The Blondes (10 page)

None of these were marvellous ends.

But back to Karl: the thing about Karl was that he needed me like no one else needed me. He was absent-minded, caustic, and sad. Yes, you should know this. It’s possible you’ll inherit these traits too. And yet he managed to accomplish so much. I heard of Karl while doing my MA; other students spoke of him as if he were a character in a film, someone with whom they all shared an identical experience. There was a rumour that he had been part of an art performance in the early ’90s where he lay on a gallery floor and a woman knelt over him and urinated on him. Addy and Jude told me that they had seen the footage—even though it wasn’t online anywhere.

When I met Karl, I was surprised by how unremarkable he was. I had heard he was known for his eccentricity, for wearing his hair up in a fountain over his forehead like the film director Jim Jarmusch. But when I met him, he was going through a buckled-down, respectable phase. He had jettisoned his shiny shirts and anoraks and replaced them with plain button-collar fare. He had applied for the position of department head and cut his hair. Although he was tall, to me he was always slightly diminished in comparison to the description I had been given of him.

That first day, I found him in his office. The door was open, the telephone was ringing, and he was standing on a chair, endeavouring to retrieve a slim book from beneath a stack of film canisters and other books piled sideways and every which way overtop. I was attempting, late, to get into a seminar he was teaching.

“Ah! Could you take these?” he asked when I poked my head into his room. That was our first exchange. The absolute ordinariness of it strikes me now, considering how things went. He began handing me book after book to hold—there was no place else to put them. The shelves that ran along one side of the small office were crammed with double rows. And there were even more books where there were no shelves. I watched his knobby, hairy knuckles moving across the rows. How they flicked and snapped as he dropped volumes into my hands.
The Little Black and White Book of Film Noir. Simulacra and Simulation. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
. The telephone kept ringing.
Illness as Metaphor. Against Interpretation
. After it had ceased ringing, there would be a pause and it would begin again. Roland Barthes’s
S/Z
. “Damn phone. Could you …?” Karl asked from above, removing another book, a film canister pressed tightly to his body under one arm. He was still a dozen or so books away from the one he seemed to actually want. I set my stack on the floor and hopped around it to the telephone.

“Dr. Mann’s office.”

“Uh … hello. Is he there?”

“Y-yes,” I said into the receiver to a confused young woman. “But he’ll have to call you back. Would you like to leave a number?”

It was his teaching assistant. I took the girl’s extension.

In the meantime, Mann—which was how I thought of him then—had descended. “What am I going to do about this mess?” He peered at the tower of books he had passed down to me. It was as if a garbage can had been turned upside down and
its contents dumped out. He set the film can down on the desk. It had come open and loops of brown were spilling out.

“What’s the book?”

“Oh …” Mann looked at it as if surprised to see it in his hand. “A lend from a former student.” He told me he had thought it was a gift—and when people send you something by mail, you assume you can keep it, don’t you? He tossed the volume onto the desk atop the film can and ran his hand over his inch-long hair. Then he squatted and grabbed half a pile of books, heaving them up against one wall. He toed the other half, using his leg to push them flush against the shelves. I noticed he wore brown shoes and old-man dress socks, even though he wasn’t, you know, ancient.

“I’m so sorry to impose,” he said, “but could you …?” He indicated another stack, one he must have brought down before I came to the rescue.

The book on top of the pile was a blue-bound edition with text on the spine only. I tipped it sideways and stared at the title, stamped in gold foil:
Phenomenology of the Cowpoke: Self-Aware Masculinity in the Late American Western
. I opened it and saw that it was by
Karl Mann, PhD, University of Minnesota
. It didn’t look like it had been published so much as bound, perhaps by Mann himself. I wondered what had taken him to Minnesota, and what had brought him back again.

Karl put out his hand, and I closed the cover and handed him the thesis. As he tried to find new places for the volumes we had unshelved he made hemming and hawing sounds in the back of his throat—like Kovacs, it occurs to me now.

Five or ten minutes later, he said doubtfully, “Well, this can’t be the permanent spot for these, but I’ve taxed you enough … I’m sure you have better things to do. What did you say your name was? Could you—?” Mann gestured for the message.

“Hazel,” I answered, handing the message across the desk, where he was fussing with several of the film canisters we’d moved, trying to stack them on a narrow shelf above his desk chair.

“I’m going to put these over here for a while and then I’ll forget to move them again. They’ll fall on my head one day. That’s when I’ll remember they’re here!” He peered at the stuff with contempt. It was an astute assessment; later I’d find out that’s exactly what would happen, time and time again.

That office was snug as last year’s sweater, packed tight. A little room with no window, it was filled with files and findings: books, DVDs, audio cassettes—audio cassettes, even!—VHS tapes, magazine file boxes, at least two Rolodexes, a bottle of wine, milk crates of records, a dusty antique typewriter sitting on a case with a broken handle, a whole shelf full of cowboy figurines and wagon trains and ceramic cacti. A lacquered suit jacket made of stretched bread packages hung on a valet in the corner, the word
Wonder
emerging from plastic lapels and pockets, the whole held together by blue and yellow bread-tie buttons: a sculpture Mann had obviously purchased without having a place to properly display it. A dusty cowboy hat hung by a cord from a nail in
the drywall. Oversize framed artwork was stacked against the wall, the front one a drab square of kraft paper declaring in blown-up typewriter font:

The overall effect was more that of an installation than an office. Right there, that should have told me about the dynamics between Karl and Grace. I never saw their condo, and she’s never talked about it, but I imagine it looks quite different. His stuff would have been relegated to his office and other distant places.

