Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Kates Shulman

  The people of Italy! I took a long, stalling swig of my wine to let it sink in: The clap. Souvenir of Spain? As I reached for the carafe to fill my glass again, Leonardo mounted his assault.

  The words go whizzing by my ears, but I am barely able to catch them. Leonardo has abandoned the polite formality with which he usually speaks his mother’s English for the passionate gesticulation of his father’s countrymen.

  I duck as he calls me una donna pericolosa (a dangerous woman!), but at last the accusation “carrier” catches me square in the ear.

  I—a carrier! Quickly I compute: from the time I left Spain until I was led astray by this PR man I’ve slept with no one but my husband, who doesn’t count. Though I can as easily have caught it from Leonardo as he from me, I note he’s the one doing all the shouting. His voice rises and my lofty persona dissolves. I see I had better behave. Even if they’ve done no other damage yet, the insidious bacteria have already destroyed my image.

  Yes, I must have a cure. A V.D. victim needs all the help she can get. The embassy won’t bail me out of this, the Ericksons would snicker if they knew, and all those foreign doctors with their shots and pills have likely been operating on a false diagnosis. I’m afraid it’s Leonardo’s help or no one’s: I’m utterly alone.

  Over dessert we reconciled. With the magnanimity of a gentleman, Leonardo assured me that the cure would involve nothing more than a routine series of penicillin shots which we could take together. At least, I consoled myself, it would be a good reason to get up and out in the mornings. Sipping our coffee we were thick as conspirators, and when we finally left the restaurant for the doctor’s office, it was arm in arm.

  “Eccola!  ” exclaimed the doctor excitedly, as Leonardo, gazing into the microscope’s eyepiece, scrutinized a tiny precious part of me smeared on a slide. I bared my buttock and received the needle.

  During our cure, Leonardo and I grew closer than we had been in Sicily. We met for breakfast each morning at a café near the doctor’s, unless I had spent the preceding night at his place. We stretched out our single bond like taffy. There was nothing aphrodisiacal in the antibiotic; it was just that, sinners together, we suddenly had more and worse in common than with anyone else.

  • • •

  The tourists were swarming to Italy and we were just over our cure when some rich friends of Leonardo’s came to Rome on an extended honeymoon. Nice Americans. Jumping to the usual conclusions, they assumed I was in love with Leonardo. They were so solicitous I could tell they felt sorry for me. It was unbearable.

  “I understand you’re separated from your husband,” said the wife sympathetically, wandering with me among the ruins. Up ahead her husband and Leonardo had stopped to study the map of the Forum. “Is your husband in Italy too?”

  “We were living in Munich when we separated. He’s probably gone back to the States by now.”

  There was an awkward silence. “And how long do you plan to stay in Rome?” she asked politely.

  I had used up all my answers. “Till my money runs out I suppose; after that I just don’t know.” The very words that had once proclaimed my daring now rang of defeat.

  We caught up with the men following the tourist map through the Forum—the Forum where Vestal Virgins had once guarded the sacred fires with the power of their chastity; the same Forum where Isabel Archer had turned away the most eligible suitors on the continent. I hung back while the others talked over old times until the sun set and it was time to choose a restaurant. Spaghetti alla Carbonara? Zuppa di Pesce alla Romana? Carciofi alla Giudia? Let the newlyweds choose among the specialties of a Rome I had already tasted.

  In the back of my mind I was deciding I really mustn’t see Leonardo any more.

  No question my nerves were shattered. I was oversensitive and touchy. My excursions had become a sham: I found myself leaving the maps in my room and turning corners at random to avoid the street people. All the ruins started to look alike. My writing was a failure, and I abandoned it. Each foray into a restaurant was an assault, with everyone seeing I was eating alone. What is she doing here? I could see them wonder; Doesn’t she have a man? Isabel Archer had finally married, and just as her story promised to be resolved it turned out it was only beginning.

  And mine? Was twenty-four old or young? Was I ugly or beautiful?

