by Terry Castle
And after a long and ill-timed absence, Lady Luck, too, came back into my life. Several kindly bystanders, witnesses to the train wreck, came to my assistance. Elsbet had been a rock once I had started slipping and spiraling downward, of course, and as the summer unfolded, she took me off for therapeutic weekends at her family’s rustic cottage on Lake Chetek. There she cooked me sustaining little high-protein Nordic meals and remained stalwart and kind during the monotonous bouts of keening that often overtook me. Stalwart was she, too, during more alarming flights—whenever I said I was going to kill myself, for example (this would go on for a while), or when I suddenly lolled forward at the dinner table and flopped my head down, tragicomically, into my plate of food. In the daytime we splashed around on the lake in a long-oared metal skiff, swam about, and fought off the horseflies. I was like a wounded World War I soldier, invalided out and now convalescent in dear old Blighty—taking the air for the first time, shuffling around the hospital grounds in slippers and striped dressing gown, summoning up, every now and then, a weak little traumatized smile.
And though I never gave her the details of my situation, Jo—butt of so many cruel jokes—was another godsend: it was she who supplied me with the name of the shrink who made calling me back from the abyss one of her pet projects for the year. I feel ashamed of my own bad satiric self when I reread a journal entry I made at one especially terrible point that spring:
Shocking depression. I went to see Jo in her office this noon—she gave me the names of some therapists. I told her something very bad had happened, didn’t say what. She looked solicitous, but didn’t probe. Put her arms round me at the end—I was on the verge of breaking down into sobs.
The therapist I saw was a middle-aged Israeli child psychiatrist, by turns brusque and bracing—and a fair match for the Professor (or at least my mental image of her) in what I sometimes thought of as a Manichean battle over my survival. Malka had fought in the 1948 war, and in the role of psychological second did her best to inject me with her own brazen and bellicose spirit. I confess I was not too receptive at first, and when I objected, mewlingly, to taking an antidepressant—such reckless pill popping, I feared, would mess up my concentration and interfere with my schoolwork—she dubbed me Little Miss Sunshine and threatened to stick me in the goddamned psych ward until I complied. (Little did one know that thirty years later virtually every person on earth, not to mention one’s pet gerbil, would be on psychotropic drugs of some kind.) While I continued to feel ashamed of my pharmaceutical “crutch,” comply I did, and the drug’s inspiriting effect on my hypothalamus was indisputable. After constant narcotic debauchery at the Professor’s I had pretty much renounced dope-smoking—forever. But Tofranil, I have to say, has been a dear, dear pal of mine ever since: a sort of friendly and intelligent dolphin, on whose accommodating back I have ridden safely to shore after various major and minor shipwrecks. Though prone alas to getting stuck in fishing nets, dolphins—one somehow feels—seldom let themselves get entangled in unsuitable love affairs.
Various other pieces got picked up. I waited a year to tell Alice what had taken place—she had been puzzling, I guess, why she never seemed to hear from the Professor anymore. As it happened, Alice had not been entirely absent from my life during the Professor episode; I’d seen her once in fact just before its dolorous end. But given the Professor’s grip on me then, the encounter had simply added a new element of nightmarishness:
At Alice’s house, struggling to keep off misery. Invited to dinner. Alice has been asking me exhausting questions about Shelley and Spenser, the last things I feel like talking about. I can’t talk to her about IT. [The Professor] last week: “I suggest you don’t talk to Alice.” While Alice and I were driving along today, A. said out of the blue, Do you have any erotic attachment to a man. I said No in a lame way. Alice again: aren’t you attracted to men. I could have wept with frustration and pain. Told her I didn’t really want to talk about it. Alice saying in any case—I looked like “I didn’t take much joy in being a woman.” I could have thrown up. She said I shouldn’t “give up” on men “just because of your father.”
I’d stayed mum thenceforth: not exactly the life of the party; nor, would it seem, was I making the most of my looks.
