An Imperfect Spy (14 page)

K
ATE
returned to Schuyler for her seminar the next day, reassured by Reed’s promise to learn what he could from Betty Osborne. She reported to Harriet the substance of her New Hampshire visit: Nellie had not been killed. Harriet listened, in the women’s room, to Kate’s account, and seemed unimpressed.

“No doubt the brother’s right,” she said, “technically speaking. They killed her all the same, the bastards. Why is it that men with retrograde opinions have no manners? They come into the secretaries’ room and order me and the other women around. Sometimes they come in, looking for a fellow conspirator, and if he’s not there they say, ‘Oh, there’s no one here.’ I’ve trained the women to sing out in unison, ‘There’s somebody here; there’s a
bunny rabbit underneath the radiator.’ It’s had a surprisingly good effect.”

“Men like these,” Kate said, “have good manners to women they consider their social equals. They’re only rude to women over whom they have power. That’s the explanation of most sexual harassment, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Of course I’ve noticed. At least I’ve been able to maintain an atmosphere of no bottom smacking or cheek pinching in my secretaries’ room. ‘Go home and pat your wife,’ I say to them. Really, Kate, there’s been a change. They creep in the door now, and behave like lambs once inside. They have definitely decided not to mess with me. And they don’t want to be rid of me, because I get the work done. This is known as having them by the short and curlies: hands and hats off, boys, I say.”

Kate, considerably cheered by Harriet’s grip on things, went down to the seminar room where Blair was waiting. Blair, too, seemed to feel that things were looking up. A good deal of what Kate and he had been saying seemed, suddenly, to have taken root. As a result, instead of discussing legal and literary treatments of rape, Kate and Blair found themselves this afternoon being questioned about the law school itself.

While they were still, at the beginning of the seminar, parrying questions and trying to decide without the benefit of consultation how to deal with this new openness, a male student strode to the door of the classroom, locked it with a key he had with him, and stood facing the class.

“No one leaves till I say so,” he ordered, “and no one telephones.” He glared at the young woman who had had the phone on the last occasion. Blair looked at Kate and both simultaneously recognized that the last attempt to incarcerate the class had gone awry, and this student, or whoever had planned it, had seen the trick fail. The call to the police had gone out too fast. This time the student was better prepared; he had decided or been ordered to lock the door himself, and he had done so. He now faced Blair in a confrontational stance that was, Kate realized, what was meant by squaring off.

“I’ve had enough of your goddamn bullshit,” the young man said to Blair, “and I’m going to show you how real men behave. If there’s one thing I hate worse than fags, it’s straight men who let women tell them what to do.” And he launched himself at Blair, punching him first in the stomach and then, as Blair bent over in pain, in the face. Kate and everyone else in the room stood as though paralyzed. In the lengthy moment it took Blair to collapse on the floor and the student to leap on him, Kate realized that outside of movies and television, she had never seen any men she knew personally fighting. The whole thing resembled a staged fight for a characteristically violent film of the day, providing guns and knives had been, for some eccentric reason of plot, avoided. All this was the thought of a second: she was uncertain what to do.

The students in the class, however, if less literarily inclined, were more practical. One of the young women picked up a chair, hoisted it above
her head, and brought it down on the back of Blair’s assailant. Obviously, a young woman who worked out, which Kate did not. Nonetheless, grasping the strategy, she and others grabbed chairs and began shoving them onto the belligerent student, still on top of Blair. The effect was confused but effective; the student rolled away from the chairs, and Blair grabbed him.

In the extraordinary (to Kate) manner of the indestructible men in films, Blair started punching the student, who was considerably taller and heavier, until the student, in his turn, was lying on the floor with Blair hovering over him, waiting for him to get up. At that moment Kate remembered the student’s first name, which was Jake. (Blair had insisted on running the class on a first-name basis, and Kate never did learn which last name went with whom until almost the end of the semester.)

Blair, tired of hovering, pulled Jake to his feet and slammed him against the wall, where he held him up with one hand, while threatening him with the other, should he move. Jake seemed either worn-out, or biding his time. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Blair asked, shaking him as though a reasonable explanation might just possibly fall out.

“I’ve been taping this bullshit class,” Jake said, shaking himself loose but carefully not suggesting any further violence. “I’ve been listening to all this propaganda, cases where guys rape girls because the damn girls can’t make up their minds even when your balls are blue. And what the hell are girls for
anyway? You people, you and this crazy dame, are polluting the whole atmosphere of this law school and of the country, and I intend to put a stop to it. That’s what the fuck I’m doing.”

“Give me the key,” Blair said, holding out his hand.

After a moment’s consideration, Jake handed it over, hatred oozing from him like sweat. Blair unlocked the door, but did not open it; he pocketed the key.

“How many of you knew that this guy was taping the class?” he asked. He motioned Kate to the seat next to him and sat down. Jake leaned against a wall. “Lean over there,” Blair said to him, pointing to the farther wall. “I want to be able to see you. Or sit down, if that position is compatible with your profound dignity. But keep your hands on the table.”

Jake sat down, reached into his pocket as Blair rose menacingly to his feet, and then slid the tape recorder across the table toward Blair. “You can keep this tape,” he said. “I have plenty of others. With copies.” He sneered.

Blair removed the tape and put the recorder in his jacket pocket. “I’ll return it when this class is over,” he said. “Don’t forget to ask me for it. Now, as I was saying, how many of you knew this class was being taped?”

For a time there was silence, long enough for Kate to wonder what Blair would do next—she herself hadn’t, she realized, the least idea of what to do—when a young woman spoke up.

