“All this other girl has done is to go directly into life—her own, because she has no grandiose ambitions to be an artiste and because that is the easiest and most obvious place to go—and simply record a painful experience.”
Let him never know, God, that it didn’t happen. That we’ve had the same priest for as long as I can remember, pale, thin, dreamy Father Francis, whose sister or mother always wins the washing machine or the TV set at the raffle.
After class she ran out without talking to anybody. Ashamed to face Rhoda. Afraid that if she had any conversation at all with Professor Engle, he would guess at the truth and she would be forever humiliated. She was astounded to see Rhoda there for the next class.
They got another assignment; this time it was a pleasant experience, with the other conditions being the same. They were to try to keep the essay down to under a page; brevity was not only the soul of wit but the foundation of many other qualities as well.
A PLEASANT EXPERIENCE
BY THERESA DUNN
I was at the beach. There were many of us. There had been a clambake. All the others were still sitting around the fire, toasting marshmallows and singing. I wandered off by myself, digging my toes into the warm sand as I walked. Once in a while I stopped to pick up a pretty shell or a smooth pebble.
The fire seemed to have died down in the sun so that it was just a glowing red ball in the sky. I walked to the edge of the water. The waves lapped at my toes. The sun was very low. I had never seen it seem so close to the earth. The whole sky seemed very close. The wet sand moved beneath my feet. I didn’t feel as though I was standing on the earth looking up at the sky. I felt that I was in a pocket whose sides were made of sky and sand.
Suddenly the sand shifted too fast and I was frightened out of my revery. I heard my name being called.
My companion had come looking for me.
Dear Theresa—
I doubt that you are an artist for you follow instructions too well. But this is a perfect piece—brief and beautiful. The Sacred Gizzard of Xavier—or whichever grove of academe had the privilege of spawning you—obviously did you—or your sense of language, at any rate—no lasting harm.
We must talk some time about your plans for the future. If you are an education major I don’t want to hear about it. Make up something else before we speak.
M.E.
He had definitely singled her out for some reason. She checked around surreptitiously, looking at the comments on other people’s papers when she could, listening to him, and there was no one else, even of the kids he treated nicely, to whom he displayed such kindness and interest. This made her happy in a tense way; since she wasn’t sure how she had earned this sole warm spot in the sunshine of Martin Engle’s approval, she was terrified that she would just as ignorantly one day step out of it. Carol and Rhoda (his scorn for them had convinced them that he was even more brilliant than they’d first realized) tried to befriend her, as though some of that magic she possessed would rub off on them. She avoided them for the same reason. They waited for her after class because if she were with the small group flanking him as he left the building and headed toward the North Campus, there was a better chance that he would allow them all to remain around him. While if it were just Carol and Rhoda, for example, he was likely to suggest that they find some other shrine to worship at that day, he was too weary for adoration.
Finally a day came when not only Carol and Rhoda but also Jules Feingold, the skinny, dark-haired boy who was the other regular kicked-around hanger-on, were all out of class and she got to walk the whole way alone with him. It was like being on a roller coaster, up and down, up and down, with no way to know which was coming next until you reached it.
“So, Theresa,” he said as they passed through the gates to the outside walk, “Theresita . . . little Theresa . . . we are alone at last.” Her heart began thumping wildly. “The moment you’ve been waiting for.” The plunge down. Mortification. “And I have been looking forward to, I confess.” Up, up, up. “Now you can tell me what it is that has put that haunted look in your beautiful green eyes.” Up, up, up, but holding her breath. Haunted? “The fear of Engle? I think not, you had it the first time I saw you, before you could possibly have known what a ferocious, erratic creature I was. It drew me to you. Let’s see . . . the fear of God? Doubtful. More likely of one of his messengers. Stern parents? Whiskey priest? Butch nun?”
Theresa sucked in her breath. She’d never heard anyone say anything like this out loud and straight, although the girls in school would occasionally giggle about some faggot priest, and of course she’d come across all kinds of characters in books.
“Do you know that you don’t giggle when you’re nervous?” he asked. “And that this is an unusual quality in a young girl?”
She was silent.
“Ah.” He pretended to be sad. “I see that I shall not hear the life story of Theresa Dunn before I reach North Campus. I shall have to have a conference with her in my office some time. As though she were one of my elective students. Would you like to do that, Theresa?”
“I guess.” Her mouth was dry.
“Good.” He took out his appointment book and made a great to-do about finding a time when he had a solid free hour. Then he wrote in “Phantom Guest” and showed it to her, explaining that he didn’t normally reserve time for required-course students and he wouldn’t want to be caught red-handed with proof to the contrary. His exaggeratedly furtive manner told her that he was making fun of her again, that none of it really mattered at all. Her head was swimming.
He was in a bad mood. He had lost—or misplaced—a set of papers. Not that he would give a damn except he’d marked half of them already. His tiny office was jammed with books and papers. He beckoned her to sit but then ignored her as he continued to search for the papers.
