Read An Uncommon Education Online
Authors: Elizabeth Percer
I turned around. He was standing just at the threshold. He was wearing his rattiest cardigan and hadn’t shaved well. I wanted to pull out some clean laundry for him and get him a new razor. “You need a shower,” I said instead, not moving.
“If you need to call you should call now,” he replied and left again.
“It’s too early,” I muttered to no one, but hurried myself into working up the courage and went to the phone soon after.
The exchange hummed through, a tone instead of a ring. I thought no one would pick up, and then someone did, a man. I was suddenly terrified it was Jun’s father and he’d be annoyed by the early-morning call.
I tried to speak clearly, “This is Naomi Feinstein. From America,” I added idiotically. “Is Jun Oko available?”
There was a small pause at the end of the line. “She is,” the voice said. I held the line for what felt like too long before it was picked up again, “You said your name is Naomi?” I nodded, then answered yes. He had said my name carefully, pronouncing each vowel. I was sure it was her father. A second later Jun was on the line.
“Dad, hang up.” The receiver was replaced.
“What is it, Naomi? Is your mother okay?”
“She’s okay,” I said, holding back. “The recovery went pretty well.” I had to stop and collect myself. It was so good to hear her voice. “Jun, I don’t have a room for next year.” She knew this. She had told me, in the letter, that Ellie had decided to move into her much older girlfriend’s apartment—
to see how things might go
—and that if I had decided not to commute from home I could room with her. I could hear the static in our connection as I told her I hoped the offer was still good. She didn’t say anything. “I know it’s probably too late.”
“No,” she said. “Actually, that would be great.”
She started to tell me about the room assignment, but in my excitement I interrupted her; for the first time that summer something was being fixed. I leapt—“I’ll just go over and figure it all out, fill out whatever forms they want.” I was grinning. I didn’t know what else to say. “How’s your summer going?” I asked.
I could hear her smile for sure this time. “Good,” she was saying. “I’ve spent tons of time with George Osaki, an old family friend. Can’t talk now, I’ve got an audience.”
“Right,” I said.
“So I’ll see you in a few weeks, I guess,” she added, sounding genuinely happy.
“Yes, yes,” I said. We hung up. I stood by the phone, smiling. I was suddenly struck by how much I had missed her. My father was at the door again. When I looked up he seemed surprised to see me grinning, but then his ragged mustache twitched up at one corner, as if jerked by an invisible string.
M
y first impression of that fall was that it would be different from the ones before it. I was rooming in Freeman with Jun, Mara was to be our director for
Macbeth
, the auditions for which I had missed last spring to be with my mother, as had Jun. We were both preoccupied with other concerns, unable to play. But for the first time we had a class together: The Writer and Her Critic, taught by the latest celebrity visiting scholar, Jules Weingarten. I’d actually heard of him, which made me feel even more confident. For a short while it seemed the school and I were coming together again as the result of a natural progression.
Professor Weingarten had been wooed away from Yale to Wellesley for a short appointment, and it lent him a certain sexy, masculine cachet even before he arrived. I think we liked to entertain ourselves with the idea that he had left a bunch of scrawny boy geniuses for Wellesley’s stiff beauties. I was still proud to call myself a student at the college, though most of my classmates had become, if anything, even more intimidating over the years. So many of them were self-actualized by that point, no longer needing to pretend at confidence. It made them less hostile but more enigmatic. No one thought of the women at Yale: they appeared vague and undefined from our lookout.
A.J., Tiney, and Ruth had also signed up for Weingarten’s class, and we ended up sitting together for most of the semester; or at least A.J., Tiney, Jun, and I did. Ruth found whatever seat she could when she arrived a few minutes late, or waved sheepishly at the door when it was simply too late for her to dare come in, holding her notebook up to the window to let us know she’d be asking for notes later. Usually A.J. or I nodded; she wouldn’t leave until someone did. Julie was away for the semester, studying at Oxford.
