Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Kates Shulman

  “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.

  Six

  Nothing like seven days on the high seas for thinking things over. I boarded the Benvenuto Cellini at Genoa to the music of a little brass band and a hundred weeping families. After checking my cabin (no roommate: a good omen), I went directly to the Tourist Class dining room, where a sailing party was under way—champagne for everyone.

  I entered expectantly. A whole shipload of new people; an international atmosphere. I sat at a table with only one other woman, old and evidently married. She nodded to me, then spent her time engaging a soft-spoken engineer from Brooklyn on her right and a Milanese exchange student on her left. There was something reminiscent of an old movie farce as we made our own introductions and nibbled at plattersful of French hors d’oeuvres.

  “You have been in Italy long, signora?” asked the student from Milan, noticing my ring. He was on his way to Bowdoin College.

  “Only a few months, I’m afraid. Not nearly long enough.”

  “Perhaps someday you will come back,” he said, raising his glass. He had those deep, long-lashed Italian eyes.

  “Oh yes,” I smiled, already pained to be going home, “I’ll drink to that.” In that tinkly atmosphere, all Italians were once again charming.

  An hour later I finished off a last glass of champagne and went to the Purser’s Desk to sign up for second sitting. I wanted my meals to be long and leisurely. With a weekful of parties in every public room, and me the best-looking female passenger I had seen so far, I knew it would likely be a pleasant crossing. But I wanted more than that. Since this brief ocean voyage would be my last taste of freedom before I surrendered in New York a second time to a loveless marriage, I wanted one last dose of love.

  By the time I married, I had been in love up to my chin. For a whole year I’d wallowed in it, waking up and licking it off my fingers like a child gorging itself after Hallowe’en. But even without Mrs. Alport to tell me, I knew it wasn’t nourishing enough to live on, and I didn’t choose it for my daily diet. As the philosophers implied, love was the frosting that made life delicious, not the stuff of sustenance. I made a “sensible” marriage instead.

  I hadn’t really wanted to marry at all. I wanted to make something of myself, not just give it away. But I knew if I didn’t marry I would be sorry. Only freaks didn’t. I knew I had to do it quickly, too, while there was still a decent selection of men to choose from. Dr. Watson might be right about personality not ha
rdening until thirty, but old maids started forming at twenty-one. I was twenty. The heavy pressure was on. In years I was still safe, but in distance I was borderline. I had finished college and started graduate school. The best catches were being picked off while I was educating myself right out of the running.

  I had altered my ambitions once for love; I didn’t dare do it again. My first love, philosophy, still claimed me. Now I had to choose a mate who would share me with it. That ruled out Prince Charming.

  After a lot of careful thought I chose Frank. Not that he was perfect—no one is. But I was fond of him, none of his parts were missing, and unlike all the other eligibles I knew, he seemed willing and able to make a little room in his future for mine.

  Franklin Raybel was in the History Department at Columbia, studying Modern European History. He had a perfect name for a title page and a graduate fellowship, which meant he probably had a good future. It was an important point for me, because if we were both going to be teaching, my husband would have to be able to get a job at a university large enough to accommodate me, too.

  Like me, Frank was a Midwesterner sufficiently threatened by New York to need fortification. From Gary, Indiana, and twenty-seven, he had come farther and further than I. I would have preferred someone from the Philosophy Department, but my Columbia classmates all treated me either as an interloper or an anomaly. “So you’re the dish I heard about; I was hoping I’d get into a class with you,” they said. In my seminars no one ever listened to a single word I said without grinning, and then as soon as I had finished they’d all return to their heated disputes as though I had never spoken. They treated me a little better than they treated the older woman in the department, at least acknowledging (after class) that I existed. But it was still a terrible comedown after Baxter College, where my classmates had listened to what I had to say and Alport had encouraged me.

  Those Columbia classes were all the more disheartening because in them were held the headiest discussions I had ever been privileged to sit in on. Theses and antitheses, arguments and counterarguments, premises and conclusions ricocheted off the walls and exploded midair above the mahogany conference table in brilliant illuminations. After only a couple of weeks of classes, however, I felt so intimidated, and then stupid, that I didn’t dare participate. I just did my reading and tried to look as though I considered all that disputation beneath me. I chose obscure minor figures to write my papers on, hoping no one in the seminars would know enough about my subjects to ridicule me. And on weekends when the philosophers invited me to their parties, instead of sitting dumb and pretty through their snappy talk, I helped their girlfriends from other departments (English, Teacher’s College, Barnard) serve the food and coffee that kept them going at each other till two a.m.

  “How come you’re studying philosophy?” my colleagues would ask me over beer with bemused smiles. “Do you really want to get a Ph.D? Do you really expect to teach?” The way they asked their questions, I knew better than to answer yes. I quickly learned that there was only a handful of teaching jobs in philosophy in the country—all coveted, all for them.

  “I just like philosophy, that’s all,” I’d answer. “I don’t know what I’ll do with my Ph.D. Maybe I can work for a philosophical journal. Maybe I can teach in a finishing school.”

  Franklin Raybel spared me such questions. He talked too little to talk down. Sitting in Riverside Park of an autumn Sunday afternoon, we read the poetry of Yeats or Donne together, equally moved. As philosophy was considered a “harder” subject than history, Frank allowed that I might be serious, even awarding me a certain respect. He once listened to my explanations of Leibniz which, he later told me, he was able to repeat to advantage in his own department. He was gentle and noncommittal, permitting me to select our movies and set the time for our meetings; he gave me his favorite books to read and picked me the last buttercups along the Hudson where warm Sundays found us walking.

