Blue Angel

by Francine Prose

  “I can’t do that,” Swenson says. “But I’ll be glad to read what you’ve written.”

  “See you Tuesday,” Angela says.

  “Tuesday,” Swenson says. He listens to her footsteps running down the steps and then opens the envelope.

  The next day, I could hardly play. I’d forgotten how to lose myself in the music. I wondered why had Mr. Reynaud grabbed my arms in the woods? And that became my real science experiment: analyzing the data with more attention than I ever gave to those poor hopeless eggs I tried to hatch in our backyard toolshed.

  Swenson puts down the page and picks up the phone. But whom is he going to call? He phoned Len Currie last week. He doesn’t feel like talking to Sherrie. He dials Magda Moynahan’s extension.

  “Ted!” says Magda. “How are you?”

  Among the things he likes about Magda is how happy she sounds to hear him, as opposed to all the unwelcome calls she seems to have been expecting.

  “I’ve got a student here,” she says. “Can I call you back?”

  “Don’t,” says Swenson. “Let’s have lunch and talk then. How about tomorrow?”

  “Fine,” says Magda. “The usual place, I assume.”

  “Right,” says Swenson. “Should we drive out together?”

  “I’ll be coming from Montpelier. I’ll meet you there at twelve-thirty.”

  Expecting Magda to be a few minutes late, Swenson arrives a few minutes later and is irritated when Magda’s later still. Without a newspaper or a book, he has only his glass of headache Chardonnay to mediate between him and the Maid of Orleans’s grim ambience. The windowless, dark-paneled steakhouse was built in the late fifties by a family from Quebec. In honor of their patron saint, Joan of Arc, they decorated the place like an S&M club: armor, crossed axes, spiked maces dangling from the rafters, loops of the bicycle chain no doubt used to “distress” the woodwork. Where do you shop for objects like that? Nowhere, not anymore.

  Three generations of owners have polished the suits of armor, preserving the decor of this place where Euston faculty meet for friendly collegial lunch. Students never come here, so you can complain about them without the fear that they’ll be at the next table. On rare occasions, when a department is recruiting, they take prospective faculty members here, calculating that if they go all the way to Montpelier, where the food is better, the candidates will figure out that you have to go all the way to Montpelier. And they charm the interviewee with a Euston faculty joke: The cuisine at the Maid of Orleans has been tied up and burned at the stake.

  Today, two-thirds of the tables are filled with predictable combinations of administrators and professors. Swenson’s greeted everyone on the way to his seat. He never comes to this place except with Magda. You can have lunch here with a female colleague without exciting gossip or speculation. Lovers wouldn’t go near it unless they wanted the world to know. You might as well embrace in the middle of Euston Quad.

  Still, Swenson and Magda do have one of those friendships that can, for no clear reason, jitter for a few weeks or months on the edge of flirtation, a giddy brink from which they’re pulled back by the gravity of their working together, Swenson’s marriage, Magda’s ex-marriage, their knowing each other too well. A tinge of romance lingers, as evidenced by the fact that now, as Magda rushes in, Swenson’s surprised, as always, by how pretty she is.

  Swenson half-rises. Magda kisses his cheek. He hugs her, clumsily patting her back. She shrugs off her coat and leans forward, elbows on the table, her eyes so focused on his that, if this weren’t the Maid of Orleans, a stranger might think they were lovers.

  Women tend to like Swenson, mostly because he likes women. He’s interested in what they have to say, doesn’t think they’re plotting to kill him. That’s why he’s got a good marriage, why librarians and department secretaries will do anything for him, why he’s the only sucker at Euston who never slept with his students. Women have told him that his lack of obvious hostility sets him apart from most men. Maybe what they mean is: they don’t want to sleep with him.

