Dragons - Chapter 76 (DRAFT)

The following day was Friday. I must have been in a deep sleep, because when the morning alarm went off at its usual 5:30 AM, it felt like a bucket of cold water being dropped on me. I woke so violently that I woke Jenny, who normally slept peacefully through my alarm.

“Whaaaaat?” she moaned groggily. 

I sat for a moment in bed, the klaxon call of the alarm growing steadily louder in our dark room, trying to catch my breath and slow my heart down. I had been dreaming. Running, I think, down a dark hallway, and being chased by shadowy figures with sharp teeth and sharper knives.

“Alan,” Jenny groaned, pushing me in the small of my back. “Get up.”

I did, dragging myself over to the dresser just long enough to switch off the alarm before flopping myself back down on the bed.

“Alan,” Jenny said again, rolling her pregnant belly over so she could face me. “Get up. You have to go to work.”

“I don’t want to,” I said. “Not today. I’m going to call in sick.”

Jenny seemed instantly awake. “Are you sick?” She reached out a motherly hand and felt my forehead for a fever.

“I’m sick, all right,” I said. “Sick of that fucking place.”

Jenny knew all about Gerald’s attempted coup, my role in it, and the fallout that I would now have to deal with. We had talked about it at length, Jenny pulling the details and confessions out of me like an experienced prosecutor. She was more committed than ever to getting me out of that place, and had been sending my resume to even the less attractive listings in the newspaper. She was still hopeful about Quest Partners, but, like me, was growing worried that I hadn’t heard from Steve Anderson or his assistant.

“Have you ever called in sick before?” she asked me, a tinge of hopefulness in her voice.

“Not that I can remember,” I said. “But I really feel like doing it today.”

“If you stay home,” Jenny said, “you can come with me to my well baby checkup. Help your fat, pregnant wife out of the car. See the latest ultrasound.”

That was all it took to decide it. In a moment my cell phone was in my hand and I was placing a call to Ruthie’s direct line -- the company-approved method for calling in sick. Checking the clock to make sure it wasn’t a time that Ruthie might be at her desk, I waited for her voicemail to pick up and then left a short and appropriate message. I’m sick. I won’t be in today.

That task completed Jenny actually gave me a kiss on my unshaven cheek. “Come on,” she said. “You can make us breakfast while I get in the shower. We have to be there by nine o’clock.”

Having just looked at the clock I knew that was more than three hours away, but I also knew that that would be calling it close. The clinic was only a few minutes from our home, but there was a lot that would need to be accomplished and organized before we could leave. Even still, I waited until Jenny was in the bathroom and I heard the water running before I even got out of bed. Making breakfast now would just mean a cold breakfast by the time she got herself dressed, so I went down the hall and peeked in on Jacob.

He was sleeping soundly -- a tuft of hair on his pillow and a pudgy calf and bare foot sticking out from under his blanket. I left his bedroom door open, expecting the noise of the house to wake him gradually in the next half hour or so, and went downstairs to use the second bathroom and start putting some things in order for everyone’s breakfast.

I didn’t feel the least bit guilty about calling in sick. Rather, I felt liberated, as if some heavy burden had been lifted from my shoulders. I suddenly decided that I was going to make the best breakfast ever, even pulling a package of bacon out of the freezer and getting the microwave working on defrosting it while prepping the other things I would need for both scrambled eggs and French toast. Jenny liked a little cinnamon on her toast, I knew, and I decided to include some of that even though I didn’t care for it. This breakfast was not about me. It was about her, my wife, my soulmate, the mother of my children. Cinnamon French toast with raspberries and warm maple syrup -- it would be like that bed and breakfast we had once stayed in, long before Jacob was born, before everything -- and I would act like it was no big deal, like it was everyday. Here you are, darling. Can I get you anything else? 

Jacob was down first, trailing his baby blanket on the floor behind him and rubbing his eyes with a balled-up fist. “Daddy,” he said. “What are you doing?”

He wasn’t used to seeing me, I knew. I was usually up and gone to work before he even got out of bed in the morning, but now the noise of my bustle in the kitchen must have brought him disoriented to my door. I saw that his sleep diaper was full and sagging under his pajama pants. Everything was prepped but nothing had started cooking yet, so it was easy for SuperDad to wipe his hands on a towel, scoop his son up in his arms, and carry him back upstairs to get him changed and ready for the day. On our way past the bathroom door we heard the shower shut off and the shower door slide open. I told Jacob that I was making a special breakfast for Mommy and that he could help me with the fruit salad.

In a flash we were back downstairs and Jacob was sitting in a corner of the kitchen where I could keep an eye on him, carefully plucking grapes off their stems and dropping them into a bowl, while I started pouring the egg mixture into a pan.

