Hunger's Brides (87 page)

Love,

I
VORY
T
OWER
        

B
EULAH'S PROFOUNDEST PASSIONS
were otherworldly, mine are not. It makes me somewhat vulnerable to attack. But if I'm to take on the role she offers—her goat god, whatever—if I'm to play Beulah's comic foil effectively, we need a closer look at her godlike professor on the make, this mighty hero she happened to see strolling by the river with his mate. An unpleasant way to learn about my wife's pregnancy, I admit. There are other such scenes Beulah was not privy to, however hard she might have tried to imagine them. It falls to me, then, as a penitent form of amusement, to bridge certain gaps. But how? She had attended my classes, observed details, heard things. How might it please her to see my currency debased? Not content to make her attacks personal, clearly she intended to mix business with pleasure, and make them professional as well.

So though it be jarring, unseemly, even a touch obscene, it's well past time we had a peek under the scholar's gown, if you will, at his much shrunken divinity….

To begin.

Comedy ends in marriage.

Mrs. Madeleine Gregory is a successful child psychologist. She once liked to say it was what attracted her to her eventual husband. She works in early developmental education and has never practised clinical psychology. This has not prevented her from dispensing free analysis, though in his case only. Psycho-babble infuriates him. His basic problem, he has been recently told, is compensatory guilt and shame: too much success too fast. That is, for someone of his background. Yes, their backgrounds: heiress of a construction baron weds princeling of the trailer courts.

She'd come to him through an introductory English course, his fifth year of teaching. His classes were still popular back then. She sat near the back of the lecture hall. By the time her turn came she knew perfectly well what she was in for. This academic year's co-ed number six.

Firm knock at his office door. Mistaking it for a graduate student's, he calls out to come in. The confused freshman's knock is tentative, half-hoping to be inaudible. The willing co-ed's trails off lingeringly.

These last he likes to meet at the threshold. Overall, his office has become a fine place to meet young people.

He has been running over in his mind the stirring conclusion to today's class, the final one of his course. Art, love and healing. It amuses him to think of this as the scholarly equivalent of a song by someone, say, like Marvin Gaye. He likes to save it for the final day, a kind of lazy trolling, and will continue to do this until near the end of his career. But already he is choosier than in the early years, more sporting, likelier to throw the little ones back …

…
The schism between thinking and feeling runs as a mildly psychotic thread through the warp of Western civilization. So rare and strange it is for us to feel intense emotion attaching to an
idea
that we tend to experience it as rapture, riot, epiphany. Like love itself, perhaps—do we not visualize our beloved and our union with him as a kind of blinding and rapturous
idée fixe
? Aristotle believed it the province of art to heal this split, this rawest of wounds. To create moments that fuse the most intense passion with the most profound ideas …

He paused to send a mystic glance down at all the pretty maids in the front row, and thought of his own art as more akin to the snake charmer's. To weave a spell of complicity out of the cold stuff of distance and diffidence and respect. To charm intimacy from the chaste cobra of discretion and
pudeur …

And looking out into this lecture theatre today, I feel sure of seeing many discriminating and generous practitioners of the loving arts …

She catches him leaning backwards in his chair, his feet up on the desk. As the office door swings open he swings his feet down and hunches forward, clasps grave, modest fingers over his
mons
of scholarly briefs and folios. He notes she is a few years older than the others, about halfway to his own age. She has never sat in the front row. She takes a seat now, uninvited. Not the one for students—the straight fiddleback across the desk—but instead the stuffed armchair in the corner, reserved for sober reading and one or two esteemed colleagues.

“Word's out on you.”

“Word?”

What comes next she says with a deliberation oddly softened by a note of Western twang. Madeleine never lets her smiling eyes leave his.

“The word, Doctor Gregory, is that you're a pussy hound.”

Hearing something like this today, he would have hit the ground running for the exits. But ten years ago, well, that was a simpler time.
Even five. The idiom, not much used in his circles, still charms—though perhaps it doesn't just yet, in that precise instant, as she watches him duck behind the fig leaf of a frowning rectitude.

“Maybe you prefer ‘womanizer,'” she adds amiably.

Opportunity here, certainly, but exactly how much dignity is it going to cost?

“Skirt chaser?”

“There's synecdoche in its favour, certainly….” he concedes. He allows himself a last, speculative stroke of the philosopher's beard before yielding himself up entirely to her ice-breaker. “Or, is that metonymy, do you think?”

“Cunt-struck.”

“The hero laid low. Good, but too …”

“Too Beowulf,” she suggests.

“I see what you mean.”

“Sex addict, then.”

“Exculpatory,” he cautions, “boastful.”

“Philanderer.”

“This is better—aura of a Greek curse. Classical. But, for my money your … ‘pussy hound' is as nice as any. A certain waggish inevitability. Dog meets cat.” Suppressing what must be a smile she raises a coral-tipped index finger to her small, upturned nose. “Which would seem,” he adds gravely, “to bring us round to you. You're one of my undergrads.”

“You know who I am.”

Perfectly true. Also true: her grades are fine and it is end of term. Not a compromise in sight, he thinks, but then his apprenticeship is only just beginning. The woman lighting up a corner of his office is evidently from the hardy faction of campus perennials given to wearing absurdly little clothing at the slightest upturn in weather. Though April now and sunny, it is hardly mild. Yet bared for his delectation are two finely muscled shoulders, slender arms and—converging enchantingly towards an abbreviated jean skirt—hard, tanned thighs suggestive of immoderate amounts of spring skiing. Better yet, bareback riding. Yes, much better.

Her soft blond hair—frost-tipped then to a pinnacle of Nordic authenticity—is parted to fall aslant one blue-grey eye. He has schooled himself to take any veiling of the eyes or mouth as favourable indices.

“You're some kind of undergrad Argonaut,” he offers, “a cartographer of erotic odysseys, perhaps. As I myself am on occasion.”

“I work as a nurse.”

“Yes, precisely.”

“I'm not an English major.”

“Perfect score so far … Madeleine?”

“Educational psychology. I want to work with children.” No objections, at least none of the slightest concern to him.

“And you just happen to be free this evening….”

Certain gaps in the story, especially as they concern me, I insist on being free to fill in any way I please. It is still my fucking life, after all.

My fight for an open marriage would turn out to be a non-event. Madeleine raised not the slightest objection. I doubt I'm the first man unable to enjoy to the full the fruits of such an arrangement. Nothing more deflating of the myth of animal priapism than your wife offering to let you bring your little friends for a sleepover. While more than one candidate was game enough, the breakfast theatre of post-coital détente—Madeleine's serenity, my furtive satiation, the girl's triumphal arrival on the shores of sexual sophistication—turned out to be more than I could face. At least after the first few times.

Nor, in the end, did I care to meet let alone share even one more of the post-apocalyptic primitives that Madeleine had begun to take as antidotes to me. Another African drummer, another dancer. Fluid orientations—moral, postural and sexual—suited Madeleine's purpose best. Which was to smoke me out.