The ink had not yet dried on my high school diploma when I rushed off to begin my future at Eliza Baxter College of New England University in western Massachusetts. I was in a big hurry. With a time schedule based on Dr. John Watson and not a minute to waste, I was all set to do the four years of college in three so I could enter law school at nineteen and pass the bar at twenty-one. I had the whole thing mapped out.
But somewhere during my sophomore year my fine resolutions turned to dreams as I fell hopelessly in love with philosophy.
The romance started innocently enough. Like any lover I can recall intimations of the affair long before it began in earnest—a lingering glance, a chance meeting in the library, a greeting withheld. I still smile remembering an even earlier time when I wouldn’t have looked twice at philosophy, it so smacked of religion.
I had had my fill of that discipline in the Sunday school (that met on Saturday) my parents had enrolled me in as a child to learn “about my origins.” I wasn’t having any of it. I was willing to accept as “literature” the Bible stories presented in Literature class; I might even have learned to recite them in Hebrew as we were expected to do in Hebrew class; but when they filed into the History class dressed as real events that had once taken place, God and I parted company. If there was ever a possibility that I might have fallen for stories like Genesis or Moses and the Ten Commandments, it was destroyed by the ridiculous title of the textbook we used: When the Jewish People Was Young. An author capable of such a travesty had about as much authority to convince me of God as my Grandfather Charlie, who, despite the presence of several respected MDs in the family, shamed us all by taking himself to the local apothecary to be treated with leeches whenever he had the sniffles. And my father warning me every Saturday, “You mustn’t believe everything you hear,” didn’t boost the Temple’s credibility. I sat through the weekly compulsory religious service following History class with a skeptical heart.
The God of Abraham forfeited every challenge I threw him. Either He had no dignity or He didn’t exist. He didn’t even strike me down for standing among the mourners and weeping during that most holy portion of the religious service, the Prayer for the Dead. After I whispered the forbidden name of God and still nothing happened to me, I knew I had flushed him out. If He existed at all, he was chicken shit—certainly not worthy of worship.
My love for philosophy took an opposite course: whatever challenge I came up with, philosophy always had an answer. I never once got the last word. My little skepticism was like dusting powder next to the cosmic doubt of a skeptic like Hume. I watched heavies like Descartes and Leibniz or Plato and Aristotle slug it out together, perfectly matched champions. Who knew who would win? They were all incomparable performers, each with a style of his own.
Though it was several terms before my infatuation became a passion, I can trace the affair back to a vision I had during final exam week in my freshman year.
It was probably because of the No-Doz pills I’d been using to cram and the high level of tension around the dorm, for it was more than an ordinary insight. It was a genuine vision, complete with flashing lights and sirens in the background. Suddenly all the little rooms in my mind popped open at once, and the vision flashed through them like a comet. Every event in life can be ordered on a single continuum. All the diverse chronologies that had been complacently resting in the various rooms of my mind for years suddenly got up and started rearranging themselves. Until the vision, in one room there had been cavemen (who really came first), followed by Indians, Pilgrims, African slaves, and the Presidents. In another room had been the Egyptians (who came first), followed by Queen Elizabeth, the Renaissance, and Napoleon. And in yet another room had been first Beowulf, then the Middle Ages, then Biblical Times (including the Arabian Nights), and ancient Greece and Rome—all mostly mythical. Not until after the No-Doz vision did it occur to me that they could all fit cozily on a single continuum together. Eureka! The American Indians and the ancient Egyptians on the same line not only wind up nowhere near each other, but the Indians do not necessarily come first!
Even when exams were over and I went off No-Doz, I fought to keep hold of my vision. It was too large to assimilate all at once. I believed it intellectually but it took a long time before I felt it in my gut; it required a habit of faith too new to serve me daily, and again and again I would come up short as I was struck with fact upon astonishing fact:
There were slaves in America (slaves!) less than a hundred years ago!
Beowulf was composed after Deuteronomy; King Lear before the Declaration of Independence!
Before long I noticed vast stretches of my line with nothing filled in. They made me uneasy. What happened between Ancient Rome and the Middle Ages? Between Voltaire and Victoria? I wanted to fill it all in so I could see the line whole. I knew it would require diligent application over a very long time, but theoretically at least, it was possible. If one took the longest view, holding that simple Time Line clearly in mind, one could eventually fill in all the details and know everything.
For someone starting, like me, from scratch, it was a breathtaking thought. Everything. So far I knew nothing; I believe I hadn’t yet even registered for the second semester. But spending my time in pre-law when instead I could be on my way to learning everything seemed a tragic waste. Perhaps I ought not even bother becoming a lawyer. People were always saying how silly it was—all that work, when I’d wind up getting married anyway. Whereas, knowing everything could always come in handy.
Not that I had any choice in my program. The freshman courses were all requirements anyway—no electives at Baxter until sophomore year. But I started applying myself to my studies with a special ardor. Any course was a good starting place.
Western Civ.: Instead of examining cultures as discrete units, as the teachers taught, I examined them as moments on a continuum and ignored the details. Though I scribbled down furiously the same notes as everyone else, coughing them back up on exams, to me the Renaissance was not a series of Italian names and dates constituting what-happened-in-Italy; it was a Time with a Character. Why, Elizabethan was Renaissance! I hoped that someday I would be able to stand back far enough to see all Western Civ. itself as a Time with a Character.
Survey of English Lit. I.: English Literature was a parochial flourish on a segment of my line. Beauty was Truth.
French Grammar (otherwise loathsome): a blue chalk for coloring bits of my line.
Intro. to Psych.: a sharp pencil for detail work.
Classic, Romantic, Economic, Social, Cause, Structure—indispensable iridescent hues. I knew that only when all the colors blended together would I achieve that pure white blinding beacon that would show me All.