Jenny suddenly appeared at the door in her bathrobe and with her hair wrapped in a towel. “Oh my goodness,” she said, feigning surprise. “What’s going on here?”

“We’re making breakfast!” Jacob proclaimed proudly, smiling with his cheeks stuffed with some of the grapes that were supposed to be going into the bowl. 

“Indeed you are,” she said, as she came over and gave me another kiss on the cheek. “And what a breakfast! Is that bacon I’m smelling?”

“It sure is. Bacon and eggs and French toast -- just the way you like them, dear.”

“Well, I’d better go get dressed,” Jenny said. “And Jacob,” she said as she shuffled out on slippered feet, “save some of the grapes for the fruit salad.”

When everything was ready, I called up the stairs to let Jenny know. I could hear the blow dryer going so I had to shout in order to be heard over it.

“Okay!” Jenny called out. “I’ll be down in a minute!”

I got Jacob strapped into his booster seat and put his bowl of fruit in front of him as I retreated back into the kitchen in order to serve the plates and bring them to the table. In no time at all we were all around our small dining room table, enjoying the feast I had created, Jenny still in her bathrobe but with her hair dried and appropriately tousled.

“Fantastic!” she said, as she lifted her wine glass filled with orange juice and toasted me. “I think you should stay home from work more often.”

We ate in comfortable silence, Jenny encouraging Jacob to try some of the new-to-him things that I had made and Jacob firmly refusing. When she was done eating, I got up and started clearing the plates.

“Oh, I’ll do the dishes,” Jenny said.

“No,” I told her, looking pointedly at her bathrobe. “I’ll do them. You go get Jacob and yourself ready for the appointment.”

“Aren’t you going to shower?” she asked, a little bit of horror creeping into her voice.

I looked at the clock. It was a little past seven-thirty. “I’ve got time,” I told her. “I only need fifteen minutes to shower and get ready.”

She looked at me a little suspiciously, but accepted it, knowing that it was probably true. “Okay,” she said, rubbing me on the back. “Thanks for the wonderful breakfast.”

Truth be told, doing the dishes never took me as long as it took Jenny. She claimed I didn’t do them “right,” assuming, of course, that “her” way of doing dishes was the only “right” way of doing dishes. The same could be said about any other household chore she assigned, be it cleaning the bathroom or vacuuming the floors. Jenny both insisted that I help her with these chores -- which I did -- and she insisted that I didn’t do them “right.” As if there were a right way and a wrong way to vacuum a rug. What Jenny of course meant by the right way was her way.

I made short order of the dishes, making sure to hang the kitchen towels up just the way Jenny liked them, and then headed upstairs to take my shower and get ready. Jenny was still in her bathrobe, perched on the edge of our bed with a makeup mirror propped up on top of a pile of books on top of my nightstand. She pushed her eyelashes up with a mascara brush as she told me to get in the shower. Jacob’s bag was already packed and we needed to be out the door in twenty minutes.

When I came out of the bathroom a few minutes later with wet hair and a towel wrapped around my waist, Jenny told me that my phone had been ringing while I had been in the shower. I shouldn’t have, but without thinking I scooped it up and looked at its little screen.

“It’s work,” I said, recognizing the caller ID. “Someone from the office was trying to reach me.”

“You’re sick today,” Jenny said, standing up and shrugging herself out of her bathrobe. Underneath she was only wearing her bra and panties, her enormous belly exposed and glistening with the lotion she had recently applied. 

“You’re right,” I said, putting the phone back down. “I went back to sleep after leaving the message for Ruthie. And I turned my phone off so I wouldn’t be disturbed.”

“I swear, your honor,” she said, beginning to slather her armpits with deodorant.

“Mommy!” Jacob suddenly cried, barreling into our bedroom like a forgotten and out-of-control freight train. He rushed at Jenny and wrapped himself around her bare legs, almost knocking her over.

“OH MY GOD!” Jenny practically screamed. “Alan, get him out of here!”

I rushed over to extract Jacob as ordered, knowing that I had committed one of the greatest domestic crimes there was in our household -- leaving our bedroom door open while Jenny was getting dressed. Ever since Jacob learned how to crawl, Jenny had made it very clear that there was nothing more important than keeping the bedroom door closed while she was getting dressed. As I struggled to pull Jacob away, I could feel the towel around my waist begin to loosen, and my efforts were hampered by my own need to keep one hand on it to keep it from falling away. 

“Mommy!” Jacob was crying. “Mommy! Mommy!”

Jenny, for her part, was able to move closer to the bed and sit down, which both kept her from falling over and gave me the additional leverage I needed to finally pull Jacob away. Hooking him under one arm like a football and keeping my other hand on the knot of my towel, I carried him out of our room and into his. As soon as I left the master bedroom the door slammed shut behind me.

