The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories

by The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories (retail) (epub)

  William looks out of the window. The trees on campus start to turn brown, orange, and maroon, in a brilliant fall display. The air grows colder. The leaf-collector collects many a leaf. William puts on thicker clothes, and goes out to the few student bars that serve the specially diluted beer that will protect them. He goes to the McDonald Hamburger stand, and to graduate student parties to smoke pot, and to political meetings. He writes letters home to the girl with the abortion, and washes his clothes in the laundry down in the basement of the graduate dormitory, shown the way by Ting. He eats Fardiman’s apple cake and grades many themes. He stands behind his desk in the Chemistry Building, three days a week, and tells his students about Carnaby Street and the Portobello Road. He goes to the Teaching Round Table, where all the graduate assistants sit around a square table and discuss their problems, about grading themes, about flunking students who might be drafted, about why are we here, about the falling jobs market. Sensing an over-devotion to diurnal reality among his students, even the politically active ones, he tries to find his way to truth by perplexing them with complexity of fictions, reading them Nabokov, Coover, Barthelme, asking why writers write like that. ‘Finks,’ says one student, Miss Armfelt, an energetic little girl who interrupts his classes by asking him about their relevance, abusing Nixon, talking about the Third World, speaking for Women’s Rights, condemning the conformity of the course, the uselessness of education, the corruption of grades, ‘Escapers.’ William likes his students, more than he likes most of his colleagues; the trouble is he is unsure how close he should get to them. Taking one or two of the co-eds on dates, he feels a vague inhibition, a guilt: the start of a professional conscience. He does not touch them; they stare at him. Once he asks Miss Armfelt, but she tells him dates are a fake ritual, part of the heterosexual conformity she repudiates. For safety’s sake, then, William redirects his emotional ambitions; he has an affair with a graduate girl, also teaching freshmen composition. Strangely, it seems that some diminution of sexual attractiveness is an entry qualification for graduate school. Miss Daubernethy is not like the co-eds; she is tough and fairly charmless, a dark girl with a mole on her cheek, whom he meets in the basement of the dormitory, while observing one night the whirl of his socks and undershorts as they spin behind the thick bubble of glass, and to whom he makes all unwit tingly, an obscene suggestion: for he asks, as they stand drinking Coke together, on the wet floor in the windowless room, smelling of washing powder and drying clothes, whether she could possibly sew a button on his shirt. ‘Christ,’ says Miss Daubernethy, staring at him in anger, ‘I’m not a homemaker. I’m a graduate student. I’m not a woman, pal. I’m a person.’ ‘Of course, right,’ says William, ‘I believe in all that. I wasn’t trying to rôle-type you, honestly. I’d have asked anybody.’ ‘Oh, sure. Anybody who’s historically supposed to be seen around with a needle,’ the girl said, ‘Like a woman. Come on, how come you picked on me?’ William is aghast with his own guilt, glimpsing the darkness of his unconscious chauvinism. ‘Oh God,’ he says, ‘I’m sorry.’ It can of course only have one consequence: it is not very long after this – in fact later that night – that, person to person, with William abased, they are making love on the metal bunk bed in his room, while Ting goes ping below.

