The Professor and Other Writings

by Terry Castle

  Okay, okay—I get ahead of myself. How exactly did one get from Point A to Point B? Rewind, please, and go slowly. Well, all right—though I should confess I never really got much further than A-Point-One, or even worse, only A-Point-Zero-One. Nor did I know the half of it. Nonetheless, like the Rat Man or Anna O., I shall do my best to narrate my undoing.

  In its exalted opening phase—and notwithstanding some of the enigmas of our first night together—my new intimacy with the Professor brought me instantly and perilously close to ecstasy. Which is to say, before the great airship caught fire, life aboard the Hindenburg seemed nothing less than unrivaled bliss—a brief euphoric succession of love-drenched days and nights, during which one floated, high above the world, on golden and pillowy clouds—exultant, ravished, lighter than the air itself. For a week or two at least one could persuade oneself that life had nothing more exquisite to offer. Every desire was gratified; endless new vistas were to be enjoyed. One was slung there, after all—really, quite wondrously suspended—from the belly of the colossal mother ship, in every sense dependent. It was heaven trying to absorb it all—the sublime views and splendid accommodations, the throbbing hum of the engines, the barman in his white jacket smiling and mixing cocktails every evening in the Grand Salon.

  Undeniable: that some considerable portion of the intoxication arose simply from the need for total secrecy, the doubly, triply, quadruply, clandestine nature of the thing. For the Professor made it clear both by her words and by the speed with which she had cleared out that first morning we woke up together—the braid had gotten whipped back together in about five seconds flat—that there was to be no announcing to the world of anything, ever. Since I had no friends, really, apart from Elsbet and (sort of) Alice, the directive to remain silent seemed easy enough to comply with. I took to the practice of covert action as if I had been born to it—and come to think of it, perhaps I had. Two decades later, when my stepfather Turk was dying in a nursing home in El Cajon and pretty far gone in his dementia, he said to me one day, amid a babble of otherwise crazy loon-talk, You ran away so many times, they gave you a medal.

  The Professor and I graduated soon enough from meeting at my shabby little flat to having sex at her house: I would take the bus across town and stay over. But there were now various security protocols to be followed. Yes, on those weekdays when we both had to go in to school for classes, the Professor drove us. But she was jumpy during these morning-after commutes: preoccupied, even a bit nervy. No one was ever to see us, so she would hurriedly deposit me by the side of the road a quarter-mile or so away from the English department. My woolly winter hat pulled anonymously down over my brows, I had to tumble out pronto, like an army parachutist, then scramble up and over the dirty curbside piles of rotting snow, while the Professor sped away without a glance back.

  This undignified ejection didn’t bother me especially: the vulgar truth be told, I relished the sheer outlawry of it all. I got at once into the mad spirit of the thing. I was enough of a bandit (as she was) to enjoy épater-ing some notional unseen bourgeoisie. The Closet, all of a sudden, turned out to be fantastically exciting—far more so in fact than Destroying the Patriarchy or even Performing the Fruit Ritual. We reveled in cocking a snook at all the dull old straight people: the other professors, one’s tedious fellow students, the presumably respectable citizens of the Upper Midwest. (And even some of the dull old gay people too: poor Jo!) It was ours alone—a secret at once thrilling and obscene. Life was delicious. It was sick and it was fun. And it has to be said, for all its banality the illicit nature of our connection was also the most potent aphrodisiac I had ever experienced. It sent my physical desire for her—and hers for me, at least at the start—through the roof. We couldn’t even stop to chat when we met up those first days; we just had to do it. The Professor must care for me greatly, I concluded—as much as I did for her in fact—to risk so much, to play so close to the edge.

  I’ve often wondered why this deception felt so gratifying—for indeed I took a strange, rapt sort of pride in it. The breaching of the teacher-student barrier, coupled with the homosexuality, was obviously a flagrant offence against the System—a sort of double whammy, in fact. We’d smashed two taboos at once. As a Southern friend of mine would say, it was like getting the cash and the credit, too.

