The Horned Man

by James Lasdun

  I want to do something splendid. Something heroic or wonderful, that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead.

  I think I shall write books.

  Louisa May Alcott

  The ceiling was made of perforated white drop-tiles, and was stained yellow from a leak in one corner. The light came from three plastic-paneled fluorescent strips.

  Completing my examination of the room without any great sense of satisfied curiosity, I found myself thinking of Barbara Hellermann. I pictured her coming in here, hanging up her beret and her dry cleaning, glancing cheerfully at her cards, her uplifting quotation, taking her five-to-seven-cup Hot Pot from its box to brew coffee in for her class, setting out the pottery mugs … The sense of a sweet-natured, diligent soul came into me. I imagined her as an elderly lady, and hoped that her death had been peaceful.

  CHAPTER 2

  Later that week I attended a meeting of the Sexual Harassment Committee. It was unusual for someone as new to the job as I was to serve on this committee, but I had sat on the Disciplinary Committee at a previous job in Louisiana, and it was thought that my experience there might be useful here, so that when a seat had fallen vacant at the beginning of this semester, I had been invited to take it.

  I had hesitated before accepting. I had had a taste of the hostility one is liable to receive in return for doing this kind of work. In Louisiana, at a clambake on college grounds, a senior professor had overheard a sophomore warning some freshmen about the chiggers – insects that burrow under your skin; a local hazard. Without stopping to think, the professor had blurted out a foolish witticism: ‘We’re not allowed to call them chiggers any more,’ he had said, guffawing, ‘we have to call them chegroes.’

  It hadn’t taken the students long to find their way past the smirk of glib humor in this, to the leer of racism lurking beneath it, and before the party was over they had lodged a protest with the student council. The matter was brought before the Disciplinary Committee, and we agreed unanimously that the joke was a speech-act showing an implicit contempt for the sensitivities of minority students. The professor was asked to make a written apology, but instead of doing so he had resigned – a gesture that aroused a storm of publicity in the local press. For several weeks the members of the Disciplinary Committee, myself included, had been pilloried as fanatics of the new religion of Political Correctness. Given the low level of reporting in these newspapers, not to mention the extreme reactionary position they took on all social issues, this wasn’t as painful as it might sound – there was even a certain sense of martyred righteousness to be had from it – but I hadn’t much enjoyed the experience, and the thought of exposing myself to a possible repetition of it up here at Arthur Clay College, didn’t greatly appeal.

  What decided me in the end was the sense that as a teacher of Gender Studies, instructing my students in the science of unscrambling the genetic code of prejudice, false objectivity and pernicious sexual stereotyping that forms the building blocks of so many of our cultural monuments, I had an ethical obligation to follow through on my intellectual principles into the realm of real human relations, where these hidden codes wrought their true, devastating effects – or at any rate not to refuse to do so when asked. Either I believed that what I did for a living had a basis in life itself, or else I was wasting my time.

  I knew, of course, that the proceedings of these committees had by now become a stock-in-trade object of satire in popular plays and novels, but once I had made up my mind to serve, I found that I cared only as much about this as I had about the Louisiana newspapers: not enough to baulk at doing what I considered my duty. It was a matter, finally, of standing up and being counted.

  Sexual Harassment Awareness Week was in two months’ time, and the first part of our meeting was taken up with our two student representatives outlining proposals for Take Back the Night events, Date Rape seminars, a Speech Code conference, and so on.

  After we had voted to support and finance these proposals, the students left us and we proceeded to discuss what our chair, Roger Freeman, described as a ‘delicate matter.’ This turned out to concern a young lecturer who was said to be engaging in sexual relations with several of his students. As yet there had been no formal complaints, but the rumors in circulation suggested it was only a matter of time.

