Blue Angel

by Francine Prose

  “You need to wash that down with something, old man,” Bentham says.

  “Vodka. Straight up. A double. Please.” Swenson feels Sherrie’s eyes drilling him. Let her drink the white wine.

  It’s a purebred English Department crowd, just as Swenson feared. The tepid predictablity, the lack of interest or buzz. Easy, it’s only dinner, not death and eternal hell. The guest list suggests that this isn’t “pleasure” but business: one of the dean’s periodic checkups on his various departments. Bentham will ask thoughtful questions and murmur soft grunts of comprehension as they cut their own throats, one by one, each sounding too jaded, too naive, too earnest, too complaining, until even the tenured will feel anxious about their jobs as Bentham sits back and watches how badly they’re behaving.

  The smoke has begun to dissipate, and their convivial moment of alliance against the elements ends. They regard each other in the unflattering light of their most cherished resentments.

  “Please, sit down,” says Bentham.

  Two seats are vacant, a Queen Anne chair and a large hassock. Swenson and Sherrie dive for the hassock.

  “Hello, Ted,” Bernie Levy says in his cultivated accent.

  Swenson is supposed to have forgotten how, twenty years ago, Bernie, who still had some fight in him then, battled Swenson’s appointment, campaigned against hiring a novelist and starting a writing department. Some department: Swenson and Magda. Bernie needn’t have worried. Oh, if only Bernie had won! Swenson might have stayed in New York.

  “Our author in residence,” Bernie says. “How’s the writer’s life, old boy?”

  “Hello, Sherrie,” Ruth Levy says grimly.

  “Hiya, Ruth,” says Sherrie.

  “Fine,” says Swenson. “Thanks.”

  “How is your work going?” asks Dave Sterret, the nicest guy in the room, battered daily into mellowness by his sadistic boyfriend, Deconstructionist Jamie.

  “Some days fast, some days slow.” Is that really Swenson talking? All you have to do is walk in here to catch a case of terminal banality.

  “The creative life is such a challenge,” says Ruth Levy. “So difficult—and so rewarding.”

  Deconstructionist Jamie shoots daggers at harmless, ga-ga Ruth, while Lauren Healy glares at Jamie, protecting the older woman from his patronizing, oppressive maleness.

  “Can you talk about what you’re working on?” Could Jamie somehow have intuited that Swenson’s not working? And why should Jamie care? He hates books, or as he calls them: texts. And he especially hates the writers who deposit these annoying book-length paper turds that Jamie must dispose of.

  Ever since he got tenure, Jamie has made no secret of his contempt for the rest of the department—everyone but Dave, with whom Jamie fell in love his first year at Euston. How strange that Bernie Levy fought Swenson’s hiring and eagerly welcomed Jamie, the viper in their midst. Jamie has managed to communicate that he’s never read Swenson’s books, nor does he intend to, though sometimes he does inquire about Swenson’s more famous and successful contemporaries. He likes to ask why such-and-such is so terribly overpraised.

  Jamie says, “Is talking about one’s writing strictly against the rules?”

  “I’m going to help Marge,” Lauren announces. “The poor woman’s all alone in there.” And indeed, Bentham’s left Marge to clean up the wreckage. He leans dapperly against the mantel, twirling a drink in his hand.

  “Excuse me, Jamie. What did you say?” says Swenson. It’s one thing to skip a beat in front of your class, another at the dean’s dinner.

  “Are you working on a novel?”

  “No wonder I didn’t hear,” Swenson says. “Yes, in fact. I am.” Sherrie and Magda are watching, wishing they’d all drop the subject.

  “What’s your new novel about?” asks Bentham. “Have you told us? Sorry if I’ve forgotten.”

  What if Swenson had told them? How would he feel to learn that his wisp of an idea had already floated out of the dean’s famously retentive mind.

  “That’s all right,” says Swenson. “I don’t think I did tell you. Or anyone. Not even my nearest and dearest.” He nods at Sherrie.

  “Don’t look at me,” says Sherrie. Chuckles, all around.

  “I hear that’s quite common among writers,” ventures Ruth Levy. “Secretive. You know.”