“Mommy!” Jacob continued to cry, but he wasn’t writhing like he would have been had this been a full-blown tantrum. 

In his room I put him down on his bed and took the necessary moment to re-secure the towel around my waist. “Jacob!” I said. “What is the matter with you? What do you want?”

“I want Mommy!” he said, looking up at me defiantly.

“Well, Mommy is getting dressed,” I said. “And I need to get dressed, too. We’re going to Mommy’s doctor today.”

Jacob crossed his arms and started to pout. “I don’t want to go to Mommy’s doctor,” he said. “I want to stay home and play with my trains.”

“We can play with your trains later,” I said, doing the best I could to not lose my temper and to reason with this unreasonable creature. “The doctor is going to take a picture of your baby sister in Mommy’s tummy. Don’t you want to see a picture of your baby sister?”

“No!” Jacob cried, kicking his feet out and rumpling his blankets. “I want to stay home and play with my trains!”

I shook my head. “Well, we can do that later. In a few minutes we’re leaving for Mommy’s doctor, and you’re going to come along.”

“No, I’m not!” Jacob said, his voice threatening the darkest violence.

I’m not sure what would’ve happened next had Jenny not appeared behind me.

“Mommy!” Jacob cried, seeing her and extending his arms toward her.

She moved around me, now dressed in a pair of stretch pants and a fleecy maternity tunic, and confidently told me to go get dressed. She sat down on the bed next to Jacob and wrapped him in a tender embrace. He clutched her desperately, pressing his face into the soft fabric of her top. 

“It’s okay, honey,” she said soothingly to him. “Mommy’s here now. Mommy’s here.”

I shook my head, not really understanding the why and how of anything that had happened that morning, nor what any of it might portend for the future, and left the room. 

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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet

I had a difficult time with this one.

Here’s the first paragraph of the introduction included in my edition, written by Jean-Paul Sartre:

Our Lady of the Flowers, which is often considered to be Genet’s masterpiece, was written entirely in the solitude of a prison cell. The exceptional value of the work lies in its ambiguity. It appears at first to have only one subject, Fatality: the characters are puppets of destiny. But we quickly discover that this pitiless Providence is really the counterpart of a sovereign -- indeed divine -- freedom, that of the author. Our Lady of the Flowers is the most pessimistic of books. With fiendish application it leads human creatures to downfall and death. And yet, in its strange language it presents this downfall as a triumph. The rogues and wretches of whom it speaks all seem to be heroes, to be of the elect. But what is far more astonishing, the book itself is an act of the rashest optimism.

Wow. Now that is a book I would really like to read. But is Our Lady of the Flowers that book? In the end, I’d have to say no.

The backstory here is important. Sartre continues to explain:

French prison authorities, convinced that “work is freedom,” give the inmates paper from which they are required to make bags. It was on this brown paper that Genet wrote, in pencil, Our Lady of the Flowers. One day, while the prisoners were marching in the yard, a turnkey entered the cell, noticed the manuscript, took it away, and burned it. Genet began again. Why? For whom? There was small chance of keeping the work until his release, and even less of getting it printed. If, against all likelihood, he succeeded, the book was bound to be banned; it would be confiscated and scrapped. Yet he wrote on, he persisted in writing. Nothing in the world mattered to him except those sheets of brown paper which a match could reduce to ashes.

Sartre’s rhetorical questions are important ones. Why? For whom? Because the truth seems to be that Genet wrote Our Lady of the Flowers entirely for himself, and not just to occupy his mind while serving time in prison, but also to aid in his masturbatory fantasies.

No wonder Our Lady horrifies people: it is the epic of masturbation. The words which compose this book are those that a prisoner said to himself while panting with excitement, those with which he loaded himself, as with stones, in order to sink to the bottom of his reveries, those which were born of the dream itself and which are dream-words, dreams of words. The reader will open Our Lady of the Flowers, as one might open the cabinet of a fetishist, and find there, laid out on the shelves, like shoes that have been sniffed at and kissed and bitten hundreds of times, the damp and evil words that gleam with the excitement which they arouse in another person and which we cannot feel.

And this, to me, is key to understanding what one is reading, and whether the words can approach the heights that Sartre describes in his opening paragraph. Can they, in other words, be both the scribblings of masturbatory fantasy AND the transcendent work of genius that presents fatalism in oddly optimistic triumph?

When one looks at the descriptions that Sartre chooses and compares them to Genet’s actual words and the intent behind those words…

I have already spoken of my fondness for odors, the strong odors of the earth, of latrines, of the loins of Arabs and, above all, the odor of my farts, which is not the odor of my shit, a loathsome odor, so much so that here again I bury myself beneath the covers and gather in my cupped hands my crushed farts, which I carry to my nose. They open to me hidden treasures of happiness. I inhale, I suck it in. I feel them, almost solid, going down through my nostrils. But only the odor of my own farts delights me, and those of the handsomest boy repel me. Even the faintest doubt as to whether an odor comes from me or someone else is enough for me to stop relishing it.