  Magda might have—she almost did—one night at her apartment. This was during one of their more intense spells of attraction, so Swenson had looked forward all day to dropping off some papers at Magda’s, where he responded to the complex nuances of the situation by drinking a bottle of wine within the first twenty minutes. He slid deeper into Magda’s couch, closer and closer to Madga, and—at the very moment when they might have, should have, kissed—he’d realized he was way too drunk. He’d rocketed up off the couch and run out the door. A lot depends on their never—never once—mentioning that evening.

  “What were you doing in Montpelier?” he says.

  “The bookstore,” Magda says. “Look.”

  He squints at the title. “Great Dog Poems?”

  “There are some terrific poets in this,” she says. “Real writers, I’m not kidding.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Swenson says. “First you’re going to get a dog. And then you’re going to write a poem about it.”

  “Ted,” she says, “I have a dog.”

  “Check,” he says unsurely. What kind of dog does Magda have? An Irish setter? Or is he imagining this because Magda has the coloring and the temperament of a setter? He thinks perhaps he met the dog, that night at her house. Mostly he remembers seeing her wall of books lurch and start to rotate, gradually picking up speed.

  Swenson says, “Didn’t I meet your dog?”

  Magda sighs. “This is not about my dog. This is about one of my freshmen having written the world’s worst greeting-card poem about the death of a dog. I know for a fact it’s his dog, so what am I going to say? I’m sorry about your puppy. And by the way, your poem stinks. So I thought if I could show the kid some good poems about dogs or the deaths of dogs, at least we’d have someplace to start.”

  “You’re a great teacher. You know that?”

  “Thanks a lot,” Magda says.

  “It’s true. You take it seriously. Plus, your students love you.” Swenson remembers Angela saying she disliked Magda’s class.

  “Ted? Is something wrong?”

  “Sorry. I was just thinking: In my class they’d be writing stories about having sex with the dead dog.”

  “Huh?” says Magda. “Excuse me?”

  “I mean a dead chicken. Listen, is your class weird this semester? What’s with these kids, huh? Everyone’s writing stories about having sex with animals.”

  “Safe sex?” Magda says dubiously.

  “Danny Liebman handed in a masterpiece about some kid coming home from a date and sodomizing a raw chicken he finds in the refrigerator.”

  “Disgusting,” Magda says.

  “I wish you’d said that in my class.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I took the technical route. Accuracy of detail. I said chickens in suburban refrigerators usually don’t have their heads on.” Swenson knows he’s lying to make a better story for Magda.

  “Chickens. That’s a big sexual harassment suit just waiting to be filed.”

  “Tell me about it,” says Swenson. And they both fall silent.

  Then Magda says, “How’s Angela Argo doing?”

  Swenson’s glad she asked. He was going to bring up the subject. But just at that moment, the waitress arrives. Gruff, good-natured Janet.

  “How we doin’?” Janet says.

  “Excellent,” says Swenson.

  “Ditto,” says Magda.

  “Sure. Right,” says Janet. “A-plus.”

  Swenson orders what he always orders, the choice every insider—and who else comes here?—makes without deliberation: the grilled steak sandwich, charred (as the menu says) to perfection, layered lovingly on a buttered hard roll and served with mashed potatoes and gravy.

  “I’ll have the same,” says Magda.

  “Why did I bother asking?” Janet turns and leaves, pleased and disappointed with them for not surprising her more.

  Praise Janet, and the Maid o
f Orleans, and the fact that the ordering has gone quickly enough for them to get back to what they were saying.

  “Why do you ask?” says Swenson.

  “Ask what?” says Magda.

  “About Angela Argo.” Swenson sounds like Angela on the first day of class when she had to say her name and rolled her eyes so far back in her head he’d thought she was having a seizure.

  Magda gives him a searching look. Information zaps back and forth, complex but unclear. Well, if Magda knows so much, she can explain it to Swenson. Anyway, she’s got it all wrong, because what she says next is, “Ted, if you sleep with Angela Argo, I’ll never talk to you again.”

