by Terry Castle
And six months, of course, is no time at all. I have no idea what the Professor’s favorite color was; if she had lots of aunts and uncles and cousins or just one or two; if she suffered from any allergies. I would be curious, now, to know what she thought of assorted events and people from the intervening years—the Clintons or the Bushes, say, or the 9/11 hijackers. That creepy Mohammed Atta. True, I still recall the Professor’s birthday. It fell in late April; she even celebrated one (her forty-first or forty-second?) toward the end of our debacle. I remember going to her office that slushy spring day to give her a present (the McGarrigle Sisters’ first LP) and just how awkwardly she took it from me, as if I’d handed her a dead rat by its tail. The damage by that point had been done. The Professor was nearly twenty years older than I was—of an age to be my mother; or perhaps, given the deep voice and salt-and-pepper hair—silver in places—my father. She died of stomach cancer a couple of years ago, I heard, in her early seventies.
Regarding what might be called her soul, I had no time to collect much more than the most rudimentary data. And what material I did gather I had little way of comprehending. I received the signals all right: indeed, there I sat, rapt in my headphones, in front of the radar screen, recording all the blips and squeaks. But I had no means of decoding them intelligibly. Perhaps Alan Turing or some other Bletchley Park wizard might have been up to the job, but I—shy, feral, and still emotionally frozen at twenty-two—was not. So claggy and baggy and unexamined my own needs then, the needs of other people (as should be clear by now) remained largely invisible to me. I saw through a glass darkly. And besides, how could a being as wondrous as the Professor even have needs? She was a sun-god, a sort of lady-Phoebus Apollo. She flooded out all one’s somewhat fragile circuits. When she withdrew, leaving me in pitch blackness, I found myself as close to snuffed out as it is possible to be. Easy enough to turn melodramatic and Curse the Night. Yet the soul was indisputably there: it was, I realize now, what I loved about her. But it got lost very soon in the shuffle.
And easy enough, too, to deliver, like a volley of shellfire, the caricature version: the Professor as Hoary Mean Thing, camp, supersized and frightful, with all the glaring, eyeball-popping, Joan-Crawford-as-Mildred-Pierce mannerisms intact. I’ve delivered such blasts many times over the past thirty years. The Professor was my very own bespoke monstre sacrée for so long—so long the resident she-Minotaur in my private psychic labyrinth—that I developed, fairly early in the game, what might be called a Professorial shtick: a narrative, often comic, in which the more Grand Guignol aspects of our relationship became fodder, in the presence of others, for a catharsis at once reviving and entertaining. The Professor, I had to admit, made great copy. There were enough details—Flaubertian or Freudian—to make one feel marvelously suave and blasé after the fact: the Very Weird Long Grey Braid; the Withered Leg, the Loaded Pistol in the Bedside Drawer (often to be taken out and examined during lovemaking); the Room in Her House One Was Never Allowed to Enter; the Gruesome Crime-Scene Photos, Bloody and Horrific, she once showed me (again after sex) from a murder trial she had been involved in once as an expert witness.
All zany enough, to be sure. Yet far more intriguing to me now is a rather more mysterious issue: how the Professor and I came to collide so disastrously in the first place. Who was responsible? Which of us was more to blame? No way around it: the Professor precipitated a series of near-ruinous events in my life. Not fatal, but close enough. It would be disingenuous—especially having written paragraphs like some of the above—for me to say I have never yearned for revenge. Writing, I’m convinced, is often nothing but revenge—a way of twirling one’s mustache, donning buckler and sword and feathery hat, shaking one’s gauntleted fist at the gods. You get to be Puss-in-Boots-on-a-Tear. And why shouldn’t you? What other feeling is one supposed to have after one gets clobbered? Okay: Jesus Christ left some notes in the Suggestion Box. Yet few people ever seem to heed them while tangled in this mortal coil.
Equally disingenuous would it be, however, for me to suggest the Professor intended every aspect of my unhappiness or that I was not already in a fairly perilous emotional state when I met her. Perhaps because I find myself advancing with such disturbing rapidity through middle age—and have indeed been a professor myself for some twenty-plus years—I feel able to be rather more thoughtful now about the whole business. Coolly diagnostic, even. With the advantage of years I’ve started pondering again just what it was about her that drew me to her: what peculiar pathos she evinced, and why I was so vulnerable to it. For pathos it surely was.
