The Professor and Other Writings (41 page)

I'd stayed mum thenceforth: not exactly the life of the party; nor, would it seem, was I making the most of my looks.

The following fall, however, Alice had finished her dissertation
and was lecturing at a tiny Christian college in rural Wisconsin. Tom was still at the University; they lived apart for the year. One weekend I went to stay with her in one of the primitive on-campus trailers her college provided for visiting profs. The trailer didn't have a bath or shower so we were obliged to perform our late-night ablutions in a deserted classroom building, half-naked, at a pair of matching sinks in the women's restroom. Perhaps it was the intimacy engendered by these slightly self-conscious side-to-side sponge baths, but the first night I was there I found myself unspooling for Alice the story of my crack-up. She was predictably aghast—truly aghast—and having introduced me to the Professor, felt immediately to blame. I was hard pressed to convince her that the P. had not recruited me into unnatural love; that I had been already an eager, if somewhat unfledged, practitioner at the time we met. The homosexual angle, one could see, clearly unnerved Alice, and later she told me she'd had to call Tom that same night around 2:00 or 3:00 a.m.—she had been too upset by my revelations to sleep. She came ultimately to accept the same-sex part of it, but remained deeply shocked by the Professor's knavery and guile. Erotic deceit on such a scale was almost as disillusioning, I guess, as reading
Sartor Resartus
. And though Alice and I remained friends for many years I don't believe she ever communicated with her former tennis partner again.

 

So what to say about the Dear Lady herself, now that more than three decades have elapsed? True: one feels a bit like Sir Walter Scott putting the question so sententiously. One imagines a title:
Dumped: Or, 'Tis Thirty Years Since
. Also true: that the matter evokes contradictory feelings in me. Having now described the fiasco with the Professor at length, I confess, I feel on the one hand a bit embarrassed by its sheer triteness: my own sitting-duckness, my seducer's casebook callousness. As I expected, revisiting Ye Olde Journals has indeed been lowering—not least because they tell such a dreary old-
hat tale. Who hasn't clawed at one's pillow in anguish at a lover's faithlessness? Had one jumped off a cliff that long-ago winter—Sappho of Lesbos–style—one would simply have ratified it: one's lack of originality; one's tedious by-the-bookness.

By not taking the chump's way out I suppose I threw in my lot, however feebly, with the ongoingness of life. I stepped back from my own little Sappho-plunge; avoided becoming a sentimental statistic. I veered away, somehow went on with things. And most of the time since I've been fairly glad I stuck it out. Had I not I would have missed out, of course, on any number of peak experiences: the entire Disco Era; my first withdrawal from an ATM machine; the fall of Communism; watching the O.J. freeway chase from start to finish in San Francisco in a bar full of drag queens; a cornucopia of royal sex scandals; the Red Sox winning the Series; Marianne Faithfull singing “Pirate Jenny” at the Fillmore (Jessica Mitford and her husband, who'd arrived in a Bentley, were in the front row); nude swimming with B. in the Ladies' Bathing Pond on Hampstead Heath; picking up Wally, then eight weeks old, from a morbidly obese lady dachshund breeder in a Modesto McDonald's parking lot; and indeed, my first exacting, artful, somewhat tremulous eBay bid. And how ever to forget thrusting a twenty-dollar bill in the general direction of Martina Navratilova, then gyrating and cavorting to boomy-bunny hip-hop at the lesbian rights fundraiser I attended at Fort Mason last winter? (I was that close to the stage—in the
lesbo-mosh-pit
so to speak: she leaned down, smiled, grabbed my sweaty twenty, and stuck it her sports bra, along with other tender offerings.). Even with regard to less-than-perfect moments—Wally and I subsequently flunking out of puppy school at the SPCA, the vomitacious and terrifying ride Blakey made me take with her on the New York, New York Roller Coaster in Las Vegas a couple of years ago—I am obliged to say with Nietzsche,
Yes, give it all to me again, exactly the same
. Even (
retch
) the double-loop-the-loop-upside-down part.

