Blue Angel

by Francine Prose

  But Angela seems to be thinking of something else entirely. “You know…if I get the computer working, I could print out those missing pages and give them to you before you leave.”

  And that’s the last thing either of them says until they’re almost back at Euston. As they drive through the college gate, Swenson feels depleted. He wishes he could drive back into the country and pull over to the side of the road and take a nap with his head in Angela’s lap.

  Angela’s exaggerated sigh is so much the sound he wants to make that for one alarming moment he thinks he might have made it. She says, “I feel like I’ve been out on parole and now you’re returning me to prison.”

  “It’s not so bad,” lies Swenson. But that’s exactly how he feels.

  “That’s easy for you to say,” she replies. “You’ve got a car. You can leave.”

  “Look…if you really need to get away, if there’s anyplace you need to go, please, feel free to call me…. We could take a ride.” He can no longer pretend that this is part of his job.

  “Thanks. That’s so unbelievably nice. You might want to watch those speed bumps, what with all that stuff in the trunk.”

  Swenson slows down, comforted by the thought of the computer—exonerating evidence. They had an errand to do, and they did it. He no longer cares if someone sees him driving back with Angela. He’s innocent. They’ve completed their mission, and nothing improper happened.

  “Remind me. Which dorm is yours? They all look the same. My wife and I were dorm parents in Dover. Prehistory. Obviously.” There he goes, invoking Sherrie again. She gets the point. He’s married. Angela, he notices, doesn’t mention her boyfriend. Why isn’t he waiting to help her bring her computer upstairs, some big strong kid with wide-open, pumping coronary arteries.

  “Newfane. One dump named after another.” Euston students think their dorms are named after Vermont towns. No one tells them that the towns were named after Elijah Euston’s friends. In its effort to seem like an inclusive, democratic institution, the college has been underplaying the fact that its founder and his pals once owned most of the state. “Turn right. That one over there.”

  But of course, he knew that. He picked her up there this morning. He parks in front of her dorm. “Are gentleman callers permitted at this hour?”

  “Are you kidding? It’s a coed dorm. It’s been, like, a trillion years since they had rules about visiting hours. Guys can come in anytime. Anyhow, you’re a professor. You can do anything you want.”

  “Given the current climate,” Swenson says, “that makes me all the more suspect.”

  “What do you mean?” says Angela.

  “Forget it,” Swenson says.

  Angela gets out of the car. “Hey, maybe you should stay with the car. You could sit here and make sure nothing gets taken. I can carry the boxes up.”

  “I’d feel weird just sitting here with you busy working.” He’d feel weirder if someone came by and saw him sitting in a parked car outside a student dorm. “No one’s going to break into a locked trunk on campus.”

  “I guess you’re right,” concedes Angela. “But let’s be careful, okay?”

  Swenson goes around and unlocks the trunk. They each take one carton. Angela heads for the front door, and he hurries after, hugging the monitor box.

  It’s been ages since he’s been inside a dorm. Ruby’s dorm is more like a dilapidated housing project. The only time he saw it was when they moved her a year ago August, at the start of the semester, when every dorm has a ghostly, theoretical quality.

  Now, as he enters the foyer—a soda machine, a bulletin board, bare but for a list of fire regulations—he’s assaulted by the smell of sneakers, sweat, sports equipment. How can these kids stand being greeted, every time they come home, by this oppressive fruity rottenness, this edge of saline decay? Which only shows how far he is from their age. To them, this is the smell of life itself. The aromas he prefers—garlic, roasting chicken, wine, apple pie, flowers from Sherrie’s garden—reek to them of parents and airless stifling boredom. Evenings trapped at home, away from their friends. The stench of living death.

  They climb a flight of stairs, up past a deserted TV lounge furnished with a Ping-Pong table and a few grimy armchairs apparently chosen for the undiluted purity of their institutional ugliness. There’s not one touch of hominess, not one poster on the wall, no sign that humans spend time here.

  Swenson’s still sprinting after Angela as they take off down the hall, rushing past doorways into which he can’t help peeking. What if he meets one of his students, Makeesha or Jonelle or Claris?

