The Professor and Other Writings (34 page)

And now for the faster-than-a-speeding-bullet part. After (what shall I call it?) this first
consummation
, events unfolded with such brain-compressing rapidity, such neutrino-busting force, that even now I find myself astonished by the violence of it all. The Profes
sor set the timetable, went in, did some quick, economical bludgeoning, went out. So efficient and merciless her powers of execution one never saw it coming. But who indeed
could
have foreseen it? Not the stunned-ox bludgeonee. Yet there the proof is on the page: a few claustral weeks of implosion and despair—all logged and dated, in however shaky a hand—by the desolate diarist of thirty years ago. One felt positively guillotined by the end of it. If only the guys remodeling one's kitchen could work with such head-removing alacrity.

To give the short form: the Professor went off on what can only be called—pardon the just-invented vulgarism—a fuck-fugue. Within three weeks of seducing me, the Professor had seduced yet another juicy young maiden: Professor Hooley's eighteen-year-old daughter, of course—the hunky volleyball player.
Wudda surprize!
(Her name turned out to be Molly.) And three weeks after that, the P. seduced yet
another
young 'un—a tall, blonde, lanky, somewhat dimwitted twenty-year-old named Tina, likewise an undergrad in English. (
Hey, no fair! She's never even been mentioned before!
) I was the Methuselah now at twenty-two: at least I could lord it over everybody that I was a first-year graduate student. But none of it mattered in the end. The
Hindenburg
caught fire anyway and the gig was up—my part at least—almost as quickly as it had begun. If you managed to jump clear—or even if you were pushed—you just had to run like hell, though shattered in every part of you you might be.

Okay, okay—I get ahead of myself. How exactly
did
one get from Point A to Point B?
Rewind, please, and go slowly.
Well, all right—though I should confess I never really got much further than
A-Point-One
, or even worse, only
A-Point-Zero-One.
Nor did I know the half of it. Nonetheless, like the Rat Man or Anna O., I shall do my best to narrate my undoing.

In its exalted opening phase—and notwithstanding some of the enigmas of our first night together—my new intimacy with the
Professor brought me instantly and perilously close to ecstasy. Which is to say, before the great airship caught fire, life aboard the
Hindenburg
seemed nothing less than unrivaled bliss—a brief euphoric succession of love-drenched days and nights, during which one floated, high above the world, on golden and pillowy clouds—exultant, ravished, lighter than the air itself. For a week or two at least one could persuade oneself that life had nothing more exquisite to offer. Every desire was gratified; endless new vistas were to be enjoyed. One was slung there, after all—really, quite wondrously
suspended
—from the belly of the colossal mother ship, in every sense dependent. It was heaven trying to absorb it all—the sublime views and splendid accommodations, the throbbing hum of the engines, the barman in his white jacket smiling and mixing cocktails every evening in the Grand Salon.

Undeniable: that some considerable portion of the intoxication arose simply from the need for total secrecy, the doubly, triply, quadruply, clandestine nature of the thing. For the Professor made it clear both by her words and by the speed with which she had cleared out that first morning we woke up together—the braid had gotten whipped back together in about five seconds flat—that there was to be no announcing to the world of anything, ever. Since I had no friends, really, apart from Elsbet and (sort of) Alice, the directive to remain silent seemed easy enough to comply with. I took to the practice of covert action as if I had been born to it—and come to think of it, perhaps I had. Two decades later, when my stepfather Turk was dying in a nursing home in El Cajon and pretty far gone in his dementia, he said to me one day, amid a babble of otherwise crazy loon-talk,
You ran away so many times, they gave you a medal
.

The Professor and I graduated soon enough from meeting at my shabby little flat to having sex at her house: I would take the bus across town and stay over. But there were now various security protocols to be followed. Yes, on those weekdays when we both had
to go in to school for classes, the Professor drove us. But she was jumpy during these morning-after commutes: preoccupied, even a bit nervy. No one was ever to see us, so she would hurriedly deposit me by the side of the road a quarter-mile or so away from the English department. My woolly winter hat pulled anonymously down over my brows, I had to tumble out pronto, like an army parachutist, then scramble up and over the dirty curbside piles of rotting snow, while the Professor sped away without a glance back.

