by Terry Castle
I don’t care if you fail out of school.
Yet at other times, perfectly counterweighting the reproaches—in fact deftly inserted at precisely those points in the situation at which one seemed about to recover one’s long-submerged critical faculties—were the psycho-bonbons, the mental milkshakes, the sweet promises of futurity. Bluebeard wasn’t Bluebeard, after all; I had my adorable Beast back again. Thus even after Tina appeared, inducing more inward torment in me than I had thought it possible for a single human being (me) to bear, there were just enough of these Beast-moments to keep me entranced, if also racked with uncertainty:
[The Professor] just called up—said she was drunk, then said, “I just wanted to say that if you want me you can have me, because I think you’re the only one who really understands what is going on with this affair.”
She called me before dinner tonight. It was okay. She wanted to know if I thought she was a “together” person. I didn’t really know what to say. Then said yes of course. She also said you know I’m not cruel don’t you. Again, me nonplussed, but I said yes.
[The Professor] running out of her office today to buttonhole me. “I guess I’d better tell you what I’ve been doing, but don’t let it make you upset. I’m doing things with other people.” She said it was nothing for me to worry about—said all the time, she realized, she kept “wondering how I was.” Her description (dismissive) of Tina: “gracious, charming, attractive, vacuous.” Dull. A sort of empty version of me.
Last night; we had our best phone talk for a while. She was laughing—“I’m in love with three people.” Went on about Molly and Tina, how “fond” she was of both of them, but I, she insisted, was going to be “one of the central people in her life.” Told me again: “you understand despair.” Ended with: “will you hang on if I fool around for a while?”
Even after the Professor decreed that she and I were going to have a moratorium on a certain element—for by this time, with three gals on the go, she was presumably running somewhat short on love-gas as well as time—the verbal lucubrations, followed by some Sudden-Wild-Sex-After-All, could always be counted on to keep me in thrall.
Today on the phone I managed to bring up wanting to sleep with her; she said she did not want that “intensity” right now. Sex was “an easy answer”—didn’t address the real problem. I apologized and thanked her afterwards for talking with me about it. She is such a good person. Said at one point, “Terry, you’re a damn fine person in spite of all your shit.” When I asked about the no-sex-right-now thing she said Christ I’m not going into a nunnery.
[Next day.] I am going to [the Professor’s] house for dinner tonight. Trepidation. Feel like I am on some kind of probation. Dinner would be it, she said: said she didn’t want me staying over.
[Next day.] Back home this morning. Last night when I got there she was teasing—immediately led me upstairs for a “backrub.” Explained that just because she had stipulated no sex, it didn’t mean we weren’t allowed to lie down on the bed and get close. Drank a lot over dinner, she got more and more drunk, rubbed my leg, said she didn’t want the “other me” to come back when the “me” she loved was present. It felt crazy. We went to bed afterwards and all the joy and insanity instantly returned.
But as I became more distraught the Professor also withdrew. I recall going to her office one morning—the ill-fated day I took her her birthday present?—and she said I was making her so anxious, just my presence, there in the moment, that I had to get out. She hadn’t felt so anxious (and here she looked at me wildly) since J. She was starting to hyperventilate, she said, was going to have to take a tranquilizer. So go away. Leave. Fuck off. I did so.
And not long after—on what would be one of the very worst nights of my life—her brutality took an especially freakish turn:
Hell, hell, hell. Asked her if I could see her tonight; she said she was busy, wouldn’t say with what. Came home desolate. Called Elsbet, finally told her all about it. E. came over right away—I cried for about an hour, my head on her breast. E. spent the night at my apartment—slept in the bed, just held on to me. Saved me somehow from myself. Incredibly enough [the Professor] called around midnight. No point to the call. Except to let me know she too was in bed and someone was with her. She kept talking to her in the background. Glasses clinking. Muffled laughter. [The Professor] was chuckling and told me we were lucky—we had avoided something “potentially hideous.” Oh Christ but what exactly. Then she hung up. Elsbet enraged. Kept saying I hate her, I hate her.
