The Professor and Other Writings (35 page)

In my impaired state it became a positive pleasure—an honor—to
yield to the Professor's paranoia. (I didn't understand the paranoia as such.) In addition to the make-yourself-scarce protocol now in place when she drove us into school, there were numerous other imperatives to absorb. They kicked in immediately. Some of these took the form of odd prohibitions and constraints—a sort of behavioral hobbling. Several involved the Professor's house. The place was as delightful as I remembered it on Christmas Eve (why
couldn't
it be mine?). The marijuana plants still flourished. The Oriental rugs still lay about in elegant profusion. The Bose speakers stood ready to serve. In the kitchen the refrigerator was big and white and gleaming and now I was allowed to look inside it and even take things out. I loved it all. But the Professor also had some stipulations. Among the most draconian: that I never set foot—
literally
never set foot—in one room in the house, the one directly across from her bedroom. Here she kept various notes and files and tapes that had to do with her linguistic researches. These files were Top Secret: her duty to her sources and informants—all those aged speakers of Smoky Mountain Speech, Gullah, and the like—demanded the most rigorous confidentiality. Plus, there were sinister people everywhere who would be
very eager
to see into those files. She had to watch her back.

Why she thought I would be interested in these strange but tedious-sounding memoranda was never clear. When it came to the audio files, I would have had no clue, moreover, how to work the elaborate reel-to-reel tape equipment piled up everywhere like something out of
2001: A Space Odyssey
. Still, for me it was
'Nuff said, ma'am
. As instructed, I never did go in there, though I easily might have. In the first flush of passion the Professor had given me a key to her house and so for the month or so we slept together I often found myself hanging around the place on my own—rather like a concubine in a seraglio, waiting for the Professor to come back from wherever. (The Professor sometimes required me to do housework during these solitary vigils: I remember dragging a huge and unwieldy old
canister vacuum around one afternoon and even did the stairs, laboriously, with a highly aggravating little sucker attachment.) About the only good thing to be said about this ultradocility, or indeed my brief spell of huswifery, is that, yes,
the figure of Bluebeard did cross my mind
. Later, bless him, he would become, if only allegorically, one of one's psychic liberators.

My compliance with other taboos was likewise absolute. One night (I'd come over a few hours earlier), the Professor went out to a play with Peggy, her current T.A.—a crusty, overweight hippy lady who posed no romantic threat to me, I figured, and with whom, in fact, I later became friends. The Professor had planned it out: Peggy might want to come in afterwards for a drink, she told me, so if I heard them entering together, I was to remain sequestered in the bedroom upstairs and not make a sound. No creaking the floorboards or odd little thuds. Peggy did come in, as it happened, and so for more than an hour, even as peals of bibulous laughter wafted up from below, I hid out, Anne Frank–style—afraid to make the bedsprings creak, hardly daring to turn the pages of the book I was reading for fear of causing some stray little riffling noise. The situation brought to mind what one always heard about EST seminars: that hours passed but you weren't allowed to go to the bathroom. When the door slammed and she finally came up, the Professor was chortling heartily—
she'd really pulled the wool over Peggy's eyes
. Peggy, she announced, had always had a big crush on her.
It was sad but also touching.
The P. was churned up and a bit drunk and wanted to have sex right away.

The Professor reveled in knowing the score when other people didn't. Other people often included me. Granted, almost as soon as we became lovers, she dispensed a modicum of uncensored information—often melodramatic—about her own parti-colored past: college loves, this girlfriend and that one, the T.A. girl on the West Coast, a lady in Puerto Rico, even a plumpish young assistant professor from another department, putatively straight, with
whom she'd had—only a year or two before, it seemed—a tumultuous affair. This other woman was a
hysteric,
I learned;
a real sicko.
The Professor had once had to fire off a warning shot in bed—the loaded pistol was kept in the bedside drawer—to keep said lady in line. (That the Professor was as magnificent a shot as Wyatt Earp I had no doubt: with great pride she once showed me a weird warped quarter that she had supposedly dinged mid-flight when somebody had thrown it up in the air.) Whenever the Professor now saw this Detestable Former Love at faculty convocations or the like, she felt panicky and enraged and had to take a tranquillizer.

