Mudwoman

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Remarkable woman. Such enthusiasm!

  A natural-born leader.

  She’d been in hiding. She’d been eating at her desk. The remains of M.R.’s supper on a greasy paper napkin: dry pita bread, strips of lettuce like confetti, “grilled” vegetables dry and tasteless as wood chips and a can of Diet Coke.

  She’d canceled her dinner for that evening—she’d needed to be alone. As president of the University M. R. Neukirchen was scheduled for luncheons, receptions, dinners through the semester virtually day following day.

  And such a friendly—accessible—person . . . So sympathetic, and so informed . . .

  Such energy!

  What comfort in being alone—at last. No one to observe the wounded “leader.”

  The little phone ceased ringing. After a brief wait M.R. checked her messages hoping that Kroll hadn’t left a message but that—somehow—Andre had left a message instead.

  Thinking Love is a sickness for which the only cure is love.

  Of course—there was Kroll’s unmistakable voice. M.R. steeled herself for irony/mockery which was the politics professor’s usual style but this was very different.

  “Hello? It’s Oliver—Kroll. . . .” Haltingly Kroll spoke like one uncertain of his way. M.R. could hear his breath close against the mouthpiece. “I’m calling to say—to explain—I hope you don’t think that I had anything to do with . . . I don’t know what Alexander told you or hinted at but—it wasn’t—it isn’t—so . . . I did not have anything to do with him recording your conversation. . . . If I’d known what the hell he’d intended, I would have tried to dissuade him.” Kroll’s voice was strained, urgent. This was hardly a message M.R. might have expected from Oliver Kroll and so she listened surprised and fascinated. “He’s a—an—excitable young man . . . He’s brilliant but—obviously troubled. . . . Some things have come to light, Meredith, he’s told me about—just tonight—that will have to be revealed tomorrow, to the township police, to the security office, and to you. . . . Could you call me? Regardless of how late it is, call me? It would be better if we could talk, before. . . . Please call me at—” Hurriedly Kroll gave his number, and repeated it, though he’d have known that M.R. already had the number in her cell phone memory. He was breathing—panting—as if about to say more but broke the connection instead.

  Meredith he’d called her. Beyond that, M.R. scarcely heard.

  How they’d met, M.R. could not clearly recall. How they’d parted, M.R. hoped to forget.

  It had been a time when M.R.’s (secret) lover had abandoned her.

  Sent her into exile she’d joked. Sadly joked.

  Somewhere in the hinterland of north central New Jersey he’d sent her—this prestigious Ivy League university floating like an improbable island of academic excellence amid vestiges of quaint-Colonial American history and a hilly-rolling ultra-affluent rural/suburban landscape which, until M.R. was invited to be interviewed for a position in the philosophy department, she had not visited and had not envisioned. Reporting back to her lover This can’t be a real place! It is too perfect.

  She hadn’t quite been willing to think that Andre Litovik wanted her—hoped her to be—gone.

  Not permanently gone—only just a respectable distance from Cambridge, Massachusetts. From his house on Tremont Street, and his household. From his family.

  Nor had she been willing to think that really it was a good idea—a very good idea—for M.R. to leave the force field of her lover, a gravitational pull roughly equivalent to that of the planet Jupiter. With her instinct for self-effacement M.R. had planned to seek a teaching position in the Boston area, to be near Andre, at one or another far less distinguished university or college, which would have fatally sabotaged her career at the start; with her Harvard Ph.D. and early, much-admired publications in moral philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics, M. R. Neukirchen had been an extremely attractive candidate, and female.

  At a time when institutions of higher education were scrambling to hire blacks, minorities, females as (belated, partial) restitution for several thousand years of bigotry.

  So, M.R. had accepted a position at the University—an assistant professorship in one of the top-ranking philosophy departments in the United States. Where a decade before an individual with even her outstanding qualifications, handicapped by her sex, would have been summarily dismissed from consideration, at this time, in the 1980s, the combination of such outstanding qualifications and femaleness was irresistible. A consolation prize M.R. remarked to her (secret) lover—but more a prize than a consolation.

  Did M.R. mean to be witty? (Andre couldn’t see her face—M.R. couldn’t see his—they were speaking on the phone.) Andre chose to think yes, and laughed.

  Dear Meredith! You will outgrow me.

  Once, in a similarly philosophical mood, Andre had begun to say You will outlive me . . . but his voice trailed off. Mortality was too real an issue to Andre Litovik, to be joked about with his much-younger lover.

  (Lover! What an archaic-sounding word, M.R. thought. It hardly seemed a word that might be applied to her.)

  And so it happened, M.R. was exiled from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and moved to the hills of north central New Jersey in the late summer of 1986. A very young and “inexperienced”—(i.e., sexually)—twenty-five-year-old wondering if her life had ended, or was only just set to begin.

  It did feel like exile—a surreal sort of afterlife—at this University like Harvard University sequestered from the outer world by a wall—(in this case a ten-foot wrought-iron fence with medieval-looking gates)—yet wholly unlike Harvard in other, more essential ways—missing the urban busyness of Cambridge, a sense of life lived at a pitch just slightly higher than normal; a life lived, for all its desperation, at the white-hot core.

  You weren’t happy here, darling. You weren’t happy with me.

  So her lover told her.

  Wittily M.R. protested But happiness is so—ordinary! Like not dreaming so you can avoid the risk of nightmares.

  They kept in touch—of course. If M.R. called Andre and left a message, Andre would call back within an hour, a day, two days. . . . It was not so frequent that Andre called M.R.

