The Professor and Other Writings

by Terry Castle

  None of which is to say that the Professor’s conversation was in any way gloomy or grandiose. Alluding to past struggles, she preserved a Jimmy Stewart–like delicacy. She was affable, modest: the very opposite, it seemed, of self-absorbed. And happy enough to leaven any darker revelations with what I took to be charming, if not gallant and self-deprecating, humor. Aw, shucks, babe. One of her proudest achievements in life, she chuckled, had been receiving a C-minus in a lit class at Wellesley taught by Vladimir Nabokov. I laughed heartily at this shocking admission, no doubt out of nervous hysteria. The very idea of suffering, let alone surviving, such terrifying scholastic ignominy seemed unthinkable to me. Wasn’t 98 out of 100 a miserable failure? And the professor was Nabokov? The reader will not be surprised to learn that ladies willing to make light of their academic fiascos have often proved perversely irresistible to me. One of my all-time favorite girlfriends of the 1980s—the cocky and hilarious Robin—managed to get a D in a poetry class at B.U. from Helen Vendler. One wanted to swoon at the very thought.

  And as she’d left, the Professor had given me the perfect gift—an A-plus-plus-plus-plus. We’d been talking about Janis Joplin, then not so long deceased, and needless to say, one of my many dead heroines. The Professor had played some Janis in a class recently and been overcome, she said, by emotion. Her face filled with melancholy. I almost had to leave the room. I must have looked stricken myself, because she instantly fixed on me a breath-stopping gaze:

  She referred back to that day when we’d met on the stairs, when I’d said I was glad to see her but never knew what to say—she said she had felt the same, and that it had “taken a lot of courage” for me to say that. She had written about that stairway meeting in her journal. This gave me a lurching feeling for some reason.

  But before I could exhale in any normal manner, an even sharper bolt from Cupid’s quiver lodged itself in my breast. She said anytime I just needed a place “to be,” to come and stay with her. “I don’t say that to many people.” O but, alas, poor Yorick, she’d said it to me.

  Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life

  DADDY WAS EXTRATERRESTRIAL, OH DADDY take me up, take me up. The Professor and I first made love the day after I’d gone with Labyris and Co. to see Patti Smith. Smith had not disappointed. The concert took place downtown, in an auditorium filled to the rafters with arty would-be head-bangers. We got our wish: the event was as crazed and cacophonous as any Ubu Roi–iste might have wished. Glorious indeed Smith’s Babel-babble lyrics, the blasting, nervejangling sounds emitted by the band, the rivers of sweat dripping off everyone, the transporting spectacle of the singer twirling and chanting and ranting in the flesh. There she was, a human gyro—resplendent (as I put in my follow-up journal entry) in tee shirt with a Union Jack, combat fatigues tucked into boots, mop of black stringy hair, crawling round the stage, twisting spastically, fucking the amps, beating her chest while she sang. That Smith was a transcendent dervish-genius was now confirmed, not least by the fact that afterwards the insufferable Jo (there too, incongruously) was holding forth in the lobby and loudly broadcasting her disapproval. Patti was just like Janis, Jo declared; her lyrics were degrading to women. (“Ah hayd to pluug mah ee-yuhs.” ) One was entirely on Patti’s side, of course—that of Baudelaire and Rimbaud and Lautréamont and all the other mad dark angels—now and forever. Les fleurs du mal? Un bouleversement de tous les sens? Mais, oui, monsieur.

  No sooner said than done. Time flies when you are having crazy fun and all hell can break loose in a split second or two. The Professor went into overdrive in that week after the Adjani-evening. She became the man; I took on the deeply defective role of princess. Though sick inside with hope and lust, aquiver with excitement, I also felt weirdly fatuous, almost paralyzed—like someone in a jumbo jet when it begins its insane, mind-scrambling acceleration down the runway. All of a sudden everything starts to race by and it’s all you can do to squeeze out some last morbid good-byes: bye-bye terminal; bye-bye little fuel trucks, bye-bye control tower (hope someone’s in there), bye-bye scrubby trees and outlying cargo bays; bye-bye long-term parking lot; bye-bye ground (I’m hearing those strange shaking noises now and one of the overhead bins has popped open)—please don’t forget that I love you. The Professor did it all. I was now both inert and traveling at incalculable speed.

