Men (10 page)

However, it didn't end there, because Sharna's parents, who lived locally, contacted me via the department chair: they wanted us all to sit down and talk about the situation because, her father said, it may not have been Sharna who was responsible for the calls after all, there may have been “other forces” at work. The parents, who were not American-born and not exactly on the cutting edge of all the baffling new technologies (though neither was I—I didn't even have caller ID until all this started), were convinced that my ex had made the hang-up calls to me himself and had been able to make them appear to be coming from Sharna's phone. Nowadays this is apparently easy to do—in fact Nasreen was able to call Lasdun and make it look as though the calls were coming from elsewhere, but this was earlier on in the telephonic revolution and even caller ID was far from ubiquitous, which was probably why Sharna thought she could go undetected (if she'd thought about it at all).

The supreme irony of the situation was that I would have liked nothing more than to find out that the hang-ups were indeed coming from my ex—I suspect I'd half-hoped to find out this was the case when I acquired the fateful caller ID box. As I sat in the pleasant suburban living room while Sharna's father explained—in a scene Lasdun himself might have written—that my ex had fooled us all with his cleverly rigged caller ID override box, I deeply wanted to believe that it was true, that he wasn't over me either, and this was his roundabout way of letting me know. It was almost as though Sharna had intuited my innermost desires and engineered this little drama for her own perverse entertainment. I've half-believed ever since that when you become a figure in someone's disproportionate fantasies—even a bit player—the force field of their craziness gives them access to parts of your being you'd assumed were safely shielded from entry; and these interlopers, once installed, can be difficult to expunge.

And had my ex led Sharna on?
Had
there been more than coffee? So too Lasdun—had he done something to inflame Nasreen's imagination? Was there a meaningful glance, a double entendre, some inadvertent signal that might have made it seem they were meant to be each other's destinies? I never learned what Sharna hoped to accomplish with her hang-up calls since she never admitted to making them, though I do know that my ex was terminally seductive. After we split up, three different friends told me he'd come on to them, though I never really believed them. Obviously they'd misread the signals.

Lasdun is more self-conscious than my ex about his possible complicity, yet still baffled about what might have set Nasreen off. He doesn't like thinking that she was just mentally unbalanced as it would make her more generic, thus less interesting to write about. An unhelpful police detective he's put in touch with calls her a borderline personality—able to act crazy but control herself when necessary—but what do mental health labels accomplish? They come and go according to terminological fashion. Lasdun keeps thinking back to early on in their correspondence, when it still seemed like a harmless email flirtation, and to the time he and Nasreen had met for coffee—he'd finally agreed to read part of her manuscript and she wanted to give him the pages. In person she was an entirely different creature than the loquacious emailer: strangely absent, he later thinks. There'd been a chaste kiss-on-the-cheek parting.

Had Nasreen somehow become a different person than the one he'd met? Or was she someone other than he'd thought all along? Or a different person on the page than in person? We'll never know, and the ending to the story we want to read is precisely the one that can't be written, which is what happens when Nasreen herself reads the published book.

Are chaste kisses on the cheek between teachers and students erotic provocations? Had there been a kiss-on-the-cheek parting between my ex and Sharna? Is it possible to sufficiently eradicate erotic leakiness between teachers and students, such that misfired or misperceived signals become a thing of the past? It's generally understood that male professors are the ones more prone to such leakiness, though I personally know more than a few exceptions among the female professoriate. But Lasdun's not wrong when he reflects acerbically that in today's harassment-attuned culture, men occupy a place in society not unlike that of women in traditional societies: one whiff of sexual scandal can mean death. “Like them, our reputations were frail, in need of vigilant protection. We needed our own form of purdah, it seemed to me, our own yashmaks and chadors.”

Nevertheless, he's contemptuous about the well-meaning sensitivity workshops they shuttle us professors to, and the increasingly restrictive campus codes that instill “paranoid extremes of self-monitoring.” Of course, everyone who's not a sexual idiot knows that the price of employment in academia these days is that these wayward libidos of ours have to be throttled into obedience. But I suspect that even extremes of self-monitoring won't prevent professors from sparking the occasional imaginative chord in a student—and sometimes excessively imaginative ones.