...one can only come to the conclusion that the genius one is dealing with here is Sartre’s, not Genet’s. For, I think, it is Sartre who sees a pattern that Genet did not intend. Remember, it is Sartre who said:

The exceptional value of the work lies in its ambiguity.

In other words, it is a canvas upon which the reader can paint any picture he desires. And remember, he also said:

It appears at first to have only one subject, Fatality: the characters are puppets of destiny. But we quickly discover that this pitiless Providence is really the counterpart of a sovereign -- indeed divine -- freedom, that of the author. Our Lady of the Flowers is the most pessimistic of books. With fiendish application it leads human creatures to downfall and death. 

As masturbatory fantasy, it ends and can only end with one object in mind: the mad, rushing relief and pleasure of self-gratification. The characters in such a play are, of course, puppets of destiny, twisted and turned into whichever contortion the unrestrained freedom of their author desires and dictates. And remember, he also said:

And yet, in its strange language it presents this downfall as a triumph. The rogues and wretches of whom it speaks all seem to be heroes, to be of the elect. But what is far more astonishing, the book itself is an act of the rashest optimism.

Yes, the characters Genet creates are doomed to suffer a single and inevitable fate, but in doing so they give their author his tremulous joy in the bleakest of circumstances. In this regard, they are heroes -- they, specifically, are Genet’s heroes -- and, if he is painting them at all, he can paint them in no other light.

Genet’s genius -- if it exists -- has to be embodied in this dual understanding of his text. There are glimpses that Genet intends Sartre’s more subversive understanding…

Don’t complain about improbability. What’s going to follow is false, and no one has to accept it as gospel truth. Truth is not my strong point. But “one must lie in order to be true.” And even go beyond. What truth do I want to talk about? If it is really true that I am a prisoner who plays (who plays for himself) scenes of the inner life, you will require nothing other than a game.

...but none of these glimpses are enough to convince me that Genet is possessed of an understanding of any deeper intention than an attempt to occupy the carnal directives of his enlightened and imprisoned mind.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 75 (DRAFT)

Very late that afternoon Mary stopped by my office. I was in the middle of packing things up for the day, sliding my laptop into its sleeve in my shoulder bag.

Mary shut my door and stood with her back to it. “Paul Webster is out,” she said.

My fingers froze on the zipper. “What?”

“Paul Webster is out,” she repeated. “Don and I spoke to him this afternoon and he’s agreed to resign from the Board. He’s out.”

“Just like that?” I asked.

Mary gave me a disappointed look. “No, if you must know. Not ‘just like that.’ We had to move heaven and earth to pull this one off. Eleanor is not happy about any of this, and especially since we had to pull her in to do some of the dirty work.”

Not happy. That was one of Mary’s euphemisms. It meant Eleanor was spitting mad. She had likely chewed Mary out and extracted all kinds of promises for future work and concessions. And that, I knew, made Mary more uncomfortable than any coup attempt from below possibly could have.

“You and Gerald really did a number on us, but we’ve taken care of it. It’s over.”

“Wait, Mary,” I said. “What do you mean ‘me and Gerald’? I didn’t have anything to do with this. I’m the one who brought it to your attention, remember?”

The look on Mary’s face could only be described as skeptical, but her words were placating. “Yes, I’m sorry. You’re right. I spoke in haste. This was Gerald’s doing, but you should have discovered his plans when he started concocting them, not when he was about to execute them.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “If I wasn’t doing two other jobs in addition to mine, maybe I could’ve kept a closer eye on him.”

It was a dangerous thing to say, but the words were out before I could stop them. Most things Mary said were crazy, but it was typically even crazier to challenge them. For a moment I saw Mary’s eyes smolder, but then she carefully cooled whatever fire was brewing within. 

“You’ve got three other jobs to do now, Alan. And the leadership meeting is in ten days. I told you, we’ll talk about help when we’re on the other side of that. Not before.”

I zipped up my bag and slung it over my shoulder. I just wanted to get out of there. “Uh huh. So who am I supposed to coordinate the agenda with now? If Paul is out, is Eleanor going to step in and run the meeting in his stead?”

“No,” Mary said. “We’re moving Wes Howard into the president-elect seat. You should work with him on the final details for the event.”

My heart stopped. 

Wes Howard.

“Mary!” I cried, but her hand was already on the door knob and she had already pulled it open. 

“Yes, I know,” she said, as she exited my office. “You’ll just have to find a way to work with him. There’s no other way, now.”