  She started calling me every day. She drove me out to see some local Indian mounds, on a little cliff over the Mississippi. She took me to watch her play racquetball. (I gazed down from a glass-encased gallery above the court, like a guest in the royal box at Wimbledon.) At school, in her office with the door closed, she would challenge me to gleeful arm-wrestling bouts: some, the regular elbows-onthe-table variety, others, a rather more elaborate lying-on-the-floor kind of her own invention. One evening she came over and like a Jewish grandmother boiled up a giant pot of corned beef for me. (We ate huge slabs of it, sat on the floor, got loaded, and listened to records.) She described various oddly suggestive dreams she seemed to be having about me. She stared into my eyes, then looked away. She talked about a student, female, who’d had a “crush” on her a few years earlier—her T.A. when she’d been a visiting prof at a large university on the West Coast. She chuckled warmly at the reminiscence. She harped again on my agelessness. What did I think about this? What did I think about that? One day she called simply to tell me she had been trying not to call me. We are skipping all the steps.

  Neither of us—we discovered during one particularly long and involved phone call—was sleeping very well; our patterns of insomnia, the Professor joked, must be mysteriously related. One day, with some hoopla, she invited me to a little mid-morning performance she was giving in front of the TV cameras at a community college: the lady-reporter doing the feature on her wanted some footage of her singing. The Professor wore thick disconcerting geisha-makeup for the occasion and a butch turquoise pantsuit à la Billie Jean King around the time she clobbered Bobby Riggs. She carried her guitar in a vintage black case and had taped a list of songs on the side of her instrument, just like all the old-time folk singers did. I was her one-girl claque and yayed vigorously after every number: “The Maid of Glenshee,” “(That’s What You Get) for Lovin’ Me,” even the ludicrous “Froggie Goes A-Courtin.’” However virile the delivery, the Professor’s musical repertoire sometimes verged on the Burl Ives–ish.

  The Professor flirted with me that day, of course, but also a little bit, somewhat confusingly, with the TV reporter. The latter—a leggy blonde who later became a well-known CBS correspondent—appeared in some odd way to discombobulate the Professor. At one point the Professor forgot the lyrics to one of her gruesome ballads and froze mid-verse while cameras rolled. Afterwards she told me she had “clutched.” That’s not happened in years. She’d like to get to know that reporter better, she said: she would ask her out to lunch; she was way more intelligent than the usual dumb bunnies on local TV news. Earlier that morning, when the Professor had picked me up, she’d said we might take a joyride out of town after she’d performed—a scenic jaunt just the two of us—but after this slightly agitating taping session she apparently changed her mind and dropped me off back at my place, saying she needed to be alone. I felt let down, a bit mystified, and all the more out of my mind with love, love, love.

  At the very end of this abbreviated courtship we returned to the site of our first meeting. Alice and Tom had invited me over that week: Tom would make dinner and then we’d watch How Green Was My Valley on television. Pot roast and coal dust—a pleasant evening with friends. I wouldn’t have to go back home late at night in the snow, Alice had added: I could stay overnight and drive back in to the U. with them the following day. I mentioned the invitation to the Professor in one of our phone calls—in part because I wanted her to know and in part because I half-realized I was becoming all too addicted to the heady stimulation she provided. (Yikes I won’t be able to call you, she said at once.) It might be good to let her know—that is, if one could summo
n the smoothness and daring—that one still had other things going on. Sweet-natured Alice and Tom: the perfect duck blind. Alice picked me up as planned and drove me to her house just as she’d done on Christmas Eve. Yet barely had we finished supper and hunkered down on the sofa in front of the television with Emlyn Williams and the Welsh miners (me already swathed in one of my hostess’s shapeless crocheted Afghans and a pair of bed socks), than a sharp knock was heard at the door. It was the Professor, of course, and, hey, she’d brought her pajamas! She happened to be driving by and thought she’d just see if anyone was home.

