The Professor and Other Writings (29 page)

Not surprisingly, Jo's pronouncements seemed only to strengthen in me a yearning for the academic life. If I had been ambivalent about my Ph.D. studies at the beginning of the school year, I ceased to be so. So what if Jo didn't want to be a professor anymore? Fine: I did. I wanted to read Edith Wharton novels, own a nice middle-class house with hardwood floors, have lots of bookshelves, kilim rugs, and a Krups coffee grinder, drive a sporty little lesbo-prof car. A year or two later, when Jo took a leave of absence to start a lesbian-separatist commune with some cronies out on the prairie, I remember thinking she had finally gone birthday-suit bonkers. Life at My Ántonia's Farm (named thus in honor of the sacred Willa) was grueling, one heard, and seemed mainly to consist of shifting hay-bales, splitting very unfriendly rocks, steaming up huge vats of bulgur wheat, and having endless late-night bouts of ideological self-criticism with one's comrades. Hardly enticing. (What would Garbo or Tallulah have thought? Or Elizabeth Bishop, for that matter?) The colony later petered out, one heard, after fights and bickering and cash-flow
problems. The land was sold off, and the grizzled Jo—now somewhat subdued but also at last in a stable relationship—was soon enough back at the university, where she would remain, in harness, for the next twenty-five years. The girlfriend was known as Skydancer and I think they ended up staying together.

Jo—and the aristocratic disdain we felt for her—would prove to be an instant bond between me and the Professor. The Professor and Jo knew one another well; the latter had somehow been involved in the hiring process which had brought the Professor to the University some seven or eight years earlier. (Linguistics, the Professor's specialty, fell between disciplinary stools, and English, Sociology, and Psychology were all involved.) Not only had Jo been on a one-woman crusade then to bring more female professors to the university, she had also sussed out, one gathered, the P.'s not-so-mysterious sexual orientation. But whatever sympathy might have existed between them had long ago dissolved. Above all, Jo resented the Professor's secrecy about her sex life. And deeply closeted as the Professor was (though of course as I would later discover, every lesbian within 250 miles except me knew all about her), she in turn was bound to find Jo vulgar and down-market. To the extent she was willing to talk about it, the Professor's own attitude toward being “queer” (her term, used in the old-fashioned, apolitical sense) was haughty—almost regal. Sleeping with women was about sex, plain and simple, and had nothing to do with politics. Parading around as a “radical feminist” or some other thing was childish. Jo was nothing but a loudmouthed dolt. The Professor seemed to view herself, by contrast, as a sort of Ancien Régime lady-libertine, a subtle and inscrutable woman of the old school. She was a connoisseur, a sensualist, skilled in the arts of homosexual love; Jo was like a seagull at the dump, squawking and flapping her wings over an old potato-chip bag. Disenchanted as I had become with Amazon Nation, I found such moral refinement—for such the Professor's nihilism seemed to me at the time—intoxicating.

So how
did
I and the Professor meet? She was a sort of Christmas present—one filled with cordite, nails, and bits of broken carnival glass. As fall turned into winter I was, by hook or by crook, doing okay—even managing well in some areas. My studies had started to engage me and to my great satisfaction I had begun to attract some of the professorial attention I'd so relentlessly sought. I'd done pretty well in Chaucer—not least of all when I'd met with the instructor in his office, as all the new Ph.D. students did, to recite from memory a lengthy passage of Middle English from the General Prologue. Professor Hooley (for such was his comical name) was about my father's age, in his middle fifties, though hardly like my father in looks or temperament. Bald and jovial, he seemed, by contrast, the very model of Chaucer's own Friar. Easy enough to picture him in coarse wool monk's habit—a loose piece of rope round his waist—drinking and wenching and palming off fake relics and indulgences. He was distinctly flirtatious: he remembered having read my Ph.D. file, he leered, and could now
put a name to the pretty face
. My application essay had been
outstanding.
He had a daughter, he confided, an English major in the department, only a year or two younger than I, but she was
hopelessly dumb,
he was afraid, and would never be as accomplished as I was. A Problem Daughter (about whom more is to come). She apparently wanted to join the Air Force. Rueful laughter followed—though whether it was at his, her, or my expense was not clear.