  At last Angela reaches her door and fishes for the keys on the leather cord hanging from her waist. On the door is a poster: a black-and-white photo of a Hell’s Angel with long hair, a Nazi helmet, a beard, his thatched chest crisscrossed by menacing chains.

  “Friend of yours?” says Swenson.

  “Avedon,” says Angela. “Isn’t it terrific? It’s like having a Beware of the Dog sign. Only not nearly so corny.”

  Swenson follows Angela into her room and stops, frozen by the hundreds of faces staring back at him. Every inch of wall—except for a few mirrors glittering among the photos—is covered with postcards of actors, writers, saints, musicians, artists. At first the order seems random, but after a moment he notices the patterns, grouped by theme (Janis, Jimi, Jim, Kurt Cobain) or by era (Buster Keaton next to Charlie Chaplin and Lilian Gish). The elderly Picasso facing the equally rakish, equally bald Jean Genet. Chekhov and Tolstoy, Colette, Virginia Woolf, and…is that Katherine Mansfield?

  Across the room is a single bed, narrow as a monk’s, covered with a monastic brown cloth. Running the length of one wall is a white formica desk, on which Angela sets down her box and motions for Swenson to do likewise.

  “This isn’t a room,” says Swenson. “It’s an…installation.”

  “Like it?” says Angela proudly. “Everyone else thinks it’s a mess. Another reason so many chicks on the hall think I’m totally insane. They’ve all got, like, the one perfect poster of Brad Pitt over the bed. And you should see Makeesha’s room. It’s all done up with Black Panther shit, posters and rasta flags, and this huge blow-up poster of Snoop Doggy Dog. The thing is, everybody knows Makeesha’s dad teaches at Dartmouth. They’re way richer than my parents.”

  “Now now.”

  Swenson might look like a drooling lecher skulking around some nymphet’s room, but in fact he’s a consummate professional who never forgets his position, or the inappropriateness of joking with one student about another, even about another’s interior decor.

  “Where’s your old computer?” he says.

  “This is sort of retarded,” Angela admits. “I got so mad when it ate my work I threw it out the window. That’s how I knew it couldn’t be fixed. The creepy part was that right after I did it I remembered seeing some terrible movie where Jane Fonda played a writer who throws her typewriter out the window. I couldn’t believe I’d done it.”

  “Oh, I saw that movie. What was it? I can’t remember.”

  “I don’t know,” says Angela. “Let’s go get the rest of the stuff.”

  So they’ve got another gauntlet to run, or rather, the same one again. Swenson’s luck can’t possibly hold. This time he’ll meet all his students, gathered to watch their professor race after Angela Argo.

  They hurry back outside. Angela’s still worried that her equipment might get filched from the locked trunk of Swenson’s car. He’s touched by how deeply, how passionately she wants that machine. No wonder her parents were willing to fork over the money. If Ruby wanted anything that badly…. He takes the box that contains the minitower. She grabs the bag of cables. Okay, this is the final trip. After this, they’re done.

  Angela opens doors for him and walks slightly ahead. In the room, she clears space for him to set the box on the desk.

  “Let me help you unpack it,” he says. “Got a knife? Sharp scissors?”

  “Try this.” Angela p
roduces a bush knife from her purse. “Don’t look so alarmed. I hitchhike. A girl can’t be too careful.”

  “You shouldn’t be hitching,” Swenson says. “You could wind up like those girls that hunters find a couple of seasons after the serial killer picked them up.”

  He can’t conceal his horror at the thought of something happening to her. Meanwhile he’s aware of the irony of having these tender protective feelings while watching her slash heavy cardboard with a hunting knife. And really, for such a frail creature, she’s got remarkable upper body strength, holding the boxes while Swenson wrestles the monitor and console loose from their Styrofoam liners.

  “Okay,” he says. “Okay. Okay. Is there a manual or something…?”

  “Look,” says Angela. “Do me a favor. Sit down on that bed over there and, like I said, just be there if I need moral support, if I start freaking out….”

  Swenson laughs. “How can you tell I have no idea what I’m doing?”

  “By how many times you just said okay.”