The following fall, however, Alice had finished her dissertation and was lecturing at a tiny Christian college in rural Wisconsin. Tom was still at the University; they lived apart for the year. One weekend I went to stay with her in one of the primitive on-campus trailers her college provided for visiting profs. The trailer didn’t have a bath or shower so we were obliged to perform our late-night ablutions in a deserted classroom building, half-naked, at a pair of matching sinks in the women’s restroom. Perhaps it was the intimacy engendered by these slightly self-conscious side-to-side sponge baths, but the first night I was there I found myself unspooling for Alice the story of my crack-up. She was predictably aghast—truly aghast—and having introduced me to the Professor, felt immediately to blame. I was hard pressed to convince her that the P. had not recruited me into unnatural love; that I had been already an eager, if somewhat unfledged, practitioner at the time we met. The homosexual angle, one could see, clearly unnerved Alice, and later she told me she’d had to call Tom that same night around 2:00 or 3:00 a.m.—she had been too upset by my revelations to sleep. She came ultimately to accept the same-sex part of it, but remained deeply shocked by the Professor’s knavery and guile. Erotic deceit on such a scale was almost as disillusioning, I guess, as reading Sartor Resartus. And though Alice and I remained friends for many years I don’t believe she ever communicated with her former tennis partner again.
So what to say about the Dear Lady herself, now that more than three decades have elapsed? True: one feels a bit like Sir Walter Scott putting the question so sententiously. One imagines a title: Dumped: Or, ’Tis Thirty Years Since. Also true: that the matter evokes contradictory feelings in me. Having now described the fiasco with the Professor at length, I confess, I feel on the one hand a bit embarrassed by its sheer triteness: my own sitting-duckness, my seducer’s casebook callousness. As I expected, revisiting Ye Olde Journals has indeed been lowering—not least because they tell such a dreary old-hat tale. Who hasn’t clawed at one’s pillow in anguish at a lover’s faithlessness? Had one jumped off a cliff that long-ago winter—Sappho of Lesbos–style—one would simply have ratified it: one’s lack of originality; one’s tedious by-the-bookness.
By not taking the chump’s way out I suppose I threw in my lot, however feebly, with the ongoingness of life. I stepped back from my own little Sappho-plunge; avoided becoming a sentimental statistic. I veered away, somehow went on with things. And most of the time since I’ve been fairly glad I stuck it out. Had I not I would have missed out, of course, on any number of peak experiences: the entire Disco Era; my first withdrawal from an ATM machine; the fall of Communism; watching the O.J. freeway chase from start to finish in San Francisco in a bar full of drag queens; a cornucopia of royal sex scandals; the Red Sox winning the Series; Marianne Faithfull singing “Pirate Jenny” at the Fillmore (Jessica Mitford and her husband, who’d arrived in a Bentley, were in the front row); nude swimming with B. in the Ladies’ Bathing Pond on Hampstead Heath; picking up Wally, then eight weeks old, from a morbidly obese lady dachshund breeder in a Modesto McDonald’s parking lot; and indeed, my first exacting, artful, somewhat tremulous eBay bid. And how ever to forget thrusting a twenty-dollar bill in the general direction of Martina Navratilova, then gyrating and cavorting to boomy-bunny hip-hop at the lesbian rights fundraiser I attended at Fort Mason last winter? (I was that close to the stage—in the lesbo-mosh-pit so to speak: she leaned down, smiled, grabbed my sweaty twenty, and stuck it her sports bra, along with other tender offerings.). Even with regard to less-than-perfect moments—Wally and I subsequently flunking out of puppy school at the SPCA, the vomitacious and terrifying ride Blakey made me take with her on the New York, New York Roller Coaster in Las Vegas a couple of years ag
o—I am obliged to say with Nietzsche, Yes, give it all to me again, exactly the same. Even (retch) the double-loop-the-loop-upside-down part.
Yet on the other hand, it would be foolish to say the run-in with the Professor left me unchanged—or that its role in my life, however banal and muzzy from one angle, was insignificant. She was the Trojan Horse. She altered everything, the whole way one was trending. One doesn’t want to discount other factors, but as I hinted at the outset of this shabby little shocker, the relationship and its aftermath no doubt helped to make me the figure of charity, selflessness, and erudite fun that I am today. Bestowed on me my sweet and sunny personality. Made certain bubbly characterological tendencies even more effervescent. And at this late stage it seems bootless to dream up counterfactuals or speculate on how things might have gone otherwise. What if the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife had not been gunned down in Sarajevo in July 1914? What if Adolf Hitler had not allowed the otherwise doomed British Expeditionary Force to escape at Dunkirk in 1940? What if the Beatles had gotten back together? What if the Professor and I had not been introduced one ill-omened Christmas Eve? Don’t even bother with this last one.
