The Seventeenth Wife’s Tale
Celebrity is not a thing I have ever taken seriously. I know I am atypical in this respect, but even as a young man, I never wrote a fan letter, asked for an autograph, or hoped to catch sight of someone I did not have a reason to see. Whenever my friends played the game “What celebrity would you choose to have dinner with?” I would say, simply, “None.” Reputation is different. Reputation is acknowledgment of a person’s real accomplishments. Celebrity, on the other hand, is a form of false reverence that society assigns, for mostly ridiculous reasons, to actors, or to politicians who are essentially actors, or to other public figures who typically have done nothing of substance, and who are also for the most part essentially actors.
Yet celebrity is the subject of not just one but two of the tales I have to tell.
If I tell you that I had twenty-seven wives during my time among the heads, possibly this will make me sound like something of a ladies’ man, jumping from woman to woman as if playing a macho game. But that is not at all how it was. Everyone in Old Town married and divorced. Some more often than others, but my own twenty-seven marriages were not unusual, and there were plenty of men and women who married much more often.
My seventeenth wife, for example, had fifty-two spouses before we met and no doubt a hundred more after we parted. It was not that she was adulterous or opportunistic or “loose.” She was simply popular. The most sought-after spouse in all of Old Town, in fact, for the simple reason that she had by far the best stories, and an endless supply of them.
For you see, my seventeenth wife — Ninat was her name — was a unique figure in Old Town. Though she ate and slept among us, the Capitalists had given her a daytime profession that took her out into the world. Actually, it was many professions, a different profession every few days, each with its own physical requirements and odd experiences that she would bring back to share with us every night. The official title that had been bestowed on her was Temp.
I very much liked Ninat and enjoyed listening to her stories, but I did not envy her lifestyle. She paid a high price for her adventures. Because each job she was sent on required its own set of capacities, her head had to be attached to a differently configured body on practically a daily basis, a process that most of us had to abide only once every few years, when our own decrepit bodies rotted out. Personally, I would have found such constant upheaval irritating and disorienting. If they had offered me her job, I am sure I would have held out for something more permanent. But Ninat had a very strong disposition. She never seemed bothered by the constant changeover and even claimed to thrive on the variety. No doubt that was why she was chosen for her position in the first place.
Ninat was a very good tale-teller, but she had one unusual quirk: Because her supply of stories was always increasing, she had more material than she could easily make use of and thus had a tendency to overpack. A single Ninat tale might contain any number of smaller stories, all bunched in together, sometimes so densely that it was hard to pick them apart. That is why, even though I remember many of Ninat’s excellent tales and could sit here recounting them for days, I think it will be sufficient to tell you just one.
I will tell one of her simpler ones, which also happens to be my favorite: the tale of the Prize Administrator and the Cultural Influencer and the mediocre Head of School.
