The Touch of Treason by Sol Stein Page B

creations. And from variety, inequity.”
    Ed was accustomed to women being like his mother, shutting up even if they were smart. Leona Fuller was a new experience.
    “What I just said,” she went on, “aroused a touch of anger in you.”
    He hated that it showed. He valued control.
    “Don’t deny it,” she said. “Think about it. Our brains are for understanding ourselves first and societies second.”
    *
    When Ed was very young he heard some adult say that his father was a very impressive man. He didn’t know if they meant large or imposing mannered or rich, all of which he was. The first time he heard Martin Fuller speak, lured back for one of his perennial guest lectures, the word came back to him with a bounce: impressive. In his father’s circle there were other men as successful as he was, but Martin Fuller did what he did better than any other man on earth. That was impressive. Ed couldn’t believe his luck when Fuller took time to talk to him after class. Ed made him laugh, something he said about the bowel imperative being more imperative than the categorical imperative. Ed didn’t want to overdo it, or seem to be sucking up to Fuller, but he stopped by after his lecture the following week and sneaked in a word about the book he was finishing, Lenin’s Grandchildren.
    “Bring me ten pages,” Fuller said.
    “I could bring you all I’ve done,” Ed volunteered.
    “Ten pages,” he said.
    Ed photocopied ten pages and dropped them off when Fuller wasn’t around. He didn’t want to be there when Fuller read them. He felt like a kid physicist working on a formula and showing it to Einstein.
    Ed sweated the time away. After the next lecture he hung behind, waiting till the others got their little after-lecture ass kissing out of the way, then stood in front of Fuller, waiting.
    He just looked at Ed. He didn’t say a thing.
    “Is it that bad?” Ed asked.
    Fuller laughed with his whole chest. “I want to read the rest.”
    He could see Ed was still nervous. He said, “You have a good mind.”
    He could have said Ed had two legs for all it meant.
    Ed brought Fuller the rest of the manuscript. Several weeks went by. Was he reading it? Finally, Ed asked.
    “I’ve read it,” Fuller said. “Why don’t you come for dinner next week. We live in Westchester. It isn’t far.”
    Ed felt as if he’d suddenly been asked to sing at the Met.
    He didn’t know how he was supposed to dress and he was embarrassed to ask, but he did. “Wear clothes,” Fuller said, and that time Ed laughed.
    Ed thought there would be other students there for dinner, but that night there was only him. Was that their way of getting acquainted with a new person? Or did Fuller want to talk about Ed’s manuscript in private?
    At one point in the evening the conversation got around to the progressive income tax. Ed said, “How can you call something like an income tax progressive?” That made them both laugh. Ed desperately wanted them to like him enough to invite him back. He felt comfortable there. He’d be even more comfortable the second time.
    Fuller could turn any topic into something worth looking at again as if ideas were sculpture to be turned and seen in a different light.
    “Of course, Ed,” Fuller said, then, “Is it all right if I call you Ed?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Please call me Martin.” I couldn’t do that, Ed thought.
    Fuller was saying, “It’s the people in the middle who pay most of the tax. The rich—all you young people know that first—devote their energies to tax-avoidance schemes. The poor are trapped by sales taxes on necessities. But the Soviets,” he said, “are cleverer than the rich here. They are not about to impose a graduated income tax or eliminate their tax-free perks. Their chief tax—few people know this—is on vodka, the big contributor to the government’s coffers, the drug of choice and imposition. Since the unhappy man in the gutter and the unhappy men in the