Memories of the Ford Administration (26 page)

I can see, dear NNEAAH, how this last sentence above
might misread in a scholarly journal, and if it offends your taste, or threatens your parsimonious subvention from the Granite State’s pinched educational budget, of course strike it out; but I am trying at your behest to remember the Ford era, and the senses are Mnemosyne’s handmaidens. The aroma of a hundred young females lying sprawled and jabbering, munching and straw-sucking and with loud excessive animation presenting their cases, their agendas, their hopes and disappointments to one another like so many amateur actresses trying out for the starring role—this scent is an avenue to truth, historical truth as it has become, with the passage of a decade and a half. A nobler teacher, it may be, would have sensed only their minds; his thoughts would have flown to what lay between their ears rather than between their legs and erected fantasies about their term papers and future professions. But it was not clear, in the Ford era, that Woman’s proper destiny was to toil on Wall Street or fly a helicopter into Iraq—there was still in the air, left over from the lotus-eating Sixties, a belief that being, not doing, was the point of it all and that psychosexual fulfillment, in a practical form as vague as possible, was the aim of education.

At any rate, am I my reptile brain’s keeper? I confess: I had no special reason to be passing through the Student Center; I was cruising it. My bachelor habits had come to include working late in my office in Harrison Hall—named after neither the quickly deceased William Henry nor his equally forgettable grandson Benjamin but after Georgiana Harrison, Wayward Junior College’s militantly unwed founder and first President, who brought her father’s mill-money, earned by the sweat of sallow maidens manning mechanical looms in twelve-hour stretches, across the river and sank it into the neo-Georgian apparatus of a liberating two-year
education. Bleary from my attempts to breathe life into the tortuous career of James Buchanan, between nine and ten I would leave Harrison Hall to its ticking radiators or dripping air-conditioners, depending on the season, and walk toward the faculty parking lot on the far side of the campus. The bucolic randomness of our campus paths presented no unequivocal route; it was as direct as any other to walk through the Student Center, inhaling the aura and bringing a pause to the gabble of the students. They were, as young animals and as cloistered women, immensely sensitive; their pooled sensibilities rippled in the slightest breeze. To be fair to myself, there was something reassuring in passing in out of the damp dark through this cheery, shrill American scene—the video games chirrupping, the Ping-Pong and billiard balls clicking—on my way to my mobile cave of a car and thence to my modest rooms across the river, there to field a harrowing and hard-to-terminate phone call from either Genevieve or Norma, both sopranos (a mezzo and a coloratura, remember?—see
this page
–
this page
) singing, subtextually, the same aria:
Perchè devo dormire sola?
Why wasn’t I with, both voices asked without asking, her or her? The Student Center was a kind of last port, gaudily commercial and communal, on the edge of my choppy personal sea.

The ground-floor mall was darkened and locked after nine. I climbed the wide Mussolini-style steps toward a bank of glowing glass doors where the silhouettes of hyperactive girls flickered in a frieze of shadowplay, and entered the young-hearted hubbub. Often I stopped at the third-floor snack shop for a tuna-salad sandwich or honey-and-raisin roll to tide me through the night in Adams. One night, inside the steamy door to this mini-eatery, next to a darkened chamber wherein slumped rows of frizzy-haired students were hooting at the
Milwaukee imbroglios of Laverne and Shirley, I bumped into Jennifer Arthrop. Not literally, luckily, for she was balancing a frail cardboard tray on which a scalding paper cup of coffee loomed above a jumbo-size chocolate-chip cookie. In the months, or was it years, since I had eased her from my digs and the vicinity of my bed, I had seen her in class and in the halls of our intimate institution, but encountering her at this nocturnal hour, when the juices of human contact flow thickest, set off a spark; I could see the shock in her near-sighted eyes and feel it, like the kick of an electric resuscitator, in my heart. Again luckily, she had eaten more than one chocolate-chip cookie since our parting, and her doughy overweight somewhat neutralized my nostalgic pang of appetite.

