I frequently rehearse such confrontations with imagined enemies. Usually this happens after English department meetings, where the fatuous bullshit of certain professors runs so deep that I can’t help but lie wide-eyed at night and cycle through my mind a whole spectrum of violent fantasies. This morbid form of insomnia is piqued most deeply when Dr. Pulsinger asserts and defends hawkish positions, like his most recent, that inner-city minority students should get no credit for the remedial “bonehead” composition courses they invariably have to take: “If they knew they were coming to college.” Pulsinger says smugly, “they should have had the maturity to prepare themselves for it. In my day we managed our schedules so well we had time to prepare for each of our courses, attend debate club meetings, play in the marching band, and still have time in the evening for the little ladies, heh-heh.” Three A.M. and still fully awake, I imagine I might, on the conservative and rational end, explain to Pulsinger in an assertive (but not, as Liz warns me, aggressive), adult-to-adult manner that in his day, during his bone-white East Coast prepsterhood, you didn’t have to concern yourself with six-shot Saturday night specials concealed in the classroom desk well or with incessant pressure to smoke angel-dusted Sherms and gang-bang after school. Or, at the more radical end, I might dispense with the futile chitchat and, catching Pulsinger in the faculty parking lot, pump several dozen rounds from a silenced AR-16 into his belly, enjoy the dull splat of lead alloy in soft flesh, the convulsive jerk and horror as his smug facade crumbles … a picture that invariably relaxes me into sleep.28 So I rewound and played back my cruel exit scene over and over, imagining Lissa’s inconsolable grief over losing me, the bitchinest guy she would ever meet. But as soon as I walked in Ernst’s door and saw Lissa, I was disarmed—as almost always happens to my terrible dark fantasies in the light of day, luckily for the integrity of my teeth, I suppose; there are a lot of people out there, bruisers with hands like butt-steaks, just waiting for some little feist like me to start yapping in their face so they can act out their own violent dreams, and more devastatingly than I ever could act out mine, I’m sure.
Lissa greeted me bouncily, seizing my arm and dragging me inside. “Harmon, I’m so glad to see you.” she effused. “I saw a picture in the paper today of this college professor, he’s really a retired navy officer, one of the founders of modern electrical engineering, the paper said, as if there’s such a thing as ancient electrical engineering—Myceneans processing data on sheep grazing patterns or something. Anyway, this guy was holding a strip, a piece of wire about a foot long, and he said, ‘This is how far an electron travels in one trillionth of a second.’ I thought, ‘Wouldn’t that be a good way for Harmon to open one of his classes on some cosmic Romantic poet?’ Instructional aids for Wordsworth’s ‘vision splendid.’”
This unexpected excursion into theoretical physics and experimental pedagogy took me by surprise. I was ready for fight-or-flight on my terms, not cheery wordplay, so the best I could muster as a response to her bubbling was a disinterested-sounding, “Where’s Ernst?”
“I drove him over to Dr. Zacky’s, a colleague of his. He’ll bring him back in a couple of hours. So what about my idea, approaching poetry from an angle kids can all respect, electricity, technology?” she persisted.
Struggling to stay mad, I played dumb, “What was the point he was trying to make with the wire?”
“I guess that an electron goes pretty far in a second, although I think it must really go twice that far, since it’s traveling back and forth between here and Hoover Dam or … where do our electrons come from?”
I was hooked. Lissa made absolute non-sequiturs seem connected by an irrefutable logic just beyond the grasp of even the most synthetic of minds, like my own. I love that kind of stuff and had to play along now, even though I didn’t want to. Still enunciating woodenly, in the robotic, end-stopped monotone of locked-down hebephrenics, I said, “That’s a really good question. Everyone should know where he gets his electrons, in case he has to return a defective one to the factory or something.”
She agreed, “The first thing I would do if I were teaching a computer course would be to load the class into a bus and take them to Hoover Dam …”
“And show them where their electrons come from. That would make a good one-act play, a couple of electrons talking about their origins, and then this college class comes, and what’s all this shit about you being Sterne’s stepdaughter?” I blurted out in a quavering strangled falsetto.
She stared at me in astonishment, then lowered her eyes. “How did you find … never mind, it doesn’t matter.” She looked pissed.
Still a couple of octaves above my normal range, I shouted, “Doesn’t matter? You tell me this guy got Ernst blinded, you intimate that you’re some innocent cowgirl from the corn belt, dirt still under your fingernails … and it turns out Sterne’s none other than dear old stepdad—who’s also, in case you didn’t know, and I’m sure you do, trying to …”
She interrupted my blathering with tragic quiet, “You don’t know anything about this.”
“No, and I’m sure there’s some perfectly logical explanation for why you’re in cahoots29 with your father to fuck over Ernst and kill me.”
“Nobody’s out to kill you, Harmon. Besides.” her voice was rising now, too, her tone stoked with indignation, “where do you get off judging? While I was getting dragged across the country, town to town, hotel to hotel, you were growing up in pampered luxury under palm trees, getting spoiled rotten, making a religion out of worrying about your petty little problems because you had all the comforts and lots of leisure time to kill. You’re always putting your parents down because they loved you, they protected you. You call that destructive. You don’t have the first idea how destructive parents can be. You’ve had it easier than anyone has the right, and you dare to draw conclusions about my life?”