  The winter outside the office window gets colder, and all is not well. Miss Daubernethy, who comes from Florida, is shrill, tastes of Listerine, and not quite William’s ideal type, or the sort of person he would have picked in the free and open market. He knows, and fears she does, that she is a surrogate for the fancy, fresh, forbidden bodies in his classes, for the flashing legs and mobile nipples under sweaters, such as Miss Armfelt’s sweater, that he finds himself staring at as he stands over the sink in the Chemistry Building, and talks about the use and significance of tenses. Miss Daubernethy is thirty, tight around the jaw, and has cramps because of the tension of her PhD orals. She wears long dresses to hide her legs, and has exhibitionistic tastes in lovemaking, liking to pleasure herself, by seeing herself or doing things to herself, which is spiriting at first, but somehow basically uncooperative, and not very easy in her or William’s dormitory room, or in the back of her Willy jeep. She has an overhung bottom, stout thighs and there are more moles round her waist. There is an old myth in these matters to which William has subscribed: that American women have outrun the world in establishing an intense level of sensation for themselves in sex. William, having had too much of the over-domesticated British variety, feels that this should have its potential for him, its high compensations. Yet, with Miss Daubernethy, as the weeks go by, it seems not to. He touches and rubs and kisses, they move and wriggle and sweat, but the challenging athletics gradually acquire not the tone of an existential liberation, a Reichian fulfilment, but rather of a vulgarly inflated achievement, like trying to play a Beethoven quartet with ten musicians, for better sound. A certain fleshly exhaustion begins to come over William, and something more: I’m a humanist, he thinks to himself. As he sits in his office by day, writing B, and D, and F on essays, and noting at the end of them ‘Shows improvement’, ‘This could be better developed’, ‘You get to the point too quickly’, he feels unease, knowing that his own beginnings, middles and ends, his paragraphing and spacing, his use of the colon, will be similarly flatly measured by Miss Daubernethy’s idealized grading system. The students get very anxious about these grades: ‘Do you grade on the curve?’ they come and ask, ‘Do you give As for the best work you get from us, or do you only give them for, like, Middlemarch?’ Miss Daubernethy in the dormitory room, lying across his armchair, feet splayed and apart, crotch high, raises a similar problem in standards: ‘You’re okay, you’re as good as anyone I’ve had, to be fair, but you’re not as good as the ones I’ll get.’ William grows haunted by these Joyces, Prousts, and Manns of sex. Back in the office, he tells the kids who come and sit in his consultation chair, ‘It’s not an abstract best. There are rules and good habits, which I’m trying to teach you. But it’s a humanist affair, the best from you, the fullest insight out of you.’ Back in the dormitory room, William, lying naked on top of Miss Daubernethy’s desk, the sweat on his brow, and the inexorable large thighs dominant above, says: ‘Do you think sex can ever become personal?’ ‘I want you back up higher and your knees more together,’ says Miss Daubernethy, monstrous against the light, ultimately and in all a teacher. ‘I want your adjectives spaced out more and your verbs more together,’ she is saying, in conference in her office, in the light of the snaky desk lamp, when William comes by to fetch her for a meal – for they eat too – the following night.

  The winter grows colder still, and all is worse. One night, in her dormitory room, while Miss Daubernethy paints her nipples with silver nail varnish in the light of the desk lamp, William, naked on her bed, finds a large sharp knife under her pillow. ‘What’s this?’ he asks. ‘You shouldn’t have found that,’ says Miss Daubernethy, and starts to cry. William feels a little twinge of terror: ‘What were you going to do?’ he asks. ‘I don’t know, I think I must be going lesbian. I can’t tell you how the shape of a man’s body gets me disgusted. I hate you there.’ Then her nails come flying across the room and she is lunging for the knife. The door is locked but William turns the knob, flies out into the corridor. Happily he still holds the knife. There are long, long corridors back to his room, on the other side of the building. But William makes it in a hurry, seen only by Mr Ting, a cool person, who stands contemplatively in the passage, evincing only a modest clerkly scepticism at the sight of his nudity, his knife, his panting terror. He locks his door and leans against it, feeling for the first time not the chance and arbitrary nature, but rather the utter precious sanctity, of his male equipment. Is this the lesson? ‘You need to cut down your ending,’ Miss Daubernethy, unchanged, is saying in her office next day, as William goes in, interrupting a conference, to ask for his clothes back. The clothes turn up in the garbage can in the basement, just by the washing machine where they had first met, back there whe
n the weather was by no means so cold.

  It is over; and William subsides into an extraordinary fleshy disgust, thinking over without pleasure the detailed, intimate construction of her body and sensing an ultimate deceit in what the flesh, with all its promises, actually contains. But it is not over, for Miss Daubernethy is omnipresent. She starts wearing sexy clothes, and appears by his side during the break in the Teaching Round Table, when they all stand in the corridor drinking Cokes, saying: ‘It was nothing personal, William. It’s not because I don’t like you or anything. It was just because you’re a man.’ ‘Anyone who’s historically supposed to be seen around with a prick,’ says William. ‘That’s chauvinism too.’

  In the Victorian Novel seminar, on the very day he is due to read his paper on Jane Eyre, Miss Daubernethy comes into the class and sits beside him, though she is not enrolled for the seminar, being a medievalist. ‘Any comments?’ asks the professor, when he has finished. ‘I just love your penis,’ whispers Miss Daubernethy. ‘Do we all agree about the symbolism of the blocked up window?’ asks the professor. ‘You can’t have it,’ whispers William. ‘Narrative strategy?’ asks the professor. ‘I want to feel it inside me,’ whispers Miss Daubernethy, looking heated. ‘How do we relate this to the symbolic emasculation of Mr Rochester?’ asks the professor. ‘Now,’ says Miss Daubernethy. ‘Do you?’ says William, looking around at the rest of the class taking notes. ‘With or without me attached?’