  Yet while deliriously exciting (oh-my-god-this-is-more-thrilling-than-anything-that-has-ever-happened-my-god-Alice-and-Tom-haveno-idea-oh-my-god etc., etc., etc.) the Professor’s sudden appearance was not entirely gratifying. Her silvery hair was wet because she had just come, she announced, from playing volleyball at her gym with a kid from the English department. Hooley’s daughter, the medieval guy—an undergrad, a really delightful young woman. Eighteen or nineteen—did we know her? You know how you meet someone and realize right away you’re going to be friends for a very long time? She’s phenomenal. The Professor looked so radiant and pleased with herself I felt as if I had been impaled—riven by a stab of pain so shocking and exquisite I fairly convulsed inside. (A jealousy so pure, I wrote the next day, it was like a silver beam of light piercing me. Christ who the fucking hell St. Theresa.) After shooting merry glances all round (she barely met my eye while speaking), the Professor then snuggled up next to Alice on the sofa and asked her to give her a little neck rub; she was sore from all the activity. Even as Alice obligingly rubbed away—How Green Was My Valley burbling on in the background—the Professor fell asleep, her still-damp head ultimately resting, somewhat puppyishly, on Alice’s shoulder.

  It was a shattering display of power. The first but not the last. A blatant riposte to my own wimp’s gambit—that of thinking I could play hard to get for a few hours. Not that the Professor ever lost sight of her immediate end: when the movie was over and Alice went upstairs to make up the beds in the guestrooms—yes, there were two rooms, side by side—the Professor finally looked at me full-on: archly, inquiringly, almost cruelly. I felt crumply and ill with love, messed up in the head, and again, couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Burning physical attraction coming over me then—I wanted to look at her all night, her hair, her face, her arms when she rolled up her blue jacket sleeves. Her Beloit T-shirt. Oh Christ. Inarticulate shapes, dancing shapes. Too much….

  It is now a question of will—if I can will myself to remain integral to myself, whole, serene. Yet my soul is half out of my body and this is scaring me sick.

  We went up to our rooms with Alice and Tom; everyone uttered a cheery good-night. All went quiet and then…nothing happened. Nothing at all. Unable to sleep I listened for what seemed like hours for any muffled sounds that might come from the other side of the wall. Watchman, what of the night, and all that. I lay there like a bewildered Thisbe—avid, on tenterhooks, wondering what Pyramus was up to—but had no way to make a spy-hole. It was both wonderful and the purest agony.

  The next day I tried to put the previous night’s disquiet out of my mind and to some degree succeeded: though she’d said and done some odd things, the Professor’s amorous juggernaut was no doubt unlikely to end any time soon. (The goblin men not here yet—my diary entry from that day somewhat eerily began.) At breakfast with Alice and Tom, there had been the usual furtive eyeballing, followed by some awkward but unmistakable semiflirtation at the sink when the Professor and I washed the dishes. Now, it’s true I devolved into uneasiness later that day once I was home and she didn’t call me. And when the silence continued overnight and into the next morning, I started to panic. Before, she’d been ringing me at least twice a day. I put the silence down at first to her busy schedule: the winter term was now approaching its chaotic end. I myself was writing several papers. Or trying to. I couldn’t concentrate on them. Finally I broke down and called her.

  She picked up the phone immediately, as if she’d been sitting just inches away from it, and said in stiff formal tones that she was delighted to hear from me. We chatted amiably about nothing in particular. After a while, unprompted, she suddenly began to explain in some detail why, on the movie night—unmentioned by either of us till now—she had asked Alice for a neck massage. The episode meant nothing, she said; they always did that, gave each other massages after tennis, etc., etc. She sounded peeved, as if I had been complaining about it. Which I hadn’t been. Indeed, the Professor seemed to go off into a little phone-tunnel—a conversational wormhole, so to speak: some private world of Irritation-with-Alice, of whom she now spoke—with unexpected bitterness and sarcasm—as a bit of a prude. I was perplexed. But don’t you think she and Tom are nice? I cheeped uncertainly. Yeah, Alice and Tom were okay, she sighed, as if now bored by the whole business; but they were sometimes dull. Kinda uptight. There was a whole lot of stuff they just didn’t get. Never would. You couldn’t expect them to. The point of this untoward critique wasn’t exactly clear, but no problem. I was desperate to hear the Professor’s voice. It didn’t really matter what she said.