  What a weird thing for Magda to say! And how, precisely, did they get from Danny’s story to the possibility of Swenson’s sleeping with Angela Argo? She saw them together yesterday. Could Magda possibly think…? Did she pick up some signal as yet invisible on Swenson’s male radar screen? Even Swenson, so warm toward women, feels an edge of chill. They are another species. You really have to watch it.

  “God, Magda, where is this coming from? Are you nuts? You were at that meeting. If I were going to risk my job, it wouldn’t be for Angela. Anyway, you know I don’t do that kind of thing.”

  Magda certainly does know that. The tension leaves her face. “So? What’s Angela up to now?”

  “Writing a novel,” Swenson says. “It’s good. I mean really good.”

  “I’m not surprised,” says Magda. “Though the stuff she wrote for me was awful. But I could tell she was gifted. She’s also major trouble.”

  “Trouble how?”

  “Well,” says Magda, after a beat, “it’s as if she has…no center.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “She lies.”

  “Lies about what?” Swenson’s holding his breath.

  “Little things. For example, she borrowed some books—Rilke, Neruda, Stevens—from another student, and when he asked for them back, she said she never took them. He sneaked into her room and found them on her desk. It was complicated, because I think the kid had a crush on her. But the fact was, she had the books.”

  “Stealing books? Not the world’s worst crime. I wish more kids wanted books enough to steal them. And how does that stack up against the guy sneaking into her dorm room? So…was this the kid who’s her boyfriend now?”

  “I didn’t know she had a boyfriend. I’m pretty sure she didn’t then…. Anyhow, it was a mess. But eventually it turned out to be a sort of bonding thing for the class. I don’t think anyone told.”

  Such things never happen in Swenson’s class. No one bonds, as Magda puts it.

  “I don’t know,” says Magda. “Maybe it was just me. Angela was one of those students I always think I’m failing. I know I just told you her poems were bad…but in fact they were sort of strong. Maybe I just couldn’t deal with them. They were so…furious and dirty.”

  “Furious and dirty? Yikes. What were they about?”

  “Dramatic monologues, I’d guess you’d call them. Or dialogues, maybe. All supposedly transcriptions of phone-sex workers on the job.”

  Why did Magda never include this among the horror stories she’d told him last spring over lunch?

  “I told you about it,” Magda says.

  “You didn’t.”

  “You just don’t remember. You weren’t paying attention. The point is, they were freshmen, Ted. I felt I had to be careful. I felt I had to vet which ones we discussed in workshop.”

  What a time for their food to arrive! But by now their conversation has enough tensile strength to hang in there for a few bites.

  Magda swallows first. “Also…there was something else. The phone-sex worker in the poems calls herself Angela 911.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” says Swenson. “So now Euston’s admitting former phone-sex workers?”

  “Former or current. Hard to tell. I had a feeling it might be true. Also there was something about the way the other kids treated her. Fear. Respect. I don’t know. My rule is: Don’t ask, don’t tell. You know when a kid is writing about his dead dog. But unless they volunteer—”

  “Me, too,” interrupts Swenson. It’s a relief to switch from the subject of Angela’s steamy poems to the subject of workshop procedure. It reminds them of their mission here. Colleagues, talking shop. “Don’t ask. Don’t tell. Don’t want to know.”

  “Certainly not about this. But again, she was a freshman. I wondered if I should alert someone. I thought about telling Sherrie.”

  “Sherrie? Did you?”

  “No. I didn’t want any mental health stuff on Angela’s record. And…I’m not proud of this, but I didn’t want to get involved. You know how it is. Just hang on, the semester will be over. In any case, I didn’t have to ask. Angela made sure I knew. There was a lot in the poems about the phone-sex worker’s sexually abusive father. And one afternoon, in conference, Angela hinted that it might be true.”

  “What did she say?”

  “I can’t remember. I went into panic mode. Of course, half the student population claims to be incest survivors.”

  “Not to me they don’t,” says Swenson.

  “Lucky you,” says Magda. “But there were things about Angela…well, I could believe it.”

  “Meaning what?” Swenson says carefully.

