The Professor and Other Writings (32 page)

I had help, it must be said. The Professor was a good sport—in fact did all one might reasonably do in the way of encouragement. As soon as she “got” what I was up to, and it didn't take long, she re
turned every ball sent her way with amused, languorous, eminently masterful strokes. She fairly twinkled when she saw me:
oh, here I was, strolling the halls again, what a coincidence!
(I had by this time memorized all her usual comings and goings—not to mention her car license plate number and the section of the faculty parking lot in which she was wont to park. She drove a red Honda hatchback.) If we bumped into one another (
by accident of course
) on stairwell or sidewalk, she would shoot me a quick knowing glance, full of glinting, subtle merriment. The effect of it would persist even as she shifted up into her normal “in public” mode of bluff manly heartiness.

And enigmatic though they were, she had her own forms of semaphore. Once she spied me lurking in the hallway outside her office, and laughing gaily (
Terry, come look at these, they're really funny
) ushered me in to see some slides of herself undergoing acupuncture treatment. The window shades had been closed and the room darkened: she was preparing for a guest lecture, she said, in a friend's anthropology course on traditional healing practices. (Acupuncture remained exotic if not esoteric to most non-Asian people in the mid-seventies; the Professor clearly relished the fact that she—daringly enough—had undergone it.) Projected onto the wall at exceedingly close range were huge surreal fleshy close-ups of her back, neck, stomach, and upper arms, all stuck about with gleaming silver pins, some delicately listing to one side or another. Blown up to ten or twelve times their normal size, the body parts on display looked like those of a giantess. One saw vast moles and freckles and, now and then, a vestigial tan line. A humungous white bra strap—almost two feet long—was visible in one picture; in another, the vast, crinkly top of her underpants. Presumably to obscure her identity, the Professor had masked her face wherever it was visible with little pieces of black electrical tape. The masking had not been particularly successful, however—the snaky silver braid being always the dead giveaway—and the overall effect was both comic and vaguely
pornographic. Nowadays I can't help thinking, weirdly enough, of Bellocq's turn-of-the-century portraits of New Orleans prostitutes, in which the anonymous subjects—working girls all—pose for the camera, naked but for their black masks, slippers, and smiles.

Granted, I was often somewhat tongue-tied in the Professor's presence—at times agonizingly so. One of our staircase encounters had been the purest torture. Numb as a zombie, my dead flesh flaking off, I hadn't been able to think of anything to say our whole way down three flights of stairs. My heart had been thumping chaotically. The Professor had been smooth enough in the impasse, had filled the dead air with pleasantries, but by the time we got to the bottom and she prepared to leave the building, even she looked a bit nonplussed. She shrugged in wry farewell, and said,
Well, bonne merde, ma petite.
Something about the vulgarity triggered in me a sort of galvanic reflex. I suddenly jerked to life: a fairy-tale frog, exasperated with myself for being so inarticulate.
I always feel so glad when I see you
, I croaked out in a rush;
but I never know what to say.
To my acute shame she heard this appalling revelation and for a second stared through my eyes into my cranium. She reached the soft jelly at once.
Well,
she replied, with a chuckle,
I feel just the same
. And then as quickly as that, she was gone.

The ley lines proved to be the big breakthrough. Having finished early with my classes one day, I'd lingered near the Professor's office for most of a late gray winter afternoon. She was holding her office hours; her door was open and the light was on, casting a warm glow on the scuffed linoleum at the threshold. I wanted her to finish with the long lineup of students ahead of me before I made my presence known; I didn't want to seem like one of them, just another tedious supplicant. I wanted her to feel relief and maybe even excitement when she saw me. For I was now getting desperate: I couldn't go on, I told myself, without making some decisive move. I needed to shed my passivity; flirt, beguile, and disarm with my charm and intelligence.
Setting one's cap at somebody
is how they might have phrased it
in the eighteenth century. To fascinate thus I would of course have to disguise all of my monster-sized insecurities. Likewise block out the absurd and painful truth: that I was a first-year graduate student blatantly pursuing a distinguished (and closeted) senior scholar in my own department. Yet
faint heart never won fair lady
! The Ellen Terry DNA would somehow have to carry me through.

At last the coast was clear. Perfect timing: no gun in her pocket, but she
did
seem glad to see me.

A fair amount of this banter I can't recall—what we said about graduate school, for example. (Something best abolished?) But I remember the “ley lines” part well enough. Ley lines, for those unfamiliar with them, are those primal “energy tracks” along which—according to certain occultists and New Age archaeology buffs—the various monoliths, barrows, and earthworks of ancient Britain (Stonehenge, Glastonbury Tor, Avebury, Thornborough Henge, and the like) can be mysteriously aligned with one another. I'd been reading all about them in a slightly crackpot book by one John Michell—
A View of Atlantis.
According to Michell, the ancient Britons believed that these and other sites were connected by unseen occult “lines of force”—the so-called ley lines. The result was a telepathic network, crisscrossing the Neolithic world like a sort of cosmic Underground. Sites like Stonehenge were “stops” on the line, so to speak—magical hot spots, where the ley lines intersected and sacred rituals might be performed. Or something like that, anyway.

I was infatuated with the ley line idea and described it to the
Professor with half-ironic, half-credulous glee. From there it was a short step to Blake's myth of Albion, dowsing rods, magic wells, chalk figures, crop circles, and the eerie bottomless tarns of folklore. The Professor talked about Native American burial mounds: fascinating stuff, we agreed, and
definitely
related. I was “good for her,” she joked, because I was reminding her of all these “things she had forgotten about.” My nervousness vanished. I became more and more daring and free. Out of sheer boyish enthusiasm I found myself reading aloud a nugget from the ley line book I'd copied into my journal: “Old stones, barrows, and other ancient sites have a natural attraction for cattle.”
Very cool!
Cows and sheep, it seemed, wanted to plug into the same cosmic energy socket everybody else did. The Professor was impressed.