  “As if we’re all just dying to steal their ideas,” says Jamie.

  “Not even the title?” prods Francis coyly. “You won’t even tell us that?”

  “Well,” says Swenson. “All right. It’s Eggs.”

  He feels like that girl in The Exorcist. What demon made him say that? He wishes his head could swivel around to see where his voice just came from.

  “What an interesting title,” says Dave.

  “Ted?” Sherrie murmurs worriedly. “I thought your title was The Black and the Black.”

  Dave says, “I suppose the wife’s always the last to know.”

  “The Black and the Black,” says Ruth. “Another interesting title.”

  “We get it,” Jamie says.

  “They’re both good titles,” says Magda.

  Swenson wonders if Magda knows what Angela’s novel is called. Did he tell her over lunch?

  “Titles are tricky,” says Swenson.

  He can’t bear this another minute. He gets up and starts to leave the room with the vague purposefulness of some nonemergency bathroom errand. And why not? A leisurely piss would provide a nice mini-vacation from the party.

  “Here’s another double for the road,” Bentham says. More vodka glugs into Swenson’s glass. He downs half in one gulp, so that his throat is still burning when, en route to the bathroom, he meets Lauren Healy, emerging from the kitchen with a rattan tray on which are neat rows of yet more Marmite crackers. Normally Lauren wears dark suits, but tonight she’s put on a dress, dark cotton, gathered high over the waist, puffing discreetly over the breasts, at once matronly and girlish. Swenson checks Lauren out. Lauren watches him check her out. Now he’s done it. Lauren draws nearer. Half his size, she peers up at him with a bleary pugnacious tilt.

  “Ted, what are you doing here?” Lauren’s whisper is oddly conspiratorial.

  “What do you mean?” asked Swenson.

  “You’re not up for tenure. You don’t want anything from Bentham. You’re not lobbying for a sabbatical? Or a new faculty line? Are you?”

  Is Lauren saying he’s a cowardly suck-up for accepting the dean’s invitation? Or a guy with such a nowhere social life he’s glad to be asked, even here?

  “Sherrie answered the phone. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here, believe me.”

  Lauren cringes. Too late, it crosses Swenson’s mind that she might have been flirting with him instead of trying to make him feel small. Well, he put a quick end to that with the mention of Sherrie. And the simple, chilly statement of fact: I wouldn’t be here—where you are, with you—if my wife hadn’t tricked me into it.

  Lauren shakes herself like a small drenched pet, straightens her tray of Marmite, and leaves. Swenson treks off to the bathroom where he lingers, as planned, though it’s hardly the leisurely piss of his dreams but rather a long, nervous prelude during which he stands there, embarrassed to be holding his dick, paralyzed by Marge’s pristine, accusatory collection of fluffed-up dainty terrycloth towels and edible-looking soaps. He’s so grateful for the few dribbles that finally oblige—his prostate must be shot—that he forgives himself the stain on his pants, though he knows Lauren will see it as yet another aggressive declaration of maleness.

  He returns to the living room, which has emptied in his absence. After an instant of irrational panic, he hears voices from the dining room, where everyone’s seated except for the rude, uncivilized, drunken novelist.

  “Sorry.” Swenson slides into the remaining chair, which with his luck, or perhaps Marge’s thoughtful placement, is next to Francis Bentham and across from Lauren. If he had any balls he’d make them all move so he could sit next to Sherrie,
who’s eyeing him a little wildly from the far end of the table. But if he had any balls, he wouldn’t be here in the first place. Years ago, at dinners like this, he and Sherrie would catch each other’s eye and keep looking: Brief out-of-body moments from which they’d return refreshed, as if after a nap. Who knows if that would work now? Still, it would be helpful to grab Sherrie’s hand under the table.

  The dean sends plates of food around. Somehow Marge has flayed the sausages, peeled away the blackened skins, and pulverized the rest into a species of pork gravy to pour—an impromptu shepherd’s pie—over mashed potatoes. Though it’s hardly the blood feast from Beowulf that the Benthams specialize in, the meal’s been saved. The guests are relieved. They lean over their plates of steaming hash, periodically bobbing up to compliment Marge on her cooking and her improvisational skills, pretending the gravy doesn’t taste smoky and charred. Meanwhile, they wash the whole mess down with streams of the vinegary red wine that the dean pours from a sweating glass carafe.

