Blue Angel

by Francine Prose

  Anyone would break in now, any normal person would say: she’s lying! But if Swenson interrupts, he’ll disrupt everything, he’ll lose his only chance to hear what Angela says. To find out what she was thinking. Or anyway, what she claims she was thinking.

  “And he asked me again if I wanted his editor to see my novel, and I knew what he was really asking, and…”—Angela’s whispering now—“and I told him yes.”

  She looks down at the desk for a long time, no doubt gaining encouragement from the waves of understanding and forgiveness streaming at her from the committee, every one of whom—even Lauren, most likely—would have slept with anyone who promised them an introduction to a New York editor at a major house. And they’re supposed to know better, have lives, they’re older, Angela’s just a kid. What could she—what would they—have done? Yes, they would have said, yes.

  “And then what, Angela?” asks Lauren.

  “And then we drove back to my dorm, and he offered to help me carry the computer up to my room.”

  Offered? Angela asked.

  “And you told him yes?” says Lauren.

  “Yeah,” says Angela. “I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. I wanted to be nice. I wound up feeling really, like, totally passive, like everything was out of my control.”

  Passive isn’t Angela’s word. She can hardly say it. She’s trying out some jargon she learned in the last few weeks.

  “So you would say that you didn’t feel very much in control on that day when Professor Swenson suggested coming to your dorm room?”

  “Not at all,” Angela says.

  No, sir. She just pushed him back on the bed.

  “And did you and Professor Swenson wind up having…doing…whatever you assumed you had to do so he would help you with your book.”

  Angela can hardly speak. “I don’t know if I can talk about this.”

  “Try,” says Lauren. “Take a deep breath.”

  How pornographic and perverted this is, a grown woman—a professor—torturing a female student into describing a sexual experience to a faculty committee, not to mention her parents. Swenson could have slept with Angela on the Founders Chapel altar, and it would have seemed healthy and respectable compared to this orgy of filth. Meanwhile he has to keep it in mind that Angela started all this. Angela chose to be here.

  “Well, we sort of had sex. I mean, we began to have sex. And then Professor Swenson had this…accident.”

  “Accident?” Has the committee not heard of this? There’s some riffling of papers and notes.

  “His tooth sort of cracked.”

  The whole committee pivots toward Swenson, who just at that instant happens to be probing his broken tooth with his tongue. They observe the telltale bulge in his cheek, the incriminatory pull of his mouth. Fascinated, they watch his own reflexes testifying against him.

  “And?” says Lauren.

  “That ended it,” says Angela.

  “And how did you feel?” asks Lauren.

  “I was relieved,” says Angela, as is everyone in the room. How do Angela’s parents feel? What must they think of Swenson? “Anyhow, it wasn’t my fault. I kept my part of the bargain.”

  “And did Professor Swenson keep his? Did he take your book to his editor?”

  “Yes. I mean, I guess so.”

  “And how do you know he did?”

  “He told me. But he lied.”

  “What did he lie about?” says Lauren.

  “He said he gave it to his editor.”

  “And the truth is?”

  Angela falls silent. Perhaps they’ll sit here forever, watching her perform her party piece: psychic self-erasure. But now, as if to compensate for their daughter’s withdrawal, her parents stir from their stupor of discomfort and politeness. A tremor—a sort of hiccuping—seizes her father’s (step-father’s?) body. His wife attempts to restrain him, to keep him from breaking some rule of decorum, but the man has something to say. His voice is rusty as he shouts, “Come on, honey, tell them. Tell the people your good news.”

  His daughter turns and glares at him—now there’s the Angela Swenson knows! She closes her eyes and shakes her head. Why can’t her father just vanish? When she opens her eyes, she seems annoyed that he’s still in the room.

  “Angela?” Lauren’s improvising. “Good news?” Good news is not on the prearranged agenda of sin, abuse, and damage.

  “The thing is, I believed Professor Swenson when he told me that he couldn’t get his editor to look at my book, that the guy wasn’t interested. I was kind of upset. Disappointed. After what we’d…you know…done. And then, like two weeks ago, I got this call from a guy named Len Currie, Professor Swenson’s editor? He said he’d found my manuscript on a chair at the restaurant where they had lunch and he picked it up. He was going to send it back. But he started reading it in the cab going home. And now he wants to give me a contract and publish it when it’s finished.”

