My Education (2 page)

So this was Dutra's third year in town, though his first as a graduate student in the School of Medicine. These contrasting conditions, of jaded veteran and innocent initiate, rendered Dutra my ideal if surprising companion. In his habitual controlling egotism he was happy to spend hours lecturing me as to where I should buy morning bagels, afternoon six-packs, late-night falafels; with whom I should bank; at what drugstore I could most cheaply purchase toothpaste; which bar had an acceptable pool table, jukebox, draft beer selection; what site of natural beauty among dozens in town was most congenial to drug use, al fresco sexual relations, a bonfire—I had not yet found one category of need, however mundane or abstruse, about which he lacked a bombastic opinion.

Yet at the same time as serving as sage, Dutra was boyishly thrilled about medical school. Without contradiction he both saw it as his due and cherished it as an astounding piece of luck. It merited his delight, a sentiment he generously extended to all other aspects of his new situation, myself included. Dutra possessed a wonderful capacity for alternating domineering, almost bullying speech with a listening so thorough, so rapturously attentive—eyes percolating with interest, clown grin by impossible increments gaining more width—that my paltry resistance that first night had been demolished well before he pulled off all my clothes. No detail, of his new world or mine, was too inconsequential. His orientation thus far had been unlike mine a genuinely harrowing ordeal of obstacle courses and scavenger hunts and overnight camping trips with insufficient equipment, yet he insisted on my full reciprocation. “So I'm exhausted. Too exhausted to talk,” he concluded now while still sprawled in the hammock, after regaling me for perhaps an unbroken half hour, his arms and legs gesticulating and his bottle sometimes splashing beer that fell onto the porch with a slap. “Get the other six out of the fridge and tell me all about your
insane
day.”

I was very worked up. The first meeting of one of my classes had been disrupted by protesting second-year students who accused the professor, an elderly white male novelist and Faulkner scholar from the South, of perpetuating racist/colonialist sentiment in his most recent book. “They were chanting ‘Joseph Conrad, Joseph Conrad'!” I evoked, splashing beer of my own as I mimed a hand waving a sign. “Because, you know, of Conrad's Colonialist Agenda. So we're going to have an emergency meeting to decide if we should boycott his class, or stay and try to subvert it somehow from within.”

“Can I ask a really idiotic question?” Dutra said, in a tone that suggested his question would reveal that all idiocy lay elsewhere. “With these people, is that name, Joseph Conrad, supposed to be an insult?”

“Well, yes!—obviously.”

“But Joseph Conrad is a fabulous writer.” It was the pat declaration of a nonscholar and nonwriter; even Dutra had his limits.

“I don't think they're talking about his writing so much as his politics. And the way his discourse perpetuates the status quo. The inequities in power between whites, who control the discourse, and nonwhites, who are controlled by it—”

“Who cares about his politics?” said Dutra, swinging out of the hammock.

“I think his politics are inseparable—”

“Oh, bullshit. Do you like his books or don't you?”

“Whose?”

“Joseph Conrad's.”

Here was a question I hadn't expected. “I've only read
Heart of Darkness
but . . . I liked it,” I acceded at last. This was just the sort of double admission Dutra seemed to extract as a matter of course.

“Do you like the other guy's books?”

“Whose? My professor's?”

“Exactly.”

“I've never read them.” Strike three.

Dutra burst out hysterically laughing. “No wonder
you're confused!” he exclaimed, in the exaggeratedly bemused, tenderly condescending manner I'd already learned was his method of shifting the mood. He actually lowered his eyelids at me. Annoyed, I drained the last of my beer and threw the bottle at him, which he snatched deftly out of the air as he followed me into the house. “You don't have any empirical evidence,” he went on, pinning me to the couch cushions after sweeping a jetsam of hardcover textbooks and bong components and record sleeves and the leavings of an interrupted penny-rolling project from the couch onto the floor. “You've never read the guy's books, let alone interacted with him—how could you expect yourself to know if he's racist or not?” But by now, with joint effort, we'd unpeeled my sundress from over my head, and freed one of my legs from my panties, and freed his erection, tumid purple and blue, interestingly bent, and logically corresponding in all other ways with his assemblage of outsize mobile characteristics, so that it no longer seemed necessary to make a reply.

•   •   •

Dutra's outsize self-confidence worked its influence on me in more ways than one. At that age I still believed in the malleability of personality, and could imagine myself more competent in fields about which I knew nothing, or more devil-may-care about such competence, than I actually was. Signing up for Nicholas Brodeur's seminar was the sort of thing Dutra, in an analogous situation, would have unhesitatingly done. First-year status in a room full of third- and fourth-years; perfect unfamiliarity with the material; and perhaps most significant, as it turned out, complete lack of aptitude for it, would have only spurred Dutra to lay hold of the qualifications as quickly as possible. And knowing him, within a month he would have learned Middle English and been competing with Brodeur for who had the most lines memorized. But I wasn't Dutra, a deficiency I already suspected.

I told myself Brodeur's beauty had nothing to do with the reason I had, on impulse, added his class as the fourth to an already-respectable roster of courses with no link at all to his Chansons of the Middle Ages. Yet the image of him in absurdly spiked hair and absurdly unseasonal duster was stamped in my mind. With the recent exception of Dutra, to this point my whole sexual history, which I flattered myself to consider quite epic, might have been represented on my tomb wall with a single hieroglyphic comprising the principal features of the Byronic type. All through college with instincts befitting a bloodhound I'd unearthed variations on this theme, boys with long hair and tormented, hooded eyes and a cramp in the wrist from the thick hardbound
Collected Journals of Kierkegaard
they insisted on carrying everywhere without the benefit of a backpack. They all tended to brood and weep thrillingly, they were as sexually suave as castrati, and they were perhaps all in love with one another, not me. But by some accident of my early environment I'd been raised on them, as a person might be raised on an unnourishing, bland home cuisine, and then want to eat nothing else. In Brodeur I'd recognized the paragon of my type. Yet at each visible point he so exceeded the prior examples, I suspected he might be a superior type altogether.

A premature autumn cold snap had blown in, enabling me to dress, with more effort than I'd devoted to most of my undergraduate courses, as a sort of Catwoman of Academe, in circulation-impeding high-heeled black leather boots, and black tights, and a painted-on black miniskirt, and an outsize black cowl-neck sweater on which the cowl gaped so carelessly open in front I required a black camisole. And so it was with thumping heart, clammy hands, and naked sternum that I entered the classroom to discover Brodeur no less transformed, in professorial camouflage of slightly geriatric rimless bifocals, a jacket of actual tweed which vindicated Casper, and utterly unremarkable, even cheap-looking khakis. His leonine mane had been artlessly flattened, as if he had slept in a hat. It was the khakis that most obsessed me. Were they self-consciously mundane and sexless, or unconsciously so? Then he'd stood up from the table to do something baffling and metric on the board, and I had seen that the pants had a horizontal rip high up on the right thigh. It was not recent, judging from the stringy unravelments, and it was wide enough to expose about an inch of the cuff of a pair of white boxers, gone humbly gray from the wash—and beneath this, if lost in shadow, a narrow swath of very pale, hairy, vulnerable skin. Not one of my classmates, all of them pale, slightly hunched, and dressed like elderly clerks or librarians, seemed to notice. Nor, I felt sure, had Brodeur. That fish-belly paleness of thigh was something even a libertine would have concealed. And so already on the very first day I'd encountered the odd contradiction, between the solemnly abstracted Brodeur of the classroom and the Brodeur of notoriety; between the hapless obliviousness advertised by that hole in his pants—like the plumber's ass-crack, like the festive toilet-paper banner waving out of the back of a woman's mis-tucked pantyhose—and the vandal's dark glasses and duster he'd worn at the reading, items one could almost think he had purposely, childishly picked to fulfill others' worst expectations.

No such perversity was evident in class. His pedagogic behavior was formal to the point of anachronism. He called us, unironically, by titles and last names, and we, who had immediately grown accustomed to calling all our other professors by their first names, as if we were truly their colleagues, called him only “Professor,” or “Professor Brodeur.” His greatness as a scholar, which no one disputed, here achieved preeminence. No other detail seemed to matter. Yet the purely intellectual awe in which he held us—and I include myself despite my bewilderment, for I too was entranced—gave a clue to that degraded persona of his wandering like a rogue in the world outside. For he cast his spell on us by reading aloud, and the way that he read thrummed with sex. He was an almost indecently riveting reader: husky, restrained, oddly sullen. He read like an actor displeased with his part, Brando muffing his lines in the unlikely hope he'd be fired. He maintained an affectation of unnecessarily tenting the text open in tense fingers and pretending to read off the page, but inevitably a surfeit of emotion would ejaculate via his hands, and the book would launch off through the air as he hotly spoke on; or if this didn't happen, coming back to himself at the end of the verse he would spank the text onto the table, as if slightly annoyed by our collective dry mouths and slack jaws.