  The frightened face in the mirror had the haunted look of the mannequins. Just under the surface I sensed a fine network of ugliness which might begin showing through any moment. Too late to start a career; too late even to go back to school. I, who had always prided myself on being the youngest in the class, couldn’t now join those chain-smoking women who “went back to school” after having their children. I remembered them shyly attending our classes wearing either sensible shoes or clothes embarrassingly young for them, trying to speak an alien slang. I had cringed for them as the young men, suppressing sneers, momentarily suspended debate while they asked their female questions. I knew I would never be able to survive that.

  On my twenty-fifth birthday, alone in my room, I received a cable from New York. It was from Frank. happy birthday. time to come home. The next day on an impulse I put my wedding ring on again, and after that it was much easier to walk the streets. I even wore it to a farewell party up at the Academy the Ericksons threw before they sailed for home. They invited everyone they knew, including a genuine Italian princess. All the Americans, drinking sparkling lambrusca as though they would never taste it again, kept singing “Arrividerce Roma” louder and sloppier the drunker they got. In the days following, most of them left Italy for another academic year.

  The tourists were leaving too. It became possible once again to view the Sistine ceiling without stepping on someone’s toes. The Roman pines stayed green, but the days had already perceptibily shortened; the sugar maples would be turning on Connecticut’s Merritt Parkway. Maybe Frank was right; maybe it was time to go home.

  Five

  The ink had not yet dried on my high school diploma when I rushed off to begin my future at Eliza Baxter College of New England University in western Massachusetts. I was in a big hurry. With a time schedule based on Dr. John Watson and not a minute to waste, I was all set to do the four years of college in three so I could enter law school at nineteen and pass the bar at twenty-one. I had the whole thing mapped out.

  But somewhere during my sophomore year my fine resolutions turned to dreams as I fell hopelessly in love with philosophy.

  The romance started innocently enough. Like any lover I can recall intimations of the affair long before it began in earnest—a lingering glance, a chance meeting in the library, a greeting withheld. I still smile remembering an even earlier time when I wouldn’t have looked twice at philosophy, it so smacked of religion.

  I had had my fill of that discipline in the Sunday school (that met on Saturday) my parents had enrolled me in as a child to learn “about my origins.” I wasn’t having any of it. I was willing to accept as “literature” the Bible stories presented in Literature class; I might even have learned to recite them in Hebrew as we were expected to do in Hebrew class; but when they filed into the History class dressed as real events that had once taken place, God and I parted company. If there was ever a possibility that I might have fallen for stories like Genesis or Moses and the Ten Commandments, it was destroyed by the ridiculous title of the textbook we used: When the Jewish People Was Young. An author capable of such a travesty had about as much authority to convince me of God as my Grandfather Charlie, who, despite the presence of several respected MDs in the family, shamed us all by taking himself to the local apothecary to be treated with leeches whenever he had the sniffles. And my father warning me every Saturday, “You mustn’t believe everything you hear,” didn’t boost the Temple’s credibility. I sat through the weekly compulsory religious service following History class with a skeptical heart.

  The God of Abraham forfeited every challenge I threw him. Either He had no dignity or He didn’t exist. He
didn’t even strike me down for standing among the mourners and weeping during that most holy portion of the religious service, the Prayer for the Dead. After I whispered the forbidden name of God and still nothing happened to me, I knew I had flushed him out. If He existed at all, he was chicken shit—certainly not worthy of worship.

  My love for philosophy took an opposite course: whatever challenge I came up with, philosophy always had an answer. I never once got the last word. My little skepticism was like dusting powder next to the cosmic doubt of a skeptic like Hume. I watched heavies like Descartes and Leibniz or Plato and Aristotle slug it out together, perfectly matched champions. Who knew who would win? They were all incomparable performers, each with a style of his own.

  Though it was several terms before my infatuation became a passion, I can trace the affair back to a vision I had during final exam week in my freshman year.

