My Education (4 page)

“I'd love to. Thank you. But I'm nervous. I'll be out of my depth in a whole different way.”

“I promise you won't. And as I said, you'll be doing me the greater favor. Since Sasha bowed out it's only been myself and my superlative student Laurence Pumbleton—do you know him?—and Laurence has a baby at home, and soon I will as well.”

The penny had dropped. The woman who'd passed by his doorway and tossed the grenade of her gaze at his face—this was his wife, prospective mother of his child. I tried to hide my flusterment by laughing, with too much energy. “You might find me better suited to babysitting than teaching Chaucer,” I said. “When is your baby due? And I should say congratulations.”

“You're very kind. My firstborn is due in mere moments it seems. Meanwhile Chaucer: the lectures are Thursdays at three. Read this week's tale first and then start from the top and catch up with as much as you can. I'll have Laurence tell you the rest as he understands all of it better than me.”

“I'm sure that's not true.”

“Oh, it's true, and it will be true of you before long.”

There was physical comedy as we ended our meeting. He came out from behind the monumental desk, and I rose from the chair, and then we were left sharing the little square of floor space in front of the door so that contact seemed called for and yet none was appropriate. It would have made no more sense to shake hands than to kiss. And so we hovered a moment too close to each other before I was able to sidle myself just athwart the threshold. Then with one of my feet planted in the hallway I think we both felt a danger had passed, in the same way that, with my dizzying transformation in minutes from dependent pupil to dependable colleague, another and far greater danger had passed. The evocation of his forthcoming baby seemed to ratify this.

•   •   •

Uterine Dystopias: The Legacy of Dora;
Pynchon and Postmodernism;
Fetishes and Freaks: Strategies of Queering the Gothic; never could I have imagined, filling out my registration at the start of the fall, how quickly these interesting courses could take on the appearance of make-work, of the false tasks of investigation and organization that parents invent to keep small children busy. Only Chaucer seemed to have any substance. His writing felt particularly hard and elemental, like a lump of coal or a potato, a thing of obvious use grubbed up out of the ground. The same afternoon I had met with Brodeur I'd started working through
The Canterbury Tales
, and right away had felt the thrill of mastery, perhaps because having known nothing, I actually doubled my expertise with each couplet I painstakingly muddled out.

“Of course he didn't mean you should catch up with all of the reading before your first day,” Laurence Pumbleton said to me now. “Or he probably did, but you don't really have to. Ignore him.”

“But I've never read any at all. And I'm coming in late. If the class wasn't so huge and so popular I might be less worried.”

“You have nothing to worry about. Each week you'll sit in his lecture the same as they do. I guarantee that's all you'll need. In section you go over his lecture at a remedial pace and you force them to make little comments. You'll be wonderful.” Tilting his head back he poured in his mouth the whole contents of the second of two dainty and conical glasses that had been sitting on the table before him, with a last shake to dislodge the olive.

After calling and arranging our meeting Laurence had picked me up in a cream-colored two-seat Alfa Romeo convertible and driven me, as if I'd been Grace Kelly on the coast of Amalfi, to a nearly defunct ski resort on the Tompkinsville Road half an hour outside town. The place seemed neglected for reasons beyond the still-warm autumn weather. Perhaps fifty years earlier the small glacial escarpment in the shadow of which it was built had won acceptance from area farmers as an Alpine landscape, but now the Swiss-chalet style of the buildings only poignantly reemphasized their inadequacies. In the dining room nonfunctioning cuckoo clocks crowded the faux-split-log walls, and a faded motif of red hearts was melancholically repeated on the dingy white curtains and the dingy white lace tablecloths. Where there were not cuckoo clocks there were antlers, or elaborate beer steins with hinged pewter lids. No music played. The scattered other patrons sat hunched over wide plates of shingle-stacked meats overwhelmed by a viscous brown sauce. At noon, not one other table had drinks, but the taciturn woman in a dream-catcher T-shirt and Nikes who apparently served as host, waiter, and bartender had shown no surprise when Laurence, declining the menu, ordered us four gin martinis with olives. Laurence was arrestingly suave, in the Jimmy Stewart mold; his very lack of handsomeness seemed to burnish his charm and make him that much more handsome. He was taller than the average tall man and even so his long, spidery limbs were out of proportion to his exaggerated height, so that his arms and legs seemed to have extra joints, as with expensive umbrellas. His mode of dress, Brooks Brothers everything, was rigorously perfect down to woven leather belt and cuff links. On top he was going bald in an unusual pattern, like a monk's tonsure with decorative fringe. He had a wide gap between his front teeth amid features that were otherwise slightly too narrow. But his close-set eyes were mobile and penetrating, and he was so coordinated in his subtle attentions, holding doors and hanging coats and arranging cocktails and ashtrays with supernumerous, dexterous limbs, and, in sum, he possessed so much more than most men now alive of that intangible, old-fashioned thing we still call chivalry that I had not been at all surprised to learn that his wife was a former beauty queen from Shiraz whom he had met at the Chanel counter at Bergdorf Goodman and swept away to connubial bliss in the space of two weeks.

