Blue Angel

by Francine Prose

  Magda says, “I don’t know. It’s tough. I keep making these awful mistakes.”

  A tremor shakes Magda’s throaty voice. Swenson wants to help her up and lead her away from the table. Magda shouldn’t be telling them this. These people are not to be trusted. They will do her more damage than the most neurotic student.

  “What sorts of mistakes?” asks the dean.

  Marjorie asks, “Does anyone want another dab of shepherd’s pie?”

  “What mistakes, Magda?” the dean repeats.

  “Lord.” Magda sighs. “Miscalculations. Okay, here’s an example. I noticed that my students seemed a little narrow in their ideas about what you could say in a poem. So I read them that Larkin poem that begins, ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’”

  “Oh, I adore Larkin!” Saintly Dave rushes headlong into the hideous silence. Everyone else has gone rigid. Does Magda not want tenure?

  “I realized it was…dangerous.” Magda turns up the charm, determined to present herself as a teacher who stays up nights wondering how to help her students. “I thought about it a long time. I knew I was taking a risk. But their response was way worse than I’d thought. They all turned white as sheets.”

  Swenson refills his wineglass. How much has Magda been drinking? Is she on a suicide mission? Everyone’s heart is breaking for her, even heartless Jamie.

  “Maybe the problem wasn’t the language,” Jamie says. “Maybe it’s Philip Larkin. Talk about overrated. All that bitter, self-pitying, narcissistic whining from that squalling infant posing as a middle-aged librarian!”

  “His misogyny!” Lauren says. “And the total absence of one positive, life-affirming line in the man’s entire oeuvre!”

  Swenson can hardly stand it. He loves those beautiful poems that tell more of the truth than anyone wants to hear. Nor does it help to think that this is one of the few, the very few dinner tables in the world at which most, or any, of the guests have heard of Philip Larkin.

  “Magda, my dear,” says Bernie, “if your point is that you wanted your students to ‘loosen up,’ there are other models. Swift, for example. Swift, as you no doubt know, could get very…loose. Frightfully scatological.”

  Swenson drains his wineglass. He has the strangest sensation. His desire, his need to speak is burning a hole in his head. Is that the stench of his own charred gray matter, or the Benthams’ sausages? The pressure is explosive, but he can’t afford to blow. The group’s coming down on poor Magda for saying fuck when he spends hours of classroom time on graphic descriptions of bestiality. A man with Angela’s dirty poems on his desk shouldn’t go anywhere near this.

  The thought of Angela cheers him. It calms him, in a way, to let his churned-up feelings settle on the fact of her existence. It’s almost as if she’s become a place to which he can retreat. She reminds him that there is a world beyond this soul-eroding dinner, a world of kids with a passion to write, some of whom actually can.

  Of course, it’s at this most inappropriate moment, in this most inconvenient setting that Swenson finds himself starting to wonder if he might not be developing the teensiest bit of a crush on Angela Argo. He’s certainly been thinking about her, looking forward to seeing her. No. What he’s looking forward to is reading more of her novel.

  He looks down the table at Sherrie. Sherrie sees him, stares back at him. Sherrie loves him. She knows him. They have a child, they’ve shared twenty-one years, a sizable chunk of their lives. But Sherrie’s putting up with this dinner, which he doesn’t think Angela would. Sherrie’s compromised, as he has, while Angela probably still believes she’ll never have to. Sherrie just wants to get through this. Angela would be taking a stand against all this drippy self-satisfaction. She’d be spinning her eyes and gouging holes in the Bentham’s glossy table.

  Swenson owes it to Angela to say what he’s been thinking. He feels as if he’s growing nose rings, green hair’s springing out of his head. His forehead heats up, his cheeks warm, his skin seems to tighten and shrink.

  “I’ve got an idea,” he hears himself say. “A new approach, so to speak.” The other guests turn to watch his face turn pink, like a stir-fried shrimp.

  “What’s that, Ted?” says Bentham.

  “I think we’ve been giving in without a fight,” says Swenson. Sherrie and Magda exchange anxious looks. He winks at them and keeps going. “We’ve been knuckling under to the most neurotic forces of censorship and repression. In fact we should be helping them get beyond their problems. We should try desensitizing them, the way the Scientologists do….”