  “Loves me, loves me not, loves me, loves me not, loves me,” he said self-consciously, stripping a buttercup of all five petals.

  “No, silly,” I laughed. “Buttercups will always come out ‘loves me.’ You can only get the truth from daisies. Buttercups tell you something else.”

  “They do?” he asked surprised. “What?”

  “Whether or not you like butter.”

  He looked dubious.

  “Really,” I assured him. “Hold them under my chin. Closer.” I thrust out my chin invitingly and closed my eyes. “Now—is my chin yellow or not?”

  He tipped my jaw up with his index finger and kissed my mouth. “Yes,” he whispered.

  “That means I like butter. Now let me do it to you.”

  I took the bouquet from his hand and held it under his chin, brushing shamelessly against him. His only trouble, I decided, was shyness.

  “Well?” he asked, his eyes half-closed.

  I shook my head. “I’m afraid you definitely don’t like butter. That means we’re probably incompatible,” I concluded with a pout.

  “Flowers can lie,” said Frank, and daring to push them to one side, kissed me again.

  To find out the truth of it (and because I had a paper due and would not go home to Baybury) we spent Christmas vacation in an off-campus room of a friend of his. Compatible? Let me say we were not incompatible. I craved appreciation. The better I fucked the more he liked me, inspiring me to put on an ever better show. I could see from how cheerfully he brought in Chinese food for us to eat in the room and how eagerly he introduced me to several of his friends that he was pleased to spend the time with me. I was pleased too: there were worse sensations than being wanted. But I didn’t expect him to come out and “love” me. We had hardly ever spoken personally.

  “How can you say you love me? You hardly know me,” I said, turning down the phonograph to hear his first shy declaration. I was quite surprised. Even in Baybury, where strangers had not uncommonly declared their love in mash notes or anonymous phone calls, I was always surprised.

  He told me quite plainly how. “You’re the first girl I’ve ever known who was smart and beautiful,” he said. “The pretty girls I’ve gone out with have always turned out dumb, and the ones with brains have never been more than good friends. I can’t help it,” he confessed, “but I know I’ll never love a girl who doesn’t have both.”

  So! He considered me exceptional, appreciating my best aspects, and at the same time revealed himself innocent and honest—good qualities in a husband. If, as the poet says, only God can love one for oneself, at least Frank didn’t try to play God. A true liberal, he would likely respect his wife and treat her well.

  I investigated. “What are you thinking about? Truth, now.”

  “You really want the truth? I happened to be thinking about your resemblance to a certain painting by Boucher of Mlle. Morphy, who was a favorite of Louis XV. … Don’t misunderstand,” he added, “I mean your looks, not your character.”

  He knew I’d been no virgin—knew, in fact, I’d had an unfortunate affair with a married man—but he liked to think of me as an innocent led astray. As to my professed belief in free love, it was fine if I were involved with someone like him, but dangerous if I were involved with someone as unscrupulous as Alport. He overlooked it as he overlooked my dashing across the street against every traffic light: antics of impetuous youth.

  Between Christmas and intersession I examined him closely. If there were ten good reasons to marry him, why then I would do it! On Ash Wednesday, while people in churches repented, I stayed in my dorm and made a list.

  Ten good reasons, and besides, it was time. We’d each be getting what we wanted.

  “If you really love me so much,” I sprang on him over spring vacation, “then why don’t you want to marry me?” A sly question, worthy of my fellow philosophers.

  He reached for his cigarettes, stalling. But he fell for it.

  “What makes you think I don’t?”

  “Well, do you?”

 
; “Yes.”

  “Then let’s get married.”

  “Well …” He hesitated, but I knew I had him. “Okay.”

  I waited while he nervously lit a cigarette; then, handing him an ashtray and blowing out his match, I said softly, “How about tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow! We can’t tomorrow! It takes time to get the license and everything.”

  Oh, he was squirming.

  “As soon as we can get the license, then.”

  “In the middle of a semester? Why not wait till summer? What’s the big rush?”

  “No rush exactly,” I said. “Just, if we’re going to do it ever, we might as well do it now. There’s no reason not to. When in doubt, do it!  ”

  “But what about our families? This is crazy. I’ve never even mentioned you to my parents.”

  “Is it their life?” I asked contemptuously. “It’s ours! Would you let your parents influence you? They should be happy to be notified.”

  He could certainly have said no if he’d wanted to. I couldn’t force him to say yes. He could have composed his own list of pros and cons.

  “Look,” I said, with a hint of impatience. “It’s not as though we were planning to have a family. We’ll ask for cash instead of wedding presents and live on that, and we can both work summers till we get our degrees. If it doesn’t work out, we can always get a divorce.”

  How could he dispute my logic without seeming small-minded? Magnanimously, he succumbed.

  “Okay. Everyone will probably think we’re mad, but if you want to, we’ll do it.”

  We kissed. I was positively high.

  “You crazy adorable little girl,” he said, warming to the notion. “Shall we call our parents now?”

  “Remember,” I warned, “once we tell them, there’s no going back.” (If he says yes three times, it must be true.)

  “I know.”

  We go to the phone booths at the back of the dorm lobby to call. He calls first. I listen to him tell his mother (my mother-in-law!), smiling wrinkles into the corners of his eyes. He hands me the phone. “How do you do, Mrs. Raybel, this is Sasha. … We really just decided this very minute. You’re the first person we told. … We’ll let you know just as soon as we know. Mother.”