The Madwoman Upstairs (4 page)

The concept of a faculty wing was an unusual one at Oxford; in most of its colleges, professors worked and lived alongside their students in the residential quarters. Such was the case at Old College until 1811, when the faculty took over this old manor. I took the back route to avoid today’s tour groups. The walk wasn’t nearly as scenic, thanks to all the weeds, and as I neared the rear of the Faculty Wing, I happened upon a small, abandoned freshwater well. It was old and ugly. I hadn’t noticed it the last time I was there. It reminded me of the portable toilet I had once spied behind Buckingham Palace. Perhaps it had been Photoshopped out of all the postcards.

In a few minutes, I reached the front of the building and found the entrance. The solemn stone walls were scarred and battered, as if by too many catapult wounds. Inside, the foyer was wide and dark, like an elegant prison, and smelled of old honey and rum. There were two stuffed bison heads above the doorway and an old urn at the center of the room, out of which several denuded branches emerged like antlers.

Orville’s office was on the third floor of the West Wing, as he had explained in his last e-mail. I climbed a glorious staircase the width of a yacht, and there it was, unavoidable—the English department, visible to all passersby thanks to the giant banner that read, in Latin:
From One Example Learn All.
I walked down a deserted, umbilical corridor. It was lined with closed doors, labeled with surnames: Milton, Norris, Northington. Then, Orville. The door was closed, with a sign on the outside:
Tute in Session: Kindly Leave
. I took a seat on one of the rickety chairs nearby and waited. A sheen of sweat ripened over my body.

Soon, the door to Orville’s office swung open and a wild-eyed student erupted, sobbing and furious. Her boots made angry taps as she stormed down the corridor, hair bouncing behind her. I stayed put until the noise of her heels grew soft and then disappeared. I smoothed my palms over my jeans and entered Orville’s dimly lit room, which smelled as though an animal had just been smoked. The curtains were bloodred and drawn. This was not an office. It was a small library, two stories high, with thin ladders and impractical balconies and an expensive ceiling featuring a gaggle of naked Greeks. It was the sort of library you’d marry a man for.

Orville was sitting in an orange chair by the fireplace, not smiling. I saw a small stack of papers on the table in front of him, as well as a tea set and a pocket-size
Magna Carta
. I approached slowly.

“Welcome to your first tutorial,” he said. His five o’clock shadow was gone, and in its place was ruthlessly scrubbed skin.

“Thank you.”

He motioned toward the tray on the table. “Coffee or tea?”

“Do you have any hot chocolate?”

“This isn’t a restaurant.”

“Sorry.”

“Sit,” he said. “No, not there. Farther away, please. Yes, that’s right. You will sit over there; I will sit here.”

I moved away from the chair next to him and took a seat on the opposite couch.

“Nice office,” I said.

“Yes, it is, isn’t it?” he said. “It was a battle to secure this one. It has the finest views of the gardens—do you see? Ah, the curtains are drawn.”

I said, “Are all these books yours?”

“Of course they’re all mine.” His chin tilted up; he might have been speaking about his children.

“What did you do to the girl who just left?” I asked.

“Eliza did not complete
Ulysses
. I take my tutorials very seriously. If you do not feel as though you are emotionally equipped to perform, please leave now.”

I said, “I’ll be fine.”

“Very well,” he said. “Let’s get on with it. Please tell me about ‘Porphyria’s Lover.’ ”

“Sure,” I said. “It was pretty bad.”

“Pardon?”

“I thought it was a terrible poem. Really awful.”

He blinked. “Try to be more articulate, please.”

I waited. He waited. I crossed my legs. What did he want? I was an essayist, not a public speaker. If he wanted to know my opinion, he should have read the twenty-two hours of thought I had already poured onto the page in front of him.

“Bad,” I said. “It was a bad poem. Did you read my essay?”

Orville regarded me for a moment, then reached for the paper in front of him. He held my essay between his thumb and forefinger, like a dish towel. “You mean this?”

He tossed it to me. It landed with a small splat on my side of the table, like he was belching out the last of his lunch. There were no double check marks written on it, like there always had been for me in high school. Now, red scribbles bled into the page. I picked it up. The first comment in the right-hand margin read,
This is a pathetic sentence.