Getting the feel of my line, by semester three I found I could run quickly through it and pull out a little something from every epoch or a little more from just a few to make a neat subline, good for a term paper. I crammed for final exams by squeezing onto a single sheet of notebook paper, in perfect subdivided outline, every fact I had learned in the course: if I couldn’t comprehend the whole course in one glance, it was of no use to me. Since I had to list something, I chose History as my major, but wars and rulers, like conjugations, minor poets, and other particulars, were profoundly boring unless I could view them as reflections of something larger and more abstract. It was impossible for a notion to be too abstract for me. Abstraction was the key to seeing everything at a glance.
It was in the second semester of my sophomore year that I accidentally stumbled onto that abstraction of abstractions, History of Ideas, which opened my mind to philosophy and closed it to such comparatively trivial needs as food and rest. Offered for History credit by the Philosophy Department, the odd course was taught by one Professor Donald Alport, a hulking philosopher with strange intonations, a grey mustache, and thinning hair, who must once have had my very vision, so learned was he. My French verbs went unconjugated, the War of the Roses went unexplained, as under Alport’s tutelage I contemplated the Great Chain of Being and the Idea of Progress.
Too late for history or law, I was smitten. History itself was but an idea occurring in a mind: like Number, like Justice, like Truth.
By the next semester, taking the ultimate abstraction, Logic, and both Philosophy of History and Professor Alport’s History of Philosophy, with each class I fell more desperately in love. A hopeless case. I didn’t even care that I was reading myself right out of the marriage market but gave myself wholly up to my new passion. I could hardly drag myself out of the library back to the dorm at night. Before long I began to see my onetime dream of knowing everything as foolishly naïve. Socrates was right: the more one knew, the more one must recognize one’s own ignorance. But he was also right that the unexamined life was not worth living.
I plunged in, pursuing the ideas deep into ancient texts, losing myself among subtle distinctions. Nothing else mattered. I analyzed with Aristotle and flunked my French midterm. I synthesized with Augustine and stopped eating everything but Cheezits and black coffee. Discovering with Spinoza the connectedness of things, exploring with Kant the mind that thinks so, I stopped going to chapel or gym and eventually stopped sleeping at night. My brain was in a constant state of intoxication. With Schopenhauer I saw the world as pure will, until, with Bishop Berkeley, I saw it as pure idea. The more I studied, the less sure I was of anything—even of what I had sworn by the week before. My letters home grew enigmatic, alarming my mother. When I wrote that I planned to stay at school during Christmas vacation so I could study, she called up long distance begging me to come home.
“What’s the matter Sasha? Are you in trouble? Are you falling behind?”
“No, I’m not behind. I just want to read, that’s all.”
“Can’t you read at home? Is it really something else you want to stay for, darling?”
“There’s nothing else.”
“Your father and I have been counting the days until Christmas. Everyone’s been asking after you. If you don’t want to come home we can’t make you, but we’re worried about you, dear. Your letters have been so … so … strange. Won’t you at least tell us what’s wrong?”
She was right: something was wrong. Without gym or chapel or French I wouldn’t graduate, yet I had wiped gym and chapel and French out of my life. The official notices and warnings I had received from the Dean of Women were stuck away in the corner of my room among a mounting pile of empty Cheezit boxes, unanswered letters, incomplete law school applications, and No-Doz pills.
“Nothing’s the matter, Mom, really. I just need to spend some time thinking. But I’ll see, maybe I will come home.” I had a week left to decide.
That night I dreamed I wrote all my finals in a mysterious secret code, the more brilliant the matter, the harder to decipher. I had much to say, but I couldn’t make myself understood. Helplessly I watched my potential A’s dissolve to F’s. Waking in a panic, I spent the rest of the night reading Saint Augustine, and the next day, in desperation, I went to the infirmary to see the psychologist. It was an extreme measure for a former believer in the Behaviorism of Dr. John Watson.
The nurse looked up at me curiously, then handed me a pink paper. “Fill out this form and take a seat,” she said.
“Does it go on my record?”
“Of course.”
I sat down with the form. Name. Date. School. Year. Age: 18. Class: Junior. Major: Philosophy. Minor: Philosophy. Religion: Philosophy. Complaint:—
“What does this question mean, nurse?”
She looked at the form. “Put down what your problem is.”
I hesitated. “I don’t know what my problem is. That’s why I’m here—to find out.”
“Doctor has to know what kind of a case you are. Now go write a sentence stating your problem.”
I couldn’t name my problem. How can we know that we know? What is Truth? What is the meaning of Problem? If there were any answers, they were all in an indecipherable code. I put the pink form back on the nurse’s desk and walked out. There was no help for me here.
I returned to the dorm and flung myself on my bed. Around my room at eye level I had run a strip of masking tape representing Time. It started at the door with prehistory and stretched, densely crowded with tiny writing, all the way around to my bed. There wasn’t room on it for one more entry, but I didn’t care. What I yearned to know could not be fit between a then and a now. It could not be numbered. It was simple and yet hugely complex, like a perfect circle and the Grosse Fuge. It existed outside of Time. If I were lucky it would come to me in another vision that would be so stunning as to obliterate forever the triviality of unlearned French and the pettiness of chapel.
A junior from Cleveland’s West Side called to offer me a ride home in exchange for a tankful of gas and some of the tolls. I accepted. In the car, three Ohioans in N.E.U. sweatshirts and dungarees sang hillbilly songs and Christmas carols with the radio all the way across the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I slumped in the corner pretending to sleep. Not that I disliked the music; I loved to sing and would even have tried to harmonize if it hadn’t been for another tune buzzing in my ears. The farther west we drove the harder I strained to hear it. With my nerves taut as harp strings and my brain cells poised to replay every tantalizing signal, nothing could shake my conviction that I was listening to the Music of the Spheres.