And quick as that, she was gone.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source

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Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis

Arrowsmith is Martin Arrowsmith, a young doctor and protagonist of this novel, who vacillates between the two opposite poles of all physicians -- the life of the clinician and the life of the researcher. But in Lewis’s capable hands, the tension between these two objectives takes on a more universal and philosophical importance.

First, the clinician, embodied best by Dr. Roscoe Geake, one of Martin’s teachers in medical school, who leaves his position there to become the vice president of the New Ideal Medical Instrument and Furniture Company. In other words, he goes into business, and is anything but sheepish about it.

“Gentleman, the trouble with too many doctors, even those splendid old pioneer war-horses who through mud and storm, through winter’s chill blast and August’s untempered heat, go bringing cheer and surcease from pain to the world’s humblest, yet even these old Nestors not so infrequently settle down in a rut and never shake themselves loose. Now that I am leaving this field where I have labored so long and happily, I want to ask every man jack of you to read, before you begin to practise medicine, not merely your Rosenau and Howell and Gray, but also, as a preparation for being that which all good citizens must be, namely, practical men, a most valuable little manual of modern psychology, ‘How to Put Pep in Salesmanship,’ by Grosvenor A. Bibby. For don’t forget, gentlemen, and this is my last message to you, the man worth while is not merely the man who takes things with a smile but also the man who’s trained in philosophy, practical philosophy, so that instead of day-dreaming and spending all his time talking about ‘ethics,’ splendid though they are, and ‘charity,’ glorious virtue though that be, yet he never forgets that unfortunately the world judges a man by the amount of good hard cash he can lay away. The graduates of the University of Hard Knocks judge a physician as they judge a business man, not merely by his alleged ‘high ideals’ but by the horsepower he puts into carrying them out -- and making them pay! And from a scientific standpoint, don’t overlook the fact that the impression of properly remunerated competence which you make on a patient is of just as much importance, in these days as the new psychology, as the drugs you get into him or the operations he lets you get away with. The minute he begins to see that other folks appreciate and reward your skill, that minute he must begin to feel your power and so to get well.”

In other words, medicine, like everything else, is a business, and material success -- money and comfort -- is its highest goal.

But contrast this with the researcher, embodied best by Dr. Max Gottlieb, one of Martin’s mentors and idols, as dedicated to discovery and truth and Geake is to success and comfort.

“To be a scientist -- it is not just a different job, so that a man should choose between being a scientist and being an explorer or a bond-salesman or a physician or a king or a farmer. It is a tangle of very obscure emotions, like mysticism, or wanting to write poetry; it makes its victim all different from the good normal man. The normal man, he does not care much what he does except that he should eat and sleep and make love. But the scientist is intensely religious -- he is so religious that he will not accept quarter-truths, because they are an insult to his faith.

“He wants that everything should be subject to inexorable laws. He is equally opposed to the capitalists who t’ink their silly money-grabbing is a system, and to liberals who t’ink man is not a fighting animal; he takes both the American booster and the European aristocrat, and he ignores all their blithering. Ignores it! All of it! He hates the preachers who talk their fables, but he iss not too kindly to the anthropologists and historians who can only make guesses, yet they have the nerf to call themselves scientists! Oh, yes, he is a man that all nice good-natured people should naturally hate!

“He speaks no meaner of the ridiculous faith-healers and chiropractors than he does of the doctors that want to snatch our science before it is tested and rush around hoping they heal people, and spoiling all the clues with their footsteps; and worse than the men like hogs, worse than the imbeciles who have not even heard of science, he hates pseudo-scientists guess-scientists -- like these psycho-analysts; and worse than those comic dream-scientists he hates the men that are allowed in a clean kingdom like biology but know only one text-book and how to lecture to nincompoops all so popular! He is the only real revolutionary, the authentic scientist, because he alone knows how liddle he knows.”

For Gottlieb, seeing the truth is what matters, not taking some veiled understanding of the truth and using it to make a buck. 

And it is between these two poles that Martin will vacillate throughout the length of the novel, moving through several positions and marriages as he tries to decide which will finally claim him.

There will be those that pull him towards practical success. Here Dr. Silva, the Dean of Medicine at the hospital where Martin is interning, talks to Martin and his first wife, Leora, about one pole.

“Your husband must be an Artist Healer, not a picker of trifles like these laboratory men.”

“But Gottlieb’s no picker of trifles,” insisted Martin.

“No-o. But with him-- It’s a difference of one’s gods. Gottlieb’s gods are the cynics, the destroyers -- crapehangers, the vulgar call ‘em: Diderot and Voltaire and Elser; great men, wonder-workers, yet men that had more fun destroying other people’s theories than creating their own. But my gods now, they’re the men who took the discoveries of Gottlieb’s gods and turned them to the use of human beings -- made them come alive!

