by Terry Castle
And not so very hard to perceive now: that when the Professor spoke of children—born or unborn—she was also talking about herself. The children who should not have been born had been victims of a catastrophic failure of mothering. They had gone unprotected into the night, had been starved and clubbed and frightened to death, had been helpless in the face of adult cruelty and betrayal. Not the fault of anyone’s real mother, of course, but the effect was the same as if it had been. One intuited as much: that the Professor likewise felt unmothered—implacably so, in fact—and that her Jewishness, not to mention her homosexuality, were bound up with this intractable sensation of neglect. The terrible imperative to self-destruction she claimed to have faced down in analysis in her twenties had no doubt arisen from some deep wound of this sort—some conviction, indeed, that she herself should not have been born. To put herself to death would have been to put things right.
Yet the child who hadn’t been born—Kid-Zero, in other words, the kid the Professor herself might have had—was also a kind of self-projection. Had she had this child, the fantasy seemed to go, she would have mothered it almost to death—loved it and cared for it with a devotion at once totalizing, sumptuous, and unconditional. She would have cherished it in precisely the way that she herself had not been—which is to say, for eternity. After all, someone needed to damn well repair things. Do some fucking good in the world. The damage everywhere was ghastly and gross. She had to make it up to someone—to the poor little baby, to herself. And because of her disability she had to be especially heroic. Yes, there was a risk in such love that one might smother or be smothered, but wasn’t that preferable to being tortured and starved in a cellar or thrown into some frozen pit to die?
Such wishfulness and dread combined to produce in her an urge to treat me—whom she often seemed to perceive as a sort of youthful alter ego—with a crazy-making mixture of compassion and contempt. The Professor held a deep belief, among other things, that I had “seen” something utterly monstrous—experienced some kind of Freudian primal scene—before I could ever speak. This scarifying infant vision, made immeasurably worse by the fact that in my wordless state I had not been able to signal my distress, had left me, she declared, emotionally crippled. She was sorry for me on that count. At certain times I became caressable for just that reason. Pathetic but charming. In need of her sexual services. And I believed her—believed the whole tyrannical crackpot story of my infantile past. I was almost proud to have been traumatized thus; the mystery and melodrama seemed to make me more like her. And doubtless this Primal Scene, once rediscovered, would explain my weird personality—my stupid silences, for example, when the Professor snapped at me on the phone and I became mortified or speechless in reply. On some level I was remembering IT.
Swept up in this disastrous fiction, I would strain to recall precisely what it was I could have seen—as if I could summon it up, say, like the color of my first baby blanket, through an act of pure mentation. Other questions, too, required cogitation. Were certain later moments of childhood uncanniness—the ones that I could remember—some sort of hysterical repetition of the original terror? Like the time I opened up the linen closet—pre-parental divorce—and saw that our pretty Siamese cat had given birth in a pile of towels to a mewling and bloody little heap of kittens? I’d jumped back at once, breathless with shock. A few days later my father put all the kittens in a pillowcase and drowned them in a bucket of water in the garage.
Perhaps I should have seen that being cast thus—as messed-up Junior Sad Sack in the Professor’s gloomy mental pageant—hardly boded well for our relationship. Perhaps I should have noticed that it was the very quality for which she had praised me when we met and which was supposedly to link us forever—my putative familiarity with despair—that made the whole business untenable. For as soon as Molly and Tina appeared on the scene, my expressions of pain—muted and impaired though they were—seemed only to intensify the Professor’s scorn and condescension. Oh, so I was feeling abandoned, was I? Just because she was now sleeping with two other young women in addition to myself? I had obviously failed to understand something really basic. My unconscious was the problem. I was a hysteric. I needed an analysis like hers—and fast. Maybe after, say, some eight or nine years of intense introspection I might then evolve into a viable girlfriend—someone with whom she might like, indeed, to be associated. The Professor felt more and more obliged to harangue me on this last subject, as if I’d broken into her house and left a pile of dirty laundry in the middle of the living room. You had to realize, she often lectured me, that nobody else was going to clothe and feed you. You had to do it yourself. Lift up your little baby arms. Grab that baby cup and bring it to your mouth. Indeed, you couldn’t trust anyone to do it but yourself. I needed to learn this lesson soon, she’d decided: I was so immature in many ways. Whiney, too. I battened on such insults and implored her forgiveness.
