Affinity

by Affinity- The Friendship Issue (retail) (epub)

  A: A month or so after. Yes. Academic publishing is very slow. I had written it two years earlier.

  Q: Is there a connection between his death and your not publishing again?

  A: Yes. Of course. There is everything outside the text.

  Q: The deaths? And?

  A: Deaths and asymptotes. Chaos theory and lots of fractals. [Pause.]

  Q: I …

  A: The story is banal, I’m afraid. I inherited some money, I didn’t enjoy academia anymore, I had no idea what to write about, I had little interest in sex and none in relationships, and so I came here. [Pause.] How is Max Corliss, by the way? You said he was the one who gave you my address?

  Q: He seems to be well. I think he misses you.

  A: And I him. I should send him a note. He was the least combative Miltonist I’ve ever known. They’re a fighterly lot. Friendly, but fighterly. The nature of the subject, I suppose. What we study shapes us.

  Q: He said you were good friends.

  A: Well, yes, we were. We had sex, did he tell you that? Probably not. He was always so shy. I did something unpardonable, I’m afraid. When I didn’t understand my own feelings well enough, and didn’t understand why I wanted to get away, and mistook my desire for escape as a desire for escape from him—I lied to him. I told him a story. He was always so demure, it was easy to make up a story and make up a self. I wanted to believe I was the kind of person who could enjoy pain, who could find pleasure in inflicting and receiving violence. I told a story about that imagined self, and that story was my escape from him. I’ve always regretted it.

  Q: He doesn’t seem to hold a grudge against you. I think he’d like to know you’re well.

  A: Mr. Dalaria—Ted—let me ask you: why are you doing the work you are doing?

  Q: Interviewing you? Because I found—I find—your work, your writings, fascinating and—

  A: No, no, no. Forget about me. I’m flattered by your attention, certainly, and gratified that some things I wrote long ago have whatever ability to communicate still today, but no, that was not what I meant. What I meant was: why are you doing what you do?

  Q: Getting a PhD?

  A: In literature. Yes.

  Q: It’s work that I’m pretty good at. Work I enjoy. And I honestly don’t really know what else to do. I mean, I’m not the best in my program, by any means, but I’m not bad, and I, well … it’s something to do. I know that sounds pathetic.

  A: No, not pathetic. I don’t think so. My own reasons were similar. And you are not me and the world is different now and in any case numerous people in far more destructive careers have far more pathetic reasons for doing what they do than you have for what you do. But you must know—and yes, I will sound like a meddling scold when I say it—you must know that books and words will not save you, that they are not an escape from whatever you are seeking escape from, but rather an escape into something that … [Pause.]

  Q: Something that …?

  A: [After a pause.] Hamlet: “Words, words, words.”

  He picked up my glass and carried it to the kitchen. “More lemonade?” he asked. I said no, I was fine. He asked me to wait a moment, then went to another part of the house. I heard some drawers open, some items shift around. I stopped recording. Then he came back and handed me a small envelope. “This is the note that Randall sent me before he died. I never showed it to the FBI. Doing so would feel like a violation. And there’s nothing they could have used in it. But you should read it.”

  I didn’t want to read it. Just holding it in my hands felt like a violation, like touching fire. Wendell did not move and would not look away. I opened the envelope.

  “Dear Wendell,” the letter began—handwritten in blue ballpoint pen, almost scrawled—“You will be very angry with me, and I understand that. I’m going to go do something I’ve wanted to do for a while now. We’ve become very different. I wanted you to understand me, and I couldn’t figure out a way to make you understand. What I am going to do will not make you understand me. But it will do something. Action, not ideas. Reality, not fantasy. No stories, just lives. And deaths. All there ever is. Goodbye, my friend.” He wrote his name like an official signature at the bottom of the page. Beneath the signature, with a red pen, he wrote: “Soldier, you are content with what you are. Then that you shall remain until we meet again.”

  Wendell gave me permission to copy the letter into my notes.

  “If you want the answer to me, to my life, it is there,” he said. “There is no explanation other than those words. There is no interpretation, no story. I made a life, and then I made what I hope will prove to have been a different life for myself than the life I led before.”

  “Have you,” I asked after I finished copying the letter, “written anything recently?”

