The Professor and Other Writings (22 page)

She, in turn, played the role of Isadora Duncan will-o-the-wisp. At her urging—I was somewhat frightened by the idea—we went hiking and camping in British Columbia one spring break, not long after the virginity-breaching business. Unbelievably to me now, we walked and hitchhiked all the way, hundreds of miles, with towering backpacks replete with dangling metal cups, tent stakes, plastic bags of granola, and paperback copies of Chuang Tze and Basho. We had virtually no money. When a heavy rainstorm forced us to stay overnight in a rat-trap little motel in Port Angeles, Phoebe, clutching a blanket and with nary a word, shuffled in at one point from the other room in which she had supposedly settled for the night and crawled into my puffy mummy bag with me. She was stark naked. I too was starkers, except for a pair of
echt
-utilitarian underpants, now admittedly somewhat grotty after the day's hike. Apparently at her ease, P. fell at once into a deep and complacent slumber. I was a ravaged, silent wreck the next morning—a bit like the goggle-eyed creature from Munch's
The Scream
—and desperate to leave Port Angeles.

Later, for about a year and a half, we shared an off-campus apartment—and again, a bed. As before it was utterly chaste: indeed, Phoebe often lamented that she could never reciprocate my yearnings, of which she was quite aware. I was “unconventional,” she declared, whereas she was perfectly normal. Given that she was often in bed with her arms draped around me when she said such things, it was all perfectly agonizing, too. And the end, when it came, was outlandish. She'd suddenly acquired a second boyfriend and demanded that I move out of our apartment, presumably so she could sleep with him without me glooming around in the background. (As Blakey would say—no doubt with a cruel snort—
harshin' on everybody's buzz
.) Though mortified, as Phoebe's official slave for life, I complied at once and rented a flea-infested studio apartment a few blocks away for $65 a month.

Yet no sooner had I vacated the premises than she abruptly
canned the boyfriend and dropped out of school—for good, as it happened—and moved back to California. Shocked and bewildered by these ructions, I was even more astounded a month or two later when she began sending me odd, rambling, but unmistakably erotic letters from her parents' trailer camp in the Sierra Nevada, the rustic redoubt to which she had retreated. She regretted our untried intimacy, she said, and wanted to see me again. Might we meet at my mother and Turk's house over the upcoming spring break? Mavis, she said, was all for it. (P. had met my mother once and, both being artistic, they'd hit it off famously.) Needless to say, I flew to San Diego two days later, heart in mouth, and in a whirl of demented lust Phoebe and I had sex five nights in a row—incompetently enough, I see now, but also at such a flailing and histrionic pitch it was bizarre that my mother and Turk (asleep in the big room downstairs) remained, like characters put under a sorceress's spell in some medieval romance, oblivious to the activity above them.

This brief bacchanal, it must be said, had its imperfections, including one spectacularly ill-starred evening when P. and I went to visit Gus—a nice, hippy-dippy, none-too-bright acquaintance of mine from high school whom we'd run into at the beach—and got colossally stoned on his waterbed. Whether due to the waterbed or to Puff the Magic Dragon, the scene—to my horror—suddenly took an all too intimate turn. Emergency measures were called for. In a state of some panic I hurriedly frog-marched Phoebe—now mumbling and near-comatose but clearly loath to leave—out the door and into Turk's old Pinto, which I'd borrowed for the evening. Brain on fire, I then leadfooted it at once back to my mother's house. (I shudder now to recall this deranged freeway flight, my own faculties having likewise been considerably impaired by our debauch.) When we pulled up outside the house, Phoebe—who was very drunk as well as stoned—promptly vomited up her Spaghetti Factory dinner all over the floor of the Pinto, then flopped about flirtatiously on the
front seat, slurpy and slurry and simpering like Dean Martin after six or ten double Scotches.

