Blue Angel

by Francine Prose

  The committee members glance at Swenson, or more accurately, at his shell. He’s vacated his body. His mind is taking a little break to absorb this information.

  A mystery has been solved. So that’s how the story of his meeting Sherrie worked its way into Angela’s novel. He wasn’t crazy or paranoid. Everything had an explanation. Well, not everything. Some things did. All of which strikes Swenson as interesting, and hardly painful at all compared, let’s say, with the excruciating thought of sweet, generous Sherrie offering the romantic story of how she met her husband to a girl with whom her husband just happened to be romantically obsessed.

  “And then?” says Lauren. Good question. He could tell them what happened then. Angela went home and wrote a scene based on how Sherrie and Swenson met in the St. Vincent’s emergency room. But he’s the only one who knows that, the only one who cares. None of them would have any idea about how this relates to the charges against him. She was sucking details from his life, using them in her work. Which was proof that she cared about him, that she was paying attention. Swenson himself feels slightly dizzied by the manic speed at which his passions are tracking back and forth between Angela and Sherrie.

  “After that Angela seemed fine,” Arlene says.

  “Excuse me,” interrupts Bentham. “Are you saying that when a Euston student comes to the clinic with suicidal impulses, you and your colleagues sit around drinking Cokes and discussing your romantic histories?”

  “We’re understaffed,” says Arlene. “Gosh. We did refer Angela to the consulting psychologist in Burlington.”

  “In Burlington? You’re telling us that we advise our suicidal kids to get themselves down to Burlington?” Bentham’s tone is threatening. After they clean up this Swenson mess, they can look into the clinic. That’s how they’ll get rid of Sherrie next. Oh, what has Swenson done? Not only ruined his own life, but Sherrie’s as well, Sherrie who has done nothing, nothing to deserve this!

  “And did anyone ever check up to see if Miss Argo contacted this therapist?”

  Why didn’t Sherrie? wonders Swenson. Because all of them—except him—knew that Angela was lying. Sherrie, Magda, even Arlene. Women knew, apparently. Magda even warned him.

  “You can’t hold their hands every minute!” snaps Arlene. Does anyone but Swenson notice that class warfare has erupted? Arlene’s working-class country passions have finally been stirred by these brats she’s been coddling for years, and by these phony Brits who invaded her kingdom and think they can boss her around.

  “Of course not,” Lauren says.

  “Is that all?” says Arlene, petulantly. Yes, it is, and it isn’t. It’s all Arlene will be asked to say, but it’s not all she’s done. Her testimony has added to the weight of moral repulsion the committee feels for Swenson, who has not just offered a student a chance to be published in return for sex but has offered a suicidal student a chance to be published in return for sex.

  “Any more questions for Mrs. Shurley?” No, there aren’t, no one wants to touch this. Except Amelia, who seems to have missed that sour note of class conflict that has made Arlene and Bentham’s brief exchange so jarring and discordant.

  Amelia says, “Did Miss Argo ever mention her relationship with Professor Swenson.”

  Arlene looks dumbfounded. “I don’t think she would with Sherrie…with Ted’s wife there. Do you?”

  Amelia shrugs. It’s too much trouble to try to explain what Latin women might say—or not say—to each other.

  “Well, then!” says Lauren. “Arlene, is there anything else you’d like us to know?”

  “Maybe one thing?” says Arlene, whose voice has by this point become a thin, sharp needle for delivering its precise dose of venom. “I just think you people ought to know how hard this has been on Sherrie.” Arlene’s looking directly at Swenson. He buries his head in his hands, though what he really wants to do is put his fingers in his ears and chant nonsense syllables to drown out the sound of her voice saying, “Sherrie’s strong. She’s very strong.”

  Swenson feels like the cuckolded one! Sherrie’s left him for Arlene. And now Arlene, not Swenson, has the right to talk about Sherrie—what Sherrie’s like—to this roomful of strangers. He wants to go and grab Angela and make her look at what she’s done! But he knows that the point is: he did it. That’s what this trial’s about. If he throws back his head and howls, can they all just quit and go home?