  “I don’t know. It’s not just Angela. It’s her whole generation. Sometimes I worry that they think there’s something wrong with sex altogether. It’s as if they secretly believe that having a sexual thought or desire means you’re a terrible person.”

  “Unless it’s for an animal,” Swenson says. Then he says, “Jesus. Poor kids.” He stops, struck by the oddness of his having this conversation with Magda. Both of them have worked fairly hard to thwart the wayward sexual impulse. Maybe Angela was right about Magda having some kind of…problem. One thing that’s for certain is that Magda hasn’t read Angela’s novel. Yet the chance that Magda’s right about Angela and her generation makes Swenson feel somehow relieved.

  “The father in her poems…was that the father who killed himself ?”

  “Killed himself ? She never mentioned a suicide. You know, Ted, I had the funniest feeling about her. That all of it could be invented, and she might not know the difference.”

  “The novel’s for real,” says Swenson.

  “I’m glad to hear that,” says Magda.

  “You don’t still happen to have any of those poems, do you?” Swenson stares down at his plate. He knows he must sound insane. How many examples of student work has he saved in his files?

  But Magda doesn’t seem surprised. “Well, this is very strange, too.” She takes a small bite of her sandwich and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. Swenson gazes at the back of her hand. He wants to reach over and stroke it. “This will show you how driven Angela is. End of spring semester, I get a phone call from Betty Hester. At the library.”

  “I know Betty,” says Swenson. “Mother Hubbard.”

  “Oh, Ted, no. That’s mean. Anyhow, Betty tells me that one of my students—Angela, obviously—has printed out a volume of her poetry, nicely designed, typeset on the computer. She’s stitched it together, a real book, and presented it to the Euston library as a souvenir of her freshman year. She thought Betty should shelve it in the modern American poetry section.

  “Betty thanked her. She thought it was sweet. But then she actually read a few lines and figured out what was what. That’s when she called to ask me: Should she turn down Angela’s gift? I asked if the college had a rule against shelving books by students. Betty said they didn’t. The situation had never come up. I told Betty what I thought: that Angela could come looking for her book and was quite capable of making a fuss with the administration if it wasn’t shelved or checked out.”

  “Angela?” Swenson’s trying to square the litigious harpy Magda seems to have in mind with the awkward sparrow he knows, begging for crumbs of praise.

  “Angela,” says Magda. “Finally I told Betty that
if she catalogued and shelved the goddamn thing, no one but Angela would ever check it out. No one would ever see it. She could ditch the book as soon as Angela graduated. Of course, the truth was…I was the one who didn’t need trouble with the administration. The poems were written in my class. I don’t have tenure, remember?”

  “So the book’s in the library?” Swenson says.

  “As far as I know.”

  “I might take a look at it.”

  “Be my guest,” says Magda. Suddenly they’re both aware of their half-eaten sandwiches and guiltily apply themselves to finishing their food.

  “I was hungry,” Swenson lies.

  “Me, too. I guess,” says Magda.

  “By the way, Ted.” Magda pushes away her plate. “While you’re at the library, check out Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip. Pass it on to your students. It’s the best thing ever written about having sex with a pet.”

  “Thanks,” says Swenson. “I knew I could count on you.”

  “We’re friends,” says Magda. “Right?”

  The last sighting of Elijah Euston’s ghost took place in the library several years ago. A freshman working late in the American history stacks saw an old man in a black frock coat, sobbing, his face buried in his hands, with only his powdered wig showing. Why was Elijah crying? Because of the tragic fates of his daughters or the decline of the college he founded with such high hopes?

  Swenson jogs up the library steps, steps intended to make you feel you should be climbing them on your knees. Whether or not the library’s haunted, Swenson never feels closer to Elijah Euston than he does in this British cathedral transplanted to northern Vermont. Euston didn’t live to see it finished but left elaborate instructions for the stonemasons, stained glass makers and woodcarvers on how to build his temple to higher education.