At home I cowered through Christmas, avoiding “Jingle Bells” and relatives. Only the books I had brought from school and baroque music could soothe me. I read deep into every night that vacation. In the daytime I slipped off to the quiet garden of the Cleveland Museum of Art where, thrilling to Bach on the organ, I could contemplate with Spinoza the vanity of all human wishes save one. I followed each idea to the next, finding one subsumed under another, itself subsumed under yet another, soaring after that single axiom or thought or word that would somehow sum up everything.
“Sasha, you’ve hardly eaten a bite the entire holiday. Don’t you think you’re studying too hard, darling?” asked my poor mother. But the only nourishment I took was for my mind; for my body I couldn’t care less. Like Descartes’s, my mind and my body led separate lives, but unlike Descartes, I found no satisfactory way to connect them.
I had always despised my body. Slowly my contempt spread to all things material. For the only time in my life, I didn’t care how I looked. Neither Leibniz, nor Spinoza, nor Newton, nor Locke, nor Berkeley, nor Descartes’s God Himself could bridge for me the growing gap between mind and matter.
My second day home I had gone to an engagement shower for an old high school friend. It turned out so unhappily that I didn’t want to see another Baybury soul.
“Sasha! We never thought you’d come,” said the hostess. “We thought you wouldn’t want to associate with us anymore since you got into that fancy college.”
Fancy college! Just because it wasn’t Ohio State! “Baxter’s not fancy at all,” I said. “It’s just far away.”
“Well,” said the hostess, “nobody ever hears from you.”
“Come on, admit it,” said another friend. “You have to be a Brain to get into those Eastern colleges. But then, Sasha always was a Brain.”
“That’s not true—” I began excitedly. It was the dream again. How should I begin to explain myself?
“Calm down, now. You’re probably both right.”
“You must be meeting a lot of interesting people there.”
“We were sure you’d be engaged by now. Things turn out so funny. The three girls from our group that are left are the ones we all thought would go first.”
“She always said she wasn’t going to get married right away.”
“Yeah, she said she was going to be a lady lawyer. Maybe she really will.”
Being spoken to in the third person didn’t make me feel any more comfortable. After the shower I decided to spend my evenings in the house.
“If it’s for me, say I’m not home,” I hollered whenever the phone rang, and retreated to my room. (Actually, it was now only nominally my room. Since I had gone away to school, it had been converted into an upstairs den. My bed was still there, and my things were still in the closet, but my pictures had been taken down, the room had been painted blue, and a large TV set had been installed on my desk in place of my phonograph and records.) I refused all Christmas parties and phone calls. “You always have to be different, don’t you?” asked my father, shaking his head.
I decided that would be my last vacation at home. When it was over I took a Greyhound bus back to school rather than accept a ride from some frivolous student. I couldn’t bear to be distracted by human chatter. Professors alone, pure mind, didn’t stink of humanity.
“Sasha Davis?”
“Yes.” I stood in the doorway of my narrow room peering at a tall blond girl in a school blazer. Her hair was cropped short at the neck like Joan of Arc’s—not like all the other Baxter girls with smooth pageboys or feather cuts like mine.
“I’ve seen you in the dining room, but I never knew your name. I thought you might be missing this.”
I let out a gasp as delicate fingers held out the small black notebook to which I committed certain of my profoundest thoughts. I had not yet missed it.
“It seemed too private to turn in at the Dean’s office, so I found out your room number. I’m Roxanne du Bois. I write too.”
She dropped her voice and eyes so modestly on the last sentence that I wanted to take her hand. She couldn’t have read my notebook, or she would have known that, as a matter of fact, I didn’t “write.” But I didn’t tell her.
“I guess that makes us both creeps,” I laughed warming with gratitude. “Thank you. Do you want to come in for a few minutes?”
She smiled and walked into my sanctuary, sitting on my unmade bed. It was one of the rare times I had invited anyone into my room. I had chosen Baxter College in the first place because I knew no one there, and I wanted to keep it that way. But this tall, pale girl with the soft voice and delicate hands seemed as separate as I, and fragile besides. “I’ll make us some coffee,” I offered.
As I plugged in the coffee pot to boil the water, I felt her take in my black walls, my Time Line, my cases of books, and the bulletin board on which I mounted pictures of me at cottage, me at several dances with dates, me with my family, and our Baybury house.
“Black walls. What a great idea,” she said. “It really gets the feel of this place. I’m surprised your roommate lets you have black walls. My roommate put some flowered horror in our room, but since she paid for it all I can’t complain. It’s better than the prosaic green we moved into.”
“I don’t have a roommate,” I said, handing her a cup of instant coffee and sitting down on the foot of the bed. “I’d rather have stayed home than have to give up my privacy.” As soon as it was out of my mouth I was sorry I’d said it, Roxanne looked so fragile and distant.
“Not me,” she said. “I’d gladly have ten roommates to get away from Richmond, (home), Virginia.” Embarrassed, she reached out for the book lying on my night table. She picked it up, then looked from it to me. “You like Eliot? I love Eliot,” she said. “I think I’d rather have written Prufrock than any other poem in the English language. ‘Then how should I begin to spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?’”
“‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas,’” I answered her. A silence passed between us, a rest note in a soft duet, as we sipped our coffee.
“Are you majoring in English too?” she asked.
“No. Philosophy.” I braced myself against the awful next question, What is your Philosophy of Life? But that sensible girl didn’t ask it.
“Philosophy! I’d probably flunk it if I ever took it. I’m flunking all my subjects except English. But I don’t care,” she said, growing distant again. “Unless I flunk out. I’d hate that. I’d have to go home.” There was a trace of mockery in the exaggerated Southern way she said “home,” in two syllables. “How come you’re majoring in philosophy?”
