The Professor and Other Writings (31 page)

The evening culminated in a tipsy late-night walk through the snow and the Bestowing of the Guitar. Apparently wishing to prolong the festivities, the Professor had invited us round to her house, a few blocks away, for a hot toddy. We all put on clumpy, salt-rimmed snow boots; the Professor, I noticed, donned a mannish red-checked Woolrich jacket and what looked like a fur trapper's hat. We scrambled happily down the quiet snowbound streets. I was still high on having been (unusually for me) a chatty and dynamic guest. My favorite holiday carol was “Good King Wenceslas,” I announced to everyone apropos of nothing: I especially loved the phrase “deep and crisp and even.” Someone said it was now officially Christmas, a minute after midnight.

The Professor's house then loomed up majestically in the moonlight: a perfect example, she joked—of Midwestern Stockbroker's Tudor. (Another phrase I'd never heard before: I had been thinking the fake half-timbering magnificent.) Could an evening become yet more magical? Yes, it could. The Professor got us our nightcaps and while Alice and Tom built up a fire in the living room, she took me around to see everything: upstairs, downstairs, the bedroom, the guest room, the lovely studio space, the Native American rugs, the state-of-the-art stereo system (artfully disguised under pieces of antique ethnic textiles), the huge record collection, even the windowless little utility room in the basement in which, with the aid of an elaborate Rube Goldberg–ish system of stakes and string and purply-white fluorescent lights, the Professor had cultivated a flourishing stock of marijuana plants. I was agog. She noted my reaction with pleasure.
Hey, Terry—you'll have to come over again sometime soon
, she chuckled,
and we'll smoke some
.

I was exhilarated, almost delirious. Both house and owner were perfect. And even as the party began to wind down—Alice, Tom, and the Professor having decided to drive me back to my apartment across town together—there came the coup de grâce: the Professor insisted that I borrow one of her several guitars. It would be mine on a sort of indefinite loan, she said. She didn't need it at the moment; I'd said I played, but didn't have an instrument. And besides, surely we would be getting together again soon to play some songs, no? It would mean—and here she gave me a dazzling smile—that we would
have
to see each again. Such persuasion was irresistible. I took the instrument into my hands like a precious relic. Beautiful it was, with modest-yet-charming caramel-colored top, woven strap with little red and blue and yellow woolly bobbles, and some nice mother-of-pearl inlay around the sound hole. It gave forth a loose, open, sweet-natured tone. A regular Instrument of Joy. When I got
up the next day and saw it, propped up against the book-filled orange crates in my little living room, I had to confront it all—the insane bewitching Cinderella-truth. Everything I remembered from the previous night had really
happened
—the whole miraculous encounter. The Professor wasn't a figment; I hadn't dreamed her up. I felt clobbered—positively
brained
—with happiness.

Yet over the succeeding days, and despite the violent onrush of ecstasy I felt whenever I let myself think about her, it was not clear to me what—if anything—could now transpire between the Professor and myself. The thing was frankly so unprecedented:
she was a distinguished professor at the University, for God's sake.
Affable she might be, but how could we even really be friends? She was far too exalted. One pondered the emotional signage:
Don't Even
Think
of Parking Here!

In the awkward journal entry I made later that first morning—for it was now a sunny and cold, knife-sharp Christmas day—I was garrulous, trying to stay calm, feigning matter-of-factness:

One
might
say, but clearly I didn't want to. The hyperbole here—not to mention the stupefying envy—now makes me want to squirm. Could I really have been so threadbare and exposed? Even so I was trying, hope against hope, not to fall into the usual greedy desperation.

And indeed I stayed safe for a little while. Oddly absent in the foregoing, I see now, is any speculation about the Professor's sexuality. I think I was shielding myself on that front as best I could. However much the evidence had pointed toward it—and virtually all of it had—the possibility that the Professor might be homosexual was simply too staggering, too blinding, too refulgent a prospect even to contemplate. A
mysterium tremendum
she would—and should—perforce remain. As long as one didn't
know
, one was not obliged to
yearn
—to hanker after her (no doubt agonizingly) in the flesh-and-blood world. It was so much easier to hanker over phantoms, after all—you didn't have to worry about being rejected by them. You could sit tight for a very long time.

