The Professor and Other Writings (25 page)

My first urge was to apologize—in a sort of abject panic—to Keith himself. Admittedly, I wanted to exculpate myself; given all the embarrassment, I figured he must be infuriated with me. But far more important, I remember thinking, I
cared
about him. At the first news of his humiliation, my feelings for Keith had become as tender and protective as Joan of Arc's for her feeble Dauphin. I wanted to kneel before him in my chain mail, pledge undying troth, and stanchions unfurled, lead his troops to victory once again—all in the name of God, Holy France, dope, and blinking lights.

Not knowing how to contact Keith—such things were unfathomable in those pre-Google days and besides, I wasn't altogether sure of his last name—I had to make do with Fred, whom I strongly suspected of being the Vile Snitch. I still have in my possession copies of two long typewritten screeds I sent Fred that fall and winter, my first in the Midwest. They are fluent, principled, full of aggrieved expostulation, and as pompous and callow as one might imagine. In the first, written soon after I heard that Keith had been dismissed, I blasted Fred for his deception: he had tricked me that past spring, I complained, into revealing incriminating details about the Dog Food interview; then, against my wishes, had used the confidential information to calumniate my pot-smoking, orgone-channeling hero:

Once I was launched, it became hard to stop. “What grieves me most of all is to think that there has been a horrendous mix-up of values in the whole business,” I railed:

While I am glad to see that in classic anxious-autodidact fashion, I had learned enough at this stage in my scholarly life to know that “judgment” was spelled with only one
e
(or that that, at least, was the more
elegant
spelling), it is not clear I possessed any great portion of the faculty in question.

My second letter—composed after the turn of the year—was worse. Fred had replied to my first one, I see from my journal, with a heated (now unfortunately lost) “philosophical cannonade.” I was full of self-pity and world weariness by this time, discouraged by the fact that he and the other teachers had ignored my all too justified
plaints. I thought of myself as officially sadder but wiser. And though I conceded that the whole experience was one I would “probably have to think about more,” I claimed to be determined, in martyr-like fashion, not to hold a grudge against rank double dealers like Fred. (“
What am I supposed to do now—kick myself for being grotesquely naïve? shut up entirely from now on? stop trusting people?”
) At the end of this second missive—to which I don't believe Fred, sensibly enough, ever replied—I gave a bemused, quasi-valedictory account of my doings, now that I found myself, in the flat dead of winter, amid “the miles of snow plains.” Ominously—or so it appears in retrospect—I see I was still “reading up on Sir Thomas Browne, alchemy, Jung, and Neumann.” The Great Mother still had me gripped, blind and mewling, in her cavernous inner spaces. Yet there were other elements to freeze the spirit—if only, again, in hindsight. “
I am also finding an outlet and support for my poems in
Your Mama Wears Army Boots,
a local feminist magazine
,” I wrote proudly. And yes, though I didn't record the fact anywhere other than in my journal, between the first letter to Fred and the second I had met Her: my smiling and savage Professor.

The Professor

AFTER ALL THE BUILDUP,
I confess I find it a struggle to recapture, amid the glints and wipes and warp zones of memory, every aspect of the Professor's supercharged allure. I had to work so hard to forget her—to escort her out of the building, so to speak—that it is difficult to go back now and take note of her magnetism: to allow her her rightful nimbus, her full, devastating share of importance in my life. No doubt certain once-charmed memories were banished long ago out of psychic necessity; telling details have blown out to sea. The Professor seems at times curiously effigy-like to me now:
straw filled, hypothetical, more mannequin or puppet-form than real woman. And when it comes to the quotidian details that impart life and breath and romance, it is safe to say I know my cat Theo far better than I ever knew her. Easy enough, were this essay called
The Kitty Cat
, to vamp at length about the latter's digestive likes and dislikes, fey psychic quirks, and the usual breathtaking feline heartlessness. I have enough dope on Theo, moral and otherwise, to plot future trends. Should I suffer a fatal collapse one day and my corpse lie undiscovered for weeks, decomposing on the kitchen floor, she's exactly the sort of kitty, I realize—dainty and impervious—who would happily feed off it for the duration. Not much sentiment there. I've had Theo for fourteen years (long before B. and I got the dogs); I knew the Professor for barely six months.

