You were bored with me, and told me that you wanted to be alone for a while. It was an era before cell phones so I did not think that you would make contact with another person whose company you preferred, to laugh at me behind my back. I did not think this. You said for me to sit, and think my “deep boring thoughts,” and you would return in a while; but you did not return, and I knew that you would not though I waited anxiously.
At the edge of a steep ravine I was sitting. By the ravaged anthill, about which hundreds of ants now scurried in a single, collective paroxysm of panic. I was afraid to stand, for my legs would tremble if I did. All that day, on the hiking trail, I had been feeling lightheaded, uneasy. I was wanting to cry, and clutch at your hand. Hoping that you would ask me to room with you next year—our senior year.
In my backpack I always carried supplies—water in a plastic container, plenty of tissues (for my eyes and nose watered badly in the cold air), a Swiss army knife.
Not for a long time had I hiked such a distance that these supplies were needed. Yet, I never went out without them. The Swiss army knife seemed particularly crucial should I want to slash my wrists or, better yet, slash another’s throat on a remote trail.
In fact, I’d never taken the knife out of the backpack. Not once.
At last, I managed to stand, shakily. I could not see—my eyes flooded with tears. I was groping for the log, and sat down again, clumsily, weakly. I had not cried in such a way since childhood. And my vain, frayed life seemed to pass before me like a poorly executed film of jerky images. You are not even brave enough to die here. She wants you to die, so she can be rid of you. But you are a coward. You will let her down. And she knew that too. You can only return to what you are, and what you will be.
But I did not return to what I’d been. Soon after, I departed from Champlain College.
Nor did you return that day to find me where I was sitting weak legged, dazed by the edge of the ravine. Instead you would claim to have believed—to my very face!—that I’d taken another trail back down the mountain, and that we’d agreed to “each go our separate ways”—for this was something we’d done “many times before.”
Your lies are melodic in sound. Each syllable a joy (to the ignorant ear) to hear.
My words are truths, harshly uttered. No one wants to hear such ugly words barbed with little hooks like the penises of cats.
In your mouth, honey. In my mouth, toad venom.
“And now, in conclusion …”
For the past fifty minutes I have been staring at you. We have all been staring at you. Stunned by the horror of you.
Few know, as I know, how you’d once looked. How vile you are now that your (ugly) soul has emerged. Your coarse, showy blonde beauty has faded as if it had never been and now you are revealed as a middle-aged woman who has let her body go and has become sexless, graceless. Over the years I’d observed your official photographs change with glacial slowness (for a feminist, you were certainly loath to acknowledge your aging); yet now, exposed on the bright-lit stage in your ridiculous tent-kimono, head hairless as soapstone and face sagging, you appear much older than your calendar age so that I am thinking—gloating?—that you must have a medical condition, or you’d had one; cancer, probably. (I wonder: do you still smoke? Do Tareytons still exist?) Chemotherapy has ravaged you, face, throat, body, and scalp. Perhaps you’d lost weight and have more recently packed on weight as a warrior might pack on armor for self-protection. Oh—it is upsetting to me, to see the change in you, who’d once been so—seductive …
Especially I do not want to imagine what your ruin of a body looks like, hidden inside those silly clothes.
Friend of my heart—it is what you deserve.
“… thanking you all for your kindness, and hospitality, and your warmth on this beautiful campus …”
Each of your words, uttered with breathy insincerity, is a banality, a cliché. Yet, strung together, like cheap pearls on a cheap string, they bring to mind a memory of beauty. I shut my eyes so that I see only narrowly through my eyelashes, which shimmer with tears, and I scarcely see you—fat old woman with a Buddha face.
Instead I see that other. The girl you’d been.
When greed and ambition had not (yet) shone in your face.
Boring. You are boring. Go away.
Abruptly I’d withdrawn from college in March of our senior year. Returned home, so weak that I could not get out of bed some days but lay in a half sleep of fever and dread. Eventually it was diagnosed that I had infectious mononucleosis, which I’d thought was a mythical illness but turned out to be real. The transcript of my grades came to the house, a column of I’s—Incompletes.
