The Professor and Other Writings (40 page)

I played in five or six games before I cratered—hollow-eyed, brain-dead, emotionally gutted. (Though chatty and jokey with the others, the Professor breezily ignored me during our games.) The second and final bit of Grand Guignol came soon after. True: already a couple of weeks before, as soon as it became clear our relationship was starting to implode, the Professor had demanded that I yield up the house key she had so impulsively given me at the outset of our little idyll. I was tractable enough and one terrible sunny morning she had appeared at my flat to reclaim it. I gave it up without protest—her visit lasting all of perhaps thirty seconds—but even so, the Professor stood in the hallway and glared at me suspiciously, as if I were about to pull a fast one.

Then in turn, just after I'd quit the softball team (it was now a week or two before the end of the school year), she called to say she was coming over again: this time to repossess the pretty little guitar she'd loaned me at Christmas. She gave me advance instructions. As with the key, there was to be no whingeing on my part. Now elevated to the role of official consort, the resplendent Tina—or so I was duly informed—played the guitar and sang beautifully. In musical as in
other respects, it seemed, Tina left me quite in the shade. She was
just plain old fun to be with,
the Professor observed. The two of them were so
well-suited
; they loved
singing together
. I should
never have taken that guitar in the first place, you know
: it was time for me to be a good little nobody and relinquish it. She and Tina, I gathered, were about to embark on some romantic old-fashioned car trip—presumably in search of hoedowns and hootenannies and cans of Nehi soda.

It was wrenching, of course: for brief and disharmonious as our liaison had been, the guitar was its emblem. Even the Professor seemed a bit embarrassed in the role of Repo Man. When she called that morning to say she was on her way, you could hear disquiet in her otherwise deep and mellifluous voice: an awkward awareness of time's compression, and of the brute suddenness of her about-face. Not so long before, after all, we'd been wriggling around ecstatically on the very piece of green shag carpet remnant on which we were now to face one another.
Things were so different now
. Back then, she'd talked excitedly about driving to New York with me (just as she and Tina were now doing) during the summer vacation. (The prospect thrilled me: I'd still never been to New York, nor indeed anywhere east of Wisconsin.) She was going to introduce me to Judy Collins, she said, and one of the guys in Peter, Paul, and Mary, I forget which one. Then we'd come back and I would move into her house and we'd work on projects together. I was to become a sort of girllinguist under her tutelage. At some point we'd definitely have to go visit Little Willie McSomebody, a withered, 100-year-old speaker of the Smoky Mountain dialect who'd once been her prize informant, at his (her?) ancient shack in Appalachia. The Professor had been
waiting all her life for me,
she'd said then. Finally, I had come. And I was perfect. So where had all the flowers gone?

Yet while undeniably foul—toxic in fact—the Picking-Up-of-the-Guitar Day nonetheless marked a turning point of sorts for me.
My nadir, perhaps, but also the beginning of the struggle against the death sentence I had received. A tiny
Eureka!
moment. The point at which I first felt stirring within some of that deep unnameable
fury
—later to become howling protest—the Professor had engendered in me. After weeks in a daze I was suddenly coming alive again—beginning to crackle and spark a bit, like a dangerously frayed electrical cord. True, I still pined miserably for the Professor's sexual love. Every hour without her was like traversing a desert. But at last I was starting to grasp—with however parched and cheerless a clarity—that despite the fact I loved her (and I couldn't get the love to stop), the Professor was also fairly unspeakable. Treacherous. Mean. Dishonest. Cowardly. A Sadist. A Sociopath. All of the above. Or at least in the kooky crucible of our relationship, enough of any one of these things for me to feel more than a little ill used.

