The Professor and Other Writings (39 page)
Read The Professor and Other Writings Online
Authors: Terry Castle,Terry Castle
Pavane for a Defunct Infanta
THE PROFESSOR HAD BEEN PULLING
her car out of the faculty lot when I staggered up, palpably distraught, my face white and tear-streaked. She listened while I told her, very quickly, what had happened. Said
get in
and drove me grimly back to my apartment. On the way I was silentâaghast at what I'd done. I had needed desperately to be with her, or so it had seemed when I'd fled the exam room. Yet being with her now, I realized, wasn't actually making me feel any better.
This is all going wrong.
She in turn said little and lay down and fell asleep on my bed when we got to my apartment. Ashen-faced, I sat quietly at my desk for the next hour, writing out my aborted exam essay. I was cold and competent now, even scientific: an exiled Bol
shevik, in threadbare coat and tiny old-fashioned spectacles, laying out the mechanics of the dialectic with steely clarity. Becky Sharp, Waterloo, Napoleon, blah, blah. A great arc of necessity animated the lives of men, blah blah. My hands and fingers functioned perfectly now; the sentences of my essay rolled out in a voluble stream, like happy workers leaving a factory.
So what was all that goddamned fuss about.
The Professor went home after while; said she'd call me later, and I think she did. But things from that point on were never really the same.
My life over the next seven or eight weeks? Fractured, forlorn days, catastrophic nights. Chaos, wailing, and darkness. Imprecations. Despairing appeals for mercy. The muffled sound of dead-carts rumbling past at 4:00 a.m. Crude chalk crosses on the doors. Dancing, hip-waggling skeletons everywhere, some beckoning, others simply grinning in hideous triumph. Ashen, serrated, almost numb with disbelief, I struggled after equilibrium by writing daily in my Plague-Journal:
Last night at [the Professor's] Molly called up, was drinking somewhere, wanted to come over. [The Professor] came back and told me M. was in love with her. Now tonight they're out together. [The Professor] asked me this morning in bed if I minded if she “held onto” M. I said, No then, but later on the phone I said, Yes I would be upset by it. [The Professor] said she had a feeling she would end up “being affectionate” to M. “Poor kid.” Weird: she seemed almost proud: “I think one of my colleagues' daughters is in love with me.” At the same timeâcontinually affirms her love for me, said the feeling was not merely the result of the fact that “you got here first.” “You're timeless.”
Home alone after two days at [the Professor's]. I feel extremely depressed, not sure why. She is with M. again, though tells me repeatedly not to worry. Still do, of course. She hurt me quite badly
last night when we made love; I actually bled a little. Oh God. Then I tried this morning; she was there briefly, but I was inept. I feel I am losing confidence, wish I knew what to do about that.
Once after we made love she said if we can weather this one, we've won. Want to believe her, but it's hard though.
Didn't write yesterdayâone of the more intense days of my paltry existence. [The Professor] called in the morning, remote, depressed. Came over soon after and told me she and Molly had ended up making love again. The night I couldn't sleep and sat talking to myself in the bathtub. The sex with M. apparently “unsatisfying.” I felt at one point like I was going to have a case of dry heaves. Have to make a leap of faith and trust her. She says if she “has to choose,” no question but I am the one. We went into the bedroom then and made love for the rest of the afternoon. Afterwards [the Professor] said she felt reborn. I'm trying to control evil feelings about M.âwho apparently said to [the Professor] the other day,
Think what I could do to your career.
Saw [the Professor] at school and we sat on the grass in the sun. She saying I should try to figure out why I was attracted to her. “If it is because you're looking for a mother, the person you are relating to should get you into analysis and say goodbye.” Later: “What would you do if suddenly a whole lot of people decided they liked you.” She is afraid that even if I do get “socialized,” as she puts it, I will end up leaving her. “I'm just trying to arrange it so I don't die aloneâbut everybody dies alone anyway.”
She said she didn't feel she was doing anything “morally wrong” by sleeping with M. I have to accept her perception of the situation, trust to her goodness.
Brain-bedeviling above all: the Professor's crazy changeabilityâher constantly shifting moods and modalities. Yer-But-No-But-Yer-But. No-But-Yer-But-No-But. With regard to me, she flipped insanely from vilification to ardor and back again. At times, to be sure, she was just plain old viciousâfull of harsh, spouting criticisms, like a fountain. A human acid-bath. I was always watching her, she complained one evening; it was creeping her out.