These would change automatically to F’s if I did not return to complete the courses within a semester. But I did/could not return.
In this initial skirmish, you won. In subsequent skirmishes in the long battle, you have won. But your victories have been predicated on victims not fighting back.
Giving up. But I did not give up.
After I left Champlain College broken and ashamed we lost contact. I did not write to you, and out of shame and guilt you would not have written to me. Perhaps you forgot me! For I was but one of those whom you’d exploited, whom you might forget as one of those carnivorous insects that sucks frogs dry and leaves behind the frog husk would forget its succession of victims.
For several years I would live at home as one might live underground. For a while I stopped reading entirely—the “life of the mind” had nearly destroyed me. I would work at low-paying jobs including public-school substitute teaching. In my midtwenties I dared to return to college. This was not Champlain College where my tuition had been paid for me but one of the State University of New York branches, functional and charmless as an automat. Working days, attending classes at night, I eked out a beggarly master’s degree in English and communication arts; eventually my PhD was earned with labor like the labor of one breaking rocks with a sledgehammer. But it was too late, I’d missed my time. Older than others on the job market by five, six years and soon then condemned to a lifetime of adjunct teaching—for which I learned to be grateful if at the same time spiteful. Yet I did not ever give up my intellectual aspirations—I will never give up …
All the while I was keenly aware of you—who’d gone to Duke on a fellowship, then a first-rate department of stellar feminist scholars and critics. You were never a scholar, you hadn’t the patience. You were never a true critic, you hadn’t the taste. You were no kind of intellectual, for you hadn’t the intelligence. But you had the seductive manner that, in academic circles, is a most effective substitute. Soon, you became the protégée of a famous feminist, coeditor of a massively successful anthology of women’s literature from Sappho to the present time. You’d assisted in this project, one of the great curatorial projects in American feminist literary history—you!
From there, so launched, you were hired at Brown, and then hired away to Columbia; then, in a dizzying coup, you were summoned to Stanford, where you received a half-time appointment in gender studies and a half-time appointment at the Stanford Institute of Research. There, you cobbled together—you did not write: you are too wonderful for mere writing—the fandango of purloined material that would become The Masks of Gender. Your star ascended, brightly glaring with sparks, while mine smoldered, and nearly went out. (Indeed my star was hardly a star, rather an ember.)
Many times, pride swallowed like phlegm, I wrote to you—in appeal, in accusation, bemused, furious, matter-of-fact, and “nostalgic.” Of course you did not answer—why would you answer? These were the days of (typed or handwritten) letters in envelopes, sealed and stamped, which shifted by degrees to e-mail, so fluid, so seemingly (though not actually) bodiless, anonymous. I would write e-mails to the editors of journals in which your work appeared, and to your publishers; I would write to the dean of the faculty at Stanford, and to your departmental chairs; I would write to feminist colleagues enclosing photocopied mater
ial that condemned you, often with zestful wit. Some of these colleagues were kind enough to respond to my appeals, but most were not. And those who were initially kind soon ceased communicating with me when I sent them more material, heavy packets of photocopied material, and demanded that they join with me in a “class-action suit” against you.
Every friend, I have come to see, is a fair-weather friend.
For years, as possibly you know, I have been publishing reviews of your work in quasi-academic journals, the most public being The Women’s Review of Books; it has been my solemn task to eviscerate your (insipid, bestselling) books, your shoddy scholarship and questionable theories. Boldly I have dared to attack you as a plagiarist and thief—a betrayer of the heart. A faux feminist who sells out women.
You have won many awards, however undeserving. That is a matter of (shameful) historic fact. I have won no awards—I am not ashamed but, in a way, proud. For I do not conform to the expectations of others. My threadbare life does not make a striking résumé for a book jacket—I have yet to publish my first book—yet I am stubborn in resilience, I believe in myself—one day, my contribution to cultural studies will be appreciated.