Our erotic relations quickly came to mimic the lopsided dynamic the Professor had delineated—became, indeed, a sort of cartoon version of it. In the beginning, that is, when we barely knew one another, our couplings had been almost comically egalitarian: a matter of untutored yet reciprocal lust. Though both of us, as I’ve noted, were inflamed by the teacher-student divide—the de-haut-en-bas titillation of it all—the initial flood of relief and release gave a deceptively utopian cast to our activities in the moment. Nobody was boss. On the contrary, we were zany sidekicks in some sweaty Sapphic comedy: a sort of lesbian Some Like It Hot. We shared marquee billing: our names both up in lights, but neither twinkling more brightly than the other.
But soon enough an asymmetry became discernible. The larkish, happy-go-lucky element started to wear off. From several elliptical asides in my journal I surmise now that from fairly early in our romance the Professor had trouble achieving a climax, but I don’t remember what the issue was or if indeed it ever went away. I’m guessing not: I have no memory of being particularly adroit or funky in those days. I was still embarrassingly inexperienced. The Professor in turn was wont to dismiss any experimental forays on my part with chilling abruptness. Naw, honey, I don’t need that. I became ever more spooked and passive as a result—the fuckee more often than not, though never (more fool I) less than responsive. As a bedmate I remained lively and excitable to the bitter end. Imagine, if you will, a fancy banquet table set for thirty—grandly appointed, heavily laden with floral arrangements, silver candlesticks, fine dishes and glassware and cutlery of every description. One was oneself set in just such a fashion: eager, if not desperate, for some darling mischief maker to come along, grab a corner of the tablecloth, and yank the whole arrangement onto the floor with carnivalesque flair. Quite the mad clatter. According to the Professor I was a refreshing change, in particular after the West Coast girlfriend, who, while apparently lovely in all other respects, had been entirely dead to her touch.
In turn the Professor became ever more butch and seignorial. She could be rough, even savage, when she was about it, a true ravisher of innocent maidens, though here, admittedly, one’s rather pitted and pockmarked memories come partly mediated by a vivid conversation that took place a while later. A year or so after my debacle, an acquaintance of mine, knowing my sad history, brought a friend of hers round to see me one day: a married Ph.D. student in her thirties from Anthropology. The latter had likewise been seduced by the Professor—likewise summarily dumped—and wished to revile the P. with some other local Ancient Marineress who might lend a sympathetic ear. The Married Lady was a hard, glozing, stupid sort of woman—definitely Jenny Petherbridge from Nightwood—and I remember not liking her much. Nor did I particularly resonate to her somewhat repetitious invective on the subject of our mutual tormentor. I listened politely, however, as the woman unfolded what was to me an all too familiar tale of woe.
Admittedly, I took ascetic (and uncharitable) satisfaction in realizing that Tweedledum (Tina), of whom I had once been so pathetically jealous, had now suffered her own erotic humili
ation. In sleeping with this bitchy gal—and God knows whom else—the piratical P. was apparently treating Tina as shabbily as she had me. It was all so pleasingly ironic. Back when the three of us—Molly, Tina, and I—had all been vying for the Professor’s attentions, it was the tall blonde Tina who seemed to have won the sexual jackpot hands down. The Last One Standing. (Or, as the case may be, the Last One Lying Supine.) As a reward, the Professor had invited Tina to move in with her almost as soon as the victory was decided. There, at the Professor’s house, Tina resided for several years—the rest of her undergraduate career, I guess—serving as lover, protégée, chauffeur, dogsbody, mysterious kept creature. (One recognized the P.’s fell hand at work in Tina’s subsequent listing in the English Department directory: for “local address,” the poor thing now had only a discreet P.O. box and no phone number.) The relationship later ended badly—with Tina, now in graduate school in another state and in debt to the Professor for a considerable sum, having to endure her former chatelaine’s long-distance harassment. For in order to reclaim her money, the Professor had set a detective on Tina’s trail and in the end succeeded in driving her into bankruptcy. I know about all this stuff—even the detective and bankruptcy part—because I heard about it a decade or so later from the Professor herself. The last time I ever saw her, the Professor was boasting about the episode with crazy pride, as if it were a sign of her business acumen, or indeed something to feel warm and fuzzy about.