But there were many other things I wasn't to know and I was made to know I wasn't to know. Oh, yes, said the Professor, of course she slept with men as well as women; having taken me in her arms, she frequently hinted she was even then simultaneously romancing some agreeable stud or other. (Who no doubt favored women with long silver braids and missing pieces.)
She did what lesbians did, but she refused to be called one.
I was not to ask questions, especially when I didn't hear from her for a day or two. Regarding this purported taste in men I knew nothing, save a little tidbit of 411 that she dropped one evening while we lay in bed, drunk and already bickery, in front of the TV. The Bionic Man (a pumped-up Lee Majors)—just then bending some pieces of rebar onscreen in front of us—was, she allowed, exactly the sort of guy she liked.
You know, athletic—a good physique
. Bionic in fact. The comment—I daresay—expressed one of the very few forward-looking aspects of her sensibility: she was straight; she was gay; she was cyborg-friendly too.

Unnamed women everywhere were in love with her—especially straight ones. They were all over the country, apparently: professors, students, media people, folksingers, sportswomen of various sorts. Some of her exasperation with Alice, it turned out, was due to her belief that Alice harbored repressed homosexual feelings for her but was too stiff and dumb and straitlaced to realize it.
When I was
younger I could have really gotten messed up over her….
But luckily, there were women enough with yearnings similar to one's own who
were
prepared to act on them: that made up for it. The well would never run dry. She'd let me know, in good time, the Professor chuckled, if I ever had anything to worry about. But, of course, I never would. She was
crazy
about me;
we'd be together for a very long time
. Probably forever.

Thus even when Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Molly and Tina, came along a few weeks later—the three of us becoming for a brief spell rival boinkees—it was supposedly no sweat. They didn't know about me, the Professor insisted; nor were they aware of each other's involvement with her. They were just two
dumb kids
she was helping out. Teaching them, as it were—Molly, the little baby dyke especially—that it was totally normal and okay to have sex with women. I was the one whom she had graced with a full accounting, the Professor explained, because I was tough enough, grown-up enough, and the one she
really
wanted. She owed it to me. Indeed, I should feel very special. It was precisely because she loved me so passionately—already, she declared—that she was screwing around.
I'm testing you, I guess.
The infidelities (
aw, honey, if you can even call them that)
were simply proof of her feeling for me. I should wait it all out: she'd slough off the other two soon enough. I would be hers and she would be mine because I was
so goddamned smart
and
so goddamned substantial
, such a
fine and superior person—so funny too
—but even more than that because
I understood despair.

I'll come back to the despair part in a moment. What is most difficult to convey here, of course, is why I remained so feverishly in thrall to the Professor, even as various unpleasant quirks and peculiarities in her began to reveal themselves. The Bluebeard business alone, I realize, suggests a certain monstrosity. Yet the Professor, I swear, was deeply lovable, too; lovable enough, in fact, to balance out whatever misgivings even a harsher judge than I might have enter
tained. True—the split in her nature was extreme: Ripley's Believe It or Not could have done a feature on her.
Good and Bad Amazingly Combined! Two People in One! The Famous Lady Jekyll-and-Hyde!
She fooled even those, it seemed, far more subtle and streetwise than I. At the university and out in the world, after all, she was managing to function at an extremely high professional level without raising undue suspicion. Yes, I was a needy and overawed twenty-two-year-old. But jumbled up as everything was in my beloved's psyche, I had legitimate as well as pathetic reasons for being smitten with her. She was a menace, it transpired, but a captivating one.

First, of course: the sheer seduction of her personality. She could love-bomb you. In social settings the Professor had a shining, attentive, fresh-faced quality to her—a sort of openness and kindness and unaffected curiosity about the world. She seemed more
alive
in the moment than most people ever became over their entire lives. When she was relaxed, not freaked out about something or someone, she could exhibit an enormous, infectious social charm, a charm almost impossible to delineate after the fact. It was fully embodied yet also somehow philosophical. The Professor was an accomplished winker, among other things, and when she winked at you from across the room you felt an immediate and delicious contact and acceptance. You couldn't keep yourself from smiling back. No doubt, the wink suggested, there was something
funny
, as well as tragic, about being alive and you and she both knew it.
What a farce, eh?

