Blue Angel (12 page)

“Sherrie answered the phone. Otherwise I wouldn't be here, believe me.”

Lauren cringes. Too late, it crosses Swenson's mind that she might have been flirting with him instead of trying to make him feel small. Well, he put a quick end to
that
with the mention of Sherrie. And the simple, chilly statement of fact: I wouldn't be here—where you are, with you—if my wife hadn't tricked me into it.

Lauren shakes herself like a small drenched pet, straightens her tray of Marmite, and leaves. Swenson treks off to the bathroom where he lingers, as planned, though it's hardly the leisurely piss of his dreams but rather a long, nervous prelude during which he stands there, embarrassed to be holding his dick, paralyzed by Marge's pristine, accusatory collection of fluffed-up dainty terrycloth towels and edible-looking soaps. He's so grateful for the few dribbles that finally oblige—his prostate must be shot—that he forgives himself the stain on his pants, though he knows Lauren will see it as yet another aggressive declaration of maleness.

He returns to the living room, which has emptied in his absence. After an instant of irrational panic, he hears voices from the dining room, where everyone's seated except for the rude, uncivilized, drunken novelist.

“Sorry.” Swenson slides into the remaining chair, which with his luck, or perhaps Marge's thoughtful
placement,
is next to Francis Bentham and across from Lauren. If he had any balls he'd make them all move so he could sit next to Sherrie, who's eyeing him a little wildly from the far end of the table. But if he had any balls, he wouldn't be here in the first place. Years ago, at dinners like this, he and Sherrie would catch each other's eye and keep looking: Brief out-of-body moments from which they'd return refreshed, as if after a nap. Who knows if that would work now? Still, it would be helpful to grab Sherrie's hand under the table.

The dean sends plates of food around. Somehow Marge has flayed the sausages, peeled away the blackened skins, and pulverized the rest into a species of pork gravy to pour—an impromptu shepherd's pie—over mashed potatoes. Though it's hardly the blood feast from
Beowulf
that the Benthams specialize in, the meal's been saved. The guests are relieved. They lean over their plates of steaming hash, periodically bobbing up to compliment Marge on her cooking and her improvisational skills, pretending the gravy doesn't taste smoky and charred. Meanwhile, they wash the whole mess down with streams of the vinegary red wine that the dean pours from a sweating glass carafe.

“Comfort food!” says Lauren, bullyingly.

“Mmm,” agree the others.

“Very good, Marjorie. Well, friends,” says Francis, “what's new out there in the trenches?”

Everyone keeps eating. Let someone else begin.

“How do Euston's best and brightest seem to you? As opposed to last year's? As compared with any year's…?”

“Well,” begins Bernie Levy, “I don't suppose it'll come as a shock if I say that each year's entering class seems to have read less than last year's worst students.”

“Right,” Deconstructionist Jamie sneers. “I guess those high schools are really slacking off on their Dryden and Pope.”

“What about you, Jamie?” says Francis. “Are your students cut from brighter cloth?”

Does Jamie intend to tell the dean that the five or six misfit seniors who elect to take his Literary Theory seminar are brighter than Bernie's? Even Swenson, who has no great love for Bernie, tenses with anticipation.

“I have mostly upperclassmen,” says Jamie. “So by the time they get to me, I can't blame their high school teachers. It's these guys”—he gestures at his colleagues—“who have messed up their minds.” Jamie laughs. Alone.

Gerry Sloper says, “I had a sort of interesting thing happen in class the other day. It made me realize where the students are at—how different from myself at their age.”

“I was never their age,” Bernie says.

“We believe it,” Dave says affectionately, mopping up after the ravages of Jamie's casual meanness.

“
Sort of
interesting,” says Jamie. “God help us.”

“Gerry,” says Bentham. “Please. Proceed.”

“Well,” says Gerry, “this was in my Intro to American Lit. We were doing Poe. I thought I'd give them a little bio…a little…gossip, really, to make it more immediate, give it a personal touch—”

“Personal!” says Bernie. “That's what we've been reduced to! Fodder for the talk show.”

