“You mean if it were Skowhegan or Bangor, it would’ve been okay.”
“Very funny.”
“He’d have thought it great. He’d want you to be happy.”
“Perhaps you’re right.” She paused, considering this.
And what would my father have wanted for me, his only daughter? I wondered. A quiet settled life in Old Town, Maine. Not this sitcom–slash–soap opera I was now in the middle of.
Which, on the other hand, intrigued my mother, who didn’t know the half of it. “So, nothing new?” she asked again, her hope an eternal flame under the studied casualness.
“Not a thing.”
She sighed again. Then her voice became more animated. “Arthur talked to Zenobia. Her monograph’s won a prize. They’re flying her and Harriman to Amsterdam.”
“How great for her,” I said. Shit, I thought. Here I was again the loser in the daughter sweepstakes. Unless of course—and this was a sudden and not entirely welcome flash—my mother looked upon Zenobia as the second daughter she never had and thus, along with her, adopted her accomplishments. Gain a daughter; gain something to brag about. It took the burden off me while casting me as underdog. Either way I was an also-ran.
When I was young I mourned my mother’s miscarriages, mourned the brother and sister I wouldn’t have. At the same time I was elated to be the single apple of my parents’ eye, center stage in all our family theatricals. If, in our Freudian times, I was heir to the general Oedipal struggles and the assorted complexes that we human beings share, I was spared specific sibling rivalry. Until now.
Oblivious to my archetypal suffering, my mother continued, “Arthur is so proud. As am I. They’ll leave in a couple of weeks. They need to make arrangements for Max.”
“I’ll take Max,” I said. The phrase, unbidden, bubbled up as naturally as water from a spring, surprising me.
And surprising my mother, who finally sputtered, “That’s out of the question, dear. You know nothing about children.”
“I’ve been one,” I began. “I’ve had the authentic experience.”
“Besides,” my mother went on, “they’ll want to hire a professional.”
“No dispute there.” I sent along my congratulations to Arthur and asked about West Indian cuisine. We discussed flora and fauna and Jamaican rum. I remained pleasantly noncommittal until she announced she had to go, cocktails were being served.
I hung up, congratulating myself that I had revealed none of my secrets however provoked. Given Zenobia’s triumphs, I was even more tempted to fill my mother’s plate with my own delicious morsel. In spite of sibling rivalry, I refused to compete. Usually in my excitement I bare all—the editor considering my story, that agent who asked to see my work—then, ultimately rejected, I end up having to share that, too. Once at a neighborhood meeting to fight the granting of a liquor license to a pizza joint down the street, I told a roomful of near strangers that I’d entered a writing contest. Naturally the next day I heard I’d lost. The next week, at the market or the drugstore, I’d bumped into nearly every one of them. “What about that contest?” each would brightly ask. If I fail tonight at my first class, if the students hoot me out, at least it won’t be reported on the six o’clock news.
My mother was harder than Louie. Maybe withholding the truth comes more easily with practice. Certainly it was easy enough not to tell Louie about my Harvard course or the Biba dinner with Jake Barnes when he called last night. He’d just come back from Florida, he said, and after hours of quoting each of the seven dwarfs’ out-of-the-mouths-of-babes to his parents, he was about to collapse into bed. I didn’t inquire whether he was collapsing into bed with Cheryl, even though I thought of it, it being a Wednesday night. How could I ask him to tell me stuff when I had my own stuff I wasn’t telling him? “I miss your feet,” I said to him.
“I miss all of you.”
He had an appointment, he apologized, and couldn’t see me tonight till after dinner. “I may be as late as ten.”
“That’s fine,” I said. I didn’t ask about his appointment either, didn’t even ask if he was seeing Cheryl two nights in a row so relieved was I not to have to explain about what I had convinced myself would be my one-night stand on academic row.
Now I go over Seamus’ notes, my own notes. I pack them into my briefcase with four sharpened Mongol No. 2 pencils which I am not even tempted to tuck underneath my breast, paper clips, Best American Short Stories in case none of my students brings anything to read, and a pack of Life Savers—Cryst-o-Mint—for my breath though I hope my students won’t be close enough for me to fear being close. I jump into my second shower of the day— worrying brings on a sweat—and button on my dress of dark green corduroy.