I stirred my coffee, stalling. How could I tell her why I chose philosophy? I couldn’t tell anyone, it sounded crazy. I shrugged my shoulders, but she wasn’t watching. She had put down her coffee and begun examining my books, all tidily arranged on the bookshelves in perfect logical order.
Delight suddenly lit up Roxanne’s face as she discovered the tiny volumes of my Little Leather Library. “What dear little books,” she squealed, turning them over one at a time. She was okay, I thought. She handled them so reverently that I offered to lend them to her.
“Maybe they’ll help you out,” I said. “They’ve always helped me.”
It was an odd thing to say, but Roxanne seemed to understand what I meant. “I have a few books you might like to look at too. Nothing like this. … My room’s on the first floor in the West Wing. Room 108. My roommate Dandy is away every weekend, but I’m always here. I don’t have anywhere to go. Drop in some time if you feel like it.” She walked to the door. She was evidently too refined to mention the Time Line. Definitely okay.
“Thanks for the books,” she added. “I’ll be careful with them.”
“Thank you for my notebook,” I replied.
Roxanne hesitated on the threshold. Then, dropping her eyes shyly again, she said, “I want you to know I didn’t read anything in it, except your name.”
“I know you didn’t,” I said.
She was clearly the exception to prove the rule. A girl I could trust.
Two loners together are different from a pair of ordinary friends. They have more respect for one another.
Roxanne and I quietly became friends; so quietly that people began to mistake us for each other. She was right about having books I would love. She introduced me to Gerard Manley Hopkins and Franz Kafka, as I had opened her eyes to Voltaire and Mencken and Russell. My own reading improved when I began underlining with Roxanne in mind, seeing the world through four eyes instead of two.
Our compulsions and fears complemented one another’s. I sat with her in the dining room since she was afraid to eat alone. She hid me in her room during gym and chapel. She listened compassionately as I struggled with the mind-body problem or the problem of free will, and I sat rapt as she read me her poems. After I taught her chess, as my father had taught me, we played by mail, dropping our moves in each other’s postal boxes between classes. Together we went to the movies, or avoided the Smoker and the Student Union. We traded clothes, and lent each other money when we needed it.
On weekends we sometimes went to Boston together, sitting apart from the other Baxter girls on the train. They went to Harvard or Boylston Street or Filene’s, while we wandered in the old bookstores or took in a concert. Occasionally Roxanne called up a friend she dated at M.I.T., and if his roommate was free they’d join us at Symphony Hall for a matinee or meet us for dinner at Durgin Park.
Roxanne’s friend Dave wasn’t bad, but his roommate Gary was so unpleasant I kept forgetting his name. I was temporarily off boys, and would certainly never have gone out with him except for Roxanne. Nevertheless, it was at one of those Symphony Hall matinees that I got my first inkling of a possible solution to the mind-body problem.
We were looking around for someone to light our cigarettes during intermission, when I found myself standing next to Professor Donald Alport. He was alone, standing a full head taller than everyone else, gazing over the crowd distractedly. I was thrilled to see out of context this mind that knew everything. His was the only mind I had ever known that had probably seen my vision, and here it was walking around Boston on long legs, winding up in exactly the same auditorium, and at precisely the same moment, as mine.
“Dr. Alport,” I said.
“Hello there.” He slowly focused on my eyes. “Are you enjoying the concert?”
“Oh, yes! The Eroica’s my favorite symphony. Are you?”
He didn’t answer, just looked at me. Suppose he had hated the concert? To cover up, I changed the subject. “Professor Alport, this is Roxanne du Bois, and her friend Dave Merritt, and … and … and …”
My mind blacked out. I couldn’t remember Gary’s name. Dr. Alport was looking at my face severely now—so severely that I wanted to disappear. I tried to remember the name again, but I couldn’t. If only someone else would say something; if only Dr. Alport would stop staring at me.
I was still searching for Gary’s name when it occurred to me that Dr. Alport wasn’t waiting for me to produce the name of my date at all. He was concentrating his gaze too deeply into my eyes for that to be it. Inexplicably, I felt the flow of adrenalin. My eyes began to waver under that stern gaze, and I was filled with self-loathing at the defeat. It’s the defeat of the Bus Stop Game!—I may not touch it tonight.
I feel myself turning crimson. Now I know what is happening. I have an itch for this hulking man whose power has forced my eyes, unworthy to look at him, into humiliating retreat. This itch that has been such a long time coming—years and years!—this itch spreads in little waves from my joy button to my scalp and fingertips. I know I am deep purple by now, and still I can’t raise my eyes.
“Yes, how do you do?” he is saying, ignoring that I have still not introduced my date by name. He has let me off the hook.
And then I understand that the penetrating gaze was only Dr. Alport’s own attempt to remember my name, which he has now given up. It is he who wants off the hook. He does not know quite everything. Outside the classroom he doesn’t even recognize me.
He moves off. Everyone forgets my gaffe. The gong is sounding for us to return to our seats and I move with the others down the aisle. In my head I hear a distressing discord, more than the sound of the orchestra tuning up. I prepare to hear the music. But the staggering itch remains.
“Miss Davis.”
“Yes?”
“I found your paper on Nietzsche extremely interesting. Did anyone help you with it?”
“No, Professor Alport. No one.” Although I had patently adored Dr. Alport for over a month, unable to take breath without hearing his voice, this was our first private conference. Between last week, when he had called it, and today I had walked around in a mist of anticipation, rehearsing for this moment, taking now my part to Roxanne’s Alport, now Alport’s to Roxanne’s me. But facing him in person, flesh to flesh, I forgot all my lines.
“It’s a very good paper.” He put a pencil to his lips and scrutinized me. Though my pulse quickened, I was paralyzed.
“Has anyone ever told you you have an interesting turn of mind?”
“Not really. Thank you,” I managed, reddening beyond endurance.