This undignified ejection didn't bother me especially: the vulgar truth be told, I relished the sheer outlawry of it all. I got at once into the mad spirit of the thing. I was enough of a bandit (as she was) to enjoy
épater
-ing some notional unseen bourgeoisie. The Closet, all of a sudden, turned out to be fantastically exciting—far more so in fact than Destroying the Patriarchy or even Performing the Fruit Ritual. We reveled in cocking a snook at all the
dull old straight people
: the other professors, one's tedious fellow students, the presumably respectable citizens of the Upper Midwest. (And even some of the
dull old gay people
too: poor Jo!) It was ours alone—a secret at once thrilling and obscene. Life was delicious. It was sick and it was fun. And it has to be said, for all its banality the illicit nature of our connection was also the most potent aphrodisiac I had ever experienced. It sent my physical desire for her—and hers for me, at least at the start—through the roof. We couldn't even stop to chat when we met up those first days; we just had to
do it.
The Professor must care for me greatly, I concluded—as much as I did for her in fact—to risk so much, to play so close to the edge.

I've often wondered why this deception felt so gratifying—for indeed I took a strange, rapt sort of pride in it. The breaching of the teacher-student barrier, coupled with the homosexuality, was obviously a flagrant offence against the System—a sort of double whammy, in fact. We'd smashed two taboos at once. As a Southern friend of mine would say, it was like
getting the cash and the credit, too
.

Thirty years on, in a different world, I remain ambivalent about this aspect of our transgression—what you might call its conjoined, two-headed nature. Worth remembering: the Professor and I violated no laws or codes or University policies; the concept of sexual harassment remained embryonic in academia in those days, laughably unworked-through. Academic culture was mostly unreconstructed—like Sodom and Gomorrah before the pelting rain of fire. Today, of course, official antiharassment policies exist at virtually all American colleges and universities (including my own) and various kinds of professor-student intimacy are now expressly forbidden. Everyone knows instructors who've been disciplined, about whom complaints have been lodged, questions raised, lawsuits filed. Many of the longtime abusers have been punished. All to the good, people seem to agree:
about time, too
. And of course one finds oneself chiming in:
Yeah! Huzzah! I'm down with that. The power disparity is always so great, after all.
As assuredly it is. Damaged men and women can (and do) exploit their authority over others in abominable ways—for wicked, selfish, self-deluding ends. Evil Never Sleeps and It's Working for Management.

Yet at the same time some mad little antic part of me still wants to rebel (if only rhetorically) against the wholesome official template. I don't rebel in actuality, of course, but every once in a while I
do
have the odd impeachable thought or two. This urge persists in spite of (because of?) the fact that my own experience might appear to provide irrefutable evidence of the painful folly of teacher-student love affairs. Indeed, it has to be said: however local and abbreviated and misleading, I have never forgotten, in some long-submerged baby-Sapphist part of me, the sheer euphoria—the release, relief, and vaulting transport—I experienced with the Professor. There was a huge kick in it all. Especially after the confusing love-episodes of my undergraduate years—Phoebe, Karen—the Professor's lust was a kind of instant education. Another woman besides me craved
sex with women. A beautiful and distinguished woman, no less. A grown-up woman. An older woman. A noble woman—almost chivalric—with silver-grey hair. For a single iridescent moment, the affirmation of same-sex love seemed to outshine the glaring inequalities of age, money, authority, power, prestige.

In wishful (or maybe just intransigent) moods I sometimes find myself wondering if the same-sex element doesn't ameliorate the teacher-student situation in some degree—make the damnable slightly
less
damnable. For when you get right down to it, doesn't just about every interesting and (dare one say?)
intelligent
older lesbian have lurking in her misspent youth some erotically charged relationship with a female teacher? The woman in question wasn't always literally a teacher, of course: sometimes she merely occupied an analogous position of authority—i.e., was an athletic coach, camp counselor, kindly nun, or the like. She is often recollected, nostalgically, as the First Love. One woman I know was initiated into Sapphism by her high school tennis coach; another by the married Sunday School teacher at her church—there in the empty rec room, amid the little kids' chairs and pictures of Jesus. Another young lady well known to me but who shall remain nameless had a wild affair in her teens with her English teacher at a famous prep school. (They would meet late at night in a deserted Wendy's parking lot for urgent trysts in the teacher's car.) That homosexual men of a certain age can tell similar stories I don't doubt; a comical pal of mine was deflowered by his high school French teacher and to this day recalls the event (and the teacher) with great fondness. '
ello, mon cheri. Deed you zhee me weenking at you? Zut, alors.