  If this were a real courtroom—or better yet, a courtroom in a movie—a wave of shock and astonishment would ripple through it right now. But these academics are too refined, too repressed to whisper or gasp. Still, Swenson thinks he can hear the stifled buzz emanating directly from their brains. Doesn’t anyone get it? The girl’s a pathological liar. This wishful-thinking sick little joke about Len Currie and her novel…. The committee isn’t laughing. Their facesare parched and drawn. They haven’t had a chance to hide their separate pained responses to the jabs of envy and resentment. They’ll need a moment to conceal their private jealousy and grief behind the mask of unselfish happiness for a Euston student’s success.

  Magda’s mouth is open, but Magda doesn’t know it. Swenson looks at her and looks away. That Magda asked him to bring Len her book and Swenson refused and brought him Angela’s instead is more than their friendship can sustain. Magda will never get over this: so many different tiny rejections streaming into one. He’s flattering himself. She’ll recover. It’s their friendship that won’t make it. It’s something else he’s losing, yet another precious part of his life that he’s never valued enough, just part of the water he didn’t miss until his well ran dry. Only now does he realize how much he loved, he loves Magda. So why was it Angela’s book that he tried to persuade Len Currie to publish?

  Len Currie is publishing Angela’s novel. So what is this hearing about? Angela should be kissing Swenson’s feet instead of ruining his life. As she must have decided to do when she still believed that Swenson, her white knight, had failed to get her manuscript published. If that’s when she decided. Who knows what she did, and why? Why did Lola Lola want a bumbling overweight professor selling dirty postcards—of her?

  From now on it will be Len who gets to read Angela’s book in installments, Len who talks to her about it, Len who will be the first to find out how the novel ends. But Len won’t fall in love with her, he doesn’t have to, he isn’t that bored, that weird, that pathetic. Why would he sleep with Angela with a whole city of beautiful women to choose from? And Angela doesn’t have to bother making him fall in love with her because she already has a contract.

  Another thing Swenson wants to know is: Why didn’t Len Currie call him? Why has he been cut out of the loop? What conspiracy is at work? He’d been mooning over The Blue Angel, how typically lame and romantic, when the film he should have been watching was All About Eve. Be careful…. That way madness lies. He’ll never publish another book. Angela will take over the world. Well, let her. She can have it.

  “That’s…wonderful, Angela,” says Lauren.

  “Here, here,” Bentham cheers. “Congratulations, Miss Argo! You’ll be sure to let the alumni newsletter know, and of course freshman admissions.”

  How smoothly Angela’s triumphed! Whom will the committee favor? The student with the success story to impress prospective students and alumni donors? Or the used-up, erotically restless, loser professor whose very existence must be hidden from the same applicants and donors?

  “Congratulations,�
� Magda says. The committee echoes: well done, congratulations. This is all working out wonderfully. They’re extracting the thorn from their side—and getting good press for the college.

  Quietly now, soothingly, as if to a baby, Lauren says, “Angela, how has this thing affected you? Have there been lingering effects?”

  “What do you mean?” Angela says.

  “You’ve mentioned sleep disturbances….”

  “Oh, that?” says Angela. “Well, yeah. I mean, I’ve been having these terrible nightmares. Practically every night I dream that I’m looking out my window and I see these white shapes floating across the quad, women in long white dresses with this long flowing hair. As they get close I somehow know they’re Elijah Euston’s dead daughters. And I have this feeling they’ve come for me, and I start to scream and wake up screaming—”

  Welcome to The Twilight Zone. Really, it’s appalling, Angela’s hokey performance on the theme of Euston mythology, its spooky Puritan ghosts. But the committee goes for it. Angela is multitalented. She can act, as well as write. Swenson can’t—he won’t—believe that she was always acting with him. Not about what he meant to her. At least in terms of her work.

  Magda puts on her sweater. Shivers all around. Lauren looks flushed, exalted. This is what she teaches her students, what she believes in her soul: the restless female spirits, floating up through the centuries, wailing.

  “Am I done?” says Angela, the sulky teenager again, asking to be sprung from the hell of the family dinner table.