As we struggled into the house and up the stairs—me cursing inside, trying not to wake anyone up (it was around 2:00 a.m.) and grimly fretting over what on earth I would use to clean up Turk's car—Phoebe was amiably burbling away to herself, the drunken gist being (as I heard with some dismay) that despite my sincerest amorous efforts I would never be able to
give her what Gus could
. Now Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime, I guess. Or is it that People Who Need People Are the Luckiest People in the World? Either way, Phoebe's blunt assessment was not exactly a confidence booster. I absorbed it as best I could under the circumstances and by the time we bade our sober, shy farewells at the airport a day or two later—neither one of us really wanting to look the other in the eye—I had in my own mind transformed the whole evening (of which P. seemed to have no recollection) into something Wild and Fun and Oh-So Grown-Up. I returned to college in a state of maudlin tristesse—proud of every fleeting, fumbled caress, brimful still with dumb-beast adoration, and with all my half-slaked desires of three years morbidly intensified. They had nowhere to go. I often wonder what extraordinary dismay I might have felt had I known there and then that thanks to the capricious turns of Fate (a complex myriad of them, in fact) I would neither see nor hear from Phoebe again for almost twenty-nine years, until I ran into her by accident, along with her fourteen-year-old daughter, at a crafts fair in San Francisco when we were both too old to care.

But onward to the Bambi-event. With Phoebe gone, my last year as an undergraduate began dolefully enough: I studied, rode my bike in the rain, and wallowed in my romantic solitude. I had a little job working nights in the school library. This last activity, though dull in many respects, nonetheless played a substantial role in my ongoing sex education. Even as I whiled away the hours every Friday
and Saturday evening in the morgue-like precincts of the reserve desk, I would explore the library's X-rated holdings, all of which were kept off-limits to the general student body in a nearby locked cupboard to which I had a key.
Erotic Art from Around the World
was a favorite, likewise
Tropic of Cancer,
and an old illustrated edition of Casanova published, I think, by the Fortune Press in the 1920s. But I also found things pertinent to my own case:
Diana: A Strange Autobiography
, a dated but illuminating anonymous memoir from the 1950s (full of curious facts about the hothouse life in women's colleges and secret lesbian bars in Paris); Dr. George Weinberg's
Society and the Healthy Homosexual
(1972), one of the first books to argue (successfully) that the American Psychiatric Association drop its classification of homosexuality as a mental illness; and—most exciting of all—a near-pristine copy of Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love's recently published
Sappho Was a Right-On Woman!
(1972), a moral and political defense of lesbian civil rights far more tough, judicious, and emotionally à propos than the goofy title might suggest. Along with the
Village Voice
, whose back issues I now burned through over the course of several weeks (not that I had ever been to New York), these books were to jumpstart my radical-dyke phase. With roaring girls such as Jill Johnston, Robin Morgan, Kate Millett, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Mary Daly, and Monique Wittig for inspiration, could Alix Dobkin [
annunciatory flute trill
] be far behind?

And even as I ruminated endlessly over how and when Phoebe would be restored to me, I fell into a handful of relationships, as if by accident, that served to pass the time till graduation. One was with a classmate and fellow oddball named Davy, from Pocatello, whose curly brown hair and Peter Pan–like company appealed to me. (I somehow excluded him from my general indictment of the male sex.) He'd made a suicide attempt the previous year, he told me, but was now over his depression. He played chess competitively (not a Master but near it); and idolized Nijinsky. We rode around town on
his puttering Honda 90 while he regaled me with strange or touching facts he'd absorbed from his reading. He'd just read the memoirs of Dorothy Caruso and been much struck by her declaration that she loved Caruso because “he had
a great soul
.” (
Was this true of all great artists?
We debated the question at length.) The reason the faun-god Nijinsky was able to leap so high in the air, he explained on another occasion, was because the bones in his feet, freakishly,
were those of a bird, not a man
. Davy often made me laugh by reciting, wide-eyed, his favorite sentence from
Ulysses
: “For
him
, for
Raoul
!” (a quote from the trashy romance novel Molly Bloom is reading on the day of Bloom's wanderings). The line became a comic catch-phrase for us, to be uttered at any incongruous moment. With Davy's assistance I made a second half-hearted attempt at normal sexual intercourse, but to no very pleasing end. He later went on to live in a series of unlikely places (Tonga, Japan, Montana, Caracas) and would write me scribbly letters with big, odd-looking postage stamps, but never settled anywhere or found a vocation. Maybe he has now but we've lost touch.