“There's an expectation that the teaching assistant has
some
expertise in the subject,” I persisted.

“The expectation is enough all by itself. I guarantee you, Regina, even if you never read one page of Chaucer and even if you skip every one of the lectures you'll do beautifully because they invest you with all your authority. Just relax and accept it. But you should at least go to the lectures, for your own enjoyment. He's so good. It's why they sign up in hordes.”

“Up to this week I was taking his seminar.”

“Oh, no, in seminar he's terrible. He's so mumbly and turgid. It's excruciating. All his stage fright comes back in small rooms.”

“His stage fright?” I exclaimed.

“Nicholas Brodeur is the shyest, most socially awkward, just-barely-cured-of-stammering human you will meet in your life. No, absolute truth,” he cut short my amazement. “I mean, beyond what you're thinking. Special classes for half his childhood—they thought he was retarded! That's where the memorization comes from. They found if he memorized things he could say them straight through.” Our second double round of cocktails arrived. “They're so lovely because she pours them so small,” Laurence said, draining the first of his second pair, meaning his third overall—I was still nursing the dregs of my second but I was already substantially drunk.

“He alluded to that. To doing poorly in school and getting—whacked, he said.”

“I can only imagine. Vicious narrow parents with prosaic ambitions. They really thought he was quite a dim bulb. And then of course there are the other endearing peculiarities, not of mind, of course. More on the side of emotion.”

“Peculiar in what way?”

But Laurence had mislaid the thread. “Isn't this place wonderful?” he exulted.

“I'm so glad you brought me. I never would have found it.”

“That's the idea. That's the
idea
. That others not find it. Not you. You merit it fully.” Laurence had first dined here the previous winter, when during the meal a freak blizzard had blown in and trapped him and his wife and their then-newborn child, by that hour the only customers left. “They went up and prepared us a room—I don't think the hotel at this place has been open since the Vietnam War. And they slept here themselves—by this time they had to—and the next morning cooked us the most magnificent breakfast of eggs and kielbasa. Then we all drank Chartreuse and pear brandy for hours while we waited for snowplows to come. By the time the roads were open Sahba and the cook were weeping on each other's necks they had grown so attached. I'm telling my colleague Regina about the time we took up residence,” Laurence unexpectedly said to the taciturn waitress, who unseen by me had drawn near in the course of the story.

“That was a hell of a night,” she agreed.

“Carole, meet Regina. She's teaching with me. Regina, Carole here, as you have already learned, is a superlative hostess, and also she is married to Claude. It's their place. It was Claude, along with Marcus the waiter, who took mercy on Sahba and Bebi and me. Of course, you enjoy having us indebted,” he play-scolded Carole, who now chuckled and blushed and pshawed.

Before she brought the check they talked awhile, mostly about nearby roadwork—Laurence lived just a few miles away—and her friendliness increased so much compared with at the time of our arrival that once we had paid and were back in the car, I made a comment about it. Laurence said, “She was afraid you were my bit on the side. And then hearing me talk about Sahba, she grew reassured.”