And six months, of course, is no time at all. I have no idea what the Professor's favorite color was; if she had lots of aunts and uncles and cousins or just one or two; if she suffered from any allergies. I would be curious, now, to know what she thought of assorted events and people from the intervening years—the Clintons or the Bushes, say, or the 9/11 hijackers. That creepy Mohammed Atta. True, I still recall the Professor's birthday. It fell in late April; she even celebrated one (her forty-first or forty-second?) toward the end of our debacle. I remember going to her office that slushy spring day to give her a present (the McGarrigle Sisters' first LP) and just how awkwardly she took it from me, as if I'd handed her a dead rat by its tail. The damage by that point had been done. The Professor was nearly twenty years older than I was—of an age to be my mother; or perhaps, given the deep voice and salt-and-pepper hair—silver in places—my father. She died of stomach cancer a couple of years ago, I heard, in her early seventies.

Regarding what might be called her
soul
, I had no time to collect much more than the most rudimentary data. And what material I did gather I had little way of comprehending. I received the signals all
right: indeed, there I sat, rapt in my headphones, in front of the radar screen, recording all the blips and squeaks. But I had no means of decoding them intelligibly. Perhaps Alan Turing or some other Bletchley Park wizard might have been up to the job, but I—shy, feral, and still emotionally frozen at twenty-two—was not. So claggy and baggy and unexamined my own needs then, the needs of other people (as should be clear by now) remained largely invisible to me. I saw through a glass darkly. And besides, how could a being as wondrous as the Professor even
have
needs? She was a sun-god, a sort of lady-Phoebus Apollo. She flooded out all one's somewhat fragile circuits. When she withdrew, leaving me in pitch blackness, I found myself as close to snuffed out as it is possible to be. Easy enough to turn melodramatic and Curse the Night. Yet the
soul
was indisputably there: it was, I realize now, what I loved about her. But it got lost very soon in the shuffle.

And easy enough, too, to deliver, like a volley of shellfire, the caricature version: the Professor as Hoary Mean Thing, camp, supersized and frightful, with all the glaring, eyeball-popping, Joan-Crawford-as-Mildred-Pierce mannerisms intact. I've delivered such blasts many times over the past thirty years. The Professor was my very own bespoke
monstre sacrée
for so long—so long the resident she-Minotaur in my private psychic labyrinth—that I developed, fairly early in the game, what might be called a Professorial
shtick:
a narrative, often comic, in which the more Grand Guignol aspects of our relationship became fodder, in the presence of others, for a catharsis at once reviving and entertaining. The Professor, I had to admit, made great copy. There were enough details—Flaubertian or Freudian—to make one feel marvelously suave and blasé after the fact: the Very Weird Long Grey Braid; the Withered Leg, the Loaded Pistol in the Bedside Drawer (often to be taken out and examined during lovemaking); the Room in Her House One Was Never Allowed to Enter; the Gruesome Crime-Scene Photos, Bloody and Horrific, she
once showed me (again after sex) from a murder trial she had been involved in once as an expert witness.

All zany enough, to be sure. Yet far more intriguing to me now is a rather more mysterious issue: how the Professor and I came to collide so disastrously in the first place. Who was responsible? Which of us was more to blame? No way around it: the Professor precipitated a series of near-ruinous events in my life. Not fatal, but close enough. It would be disingenuous—especially having written paragraphs like some of the above—for me to say I have never yearned for revenge. Writing, I'm convinced, is often nothing
but
revenge—a way of twirling one's mustache, donning buckler and sword and feathery hat, shaking one's gauntleted fist at the gods. You get to be Puss-in-Boots-on-a-Tear. And why shouldn't you? What other feeling is one supposed to have after one gets clobbered? Okay: Jesus Christ left some notes in the Suggestion Box. Yet few people ever seem to heed them while tangled in this mortal coil.