I couldn’t argue.
Her fury spent for the moment, Lissa softened: “You think I didn’t want to tell you? I’ve been dying, keeping this thing inside, with no one to share it with. From the very first, I thought maybe I could open up to you. But we’re on dangerous ground here, and I couldn’t be sure. We haven’t really known each other that long .… but it really isn’t what it looks like, Harmon. You’ve got to believe me.”
FIFTEEN
I wanted to disbelieve.
I’ve seen too many Late-Nite Movies on Channel 13, where the stereotypical scheming broad wrings out a few tears and then cons an infatuated paramour into murdering her fat husband, for which chivalric act our hero spends the rest of his days lettering street signs in the prison metal shop while she lives it up in Rio with a tanned boating instructor. But if you’re going to have a tragic flaw, it might as well be a too-complete trust in the woman you love. And if she takes you down, then you go down true to your sense of romantic honor, a nearly-extinct moral code which should have been shoved downriver in the funeral barge next to Arthur but which lives instead in a few starry-eyed throwbacks like me. Skeptical, knowing that I was risking a fall that would make my marital failure seem a love slap by comparison, I chose—because I couldn’t do otherwise—to take a chance that my initial impression of Lissa was accurate.
“All right.” I challenged, “make me believe you.”
Where she had been deliberate and plodding as she invented lies, quick and rambling when happily absorbed, she now began tentatively, taking little stabs at speech as though trying on a new set of vocal cords. She began, “I don’t know. You’re right. I did. Lie I mean. But as for being in cahoots .…”
“Let’s try to forget I said ‘cahoots,’ all right? It’s embarrassing.”
“I’m trying to tell you, I’m not working with my stepfather. I’m working against him. See, Harmon.” she started gathering momentum, “when I was a small child all I heard from my stepfather was that Ernst, my real father, was a wife-beater, a philanderer, a pederast, and on and on. Over the years Sterne told my mother and
me some dreadful stories about him, and they couldn’t help but make an impression. I mean if my mother, a fully grown woman, believed him, it’s not surprising that I would, too. Sterne eventually got tired of his little family and abandoned us when we moved to the West Coast, but by that time those stories had their own life. My mother died a couple of years ago, still convinced Ernst was a degenerate.
This new story sounded even more improbable than the last one, but I held the Nails tongue in order that she might have a chance to finish, thereby either hanging or vindicating herself.
“When you think about it, my mother had to keep believing Sterne’s story. Otherwise she’d have to admit to herself the unthinkable, that she wronged a good man, Ernst, to go off with a corrupt one.”
“Sterne.” I said in a tone that implied cold rationality, a dispassionate need to assemble the facts as she presented them and thus to derive my own conclusions about Lissa’s sincerity.
“Right. But I inherited my real father’s independent nature, I guess, and I always nurtured this secret seed of love and trust for him in spite of all the stories. So when I turned eighteen, I decided to find out for myself. I moved out of the house to go to college .…”
“The bio major and her aviary.”
She nodded in affirmation.
“Was that all made up, too?” I asked.
“No, the business about the birds really happened.”
“Leonard and Rexie really are dead?”
“Dukie, not Rexie.”
“Dead?”
“Dead.”
“Damn.” Against my better judgment I was already letting down my guard a little, even if there were huge hunks of the puzzle still unexplained. For better or worse, there was no way I was going to mistrust Lissa when she waxed sincere. I said, “I suppose even a compulsive liar like you couldn’t make up that stupid bit about Bernstein’s hair.”
“We all have our limitations, Harmon.”
“So let me get this straight. You move into the studio, hide in the library to get away from the parakeets, graduate with honors and end up on the doorstep of Ernst, your father. He must have been a little shocked; long-lost daughter shows up and asks Daddy for a job.”
“I didn’t do it quite that way. I really didn’t know whether Ernst was the soul of evil Sterne described or the good guy I hoped and suspected. I thought it’d be better if I got close to him and checked him out, instead of showing up and saying, ‘I hear you’re a cruel pervert. Tell me about it.’”
“Yeah, I see your point. That might not go over real well.”
“No, it might not. So I did some work for Dr. Zacky and got him to introduce me to Ernst as a graduate student interested in old Greek poetry. After a while, I offered to help him out with his research, and he hired me.”
“You mean Ernst still thinks you’re just an employee?” My skepticism was starting to resurface, in the same way that a lunch of chile relleno resurfaces when it’s followed too closely by several sets of situps and oblique crunches.
“You still haven’t told him you’re his daughter?”
“Yes. I mean, no. I mean, I haven’t.”
“That’s dragging out the role-playing a bit far, don’t you think? I mean, you must know by now if he’s a cruel pervert or not.”
