Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Kates Shulman

  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 sh
eer 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?”