Blue Angel

by Francine Prose

  Swenson’s spirit used to soar on the updraft of transcendence that the library’s vaulted arches were designed to produce. Every so often he still gets a buzz in the presence of two thousand years of poetry, art, history, science—the whispery proximity of all those dear dead voices. But lately, he’s more likely to feel the dizzying chasm between what Elijah Euston dreamed and what his dream has become, between the lofty heights of Western culture and the everyday grubbiness of education at Euston.

  It’s the same mild vertigo Swenson suffers whenever he passes portraits of Euston’s past presidents, or Jonathan Edwards scowling from the Founders Chapel wall. That’s what tradition means these days: those stirrings of inadequacy in the face of our ancestors’ hopes. Or maybe Swenson’s just edgy as he enters these hallowed halls to find a student’s dirty poems.

  As always, the library’s empty. Where do the students work? Swenson’s footsteps ring against the stone floor of the entrance hall. He feels at once tiny, overwhelmed, and disruptively huge and noisy. At least no one’s around to ambush him with maddening conversation.

  Then he sees Betty Hester at the checkout desk. A tall upright tea cosy of a woman, Betty wears a homespun eggplant-colored dress with a skirt roomy enough for her whole clan—the six children she’s raised while working at Euston and obtaining the requisite Library Science degrees—to live comfortably underneath it.

  “Ted!” hisses Betty. “We haven’t seen you in decades. Too busy writing to read?”

  “If only!” Swenson shrugs modestly to deflect Betty’s assumption, meanwhile leaving open the chance that she might be right.

  “Oh, you artists. How’s Sherrie?”

  “Fine,” says Swenson. “The kids?”

  “Just dandy. Well! Is there something I can help you with today?”

  “Thanks, no. I’m at one of those slow points…. I thought I’djust drop in and browse, see if inspiration strikes.”

  “Oh, a real reader!” Betty says. “People like you are the reason this place still exists.”

  With newly wary eyes, the paranoia of a pervert, Swenson observes that from the checkout desk Betty can see the card catalog, which he still prefers over the frustrating computer. Does he imagine that if Betty sees him head for the As, she’ll guess he’s here to find The Complete Dirty Poems of Angela Argo? And now inspiration does strike. He can go to the As, look up Magda’s suggestion—Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip—and while he’s in the neighborhood…

  He scribbles the Ackerley call number on a slip of paper and then, with studied casualness, finds “Argo, Angela. Angela 911. Privately printed.”

  No need for Betty to notice that Swenson’s breathing quickens. And now he can only hope that Elijah Euston’s ghost has gone back to wherever it normally lurks as he takes the stone stairs that corskcrew up to the literature section.

  Not an extra molecule of oxygen up here in this smog of mildew. He traces his index finger along the rows of books and stops at a volume sewn with shiny red thread, shelved next to A. R. Ammons. His fingers fly away from it as if from a hot iron. His lungs seem to be shrinking in response to the lack of air.

  He steadies himself, then slides the book—the booklet—from the shelf. No wonder Betty was freaked. On the cover is the title, Angela 911, in bold red letters. And below that is a photo, downloaded from a computer, of the Venus de Milo, with a pair of arms crudely drawn in. One hand covers the statue’s crotch. The other holds a phone receiver.

  Hearing—imagining?—footsteps, Swenson stops and listens. He peers down the row of bookshelves. The manuscript shakes in his hands. He finds the dedication page: “To my Mother and Father.” How thoughtful—dedicating dirty poems about incest and phone sex to your parents. He shuts the book. Is someone coming? Perhaps the bookshelves are groaning with age, the floors shifting under their weight.

  The light is too dim to read by, but he hesitates to go to a carrel, where someone might catch him with the book, too far from the shelves to slip it back. He restores it to its proper place, leaves, finds the Ackerley book, returns and gets Angela’s manuscript, which he slips under the Ackerley. Then he walks to the farthest desk, a cubbyhole wedged in a corner—a carrel no one would ever pass on the way to anywhere else.

  He pages to the first poem and reads:

  I’m the father of four daughters.

  Three of them are sleeping.

  One is awake and waiting for me.

  That’s why I called you tonight.

  Are you sleeping? Don’t sleep. Listen.

  I keep thinking of her hard tiny breasts.

  My fingers between her legs.

  Her hips pushing up against my hand.

