“Frankly….” Whenever Meg says frankly, or personally, they’d all better run for cover. “The whole subject bored me. Personally, I’m sick of this shit about guys nearly killing each other so they won’t have to admit that what they really want to do is suck each other off.”
“Meg,” says Swenson, “please. We’re supposed to start out with what we liked about the story.”
Carlos says, “And I’m sick of your shit, Meg. If you think the only thing guys want is to suck each other’s dicks, no wonder you’re such a dyke!”
And now Swenson has an almost cinematic image of himself in Francis Bentham’s office, answering Meg’s charges that she was called a dyke in his class. But not by Swenson. It’s not his fault. He’s innocent. Innocent!
“People,” he says, “surely it’s possible to do this with civility and intelligence. I want to remind all of you that we’re talking about language in this class, and some kinds of language will not be permitted.”
“What do you mean?” says Makeesha. “Brothers and sisters be talkin’ this way—”
Swenson ignores her. “Carlos, aren’t you supposed to shut up until the others are finished?”
“Sorry, Coach!” Carlos makes a zipping motion across his lips.
“Claris,” says Swenson, desperately, “What did you like about Carlos’s story.”
“It’s got some…good moments,” Claris concedes. “I liked the last scene. The part where that other kid, what’s his name, tells the story about the dog—”
“Doofy,” Nancy says.
“I liked the guy’s name,” says Danny. “Doofy. That’s pretty good. Especially considering that he wasn’t doofy at all. He was, like, kind of—”
“A snake,” says Meg.
“Doofy,” says Claris. “That’s right. Anyway, I liked his crazy speech about shooting the dog that’s been run over by the truck. I liked how over the top it was even when he’s trying to make Eddie feel like he’s the dog.”
“That part about the dog blood and guts and brains, it was sort of like Quentin Tarantino.” Jonelle doesn’t mean this as a compliment.
“It was too obvious,” says Courtney. “Connecting the kid with the dog.”
“It was supposed to be obvious,” Claris says. “But I still didn’t believe that Doofy’s story would actually push Eddie into killing himself.”
Once more, Claris is right on the money. The ending’s completely implausible. Eddie dives out the dorm window and breaks his neck on the pavement.
Jonelle says, “It was too predictable. It was a total setup. From the first line we knew that Eddie was going to do it.”
“Where?” bursts out Carlos. “You show me, Jonelle. You show me where the story says that in the first sentence.”
“Carlos,” says Swenson, “please. Stay calm.”
“You know what I thought?” says Courtney. “I kept trying to figure out where I’d read it before. And then I realized I saw it in a movie, some movie just like Carlos’s story, except they were soldiers, Marines or something, some fat stupid soldier in a barracks and everybody’s being mean to him and he blows his head off in the bathroom and they go to Vietnam. Or something.”
“Full Metal Jacket!” says Danny. “Kubrick! One of the all-time great films!”
“I thought it was boring,” says Courtney. “But still better than Carlos’s story.”
Just then the bells start ringing. Courtney’s statement hangs in the air. And now—without the distractions of protecting Carlos from the class’s blood lust—Swenson feels the floor shake as Angela’s legs bounce under the table. For as long as the bells ring he thinks about reaching over and sliding his hand between Angela’s legs. He imagines this so vividly, he can feel her against his hand. It takes a few scary seconds to realize he hasn’t done it.
The bells stop. “Okay,” he says. “Where were we?”
Angela says, “You guys are all being way hard on Carlos. There’s good stuff in his story, and it’s nothing like a movie. The scene where Doofy goes on about the dog is pretty amazing.”
Swenson thinks, She did it for me. I needed her to say that. Carlos gazes at Angela with naked adoration.
“Well,” says Swenson, “it looks as if opinion is divided. I don’t know how helpful this was for you, Carlos. Is there anything you want to say?”
“Thanks, Angela,” Carlos says. “At least somebody understands me.”