“Read me your opening paragraph,” he instructed.

“I can’t,” I said. “You’ve crossed out most of it.”

“Read what’s left.”

My breathing was shallow. I was supposed to be good at this, I reminded myself. Hadn’t I applied to Oxford as a literature major? Rational, methodical, systematic pieces of analysis were my forte. The heat gathered in my cheeks and it occurred to me that years from now, when I was old and bedridden with some twenty-first-century plague, I would feel grateful that I was not in this office.

I cleared my throat and read my own writing aloud: “ ‘Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” appears to be a poem about beauty.’ ”

I stopped. Orville had begun gently stroking the wood of his armrest like it was the snout of a giant, drooling pet tiger.

I looked back at the page and continued: “ ‘However, beauty in the poem proves to be as illusory as the narrator’s sanity.’ Should I go on?”

“Please don’t.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Is your writing always so flat and uninteresting?”

“Only when I don’t like the subject matter.”

“Everyone dislikes that which they cannot understand.” Before I could respond, he said, “Why don’t you tell me what you were trying to argue. I couldn’t read past page seven.”

My cheeks flamed. My feel-good, every-opinion-is-valid high school had not prepared me for a one-on-one tutorial. High school had taught me that classrooms were a safe space where every opinion was right. It was an environment in which Ophelia could be compared to both Dido and the hooker from
Pretty Woman
and no one would object. Once upon a time, I used to be comfortable with confrontation, but that had been a long time ago, when my father was still my sole tutor. Now, I felt rusty, like a cheerleader trying to squeeze back into her uniform after gaining a hundred and forty-five pounds.

I cleared my throat. “All I mean is that for a poem about the preservation of beauty, the poem itself isn’t beautiful.”

“What do you mean, the poem isn’t beautiful?”

“It’s about a man who strangles his lover with her own hair,” I said.

“And you don’t find that beautiful.”

“Do
you
?”

Orville stood up and walked to the fireplace, so that his back was toward me. I imagined he was contemplating what a waste of a Brontë I was.

“What about the exquisitely sensual way in which he kills her?” he said. “He wraps a strand of her own hair around her neck, treating her body as a work of art—a temple of aesthetic pleasure. Her beauty is so ephemeral that the only way to preserve its perfection is, paradoxically, to destroy it. You have overlooked the poem’s nuances.”

“What nuances?” I said. “The poem is not subtle at all. It’s written in blunt, simple, stupid words. The speaker is a madman and a murderer and a lunatic. He doesn’t even say that the woman he kills is attractive. You’re imagining a beauty that does not exist.” For good measure, I added, “Sir.”

He turned back to face me. “Do you honestly believe that beauty cannot exist in something that does not appear to be beautiful?”

No,
I thought to myself.
Yes. No.
I decided not to answer the question. I said, “You’re changing the definition of ‘beautiful.’ ”

“You’re forgetting the subjective nature of beauty.”

“You’re wrong to think that beauty is subjective.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No,” I said. “People know what’s beautiful, and Browning gets that. He is making a fool out of you.”

“Me?” Orville said.

“Yes. You. The poem is ugly and Browning knew it. The point was to see how many delusional academics he could trick into thinking it was worth analyzing.”

There—right there. Both of Orville’s eyebrows raised at the same time.

“And for that matter,” I continued, “if you believe what you say, then you shouldn’t find fault with this stunning piece of poetry I provided for you.” I tossed my essay back at him. “You are simply unable to see the inner beauty in my deplorable lack of passion.”

There was a small pause. Orville almost smiled. “Do you take me for a fool, Samantha?”

“Do you really want me to answer that question?” I blurted.

He stopped. My cheeks flamed. “Well,” he said, “now we’re getting somewhere.”

With that, we began the tutorial in earnest. The next hour passed in a state of intense discomfort. Orville told me that my sentences were bland, and had I ever read something called a stylebook? I informed him that I was merely exercising artistic license. He explained that my inverted commas were used incorrectly and that, anyway, I should really have a look at the
Oxford English Dictionary
. I told him that I didn’t know what an inverted comma was and that he should take this argument up with my muse. He seemed terribly content, as though he knew no finer pleasure than arguing over line breaks and semicolons and adverbs. I wondered what the women in his life thought of that.