  Swenson does as he’s told. He perches on the edge of the bed, then scoots his back against the wall with his feet sticking out before him. Angela’s too busy to notice. She’s hooking up power cords, finding parallel ports, shaking the toner cartridge, attaching the mouse, and massaging it around its brand-new pad.

  The computer’s behaving obediently. At each juncture Angela waits, tense. When the proper light blinks on or something begins to whir, she puts up her thumbs and says, “Yessss.”

  How fond Swenson is of this gifted, awkward girl! It’s not just that he covets her youth, her talent, her good teeth, whatever she has that he’s lost. It’s genuine affection. At the same time he’s acutely aware that he’s sitting on her bed. Once more a drowsiness overcomes him, as it did in the car outside. He looks longingly at Angela’s pillow. Perhaps he could just nod off.

  Angela says, “I can’t believe how well this is going. Setting up my old computer was total hell. It’s like you’re…lucky for me.”

  “I hope so,” Swenson says.

  “Yessss!” hisses Angela. “Yes yes yes. I think we’ve got it up and running. Let me try printing that last chapter.”

  Angela pops a disk into the floppy drive, skates the mouse, and clicks. The first five pages the printer spits out are bare but for a diagonal black stripe. Then the machines stops printing, and an error light flashes.

  “Sonofabitch!” She flips the switch on and off. For a moment there’s a hopeful whir, and then a daunting crunch sounds from deep inside the machine. The paper jam light blinks.

  “I think the paper’s stuck,” says Swenson.

  “Duh,” says Angela, wheeling on him.

  Wait a minute! Swenson’s not her friend, not her father or stepfather or boyfriend, some random useless male she can talk to like that. He happens to be her teacher, her creative writing professor. He’s doing her a favor way beyond his job description.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “Please don’t be mad. This shit drives me so crazy. I so wanted to get you those pages so you could take them with you. It meant so much to me, and now.…”

  “That’s okay. Try it one more time.”

  Angela shrugs and clicks on PRINT. The printer starts. The paper jams. She bursts into tears. Swenson gets up and crosses the room and puts his hand on her shoulder. Angela reaches back and covers his hand with hers. Swenson has an out-of-body moment, watching their fingers intertwine, as if his hand were an arachnid or sea creature with a life of its own.

  It’s not as if he doesn’t know that one thing will lead to another, that his leaving his hand on her shoulder will lead to his sliding it up her neck to the base of her hair, to his running his hand through the soft down on the back of her neck. It’s not as if he doesn’t know that he is reaching down her T-shirt, down the smooth expanse of her back, and that, still sitting at her desk chair, she is arching her back against him. It’s not as if he doesn’t know that if he stays there and doesn’t move away, Angela will stand and turn around and they’ll be in each other’s arms. He knows it, and he doesn’t know it, just as he has and hasn’t known all along that every word they spoke, every gesture they made was leading to this. Still, he manages to be surprised, and he watches, as if from a distance, as he kisses Angela Argo.

  After a while, Angela pulls back. She says, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  He is sure, but only so long as he doesn’t have to say so, which would mean it was really happening—with his full knowledge and participation. He could be one of those unfortunate girls who manage to get pregnant while convincing themselves they’re not really having sex. Isn’t he supposed to be the one asking Angela’s permission? Swenson can’t let himself think about that, he’s got too much on his mind: for example, the challenge of moving, while still kissing Angela, across the room to her bed, navigating the obstacle course of discarded computer boxes.

  Luckily, Angela’s walking smoothly backward, guided by some sort of sonar. All he has to do is follow. How can this be the same person who’s always tripping and flopping about, trying to get comfortable? She’s in her element, Swenson thinks, a fish returned to water. She pulls him across the room, steers him round, pushes him down on the bed. There’s no resisting, no evading her gaze. It’s like being charmed by a snake, not a king cobra, obviously, but a tough little adder, weaving slightly, holding him in her unblinking stare. Isn’t it the snake who gets charmed? Why can’t Swenson think straight? Why? Because Angela seems to be taking off her clothes, crossing her arms before her and pulling her black T-shirt over her head. How budlike and perfect her breasts are. The nipples stand up from the chill.