  Thirty years on, in a different world, I remain ambivalent about this aspect of our transgression—what you might call its conjoined, two-headed nature. Worth remembering: the Professor and I violated no laws or codes or University policies; the concept of sexual harassment remained embryonic in academia in those days, laughably unworked-through. Academic culture was mostly unreconstructed—like Sodom and Gomorrah before the pelting rain of fire. Today, of course, official antiharassment policies exist at virtually all American colleges and universities (including my own) and various kinds of professor-student intimacy are now expressly forbidden. Everyone knows instructors who’ve been disciplined, about whom complaints have been lodged, questions raised, lawsuits filed. Many of the longtime abusers have been punished. All to the good, people seem to agree: about time, too. And of course one finds oneself chiming in: Yeah! Huzzah! I’m down with that. The power disparity is always so great, after all. As assuredly it is. Damaged men and women can (and do) exploit their authority over others in abominable ways—for wicked, selfish, self-deluding ends. Evil Never Sleeps and It’s Working for Management.

  Yet at the same time some mad little antic part of me still wants to rebel (if only rhetorically) against the wholesome official template. I don’t rebel in actuality, of course, but every once in a while I do have the odd impeachable thought or two. This urge persists in spite of (because of?) the fact that my own experience might appear to provide irrefutable evidence of the painful folly of teacher-student love affairs. Indeed, it has to be said: however local and abbreviated and misleading, I have never forgotten, in some long-submerged baby-Sapphist part of me, the sheer euphoria—the release, relief, and vaulting transport—I experienced with the Professor. There was a huge kick in it all. Especially after the confusing love-episodes of my undergraduate years—Phoebe, Karen—the Professor’s lust was a kind of instant education. Another woman besides me craved sex with women. A beautiful and distinguished woman, no less. A grown-up woman. An older woman. A noble woman—almost chivalric—with silver-grey hair. For a single iridescent moment, the affirmation of same-sex love seemed to outshine the glaring inequalities of age, money, authority, power, prestige.

  In wishful (or maybe just intransigent) moods I sometimes find myself wondering if the same-sex element doesn’t ameliorate the teacher-student situation in some degree—make the damnable slightly less damnable. For when you get right down to it, doesn’t just about every interesting and (dare one say?) intelligent older lesbian have lurking in her misspent youth some erotically charged relationship with a female teacher? The woman in question wasn’t always literally a teacher, of course: sometimes she merely occupied an analogous position of authority—i.e., was an athletic coach, camp counselor, kindly nun, or the like. She is often recollected, nostalgically, as the First Love. One woman I know was initiated into Sapphism by her high school tennis coach; another by the married Sunday School teacher at her church—there in the empty rec room, amid the little kids’ chairs and pictures of Jesus. Another young lady well known to me but who shall remain nameless had a wild affair in her teens with her English teacher at a famous prep school. (They would meet late at night in a deserted Wendy’s parking lot for urgent trysts in the teacher’s car.) That homosexual men of a certain age can tell similar stories I don’t doubt; a comical pal of mine was deflowered by his high school French teacher and to this day recalls the event (and the teacher) with great fondness. ’ello, mon cheri. Deed you zhee me weenking at you? Zut, alors.

  Hard not to feel, if you’re gay, the hot, old-timey romance in some of these tales. But it’s also arguable, I’ve come to think, that whenever same-sex love is illegal, unmentionable,
or outright taboo—exists only under the Sign of the Closet, so to speak—teacher-student eros can serve a socializing, even genealogical, function across the generations. Think of Claudine at School, Mädchen in Uniform, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, or indeed any number of turgid lesbian school novels in which an adolescent heroine becomes infatuated with a charismatic pédagogue. (There’s even a super-hot depiction of such a liaison, of all places, in D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow.) It’s part of the life, part of one’s own little heritage. And for better or worse, the Affair with the Teacher still stands as an archetypal rite of passage into the Sapphic world. Shouldn’t the role such relationships have played in individual lives be acknowledged and their functions explored? Maybe there could be a museum or even a theme park.

