The Horned Man (2 page)

I finished my coffee, read a newspaper, then walked the two blocks to her building. As I entered her consulting room, I saw that she had changed her clothes again: in place of the leather skirt was a demure pleated tweed affair, with thick brown wool tights underneath, and house slippers on her feet. She looked rather aloof and forbidding.

I lay down on the couch, facing away from her. For a moment I almost baulked at telling her the things that had just been going through my mind, but at a hundred dollars an hour, I couldn't afford to suppress anything that might prove illuminating.

‘After I passed you on the street just now', I began, ‘I went to a diner where I started thinking about why seeing you like that disturbed me, which it did, and I found myself drifting into this fantasy …'

I described all the things I had thought and felt and imagined as I sat in the diner. As I spoke, I was aware of the sound of her pen scratching across the pages of the notebook she always jotted in furiously while I talked. It occurred to me
that this notebook contained a great deal of intimate material about me, and I wondered if there were any circumstances under which she would show it to someone else. Was she bound by any code of privacy or therapists' version of the Hippocratic oath? What, in fact, bound her to me other than the fees I paid her; the fees I realised now I had been faintly annoyed to see glistening in that expensive-looking leather skirt?

I must have been speaking for longer than I realised: it seemed we had barely begun to discuss my fantasy of her picking up men in the park when a soft buzzing filled the room, marking the arrival of Dr Schrever's next patient.

As I got up to go, Dr Schrever looked at me in a way that seemed for a moment uneasy.

‘By the way,' she said, ‘I wasn't sure whether to tell you this, but I think on balance I should. You mentioned passing me in the street, but I haven't been out of this room all afternoon.'

I looked at her, dumbstruck.

‘In any case,' she went on, ‘I was with another patient when you arrived. You must have seen him leave while you were in the waiting room.'

Now that I thought of it, I had seen him leave: a lugubrious-looking man who always preceded me that day of the week. But so certain had I been of encountering Dr Schrever half an hour earlier that it hadn't even crossed my mind to infer from his presence anything that might have brought this into question. I had seen him, but apparently not taken account of him.

‘Perhaps it disturbs you to think I have other customers?' she asked, looking at me levelly.

‘You mean … patients?'

‘Well, yes,' she said with the trace of a smile, and I realised she had been referring light-heartedly to my fantasy, presumably to defuse any embarrassment I might have felt about it, with a note of humor, and I appreciated this.

Even so, as I left, I felt rather worried that I could have made such a blatant error of recognition, and as I walked back toward the park, where the snow was now lying in raised veins along every shiny black branch and twig, forming an exact white replica of each tree, I wondered who the woman was who had smiled at me in the street and said hello.

I walked idly over to the opening where I had seen her disappear into the park, and even went so far as to go down the winding path that led to the lake.

There was a small, rustic shelter where the path turned. I looked in; half-hoping, I suppose, to see the woman there. It was empty, of course. I stood there for a moment, watching the snowflakes dissolving in the black water, parts of which still had great plates of ice floating on or just under the surface.

Then I went home.

The next time I was in my office, I made a deliberate effort to settle the question of whether there really were grounds for thinking I had an intruder. The moving bookmark no longer seemed very mysterious, and given my misidentification of Dr Schrever I now began to wonder whether I might not have been paying proper attention when I went through the phone bill. Perhaps I had called that number after all, forgotten whose it was, and misread the time of night recorded on the printout. I looked for the bill now, but I couldn't find it. I assumed I must have thrown it away after paying it, and the cleaner had emptied the wastepaper basket.

In the act of searching for it, however, I found myself for
the first time really noticing the contents of this room. It hadn't occurred to me to take stock of them before; after all, why would anyone waste a moment on such things – objects so remote from any active use or ownership they'd staled away into little more than dust-shrouded memories of themselves? But my curiosity was aroused, and I embarked on a conscious inventory of the place.