Equally disingenuous would it be, however, for me to suggest the Professor intended every aspect of my unhappiness or that I was not already in a fairly perilous emotional state when I met her. Perhaps because I find myself advancing with such disturbing rapidity through middle age—and have indeed been a professor myself for some twenty-plus years—I feel able to be rather more thoughtful now about the whole business. Coolly diagnostic, even. With the advantage of years I've started pondering again just what it was about her that drew me to her: what peculiar pathos she evinced, and why I was so vulnerable to it. For pathos it surely was.

Some of it, yes, was plainly visible: the Professor had suffered from polio at the age of twelve or thirteen; one leg was shorter than the other and noticeably atrophied. She had a herky-jerky way of walking and was unable to run (if you could even call it that) other than in a halting and chaotic fashion. The infirmity did not prevent her from taking intense pride in her athleticism; she relished
the challenge of her handicap and the sympathetic attention (mostly from young women like myself) that it brought her. Having become adept at a sort of crab-like sideways scuttling and lunging, she managed to play badminton and tennis with some success (doubles especially) and even threw herself into a game of softball now and then—butch and hearty and gym teacher–ish in nylon windbreaker and stretch pants—if, that is, some fleet of foot surrogate were allowed to run the bases for her. This buoyant response to misfortune, her sheer gaiety and éclat under the circumstances, epitomized for me gallantry of an absolute sort. It was as if she bore a fencing scar: some ancient and noble wound suffered in an affair of honor.

But many things about the Professor drew my sympathy—drew, indeed, my lonely and passionate love. Some of them, I see now, had more to do with me than with her. Or with something deranging that happened when the two of us were together. I'm hoping here, obviously, to make some sense of my obsession with her, though I hasten to add I don't expect to “make sense” of the Professor herself. I'm becoming less sure one
can
make sense of certain individuals. The Professor's kindness and brutality offset one another so perfectly—were so freakishly counterbalanced, one against the other—it would be foolish to try to make her personality “cohere” in retrospect. It didn't. There was no way it could. The Professor was a hybrid, a sort of unicorn. And besides, I'm now well aware of a similar, if less severe, incoherence in myself. No matter what one does, it seems, certain warring parts of the psyche never really get reconciled. The much-touted “integration” never happens. The least one can hope for, then—? That at some point my mixed-up memories of her and much else might simply
expire
: like coupons for a defunct rug-cleaning service or an old takeout menu lying in the dry leaves on my porch. Then might a lesson be said to be learned:
I'll be expiring myself, of course—no doubt soon enough. After a while no one will remember either of us.

So on to the new Scene of Life. I noted earlier that a certain scary
precocity as a Student was one of the factors that made me so susceptible to the Professor. To that might be added the frightening isolation I felt upon arriving in my new (and strange) Grain Belt home. The alien corn, indeed. I might as well have landed on Mars: so thoroughly lost was I, I didn't realize
how
lost. I'd arrived, it's true, somewhat unpropitiously: an acquaintance at my former college had a friend in the new city, a woman named Mindy, the scion of a wealthy department store family. My schoolmate had arranged for me to stay with Mindy for a few days while I searched for an apartment. Yet when I arrived, that hot and airless August morning, and called my putative hostess, she immediately disclaimed all knowledge of the arrangement. (
Fie, thou still-unknown Mindy! What a cruel minx thou wert! Perhaps thou shalt send me thy overdue apology now?
) At the taxi driver's suggestion I ended up—though carless—staying in a shabby motor inn downtown, seemingly untenanted apart from me, from whence I immediately began the quest for more permanent lodging by perusing all the local bus maps and classified ads.