Beyond the Tina update, however, little in the Married Lady’s kvetching diverted me. Yet seared into my brain forever is one of her parting utterances: a cool assessment—delivered with ghoulish panache as she and my friend were about to leave—of the Professor in the sack.
I’ve been fucked by lots of guys, but no guy ever fucked me like SHE did.
Blunt to be sure, and perhaps a teeny bit on the coarse side? You might not want to get it printed on a T-shirt, let alone have it embroidered it on a sofa pillow. But it was true nonetheless. One bore the Professorial stigmata, if only brainular, for years.
And, as I have to remind myself: my surrender, again, was total. There was always an element of truth, confusingly enough, in the mean things the Professor said about me. (Possibly at times a great deal.) I had received my Orders From On High, so like an obedient aide-de-camp I immediately regressed in the way the brutal logic of our relationship seemed to demand. I became ever more infantile. Sexually speaking, I devolved into an overgrown erotic baby: hungry, enfeebled, emotionally incontinent—a gaping maw of need. My need for soothing became vast, blithery, peckish. It was as if I suffered from some sort of existential colic. And so it is, perhaps, that whenever I try to calibrate now the pleasure to be taken in the Professor’s lovemaking, I find myself fixing, not on any putative fireworks moments—they seem to have vanished from recall as if they never happened at all—but on the primitive feeling of quiescence she could produce in every part of me: the voluptuous sensation of being lulled, cosseted, calmly supported—at rest, so to speak, on a soft and buoyant cushion of water. For all her brusqueness, the Professor could induce this state in me with ease—a sort of floaty, cataleptic feeling. Amniotic, one might say. Thirty years later I can still summon up various dreamy visual cues I associate with the feeling: the pale, pale blue walls of her bedroom; the Midwestern winter morning sunlight streaming in at the window; bright silvery droplets of water forming and falling from the icicles outside; the soft, lofting white cotton sheets (like those in a wonderful hotel) on her bed. The sensation was delectable—warmth and comfort of the most disabling kind imaginable—and nearly killed me when it was taken away.
Just so: one got very close to the heart of things with the Professor. Yet such self-abandon came at a fearsome cost: for in delivering oneself up thus, one had to let oneself go limp in an almost metaphysical sense. Give up all one’s skittery will to power. Go loose and floppy and half-dead. Become a flatliner. A rag doll. A rag doll, moreover, suddenly susceptible to hitherto unknown (or at least unrecognized) sources of panic. Preeminent among them: the realization that the bliss one felt was terminable and insuperably linked to the whim of another, seemingly stronger person. One’s tutor in ecstasy—the Teacher of One’s Dreams—might gather up her notes and papers and depart at any time.
Grief was the tariff one would then have to pay (one half-knew it from the start), and sooner rather than later. The more time the Professor and I spent together after our affair began, the more things seemed “off” between us. Awkward. Bilious. Out of whack. Unpleasant. Anna with her now-dyspeptic Vronsky on the Riviera. And through it all, even as I struggled to disguise it, I was becoming increasingly overwrought—soon to become toweringly so. I worried incessantly (more every day it seemed) about the inexplicable turn the affair with the Professor was taking; and about my ongoing schoolwork, which now stared me in the face. Careening lust had for a while tamped down the obsessive-compulsive seventh-grader in me, but had not by any means expelled the baleful junior daemon from my psyche. The rat-faced little monster was starting to make itself known again. Now not only had spring quarter classes begun, I also needed to start cramming, I’d decided, for my prelims at the end of the summer, the big, bad, banal qualifying exam one had to pass to go on to one’s main Ph.D. work. Yet I couldn’t fix my scrambled brains on anything. I was losing my self-discipline, I feared, my sense of purpose—my intellectual grip.
