Swenson puts down the manuscript, determined to have—for one second of grace—a purely literary response. Well, sex scenes aren’t easy, and this one’s pretty good…the detail of the cracked egg, for example. What were the lines he liked? I assumed it was his penis. I’d never felt one before. Swenson writes “good” in the margin.
Suddenly, he’s gasping for air. What is this about? Where’s his sense of humor? His distance? His perspective? Well, at least the poor music teacher didn’t crack a tooth. The poor teacher? The guy’s a pervert. But at least a successful one.
Swenson takes a deep breath, counts backward from ten. Angela doesn’t mean him. She likes him. Loves him, maybe. She knows he’s nothing—nothing—like that disgusting creep in her novel. She wrote it before they had sex, or whatever it was they had. It was on the computer when she got up from bed. All she did was print out what was already there.
So what? Who cares if life copies art, or if life imitates art?
Swenson does. He cares a lot. He’d rather that teacher not be him.
No one said it would be easy, teaching a class five days after you’ve slept with one of your students. It’s a good thing Swenson’s made such a production of his miniblackouts. Because now that he’s sustained real harm, the class is cutting him some slack, a moment in which to collect himself and attempt to stop ping-ponging back and forth between the image of that Angela, naked except for her boots, and this Angela, across the seminar table, fully armored—rings, bracelets, spiked collar, the works. She seems to have reverted to an earlier, more ferretlike incarnation. Twitching, sighing, she alerts the class to her presence without anyone having to look at her, which is fine. Swenson can’t look at her, nor can he look at Claris, which considerably narrows his visual range.
Meanwhile he’s facing a session that under normal circumstances would test his pedagogical, diplomatic, and psychiatric skills. Today’s ordeal is a discussion of Meg Ferguson’s story about a man whose girlfriend leaves him after he (Meg’s word) batters her, and the man takes revenge by kidnapping the woman’s beloved cat, Mittens, taking Mittens to Manhattan, and dropping her out a thirtieth-story window. Everything in the story is maddening and false: The thin, implausible characters, the idiot-simple morality, the dishonest, judgmental cant masquerading as narration. It’s what Swenson hates most about certain student work. This ideological junk is what some of his colleagues would write if they could. The ferocity of his distaste scares him into silence.
At least the chicken in Danny’s piece was already dead. At least that was about love of a sort, not male brutality, vengeance, and murder, though maybe it was male brutality. The kid wasn’t making love to the chicken, he was raping it, just as the music teacher rapes the girl in Angela’s novel, just as the father rapes the daughter in her phone-sex poems. That’s all sex is to these kids. Rape and abuse and incest. Magda told him, and Magda was right. Why didn’t Swenson listen?
Luckily, the others are so busy mulling over Meg’s story that they hardly notice Swenson drowning. Even Jonelle and Makeesha, who share Meg’s disapproval of human nature in general and male sexuality in particular, must have been awed by the moment when the villain wishes that his girlfriend would come along and find Mittens splattered on the sidewalk. Danny and Carlos look at Swenson, as if they’re hoping he’ll tell them what to do if they don’t want to wind up like Mittens.
Swenson’s own anxiety is so multilayered, so sticky, he barely hears Makeesha saying she knows where the story’s coming from, she knows there are dudes who would do that. She just wasn’t convinced that this dude would do that. Carlos says it’s total bullshit, he knows lots of funky bad dudes, but nobody does shit like that. This abstract philosophical conversation about whether or not a dude would do that goes on for a long time. Spared from literary scrutiny, Meg nods smugly, enragingly. She knows dudes would do that.
Swenson’s left his body. He’s floating above the table at which Claris is saying that it doesn’t matter whether or not someone would do something like that, what matters is whether Meg has made them believe that the guy in her story did it. Even Claris is frightened of Meg. She’s not saying whether she believes it or not. Though otherwise Claris seems normal—that is, not as if she’s brooding about the fact that she’s seen her professor in a classmate’s dorm.
