Blue Angel (30 page)

“She's suicidal,” Sherrie says. “Oh, Ted. Jesus. How could you pick on the weakest, most vulnerable, most unstable girl on campus? How could I live with someone for so long and not know him, not know him at all—”

Swenson says, “That poor helpless little girl is suing me for harassment.”

“Good,” says Sherrie. “I hope they crucify you. I hope they make you pay.”

They finish their dinner in silence. Finally, Swenson says, “So what's going to happen now? Do we get to go on being married?”

“Let's see what happens.” Sherrie's answer fills him with panic and the almost unstoppable impulse to cry out, like a child, What do you mean we'll see? I want to know
now
!” Repeating it until the grown-up gives in…. For some reason, Swenson finds himself thinking of his father and how, near the end, even language fractured for him, words turned into pure sounds whose meanings he could ignore, enabling him to hear a parallel nonsense-conversation of puns and double entendres. At least Swenson was old enough not to bother trying to make sense out of what his father said.

The couple sitting beside them seems to have gotten up and left. At some point when he and Sherrie were at once so engrossed and distracted, the lovers must have retreated into their cocoon of protection and light and grace, of chosenness, of being singled out and granted the singular blessing of being allowed to live in a world in which what's happening to Sherrie and Swenson will never happen to them.

S
herrie stays for two weeks, fourteen days that seem longer
than their whole life together so far because time stretches out in a sequence of discreet, dreadful moments, no major blowouts, surprisingly, but a steady killing politeness. Every over-careful exchange is a boulder in their path, which they must either squeeze around or gracelessly stumble over. Every conversation dead-ends, every effort they make—Sherrie telling a story about the clinic, Swenson summarizing something he's read—requires a heroic, futile effort to appear natural and normal. When Swenson reaches for Sherrie's hand, he stops himself and draws back; every instinctive, affectionate gesture has come to seem like a calculated ploy, or worse, a heartless insult.

Laughter is impossible. Every motion's a strain: waking, cooking, opening the mail are like acting-class exercises. Their sense of being on stage persists even when they're alone. Sherrie—the confrontational one—is obviously trying to get through this without open antagonism, which means not bringing up his affair with Angela or the upcoming hearing. But there is no other subject, everything is about that.

This is why God made alcohol. Though plenty of people, the guests at Bentham's, maybe Len—and Sherrie, for all he knows—probably think Swenson has had a drinking problem for quite some time, Swenson disagrees. But now is when a drinking problem would solve a lot of more serious problems. This is the moment for which God
created
drinking problems. Swenson watches the cases of wine empty, wrapping the world around him in Styrofoam, cushioning voices and objects as if for the shock of a move, a spongy buffer zone between Swenson and his life. Alcohol keeps him numb and paradoxically energized with an oddly pleasurable anger: white noise that drowns out the dangerous whispers of pain and fear and sorrow.

So he's not paying quite the attention he might when Sherrie comes home and tells him that she'd gone to the library, and there'd been a rally on the steps, the Faculty-Student Women's Alliance with their placards demanding that Euston be made a safe place for women. In preparation for that happy day, they've started redecorating. Banners drape the women's dorms. S
TOP SEXUAL HARASSMENT NOW
.
NO WHITEWASH FOR SEXUAL HARASSERS
. It's given the bleak, wintry quad a splash of Mardi Gras color.

Poor Sherrie had to walk right by the demonstration. She stood and watched the speakers ranting in that shrill, strained warble that she says could make you understand why guys hate women. Swenson wonders, Was Angela there? When Sherrie passed the demonstrators—they were blocking the steps—Lauren Healy invited her to come up and speak, and the other women cheered.

Sherrie says, “I couldn't get up there and argue with them as if I was on your side. But I've been on your side for so long, I've had so much
practice
being on your side, I couldn't figure out which side I was on, or how to be on anyone else's.”

Wine or no wine, Swenson hears Sherrie say
that
. He's still reeling, he hasn't quite caught his breath, when Sherrie tells him she's had it, she's leaving, she's going to stay in the large farmhouse that Arlene Shurley has lived in alone ever since her husband quit knocking her around long enough to miss a curve in the road and plow into a cinderblock shed.

Sherrie's right. You can live with someone forever and not know them at all. Personally, he's astonished to discover that the woman with whom he's spent his life prefers Arlene to him. If, as Sherrie said, guys always turn out to be guys, maybe women turn out to be women, with their
Jane Eyre
and their covens.

