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them had made the first move, she always hotly (but with bright eyes) denying that she could ever have been so forward, he insisting-while knowing it to be untrue that she had “thrown herself at him.”
    “Do you want to hear this stuff or not?” Yes, he’d nodded, his hand caressing one small, finely wrought breast. She put her hand over his and launched into her argument. Her proposition was that at the heart of each of the great tragedies were unanswerable questions about love, and, to make sense of the plays, we must each attempt to explicate these inexplicables in our own way. Why did Hamlet, loving his dead father, interminably delay his revenge while, loved by Ophelia, he destroyed her instead? Why did Lear, loving Cordelia best of his daughters, fail to hear the love in her opening-scene honesty and so fall prey to her sisters’ unlovingness; and why was Macbeth, a man’s man who loved his king and country, so easily led by the erotic but loveless Lady M. toward an evil throne of blood? Professor Solanka in New York, still absently holding the cordless telephone in his hand, recalled with awe naked
    Eleanor’s erect nipple beneath his moving fingers; also her extraordinary answer to the problem of Othello, which for her was not the “motiveless malignity” of Iago but rather the Moor’s lack of emotional intelligence, “Othello’s incredible stupidity about love, the moronic scale of the jealousy which leads him to murder his allegedly beloved wife on the flimsiest of evidence.” This was Eleanor’s solution: “Othello doesn’t love Desdemona. The idea just popped into my head one day. A real lightbulb moment for me. He says he does, but it can’t be true. Because if he loves her, the murder makes no sense. For me, Desdemona is Othello’s trophy wife, his most valuable and status-giving possession, the physical proof of his risen standing in a white man’s world. You see? He loves that about her, but not ber. Othello himself, obviously, is not a black man but a ‘Moor : an Arab, a Muslim, his name probably a Latinization of the Arabic Attallah or Ataullah. So he’s not a creature of the Christian world of sin and redemption but rather of the Islamic moral universe, whose polarities are honor and shame. Desdemona’s death is an ‘honor killing.’ She didn’t have to be guilty. The accusation was enough. The attack on her virtue was incompatible with Othello’s honor. That’s why he didn’t listen to her, or give her the benefit of the doubt, or forgive her, or do anything a man who loved a woman might have done. Othello loves only himself, himself as lover and leader, what Racine, a more inflated writer, would have called his flamme, his gloire . She’s not even a person to him. He has reified her. She’s his Oscar-Barbie statuette. His doll. At least that’s what I argued, and they gave me the doctorate, perhaps just as a prize for brazenness, for my sheer gall.” She took a big gulp of the Tignanello, then arched her back and put both arms around his neck and pulled him down to her. Tragedy vanished from their thoughts.
    These many years later, Professor Solanka stood under a hot shower, warming himself after his soaked ramble with the calypso revelers and feeling like a pompous dope. To quote Eleanor’s thesis against her was a cruelty he might easily have spared her. What was he thinking of, giving himself and his paltry actions these high Shakespearean airs? Did he truly dare to set himself beside the Moor of Venice and King Lear, to liken his humble mysteries to theirs? Such vanity was surely a more than adequate ground for divorce. He should call her back and tell her that, by way of apology. But that, too, would strike the wrong note. Eleanor didn’t want a divorce. Even now, she wanted him back. “You know perfectly well,” she had told him more than once, “that if you decided to give this up, this stupidity of yours, everything would be fine. It would be so fine. I