Blue Angel (10 page)

“Betty thanked her. She thought it was sweet. But then she actually
read
a few lines and figured out what was what. That's when she called to ask me: Should she turn down Angela's gift? I asked if the college had a rule against shelving books by students. Betty said they didn't. The situation had never come up. I told Betty what I thought: that Angela could come looking for her book and was quite capable of making a fuss with the administration if it wasn't shelved or checked out.”

“Angela?” Swenson's trying to square the litigious harpy Magda seems to have in mind with the awkward sparrow he knows, begging for crumbs of praise.

“Angela,” says Magda. “Finally I told Betty that if she catalogued and shelved the goddamn thing, no one but Angela would ever check it out. No one would ever see it. She could ditch the book as soon as Angela graduated. Of course, the truth was…
I
was the one who didn't need trouble with the administration. The poems were written in my class. I don't have tenure, remember?”

“So the book's in the library?” Swenson says.

“As far as I know.”

“I might take a look at it.”

“Be my guest,” says Magda. Suddenly they're both aware of their half-eaten sandwiches and guiltily apply themselves to finishing their food.

“I was hungry,” Swenson lies.

“Me, too. I guess,” says Magda.

“By the way, Ted.” Magda pushes away her plate. “While you're at the library, check out Ackerley's
My Dog Tulip
. Pass it on to your students. It's the best thing ever written about having sex with a pet.”

“Thanks,” says Swenson. “I knew I could count on you.”

“We're friends,” says Magda. “Right?”

T
he last sighting of Elijah Euston's ghost took place in the
library several years ago. A freshman working late in the American history stacks saw an old man in a black frock coat, sobbing, his face buried in his hands, with only his powdered wig showing. Why was Elijah crying? Because of the tragic fates of his daughters or the decline of the college he founded with such high hopes?

Swenson jogs up the library steps, steps intended to make you feel you should be climbing them on your knees. Whether or not the library's haunted, Swenson never feels closer to Elijah Euston than he does in this British cathedral transplanted to northern Vermont. Euston didn't live to see it finished but left elaborate instructions for the stonemasons, stained glass makers and woodcarvers on how to build his temple to higher education.

Swenson's spirit used to soar on the updraft of transcendence that the library's vaulted arches were designed to produce. Every so often he still gets a buzz in the presence of two thousand years of poetry, art, history, science—the whispery proximity of all those dear dead voices. But lately, he's more likely to feel the dizzying chasm between what Elijah Euston dreamed and what his dream has become, between the lofty heights of Western culture and the everyday grubbiness of education at Euston.

It's the same mild vertigo Swenson suffers whenever he passes portraits of Euston's past presidents, or Jonathan Edwards scowling from the Founders Chapel wall. That's what tradition means these days: those stirrings of inadequacy in the face of our ancestors' hopes. Or maybe Swenson's just edgy as he enters these hallowed halls to find a student's dirty poems.

As always, the library's empty. Where do the students work? Swenson's footsteps ring against the stone floor of the entrance hall. He feels at once tiny, overwhelmed, and disruptively huge and noisy. At least no one's around to ambush him with maddening conversation.

Then he sees Betty Hester at the checkout desk. A tall upright tea cosy of a woman, Betty wears a homespun eggplant-colored dress with a skirt roomy enough for her whole clan—the six children she's raised while working at Euston and obtaining the requisite Library Science degrees—to live comfortably underneath it.

“Ted!” hisses Betty. “We haven't seen you in decades. Too busy writing to read?”

“If only!” Swenson shrugs modestly to deflect Betty's assumption, meanwhile leaving open the chance that she might be right.

“Oh, you artists. How's Sherrie?”

“Fine,” says Swenson. “The kids?”

“Just dandy. Well! Is there something I can help you with today?”

“Thanks, no. I'm at one of those slow points…. I thought I'djust drop in and browse, see if inspiration strikes.”

“Oh, a real reader!” Betty says. “People like you are the reason this place still exists.”