Hard not to feel, if you're gay, the hot, old-timey romance in some of these tales. But it's also arguable, I've come to think, that whenever same-sex love is illegal, unmentionable, or outright taboo—exists only under the Sign of the Closet, so to speak—teacher-student eros can serve a socializing, even genealogical, function across the
generations. Think of
Claudine at School
,
Mädchen in Uniform
,
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
, or indeed any number of turgid lesbian school novels in which an adolescent heroine becomes infatuated with a charismatic
pédagogue
. (There's even a super-hot depiction of such a liaison, of all places, in D. H. Lawrence's
The Rainbow
.) It's part of the life, part of one's own little heritage. And for better or worse, the Affair with the Teacher still stands as an archetypal rite of passage into the Sapphic world. Shouldn't the role such relationships have played in individual lives be acknowledged and their functions explored? Maybe there could be a museum or even a theme park.

Hard to ignore, of course: the age-old charge that homosexual teachers are predators, eager to “recruit” students and by their devilish lessons convert them to sex deviance. It's one of the oldest antigay canards on the books. The irony here is that the homophobes get things partly right: the teacher-pupil relationship can be a powerfully erotic one. The Greeks knew all about it; witness Socrates and Co. Or even more to the point, the great Sappho herself. One of the surviving legends about the poet holds that she ran a sort of female academy on Lesbos and that the various lovers mentioned in her poems (Atthis, Anactoria, Gyrinna) were her favorite students: teacher's pets in thongs and chitons.

Which isn't necessarily to say that same-sex love can be taught—even were there such a thing as a University of Sappho at Lesbos. (Otherwise known as USL:
transfer students accepted.
) In my own experience the desire preceded any curriculum. The lesbian pedagogue may crystallize or refine what is there, of course, but under the Sign of the Closet her most useful function may be simply to externalize the desire: to demonstrate to the junior partner that homoerotic fantasies can in fact be realized, given weight and heft and carnal life in an otherwise inhospitable grown-up world. She offers a kind of adult recognition and endorsement: a fleshly validation across time zones. If the teacher is a benign, unscrewed-up sort of person (a big
If, I know) she can offer a sense of lineage and belonging. Even as she intimates the emotional viability of a life thus lived, the teacher is often the first to confer on homosexuality both a historic dimension and epistemological gravitas.

Or at least that's one (exceedingly) rosy way of looking at it. Maybe far
too
rosy. Icky-rosy. Pukey-rosy. I may be utterly mistaken. Maybe I'm a blithering idiot. An irresponsible fantasist. Maybe the theme park should be a jail after all. Maybe, indeed, I am eager to place the whole business in such a sanguine light precisely because my own surrender to the Professor was so complete, so abject, and so devastating.

For surrender it was. I was happy to be dominated, to defer to her majesty. Given the differences between us, I reflexively assumed the Professor to be the wiser, the more sophisticated, of the two of us. She was prominent in her field, after all, admired by colleagues and students, and had achieved precisely the kind of success I longed for. (One of her favorite boasts had to do with having attained the rank of full professor at the relatively precocious age of thirty-five. I later became obsessed with outdoing her in this respect.) She was an expert, an eminence, a sort of lady-comet, flashing across the heavens. She zipped round the country giving lectures and performances; had her own letterhead and business cards; toted a briefcase, glossy and magnificent, around with her—no doubt full of important stuff. Yet one's deference, to say the least, was ill-advised. The Professor had problems of her own, it would turn out—manifest above all in a steely, seemingly insatiable appetite for emotional control. Combined with my own equally insatiable desire—to be taken care of—the result was near-instant psychic mayhem. The Professor became cruel; I succumbed to a kind of Sapphic Stockholm syndrome. One joined the cult of Dear Leader. Easy enough to let myself be washed away by the sheer disorderly force of her personality.