  The lecturer, a fellow Englishman named Bruno Jackson, was aware of the rules governing this sort of conduct. He and I had both attended the Sexual Harassment seminar, obligatory for all new faculty, at the beginning of the year. There, we were addressed by Elaine Jordan, the school attorney (and a member of this committee), on the need for constant vigilance and self-scrutiny. She advised us to keep our office doors wide open during one-on-one meetings with students of either sex. She urged us to look around our desks for objects of an inadvertently suggestive nature that might offend or upset a sensitive student. As an example, she gave the case of a visiting Australian Adjunct who had written the word ‘Ramses’, the name of a condom brand, on the chalkboard behind him. Two or three of his students had been made uncomfortable by this, imagining it to be some kind of Australian method of importuning. When the man was brought before the Sexual Harassment Committee, he expressed astonishment, claiming the word referred to a Turkish cigarette of the same name, which a friend had asked him to buy in New York, and that he had chalked it up to remind himself. To the extent that he wasn’t officially reprimanded, he had been given the benefit of the doubt, but his contract had not been renewed. ‘And be advised,’ Elaine had continued, ‘these things stay in your record. Permanently.’

  She had then gone on to warn us about the dangers of introducing the subject of sex into classroom discussions. ‘Obviously you can’t always avoid it, but be sensitive. Some students find it embarrassing, especially when they think a faculty member’s harping on the subject unnecessarily. We get a lot of complaints about teachers who are always looking for the sexual symbolism of a poem or story –’

  It was here that Bruno Jackson had interrupted her. I had already noticed him reacting with ill-concealed amazement and sarcastic disbelief to much of what Elaine had been telling us, as though it was the first time he had encountered anything like this, which was unlikely, given the peripatetic job history he and I shared. I myself had heard numerous versions since coming to the States from England seven years ago, and was no more surprised by it than I would have been, say, by a flight attendant demonstrating safety procedures before take-off.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ he’d said in a voice brimming with aggressive irony, ‘are you saying I have to put a lid on discussion of sexual imagery in the books I teach?’

  Elaine looked at him, startled. She saw herself as our ally – a purveyor of information necessary to our survival – and it clearly upset her to be spoken to as an oppressor.

  ‘No, that isn’t what I’m saying –’ Her eyes darted anxiously about the room in search of support. ‘I’m just saying you have to be sensitive.’

  I nodded vigorously, and one or two other people followed suit.

  ‘The kids don’t like being made to feel uncomfortable,’ Elaine continued. ‘They’re very young, remember. Not even in their twenties, some of them –’

  ‘I see,’ Bruno had said. ‘So for instance, I’m teaching Jane Austen this week. Mansfield Park. There’s this one scene where a girl loses something down the back of a sofa. She pushes her hand down the cracks between the cushions and starts feeling around for it. It’s all very heightened, and as far as I’m concerned it’s a thinly veiled image of female masturbation. Are you saying I should just gloss over that?’

  Elaine, who had recovered her composure now, gave him a level stare. ‘All I’m trying to do’, she said, ‘is I’m trying to alert you to the possible consequences of certain acts. I’m not here to tell you how to teach your classes. That’s a judgment call only you can make.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a veto on masturbation in Jane Austen then,’ Bruno had said with a smirk. He’d looked around th
e room, as though expecting complicit smiles. I avoided his eye, and as far as I could tell, not one of us, male or female, had given him the slightest hint of encouragement.

  After the meeting I had gone up to compliment Elaine on her handling of the situation. She thanked me profusely. We talked for a while – about what, I forget, though I do remember thinking that she was a more vulnerable and emotional person than her somewhat bland exterior had suggested.

  Looking back at Bruno’s behavior, I see that it wouldn’t have been difficult to predict the trouble that was now looming over him.

  Roger Freeman, our chair, was a small, dapper man of about fifty, with sparkling blue eyes and a thick mane of white hair. He had a dry, fluent way of talking, as though his words had formed themselves long before he actually spoke them, and he was merely reporting his side of a conversation that had already taken place.