Some of it, yes, was plainly visible: the Professor had suffered from polio at the age of twelve or thirteen; one leg was shorter than the other and noticeably atrophied. She had a herky-jerky way of walking and was unable to run (if you could even call it that) other than in a halting and chaotic fashion. The infirmity did not prevent her from taking intense pride in her athleticism; she relished the challenge of her handicap and the sympathetic attention (mostly from young women like myself) that it brought her. Having become adept at a sort of crab-like sideways scuttling and lunging, she managed to play badminton and tennis with some success (doubles especially) and even threw herself into a game of softball now and then—butch and hearty and gym teacher–ish in nylon windbreaker and stretch pants—if, that is, some fleet of foot surrogate were allowed to run the bases for her. This buoyant response to misfortune, her sheer gaiety and éclat under the circumstances, epitomized for me gallantry of an absolute sort. It was as if she bore a fencing scar: some ancient and noble wound suffered in an affair of honor.
But many things about the Professor drew my sympathy—drew, indeed, my lonely and passionate love. Some of them, I see now, had more to do with me than with her. Or with something deranging that happened when the two of us were together. I’m hoping here, obviously, to make some sense of my obsession with her, though I hasten to add I don’t expect to “make sense” of the Professor herself. I’m becoming less sure one can make sense of certain individuals. The Professor’s kindness and brutality offset one another so perfectly—were so freakishly counterbalanced, one against the other—it would be foolish to try to make her personality “cohere” in retrospect. It didn’t. There was no way it could. The Professor was a hybrid, a sort of unicorn. And besides, I’m now well aware of a similar, if less severe, incoherence in myself. No matter what one does, it seems, certain warring parts of the psyche never really get reconciled. The much-touted “integration” never happens. The least one can hope for, then—? That at some point my mixed-up memories of her and much else might simply expire: like coupons for a defunct rug-cleaning service or an old takeout menu lying in the dry leaves on my porch. Then might a lesson be said to be learned: I’ll be expiring myself, of course—no doubt soon enough. After a while no one will remember either of us.
So on to the new Scene of Life. I noted earlier that a certain scary precocity as a Student was one of the factors that made me so susceptible to the Professor. To that might be added the frightening isolation I felt upon arriving in my new (and strange) Grain Belt home. The alien corn, indeed. I might as well have landed on Mars: so thoroughly lost was I, I didn’t realize how lost. I’d arrived, it’s true, somewhat unpropitiously: an acquaintance at my former college had a friend in the new city, a woman named Mindy, the scion of a wealthy department store family. My schoolmate had arranged for me to stay with Mindy for a few days while I searched for an apartment. Yet when I arrived, that hot and airless August morning, and called my putative hostess, she immediately disclaimed all knowledge of the arrangement. (Fie, thou still-unknown Mindy! What a cruel minx thou wert! Perhaps thou shalt send me thy overdue apology now?) At the taxi driver’s suggestion I ended up—though carless—staying in a shabby motor inn downtown, seemingly untenanted apart from me, from whence I immediately began the quest for more permanent lodging by perusing all the local bus maps and classified ads.
As I climbed into the first of many bu
ses later that day, I confronted a ruddy, blue-eyed, pink-cheeked older man, happily perched, like a bouncy six-year-old, on the plastic banquette seat behind the driver. As soon as I’d paid my fare and taken the seat across from him, he gave me an enchanting smile and held out his arms in greeting. He wore a pair of ancient high-top sneakers and despite the heat, a long, flowing muffler. These sartorial accoutrements gave him a certain resemblance to the eccentric tapir-like protagonist of Edward Gorey’s The Doubtful Guest—a mysterious furry creature who arrives inexplicably at one’s front door, politely takes a seat on the living room sofa, and then, without ever saying a word, proceeds to stay on forever.