As the class breaks up, Carlos waits at the door for Angela. But Angela hangs back, waiting for Swenson. What’s being communicated here could hardly be more obvious if the most desirable doe were sidling up to the buck who’d just won the antler-bashing contest. Carlos may be younger and stronger, but Swenson is the teacher.
From the doorway, Carlos sees all, comprehends all, and leaves, but not before giving Swenson a knowing—a monitory—look.
Swenson says, “Angela, I guess you saved another class from the dumpster. I thought they’d tear poor Carlos limb from limb and feast on his bleeding carcass.”
“I just told the truth,” says Angela. “His story wasn’t so bad.”
“Well, thanks again,” says Swenson.
“Don’t thank me too fast,” says Angela. “Nothing’s for free, you know.” She fixes him with a cool stare, and suddenly all Swenson can think of is the clinical, practiced, zombified voice of her poems. He feels as if he’s calling Angela 911 and requesting some repugnant sexual service. But nothing like that’s happening here, it’s entirely his own projection….
“What’s it going to cost me?” This comes out more flirtatiously than he would have liked.
“Time,” says Angela. “Hard time. Was that paragraph I gave you okay?”
“Oh, fine. A good addition. But I will read more than a paragraph—”
“Great. I was hoping you’d say that. I’ve got another chapter for you. I’m a little worried about this one. In fact…I think it sucks. I’m trying to write this part from the mother’s point of view. Look, I’m only joking about this being payback. I know I’ve been loading you down with stuff, so if you don’t have time, I can wait till next week, whenever you feel ready.”
“Don’t be silly,” Swenson says. “I’d be delighted. Just promise not to be upset if it takes a few days.”
“I won’t,” says Angela, handing over another orange envelope. “I’ll be waiting by the phone…. Oh, listen, could I ask you another favor?”
Swenson tenses, reflexively.
“My mom and stepdad are coming for parents’ weekend? They’ll probably stop in and see you? So could you do me a favor and tell them I’m not just blowing their money? My grades suck so bad my stepdad keeps threatening to take me out of here and make me go to some, like, community college—”
“Would they do that?” How anxious Swenson sounds!
“Probably not. At this point I probably couldn’t get into community college.”
“I’ll do what I can,” says Swenson. “I’m looking forward to meeting them.”
Out of breath from the hike across campus and the healthful cardiovascular trot up four flights of stairs, Swenson locks his office door, sits at his desk, and starts to read.
All that summer, Mr. Reynaud was away with his family at a summer program for music teachers. That was where I imagined him as I lay in a deck chair in my backyard, working on my tan. I pictured him in an auditorium paneled with gleaming wood and acoustic carpet. I saw him press his hips into the back of his bass as the harmonies of a Bach chorale floated up the steps of the theater.
At the start of junior year, when I saw him in the band room, I was confused for a second. What was he doing there in real life, outside my imagination?
“How was your summer?” I managed to say.
He rested his hand on my upper arm, where he’d grabbed me the previous spring. I felt as if he’d let me go for the summer and with one touch reeled me back in. I held my arm as I sat down. I watched him greet each student, hugging the section leaders, so I knew
his touch meant nothing. I wasn’t the only one.
The girls were still in sleeveless T-shirts. The violinists’ arms looked like pale sausages trembling in their casings as they sawed away at their bows. The windows were open. The air smelled of burning leaves. Shouts from football practice rolled in on the spongy heat. I was sweating, my hair stuck in points like dirty paintbrush tips.
For once, I hoped class ended late. The last thing I wanted was to stay after and attract Mr. Reynaud’s attention. Also I hadn’t slept well. I’d woken up feeling sick. I wondered if I’d caught something in Mrs. Davis’s henhouse.
I packed up my clarinet and was leaving when Mr. Reynaud called me back.
He said, “Where was everyone’s head today?”
I said, “I don’t know. It’s hot.”
“Are you all right?” said Mr. Reynaud.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Really, I’m fine. I went to this weird farm last night for my science project….”