And in fact, the first, fine fantasy of vengeance loomed up that day: the novel idea that one might take the gloves off. (Before, I hadn't even realized I was wearing any. Nor indeed that I had possibly useful appendages underneath.) Now I freely admit to having become moody and mean-spirited in middle age. I know I have a horrible attitude. Towards
people,
especially. But I've never actually punched anybody out. I've never tripped anybody up or tried to poke their eyes out. I keep the dogs from mauling small children. Nor indeed, not even on some pitch-black moonless night, have I ever TP'd anybody's house—gratifying though that would be in certain cases. Yet as soon as I heard the Professor's car pull up on the morning of my final trial, I was suddenly overtaken—after
how
many weeks of pure hell?—by a wild urge to Clobber Her.
Clock Her
.
Really Ding Her. Smack Her Down Once and For All.
I lived on the third floor of my building, overlooking a godforsaken little front courtyard, and as I stood at my window watching the faithless Professor scamper up the main steps—while Tina, in the driver's seat,
sat coolly idling the Professor's car at the curb—I had a sudden murderous fantasy of flinging the guitar out the window onto her, my wretched abuser's, head.

 

T-W-A-N-G-G-G!!

 

[
Sickening sound of splintering wood and bone, the harsh thrum of untuned guitar strings, faint groans, an ambulance in the distance, a discreet death-rattle.
] Death by concussion, woolly bobbles, and mother-of-pearl. Then an old-fashioned undertaker might have come along, closed the Professor's eyes, and laid matching plastic guitar picks on them.

True, I didn't carry out my revenge: it was satisfaction enough just to picture it. It would be like a Road Runner cartoon, I figured, or the Laurel and Hardy movie when the grand piano falls out the window.
Ka-boing!
And for the first time in a month or two I discerned—yes—a small light twinkling in the darkness. Indeed, as the light grew stronger, I was even moved to refine on, to embellish, my concept. To sing a little aria. If only the Professor had lent me—instead of that stupid guitar—
some lead weights
.
An anvil, maybe. Or a set of bowling balls. A refrigerator even
. (The P. had, in the meantime, come and gone, taking her purloined property with her.) And thus—amid dark and bloodthirsty visions—my first year of graduate school came to an end.

 

I survived, of course. The summer was long and the Midwestern heat furnace-like. I had a little part-time research assistant job, after which I swam every day in the pool at the University gym. I resumed my Ph.D. work and subsequently passed my qualifying exams that fall. The test-taking heebie-jeebies of the previous spring did not return; I did as well as people expected me to. And there I remained at the
University—working more or less doggedly for the next four years, even as the Professor pranced and preened, took on (so one heard) various new paramours, and cut a rakish, merry swath. She was like a carousel horse. Always coming round again. Impossible to avoid in fact. (And still—fantastically enough, after everything—in the closet.) One had to encase oneself fairly rigidly in order to prevail. Trade in the Sapphism for stoicism. Wear an artificial carapace. No more Rubyfruit Jungle. Marcus Aurelius wuz da Man.

Most of that first year I cultivated an air of cool disconnection when I saw her—a sort of nonseeing, lost-in-the-stars look. But after a while we began to acknowledge one another in the halls again—I, extremely gingerly; the Professor, more often than not, with a big, psycho smile and jovial hello. It was inevitable; I saw her—literally—several days a week. Once, improbably enough, she stopped me in front of the Social Science building to tell me she was “really getting into” the music of Adam and the Ants. I reciprocated on these occasions with vague pleasantries and sought to maintain what I hoped was a mild, manly, dignified mien—Dobbin, indeed, in
Vanity Fair.
Sometimes I even asked politely after Tina. Granted, I was still quite ferociously obsessed. I watched the Professor from afar and kept spooky-morbid tabs on her comings and goings. Not the healthiest response, I realize, under the circumstances, yet also perhaps inevitable. One's eye had indeed offended, but plucking it out seemed far too painful to bear. One loved one's grief too much. Ordinary life thus required that one give in to regular little crying jags—off and on, it turned out, for the entire four years. Special anniversaries—Christmas Eve, the first date, the first disrobing—were always noted and produced the purest, most pungent, agony.