Engaging me further was also a more complex friendship: with a blonde woman who sat behind me in my 9:00 a.m. class on the History of Literary Criticism. My private nickname for her was the Daring Divorcée: she was an intelligent, petite, extremely attractive woman named Karen. She was in her early thirties, had two small children, lived in the suburbs in a sixties ranch house with a carport, was a firm and vocal ex-Catholic. Having recently divorced an Irish-American Weyerhauser exec, she had come back to school to get an M.A. in Comparative Literature. She was intrigued by me, she later explained, because in class my hair, seen from behind, was always
confused
, a regular topological tangle. I guess it looked as if I had gone to bed with it wet, lain on it in some untoward fashion, and then—like a female Strewelpeter—neglected to smooth it down before I left the house. Unfortunately, Karen was correct: I'm afraid I still sometimes do this.

We fell into bed one evening: she'd put Laura Nyro and Labelle's
Gonna Take a Miracle
on the record player, and though basically straight as a one-dollar bill, was obviously in an experimental mood. The same thing happened a few times more and so I moved into her house—“to save on rent”—that last spring and early summer before I left for the Midwest. To my dismay—and I rarely seem to have been in any other state of mind in those days—she lost interest in the sex part almost at once, though we went on sleeping in the California King marital bed together. I remember being unsettled indeed when her six-year-old daughter Polly—as dark-haired and fey as Flora or Miles in
The Turn of the Screw
—would come into the bedroom in the morning and give us an eerie, impervious, reproving glance. I began to regress a bit in the odd situation; started to act in fact like one of the children. I wrote mysterious, droogy love sonnets, usually about P., but some about someone else known (enigmatically) only as “K.”

Granted, in the intellectual realm I was able to maintain—albeit feebly—a quasi adult demeanor. Karen and I shared an enthusiasm for Renaissance literary arcana and were much fired up that spring about alchemy, the Metaphysical poets, Sir Thomas Browne, and Hermes Trismegistus. Good old Hermes T.:
wacky but cool.
Karen's specialty was Spanish literature of the Golden Age and with her long blonde hair illumined in the lamplight she would sometimes read Góngora poems to me, in the soft, lisping Spanish accents (or so I imagined) of a seventeenth-century infanta. But at the same time she was also a fledgling satirist and freethinker: embittered by her failed marriage, ferociously anticlerical, droll, caustic, and self-protective. This side of her, I have to say, appealed to me less than the infanta side. At the time I met her she was recovering from a brief and disastrous affair with a morose male undergrad named Richard (I knew him by sight) who'd dumped her in a painful and inexplicable fashion. His pink boy-skin, she would lament, had been that of an Adonis—the most delicious downy fuzz. But now she detested him. She had hatched
an idea, she said, for a short story: a divorced woman in her thirties, having fallen madly in love with a college student and been rejected by him, hits a pedestrian while driving. The pedestrian turns out to be the student. Karen confessed to being undecided about the story's ending: whether the accident would kill him or just leave him horrifyingly maimed—the Adonis features scarified, the beautiful fuzz caked with blood. It was the sort of technical question, we agreed, that a writer like Doris Lessing would know how to resolve.

When the Embarrassing Episode began to unfold that spring, Karen had by far the most jaded—and accurate—view of things. I had been nominated by my college for a fancy graduate scholarship sponsored by one of the great American dog food families. Given that in the greater world of higher education my college was regarded as distinctly subpar—the place wouldn't be granted a Phi Beta Kappa chapter until the late 1980s—the fact that I made it into the regional semifinals was considered a marvelous coup for the school. In anticipation of my interview—to be conducted, somewhat peculiarly, everyone thought, in the early evening at the newly refurbished Sea-Tac airport—I was “prepped” incessantly by a crack team of withered male professors. The group included a temporizing, semicretinous sociology prof whose main contribution was to observe I had “attractive hands” (unlike the Strewelpeter rest of me, presumably) and that I should accentuate all my answers to questions with graceful hand movements. (He demonstrated to loathsome effect.) They were worried, obviously, that I was eccentric—no doubt a bit troubled—and that given my well-known man-hating propensities would bomb out without some kind of last-minute makeover. My feminism in full spate, I was obliged to rail to friends afterward about what disgusting patriarchal pigs they all were.