  And yes, the following night at my apartment, we finally Made It Into Bed—literally, into the skanky old box-spring that had come as part of my “furnished suite.” Everything began as it had on the corned beef evening: with music and drinking and lollygagging on the floor, gossiping about people we knew at the university. Then it was on to smirky looks, awkward pauses, slightly hysterical guffaws, arm-wrestling that went a bit too far, my very own private back rub, and before I knew it, the Professor had dragged me down the little hall to the bedroom, the nearest available Bower of Bliss, and was already stripping down to a pair of unusually voluminous and highwaisted white cotton underpants. (More like bloomers—the pedant in me couldn’t help observing—something Dame Ethel Smyth might have worn.) I struggled and flopped into the bed, like a baby walrus trying to get on a rock. I was being battered every which way by big waves. So tell me, friends: why do storytellers use the phrase “before I knew it”? In my experience you only use that phrase when in fact you did know it. It’s like signing cordially at the end of a note: that’s the word you employ when you hate the person’s guts.

  No real memory of the sex—zero, I’m afraid—only of the Professor saying, once we’d gotten underway, I feel a bit overdressed, just like when the pilot comes on after take-off to announce you’ve reached your cruising altitude and what the weather is like where you’re going. You’re free to get up and walk around the cabin. Prompt service from the underlings in response: drink carts rolled out from the galley; all remaining underpants off. And later: the braid at last being ceremonially unfurled and brushed out for sleep. Oh, and that through everything the Professor kept her watch on—a big macho affair, like a scuba diver’s, with a host of luminescent dials. It sometimes rubbed against one’s skin abrasively, though whether by accident or some libidinous design on the part of the Professor, it wasn’t clear. Her grip was fierce and strong. I don’t think I slept much afterward—after a certain point, the whole night seemed to get permanently stuck around 4:00 a.m. Nor could I tell if the Professor slept, or only pretended to sleep. I didn’t know her, after all. My eyes felt dried out and sandpapery from the close and incessant heat; the ancient radiator in my bedroom had never, through all our rough sport, stopped its tedious clunking and clinking. Otherwise, the apartment seemed dead—indifferent to what was going on, and to me, its latest inhabitant.

  And now for the faster-than-a-speeding-bullet part. After (what shall I call it?) this first consummation, events unfolded with such brain-compressing rapidity, such neutrino-busting force, that even now I find myself astonished by the violence of it all. The Professor set the timetable, went in, did some quick, economical bludgeoning, went out. So efficient and merciless her powers of execution one never saw it coming. But who indeed could have foreseen it? Not the stunned-ox bludgeonee. Yet
there the proof is on the page: a few claustral weeks of implosion and despair—all logged and dated, in however shaky a hand—by the desolate diarist of thirty years ago. One felt positively guillotined by the end of it. If only the guys remodeling one’s kitchen could work with such head-removing alacrity.

  To give the short form: the Professor went off on what can only be called—pardon the just-invented vulgarism—a fuck-fugue. Within three weeks of seducing me, the Professor had seduced yet another juicy young maiden: Professor Hooley’s eighteen-year-old daughter, of course—the hunky volleyball player. Wudda surprize! (Her name turned out to be Molly.) And three weeks after that, the P. seduced yet another young ’un—a tall, blonde, lanky, somewhat dimwitted twenty-year-old named Tina, likewise an undergrad in English. (Hey, no fair! She’s never even been mentioned before!) I was the Methuselah now at twenty-two: at least I could lord it over everybody that I was a first-year graduate student. But none of it mattered in the end. The Hindenburg caught fire anyway and the gig was up—my part at least—almost as quickly as it had begun. If you managed to jump clear—or even if you were pushed—you just had to run like hell, though shattered in every part of you you might be.