The Professor and Other Writings (19 page)

But my moral understanding is also in need of enlargement. Having entirely lost interest in my feckless responses, Blakey is now propped on the bed with her laptop and engrossed in the online
Daily Mail
, her favorite source of celebrity gossip and all-around human drama. By some freak of synchronicity a big double-spread—“My Daughter's a Lesbian and I'm Devastated!”—is the day's leading non-celeb story. There are pained interviews with both mother and daughter (now apparently estranged), complete with dramatic photos. The mum in question is a big, rather trollopy-looking lady with cavernous décolletage—very Edna Turnblad—living somewhere dreary like Hove or Eastbourne. Mandy, the twenty-something daughter, sports a pale but noticeable mustache, black T-shirt, studded leather belt, and lip piercings. Mandy's obviously the town fright, eager to terrorize old-age pensioners in the local Tesco. Her unnatural tastes are hardly the worst of it, her mother avers: Mum's greatest fear is that “society” will discriminate against ugly, headstrong Mandy and make her life a living hell:
“I don't want to see my little girl get hurt!”

I'm hardly surprised by Mandy's Amazonian riposte: that her mother's expression of concern is simply a hypocritical displacement of her own deep maternal homophobia. After all, that's what I used to say (or thought I might say) when I was her age and my mother
made similarly doleful observations. I am entirely unprepared, however, for B.'s thunderous jeremiad, complete with fist-pounding on the fluffy duvet:
I hate that fucking Mandy! What an idiot! I hate fucking lesbians! She looks like a pooch! I feel sorry for the poor mother! Of course she's devastated! Anybody normal would be! That Mandy should go live in the gutter and drink piss!
While I balk slightly at B.'s subsequent suggestion that we cease being lesbians at once and begin an Internet breast-feeding service, her impassioned moral commentary leaves me abashed, rather like Emma when Mr. Knightley takes her to task for her unkind words to harmless old Miss Bates.

How should a Santa Fe Diary end?
Today we set off on the arduous eight-week stagecoach journey back to California. Though rough and indelicate in manner—as I learned to my dismay when one of them was so careless as to miss the spittoon adjacent to where I stood awaiting our departure—the young gentlemen in Stetsons at our hotel in Santa Fe were most eager to help us secure our heavy boxes. I wore my pretty yellow calico dress for the journey; Miss Beaverbrook had chosen her usual frayed blue gingham suit with the buttons missing. So as not to delay our embarkation I thought it wisest not to mention that her muslin petticoat was besmirched with some small unknown foulness.

The day was fine and bright and despite an oft-expressed fear of those savages who might molest us en route, my Venerable Mama proved a delightful travelling companion. Though frequently requiring short stops so that she might admire the picturesque desert vegetation—scores of them in fact—she was a constant source of useful and enlivening information. Miss Beaverbrook and I listened raptly and the hours (and miles) flew by. Struck by a pithy reflection, Miss Beaverbrook several times registered her pleasure by closing her eyes and breathing deeply and slowly, as if to cogitate upon my mother's worthy sentiments more thoroughly.

When we drove past the sign marking the road to Roswell—a place where the local Indian tribes, I am told, worship a god who takes the shape of a large flying disc—Mama observed that my great-aunt O'Keeffe had
once traveled the old Santa Fe Trail, too. Before, that is, she disgraced herself forever in the eyes of God and man. I boldly enquired as to the precise nature of Aunt Georgia's offences but no doubt out of solicitude for Miss Beaverbrook's youthful sensibilities, Mama refused to expatiate. Our only terror of the day—thankfully brief—came when an enormous jackalope sprang from the mesquite and into the path of our coach, requiring our driver to pull up short in a swirl of dust and neighing horses. The jackalope was at least twelve feet tall and gaped at us menacingly, revealing hideous yellow snaggle-teeth. The men shot at it with their rifles, however, and the monstrous beast bounded away—huge antlers flashing and large white cottontail bobbing—into the sagebrush. We all thanked Providence for our deliverance.

The author, 1976

Proglomena

HAVING DROPPED SERIOUS POUNDAGE THIS
summer on Weight Watchers and become ever more buff and lissome in the process, Blakey has started me on yet another
régime amai-grissante.
I much prefer the French term, I have to say, to the boring old English “diet.” Like all things French, it's elegant—almost neoclassical-sounding, like something from a little shop in the Marais. You can burn up to fifty calories just by pronouncing it. But I also like the way it suggests something rather more austere, even theological, than merely dumping the Mrs. Fields in favor of bok choy. To me it hints, fittingly, at some arduous and refining ordeal—a conversion to Jansenism, perhaps, or some terrible Protestant night-sweat of the soul.
You, pale criminal
, etc. And that's me exactly—pale, criminal, a bit bloated. Exercise turns out
to be just as important as eating less. O, Lord, I accept these blue sweatpants and stale-smelling T-shirt, this wafer-thin iPod—so tiny and portable yet so full of song in thy praise. Till death do us part will I follow Blakey on our Daily High-Speed Power Walk through the neighborhood, disagreeable though the hilly bits are. She is the Chosen One.
Gotta get to U-U-U and that booty…
Can't help wondering what she's listening to, though. One of her Great Professor lectures on Spinoza? The
Enigma Variations
? Fitty Cent? We both got our headphones on now and we pumpin'.