Had one’s dear friend not been there? No trouble whatsoever, Madam—indeed it would be our pleasure—to totter down to the freeway bridge a few blocks away and fling oneself, Berryman-style, over the icy railing into the dark.
The endgame had finally begun. The corpse was still twitching a bit, and there were indeed a couple of pieces of Grand Guignol still to endure—one entirely self-inflicted, the other not. The self-inflicted one was laughable—in the way the sinking of the Titanic might be considered laughable. As a bit of black existential farce, during which one did not show oneself to advantage. Rather, like J. Bruce Ismay, lily-livered owner of the White Star Line, who when the great ship began to list disguised himself as a woman so as to sneak onto one of the doomed liner’s few remaining lifeboats (thus disgracing himself forever), one simply gave up and wallowed and begged one’s executioner for a last-minute reprieve. Lesbian readers, I’m afraid, all too familiar with the clichéd subcultural dynamics of the situation described here, will no doubt be especially inclined to groan. But it’s true: so desperate was I still to see the Professor, even after her defection had become obvious, I continued to play each week on a ghastly little all-woman softball team that one of the English department secretaries had organized on campus that spring. Ghastly because there on the roster with me, smirking and mugging like costars in some dire lesbian sitcom, were all three of them: Molly, Tina, and the brimming, bountiful Professor. No joy in Mudville—any idiot could see that—but one sat there in the mud anyway: red-eyed, gibbering quietly, unable to raise even a hideous rictus of a smile. A situation so awful it demanded a laugh-track.
Plus one could hardly have wished for a more perfect allegory of the Professor’s devilish charisma—or of one’s own torment. Elegant Tina was the team’s agile, golden-gloved first baseman. Baby butch Molly H.—best all-round athlete in our little trio of Professor-lovers—played a skillful Bucky Dent–style shortstop. I was the Designated Zombie: an inept, strangely cadaverous presence at second base. The Professor herself was at the center of things—cock of the walk, a squatting, crowing Chanticleer presiding over his hens—in the position of catcher. She couldn’t run, of course (the polio leg); but she could bob up and down, yell out instructions to the defense, pick runners off, and block the plate with the best of them. On top of it all, she was a disgustingly good sport—full of friendly compliments and warm manly butt-taps for the members of the opposite team. And as it happened, whenever the Professor got a hit, the lanky Tina, Atalanta-like, would run the bases for her. One stillawful memory from that green and hostile spring: watching the Professor, eyes aglitter, laughingly toss her tennis shoes to Tina, after she [the Professor] had hit safely to center. (Having come to the game in flip-flops Tina had no base-running shoes.) Somehow the rangy Tina managed to slip into the Professor’s Adidas on the fly, even as she sloped off, commandingly, in the direction of first base. Not only was she impossibly tall, lithe, and graceful—for so one was forced to register—she seemed to share the Professor’s shoe size. They were obviously fated to be together. One could just see them: in a clinch on the floor in a Foot Locker store, making love amid the racks of the latest Nikes and tube socks.
I played in five or six games before I cratered—hollow-eyed, brain-dead, emotionally gutted. (Though chatty and jokey with the others, the Professor breezily ignored me during our games.) The second and final bit of Grand Guignol came soon after. True: already a couple of weeks before, as soon as it b
ecame clear our relationship was starting to implode, the Professor had demanded that I yield up the house key she had so impulsively given me at the outset of our little idyll. I was tractable enough and one terrible sunny morning she had appeared at my flat to reclaim it. I gave it up without protest—her visit lasting all of perhaps thirty seconds—but even so, the Professor stood in the hallway and glared at me suspiciously, as if I were about to pull a fast one.