* * *
Sever Hall is just inside Harvard Yard through the Quincy Street gate. Snow crackles underfoot, and though the walkways have been sanded, there are patches of lethal-looking ice. I have not worn my sensible L.L. Bean Antarctic lace-ups with the crenellated rubber soles that all the students wear. Instead, now that I am on the other side, black leather with a stacked heel. I picture myself slipping on the ice, slipping a disk, and being tucked into a bed near Seamus on the orthopedic ward, the consequence of which is my slipping round the bend. Worse than the pain of a slip, even a metaphorical one, however, would be losing the job before I even get a chance to deserve losing it.
Which I shouldn’t have accepted in the first place I tell myself, inching toward the terrifying destiny which waits behind the heavy doors of Sever Hall.
My class is held in a small corner room suitable for seminars and not, mercifully, in one of those huge banked lecture halls where over two hundred students used to scribble notes in introductory survey courses, their green bookbags piled like cairns up and down the aisles. A few students mill outside the open door and barely glance at me as I thread through them excusing myself. Inside I turn on the light, arrange four chairs along each side of the battered rectangular table and one at its head. I erase the blackboard on which is diagrammed what look like galaxies of stars. I bang two erasers together and raise a cloud of chalk dust. This was my job in second grade, to stand on the school steps and clean the erasers. How far I’ve come, I marvel, almost thirty years later to be raising the same clouds of dust at Harvard University.
I sit myself at the head of the table and open my briefcase. I string a line of short story anthologies, notebooks, pencils from edge to edge. Dead center I place Seamus’ syllabus.
Five minutes later I am convinced that nobody will show up. Maybe nobody has enrolled. Or worse—that word has spread of the substitution of a cubic zirconia for the diamond in Harvard’s faculty. I brush some chalk dust off my dress and feel sorry for myself. All this suffering for nothing. All this preparation for nothing. I am relieved and disappointed. Only slightly heavier on the disappointment. But just before I’m about to sink my head onto Seamus’ syllabus, perhaps even to turn his notes into Rorschach blots with my tears, the students arrive and take their seats.
At first they’re a blur of color, a chorus of clatter. Then I begin to sort them out. There’s a tall, large-boned, middle-aged woman who dangles chandelier earrings and is purple-shawled and maroon-caped and silver-ornamented like those swaddled and cluttered grand pianos one sees in photographs of Victorian drawing rooms. Her hair, too, is the glossy ebony of a Steinway.
Next to her slumps an ethereal-looking young woman in a white turtleneck whose face and lips and eyes are so pale that the only contrast in tone lies in the smattering of freckles over her nose and the light brown lashes on her rapidly blinking lids. It’s as if her resplendent table mate has leached all color by sheer proximity. Together, they’re the positive and negative in a photographic print.
Separated from the others by a chair on either side—like a trench-coated patron of an X-rated movie—sits an earnest thirty-something man. He wears a plaid flannel shirt whose collar is open on the stretched-out neck band of his Hanes undershirt. A row of bal
lpoint pens and mechanical pencils marches across his pocket flap like medals arrayed on a four-star general’s chest. He has the large two front teeth of an eager beaver and in fact is already taking notes, which his neighbor one space over is straining to read.
This man’s in his forties, barrel-chested, his forearms ornamented with tattoos. But his eyes look gentle.
As do those of a young black student with a round sweet face and the air of an undergraduate. He’s talking to two women, probably fellow undergraduates. One looks like a California Valley Girl with the species’ curtain of blond hair halfway down her back. Her companion’s more like a small red fireplug. She has a short squat body wrapped in army surplus and a head of red curls so badly shorn they form a peak at the top. The St. Joan haircut reminds me of Pollyanne Mulligan, who lived two houses behind me in Old Town and went to St. Joseph’s Academy where the Mother Superior insisted that the Huns had short squat bodies and pointy heads. In every room of Pollyanne’s house hung a crucifix and a picture of a suffering Christ. This student has the look of one of the Mother Superior’s Huns. Her mouth is pursed as if she’s just swallowed something sour.