“Particularly for an undergraduate. You might want to consider doing some special work.” He was biting deeply into the pencil, making the end disappear under his dense grey mustache, indistinguishable in color from his eyes.
I had slaved over the Nietzsche paper, agonizing over each word, exhausting the library and the unabridged, listening to Wagner, all toward this particular A. But never did I expect anything more. O my soul, I gave thee the right to say Nay like the storm and to say Yea as the open heaven saith Yea. … Thus spake Zarathustra. Nietzsche’s own daring had inspired me, and the Liebestod, soaring higher and higher in my head, provoked such desire that now, watching Dr. Alport’s pink lips move caressingly over the yellow cylinder of wood, I was struggling against the liquefaction of my spine, urging myself: do it!
“A remarkable grasp. If you think you might be interested, I could give you a special reading list. No need for you to stick to the textbook selections.”
Too much. He had remarked my acumen and erudition, and I could never begin to repay him. If only I were worthy of him, he could have me as soup for lunch. O my soul, I washed the petty shame and the by-place virtue from thee and persuaded thee to stand naked before the eyes of the sun. … Thus spake Zarathustra.
“How’re your Saturdays, Miss Davis?” (O my soul … Who knowest as thou knowest the voluptuousness of the future?) “Saturday morning I’ll have time for a good long chat. We could meet at the library or”—he took the pencil out of his mouth and leaned forward over the desk—“or here in my office if you prefer.”
I heard a laughter which was no human laughter—and now gnaweth a thirst at me, a longing that is never allayed. My longing for that laughter gnaweth at me, o, how can I still endure to live? Thus spake Zarathustra.
“Dr. Alport?” My eyes had locked in their old daring glance, somehow managing not to falter.
“Yes?”
“I wanted to ask you something.”
“What is it?”
“Dr. Alport?” He waited, his grey eyes as unflinching as mine, till I blurted it out: “Are you seducible?”
I felt faint. I had had crushes before, starting as an orthodox bobby-soxer in Baybury Heights with the hots for Frank Sinatra, but never a crush like this. This huge ungainly man destroying a pencil between his jaws personified all that I valued and nothing I scorned. I worshiped him. What did I care that he was twice my age and probably married? I did not believe in youth or marriage. He was so far above the petty concerns that corrupted every shallow young man I knew that I didn’t care if he was forty or one hundred and forty. I loved him for his mind that knew everything—a provocative mind whose experienced eye could penetrate through layers of mask, clothes, skin, muscle, and bone, straight to the center of me where my own untutored mind, now a quivering mass of jelly, lay waiting to be given form and life.
He unknitted his brow and sat back. “I think that can be arranged, Miss Davis.”
Indeed, I led a charmed life. Things went too much my way to be all accident. The Blue Fairy of my childhood had evidently given way to a genie of rare skill. How else explain that this remarkable Professor Alport, of whose mere attention I was so unworthy, should say yes? He barely knew me. And yet he, with his hundreds of students, had recognized buried in my term papers and among the pages of my B-plus bluebooks the one quality I treasured in myself. Not my nose or my skin; not my eyelashes or my ass—but my “interesting turn of mind,” as he dubbed it. My authentic preciousness. Oh, it was his.
Saturday morning came slowly and ceremoniously, like a virgin’s wedding day. From his office where he was already waiting when I arrived at nine, Dr. Alport led me to an old brick building just off campus. At the entrance to a third floor apartment he fumbled with lock and keys until the door finally yielded; then, lifting me effortlessly in his lanky arms, he carried me to the dark inside and lay me gently on someone’s unmade bed.
Did it really happen? With sure fingers he unbuttoned my sweater, reached under me to unhook my bra, and lay both garments on the floor without moving his eyes from my already heaving chest. Slowly he bent his head and placed one long kiss on each breast, unkissed before.
“So beautiful, so perfect,” he murmured, removing my dungarees and sox with the same deft touch. And suddenly I lay exposed and quivering under his gaze. Shame almost turned me over; but I so longed to please this generous man who had brought me here that I forced myself to stay on my back, exposed.
He stood up and removed his own clothes, then lay down beside me. I closed my eyes. I no longer thought to please, I was so captivated by the thrill of toes on toes, his somewhat convex belly on my concave one, his prick on my thigh. Lying naked in a bed with a man for the first time in my life might explain a little, but not the joy of my untutored head fitting perfectly on the shoulder of one who knows everything; not the rapture when at last he kissed my waiting mouth while his practiced fingers continued to stroke me. My back, my neck, my thighs—I had never been touched or kissed before, and now suddenly, out of a large generosity of spirit, this gifted teacher would give me in one day a supply of caresses to make up for years. Beginning at my fingertips, he kissed one finger at a time down into the webs and up the next and moved slowly over every inch of me with his generous lips and tongue. He lingered over each freckle, each beauty mark, as I lay back, eyes still closed, incredulous. I, who had nothing to give him but gratitude and adoration, was being kissed, despite my smells, in the armpits, on the nipples, the navel. Gently he spread my thighs and moved his mustached mouth down one, then the other, until, after an eternity, he zeroed in on my very center, so many times invaded but never once kissed.
Happy me, to be kissed and covered like this at last, to be inexplicably noticed and loved. Starting like a pebble plunging deep into a pool, my gratitude stirred under those tingling kisses and spread through my body in little concentric circles, little shock waves, warming me, fanning out to my fingertips, my nerve endings, touching my glands and ducts until tears overflowed my eyes, and from somewhere deep inside me rose a strange little whimper of joy.
So this was what my joy-life meant! So this was the point of it!
His tongue lingered for a last caress, and then he entered my body with a single welcome thrust. My knees and lips guided him into me, greasing the way for him. I clasped my legs around his massive trunk to merge my own self in his. Like a quarter’s worth of nightcrawlers we undulated in unison until everything we knew came together.