  “Thank you, Arlene,” says Lauren.

  “Don’t mention it,” Arlene says. She looks at Bill, as if she expects him to help her out of the room the same way he helped her in. But there’s nothing wrong with Arlene—a sixtyish, healthy nurse who has just shown great vigor in hammering yet another nail into Swenson’s coffin. She can exit on her own steam, pick herself up and leave. As Arlene passes Angela and her parents, Swenson looks to see how the news of Angela’s “suicidal” thoughts have affected her mom and dad. Not at all, apparently. They’re too focused on their mission. They are here to support their daughter and to make sure that justice is done.

  The committee looks at Angela—that is, at Angela and her parents. No one’s surprised by any of this. It’s all been arranged in advance.

  Lauren says, “Angela, are you ready? Do you feel strong enough to address the committee?”

  Angela, are you ready? The other witnesses weren’t asked if they felt strong enough to speak. They were just trundled in and out at the committee’s convenience. But it was Angela who started this, Angela who wants it. Angela’s always been ready. She was present at the creation.

  Angela gets up shakily and goes over to the table. As she moves, Swenson thinks he can still see sharp angles of sullen punkhood poking through the fuzzy eiderdown of that Jane College getup. He waits to see her trip or hit her hip on the edge of the table, but she glides into a chair like a debutante. Even with the makeover, wouldn’t her gestures be the same, her body language speaking the unchanging language of self, like the kidnapped child’s shoes in Arlene’s ridiculous story? Wouldn’t the body be slower to learn a whole new set of directions? Actors do it all the time. Angela’s multitalented.

  It’s as if the whole committee takes a step backward, giving Angela over to Lauren, the only one qualified to take responsibility for handling this fragile creature and her sensitive testimony.

  “Now, Angela,” says Lauren, “perhaps we should start by saying that everybody in this room understands how difficult it must have been for you to come forward. How brave you are for helping make sure that this kind of thing is stopped. I also want to say, we’ve all heard that upsetting tape of your…conversation with Professor Swenson. And we agreed, unanimously, that there is no compelling reason for us to sit here and listen to it together. Ms. Wolin”—she nods at Bentham’s secretary—“has transcribed it for the record.”

  So they’re not going to be forced to endure a public performance of the tape. Swenson’s woozy with joy. He’ll never have to hear the tape again, that crude low-tech forgery, that lie, that accident of timing that made it sound as if he’d persuaded her to trade sex for showing her book to Len. Angela’s wringing her hands in her lap, reflexively searching for rings to twist. She should have anticipated this when she got dressed this morning. On her face is that combustive chemistry of wild irritation and boredom so familiar from those early classes, but now it’s become a martyr’s transfixed gaze of piety and damage, lit by the flames of the holy war she’s waging against the evils of male oppression and sexual harassment.

  “Well, Angela,” says Lauren. “Suppose you begin by telling us how you became acquainted with Professor Swenson.”

  Angela curls her lip in disbelief. Are these people stupid? “I’m in his class. I mean, I was.”

  “How many students were in the class?” asks Carl. Just faculty checking up on who might have a lighter load.

  “Eight,” says Angela. “Nine, counting me.”

  Amelia and Bill shoot looks at Swenson. His teaching load has been light.
r />   “And you and Professor Swenson developed a…relationship.”

  “Well, it was kind of weird,” says Angela. “He kept wanting to meet me for these private conferences. Everybody thought it was strange, because he wasn’t having them with anybody else. In fact it was pretty well known that he was, like, never in his office.”

  Lauren gives this damning information a moment to sink in. Swenson’s not just a child molester—he’s a lazy teacher.

  “And what did you discuss in these ‘conferences’?”

  “My work, I guess. I mean, sort of. I mean, he never suggested any changes, exactly. He just said my stuff was so good I should just keep on doing whatever I was doing.”