It was a primitive sort of grafting exercise, of course. I was more confident than usual in part because the focus was putatively on “scholarship”—however dubious or half-cocked. I could show off what I knew—twaddle on and play the familiar role of World's Most Intriguing Student. But the Professor and I were both aroused, too (I think now), by the magical adhesiveness implicit in our topic. That a subliminal stream of energy might somehow conjoin two disparate places—possibly even two disparate people?—was exciting. It seemed to grant a license. Outlaw connections became possible. We were like a couple of standing stones buzzing away at each another along some very zippy ley line. And the archaic word “ley” was so suggestive, too. It was hard not to snicker whenever one said it.
Ley, Lady, Ley?
Heh, heh, heh.

That we shared the same favorite film,
Persona
, was simply more dextrose to mainline—the sugary icing on the all too sugary cake. A Sapphic cliché, of course, though neither of us said so: no less a figure than the great Sontag had declared the film Bergman's “masterpiece” and she'd definitely been around the block a few times. Bibi Andersson—could one do anything but sigh?
Ja,
sure, the
nurse was
obviously
in love with Elisabet. And yes, wasn't the most fabulous part when Liv Ullmann and Bibi were naked and in closeup and their faces seemed to merge? From such giddy chitchat—a sort of mad secret code by which we made our desires both known and not known—the journey to full-on ecstasy looked like a straight shot.

She indeed called me the next day with a plan. (Somehow our roles from the day before had reversed.) We would go downtown that Friday to see a film, the Professor said—the new Truffaut. Beforehand she would take me to one of her favorite “seedy” restaurants, a little Japanese place near the theater. She would probably just honk when she picked me up: I should listen out for her. This last part of the plan was a tiny disappointment: I had wanted her to see me in my place, shabby though it was. (
“Momentarily nonplussed—but now: a resolution that I will not to attempt to ‘organize.' My old solipsistic move, desire to impress—the arranging of one's belongings in order to create a studied disorder, a creative persona.”
) But who could complain at such otherwise fabulous decisiveness?

By this time I had done the I Ching and gotten, of course, a transcendental go-ahead for the whole business: Hexagram 34, aka The Power of the Great:

Pretty damn good. Okay, there
were
a couple of tiny worrying bits in the extended commentary: “Danger of overexuberance; perseverance in inner equilibrium necessary.” And a sentence or two, way down in the fine print, that seemed downright contradictory: “the meaning of The Power of the Great shows itself in the fact that one pauses. Strength makes it possible to master the egotism of the sensual drives.”
Hmmm
. What was that supposed to mean? Of course, not every part of the ancient oracle-text was reliable: one had to use one's intuition to determine what was relevant in any situation. All right, I decided: I'll be “exuberant” and not “overexuberant.” But I ain't gonna
pause.

The date went as planned: Too Good To Be True. Any less-than-luminous aspects of the evening were quickly disavowed, so in the end it was as if one hadn't registered them at all. Yes: I
had
been a bit gauche and awkward, still. (According to my journal, over dinner I seem to have made some terribly embarrassing “blooper” about a heating pad.) Yes: the restaurant was small and seedy as promised, a cheap noodle place with sticky plastic tables and vaguely unsavory smells emanating from the kitchen. (
It was rough,
I lied in my account the next day,
but I loved it.
) Actually, I'd found it frightening: at one point several men careened in off the street, drunk and foul-mouthed, and began taunting everyone. The Professor, though instantly grim and alert, appeared to take it in her stride: when the wizened Asian owner came out with a huge old-fashioned camera and began flashing the flash attachment repeatedly in the eyes of the interlopers, a defensive gambit that in fact drove them cursing out the door and back into the slushy street outside, her only comment (delivered with cold smile) was,
Oh, things like that are always happening in here.

The Truffaut film,
The Story of Adèle H
., was yet another of those
idiotic portents that, I see now, shadowed my relationship with the Professor from the start. It was based on a true story: the eponymous Adèle, it turned out, was the second daughter of the great French novelist Victor Hugo. Toward the end of her father's long political exile on the island of Guernsey (1855–1870), where she and her siblings had grown up, she had encountered a rakish British naval officer, one Lieutenant Pinson, and become infatuated with him. That Pinson—a nautical bad boy to rival his operatic counterpart, Lieutenant Pinkerton, USN—did not return her passion seems to have escaped her notice. Horrifying her family, she chased Pinson across the sea—first to Nova Scotia, then to Barbados in the West Indies. In Barbados, she finally twigged on the fact he couldn't stand her and went totally bananas. She was taken back to Europe and committed to an asylum where she died in 1915, one of the bleaker years of the new century.

All I can remember of this turgid flick are endless shots of Isabelle Adjani, the besotted Adèle, stalking around, wild-eyed, in costume-drama misery against a garish backdrop of bougainvillea and colorful tropical birdies. Now has anyone ever noticed that Victorian women's hairstyles are the ugliest in the entire history of the world? Think of George Eliot: those ringlets and vile center part.
Acck!
George Sand and the matching greasy curls:
merde!
Florence Nightingale?—
don't even go there.
One of Blakey's greatest vices is to sneak up behind when I'm not looking, pin my arms to my sides, and using a kind of Death-Comb maneuver, give me an enforced center part. I am then press-ganged into the bathroom and made to look at the nasty result in the mirror.