Blue Angel

by Francine Prose

  “I didn’t,” Swenson lies.

  “Thanks for doing this, Dad,” Ruby says.

  “My pleasure,” Swenson tells her. Then, partly to cover the hollow echo of his words, he leans over and kisses her cheek. It tastes perfumey, of makeup. Ruby stiffens and flinches.

  All right. Let’s do it Ruby’s way. He’s giving her his day. The idea floods Swenson with the peace he imagines people feel when they decide to turn their problems over to Jesus.

  “Chilly.” Swenson shudders.

  “Yup,” says Ruby. “Nasty.”

  They turn onto Route 2A, which takes them into the woods. The black branches stream past above them, oozing droplets of ice.

  “How’s school?” It’s not as if Swenson hasn’t asked forty times this weekend. But that’s one privilege of family life—the right to ignore good manners and the fear of boring others, to repeat things and get the same answers. “Aside from everyone getting sued?”

  “Pretty good.”

  “It gets easier,” Swenson says. “Are you having fun?”

  “Fun?”

  “You know. Friends. Hanging out.”

  Ruby says, “I work at a rape crisis center, Dad. I wouldn’t call that fun, exactly.”

  “I wouldn’t either,” Swenson says.

  Ten, twelve miles of silence go by, simultaneously tense and boring. As opposed to his drive with Angela—also tense, but fascinating. Swenson inhales audibly.

  “Is something wrong, Dad?” Ruby asks.

  “Toothache,” Swenson says.

  “Do you want to go back home?”

  “No, I’m fine.” After another pause, he says, “Is there that much rape on campus to keep a whole center going?”

  “Not really. We also do battered women outreach into the community. We just try to give them a place where they can feel safe, and share.”

  Feel safe? Share? Who is this person? She sounds like Lauren Healy.

  “But there was one incident…. It’s pretty gross. Sure you wantto hear this?”

  Well, now that she asks, he isn’t sure. “Of course I am.”

  “There was this fraternity party? The whole lacrosse team was there? It was Keg Day, which is this really stupid tradition at my school, like, you’re supposed to start chugging beer the minute you get up in the morning and keep drinking till you fall asleep or pass out or whatever. Anyhow, one of the guys had this date. Supposedly his high school girlfriend. She’d come for the weekend, but really she’d come to tell him that she wanted to break up. So…this guy gets all his fraternity buddies together, and they drug this girl’s drink, and they stretch her out in the frat house living room, and they all take turns pissing on her.”

  “Christ,” says Swenson. “That poor girl.”

  “I mean really.” Ruby warms to the heat of her father’s outrage. “And the really disgusting part is, she wasn’t going to report it—women always blame themselves and don’t come forward in these situations—but two friends of hers witnessed the crime and convinced her that her healing process would go faster if she nailed the guys.”

  “I’m sure they’re right,” mumbles Swenson, knowing perfectly well that he should be feeling sorry for the victim instead of for himself and Ruby. He can’t believe that his only daughter, the light of his life, goes to a school in which there are students who could piss all over a woman. This kind of thing doesn’t happen at Vassar or Harvard. Or Euston, for that matter. How can his daughter be caged in that zoo while, just a few miles away, kids no better than Ruby, girls like Angela Argo, are enjoying the freedom to cultivate their tender feelings? Carlos and Makeesha are in college to have their rough edges sanded off, to prepare for easy lives, good jobs, cocktail parties, while his daughter is being schooled in downward mobility, taught to keep her elbows tucked in and her eyes lowered as she slithers down the chute that leads to subsistence-level employment.

  Where did he and Sherrie fail her? She didn’t want to go to Euston. That would have been a disaster of another sort. It was Ruby’s decision to go to State. They couldn’t have changed her mind. He tells himself that the future masters of the universe are, in fact, more likely to have been fraternity animals from State than creative writing students from Euston. But why is he even thinking about this? The story Ruby’s just told him is far more serious and troubling than the question of where his kid goes to college.

