by Lisa Alther
By the end of the fourth movement, the armpits of my high-necked blouse were drenched with sweat.
As we drove in Miss Head’s Opel sedan back to Worthley, I said, ‘Well, thanks, Miss Head. That was neat.’
‘Neat?’
‘Uh, interesting. Elevating?’ I hadn’t yet mastered the adjectives of academe. ‘I particularly savored the mellifluous second movement,’ I tried tentatively.
She looked at me strangely.
‘I mean, I found it very sonorous.’ I decided to forget it.
She took me back to her apartment and poured me my nightly fix of tea and played on her cello the themes and some of the variations. She illustrated the features of a good theme and the transformations one underwent in symphonic treatment.
At some point, she must have looked up to discover me sunk deep in a sleep of intellectual exhaustion on her horsehair loveseat.
The next day in her class, she called on me to discuss the ways in which Descartes’s ‘necessarily true propositions’ were used in the construction of his proofs. I parroted what she’d told me the night before about the qualities of symphonic themes — their clarity and simplicity and intrinsic necessity, the ways in which they were and were not susceptible to modification and adaptation. She nodded with satisfaction. Apparently I was progressing well as her mouthpiece. The thought left me vaguely uneasy. I was gaining Worthley, but was I losing Hullsport in the bargain?
Marion, a girl on my hall whom I vaguely knew, was concerned about my lack of social life and invited me to go to Princeton with her for a weekend. She was meeting her boyfriend Jerry, and he had a roommate who needed a date. Please would I go?
My immediate gut reaction, which I should have honored, was to refuse. I had an important physiology paper due the next week, and I hadn’t even picked a topic. Out of curiosity to see firsthand the famous Princeton, I agreed to go (strictly as a didactic experience, of course).
The two boys met us at the bus station Friday night. Marion’s man was tall and dark and debonair. Mine was short and acned. He was also surly when he discovered that he’d been paired with a pituitary giant for the weekend. We smiled sickly at each other, having both lost out at the potluck supper of weekend blind dates.
Their neo-Gothic stone dormitory looked very similar to our own neo-Gothic stone dormitory except that it was filled to the rafters with male sexual psychopaths rather than female ones. Their entry was having a party. Thirty of us were crammed into a small dark third-floor room. Everyone but Marion and me was already drunk, and we were well on our way, guzzling gin and orange juice. The din from the records and the shouting was deafening — blessedly so, because it meant that my date, Ron, and I didn’t have to try to converse civilly. Clutching my paper cup of gin and juice, I stood crushed against Ron in the packed room, swaying back and forth in time to the music. Ron’s head came to my chest level. If we had been so inclined, he could have chewed my nipples without moving a muscle. As things were, though, we merely swayed to the music
After a couple of hours, people started disappearing, and enough space developed for some heavy breathing. Someone put on the Beach Boys singing ‘Surfin’ Safari.’ I hadn’t danced in years. It had been out of the question with Clem because of his leg. And Joe Bob and I had had too many other things to attend to. But at one time I had loved it. Under the influence of that forgotten love, and of the dozen or so cups of gin and juice I’d tossed down, I leapt up from the sofa on which we were sprawled, grabbing the stunted young Ron by the hand. We stood facing each other like David and Goliath. We worked our way into the beat, and soon we could have joined any burlesque show in the country, with our obscene thrustings and gyratings and shudderings. My befogged Miss Head-trained brain tried briefly to explore the thematic material of ‘Surfin’ Safari’ and the ways in which those themes were being developed. But soon, these efforts were swamped by the hungers of my neglected flesh.
Ron and I were not alone on the dance floor. The music, the people, the time of night, the gin and juice — everything was converging to trigger an orgy. We were all writhing in the grip of the Beach Boys. A dateless boy was standing on the couch exposing himself. He supervised the scene with satisfaction, a Priapus at a garden party.
‘Surfin’ Safari’ ended with a crash. We dancers slumped like puppets whose strings had been cut, breathing fast and sweating. When ‘The Little Old Lady from Pasadena’ began, Marion stumbled over and slurred, ‘You and Ron wanna come downa Jerry’s room and relax?’
Jerry locked his door from inside. The furnishings consisted of two beds. Jerry and Marion sat on one, Ron and I on the other.
‘Some party,’ I suggested brightly.
No one answered. They were all breathing heavily.
‘Yup, I can see that you Princeton men are real hellers,’ I said amiably to Ron, who had been at great pains to convince me of that earlier in the evening.
Again, no one replied.
Jerry fell back. He reached up and pulled Marion down beside him. Kissing her ravenously, he began working his knee between her legs. He reached over and turned out the light.
I sat in the dark, trying not to eavesdrop on the gasps and slurping sounds coming from the other bed. This scene was strangely familiar to me. Before I had a chance to put my finger on exactly why it should be, I felt myself being dragged down onto my back. Before I could say Tom Thumb, nimble Ron had ripped the cameo brooch from my throat and laid my nylon blouse open to the navel. Now he was trying to reach around me to unhook my bra. Recalling reflexively my football skills, I straight-armed him, and he fell off the bed with a crash.
However, I underestimated his perseverance and cunning. The next thing I knew, he was crawling between my legs, forcing my tweed skirt up to my waist. I heard a zipper unzip and then felt him plunge into me.
Unfortunately for him, I was wearing a girdle. He shot out of me as though on a trampoline. I felt like a cow with a gnat buzzing around my tail.
Suddenly I found myself pinned spread-eagle under his small frame; his hand was groping for the top of my girdle.
I’d had enough. In fact, I’d had more than enough. Miss Head was right. One had to make a choice as to how to expend one’s limited energies. I chose to expend mine at Princeton’s Spring Fling no longer. I brought one of my pinned knees up sharply between Ron’s legs. With a scream he rolled off me and crashed to the floor.
Snatching up my brooch, I sprinted for the door. Finding it locked, I raced for the light and threw it on.
‘May I have the key please?’ I asked Jerry.
By the time my eyes were used to the light, I had figured out that Jerry was no longer on the bed. Nor was Marion. But I heard her voice, emanating from somewhere in that room. She was gasping, ‘Dear God, I’m dying!’
I looked around frantically. What was happening to her? What was her Princeton sex deviant doing? I knelt down between the beds and looked under them. Marion shrieked, ‘Yes! Mother of Jesus, yes!’ Under the bed I saw a disembodied limb twitching through the folds of the bedspread. Good grief, I had to help her!
I scrambled to my feet and tore around to the far side of the bed. There on the floor, in the space between the bed and the wall, were Jerry and Marion, locked in furious anal intercourse. With a sigh of relief that Marion’s sodomization was evidently voluntary, I picked up Jerry’s impeccably creased and pressed blue jeans, extracted the key and left them — Ron in one whimpering heap, and Marion and Jerry in a second one.
By the time I got back to Worthley, I had settled on a topic for my physiology paper: ‘Venous Congestion and Edema as a Determining Factor in the Intensity of Human Orgasm.’ I spent the remainder of the Princeton Spring Fling in the library researching and writing it.
The thrust of the paper, as it were, was that blood was the key factor in sexual response in humans. Blood, many ounces of it, surged into the areas involved. Or as one of my sources put it with regard to the female, ‘The bulbous vestibule, plexus pudendals, plex
us uterovaginalis, and, questionably, the plexus vesi-calis and plexus hemorrhoidalis externus are all involved in a fulminating vasocongestive reaction.’ The tissues, engorged with blood, pinched the veins so that none of the blood being pumped in along the arteries could drain away. Being a corpuscle in such a situation was equivalent to being an MTA passenger on a platform during rush hour with no trains appearing; more corpuscles kept arriving but none could depart. This state of affairs continued until the distention reached its outer limits and triggered a reflex stretch mechanism in the neighboring muscles. These muscles then contracted in spasms, which expelled the blood along the pinched veins in spurts. The collective experience of the muscular spasms and the blood expulsion was referred to as ‘orgasm.’ The tissues and muscles involved in this female orgasm had their precise counterparts in the male.