With newly wary eyes, the paranoia of a pervert, Swenson observes that from the checkout desk Betty can see the card catalog, which he still prefers over the frustrating computer. Does he imagine that if Betty sees him head for the
A
s, she'll guess he's here to find
The Complete Dirty Poems of Angela Argo
? And now inspiration
does
strike. He can go to the
A
s, look up Magda's suggestion—Ackerley's
My Dog Tulip
—and while he's in the neighborhood…

He scribbles the Ackerley call number on a slip of paper and then, with studied casualness, finds “Argo, Angela.
Angela 911
. Privately printed.”

No need for Betty to notice that Swenson's breathing quickens. And now he can only hope that Elijah Euston's ghost has gone back to wherever it normally lurks as he takes the stone stairs that corskcrew up to the literature section.

Not an extra molecule of oxygen up here in this smog of mildew. He traces his index finger along the rows of books and stops at a volume sewn with shiny red thread, shelved next to A. R. Ammons. His fingers fly away from it as if from a hot iron. His lungs seem to be shrinking in response to the lack of air.

He steadies himself, then slides the book—the booklet—from the shelf. No wonder Betty was freaked. On the cover is the title,
Angela 911
, in bold red letters. And below that is a photo, downloaded from a computer, of the Venus de Milo, with a pair of arms crudely drawn in. One hand covers the statue's crotch. The other holds a phone receiver.

Hearing—imagining?—footsteps, Swenson stops and listens. He peers down the row of bookshelves. The manuscript shakes in his hands. He finds the dedication page: “To my Mother and Father.” How thoughtful—dedicating dirty poems about incest and phone sex to your parents. He shuts the book. Is someone coming? Perhaps the bookshelves are groaning with age, the floors shifting under their weight.

The light is too dim to read by, but he hesitates to go to a carrel, where someone might catch him with the book, too far from the shelves to slip it back. He restores it to its proper place, leaves, finds the Ackerley book, returns and gets Angela's manuscript, which he slips under the Ackerley. Then he walks to the farthest desk, a cubbyhole wedged in a corner—a carrel no one would ever pass on the way to anywhere else.

He pages to the first poem and reads:

I'm the father of four daughters.

Three of them are sleeping.

One is awake and waiting for me.

That's why I called you tonight.

Are you sleeping? Don't sleep. Listen.

I keep thinking of her hard tiny breasts.

My fingers between her legs.

Her hips pushing up against my hand.

Are you sleeping? Listen.

I hear her cry

The pigeon coo she made as a baby

But now the cry is for me, it's mine.

Her bones are a pigeon's bones.

I lie on them gently, gently,

My penis against her smooth thigh.

That's why I called you.

Listen. Don't sleep. Listen.

I said, I'm not sleeping.

I'm waiting for you.

Oh, you make me so hot.

Pretend that you're lying on top of me.

Pretend that I'm your daughter.

Okay. She's no Sylvia Plath. It's a good thing her fiction is better than her poems. Meanwhile he's aware that these uncharitable thoughts are merely attempts to distract himself from the fact that he has an erection. What kind of monster is he? Aroused by a poem about incest, the abuse of an innocent girl! All these years he's been fooling himself about his so-called moral principles, his inner life, his duties as teacher and husband and father—the father of a daughter. Suppose someone did this to Ruby? Suppose someone did this to Angela?

Swenson's hardly human. He's an animal. A beast. He crosses and uncrosses his legs, closes his eyes and inhales. The dust makes him cough. Think of lung cancer. All those years he smoked. There now. His hard-on's subsiding. Really, he's got to calm down. Stop being so tough on himself. An erection isn't a capital crime, it's neither rape nor molestation. Not even Catholics believe that bad thoughts are as bad as bad deeds. In high school, when he got erections during boring math class, he'd imagine his parents were dead. And now they
are
dead, and he himself will be dead, as will Sherrie and Ruby. Well, that takes care of it nicely. The industrial-strength antiaphrodisiac.