  A gray blur streaks across the road. Swenson twists the wheel. The swerve sends Ruby flying into the passenger door. She runs her hands down her upper arms—checking for damage, thinks Swenson. He recalls a grade school drama in which Ruby played a male character. King Midas? The giant in “Jack and the Beanstalk”? Who knows. What he does remember is that something about her performance seemed puzzlingly familiar, and later Sherrie pointed out that Ruby had copied all of Swenson’s gestures.

  “Dad? Are you sure you’re all right? Would you like me to drive or something?”

  “I’m fine,” he says. “Fine and dandy. Okay?” By now they’ve reached the Wendover Inn, and he’s mortified by the contrast between the relief he feels—the trip is half over—and how disappointed he was, for the same reason, when he came this way with Angela. He deserves to be in this car hurtling sixty miles an hour down a glorified cow path, on a suicidal journey with this sullen, unhappy young woman pretending to be an older version of the happy little girl who used to bounce up and down, singing her unintelligible songs, beside him in her car seat. It’s all his fault. He knows how evil—how unforgivable—it is to be spending the day with his daughter for the first time in more than a year and secretly wishing he were with his little slut of a student girlfriend. Let whatever happens, happen. Let it all come down.

  “The school didn’t want to press charges,” says Ruby. “The Women’s Studies Department had to threaten a class-action lawsuit before they’d even investigate.”

  Another symbol of the vast divide between his daughter and his students: at State, a girl gets pissed on and the school does nothing. At Euston, they have meetings to warn the faculty about saying an unkind or ambiguous word.

  Swenson says, “It’s only right. Someone has to take responsibility.”

  “It’s not about responsibility,” Ruby says. “It’s about not having secrets. Everyone knows that secrets can kill—”

  You can say that again! The secret that Swenson’s keeping is a real killer, as it happens. What if he told Ruby, floated it by her, just to relieve the pressure? Hey, you know, the last time I was here, I was driving around with this student, and we got her a computer and then went back to her room and had sex. Tried to have sex….

  “Dad,” says Ruby, tremulously. “Don’t you think you should open your eyes?”

  Swenson needn’t have worried so about his return trip to Computer City. The place is unrecognizable. It takes him five minutes to find a parking spot. The fluorescent wasteland has turned into a hive of buzzing shoppers, wheeling carts and baby carriages, arguing, discussing, comforting screaming babies. Swenson spies a toddler whacking at a neatly stacked pyramid of boxed diskettes. The kid sees Swenson watching, pauses, then slams it again.

  The difference has nothing to do with Angela and Ruby. He came here with Angela on a weekday morning, and now it’s the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, the busiest shopping day of the year. Furled patriotic bunting announces holiday specials.

  Ruby pauses near the entrance, disconsolately studying the crowd. As Swenson heads for the computer department, she lags a few steps behind him. She takes it for granted that he, the grownup, knows where to go, which, as it happens, he does, if not for the reasons she thinks. She gazes at the rows of keyboards and screens, but can’t quite focus or commit herself to trying them out. She looks autistic, thinks Swenson.

  Several grueling minutes pass. All the salesmen are busy or purposely refusing to make eye contact. At last a nervous boy approaches. His terror of Ruby seems sexual, and clearly the feeling’s mutual. She has no idea what she wants, or needs, or
what the confusing specifications mean. Swenson thinks of Angela reeling off gigabytes, RAM. Why doesn’t Ruby know that?

  Ruby looks at the kid, than at Swenson. She’s on the brink of tears. Even the unconfident salesman is moved to awkward gallantry. With a sweet, fraternal reassurance that Swenson feels certain has nothing to do with inflating his commission and everything to do with keeping Ruby from flying apart in front of their eyes, he shows her a computer that he says may suit her needs—as if she knew what her needs were and had managed to make them clear. It’s the third cheapest computer. Swenson wants to hug the kid, which, he knows, would only increase their collective discomfort.

  Somehow they get through the transaction with minimum embarrassment and join the long queue shuffling toward the cash register, shoppers trudging forward in silence, like deportees. When he’d come with Angela there hadn’t been a line. The salesman had borrowed her credit card and flown across the store while Angela browsed the computers and Swenson watched her browsing. The card flew back, and Angela signed.