“Wouldn't it be great?” Jamie says. “Poe and the thirteen-year-old child-bride cousin discussing their marital arrangements with Sally Jessie Raphael?”

“Interesting,” says Ruth.

“Jesus Christ, no,” says Swenson.

“Oh, Ted,” says Lauren, “you're so predictable. Always taking the male writer's side.”

“Anyway,” says Gerry, “I told them about Poe's problems with alcohol and opium. Winding up in the gutter, details like that. Any reference to substance abuse always gets their attention. But when I got to Poe's marriage, the class got very quiet. I kept asking what the matter was, none of them would answer. Until finally one young woman said, ‘Are you telling us that we've been studying the work of a child molester? I think we should have been told that before we read the assignment.'”

“No way,” says Dave.

“Way,” Gerry says.

“A child molester?” says Magda. “Oh, poor Edgar Allan!”

“Edgar Allan, is it? Listen to Magda!” Dave says. “Oh, you poets! On a first-name basis with the dead.”

Magda likes being called a poet and turns to smile at Dave.

“Fascinating!” Coquettishly, the dean cups his chin in one hand and tilts his head in measured increments toward each guest at the table. “Are the rest of you finding a heightened consciousness about those…issues…?”

Another mystery solved! All this is just a follow-up, one in a series of dinner-hour departmental reviews of the basic points covered by the recent faculty meeting. Is sexual harassment Bentham's private obsession? Or his professional duty? Ceaseless vigilance on behalf of the college's legal status, its budget, its reputation?

“We all have to watch our backs,” says Bernie. “I never talk to a female student in my office alone without the door wide open. And I keep a tape recorder in my desk that I can activate if things get dicey.”

Everyone stares at Bernie, straining to imagine the scenario in which a student fantasizes that Bernie's about to grope her with those mottled spidery fingers.

“What about the rest of you?” says Francis. “Does the problem seem dangerous here at Euston? Or is it just our…sensitivity to the current academic climate?”

“It's very dangerous,” says Dave Sterret. “Sensitive as in…top secret. Sensitive as in…explosive.”

The guests deepen their involvement with their charred shepherd's pie.

For years before Jamie came to Euston, Dave, as faculty adviser to the Gay Students Alliance, dated its best-looking guys. The department heaved a collective sigh of relief when Jamie and Dave fell in love, though by then, knowing Jamie, they worried about poor Dave. Swenson used to wonder how Dave—a tall, thin, painfully awkward guy with a face badly scarred by acne—got so much action. Apparently, Dave Sterret has hidden depths, some well of integrity or bravado that's led him to take on the dean's question, despite a past that might keep a lesser man focused on his mashed potatoes.

Dave says, “We were doing
Great Expectations
last week. And one of my students—a big beery jock—asked if Dickens meant there to be a homosexual thing between Pip and Magwich. Was this kid trying to bait me? They all know I'm gay. I said I thought there might be critical writing on the subject, which the kid could look up for extra credit. But I didn't think that Dickens meant us to read a gay subtext into the book. And finally we had to consider what the writer intended.”

“What the
writer
intended?” cries Jamie. “I can't believe I just heard you say that, Dave. Have I taught you
nothing
?”

Dave's used to this. He hardy misses a beat. “I thought that was the end of it. But the next day, a young woman—stuff she's said in class makes me think she might be some sort of born-again evangelical—came to my office and told me that the discussion had made her feel very unsafe. The way she said that word…
unsafe
…I'll tell you, it gave me the chills.”

“Why?” demands Lauren. “It's an ordinary English word with a perfectly valid meaning.”

“Oh, dear,” says Jamie. “
Semantics,
now!”

“What did you do, Dave?” asks Magda.

Dave says, “I reminded her that
I
didn't start the discussion. I said I wanted students to feel free to bring up any questions they had. I gave her a two-minute sermon about academic freedom. And then I went home and took to my bed with a major case of the vapors!”

“Oh, my,” says the dean. He looks from Dave to Gerry and back again. “And both of these incidents—the Poe and the Dickens—you say happened
last week
?”