Suddenly they’re startled by a sound so loud that Swenson thinks it’s the bells, then realizes it’s the hollow boom of Angela hitting her spiked wristband against the seminar table.
“Meg,” says Angela, “let me ask you something. That guy in your story—what does he do for a living?”
“I don’t know,” says Meg, warily. “I mean. Wait. He’s a contractor. That’s right.”
“Is that in the story?” Angela asks.
“No,” admits Meg. “Not yet. I mean, maybe it was, and then I took it out.
The whole class is transfixed by the spectacle of Angela going after Meg. Who would have predicted that the feisty, righteously aggrieved Meg would be so easily routed?
“It’s not in the story. Because the guy’s not in the story, nothing’s in the story except your stupid ideas about how men are disgusting pigs. We don’t believe this guy for a second, not one thing he says or does, certainly not his taking the cat to the top of the building. Have you ever traveled with a cat?”
This is precisely the sort of thing Swenson’s promised not to allow—this prosecutorial lunge for the throat, this reckless blood-letting. He should be wading into the fray, yanking back on Angela’s leash, rescuing poor Meg, but he can only watch, mesmerized, as Angela says exactly what needs to be said. How relieved he is—for obvious personal reasons—to hear her say that men are not disgusting pigs. Meg answers each of her questions with a slight, almost involuntary nod of appeasement and supplication.
“Did you bother working that out, Meg? Or were you too busy thinking up some vicious thing for this asshole to do? A guy like that might kill a cat, but he’d stay in the neighborhood. Most likely he’d be nicer to the cat than he was to the woman.”
The room’s dead silent. No one blinks. Why can’t the bells ring at the right moment, for once, and save them from this silence?
Finally Swenson says, “Well, I guess Angela didn’t much like Meg’s story.”
Heh heh. After a beat, the others laugh.
Another silence. Then Claris says, “I agree with a lot of what Angela…but…I’ve got something to say. I’m sorry, Professor Swenson, but I think it’s unfair that Angela gets to shoot her mouth off about everybody else’s stuff, but we never talk about her work, so it’s really safe for her, she doesn’t have to play by the same rules we do.”
Swenson must have been insane to think he’d get away with their encounter in the hall of Angela’s dorm.
Carlos says, “That’s right, man.” The others nod. Why are they so eager to jump all over Angela instead of thanking her for freeing them from a gruelingly tactful discussion of Meg’s story? Could Claris have told the others about seeing Swenson in the dorm? Swenson tries out a placating smile. “I made it clear at the beginning that no one would be forced to bring work into class….”
This is not going over. No one’s being persuaded.
“Fine,” Angela says. “Whatever. If that’s a problem for you guys, then fine, I’d be glad to bring my stuff into class. It’s not that I was scared. I just didn’t see the point. But if it makes you guys happy, we can do it next week.”
“Thank you, Angela,” Swenson says. “For volunteering. And extricating us from this little snafu.”
“Snafu,” says Carlos. “Beautiful.”
“All right,” says Swenson. “Meg? Anything else about your story?”
“No,” says Meg, quickly. “I think I’ll survive. Thanks.”
“Good,” says Swenson. “See you all next week. Angela, hang on and we’ll figure out what you should hand in.”
Slightly stunned, they file out. Footsteps gallop down the stairs. Swenson hardly hears
them. He’s searching Angela’s face for some sign of what she feels, and whether that…mishap in her room was an end or a beginning.
He’d planned to pretend that nothing happened, but he’s just so glad to be with her. He’s missed her. He can’t stop staring. Whatever happened, or didn’t, between them, at least it’s given him the right to look her in the eye. It seems to him that her face is flushed with feverish affection. Now they’ll have to be careful lest her feelings for him—their feelings for each other—get them in serious trouble.
Meanwhile he’s trying to reconcile the young woman across the table with the naked girl crawling up his body, the one whose nipple he took in his mouth. It just doesn’t seem possible. Maybe he dreamed the whole thing. He probes his broken tooth with his tongue. It happened. It was no dream.