  At the faculty picnic in early December she appears round the other side of a tree by the icy lakeside, holds onto his coat, and says: ‘Funny dark things can happen, William. I was crazy. But I’m through it now. You have to be with me again, because I think of you all the time.’ William looks at her, thinks of her disgust, and then of his, inspects the body with no appeal, the body which is supposed to render us everything. ‘I’m really sorry,’ says William, ‘But I’m really way into celibacy now. I want to try that for a bit.’ ‘No,’ says Miss Daubernethy, pushing him into the lake. Two deans and three fully tenured professors are needed to get him dripping out. He is taken back by a Swinburne specialist and put into his dormitory bed. In the following days his throat seizes up and, after two croaking classes, speech becomes impossible. He goes to the campus hospital and lies feverish between clean, antiseptic sheets, while beautiful white-clad nurses inject penicillin into his bottom. Sometimes, hot, he thinks he sees Miss Daubernethy peering in through his room window, but only Fardiman comes inside, bearing the New York Review of Books. When he is better, it is Christmas, the festive season, and the students have gone home; happily Fardiman is there, with his old Studebaker, proposing, for his family have gone east for the break to New York City, that they both go off on a healthy vacation together. They drive south, William’s mind clearing under Spanish moss. They leave behind the cold and the snowfalls. On Christmas day he sits on the porch of a motel in the sunlight, watching pelicans, farcical birds, ungainly and unadapted, revelling in their own absurdity.

  III

  After Christmas, with only a little more of the semester still to go, the snow piles up on the window sill of William’s office, from which the screens had gone, and there is a curious change of atmosphere in his classes. He has been, with his little English radicalism, and his fancy talk about fictions, a popular teacher, but now someone steals his nameplate from the door of the office, and the students come in to complain about grades he has been giving them. There is a politics about grades, but it is a curious politics. There is the problem of the draftees, which would have been simple (William has been putting brackets, and commas, in for them right through the course), were there not also, subjunctively, the problem of the girls, and the problem of the footballers, and the problem of the blacks, and the problem of the fraternity boys. ‘What did she mean when she said she’d do anything to get an A?’ asks William, as a girl who has plagiarized an essay, having submitted for him a copied-out article from Reader’s Digest, entitled ‘One of Nature’s Wonders: The Mighty Bee’, leaves his consultancy chair, right by his desk, and departs angrily from the office. ‘She means anything,’ says Fardiman, ‘She’ll use what she’s got, and what she’s got isn’t in her head.’ ‘I thought that’s what she meant,’ says William. ‘I wonder whether you could take a moment or two to talk to me about a few of my themes,’ says Mr Krutch, coming in; Mr Krutch sits in the front row of William’s class with his feet up on the teaching desk, sometimes with vaguely insulting messages – like ‘Limey’ – written on the soles. ‘Sure,’ says William. ‘I wonder whether there’s any rational explanation of the grades you gave them,’ says Mr Krutch, ‘Or whether you’re just plain crazy.’ ‘I could be,’ says William. ‘Look,’ says Mr Krutch, ‘this theme was handed in by another guy to another teacher. He gave it a B, you gave it a D. How come?’ ‘Maybe you didn’t copy it out very well when you were plagiarizing it,’ says William. ‘What do I have to do to get good grades from you?’ asks Mr Krutch, ‘Stand on my head? Play the piano with my ass? I’m just a nice, ordinary guy. I’m not so different than anyone else on this campus.’ ‘From,’ says William, ‘We did different from.’ ‘Tell him goodbye, and Happy New Year,’ says Fardiman. An hour later the football coach is in to plead for Dubchek, who has submitted an essay called ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, an argument so complete that it even concludes with the name Matthew Arnold. Fortunately there is Miss Armfelt, who comes next, dark, intense, with no bra, a city girl. She has been getting As right through the course. ‘Another A,’ says William, handing her theme back to her with relief. ‘So what?’ says Miss Armfelt, putting her Mexican totebag down on the desk, and putting the folded theme, with William’s red A on it, inside it, ‘Grades are crap.’ ‘That’s right,’ says Fardiman, leaning back, ‘Take Hester Prynne. She got an A, and look what happened to her.’ Miss Armfelt looks coolly at him. ‘Grades are repression,’ she says, ‘Grammar’s repression. All true creativity transcends rules.’ ‘So does all true stupidity,’ says Fardiman, eating apple cake. ‘I wondered if I could have a private word with you, Mr Honeywell,’ says Miss Armfelt. ‘Sure, I’ll go to the john for a minute,’ says Fardiman, ‘Since you’re already getting As.’ ‘Oh, it’s not about grades,’ shouts Miss Armfelt after him, ‘Screw grades.’ When Fardiman has gone, she says: ‘It’s just a crazy thought. We were wondering – we is myself and Laura Ann Dix, she’s my room-mate and she’s in your section too, you know? – we thought you looked kind of bushed. We both enjoyed your classes. So, like to say thank you, we thought we’d ask if you’d like to stop round at our place sometime for a drink. And one thing we won’t talk about is grades.’ ‘That’s very human,’ says William, ‘Sure I’ll come.’ ‘Tomorrow night around eight?’ ‘Fine,’ says William. ‘They’re even crowding round the doors of the faculty john,’ says Fardiman, when he comes back, ‘Hoping to catch us unbuttoned.’