With the swift unerring friendliness of the truly mad, the smiling man got right to the point: would I be his PEN PAL? I must have appeared startled because he suddenly looked mournful and frightened and said being pen pals would actually be wonderful: his name was Dick, after all. I was even more disconcerted by this last statement and still wondering what to say when he broke into an excited and chummy gabble. What’s your name/who are you/where are you going? He was feeling so so happy, he squeaked: You remind me so much of my daughter! He had a poem by Edgar Guest he wanted me to read, he exclaimed, and here he actually started to pull a piece of grubby paper from his pocket. By this time, however, I had already lurched off down the aisle and found another seat as far from him as possible. I watched him warily for several blocks. He got off soon enough, though not without a last wistful look in my direction. Yes, disbelieving readers: Dick is my father’s name. (Oh, THAT explains everything!) Oh, shut up.
To judge by the diary entries I kept those first months I went a bit cuckoo myself. I wrote in my journal, indeed, with the enthusiasm of a Victorian onanist—usually no fewer than five or six times a day. My solitariness—in the new place, and more broadly, in the world—seemed absolute and intractable, the sort of thing one can’t shake even when one somehow does, miraculously enough, get to know a few people. It’s true that on one level I was functioning more or less adequately: I found an apartment (a somewhat dilapidated one) in an ugly yellow brick building near the campus. And though the term had yet to start, I met some of my fellow graduate students in the English department and recorded my impressions of them. (Rather censoriously, I’m afraid, in a sort of warmed-over Mitford-Sister idiom: “Last night I attended the grad student beer bust, and it was quite dreadful. Full of young men with beards, older sullen professors. Revolting scenes.”)
One piece of good fortune (though not one I would really be able to cash in on for a while): my first week in the new place, I met a young woman of my own age—now my oldest and truest friend. (Elsbet’s coming out for the B & T Wedding Party later this month.) We met by a fluke. A few days after my arrival the couple across the hall in my building invited me to the movies with them and their friends. Elsbet was there—the just-tagging-along roommate of one of the friends. I gave her a splashy journal write-up right away: “Elsbet: large humorous person in a leaf-green suede coat, whom I met last night. Takes voice lessons and sings opera and Tammy Wynette songs. From Eau Claire, wherever that is, and about to start an M.F.A. in Sculpture at the University.” She was bosomy, robust, comically Norwegian American, and oddly determined to befriend me. I was shy and a bit nonplussed but I liked her at once.
And to the extent that anyone could that autumn, Elsbet managed to lift my spirits in the midst of my disorientation. I reveled (as did she) in her broad Wisconsin accent; she was a gifted raconteuse. I heard all about her crazy old Norwegian aunties and what growing up in Eau Claire was like. So many Bengts, Eriks, Sigrids, and Ingrids: it was like an Old Norse saga. She taught me how to say “you bag of shit” in Norwegian: Du Drittseck. Everyone in her family was cultivated, musical, and high achieving; Elsbet, the decidedly non-academic baby. She’d fixed on an art degree, she told me, in part to distinguish herself from her annoyingly talented older siblings. She enjoyed music too, though, and one weekend we drove out of town to see a bearded Garrison Keillor, then still in his twenties and a local radio announcer, do his new live show, A Prairie Home Companion. The Red Clay Ramblers were his guests, I think—plus some primitive-looking Viking types (from Tröndheim?) who played Hardanger fiddle. Elsbet kindly explained all the local jokes to me—Powdermilk Biscuits, Norwegian bachelor-farmers, the Chatterbox Café, and all the rest of it. It was corny and fun, but also, like the rather alarming Snow Plow Emergency signs on every street, somewhat alienating to a San Diego girl. A Prairie Homeless Companion might have been more appropriate.
And there were limits to what even Elsbet could do. (That our own relationship would not be a romantic one was somehow clear from the start.) You would not have guessed it from her unflappable demeanor, nor indeed the immense good humor, but the very month I met her she had been dumped—somewhat summarily—by her college girlfriend, a tall and gloomy cellist named Amelia. Amelia—vegan and woodswoman—was earnest, judgmental, and reeked of garlic. She was about to decamp for Cremona to learn violin making in the celebrated Guarneri workshop. I met her a couple of times and thought Elsbet well rid of her. (Amelia’s notion of bacchanalian excess: to light a candle, brew a mug of chamomile tea, and eat a single square of organic dark chocolate very slowly.) But she’d undoubtedly left grief in her wake—Elsbet seemed pained and put off by Sapphic romance. One result was that when the chaos with the Professor began, I was hesitant to tell Elsbet about it for some time, partly out of a sense of delicacy, shame, embarrassment.