  “Oh, Ted,” says Lauren, “are you a Scientologist? I had no idea. How amazing!”

  “Ted’s a Quaker,” says Dave Sterret, the only one who’s read—who makes a point of having read—Swenson’s work. In fact he often refers to details, as if he’s being tested.

  “Not anymore,” says Sherrie. “Ted’s not a Quaker anymore.” Sherrie, the expert on his spiritual life.

  “Of course I’m not a Scientologist. What do you think I am, Lauren? An idiot? I’ve just read about their process. And it’s got its points. They hook you up to a lie detector and read you a list of words guaranteed to pack an emotional punch. Mother. Father. Child. Sex. Death. And then they say them over and over, until the graph stops spiking.

  “So why don’t we do something like that for these wimps, these…whiners bitching about sexual harassment. Lock them in a room and shout dirty words at them until they grow up. Shit shit shit. Fuck fuck fuck. Like that. You get the idea.”

  Well, he’s got their attention now. The guests all listen politely as he goes on braying obscenities like some sidewalk psycho. “Motherfucker. Penis. Words like that. Nothing fancy or kinky. Ordinary, honorable, time-tested Anglo-Saxonisms. We’d be doing them a big favor, educationally, morally, spiritually, helping them mature faster than if we coddle them, indulge every whim and neurosis.”

  “Ted…,” says Sherrie. “Ted’s got Tourette’s. Late-onset adult Tourette’s. A very rare condition.”

  No one laughs.

  Swenson says, “That’s a great idea. Hire the handicapped. Find people with Tourette’s to say the dirty words.”

  His colleagues gaze woozily down at their food or into some middle distance.

  “Well!” says Marjorie Bentham at last. “Freeze! No one move! Everyone stay exactly where you are while I clear the table.”

  “That was wonderful, Marjorie,” Magda says.

  “Are you sure we can’t give you a hand?” says Lauren.

  More compliments, more offers of help. None of them—not even Sherrie—is up to eye contact with Swenson. From down the table Magda sends him a smile so supportive and stricken that it dawns on him, at last, just how badly he’s blown it.

  “Marjorie’s spent all day making the sweet,” announces the dean with pride. And Marjorie appears in the doorway with her twenty-four-hour production: a giant free-standing pudding, its outer layer—strawberry jello?—trembling under the load of tiny silver candy ball bearings and multicolored sprinkles. A blazing toxic rainbow.

  “Jam trifle!” Marge solves the mystery for them.

  The guests say, “Oh!” and smile in unison as if she’s taking their picture, a formal group portrait of adult men and women simultaneously rescued and menaced by dessert.

  A bad sign: leaving the Benthams’, Sherrie hurries ahead and gets in the driver’s seat. Another bad sign: silence, and the fact that they’re both holding their breath as they pull out of the driveway and cruise past the grand houses on Main Street, whose lights appear to be blinking out, house by house, as they pass.

  “Jesus, Ted,” says Sherrie. “What the hell got into you? I kept expecting your head to swivel around and for you to projectile vomit.”

  “You want to hear something weird? I was thinking about The Exorcist too, just recently. I was feeling like that kid….” Swenson laughs with wild relief. How lucky he feels not to be enacting the more standard scenario: the sourpuss wife scolding the
errant husband for transgressing against the standards of social decency and offending the powers that will decide on his next minuscule salary raise. Sherrie hasn’t turned into his mother, reproving her naughty child-husband. They’re both still unruly children, still the rebel kids, preserving some vestige of big-city badness here among these bloodless New England wusses.

  “Glad you enjoyed yourself,” Swenson said. “Jesus, why did I do that? It was Jamie trashing Philip Larkin that sent me over the edge.”

  Sherrie’s silent till after she’s made the turn by the Euston dairy co-op. “Magda’s got a huge crush on you. You know that, don’t you, Ted?” Is Sherrie curious? Jealous? Proud? Or just making conversation?