Each semester it seems that I open my veins, and bleed. And I bleed, and I bleed. I teach the great texts—the pretexts of our debased era: Freud, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Sartre, Camus. And one or two students, perhaps, will appreciate me—in their student evaluations they will write, Ms. Leeuwen is an excellent teacher, I think. She is very well knowledgeable and her tests are hard but not unfair. When I did not do like I thought I should, I went to talk to her and she went over my paper with me, and took time. She is not like some teachers, who are resentful of you when you come to their offices and the first minute you are there, they are waiting for you to leave.
I feel sorry for Ms. Leeuwen, there is something sad about her. But she is excellent reading to us passages from Jean-Paul Sartre on disgust.
My friend said, Jesus I would slash my wrists if I turned out like her. But I do not feel this way. I think that my thinking has been sharpened by Ms. Leeuwen and I would take more courses from her if these existed.
Other evaluations, cruder, frankly stupid, scribbled by persons to whom I gave grades lower than A, I do not dignify by reading. Quickly shoving the forms into the unwieldy envelopes, and “filing” them in the trash.
At the start of my career at this college I was admired by many in the tenured ranks. Many times I was complimented on something I had written, published in an obscure journal, or online; not all of these compliments were insincere or hypocritical, though, this being academia, one should not be naive. But at departmental meetings, which I took care not to miss, though I was but an adjunct, I could not resist raising my hand to comment, to question, to object, and occasionally to ridicule; in this way, though many continued to admire me, and admire me still, after eleven intrepid years, the majority soon came to dislike me as one of those whom literary tradition has called the plain dealer—the individual who speaks her mind, all too bluntly.
Shamefully, though I am the most experienced, the most published, and the most intelligent of the small army of adjuncts who help keep the college afloat, like galley slaves hidden from the upper deck, there was a small cadre of colleagues who tried to terminate my contract just last year. Only my reasoned appeal, and my threat of bringing a lawsuit against the college, with a likelihood of sensational repercussions in local media, as in The Chronicle of Higher Education, thwarted this attempt to destroy me; but I do not trust anyone here now.
At last you have finished your “lecture.” You are peering coquettishly over the rims of your dark-tinted glasses at the audience exploding in applause.
It is deafening—such applause!
And now—a standing ovation.
Stubbornly, I remain sitting. I am sure that some of my tenured colleagues will remain seated as well, for not all of them can have been persuaded by you, yet, by quick degrees, as if shamed by the younger persons behind them, my hypocrite colleagues rise to their feet, smiling and abashed like Chinese elders routed by the cudgels of the Red Guard.
At the podium you have the grace to remain standing, somewhat surprised looking, or so it seems, at the waves of warm applause washing over you; now, you are leaning your bulky body pointedly on your cane, and a look of fatigue has come into your face. Quickly the Gender Studies apparatchik comes to your side, to escort you from the stage.
Another time, your gaze drifts onto me—I think. As I sit here in the choicest seat in Hill Auditorium, stubbornly refusing to stand, arms crossed over my backpack as if to secure it.
And then, the unexpected occurs.
Though I have prepared, assiduously, for the next stage of my confrontation with E_____ K_______, steeling myself for the most demanding performance of my life, all is—suddenly, capriciously—changed; and what was to be, by my vow, is not to be after all.
At the conclusion of the program, there is to be a book signing. Many, many persons have lined up in the foyer, awaiting your arrival there, but I do not intend to be one of them.
Instead, boldly I leave my seat, and make my way up onto the stage. No one takes notice of me—the performance is over, people are milling about in the aisles, making their way to the exits. In my most pleasant voice I call your name—“Erica! Hello”—as I follow you and my colleague from Gender Studies, who is escorting you off stage; you turn to me, puzzled, with a half smile, and adrenaline rushes to my heart so powerfully that I nearly faint.