  Hard to ignore, of course: the age-old charge that homosexual teachers are predators, eager to “recruit” students and by their devilish lessons convert them to sex deviance. It’s one of the oldest antigay canards on the books. The irony here is that the homophobes get things partly right: the teacher-pupil relationship can be a powerfully erotic one. The Greeks knew all about it; witness Socrates and Co. Or even more to the point, the great Sappho herself. One of the surviving legends about the poet holds that she ran a sort of female academy on Lesbos and that the various lovers mentioned in her poems (Atthis, Anactoria, Gyrinna) were her favorite students: teacher’s pets in thongs and chitons.

  Which isn’t necessarily to say that same-sex love can be taught—even were there such a thing as a University of Sappho at Lesbos. (Otherwise known as USL: transfer students accepted.) In my own experience the desire preceded any curriculum. The lesbian pedagogue may crystallize or refine what is there, of course, but under the Sign of the Closet her most useful function may be simply to externalize the desire: to demonstrate to the junior partner that homoerotic fantasies can in fact be realized, given weight and heft and carnal life in an otherwise inhospitable grown-up world. She offers a kind of adult recognition and endorsement: a fleshly validation across time zones. If the teacher is a benign, unscrewed-up sort of person (a big If, I know) she can offer a sense of lineage and belonging. Even as she intimates the emotional viability of a life thus lived, the teacher is often the first to confer on homosexuality both a historic dimension and epistemological gravitas.

  Or at least that’s one (exceedingly) rosy way of looking at it. Maybe far too rosy. Icky-rosy. Pukey-rosy. I may be utterly mistaken. Maybe I’m a blithering idiot. An irresponsible fantasist. Maybe the theme park should be a jail after all. Maybe, indeed, I am eager to place the whole business in such a sanguine light precisely because my own surrender to the Professor was so complete, so abject, and so devastating.

  For surrender it was. I was happy to be dominated, to defer to her majesty. Given the differences between us, I reflexively assumed the Professor to be the wiser, the more sophisticated, of the two of us. She was prominent in her field, after all, admired by colleagues and students, and had achieved precisely the kind of success I longed for. (One of her favorite boasts had to do with having attained the rank of full professor at the relatively precocious age of thirty-five. I later became obsessed with outdoing her in this respect.) She was an expert, an eminence, a sort of lady-comet, flashing across the heavens. She zipped round the country giving lectures and performances; had her own letterhead and business cards; toted a briefcase, glossy and magnificent, around with her—no doubt full of important stuff. Yet one’s deference, to say the least, was ill-advised. The Professor had problems of her own, it would turn out—manifest above all in a steely, seemingly insatiable appetite for emotional control. Combined with my own equally insatiable desire—to be taken care of—the result was near-instant psychic mayhem. The Professor became cruel; I succumbed to a kind of Sapphic Stockholm syndrome. One joined the cult of Dear Leader. Easy enough to let myself be washed away by the sheer disorderly force of her personality.

  In my impaired state it became a positive pleasure—an honor—to yield to the Professor’s paranoia. (I didn’t understand the paranoia as such.) In addition to the make-yourself-scarce protocol now in place when she drove us into school, there were numerous other imperatives to absorb. They kicked in immediately. Some of these took the form of odd prohibitions and constraints—a sort of behavioral hobbling. Several involved the Professor’s house. The place was as delightful as I remembered it on Christmas Eve (why couldn’t it be mine?). The marijuana plants still flourished. The Oriental rugs still lay about in elegant profusion. The Bose speakers stood ready to serve. In the kitchen the refrigerator was big and white and gleaming and now I was allowed to look inside it and even take things out. I loved it all. But the Professor also had some stipulations. Among the most draconian: that I never set foot—literally never set foot—in one room in the house, the one directly across from her bedroom. Here she kept various notes and files and tapes that had to do with her linguistic researches. These files were Top Secret: her duty to her sources and informants—all those aged speakers of Smoky Mountain Speech, Gullah, and the like—demanded the most rigorous confidentiality. Plus, there were sinister people everywhere who would be very eager to see into those files. She had to watch her back.