Suddenly he jerked himself out, and pulling my head abruptly to his lap, came in my mouth. I considered it an honor. We smoked one cigarette without a word, and then we started all over again.
Alport was married, with a wife, a house, several small children, and an unfinished research project—all more deserving of his time than I. Though I hadn’t expected to see him again outside of class, I was grateful for the occasional Saturday morning he gave me, and I treasured the veiled messages he wrote on my bluebooks and the A’s I wasn’t sure I deserved. Unable to speak in his presence, instead I spilled my feelings to Roxanne or held passionate conversations with him when I was alone in my room.
When summer came, Roxanne went home, but I stayed at Baxter. I registered for both of the summer courses Alport taught, Ethics and Metaphysics, expecting no more of him than any ordinary student, but wanting to make myself available just in case. It was my genie, I’m sure, who arranged that we would spend the free time between the two classes having coffee together.
I never believed I could be so happy as I was from nine till one every day that summer. We sat in the darkest corner of a certain coffeeshop, straining toward each other across a small table, barely able to keep from touching. I could see that he had the same trouble as I. We began building elegant metaphysical fugues on some theme arising out of a class discussion or a line of text, embellishing and complicating together. Our music grew rich as, little by little, I opened up. Soon there was no more room for my shyness. Willingly, I sat at Alport’s feet. I did all the tasks and read all the books he assigned me. My mind never worked better. Even when he corrected me it was with such care that I emerged unharmed. I played Héloïse to his generous Abelard. One compliment from him on a question I asked set me up for a week, and under his direction I composed charming pieces of my own. He responded with such open delight that I began to believe he loved me a little, too.
We made love every Saturday morning—not nearly enough. I wanted to spend my life with him. Before the fall term of my senior year, I decided to take a room off campus so we could be more together. I had managed the ordeal of getting a diaphragm for Alport, why not a room as well? My dream was to spend one whole night with him, curled up in the curve of his body, waking up beside him in the morning.
I had five hundred dollars worth of war bonds I could cash if my parents wouldn’t pay the rent. I wrote Roxanne about my plan (she would have to masquerade as my roommate) and made up a good pitch for my parents. Fearing Alport’s veto, I didn’t say a word to him. Then I got the room.
Black walls, my books and phonograph, and a bed were all I started with. I was crazy to keep everything pure, like my love. I didn’t even put up the Time Line or my pictures.
“Wait here,” I said when the room was ready. Quickly I ran inside to start the Grosse Fuge on the phonograph while Alport waited. Then I went back outside for him and led him in with his eyes closed.
“Promise not to open them until I tell you to?”
“I promise.”
In we went. “You can look now,” I said, watching his face. He opened his eyes. “Do you like it?” I squealed. “It’s ours.”
He just carried me to the bed for an answer.
When Roxanne came back to school after the summer, she was more distant than usual. Her roommate Dandy had married and dropped out of school; I thought maybe it was my leaving the dorm too that depressed her. Maybe she thought I had used her, or abandoned her. I begged her to move in with me.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“My mother would pull me out of school if she found out I was living with the Jewess.”
“How would she find out?”
“She’d find out.”
She grew glummer and glummer until, finally, she told me what was the matter.
“I think I’m pregnant.”
“Pregnant! My God! Have you missed your period?”
“No, not yet, but I’m sure I will.”
“How can you be sure?”
“My luck.”
She was already sick, vomiting in the mornings and unable to eat. She didn’t dare go to the infirmary, since pregnancy meant automatic expulsion from Baxter. When she missed her first period, I begged her to get a pregnancy test, but she wouldn’t. “Why bother with a test? I know I’m pregnant.” She smiled an ironic I-told-you-so smile. I knew she wouldn’t take the test out of the same defeatism that kept her from taking the zoology exams: she simply wasn’t prepared to deal with the result.
She had been knocked up by a West Point cadet friends had thrust on her late in the summer. So eager was he to make out that he had hardly pulled off her pants and lay on top of her before he’d come all over her legs. It had been their third, and, she had determined, their last date. It was a freaky impregnation, but, as they say in the hygiene books, all it takes is one sperm and one egg.
When she missed her second period she finally consented to have a test. We searched among the doctors in the Boston Yellow Pages for a sympathetic-sounding obstetrician. There were only a few names left after we eliminated all those sounding Catholic (O’Brien), expensive (Van Aken), or Puritanical (Goodwin). We finally picked out a Dr. Brodsky (“Pick a Jewish name,” said Roxanne; “at least he won’t be Catholic”) on Flint Street, and the following Saturday, while Roxanne waited in a diner across the street, I took him a sample of her urine in an instant-coffee jar. It was I who put on the dime-store wedding ring and walked into the doctor’s office because, should the police be called, unpregnant I could deny everything. We used a pseudonym with my true address.
The result came a week later. Positive—Roxanne’s luck. We couldn’t go back to the same doctor, because now it was Roxanne who had to be examined, not I. She wanted an abortion, but she had neither money nor an abortionist. I offered her all my money, but she had no one to spend it on. Tucked away in western Massachusetts, we knew no one to go to for help. Absolutely forbidding me to discuss it with Alport, Roxanne decided to go to Boston and tell Dave, her M.I.T. friend. Maybe he could find the name of an abortionist.
“What did he say?” I asked eagerly when she returned.
“We had such a nice weekend I couldn’t tell him.”
“You mean you wasted the whole trip?”
“I knew he’d think I was trying to pin it on him if I told him. Anyway, it wasn’t all wasted. We had a good dinner and we read King Lear together. I played the women, and he played the men.”
“Roxanne, you don’t have any time to play around. I’m going to tell him if you won’t. Or else I’m going to get in touch with the father.”
“No you won’t,” she said firmly.
“Well, what are you going to do, then?”
“I don’t know.”