On the night after Sherrie moves out, Swenson's a little looped when Ruby calls. But he distinctly hears her say, “I think it sucks, what you did to Mom.”

Then she tells him she didn't call to talk about that. She called to say she won't be coming home for Christmas. She's decided to spend the holidays with Sherrie at Arlene Shurley's. Fine. They can have their own private battered women's shelter. Ruby can do an internship with her mom and her mom's weepy friend. Besides, he knows that Ruby is the last person on earth whose mind he would attempt to change with logic or persuasion.

For a few nights, Swenson tries cooking something Sherrie would have made, a simple omelet, or spaghetti carbonara. But the sauce refuses to coat the pasta and sticks in the pan, grainy lumps of butter and cheese, a thick coating of bacon grease. Each culinary attempt involves at least one moment of panic—he can't find the pasta server, the butter's smoking under the omelet—and eventually he gives up. Why not live like the rest of the world? Frozen microwave dinners. Actually, they're not so bad. He and Sherrie should have done this before, instead of making such a
production
of their middleclass gourmet life. But the exotic charm of the freezer section wears off, and after a while he stops eating, though from time to time he heats up a can of baked beans or creamed corn, healthy vegetarian stuff.

Most afternoons, he doesn't drink till five, though sometimes it's closer to four. During the day he reads. Engrossed in his book, he forgets to listen for Sherrie's car, for the noises that will announce she's had second thoughts and come back. He stops waiting for Magda to call and assure him she's still his friend even though it was stupid to get involved with a kid. He stops dreading that Magda will hear about the tape—or worse, that she'll find out he tried to give Angela's manuscript to Len Currie.

Swept along by some plot turn or revelation of character, he can forget his grief over Sherrie and what he'd foolishly thought was his life, and almost convince himself that this apparent curse is really a blessing. He can read as much as he wants, he doesn't have to teach, he is filling up the cup that will spill all over his writing! Meanwhile, he can't help noticing that he's reading the great classics of adultery, or, depending on one's personal interpretation, the great classics of inappropriate, tragic, ennobling, life-changing love. He dips into
Anna Karenina
, rereading his favorite scenes, looks at
Madame Bovary
, tries
The Scarlet Letter
—which he can't get through at all. Passion and its punishments: poison, prison, a train. Not much slack for the sinners. Tolstoy would say that Swenson should find the nearest train to jump under. Which may not be a bad idea. But Swenson won't let himself go there—where his father went.

No one forgives the liars, the cheaters. Except for Chekhov, of course. That's what Swenson wants: the end of “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” Gurov and Anna deceiving their mates, neither of them perfect despite their great transformation by love, the love that has lifted them out of the shallow pond in which they'd dog-paddled all their lives. Gurov is still a delusional poseur, Anna still passive and whiny, but they're not just small and ridiculous in their low-rent lusts, but humans, acting out of their mortal desires and dreams and fears, and therefore lovable and forgivable. The hardest part is still before them. Swenson has no trouble believing the hardest part's in front of
him
.

Maybe Tolstoy and Flaubert are right, he should be diving under the train or drinking some poison that will make him swell up and turn blue. But when he lets himself imagine that all of this is being observed and forgiven because he's only human, with all his flaws and imperfections, well, then he can actually get himself up off the couch and make some token attempt to wrest control of his day from the suicidal kamikaze who most times seems to be driving.

During one such attempt to act like an adult whose future is at risk, Swenson returns Angela's book of poems to the library. He doesn't know or care, really, if this will help or hurt his case. His instinct is purely expulsive. He wants it out of the house. He goes at eight, when the library opens, an hour when no self-respecting Euston student would be studying, when even the members of the Women's Alliance are still snuggled in their beds, dreaming of Amazon utopia. Not even Betty Hester has come to work, but is home trying to dislodge those half-dozen children from their nest under her skirts.

Amazingly, no one's at the desk. The sanctuary is unguarded. Anyone could steal anything from the magazine rack. Swenson rushes out of the library, so energized by the ease with which he's aced this dangerous mission that he feels emboldened to attempt a trip down Main Street. Since Sherrie left, he's avoided town, not for fear of meeting someone he knows, but rather from an irrational terror of Christmas decorations. If he stays home, avoids the radio and TV, and confines himself to books whose authors are dead, he can generally manage not to notice what season it is. Not that he's ever had a particular attachment to the holidays—quite the opposite, in fact—but he's sure that his already low spirits will dip further if he remembers that his wife and daughter have left him just in time for Christmas.