Then in turn, just after I’d quit the softball team (it was now a week or two before the end of the school year), she called to say she was coming over again: this time to repossess the pretty little guitar she’d loaned me at Christmas. She gave me advance instructions. As with the key, there was to be no whingeing on my part. Now elevated to the role of official consort, the resplendent Tina—or so I was duly informed—played the guitar and sang beautifully. In musical as in other respects, it seemed, Tina left me quite in the shade. She was just plain old fun to be with, the Professor observed. The two of them were so well-suited; they loved singing together. I should never have taken that guitar in the first place, you know: it was time for me to be a good little nobody and relinquish it. She and Tina, I gathered, were about to embark on some romantic old-fashioned car trip—presumably in search of hoedowns and hootenannies and cans of Nehi soda.
It was wrenching, of course: for brief and disharmonious as our liaison had been, the guitar was its emblem. Even the Professor seemed a bit embarrassed in the role of Repo Man. When she called that morning to say she was on her way, you could hear disquiet in her otherwise deep and mellifluous voice: an awkward awareness of time’s compression, and of the brute suddenness of her about-face. Not so long before, after all, we’d been wriggling around ecstatically on the very piece of green shag carpet remnant on which we were now to face one another. Things were so different now. Back then, she’d talked excitedly about driving to New York with me (just as she and Tina were now doing) during the summer vacation. (The prospect thrilled me: I’d still never been to New York, nor indeed anywhere east of Wisconsin.) She was going to introduce me to Judy Collins, she said, and one of the guys in Peter, Paul, and Mary, I forget which one. Then we’d come back and I would move into her house and we’d work on projects together. I was to become a sort of girllinguist under her tutelage. At some point we’d definitely have to go visit Little Willie McSomebody, a withered, 100-year-old speaker of the Smoky Mountain dialect who’d once been her prize informant, at his (her?) ancient shack in Appalachia. The Professor had been waiting all her life for me, she’d said then. Finally, I had come. And I was perfect. So where had all the flowers gone?
Yet while undeniably foul—toxic in fact—the Picking-Up-of-the-Guitar Day nonetheless marked a turning point of sorts for me. My nadir, perhaps, but also the beginning of the struggle against the death sentence I had received. A tiny Eureka! moment. The point at which I first felt stirring within some of that deep unnameable fury—later to become howling protest—the Professor had engendered in me. After weeks in a daze I was suddenly coming alive again—beginning to crackle and spark a bit, like a dangerously frayed electrical cord. True, I still pined miserably for the Professor’s sexual love. Every hour without her was like traversing a desert. But at last I was starting to grasp—with however parched and cheerless a clarity—that despite the fact I loved her (and I couldn’t get the love to stop), the Professor was also fairly unspeakable. Treacherous. Mean. Dishonest. Cowardly. A Sadist. A Sociopath. All of the above. Or at least in the kooky crucible of our relationship, enough of any one of these things for me to feel more than a little ill used.
And in fact, the first, fine fantasy of vengeance loomed up that day: the novel idea that one might take the gloves off. (Before, I hadn’t even realized I was wearing any. Nor indeed that I had possibly useful appendages underneath.) Now I freely admit to having become moody and mean-spirited in middle age. I know I have a horrible attitude. Towards people, especially. But I’ve never actually punched anybody out. I’ve never tripped anybody up or tried to poke their eyes out. I keep the dogs from mauling small children. Nor indeed, not even on some pitch-black moonless night, have I ever TP’d anybody’s house—gratifying though that would be in certain cases. Yet as soon as I heard the Professor’s car pull up on the morning of my final trial, I was suddenly overtaken—after how many weeks of pure hell?—by a wild urge to Clobber Her. Clock Her. Really Ding Her. Smack Her Down Once and For All. I lived on the third floor of my building, overlooking a godforsaken little front courtyard, and as I stood at my window watching the faithless Professor scamper up the main steps—while Tina, in the driver’s seat, sat coolly idling the Professor’s car at the curb—I had a sudden murderous fantasy of flinging the guitar out the window onto her, my wretched abuser’s, head.
T-W-A-N-G-G-G!!
[Sickening sound of splintering wood and bone, the harsh thrum of untuned guitar strings, faint groans, an ambulance in the distance, a discreet death-rattle.] Death by concussion, woolly bobbles, and mother-of-pearl. Then an old-fashioned undertaker might have come along, closed the Professor’s eyes, and laid matching plastic guitar picks on them.