  Are you sleeping? Listen.

  I hear her cry

  The pigeon coo she made as a baby

  But now the cry is for me, it’s mine.

  Her bones are a pigeon’s bones.

  I lie on them gently, gently,

  My penis against her smooth thigh.

  That’s why I called you.

  Listen. Don’t sleep. Listen.

  I said, I’m not sleeping.

  I’m waiting for you.

  Oh, you make me so hot.

  Pretend that you’re lying on top of me.

  Pretend that I’m your daughter.

  Okay. She’s no Sylvia Plath. It’s a good thing her fiction is better than her poems. Meanwhile he’s aware that these uncharitable thoughts are merely attempts to distract himself from the fact that he has an erection. What kind of monster is he? Aroused by a poem about incest, the abuse of an innocent girl! All these years he’s been fooling himself about his so-called moral principles, his inner life, his duties as teacher and husband and father—the father of a daughter. Suppose someone did this to Ruby? Suppose someone did this to Angela?

  Swenson’s hardly human. He’s an animal. A beast. He crosses and uncrosses his legs, closes his eyes and inhales. The dust makes him cough. Think of lung cancer. All those years he smoked. There now. His hard-on’s subsiding. Really, he’s got to calm down. Stop being so tough on himself. An erection isn’t a capital crime, it’s neither rape nor molestation. Not even Catholics believe that bad thoughts are as bad as bad deeds. In high school, when he got erections during boring math class, he’d imagine his parents were dead. And now they are dead, and he himself will be dead, as will Sherrie and Ruby. Well, that takes care of it nicely. The industrial-strength antiaphrodisiac.

  Anyway, Angela’s poems—their trite erotic content—weren’t what got him hard. Nor the fact that they were written by a student he can picture in his mind, a girl with a side he wouldn’t have guessed, or maybe he could have guessed, and wisely chose not to. He’s forty-seven, nearly done with the necessity of evading erotic sabotage. Having chattered his way through flirtations with so many pretty students, he’d have to be mad to lose it, so near the finish line, for scrawny Angela Argo. His hard-on wasn’t about the poem. Or Angela. Certainly not. It’s the whole situation: the airless library, the aura of taboo, reading any reference to sex, no matter how banal, in this…hushed, ascetic, hallowed temple to scholarship and study.

  He wants to read the rest of the poems. But not here in the stacks. It would be different at home. Cleaner. Less furtive and weird. But first there’s the little problem of getting it past Betty Hester.

  Probably he should just steal it. He’d be doing Betty—and Magda—a favor. Why didn’t he bring his briefcase? He could tuck the book under his arm and walk it through the front door. With his luck, it’s been magnetized and will set off the alarm they installed a few years back on the foolishly hopeful premise that students want to steal books. Angela steals books, Magda said. And now, it seems, so does Swenson.

  He wants the book. He should have it. But he can’t risk checking it out, generating a permanent record stored in the computer. Why doesn’t he just photocopy it? It’s only fifteen or twenty pages. He’s so pleased by this easy solution that he hurries downstairs, then stops when he remembers that
the library copy machine is near the card catalog—plainly visible from Betty’s desk. Copying will never work. He’s got to keep a cool head. Avoid all eye contact with Betty and make it clear through gesture, or lack of gesture, that he brought the bound manuscript into the library and can simply take it back home.

  From the corner of his eye he sees that Betty’s not at her desk. Then, from the reference stacks behind the desk, Betty shouts, “Oh, hi, Ted! Be with you in a sec!” Where’s her professional duty to maintain the tomblike silence?

  Swenson forces a smile. It’s vital not to panic. For him to go to the trouble of checking out a student’s work for a previous class is not only well within his rights but a sign of superhuman dedication. What has gotten into him, a respected novelist and professor, terrified he’ll get busted for borrowing some amateurish, slightly titillating poems? You’d think he was a kid getting caught with his first dirty magazine.

  As Betty takes the Ackerley, Swenson surreptitiously transfers Anegla’s book to his other hand. That’s his. He’s not surrendering it. It’s none of Betty’s business.

  “Ted?”

  “What?” he temporizes. Busted for possession.

  “Your card?” says Betty, sweetly.

  “Oh!” Twisting sideways to keep Angela 911 out of Betty’s view, Swenson gropes with his free hand until he finds his wallet.

