biological consequences of the liaison so discreetly chronicled in John Collier’s His Monkey Wife.)
Donald Johanson, American paleoanthropologist and discoverer of the fossil remains of the Australopithecus afarensis specimen known as Lucy: “It would be interesting to know if a modern man and a million-year-old Homo erectus woman could together produce a fertile child. The strong hunch is that they could; such evolution as has taken place is probably not of the kind that would prevent a successful mating.” (However, one might reasonably suppose that a million-year-old woman had long since passed through menopause.)
Of late it has been fashionable for critics to dismiss my claim as a contemptible form of sexual braggadocio. I refute this mean-spirited charge by confessing my inadequacies as a lover.
First, a quotation from the pens of Richard Leakey (Blair’s Kenyan nemesis) and Roger Lewin (erstwhile editor of New Scientist):
“As a biological response to female sexuality, human males have evolved a penis that is larger than any other primate, including the gorilla whose body bulk is almost three times that of a man’s.”
Sic, sic, sic.
(A connoisseur of others’ slip-ups and solecisms, Blair once hung a sampler bearing this remarkable assertion on the wall of his private office in the National Museum in Marakoi.)
Despite an indefatigable popular belief in the sexual prowess of males of my pigmentation, my penis is not as large as a gorilla. It is not even as large as an Airedale. It may be as large as a lesser mouse lemur, but I do not propose to put this supposition to the acid test of direct comparison. And although I might pay for a quick glimpse of someone whose masculine member reminds Messrs. Leakey and Lewin of a mountain gorilla, I do not believe I would envy this person. He would probably have to purchase two fares each time he contrived to board a bus.
Second, neither do I possess exceptional staying power. Alfie was more than a match for me in this regard, as his exploits with Emily, Guinevere, and Nicole clearly demonstrated. Fortunately, even in her periods of utmost receptivity, Helen’s sexual appetite was modest, and I did not have to overextend myself to give her her fill. The fact that I remain single today may be a function of my quiescent libido. Since Helen, I have not been drawn to any other woman, and my political obligations have exercised most of my energies.
Very well, then, setting aside chromosome counts, anatomy lessons, appeals to authority, and ritual self-abasement, how do I account for Helen’s unlikely pregnancy?
Well, it may have been a miracle.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Fort Walton Beach, Florida,
to Van Luna, Kansas
September to December 1985
WOODY KAPROW WAS AN ENIGMA. He did not consider Florida home, but he paid so little heed to his physical surroundings that no other place in the world (with the possible exception of a marshy area in Poland from which his family hailed but upon which he had never laid eyes) could claim that distinction, either. He was truly at home only in his own mind. A civilian, he let his mind to the Air Force under the terms of a complicated military research-and-development contract. A bachelor, he was married to this work. A loner, he was surrounded by assistants. A genius (if you could trust the judgment of these often fuddled minions), when it came to literature, music, art, or the likely contenders in this year’s Super Bowl game, he had the attention span of a third-grader. Time—its properties, paradoxes, metaphysics, measurement, and maddening theoretical possibilities—was Woody Kaprow’s passion. It was his career. A vocation that did not prevent him from misgauging the number of minutes it required to heat a frozen TV dinner. A passion that he could indulge while rinsing out a pair of socks, picking his nose, or attending committee meetings.
Kaprow, in person, was unprepossessing. A slender, middle-aged man with dark hair and eyes like bloated cocktail onions, he seemed younger than his years. (Joshua felt that this was because his ruling passion gave him a distracted, adolescent air, like a teenager in love with opera or astrology.) His clothes were always minimum-maintenance: dungarees, drip-dry shirts, chinos, turtleneck pullovers, jean jackets, sweatshirts, deck pants, and, occasionally, an orange, multizippered flight suit that he had purchased from a retiring fighter pilot. Even in the flight suit, however, he looked less like a military man than like one of the surviving members of the Flying Wallendas. Indeed, with his head cocked just so, his eyes afloat in the martini-bright waters of