Don't you even realize how it disturbs and
UPSETS ME
to see you watching me like that?
I guess I had a particular Moron-Girl look that especially rankled her. One day I made the mistake, I see from my journal, of telling her that I felt good about a talk we'd had the night before: it had renewed my hope that things were going to work out for us. The Molly element was awkward, but I'd been thinking about it, I said; I knew I could be philosophical. I could be patient; I understood. These weak-sister comments were instantly cut off. No, the talk had been pointless and stupid. I'd just stressed her out with more whining. Not only that: I had had a
childish expression
on my face all through it that had
greatly annoyed her.
She looked down and away and frowned darkly at the very thought of me.
In public situationsâ
like when that nice Tina came over to talk to us in the English office the other day
âmy behavior was
appalling
. Obviously out of control.
Boring and irritating like a tic
.
Did I want people to realize what was going on
?
That we'd been sleeping together?
Plus I was always so
devious
and
sly.
From the very first, it seemed, I had used various sneaky intellectual wiles to gain power over her:
Tarot cards, the I Ching, all your literary allusions.
I was always making references that were
purposely obscure
, she said. This unattractive habit merely demonstrated my
anger and insecurity
. Tough shit if now I was getting too upset to concentrate on my homework. Or write my fucking exams. The sole journal entry I made that week was the transcription of a gruesome Professorial one-liner:
I don't care if you fail out of school.
Yet at other times, perfectly counterweighting the reproachesâin fact deftly inserted at precisely those points in the situation at which one seemed about to recover one's long-submerged critical facultiesâwere the psycho-bonbons, the mental milkshakes, the sweet promises of futurity. Bluebeard wasn't Bluebeard, after all; I had my adorable Beast back again. Thus even after Tina appeared, inducing more inward torment in me than I had thought it possible for a single human being (me) to bear, there were just enough of these Beast-moments to keep me entranced, if also racked with uncertainty:
[The Professor] just called upâsaid she was drunk, then said, “I just wanted to say that if you want me you can have me, because I think you're the only one who really understands what is going on with this affair.”
She called me before dinner tonight. It was okay. She wanted to know if I thought she was a “together” person. I didn't really know what to say. Then said yes of course. She also said you know I'm not cruel don't you. Again, me nonplussed, but I said yes.
[The Professor] running out of her office today to buttonhole me. “I guess I'd better tell you what I've been doing, but don't let it make you upset. I'm doing things with other people.” She said it was nothing for me to worry aboutâsaid all the time, she realized, she kept “wondering how I was.” Her description (dismissive) of Tina: “gracious, charming, attractive, vacuous.” Dull. A sort of empty version of me.
Last night; we had our best phone talk for a while. She was laughingâ“I'm in love with three people.” Went on about Molly and
Tina, how “fond” she was of both of them, but I, she insisted, was going to be “one of the central people in her life.” Told me again: “you understand despair.” Ended with: “will you hang on if I fool around for a while?”
Even after the Professor decreed that she and I were going to have a
moratorium on a certain element
âfor by this time, with three gals on the go, she was presumably running somewhat short on love-gas as well as timeâthe verbal lucubrations, followed by some Sudden-Wild-Sex-After-All, could always be counted on to keep me in thrall.
Today on the phone I managed to bring up wanting to sleep with her; she said she did not want that “intensity” right now. Sex was “an easy answer”âdidn't address the real problem. I apologized and thanked her afterwards for talking with me about it. She is such a good person. Said at one point, “Terry, you're a damn fine person in spite of all your shit.” When I asked about the no-sex-right-now thing she said Christ I'm not going into a nunnery.
[Next day.] I am going to [the Professor's] house for dinner tonight. Trepidation. Feel like I am on some kind of probation. Dinner would be it, she said: said she didn't want me staying over.
[Next day.] Back home this morning. Last night when I got there she was teasingâimmediately led me upstairs for a “backrub.” Explained that just because she had stipulated no sex, it didn't mean we weren't allowed to lie down on the bed and get close. Drank a lot over dinner, she got more and more drunk, rubbed my leg, said she didn't want the “other me” to come back when the “me” she loved was present. It felt crazy. We went to bed afterwards and all the joy and insanity instantly returned.
