61 :: ethics :: 7/30/01
Janine watches Ingrid raise her bleached hair and fan the back of her neck. —Jesus, she says. —It's hot in here.
A throng of dim bodies surround them. They were fortunate enough to score one of the last remaining tables before the place filled up. Janine is drinking Honey Weiss and Ingrid is drinking Beck's. The blackboard behind the bar, bearing the names and prices of three dozen beers, is surrounded by tiny Christmas lights, which cast rosy light onto Ingrid's skin.
It's weird that Ingrid asked her to get together at this bar. Usually the two of them just get together for lunch: they haven't gone out together to a bar since they were both in grad school. She has distantly considered the possibility that the shift from cafe to bar may be related to Ingrid's recent confession of attraction, but the confession still seems unreal enough that no connection between it and anything else seems fully plausible.
In two months Ingrid will be going back to Berlin to marry Elsa.
Sometimes Janine senses that huge forces are moving in her life and she does not have the time to be fully aware of them. On some mental layer that notion terrifies her, makes her feel completely out of control. She has a pack of Camel Turkish Gold cigarettes of the pack that was given to her by some guy hired to give away promotional packs of cigarettes at bars. She taps one out, lights up with her Eightball Zippo, which has a Clowes drawing of a geeky-looking female devil on it, and proffers the pack to Ingrid.
—Want one?
—Sure.
She leans over and lights Ingrid's cigarette for her. They both drag.
—So look, Ingrid says. Janine waits. She has a sense that she knows what is coming. Unspoken words have been drawing together all evening, massing.
—I'm just gonna ask you straight out, Ingrid says. Janine watches her blue eyes. The light of so much intelligence within them. —Do you want to come home with me tonight?
Janine draws back a few inches, as if to better survey the view. An entire system of ethics flickers on in her brain, disassembling the components of the situation and holding them up for analysis. (A somewhat confused analysis, given that she's in the early phases of drunkenness.) She immediately grins, to show Ingrid that the idea itself is pleasing (it is). Then she takes a long drag on her cigarette, to buy time.
Some years back, Janine identified strongly as a lesbian, and her social group was composed almost entirely of lesbians: during that period she swore she would not get involved with someone who was already involved. She had had unpleasant experiences with the whole game where a rival gets close to your lover and undercuts your image in their eyes: that game seemed a remnant from the heterosexual world, and Janine believed it had no place in lesbian relationships. (At that time she'd been reading a lot of Monique Wittig. From The Straight Mind: it would be incorrect to say that lesbians associate, make love, live with women, for 'woman' has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economic systems. Lesbians are not women.)
Since then, she's reinterpreted the Wittig somewhat: she's come to believe that it's monogamy itself that is the remnant of heterosexuality, monogamy itself which could serve to be eliminated amongst lesbians and bisexuals. She has found there to be a certain liquid (nonmasculine) pleasure in multiple simultaneous connections. But she's never felt like Ingrid shared that view; for fuck's sake, Ingrid is moving to another country just so she can be married, and if anything there's anything on this planet that Janine would describe as a remnant of heterosexual economic systems, it's marriage.
She exhales. —Everything's all right between you and Elsa, right? Janine asks. —Still planning to go over there and all that?
—Yeah, says Ingrid. —So this would basically be a short-term kind of thing. It wouldn't have anything to do with her, really.
Hmm. Would it? Janine suddenly wants to know whether Ingrid has told Elsa that she has been thinking about doing this. But she resists asking. What Ingrid and Elsa decide to tell one another is none of her business. Ingrid is a human being capable of making her own choices.
—If you don't want to, Ingrid says, —it's OK. I'm mostly just curious. We've known one another for such a long time; I just wonder what it would be like.
Janine wonders too. Ingrid is a human being capable of making her own choices. That's basically what it comes down to: that's the ethical rule that trumps all others this evening. Janine knows that she wants to spend the night with Ingrid; she knows that Ingrid wants to spend the night with her. Janine is worried about how this will affect the relationship between Ingrid and Elsa, but ultimately she has to leave that whole process of risk-assessment up to Ingrid, and Ingrid seems to have already completed that process. To say I don't think we should do this because of Elsa would be to assume that she has the power to make superior decisions in matters between two people, neither of which are her. A kind of arrogance.
—No, says Janine. —I want to.