“What science project?” said Mr. Reynaud.
“I’m hatching chicken eggs.”
“Sitting on them?”
“In incubators,” I said.
That was when he told me that during the equinox and the solstice you can balance an egg on its end.
“Wow,” was all I could say.
“I grew up on an egg farm,” he went on. “So if there’s any help you need, anything you don’t know, don’t hesitate to ask. I’d be glad to pass along the wisdom gleaned from all those years of reaching up under hens.”
At that moment the bell rang and saved me.
He’d forgotten to give me a late pass. I had to run to my next class, so it wasn’t until after school that I had time to wonder. Had he really offered to help me with the eggs? Also it was a little strange, the part about the egg farm. I remembered him telling the band he’d grown up in the slums of Chicago.
The final sentence is meant to cause a shiver of unease, but Swenson finds it, finds the whole chapter, wonderfully reassuring. Now he remembers what drew him to Angela Argo—not those awful dirty poems. The girl has demonstrable talent that he’s being paid to encourage.
He’s glad he’s got a few pages left. He puts off reading them for a moment. They’re all he’ll get this week. Obviously, he could ask to see as much of the book as she has. She’d be only too happy to oblige. But then he’d have to wait for her to write more chapters. Anyway, that would threaten the fragile pretense that she is presuming on his good graces, asking favors above and beyond his pedagogical obligations.
Stuck to the next page is a yellow Post-it on which Angela has scrawled, “This is the section that’s really messing me up. The mother’s POV.”
Only after what happened later did I begin to understand what was really going on during those autumn evenings when she told her father she didn’t want him to come to the shed and help her do whatever she was doing to those eggs.
As always, he pretended that what hurt him was a joke. Ha ha, his teenage daughter said she had to do her science project herself. I watched him watch her go.
“She’s quite a kid,” he said. “The clarinet, the perfect grades, and now this thing with the eggs.”
Then he went off to his medical journals, his giant tumbler of Scotch, his nap in front of the evening news. Sometimes I watched him sleeping with his mouth open, his glasses slipped to one side, and I wondered what had happened to the handsome young doctor who had reached out and saved me years ago as I fell over and slumped toward the emergency room floor.
And now Swenson does have the shivers, a tightening over his scalp. The doctor breaking the patient’s steady slide toward the emergency room floor—could that be just concidence? Possibly, but not likely. More probably, it’s been stolen straight, perhaps unconsciously, from his novel, Blue Angel. Which, in turn, was borrowed from his life. He reads on.
That was in Boston, in the fifties. I was living in Copley Square. I wanted to be a jazz singer. My boyfriend played the guitar. He said he was a gypsy. He said his name was Django. But once an old woman—his grandmother—called. She sounded Italian. She asked for Tony.
Nothing led to his hitting me, not one word or a gesture. It had never happened before. He had gone to play at a club and came home and pulled me off our mattress and punched me in the face. I remember his anger having a smell, the smell of burning truck tires, a diesel laying tread on the road as it crashed into my face.
Swenson looks up from the manuscript. All right, she’s read Blue Angel. His heroine was a jazz singer, recovering from a violent affair with a musician. So how is he going to handle this? Does he let Angela know he’s noticed the striking correspondences between her novel and his? Such things happen—quite innocently. A phrase, a fragment of description, even a minor plot point lodges in one’s mind and emerges in one’s work without one’s knowing where it came from. That’s what he could tell her: make it very abstract, theoretical. Take a leaf from Francis Bentham’s book—keep the pronouns third-person impersonal. Sometimes the work of others lodges in one’s mind….But even that could ruin everything, destroy the trust between them. Angela’s so skittish, she might think he was accusing her of plagiarism—of plagiarizing him. Better not to mention it, just say that the part about the mother’s past seems extraneous, distracting. Angela said she had her doubts. He’ll suggest she cut the whole section.