But as I became more distraught the Professor also withdrew. I recall going to her office one morningâthe ill-fated day I took her her birthday present?âand she said I was making her so anxious, just my presence, there in the moment, that I had to get out.
She hadn't felt so anxious
(and here she looked at me wildly)
since J.
She was starting to hyperventilate, she said, was going to have to take a tranquilizer.
So go away
.
Leave
.
Fuck off.
I did so.
And not long afterâon what would be one of the very worst nights of my lifeâher brutality took an especially freakish turn:
Hell, hell, hell. Asked her if I could see her tonight; she said she was busy, wouldn't say with what. Came home desolate. Called Elsbet, finally told her all about it. E. came over right awayâI cried for about an hour, my head on her breast. E. spent the night at my apartmentâslept in the bed, just held on to me. Saved me somehow from myself. Incredibly enough [the Professor] called around midnight. No point to the call. Except to let me know she too was in bed and someone was with her. She kept talking to her in the background. Glasses clinking. Muffled laughter. [The Professor] was chuckling and told me we were luckyâwe had avoided something “potentially hideous.” Oh Christ but what exactly. Then she hung up. Elsbet enraged. Kept saying I hate her, I hate her.
Had one's dear friend not been there? No trouble whatsoever, Madamâ
indeed it would be our pleasure
âto totter down to the freeway bridge a few blocks away and fling oneself, Berryman-style, over the icy railing into the dark.
The endgame had finally begun. The corpse was still twitching a bit, and there were indeed a couple of pieces of Grand Guignol still to endureâone entirely self-inflicted, the other not. The self-inflicted one was laughableâin the way the sinking of the
Titanic
might be considered laughable. As a bit of black existential farce, during which
one did not show oneself to advantage. Rather, like J. Bruce Ismay, lily-livered owner of the White Star Line, who when the great ship began to list disguised himself as a woman so as to sneak onto one of the doomed liner's few remaining lifeboats (thus disgracing himself forever), one simply gave up and wallowed and begged one's executioner for a last-minute reprieve. Lesbian readers, I'm afraid, all too familiar with the clichéd subcultural dynamics of the situation described here, will no doubt be especially inclined to groan. But it's true: so desperate was I still to see the Professor, even after her defection had become obvious, I continued to play each week on a ghastly little all-woman softball team that one of the English department secretaries had organized on campus that spring. Ghastly because there on the roster with me, smirking and mugging like costars in some dire lesbian sitcom, were
all three
of them: Molly, Tina, and the brimming, bountiful Professor. No joy in Mudvilleâany idiot could see thatâbut one sat there in the mud anyway: red-eyed, gibbering quietly, unable to raise even a hideous rictus of a smile. A situation so awful it demanded a laugh-track.
Plus one could hardly have wished for a more perfect allegory of the Professor's devilish charismaâor of one's own torment. Elegant Tina was the team's agile, golden-gloved first baseman. Baby butch Molly H.âbest all-round athlete in our little trio of Professor-loversâplayed a skillful Bucky Dentâstyle shortstop. I was the Designated Zombie: an inept, strangely cadaverous presence at second base. The Professor herself was at the center of thingsâcock of the walk, a squatting, crowing Chanticleer presiding over his hensâin the position of catcher. She couldn't run, of course (the polio leg); but she could bob up and down, yell out instructions to the defense, pick runners off, and block the plate with the best of them. On top of it all, she was a disgustingly good sportâfull of friendly compliments and warm manly butt-taps for the members of the opposite team. And as it happened, whenever the Professor got a hit,
the lanky Tina, Atalanta-like, would run the bases for her. One stillawful memory from that green and hostile spring: watching the Professor, eyes aglitter, laughingly toss her tennis shoes to Tina, after she [the Professor] had hit safely to center. (Having come to the game in flip-flops Tina had no base-running shoes.) Somehow the rangy Tina managed to slip into the Professor's Adidas on the fly, even as she sloped off, commandingly, in the direction of first base. Not only was she impossibly tall, lithe, and gracefulâfor so one was forced to registerâshe seemed to share the Professor's shoe size. They were obviously fated to be together. One could just see them: in a clinch on the floor in a Foot Locker store, making love amid the racks of the latest Nikes and tube socks.
