The Professor and Other Writings (36 page)

 

Too bad, fatso.
Mothering
, goddamn it, is the only word for it.

 

Mothering.
The Professor had been right, in one of her seduction speeches, to speak of a universe of human suffering: everyone needed this
mothering
, it seemed, but not everyone got it. Or not enough. The Professor knew the bitter reality—inside and out, apparently—and was able to express it better than anyone I had ever met. In mo
ments of intimacy, this dark knowledge—somehow enthroned in her—gave the Professor what can only be called an overwhelming emotional depth and moral pathos. Overwhelming to me especially because I felt I responded to it in every cell of my being. I recognized it. She seemed to describe me to myself. And to listen to her—especially the pillow talk—was to experience a devastating wish to console. Devastating because the pain was as much one's own as it was hers and one knew that consolation was impossible. One had not the power. One tried to clutch at her anyway, to pat her chest, or lay one's hand or head against her breastbone. But everything was so terribly unstable, like a nightmare.

To return to the world of fairy tales: if the Professor was in one sense Bluebeard-like, she was also, at other times, like the Beast in
Beauty and the Beast
. Her beastliness, like the latter's, was of that achy, endearing, human-all-too-human sort that makes one want to weep. One could imagine her crouching down, like the Beast in Cocteau's film, to lap water from some clear crystal pool. Because the Beast is yet an
animal
—though also a noble and stately one and soon to metamorphose, ever so feelingly, into Jean Marais—he has, one realizes, no other way of doing it. The vulnerability in the movement, the enactment of frailty and mortality, of embodied need and suffering, is heartrending. Yet the Professor too conveyed such vulnerability. She seemed to grasp the nature of things in a way I had yet to understand. I remember once asking her if she would like to live forever.
Wouldn't it be
great
if we never had to die?
No, she responded,
because then nothing would ever mean anything
. Not the answer I wanted, of course, but I've never forgotten it.

The childhood polio—grotesque curse of the American mid-century—was one eminent source of pain; a historic sadness that kept on giving. Even for me at the time it was easy to see that the psychic consequences of the Professor's illness had been deep and disordering. She had had the disease when she was around twelve or
thirteen. Though never confined to an iron lung (or at least I don't recollect her ever saying she was) the Professor was clearly still haunted by the mechanical 1940s–'50s sci-fi nightmare of it all. Big metal mummy-tubes. People locked inside what looked like cyclotrons. Her restlessness, her athleticism, her twitchy, quick-to-surface aggression and agitation—all suggested a massive compensatory effort of self-mobilization. The point was not to get
paralyzed.
To
keep moving.
Such willfulness and strength at times made her seem ineffably brave and wise.

One night as we lay in bed she showed me an old black and white photograph of herself. She was on the cusp of adolescence in the picture and posing outdoors, tennis team–style, with a group of ten or fifteen other girls. The girls were all smiling: they seemed in fact to be a sports team or summer camp group of some sort. Everyone had on shorts and white middy blouses and kerchiefs. The Professor was in the middle of the back row, her then-dark hair in pigtails, looking out at the camera with dread and dismay.
That was the day I got sick. I was already feeling sick when they took that picture. That was when it started, right then. I remember feeling sick.

I didn't know what to say, nor indeed what to do—that night or any other—when the Professor's withered leg began
acting up.
At times she got a tormenting sensation in her calf and hamstring akin to “restless legs” phenomenon. Some sort of neuropathy? She jerked around and groaned briefly and told me that the only thing that helped was
quinine
and she didn't have any. I was fascinated and appalled. I'd been born in 1953, soon after Jonas Salk had tested the first polio vaccine. I was so much younger—a Baby Boomer: safe forever. Quinine sounded like something from the nineteenth century. Such suffering was exotic to me, like the word “poliomyelitis” itself. My goggle-eyed concern during these episodes in turn seemed to exasperate the Professor. She became irritable and nasty. Things were definitely starting to go south the last time it happened—I was
fretting incessantly about how to
be
around her—and this strange pain threw her bad luck, and my good luck, into relief. There was nothing I
could
do but look stricken and dumb and far too young to cope with any of it.