My Irish lit professor, one Larson by name, was another jolly old dog—white-haired and goofy, though in an even more infantile way than Hooley. He was fond of silly jokes and bawling out Clancy Brothers songs during lectures. He was Scandinavian, stereotypically so in looks, yet nonetheless affected a loud and insistent Irish brogue: your typical Boorish-Swedish-Stage-Irishman. He'd enjoyed my final paper, he said—on satire and magic and Celtic poetry—and thought I should try to get it published. I was amused
by his propensity to burst into “Kevin Barry” at any provocation but viewed him, too, with mild superciliousness. (He would later prove a mentor both singular and kind.) In class Professor Larson habitually referred to Ireland's ancestral enemies—i.e., one's own cutthroat kinsmen and kinswomen—as “Brits.” Not having heard the term before, I wondered if I should consider it an ethnic slur and reprimand him for it. I didn't, though, and that was probably a good thing. History, public and private, has its moral tangles. Little did I know that at that very moment, my long-lost cousin Bridget—whom I would meet again in 1987 after thirty years of noncontact—was a sergeant in the Women's Royal Army in Belfast, performing, among other duties, strip searches on Catholic women suspected of smuggling contraband to IRA men held in the Maze prison. Somewhat recklessly, too, given the British Army's position then on homosexuality, she was also involved in a clandestine love affair with a fellow soldier—a tough lady in the Military Police named Roni. Roni later got slung out during one of her unit's periodic witch-hunts.

Elsbet was around too, of course—a new friend to be valued—though much preoccupied with her M.F.A. program and family doings. I felt I couldn't impose on her too much. She invited me home with her that Thanksgiving and I met her parents and siblings, which was nice, though I felt sorely abashed around the aged and imposing Norwegian aunties. (My ordinary social skills remained pretty abysmal.) For the holiday meal, the whole family, young and old, all put on boiled-wool hats and skirts and reindeer jackets and toasted one another with aquavit and alcoholic punch. The table centerpiece of holly and pine cones was topped with a festive little Norwegian paper flag.

But in other ways I still felt lost. The scene in Eau Claire might as well have taken place on Pluto, so foreign, at bottom, did it seem to me. (Family life to me still meant one mother, one sister, no money,
palm trees and crabgrass and canned-soup meals at a folding card table.) True, my sex life was momentarily quickened: I actually went out on a couple of dates that December with a scrawny, sallow-faced, thirtyish woman I had met at the Lesbian Resource Center. Celeste was half-Scottish and half-Sinhalese—not a particularly attractive combination in her case—and worked as a freelance German translator. She followed a fanatical macrobiotic diet and lived in a dark and dirty one-room basement apartment near one of the lakes. The walls were decorated with photos of Dietrich, Conrad Veidt, and other louche celebrities of the Weimar era; the floors were cold bare linoleum. Celeste nurtured a number of paranoid theories: that heavy metals in deodorant went straight up from your armpits into your brain within seconds; also, that if you stirred anything you were cooking on the top of the stove in the wrong direction (clockwise? counterclockwise?) the resulting meal would give you cancer.

We slept together a couple of times—once, nightmarishly enough, after she'd dragged me to see Rainer Fassbinder's lesbian-psycho film,
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.
As Celeste's cinematic tastes might have hinted, our love trysts were neither romantic nor particularly wholesome. True, I was pleased, in a statistical sense, to have had the experience: Celeste was still only the third woman I'd gone to bed with, and I was definitely counting. Three seemed to make it official, Sapphic love–wise. I could now say I was an old hand at the business—almost like Colette or Janet Flanner or somebody. I attempted to cultivate what I took to be a cynical, devil-may-care attitude: one didn't have to “fall in love” to have sex with someone; one just did it. That was what being grown-up and sophisticated was all about.

Yet however detached I tried to be, my brief affairette left me feeling empty.
The Bitter Tears of Terence von T-Ball.
The first time we embraced I had been shocked to discover that not only was Celeste's body bonier and pimplier than any I had encountered before, she also seemed to have a sort of gingery red fuzz all over her. To move a hand
up her knobbly spine was to brush this curious she-pelt in the wrong direction—almost as if one were caressing an orangutan. (Something I've never done, I hasten to add—but believe myself capable of imagining.) The touch thing was there but nowhere close to being right. In combination with Celeste's unusually wet, self-involved, and aggressive way of kissing, the overall erotic package was in fact fairly sick-making. (
Who knew that sex might be revolting
?) You could see why some people took vows of celibacy.

