Eye to Eye (19 page)

By the end of most films, the characters have reached a paradise that looks nothing like compromise, and chucked whatever veneer of individuality they had for that most elusive of romantic ideals: love. Their two become one so, so seamlessly.

But normal men and women? For normal men and women, hard choices with unsatisfying ends are what we deal in all the time. And it starts to feel like a lot of half-baked choices that aren't so much choices as forced hands that have you checkerboarding across the country, possibly losing the people that you truly care about. The people who made your life what it once was: special. And am I expected to go on like this for the sake of an academic career, coasting from place to place, from person to person, feeling slightly more detached at each juncture? Or worse yet, getting good at it?”

 

Given my general level of grouchiness, it's probably best that the end of the week is the actual day of my date with Maxwell, which brings me back to the one place where romance still thrives. The poetry classroom. Paige Prentiss and I are engaging in an uneasy standoff. I try to pretend that I don't know or care that she's possibly sleeping with a man old enough to be her grandfather and also, perhaps, studying my liberal tendencies and reporting me to the university higher-ups in a so-called attempt to protect her right to an apolitical education. She tries to pretend that she never saw me in the hall with Antonius Block that day, let alone reported me to her conservative coalition.

This week we're discussing sonnets, and I don't even pretend that all this nonsense hasn't gotten to me. I could have brought in biting social commentary by Claude McKay or Gwendolyn Brooks. The sonnet transformed into political statement, divorced from its romantic roots and rejuvenated for the twentieth century. That, of course, runs the risk of discussing actual issues, so I settle on Edna St. Vincent Millay, also on occasion political, but politics aside, one of the definitive writers of the anti-love sonnet.

As I'm collating today's packet of material to hand out to the class, a tall, tanorexic woman who looks close to my age, but of an entirely different genus of female, enters the room. She'd probably be pretty were she not wearing a full pound of makeup, salmon-colored skirt-suit in a size four or six, gold dripping from her neck, wrists, and fingers like she bleeds the stuff and started to hemorrhage before class. Her hair is dark and professionally blown out. The supershiny lip gloss is a trampy nude. It's one of those outfits that is supposed to signal money, but mostly signals a complete lack of taste or judgment.

“Ms. Weatherall,” she starts.

And then Paige Prentiss corrects her, “It's Dr. Weatherall, Mom. Don't be an idiot.”

Paige Prentiss has a mother. An actual uterus from which she was no doubt ripped. A tacky, clinging to her twenties, clearly overchurched (this judging from the hubcap-size cross hanging prominently between her pushed up breasts), probably twice-divorced mom. Ms. Prentiss looks slightly stung, but immediately overcorrects with a hyperwide smile and officious shrug of the shoulders.

“You don't look like you could be more than twenty-five,” Ms. Prentiss says. “I do apologize. I spoke to the dean, and your department chair, and they said it would be fine for me to sit in on your class today. Just to write up my own little report, part of the parental front line in the classrooms. Showing concern for the students, my little girl.”

Ms. Prentiss removes her suit jacket, revealing a white tank top with red piping, and inexplicably, a red bra that all but glows through the material. Paige, for the first time since I've met her, looks potentially suicidal. She refuses to make eye contact with me or anyone else in the room.

“Jesus, Mother,” she finally says, adjusting the bright red bra strap peeking out from Ms. Prentiss's tank top.

“Praise the lord, Paige.”

Paige cringes.

“Ms. Prentiss, I assume. No one, but no one, told me that my class would be observed today, although you're welcome to sit in.”

“Actually, I'm Ms. Cartwright. I never even was a Ms. Prentiss, but thought that Paige shouldn't suffer for my mistakes.”

She's polite, but examining me from head to toe like Rocky sizing up the opponent before stepping into the ring.

Paige tugs at her mother's arm. “Class is starting.”

“Now you be quiet, Paige,” she says without a hint of authority. And then to me, as though we were suddenly co-conspirators, “I know that you received a letter about my coming some time ago, and I apologize for being so late with my visit. I've been planning a wedding, and it takes so much time. I always try to be sure to say something positive in my write-ups.”

Ms. Cartwright puts her arm around her daughter, who pushes it off like someone attempted to drape her in last year's Banana Republic irregulars. Ms. Cartwright looks embarrassed, but then starts doing what she clearly does best. Smiling like a monkey who hit the banana motherload.

I make a mental note that if I survive the afternoon, I deserve not only a ticket to Los Angeles, but the luxury of investigating first-class airfares.

Ms. Cartwright is quiet the first twenty minutes of class, while I give a thumbnail sketch of the sonnet's history, form, rhyme and meter, and the value of using something as antiquated as form in the twenty-first century. I read some Shakespeare that we've all heard before, and we discuss ideas of romantic love, the love object, etc. Ms. Cartwright even sits still while I read the first of Millay's poems, fiddling with her bracelets instead of looking at the page like the rest of the class. Paige is understandably quieter than usual, answering only the most innocuous of questions. Then we move to the first of the “love” sonnets, Millay's “I shall forget you presently, my dear.”

I start by asking an obvious question or two.

“How is this different from, say, what we saw going on in Shakespeare's poems? Look at the first line, does it seem tonally similar?”

Two hands go up, but before I can call on either, an unsolicited, “So what exactly is the woman saying?” comes from the mouth of Ms. Cartwright. “Is she saying that love just doesn't last? I think that's a rather hateful thing to have young people reading.”

“Mother,” Paige hisses. “It's ironic. Millay is using irony.”

“Good,” I jump in, “in what way is she using irony, Paige?”

Paige gives me a drowning look. She's caught between the good mommy and the bad mommy, and even she has no idea which is which anymore.