In other words, the back-seat blue balls of high school days had been caused by the failure, for different sociocultural reasons, to trigger reflexive contractions of the bilateral bulbocavernosi, the transverse perineals, the external anal sphincter, the rectus abdominus, the levator ani, and the irschiocavernosi, which would have drained the congested venous erectile bodies of the corpora cavernosi of the penile shaft and the sinuslike cavities of the penile bulb, the glans, and the corpus spongiosum of the blood that had engorged them. This blood lingered on in oxygen-starved puddles. (Oh, Joe Bob, where are you now? I asked of the shelf of thirty-pound anatomy texts I was consulting.)
By why? What was the point of eternally filling those mysterious interconnected venous chambers with blood, and then pulling the plug and draining them — only to start filling them all over again almost immediately? It seemed like the task of Sisyphus. Luckily, I had learned from my philosophy paper about who made the world never to tack a ‘why’ on to the end of my topics. I now limited myself to the ‘how’.
But this much I did know: Although my pudenda personally hadn’t experienced much in the way of fulminating vasocongestion of the venous plexus, I had no intention of spending my life functioning as a hydraulic engineer. Miss Head apparently did without fulminating vasocongestion, and so could I. It was simply a question of channeling my energies in a more rarefied direction. I was delighted that I was at last having the great good sense to foreswear the whole ridiculous enterprise.
I tacked onto the paper a few arresting statistics about the relation of different coital positions to the degree of vasocongestion, and therefore the intensity of orgasm. Then I turned it in. It came back marked A. I had known that the scientific detachment I’d inherited from the Major would come in handy one day.
Miss Head invited me to a production of Aida in Boston, being given by the Metropolitan Opera Company on tour.
We were practically in Aia’s lap when she sang her death aria while sealed in the tomb by the Nile. Being sealed in a tomb by a high priest and suffocating was one hazard Mother hadn’t thought to warn me about. By this time, I had become quite attached to both Aida and Radames, and was appalled by their approaching deaths, by their hostile environment, by the perfidy of Princess Amneris, by Radames’s moral dilemma over whether or not to reveal military secrets to his would-be father-in-law.
They pulled out all the stops for their final duet. Although I knew it was just a story, I found myself very moved. Tears, of all things, spilled from my eyes and ran down my cheeks, as the oxygen inside the tomb ran out.
Her eyes on the stage, Miss Head leaned over and said softly, ‘Notice how Verdi increases the atmosphere of doom and poignancy with the sharp drops in the soprano melody line, and by his insistent refusal to return to the tonic.’
Blotting my tears with a Kleenex, I did as I was instructed, and let Aida herself go hang.
After the performance, I suggested we go eat at a pizza parlor.
‘Well, pizza is Italian, isn’t it?’ I protested, as Miss Head dragged me toward a Pakistani restaurant. Haltingly, I was absorbing this strange new set of tastes and standards. I had figured out that anything American — hamburgers, fried chicken, steaks — wasn’t comme il faut. Colonel Sanders and Bonanza Beef were out. Small crowded foreign restaurants were in, preferably those featuring foods of an under-developed nation. So be it. But what was wrong with pizza?
“How did you like the opera?’ Miss Head asked, as we ate murgh musallam and sanzi seeni and bushels of rice.
‘It was wild!’
‘Wild?’ she asked, closing her eyes and raising her eyebrows. ‘Indeed.’
‘Neat. You know.’
‘Yes, of course. Neat, as it were. In other words, you found the performance satisfying?’
‘Right. Sure. Did you?’ Suddenly I was hesitant about my enthusiasm. After all, I’d never seen an opera before. How was I to know whether or not this one had been neat? I had nothing to compare it to.
‘I don’t know. I thought the baritone left a lot to be desired. And the staging was overdone, as it tends to be for Aida. Otherwise, it was adequate.’
‘Of course.’ Adequate. That was like getting a C on a paper. When would I develop the ability to distinguish, as Miss Head did with such ease, between the merely adequate and the excellent?
‘The soprano was very good, though. Did you notice how she was able to change the emotional coloration of a line simply by varying the harmonics of her voice?’
I nodded yes, lying shamelessly.