Once again, Euston comes through. His dear little country town! What was he imagining—the gaudy splendor of Fifth Avenue department store displays? A string of lights flickers weakly around the edge of the awning at the convenience store. On the napkin of frozen grass in front of the Congregational Church, the Adoration of the Magi is being enacted by a group of store-window mannequins in golden crowns and purple terrycloth bathrobes. It's hardly a scene to bring tears to one's eyes, and Swenson passes by unscathed, so heartened by this that he decides to stop at Video Village. Miraculously—this
is
his lucky day—the store is open early, possibly for stay-at-home moms who have dropped off the kids at day care and are facing the gloomy hours ahead.

Swenson evades the glittery enticements of the new arrivals, sails past the siren song of the depressing romantic comedies, and heads for the classics section.
Brief Encounter, Rules of the Game
—his principles of selection seem to be roughly similar to those that currently govern his choice of reading material. He takes
The Blue Angel
off the shelf and considers renting it, then puts it back with a sort of shudder, not of distaste but attraction. He tells himself he'll save that for when he really needs it, for when he needs to see another pitiful self-abasing slob transformed by the magic of art into a tragic hero.

 

And yet for all the care that Swenson takes to cushion his fragile psyche from the shock of holiday cheer and the grim reality of family celebration, he knows, he would know in outer space, when it's Christmas Eve. He buys a gallon of good rum and several cartons of supermarket eggnog, which he mixes together in a crystal punch bowl—if he's going to do this, he might as well do it right—but then, unable to find the ladle, dips his coffee mug into the eggy mess. After several cups, he finds himself thinking with amusement of all the terrible Christmases, strung out like some freakish popcorn-and-cranberry chain, reaching back to his boyhood. The Christmas when his father gave him, as his only gift, an impressive selection of nasty old bottles containing specimens of algae from the coastal waters; the Christmas that Ruby's brand-new doll came broken from the store and refused to talk or wet itself or perform in any way, and Ruby spent the day wailing that she wanted a new one
right now
.

How much better this is! Privacy, peace and quiet, enough eggnog to make himself puke, a library of comforting, suitable books. It's been years since he's looked at
A Christmas Carol
. So why is he sitting so near the telephone, in case Sherrie or Ruby decides to call to wish him a happy holiday and better luck for the coming year? He lets himself imagine that Angela will phone to tell him she's thinking about him. What else has she got to think about, stuck home with her parents in New Jersey? Of course she's thinking about him—about testifying against him. Even the eggnog reminds him of Angela's book.

The time begins to drag again. Swenson feels like some lovelorn high school girl waiting to hear from a boy. He
has
turned into the heroine of Angela Argo's novel. Before the eggnog's worked its magic—he's on the cusp of still being able to drive—Swenson heads out on the icy, deserted road between his house and the video store.

The rum has mercifully blurred the edges of his peripheral vision, allowing him not to register the Christmas Eve lonely guys edging their way to the curtained-off “adult” area. Though he himself could be looking for child porn, that's how guilty he feels as he slinks down the aisles of the classics section.
The Blue Angel
isn't in, isn't anywhere. He frantically searches the shelves. Who could have taken the goddamn film? No one's borrowed it for years—except for Angela Argo. Maybe she's brought it home for vacation and is watching it over and over, thinking of him, of…Oh, what has he done to deserve this? He helped her with her work.

He rushes to the cash register, behind which a pretty girl with long blond hair and blue eyes, a Botticelli cherub, is secretively nibbling potato chips from a bag hidden beneath the counter. If he had to get involved with a student, why not some sweetie like this instead of a shark with facial piercing and an eye on mainstream publication?

Swenson says, “Is
The Blue Angel
in?”

“Gee, I don't know,” says the cherub. “
The Blue Angel
…Hey, what about
It's a Wonderful Life
? Have you seen that? It's the best angel movie there is. We've got ten copies just for Christmas Eve. And they all went out. But someone brought one back already. I guess they couldn't wait.”

And now Swenson remembers: why Angela and not this girl. He says, “It's German. From the thirties.” It is very important to think of himself as someone who wants to see
The Blue Angel
and who would never ever watch
It's a Wonderful Life
. But what difference does that make? Who cares what movies he likes? He's ruined everything, over nothing, because of some embarrassing, pointless obsession with a difficult, dull girl, an amoral, ambitious child, literally scrambling over his body—