“Man,” she says. “I am so sorry for going off like that in class. I don’t know what got into me. One minute I was sitting there minding my own business and the next minute I was ripping Meg’s heart out.”
“Well, you were right,” says Swenson.
“But way too heavy. Now look what I’ve got myself into. I just didn’t want to put up my work for, you know, target practice—”
“You can still back out. We don’t have to workshop your novel. It’s not a requirement.” Frankly, he wishes she would refuse. He’d rather not moderate a discussion of a novel about a student-teacher affair by a student for whom (as the least perceptive student can tell) he has some special feeling.
“I might as well bite the bullet. Let them tear it apart. Revenge for my trashing Meg. You want to know the truth? It wasn’t Meg’s story. It was me—the mood I was in. I was pissed before I walked in here.”
“And…why was that?” Swenson couldn’t be more eager, or more reluctant, to know.
“Because you didn’t call all week.”
Christ, thinks Swenson, bracing himself. Here it comes.
“To tell me what you thought of those pages,” she says. “I mean, that scene was sort of…extreme. I needed to know what you thought. So, like, I’m sitting here in class defending males against Meg’s bullshit while this week you demonstrated the worst shit about guy behavior. To tell you the truth, I’d rather see some guy throw my cat out the window than give you this really tough, hard-to-write scene and you don’t even call.”
Swenson can’t keep from laughing. What a strange little creature she is. She’s not even going to mention…whatever happened between them. It’s all about the work for her. It was always about her work. But doesn’t the rest mean anything?
“I promise I won’t throw your cat out the window—”
“Fuck that,” says Angela, shocking them both. “Did you notice that you didn’t call?” Her voice is edging up toward the pitch at which she’d berated Meg. Slow down. This is going too fast. How did they get to the breakup stage and skip the middle steps? What makes her think she can talk to a teacher that way? He has only himself to blame.
He’s sorry. He was wrong not to call. He’s supposed to be the adult. It couldn’t have been simple for her—what happened in her room. Actually, it’s made everything hopelessly complex. He didn’t call because he couldn’t imagine saying, Hey, I really liked that scene of revolting sex with an older man.
“Did you even think about it?” she says.
“All the time.” Was that a declaration of love? Swenson feels suddenly brave.
Angela doesn’t return his smile. “Well, that’s a start,” she says.
“The fact is, I wanted to call so much that I couldn’t call.”
All right, then. He’s said it. Let it all come down.
Angela seems unimpressed by what’s just occurred, by the giant leap he’s taken over the widening fault between himself and his life.
“That makes no sense, no sense at all. You couldn’t call because you wanted to call? If you want to call someone, you call. Anything else is just guy bullshit.”
Who is this girl, and what does she think is going on between them? What happened to the worshipful student who hung on his every word, the young woman whose favorite author, whose hero he was, whose life he saved and transformed? Something’s ringing the faintest of bells, he hears Angela’s mother’s voice, The second he started to like her, she wouldn’t answer the phone…. Now that she’s let Swenson sleep with her she doesn’t respect him anymore. That’s the trouble with loving. It makes you act like a girl. Meg is right, Makeesha’s right, Angela’s right to hate men, to fear their power. He could flunk this little twit. Fail her for the semester.
“What did you think of the pages?” she says.
“Fine,” Swenson says, idiotically. “At least the guy didn’t break a tooth.”
Angela claps her hand over her mouth, truly concerned and contrite. “Oh, gee, how’s your tooth?”
“Fixable. I guess.”
“Cool. So what about the pages?”
“I…liked them. They’re risky. Very brave. The scene makes your flesh creep. I guess you meant to do that.”
“I meant to do that,” she says.
“You did it,” says Swenson.
Angela sprawls forward and leans her elbow on the table in a parody of rapt attention. Her eyes are liquid and sincere, but her voice is clipped and ironic.