“Can I help?” she asked timidly.
“Feel free.” He sounded sarcastic.
She wanted desperately to be the one to find them but she didn’t, nor did he, and eventually he said, “Halt! That’s it. I refuse to spend another minute on this nonsense. I’ll tell them that the whole set was such drivel that I threw them away without marking them.” He laughed but his crossness wasn’t really gone and she held her breath.
“All right,” he said abruptly, “what do you want to talk to me about?”
She stared at him. What had she—he was the one who’d scheduled the conference because he wanted to—in one swift motion she stood up in the tiny cubicle, opened the door and fled. He called her name once but she didn’t stop. By the time she got halfway to the subway she was badly out of breath and she ached all over. It wasn’t until she was on the train that she realized she had two more classes that day, including his.
She started every time the phone rang, then got angry at herself, reminding herself that she hadn’t expected him to call; it would be ridiculous to expect him to call. Two days later, when she went to his class again, she walked into the room, sat in her seat with her eyes on her hands, and refused to look at him or anyone else.
“Theresa,” he said as the class filed out, “will you stay for a moment? I’d like to speak with you.”
She returned to her seat, eyes cast down. When the others had left, he came and sat in the chair next to hers, moving it to face her.
“This isn’t an act, is it, Theresa? Because I will not be diddled by a—”
She felt a wave of helpless hatred so strong that it was like a massive electric shock going through her; he saw it and stopped.
“You’re really this upset,” he began again, slowly, “by the fact that I was cross with you? Not even you—I was just angry at something and you happened to be there.”
And you happened to suggest that it was my own idea to be there! Not that she hadn’t liked the idea, but it was his. That seemed very important for some reason.
“You’re much too sensitive, Theresa.” But his voice was caressing her now and her body felt like liquid and sh
e couldn’t be angry with him any more. “We’ll have to work on raising your threshold of pain. Let’s see. A small dose of nastiness every day, like a shot, until you build up an immunity? What do you think?”
He was smiling but she wasn’t sure he was really kidding. She waited helplessly. Everything was churning inside her. She had to go to the bathroom very badly and she both wanted him to touch her and was terrified that if he did she would lose control and wet her pants and never be able to come back to this room again.
“Theresa,” he reproached her, so softly that it was almost a whisper, “you have absolutely no sense of humor.” But it was said like an endearment, not a criticism, and as he said it he very lightly touched his index finger to the middle of her chin, as though to make a dimple. She was in an agony of expectation.
“Well,” he said—it was sudden but still gentle—“time to get up to North Campus. Coming?”
She shook her head.
“Why not?”
“I have some things I have to do here.”
“Really?”
She nodded.
“All right. I’ll see you on Friday. You are not to cut my class again, that would be taking advantage of my preference for you and I don’t like being played with that way. Understood?”
She nodded again. Licking her dry lips.
“All right,” he said. “Then we understand each other. You may write me a special essay for Friday—How I Lost My Virginity. Work from your imagination, if necessary.”
And he disappeared before he could see the blood drain from her face.
He had to have been kidding.
But he was so crazy. Maybe he was serious.
No, he had to have been kidding.
She couldn’t do it, anyway, so he’d better have been.
She sat for another ten minutes or so in the empty classroom before she could make herself get up, go to the bathroom and then walk over to the cafeteria for lunch. Jules was there, along with a couple of other boys; he tried to draw her into conversation, but she couldn’t be bothered. In her head she was going over and over the scene in the classroom and she was afraid she would lose pieces of it if she let herself talk with Jules or anyone else.
In her fantasies his wife had always just died in an automobile accident and he had sent for her. He made love to her passionately after explaining that all love had been gone from his marriage for years. Sometimes they played a game called Threshold of Pain, in which he and many assistants tested her to see where pleasure ended and pain began. Or vice versa. Afterwards they would bring her to a warm, healing bath.
He never asked her for the essay, and things went back more or less to where they’d been before. Several times it seemed that he was about to make some effort to be alone with her, but then he never actually did anything. She found out where he gave the class before hers and made it a point to be in that area when the class ended. But he came out with a girl with bouffant teased hair like Katherine’s. (People on airplanes these days were always telling Katherine she looked like Jackie Kennedy. Katherine claimed to be irritated by this but she didn’t change her hair style, either. It was ridiculous, anyway; Katherine’s hair was dark red, not black. This girl’s was black.)
Theresa felt toward this girl a hatred so consuming that had He—or anyone—spoken to her at that moment she could only have choked in response. This girl was talking and smiling and looking as though she owned him.
She was late to class and for several sessions afterwards refused to join the group around him as he left for North Campus at the end of the hour. She continued to get approving comments on her papers but grew desperate because he didn’t seem to notice that she was boycotting him.