  “Comfort food!” says Lauren, bullyingly.

  “Mmm,” agree the others.

  “Very good, Marjorie. Well, friends,” says Francis, “what’s new out there in the trenches?”

  Everyone keeps eating. Let someone else begin.

  “How do Euston’s best and brightest seem to you? As opposed to last year’s? As compared with any year’s…?”

  “Well,” begins Bernie Levy, “I don’t suppose it’ll come as a shock if I say that each year’s entering class seems to have read less than last year’s worst students.”

  “Right,” Deconstructionist Jamie sneers. “I guess those high schools are really slacking off on their Dryden and Pope.”

  “What about you, Jamie?” says Francis. “Are your students cut from brighter cloth?”

  Does Jamie intend to tell the dean that the five or six misfit seniors who elect to take his Literary Theory seminar are brighter than Bernie’s? Even Swenson, who has no great love for Bernie, tenses with anticipation.

  “I have mostly upperclassmen,” says Jamie. “So by the time they get to me, I can’t blame their high school teachers. It’s these guys”—he gestures at his colleagues—“who have messed up their minds.” Jamie laughs. Alone.

  Gerry Sloper says, “I had a sort of interesting thing happen in class the other day. It made me realize where the students are at—how different from myself at their age.”

  “I was never their age,” Bernie says.

  “We believe it,” Dave says affectionately, mopping up after the ravages of Jamie’s casual meanness.

  “Sort of interesting,” says Jamie. “God help us.”

  “Gerry,” says Bentham. “Please. Proceed.”

  “Well,” says Gerry, “this was in my Intro to American Lit. We were doing Poe. I thought I’d give them a little bio…a little…gossip, really, to make it more immediate, give it a personal touch—”

  “Personal!” says Bernie. “That’s what we’ve been reduced to! Fodder for the talk show.”

  “Wouldn’t it be great?” Jamie says. “Poe and the thirteen-year-old child-bride cousin discussing their marital arrangements with Sally Jessie Raphael?”

  “Interesting,” says Ruth.

  “Jesus Christ, no,” says Swenson.

  “Oh, Ted,” says Lauren, “you’re so predictable. Always taking the male writer’s side.”

  “Anyway,” says Gerry, “I told them about Poe’s problems with alcohol and opium. Winding up in the gutter, details like that. Any reference to substance abuse always gets their attention. But when I got to Poe’s marriage, the class got very quiet. I kept asking what the matter was, none of them would answer. Until finally one young woman said, ‘Are you telling us that we’ve been studying the work of a child molester? I think we should have been told that before we read the assignment.’”

  “No way,” says Dave.

  “Way,” Gerry says.

  “A child molester?” says Magda. “Oh, poor Edgar Allan!”

  “Edgar Allan, is it? Listen to Magda!” Dave says. “Oh, you poets! On a first-name basis with the dead.”

  Magda likes being called a poet and turns to smile at Dave.

  “Fascinating!” Coquettishly, the dean cups his chin in one hand and tilts his head in measured increments toward each guest at the table. “Are the rest of you finding a heightened consciousness about those…issues…?”

  Another mystery solved! All this is just a follow-up, one in a series of dinner-hour departmental reviews of the basic points covered by the recent faculty meeting. Is sexual harassment Bentham’s private obsession? Or his professional duty? Ceaseless vigilance on behalf of the college’s legal status, its budget, its reputation?

  “We all have to watch our backs,” says Bernie. “I never talk to a female student in my office alone without the door wide open. And I keep a tape recorder in my desk that I can activate if things get dicey.”

  Everyone stares at Bernie, straining to imagine the scenario in which a student fantasizes that Bernie’s about to grope her with those mottled spidery fingers.

  “What about the rest of you?” says Francis. “Does the problem seem dangerous here at Euston? Or is it just our…sensitivity to the current academic climate?”

  “It’s very dangerous,” says Dave Sterret. “Sensitive as in…top secret. Sensitive as in…explosive.”