  Betty says, “Hmm. My Dog Tulip. I don’t believe I know this.”

  “Professor Moynahan recommended it,” he says. And then unnecessarily, “My students seem to be writing stories about people who fall inappropriately in love with their pets.” Why did he say that?

  “Well, I suppose that happens.” Zapping the book with the quivering beam of red light, Betty seems reassured by whatever message comes up on the computer screen and surrenders the Ackerley, all checked out and ready to go.

  “Thanks,” booms Swenson in an effort at hearty closure.

  Then Betty points and, in the unmistakable tones of a grade school teacher ordering a child to bring up the passed note or spit out the contraband gum, says, “And that one, Ted?”

  Oh, that one’s mine, Swenson should say. He doesn’t have to show her. But he hands it over, a transaction in which far more is exchanged than Angela Argo’s manuscript. A silent interrogation—all body language and facial expression—ensues over the question of whether he’d merely forgotten or intended not to declare it. The faintest tremor of suspicion…then the moment passes. Betty rotates the manuscript and together they study the Venus de Milo, the naked torso talking on the phone and grabbing her crotch.

  “Oh, dear,” Betty says. “I believe I know the author. Is she one of your students?”

  “You got it,” Swenson says gratefully.

  “How fortunate for her.”

  Swenson’s eyes film with tears of relief. It’s been an emotional day—lunch with Magda, then that little incident with himself, up in the stacks. Bless dear Betty for making it clear that borrowing a student’s poems is neither a perversion nor a punishable offense.

  Betty checks out the book and gives it to him. It’s all he can do not to grab it before she changes her mind.

  “How’s Sherrie?” says Betty. Didn’t she already ask?

  “Fine,” Swenson says. Again.

  “And Ruby?”

  “Fine.”

  “Give them my love,” says Betty.

  “And mine to yours,” says Swenson.

  As Dean Francis Bentham opens the door of his Main Street Victorian, a cloud of acrid smoke billows out at Swenson and Sherrie.

  “Welcome to the crematorium, chums!” Francis waves them inside. “Enter at your own risk. We’re in the midst of a crisis. Let’s just say a head-on crash between high tech and haute cuisine.”

  “Is something burning?” asks Sherrie.

  “Dinner,” Francis says. “I suppose I should have taken the new Jenn-Aire for a test run. A maiden voyage, what? The range-top grill is the problem. Not vented properly, I guess. The minute I put on the sausages, they erupted like volcanoes.”

  Swenson and Sherrie exchange quick looks. Both think, Serves him right.

  Francis makes a major production of serving roast hunks of meat. It’s partly the British tradition he’s hanging onto so tenaciously in the savage vegetarian colonies, and partly his private dig at the health-conscious squeamishness of Americans in general and of academics in particular.

  Swenson likes red meat. He’s glad to get it. They rarely eat it at home. He certainly prefers it to the ectoplasmic zucchini casseroles so popular at faculty dinners. But he doesn’t think food should be used to make a point about status and power. Who cares if you’ve got tenure? The dean can serve you what he wants. And you can either eat it or shut up and go hungry. Also, it occurs to Swenson that he’d better get his tooth fixed before he attends too many more of these flesh fests. He probes his molar with his tongue. He’ll chew on the other side.

  He and Sherrie used to go to faculty dinner parties, but when Ruby was born they got out of the habit, and by now they’ve lost the impulse—besides which, they’re rarely invited. In a community like Euston, turning down invitations makes you seem briefly more desirable. But fairly soon the magic wears off, and you stop being asked.

  It’s been a while since they’ve participated in one of these protracted peeps into the abyss. Deadly conversations, banal beyond belief. Did Mrs. Professor X really and truly see a red-crested titmouse at her bird feeder this morning? Could Professor and Mrs. Z possibly have ordered a double sleeping bag and been obliged to send back the single they received by mistake? The gossip, from the tepidly mean to the libelous and cruel. And the vile food, memorable only by decade, as generations of wives discovered the joys of olive oil, garlic, paella, sun-dried tomatoes, crudités with yogurt dip, parched chicken breasts, falafel—and now the ascetic vegans with their soy cheese and faux sausage.

  Swenson wouldn’t be here if Sherrie hadn’t answered when the dean’s secretary phoned. Sherrie thinks it’s suicidal to keep insulting his colleagues. He might need to ask for a favor someday, for a string to be pulled—or just tweaked. And Bentham will think of him as the man who wouldn’t come to dinner.