“All credit to the men who invented paint and canvas, but there’s more credit, eh? to the Raphaels and Holbeins who used those discoveries! Laennec and Osler, those are the men! It’s all very fine, this business of pure research: seeking the truth, unhampered by commercialism or fame-chasing. Getting to the bottom. Ignoring consequences and practical uses. But do you realize if you carry that idea far enough, a man could justify himself for doing nothing but count the cobblestones on Warehouse Avenue -- yes, and justify himself for torturing people just to see how they screamed -- and then sneer at a man who was making millions of people well and happy!

“No, no! Mrs. Arrowsmith, this lad Martin is a passionate fellow, not a drudge. He must be passionate on behalf of mankind. He’s chosen the highest calling in the world, but he’s a feckless, experimental devil. You must keep him at it, my dear, and not let the world lose the benefit of his passion.”

But there will also be those that pull him towards esoteric greatness. Just a few days after meeting with Dr. Silva, Martin and Leora accidently encounter Dr. Gottlieb.

But a few days before the end of Martin’s internship and their migration to North Dakota, they met Max Gottlieb on the street.

Martin had not seen him for more than a year; Leora never. He looked worried and ill. While Martin was agonizing as to whether to pass with a bow, Gottlieb stopped.

“How is everything, Martin?” he said cordially. But his eyes said, “Why have you never come back to me?”

The boy stammered something, nothing, and when Gottlieb had gone by, stooped and moving as in pain, he longed to run after him.

Leora was demanding, “Is that the Professor Gottlieb you’re always talking about?”

“Yes. Say! How does he strike you?”

“I don’t-- Sandy, he’s the greatest man I’ve ever seen! I don’t know how I know, but he is! Dr. Silva is a darling, but that was a great man! I wish -- I wish we were going to see him again. There’s the first man I ever laid eyes on that I’d leave you for, if he wanted me. He’s so -- oh, he’s like a sword -- no, he’s like a brain walking. Oh, Sandy, he looked so wretched. I wanted to cry. I’d black his shoes!”

“God! So would I!”

And throughout it all the reader is presented with competing ideals and competing understandings of the world. What is the thing that matters? Practical success? Or esoteric greatness? And why is it not possible to have both? For that, as we read and enjoy all of Lewis’s prose describing Martin’s vacillations, is the underlying truth of it all. Whichever one chooses, the other has to be sacrificed in order to attain it.

Near the very end, Martin Arrowsmith makes his fateful decision.

“Please don’t be vulgar.”

“Why not? Matter of fact, I haven’t been vulgar enough lately. What I ought to do is to go to Birdies’ Rest right now, and work with Terry.”

Martin is arguing with Joyce, his second wife, about his decision to abandon his administrative position at the prestigious McGurk Institute and join his friend and colleague Terry Wickett at the rural retreat he has established for the pursuit of pure research.

“I wish I had some way of showing you-- Oh, for a ‘scientist’ you do have the most incredible blind-spots! I wish I could make you see just how weak and futile that is. The wilds! The simple life! The old argument. It’s just the absurd, cowardly sort of thing these tired highbrows do that sneak off to some Esoteric Colony and think they’re getting strength to conquer life, when they’re merely running away from it.”

“No. Terry has his place in the country only because he can live cheaper there. If we -- If he could afford it, he’d probably be right here in town, with garcons and everything, like McGurk, but with no Director Holabird by God -- and no Director Arrowsmith!”

“Merely a cursing, ill-bred, intensely selfish Director Terry Wickett!”

“Now by God let me tell you--”

“Martin, do you need to emphasize your arguments by a ‘by God’ in every sentence, or have you a few other expressions in your highly scientific vocabulary?”

Notice how Joyce has become the voice for practical success, wholly unimpressed with the esoteric greatness that so bewitched Leora.

“Well I have enough vocabulary to express the idea that I’m thinking of joining Terry.”

“Look here, Mart. You feel so virtuous about wanting to go off and wear a flannel shirt, and be peculiar and very, very pure. Suppose everybody argued that way. Suppose every father deserted his children whenever his nice little soul ached? Just what would become of the world? Suppose I were poor, and you left me, and I had to support John by taking in washing--”

“It’d probably be fine for you but fierce on the washing! No! I beg your pardon. That was an obvious answer. But-- I imagine it’s just that argument that’s kept almost everybody, all these centuries, from being anything but a machine for digestion and propagation and obedience. The answer is that very few ever do, under any condition, willingly leave a soft bed for a shanty bunk in order to be pure, as you very properly call it, and those of us that are pioneers-- Oh, this debate could go on forever! We could prove that I’m a hero or a fool or a deserter or anything you like, but the fact is I’ve suddenly seen I must go! I want my freedom to work, and I herewith quit whining about it and grab it. You’ve been generous to me. I’m grateful. But you’ve never been mine. Good-by.”