Granted, a certain amount of discomfort had to be endured. For five years I was entirely celibate—so scarified by the desolation that grown-up sexual desire had brought into my life that it seemed best, on the whole, just to fuggedaboudit. Bambi wore fawn-blinkers for quite some time—just couldn’t cope. It was as if one had to start over again, work up to it—now with more ambivalence, more protective padding. One had tripped right out of the starting-gate.
If emotions were called for, they would now have to be dark ones. Mine was indeed a monkish, caustic, dyspeptic kind of chastity. In the matter of romance I became a sort of Swiftian misogynist: women, as lovers, were treacherous and bewildering. Impossible to trust Stella or Vanessa with one’s adoration. Better to heap scorn and contumely—to wallow in one’s abject, unsexed spleen.
Or at least that was the idea. For even as the rebuilding effort dragged on, and even though I continued to indulge, sometimes theatrically, in wholesale bouts of contemptus mundi (all too reminiscent of the perilous solipsism of adolescence), I also felt a subtle change in the atmosphere. Almost in spite of myself I was beginning to function, if not in the sexual sense, then at least rather more capably in social settings. Convening with other members of homo sapiens. Meeting the planetary locals in seminormal fashion. (Teaching, indeed, my first students, if only for a quarter or two, as an apprentice English instructor.) Joining the Human League, however belatedly—though not yet, perhaps, the Joy Division.
I continued to hang out every week or two with my feminist reading group; indeed one of the paradoxes of my misogyny, like Swift’s, was that it coincided with a growing emotional connection with individual women, several of them in the group. (As I had done with Elsbet and Malka the Israeli shrink, I exempted these female paragons from my general excoriation of the sex.) This budding sense of relationship had nothing to do with the militant-sisterhood pipe dreams of my undergraduate years or indeed the hairy-legged velleities of lesbian separatism. Bye-bye, Pokey Donnerparty. These women—these new friends—were simply themselves: in need of no political reeducation by me, just open to life, and thoroughly nontoxic. Ordinary women (mostly straight, it turned out), with whom it was possible to talk and go on talking. Several of them were also, ahem, distinctly maternal. (Awesome!) I later told two of these friends about my imbroglio with the P.—I was still only slowly shaking off the Professor’s demand for tomb-like discretion—and the sky didn’t fall and that made me feel better, too.
My new Midwestern home likewise began to cushion and hold me somehow. I found I actually relished the meteorological extremes—especially the hot, glutinous, thundery days of summer. Riding my bike around the lakes or along the river past the old brewery was soothing—a balm to my prematurely ravaged soul. I moved to a new apartment, not far from my old one, and despite the ever-present company of a group of party-hearty cockroaches, several of them real no-goods, I was glad to escape the dismal reminders of the Professor still lingering at my previous domicile. Farewell, O green shag carpet remnant. Farewell, O filthy old stovetop (on which the corned beef had been boiled). Farewell, O brainless spring-sprung bed. Another wager on future happiness: I adopted a gray tabby kitten, subsequently named Iris (pretentiously enough) after Miss Murdoch. Iris—my Iris, that is, not the novelist—would meow in greeting when I came home from school; played happily for hours with the cockroach roommates (sometimes snaring and deftly consuming one); and would live with me for the next twenty years—almost, indeed, into the EBE (Early Blakey Era).
I attended, believe it or not, my first real party—one given by a droll fellow student, homosexual, with whom I became close in my last two years at the University. Being male, Derek was indeed a novelty in my world—a bawdy, quite unprecedented non-Terry. I found him endlessly amusing, a sort of human mood elevator. Physically speaking, he cut a wonderfully outlandish figure, being six feet six, pencil-thin, slim-waisted and swivel-hipped, with the longest legs I had ever seen. A dead ringer for Ichabod Crane. He smoked like a chimney, doted on hirsute redheads and rugby players, and would often entertain me by performing his own madcap version of the lewd chair-between-the-legs Bob Fosse choreography made famous by Liza Minnelli in the film Cabaret. I became for a while a sort of honorary (if chaste) gay man in his company. These were the early days of Clone Culture, after all—that glorious doomed era of Tom Selleck–style mustaches, disco balls, and bomber jackets. Even in the land of Norsemen and snowshoes, the fizziness in the atmosphere was contagious. Derek was the first man I had ever met who didn’t wear underpants. His numerous erotic exploits—all pre-AIDS, of course, and typically acrobatic and arabesque—in turn helped to explode many of my sentimental notions about sexual love. One that he told me about somehow involved wrapping a number of greasy bicycle chains around his waist, hips, and crotch—to striking effect.