What sets Lasdun's account of his experience apart is that as much as Nasreen's hate campaign derailed him, he's too exquisitely attuned to the daily difficulties of libidinal self-management—his own as well as his students'—to entirely pardon himself for it either. He's also uncomfortably aware of the extent to which the two of them came to mirror one another. “Her obsession with me achieved perfect symmetry: I became just as obsessed with her.”

If there's a moral to this grim little story, it's that acting out prohibited desires isn't the only way to cause mayhem: regard the rancid turns that
not
acting on them can sometimes take. Lasdun's misfortune was to encounter someone whose obsessions he fired, and who refused to let him off the hook for not following through on what he thinks he never implied.

 

The Lothario

Via the grapevine I hear some startling news. Humorist Patricia Marx's oddly titled new novel,
Him Her Him Again the End of Him,
is apparently a roman à clef about an ex-boyfriend of hers, who happens to be someone I myself dated at one time too. Life is long and the world is small, so it stands to reason that you will occasionally encounter an ex turning up as a thinly disguised character in another of his previous girlfriends' satiric novels, but I feel a momentary rush of annoyance anyway. Dammit, why didn't I think of this first? He would have made such great material! I could have really skewered him! Then I remember that I'm not a novelist, nor a memoirist, and when I enter the ex's name in my carefully cultivated internal database of animus toward men, the hostility meter barely flutters. Still, you can probably understand why I was most eager to get my hands on an advance copy of this book.

A swirl of pre-publication rumor also leads me to believe that the ex gets quite a working-over from Marx. He was indeed something of a Lothario. Although short, he got around quite a bit, at least among a certain type of woman—the type I'm likely to encounter socially, it appears, as I keep running into other women who were also involved with him at some point, though thankfully none of us overlapped, which could prove awkward. But I was well aware that he cast a wide net: I recall mentioning his name once to my then hairstylist and even he knew someone who'd previously gone out with the man.

With this material, I figured Marx—a former writer for
Saturday Night Live
—could do a lot. The first woman elected to the
Harvard Lampoon,
she now writes occasional comic pieces for the
New Yorker,
meaning that she's been certified by various arbiters of American humor as “a funny woman.” This is an exceedingly rare genus, at least according to a notorious throw-down by the late Christopher Hitchens in a 2007 issue of
Vanity Fair
titled “Why Women Aren't Funny.” When it comes to sexual politics, Hitchens liked to get the ladies hoppin'. His argument is that men are simply more motivated than women to be funny since men want sex from women, whereas we females can get it anytime, on demand. And if a guy can get a girl to laugh—real open-mouthed, teeth-exposed, “involuntary, full and deep-throated mirth … well then, you have at least caused her to loosen up and to change her expression.” (You know what he means:
deep-throated.
) Women also aren't funny because women are the ones who have to bear the children, these children might die, and you can't really make jokes about that.

Now, this is a fascinating portrait of female nature and relations between the sexes, though it's unclear which decade he had in mind: it has the slightly musty air of 1960-ish Kingsley Amis, wrapped in nostalgia for the merry days when sexual conquest required an arsenal of tactics deployed by bon-vivantish cads on girdled, girlish sexual holdouts. “
Oh, Mr. Hitchens!
” you imagine one of the potential conquests squealing at an errant hand on nylon-clad knee.
1

As if to set Hitchens straight on what women really go for in a man, the unnamed heroine of Marx's novel—unnamed because it's written in the first person, meaning you have to keep pinching yourself to avoid falling into the biographical fallacy—is pathetically eager to have sex whenever possible with a man possessing absolutely no sense of humor whatsoever. The titular “him” is Eugene Lobello, a philosopher and academic Lothario who relieves the inexperienced protagonist of her unwanted virginity at the advanced age of twenty-one, while both are postgraduates at Cambridge. Not only is Eugene the furthest thing from funny there is, he's also utterly charmless, except, inexplicably, to the insecure and constantly self-deprecating heroine. Her friends all think he's a pretentious twit who's jerking her around, but having bestowed the gift of her virginity on him, she's apparently able to forgive him any form of churlish behavior. All she really wants is for the purportedly brilliant and infinitely narcissistic Eugene to think she's smart, thus she specializes in the erudite quip, a source of some of the book's funnier moments. On William Empson: “Don't you think a better title would be
Seven or Eight Types of Ambiguity
?”