  “Yes, of course, thank you,” Bentham says.

  Lauren’s not about to let it go so quickly, so unceremoniously. “Angela, let me say again that we know how tough it was for you to come in and say what you did. But if women are ever going to receive an equal education, these problems have to be addressed and dealt with, so that we can protect and empower ourselves.”

  “Sure,” Angela says. “You’re welcome. Whatever.”

  “And congratulations about your book,” says Bentham.

  “Thanks, I guess.” says Angela. “Now I have to finish it.”

  “I’m sure you will,” says Magda, her tone so neutral that only Swenson can hear the icy sarcasm beneath it.

  “Angela,” says Lauren, “are you sure there’s nothing you want to say? This may be your last chance.”

  “Just one other thing,” says Angela. “It really hurt my feelings. I thought Professor Reynaud really liked my book. And then to find out it was because he just wanted to sleep with me—”

  Reynaud. Did the committee hear that? That’s the name of the character in her novel. Now Swenson’s the one with the shivers. Angela called him Reynaud. Have them put that into the record! The girl can’t tell the difference between living breathing humans and the ones she’s invented. It proves she’s a raging psychotic.

  Angela stands up shakily and practically limps to her seat. Her parents hug her and thump her back. After a suitable silence, Bentham turns to Swenson and says, “Ted, I imagine there are some things you might want to say.”

  It’s just like the end of the writing class. The moment when students thank their tormentors and acknowledge their wrongdoing. Thank you for helping me figure out how to improve my story. Thank you for teaching me to sit still and shut up while what I care about most is defiled and mocked.

  It takes Swenson a while to figure out that Bentham is not waiting for an explanation, or an expression of gratitude and self-abasement, but for an apology. This is Swenson’s big chance to make his Dostoyevskian confession of sin, his impassioned, reckless plea for foregiveness and redemption. And in fact, Swenson is sorry. Sorrier than he can ever begin to say. He’s very very sorry that he wrecked his marriage and his career, that he sacrificed his beautiful, beloved wife for some adolescent fantasy of romance. He’s sorry he fell in love with someone he didn’t know, who couldn’t be trusted. He’s sorry that he ignored Magda’s warnings and his own suspicions and doubts. But, as it happens, he is not particularly sorry for having broken the rules of Euston College, which is what he is supposed to say. The committee couldn’t care less about the rest. But he can’t possibly tell them the painful details, nor would they want to hear them. Which brings up something else that he is sorry about. He is extremely sorry for having spent twenty years of his one and only life, twenty years he will never get back, among people he can’t talk to, men and women to whom he can’t even tell the simple truth.

  That is, if he knew what the truth was, or why exactly he did what he did. It’s become progressively more mysterious to him, increasingly harder to fathom, as each new version of Angela has obscured and erased the one he was drawn to in the first place. He can’t imagine how he’d begin to explain. The will to argue leaves him. He doesn’t bother to go the table. He can speak from where he is.

  He says, “I admit my behavior toward Angela was unprofessional. But I don’t agree with the way it’s been presented here today. It was personal. And complicated. It was never a business transaction.”

  Transaction. What kind of word is that? And what does he mean by complicated? He supposes it’s one way of describing how one thing led to another.

  “I guess that’s it” is Swenson’s stirring summation of his rousing self-defense.

  “Thank you, Ted,” says Bentham. “We appreciate your honesty. Your forthrightness. We know this hasn’t been easy for you. It hasn’t been simple for any of us.” The others mumble, in chorus, Thank you thank you thank you.

  “Hey, any time,” says Swenson. He gets up and, turning to leave, casts one last, long, burning, melodramatic look in Angela’s direction. But she won’t return his gaze, not with her parents there. Their eyes seek him and find him, bore into him, shielding their daughter with preemptive strikes: defensive earth-to-air missiles. He climbs a few steps, then ducks and sits, pushed into the nearest seat by the shock of seeing rangy Matt McIlwaine—charged up, pink-cheeked from the cold—bounding straight toward him. Matt’s eyes are bloodshot, puffy. Obviously drugs. Or perhaps he’s just woken up.