  He sighed. He started to speak, stopped. Then: “You haven’t understood a word I’ve said.” He spoke quietly, without anger, without even disappointment. But his words were a wall suddenly between us. I had confirmed his doubts.

  I tried to protest, tried to speak, to put words to it all. I don’t remember what I said.

  “Goodbye, Mr. Dalaria. It was nice to meet you. I wish you the best with your studies.”

  And so I left.

  The sky had become gray, rain was moving in, and darkness shimmered through the hovering trees. I listened to the water in the brook below the house. I listened to birds, though I know nothing about birds and could not identify their calls. I stood in the driveway, fearing to leave. Mosquitoes found me, bit me. Misty dashes of rain touched my hands and nose. I got into my car. Soon, the rain poured down hard, torrential, pelting the metal of the car like pebbles on a steel drum, splashing—smashing—against the windshield in obscuring bursts so that I could barely see even a few feet ahead. The world was dark and the headlights could not penetrate the darkness. Now and then, the lights’ glare flashed in the water on the windshield and the rain became a firefly, alive for a moment only. I kept moving forward, as slowly as the car would go, inches at a time, because the bare animal part of me insisted that if I stopped I would die, the car would wash away in a flood, and the flood was here and only here, and if I could get away from here then I could find some dry land, some place to stop and rest without fear. I imagined that the rain was not rain but mosquitoes and flies and june bugs, insect life lured to my headlights and splattered together into a mass and wiped away. I started laughing, nervously, then ghoulishly, and soon in my mind the water on the windshield was no longer bugs but birds and bats and then severed bits of bodies and then eyeballs and then, as somehow the night grew even darker, sprays of maybe ink or maybe blood, I didn’t know, but surely not water, because how could mere water so menace me? I exhausted what laughter I had left. The night remained dark. The rain continued to fall. All I could do to stay alive was try to keep moving forward no matter how little, no matter how deafeningly the torrent attacked the car, no matter the floods beneath the wheels, and to hope that somewhere the rain would stop, day would erase the night, the quiet would return, and I could step outside.

  Friend of My Heart

  Joyce Carol Oates

  And now, after thirty-two years, seven months, three weeks, and a scattering of days we will meet again.

  At least, you will have been met by me.

  Not sure if I should announce myself too explicitly. If you recognize me, and remember what happened between us, you might call for help, or manage to flee, before I can act appropriately, as I have (meticulously) planned; but if I don’t identify myself, so that you comprehend clearly the reason for my actions, there is hardly any point in my acting at all.

  For what is revenge if it is not registered in the brain of the Other?

  Like the proverbial tree that falls in the forest with no creature to hear it, revenge that is not made unambiguously clear to the subject is hardly revenge but mere catastrophe, which might happen to anyone, innocently/accidentally to no purpose.

  For weeks I have rehearsed my
greeting. For weeks, what I must summon my courage to do publicly, to you.

  Hel-lo! Do you remember me?

  Or perhaps—Hello Professor K_______. Do I look familiar to you?

  Or maybe I will say, simply—Hello, Erica. Are you surprised that I’m still alive?

  “Excuse me. These seats are reserved for faculty.”

  “Excuse me. I am faculty.”

  A dramatic moment. I had not intended to call attention to myself at your lecture but somehow this has happened, and I cannot respond otherwise to such an insult.

  The usher stares at me, in my soiled khakis, suede jacket worn at the elbows, baseball cap pulled low over my forehead, hiking boots. She must be mistaking me for a noncollege person, perhaps even a homeless person, with my grimy backpack, stringy hair, and truculent manner; she is uncertain how to react—whether to back off or to call for reinforcements to prevent me sitting in a so-called “reserved” seat at the front of the five hundred–seat auditorium.

  Not one of my students—ever. If she’d been, the little bitch would be respectful to Ms. Leeuwen.

  For your much-ballyhooed “Gender/Language/Sexuality” lecture in Hill Auditorium all ushers appear to be undergraduate volunteers, and all appear to be female. Though our college has been coed since 1997 its (revered, inflated) history is that of a women’s college (founded in 1883) and the great majority of our student body remains female; the abysmal quality of our male students is something of a joke but our administrators are desperate for undergraduates, any sex/gender/IQ will do. It would be hypocritical of me to criticize them since I am a longtime member of the faculty, as I am trying to explain to this dolt of a girl-usher.

