I went over to Paul's at dinnertime, unannounced, wearing my green knit cap, thinking hard. I let myself in through the foyer, walked quietly up the stairs, and slowly turned my copy of the key in the door to his room. It doesn't open easily, so I went very slowly. Finally I had the lock unlatched. I savored the moment, the pleasure of unpredictability, the half-finished story.

I squared my shoulders, put my head down, took a breath, and pushed open the door, stomping in. I yelled: “Motherfucker!” in my best cop voice.

Paul said, “ahlaaalh!” and stood up with his hands out, a sharp steel knife with a plastic handle in his right hand. His other hand held a tomato.

“Put the tomato down and I won't kill you,” I said.

Thankfully the knife missed my eye, bouncing off my brow, and about fifteen minutes later he let me back in the apartment. By then I'd taken off my shirt and pants and was pounding his door pretending to cry, saying as loudly as I could, “baby, I'm bleeding! You gotta help me, baby. The neighbors are all going to see what you did. Paul, baby, just let me call the hospital.” So he let me back in.

Paul had been slicing his tomato onto some bread and dipping that combination in a shallow pool of olive oil in a plastic saucer, and when I'd come in he'd knocked the olive oil onto the rug, where it quickly dissipated into a permanent stain. He pointed to it when I walked in and called me a motherfucker. I don't deny that I love my mother. I patched up the small cut on my eyebrow his knife-toss had left (“I wasn't aiming,” he said.) he pointed to this as evidence of what a resolute bastard I was.

“I am a bastard by any definition,” I said, kneeling at the edge of the rug with a spray bottle filled with some vile-smelling chemical and paper towels, trying to fix the damage. I didn't feel guilt - it's a $40 blue carpet from Bed Bath and Beyond and he deserves punished for owning such a thing - but I take responsibility for my offenses against social decency.

“Listen, before you got all bent out of shape, I was thinking. Geography,” I say, then trailed off, just to piss him off.

“Geography, what?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“What?”

“You're cranky, Paul. You want me to leave?”

He turned back to The House of Mirth.

“You're against racism, right?”

He gave me a look.

“So what I've done is uncovered an entirely new kind of racism, a patronism minstrelsry unseen by humans.”

“What is that? Don't say that white men are being oppressed.”

“Of course not. What I'm talking about is Renaissance Faires. Don't look that way. Renaissance Faires are chronological chauvinism. They're historical minstrelsry. The thing you have to do is look at chronology as you would geography. Look at it as culture. Imagine a fantasy role-player dressed in a leather jerkin and jodphurs pretending to be nights or whatever. Is that any worse than people putting on blackface? It's just that there's no one from the Renaissance or Medieval era to complain. They're mocking the dead.”

“Let's go to a bar and drink until we fall down,” Paul said. “And right before I send you home with whatever harelipped trash you can find, you can explain this to me and it'll matter.”

“Don't be hostile. I'm telling you. The Ren Faire is as bad as sexism and racism.”

“Look, I'm at the end of an ideological rope. You know what ideology scores me? It scores me shit. I try to think rightly and do rightly and I end up just as cranky and boring as I ever was. What do I give a fuck if someone wants to play a lute and pretend they're an Italian prince?”

“You're approaching it wrong. You have to have your beliefs in spite of opinion. You have to have ”

“”

“”

“”

I think the Renaissance Faire is a kind of prejudice. Like a minstrel show. Just that everyone who could criticize it as a kind of patronizing foolishness is dead.

You're serious?

Chronological chauvinist! he says. Yes I'm serious. I think we patronize the past. And romanticize. We assume that Victorians were somehow in control of their impulses because the texts that have come down show us a huge pile of repressed people in corsets.

And a lot of smut.