  Nothing’s that simple this time. The machine rejects Swenson’s card while he watches in growing panic, certain that his life has crashed and burned without his suspecting, some fresh disaster related to Angela or to his trip to Manhattan.

  The teenage girl at the cash register says, “I never had this happen before.”

  Swenson says, “Try it again.”

  The second time it doesn’t work, Swenson says, “What is this?”

  The third time, he says, “What the fuck is this?” The register girl won’t look at him but stares fixedly at the LCD screen. At last she grins. The card goes through. Swenson signs the slip, and he and Ruby leave.

  As they wait in the long line of cars inching past the pickup window, he scans the radio stations. Ruby says, “Dad, could you turn that down?” Annoyed, he turns it off.

  “Sorry,” Ruby says.

  “Don’t be sorry,” Swenson says.

  The guys at the pickup window can’t find Ruby’s order. Five, ten minutes go by. Swenson attempts to stay calm despite the pressure building behind his eyes. He taps his palm on the steering wheel. Some small, childish part of him wants Ruby to understand what a giant inconvenience this is. Let her feel guilty for once.

  Ruby stares straight ahead, while Swenson twists around, shooting furious glares into the warehouse window. He wants to take her in his arms and swear that everything will be fine, that he and Sherrie love her, they will always love her. At last someone produces their boxes and goes to the apologetic extreme of sending a young bodybuilder out to load them in the trunk.

  It’s not till they’re back on the road, moving at a decent speed, that Swenson feels able to attempt conversation. “I think you made a good choice,” he said. “I think it will be useful, make it easier to write your papers—”

  “Case histories,” Ruby corrects him.

  He thinks, I have to call Angela.

  “Case histories,” Swenson repeats.

  Three sharp taps rattle the glass on his office door. He’d know Angela’s knock anywhere.

  On the afternoon he got back from Computer City with Ruby, he’d called Angela’s dorm room and left a message on her machine telling her to meet him in his office Monday morning. If he’d reached her at home, he’d have had to explain over the phone what happened with Len. Better to do it in person. At the time, it had seemed a smart solution. But now he wants to bolt and run, hop the first flight to Tahiti. Or anywhere. Downtown Seattle! He pictures himself in a seedy hotel over an XXX video store, registered under a false name, sitting—happy, compared with this—on the edge of a lumpy bed.

  Angela stumbles into the room. What has she done to herself? Devoted her Thanksgiving to advanced facial piercing, adding a tiny ball bearing to the center of her lower lip, another ring in one nostril, a triangular silver billy-goat beard bubbling from her chin. The holes must have been there before. She must have put in the extra jewelry as a holiday surprise for her parents. Her Mad Max look is emphasized by the vampire makeup: white geisha powder, black lipstick, sooty kohl smeared on her eyelids. Actually, the total effect is less Mad Max than La Strada. There’s a glint of fear in her eyes, as if she’s being chased. Did something traumatic happen at home? Did her parents deceive him with their goofy goodwill?

  Angela flings herself into the chair. And then, in an unusually loud and strident voice, she says, “I hate it when you look at me like that.”

  Has she gone mad over Thanksgiving break? A weekend with her parents has driven her over the edge. The extra facial piercing is merely the external symptom. Swenson has read descriptions of how schizophrenia can strike suddenly, unpredictably, in early adulthood, often in association with a young person’s first leaving home. Something horrible must have happened. Swenson longs to touch her shoulder, to comfort her in some way, but remembers how, the last time he did, one thing led to another. Their history has made it impossible to distinguish a simple gesture of concern from a sexual come-on.

  “Look at you like what?” says Swenson.

  “Like dinner,” Angela says.

  “I’m sorry,” says Swenson. “Believe me. I didn’t think I was looking at you like dinner.”

  Maybe she’s just worked up about Len having seen her novel. Maybe she senses that if the news were good, Swenson would have called her at home. Her fate is at a crossroads, and it’s his happy job to tell her it’s taken a turn for the worse. Really, he should just lie to her. He’s gotten so good at lying.