But my classmates constituted a cabal of highly specialized persons, and once the spell was broken they piped up in an elaborate argot. Dowdy, studious, and translucent as they were they yet somehow held the keys to these cloistered proceedings. Perhaps sex was so little a habit with them they did not even credit it as a distraction. Whatever the case, I was totally out of my depth, more and more with each class I attended. I never spoke, and my silence was increasingly mortifying. Why had I been so stupid as to forget that he also did lectures? This term he was teaching two titanic undergraduate surveys, Shakespeare and Chaucer, from within the anonymous hundreds of either of which I could have gaped at him undetected. Each time he stopped reading to us and asked for discussion I counted the minutes until I could plausibly leave for the bathroom, a remote destination to which even a perfunctory visit would take fifteen minutes. All the women's bathrooms on campus had been grudgingly crammed into unvalued spaces, like former broom closets or the triangles under staircases, sometime in the mid-1970s, in a belated acknowledgment of coeducation, and the one for the English department was interred in the basement, reached by a claustrophobic subterranean passage that had only been meant by the hall's architects to give access to the heating pipes running the length of the ceiling. But despite its obscure situation the bathroom was a nodal point, heavily used for the whole range of female purposes, hygienic and otherwise. No sooner had I settled down onto the bowl than I read, at eye level,
BRODEUR IS A HARASSER
,
HARASSER
crossed out and revised—by the same hand?—to
RAPIST.

It oddly seemed to confirm my impurity more than Brodeur's. Of course I had come to his class out of prurience. Whatever sort of criminal he might also be, he was committed to his field. I was not; not once in my life had I given a thought to medieval chansons. I was a prurient fraud; unself-consciously slumped on the toilet, I could see myself clearly and feel calm resolve.

The weather at the brink of October had reverted to the stillness and heat of an Indian summer, and it felt apt that on what turned out to be my last day in his class, I'd been obliged to forgo my Catwoman costume and reveal my true self, in a juvenile sundress and sandals. Emerging from the suffocating basement the palatial first floor gave relief, with its long colonnade, in the shadows of which it was cold as a cave, but ascending back up the staircase I rose into the blanket of heat as if into a cloud layer. Down the length of the hall I could hear him, enthralling with his voice; this would be the last time. Slipping back in the room I left the door standing open, as it always remained. He had made this preference clear the first day, when one of the translucents, hurrying in moments after Brodeur took his seat, reflexively pulled the door shut in his wake and was told: “Leave it open, Ted, won't you.” In subsequent classes, if someone forgot, he walked over and stood it wide open himself. Was this in response to some past accusation? Professor, or students, reciting unclothed? I'd tried to return to my chair without making a sound, yet he glanced sharply at me, and then I realized that his gaze had been drawn by a movement outside in the hall. I turned in time to see a very fair, slender woman come into the frame of the doorway; she must have been climbing the stairs just behind me. Without pausing she threw a look at Brodeur that seemed to land on him like a grenade. Then she passed out of sight. His voice, which I'd never heard falter before, died off as if by the flip of a switch. In a beat he resumed, but a little past where he had been.

A few moments later I saw her again, out the classroom windows, passing by on the sidewalk below. Very straight, lank blond hair the confusing color of drenched straw, both dark and pale. Her face a portrait from Wyeth. Her carriage was so narrow and erect, her arms and legs so finely jointed and long, she looked something like an egret stalking past, except for being massively pregnant, so pregnant the prow of her belly seemed to part the air some two feet ahead of the rest of her. She was wearing black leggings and some sort of cheap black cotton slippers, and a white tank top, riding up at the waist, and over it a white Oxford, unbuttoned, the overlong sleeves making donuts where she'd rolled them to her elbows.