easy to be the ideal. Yana was sure it was difficult, sometimes. She had read about it.
    She typed, “Troubadours put women on pedestals, where they stood in their