There's nothing more alluring for many of us independent women than an unavailable boyfriend, and Eugene plays the role to the hilt, not least when he dumps the heroine to marry and impregnate the annoying and sniffly Margaret. (Quips our abandoned protagonist: “Hypochondriacs make me sick.”) Her creative solution to Eugene's romantic flight is to rent the apartment directly above the newlyweds, where she can smell the curry odors wafting up from the dinner parties they don't invite her to. Marx is adept at sending up the familiar terrain of Women Who Love Too Much—you'd definitely like to get this girl on Dr. Phil for one of his tough-talking butt-kickings. But the fact that the humor usually ends up being far more at the heroine's expense than at Eugene's creates a more curdled than comic feeling. Eugene may be the ostensible target—saddled with cringe-inducing lines like “Your kisses are so recondite, my peach, that they are almost notional”—but she's the one who so relentlessly
loves
such a buffoon.

It's also disconcerting that these characters live in such different comedic universes: he's cartoonish, obtuse as an Oxbridge Homer Simpson, while her self-reflections have the ring of real human pondering and pain. Let me qualify that: real
female
human pondering and pain. It's not that men don't sometimes conduct themselves in a pathetic fashion when it comes to romance, but when they do they're “acting like little girls,” in the current idiom—romantic dippiness is popularly coded as female. The heroine isn't unaware that Eugene doesn't love her, and that arguing and pleading and phoning a lot is a good way to “make someone who was hitherto lukewarm really detest you.” Unfortunately, the less he loves her, the more convinced she becomes that “he and I could have been just the thing.”

And remains convinced, against all odds. Seven years later, Eugene turns up in New York, where our still terminally insecure narrator now resides, having landed and been fired from a number of jobs (including one as a writer on a
Saturday Night Live
–like TV show called
Taped But Proud
), and she readily takes up with him once again. Eugene is in training to become a psychoanalyst (as a philosopher, he'd specialized in “ego studies,”
ha ha
), and, though still married to Margaret, he lures the heroine into an affair that drags on for years. As a shrink, he's no more reliable than as a boyfriend: his pillow talk consists of divulging all his patients' secrets, and in the end it turns out he's been sleeping with one of his more attractive analysands, for whom he—yet again!—summarily dumps the heroine.

If there's humor to be milked from the common but wretched plight of loving someone who doesn't love you back, or from the variety of self-abnegating female behavior on display here, let's call it the humor of painful recognition. To the extent that it's funny, the comedy hinges on our willingness to recognize the element of truth in the parody. It struck me, while reading Marx's book, that the humor of painful recognition is an inherently conservative social form, especially when it comes to conventional gender behaviors, because it just further hardens such behaviors into “the way things are.” The laughter depends on our recognizing the world as it is, and leaving it the way we found it. Like all cathartic laughter, it questions nothing. (This was Brecht's objection to catharsis in theater, which leaves audiences complacent and sheeplike; expelling our emotions instead of reflecting on what caused them.) By contrast, consider the comic sensibility of someone like Sarah Silverman. At her best, Silverman's scalding humor, delivered in that faux-naïf girly voice, leaves exactly nothing the same. When she takes on female abjection—most famously, “I was raped by a doctor. Which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl”—clichés are defamiliarized and demolished; the world as it was is turned on its ear. The laughter isn't the laughter of painful recognition, it's the shock of sledgehammering feminine shame and smearing menstrual blood all over its covenants, not deferring to them with a chuckle.