I did manage to learn a few things over the course of the morning. First, overusing the word
and
betrayed my limited understanding of elegant writing; second, some people actually did know what the word
heteronormative
meant; third, my sarcasm was not helpful, thank you very much. I learned that only Americans refer to their tutors as professors; at Oxford they were generally dons or fellows, so I should kindly note that. I thought I might relax into the rhythm of the tutorial, given enough time, but my posture was stiff from beginning to end. Orville was terrifyingly articulate. Had his entire vocabulary been limited to twelve words, I’m sure he would have found a way to include
discursive
.

“There is one thing I am curious about,” he said, as we neared what was either the end of the tutorial or the end of time. I considered mentioning that he had just ended his last thought with a preposition, but thought better of it.

“If we might,” he said, “I’d like to return to your accusation that the narrator of this poem is a madman.”

I glanced at his grandfather clock, which was broken. “We only have three minutes left,” I guessed.

He didn’t move. “So speak quickly.”

I did my best to summon my thoughts out of their tortured stupor. “The narrator is a madman. What is there to debate? That’s why it’s juvenile to call this a great piece of art. People have a bad habit of assuming that anything insane is automatically profound. Ergo.”

“Ergo what?”

I frowned. “Ergo, that’s it.”

“You cannot say ‘ergo’ without something following it.”

My face grew red. It was one of my grammatical inaccuracies that my father must have found too amusing to correct.

I said, “Ergo, authors uniformly assume madness is deep. They’re wrong. Sometimes, insane people aren’t tortured artists. Sometimes, insane people are just insane.”

Orville frowned. “Consider the afflictions that drive sane men into madness: love, money, blood, power. The condition of insanity is but an exaggeration of the very qualities that make one human. Wouldn’t you say that madness, therefore, is but a magnification of reality?”

“No, I would not say that.”

“Have you never been in love?”

I blinked. “What?”

“You. In love.”

“I don’t think you’re allowed to ask me that.”

His expression did not change. “I ask only because the memory of being in love will help you understand this poem.”

“Understand what? What it means to want to kill someone?”

“Precisely. Passion can take even the most rational men in directions they would not anticipate. Think of what Browning has done to elucidate this point: He has given a murderer a rational voice. He has channeled madness into an intrinsically organized, structured art form. He is encouraging you, Samantha Whipple, to recognize sanity within the insane. If you cannot appreciate madness, then you cannot appreciate great art.”

I said, “I’m sure the woman being strangled had a hard time appreciating this man’s art.”

“She’s a fictional woman.”

“That’s what they all say.”

I waited. Orville glanced at his watch. “Very well, Samantha—we will continue this conversation another time. You may leave.”

He stood and walked to his teapot on the opposite side of the room. I stayed where I was. We didn’t say anything. I picked up my violated essay and shoved it into my bag.

“Have
you
ever been in love?” I asked.

Orville looked back at me and let out a bark of a laugh. “I’m a great deal older than you are.”

“I mean, properly in love,” I clarified. “The kind of love you strangle people over.”

The dishes gave a clank. I couldn’t tell whether that meant yes or no. I imagined a horde of secret lady admirers falling all over him, one by one, getting caught in the spokes of his bike as he moved around the city.

“You probably just haven’t met the right girl yet,” I said, giving a sweet smile. “When you meet someone you really want to kill, I bet you’ll know.”

He brought a fresh cup of tea back to the center of the room and set it down on the table. He was a very tall man and the teacup was miniature in comparison.

“Do you have somewhere to be?” he asked.

I blinked. With the lesson over, a switch seemed to have turned off in his mind, ending our relationship for the time being. He sat down and unfolded the newspaper in front of him. I was unused to sudden coolness in teachers. My father had always been the same person in and out of the classroom. After a day of lessons, he’d take me down to the grocery store and we’d count the lobsters in the tanks. Orville was silent, and I couldn’t help but think that all I had done was rent him for the hour.