Yet over the long haul it became easier
not
to know—not to hear about, not even to fantasize about, whatever it was she was up to. True, at one point I couldn't help noticing she'd traded in the Honda for a large, high-off-the-ground Jeep-thingy: I'd see her tooling
round campus in it, cheeky and exalted in the driver's seat, beaming with self-regard and thuggish warmth for all. The silver braid gleamed and glinted in the sunshine. She was definitely a guy's guy. (Oh, yeah: something about driving around the back country looking for the last speakers of Ozark English or Okracoke justified the gas guzzling: you
had
to have the four-wheel drive.) In my second year in graduate school I got my own car—an ancient VW bought for $200—and that helped, fortunately, to even things out a bit for me psychologically. Yes: I had to spend five or six greasy weekends that summer with Alice's husband, Tom, crawling around with tar and rivet-gun under the chassis, repairing (with his help) the rotted-out metal struts that ostensibly held the whole thing together. But once my frail chariot was semidrivable, I enjoyed a new sense of freedom. One of the first things I did after it rattled back to life was to drive across the city late at night and park in a dark spot across the street from the Professor's house. There I sat—a brooding crazy—for two or three hours. One was doing one's best: this sinister little stakeout, punctuated by sobs, did in the end lay something to rest.

And after a long and ill-timed absence, Lady Luck, too, came back into my life. Several kindly bystanders, witnesses to the train wreck, came to my assistance. Elsbet had been a rock once I had started slipping and spiraling downward, of course, and as the summer unfolded, she took me off for therapeutic weekends at her family's rustic cottage on Lake Chetek. There she cooked me sustaining little high-protein Nordic meals and remained stalwart and kind during the monotonous bouts of keening that often overtook me. Stalwart was she, too, during more alarming flights—whenever I said I was going to kill myself, for example (this would go on for a while), or when I suddenly lolled forward at the dinner table and flopped my head down, tragicomically, into my plate of food. In the daytime we splashed around on the lake in a long-oared metal skiff, swam about, and fought off the horseflies. I was like a wounded World War I
soldier, invalided out and now convalescent in dear old Blighty—taking the air for the first time, shuffling around the hospital grounds in slippers and striped dressing gown, summoning up, every now and then, a weak little traumatized smile.

And though I never gave her the details of my situation, Jo—butt of so many cruel jokes—was another godsend: it was she who supplied me with the name of the shrink who made calling me back from the abyss one of her pet projects for the year. I feel ashamed of my own bad satiric self when I reread a journal entry I made at one especially terrible point that spring:

The therapist I saw was a middle-aged Israeli child psychiatrist, by turns brusque and bracing—and a fair match for the Professor (or at least my mental image of her) in what I sometimes thought of as a Manichean battle over my survival. Malka had fought in the 1948 war, and in the role of psychological second did her best to inject me with her own brazen and bellicose spirit. I confess I was not too receptive at first, and when I objected, mewlingly, to taking an antidepressant—such reckless pill popping, I feared, would mess up my concentration and interfere with my schoolwork—she dubbed me Little Miss Sunshine and threatened to
stick me in the goddamned psych ward
until I complied. (Little did one know that thirty years later virtually every person on earth, not to mention one's pet gerbil, would be on psychotropic drugs of some kind.) While I continued to feel ashamed of my pharmaceutical “crutch,” comply I did, and the
drug's inspiriting effect on my hypothalamus was indisputable. After constant narcotic debauchery at the Professor's I had pretty much renounced dope-smoking—forever. But Tofranil, I have to say, has been a dear, dear pal of mine ever since: a sort of friendly and intelligent dolphin, on whose accommodating back I have ridden safely to shore after various major and minor shipwrecks. Though prone alas to getting stuck in fishing nets, dolphins—one somehow feels—seldom let themselves get entangled in unsuitable love affairs.

Various other pieces got picked up. I waited a year to tell Alice what had taken place—she had been puzzling, I guess, why she never seemed to hear from the Professor anymore. As it happened, Alice had not been entirely absent from my life during the Professor episode; I'd seen her once in fact just before its dolorous end. But given the Professor's grip on me then, the encounter had simply added a new element of nightmarishness: