by Terry Castle
It certainly did: she was there at the convention, it turned out, as a delegate from some national disability-rights-in-higher-education group. She was one of the head honchos in fact—was flying all around the country, would be taking part in meetings with this one and that one, liaising with the head of the Blah Blah Foundation. So what accounted for her being in the chair? She seemed nearly to rejoice as she explained: like some child-sufferers from polio, she had developed later-life post-polio syndrome—a sort of wasting condition involving the muscles originally affected. Her leg muscles had atrophied; her back had also gotten messed up. Final result: the P. would never walk again. I tried to look appropriately dismal when she said this last, but the response hardly seemed necessary. She appeared to exult in her paralysis, as if it had brought her some new and febrile kind of glory. Her deepest wish had finally come true. And hey, Terry, you know, it’s really fantastic: I’m in the best shape ever—working out with weights, playing Wheelchair Basketball every weekend; I’m training for the local disabled Olympics…—on and on she went. It was true—her biceps looked seriously ripped. As I walked alongside her and the companion toward the bank of elevators (they were on their way to some caucus session), the Professor began shouting again to people to move aside and blew on the whistle with renewed, even theatrical gusto. The whistle, I now saw, was on a sort of lanyard round her neck, like an athletic coach’s. The scene was heroic, Gipper-like: WHEELCHAIR COMING THROUGH!
I had been shocked to see her, needless to say, but also found myself thinking, This is fabulous, this is so insane I can barely take it in. I felt mirthful, curious, and—I was glad to find—mostly unperturbed talking to her: if anything, she made me feel oddly elated. Intellectually speaking, I felt detached—Herr Isseyvoo in Goodbye to Berlin. I just wanted to hear her say more wild and surreal things. The uncanniness of the meeting was overwhelming: the face so familiar, but now haunted by inscrutable changes, a certain metaphysical blowsiness. No doubt she was thinking something similar about me. Yet she also seemed genuinely thrilled to encounter me—exhilarated in some unfeigned and child-like way. While the companion (who had been introduced but never said a word) continued to give me shade, the Professor bounced up and down with glee and burbled out an invitation: Let’s have dinner tonight—for old times’ sake! I assented instantly: I couldn’t wait to get back to my hotel room, call various friends, tell them what had happened and what was still to come.
We met again in the lobby that evening and the Professor, now genteel, leather-gloveless, and sans companion, condescended to be pushed outside to a waiting cab. (We were going to a restaurant a few blocks away.) Here one had suddenly to credit the miracles one heard took place in the holy pools at Lourdes; for even as the cabdriver came over to help her, the Professor suddenly vaulted out of the wheelchair, folded it up, neatly and compactly, like a little campaign desk from the Napoleonic Wars, and before the driver could stretch out a hand, had shoved it into the open trunk, twirled around, and zipped back to me. Then she scooted herself into the back seat. She could obviously walk as well as I could—at least some of the time. In fact, when we got to the restaurant she didn’t even bother unfolding the chair, just carried it in and then left it to be checked with our coats.
Our conversation was at first quite stunningly inconsequential. It was as if she had been declawed—had four soft paws now and was on my lap giving me little face-pats. Bizarrely enough, she seemed to regard me as if I were some former junior colleague—a student perhaps—who had gone on to do well and with whom she was just now belatedly catching up. She beamed at me proudly when I mentioned having published several books, as if she had seen my talent early on and pointed me in all the right directions. I was the protégée who had made good. What had been true all along, I now saw, was still true: that she was thoroughly dissociated. Lost in herself. Not available. Never had been. The smile was charming; the eye contact warm and intense; the alienation absolute.
There were moments of impinging hilarity, of course, during which I had to struggle not to give the game away. One had to meet the Professor’s self-deception with one’s own mask firmly in place: she had been one’s tutor, after all, in slyness. The Professor was eager, for one thing, that I come to visit her ASAP and stay awhile. (Really, Terry! I mean it!) She wanted to get me out with her in a pair of chairs on the Wheelchair Basketball court. Then I would see what’s what. The game was rough and nasty, I was informed; you had to have superstrong arms and could get pretty loused up in collisions. Not that you needed to be paralyzed or disabled to take it up. Able-bodied people did, too. All the time. You’ve got to come this summer. You’ll meet your match! I guarantee: your lower back muscles will feel like hell! The Professor laughed and vamped and told me how fantastic it would be—not least of all, she crowed, because it would be the one thing I could beat you at.
And then there were the moments of feigned communion. I asked at one point what had become of Tina, and the Professor, suddenly less friendly-looking, went into some dark bad-memory zone and related the story of the unpaid loan, the detective, and Tina’s subsequent bankruptcy. The Professor now looked paranoid: morose, hard, old, mentally addled. She never paid me back. That was unacceptable. No way was I gonna let her do that. But then, recollecting how effectively she had handled it, the P. regained her poise. She reverted to a more characteristic look—that of someone who had just received a best-in-show ribbon at the County Fair. Her begonias had obliterated everybody else’s in the flower competition. Left them riddled. Ripped-up leaves and bits of pink and purple petal everywhere on the ground. Major vandalism. Fuckin-fantastic!
And then again, as if on cue—her expression softened and she turned a melancholy gaze on me. Garbo in Queen Christina saying goodbye to John Gilbert after their night of love in the inn. The chain of association had obviously triggered something: some ghoulish, poetical sensation of contrition. She had treated me terribly, she now confided; how could I even bear to think about it? She knew how much pain she had caused. The things I did to you were unforgivable. I’m sorry, Terry—you know I mean that, don’t you? I hope you can forgive me. Then, out of the blue, More Good News: You know, Terry, I would love to write a book with you. There would be so many things we could write about, don’t you think? You can come stay with me in June. We can spend the summer together. I mean it: think about it. Can I call you when you are back home in California? I could make everything up to you. The Professor’s eyes glistened oddly; she sniffed a little, reached down for her napkin. Now, I admit it, I had never till then fully grasped the metaphoric spot-on-ness of the term crocodile tears. (Or, for that matter, the term crocodile smiles.) But here, all of a sudden, were the former: the conscious, copious tokens of grief—undeniably dampening the Professor’s strong, still-handsome face.
One didn’t say it in so many words, of course—one remained a paragon of good cheer throughout—but the sentiment not on your bloody life, my dear, dear Professor, was nonetheless delicately conveyed. The lady herself smiled winsomely in response—though not without a slight razor-glint—then gave me a cheeky, boyish wink. Well, hey, keep it in mind, Terry: maybe one day you’ll realize you have to stop looking in the rear view mirror all the time! This final tweak was one of the very last things I remember her saying—we didn’t stay in touch and I never saw her again. I think she ended up in some kind of hospice care organized by the nuns. Whatever Wheelchair Basketball skills I might have developed were sadly nipped in the bud.
Smiles and tears and a Parting Shot. Blakey and I celebrated our wedding in August, the one I mentioned in my proglomena a thousand years ago. (Lo, since I began this piece, many months of whingeing and moaning over it have come and gone.) The ceremony was surprisingly moving for us—deep, even. We both cried when the twinkie-gay-guy Justice of the Peace at City Hall read the vows and asked us to repeat them. Harvey Milk looked on (or at least his bust did); our friends and families stood by in a little circle around us. B.’s brother Adrian
was one of the official witnesses when we went in to sign the registry; my baby sis was the other. My mother got weepy, but nonetheless managed to keep her knickers up in the Humor Department. She would never have dreamed, she announced loudly during a lull at the wedding brunch, that when the first of her two daughters got married, she (the mother of the bride) would be a wobbly eighty-two-year-old and the bride in question (an extremely weird English professor) pretty much past it too at fifty-four.
And yes, the November election has come and gone; and yes, the right-wing head-bangers did pass their stupid Prop 8 banning same-sex marriage in California. Ugh. The face-ache people at it again. B. and I think our nuptials are still binding, however: it appears that voiding existing marriages—as opposed to outlawing new ones—is close to impossible, or at least would require many court challenges, and possibly years, to bring off. So in the meantime—till death do us part in fact—we revel in our licit conjugalism.
It’s been a big year all around, in fact, and not only on account of the Dearly Beloved stuff. We went round the world for the first time and that too was phenomenal—even if one’s itinerary (owing to various far-flung conferences one was obliged to attend) was an oddball one to say the least: San Francisco to Aberdeen to Istanbul to Bangkok to Sydney to San Francisco. Bangkok, admittedly, was a bit of a low point—the fetid river canals and ubiquitous sex tourism got us down. But Sydney—lovely Sydney, our final stop before SF—was a different matter altogether. The Macquarie conference was fun; the city enchanting and easy and full, as always, of sweet, gleaming, carousing life.
No aggro at all—in fact—but, as we joked in our last e-mails back to the United States, lots of AGGRO! Aggro (her real name) was one of the more entertaining individuals we met on our trip, possibly even a new Best Friend Forever. Too bad she couldn’t have come back with us for the wedding. Transport would have been a problem, though: Aggro is a seventeen-foot-long lady crocodile who lives under a sun lamp—stylishly enough—in a weedy faux-swamp at the Sydney Aquarium in Darling Harbor. We spent the morning with her our last day in Oz. And what an attractive nymph she is—svelte, greeny-yallery, with warm golden eyes, white scaly tum, and, yes, a big ingratiating smile for everyone. Alas, she suffers a little from Temperament: apparently in the past she has tried to eviscerate any other crocodile they put in the tank with her. Has a hard time getting close, in other words. Not especially nice to those whom she doesn’t trust. (No real love life either, obviously.) Her favorite activity would seem to be dozing under her infrared lamp for hours on end, preferably while digesting some large and savory prey. When we first came upon her she was in fact relaxing in just this fashion. Someone said she was going to be fed again very soon, however, so with considerable excitement, we joined the little crowd assembled for the event.
From our first vantage-point, on one side of her glassed-in enclosure, we could see Aggro well indeed: sluggish yet majestic, stretched out at full length, both the parts of her above water and those below. She lay on a sort of shallow, silty underwater ledge, with only her eyes, brows, and big flaring nostrils showing above the water line. All very revealing, but after a few minutes we decided to move to the observation platform directly above her. (Sad to report, but Aggro had just delivered herself—rather indecorously, we felt, given her otherwise regal demeanor—of a large yellow torpedo of crocodile poo.) From above the view was less intimate, perhaps, but more pleasing overall. Nor did any safety glass block one’s line of sight. While we waited for something to happen, B. and I took pictures of ourselves next to the No Jumping or Diving! sign gracing the platform: a truly horrifying pictograph, showing the Universal Stick Figure falling into the open maw of one of Aggro’s brethren.
At last, from behind a padlocked door at the far back of the enclosure, Aggro’s two keepers finally emerged—a pair of young and sporty-looking digger-girls with blonde ponytails, big rubber galoshes, and matching blue polo shirts. After a quick gander round to confirm exactly where Aggro was, they began moving silently and gingerly toward the edge of the pond—the one in front having attached and braced on her forearm, medieval knight–style, a sort of clear plastic riot shield, almost as broad and tall as she was. Behind her, the second keeper hung back slightly, stayed hidden as much as possible behind her colleague and the shield. She, the second girl, carried a bucket and was obviously concealing something large, wet, and scrumptious behind her back. As they proceeded—inch by inch, with utmost caution—the tension grew. Aggro had by now raised herself slightly out of the water, one saw, and was supporting her huge wedge-head and torso on her two tiny forelegs. Her finely marked features stood fully revealed now. She looked, by turns, pensive, feminine, intelligent, oddly expectant—the heroine in a Henry James novel waiting for the answer she both desires yet fears will never come. One’s camera was at the ready; the suspense riveting.
Then—in a sequence almost too quick and fearsome to absorb: a Sudden Deranging Upward Lunge. The huge hoary form, vertical now and almost entirely out of the water, smashed up against the riot shield, powering its onslaught with a massive lashing tail. The keeper in front pushed back, reflexively and hard, struggled to keep her balance; her companion quickly braced her now from behind. The crowd of observers screeched at the blood-curdling shock of it all. And then again, just as fast as it had happened: a lull and a disengagement, a colossal slapping backwash. The monster had already slithered away in reverse, slipped easily down under the water. At peace too, presumably, having now been fed—though the residual water in the pond, so rapidly and violently displaced, still slopped from side to side, like that in an industrial washing machine.
There had been a fish, one gathered—Blakey says it was a big Aussie sport fish like a barramundi—but I never saw it at all. Not when the keeper thrust it up and over the shield; not the nanosecond flash of silver scales. My fault? Or a tribute to Aggro’s balletic, crack-the-whip, zero-to-sixty? All I know is that the crusty little lady moved fast as soon as she saw what she wanted. Now, true enough: one had never entirely credited those gruesome stories one heard about alligators and crocodiles suddenly launching themselves out of lakes and rivers and snatching babies out of their prams. Or that someone’s pet croc had suddenly appeared on a golf course at a resort somewhere in Florida, killed several golfers, then managed to abscond with a full set of golf clubs. Hard to accept, even from supposed eyewitnesses, that a pile of man-sized bones—now stripped clean—lay in shards and disarray at the fifth hole. Or indeed that a long greenish beast—huge, dwarf-legged, and dreadful, its booty hanging limp in its humungous jaws—had been seen hotfooting it back to its swampy home faster than an NFL wide receiver. But Aggro had had her lunch mauled and down her gullet before those of us in the peanut gallery had even registered its existence. This lady croc was one awesome predator. What a smile! What personality! What teeth! One couldn’t help adoring her. It was lucky, Blakey and I agreed, as we packed up our suitcases that evening, that those two young Aussie girls at the Aquarium were buffer and butcher than they first appeared. They’d had the plastic riot shield thing down pat and were obviously familiar with Aggro’s quick little feminine wiles. For all our tough talk and cynicism, the two of us would have been eaten alive.
About the Author
TERRY CASTLE was once described by Susan Sontag as “the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today.” She is the author of seven books of criticism, including The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (1993) and Boss Ladies, Watch Out! Essays on Women and Sex (2002). Her anthology, The Literature of Lesbianism, won the Lambda Literary Editor’s Choice Award in 2003. She lives in San Francisco and is Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University.
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Also by Terry Castle
The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture
The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Cent
ury Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny
Boss Ladies, Watch Out! Essays on Women and Sex
The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall
Copyright
“Courage, Mon Amie” image courtesy of the author.
“My Heroin Christmas” image of Art Pepper courtesy of the Concord Music Group.
“My Sicily Diary” image by permission of Marco Lanza.
“Desperately Seeking Susan” image, Susan Sontag, 1975: Copyright © The Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.
“Home Alone” image, Portrait, Miss Elsie de Wolfe, 1905, by permission of the Museum of the City of New York, Byron Collection.
“Travels with My Mother” image of Agnes Martin by permission of Cary Herz Photography.
“The Professor” image courtesy of the author.
Vera Brittain material is copyright Mark Bostridge and T.J. Brittain-Catlin, Literary Executors for the Estate of Vera Brittain 1970.
THE PROFESSOR AND OTHER WRITINGS. Copyright © 2010 by Terry Castle. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.