The sense of the comic was rich and well-developed in her; the lack of pretentiousness genuine. An early, deep-voiced kind of geniality had no doubt been a part of her professional success—had helped to make her a successful teacher and collector of data. She had a way with an audience: got people talking, made people open up in intimate ways. (It was also what made her such an effective manipulator of those who didn't see through it.) She wasn't afraid to play the jester in public. She enjoyed singing little bits of grossly ribald
song, for example—especially some favorite lines from a smutty sailor ditty about
frigging in the rigging
. She approved of the silliness, the way lewdness got overtaken by slapstick. In fact, she seemed to relish silliness in any form. She admired dachshunds for the palpably absurd way they waddled through life. She had an iron doorstop in one of the rooms upstairs in the shape of a dachshund. (Was his name
Alexei
? Like the doomed Tsarevitch?) The ridiculous combination of preening amour propre with the Chaplinesque short legs never failed to delight her.

She was likewise drawn, in endearing fashion, to buoyant, fruity-voiced, full-figured
comedienne
types of the sort popular in classic Hollywood films in the 1930s and '40s. Larger-than-life female clowns like Margaret Dumont, say, as Mrs. Gloria Teasdale in
Duck Soup
or Mrs. Claypool in
A Night at the Opera
. Margaret Rutherford in anything. (Or her panto-dame equivalent: Alastair Sim, in bosomy drag, as Millicent Fritton, the girls' school headmistress in
The Bells of St. Trinian's
.) The Professor greatly enjoyed hammy old burlesque queens like Tessie O'Shea and Sophie Tucker; likewise, the glorious Ruth Draper—famed for her arch comic monologues in Edith Wharton–ish
grande dame
persona. Anna Russell, the Canadian opera singer and comedian of the 1950s and '60s was another special favorite: I first heard Russell's (now classic) plummy-ludicrous retelling of the story of Wagner's
Ring of the Nibelungen
one night at the Professor's house. She'd dug the record out from her stack of favorite LPs and insisted that I listen.

The Professor's favorite star of all time, though, was Marie Dressler—she of
Dinner at Eight
,
Tugboat Annie
, and
Min and Bill.
She seemed in fact to have a huge crush on her. Dressler was then just a name to me—a symptom of the seemingly vast age difference between myself and the Professor, so I didn't pay much attention. I know more now. (Was Dressler
too
a big ole dyke? She definitely looks like one in photos.) You can see lots of Dressler today on
YouTube—going all the way back to her 1914 silent film with Chaplin,
Tillie's Punctured Romance
. She's utterly marvelous. One could hardly say that she and the Professor looked alike—the P. being lean and athletic, almost sinewy, when I knew her, and Dressler like a giant washerwoman—but there's something in the theatricality and warmth, the comic mobility of expression, that carries over. A certain bizarre sexiness. After thirty years it's hard for me to retrieve more than a weak-signal, evanescent sense of the Professor's presence
in the flesh
—her distinctive carnal magic—but I've felt closest to her, and her closest to me, while watching Dressler mug and dance and carry on in these flickery, droll, now-ancient video clips. I can imagine the Professor and I laughing at them together, in some life we never had.

Yet even more attractive to me than the Professor's comic side was her melancholia. The two things were related, of course: the comedy, like her sexual promiscuity, bore the traces of, seemed to grow out of, some deep and unfathomable undercurrent of pain. This pain, I suspect, was both what bound us, at first, then sent us careening off in opposite directions with such violence. We saw reflected in one another the same need—ancient, tactile, immense—for succor. I'm tempted to call it a need for mothering, except I'm English and hate the reductive and humiliating cliché sound of
that
. Mother's milk and such. Yuck.
So let's look round for another way of saying it, shall we? Hmmm
…