It was already almost too late. Roxanne spent precious hours in front of the mirror trying to see if the pregnancy showed instead of getting rid of it. To torture herself she put on her tightest clothes and examined her profile.
“Don’t you think it shows?” she asked hysterically, and changed her clothes again. She stopped attending classes and began to withdraw, spending more and more time in bed. She refused the food I brought to her room, saying, “I’m going to starve it out.”
She looked terrible. “I am going to notify the father, that bastard. Let him find a doctor. It’s his fault,” I said.
But Roxanne wouldn’t hear of it. “He’s got his own problems. Anyway, I can’t stand him.”
When she missed her third period and it was too late to do anything else, Roxanne went home to her mother. “Don’t worry,” she said, preparing to leave. “She’ll find me a nice home for wayward girls and maybe I’ll finally get some sleep. I’d never graduate anyway, since I’m flunking Zoology and History. Maybe I’ll get a degree from a correspondence school.”
She planned, after she gave away the baby, to get a job in New York City and write poetry. “I’d rather take Martha Foley’s writing workshop at Columbia than stay here worrying about zygotes. At least,” she said with her ironical smile, “by then I’ll have lots to write about.” The more cheerful she tried to sound, the more desperate I knew she was.
“Take the Little Leather books with you for good luck,” I said, thrusting several at her.
“Good idea,” said Roxanne. “If the nuns enforce lights-out after evening prayers, I can read Voltaire under the covers by flashlight. Till human voices wake us and we drown—or till we have to get up and change a diaper.” She smiled her distant smile. “Well, so long. You’ll be hearing from me. I hope everything works out with you and your dreamboat. Be careful not to let the old man knock you up.”
Alport came to my room for occasional quickies in the evening, or between certain classes, and on Saturdays, but we never did get to spend a whole night together. The best we managed was a whole Saturday, from nine until six, with a long delicious nap in the middle. I was grateful for whatever I could get.
There were no more courses of his left for me to take, so I stopped being his student. Still, we managed to see each other almost every day, if only for coffee, whether or not there was time to touch, whether or not I was having my period.
In all my classes but French, I began to feel like a pro. My dream was coming true; finally I saw the entire history of ideas, at least in outline, at a glance. Every new text fit so neatly into place that I was able at last to concentrate on the details. I may not have had the answers, but I felt familiar with the standard questions. I could recognize and catalogue them as readily as Beethoven’s quartets.
I got out of gym with a fake heart-murmur letter from one of the family MD’s, and officially protested chapel on philosophical grounds. It was a good ploy to submit my junior honors paper (on the Refutation of Anselm’s Proofs of the Existence of God) in support of my position. The Dean of Women, afraid of controversy and aware that I was born Jewish, allowed me to skip chapel if I agreed to give some alternative service instead—tutoring poor town children in math, for example. I agreed. Alport insisted that I learn my French, giving me Descartes’s little Discours de la méthode to study from. Since he expected me to pass, I did, preparing to cheat on the final if necessary. Nothing would prevent my graduating.
The wife? Alport refused to discuss her, and I tried not to think about her. She was simply one of the limits within which I was forced to operate like the Kantian categories. She was the invisible context. Though the thought of her filled me with pain, I wasn’t jealous, for she had preceded me and would survive me in her claims on Alport. To understand that was, as Spinoza taught, to accept it. My only claim on Alport was my love.
Alport helped me fill out applications for graduate school. Despite the mediocre reputation of its graduate philosophy department, I applied to New England University to be near him, as well as to the University of Chicago and Columbia. To all three Alport wrote me glowing recommendations.
“Let me see what you wrote.” I grabbed for the letter.
“It’s highly irregular,” said Alport in his deepest voice, raising the paper out of my reach.
“I don’t care. Let me see.” I leaped up and snatched it from him, then read it with my heart in my throat. It took no more than one sentence to remind me of my irrepressible itch. “Do you really believe this stuff you wrote? Is that person really me?”
“Yes, I really believe the ‘stuff’ I wrote. Yes, that person’s really you.”
There was only one way I knew to express my gratitude. And even that was sadly inadequate.
It was a long time before I heard from Roxanne. I was so worried about her I called her house in Virginia. But her mother refused to tell me where she was, and I had no other leads.
Finally in April I got a letter. It was from an army base in Dallas, from a Mrs. Whitney Boyd, Jr.—“housewife, mother, and camp follower.” It was heartbreaking.
Roxanne’s mother had “convinced” her to marry the cadet instead of bearing the baby out of wedlock. With herself as the living proof, Mrs. du Bois had said: “You can always get a divorce; it’s better than being used merchandise.” And for Whitney Boyd, Jr., it was evidently better than sacrificing a commission. Roxanne said she was naming the baby after me if I didn’t object—“unless it’s a mongoloid.” Luckily my name was good for either sex.
She described her domestic life with an elaborate military metaphor, matching detail for detail. The talent Martha Foley would be losing! She ended the letter bitterly: marriage was “not much better than home.” “Write me anything you like,” she said in closing, her distant smile rising from the page. “My husband is functionally illiterate.”
Something was wrong. Even before I opened the door to let Alport in, I sensed it. He was late, and wasn’t the knock different?
Inside, everything was arranged the Saturday way: coffee in the pot, our two mugs set up on the floor, a Beethoven quartet playing on the phonograph; and I, hair freshly washed, legs and underarms newly shaved, diaphragm in place, had bathed and dressed again in my one sheer nightie.
Yet something was not quite right. I undid the bolt and opened the door.
A woman. She didn’t have to say a word for me to know who she was. Alport’s wife.
She looked me over through my nightie, burning my skin with her eyes. Nowhere to hide.
“I think it’s time you and I had a talk, don’t you?” she said, planting herself inside the room. She bolted the door and placed her back firmly against it, folding her arms across her bosom. I backed slowly toward a dark corner, imperceptibly diminishing.