Mann extended one hand and took the phone message without looking at me.

“I’m trying to get into your course, and I need your signature,” I said.

He ceased straightening and put up a finger, studiously taking in the message. “I am so
very
sorry. I know this must seem unprofessional, but I have to return this call. It’s just been one of those—”

I nodded.

But the call did not seem urgent at all, judging from what I could overhear. While Mann and his assistant spoke, I removed a stack of books from the only other chair in the office and placed them to the side. Then I sat and waited for Mann to finish. When he had, he looked around the office again and said in a tight voice, as if he might cry, “I don’t know if I can be of any help—”

I was jolted back to reality by his pinched tone and suddenly wondered if I should have left the office during the call and given him his privacy. But it was too late for self-doubt. And all I needed was his signature.

“Walk with me,” Dr. Mann said. He was now pale and sober-looking. He came around the desk and picked up my bag for me, an act that made him difficult to refuse. He told me that the Starbucks line was long at that time of day, and that he hated standing alone. “I’ll buy you one and catch you up on the two classes you missed.”

You must remember that less than an hour earlier, Mann had known nothing about me except that I had willingly entered his office. But now I was rearranging his books, listening to him complain about his teaching assistant’s confidence (or lack thereof)—the same teaching assistant he had just signed me up to take a course with—and waiting with him in line because he couldn’t face standing alone.

“You look about the same age as my assistant, and you seem to have a fair sense of self-assurance,” he said, giving me a glance up and down. “It will be good to have you in the group.”

While we were in line in the café his chest pocket became illuminated by his cellphone, and for a second, with the light showing through the thin fabric, I had the impression that he had a blue electric heart. Then he took the device out of his shirt pocket, frowned at it, and extinguished it.

Later, after we returned to his office, Mann picked up a stray DVD collection he’d forgotten to shelve. “I want you to have this,” he said, pressing it into my hand like a gift. “I think
you’ll like it. You seem like you might go for the Neo-Victorian Betacam-ness of it. It’s from the ’60s. Let me know what you think.”

It was a three-disc set of
Dark Shadows
. And it wasn’t a gift, I would realize later, when he casually asked me three times over the course of the next two months if I’d ever seen it. It was just something he liked that he didn’t have a place for.

This is why it should not have surprised me when Kovacs implied that Karl Mann had slept with a dorm’s worth of students, then sent them to her—for what? A man who gave things away without thinking about them and couldn’t stand in line by himself … No, it should not have surprised me.

But it did.

Did I honestly believe that in his twenty-odd years of teaching, I was the first female student to stumble into Karl Mann’s office and somehow manage to interest him? The first to stand too close to him in his cramped little space? The first to pity him? The first to believe my love would save him from middle age and mediocrity?

Honestly, I did.

Following my meeting with Dr. Kovacs, I thought several times about dialling Karl’s number again—but then I would hear
her
voice repeating that
they
were at the cottage. Instead I returned to my room and reread a journal article called “Don’t It Make Her Brown Eyes Blue,” about the practice of matching models’ eye colour—naturally or by digital alteration—to
product packaging. I also wrote numerous emails to
our Karl
.

One of the emails, maybe number ten or thereabouts, was cribbed from a movie I had once made him watch—the only one he did at my insistence. Ironically, it was about a man having an affair, but with his own wife:

Another one of the emails—my twelfth attempt—made me shake. I could hardly believe the depth of my own rage, and yet I felt a hundred times better after writing it. It was like running down a hill—how your feet get away from you, and you’re going so fast you think you’ll trip and roll, but in the end you just keep running, and you stand at the bottom looking back at where you’ve come from, chest heaving, an incredible fire inside you. I got away from myself and something propelled me that was but wasn’t me. I deleted that note. It scared me to have the words exist.

I sent none of the emails, but retained them (all but number twelve) in my Drafts folder as proof of my suffering should future anthropologists ever haphazardly stumble upon my laptop and develop an interest in the life of Hazel Hayes.

It was because of that anger I didn’t phone him. It was because of that anger I didn’t tell him about you. I was paralyzed by it. And in the midst of that paralysis I found out,
finally, the truth about what I’d seen first-hand without knowing it. I found out about the Fury.

For forty-eight hours or so after my meeting with Kovacs, I had forgotten about anything but Karl—I had even managed to push the subway incident and the news report about the woman in the hair salon to a remote corner of my mind—and I had quit logging into my social networking sites. I was worried about what I might post. Finally I emerged from my rage long enough to log into my computer and check if, in the two days I’d ignored the site, I might have suddenly become popular—and that’s when Larissa began to instant-message me. She popped up immediately.

I was reminded that I hadn’t spoken to Larissa in weeks—not since she drove me to the airport for my flight to New York.
You there?
she wrote.

I typed that I was.

Then:
Cut off all my hair
popped up on my screen.
It’s terrible …

I didn’t understand. What was the big deal? She’d cut it short before. I wrote back:
Sienna Miller circa
Factory Girl
or Nicole Kidman circa
Birth
?
LOL
.

I thought I was being smart to come up with those hair/movie references off the top of my head, but Larissa didn’t respond right away. When she did, she simply typed:
The plague
.