“You know what?” she says. “None of this means anything. Nothing that happens in this crappy little college amounts to jack shit. The class could build a bonfire and burn my novel or get on their knees and worship it, and it still wouldn’t mean anything. I care what you think. A lot. You know that. Obviously. But I need to get my stuff beyond this…college, out into the world, and find out if someone who doesn’t know me thinks I should even go on writing or tear it up in tiny pieces and throw it in the garbage.”
“You can’t ask anyone that,” Swenson says. “Especially not at your stage.”
“What’s my stage?” she says. “Listen…tell me if this is impossible. I mean, you don’t have to do this, but maybe the next time you talk to your editor in New York, you could sort of mention my novel and ask him read it, just look at it, thirty pages, whatever, enough so he could tell you something and you could tell me.”
He should have seen this coming, taken his warning from her being the only student in Euston history who claimed to love The Red and the Black. What did he think that was about? Naturally Angela loves Stendhal. And now she’s Julien-Soreled him. But it wasn’t—it isn’t—so simple. There’s something deeper between them than mere opportunism and ambition.
Len Currie might like Angela’s book—it’s young, sexy, transgressive, there’s no telling what the folks in New York are going for these days. If that happened, it would be great—for her, for Swenson, for Euston. A marvelous boost for everyone except the other students.
“Let me think about it,” he says.
“Think about it,” Angela says.
“What about the novel?” he says. “Do you have more pages for me?”
“I do,” she says. “But it’s weird. I forgot to bring them.”
“That is weird,” says Swenson.
“Who knows? Maybe my forgetting was Freudian or something. Maybe it’s because I was so fried over your not calling me. I thought maybe you didn’t read the pages I gave you.”
“I read them.”
“I got that. Well, I can hardly bring those pages into class next week.”
She’s right. She’d have to be mad to bring a sex scene into that bloody arena of gender combat. Not to mention the challenge of submitting a chapter about teacher-student sex when the student writer is having sex with the teacher. Is having? Has had. Will have? Swenson has never felt so alone. If he can’t discuss this with Angela—whom can he ask? Let it go. He is not going to quiz Angela about their…relationship. The word gives him the creeps.
Angela says, “I guess the smartest plan would be to do that first chapter. It’s fairly neutral compared to the rest of the book. Things haven’t really started hopping.”
Swenson chuckles. “Would that be useful? That first chapter’s pretty polished.”
“None of it’s useful. It’s just some initiation thing. I get to be part of the gang. The Latina Diablas.”
“Wear earplugs to class,” he says. “Ignore anything they say.”
“I already do. Anyhow, I promise to bring you some new pages next time. I don’t know how I forgot. It’s been a strange week, I guess.”
“That it has,” says Swenson.
“Look, I’m really sorry I asked you about your editor. Why don’t we just forget it?”
“No,” says Swenson. “It’s fine. I promise I’ll think about it.”
“Okay. See you next week,” she says. And she’s gone.
Swenson gazes after her. His grief is visceral—shocking. Well, he can’t sit here forever, alone in an empty classroom, mooning over an undergrad with lip rings and a tattoo. He practically runs down the stairs, across the quad, and into Magda.
“Ted! How was your class?”
“Crazy,” Swenson says.
“Normally crazy or especially crazy?”
“Normally,” lies Swenson. “I guess.”
If only he could tell her! How sweet it would be to grab Magda’s wrist and hustle her off to his car and drive around long enough to tell her the story of the conferences, the classes, Angela’s novel, sex, the broken tooth, and now her asking him to show her novel to Len.
He would end with the questions forming in his mind: Does Angela—did she ever—have a crush on him, or is she just using him for his professional connections? Is Angela blackmailing him, or simply asking a favor? What does a favor mean when you have the power to wreck someone’s life? How devastated Magda would be to learn that he’d slept with a student. This is how criminals get caught. Sooner or later they talk. It’s not the cops who bring them down, but their own urge to confess or boast.
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