  The guests deepen their involvement with their charred shepherd’s pie.

  For years before Jamie came to Euston, Dave, as faculty adviser to the Gay Students Alliance, dated its best-looking guys. The department heaved a collective sigh of relief when Jamie and Dave fell in love, though by then, knowing Jamie, they worried about poor Dave. Swenson used to wonder how Dave—a tall, thin, painfully awkward guy with a face badly scarred by acne—got so much action. Apparently, Dave Sterret has hidden depths, some well of integrity or bravado that’s led him to take on the dean’s question, despite a past that might keep a lesser man focused on his mashed potatoes.

  Dave says, “We were doing Great Expectations last week. And one of my students—a big beery jock—asked if Dickens meant there to be a homosexual thing between Pip and Magwich. Was this kid trying to bait me? They all know I’m gay. I said I thought there might be critical writing on the subject, which the kid could look up for extra credit. But I didn’t think that Dickens meant us to read a gay subtext into the book. And finally we had to consider what the writer intended.”

  “What the writer intended?” cries Jamie. “I can’t believe I just heard you say that, Dave. Have I taught you nothing?”

  Dave’s used to this. He hardy misses a beat. “I thought that was the end of it. But the next day, a young woman—stuff she’s said in class makes me think she might be some sort of born-again evangelical—came to my office and told me that the discussion had made her feel very unsafe. The way she said that word…unsafe…I’ll tell you, it gave me the chills.”

  “Why?” demands Lauren. “It’s an ordinary English word with a perfectly valid meaning.”

  “Oh, dear,” says Jamie. “Semantics, now!”

  “What did you do, Dave?” asks Magda.

  Dave says, “I reminded her that I didn’t start the discussion. I said I wanted students to feel free to bring up any questions they had. I gave her a two-minute sermon about academic freedom. And then I went home and took to my bed with a major case of the vapors!”

  “Oh, my,” says the dean. He looks from Dave to Gerry and back again. “And both of these incidents—the Poe and the Dickens—you say happened last week?”

  “Well,” says Gerry, “within the last few weeks.”

  Bentham shakes his head. “Statistically speaking, I’d say this indicates that things are heating up. What about you, Lauren? Has this come up in your classes? I’d imagine it might be a flash point in the field of gender studies.”

  Swenson tries to recall the title of Lauren’s senior seminar. Huck as Hermaphrodite: Masks of Gender and Identity in Twain—or Was It
Samuel Clemens? It was the department joke when the course list first circulated. But by now everyone knows that Lauren’s classes fill up fast. The memory of Angela’s contempt for Lauren’s reading of Jane Eyre glows in the center of Swenson’s chest, a bright star of protection.

  “Of course, it comes up,” says Lauren. “I bring it up. I want to make sure they know that I’m on their side. I want them to feel that the classroom is safe—that word Dave finds so ‘chilling.’ I want them to be aware that they can talk to me, that if they’re having a problem with these issues, harassment or whatever, the kids can confide in me, and I’ll take them seriously. I feel it’s my duty, as one of the few women….”

  Lauren never lets them forget that she was the first woman given full tenure in the English Department and is still the only tenured woman. “We all know Euston’s history, beginning with Elijah’s poor martyred daughters. In any case, I find that the whole mood in the classroom changes after we work our way through this. Clear the air. After that, we can pretty much talk about anything—safely—without any threat or discomfort….”

  So that’s what Swenson’s doing wrong. If he had any brains—or the vestiges of a survival instinct—he’d urge his students to confide in him, say he wants them to feel safe. After that they can have the world’s most relaxed discussions about teenagers having sex with whole flocks of chickens.

  “Magda?” the dean asks. “What about your class?” Speaking of untenured women, let’s hear from our little poet.

  At the faculty meeting, Bentham told a story about a hiring committee that called up a male candidate’s former student to ask how the candidate had interacted with the women in his class. When the student said that one of those women—a friend—was visiting him and would be happy to answer his question, the interviewer said that female students would be contacted later by a female member of the hiring committee. This cautionary tale had gotten a laugh, or at least a horrified chuckle. A tornado was brewing out there. Head for the basement, Dorothy.