  ‘Here’s what I think we need to do,’ he began. ‘Number one, we need to talk informally to this young man, give him a chance to explain what’s going on here. Number two …’

  It was my job, as the newest member of the committee, to keep the minutes at these meetings. I was an assiduous clerk, and in my efforts to write down everything that was said, I often didn’t take any of it in until after the meeting was over. I didn’t, for instance, register the name ‘Trumilcik’ – a name that was to become increasingly important to me over the next weeks – until later, when I was checking the legibility of my minutes prior to giving them to the department secretary to type out.

  What we need to avoid at all costs, I saw that Roger had said, is letting things get to the point where we find ourselves with another Trumilcik on our hands.

  ‘Who’s Trumilcik?’ I asked Marsha, the department secretary.

  ‘Bogomil Trumilcik? Oh God! What do you want to know about him for?’

  I smiled. ‘You’ll see when you read this.’ I handed her the minutes.

  Marsha was a large woman with a resonant voice.

  ‘He was a visiting professor. Some kind of poet or novelist from Romania or Bulgaria or one of those places. He was an awful man. I mean just awful!’

  ‘What did he do?’ This was Amber, looking up from her desk at the side of the room. Remembering my near-blush of the other day, I refrained from looking at her. But I was strongly conscious of her presence – her sleepy eyes, her short reddish-orange hair dividing in soft feathery wisps down the fluted back of her neck, her skin freckled and unnaturally pale, almost silvery. Acknowledging to myself that this young woman had begun to have an effect on me, and preferring to confront such things rather than sweep them under the rug, I made a mental note to think about the precise nature of this effect, and to construct a suitable attitude in response.

  ‘What didn’t he do!’ Marsha was saying; ‘He made passes at practically every female he taught. Then when someone finally complained about him to the President, instead of being embarrassed, he went totally crazy. He made this terrible commotion right out there on campus. I mean the most truly awful scene you can imagine. Him yelling at the President, calling everyone the most horrible names, students yelling at him … Just awful! Finally he ran off down Mulberry Street, screaming and yelling like a madman.’

  ‘What happened to him?’ I asked.

  ‘He never showed up again. They had to find another instructor to take over his classes.’

  It wasn’t until I got back to my office that the real significance of Marsha’s story struck me. I was sitting down at my desk, when the bronze bowl on one of the black-stained shelves caught my eye, and I remembered the Bulgarian coin I had seen in it.

  I went over to the bowl to look again at the coin. The pebbles were there as I had left them, as were the quartz, the fir-cone, the key-ring and the jay feather. But the coin was gone.

  Given my recent spate of slips and lapses, my first inclination was to think I must have made another mistake. Either there’d been no coin in the first place, and I had somehow fabricated a memory of it, or else there had been a coin, but for some reason I myself had spirited it away, behind my own back.

  The first seemed inconceivable: I could remember with absolute clarity the physical appearance of the coin – the high-domed head of some dignitary on one side, the bunch of grapes on the other, the Cyrillic letters I had partially deciphered using the smattering of ancient Greek I still remembered from school. Also the feel of it in my hand – the almost total weightlessness of the silver-gray alloy it was cast in; more like plastic than metal. How could I have invented such a vivid and detailed memory? It simply wasn’t possible. As to the latter, that I myself had got rid of the coin, although it seemed far-fetched, I had to admit that on the basis of my having moved the bookmark and misread the phone number – if those were indeed what had occurred in these cases – not to mention misidentified Dr Schrever on the street, which indubitably had occurred, this too was possible. But what reason could I have had for doing it – especially since I’d have had to have done it before I’d heard of Trumilcik, or at any rate learned that he may have been Bulgarian? I had no prior connection to Bulgaria, and I could think of no other earthly reason why I should want to conceal a coin from myself. It didn’t make sense.

  And yet I still couldn’t give myself entirely to the belief that someone else had been in the room and taken it.