The end of the term was approaching. What if she couldn’t get him for Comp II? Their last assignment was a free choice. It came into her head that she would write on the subject he’d suggested but then she was afraid she would give herself away. What she needed was to prove to him that she had a sense of humor. Sometimes she thought this must be why he had made no further move in her direction. You have no sense of humor, Theresa. We must raise your threshold of humor. Other times she thought it was her failure to take up his dare that had kept him from . . . from what? From whatever had been about to happen.
She wrote a piece called “The Fan Club” about a rock star named Elvis Angle and the silly teenagers who waited for him after every performance. The would-be Jackie Kennedy, the two folksy Jewish girls in leather sandals (except she didn’t say Jewish because she thought Professor Engle might be). In the first draft there was a freckled-faced redhead whom she later deleted, not wanting him to think of her as one of that bunch of starstruck idiots, even if she was.
“You gave me pleasure,” he said when he returned the paper. “Very few students ever do that.”
Her body was invaded by warmth. She had a brief image of herself in a beautiful blue tutu whirling across a tiny stage for an audience of one, Martin Engle, who clapped so wildly that he sounded like a hall full of people.
He told her that he was going down to a Cuban luncheonette on Broadway which had excellent coffee and no CCNY students and asked if she would like to come along. She nodded. (She never drank coffee. She hated the taste.)
She drank and loved the thick, sweet, milky coffee. He asked her about her plans, now that the term was ending, and she said she was going to take his Comp II class next term. He laughed and asked if she had any plans for the future beyond that. She blushed because the truth was that she did not. Where once she’d thought about being a teacher, and later about going into the Peace Corps, her planning energies were now entirely devoted to figuring out how she could stay with him—in any capacity, from student to whatever. Sometimes she thought maybe she could work for him. Grading papers and such. Her knowledge of grammar was excellent, as was her spelling.
“I always wanted to be a teacher,” she said. “But I don’t want to be an Ed major.” They were the object of general derision, she’d discovered, and not just of his scorn. They were the ones who, when a teacher veered off on one of those interesting sidetracks that brought your attention back to class, interrupted to ask if this would be on the exam. “Sometimes I think I’d like to go into the Peace Corps for a few years, and . . .”
“And then get married and have six children.”
“Oh, no!” She was genuinely aghast.
He watched her thoughtfully. “Usually when young girls say that to me their voices are thick with hypocrisy.”
She was silent.
“You’re not going to have children and give them TV dinners and rush off to chair the PTA meeting?”
She shook her head.
“You just passed the acid test,” he said. “Usually when I say that the response is, ‘But if I ever did have children against my will I wouldn’t ever serve them TV dinners.’ ”
She smiled. “Do you have the same conversations over and over?”
“Absolutely.”
She was silent, upset not only by his admission but by his casual manner in making it.
Finally he said, “You want to be a teacher because you love children although you don’t wish to bear them.”
She nodded. Embarrassed because it was corny but true. She was earning a great deal of money these days baby-sitting. All the children adored her because she didn’t care if they never went to bed.
“And you want to go into the Peace Corps because you want to teach small African children a language they have no desire to learn. Or build grass huts.”
As usual when she was with him she felt dumb. He always said she was smart, but their conversations were a mined field in which at any moment she might make the wrong verbal move and find her ignorance exploding in her face.
“Or because you have some special affinity for Negroes.”
She glanced at him, trying to tell if he was serious or still making fun of her, because this was a subject she had wanted to talk on with someone. The truth was tha
t she was afraid of colored people. Men, particularly, but women, too. When she saw colored men on the subway looking at her she was afraid they wanted to rape her or murder her, and she was terrified if she was alone with one of them at an underground station. With the women it was different—there was no question of rape, of course, and yet she always felt they would like to do her violence, that they hated her because she was white. Perhaps they would steal from her. When they were talking and laughing she often felt she might be the object of their laughter, but worse, when their big white teeth flashed in the middle of their dark-brown faces (her fear was in almost direct proportion to their darkness; the pales ones were not nearly so bad), when they laughed and she saw their teeth, she sometimes had a physical memory of an old half-remembered dream in which a huge monster was about to devour her, and then a tremor would pass through her whole body, and when it had passed they were people again but still people to be wary of.
What would he think of her if she told him the truth?
“No,” she said. “Not really. I . . . my parents are very prejudiced. You know, typical lower-middle-class Roman Catholics.” She thought she sounded quite sophisticated. “I grew up with all that stuff, you know, the niggers are coming. They don’t even like Martin Luther King!”
He laughed with her.
“I know they’re—ignorant,” she said carefully. “I mean, they’re provincial—where I’m from in the Bronx it could be Kansas—and narrow-minded, and so on, and I want the Negroes to have equality . . . I know they’re equal . . . but I feel as if they’re different from me.” There. It was out. She waited for an expression of disgust.
Looking for Mr. Goodbar Page 4