Being a
resourceful siren, Shirley took a different tack than she had
previously employed with him. “Laurence, why are you such a bundle
of hostile rage?” Shirley asked him. “No one is ever going to
believe you love them, if you go around wound up like an eight day
clock!”
Most of
Laurence's peers thought that he was just being an anal retentive
nerd, and Shirley was prepared to agree, but she nonetheless wanted
to force Laurence to marshal his thoughts, and put them into words.
Shirley had
formulated the intuitive conclusion that, once Laurence put his
thoughts into words, his peers would be forced to agree or disagree
with Laurence's true opinions, and that this would necessarily put
paid to misconception and rumor. Despite this optimism, the answer
still surprised her.
“In
Africa, people found fault with everything,” Laurence began. “I
just believed that if I was hostile to everybody, and didn't trust
anyone, then nobody would be able to take advantage of me.”
Shirley
paused as she assimilated this news. “Well why are you acting like
you're still in Africa?” she finally asked. Geographically he was
undeniably here in her presence, but people are social and cultural
beings, not geographical ones.
“I don't
know,” Laurence replied truthfully. “I think part of what holds
me is grief for the poverty and suffering there. Most Americans don't
know about that degree of injustice, and they are tenderhearted
people. I feel like that if I tell them the actual truth somehow (and
that wouldn't be an easy conversation to put into words,) my American
friends would just find themselves used and taken advantage of, just
like I was.”
For
Laurence, this was more about his feelings than he ever shared. It
was way easier to talk about how library science was essential to
history students, or how the Ottoman and Byzantine empires differed.
Shirley was
a caring girl. However, her concern was for Laurence, not for Africa,
and she ultimately came away perplexed.
If Laurence
was like a knot in a piece of string that needed to be teased loose
and released, his knot was simply too complicated for Shirley to see
where to begin. She concluded that pulling the two ends taut would
make irreparable changes to his psyche. In the face of such
complexity, alcohol and sex were clumsy tools.
