Blue Angel

by Francine Prose

  Meanwhile all he really wants is to stay pressed against Angela Argo. But now she’s sitting cross-legged on the bed, against the wall. Swenson pulls his legs over to make room. In their neutral asexual ease, they could be two dorm pals gathered to do their nails and gossip. The fact that they’re both naked makes surprisingly little difference. He looks disconsolately across the room, and his gaze is drawn to the mournful: Bert Lahr, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton. What’s Chaplin got to look gloomy about? He slept with harems of women!

  “I’m sorry about your tooth,” Angela says. “But you know it’s no big deal about the sex. I mean lots of weird stuff goes on. You know what happened to me once? I had an epileptic fit right in the middle of sex. A lucky thing it’s petit mal. The guy really would have been grossed out if I’d started twitching and foaming. But I just spaced out and, like, disappeared.”

  How sweet of Angela to offer this confession of a sexual gaffe even worse than cracking a filling. On the other hand…what if Angela had had a fit while she was with him? Whom would he have notified? How would he have explained it?

  “I didn’t know you were epileptic,” he says.

  “I’m on medication,” she says. “I’m fine.”

  “Like Dostoyevsky. Except that he wasn’t fine….” Swenson hears noises outside the door. He’s naked in a girl’s dorm room. He doesn’t even know her. She could be a lunatic who’s lured him here just to blow the whistle on him and make him lose his job.

  “Does that door lock?” he asks.

  “Yeah,” says Angela. “I locked it. When we first walked in.”

  So she engineered this. But what is Swenson turning into? Another Adam blaming Eve for making him eat the apple? He knew better. It was his idea, too. He’s the adult, the teacher. It was his doing as much as hers. A fine time to develop a consciousness, or, for that matter, a conscience. After he’s already tried—and failed—to sleep with his most vulnerable student. Or was it his doing, really? Swenson has to wonder. What does it mean that she’s writing a book about a teacher-student affair? Is this research for the next scene?

  She scrambles toward him, monkeylike, and tenderly—or is it pityingly?—ruffles his hair. Her nipples brush against his face. He takes one in his mouth, from which she gently extricates it with a gesture so instinctive, so sure, that Swenson thinks—God help him—of how Sherrie used to reclaim her breast after Ruby fell asleep nursing.

  As he dresses, Angela, still naked, goes back to the computer. She says, “Let’s try it again.” It takes him a moment to realize she means the printer, not sex. “Maybe we worked magic,” she says, and now she does mean sex.

  He watches her lithe, agile body. Her unselfconscious beauty. She double-clicks the mouse. The printer purrs. One by one, three pages drift onto her desk.

  “Bingo,” she says. “We shook it loose. We did do some kind of voodoo.” She waits until he’s fully dressed, then hands the pages to him.

  “End of chapter,” she says.

  “Excellent,” Swenson says, uncertainly. “I’ll read it as soon as I can.” The promise feels extracted—the price he’s paid for sex. But wait! He likes Angela’s novel. He wasn’t faking enthusiasm just to trick Angela into bed. In fact it’s quite the reverse. He began to like Angela because he liked her novel. And he should have kept it that way and not let himself blur the distinction between literary enthusiasm and sexual attraction. But it’s not a catastrophe, only a misunderstanding…. He pauses, then can’t keep from saying, “You know we can’t tell anyone. It would be a giant scandal.” Well, it’s certainly going to be a challenge to keep on conducting the workshop as if none of this had happened.

  “Right,” says Angela. “Sure. I’m really going to tell everyone. I really want us both to get kicked out of Euston. Besides, I don’t want my boyfriend to know.”

  Right. The boyfriend. Chances are his teeth don’t crack in the middle of sex.

  “It never happened,” Angela says. “Later, you know…we could…”

  “I’d like that,” says Swenson, though he’s not quite sure what she means. This is no time to figure it out. It’s time get out of her dorm before he ruins his life completely.

  “I’ll call you when I read these.” It’s what he’s always said. So maybe Angela’s right, after all. They can go on the same as before.

  “I’ll be waiting,” Angela says. But it’s not the same. For starters, she’s never before come over to him stark naked and, rolling her eyes—all irony—shook his hand.