  The next day William posts one set of his final grades on his office door and locks himself in. He can hear the students outside, reading the grades and banging on the door. He has been infinitely generous, a compromise between the system and his politics, but indignation is rife: ‘We know you’re in there,’ voices shout. Towards evening he creeps out down the ill-lit hall and, his coat-collar turned up, eats a hamburger at the hamburger stand, before going to Miss Armfelt’s. He crosses the campus. Some black students, sitting-in in the computer block, have started a fire. Outside a dormitory, boys in red Ford Thunderbirds are shouting to girls to come away with them to the West Coast. William reaches the tree-shaded streets just off campus, with ploughed snow stacked on the sidewalk, and finds Miss Armfelt’s place, a small basement entrance below a frame house. He taps on the door. ‘Come on in,’ someone shouts. Some freak music is on the record player. ‘Hi,’ says Miss Armfelt, wearing her swimsuit and sitting on an exercise bicycle in the middle of the room, pedalling busily, ‘I’ll be through in a minute.’ Laura Ann Dix, whom William knows, sits on the sofa, next to a brown retriever, which growls
at him. ‘Stay, Fidel,’ says Laura Ann. ‘Fix some beer, eh?’ says Miss Armfelt, peddling on, ‘There’s some in the icebox.’ ‘I’ll get it,’ says William. ‘Let me, you talk to Ellie,’ says Laura Ann. William leans against a bookcase and watches Miss Armfelt getting up real speed. ‘You don’t need exercise,’ he says. ‘I wish I had one of those exercise pogo sticks, with a pedometer on it,’ says Miss Armfelt. ‘And another one for the dog?’ asks William, ‘Why do you need exercise?’ ‘It’s for the bodily pleasure,’ says Miss Armfelt, ‘Hey get me a cigar, will you? Right there in that box, Mr Honeywell.’ ‘William,’ says William, getting a cigar and slipping it between Miss Armfelt’s pert lips. ‘How’s that for symbolic action,’ says William. ‘They’re illegal Havanas,’ says Miss Armfelt, ‘I guess it keeps him in business.’

  ‘How come we have so much light?’ says Laura Ann, bringing in the cans of beer. She switches lights out and others on, leaving a paper Japanese lampshade hanging low over the end of the sofa, and a tiny intense-light desklamp on the coffee table. William picks up a matchbook and lights Miss Armfelt’s cigar. ‘Get one,’ says Miss Armfelt. ‘She’ll be through in a minute,’ says Laura Ann, ‘Come and sit on the sofa with me.’ William sits down. ‘Doesn’t it drive you crazy, teaching this crazy course?’ asks Laura Ann. ‘It wouldn’t, if all the kids were as bright as you.’ ‘I look at you sometimes, standing there, and I keep thinking, what he must be thinking! But you never get mad.’ ‘I really would just once like to see you really let fly,’ says Ellie Armfelt. ‘It’ll happen,’ says William. ‘But you must have such a good level of consciousness,’ says Laura Ann. William laughs and says: ‘I’m a stranger. Maybe what sounds commonplace to you doesn’t to me.’ ‘Oh, but the things they tell you,’ says Laura Ann, ‘They make up things because they think you’ll believe it.’ ‘He knows that,’ says Ellie, ‘I keep wanting to interrupt, but I say to myself, he knows that.’ ‘I loved the way you put down that WASP kid who was talking about dates,’ says Laura Ann. ‘What’s that?’ asks Ellie. ‘Oh, she was saying she gave a boy her right breast on the first date, and her left breast on the second date, and he said, it was funny, what happens on the third, don’t you run out of breasts?’ They all laugh. ‘We really enjoy your classes. You’re the most interesting teacher I ever had.’ ‘You haven’t had him,’ says Laura Ann. ‘You haven’t had him,’ shouts Ellie Armfelt. Laura Anna laughs, and then pushes her face against William’s. He kisses it. Miss Armfelt suddenly gets off the exercise bicycle and disappears into the kitchen space. Laura Ann surfaces out of William’s arms and says: ‘What are you doing, Ellie?’