Yet like Our First Parents reaching blindly for the fruit, I was fated to know. True, the new year brought its distractions. Classes started again (Victorian Poetry this time and Larson's Joyce seminar); and I reconnected with Alice, who was auditing the Joyce. I ran into the grunting Jo several times too and even had a snarky little chat with her over coffee one afternoon about Christina Rossetti. (
“Jo had on odd stretchy clothes, a sort of Avon-lady pantsuit. She has no sense of self-adornment.”
) I attended my feminist reading group. But the potion was about to be decanted, the Tristan chord to sound.

Once classes had commenced, I began mooching around the hallway near the Professor's office, in a shady way, rather like a police informer. One afternoon I actually hung out there for an hour or so, hoping to see the Professor in her office, but without any luck. I mentioned this futile little patrol ever so casually to Alice.
Had she seen the Professor? I just wanted to say hi.
Like an unwitting Pandarus,
Alice must have transmitted this information-mote on at once; for no sooner had I arrived home that evening than the Professor called—the first time ever. She'd tried me several times before, she said. She'd had a cold, she said: that was why she hadn't been around. She wanted to know
what I'd been up to
.

I was startled—both by the call and her question—and devolved at once into clammy self-consciousness.

Yet however nerve-wracking in reality—
what a stupid idiot I am ugh why couldn't I speak to her in a normal way
—the call was hardly displeasing in principle. The Professor had obviously been thinking about me. The adult attention, again, was overwhelmingly pleasurable; her inquiries, so personal, an odd mixture of soothing and arousing. Indeed when I'd picked up the phone and first heard her voice, I'd had that split-second grandiose flash of triumph known to erotic fantasists everywhere—the giddy sense that I had somehow
willed
her into calling me. Why else had she telephoned? My banal attempts at small talk didn't matter: I was clearly omnipotent. She was under my spell. She couldn't
not
call.

Ironically, a member of the women's “community”—Labyris, no less—provided the necessary, if perverse, turn of the screw to our courtship. Some of the
Your Mama
women were going to see Patti Smith, Labyris phoned to say, and did I want to go? Now along with Dolly and Waylon, Patti—then making her first Dionysian splash on the scene—had been one of the musical epiphanies of the winter: perhaps the most charged, sexy, and momentous of all. Music
unheard, I'd bought
Horses
almost as soon as it came out—having been instantly ravished by the stark, now-iconic Mapplethorpe photo of Smith on the cover. I loved the stunning freak-out of it all: Patti's gaunt visage, punk dishevelment, the sullen unrepentant expression on her face. She looked like a sort of spooky elf-boy. I immediately acquired an oversized white cotton man's shirt like hers at a thrift shop and slouched around my stuffy apartment in it. The tight modernist black pants (ah, one was slim then) were soon to follow.

And then—holy shit—there were the
songs
: wild, outer-spacey, steamy orgone-boxy things with that visionary Land-of-a-Thousand-Dances-Let's-Make-Love-with-Two-Headed-Aliens-T.S.-Eliot-on-Acid feel. The glorious vamps on
Horses
seemed tailor-made for me in particular: Hermaphroditic-English-Major-Punk of a Transcendent Order. It spoke well of Labyris, usually so dumb and doctrinaire, that she was open to it. And wasn't it incredible, she and I marveled:
all that mind-blowing lesbian stuff. Yeah, totally fantastic! I can't believe she sings “Gloria”! Like Gloria's her girlfriend! Like they're having sex!
As if simultaneously invaded by the Patti-spirit, Labyris and I then burst into her delirious love-yawp:

 

GLOO-OOR-EE-AH!! JEEE—EL—OH—ARR—I—A!!

 

Of course
I wanted to see Patti. Life was suddenly thrilling.
She's comin' up my stairs!