  “Bye,” she says, and, without bothering to dress, returns to her computer.

  Swenson stumbles into the hall without checking to see if it’s empty. Luck, it seems, is still on his side, the fate that looks out for lovers, if that’s what he and Angela are. Well, they’re no longer just teacher and student. Something irrevocable’s happened. His life will be changed after this—to say nothing of writing class. He turns into the stairwell and nearly runs into Claris.

  “Hi, Claris,” says Swenson.

  “Hi, Professor Swenson,” Claris says.

  He can’t even attempt the breezy explanation of how he came to help Angela with her computer. He can’t bring himself to say Angela’s name, partly because he’s sure that Claris is already thinking Angela’s name, that somehow she knows what just happened. She can read it on his face.

  “Well,” says Swenson. “See you in class.”

  “See you,” Claris says, watching him lope unsteadily downstairs.

  Swenson checks the mailbox. Nothing. Well, not nothing, exactly. A brown envelope of coupons that will languish on the kitchen counter where he and Sherrie will eye it, guilty for being too lazy to practice these small domestic economies, until one of them gets sick of looking at it and tosses it in the trash. He thinks of Len Currie, facing his stack of unanswered invitations to glamorous parties, to literary conferences in Tuscan villas and Sonoma vineyards.

  The contrast between Len’s undeserved popularity and his own undeserved exile generates a vapor of discontent and irritation that, for want of another solid object, collects around Sherrie, who’s done nothing to deserve it short of having the bad luck to be sitting in the kitchen, leafing through a cookbook, no doubt seeking something soothing to prepare at the end of a long day he’s spent cheating on her—or trying to—with a student.

  Sherrie must have had a tough day, too. It’s The Cooking of Sicily, roots she tends to return to when things are a trifle rocky. The cuisine of a culture in which a wronged wife’s male relations are the vigilante marriage counselors practicing kidnap-murder therapy.

  “What do we want?” asks Sherrie, without looking up from the book.

  “A million bucks. A new life. Roll back the clock twenty years—”

  “For dinner?” says Sherrie, impatiently.

  “Oatmeal,” Swenson says.

  “Excuse me?” says Sherrie.

  “I broke a tooth today.” Swenson probes the jagged edge with his tongue. He’s got to go to the dentist. What if he needs a root canal? What if he’s exposed a nerve? Wouldn’t he know that already?

  Sherrie winces. “Oooh. How did you do that?”

  “On an olive pit,” says Swenson.

  “Where did you get an olive?” says Sherrie. “An olive’s way exotic for the Euston Commons.”

  Is that all the sympathy Swenson’s going to get? The wince, the little moan. And now we’re onto the olive. The worst student malingerers must get a few more seconds than that.

  Anyway…Swenson hadn’t given much thought to the nonexistent olive. He waits a beat, then watches the liar inside him get busy. “Well, it was the strangest thing. I got this craving…for olives. I went to the MinuteMart and bought a jar of olives and ate the whole jar, and you know how you save the pits in the corner of your mouth? And then forget they’re there? Crunch.”

  It’s pure adrenaline talking, but fine, whatever works. Often the most effective lies are the most unlikely.

  “Are you pregnant?” Sherrie as
ks.

  “What?” says Swenson. “What?”

  “Weird food cravings. Ted? For a second it looked like you were scared you might be pregnant.”

  “It’s not a joke, Sherrie. Breaking a tooth. When you’re twenty-two, you think everything can be replaced. At forty-seven, you know better.”

  “I’m sorry,” says Sherrie. “You should have come to the clinic. We could have fixed you up.” Sherrie’s flirting with him in that reflexive, unserious, conjugal way.

  “I guess it didn’t occur to me.” Swenson seems to have lost the reflex.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Only psychically. But let’s not do the big juicy steak dinner tonight?”

  “When’s the last time we ate steak? Listen, I’ve got an idea. Chicken soup with pastina and egg and spinach and cheese. Soothing and warm. No chewing. Baby food. I think I’ve got some chicken broth put away in the freezer.”