At the end of the novel, Martin Arrowsmith has to make the same choice that Charles Strickland makes at the beginning of The Moon and Sixpence. To achieve something, something else must be sacrificed. In the most general of terms, If you want comfort, you must sacrifice art; and if you want art, you must sacrifice comfort. There’s no other way to approach it, and that may be what I like best about Lewis’s novel.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 74 (DRAFT)

The leadership meeting was the same one I had attended the year before, when I had first moved into my position as deputy executive. That’s the way things worked in the company and with the clients it served. Everything was on a slow slog of an annual cycle, with the same events happening again and perpetually, with only the glacial pace of the volunteers changing positions in the leadership ranks there to provide some variety and a fresh set of political challenges.

If you remember, Eleanor chaired the meeting a year ago. She did that in her then-capacity as President-elect of her organization. That meant that the chair for the upcoming meeting was the current President-elect of the organization. And who might that be, you ask?

None other than Paul Webster.

By that time I had already had several conversations with him -- all of them before my recent run-in with Gerald. As President-elect, one of his functions was to review and confirm the leadership and rosters for the hundred or so committees that made up the byzantine structure of their organization. Like so many, it was an annual ritual, the President-elect making sure his or her hand-picked supporters were in any position that was vacant, and making sure the appropriate bonds could be forged with those who would statutorily continue into the President-elect’s term as President. My job was to make sure he had an accurate report of all the committees, to accept all his changes, to coax those changes into our membership database, and then to coordinate the appropriate invitations to the leadership meeting he would be chairing.

Fortunately, with just two weeks to go before the meeting, most of that work had already been done, and now I was corresponding daily with some portion on the one hundred and thirty-nine people that had been invited, making sure that they had the information they needed to make their travel arrangements and, shortly, that they had received the agenda materials that had been prepared for them.

There were still several pieces of information I needed from Paul before that final task could be completed, but I knew better than to contact him without speaking to Mary first.

“Mary,” I said, leaning into her office the day after Gerald had been pushed out. “I need to contact Paul Webster about the agenda for the leadership meeting.”

Mary was sitting at her desk, her fingers busy on her keyboard, but she stopped and spun on me like I had caught her cheating on a test. “Oh, Christ, you didn’t call him, did you?”

“No,” I said. “But I need to.”

“Don and I haven’t spoken to him, yet,” she said, somewhat frantically. “You had better wait until we do that.”

“I know,” I said. “Or, at least, that’s what I suspected.”

“You’ll have to wait,” she said, very much like she couldn’t hear me over the torrent of thoughts running through her brain. “We have a call set-up for two o’clock this afternoon. You need to wait at least until then.”

“Sure, no problem,” I said, backing away. “I’ll hold until you tell me it’s safe to reach out to him.”

As I left I almost bumped into Ruthie, who was waiting for me to leave so that she could shut Mary’s door.

“Is she all right?” I asked.

Ruthie gave me a quizzical look, like I had asked for something nonsensical. “She’s fine. She just has a busy schedule today.”

I nodded and went back to my office, knowing that there were a thousand other things I could keep myself busy with until two o’clock that afternoon.

One of those things was a meeting with the department heads -- our number reduced down to six with Susan, Michael, and now Gerald sacrificed on Mary’s increasingly bloody altar of concentrating productivity. Bethany was the only one who remained who was my direct report. The others -- motherly Peggy Wilcox over Human Resources, closeted Scott Nelson over Accounting, pallid Jurgis Pavlov over IT, and hydrant-like Angie Ferguson over Meeting Planning -- they all reported either to Mary or Don. The meeting was about as focused as all those intersecting lines of authority would suggest.

Our agenda included the upcoming leadership meeting, which everyone should have had a stake in. Bethany and I were trying to organize the agenda with Paul Webster and all the various committee chairs -- stalled until Mary gave me the go-ahead to contact him. Scott reported out on the latest variances of actuals versus budget -- none of which had changed since the last time we had come together. Jurgis talked about the latest patch to our membership database -- which hadn’t been in place in time for us to coordinate all the appointments and invitations through it, forcing use to rely on our own tracking spreadsheet and word processing documents. Angie had everything lined up with the luxury hotel hosting the event -- and knew there was nothing more substantial to do until we reached 72 hours out and the final catering numbers had to be confirmed. And Peggy? Peggy did everything she could to keep silent, knowing that her only contribution would be reassigning some staff to help with the logjam, which she was prohibited from doing by both Mary and Don.

