“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 can’t bear it that you won’t.”

And this was the wife he had left! If she had a failing, it was that she didn’t give blow jobs. (His own eccentricity was that he hated having the top of his head touched during the act of love.) If she had a failing, it was that she had so acute a sense of smell that she made him feel as if he stank the place up. (As a result, however, he had begun to wash more often.) If she had a failing, it was that she bought things without ever asking what they cost, an extraordinary trait in a woman who did not, as the British say, come from money. If she had a failing, it was that she had grown accustomed to being kept, and could spend more money on Christmas than half the population earned in a year. If she had a failing, it was that her mother-love blinded her to the rest of humanity’s desires, including, to be blunt, Professor Solanka’s. If she had a failing, it was that she wanted more children. That she wanted nothing else. Not all the gold of Araby.

No, she was faultless: the tenderest, most attentive of lovers, the most extraordinary mother, charismatic and imaginative, the easiest and most rewarding of companions, not a big talker but a good one (reference that first phone call), and a connoisseur not just of food and drink but of human character, too. To be smiled on by Eleanor Masters Solanka was to feel subtly, pleasingly complimented. Her friendship was a pat on the back. And if she spent freely, what of it? The Solankas were unexpectedly well-off, thanks to the almost shocking worldwide popularity of a female doll with a cheeky grin and the cocky insouciance that was just beginning to be called “attitude,” and of whom Asmaan Solanka, born eight years later, uncannily looked like the fair-haired, dark-eyed, sweeter-natured flesh-and-blood embodiment. Though he was very much a boy, preoccupied by giant diggers, steamrollers, rocket ships, and railway engines, and captivated by the I-think-I-can-I-think-I-can-I-thought-I-could-I-thought-I-could determination of Casey Jones, the indomitable circus-hauling little engine in Dumbo, Asmaan was constantly, infuriatingly, taken for a girl, probably because of his long-eyelashed beauty, but possibly also because he reminded people of his father’s earlier creation. The doll’s name was Little Brain.

2

Professor Solanka in the late 1980s despaired of the academic life, its narrowness, infighting, and ultimate provincialism. “The grave yawns for us all, but for college dons it yawns with boredom,” he proclaimed to Eleanor, adding, unnecessarily as things turned out, “Prepare for poverty” Then to the consternation of his fellows, but with his wife’s unqualified approval, he resigned his tenured position at King’s, Cambridge—where he had been inquiring into the development of the idea of the state’s responsibility to and for its citizens, and of the parallel and sometimes contradictory idea of the sovereign self—and moved to London (Highbury Hill, within shouting distance of the Arsenal Stadium). Soon afterward he plunged into, yes, television; which drew down much predictably envious scorn, especially when the BBC commissioned him to develop a late-night series of popular history-of-philosophy programs whose protagonists would be Professor Solanka’s notorious collection of outsize egghead dolls, all made by himself.

This was simply too much. What had been a tolerable eccentricity in a respected colleague became intolerable folly in a craven defector, and The Adventures of Little Brain was unanimously derided, before it was ever screened, by “intellos” both great and small. Then it aired, and within a season, to general astonishment and the knockers’ chagrin, grew from a sophisticated coterie’s secret pleasure into a cult classic with a satisfyingly youthful and rapidly expanding fan base, until at last it was handed the accolade of being moved into the coveted slot after the main evening news. Here it blossomed into a full-blooded prime-time hit.

It was well known at King’s that in Amsterdam in his middle twenties Malik Solanka—in the city to speak on religion and politics at a left-leaning institute funded by Faberge money—visited the Rijksmuseum and was entranced by that great treasure-trove’s displays of meticulously period-furnished dollhouses, those unique descriptions of the interior life of Holland down the ages. They were open-fronted, as if bombs had knocked away their facades; or like little theaters, which he completed by being there. He was their fourth wall. He began to see everything in Amsterdam as if miniaturized: his own hotel on the Herengracht, the Anne Frank house, the impossibly good-looking Surinamese women. It was a trick of the mind to see human life made small, reduced to doll size. Young Solanka approved of the results. A little modesty about the scale of human endeavor was to be desired. Once you had thrown that switch in your head, the hard thing was to see in the old way. Small was beautiful, as Schumacher had just then begun to say.