Though there are only seven students out of the promised eight, it’s already ten minutes past the hour the class is supposed to start. People are making impatient noises, pushing papers around and clearing their throats. “I think it’s time to start,” I say.
“But the teacher’s not here,” says the voice of reason, the man with the pens.
“I’m the teacher,” I explain and nearly apologize.
“Are you Professor Seamus O’Toole?” he asks.
I hesitate. Now’s the time for one of Arthur T. Haven’s syllogisms. If the teacher’s Professor O’Toole and I’m the teacher, ergo I’m Professor O’Toole I’m tempted to reply—Quod erat demon-strandum. “Actually,” I begin.
But before I can say another word, the red-haired fireplug shakes her head. “Of course she isn’t! I know Seamus O’Toole and she’s no Seamus O’Toole!”
Haven’t I heard this before? I wonder. But now’s not the time to start a riff on originality. “Let me explain,” I say. I grip the edge of the tabletop to steel myself against what I see as seven pairs of hostile eyes fixing me in their masterful communal gaze. “Professor O’Toole is laid up in the hospital with a bad back. A very bad back,” I add.
“That’s too bad,” the sweet-faced black student says sweetly.
“Then who are you, my dear?” asks the woman draped like the Steinway.
“I’m Katinka O’Toole,” I begin. I know the minute I say this I’ve made a mistake.
So does Fireplug. “I knew it!” she shouts. “Just like a man to send his wife!” This last word she spits out as if wife were even lower on the evolutionary scale than rat.
“I’m not his wife,” I say, indignant.
“That’s Harvard for you. Sexism and nepotism.”
“Ri-i-ght,” agrees Valley Girl, extending the one syllable into three.
“I’m not related,” I insist. Though I’m not really telling a lie, what would this crusader think if she knew the truth, that I was one of those women so gravely lacking in feminist genes to take a husband’s name in the first place and then, compounding the crime, to keep it after divorce. “The name is mere coincidence.”
“How about that,” says the black student.
“In fact,” I go on, seizing the pedagogical opportunity, “this is after all a writing class. If you were to use such a coincidence in your fiction it would sound contrived. What’s real in real life doesn’t often seem real in fiction.” I am pleased to hear the scratch of ink on paper as the man with the ballpoints commits this profundity to his notebook.
“Like nothing personal,” saysValley Girl as she stands and sweeps her coat and books into one aerobicized arm, “but I’m outta here. I need Professor O’Toole on my résumé.You know how it is if you go to the theater to see, like, Mel Gibson, and he’s sick and an understudy goes on. Well, like you’ve got an option to leave and get your money back.” She’s halfway across the room now. Her jeans are pressed and the word Cindi, with an i, is stitched in rhinestones across her belt.
“Anyone else?” I ask. “Anyone else who wants to leave?”
“I think we should give you a chance, my dear. Harvard wouldn’t hire a teacher who wasn’t good,” says Steinway.
And because I am turned toward my savior to bestow upon her my most blindingly grateful smile, I miss what happens next. I hear a commotion, the fall of books, Cindi’s irritated “Oh, shi-it.”When I look up I realize my eighth student has arrived and collided with the departing Valley Girl. For a second the doorway is a tumble of arms and boots and overcoats. Then Cindi leaves and the splayed and vaguely familiar figure moves.
I stare. “Louie!” I exclaim.
“Katinka!”
“Oh, goody,” my savior claps and turns to me. “I just knew you were experienced. Here’s someone who’s had you before!”
For a minute no one moves. We’re all actors freeze-framed into a movie still. My hands hover above the table like a medium’s. But no spirits appear to shake and rattle it. It’s my mind that rattles. Races. What’s he doing here. What does it mean? Maybe it’s a mistake. If only it were a mistake. How ridiculous. Help! Why my class? Why me? Why not me?