But I had underestimated the complexity of our encounter. “Professor Clayton,” she mouthed, getting her social bearings, “I’d like you to meet my mother.” Indeed there was, behind her,
her
cardboard tray holding a dainty can of apple juice and a healthful tangerine, an older version of herself. The two women’s heads were at the same height, but Mrs. Arthrop’s curls were artfully tinged a metallic bronze, to hide filaments of silver no doubt, and had a firmer, more settled look on her scalp. Her toothy smile, springing forward even before we were introduced, seemed too ready until I remembered,
She runs a gift shop
. “My mother’s come up from Connecticut to see me in
Lysistrata
,” Jennifer explained, with a touch of nasal petulance. “We’ve just come from dress rehearsal. She’s staying upstairs.”

The two top floors of the Student Center, I neglected to explain, were a campus hotel, with rooms for visiting parents, speakers, overseers, and salesmen of newly revised textbooks boasting a simplified and corrected canon.

“Jennifer has told me all about the course she took from you last year, Professor Clayton,” Jennifer’s mother gushed at me. “She loved it, the way you bring the Presidents to life.”

“Well, Presidents are people, too,” I snapped, my intense little vision of a bean-sprouts-on-rye sandwich and a cottage-shaped half-pint carton of milk in a take-out bag slowly fragmenting under the impact of this encounter.

Jennifer’s mother laughed as if I had said something rather naughty. Her teeth were remarkably large, and square, without being at all buck or false-looking; when her lips closed over them, it was an act of containment that gave her mouth a composed
presence
I found exciting. Her lips were full, and at the end of a long day away from home had lost lipstick on all but their edges, like a drawing of lips in red ink. Her round yet not fat face had the gloss and glow of youth, with an albedo higher than Jennifer’s, who for all her youthful amplitude and thrustingness of figure had something unripened about her, something sullen and light-absorptive, whereas her mother’s mature face gleamed with decades of moisturizer and anti-wrinkle cream. I calculated that Mrs. Arthrop, whose twenty-year-old daughter might have been born when she was herself twenty, need not be much older than I, who had celebrated my thirty-ninth birthday (falling in October—see
this page
) by passing from a twilight supper catered by Norma and attended by the children in my old house, the cake arriving from the kitchen wearing a crown of candle-flame that three breaths by me, suddenly asthmatic, could not extinguish, so that dismay was kindled on the faces of Andy, Buzzy, and Daphne, who knew this meant bad luck and cancelled everybody’s wishes—by passing, I say, with singed eyebrows from this ex-domestic feast of melting ice cream to a nocturnal celebration
at Genevieve’s, sneaking in the back door and accepting toilet-paper-wrapped presents (a Bic pen, a Magic Rub eraser) from the two little girls before my perfect almost-wife tucked them in and came back downstairs in a filmy black nightie to serve up, in deference to her ulcer, two champagne glasses filled with white milk—a rather stunning visual effect—and two ambrosial macaroons, a feast for dieting gods, consumed by the light of a single tall candle whose phallic hint was soon taken by living flesh. My mistress lay on her modernist, goosedown-filled sofa and let the folds of black film drift up her white waist so I could eat my fill of her musky slit; a few macaroon crumbs from the corners of my mouth were suspended like stars in her tingling pubic cloudlet. My prick kept tapping my belly like a doorknocker, it was so hard.

“Would you like to join us, Professor Clayton—is that terribly forward?” Jennifer’s mother asked, two questions in one, rather breathlessly. It flashed upon me that she thought I had slept with her daughter and was slyly granting me a kind of honorary son-in-law status. How could she have gotten this idea? Only from Jennifer’s sulky, embarrassed manner now, unless the girl was an outright liar, as even normal girls often are. They lie, they shoplift, they attempt suicide, all as part of their sexual development. I pictured my lonely room, my phone poised to shrill into life with the details of two unhappy women’s lives, and figured that fifteen minutes of parent-child-teacher socialization could do no harm, and might do Wayward College, which was always looking to widen its support base, some good. Also, there was about Mrs. Arthrop an elusive likeable something—a bit of blankness, like an unmarked price tag, that signifies a woman who will sleep with you. Or is it that you want to sleep with them?
The one becomes the other, in the shadowland where sexual politics defies the best attempts of legislators to clean up corruption and graft.

I joined the two Arthrops in a plastic booth, adjusting my hoped-for milk to a more sociable herbal tea and for the bean-sprout sandwich substituting one of those tempting, Christmassy tangerines Mrs. Arthrop already possessed. “Well, how did the rehearsal go?” I asked, turning myself toward Jennifer, steering away from the dangerous blank next to her, the glossy forty-plus face. Jennifer didn’t have that blank; few of our students did. They were too full of ideas and uncertainties; three-fourths of their lives were ahead of them, instead of a diminishing third. “Who are you?” I asked. “Lysistrata?”