  “I left your manuscript with Len Currie. He said he’s terribly busy, but he’ll try to take a look at it. Of course he may be too busy, and he’ll pretend he’s read it and just send it back.” It’s not a total lie. He did leave her manuscript with Len. Or somewhere.

  “When can I call him?” Angela says.

  “How was your Thanksgiving?”

  “Grisly. So how soon can I call your editor? And, like, ask if he’s read it?”

  “That just isn’t done!” says Swenson. “I don’t think he’d like that. I’m afraid that might make him decide not to read it at all.”

  As Angela tilts her head back quizzically, Swenson thinks he sees something metallic wink high up in one nostril. The energy rushes out of him so fast he feels as if he’s deflating. He should have told the truth in the first place. It just seems more peculiar now.

  “Look, I lied. I didn’t leave it with Len. Len’s not reading first novels. So it isn’t personal. It’s not like he read it and didn’t like it—”

  “I knew that,” Angela says. “I knew if it was good news you would have called me. I knew something terrible happened.”

  “Nothing terrible happened. Come on. You’re young, the book isn’t even finished. Besides which, you and I know that this isn’t what matters. Publication, reputation, fame, none of it matters as much as the work—”

  “Fuck you,” Angela says.

  “Wait,” Swenson says. How dare she? He left his family and flew to New York—at considerable personal expense—to try and do her a favor, and this bitch is saying fuck him? “Fuck you is more like it. I went out of my fucking way for you, I went all the way into Manhattan to have lunch with my editor so he could treat me like shit, so he could tell me to write a memoir about my early life, all the stuff I already covered in Phoenix Time but this time telling the so-called truth—”

  “What did you tell him?” Angela asks.

  “Of course I won’t write it,” says Swenson. “I’m a novelist. An actual writer. I’ve still got some…standards.” Oh, listen to the fatuous, grating drone of his voice!

  “I would have written the memoir if someone said they’d publish it,” Angela says. “If someone said they’d pay me for it. It’s easy for you to have standards, you and your nice fat teaching job, your tenure forever and ever. You never have to write another word, you’d still have time to write, whereas if I wind up working in a drugstore—and with my parents’ connections, that’s the best-case scenario—I w
ill not have time to write, while you sit here making your little moral distinctions about not selling out your fabulous talent.”

  Angela approaches the desk, leaning so close to Swenson that he sees red patches marbling her face under the rice-powder white.

  “I can’t believe you let this happen,” she says. “I can’t believe you didn’t fight harder for me. The only reason I let you fuck me was so you would help me get this novel to someone who could do something—”

  Swenson feels his spirit separating from his body. Now he knows what he was dreading, but this is worse than whatever he’d feared. He feels as he does when he hurts himself, cuts his finger or stubs his toe, and in that first moment understands that the real pain is still to come, taking its own sweet time, waiting until the adrenaline goes and leaves him unprotected.

  “I didn’t know it was about that,” he says. “I didn’t think it was about you letting me fuck you. I thought it was what we both wanted, and we both knew that all along.”

  “Well, let me know if you figure it out,” Angela says, and rushes out of his office. Swenson listens to her boots pounding down the stairs. A short time later the noise stops. Has she paused halfway down? Is she considering running back up, telling him she’s sorry? The footsteps continue, growing fainter, until he can no longer hear them.

  On Tuesday, Angela isn’t in class. Swenson half expected her to be absent. But when he walks in and sees that she’s not there, he’s shocked by the intensity of his disappointment.

  “Who’s missing?” he says, unsteadily.

  “Angela,” says Makeesha. They know he knows that, they can read it on his face. No one’s forgotten the session before Thanksgiving break—Swenson’s impassioned oration on the subject of Angela’s talent. And now they seem to be taking a sour triumph in her absence. She’s gotten the praise she wanted, heard what she wanted to hear. Why should she waste any more precious time slumming among her inferiors?

  Swenson takes a deep breath. “Anybody know where she is?”