I uttered these apprehensions aloud once or twice. The Professor did not like such tedious fretting one bit and expressed herself on the subject with cutting asperity. So I struggled thenceforth to appear wry and carefree. Yet I couldn’t ignore it: I was sleeping poorly and becoming more and more uneasy. Making everything worse (one’s Primal Scene notwithstanding) the inner turmoil felt terrifyingly unmotivated to me. I chastised myself over the senselessness of it. I had found my Great Love. She was beautiful and wonderful. We were even fucking. I was having regular moments of ecstasy. The Problem of Homosexuality had been solved—Forever. A fantastic new world had opened up. But all I could do was worry about getting through the next book of The Faerie Queene. Our sexual relationship was not yet a month old. Why was I so jittery? Why so stupidly agitated?
As difficulties multiplied, the Professor and I took refuge in joint intoxication—which only made the anxiety worse. The Professor usually required a Scotch or two in the evening and though never before or since a drinker of hard liquor, I joined in. We slurped whiskey, often assiduously, out of big paper cups in bed. We would frequently top everything off with great cool sucking hits off the Professor’s large blue bong—now permanently stationed, along with her gun, on the bedside table next to her pillow. She often needed a lungful or two of pot to get to sleep. So potent and stunning this homegrown marijuana, even the most lascivious bedtime episodes were liable to end quickly, with one or both of us sinking first into sot-like inebriation, followed by a drooling and fitful slumber.
To one degree or another in fact we were stoned for the whole duration of our affair. No wonder that struggling through Spenser’s Faerie Queene was proving difficult: I was blotto upside the head. I still have my old paperback copy of Spenser’s poem and just looking at it—the pages and pages of bewildering verse in tiny print, the demented little crib notes I’ve scribbled in the margins—can induce in me a sort of mental seasickness. After enough angst and pot and lack of sleep the poet’s romance-world—so dense with weird archaisms and arcane symbols, bizarre characters, confusing plots and subplots—seemed more and more to allegorize the scary mental maze in which I found myself. The traces of my anguish are still to be seen. Like a doomed swain—or else some crushed-out girl in high school—I have inscribed the Professor’s initials, I find, next to certain especially excruciating passages. (“As when a Beare hath seiz’d her cruell clawes/Vppon the carkasse of some beast too weake,/Proudly stands ouer…. ) And at the end of one of Spenser’s more gloomy and sententious stanzas—
The ioyes of loue, if they should euer last,
; Without affliction or disquietnesse,
That worldly chaunces doe amongst them cast,
Would be on earth too great a blessednesse,
Liker to heauen, then mortall wretchednesse.
Therefore the winged God, to let men weet,
That here on earth is no sure happinesse,
A thousand sowres hath tempred with one sweet,
To make it seeme more deare and dainty, as is meet.
—I have written how true in a microscopic hand and underlined the last two lines.
When the fatal unwinding began I was therefore fuddled enough. The mental chaos would only get worse. Within two or three weeks of our first tryst, my panic level abruptly sky-rocketed: the Professor began hanging out with Molly Hooley. She was taking Molly under her wing, the P. explained, because M. had sought her advice about a personal problem. Scads of troubled eighteen-year-olds, the Professor boasted, were wont to solicit her aid in this fashion: compared with other adults, she was “cool,” they seemed to believe—someone who could be trusted. Molly’s father, Professor Hooley—Mr. Jolly Friar from the Canterbury Tales—was evidently the problem under discussion: he’d been making cruel jokes about Molly’s appearance at the family dinner table and had reportedly accused her in front of everyone of looking like a dyke. However unfeeling this paternal jest, no doubt there was some truth in it: Molly was wide-bodied and husky—had a sort of strapping, third-baseman’s build—and did nothing by way of clothing or makeup to obviate that fact. Nonetheless she was blue and upset: the Professor was very concerned. To cheer her up, the Professor had carried her off a couple of times to play racquetball with her; afterwards they’d gone out for beers and shot the shit. The Professor would roll in on the late side after these charitable ministrations, full of boisterous chatter and lady-jock aperçus. It was obvious, she told me with a delighted grin, that Molly had a monster crush on her. But again I shouldn’t worry: that girl still has her baby fat! She was just a mixed-up kid. A big galoot. Could you believe it? She’s even a goddamned virgin! I’m helping her.