This was tactless, actually. “I’m Cinesias,” Jennifer said. “It’s a little, man’s part, but I have a big scene with this real cock-teaser.”

Mrs. Arthrop blinked her daughter’s language away and told me, “The girl playing the part is quite wonderful. As you probably remember, the plot is she keeps leaving him, in the throes of—how shall we say?—passion, to get one more thing to make it all perfect—a pillow, ointment. And of course it never happens.”

“Marjorie Weisman,” Jennifer told me, naming another student. “If you ask me, she gets too much into it. I began to feel sorry for myself. The guy.”

“You were
won
derful, dear,” her mother told her. “A real man couldn’t have done it any better.”

“You get to feel like raping her,” Jennifer allowed. “Her roommate tells me she’s a sadist in other ways. Marjorie.”

I had a reprehensible itch to wink at Mrs. Arthrop, Jennifer was mulling things over so solemnly. The very air around us
seemed to be winking, since the Student Center, for all its installed comforts, had the bare concrete frame of a multistory garage, with such a garage’s gloomy flicker of ailing fluorescent tubes. Jennifer’s young mind for the first time seemed to be questioning the conventional binaries of male/female, sadist/masochist, desire/anger, war/love.

“Well, it’s all in a good cause, isn’t it?” I asked, none too brightly, explaining myself: “To end war. And it comes out happily, as I recall.” I was being very much the teacher, focusing on Jennifer as a student, while being all too aware of her mother next to her as a crevasse of invitingness that might swallow my teetering eyes.

“Yeah, the women go back to being sex slaves,” Jennifer said sourly. “I guess you and old Aristophanes would think that’s a happy ending.”

“
Jen
nifer,” Mrs. Arthrop said. “What a way to talk to your professor!” She was my age, we had passed from class to class in the same corridors of time, so I could read in her motherly rebuke the subtext of flirtation, of more warmth than the social thermostat called for, of titillation based upon the (false) premise that her daughter and I had achieved the intimacy of lovers. In fact I felt distaste for doughy Jennifer; she was stale goods, touched by the loathed Brent Mueller intellectually at least, contaminated by his anti-canon deconstructionist chic, which flattened everything eloquent, beautiful, and awesome to propaganda baled for the trashman; Brent dwelt in an ideological Flatland from which I was endeavoring to rescue Genevieve, and Jennifer was his two-dimensional minion there, ostentatiously rounded though her dull flesh was.

“No problem,” I said to my defender. “All that respect we were supposed to show our teachers was hierarchical crap. At Wayward we ask our students to be frank.”

“
I am a woman, but I don’t lack sense
,” Mrs. Arthrop surprisingly recited, in iambic pentameter, her eyes shut to get her started.
“I’m of myself not badly off for brains, / And often listening to my father’s words / And old men’s talk, I’ve not been badly schooled.”
She lifted her greasy-blue eyelids, exposing irises that indeterminate organic color called hazel, and broadly smiled, exposing those confident teeth. Her facial gloss had gone a degree higher.

“O
.K.
, Mom,” Jennifer said, uncomfortably sensing that this was sexual display. To me she grudgingly explained, “
She
was Lysistrata in a school play once.”
Big deal
, her tone implied.

“At Miss Porter’s School, ages ago,” Mrs. Arthrop modestly amplified. “Seeing Jenny’s rehearsal brought that bit of it back. At the time, there seemed nothing wrong with her having to learn by eavesdropping on men’s talk. What
did
seem daring, as I remember it, and offended some of the faculty and the chaplain, was the anti-war theme—it would have been in, oh, I was seventeen, ’51, Korea was on, and though it was all right to be against war in the abstract, nobody
dreamed
of being against a war the United States was fighting.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “The war ended before I was eighteen, and I remember feeling slightly cheated.” There. Our ages were on the table, if we could do the figuring. “How long are you here for?” I asked the woman—a
real
woman. The girls of Wayward insisted on being called “women”; their boyfriends, conditioned in puberty, had no trouble with it, but we older guys kept tripping up.