True, I didn’t carry out my revenge: it was satisfaction enough just to picture it. It would be like a Road Runner cartoon, I figured, or the Laurel and Hardy movie when the grand piano falls out the window. Ka-boing! And for the first time in a month or two I discerned—yes—a small light twinkling in the darkness. Indeed, as the light grew stronger, I was even moved to refine on, to embellish, my concept. To sing a little aria. If only the Professor had lent me—instead of that stupid guitar—some lead weights. An anvil, maybe. Or a set of bowling balls. A refrigerator even. (The P. had, in the meantime, come and gone, taking her purloined property with her.) And thus—amid dark and bloodthirsty visions—my first year of graduate school came to an end.
I survived, of course. The summer was long and the Midwestern heat furnace-like. I had a little part-time research assistant job, after which I swam every day in the pool at the University gym. I resumed my Ph.D. work and subsequently passed my qualifying exams that fall. The test-taking heebie-jeebies of the previous spring did not return; I did as well as people expected me to. And there I remained at the University—working more or less doggedly for the next four years, even as the Professor pranced and preened, took on (so one heard) various new paramours, and cut a rakish, merry swath. She was like a carousel horse. Always coming round again. Impossible to avoid in fact. (And still—fantastically enough, after everything—in the closet.) One had to encase oneself fairly rigidly in order to prevail. Trade in the Sapphism for stoicism. Wear an artificial carapace. No more Rubyfruit Jungle. Marcus Aurelius wuz da Man.
Most of that first year I cultivated an air of cool disconnection when I saw her—a sort of nonseeing, lost-in-the-stars look. But after a while we began to acknowledge one another in the halls again—I, extremely gingerly; the Professor, more often than not, with a big, psycho smile and jovial hello. It was inevitable; I saw her—literally—several days a week. Once, improbably enough, she stopped me in front of the Social Science building to tell me she was “really getting into” the music of Adam and the Ants. I reciprocated on these occasions with vague pleasantries and sought to maintain what I hoped was a mild, manly, dignified mien—Dobbin, indeed, in Vanity Fair. Sometimes I even asked politely after Tina. Granted, I was still quite ferociously obsessed. I watched the Professor from afar and kept spooky-morbid tabs on her comings and goings. Not the healthiest response, I realize, under the circumstances, yet also perhaps inevitable. One’s eye had indeed offended, but plucking it out seemed far too painful to bear. One loved one’s grief too much. Ordinary life thus required that one give in to regular little crying jags—off and on, it turned out, for the entire four years. Special anniversaries—Christmas Eve, the first date, the first disrobing—were always noted and produced the purest, most pungent, agony.
Yet over the long haul it became easier not to know—not to hear about, not eve
n to fantasize about, whatever it was she was up to. True, at one point I couldn’t help noticing she’d traded in the Honda for a large, high-off-the-ground Jeep-thingy: I’d see her tooling round campus in it, cheeky and exalted in the driver’s seat, beaming with self-regard and thuggish warmth for all. The silver braid gleamed and glinted in the sunshine. She was definitely a guy’s guy. (Oh, yeah: something about driving around the back country looking for the last speakers of Ozark English or Okracoke justified the gas guzzling: you had to have the four-wheel drive.) In my second year in graduate school I got my own car—an ancient VW bought for $200—and that helped, fortunately, to even things out a bit for me psychologically. Yes: I had to spend five or six greasy weekends that summer with Alice’s husband, Tom, crawling around with tar and rivet-gun under the chassis, repairing (with his help) the rotted-out metal struts that ostensibly held the whole thing together. But once my frail chariot was semidrivable, I enjoyed a new sense of freedom. One of the first things I did after it rattled back to life was to drive across the city late at night and park in a dark spot across the street from the Professor’s house. There I sat—a brooding crazy—for two or three hours. One was doing one’s best: this sinister little stakeout, punctuated by sobs, did in the end lay something to rest.