First glance, you’d think that I might be a graduate student—straggly hair, cap pulled low over my forehead, bulky backpack I am struggling to unzip, out of which I will probably (you assume!) tug a dog-eared copy of Masks of Gender to ask you to sign; your escort will frown in annoyance, but you, in your mode of noblesse oblige, will say, Why of course! How shall I inscribe it?
Second glance, you will see that I am not so young. Probably not a graduate student, and probably not a (full-time) faculty member.
Third glance, if there is time for a third glance, you will see that I am middle-aged, as you are; with a face less obviously ravaged and a body still lean, if perhaps too thin, and my skin papery pale, no longer the resilient skin of youth.
“Is it—Adrienne? Is it you?”
I almost can’t see—you are so dazzling in the gold-glittering kimono.
And you are staring at me. An expression in your face of wariness, warmth—surprise …
“Adrienne? It’s you?”
On your cane you hobble toward me. This is so unexpected, I am unable at first to respond.
Your lips are parted, glistening. Your eyes inside the dark-tinted lenses are indeed pouched with tiredness, yet alert, fixed upon my face.
“Not ‘Adrienne’—not exactly.”
“You were my student at—Columbia?”
I don’t correct you. At this moment my name seems laughably insignificant—Adrienne, Adra. How could it matter?
The shock is, you have recognized me. You have identified me—friend.
With seductive boldness you dare to take my hands, which are cold, and warm them between your palms, which feel almost hot, moistly hot, and comforting.
What a long time it has been!—through a buzzing in my ears I hear your throaty voice and the laughter in your voice. Friend. Here is a friend.
It is astonishing to me; you seem delighted to see me. Unless it is just a performance for several of my colleagues who have hurried to surround you—but I don’t think so, I believe it is genuine; you are not pretending now that the lecture is over and the audience has departed. As you would to an old friend whom you had not seen in years, you complain of your “wreck of a knee” and the “mostly futile” surgery you’d had to correct it. Boastfully you say you’d decided just to “flaunt” your “ugly baldy head”—why not?
“So—you are teaching here, Adrienne? That’s wonderful news. You’re coming to dinner with us, I assume …”
G
lances among my colleagues. Eyes avoiding my eyes.
“I—I don’t think that I’ve been invited …”
“Of course you are invited! I insist.”
You turn to the others, with an imperial look. Still you are grasping my hands, so strangely. Is it possible—I will think this much later, sleepless that night and in the throes of an enormous, burgeoning love like a great snake that has forced itself down my throat—that you do, in fact, recognize me?—Adra Leeuwen?
But no, this is not so clear. While recognizing me, my face, this look of yearning in my eyes, you have conflated me with another yearning girl, enough like me to be a substitute for me; but this does not invalidate the warmth with which you address me.
You seem shorter than I recall. There is sadness in that. Yet you are far heavier, and are leaning on me; I think it is a tremor I feel in your hands, and I wonder if you are overexcited as well as fatigued and unwell. The kimono is a brave, silly choice; the black slacks are more practical, hiding fat, quivery legs. You are making a fuss over me as—what is this?—lights flash, for a girl photographer from the student newspaper is taking pictures, and a professional photographer from the college development office.
Flashing lights! I am too confused to smile—overwhelmed—for it occurs to me that no one has taken my photograph in a very long time.
My colleagues are virtually tugging at you. Come with us!
Time for you, distinguished guest lecturer, to sign books. But there is a dinner to follow, at a local restaurant, and with dogged persistence, that steeliness that underlies your gregarious social manner, you say again to your hosts that you assume I’ve been invited; my face burns with a hurtful sort of pleasure. It is up to me to say, Oh no, I’m very tired, I wasn’t intending to come to dinner—but thank you so much; yet, as my colleagues stare at me, embarrassed, glowering, I do not stammer these words; I will not stammer these words.
“Adrienne? You’re coming, yes?”
“Yes …”
“I’ll see you at dinner then. Save me a seat!”
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