  They might as well end the hearing right now. Every self-respecting academic knows a professor has never liked a student’s work that much unless he was trying to arrange a little extracurricular activity.

  “Now tell us, Angela, in your own words, how this relationship developed.”

  If Lauren says relationship one more time, Swenson will have to kill her. Re-lay-shin-ship. He hates how her tongue lingers on the second syllable.

  And now the old Angela reappears inside the new Angela’s clothes, and begins to writhe. But for all her squirming, Angela won’t twist his way. He could jump up and down in front of her, and she wouldn’t spare him a glance. He feels that if Angela looked at him once, something would have to change. She would call this whole thing off, she would drop the charges. He’s thinking like a stalker. Is that what he’s become? A stalker who’s not even obsessional enough to stop being self-conscious, who’s mortified to have this group know that he had a relationship with this bizarre wriggling girl.

  “I began to get the feeling that he was, well, like…well, interested.”

  “Interested?” repeats Lauren. “Interested in having a relationship?”

  Angela says, “Well, you know…I’d catch him looking at me in class.”

  Of course, he was looking at her, or at least in the direction of her aggressive silence, of the rings and chains and studs—where are they now?—that she’d tap on the table while her fellow students poured out their hearts and souls. Swenson hopes the committee is taking all this to heart. From now on, they’d better be careful before they even look at a student. Though how could anyone not have looked at Angela, whose whole performance was geared to make you look and at the same time make you feel that your looking was a violation of her right to slink, invisible, through the world?

  Swenson needs to remember that. He needs to recall what happened so as to retain his grip on the truth—on his version of the story. A grip on recent history. On reality. The young woman he was “involved” with barely resembles the person before them. It’s disorienting to keep translating from this Angela to that. Which one is the real Angela? Astonishing, what you don’t know, not even when a person’s writing allows you, apparently, intimate access to her soul. But as Swenson’s always warning his class: don’t assume that soul is the writer’s.

  Lauren says, “Did Professor Swenson say anything to you during this time?”

  Angela says, “Sure, he talked to me. I brought him my stuff. My writing.”

  “And what did Professor Swenson say about your writing?”

  “I already told you,” says Angela. “He really liked it.”

  “I see,” Lauren says. Then, after a moment, “How did you know he really liked it?”

  “Well, he would leave messages on my answering machine saying how much he liked it.”

  “On your an-swer-ing ma-chine?” repeats Lauren.

  “And he kept asking to see more of my writing.”

  Let the committee get this straight. A teacher asked to see more of a student’s writing? Swenson only wishes they knew how good her book is. That’s what he wants to say now, to set the record straight, establish that there was a reason he was asking to see more. But it will hardly help his case if he stands up and declares that. It will just make him look delusional. Which he was. But not about her novel.

  “And what kind of writing did Professor Swenson ask to see?”

  “My novel. Chapters from my novel.”

  There’s just the faintest swell in her voice when she says that word: novel. Can’t the committee pick up the signals that the blood-thirsty killer is transmitting from inside that deceptively guileless girl? Swenson’s kidding himself. They hear nothing. None of them—except Magda, and she’s not talking—can possibly imagine how this inarticulate, subliterate child could write a novel that a grown man would ask to see more of. Their moods sink just as his did when he first heard that word. Novel. Swenson watches Carl and Bill conclude: she’s not the one they’d risk their jobs for.

  “Perhaps you want to tell us a little about your novel.”

  “Like about what?”

  “The plot?” Lauren prods gently, in the hope of forcing another inarticulate grunt to plop out of Angela’s mouth.

  Angela says, “It’s about this girl who gets, like, involved with her teacher.”

  Yes, well, let’s tell the committee about the scene in which the girl and her teacher fuck among the broken eggs. Let’s point out that this demure, virginal young woman did an amazingly accurate rendering of all that groping and fumbling amid all those sticky fluids.

  “And where did you get this story?” Lauren asks. “Where do you think it came from?”