  Chicken soup! The adulterer’s wife cooks him chicken soup. You couldn’t get away with writing a scene so obvious and corny, a scene in which the cheating hero simultaneously wallows in guilt and luxuriates in uxorious admiration. How confidently Sherrie raps the eggs on the side of the bowl and pries apart the shells, letting the contents slide out with a satisfying plop. Obviously, he can’t help thinking of Angela’s novel.

  He has done a dreadful thing that he can never undo. Not just morally wrong, but stupid. How could he have betrayed this graceful woman, who makes chicken soup with spinach and egg and cheese for her wounded husband? And it’s not just a matter of culinary skills, but of beauty and soul. He’s married to Florence Nightingale and Anna Magnani rolled into one.

  What was it that distracted him? A self-involved, wounded baby bird who knows her way around a computer, a neurotic child writing an overwrought, precious little romance about a teenage girl and her sleazeball teacher? For that he’s wrecked a tooth, and he’ll be very fortunate if he hasn’t totaled his marriage.

  Now is when he figures out how easily—how inevitably—all this could blow up in his face. Angela could tell someone. It would be odd if she didn’t. Sherrie will find out, the college will know, and that’s the end of life as he knows it. Now is when he thinks about that, in the kitchen with his wife. Certainly not this afternoon, when he wasn’t thinking.

  He sits at the kitchen table and opens the two-day-old New York Times, which has come in today’s mail. The front-page photo shows an Afghani with a rifle shooting a teenage boy at close range. Swenson skims the article, about the revival of Islamic justice and the cultural emphasis on revenge. The Sicilian uncles again. Swenson doesn’t need this. He’s got his own molar to dole out primitive justice. The newspaper shots of his father’s death pop into his head. Flames, a cone of incense, tendrils of black smoke….

  All at once, he feels what he felt then, that intensity of longing to travel back in time and reconfigure the future. He couldn’t have saved his father. But he could have stopped himself from trying to sleep with Angela Argo. Glancing around the kitchen, he can hardly bear to see Sherrie’s Fiestaware pitchers, the cat clock with the moving eyes, the folk art whirligig of the mother feeding her babies. He feels as if his house has burned down, been swept away by floods. He thinks of Emily in Our Town, Bill in Carousel, the Jimmy Stewart character in It’s a Wonderful Life. He’s died, and an angel is showing him how smoothly life goes on without him.

  He’s lost it all, lost everything, and Sherrie, blissfully unaware—for now—grates Parmesan cheese and chops spinach. How much he has sacrificed for a kid with a scabby tattoo oozing under a Band-Aid. But why can’t he lighten up? Guys used to do this on a daily basis and never think twice about it.

  Swenson says, “When’s dinner?”

  “Anytime,” Sherrie says. “Ten minutes. Whenever.”

  “I need to jot down some notes. Something I thought of today.”

  “For the novel?” Sherrie says hopefully.

  “Yeah, right,” he says. “The novel.”

  “Gee. Sorry I mentioned it. Let me know when you want to eat.”

  “Fifteen minutes.” Swenson nearly runs from the kitchen because he can no longer sit there and talk about olive pits and when he wants his soup.

  He needs to call Angela. He wants to know what she’s thinking. He owes her a phone call—some gesture of care and concern. Isn’t that what women want? He remembers a passage in an Isak Dinesen story, about how, in sex, the woman plays the part of the host and the man plays the part of the guest. The man wants what a guest wants: to make a good impression, to enjoy himself, to be amused. And what does the hostess want? The hostess wants to be thanked. Fine, but what precisely does he have to thank Angela for? Thanks for the chance to destroy my marriage and my career?

  Anyway, he can’t call. How would that little chat go? Oh, hi, Angela. I was just wondering…how’s the new computer working? He used to be able to phone her, but now everything’s been deformed, twisted into coils of discomfort and innuendo. Simple communication is no longer an option. Maybe it never was. Maybe he and Angela have never had a straightforward conversation. He might as well admit that now. Some element of flirtation or attraction was present from the start. Meanwhile, it seems, he’s the kind of guy who can have no idea what’s going on until after it’s happened.