B. is the Chosen One in another sense, too: we are getting married this month at San Francisco City Hall. Our
nupitals
—or so our pot-smoking mountain-mama dog-sitter mistakenly refers to them—have both a true-love and a civic-duty dimension. (They've also prompted the latest bout of fitness training.) It is time to share the love, with various Castles and Vermeules in attendance. But we also want to pile on before the November election: in an effort to overturn the recent California law legalizing same-sex marriage, dull hordes of the pious and cretinous have managed to stick an antigay referendum on the ballot. Yet even if the wretched thing passes, we figure, the more couples who marry before Election Day, the harder it will be for the courts to nullify the marriages later. So order in those crates of confetti! It's like the Enlightenment all over again.

And so too, historically speaking, the time seems right to begin this piece: a wee reminiscence of my Sapphic salad days (the 1970s) and dire yet life-shaping acquaintance with the Professor. I've had it in mind to write about the Professor for a while, but as B. can attest, have had to do a fair amount of emotionally taxing research first. Some of this research has been archival in nature: a matter of digging through Old Journals of the Time. (These will figure prominently later.) Ghastly to admit it, but I've got a huge groaning boxful of them, the earliest and scruffiest dating back to 1972, several years before the Professor and I met. One of my undergraduate English teachers had made us keep
one—a little vade mecum, he called it—in which, Montaigne-like, we were to preserve our thoughts about the books we were assigned that term. It being the “liberated” 1970s, we were free—indeed encouraged—to incorporate personal material into our responses. Alas, reviewing this virgin effusion now, I am embarrassed to see just how obsessively, if also coyly, I managed to relate whatever great work I perused (everything from Homer's
Iliad
to Rosa Luxembourg on the Revolution of Rising Expectations) to the tormented crush I had at the time on Phoebe, the straight hippy-girl roommate with whom I had been painfully infatuated since our freshman year.

Unfortunately for me, the professor in question, a somewhat dissolute character with a beret and a foot-long Mr. Natural Keep-on-Truckin' beard, seemed to intuit the nature of the attraction to P. and relished all the suppressed girl-on-girl hysteria. (My journal always came back with approving “yes's” and “good's”—sometimes even a tiny “whoa”—next to the more suggestive entries.) Thus was a habit ingrained: I kept journals religiously for the next ten years. And no, it hasn't been fun confronting them again; when I finally dragged them down a few weeks ago from the top shelf in the coat closet—the place where they've been lying, dusty and unregarded, all this time, I felt more than a spasm of foreboding. There they all were, in their neat, puerile, incriminating stacks, patiently awaiting some sadder-but-wiser postmodern rediscovery. Reading them through for the first time in twenty-five years was not going to be easy—nor was it.

Along with the journal dredging, however, some serious musical
research has also been necessary. Folk music, after all (especially folk music of the more dismal, depraved, and gallows-ridden sort), was a central element in my relationship with the Professor. We had bonded (if ever so briefly) over elf-knights and demon lovers, silver daggers and Little Sir Hugh, the chatty ghosts of maidens drowned at sea—even the odd croaking
corbie
or
twa
. To get into just the right mind-set, therefore—the proper mood for maundering—it has been necessary to immerse myself once more in great aural tidal waves of Joan Baez, Pentangle, Peter, Paul and Mary, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Ewan MacColl, Judy Collins, Fairport Convention, Incredible String Band, John Renbourn, Ian and Sylvia, and countless other folkie-tinged worthies of the late sixties–early seventies era. Dylan too, of course: the Professor claimed to have known him in the fabled days in the Village.
Blood on the Tracks,
possibly my favorite Dylan album ever, came out just pre-Professor, I recall, during my last year in college. When I met her a short time later, a few months into my new Ph.D. program, it was strange to find that despite the putative Bob connection, not only had the Professor not yet heard it, she had not even heard
of
it.

And thus it was the other day—as B. and I bowled along on the now-obligatory Power Walk (me lollygagging a bit, I confess)—that I found, through the music, this essay's starting point: my donnée. I had been listening on my iPod to a true musical relic, a collector's item of such rarified loopiness I had not thought to hear it again, as they say in the
Aeneid
, this side of the Styx. The rara avis in question was Alix Dobkin's 1973 album
Lavender Jane Loves Women
, an eccentric self-produced paean to Sapphism—at once noodly, maudlin, and curiously rousing—that I had recently rediscovered online. Warmed-over folkie, loosely speaking, was indeed the mode: American-lady-singer-with-acoustic-guitar-and-fake-Scottish-accent-croons-archaic-sounding-pseudoballads. The record even included a feminist update of Child ballad No. 223—about a pistol-packing gal named Eppie who “wadna be a bride, a bride.” But
Lavender Jane
's overriding message, strictly women-only, was 100 percent of its historical moment:
Destroy the Patriarchy! Dykes Rule! Adam was a Rough Draft! Mother Nature Is a Lesbian!
Radical lesbian propaganda in folk-song guise, in other words—enough to make an erstwhile Mytilinean proud.