  She peels her miniskirt down over her boots and steps out of it, leaving it on the floor. She’s wearing a lacy black thong. Is this what young women routinely wear to go shopping for a computer? Could Angela have planned this? She’d left off the lip rings and any of the facial jewelry that might have made kissing a problem. Well, it’s not as if he didn’t dress with special care this morning.

  She’s naked except for the leather boots. It’s unbelievably sexy. And yet…how thin she is. Her body’s so different from Sherrie’s, about whom he should not be thinking as he sits here with an erection so big that Angela can see it through his jeans.

  “Cool,” she says admiringly, and comes over and straddles his thighs, facing him. For an instant Swenson catches what looks like fear in her eyes. Then she refocuses on his belt buckle, by which she’s stumped for a moment until she figures it out and unbuckles it with a dreamy, sly abstraction. Abruptly, she slides off him, then sits down next to him and, leaning forward, yanks off her boots. Swenson slides one hand along the delicate bumps of her spine while, with the other, he struggles with his jeans and shorts.

  When Angela has her boots off, he reaches for her again, but she motions for him to lie back on the bed and fumbles in the nightstand, from which she produces a little foil packet. It’s been so long since he’s used one—Sherrie’s had a diaphragm for years since she went off the pill—that for one confused instant he thinks it’s a tea bag. Well, it’s a condom, all right. That’s sex in the nineties, and a good thing for them both that Angela’s careful. Not that she has much to worry about from Swenson. But who knows what she’s been up to? Who was that boy who answered the phone? Swenson’s the one at risk. It’s a sobering thought, but not grim enough to make him lose his hard-on, which seems to be responding positively to the intimidating fact of how nearby Angela keeps her condoms. Isn’t this how girls used to feel when Swenson was in high school, and, in the midst of the spontaneous passionate necking, their boyfriend turned out to have brought along a coolly premeditated rubber?

  Angela gives him the packet, which he unwraps, mildly worried lest condoms have changed. What if he no longer knows how to use one? His high school years come back to him. It’s like riding a bicycle. He slips it on, leaving room, and rolls back the rest.

  Once more he feels the way the woman’s supposed to a
s Angela lowers herself onto him and he thinks, What about foreplay? But it’s only for a split second, until the pleasure takes over, the warmth pulsing up from his groin. For once he isn’t thinking as he turns her over, and her legs fall open. He braces himself on his arms, then lets his chest sink against hers, feeling his chest against her breasts, her thighs pushing to get closer. And now his face is against her face, his chin against her cheek….

  There’s an explosion inside his head. A crack, a crunch, and then a grinding, like stone turning to powder. It takes him a while to realize what’s happened.

  “What was that?” asks Angela. “I heard it through my skull.”

  “Nothing,” says Swenson. “I broke a tooth.”

  That molar that’s been going for months has chosen this moment to self-destruct. He hadn’t realized he was gritting his teeth. This is dreadful! Unfair! At the moment he’s been longing for and denying he wanted, when at last he gets what he hasn’t dared to dream, he cracks a tooth. How middle-aged, how pathetic to be unmasked as a geriatric case with emergency dental problems! Still connected to Angela, Swenson moves his tongue to the back of his mouth and probes the jagged ruin.

  “I lost a filling,” he says.

  “That’s not all you lost,” says Angela.

  His hard-on’s gone. Gone for good. He rolls onto his side. He looks down at Angela as desire drains from her face, ironing flat her expression. She blinks, then smiles uncertainly.

  “Bummer,” she says. “Does it hurt?”

  “Only my vanity,” he says. “My vanity’s mortally wounded.” It’s important not to let her know how wretched he feels. And the fact that he can’t tell her fills him with a loneliness so excruciating that tears pool in his eyes. He knows it’s partly hormonal, the chemistry of frustration. Still, he’s cogent enough to wonder what he’s doing here naked with this child, this stranger. He should be with Sherrie, whom he knows like his own skin. What will he tell Sherrie about how he broke his tooth? Sherrie’s sympathy will make his torment more exquisite—and more deserved. He wants to howl at his own stupidity, at this toxic cocktail of lust and self-deception that he’s been consuming in sips so tiny that he could convince himself he wasn’t drinking.