  Having forgotten that the party was tonight, Swenson’s spared himself the anticipatory dread, so that now the full horror assaults him. Their host ushers Swenson and Sherrie past the massive Victorian pieces that Marjorie Bentham has draped with folksy weavings from their junkets to third-world conferences. The house suggests an English country manor with the obligatory scuffings inflicted by the Benthams’ three outdoorsy, oversize, puppylike children: one now at Princeton, one at Yale, one in boarding school. Tonight, the details of that scruffy aristocracy are obscured by smoke. Bentham coughs, allowing—almost requiring—Swenson and Sherrie to hack politely after filling their lungs with particulate flakes of charred protein.

  “Be good chaps,” says Bentham, “and toss your coats over there. I’d take them, but—” He models two transparent speckled gloves of grease. It used to be the wives who were responsible for the dinners, but now often the cooks are men, who preempt any suspicion of feminization with fierce territorial possessiveness about what goes on in their kitchens. Men who, like Francis Bentham, use the ladle to remind their guests of the manly pleasures of animal muscle.

  Why is Swenson being so harsh? Of what are these people guilty? Dull dinner parties aren’t crimes. They’re not making child snuff films. Why not see this scene as Chekhov might: a gathering of lost souls pretending they’re not expiring from boredom and angst in some provincial outpost? Chekhov would feel compassion for them and not judge them, as Swenson does. And who is he to judge? A guy who gets a hard-on over girl-student erotica.

  The memory of his afternoon—the incident in the library—makes him feel as if his skin is coated with a thin film of sticky lotion. What if the soot from Bentham’s kitchen adheres and coats him with black? So now he’s imagining himself as a Hawthorne character whose sin manifests itself
at a faculty dinner party. What is his crime, exactly? Borrowing some poems? It’s not as if he hurried home and rushed off to his study to read them. They’re where he left them, on his desk.

  Speaking of Hawthorne…here’s Gerry Sloper, Mr. American Lit, his florid face dimly visible through the miasma of sausage fumes. Whom else has Bentham invited? Swenson prays that the guest list will venture beyond the English Department. Sometimes the dean makes an effort to include new faces, insofar as there are any at Euston. On the way over, Swenson let himself hope that Bentham might have asked Amelia Rodriguez, the sexy, unsmiling Puerto Rican martinet recently brought in to head—to be—the new Hispanic Studies Department. The disapproving Amelia might at least generate a faint hum of the exotic, a promise of masochistic excitement as the guests took turns failing to amuse her.

  But Amelia’s isn’t among the group in the living room, the all-too-familiar bodies perched on the edges of sofas and chairs, balancing drinks and nibbling Triscuits smeared with some sort of fecal material. Who knows how long they’ve been knocking back those vodkas and double scotches. They may have given up red meat, but some things are still sacred.

  “Marmite!” cries elderly Bernard Levy, their eighteenth-century man. “Why, I haven’t had Marmite since my wunderjahr at Oxford!”

  “Oh, do you like it?” says Marge Bentham. “Most Americans don’t.” Encouraged, she picks up two more crackers and waves them at Swenson and Sherrie, biscuit treats offered witholdingly so they have to trot over to get them.

  Marmite! Is there no end to the Benthams’ sadism? What will they be serving next—wobbly slabs of jellied calves feet? Steak and kidney pie? If Marjorie knows that most Americans—most humans—don’t like Marmite, why is it the only hors d’ouevre? Swenson gobbles his Triscuit in one brave bite and tries not to make a face at the sharp wheaty splinters glued together with vile salty paste. Attentive as baby birds, the other guests wait for him to gulp it down.

  Who’s the audience for Swenson’s magic trick? The Benthams. Gerry Sloper. Bernard Levy, the elderly Angophile, and his wife, the long-suffering Ruth. Dave Sterret, their Victorian man, and his boyfriend, Deconstructionist Jamie. The frosting, so to speak, on the cake is Swenson’s number one fan, Lauren Healy, the feminist critic and head of the Faculty-Student Women’s Alliance. He’s thrilled to see Magda—a friendly face for his gaze to alight on in its frantic swoop around the room. But his pleasure turns into a low-grade unease that takes a while to diagnose: lunch today. Angela’s poems.