“Well? Aren’t you going to invite me to sit down?”
“Please. Sit down,” I managed. I didn’t care. I had already slipped out the window leaving only a sickly shell of me behind in the room to manage the charade of offering coffee and maybe saying a word or two.
She sat down on the bed. “No thank you, no coffee. But I’ll wait while you put some clothes on, if you like.” She took a cigarette out of her bag and leaned back on the bed against the wall while I obediently pulled on a heavy wool work shirt—my bathrobe. She lit her cigarette and, exhaling, spread her presence through the room.
“Ashtray, please?”
I brought her an ashtray.
“That’s better. You may sit down too.”
My shell sat at the end of the bed. Even seated, she dominated me from an imposing height. She was a large, beautiful woman of forty, say, or thirty, big-boned, big-bosomed, big-hipped. Lush. Her proud face with its fine toothy smile and piercing eyes emanated a sureness that made mush of me. She had my mother’s pink smell—the same face powder?—but none of my mother’s softness. No, there was nothing soft in this one, nothing to play on.
“What’s your name?”
“Sasha.”
“How old are you, Sasha?”
“Nineteen.”
“Nineteen. Why, Donald’s old enough to be your father.”
A strange thrill flickered through me. Donald. To me it was just a name in the college catalogue. I never called him anything, and thought of him only as Alport. She called him Donald.
“Do you know how old Donald is, Sasha?”
“Forty-three?”
“Yes. Forty-three. With a son of his own only a few years younger than you. And two little girls. And, of course, a wife.” She paused, respecting the magnitude of the pronouncement. “Tell me,” she said, covering my hand with hers, “aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
I was indeed terrified, but hardly ashamed. “For what?” I asked.
“For trying to take a married man from his children and his wife. For jeopardizing his job. For putting everything he cares about in jeopardy.”
It had never crossed my mind that I might be taking Alport from anything. He did the taking. I was just there, available for him to take. “That’s his choice,” I said. “I can’t make him see me. Maybe he cares about me too.”
She got up, walked to the phonograph, and took the needle off the record. “Do you mind?” she said. I shook my head. “It’s very hard to try to compete with Beethoven.” She smiled down on me, crushing my shell into the mattress.
“Now, Sasha, I’m going to ask you to do something for me. It may be difficult for you, because I’m sure Donald has charmed you out of your senses, but I’m going to ask you anyway. For your own sake and his sake, as well as mine. I’m going to ask you not to see Donald again.”
But of course.
“He’s been in this sort of trouble before,” she continued. “You’re not by any means his first little … friend. But if he gets in trouble again, that will quite simply be the end of his teaching career. He has three young children totally dependent on him for support. Do you understand what that means? He has an enormous obligation to meet.” Her fine nostrils flared out as, again, she exhaled her will over me, and crushed out the cigarette.
“Why don’t you ask him?” said my shell. From outside the window I admired how coolly my shell answered her back.
“Oh, I shall, don’t worry. But I wanted to meet you first.”
She suddenly smiled at me so warmly that I wanted to trust everything to her. She seemed fully competent to manage things and unscramble us.
“Tell me,” she said with concern, “do you love Donald very much?”
I nodded. Why waste on words the little strength I had left?
She nodded too, sympathetically. “I know. Luckily, you’re very young. You’ll love again. But it’s not everything. You’ll see that one day.” She raised her perfectly arched eyebrows and asked, “Where are your parents? Do they know about this affair?”
I shook my head. I saw that my hands were trembling, though I didn’t feel it. I hid them under me.
“I do hope it won’t be necessary for your parents to be told, Sasha,” said Mrs. Alport. She put her cigarettes back in her bag and walked to the door. “I hope I haven’t upset your Saturday too terribly. But when you start this sort of thing, I suppose you really ought to be prepared for the consequences.”
She looked at her watch and unbolted the door. “You’ll understand if I say I hope we won’t have to meet again. Goodbye, Sasha.”
I saw him three times more. The first time, that very day, he was enraged to learn that his wife had been to see me. “It’s none of her business. I’ll decide whom I see and how I spend my time!” But he had arrived late, and had to leave early, and when we made love I didn’t come.
The second time he stayed longer. I brewed us jasmine tea. Just before he left he told me he was going away during exam week to use some documents in the library of another university.
“Is your wife going with you?” I asked.
“Yes, she’ll probably come along,” he said. I had never before felt the right to ask such a question. But with her presence still dominating the room, it just slipped out.
Exam week, between cramming and listening to the late quartets, I gazed out through my crumbling defenses to see there was really no room for me in Alport’s life except in the crevices. Philosophy, I consoled myself, had been my first love anyway. Why study here when I could go to a place like Columbia? The music was so poignant that I found myself bursting into tears, especially during the fugal passages. Perhaps it was because of all the No-Doz pills I took cramming for exams. I even cried in the middle of one exam, writing an essay on Aristotle’s thesis that it’s love that makes the world go round. Fancy crying, when I knew I was writing bullshit!
The third time I saw him was after he came back. Over coffee I told him I was pretty sure I was going to Columbia.
He said nothing for a while, just sat on the floor and sipped his coffee. Then, stretching his long legs out before him, he said, “You know I hoped you would stay here with me. I wanted that more than anything. But I can’t blame you for wanting to go to Columbia. It’s got the best department in the country. You’ll go there, and you’ll get married, and I can’t blame you at all.”
“I’ll never get married!” I cried. “I don’t believe in marriage! Or in having babies or changing diapers or wearing aprons or owning anyone or being owned, either!”
He smiled a superior, knowing smile that made me want to kill him.
“Why don’t you leave now?” I screamed. “Why don’t you just go on home right now?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “As you wish,” he said softly, and walked out of my life.