Novel Excerpt – Prolix (working title) 3

Posted by on June 9, 2011 in Fiction, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Rose

The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry. Dawkins, R

 

Rose Staff, currently the object of desire for two men in her field of influence, both of which planned to change their lives dramatically around her, used to be a beautiful woman. That is, she is a beautiful woman today, but never previously   needed the qualifier ‘for a woman in her sixties.’

The issue here is that Rose is a muse, and muses don’t generally get older and look good for their age. They inspire, bloom, and live forever in printed inscription:

For Rose – Without whom nothing will ever make sense.

Dedicated to the unobtainable Rose – forever just beyond my reach.

For Rose, from whose very well-being this work has sprung.

But the truth of the life of a muse is very different to the entire world summed up in an inscription. Muses do not descend delicately from high heaven, they do not walk languidly past as reams of poetry manifest themselves in the minds of simple men, and they do not wear pink frills and fishnets. They exist like this for a brief few weeks at most, before the ugliest truths of all are found out. Muses are from somewhere here on earth. They have family, friends, expectations, careers and ideas.

To be clear, Rose had three grown children, two of whom were official no hoper’s who still relied upon their widowed mother for financial support occasionally, three grandchildren, a large heritage listed house she’d inherited from her husband that she intended to renovate and a dog that was not now and never will be house-trained. She worked as the head researcher for the blood bank, and held large salon-style dinner parties in her home pretending to herself she was on the Parisian Left Bank.

Worst of all, at least worst of all for a muse, Rose had not yet one work of art, one novel, or one philosophical paper dedicated to her.

The desire for this recognition started in the early days of her marriage to the good natured but intensely ugly Simon. Simon’s red hair, abundance of connect-the-dot freckles, bucked teeth and painfully thin frame were invisible to Rose in university because Simon was the winning student in Biology at Sydney University, and she’d already worked out that she wanted to be yoked with a believer. Long before Simon even noticed Rose, she had committed, a la Simone de Beauvoir, to helping Simon achieve greatness and seeing to it that Simon’s ‘work’ got ‘out there’, whatever that ‘work’ may be and wherever ‘out there’ is. Rose believed her position by his side to be all the more natural one seeing as she was the number two student at the aforementioned University.

Sidling up to Simon was fairly easy. Getting him to partner her in an assignment was considerably harder, but Rose was resolute, and keen to be seen out with him. An avid believer in biological determinism, she knew herself to be pretty if not beautiful at that stage, and to possess an enormous pair of pouting breasts, that worked on so many other men, she only assumed they would work on Simon. They did, and she had no guilt or shame in using them, as she considered herself a superior sort of woman because of them, determined to be coupled with a superior sort of male. Athletic prowess, though biologically preferable, mysteriously never attracted her, while intellect did, so Rose used her lovely glands, peacock-style to attract herself an intelligent version of her own species.

The early days with Simon, for whom Rose was the first, were spent in three major diversions. Time studying together, time spent doing up Simon’s second hand Valiant, and time studying together. While many women may have been appalled at spending so much time in Simon’s garage and bedroom, (fully clothed) Rose had begun to see in Simon a man she could encourage, nurture, develop and inspire.  All their time together looked to Rose like the start of a very long time line, in which she had most of the important decades allocated to specific events – graduation, marriage, Simon’s science grant, children, buying a house, Simon’s ground breaking discoveries, children at university, Simon’s dedication of his Nobel prize to his wife, and finally her death first and his famous well documented desperate loneliness.  

Rose had no problems keeping secret this complicated plan from Simon, as she discovered early that Simon was a man of very few words and that all of them were about Simon; His plans, his dreams (both Valiant related) and his passion for science. They agreed on crucial issues; god was dead, science is the only rational answer and we are all glorified monkeys, which gave room for the oddities Simon believed in (Fruit bats in Centennial Park will provide the way forward for all humanity) to be expressed freely.

Very soon they were known around campus to be very ‘thick’ though everyone looking at the union were mystified at Rose’s baffling keenness for Simon Staff. This enthusiasm transcended his bad looks, his poor personal hygiene and his non-existent social abilities. But Rose was a blossoming woman like any other and as such she was in love with passion and a perception of control she felt she had over a potential genius; and this desire for control of Simon Staff exploded out of her with volcanic necessity. Ever since the day Shelly Munroe had said to Janet Kearny behind her in Chemistry, that Simon Staff was the smartest person she’d ever known and it must be very flattering to be loved by a mind like that, Rose was smitten; being in love with passion itself, the object of her desire only an accessory to that passion, allowed Rose to forgive a multitude of dating sins.

They married soon after graduation, right on schedule, fulfilling the rest of Rose’s time table with some notable exceptions:

1.      Simon never won a Nobel Prize and therefore never was able to dedicate it to her.

2.      Simon died before Rose, in a tragic car accident, bringing what had become a very successful marriage to a sad and grinding halt.

Dutiful in mourning as she was in marriage, Rose took her time to lament the early death of her husband. She tended their teenage children, encouraging them through university (all science degrees) and went back to the blood bank rapidly rising through the ranks again, seeing as she liked so much to immerse herself in her work. After a couple of years of appropriate widowhood and with her children encouraging her to step out into life again, Rose emerged from her duty, fresh and ready for the next chapter.

It was at one of her earliest dinner parties (a salon style affair she decided she’d emulate) Rose sat next to a woman a little younger than herself and her doting husband. The woman waxed lyrical about the novel her brilliant husband had dedicated to her, and perhaps it was the absence of Simon, keenly felt at her first dinner party, or perhaps it was the wine that had moved from her gut to her head and back to her gut again, but Rose decided with a potent firmness that she wanted something great dedicated to her.

Something like a novel.

Or a painting.

Or a great work of philosophy.

All her hard work with Simon had been wonderful, but really she had nothing to show for it but three children whose lives and accomplishments belonged to themselves. Rose had no evidence of her being on the earth, no eternal reminder to everyone that she inspired and brought out the best in a man.

It was that night she decided to attend the local Philosophy Cafe.