Black-stained wooden chairs and bookcases; off-white walls; grey carpet and doors; a four-drawer metal filing cabinet with a Hewlett Packard printer curled up on top of it; the two oversized desks by the latticed window, a Dell desktop computer on one of them, on the other a giant stapler; a five-to-seven-cup Hot Pot Coffee Maker in its opened box; my own wooden desk with cables running around its legs, and a cache of styrofoam peanuts under its base – out of reach of the cleaner's vacuum.

There was a door I hadn't opened: behind it a closet with an air-conditioner hibernating on the floor, pleated wings folded neatly into its body. Some clothes in a dry cleaner's wrap hung on a metal hanger from a peg, under a woman's maroon beret. The late Barbara Hellermann's, perhaps? I closed that door. A few curled and fading cards stood on the window ledge. I opened them; saw they were all to Barbara from her students: ‘Thank you for being you'; ‘Your generosity and understanding will live with me forever.' A clock in the shape of a sunflower stood on a metal shelf next to several amateurish, brightly glazed pottery mugs. Although these things were of little interest in themselves, I did find it interesting that I hadn't even registered them until now. On another shelf was a bronze bowl with pebbles, a piece of quartz, a fir-cone, a tarnished coin – Bulgarian, on closer inspection – a key-ring and a jay feather. There was a framed
Matisse still-life on the wall, a small cork bulletin board with an old teaching schedule pinned to it, and next to that a rough-edged square of what looked like handmade paper with the following quotation printed on it in gold letters:

I want to do something splendid. Something heroic or wonderful, that won't be forgotten after I'm dead
.

I think I shall write books
.

Louisa May Alcott

The ceiling was made of perforated white drop-tiles, and was stained yellow from a leak in one corner. The light came from three plastic-paneled fluorescent strips.

Completing my examination of the room without any great sense of satisfied curiosity, I found myself thinking of Barbara Hellermann. I pictured her coming in here, hanging up her beret and her dry cleaning, glancing cheerfully at her cards, her uplifting quotation, taking her five-to-seven-cup Hot Pot from its box to brew coffee in for her class, setting out the pottery mugs … The sense of a sweet-natured, diligent soul came into me. I imagined her as an elderly lady, and hoped that her death had been peaceful.

Later that week I attended a meeting of the Sexual Harassment Committee. It was unusual for someone as new to the job as I was to serve on this committee, but I had sat on the Disciplinary Committee at a previous job in Louisiana, and it was thought that my experience there might be useful here, so that when a seat had fallen vacant at the beginning of this semester, I had been invited to take it.

I had hesitated before accepting. I had had a taste of the hostility one is liable to receive in return for doing this kind of work. In Louisiana, at a clambake on college grounds, a senior professor had overheard a sophomore warning some freshmen about the chiggers – insects that burrow under your skin; a local hazard. Without stopping to think, the professor had blurted out a foolish witticism: ‘We're not allowed to call them chiggers any more,' he had said, guffawing, ‘we have to call them chegroes.'

It hadn't taken the students long to find their way past the smirk of glib humor in this, to the leer of racism lurking beneath it, and before the party was over they had lodged a protest with the student council. The matter was brought before the Disciplinary Committee, and we agreed unanimously that the joke was a speech-act showing an implicit contempt for the sensitivities of minority students. The
professor was asked to make a written apology, but instead of doing so he had resigned – a gesture that aroused a storm of publicity in the local press. For several weeks the members of the Disciplinary Committee, myself included, had been pilloried as fanatics of the new religion of Political Correctness. Given the low level of reporting in these newspapers, not to mention the extreme reactionary position they took on all social issues, this wasn't as painful as it might sound – there was even a certain sense of martyred righteousness to be had from it – but I hadn't much enjoyed the experience, and the thought of exposing myself to a possible repetition of it up here at Arthur Clay College, didn't greatly appeal.