The excitement I felt about Smith—jiggy, hormonal, somewhat demented—was more than a little bound up, I knew even then, with the Professor and the strange erotic lurch
she
provided. Granted, one could hardly relate the two musically—they were from different eras, different centuries almost. Never the twain, etc. But the brusque, unselfconscious, even flagrant rejection of femininity was the same. Ditto the hiding-in-plain-sight homo-tease. (Was Patti a dyke? Bi? Was the mysterious Robert Mapplethorpe her boyfriend?
Despite “Gloria” no one seemed to know for sure.) So perhaps it was fitting, after all, that it was Labyris, oblivious to the shock waves she was about to set off, who should now spill the beans about the Professor and her legendary menace.

Yeah
, said Labyris,
she's a big ole dyke
. I was stunned. I had met the Professor over the break, I had said: what did Labyris know about her?
Well, you know Jo doesn't like her at all 'cause she's too chicken to come out; she's superclosety and uptight. But everybody knows about her. Basically everybody in the world. She has affairs with students. Stuff like that. 'Member that tall woman Elaine who came to the LRC once and was a basketball coach? Well, she had an affair with [the P.] when she worked at the U. last year; and
she
says she's totally nuts. Really, a total creep. Notorious.

I was instantly stupid with desire. The scales were lifted, the handwriting on the wall apprehended, the frontal lobes removed. An awe-inspiring charge had suddenly been laid upon me:
SHE
had arrived in my life and I had to do something about it at once. Labyris's mean stories were obviously untrue. That whiney, oafish Elaine: what a moron! The nay-saying Jo: another idiot. The sanctimonious Labyris and her ilk: dull middle-class prudes, all of them. Alice and Tom clearly liked the Professor, and They, One Knew, Were Unimpeachably Good People. Besides, I had the Professor's guitar. She sang folk songs. She knew who Ellen Terry was. She had looked breathtaking in that fur-trapper's hat. Only one conclusion could possibly be drawn.
Of all the lesbians in the world, I alone was smart enough and free enough and passionate enough to adore this sensitive, sophisticated, and beautiful woman as she deserved! No one understood her but me! EEEEEEH!

Not one in this crowd of thoughts could I reveal to Labyris in the moment, of course: for part of my charge, I understood already, was to be vault-like discretion. This relationship would be for the ages—an ecstatic fusion of body and soul—and I needed to cultivate
in myself the proper spiritual exaltation. Phantom couples arose, as if to spur me on: Sappho and Anactoria; Radclyffe and Una, Gertrude and Alice; Lady of Llangollen No. 1 and Lady of Llangollen No. 2; Garbo and Mercedes; Vita and Violet, Rita Mae and Ms. Rubyfruit. The Professor, so Fate had decreed, was available. She was friendly. She was gorgeous. She'd given me the glad eye. Anything was possible. I had to
get
to her before anyone else did. I had to figure out a way to Ask Her Out.

I began a campaign—the fervor and folly of which can only be judged by the fact that I was willing to adjust my otherwise obsessional studying in order to implement it. I didn't exactly neglect my schoolwork—even at the best and the worst moments I never missed a lecture—but it was as if I were now emitting two enormous parallel streams of energy. I'd ramped up the adrenalin flow, quickened every reflex, called upon every bit of Red-Baron daring, endurance, and stealth I could muster, so as to manage the simultaneous pursuit of scholarship and eros. But I was confused and heedless, too. For precisely what effect a relationship of the transgressive sort I now envisioned might have on my budding academic career, I didn't stop to consider. This sudden recklessness should have been a warning. But there was no one around to challenge me on it. (While aware of my sudden crush, Elsbet didn't know me well enough, she said later, to question its wisdom.) A sort of mad grasshopper gaiety—itself the work of loneliness—drove me on. Thus even as I crammed with eye-crossing intensity—at one point barnstorming through
The Pickwick Papers
,
In Memoriam
, and
Ulysses
all in the same week—I brooded about the Professor. I stayed up late, got up early and consumed cup after cup of coffee, wrote endlessly in my journal about sightings (real and imagined), and planned the stages of my assault.