That the Professor's disability meant something, inalterable and profound, in the gestalt of our relationship seems clear, though I still can't say exactly what it was. Even now a sort of aphasia comes over me. To be sure, she had developed a certain assertion and bravura in response to it. Yet it had also instilled in her a generalized anxiety and hypochondria. She was obsessed with dread diseases, and cancer in particular. These fears were in turn ineluctably bound up with sex and death. Not long after we'd begun sleeping together, we were again in her bed—the place where almost all of the important conversations I remember having with her seem to have occurred—and she told me she was worried about her breast lumps. They were
all over the place
. She took my hand and guided me to some of them and wanted me to palpate them. (I did so gently, though not without a sickening wave of disquiet.)
Would I stay with her if she had to have a mastectomy?
Oh, yes, yes.
Of course. Yes
. Would love her even
more
, in fact. It was clear one had to demonstrate more equanimity under the circumstances than the reviled Colleague-Lover of a few years back had shown—the lady, that was, whose apparent dastardliness had obliged the Professor to fire a bullet into the bedroom floor. One night when she and the Professor had been making love—or so the Professor scathingly related it—this feeble excuse for a girlfriend had brushed against a particularly hard nodule by accident and instantly become nauseous. Freaked out. Unable to continue with the business at hand. All the more proof, said the P., she was a complete
psycho.
Didn't matter then that she was a former child figure-skating star and a blond cutie-pie and they'd been going to buy a house together.
Fucking cow.

I remember—again—listening in on such anguish, scared but
mesmerized.
So far, so bad.
One lay on one's side, head raised and resting on one hand, and gazed down into the Professor's unseeing eyes as she talked. (Oddly, despite her Jewishness, her eyes were a stark gray-blue.) As she emerged from her pain-reverie, she would gradually return the gaze, focusing increasingly intently, as if searching one's features for something resembling strength. One tried to look pensive, tough—courageous. But what did one really feel about any of it? This terrifying fragility in things? I couldn't tell you.

A year or two after getting dumped I had a bizarre reminder of the Professor—the polio, the withered leg, and everything else I didn't understand about her. My feminist reading group was having its biweekly get-together. (What were we reading? Eudora Welty? Carson McCullers? Flannery O'Connor? Something corny and 1940s but wonderful like that.) Jo was there, and by some odd coincidence reminiscing vividly about the polio epidemic. She too had lived through it—obviously without succumbing—but as a child had been terrorized by the thought of the disease. She'd been too young to understand about viruses and their transmission and had somehow concluded that “Polio” was a monster who would pursue you and kill you if he saw you having fun at a swimming pool. Polio was his name—a name like Popeye or Bluto.
(“Ah wuz tahr-ri-faahd that PO-LEE-OH wuz gawna git me.”)
It was a gripping account—Jo's eyes had gotten huge and everyone else in the room seemed to have stopped breathing. Just so: at the thought of little Jo and Polio,
that nightmarish monster
, I was instantly overcome with hysteria, an urge to giggle and guffaw as mad and gay and preemptive—as
sexual
in fact—as any I've ever felt. It was hideous: I had to contort my face gargoyle-fashion—grit my teeth and somehow try to keep my lips from moving, so as not to explode. But the image in turn just wouldn't stop being hilarious. The whole dreadful fit went on for what seemed like ten minutes—a sort of multiple orgasm of wanting-to-laugh. I
just had to shut my eyes tight—contain the feeling even if it killed me—and somehow I guess I did.

But lodged in the Professor too were other even more archaic fears. She often spoke with some anguish about being Jewish, which she seemed to regard as a sort of primeval curse. Jewishness was not so much a bequest as a kind of doom, the dire and definitive mark of Cain. Perhaps not so unusual for an American woman of her generation, I guess: the Professor had lived through the discovery and first documentation of the Holocaust, after all. News of that inassimilable disaster had coincided exactly with her coming of age. True: I didn't know her long enough to acquire many intimate details about her parents or early life—I can't recall what her father did for a living, for instance, or anything about siblings, except that she had a brother. But one gathered that the family unit (huddled up together somewhere in a middle-class Long Island suburb) was dreary and unhappy—rather like the one Art Spiegelman depicts in
Maus.
The Professor's parents, unlike Spiegelman's, were not survivors, as far as I know, except in the most displaced and psychological sense. Yet the atmosphere of unease—a pervasive feeling of oppressiveness and precariousness—seems to have been similar. There'd been a sort of crazy-suicidal vibe in the air: that
Maus
-vibe.

