The Golden Condom (17 page)

 

7

THE TANTALIZING MENTOR AND THE PASSIONATE PROTÉGÉ

THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP

He was a star—dazzling, handsome, and rich, at the top of his game, still an enfant terrible at age forty-four. He wrote his first bestseller, the first of his fifty books, at twenty-one. By twenty-nine, he had founded a controversial journal of opinion, of which he was editor in chief. By forty-one, he was hosting a hit interview show on television, and his name was a household word. He had a glittering wit, a glamorous life, and an eye for talent.

That eye alighted on a brash and brilliant teenager who sent an article to the magazine, unsolicited, at the age of fourteen. The article became a cover story, and its author, as if destined for the post, became the editor in chief's protégé.

Since the protégé was my boyfriend when he was officially appointed heir apparent and became my husband two years later, I had a ringside seat at the progress, deterioration, and restoration of this tempestuous relationship over the next three decades. The bond between these two, which began with mutual admiration and idealization, came to encompass the entire gamut of emotions—with the exception of sexual attraction—between mentor and protégé:
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awe, exhilaration, devotion, fear, envy, rage, shame, rivalry, disillusionment, sorrow, and gratitude.

Most protégés start out as teachers' pets, the kind of students whose report cards say “a pleasure to have in class” and whose teachers from grade school through graduate school remember them as fondly as they remember their teachers. To qualify for the position of a genuine protégé, however, a depth of intensity and intimacy that goes beyond the role of favorite student has to develop. The candidate must be seen as the bearer of a mentor's legacy and, in particularly charged cases, even identity—a professional, intellectual, and psychological heir.

These relationships are always more complicated than simple arrangements for the giving and receiving of good counsel and are more volatile than they appear. They are a precious, memorable, and extremely compelling variety of love, and as such are sown with pitfalls for both participants. Because both parties are amalgams of parent/child, lover, and friend, the potential for profound gratifications, and for devastating disappointments, is built in. As in all intimate connections, transferences and projections
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in both directions, as well as unfulfilled and unfulfillable longings of all kinds, are undercurrents—the wish to relive one's youth, to have obstacles in your path whisked effortlessly away by someone else, to control the future, to have your life work perpetuated unchanged, to be admired or inspired without ambivalence. Though these bonds can morph into partnerships, friendships (or enemy-ships), rivalries, and even marriages, during the initial stage, they are by definition never relationships of equals; there is always an implicit power differential. Even if they last long enough for the couple to become near peers, echoes of the original hierarchy never entirely fade; they resonate for a lifetime.

Mentors can be of the same or the opposite sex and are typically fifteen to twenty years older than their protégés, which makes them slightly older than most lovers and younger than most parents. They are most commonly drawn from the ranks of teachers, supervisors, older colleagues, and bosses. Their principal function is to serve as experienced and trusted advisors, but they are often much more than that. The best of them have a combination of discernment, tact, generosity, and self-control. Like Plutarch, they believe that “the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”

There are psychological prerequisites for each role. The mentor sees in the protégé a younger, malleable self, someone who can be formed in his or her own image; the protégé seeks a reliable, nonjudgmental intellectual or emotional guide, as well as the embodiment of the mature self he or she hopes to become. Both perceive—or think they perceive—an essential like-mindedness that sets their relationship apart. Each is a projective screen for the other. Not every good, or even great, teacher is mentor material, and not every good student aspires to be a protégé; there has to be a certain synergy, a personal fit, and a gift for a particular type of intimacy with someone who is not on one's own level, with all the demands and exposure that either role entails. Unconscious needs and ways of relating rooted in the past, as well as conscious affinity—at least for salient aspects of the other person—are essential.

Explicit or implicit sexual tensions between mentors and their protégés are one of the most treacherous maelstroms to navigate. While some of these relationships are blessedly exempt from boundary violations of this kind—as was my thirty-year tie with my first boss and role model, a vibrant, attractive man whom I adored with very little ambivalence and a complete sense of safety despite his well-deserved reputation as a ladies' man—many are not. These relationships inhabit a gray area where fantasies flourish and the urge to succumb is great on both sides. Few women I know, myself included, have not had to field unwanted advances from male mentors. When I taught graduate school in my thirties and my male students gazed at me with wide-eyed admiration or earnestly sought my advice, I gained a new appreciation for the temptations my own professors had endured, felt more sympathetic toward them, and judged them less severely.

Unacknowledged desire also has its perils, prompting the guilty or unwilling lover to reject the object of his or her longing, breeding shame, confusion, pain, and mutual anxiety. Breakups between mentors and protégés have an anguish all their own.

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The first mentor, Mentor, wasn't so great at the job. Before leaving to fight in the Trojan War, Odysseus, king of Thebes and hero of Homer's
Odyssey,
asked this old friend to oversee the royal palace in Thebes and to educate and advise his young son, Telemachus. Mentor failed miserably at both assignments, leaving Telemachus to fend for himself during Odysseus's twenty-year absence and allowing the palace to be overrun by unwanted suitors who harassed Odysseus's wife, Penelope, and lived off his estates. Mentor only rose to the occasion and acted like a proper mentor when Athena, goddess of wisdom, assumed his form and spoke in his voice. Then he was able to instruct Telemachus properly and help the young man assert himself.

All modern mentors could use Athena's help in discharging their duties, but all too many seem instead to be possessed not by her but by Eros (god of desire), Ares (god of war), or some combination of the two.

THE PERENNIAL PROTÉGÉ

I have had a panoply of mentors all my life—ten major ones—beginning in grade school and continuing, in subtly altered form, into the present. I still seek and find them, and they find me, even though they are now often younger than I am, and the current manifestations have many of the same qualities as the memorable ones of my youth. While not all these special bonds ended well, the men and women I have emulated, including those who ultimately disappointed me, did me far more good than harm. They have fulfilled me more deeply, taught me more, and had a more enduring influence than many of my relationships with men I loved.