Looking back at my journal entries from those first months I am struck above all by their tone: dismal, tedious, curiously deadened. So Terry-versus-the-Conqueror-Worm. At first it was simply the shock of a drastically new place—one so stark and flat, as I noted for posterity, “you can see everything in a straight line from wherever you are standing”—all the way out to the “pale silver water towers and grain elevators.” I missed the blue promise of the Pacific Ocean somewhere over the next hill. (I missed hills, period.) Not to say my sense of geography was any less vague than it had been: Elsbet went away to Chicago one fall weekend and I realized that I didn’t know in what direction it lay. (Though the city’s magnificent skyscrapers and adjoining natural bathtub, Lake Michigan, would later provide a dramatic backdrop for my checkered romance with the Blakester, I never visited the place until the mid-1990s.) I felt islanded. Meanwhile the late summer heat bore down and my apartment became dank, close, and oppressive. Wizard of Oz–style thunderclaps startled me on muggy afternoons; and the resulting cloudbursts, while fierce and cooling, never lasted long enough. Everybody had warned me my new home would be cold; no one had told me it would also be unbearably hot. The Midwestern mosquitoes were another novelty. They viewed me with undisguised glee and took to feasting indoors and out on my pale, easily irritated, all too Anglo-Saxon flesh. Sometimes they came in pairs or trios: well-padded mosquito-matrons lunching at the Four Seasons.
I tried to keep a lifeline going to Karen and the mist-shrouded Pacific Northwest with letters and phone calls, but these on the whole failed to satisfy. The phone calls were expensive, and besides that, Karen, now in her own Ph.D. program in Seattle, had already begun to morph into someone about whom I knew less and less. She seemed to be dating an mysterious unnamed man; I had a creepy suspicion it was my friend Davy—he of Nijinsky and the bird feet. Arghh!!! The Invert’s Lot Is Not a Happy One. (I had introduced them.) And even at a distance Karen remained dry and intransigent in her refusal to mother. I see from one journal entry—characteristically maudlin—that I asked her over the phone if she “loved me” and her Wittgensteinian reply was I love this salami I’m eating. Yes, true enough—sometimes she added a brief, mollifying comment or two, and I, in my fallen-angel exile, made mopey attempts to cultivate a more mature philosophical outlook:
Karen refuses to provide pity: I demand it in my letters and she returns with impersonal replies, or at least detached replies. We talked about this a bit: she said one’s twenties were awful but even though things were b
ad now I was “not necessarily doomed to be miserable.”
Yet in the only sense that mattered to me, she had vanished forever. That I might have some misery-free future in store struck me as highly unlikely, and her willingness to imagine one for me as a hollow (and hardly palliative) fare-thee-well.
Nor, needless to say, could my real mother bolster me across the miles. We talked every week or so but she and I were entering a lengthy period during which we would see one another for perhaps two or three days every other year. (I saw my father even less often.) My teenaged stepbrother Jeff had begun his stupefying spiral into chaos and brutality, and Dee Dee, one of my stepsisters, barely out of high school, had become seriously addicted to coke and pills. The prissy aesthete in me shuddered even to hear about these step-relations—so tacky, macabre, and fantastical their doings. Nor would the problems end anytime soon. Later, after moving to Wyoming, Dee Dee would have three babies in quick succession—all, according to my mother, born crack-addicted. Her boyfriend, Frankie, weedy and feckless, was a supermarket bag boy, and once after Dee Dee kicked him out, tried to set their mobile home on fire with kerosene and old rags. (She and the kids were asleep inside.) Luckily this homicidal scheme came to naught: Dee Dee woke up, and she and Frankie got back together soon after. Not long ago, my mother told me Frankie had died fairly horribly. While driving around drunk—a quaint Wyoming custom—he had careened into the back of a parked big rig. As in a sick John Waters sight gag, his head was found some distance from the wreck.