Weingarten’s appearance took some getting used to, and I wonder if it contributed to our initial fascination with him. His head was large and asymmetrical; his hair thin, kinky, and reddish and sprouting in two places: just above the temporal lobes and above either ear. His appearance was a study of arrogance: the eyes were small and hooded, the nose a waxy beak, the lips too expressive and slightly dry. His skin was the color of thinned honey and covered in small, dense constellations of acne scars. When excited, a long blue vein stood out from just below his hairline and ran the length of his skull to just above the back of his neck.
Most of his lectures were extraordinary, too, like a symphony wherein every movement seems too wonderful to be trumped by anything afterward, until it is. On the first day he started class, as we learned he always would, by taking a minute to leaf through a page or two of the texts in front of us all. He started to speak while still looking down: “Writers and critics,” he cleared his throat. “A relationship many of us have wondered about. An uneasy relationship.
“What we’ll begin exploring today, and what I’d ultimately like to have you write about in your term papers”—he still had not made eye contact with anyone in the class, though we were all watching him—“is the relationship, the epistemological, existential, political—what have you, and we’ll get into this—relationship, between writers and their critics.” He paused here, took a sip of coffee, turned toward the board, and studied it as if he were either not sure what would appear on it next or where to begin writing. “Let’s take, for a moment”—he continued to stare at the board—“as our starting off point, the argument that posits that a fundamental difference between the writer and the critic, and the reason why literature soars and critique stings, is that the writer pursues what interests him while the critic pursues what bothers him.” He had written “writer” and “critic” on either side of the board with the word “interest” under the one and “disturbs” under the other.
He walked back to the podium before looking back down at the text, but I didn’t think he was drawing from it. Instead, he seemed to be taking courage from the sight of words on paper, maybe enjoying the reassurances of black on white.
“Because the critic pursues what disturbs him,” he continued, still not looking up, “he is infinitely more knowledgeable. He must be”—head still down—“because when a mind chooses to seek out what disturbs it over what interests it, it will find far more material than the one in pursuit of its own joys.” He had the habit of leaning on one fist as he stared down at the table. “Yet although he comes across as jaded by this knowledge, although his writing is frequently dispassionate and dismissive, it is the critic who is far more consumed with his own romanticism; he reads with the buried hope that someone will come along who is so without fault, so aesthetically or morally or perhaps epistemologically brilliant, that he might be forced to believe unequivocally that one other man, or woman, might exist who could make everything that disturbs him about the world, or his chosen world, the literary world, insignificant.
“And, curiously enough, in times past, when a critic has stumbled into such territory, it is indeed only one man or woman who captures his fancy, as if to be so bewitched by a text is to experience some bastardized form of monotheism.” He looked up briefly, over his glasses, checking our reactions. Everyone was quiet, watching and listening to him. “And so the critic is the closet believer, though he is doomed, some might argue, to spend most of his life either deluded or miserably misanthropic, at least as far as the written word is concerned.” A small hint of a smile on his face now, a light laugh moving through the class. “Or perhaps I should say ideologically doomed,” he added, nearly muttering this last bit directly into the book.
A moment hadn’t passed before Sharon Minks—a woman I wasn’t friendly with but knew well for her compulsion to discredit her professors the instant after the first tenet of the lecture had been introduced—jumped in. I tuned out what she said, but wasn’t able to prevent the memory of her expression from forming: protruding, greedy eyes opening just a bit more the instant her mouth did.
Professor Weingarten listened to her and replied, shooting down what she’d said calmly and without effort, though it didn’t stop her. She rose to the fight like a pack dog tethered too long; she couldn’t help but pant her way through the first five minutes of discussion. Fortunately, she usually blew over before too much damage was done to the discussion as a whole; unfortunately, this was most often the result of some uncomfortable allusion the professor would have to make to her unfounded and irritating comments. We were in three classes together at Wellesley; apparently, I realized with concern, we had similar tastes. When she was in a class, it made me miss the quiet, staid lab, my fellow students and I hunched over our materials, not speaking, finding answers.