Yet on the other hand, it would be foolish to say the run-in with the Professor left me unchanged—or that its role in my life, however banal and muzzy from one angle, was insignificant. She was the Trojan Horse. She altered everything, the whole way one was
trending
. One doesn't want to discount other factors, but as I hinted at the outset of this shabby little shocker, the relationship and its aftermath no doubt helped to make me the figure of charity, selflessness, and erudite fun that I am today. Bestowed on me my sweet and sunny personality. Made certain bubbly characterological tendencies even more effervescent. And at this late stage it seems bootless to dream up counterfactuals or speculate on how things might have gone otherwise. What
if
the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife had not been gunned down in Sarajevo in July 1914? What
if
Adolf Hitler had not allowed the otherwise doomed British Expeditionary Force to escape at Dunkirk in 1940? What
if
the Beatles had gotten back together? What
if
the Professor and I had not been introduced one ill-omened Christmas Eve? Don't even bother with this last one.

Granted, a certain amount of discomfort had to be endured. For five years I was entirely celibate—so scarified by the desolation that grown-up sexual desire had brought into my life that it seemed best, on the whole, just to
fuggedaboudit
. Bambi wore fawn-blinkers for quite some time—just couldn't cope. It was as if one had to start over again, work up to it—now with more ambivalence, more protective padding. One had tripped right out of the starting-gate.

If emotions were called for, they would now have to be dark ones. Mine was indeed a monkish, caustic, dyspeptic kind of chastity. In the matter of romance I became a sort of Swiftian misogynist: women, as lovers, were treacherous and bewildering. Impossible to trust Stella or Vanessa with one's adoration. Better to heap scorn and contumely—to wallow in one's abject, unsexed spleen.

Or at least that was the idea. For even as the rebuilding effort dragged on, and even though I continued to indulge, sometimes the
atrically, in wholesale bouts of
contemptus mundi
(all too reminiscent of the perilous solipsism of adolescence), I also felt a subtle change in the atmosphere. Almost in spite of myself I was beginning to function, if not in the sexual sense, then at least rather more capably in social settings. Convening with other members of
homo sapiens
. Meeting the planetary locals in seminormal fashion. (Teaching, indeed, my first
students
, if only for a quarter or two, as an apprentice English instructor.) Joining the Human League, however belatedly—though not yet, perhaps, the Joy Division.

I continued to hang out every week or two with my feminist reading group; indeed one of the paradoxes of my misogyny, like Swift's, was that it coincided with a growing emotional connection with individual women, several of them in the group. (As I had done with Elsbet and Malka the Israeli shrink, I exempted these female paragons from my general excoriation of the sex.) This budding sense of relationship had nothing to do with the militant-sisterhood pipe dreams of my undergraduate years or indeed the hairy-legged velleities of lesbian separatism. Bye-bye, Pokey Donnerparty. These women—these new
friends
—were simply themselves: in need of no political reeducation by me, just open to life, and thoroughly nontoxic. Ordinary women (mostly straight, it turned out), with whom it was possible to talk and go on talking. Several of them were also,
ahem
, distinctly maternal. (
Awesome!
) I later told two of these friends about my imbroglio with the P.—I was still only slowly shaking off the Professor's demand for tomb-like discretion—and the sky didn't fall and that made me feel better, too.

My new Midwestern home likewise began to cushion and hold me somehow. I found I actually relished the meteorological extremes—especially the hot, glutinous, thundery days of summer. Riding my bike around the lakes or along the river past the old brewery was soothing—a balm to my prematurely ravaged soul. I moved to a new apartment, not far from my old one, and despite the ever-present
company of a group of party-hearty cockroaches, several of them real no-goods, I was glad to escape the dismal reminders of the Professor still lingering at my previous domicile.
Farewell, O green shag carpet remnant. Farewell, O filthy old stovetop
(on which the corned beef had been boiled).
Farewell, O brainless spring-sprung bed.
Another wager on future happiness: I adopted a gray tabby kitten, subsequently named Iris (pretentiously enough) after Miss Murdoch. Iris—my Iris, that is, not the novelist—would meow in greeting when I came home from school; played happily for hours with the cockroach roommates (sometimes snaring and deftly consuming one); and would live with me for the next twenty years—almost, indeed, into the EBE (Early Blakey Era).