  “Magda’s not my type,” he says. “All that wired Irish Catholic hysteria. If I’d wanted that, I would have married Mom.” He feels disloyal to Magda and also guilty for lying, since the qualities he’s just dismissed are what he finds appealing. But it’s a quick way of changing a subject that he’s not quite ready to change.

  “What makes you say that?” he asks.

  “The way she looks at you,” says Sherrie. “Total adoration. Poor thing. I wanted to kill her.”

  “You were projecting,” Swenson says. “The total adoration.”

  “Right,” says Sherrie, and laughs.

  “I’m flattered. But I don’t think Magda’s attracted to me. It’s too late. I’m too old. I’ve lost it. No one gets a crush on me. Not even students. Do you think anyone would find me attractive anymore?”

  “I do.” Sherrie puts her hand on his thigh. Swenson puts his hand over hers and slides it closer to his crotch. Oh, he’s a very lucky guy, to have a beautiful wife who’s turned on by his bad behavior at a faculty dinner party.

  Their hands stay locked until Sherrie retrieves hers to turn into the driveway. She reaches the house before him—getting out of the car, Swenson realizes he’s drunker than he’d thought—and is waiting for him in the hallway when he finally gets through the door. They embrace. Swenson runs his hand down her back and pulls her against him.

  He says, “Wait up for me a minute. I’ll meet you in the bedroom. I had this idea for something I’m working on. I need to jot down a few notes before I lose it.”

  “Okay,” says Sherrie. “Don’t be long. I’m about to pass out.”

  And now Swenson knows he is sinking, has already sunk beneath the level of decency, honesty, and self-preservation. His attractive, grown-up wife is waiting for him in bed, and the rat he’s turned into is streaking through the dark, scurrying off to his rathole because he can’t wait till morning to read a filthy poem by a child.

  Swenson finds Angela 911 hidden under some unpaid bills. He opens the book at random and concentrates to keep the words from sliding all over the page.

  He says: Is this 859–6732? Is this Angela 911?

  Angela, is that you?

  I say: What would you like to do tonight?

  He says: Hush. Don’t talk. Listen to what I’m doing.

  I’m coming up to you from behind.

  My hand is over your mouth.

  I say: Honey, how can I talk on the phone

  With your hand over my mouth?

  He says: Don’t call me honey.

  My hand is over your mouth.

  I’m bending you over a trash can.

  I’m pulling up your skirt.

  I’m slapping your thighs, just lightly.

  Making you open your legs. You push your ass against me,

  Helping me find your cunt.

  I say: Honey, you know I can’t talk.

  Bye now. I’m hanging up.

  Swenson puts down the manuscript, switches off the light. He doesn’t want to think about the poem, doesn’t want to think at all.

  Navigating by faint moonlight, he gropes and stumbles to his dark bedroom. Is Sherrie sleeping? He undresses and gets in next to her. He runs his hand down her thigh.

  “Ted,” she says sleepily, “listen.”

  He puts his hand over Sherrie’s mouth. She pries his hand away and gently licks his palm with one swift silky stroke that transmits a shower of sparks directly to his groin.

  “Don’t talk,” says Swenson.

  “Okay,” Sherrie says. “Not a word. I promise.”

  Sometimes, when Swenson can’t remember what happened in class last week, he looks to see which student seems most wounded or aggrieved and tracks that information back to whose story they demolished. Today, it’s a real contest. Everybody’s scowling, though Courtney’s special ferociousness as she sits, shoulders high and rigid, hands knotted over her books, offers a helpful memory jog. “First Kiss—Inner City Blues.”

  But the rest are also projecting massive discontent. Did the college announce a new policy banning keg parties or binge drinking? Maybe it’s just that low point that comes at midsemester, though it’s early for that. Or could they all somehow suspect that their teacher spent the week rereading Angela’s poems? Isn’t this what one hears about bullfighters and lion tamers? On the day of the accident, they could taste the animal’s ugly mood.

  In this cage of snarling beasts, Carlos looks the most frightened.

  “Carlos,” says Swenson. “My man!”

  “Yo,” says Carlos, gloomily.