“Well,” says Gerry, “within the last few weeks.”

Bentham shakes his head. “Statistically speaking, I'd say this indicates that things are heating up. What about you, Lauren? Has this come up in your classes? I'd imagine it might be a flash point in the field of gender studies.”

Swenson tries to recall the title of Lauren's senior seminar.
Huck as Hermaphrodite: Masks of Gender and Identity in Twain—or Was It Samuel Clemens?
It was the department joke when the course list first circulated. But by now everyone knows that Lauren's classes fill up fast. The memory of Angela's contempt for Lauren's reading of
Jane Eyre
glows in the center of Swenson's chest, a bright star of protection.

“Of course, it comes up,” says Lauren. “I
bring
it up. I want to make sure they know that I'm on their side. I want them to feel that the classroom is safe—that word Dave finds so ‘chilling.' I want them to be aware that they can talk to me, that if they're having a problem with these issues, harassment or whatever, the kids can confide in me, and I'll take them seriously. I feel it's my duty, as one of the few women….”

Lauren never lets them forget that she was the first woman given full tenure in the English Department and is still the only tenured woman. “We all know Euston's history, beginning with Elijah's poor martyred daughters. In any case, I find that the whole mood in the classroom changes after we work our way through this. Clear the air. After that, we can pretty much talk about anything—
safely
—without any threat or discomfort….”

So that's what Swenson's doing wrong. If he had any brains—or the vestiges of a survival instinct—he'd urge his students to confide in him, say he wants them to feel safe. After that they can have the world's most relaxed discussions about teenagers having sex with whole flocks of chickens.

“Magda?” the dean asks. “What about your class?” Speaking of untenured women, let's hear from our little poet.

At the faculty meeting, Bentham told a story about a hiring committee that called up a male candidate's former student to ask how the candidate had interacted with the women in his class. When the student said that one of those women—a friend—was visiting him and would be happy to answer his question, the interviewer said that female students would be contacted later by a female member of the hiring committee. This cautionary tale had gotten a laugh, or at least a horrified chuckle. A tornado was brewing out there. Head for the basement, Dorothy.

Magda says, “I don't know. It's tough. I keep making these awful mistakes.”

A tremor shakes Magda's throaty voice. Swenson wants to help her up and lead her away from the table. Magda shouldn't be telling them this. These people are not to be trusted. They will do her more damage than the most neurotic student.

“What sorts of mistakes?” asks the dean.

Marjorie asks, “Does anyone want another dab of shepherd's pie?”

“What mistakes, Magda?” the dean repeats.

“Lord.” Magda sighs. “Miscalculations. Okay, here's an example. I noticed that my students seemed a little narrow in their ideas about what you could say in a poem. So I read them that Larkin poem that begins, ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.'”

“Oh, I adore Larkin!” Saintly Dave rushes headlong into the hideous silence. Everyone else has gone rigid. Does Magda not
want
tenure?

“I realized it was…dangerous.” Magda turns up the charm, determined to present herself as a teacher who stays up nights wondering how to help her students. “I thought about it a long time. I knew I was taking a risk. But their response was way worse than I'd thought. They all turned white as sheets.”

Swenson refills his wineglass. How much has Magda been drinking? Is she on a suicide mission? Everyone's heart is breaking for her, even heartless Jamie.

“Maybe the problem wasn't the language,” Jamie says. “Maybe it's Philip Larkin. Talk about
overrated
. All that bitter, self-pitying, narcissistic whining from that squalling infant posing as a middle-aged librarian!”

“His misogyny!” Lauren says. “And the total absence of one positive, life-affirming line in the man's entire oeuvre!”

Swenson can hardly stand it. He loves those beautiful poems that tell more of the truth than anyone wants to hear. Nor does it help to think that this is one of the few, the very few dinner tables in the world at which most, or any, of the guests have heard of Philip Larkin.

“Magda, my dear,” says Bernie, “if your point is that you wanted your students to ‘loosen up,' there
are
other models. Swift, for example. Swift, as you no doubt know, could get very…loose. Frightfully scatological.”