  The only excuse to call her is that he’s read her new pages. That’s what their relationship’s really about. Sex was just a distraction. That’s why she’ll make it easy for him, why she’ll set the tone of their conversation so they won’t have to deal with what happened this afternoon. Perhaps they’ll never mention it. It will never happen again.

  As always, he’s eager to read Angela’s work. Though now, for the first time, doubt creeps in. Is he merely looking for a reason to call her? No! He admires her writing and genuinely wants to know whether the heroine will sleep with her music teacher.

  Swenson puts his head in his hands. I’m losing it, he thinks.

  He rips apart his study looking for Angela’s envelope. He must have left it in the car. Understandably, he was a mite confused—a first-time semiadulterer in the midst of a dental crisis.

  It’s perfectly normal for someone to go outside and get something from his car. Even so, he’s glad he can use the side door without having to go through the kitchen. Outside, the icy mist carries a sharp edge of leaf rot. He turns to look back at the house. Lit up. Welcoming. Bright.

  The pages are on the car seat, exactly where he left them.

  Sneaking back inside, he goes to his study and begins from the top of the page, rereading the part he read before and this time reading straight through.

  Wood shavings had clung to the clarinet and gotten into my hair. He reached out and brushed them off. He said, “Why so sad?”

  I told him I’d ruined my science project. None of the eggs had hatched. For a moment he seemed puzzled.

  Then he said, “Why don’t I come over and take a look at the incubation system? Figure out what’s wrong. I grew up on a farm. I know about these things.”

  I said, “Oh, please don’t. You don’t have to.” But that was what I wanted. It was the only reason I’d tried to hatch the eggs.

  Did I give him directions to my house? I must have. I can’t remember.

  All that day and the next, I thought about him all the time, eating breakfast, driving to work.

  That night, someone knocked on the door. It was Mr. Reynaud. Standing there, smiling but serious. Just as I’d imagined. Somehow that made me less nervous, as if it had happened before. Still my heart was beating so hard I thought I would literally die.

  Swenson finds his blue pencil and circles literally die and writes “cut ‘literally’” in the margin. What in God’s name is he doing?

  Mr. Reynaud’s face looked confident, pleased, but also apologetic. As if I might be angry. I wasn’t angry. I couldn’t speak. I stepped aside. The incubators hummed. The shed was warm and dark except for the blood-red light. I helped him take off his jacket. He pi
cked up one of the eggs.

  “Come here,” he said. I went and stood behind him and leaned my stomach against his back, and he slowly turned toward me, still holding the egg. He took my hand with his free hand and closed my fingers around his hand, the one that held the egg. He pressed until the egg cracked. The slimy sticky yolk and white slipped over our intertwined fingers, and, as he rubbed his hand against mine, the egg stuck us together. My fingers slid against his fingers until our hands were joined and I no longer knew which fingers were whose.

  I’d imagined him looking at me in the pulsing red light, but not that he would go on staring, keeping my eyes locked on his as he released my hand and reached down and opened his pants. Then he took my hand again, still slippery from the egg, and wrapped it around his penis. I assumed it was his penis. I’d never felt one before. His was smooth and already hard, and he rubbed my hand along it, closing my fingers around it, just as he’d closed them over the egg. Actually, it felt sort of nice, velvety and warm. And also, sort of disgusting—rubbing egg on some guy’s penis!

  He pushed me back against the wall and began to kiss me. His tongue squirmed in my mouth. His spit tasted like an old person’s food. Liver and onions, fried fish. I choked down his bubbly saliva. I thought, This guy is my father’s age. His stomach pillowed into me. His whiskers scratched my face. He was a whole other species than the smooth boys I’d kissed in school. Maybe he knew I was thinking that, because he got rougher, angrier, and he picked my skirt up and pushed down my tights, and pushed himself hard inside me, and now it didn’t feel smooth at all, but sandpapery and rough. I began to cry because it hurt, and it was so unromantic to think that there was raw egg on his penis inside me.

  At the same time I felt happy because he wanted me, wanted this so much he had risked everything to get it. My parents were across the yard. Our school loomed somewhere in the dark. And I was bigger than any of it. I alone had the power to make a grown man risk everything to do what we were doing in the warm light of the shed, with the trays of eggs humming around us.