What decided me in the end was the sense that as a teacher of Gender Studies, instructing my students in the science of unscrambling the genetic code of prejudice, false objectivity and pernicious sexual stereotyping that forms the building blocks of so many of our cultural monuments, I had an ethical obligation to follow through on my intellectual principles into the realm of real human relations, where these hidden codes wrought their true, devastating effects – or at any rate not to refuse to do so when asked. Either I believed that what I did for a living had a basis in life itself, or else I was wasting my time.

I knew, of course, that the proceedings of these committees had by now become a stock-in-trade object of satire in popular plays and novels, but once I had made up my mind to serve, I found that I cared only as much about this as I had about the Louisiana newspapers: not enough to baulk at doing what I considered my duty. It was a matter, finally, of standing up and being counted.

Sexual Harassment Awareness Week was in two months' time, and the first part of our meeting was taken up with our
two student representatives outlining proposals for Take Back the Night events, Date Rape seminars, a Speech Code conference, and so on.

After we had voted to support and finance these proposals, the students left us and we proceeded to discuss what our chair, Roger Freeman, described as a ‘delicate matter.' This turned out to concern a young lecturer who was said to be engaging in sexual relations with several of his students. As yet there had been no formal complaints, but the rumors in circulation suggested it was only a matter of time.

The lecturer, a fellow Englishman named Bruno Jackson, was aware of the rules governing this sort of conduct. He and I had both attended the Sexual Harassment seminar, obligatory for all new faculty, at the beginning of the year. There, we were addressed by Elaine Jordan, the school attorney (and a member of this committee), on the need for constant vigilance and self-scrutiny. She advised us to keep our office doors wide open during one-on-one meetings with students of either sex. She urged us to look around our desks for objects of an inadvertently suggestive nature that might offend or upset a sensitive student. As an example, she gave the case of a visiting Australian Adjunct who had written the word ‘Ramses', the name of a condom brand, on the chalkboard behind him. Two or three of his students had been made uncomfortable by this, imagining it to be some kind of Australian method of importuning. When the man was brought before the Sexual Harassment Committee, he expressed astonishment, claiming the word referred to a Turkish cigarette of the same name, which a friend had asked him to buy in New York, and that he had chalked it up to remind himself. To the extent that he wasn't officially reprimanded, he had been given the benefit of the doubt, but his contract had not been renewed. ‘And be
advised,' Elaine had continued, ‘these things stay in your record. Permanently.'

She had then gone on to warn us about the dangers of introducing the subject of sex into classroom discussions. ‘Obviously you can't always avoid it, but be sensitive. Some students find it embarrassing, especially when they think a faculty member's harping on the subject unnecessarily. We get a lot of complaints about teachers who are always looking for the sexual symbolism of a poem or story –'

It was here that Bruno Jackson had interrupted her. I had already noticed him reacting with ill-concealed amazement and sarcastic disbelief to much of what Elaine had been telling us, as though it was the first time he had encountered anything like this, which was unlikely, given the peripatetic job history he and I shared. I myself had heard numerous versions since coming to the States from England seven years ago, and was no more surprised by it than I would have been, say, by a flight attendant demonstrating safety procedures before take-off.

‘Wait a minute,' he'd said in a voice brimming with aggressive irony, ‘are you saying I have to put a lid on discussion of sexual imagery in the books I teach?'

Elaine looked at him, startled. She saw herself as our ally – a purveyor of information necessary to our survival – and it clearly upset her to be spoken to as an oppressor.

‘No, that isn't what I'm saying –' Her eyes darted anxiously about the room in search of support. ‘I'm just saying you have to be sensitive.'

I nodded vigorously, and one or two other people followed suit.

‘The kids don't like being made to feel uncomfortable,'
Elaine continued. ‘They're very young, remember. Not even in their twenties, some of them –'

‘I see,' Bruno had said. ‘So for instance, I'm teaching Jane Austen this week.
Mansfield Park
. There's this one scene where a girl loses something down the back of a sofa. She pushes her hand down the cracks between the cushions and starts feeling around for it. It's all very heightened, and as far as I'm concerned it's a thinly veiled image of female masturbation. Are you saying I should just gloss over that?'