I have experienced many permutations of this unique and compelling relationship. Most of my mentors delighted and inspired me or became my friends, but some disappointed me, dropped me, turned on me, or tried to seduce me. I identified with the best of them. They became part of me, and I incorporated their ways of thinking and acting into my adult self. I still see them and hear their voices when I need encouragement.

Being a protégé comes naturally to me; I learned the role at home. It has become so thoroughly integrated into my personality that it feels instinctive. I was the favorite of both my parents, their confidante and the fulfiller of their dreams (my father took me on his rounds at the hospital as a child and introduced me as “my assistant,” and the original name my mother gave me on my birth certificate was one she thought I could use as a pen name); my brother, unfortunately for him, lacked the protégé gene and could not meet their emotional needs. The role of being the chosen one, the “master's” favorite (and often his voice, as well), has been a powerful archetype in my life. Subsequently, both men and women chose me for a position that can be simultaneously arduous, thrilling, and oppressive, even if filling it is your fondest desire. Having spent so much time as a child relating to adults and intuiting their psychological requirements made being my teachers' prize pupil easier than fitting in with most others my own age. When my husband watched part of a lesson with my swim coach (I was sixty and my latest mentor was fifty-five at the time), he noted with merriment how intent and connected with him I was. “Still the perfect student, aren't you?” he observed.

I wanted to learn what they had to teach me. I also cultivated the ability to concentrate my attention on them, to make them feel special, to reflect a gratifying image of themselves, and to become what they needed. This empathic enthusiasm was never contrived, because I really meant it; the same impulse led me to become a psychotherapist, a vocation I first felt in my preteen years. For a while, I even thought of becoming a professional translator, which required some of the same attunement to another's innermost thoughts.

The gift of being an ideal audience and helping others articulate what one has heard are prerequisites for being a successful protégé. These qualities made me a sought-after assistant—but also kept me from fully discovering and pursuing my own ideas independently as a writer until middle age. And since maintaining my special position was critical to my sense of self, I had intense anxiety about disappointing those I admired so much. What if I wasn't good enough for them? Even the perfect student isn't always perfect. Fears of fraudulence haunted every one of these relationships, even the best of them. Such fears are extremely common in protégés.

My first memorable protomentor was my fifth-grade teacher, a middle-aged woman with a prim appearance and an ardent sense of mission. She taught me to write and, with an eye to my future, gave me books on female “health heroes” like Marie Curie. Teachers like her intuit things about you—including abilities you actually turn out to have—before you know them yourself. “Possesses initiative,” she commented on my report card. This made me proud, even though I had to look up the word in the dictionary. Years later, when my first article was published, she sent me a congratulatory note.

College gave me the opportunity to become the designated protégé of multiple mentors and would-be mentors. This way of relating was so ingrained that several professors whose areas of expertise were of only peripheral interest to me wanted me to be their assistant and to pursue a doctorate in their discipline. One who was on leave from another university encouraged me to follow him back there to work on his research, and another even cherished hopes that I would become a pioneering female rabbi, a profession for which I was utterly unsuited. I found these requests more awkward than flattering—how do you refuse the offer to be someone's acolyte without risking his displeasure? Will the person turn on you like a rejected suitor? At least none of them was vindictive, though none was pleased when I followed my own inclination to become a psychologist, rather than theirs.

One of the most painful relationships I ever had was with a mentor whom I sought out and truly revered, a renowned psychologist who was as much a humanist and moralist as he was a social scientist. A slovenly man in his late forties, he looked vaguely amphibian, with eyes that were both sad and merry, and the undergraduate course he taught, the first in the field I ever took, was entrancing. I wrote papers that he loved and went to see him frequently in his office, where we talked about his work and my future. When he left the university to teach elsewhere, he gave me my pick of any book of his I wanted as a parting gift. We had no further contact until five years after I graduated, when I was living in New York City and he called me entirely unexpectedly. He asked me to come to his hotel room to read and critique a paper he had just written about the psychology of King David; analysis of biblical figures was one of his specialties. He was in town to deliver it at a scholarly meeting and wanted me to make comments before he submitted it for publication. I was astonished and honored that he remembered me and sought me out. Flattered to be asked to comment on his work, as though I were a colleague when I was only a twenty-five-year-old graduate student, I went eagerly to meet him. I read the beginning of the typescript and made some observations, and then we caught up on my life and his. He asked me about my boyfriend and my plans. After an hour, I rose to leave, promising that I'd read the paper closely and send him more comments. He walked to the door, but instead of opening it for me, he stood in front of it, barring my way. Then he said, in a voice I had never heard before, words I could never have imagined him uttering, which I remember exactly: “I want to kiss you the way you ought to be kissed.” Instinctively, I recoiled in shame and horror and blurted out, “No!” I pushed past him and fled down four flights of stairs to avoid being on the same floor with him a minute longer. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before, and I was completely unnerved. Had I unwittingly encouraged him? Shouldn't I have suspected a more than scholarly interest when he invited me to his room? I didn't blame myself; I chalked it up to naïveté and the blindness of idolatry. He seemed pitiful, not a practiced seducer. And I never imagined I had stirred desires I did not feel in the slightest myself. I was deeply shocked, since he had a wife and many children and was at least twenty-five years my senior. I felt humiliated for both of us—for me that I had been clueless, for him that he had so disastrously misread my intent. I was appalled by his desperation and his naked loneliness, things I had never been privy to in all our previous conversations and did not want to be.