Anyway, Angela's poems—their trite erotic content—weren't what got him hard. Nor the fact that they were written by a student he can picture in his mind, a girl with a side he wouldn't have guessed, or maybe he could have guessed, and wisely chose not to. He's forty-seven, nearly done with the necessity of evading erotic sabotage. Having chattered his way through flirtations with so many
pretty
students, he'd have to be mad to lose it, so near the finish line, for scrawny Angela Argo. His hard-on wasn't about the poem. Or Angela. Certainly not. It's the whole situation: the airless library, the aura of taboo, reading any reference to sex, no matter how banal, in this…hushed, ascetic, hallowed temple to scholarship and study.

He wants to read the rest of the poems. But not here in the stacks. It would be different at home. Cleaner. Less furtive and weird. But first there's the little problem of getting it past Betty Hester.

Probably he should just steal it. He'd be doing Betty—and Magda—a favor. Why didn't he bring his briefcase? He could tuck the book under his arm and walk it through the front door. With his luck, it's been magnetized and will set off the alarm they installed a few years back on the foolishly hopeful premise that students want to steal books. Angela steals books, Magda said. And now, it seems, so does Swenson.

He wants the book. He should have it. But he can't risk checking it out, generating a permanent record stored in the computer. Why doesn't he just photocopy it? It's only fifteen or twenty pages. He's so pleased by this easy solution that he hurries downstairs, then stops when he remembers that the library copy machine is near the card catalog—plainly visible from Betty's desk. Copying will never work. He's got to keep a cool head. Avoid all eye contact with Betty and make it clear through gesture, or lack of gesture, that he brought the bound manuscript into the library and can simply take it back home.

From the corner of his eye he sees that Betty's not at her desk. Then, from the reference stacks behind the desk, Betty shouts, “Oh, hi, Ted! Be with you in a sec!” Where's her professional duty to maintain the tomblike silence?

Swenson forces a smile. It's vital not to panic. For him to go to the trouble of checking out a student's work for a previous class is not only well within his rights but a sign of superhuman dedication. What has gotten into him, a respected novelist and professor, terrified he'll get busted for borrowing some amateurish, slightly titillating poems? You'd think he was a kid getting caught with his first dirty magazine.

As Betty takes the Ackerley, Swenson surreptitiously transfers Anegla's book to his other hand. That's his. He's not surrendering it. It's none of Betty's business.

“Ted?”

“What?” he temporizes. Busted for possession.

“Your card?” says Betty, sweetly.

“Oh!” Twisting sideways to keep
Angela 911
out of Betty's view, Swenson gropes with his free hand until he finds his wallet.

Betty says, “Hmm.
My Dog Tulip
. I don't believe I know this.”

“Professor Moynahan recommended it,” he says. And then unnecessarily, “My students seem to be writing stories about people who fall inappropriately in love with their pets.” Why did he say
that
?

“Well, I suppose that happens.” Zapping the book with the quivering beam of red light, Betty seems reassured by whatever message comes up on the computer screen and surrenders the Ackerley, all checked out and ready to go.

“Thanks,” booms Swenson in an effort at hearty closure.

Then Betty points and, in the unmistakable tones of a grade school teacher ordering a child to bring up the passed note or spit out the contraband gum, says, “And that one, Ted?”

Oh, that one's mine, Swenson should say. He doesn't have to show her. But he hands it over, a transaction in which far more is exchanged than Angela Argo's manuscript. A silent interrogation—all body language and facial expression—ensues over the question of whether he'd merely forgotten or intended not to declare it. The faintest tremor of suspicion…then the moment passes. Betty rotates the manuscript and together they study the Venus de Milo, the naked torso talking on the phone and grabbing her crotch.

“Oh, dear,” Betty says. “I believe I know the author. Is she one of your students?”

“You got it,” Swenson says gratefully.

“How fortunate for her.”

Swenson's eyes film with tears of relief. It's been an emotional day—lunch with Magda, then that little incident with himself, up in the stacks. Bless dear Betty for making it clear that borrowing a student's poems is neither a perversion nor a punishable offense.

Betty checks out the book and gives it to him. It's all he can do not to grab it before she changes her mind.

“How's Sherrie?” says Betty. Didn't she already ask?

“Fine,” Swenson says. Again.

“And Ruby?”

“Fine.”

“Give them my love,” says Betty.

“And mine to yours,” says Swenson.