  How angry I am, at being treated so disrespectfully! My heart beats fast and hard and a taste of toad venom comes into my mouth.

  You would be amused, I suppose. You, who have become an academic celebrity, a shameless plagiarist/charlatan, concocting a career out of the labor of others whom you’ve used, wrung dry, and discarded. The insults hurled at me in the ordinary course of my life would be a joke to you—the illustrious E_____ K_______.

  Another girl-usher comes tripping down the aisle to assist the first. Sheaths of fair, straight, identical-blonde hair falling about their blank-idiot faces. It’s touching, I suppose—each girl-usher is wearing a fresh-ironed white shirt, hunter-green school tie, black trousers. Not the usual ridiculous pre-torn jeans and T-shirts or cutoffs showing their flawless skinny legs.

  “It’s undemocratic and elitist to reserve so many seats. Not all these ‘VIPS’ will show up for this meretricious lecture, I guarantee.”

  My voice is icy, calm. If the silly girl-ushers had any doubt that I am a faculty member they should be convinced now.

  By this time I am sitting in defiance of the ushers, backpack on my knees. And I am not going to budge. In the very center of the first row in the choicest seat in Hill Auditorium directly below the podium and approximately twelve feet from the stage where you will be giving your lavishly “endowed” lecture within the hour.

  Would you be apprehensive if you knew? In fear of—something happening to you in this public place?

  The girl-ushers flutter nearby, uncertain what to do until one of the faculty arrives to whisper to them that, yes, the person whom they are regarding with such suspicion is indeed a faculty member.

  It is a pleasure to see the girl-ushers’ faces clot with chagrin! Not that they will apologize to me, of course.

  And not that this person, one of the English faculty, that’s to say the permanent faculty, knows my name. Though I have been an adjunct instructor in English and Communication Arts here for eleven years.

  Strange, no one seems to know my name. Or will acknowledge my name. That is the pretense.

  Should I be insulted, I will not be insulted. Not by pygmies.

  Should I be wounded, I will not be wounded. I will not be disrespected.

  There is nothing shameful in being an adjunct instructor. There is nothing shameful in having no car, in being obliged to bicycle to campus from (rented) quarters three miles away, even in rainy or snowy weather. There is shame only in the elitists who have denied me a permanent position at the college even as they have given themselves such positions, with tenure, and raises, and every kind of benefit—medical, insurance—denied to adjuncts; even as they are well aware of my superiority over them, as a scholar, and as a writer, and as a teacher.

  Elitists who misuse their power to offer exorbitant lecture fees to individuals like you.

  (Yes, the rumor is that E_____ K_______ is receiving, for a presentation of no more than fifty minutes at our college, as much as an adjunct instructor is likely to receive for an entire course in a twelve-week semester—outrageous!)

  The auditorium is filling. Buzzing and murmuring like a hive. The largest crowd I’ve seen in years, since Oliver Sacks. Undergraduates clutching copies of The Masks of Gender: Language, Sexual Deceit, and Subterfuge they will ask you to sign, breathless and eager—Oh please will you—? Professor K_______? And may I take a picture of myself with you? Gosh!

  Gradually the reserved seating is filling also. Colleagues of mine—to whom I am invisible, nameless. At first they avoid me, pointedly; for the tenured faculty avoids the untenured, if it is humanly possible, without being overtly rude or vicious. (They need us, after all. Or rather, the college needs us, to work for a fraction of the salary at which the permanent faculty works.) No one sits beside me until those seats are the only remaining, and two late arrivals have no choice but to take these.

  It is amusing really. It is laughable. How stiffly aware of me these “colleagues” are. Though not knowing my name, knowing that I am not one of them. A plebeian, a prole, in their midst. A leper. Yet a worker-leper. Daring to sit amid the reserved for the fancy endowed lecture as if we are all equals.

  But no need to worry. I am very well-behaved. When I wish to be. As you noted, thirty-two years ago. Still waters run very deep. Still waters mined with explosives, deeper still. (How shrewdly you knew my soul, dear Erica, though we were not yet twenty years old!)

