The Discomfort Zone (16 page)

 

EVEN AS THE
bearded Mutton and his male disciples were recapitulating old patriarchies, Fellowship was teaching us
to question our assumptions about gender roles. Boys were praised and rewarded for shedding tears, girls for getting mad and swearing. The weekly Fellowship “women's group” became so popular that it had to be split in two. One female advisor invited girls to her apartment and gave vivid tutorials in how to have sex and not get pregnant. Another advisor challenged the patriarchy so needlingly that once, when she asked Chip Jahn to talk about his feelings, he replied that he felt like dragging her out to the parking lot and beating the shit out of her. For parity, two male advisors tried to start a men's group, but the only boys who joined it were the already-sensitized ones who wished they could belong to the women's group.

Being a woman seemed to me the happening thing, compared to being a man. From the popularity of the weekly support groups, I gathered that women truly had been oppressed and that we men therefore ought to defer to them, and be nurturing and supportive, and cater to their wishes. It was especially important, if you were a man, to look deep into your heart and make sure you weren't objectifying a woman you loved. If even a tiny part of you was exploiting her for sex, or putting her on a pedestal and worshipping her, this was very bad.

In my senior-year journal, while I waited for Siebert to return from her first year of college, I constantly policed my feelings about her. I wrote “Don't
CANONIZE
her” and “
Don't be in love
or anything idiotically destructive like that” and “Jealousy is characteristic of a possessive relationship” and
“We are not sacred.”
When I caught myself writing her name in block letters, I went back and annotated: “Why the hell capitalize it?” I ridiculed and reviled my mother for her dirty-mindedness in thinking I cared about sex. I did, while Siebert was away, date a racy Catholic girl, O., who taught me to enjoy the raw-cauliflower aftertaste of cigarettes in a girl's mouth, and I did casually assume that Siebert and I would be losing our virginity before I had to leave for college. But I imagined this loss as a grown-up and
serious and friendship-affirming thing, not as intercourse of the kind I'd read about in
Rogue
. I'd finished with sex like that in junior high.

One summer evening, soon after Siebert broke her back, just before I turned eighteen, my friends Holyoke and Davis and I were painting a mural, and Holyoke asked Davis and me how often we masturbated. Davis answered that he didn't do that anymore. He said he'd tried it a few times, but he'd decided it wasn't really something he enjoyed.

Holyoke looked at him with grave astonishment. “You didn't enjoy it.”

“No, not really,” Davis said. “I wasn't that into it.”

Holyoke frowned. “Do you mind if I ask what…technique…and materials…you were using?”

I listened carefully to the discussion that ensued, because, unlike Davis, I hadn't even tried it.

 

THE FIRST-YEAR GERMAN
teacher at Swarthmore College was a flamboyant, elastic-mouthed one-man show, Gene Weber, who pranced and swooped and slapped desktops and addressed his first-year students as “bambini.” He had the manner of an inspired, witty preschool teacher. He found everything in his classroom hilarious, and if the bambini couldn't generate hilarity themselves, he said hilarious things for them and laughed on their behalf. I didn't dislike Weber, but I resisted him. The teacher I adored was the drill instructor, Frau Plaxton, a woman of limitless patience and beautifully chiseled Nordic looks. I saw her every Tuesday and Thursday at 8:30 a.m., an hour made tolerable by her affectionate, bemused way of saying “Herr Franzen” when I walked into the room. No matter how badly her students had prepared, Frau Plaxton couldn't frown sternly without also smiling at her sternness. The German vowels and consonants she overpronounced for heuristic purposes were as juicy as good plums.

On the other weekdays at 8:30, I had Several-Variable
Calculus, a freshman class designed to winnow out students whose devotion to math/science was less than fanatical. By spring break, I was in danger of failing it. If I'd intended to pursue a career in science—as the official fifty-year-old continued to assure his parents that he did—I should have spent my spring break catching up. Instead, my friend Ekström and I took a bus from Philadelphia to Houston so that I could see Siebert, who was out of her back brace and living in a dorm at the University of Houston.