  Mystified, I set off for the train station, a ten-minute walk.

  Last week’s snow had mostly melted, leaving just a few rags of soot-flecked white in the shadows of walls and hedges. The campus was landscaped to give the impression of a pastoral setting, though it was in the middle of a dreary town that was itself part of the uninterrupted sprawl running west and north from New York. It had been founded by a local sugar merchant at the turn of the last century, as a memorial to a beloved nephew, Arthur Clay, who had died young, and after whom the college was named. Something of the flukey nature of its origins (if the boy hadn’t died, the college presumably wouldn’t be there) still clung to it despite its massive shade-trees and thick-walled gothic buildings. In winter especially, with the traffic and nearby housing projects unhidden by foliage, you felt the thinness of the romantic illusion of itself – something between a country estate and a medieval seat of learning – that it seemed intent on purveying; its closeness to non-existence.

  In the car park I saw Amber, heading out on to Mulberry Street. She was drifting along at her usual sleepwalker’s pace. I hadn’t had a chance to think about her effect on me yet, and by default fell into the perhaps regrettable but, alas, necessary attitude of caution a man in my position needs to adopt in such situations. I felt that it would be unwise to be seen walking with her off the campus, but on the other hand I didn’t wish to seem unfriendly by passing her by, so I slowed down to a dawdle, letting her get a couple of hundred yards ahead of me. As a result I missed my train, and had half an hour to wait till the next one.

  Time to kill. I disliked having nothing to do. I walked to the end of the platform and back; looked at my watch: a minute and a half had passed. A familiar vague restlessness came into me. The blank oblong of time ahead of me seemed to thicken, forming a viscous, impenetrable emptiness. I didn’t want to have to think about the things I inevitably thought about during these dead stretches. Up above the opposite platform five cold pigeons snuggled in a row on top of a rain-puckered billboard with a podiatrist’s ad on it: 1–800 WHY HURT? 1–800 END PAIN.

  Trumilcik … the name stirred in my mind again … I thought of him running off down Mulberry Street, screaming and yelling like a madman. Where had he run to? The train station? Had he stood here like me, waiting for a train into Manhattan? And if so, then what? Packed his bags and booked the next flight back to Bulgaria?

  I doubted that. I had met very few visiting workers in this country who had the slightest interest in returning to their native land unless they were forced to. The mind abhors a vacuum: into the total vacuum that represented my knowledge of Bulgaria, spread the one detail I had recently
encountered, namely the coin – its sub-metallic substance, pallid color (as if leached of any purchasing power), the squat, handicapped-looking lettering, the blandly pompous face on one side of it, the bunch of implausibly circular grapes on the other … And it seemed to me distinctly unlikely that a man who had put all that behind him would choose to return to it if he could possibly avoid doing so.

  I found myself imagining Trumilcik surreptitiously entering my office late at night. I pictured him sitting at my desk, reading the book I had taken from the shelf, using the phone … I thought of him removing the coin from the bronze bowl. As I did so, something delicately uneasy passed through me, though as I tried to account for it, the sensation – too faint to withstand scrutiny – evaporated.

  Six and a half minutes … A high-speed train bulleted through the station, pummeling the air. The pigeons shifted in unison, ruffling their feathers a little before settling back as they were, as if they thought it only polite to register such an event.

  There was a payphone on the platform. I’d been resisting its winking glitter since I’d arrived, but I found myself starting to amble toward it. As I did, I saw myself dialing my wife’s number. I heard her voice say hello, then imagined asking her in a casual tone how she was doing; telling her I just happened to be thinking of her, waiting to see if she would suggest getting together for dinner, realising she wasn’t going to, and saying a friendly, brittle goodbye, with a reinvigorated sense of the emptiness of the evening that lay ahead of me.

  Better not to call, I told myself as I approached the phone. Better to think she might for once have actually suggested the dinner if only I had called. That way when I ate I could legitimately imagine her right there across the table.