  Why she thought I would be interested in these strange but tedious-sounding memoranda was never clear. When it came to the audio files, I would have had no clue, moreover, how to work the elaborate reel-to-reel tape equipment piled up everywhere like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Still, for me it was ’Nuff said, ma’am. As instructed, I never did go in there, though I easily might have. In the first flush of passion the Professor had given me a key to her house and so for the month or so we slept together I often found myself hanging around the place on my own—rather like a concubine in a seraglio, waiting for the Professor to come back from wherever. (The Professor sometimes required me to do housework during these solitary vigils: I remember dragging a huge and unwieldy old canister vacuum around one afternoon and even did the stairs, laboriously, with a highly aggravating little sucker attachment.) About the only good thing to be said about this ultradocility, or indeed my brief spell of huswifery, is that, yes, the figure of Bluebeard did cross my mind. Later, bless him, he would become, if only allegorically, one of one’s psychic liberators.

  My compliance with other taboos was likewise absolute. One night (I’d come over a few hours earlier), the Professor went out to a play with Peggy, her current T.A.—a crusty, overweight hippy lady who posed no romantic threat to me, I figured, and with whom, in fact, I later became friends. The Professor had planned it out: Peggy might want to come in afterwards for a drink, she told me, so if I heard them entering together, I was to remain sequestered in the bedroom upstairs and not make a sound. No creaking the floorboards or odd little thuds. Peggy did come in, as it happened, and so for more than an hour, even as peals of bibulous laughter wafted up from below, I hid out, Anne Frank–style—afraid to make the bedsprings creak, hardly daring to turn the pages of the book I was reading for fear of causing some stray little riffling noise. The situation brought to mind what one always heard about EST seminars: that hours passed but you weren’t allowed to go to the bathroom. When the door slammed and she finally came up, the Professor was chortling heartily—she’d really pulled the wool over Peggy’s eyes. Peggy, she announced, had always had a big crush on her. It was sad but also touching. The P. was churned up and a bit drunk and wanted to have sex right away.

  The Professor reveled in knowing the score when other people didn’t. Other people often included me. Granted, almost as soon as we became lovers, she dispensed a modicum of uncensored information—often melodramatic—about her own parti-colored past: college loves, this girlfriend and that one, the T.A. girl on the West Coast, a lady in Puerto Rico, even a plumpish young assistant professor from another department, putatively straight, with whom she’d had—only a year or two before, it seemed—a tumultuous affair. This other woman was a hysteric, I learned; a real sicko. The Professor had once had to
fire off a warning shot in bed—the loaded pistol was kept in the bedside drawer—to keep said lady in line. (That the Professor was as magnificent a shot as Wyatt Earp I had no doubt: with great pride she once showed me a weird warped quarter that she had supposedly dinged mid-flight when somebody had thrown it up in the air.) Whenever the Professor now saw this Detestable Former Love at faculty convocations or the like, she felt panicky and enraged and had to take a tranquillizer.

  But there were many other things I wasn’t to know and I was made to know I wasn’t to know. Oh, yes, said the Professor, of course she slept with men as well as women; having taken me in her arms, she frequently hinted she was even then simultaneously romancing some agreeable stud or other. (Who no doubt favored women with long silver braids and missing pieces.) She did what lesbians did, but she refused to be called one. I was not to ask questions, especially when I didn’t hear from her for a day or two. Regarding this purported taste in men I knew nothing, save a little tidbit of 411 that she dropped one evening while we lay in bed, drunk and already bickery, in front of the TV. The Bionic Man (a pumped-up Lee Majors)—just then bending some pieces of rebar onscreen in front of us—was, she allowed, exactly the sort of guy she liked. You know, athletic—a good physique. Bionic in fact. The comment—I daresay—expressed one of the very few forward-looking aspects of her sensibility: she was straight; she was gay; she was cyborg-friendly too.

  Unnamed women everywhere were in love with her—especially straight ones. They were all over the country, apparently: professors, students, media people, folksingers, sportswomen of various sorts. Some of her exasperation with Alice, it turned out, was due to her belief that Alice harbored repressed homosexual feelings for her but was too stiff and dumb and straitlaced to realize it. When I was younger I could have really gotten messed up over her…. But luckily, there were women enough with yearnings similar to one’s own who were prepared to act on them: that made up for it. The well would never run dry. She’d let me know, in good time, the Professor chuckled, if I ever had anything to worry about. But, of course, I never would. She was crazy about me; we’d be together for a very long time. Probably forever.