It was just what I'd sensed, though I wouldn't have said it so bluntly.

“Don't think I have any such history,” Laurence went on, as if reading my mind. “I'm almost comically irreproachable. In fact, among our colleagues it is
thought comical.”

“What is?”

“Being happily married.”

My last night before Chaucer I splashed through
The Canterbury Tales
until the lines loosed their moorings and swam off the page. I crossly refused Dutra's numerous offers of dope, and awoke from a far too brief sleep with fatigue circles under my eyes. But as the hall began to throng with earnest, shambling students hurrying up the aisles, actually seating themselves on the floor in the front of the very front row, the better to gape at their dangerous idol, their arms hugging their knees, their brightly colored hoodies flopping from their waists where they'd belted them on by the sleeves because the hall was too hot—Were they actually college-age students? Had I really been one such, just one year ago?—I felt my anxiety lifting away. With cool professional absorption I conferred with Brodeur and Laurence about copied handouts, standing so near Brodeur's corduroy-jacketed shoulder I could feel his warmth meeting my own. I returned his concise nod of greeting with same, exulting within that he already took me for granted. When he left us, broke away to brood a moment Olivier-like in the lee of the podium before launching on his performance, I felt spotlighted also, Laurence's height, beside me, adding yet more conspicuousness. I too was an object of rapt expectation, pinioned by a thousand young eyes.

Once Laurence and I, like the royal attendants, had seated ourselves in our reserved front-row seats, I was free to devour the lecture, and I feasted on it as the lightning rod feasts on the lightning. Laurence had been right about Brodeur's seminar manner as opposed to his lectures. The man who had held me entranced in the classroom was like this man's fuzzy impostor. Glancing back once, at the mammoth composite half-shell of five hundred identical faces, boys and girls alike with lips parted and feverish eyes, I understood that whatever his sexual conduct, it could never guarantee his sexual reputation—that was subject to forces outside his control. Yet my own sexual interest in him was transposed to sublime incorporeal realms. I could hardly credit the schoolgirl crush I'd felt on first seeing him—as if that man in the vandal's sunglasses had been his own shadow on Plato's cave wall, and myself a poor, silly cave dweller, who had now emerged into the light.

My legitimate feeling took one other form. My style of dress changed, and not just by contrast with the way I had dressed for Brodeur while his student. I had always been as partial to skirts as to jeans; to tall boots as to sneakers; to floral prints, and dangling pendants, and earrings. But now I found myself going to lecture in sober, androgynous clothes. I seemed to want to imply I was just coming from or about to embark on some nonintellectual, macho diversion, so that, for example, I wore black jeans and black V-neck sweaters with a French boating shirt underneath, or a gigantic plaid work shirt of Dutra's with Timberland boots, or a gigantic Irish sweater of Dutra's with wool hiking pants thick with pockets for trail maps and wilderness tools. One morning I found I was wearing a pair of OshKosh overalls I had inherited from an old boyfriend and never previously worn unless painting a house. My hair grew out shaggily from its most recent cut and was left to its own devices so that it often floated strangely in sections from the static of a black knit watch cap.

In late October Brodeur's child was born. I learned of it only when, after lecture one day, Laurence handed Brodeur a slim, flat, pale blue Tiffany box bound lengthwise by a white satin ribbon. Brodeur took it onto his hand as if it were a potentially dangerous creature, a snake or a bird. He seemed not to know what to do.

“A minor congratulatory token, with much love from Sahba and Bebi and me,” Laurence gently encouraged. “You can open it now if you like.”

Within was a small silver spoon, the end of its handle enlarged in the shape of an apple. The two rounded ends, spoon and apple, gleamed like moons. On the back was engraved in impossibly small yet entirely legible cursive
Joachim Hallett-Brodeur 27 October 1992.

Brodeur appeared dumbstruck.

“It's beautiful, Laurence,” I said to dispel the silence. I felt chagrined for not having a gift of my own, and, what was worse, for not even having remembered the baby was due. But Brodeur, since the day in his office, had not mentioned it.

Now he finally spoke. “This is lovely, Laurence,” he said, and I saw he was moved.