One night, to get away from her roommate, she and I went outside and sat on a bench in a courtyard surrounded by concrete walls. Siebert told me that one of her teachers, the poet Stephen Spender, had been talking a lot about Sigmund Freud, and that she'd been thinking about her fall from the downspout at Eden Seminary a year earlier. The night before she'd fallen, she and our friend Lunte had been hanging out at my house, and the doorbell had rung, and before I knew what was happening, Siebert was meeting my former sort-of girlfriend, O., for the first time. O. was with Manley and Davis, who had just taken her up to the top of the Eden Seminary bell tower. She was flushed and beaming from the climb, and she didn't mind admitting that Manley and Davis had tied ropes around her and basically dragged her up the downspout; her physical unfitness was something of a joke.

Siebert had lost all memory of the day after she met O., but other people had subsequently told her what she'd done. She'd called up Davis and said she wanted to climb the same tower that O. had climbed. When Davis suggested that Manley come along, or that they at least take a rope, Siebert said no, she didn't need Manley and she didn't need ropes. And, indeed, she hadn't had any trouble climbing up the downspout. It was only at the top, while Davis was reaching down to help her past the gutter, that she'd thrown back her hands. And Freud, she told me, had a theory of the Unconscious. According to Stephen Spender, who had a way of singling her out and fastening his uncanny blue eyes on her whenever
he spoke of it, Freud believed that when you made a strange mistake, the conscious part of you believed it was an accident, but in fact it was never an accident: you were doing exactly what the dark, unknowable part of you wanted to do. When your hand slipped and you cut yourself with a knife, it was because the hidden part of you wanted you to cut yourself. When you said “my mother” instead of “my wife,” it was because your id really did mean “my mother.” Siebert's post-traumatic amnesia was total, and it was hard to imagine anyone less suicidal than her; but what if she'd
wanted
to fall off the roof? What if the Unconscious in her had wanted to die, because of my dalliance with O.? What if, at the top of the downspout, she'd ceased to be herself and become entirely that dark, other thing?

I'd heard of Freud, of course. I knew that he was Viennese and important. But his books had looked unpleasant and forbidding whenever I'd pulled one off a shelf, and until this moment I'd managed to know almost nothing about him. Siebert and I sat silently in the deserted concrete courtyard, breathing the vernal air. The loosenings of spring, the fragrances of breeding, the letting go, the thaw, the smell of warm mud: it was no longer as dreadful to me as it had been when I was ten. It was delicious now, too. But also still somewhat dreadful. Sitting in the courtyard and thinking about what Siebert had said, confronting the possibility that I, too, had an Unconscious that knew as much about me as I knew little about it, an Unconscious always looking for some way out of me, some way to escape my control and do its dirty work, to pull my pants down in front of the neighbor girls, I started screaming in terror. I screamed at the top of my lungs, which freaked both me and Siebert out. Then I went back to Philadelphia and put the whole episode out of my mind.

 

MY INSTRUCTOR FOR
third-semester intensive German was the other tenured professor in the department, George Avery, a nervous, handsome, scratchy-voiced Greek-
American who seemed hard-pressed to speak in sentences shorter than three hundred words. The grammar we were supposed to review didn't greatly interest Avery. On the first day of class, he looked at his materials, shrugged, said, “I'm guessing you're all familiar with this,” and embarked on a rambling digression about colorful and seldom-heard German idioms. The following week, twelve of the fourteen students in the class signed a petition in which they threatened to quit unless Avery was removed and replaced with Weber. I was against the petition—I thought it was mean to embarrass a professor, even if he was nervous and hard to follow, and I didn't miss being called a bambino—but Avery was duly yanked and Weber came prancing back.

Since I'd nearly flunked Several-Variable Calculus, I had no future in hard science, and since my parents had suggested I might want to pay for college myself if I insisted on being an English major, I was left with German by default. Its main attraction as a major was that I got easy A's in it, but I assured my parents that I was preparing myself for a career in international banking, law, diplomacy, or journalism. Privately, I looked forward to spending my junior year abroad. I wasn't liking college much—it was a comedown from high school in every way—and I was still technically a virgin, and I was counting on Europe to fix that.

