Men (9 page)

Then everyone wanted to get on the bandwagon, to the point that memoirs began vying with the novel for literary cultural dominance, and may well have nosed ahead, in sales at least. But even if it's widely suspected (or muttered) that rampant narcissism more than bravery now fuels this sort of thing, luckily there's a corresponding rampant voyeurism about other people's private pain on the part of the reading public, who can't seem to get their fill of real-life miseries and foibles.

With male writers increasingly swept up in the confessional momentum, at least we're getting a less mythical vantage on men's inner lives, and closer-to-the-gut material than the familiar Successful Guy musings about careers well played and lives fully led. There's more vulnerability on view: anxiety and depression, divorce and destitution, urinary and other embarrassing conditions—the sorts of afflictions and woes that were once the hallmark of women's memoirs. It turns out that women have no monopoly on even classically “female” ailments: men have eating disorders too, men have trouble “down there,” and now comes news that men too get sexually harassed, sometimes for years on end.

If there were a Harasser of the Year award it would have to go to Nasreen, a student in a graduate fiction-writing class that Lasdun, the English-born author of several exquisitely strange books of fiction and poetry, taught in New York in 2003—like many midlist authors, he's also an itinerant creative-writing professor on the side. Then in her early thirties, Nasreen had fled Iran for the US with her family during the revolution, which provided the setting for an ambitious novel-in-progress. She'd been polite and self-contained in class, meaning Lasdun learned only a few minimal facts about her at the time: she had a fiancé, she was a Muslim, she had talent. Two years later she emails him out of the blue, asking him to read a new draft of work he'd previously praised; he begs off by offering to put her in touch with his agent.

They start corresponding anyway—at first it's just chatty, soon a little flirtatious. Living a secluded country life upstate at the time, Lasdun admits that though he's happily married he doesn't mind being flirted with. Writers
are
especially prone to email flirtations, in my experience. There you are, sequestered at your keyboard hour after desperate hour, trying futilely to harness the vagaries of mental life into the discipline of prose, and email flirting is a far less taxing, though not entirely dissimilar, enterprise. At least it provides someone other than your own inner critic to commune with. In this case, Lasdun feels some actual affinity with Nasreen: they're on the same wavelength, he thinks; he genuinely admires her writing. Except that soon her emails are flooding his inbox, followed by pictures, then flirtation escalates into propositions—she offers to smuggle herself aboard a cross-country train trip he'll shortly be taking and constructs suggestive reveries about what they might get up to together on board. Alarmed, he reminds her that he's married, telling her bluntly that he doesn't want to be a figment in anyone's fantasies. In other words, he does and says all the correct things.

But once on the train he finds himself fantasizing about her too. “A sexual overture, however firmly resisted, is registered in a part of the psyche that has no interest at all in propriety or fidelity.… If the person making the overture is attractive and interesting, then that part of the psyche regards it as a matter of course that you will go ahead and sleep with them, and in fact regards it as a deeply unnatural act to choose not to.” Lasdun's wonderfully frank on the hairy business of possessing a libido: the sad truth is that you and it are never entirely on the same team, are you? A libido is
not
an entirely trustworthy partner on one's journey through life. There you are, innocently going about your business, buying stamps or meeting with students, and some scene of astonishing perversity proposes itself to your brain as if out of nowhere, as though you weren't really as upstanding and circumspect as you know yourself to be. So when Nasreen's emails take a sudden ugly turn—“You fucking faggot coward, say something!” she demands in the face of Lasdun's newly cautious silence—however blameless he is in reality, having been a teensy bit roused by her provocations makes him feel, at some not entirely rational level, a teensy bit complicit in them. “When an attractive person makes you an offer like this, she or he establishes a powerful link to your own psyche, and whether or not you are interested in pursuing it, a whole new world of erotic possibility has become … latently present in your imagination,” he rationalizes.