  The only seat left at the table is between Angela and Claris. Swenson inserts himself exactly halfway between them, where he sits, unable to breathe, hoping only that if he passes out, he’ll fall into Claris’s lap and not in the more incriminating direction of Angela Argo. Is anyone alarmed by the icy droplets beading up on his forehead? Does anyone notice? Apparently not. Well, that’s fine. Just asking. An ominous interior voice pretends to offer him comfort, droning its three-word mantra: No one knows. No one knows. No one knows that Angela’s poems are in his office at home, locked in his filing cabinet. Or that her filthy free verse has traveled here in his head, like some malarial mosquito sneaking across the ocean in an airplane’s passenger cabin. The poems about the incest, the ones about the rapes…

  But Carlos’s work is what’s happening here. Swenson needs to stay focused on the story, which he skimmed way too fast this morning. It’s not bad, but it’s disturbing, and the students don’t like to be disturbed, so by the time they’ve finished working over the unfortunately titled “Toilet Bowl,” they will have defused its power to unnerve them.

  “Toilet Bowl” opens with its sorry, “fat white fish” of a hero having his face dunked in the eponymous commode by other inmates at a state reformatory for boys. As the story progresses, the hero is pushed toward the suicide that the reader can see coming from the second paragraph. And in the harrowing and surprisingly successful penultimate scene, the boy is talked into killing himself by a bunkmate who tells him a rambling, sadistically detailed story about the mercy killing of a dog, and why it was such a mercy.

  Swenson says, “Carlos, read us something.”

  Carlos takes a deep breath. “Man. This is tough.”

  Jonelle says, “Everyone’s got to do it, Carlos. Come on. You’re the ex-Marine.”

  “Navy,” says Carlos. “If you don’t mind.”

  “Come on, people,” Swenson says. “It is hard. Give Carlos a break.”

  Angela says, “Yeah, man, it’s torture. I mean, I’m so terrified of you guys talking about my work that I’m just not bringing it in this semester.”

  Like every class, this one is attentive to infinitesimal shifts of status and position. Everyone knows that Swenson has been reading Angela’s manuscript. Now she’s signaling them that her seemingly special treatment is not a sign of superior talent but actually a concession to her childish fears. She’s like some furry animal, rolling over and playing dead in their furious Darwinian struggle.

  “Right!” says Nancy. “Angela got trashed so bad in Magda’s poetry seminar last spring that she doesn’t want to risk it again.”

  So that’s how they see Angela: a writer of mediocre pornographic poems. In any case, they’ve read her poems, discusse
d the least dicey ones in class, the very same poems that Swenson is so ashamed of reading in secret. But they were assigned to read Angela’s poems—and Swenson’s volunteering. Oh, why can’t he just lighten up and be proud of himself for taking a genuine interest in a gifted student?

  “That’s right,” Swenson says. “We all know that having our work talked about in class isn’t exactly fun. So let’s all shut up and give Carlos our most generous attention.”

  “Okay, Coach. Here we go. Let’s do it.” Carlos clears his throat:

  “‘Eddie was glad there were no mirrors on the bottom of toilet bowls. He would have had to see his fat pale jellyfish sea-monster face, bobbing around like some sort of undersea creature, the terror in his filmy blue eyes and his neck twisting back to choke down disgusting shit water and beg his torturers for mercy….’”

  Swenson lets Carlos go on for awhile. “Thank you,” he says at last. “It’s a brave story. Really. Let’s hear what the rest of you think. Remember, let’s start off with what we like….”

  “Well,” says Makeesha, “that first paragraph is typical of the whole problem. What dude with his head being dunked in a toilet would be thinking about why they don’t have mirrors in the bottom of the bowl?”

  Danny says, “Makeesha’s right. That stuff about the mirror in the toilet bowl felt more like Carlos wanting to describe the kid than like anything the kid himself would be actually thinking—”

  “Actually thinking?” says Angela. “How do you know what you’d be actually thinking if someone was stuffing your head down a toilet bowl?”

  Go, Angela, thinks Swenson. It irritates him that Carlos shoots Angela a grateful glance. He’s never noticed her before. Just for that, Swenson won’t remind the class that they’re still supposed to be discussing what they liked about the story.