I attended, believe it or not, my first real party—one given by a droll fellow student, homosexual, with whom I became close in my last two years at the University. Being male, Derek was indeed a novelty in my world—a bawdy, quite unprecedented non-Terry. I found him endlessly amusing, a sort of human mood elevator. Physically speaking, he cut a wonderfully outlandish figure, being six feet six, pencil-thin, slim-waisted and swivel-hipped, with the longest legs I had ever seen. A dead ringer for Ichabod Crane. He smoked like a chimney, doted on hirsute redheads and rugby players, and would often entertain me by performing his own madcap version of the lewd chair-between-the-legs Bob Fosse choreography made famous by Liza Minnelli in the film
Cabaret.
I became for a while a sort of honorary (if chaste) gay man in his company. These were the early days of Clone Culture, after all—that glorious doomed era of Tom Selleck–style mustaches, disco balls, and bomber jackets. Even in the land of Norsemen and snowshoes, the fizziness in the atmosphere was contagious. Derek was the first man I had ever met who didn't wear underpants. His numerous erotic exploits—all pre-AIDS, of course, and typically acrobatic and arabesque—in turn helped to explode many of my sentimental notions about sexual love. One that
he told me about somehow involved wrapping a number of greasy bicycle chains around his waist, hips, and crotch—to striking effect.

Elsbet stayed on, too, and our friendship deepened. I remember her coming over one hot afternoon: she was taking a photo class and had to do a series of black and white portraits. I was to be the model. I was a bit nervy and self-conscious; so we drank beer and put Lou Reed's
Berlin
album on the stereo to get in the appropriate
fuck-all
mood. Sweet sounds of glass breaking, drunken laughter, tinkly piano, a crowd counting to ten in German—then Lou, all bleary and would-be decadent. We hadn't talked about what I would do by way of posing, so I improvised: first, by dragging out some old photos of my parents from the fifties, just after they were married. These I held up to the camera, like biological specimens, while Elsbet took several close-ups of my hands holding them. (Caught forever in the lost light: I hold these family mementos with surprising delicacy.) Next I unearthed a somewhat garish five-by-seven color publicity shot of the Professor and displayed it in similar fashion. Garish because it showed her tanned (even a bit leathery) and draped in a sort of Mephistophelian seventies orange pants suit. She brandished her guitar mariachi fashion and had that same-old same-old wicked grin on her face I knew so well. A dark-eyed Queen of Spades look. Even now I can recall the moment she gave me this long-to-be-mourned-over souvenir. We were in the bedroom of my apartment one morning, getting dressed, I think, and when she took it out of her briefcase and handed it to me, I fumbled it clumsily. It wafted to the ground, landing face down on the dirty wooden floorboards—an ill omen, to be sure. While Elsbet snapped away, Lou's Weimar-sludge in the background, I mimicked tearing the picture apart with sharp little teeth, rabid-skunk style.

For the last part of the shoot, perhaps inspired by the dissipated soundtrack, I decided to cross-dress—something I had only ever done before in moments of ultrafreaky solitude. I suddenly really
wanted to. I wet my hair in the kitchen sink and slicked it back decisively. I was already wearing jeans and a man's shirt, so the basic sartorial items were already in place. To these I added a dark unisex-looking jacket, aviator sunglasses (then the height of fashion), and a gift from the long-lost Phoebe—a brightly woven Guatemalan belt that I fashioned into something resembling a bizarre bulky tie. This crude neckwear notwithstanding, I have to say I made a pretty convincing man. Even a beautiful one, perhaps. Elsbet photographed me for a good while in my get-up and I became ever more loose and free. The resulting pictures—she later gave me a set of them—turned out to be fairly stunning. She said afterwards that once I'd donned my she-male duds my body language had completely changed. I'd relaxed somehow: unkinked, acquired a certain elegance. Ah, confident at last. Scrutinizing them nowadays I'm appalled by how young and austere and baby-faced I look, but I can also see a little bit of what she meant.