Then the accusations start escalating: He's ripping off her life for his work, he's guilty of emotional rape, racism, sexually exploiting students, and worse. Middle Eastern politics becomes a motif, which devolves into anti-Semitic insults and Holocaust gibes: “I think the holocaust was fucking funny.…” “Look, muslims are not like their Jewish counterparts, who quietly got gassed and then cashed in on it.” “Your family is dead you ugly JEW.” The ongoing hate mail is “like swallowing a cup of poison every morning, with usually a few more cupfuls to follow later in the day”—just one of the many arresting sentences Lasdun manages to wrench from this increasingly ugly situation. When Nasreen takes to smearing him all over the Internet and writing accusation-laden letters to the schools that employ him, he realizes he should start worrying about his reputation. If he doesn't get hired to teach a course, how will he know whether it was Nasreen's hate campaign that did him in with a would-be employer? He can't exactly
ask.

But the unease goes deeper. Maybe it's because having an unseen tormentor is so close to the equivocal world of dreamlife, where you're always guilty of some prior crime you can't remember having committed. And Nasreen is nothing if not psychologically shrewd: she has an uncanny way of intuiting his neuroses and insecurities, of getting under his skin; she reads him like a hostile psychoanalyst. Or maybe like a character from one of his own books—as a dedicated stalker she's obviously also an ardent student of his work, which gives her a leg up at penetrating his defenses. Literary criticism is a paranoid endeavor in the best of cases: critics are always looking for what's beneath the surface, finding hidden patterns and connections that no one else sees. Nasreen's special talents in this area equip her to become Lasdun's very best reader. Plumbing his publications for buried messages and truths, eventually she knows his work better than he does, proposing subtle interpretations he can't help being intrigued by. I think most writers would acknowledge that there's something about being astutely read that's kind of erotic—someone who reads you shrewdly has already burrowed rather deeply into your being, penetrated your social armor. It's happened to me occasionally: someone says something you hadn't thought of about your work and you suddenly feel an unaccountable little … spark.

What makes this turn of events all the more uncanny for Lasdun is that a decade earlier he'd written a dark campus novel,
The Horned Man,
with motifs strikingly similar to the situation in which he now finds himself. The upright Lawrence Miller—a gender-studies instructor, no less—is being hounded by a malevolent émigré disgraced former professor named Trumilcik, and possibly framed for a series of sex crimes. Except that Lawrence is not what you'd call a reliable narrator. He moves through life in a dreamy fashion while people project things onto him, develop elaborate hatreds, and engineer sabotage. Or so he reports. Bad things just keep befalling him, out of nowhere. But is this Trumilcik even real? Or is he the rectitude-obsessed professor's alter ego—the return of the repressed? “How I had managed to lay myself open to an act of such preposterously elaborate vindictiveness,” the hapless Lawrence wonders—“with a pertinence I struggle to find coincidental,” adds Lasdun now, driven by subsequent real-life events to plumb his own backlist for portents. It's as though he and his protagonist had changed places—or even more peculiarly, as though the authorial unconscious can engineer the future.

A sly Freudianism sluices through Lasdun's oeuvre: fantasy and reality aren't nearly as separable as the rational person would prefer. People who pride themselves on virtue keep ending up mysteriously sullied, in ways that mirror their desires and ambivalences. In his story “Cleanness,” a son, decked out in rented formalwear, drives to his father's wedding to a much younger woman. After a series of wrong turns on unfamiliar country roads and other mishaps, he arrives to find he's missed the nuptials. He's also—accidentally? inevitably?—covered in sewage. No matter: his disturbingly attractive new stepmother clasps the shit-covered stepson to her frilly bosom anyway. The Oedipal and the excremental: what fertile turf Lasdun makes of them! Shit just happens, as in
The Horned Man,
when Lawrence, having benevolently left money in his office for Trumilcik, who may be camping there at night, returns to find the bills replaced by a coiled turd. Amateur Freudians will be cackling at the inside joke: money
=
shit in psychoanalytic symbology. (Anal types wish to retain both—yes, the relation between spending and toilet training is something all of us need to ponder thoroughly.)

The theme of exchanges and equivalences sets the Nasreen story in motion too: Lasdun offers career help; in return Nasreen shits all over him and plants fart jokes on his Wikipedia page. You can't help noticing that Lasdun's antic real-life tormentor seems cut from similar cloth as the id-like Trumilcik; that the atmosphere of ontological guilt
The Horned Man
summons echoes the self-interrogations of
Give Me Everything.
Is it fair to say that Lasdun authored both these foes? They certainly inhabit the same aesthetic universe, cronies in gleeful malevolence.