Now, it's true I still owned my original
Lavender Jane
LP. It's in the garage even now—complete with worn yet striking hand-drawn purple cover, vaguely floral in design, with an arabesque blob meant (I think) to look like the mons veneris. Along with its handsome sister album from 1975,
Living with Lesbians
—the latter graced by a picture of crop-headed Alix and some hard-boiled mates hoeing dirt in a communal field and glowering suspiciously at the camera—I've hung on to it for decades, hoping that it might one day become valuable. (Note to Smithsonian: I also have a pristine Patty Hearst “Wanted” poster from the same era, deftly snatched off the wall of a post office in Tacoma, Washington during my SLA-wannabe phase.) But I hadn't actually heard any of Dobkin's music for a long time; I'd jettisoned my last turntable ages ago and no longer had the equipment to play it on.

Thus when the morbid desire to listen to her again came over me recently—for hadn't Dobkin's deep singing voice, though plusher, borne an uncanny similarity to the Professor's?—I found myself Googling her. I doubted I would unearth much, though; given the esoteric nature of her recording career, I assumed Dobkin had been sucked down a cultural memory hole more abyssal even than the one that had engulfed the ukulele-strumming Tiny Tim—the dim falsetto-voiced singer (purportedly male yet oddly reminiscent in looks of the older Vita Sackville-West) who had once been a regular on
Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In.
Yet such was not the case. Not only did I find Alix's Wikipedia entry in a nanosecond, I soon hit upon
Lavender Jane
itself, freshly pirated and all ready for clicking and downloading at ten cents a song (!), on—of all things—a dodgy
Russian Web site specializing in Beatles and Bee Gees bootlegs. Now, how exactly had the digital entrepreneurs of Smolensk and Novgorod obtained this freakish memento of 1970s radical lesbian feminism? Had the globe-trotting Condoleezza Rice had something to do with it? I didn't know. It was definitely iffy, even sinister. But I went ahead and clicked away anyway. Here's hoping that Ludmilla and Svetlana—or indeed any other lesbo-Russki cybergangsters who may now be using my credit card number—got a chance to play some of the songs while they hacked into my account; I suspect they might have enjoyed them.

So what was
Lavender Jane
like after thirty years? It has a claim, after all, to a certain minor historical importance: it was one of the first-ever recordings of what subsequently came to be known as “women's music”—music written by or performed by lesbians, usually exclusively for other lesbians. In the 1970s the sanitary euphemism seemed necessary: many of the form's early proponents were closeted, or half-closeted, and still hoping, one presumes, for mainstream careers. (Perhaps on some distant purple planet: except for maybe Melissa Etheridge or k.d. lang, few such careers ever materialized.) Nor could you find an album like
Lavender Jane
in a record store: I had to order my copy through the mail, like contraband plutonium, after seeing a tiny ad for it in the classified ads section of
Ms
. magazine. All this, in the end, for a fairly anodyne (and soon-to-become formulaic) product. Hard to believe in an era of Chicks on Speed, Vaginal Cream Davis, and Le Tigre, but “women's music” disks are still occasionally manufactured, like reproduction Bakelite rotary-dial telephones, with all the time-honored generic features preserved intact: plaintive warbling on the part of the female singer-songwriter, ultrasaccharine lyrics about waterfalls, women's hair, and kindly gym teachers—the occasional quasi-clitoral image or (
gasp
) female pronoun folded in here and there to insinuate, ever so delicately, the same-sex erotic setup. Funkadelic and potty-mouthed it is not.

And indeed, as soon as the first notes of “The Woman in Your Life”—the lead-off cut and Dobkin's signature piece—came plink-plonking over my headphones the other day, I was immediately reminded of the genre's gauzy inanities. The lyrics—a paean to a sort of
Our Bodies, Ourselves
–like self-concern—would no doubt work well in a sales pitch for vibrators:

The basic conceit established, it doesn't take long for the creamy goo to start seeping in—not least because The Woman in Your Life (aka You) knows a “way to touch” to make you,
um
, whole:

Ladies, start your labia!

Other songs broached similarly delicious themes. In “A Woman's Love”—a slightly boomy treaclefest (apparently recorded inside a cistern) in which Alix was accompanied, uncertainly, by an (alas) fairly pitch-impaired cellist and flute player—she celebrated her discovery of her passion for, yes, a Woman. Why had she been attracted
to her? Because said woman—or so one learned amid gallons of sloshy reverb—
was a Woman
. Ah, mystery solved!