But I was also frightened by Celeste's somewhat dank personality. After our first sexual encounter—and despite the fact that we were in my bed, in my apartment—she had insisted that I get out of bed and sleep in the front room like an errant hubby. She couldn't tolerate anybody next to her at night, she declared, couldn't bear to feel someone else's arm or foot. Not even a king-sized bed could satisfy this need for
Lebensraum
. No explanation. I had no real couch to speak of, just a sort of truncated love seat thingy that had come with the apartment, so I ended up sleeping on the floor that night, on a small remnant of olive green shag carpeting about three feet by three feet that I had found on the street one day and used as a primitive living room “rug.” I immediately convinced myself that being ejected thus from my own bed was fine—possibly even kind of cool. When it came to meeting the demands of mixed-up women, I was as eager to please as ever—Nora Flood in
Nightwood
, carrying her betrayal money “in her own pocket.”

As it happened, the Irish Lit course led me to the Professor. Just after Thanksgiving, during the last week of the term, one of my classmates, a tall, blonde, somewhat suburban-looking woman in her thirties named Alice, a local community college instructor who had come back to school to finish a Ph.D. on Burns, approached me with an invitation. She had overheard me saying to someone in the class I would be staying in town over the Christmas holiday. Would I like to come to her house on Christmas Eve and spend the evening with
her and her husband and a very good friend of theirs? There would be roast beef and mulled wine, said Alice; she was also going to put together little Christmas stockings for everybody.

Now, I had never really spoken to Alice, except in the fitful artificial way one does while sitting at one's desk in the front row, waiting for the teacher to arrive. She was older and very straight-looking—neat and ladylike in an Our-Miss-Brooks way. Not my style at all, I'd judged, but nonetheless I'd been curious about her. She was from a devout if chilly Presbyterian family—she told me later—but had lost her faith as a result of reading Thomas Carlyle's
Sartor Resartus
. (She must have been the last person on whom the work had had that devastating effect since 1858.) This weird Victorian spiritual crisis—for such it had been—had not, however, divested her of an intensely serious, indeed Christian, sense of moral duty. Kind to a fault, she had the ability to make one suddenly aware, without spite or voyeurism, of the gaping emotional gulf that existed between oneself and others. Awfully enough, when I realized what it was she was offering, a little cache of tears—hot, involuntary, and no doubt stored up behind my eyeballs for several months—started up in my eyes. I accepted at once with an embarrassing mixture of gratitude and self-pity.

But I must I confess: I felt slightly uncomfortable, too. Alice was obviously a Very Good Person but had not, it seemed, picked up on the Fact of all Facts—that I was G-A-Y. (I was preoccupied, in those days, of course, with who knew and who didn't. Paradoxically enough, being a “radical lesbian” and dressing like a Special Forces commando did not necessarily mean you wanted anyone from the Real World ever to twig on the fact. That would have been
too scary
by far.) I assumed the knowledge would repel someone as straitlaced as Alice. I determined therefore to be circumspect. I was right about her naïveté nor would I be candid myself until circumstances later made it painfully necessary.

The Professor, perhaps needless to say, was the “very good
friend.” Now, this was exciting news indeed. The relation between linguistics (the Professor's subject) and literature was one of the areas I was hoping to pursue in my Ph.D. work. Having taken, among other ultra-nerdy things, a History of the English Language course as an undergraduate, I was eager to hear more about labio-dental fricatives, glottal stops, and the Great Vowel Shift. Who knew? Despite a vague plan to study Cruelly Oppressed Women Writers, maybe I would do some linguistics too. I'd noticed the Professor's classes in the course catalogue (Poetry and Phonetics, The History of Slang) and heard she was a big shot in the field. And when Alice came to pick me up late in the afternoon that snowy Christmas Eve, she confirmed it: yes, the Professor was a renowned scholar of regional dialects. A major contributor to the
Linguistic Atlas of the United States
. She traveled high and low across the United States collecting folk idioms, samples of local speech, regional pronunciation patterns. She had even—very famously—found some of those putative vestiges of Elizabethan English in Southern Appalachia.