Elsbet stayed on, too, and our friendship deepened. I remember her coming over one hot afternoon: she was taking a photo class and had to do a series of black and white portraits. I was to be the model. I was a bit nervy and self-conscious; so we drank beer and put Lou Reed’s Berlin album on the stereo to get in the appropriate fuck-all mood. Sweet sounds of glass breaking, drunken laughter, tinkly piano, a crowd counting to ten in German—then Lou, all bleary and would-be decadent. We hadn’t talked about what I would do by way of posing, so I improvised: first, by dragging out some old photos of my parents from the fifties, just after they were married. These I held up to the camera, like biological specimens, while Elsbet took several close-ups of my hands holding them. (Caught forever in the lost light: I hold these family mementos with surprising delicacy.) Next I unearthed a somewhat garish five-by-seven color publicity shot of the Professor and displayed it in similar fashion. Garish because it showed her tanned (even a bit leathery) and draped in a sort of Mephistophelian seventies orange pants suit. She brandished her guitar mariachi fashion and had that same-old same-old wicked grin on her face I knew so well. A dark-eyed Queen of Spades look. Even now I can recall the moment she gave me this long-to-be-mourned-over souvenir. We were in the bedroom of my apartment one morning, getting dressed, I think, and when she took it out of her briefcase and handed it to me, I fumbled it clumsily. It wafted to the ground, landing face down on the dirty wooden floorboards—an ill omen, to be sure. While Elsbet snapped away, Lou’s Weimar-sludge in the background, I mimicked tearing the picture apart with sharp little teeth, rabid-skunk style.
For the last part of the shoot, perhaps inspired by the dissipated soundtrack, I decided to cross-dress—something I had only ever done before in moments of ultrafreaky solitude. I suddenly really wanted to. I wet my hair in the kitchen sink and slicked it back decisively. I was already wearing jeans and a man’s shirt, so the basic sartorial items were already in place. To these I added a dark unisex-looking jacket, aviator sunglasses (the
n the height of fashion), and a gift from the long-lost Phoebe—a brightly woven Guatemalan belt that I fashioned into something resembling a bizarre bulky tie. This crude neckwear notwithstanding, I have to say I made a pretty convincing man. Even a beautiful one, perhaps. Elsbet photographed me for a good while in my get-up and I became ever more loose and free. The resulting pictures—she later gave me a set of them—turned out to be fairly stunning. She said afterwards that once I’d donned my she-male duds my body language had completely changed. I’d relaxed somehow: unkinked, acquired a certain elegance. Ah, confident at last. Scrutinizing them nowadays I’m appalled by how young and austere and baby-faced I look, but I can also see a little bit of what she meant.
I put the Professor-sorrow to intellectual use. When the moment came to choose an area for my Ph.D. work, I decided to specialize in eighteenth-century British literature. It seemed a good way of getting far, far away from her. No more linguistics, no more ye olde bloody folksongs. Yet that said, even with my Swift-identification, it was also a somewhat peculiar choice. (The alternative was to have been Gertrude Stein.) The scholarly subfield in question was then pretty reactionary and male dominated; few female students were ever drawn to it. Many of the age’s canonical works remained spectacularly resistant to the new interpretive methods (Marxist, post-Structuralist, and yes, yawn, feminist) then the coming rage among American academics. But since I needed a break from women and felt disinclined to jump on any more bandwagons, the pull the period exerted on me was great.
The attraction no doubt also reflected the emotional contradictions I still struggled with. At first—during my official mourning period over the Professor—I identified mainly with the more dismal aspects of the period. I had taken a course on eighteenth-century fiction and had been stunned by the bleak, disaster-ridden novels of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson. The stark psychological worlds described therein—harsh, harrowing, inhuman at times—seemed to evoke something of my own psychic life. The heroes and heroines in these books—Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Pamela, Clarissa—were as marooned and beset as I felt myself to be. They were cut off from love and companionship and locked in a ruthless Hobbesian battle just to survive.