Then Louie bends over to pick up his books, and my mind empties into my heart. I look at him. His face is bronzed, the backs of his beautiful hands are brown, their palms delicately white. I’d never thought of this before, but now I’m struck by how those hands resemble the stylized ones steepled in prayer over the chests of Pollyanne Mulligan’s many Jesuses. And at the same time I’m beatifying him, I’m sticking him in the pages of Playgirl, posing him in the sand on a Florida beach, a knee angled so, an arm raised. I think of tonight, of how I’ll trace the pale outline of his bathing suit against his darkened skin. I shudder. I’m a mess of complexes, a Freudian test case: sibling rivalry, performance anxiety, father figure difficulties with both Seamus and Arthur T. Haven, not to mention the castration connotation of dating someone named Jake Barnes. What is Louie Cappetti doing in my class? And what am I going to do with him?
Louie, to his credit, looks as panicked and shocked as I. But he recovers quickly and takes the seat to my right. It is all I can do not to press my leather-tipped toe against his calf. He’s close enough for me to smell him—his familiar Louie smell mixed with coconut oil and the briny tang of the Florida sea. I try to take him in with the same abstraction I have exercised on the blackboard or on the man with the ballpoint pens. He’s wearing jeans and a Shetland sweater. It pleases me that he looks like junior faculty.
“I was expecting Professor O’Toole,” Louie apologizes, avoiding my eye.
“You and everyone else,” says Fireplug.
“He suggested I sign up for his class.”
“Does that mean you’ll want to leave?” asks Ballpoint.
“Leave?” Louie’s startled eyes widen.
“That dame you bumped into—” the man with the tattoos begins.
“Woman,” Fireplug corrects.
“Woman. She was on her way out. Wouldn’t accept a substitute.”
“Miz O’Toole’s no substitute,” Louie says. “She’s—hey,” he grins, “she’s better than the original.”
“See,” says Steinway triumphantly.
“You mean you know her work?” Ballpoint has one of his pens poised as if to copy down my résumé.
“She’s an incredible writer,” Louie says, “a real professional.”
Fireplug addresses me. “Is this another relative?”
What do I answer? He’s my mailman. My lover. I even hesitate at friend. “He’s from the neighborhood” is what I say. Then worry that Louie thinks I’m hiding something, that I’m ashamed.
Steinway clanks some bracelets in Louie’s direction. “What has she published?” she asks as if I’m a deaf-and-mute child for whom he’s interpreter.
“L
ots,” Louie says. “In really good places. She’s just had a story accepted by Playgirl magazine.”
Which falls like a stone into a well. There’s a long pause. If the question had been addressed to me, I might have omitted this last fact.
“Whattya know,” says the man with the tattoos. He leans forward with lecherous eyes fixed on my breasts.
Fireplug’s face turns nearly as red as her hair. “I knew it,” she exclaims. “Harvard’s stuck us with a writer of porn. In a magazine notorious for the exploitation of women.”
“That’s Playboy, not Playgirl,” admonishes Louie.
“No matter, they’re all the same.”
“Playgirl publishes some good writers,” I protest. “Alice Adams, Joyce Carol …”
But no one’s interested in my literary test case. Even the ballpoint pen has stopped its scratching.
“I’d sure like to read your story,” the man with the tattoos grins.
“Well, I think it’s hunky-dory,” says Steinway, who is turning into the mother I always wished I had.
“Look,” I say, “I have perfectly acceptable literary qualifications which I will be glad to discuss with each and every one of you outside of class. But right now, right here we have work to do.”
Which seems to have been the right tone to strike since they quiet down. A couple even look interested.
I know enough not to let a second lapse and launch right into a discussion of voice and point of view. I’m on a sinking ship that only words can keep afloat. In an emergency, I can come through. The words keep tumbling out as if Seamus’ Irish gift of them has been bestowed upon my tongue. To my own ears I’m producing lyrical gobbledygook, but I must be making some sense since Louie and Ballpoint are scribbling away. Louie’s notebook is a Harvard one, crowned by a silver veritas. Steinway is nodding furiously. With the exception of Louie she’s the dearest shepherd in my flock.
By the time I get to third-person omniscient-impersonal I’m out of breath. “Why don’t we go around the table and have you introduce yourselves,” I suggest. “Tell us a little about what you’ve written and what you hope to do.”
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