  “Am I too late?” he says. “My car broke down.” The lie is so reflexive that no one pays attention. It seems more like a tic than a conscious act. Why would he need his car to get across campus? Doesn’t it bother the committee to depose a witness who’s lying before he even takes the stand? Bentham looks at Lauren. Lauren looks at Magda. Swenson’s the one they should check this with; he knows why Matt might take real pleasure in destroying him. They probably know that already. The committee’s done its homework. They also know enough about Matt to suspect that he could make plenty of trouble if his testimony’s not heard.

  “Better late than never, I suppose,” Francis Bentham says. In for a penny, in for a pound. What’s it to him? It’s nowhere near time for lunch.

  Lauren takes one look at Matt and hands him over to Bentham.

  “Matt,” says Francis, “why don’t you tell the committee what you told me in my office?” So they’re in collusion. Whatever lies Matt’s come here to spread are no surprise to the dean, who’s permitted—advised—him to add his evidence to the rest. Swenson’s trying to remember how the dean responded earlier, when it had seemed that Matt wouldn’t show up for the hearing. Was he disappointed or relieved?

  “I’m not actually a student of Professor Swenson’s,” says Matt. “That would be pretty stupid. Because I’m, like, a friend of his daughter’s—”

  “Ruby?” says Magda, proprietarily. Swenson can hardly stand to hear his daughter’s name spoken aloud in this room, among these people who wish him and Sherrie ill, and who would wish Ruby harm, if they knew her.

  “Ruby,” says Matt. Swenson steels himself for whatever new torture awaits him.

  “And I just thought the committee would want to know that Ruby used to talk about how her dad, like, messed around with her when she was a kid—”

  “Messed around?” asks Bentham.

  “You know,” says Matt. “Sexually.”

  “I see,” says Bentham.<
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  But what does this have to do with this case—with Angela’s complaint? This is a violation of Swenson’s human rights. Besides which, the kid is lying. Anyone can see that! Swenson loves Ruby. He would never hurt her. And he never has.

  But the committee doesn’t understand. Swenson’s all alone here. They all, very suddenly, have a lot of paperwork to do, notes to scribble, papers to check. So perhaps they do know it’s a lie—or, in any case, irrelevant. Then why don’t they say that? Because they have taken off their masks. Jonathan Edwards, Cotton Mather, Torquemado. Swenson’s crime involves sex, so the death penalty can be invoked. No evidence is inadmissible. They’re hauling out the entire arsenal for this mortal combat with the forces of evil and sin.

  Swenson lets himself wonder: Did Ruby tell Matt that? He wants to believe she didn’t. He can only pray that she didn’t.

  “That’s it,” said Matt. “That’s all she wrote.”

  “Thank you,” Bentham says. “And thank you all.” Class dismissed. “Ted, the committee will be letting you know its decision in, shall we say, two weeks?”

  The committee members nod. Two weeks would be grand. As long as it isn’t tomorrow, they’ll agree to anything.

  “Thanks.” Swenson’s on autopilot. He stands and grabs his coat. Then he sees something that stops him. The committee members’ preparation to leave is just background activity, the bustling of extras behind the important scene in which Matt goes over to Angela, who stands on tiptoe and kisses him on the cheek.

  They turn to chat with her parents. Matt’s arm is around her shoulders. Is Matt her boyfriend? Was it Matt who answered her phone? Did they cook all this up between them? Were they pretending to be near-strangers when Swenson met them outside the video store? Maybe they weren’t faking it and hardly knew each other then, and Swenson introduced them, brought the happy couple together. He feels like Herr Professor Rath seeing Lola Lola entwined in the arms of Mazeppa the Strong Man. Angela’s too smart for Matt. She’ll chew him up and spit him out.

  Angela’s parents stand, and Matt places a steadying hand on Angela’s father’s shoulder. What hell they’ve been through together! Angela’s mother gazes at him. How thrilled they are that young Sir Lancelot has rescued their fairy princess from the pervert professor King Arthur. Who wouldn’t want Mazeppa as a family member? Matt would make the ideal son-in-law. He’s rich. He’s going to be richer. Why didn’t Swenson see that? Sorry. His mistake. Perhaps all this was Matt’s revenge. But that seems unlikely. Matt isn’t nearly that competent, nowhere near that together. Angela is. But why would Angela want to destroy him? Her only agenda was to get published.