by Alix Shulman
“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, redden
ing 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.
