My Life as a Man (11 page)

It was the accumulation of small details that gave Lydia
’
s stories such distinction as they had. With painstaking diligence she chronicled the habits and attitudes of her aunts, as though with each precise detail she was hurling a small stone back through her past at those pinch-faced
little
persecutors. From
the fiction it appeared that
the
favorite subject in that household was, oddly enough,
“
the body.
”
“
The body surely does not require that much milk on a bowl of puffed oats, my dear.
”
“
The body will take only so much abuse, and then it will
halk.
”
And so on. Unfortunately, small details, accurately observed and fla
tly
rendered, did not much interest the rest of
the
class unless the detail was
“
symbolic
”
or sensational. Those who most hated Lydia
’
s stories were Agniashvily, an elderly Russian
émigré
who wrote original
“
Ribald Classics
”
(in Georgian, and translated into English for
the
class by his stepson, a restaurateur by trade) aimed at the
Playboy
“
market
”
; Todd, a cop who could not go two hundred words into a narrative without a little something running in the gutter (blood, urine,
“
Sergeant Darling
’
s dinner
”
) and was a devotee (I was not—we clashed) of the O. Henry ending; the Negro woman, Mrs. Corbett, who was a file clerk with the Prudential during the day and at night wrote the most transparent and pathetic pipe dreams about a collie dog romping around a dairy farm in snow-covered Minnesota; Shaw, an
“
ex-newspaperman
”
with an adjectival addiction, who was always quoting to us
something
that
“
Max
”
Perkins had said to
“
Tom
”
Wolfe, seemingly in Shaw
’
s presence; and a
fastidious
male nurse named Wertz, who from his corner seat in the last row had with his teacher what is called
“
a love-hate
”
relationship. Lydia
’
s most ardent admirers, aside from myself, were two
“
ladies,
”
one who ran a religious bookshop in Highland Park and rather magnified the moral lessons to be drawn from Lydia
’
s fiction, and
the
other, Mrs. Slater, an angular, striking housewife from
Fl
ossmoor, who wore heather-colored suits to class and wrote
“
bittersweet
”
stories which concluded usually with two characters
“
inadvertently touching.
”
Mrs. Slater
’
s remarkable legs were generally directly under my nose, crossing and uncrossing, and making that whishing sound of nylon moving against nylon
that
I could hear even over the earnestness of my own voice. Her eyes were gray and eloquent:
“
I am forty years old, all I do is shop and pick up
the
children. I live for this
class. I live for our conferences. Touch me, adverten
tly
or inadvertently
. I won
’
t say no or tell my husband.
”

In all there were eighteen of them and, with the exception of my religionist, not one who seemed to smoke less than a pack a night. They wrote on the backs of order forms and office stationery; they wrote in pencil and in multicolored inks; they forgot to number pages or to put them in order (less frequen
tl
y, however, than I thought). Oftentimes the first sheet of a story would be stained with food spots, or several of the pages would be stuck
together
, in Mrs. Slater
’
s case with glue spilled by a child, in the case of Mr. Wertz, the male nurse, with what I took to be semen spilled by himself.

When the class got into a debate as to whether a story was
“
universal
”
in its implications or a character was
“
sympathetic,
”
there was often no way, short of gassing them, of getting them off the subject for the rest of the night. They judged
the
people in one another
’
s fiction not as though each was a collection of attributes (a mustache, a limp, a southern drawl) to which
the
author had arbitrarily assigned a Christian name, but as though they were discussing human souls about to be consigned to Hades or elevated to sainthood—depending upon which the class decided. It was the most vociferous among them who had the least taste or interest in the low-keyed or the familiar, and my admiration for Lydia
’
s stories would practically drive them crazy; invariably I raised
somebody
’
s
hackles, when I read aloud, as an example they might follow, something like Lydia
’
s simple description of the way in which her two aunts each had laid out on a doily in the bedroom her hairbrush, comb, hairpins, toothbrush, dish of Lifebuoy, and tin of dental powder. I would read a passage like this:
“
Aunt Helda, while listening to Father Coughlin reasoning with the twenty thousand Christians gathered in Briggs Stadium, would continually be clearing her throat, as though it were she who was to be called upon to speak next.
”
Such sentences were undoubtedly not so rich and supple as to deserve the sort of extensive, praiseful exegesis I would wind
up giving them, but by comparison with most of the prose I read that semester, Mrs. Ketterer
’
s line describing Aunt Helda listening to the radio in the 1940s might have been lifted from
Mansfield Park.