“I knew,” she said. “I encouraged him. He seemed to be a real guy, not like the other so-called men in the class—well, that’s what I thought then,” she added, looking around apologetically. “I mean, Jake was going with a friend of mine and she thought it was a great idea. I’m not so sure I still think so. Anyway, I’d started reading up on the law on taping without permission. It’s complicated, but I thought one’s motives should come into it. I mean, you know, well, I didn’t think Jake would want me to tape some of his conversations about this class. Would you, Jake?” she added, turning toward him. Jake started to snarl something, and then stopped.

“What really got to me,” the young woman, whose name was Tilly, went on, “was that he somehow got hold of a picture of Kate, Professor Fansler, and attached it to one of the worst kind of centerfolds from
Hustler
, or some such porn magazine. He passed it around, and everyone sort of laughed at first, and then some of us began to wonder if we’d really like someone to do that to us, and if it was really fair. I mean, Kate never pretended to be a sex object, did she? It seemed like taking Jake’s head and putting it on the picture of a guy with a tiny little prick, if you know what I mean.”

Smiles around the table indicated that they knew what she meant. Neither Kate nor Blair smiled. It all seemed far more crude and violent and intrusive than anything they had imagined possible in a classroom.

“Did Jake show this composite centerfold to anyone on the faculty?” Kate asked. The women around
the table exchanged glances. “I take it,” Kate said, “that silence means consent. Why is it I’m so certain the faculty found it screamingly funny?”

Blair looked at his watch and exchanged a glance with Kate, who looked at hers and nodded. “We’ll call this class over for today,” he said. “If anyone tries again to lock that door or any door with me on the other side of it, I promise you your future in any kind of law practice will become singularly difficult. Everybody out.”

They left the room slowly, as though sensing that the situation had not been satisfactorily resolved, as indeed it hadn’t. When they were gone, Kate and Blair, still seated, looked at each other and, almost simultaneously, sighed.

“I’m sorry you had to put up with that,” Blair said. “You’re taking it with remarkable equanimity. You
are
all right, aren’t you, Kate?”

She was silent for a moment. “I am all right, thank you. And I find I’m wondering why. I mean, that’s a pretty brutal thing to do to any woman. But the mean boys in
Hustler
and
Playboy
have been playing that trick for a long time now. And a woman-professor friend of mine even had the same treatment, far more skillfully carried out, from a right-wing journal. The idea isn’t shocking anymore; it’s on a par with being told that all feminists hate men and won’t wear makeup. I don’t imagine this little job was done very skillfully. It isn’t the picture, Blair, it’s the hatred and the fear. The degree to which some men are threatened by feminism. But it doesn’t make me fearful and vulnerable
anymore, it just makes me first angry, and then thoughtful—wondering what the threat really is.”

“That’s simple.” He got up and stood behind her chair, putting his arms over hers and then massaging the back of her neck and shoulders. “They’re afraid that their natural and unquestioned position at the top of the ladder is becoming less secure. The ladder’s shaking, and they are in grave danger of falling off the top.”

“You don’t seem worried.”

“Maybe because I don’t find the top as appealing as some. I’ve decided I don’t care a great deal for the guys who make it up there.”

“You sound like Harriet,” Kate said, getting up. “Thanks for the massage; I
was
tense.”

“Better than sounding like our dean,” he said. “Let’s go.” They walked together back to Blair’s office, where, seated on opposite sides of the desk, they smiled at each other.

“I didn’t know you could fight like that,” Kate said. “Do all men do that? I’ve spent so much time with literary types that I never noticed, and missed out on all the action. I’ve never seen Reed hit anyone.”

“I was a street kid long ago,” Blair said, “and I’ve stayed in shape. He hit me in the stomach, which I wasn’t ready for, but I had hardened those muscles, almost automatically, in anticipation. I’m what they call an A-type, so I’ve had to learn to be ready for what comes.”

“An A-type,” Kate repeated. “You mean the sort who can’t stand waiting on line, and finishes everybody’s
sentences, and fights over parking spaces—that kind of A-type?”

“More or less,” Blair said. “Except, as you may have noticed, I’ve tried to stop finishing people’s sentences, at least most of the time. The question is, what in hell are we going to do about Jake?”

“I haven’t an idea in the world, at least not at this moment,” Kate said. She stood up, anxious to get away from all this and especially from the excruciating fact that this revolting masculine display had made Blair sharply, noticeably attractive. I’m responding to cavemen, she thought. What the hell is the matter with me? This damn place is driving me bonkers, that’s what it is, and turning me into someone who
ought
to want to be in a centerfold. Well, anyway, able to respond to the sort of man who responds to centerfolds? Oh, shit, as Jake would say.

“I think we should make sure that guy’s actions do not go unreported to his potential employers,” Blair said. “I mean, if they think he acted in a manly and proper fashion, they’re free to hire him, and good luck. But other types should be warned.”

“I don’t know,” Kate said. “I think he did us a favor, really. He’s turned some of the students around more effectively than we might have done without his help. I think he’s the sort who’s his own worst enemy.”

“That’s because he didn’t punch you in the gut,” Blair said. “Not that I’d put it past him. The problem is—”

There was a knock on the door, and whatever Blair’s problem was remained unexpressed. He
went to the door and admitted a woman Kate recognized as Bobby, Reed’s assistant director of the clinic.

“Hi,” she said. “Sorry to intrude.” Kate introduced her to Blair. “Nice to meet you. I’ve come to waft Kate off to Staten Island. You don’t mind if I call you Kate, do you? I don’t want to presume on one dinner and a working relationship with your husband.”

“You’re not presuming. Why should I go to Staten Island?”

“Because Betty Osborne has agreed to see you, and Reed thinks it ought to be this afternoon. She could ask for you through regular channels, and you’d get a visitor’s pass, but Reed thought maybe we better strike while the iron was hot. So I’m to drive you out there. If you want to call Reed at home, he’ll explain. But hurry, he won’t be there long.”