“Oh, there’s no question that Sterne was lying all those years. And I have every intention of telling my father, only I don’t know how to go about it gracefully, so I keep postponing, and it gets harder and harder. Every day I say to myself I’m going to tell him, and then I just … don’t. He’s not strong, physically, and I don’t know how he’d take it. That sounds so selfless and noble, but really I don’t know how I’d take it, either, his reaction when he found out I’d mistrusted him and spied on him. I’m not the pillar of granite you seem to think …”
This admission of vulnerability worked to soften my resistance. I suggested, “You could tell him the same story you just told me. Anyone with an ounce of compassion would have to understand why you did what you did,” and offered, “I’d be glad to be there when you tell him, in case you have to faint into my arms or something.”
“How gallant, Harmon. I may just take you up on that.”
Disburdening herself of a portion of the awful secret she had been carrying for months seemed to swing Lissa’s mood abruptly to an exhausted giddiness, like the weird high one experiences after sitting at the bedside of a dying parent for days and nights: coffee, no sleep, fast-food malteds for nourishment, finally the death, and one’s first reaction is not a wailing grief as one expected, but instead a paroxysm of uncontrollable giggling in the face of a somber and well-intentioned attending physician and several shocked nurses. In such a state Lissa mock-swooned at my suggestion, and I caught her up. We were both laughing, I mostly out of wonder at the physical contact between us, two friends who had never gone beyond the intimacy of an introductory handshake.
We became quiet. Lissa opened her eyes and we regarded each other strangely, as though across a long gallery hung with panels of the abstractest sort. Time suspended its fierce shaking, and when we kissed at last the stars sang in their spheres—or at least they hummed and whistled and cleared their throats and shuffled their big awkward feet. I was struck so hard by a mixture of shock, elation and apprehension that I actually did begin to feel faint, and I let Lissa slip out of my arms, for which she was wholly unprepared. She fell hard on her rump, a small cloud of house dust rising around her thighs. “I take back the part about gallant.” she said.
“I guess I can’t stand up and kiss at the same time. As I heard someone say recently, we all have our limitations.”
“Then come down.”
Everything was moving too fast. Certainly I had entertained fantasies of ecstasy with Lissa on the floor—also the bed, the sofa, tables, bookcases, chair-backs, coatracks—had wondered about the private vectors of her breasts, the possible lineations of aureoles—darkling nubbins? alert rosy buttons? translucent domes with faint red mottlings?—had imagined prolonged sessions of post-coital languor and silliness followed by explorations of other furniture, of other anatomical flexures long kept secret. But since bitter experience has shown me that dreams fall apart when they become real, I couldn’t risk having my love blasted again so soon, like a sapling willow struck twice by lightning in the same fierce storm. To stall for time I improvised a feeble excuse, “I can’t, not on the floor .… dust makes me sneeze.”
Lissa reached up and took my hand. She said, “I’m not ready to be lovers either, Harmon. I like going slowly. I’ve been in too many train wrecks myself. Just hold me while I finish the story.
“I can do that.” I said, relieved but at the same time disappointed.
“Good. I haven’t even gotten around to Doctor Syntax yet.”
The mere mention of my lost books projected me back into more mundane dimensions. It seemed eons had passed since I had even thought about investigating Doctor Syntax or researching George Eliot. I sat down next to Lissa, put my arm around her shoulders and lay back on the hard floor. She nestled under my arm and I was surprised by the almost doughy quality of her embrace, not the throttling ivy wrap I was used to suffering—and, I suppose, inflicting sometimes—but more a paradoxical yielding with force.
After some moments of silence, she said, “Contenta,” and then, “How much do you know about the poems in Doctor Syntax?”
I responded by writhing as though tormented by night terrors and pleading, “No, no, Dr. Brunkard, don’t make me talk about poetry now, I meant to do the reading, but the parakeets ate my Cromden Anthology so I didn’t have a chance, but I promise if you give me another month .…”
“I take it that means you haven’t read them.”
“I skimmed The English Dance of Life, but mostly I looked at the pretty pictures. You can pick up most of what’s happening that way, and it saves you from having to read Combe’s vile couplets.”
She agreed
, “His poetry’s not my favorite, either.” adding, “but it helps if you think of it as reflecting the sensibilities of a period. Helps me, anyway.”
“You can call me an effete snob again if you want to, but bad writing is bad writing, and if I don’t like something, I can’t trick myself into reading it. It’s kind of like impotence, I think. The harder you try, the worse it gets.” Reflecting upon the analogy, I added, “Not that I’ve ever had that particular problem, of course.”
She shot me an ambiguous semi-smile that suggested either skepticism, mild curiosity, or utter disinterest.
“Anyway.” I continued, dropping the subject of sexual dysfunction posthaste, “with a boring book I start thinking about food, or my tennis serve, or .… you. You’ve been my main distraction lately. Before I know it I’ve turned five or six pages without comprehending a word.”
“You have to make an exception with Doctor Syntax, even if it means taking your mind off me for a few minutes. It’s important that you read it, and carefully. There’s a lot more going on there than the pictures, which is why my stepfather wants the books: To Sterne, they’re more than just collector’s pieces. They’re sort of … sacred …”
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