Free Cannibals and Missionaries by Mary McCarthy

was natural in somebody who had to be concerned with gifts and bequests, while a contrary thought chain was leading her to wonder how she could avoid them if they turned up at Zoroaster’s Cube or the wall tombs of Naqsh-i-Rustan when she was with Senator Carey. She could not stop herself from thinking, any more than the average person, on being shown 2 and 2, could avoid making 4.
    Her fault was only an unusual degree of mental activity. The curse of intelligence. Stupid people were unconscious of their slow-moving thought processes. But take Charles’s plain gold ring: a mind like hers could not fail to perceive immediately that it was on the “wrong” hand and be aware of what conclusions to draw. Though he must be nearly eighty and queer in every sense, there he was, a man and unmarried. With a fair share of worldly goods. If he owned a house on Mount Vernon Street and collected porcelains, he could not be, as she had first thought, some kind of gentleman guide. She could not be blamed if in the forefront of her idling mind these facts were turning over, along with the notation that she was fifty this year and single.
    For some time now, ever since her affaire with the head of the classics department had ended, she had been looking at men from that angle. To her shame, even the Bishop had passed through her head this morning. The deterrent was not the dead wife, so hard to replace, or his age, but the fact that he was too sweet: when he died, she knew she would suffer. She did not mean to be sizing up old men; it was almost cruel. But so few men of her own age were available. Most men of her own age were either married or queer. A married man could always turn into a widower, but a queer remained a queer, though an old one, if you had some interests in common, might prove to be your best hope, assuming he was no longer very active sexually—a women’s college would not offer many fleshly temptations. Yet what if she were called upon to be the first woman president of Harvard or Yale? In that event, a homosexual consort would be a liability.
    Her bald approach to this topic seemed to distress her friends. “Honey,” her PR man said, “you shouldn’t talk that way in front of me. I’m a man. You shouldn’t even talk that way to yourself. You got to leave something to fate.” But Aileen had no trust in fate. She preferred to see this as a problem for study, researching the field of “availables” in the same spirit as she leafed through scholarly publications in the hunt for a candidate with the right qualifications for an expected vacancy in one of the departments. And with luck she might kill two birds with one stone; that was how she had found her classicist, an excellent teacher and a grass widower. But then, when he was settled in, with a nice house and a top salary, his mercenary wife had returned to him. Divorced men were a mirage: they either went back to their wives or married someone much younger, the way they would turn in an old Buick for a new Volkswagen.
    She was not the kind married men left their wives for; she had learned that cruel lesson in her thirties. So her choice ought to lie between widowers and bachelors, which was not a bright outlook, given the known facts that most wives outlived their husbands and that most bachelors were disguised halves of a homosexual couple.
    She ought to have married when she was young, but then she had not wanted to. She had prized her independence. Making her own way up the academic ladder, she did not fancy adding the burden of a husband to be carried along; the Ph.D. candidates she met in the graduate-school mills and in the cafeterias and faculty dining-rooms of small Southern colleges were far from enticing partis, and the deans and department heads had their careers already made and would never forsake tenure as well as their wives and children to follow her north when the call came.
    The typical academic married too early; as a student, she had taken