They meant well. At least I think they did. Well, all except Scott Nelson, who I couldn’t stop seeing as Mary’s spy. But meaning well or not, it was clear that they were all focused on the political intrigues besieging their own fiefdoms, and were reluctant to come together under any kind of shared purpose that I dared to define.

When it was over I asked Bethany to stay behind. She had seemed unusually uncomfortable during the meeting, and I wanted to make sure she wasn’t hiding some even bigger surprise. Unfortunately, she was.

“It’s Wes Howard,” she said after getting up to close the conference room door that the departing crew had left open. “He’s causing trouble again.”

“Oh, god,” I said uncontrollably. “What now?”

Wes had been appointed to lead one of the most influential committees and, as such, he was a key player in deciding which topics would get discussed at the upcoming leadership meeting. Bethany had drawn the short straw and was working with him to confirm those details and get the right communications out to the right people.

“I think he’s trying to sabotage me, Alan,” she said, sitting down in the chair next to mine. “Like he did with Susan. He’s nitpicking everything I do. He even yelled at me over the phone yesterday. Told me I was an idiot.”

Tears welled up in Bethany’s eyes and she choked back a sob. I reached out and put a reassuring hand over hers.

“Hey, hey,” I said, “It’s okay. Don’t let that asshole get to you.”

Bethany composed herself, pulling her hand out from under mine so that she could carefully wipe away tears without ruining her mascara. 

“I know,” she said, more confidently. “I know he’s just trying to get under my skin, but he’s talking to other people, too. I think he’s calling several people on my team and telling them what he thinks of me.”

This seemed especially outrageous, even for someone like Wes, so I asked Bethany to elaborate. She said that one of her team members -- a twenty-something named Tammy -- was late coming to one of their team meetings last week, and when Bethany went to go investigate she found Tammy on the phone with Wes.

“He was filling her head with all kinds of lies about me,” Bethany said.

“Like what?”

“I’d rather not say,” Bethany replied. “But I heard them. Tammy was obviously trapped, not wanting to talk to him anymore, but unable to get off the phone. I motioned for her to put him on speaker phone and I heard some of what he was saying.”

I looked at her as if I expected her to go on, but she didn’t oblige. “Bethany,” I said as gently as I could. “What kind of things is he saying about you? If you want me to do something about it I’m going to need you to be specific.”

I tacked that last sentence on almost without thinking, but it was the one that Bethany had the strongest reaction to.

“Oh, Alan! I’m not expecting you to do anything about it. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

That set me back in my chair. The reason my comment of doing something came off so thoughtlessly was, of course, that it was empty. Whatever Wes was saying, however vile or untrue, there was nothing I would be able to do about it. I knew that, and that’s why my words felt so hollow. But clearly, Bethany knew that, too. She knew that there was nothing I could do about anything that went wrong in the company. Our experience together at Club NOW had proven that.

I gave Bethany a bemused look. “Well, I’m sorry. I wish there was something I could do about it. People like Wes Howard should be banished from polite society.”

Bethany smiled, and this time placed a reassuring hand on mine. “It’s okay. I just wanted you to know that he was causing trouble. We’ll be seeing him again at the leadership meeting.”

There was something in the way she looked at me, a strange mixture of affection and disappointment, that made me charge down an unpremeditated path.

“Bethany, can I ask you something?”

“Of course,” she said, pulling her hand back.

“Gerald said some things about me in…, in his…, in the tantrum he threw when Don was firing him. I think he’s crazy, but I haven’t been able to get them out of my mind since Mary told me about them. I’m worried that they might actually be true.”

Bethany shrunk away, folding her hands in her lap. “What did he say?”

The words were on the tip of my tongue but they suddenly felt like the most dangerous words I could possibly utter. Once out, I realized, they would never be able to be brought back. They would be out forever.

“He said I was in over my head. That I was not up to the responsibilities of my position. That I had lost the trust of my team members. That they knew they couldn’t count on me.”

I looked at Bethany and she looked back at me in silence for several uncomfortable moments. I struggled to read the expression on her face, desperate to find something like incredulity or compassion manifest there. But try as I might, her stoicism seemed absolute, perpetual, eternal.

“Do you think any of that is true?” I asked.

“No,” Bethany said after only the shortest of perceptible pauses. “I think there are people here who are out to get you, who want to see you fail, but I don’t think those things about you, and I know plenty of others who don’t as well.”

I smiled, but Bethany did not smile back. If anything, she looked more uncomfortable than ever, far more distressed than how she appeared before telling me about Wes Howard’s hijinks. I thought briefly of the difficult position I had put her in -- I mean, what would anyone say if their boss laid that kind of doubt and fear on them -- and decided to chalk it up to that. The idea that she might be lying to me didn’t even cross my mind.

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you. I appreciate that vote of confidence.”

“Uh huh,” Bethany said, quickly excusing herself and leaving the room.

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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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