“In the difference between feelings, the fact that they are impermanent, and a drive for sex, which is underneath the feelings, and how the two confuse each other.”

“Good.” I ask, “Can anyone else elaborate on that or clarify what Paige just said?”

Ms. Cartwright's lips tighten, no doubt erasing thousands of dollars of good face work. She crosses her hands in her lap and interrupts.

“I don't know anything about irony,” she says. “But I do know that these children should be reading something with a better moral lesson. How are they supposed to take anything of value away from a poem like this?”

Between “children,” “morals,” and “take-home lessons,” I am truly, truly, truly at the end of my deeply frayed rope. This is more like Romper Room than college. I take one deep breath and do my best to respond.

“This is some serious bullshit,” Jack Moynihan mutters audibly from the right side of the room. I've been letting Jack audit the class since his born-again liberal arts experience, and for the most part he's been quiet and listened. But even a frat boy has his limits. The obscenity is followed by more murmurs of aquiesence.

“God, Mother,” Paige says, the fury in her voice now totally unmitigated. “I told you not to act this way when you came to class. You don't understand. Dr. Weatherall isn't like you, and this isn't like high school. It's poetry. It's about language. But you wouldn't understand that. You don't understand anything. You can't even wear the right
bra,
how can you even talk about Millay!”

Jack Moynihan laughs, and Paige seems to suddenly to remember that he's in the room.

Ms. Cartwright gives Paige a death look. “Of course,” she says, with guarded Southern politeness, “you would be able to tell me what to do, since you know everything. Since I gave up my youth to send you to some fancy school, so you can tell me how you know better.”

And suddenly, my classroom has become the Jerry Springer show. I wouldn't have believed it possible, except that Paige had to have learned a total lack of boundaries somewhere, and now it was crystal clear where the lessons have been taking place. No wonder she hates women in any kind of authority. I felt sorry for both of them, and dismiss class early before the shame spiral tightens further.

“I'd be happy to answer any questions you have at a later time,” I offer to Ms. Cartwright on the way out the door. “But as I didn't know you were coming, I have other appointments this afternoon. Paige has my e-mail if you need to contact me.”

If she writes me up as Satan herself and mails it to the actual president of the United States, not just Atlanta State, I am overjoyed to realize that I no longer care.

 

I confess. In the scant three hours between returning home from my afternoon at school and my date with Maxwell, I probably down a good five ounces of vodka. Alcohol in moderation has generally been my post-grad-school motto, and alcohol in moderation on first dates is one of the ten commandments of dating. As are: thou shalt not boss thy date around, and thou shalt not complain about thine own life, thou shalt not talk about thyself all the time and thou shalt not express too many strong opinions. If there were such a thing as a dating heretic, I was gearing up to be burned at the stake.

When Maxwell knocked on the door looking finer than fine in a cream-colored silk shirt and an only slightly creamier pair of pants, I had already decided that he was driving.

“I'm sorry,” I say. “Normally I would be coy and charming, but this has been a day for the record books. Welcome to the longest week of my life. As a result, you are the lucky man who gets to squire me to dinner, your choice of venue, as driver, of course.”

Fortunately, I could apply makeup well from beneath the door frame of a collapsing house in a 6.0 earthquake, so I look positively glowing, not to mention smiley from the liquor. For all he knows, I console myself, this is my actual personality.

“Longest week of my liiiiiiife,” I sing. “How was yours? Less brutal?”

“I was looking forward to telling you this,” he responds. “Since you've been following the papers, I presume. My company just landed Maggie Mae Mischner. It's going to be announced tomorrow. Evidently, she decided that she wanted to return the dress.”

“And that calls for legal representation?” I interrupt.

“She feels that the store mislead her not only about the return policy of the dress, but also about the nature of the dress itself. She thinks that all of her problems with her ex-fiancé began when she brought the dress home, and as a point of pride, she wants the money back. The boutique owner, who'd been nothing but understanding up until then, told her that the dress had been altered, and had a ‘tawdry past.'”

“Please,” I beg. “Please, please, please tell me that ‘tawdry past' is a direct quote.”

“Indeed it is. Maggie Mae considered the comment a sort of verbal assault, and allegedly pushed the boutique owner, who is alleging that Maggie Mae caused her to spill a pitcher of their complimentary champagne punch on a rack of new dresses. Maggie Mae is pleading ‘mental distress' and the owner wants the cost of the dresses covered.”

“It's like, if Chekov wrote chick lit,” I say. “Only the ‘gun in the first act' is a fifteen-thousand-dollar wedding dress. It has to go off by the end. Flaw-less.”

Maxwell isn't smiling exactly, in fact, something in Maxwell's demeanor leads me to believe that he
feels sorry
for Maggie Mae Mischner. I'm not sure that I approve.

“Just promise me that
you're
not defending her.”

“She's genuinely distressed.” He folds his arms like he's about to start some grand closing argument.

“She's an embarrassment to women everywhere.”

“But you're not bitter,” he says.

“Not in the slightest.”

“For the record, ma'am.”

“Do NOT ma'am me today, mister.”

“For the record, Ms.,” he corrects. “She's got some mental problems of her own.”

“Please,” I say. “Tell her to JOIN THE CLUB. Next excuse.”

“Not here,” Maxwell remarks. “Over food.”

Maxwell and I drive to a hole-in-the-wall vegetarian joint near Virginia Highland, run by vegan Indians and populated largely by a crowd that I recognize well from my days at Langsdale: socially-conscious white folks in hempware and smelly thrift-store jeans. Silent Bollywood films play on the two television sets at either end if the restaurant, and Maxwell and I are beyond overdressed. I like that we are sitting at some ratty diner-style tables, ordering delicious ginger carrot juice and debating the future of a one-time bride to be.