Something else is bothering him…. All right. He’s got it now. The part in Blue Angel about the singer’s boyfriend was loosely based on life. When he first met Sherrie, she’d just gotten rid of this guy…. Now wait a minute. This is strange. Sherrie’s real boyfriend played guitar. The guy in the novel—the character—was supposed to be a drummer. And now Angela’s restored him to what he really was. It’s not so odd, especially if Angela was consciously or unconsciously echoing his novel. She’d naturally pick another instrument for the guy to play. How many jazz instruments are there?
He finds his place and resumes reading.
I was young. I healed quickly. The bruises disappeared. But one morning I woke up, got out of bed, and fell on the way to the bathroom. When I tried to stand the room spun until it threw me onto the floor. This time, I was really scared. I thought the beating had dam aged my brain. I called a cab. I went to the hospital. The doctor was young and handsome. I didn’t want to tell him that my boyfriend had almost killed me. I said I didn’t know what was wrong. I let him look in my throat. He said I had an ear infection. I was so grateful I jumped up to thank him….
I woke up on the floor. Nurses came running in. The handsome doctor was taking my pulse. Reader, I married him.
And that’s it. The manuscript breaks off there, which is just as well because Swenson’s concentration is shot. This time he doesn’t have to stop and figure out the problem. The jazz singer in his novel—like the real one who preceded him to the emergency room—had strep throat. It was Swenson who had the middle ear infection, a detail not in his book.
There’s no way Angela could know that. It just doesn’t seem possible—logical—that she could be so tuned into him that she picks up details from his past on some sort of writerly radar. But weirder things happen all the time. He remembers writer friends—years ago, when he still had writer friends—talking about the uncanny coincidences that so often seemed to occur. You invented a character, imagined an event, and within days you met that person or experienced what you’d imagined.
There’s got to be some explanation here, less arcane than clairvoyance. Could he have told the class—during one of those out-of-body journeys from the here and now—how he and Sherrie met? Did he use it as an example of how a real incident gets altered on its way into a novel? Swenson doesn’t think so. He’s learned to be wary about bringing personal history into the classroom ever since he read, on a student evaluation, that he was always wasting class time with pointless personal anecdotes.
Or has he told the story to someone Angela might know? It’s been years since they told it at a faculty dinner. Pe
rhaps he told Magda, but try as he might, he can’t picture the scene in which Magda girl-talks with Angela about how Professor Swenson met his wife.
Grabbing for the phone has become a kind of a reflex. Reading Angela’s work seems to generate an instant need for telecommunication. But whom does he want to call? It doesn’t seem quite the perfect moment to hear Len Currie complain about being a successful, well-paid, highly sought-after Manhattan editor. He doesn’t want to call Sherrie, nor can he call Magda for another disguised interrogation on the subject of Angela Argo. Nor is he ready to call Angela and discuss this new chapter while trying to figure out how she tapped into the intimate facts of his past.
Fine, then. If the phone call’s a reflex, let the reflex dial. Swenson’s only dimly aware of his fingers pushing buttons. Hmm…whose number is this? Well, he’s just kidding around, but, hey, he seems to be dialing the phone-sex number from Angela’s poems.
The question is how he remembers it. He forgets nearly everything else. The answer is: He’s known for days that he was going to call.
He feels a flutter of light anxiety, like the turning of a page, specifically a page from the English Department phone bill. What will a call to a sex line at the college’s expense do for his professional reputation? And why should it matter, really? Phone sex is hardly criminal. The idea that he might not be allowed to call a phone-sex line makes him want to call and stay on the line until they come and drag him away.
More likely, he’ll have to give his credit card number. It’ll never show up on the college bill. Anyway, he’s not going to talk. He’ll just see who answers. In fact he’s pretty certain that the number was invented. He’ll get some old geezer in Middlebury, some garage in Plainfield. He’ll just see who answers, apologize, and hang up.
“Good evening,” says a woman in the businesslike tones of an airline ticket clerk. “Intimate Phone Friends. Whom would you like to speak to tonight?”
Blue Angel Page 13