But I couldn't seem to catch a break. The summer before I left for Europe, I inquired about an odd, lanky beauty I'd once danced with in a high-school gym class and had been fantasizing about at college, but she turned out to have a boyfriend and a heroin habit now. I went on two dates with Manley's younger sister, who surprised me on the second date by bringing along a chaperone, her friend MacDonald, who'd thought I was a cheater. I went off to study German literature in Munich, and on my third night there, at a party for new students, I met a lucid, pretty Bavarian girl who suggested that we go have a drink. I replied that I was tired but it might be nice to see her some other time. I never saw her again. The ratio of male students to female students in Munich's dorms was 3:1. During the next ten months, I met not
one other interesting German girl who gave me the time of day. I cursed my terrible luck in having been given my only chance so early in the year. If I'd been in Munich even just a week longer, I told myself, I might have played things differently and landed a terrific girlfriend and become totally fluent in German. Instead, I spoke a lot of English with American girls. I contrived to spend four nights in Paris with one of them, but she turned out to be so inexperienced that even kissing was scary for her: unbelievably bad luck. I went to Florence, stayed in a hotel that doubled as a brothel, and was surrounded in three dimensions by people industriously fucking. On a trip to rural Spain, I had a Spanish girlfriend for a week, but before we could learn each other's languages I had to go back to stupid Germany and take exams: just my luck. I pursued a more promisingly jaded American, sat and drank and smoked with her for hours, listened to “London Calling” over and over, and tested what I believed were the outer limits of pushiness compatible with being a nurturing and supportive male. I lived in daily expectation of scoring, but in the end, after months of pursuit, she decided she was still in love with her Stateside ex. Alone in my dorm room, I could hear multiple neighbors humping—my walls and ceiling were like amplifiers. I transferred my affections to yet another American, this one with a rich German boyfriend whom she bossed around and then bemoaned behind his back. I thought if I listened long enough to her complaints about the boyfriend, and helped her realize what an unsupportive and unnurturing asshole he was, she would come to her senses and choose me. But my bad luck was beyond belief.

 

WITHOUT THE DISTRACTION
of a girlfriend, I did learn a lot of German in Munich. Goethe's poetry particularly infected me. For the first time in my life, I was smitten with a language's mating of sound and sense. There was, for example, all through
Faust
, the numinous interplay of the verbs
streben
,
schweben
,
weben
,
leben
,
beben
,
geben
^*
—six trochees that seemed to encapsulate the inner life of an entire culture. There were insane German gushings, like these words of thanks that Faust offers Nature after a really good night's sleep—

—which I endlessly repeated to myself, half in jest and half adoringly. There was the touching and redeeming German yearning not to be German at all but to be Italian instead, which Goethe captured in his classic verse in
Wilhelm Meister
:

There were other lines that I recited every time I climbed a church tower or walked to the top of a hill, lines uttered by Faust after cherubs have wrested his spirit from the Devil's clutches and installed him in Heaven:

There were even, in
Faust,
short passages in which I recognized an actual emotion of my own, as when our hero, trying to settle down to work in his study, hears a knocking on his door and cries out in exasperation, “Wer will mich wieder plagen?”
^*

But despite my pleasure at feeling a language take root in me, and despite the tightly reasoned term papers I was writing on Faust's relationship with Nature and Novalis's relationship with mines and caves, I still saw literature as basically just the game I had to master in order to get a college degree. Reciting from
Faust
on windy hilltops was a way of indulging but also defusing and finally making fun of my own literary yearnings. Real life, as I understood it, was about marriage and success, not the blue flower. In Munich, where students could buy standing-room theater seats for five marks, I went to see a big-budget production of Part II of
Faust
, and on my way out of the theater I heard a middle-aged man snickeringly offer his wife this “complete and sufficient” summary of the play: “Er geht von einer Sensation zur anderen—aber keine Befriedigung.”
^*
The man's disrespect, his philistine amusement with himself, amused me, too.