  It was probably because of the No-Doz pills I’d been using to cram and the high level of tension around the dorm, for it was more than an ordinary insight. It was a genuine vision, complete with flashing lights and sirens in the background. Suddenly all the little rooms in my mind popped open at once, and the vision flashed through them like a comet. Every event in life can be ordered on a single continuum. All the diverse chronologies that had been complacently resting in the various rooms of my mind for years suddenly got up and started rearranging themselves. Until the vision, in one room there had been cavemen (who really came first), followed by Indians, Pilgrims, African slaves, and the Presidents. In another room had been the Egyptians (who came first), followed by Queen Elizabeth, the Renaissance, and Napoleon. And in yet another room had been first Beowulf, then the Middle Ages, then Biblical Times (including the Arabian Nights), and ancient Greece and Rome—all mostly mythical. Not until after the No-Doz vision did it occur to me that they could all fit cozily on a single continuum together. Eureka! The American Indians and the ancient Egyptians on the same line not only wind up nowhere near each other, but the Indians do not necessarily come first!

  Even when exams were over and I went off No-Doz, I fought to keep hold of my vision. It was too large to assimilate all at once. I believed it intellectually but it took a long time before I felt it in my gut; it required a habit of faith too new to serve me daily, and again and again I would come up short as I was struck with fact upon astonishing fact:

  There were slaves in America (slaves!) less than a hundred years ago!

  Beowulf was composed after Deuteronomy; King Lear before the Declaration of Independence!

  Before long I noticed vast stretches of my line with nothing filled in. They made me uneasy. What happened between Ancient Rome and the Middle Ages? Between Voltaire and Victoria? I wanted to fill it all in so I could see the line whole. I knew it would require diligent application over a very long time, but theoretically at least, it was possible. If one took the longest view, holding that simple Time Line clearly in mind, one could eventually fill in all the details and know everything.

  For someone starting, like me, from scratch, it was a breathtaking thought. Everything. So far I knew nothing; I believe I hadn’t yet even registered for the second semester. But spending my time in pre-law when instead I could be on my way to learning everything seemed a tragic waste. Perhaps I ought not even bother becoming a lawyer. People were always saying how silly it was—all that work, when I’d wind up getting married anyway. Whereas, knowing everything could always come in handy.

  Not that I had any choice in my program. The freshman courses were all requirements anyway—no electives at Baxter until sophomore year. But I started applying myself to my studies with a special ardor. Any course was a good starting place.

  Western Civ.: Instead of examining cultures as discrete units, as the teachers taught, I examined them as moments on a continuum and ignored the details. Though I scribbled down furiously the same notes as everyone else, coughing them back up on exams, to me the Renaissance was not a series of Italian names and dates constituting what-happened-in-Italy; it was a Time with a Character. Why, Elizabethan was Renaissance! I hoped that someday I would be able to stand back far enough to see all Western Civ. itself as a Time with a Character.

  Survey of English Lit. I.: English Literature was a parochial flourish on a segment of my line. Beauty was Truth.

  French Grammar (otherwise loathsome): a blue chalk for coloring bits of my line.

  Intro. to Psych.: a sharp pencil for detail work.

  Classic, Romantic, Economic, Social, Cause, Structure—indispensable iridescent hues. I knew that only when all the colors blended together would I achieve that pure white blinding beacon that would show me All.

  Getting the feel of my line, by semester three I found I could run quickly through it and pull out a little something from every epoch or a little more from just a few to make a neat subline, good for a term paper. I crammed for final exams by squeezing onto a single sheet of notebook paper, in perfect subdivided outline, every fact I had learned in the course: if I couldn’t comprehend the whole course in one glance, it was of no use to me. Since I had to list something, I chose History as my major, but wars and rulers, like conjugations, minor poets, and other particulars, were profoundly boring unless I could view them as reflections of something larger and more abstract. It was impossible for a notion to be too abstract for me. Abstraction was the key to seeing everything at a glance.