But then Jun raised her hand. It startled me to see her do this; most Wellesley students were pretty vocal in class, but Jun preferred to listen. She was saying something about how interest and disturbance could be one and the same thing, that many artists were disturbed and many critics easily delighted, a point Weingarten seemed to be on the verge of conceding, if she had stopped to let him speak. But she kept driving it home, and although he listened to her far longer than she deserved, you could tell from his face that he was just getting demoralized, probably wanting to keep his patience, at least on the first day; but between Sharon and Jun, I don’t see how anyone could have.
All his tolerance did was make Jun more determined, though her logic began to lose its focus. And only once Weingarten’s patience was visibly worn did Jun’s argument begin to take on its final, relentless form. There was no way Jun would prevail, and I thought back to our tennis match almost three years ago, the way her calm had infuriated me, had made me fight for something I couldn’t name.
He finally put his foot down, insisting we move on. But Jun still had to get in her parting shot: “Critics get excited, too, Professor. Especially between the sheets.”
The statement broke the tension just enough. A few people laughed and Weingarten was able to redirect. But I couldn’t. I had finally realized what Jun had been doing, and the shock of it shut everything else out. She’d been parroting Phyllis, it was a Phyllis argument she had been forwarding, the one Phyllis loved to make about how critics were never nearly as tight-lipped as they seemed, and her last statement was a repetition of Phyllis’s words verbatim. And the look on her face when Jun spoke them—a very small, very perfect smile—made me realize something I should have seen long before.
Something had happened between her and Phyllis. Phyllis, who, according to Ruth and Calbe’s insistence at a late night rehearsal last year, would sleep with anyone. The instant I remembered this, I regretted it. But there was truth behind the aversion I was fighting to squelch. Bold, indiscreet, unapologetic Phyllis.
It was all I could do to just keep my seat as the class erupted in a ripple of laughter and whispering at the next student’s contribution to the discussion, which deteriorated into even more base humor. Even Weingarten smiled a little. But I sat there, paralyzed by what I wasn’t supposed to know.
No one, I was sure even then, would have made the connection between what Jun just said and what might have happened with Phyllis, but it wasn’t the knowledge that pounded in my chest. It was the realization that Jun had let it slip. I thought of how all those on campus who had taunted her for two years, who had assumed that she was disingenuous in her sexuality, who would not bother to realize that her carefully constructed remove was the sign of an integrity and a fear too private to explain to even her closest friends, who would probably pick up on the next slip or the next. And in the midst of all this, I was suddenly most afraid of what it might mean for her that she had never seen her own move coming.
W
hen we left class it was pouring and no one had an umbrella. The five of us usually talked on our way out of class and the building, but instead we strategized out loud as to how we were going to make our next commitments in the weather. I was glad for the noise, the nonsense, and after a minute I ducked out of it and into the rain.
I didn’t see Jun again until later that night. We had planned to meet for dinner at the dining hall, but I skipped out. I was trying to decide if I had something to say to her or not. As far as I knew, she didn’t think I did. Again and again, this was what needled me most, what kept me away from her most of the day, consumed by a sort of guilt.
She was cheerful and unruffled when I returned to our room. I had picked up two umbrellas at the bookstore, and she was surprised and pleased when I gave her hers. She took it and held it in both hands, marveling at it, almost the way a parent does when a child brings home a project from school. I had the sense that she was rarely given gifts.
As she placed the umbrellas in our closet, I threw myself down on my bed. This would have earned at least a glare from Amy, but it didn’t draw Jun’s attention. She was humming, arranging the books she’d just bought for the semester.
I watched her for a while, until I could no longer stomach her contentedness, which seemed to grow larger the longer I allowed it. I sat up. “Jun,” I said, “how long did it last?” She looked at me, her face an open question. “The thing with Phyllis.”