I wanted to hang a sign over my desk saying ANYONE IN THIS CLASS CAUGHT USING HIS IMAGINATION WILL BE SHOT. I would put it more gently when, in the parental sense, I lectured them.
“
You just cannot deliver up fantasies and call that
‘
fiction.
’
Ground your stories in what you know. Stick to that. O
the
rwise you tend, some of you, toward the pipe dream and the nightmare, toward the grandiose and the romantic—and that
’
s no good. Try to be precise, accurate, measured
…
”
“
Yeah? What about Tom Wolfe,
”
asked the lyrical ex-newspaperman Shaw,
“
would you call that measured, Zuckerman?
”
(No Mister or Professor from him to a kid half his age.)
“
What about prose-poetry, you against that too?
”
Or Agniashvily, in his barrel-deep Russian brogue, would berate me with Spillane
—“
And so how come he
’
s gotten million in print, Professor?
”
Or Mrs. Slater would ask, in conference, in-adverten
tly
touching my sleeve,
“
But
you
wear a tweed jacket, Mr. Zuckerman. Why is it
‘
dreamy
’
—I don
’
t understand—if Craig in my
story
wears
—“
I couldn
’
t listen.
“
And the pipe, Mrs. Slater: now why do you
think
you have him continually puffing on that pipe?
”
“
But men
smoke
pipes.
”
“
Dreamy, Mrs. Slater, too damn dreamy.
”
“
But
—“
“
Look, write a story about shopping at Carson
’
s, Mrs. Slater! Write about your afternoon at Saks!
”
“
Yes?
”
“
Yes! Yes! Yes!
”

Oh, yes, when it came to grandiosity and dreaminess, to all manifestations of self-inflating romance, I had no reservations about giving them a taste of the Zuckerman lash. Those were the only times I lost my temper, and of course losing it was always calculated and deliberate: scrupulous.

Pent-up rage,
by the way—that was the meaning
the
army psychiatrist had assigned to my migraines. He had asked whether I liked my father better t
han my mother, how I felt about
heights and crowds, and what I planned to do when I was returned to civilian life, and concluded from my answers that I was a vessel of
pent-up rage.
Another poet, this one in uniform, bearing
the
rank of captain.

My friends (my only real enemy is dead now, though my censurers are plentiful)—my friends, I earned those two hundred and fifty dollars teaching
“
Creative Writing
”
in a night school, every penny of it. For whatever it may or may not
“
mean,
”
I didn
’
t once that semester get a migraine on a Monday, not that I wasn
’
t tempted to take a crack at it when a tough-guy story by Patrolman Todd or a bittersweet one by Mrs. Slater was on the block for the evening
…
No, to be frank, I counted it a blessing of sorts when the headaches happened to fall on the weekend, on my time off. My superiors in the college and downtown were sympathetic and assured me that I wasn
’
t about to lose my job because I had to be out ill
“
from time to time,
”
and up to a point I believed them; still, to be disabled on a Saturday or a Sunday was to me far less spiritually debilitating than to have to ask the indulgence of either my colleagues or students.

Whatever erotic curiosity had been aroused in me by Lydia
’
s pretty, girlish, Scandinavian block of a head—and odd as it will sound to some, by the exoticism of the blighted middle western Protestant background she wrote about and had managed to survive in one piece—was decidedly outweighed by my conviction that I would be betraying my vocation, and doing damage to my self-esteem, if I were to take one of my students to bed. As I have said, suppressing feelings and desires extraneous to the purpose that had brought us together seemed to me crucial to the success of the transaction—as I must have called it then, the pedagogical transaction—all
owing each of us to be as teach
erly or as studen
tly
as was within his power, without wasting time and spirit being provocative, charming, duplicitous, touchy, jealous, scheming, etc. You could do all that out in the street; only in the classroom, as far as I knew, was it possible to approach one another with the intensity ordinarily associated with
love, yet cleansed of emotional extremism and tree of base motives having to do with profit and power. To be sure, on more than a few occasions, my night class was as perplexing as a Kafka courtroom, and my composition classes as wearisome as any assembly line, but that our effort was characterized at bottom by modesty and mutual trust, and conducted as ingenuously as dignity would permit, was indisputable. Whether it was Mrs. Corbett
’
s innocent and ardent question about how to address a friendly letter to a little girl or my own no less innocent and ardent introductory lecture to which she was responding, what we said to one another was not uttered in the name of anything vile or even mundane. At twenty-four, dressed up like a man in a clean white shirt and a tie, and bearing chalk powder on the tails of my worn tweed jacket, that seemed to me a
truth
to be held self-evident. Oh, how I wanted a soul that was pure and spo
tl
ess!

In Lydia
’
s case, professorial discretion was helped along some, or I should have thought it would be, by that rolling, mannish gait of hers. Tire first time she entered my class I actually wondered if she could be some kind of gymnast or acrobat, perhaps a member of a women
’
s track and field association; I was reminded of those photographs in the popular magazines of the strong blue-eyed women athletes who win medals at the Olympic games for the Soviet Union. Yet her shoulders were as touchingly narrow as a child
’
s, and her skin pale and almost luminously soft. Only from the waist to the floor did she seem to be moving on the body of my sex rather than her own.

Within the month I had seduced her, as much against her inclination and principles as my own. It was standard enough procedure, pretty much what Mrs. Slater must have had in mind: a conference alone together in my office, a train ride side by side on the IC back to Hyde Park, an invitation to a beer at my local tavern, the flirtatious walk to her apartment, the request by me for coffee, if she would make me some. She begged me to think twice about what I was doing, e
ven after she had returned from
the bathroom where she had inserted her diaphragm and I had removed her underpants for the second time and was hunched, unclothed, over her small, ill-proportioned body, preparatory to entering her. She was distressed, she was amused, she was frightened, she was mystified.