‘Excellent, she was. Superb.’
The reason I couldn’t distinguish between excellence and mere adequacy, I concluded as I lay in my bed the next morning waiting for my alarm to go off so that I could officially wake up, was that I had allowed my emotions to swamp my intellect. I had permitted myself the indulgence of becoming personally involved in Aida’s and Radames’s deaths in a neurotic process of identification. I had failed Miss Head.
In propitiation, I went that afternoon to biology lab and scraped some cells from inside my cheek, smeared them on a slide, and dripped some water on them. Under high magnification, I zeroed in on one cell. Then I watched. Gradually the tiny inclusions in the cell body began bobbing around. Then the cytoplasm itself began puffing up as it imbibed water from outside the cell. The nucleus ruptured next and released its material into the cytoplasm. Although I couldn’t actually see it happening, I knew from my reading that now the ionic equilibrium was collapsing and that sodium ions were rushing into the cell and upsetting the potassium balance.
The entire process I’d been witnessing was the death of the cell. The final act of dying was merely a formality: It occurred when the cell wall burst open with a sickening gasp of bubbles and the cytoplasm with its dancing inclusions streamed out. What remained on my slide now, of the formerly living and functioning cell from my own body, was nothing but an undifferentiated mass of denatured proteins with small amounts of degraded nucleic acids mixed in. I knew that if I stood over this eyepiece watching for long enough, the material would eventually curl up and crumble into its molecular components.
This cell of mine was an intermediate step between two worlds. On the atomic level, protons were busy swapping electrons, like kids trading marbles; in the process, they would transform the proteins into their constituent amino acids, and the amino acids into their component elements — hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen. If the amino acids were the letters of the alphabet that combined to form word proteins, proteins in turn formed sentences — cells like this one. The paragraphs in the book of life and death were multicelled organisms. Cells were dying continuously in this same fashion in Aida’s body, in my body, in Miss Head’s body.
When cell death got out of hand, though, and the forces of chaos won out over those of elaboration and order, what happened? Those cells synthesizing the most protein burst first -the adrenals, the testes, the pancreas, the gastrointestinal tract; then the liver, kidneys, endocrine glands. The more inert substances like skin and muscle and bone and cartilage held up for a comparatively long time — so that a body could look normal from without, but inside consist solely of a bubbli
ng soup of collapsing cytoplasm.
I washed the slide and put away my equipment. Miss Head was working on her book when I reached her apartment, it being precisely 4:40, according to my Lady Bulova. Reluctantly, she put it aside to play Aida’s death aria on her cello, at my insistence. I listened with detachment, without the faintest twinge of fear or sorrow. I had spent my afternoon productively. I had seen Death, and it was no big deal. Only the unfamiliar had the power to stir neurotic emotions. So I reasoned.
The next day in class Miss Head called on me to summarize Spinoza’s attitude toward the human passions.
‘Spinoza feels,’ I stated confidently, ‘that in order to achieve virtue, a man must detach himself from the transitory passions that he suffers, so as to gain an understanding, through reason, of the nature and origin of those passions. Only by struggling to develop his intellect so as to attain this knowledge can he make himself free.’
‘Free?’ she prompted, with a pleased smile.
‘Free from his passions, which are simply a form of misunderstanding. Because to view the world as a whole, with all its interconnected necessities, is to extinguish such fleeting personal whims. Free, in the sense of choosing to accept the inevitable.’
Miss Head nodded, her face glazed with surprised pride.
On my way back to the dorm for lunch, a green VW pulled over next to me. A pleasant male voice asked, ‘Can you please tell me how to get to Castle? I’ve never come in this entrance before and I seem to be lost.’
Castle was my dorm. ‘I’m going there now. If you’ll give me a ride, I’ll direct you.’ I climbed in and inspected the driver. He was tall, thin, pleasant-looking, had brown hair and eyes that squinted in amusement as he talked.
‘Who are you looking for?’ I asked.
‘Marion Marshall.’ I regarded Marion with new respect. This man clearly wasn’t her Jerry. She had admirers all across the Northeast?
‘She’s on my hall.’
‘She’s my sister.’