  It was in the second semester of my sophomore year that I accidentally stumbled onto that abstraction of abstractions, History of Ideas, which opened my mind to philosophy and closed it to such comparatively trivial needs as food and rest. Offered for History credit by the Philosophy Department, the odd course was taught by one Professor Donald Alport, a hulking philosopher with strange intonations, a grey mustache, and thinning hair, who must once have had my very vision, so learned was he. My French verbs went unconjugated, the War of the Roses went unexplained, as under Alport’s tutelage I contemplated the Great Chain of Being and the Idea of Progress.

  Too late for history or law, I was smitten. History itself was but an idea occurring in a mind: like Number, like Justice, like Truth.

  By the next semester, taking the ultimate abstraction, Logic, and both Philosophy of History and Professor Alport’s History of Philosophy, with each class I fell more desperately in love. A hopeless case. I didn’t even care that I was reading myself right out of the marriage market but gave myself wholly up to my new passion. I could hardly drag myself out of the library back to the dorm at night. Before long I began to see my onetime dream of knowing everything as foolishly naïve. Socrates was right: the more one knew, the more one must recognize one’s own ignorance. But he was also right that the unexamined life was not worth living.

  I plunged in, pursuing the ideas deep into ancient texts, losing myself among subtle distinctions. Nothing else mattered. I analyzed with Aristotle and flunked my French midterm. I synthesized with Augustine and stopped eating everything but Cheezits and black coffee. Discovering with Spinoza the connectedness of things, exploring with Kant the mind that thinks so, I stopped going to chapel or gym and eventually stopped sleeping at night. My brain was in a constant state of intoxication. With Schopenhauer I saw the world as pure will, until, with Bishop Berkeley, I saw it as pure idea. The more I studied, the less sure I was of anything—even of what I had sworn by the week before. My letters home grew enigmatic, alarming my mother. When I wrote that I planned to stay at school during Christmas vacation so I could study, she called up long distance begging me to come home.

  “What’s the matter Sasha? Are you in trouble? Are you falling behind?”

  “No, I’m not behind. I just want to read, that’s all.”

  “Can’t you read at home? Is it really something else you want to stay for, darling?”

  “There’s nothing else.”

  “Your father and I have been counting the days until Christmas. Everyone’s been asking after you. If you don’t want to come home we can’t make you,
but we’re worried about you, dear. Your letters have been so … so … strange. Won’t you at least tell us what’s wrong?”

  She was right: something was wrong. Without gym or chapel or French I wouldn’t graduate, yet I had wiped gym and chapel and French out of my life. The official notices and warnings I had received from the Dean of Women were stuck away in the corner of my room among a mounting pile of empty Cheezit boxes, unanswered letters, incomplete law school applications, and No-Doz pills.

  “Nothing’s the matter, Mom, really. I just need to spend some time thinking. But I’ll see, maybe I will come home.” I had a week left to decide.

  That night I dreamed I wrote all my finals in a mysterious secret code, the more brilliant the matter, the harder to decipher. I had much to say, but I couldn’t make myself understood. Helplessly I watched my potential A’s dissolve to F’s. Waking in a panic, I spent the rest of the night reading Saint Augustine, and the next day, in desperation, I went to the infirmary to see the psychologist. It was an extreme measure for a former believer in the Behaviorism of Dr. John Watson.

  The nurse looked up at me curiously, then handed me a pink paper. “Fill out this form and take a seat,” she said.

  “Does it go on my record?”

  “Of course.”

  I sat down with the form. Name. Date. School. Year. Age: 18. Class: Junior. Major: Philosophy. Minor: Philosophy. Religion: Philosophy. Complaint:—

  “What does this question mean, nurse?”

  She looked at the form. “Put down what your problem is.”

  I hesitated. “I don’t know what my problem is. That’s why I’m here—to find out.”

  “Doctor has to know what kind of a case you are. Now go write a sentence stating your problem.”

  I couldn’t name my problem. How can we know that we know? What is Truth? What is the meaning of Problem? If there were any answers, they were all in an indecipherable code. I put the pink form back on the nurse’s desk and walked out. There was no help for me here.