  Angela looks puzzled. Where does Lauren think stories come from? “I made it up.”

  “We understand that.” Lauren smiles. “But do you think that reading your novel could have given Professor Swenson the idea that you were…willing to get involved with one of your teachers?”

  “Sure,” says Angela. “I guess.”

  Can six reasonable men and women believe that Swenson decided to have a “relationship” with Angela because he read it in her novel, as if he were some psycho teen who shoots up a school-yard, and whose lawyers claim he got the idea from a video game?

  Lauren says, “And was there anything else that made you think that Professor Swenson was interested in initiating a relationship with you?”

  Angela has to consider this one. “Well, I did sort of find out that he’d checked my book of poems out of the library.”

  So Angela knew he was reading her poems. Swenson’s still trying to grasp the implications of this—When did she find out? How long she did she know? Why didn’t she ever tell him?—when Lauren says, “How did you discover that?”

  “Every so often I kind of cruise that part of the shelves. To see if anyone’s borrowed it. No one ever does. And then one day it was gone. So I asked this kid I know who works in the library to look it up on the computer. And it was Professor Swenson. I figured something was going on. You don’t expect there’ll be this teacher with nothing better to do than check out your really embarrassing poetry book.”

  No, you certainly don’t expect that. But hold on. Back up. Has no one noticed that Angela’s just admitted to persuading an accomplice to commit an act that may not be strictly illegal, but still just isn’t done? Isn’t your library checkout file privileged information? Not if your phone bills and medical records aren’t. Nothing’s sacred, nothing’s private.

  “And how did that make you feel?” Lauren says. “When you found out that Professor Swenson checked out your poems?”

  “Creeped out,” Angela says. “And also…”

  “Also what?”

  “Also, I remember thinking that if Professor Swenson had been, like, a guy, and I’d found out he’d borrowed my poems, I would have thought, it would have meant that he, you know, liked me.”

  If Professor Swenson had been a guy? And where did this little twit get the idea that borrowing a book from a library is a sign of sexual interest? Well, there is something sexy about reading someone’s work: an intimate communication takes place. Still, you can read…Gertrude Stein, and it doesn’t mean you find her attractive.

  “And when was the first time you sensed that Professo
r Swenson wanted something beyond the nature of an ordinary student-teacher relationship.”

  From their first conversation, Your Honor, from the first time he looked at her in class, while the bells were ringing. Their eyes met across a crowded room. Not that he realized it was happening then. But that’s what he thinks now. How did he become the romantic? Once more, the committee’s version of him—the scheming dirty old man—seems less degrading than the truth. But if Angela knew what he wanted, why couldn’t she have told him? Told him how he felt about her and how she felt about him, and spared him all the time and trouble of trying to figure it out? Saved him from the confusion, the pain of not knowing. Even now. But of course she couldn’t have mentioned it. How could she have brought it up? Because he was the teacher, she was the student. That’s what this trial’s about.

  “I guess it was when I told him that my computer crashed, and he offered to take me down to Burlington to the computer store. That seemed a little, you know, extra. But I kept telling myself he was just being nice.”

  “And was he?” asks Lauren.

  Well, yes, absolutely. He was certainly being nice, taking a morning out of his life to drive this kid down to Burlington. All right. There is a God, and He’s punishing Swenson for having wanted that drive to last forever, and for liking it so much better than the same trip he took with his daughter.

  “And what happened that day?” asks Lauren.

  “Nothing at first. Professor Swenson seemed nervous. Like he was scared that someone would see us. Like we were doing something wrong.”

  Is Lauren forgetting that she was the one who saw them, that she was driving straight toward them as they left the campus?

  “Until…,” Lauren says.

  “Until we were on the way home and he was saying something…I can’t remember. Anyway, he started talking about his editor in New York. He asked me if I would like the guy to see my novel, and that’s when he put his hand over mine…and then he moved it to my…leg.”

  Angela takes a moment to steady herself. The room is utterly quiet.