  Just sitting here innocently, backpack on my knees. No need for anyone to make awkward small talk with me.

  Of course, no one else in the two front rows of the auditorium is an adjunct instructor. No one else would act so boldly—so brashly—as I have done. Indeed it’s doubtful that any other adjuncts have come for your lecture—the majority of us are too exhausted from overwork. Rare for us to indulge in the luxury of a “cultural occasion,” however bogus, as in your case.

  When I’d first learned last spring that you, of all people, had been invited to give an endowed lecture here at our college, immediately I protested; it is my habit to protest against misuses of college funds, especially outlandish fees paid to ill-qualified academics. Then, when I was assured that the invitation had been accepted, and could not be rescinded, I volunteered to introduce you, on the grounds that I am prominent in your field, and I know your work thoroughly—of course. Though I did not emphasize this, for I am not a name-dropper, I explained that you and I had been undergraduate friends, for a (brief) time while near roommates, at Champlain College.

  I was unsurprised when my request was denied. Yet somewhat surprised that the request was denied so rudely, in a terse e-mail from the dean.

  Yet it is my prerogative to sit here, in the reserved seats. Of all the faculty, it is I who most deserves to be here for it is I who knows you most thoroughly—I alone who knows your plagiarist’s sham heart.

  (In a lurid suspense film, the camera would linger on my unwieldy backpack. On my arms crossed over it to secure it in place and on my fingers clasped tightly together. The viewer would be provoked to think—What does she have in the backpack? A weapon?)

  (If so, it would be the kind of low-tech weapon that must be used at close quarters. Not a weapon to be operated at a distance. For intimacy is the point of the assault. Aristotle’s anagnorisis—recognition!)

  At last!
You have appeared—yet, it is not you.

  Walking with a cane? Your head shaved? In a bright, showy, kimono-like costume? You?

  Twelve minutes after the hour, escorted onto the stage by an apparatchik from Gender Studies, a former PhD student of yours from Stanford, who will introduce you—you have entered the bright, blinding lights of acclaim from which there can be no retreat.

  It is shocking to me—how you have changed. Older—other.

  Seated on the stage smiling like a fat old eunuch Buddha with a bald-shaved head. A greedy look on your face as you listen to the fatuous introducer praise you with every sort of cliché, absurd unwarranted hype, lists of books, awards, and honors, visiting professorships, MacArthur “Genius” Award—Bold, original, outspoken, defiant. Bringing women’s rights issues to a totally new plateau. Feminism as confrontational theater. Gender as deconstruction. Female speech/guerrilla speech. Politics of a New Radicalism. Courageous, pioneering …

  Shrewdly you are wearing oversized dark-tinted glasses so the audience can’t see the crepey skin beneath your eyes—can’t see your shiny little pig eyes darting about in glee at such comically inflated praise.

  Must be pancake makeup slathered on your face—not that makeup can disguise the jowly sag, the creases, aptly named crow’s-feet at the edges of your eyes. Eyebrows penciled in dark and given a curious antic “arch”—ridiculous. Square-jutting jaw like Gertrude Stein, and with the heft of Stein’s (sexless) body, in the famous Picasso portrait. How different from the beautiful girl you’d been!

  Then, you’d have shuddered at the sight you are now. You, who were so intolerant of fat.

  Not that you are fat—exactly. Overweight by thirty pounds, perhaps thirty-five pounds, but you are a tall woman, large boned, and you carry yourself like an Amazon warrior, still. Though both your face and body exude soft-middle-age flaccidity you are not unattractive; in fact (one might say), you are exotic looking, weirdly seductive, for that has been a paradoxical cornerstone of your “perverse” feminism—the sexual body, the pansexual body, is not neglected or repudiated but rather celebrated. Even pornography in which women are objectified is celebrated!—by a devious logic anathema to an earlier generation of feminists. Shrewdly you’d calculated that you could hardly build a career by agreeing with the older, liberal-minded pioneer feminists who’d preceded you, who’d been your mentors when you were a graduate student; you could not build a career of any substance by acquiescence or compromise—certainly not common sense. And so E_____ K_______ has made a career out of the inflammatory and provocative. Sex is not political. Desire is not containable. What is is not what should be.