If Lasdun cuts Nasreen to suit his aesthetic temperament, it goes both ways. Nasreen generates a running commentary on her tactics, as if stalking were a form of performance art and she's an innovator in the field. She gets overly entranced with her role as an email terrorist, fancying herself as some kind of voice for the downtrodden. Though Lasdun doesn't mention her, she brings to mind Andy Warhol's would-be assassin, Valerie Solanas, whose
SCUM Manifesto
was equally crazed and paranoid, though with flashes of brilliant insight. (SCUM stood for Society for Cutting up Men, though it was a society of one.) Lasdun too can't help acknowledging the aesthetic dimensions of Nasreen's mischief-making exuberance: each of them is creating the other, he reflects; some Gothic transposition of consciousness has occurred.

Improbable though it sounds, she becomes a kind of muse. Even though the ordeal turns him into a depressed, sleepless monomaniac, he's able to finish a story he'd been stalled on for a decade, finally understanding the desperation of a female character whose motives had eluded him. Eventually, of course, it occurs to him that a great trove of material had fallen into his lap, with Nasreen's malign intelligence releasing the creative energy in him to fuel a book. One of the pleasures of reading the results is how deeply we're embedded in the mucky war zone of the writer's imagination, spying on him while he grapples with his bizarre misfortune, and with Nasreen herself, finally wrestling the narrative away from her and remolding it into his own.

I did find myself wondering, in a practical-minded way, if it would have been wiser to just stop reading the horrible emails. Surprisingly, it's Lasdun's wife (mentioned only passingly) who advises him not to break off the correspondence with Nasreen, worried about inflaming her further. Then a police detective tells him he
has
to keep reading them in case there are actual—that is, legally actionable—threats. Though once there are actual threats no one's willing to do anything anyway—what you learn here is that law enforcement has no means of dealing with this sort of thing, thus prefers to ignore it. When Lasdun's local police department finally agrees to warn Nasreen by phone to lay off (by this point she's living in another state), she's imperiously unfazed.

In the meantime, Lasdun's growing more and more obsessed with his situation, turning himself inside out to decide what level of responsibility he bears for it. He feels unclean, living in the midst of Nasreen's onslaughts of hatred, yet can't stop thinking about her or talking about the situation to anyone who'll listen. He realizes he's becoming a bore, but then people with idées fixes invariably are.

But I sympathize with the obsessionality. Most of us who've taught for any length of time have had the occasional unhinged student, with various forms of unpleasantness ensuing. I myself was once targeted by such a student, and though the worst it ever got was incessant hang-up phone calls, it
was
weirdly preoccupying: I felt like I was being singled out by some unseen malignant force, like someone had it in for me in some personal way. Which turned out to be the case, though in fact I wasn't the true obsessional object: it was my ex-boyfriend, another professor in the same department. We'd only recently broken up after a long stormy entanglement, and I was in an unmoored state as it was (news alert: if you break up with someone you work with, daily painful reminders of his existence will become the substance of your workday). Then here comes this crazy former student of his, also apparently unmoored by him, who'd started calling both of us day and night and hanging up. Except that I didn't know it was a crazy student until, fed up with the hang-ups, I put the wheels of telephonic justice in motion, launching an investigation.

Unfortunately this ended badly for the student, whom I'll call Sharna, because a number of the hang-ups turned out to be coming, weirdly, from the state attorney general's office. I had a flash of Kafkaesque paranoia—what did they want with me? What did they know? When I finally contacted them, with no little indignation, the calls were tracked to Sharna, who'd been employed there doing something clerical after graduating, and was soon out of a job. When I learned her name and the other number she'd been calling, I of course contacted my ex, which I'd been desperately wanting to do for weeks. He was curt, saying he'd assumed the hang-up calls had been from me. I did learn an interesting fact from him, which was that Sharna had been in a couple of his classes, and they'd gone out for coffee once after she graduated. He insisted that was all there was, though allowed that maybe she'd had a bit of a crush on him. I had no idea how she knew about us in the first place as we'd tried to keep our thing a secret (including from our colleagues), but I suppose girls with crushes have special powers of observation. I did briefly wonder if anything else had happened between them, but by then at least the hang-ups had ceased.