And thus it was, grimly enough, that our postcoital conversations so often turned on extermination camps, the hideous arbitrariness of fate,
the children who never should have been born
. On the latter topic the Professor's usual steely manner would give way to tremulousness and she would fall into a sort of maudlin schoolgirl reverie. I've said she was a hypochondriac; she could also be morbid and histrionic—a sort of sorrowing death-junkie. Her inner world was dark and sad and full of dangers, constantly flooding out with anxiety. At such moments she exuded a strange mixture of panic, fierceness, and despondency. So labile, in fact, was her emotional state over the period
I knew her, she was having to pop “tranquilizers” fairly often. (I don't know what they were. Maybe Valium? This was all long before Prozac.) No doubt these angst-spells would have become exhausting over the long run, but in the moment I found them stirring and seductive.

The children who never should have been born
, I soon learned, had their melancholy counterparts elsewhere in my lover's troubled soul: namely,
the children who should have been born, but weren't
. Which is to say the children that the Professor herself might have had—had she ever married; had she not turned to homosexuality; had she not had the hysterectomy of several years before, had she not delivered (as she put it) a
healthy eight-pound uterus
to the world. This infertility, this regret, this anger at Nature's cruelty, was another part of her I never understood very well at the time—to my sorrow. But I was miles from ever getting it. (And in some way I'm not sure I even get it now, having seldom had more than the most fleeting desire either to bear or raise a child.) It was unlucky too, perhaps, that I was young enough, indeed, for her to have given birth to me. In the early fifties she would have been eighteen or nineteen.

And not so very hard to perceive now: that when the Professor spoke of children—born or unborn—she was also talking about herself.
The children who should not have been born
had been victims of a catastrophic failure of
mothering
. They had gone unprotected into the night, had been starved and clubbed and frightened to death, had been helpless in the face of adult cruelty and betrayal. Not the fault of anyone's real mother, of course, but the effect was the same as if it had been. One intuited as much: that the Professor likewise felt unmothered—implacably so, in fact—and that her Jewishness, not to mention her homosexuality, were bound up with this intractable sensation of neglect. The terrible imperative to self-destruction she claimed to have faced down in analysis in her twenties had no doubt
arisen from some deep wound of this sort—some conviction, indeed, that she herself should not have been born. To put herself to death would have been to put things right.

Yet the child who
hadn't
been born—Kid-Zero, in other words, the kid the Professor herself might have had—was also a kind of self-projection. Had she had this child, the fantasy seemed to go, she would have
mothered it almost to death
—loved it and cared for it with a devotion at once totalizing, sumptuous, and unconditional. She would have cherished it in precisely the way that she herself had not been—which is to say, for eternity. After all, someone needed
to damn well repair things
.
Do some fucking good in the world.
The damage everywhere was ghastly and gross. She had to make it up to someone—to the poor
little baby,
to herself. And because of her disability she had to be especially heroic. Yes, there was a risk in such love that one might smother or be smothered, but wasn't that preferable to being tortured and starved in a cellar or thrown into some frozen pit to die?

Such wishfulness and dread combined to produce in her an urge to treat me—whom she often seemed to perceive as a sort of youthful alter ego—with a crazy-making mixture of compassion and contempt. The Professor held a deep belief, among other things, that I had “seen” something utterly monstrous—experienced some kind of Freudian primal scene—before I could ever speak. This scarifying infant vision, made immeasurably worse by the fact that in my wordless state I had not been able to signal my distress, had left me, she declared, emotionally crippled. She was sorry for me on that count. At certain times I became caressable for just that reason. Pathetic but charming. In need of her sexual services. And I believed her—believed the whole tyrannical crackpot story of my infantile past. I was almost proud to have been traumatized thus; the mystery and melodrama seemed to make me more like
her
. And doubtless this
Primal Scene, once rediscovered, would explain my weird personality—my stupid silences, for example, when the Professor snapped at me on the phone and I became mortified or speechless in reply. On some level I was remembering
IT
.