  Despite her fear of abandonment Andre did not abandon her, entirely. For he was her lover who was the first man M.R. had ever loved and he’d promised, he would never cease to think of her. Like a theory of God as pure consciousness suffusing all sentient beings in the universe, binding them together inviolably.

  No one knew of their (secret) relationship. No one must know!

  (But surely—many knew? Over the years, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And at the University? M.R. was uneasy when women friends hinted of their concern for her—You must find someone who is free to commit himself to you. You must not let that man exploit you. . . .)

  Alone M.R. lived in faculty housing overlooking a small lake upon which the University crew teams rowed. Alone she was wakened by the sound of shouted commands careening across the glassy water like steel blades. At a distance—given a harsh impatient twang by distance—the crew coaches’ voices reminded her of her lover’s voice.

  Alone, alone! It is a fact, you hear most acutely and you see and think most acutely, when you are alone.

  Hurriedly then on such mornings M.R. dressed and—yet more alone—went outside to run along Echo Lake on wood chip paths in the damp air that smelled of pine needles. Alone, alone! But there is happiness in alone, if you believe that you have chosen it.

  And here was a prevailing strangeness: no matter that the previous night had been a miserable night beset by jeering dreams like the flinging of mud into a smiling face—the particular insult of mud in eyelashes, mouth—mud unwittingly breathed in, in nostrils—yet there was always for the dreamer-who-has-wakened the adventure of the new day—the new week, the new month, the new semester—beside which the tangled and smutty old narrative
of the past had no more substance than a tabula rasa—a reflecting surface of some cheap metal that reflected nothing.

  With running M.R.’s legs grew stronger, springier—her thoughts were revived, and began to whip in the wind like festive flags—in her head that otherwise would have swarmed like a hornet’s nest with unwanted, impractical, and despairing thoughts she quite deftly prepared essays, conference papers, lectures for her courses—she’d been given the responsibility of “Ancient and Medieval Philosophy” and “Moral Philosophy: An Introduction”—like gigantic albatrosses these courses might have hung about her neck except M. R. Neukirchen rose to the challenge of revamping them, reconstituting them as subjects of such inherent and timely interest, enrollment in each rose dramatically, in the moral philosophy course in particular where the enrollment had to be capped at three hundred fifty. This, within two years of M.R.’s arrival at the University.

  Alone in the University-owned house on Echo Lake M.R. lived so much more intensely than her colleagues who were married. Alone M.R. lived so much more intensely than if she’d lived with another. For aloneness is the great fecundity of the mind, if it is not the destruction of the mind.

  M.R. published philosophical papers in prominent journals—more impressively, M.R. read her colleagues’ papers in prominent journals. (If they published books, M.R. bought their books!) The discipline of philosophy is a discipline of thinking. That one might combine thinking with doing—and with doing publicly well—is something of an anomaly, like a giraffe that might also, beyond its giraffeness, plow a field with its hooves, or a tractor that might play Beethoven. M.R. exhibited a naïve willingness to be a good citizen—in academic circles, a rare and heedless action akin to smearing one’s naked body with honey in some outdoor setting—and so she was asked to chair committees, and to help organize conferences, and to advise students—a task that is endless since the supply of students is infinite.

  She was asked to review graduate applications—hundreds of graduate applications for fewer than twenty positions—and to rank them, for her colleagues’ perusal. She was soon a favorite dissertation committee member for she read each of her colleagues’ students’ dissertations as thoroughly as if it were her own student’s dissertation, and far more thoroughly than her colleagues had time to read it; if there were small errors, or enormous egregious errors, no one would be mortified by overlooking them—for M.R. would ferret them out.

  She could be relied upon to correct misspellings, grammar. She could be relied upon to console students on the verge of breakdowns. She could be relied upon to write letters of recommendation when her colleagues had not time. Of course she was a workhorse—but an uncomplaining workhorse—with the Harvard degree, and publications, something of a Thoroughbred-workhorse.

  Within a few years M.R. was promoted to the rank of associate professor, with tenure; by then she’d been an (unpaid) assistant to the philosophy department chair, soon to be appointed acting chair and eventually, in her eighth year at the University, departmental chair. She was an associate of the Renaissance Studies Program, the Program for the Study of Women and Gender, the Ethics and Human Values Institute. She was director of the Council of the Humanities. She was a faculty adviser for the University film series. She was one of several (female) faculty advisers for the local chapter of the Association for the Advancement of Women in Mathematics, Philosophy, and the Physical Sciences. She was an editorial adviser of the Journal of Contemporary Philosophy, the Journal of Women in Philosophy, Studies in Ethics. She wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Review of Books. She chaired the University’s most powerful committee—the president’s advisory committee on appointments and advancements. She was named “special assistant” to the dean of the faculty and when the dean retired, she was appointed to take his place. Soon then in the spring of 2001 she was appointed to the presidential search committee—that is, the committee to seek a new president following Leander’s retirement; after a few meetings of this committee, her fellow members met without her knowledge and named “M. R. Neukirchen” their first-choice candidate, to be presented to the board of trustees.

  Her life flashing before her eyes—so swiftly all this seemed to have happened.

  Because Andre didn’t want me.

  Mill Run was the name of the road. No choice but to turn onto Mill Run.

  For the Black River Road had collapsed into the riverbed like a toothless mouth and desperately/recklessly she’d turned onto the narrow unpaved detour-road though knowing—with a part of her mind absolutely knowing—that if she didn’t turn back immediately she would be late for the event that evening in Ithaca; she would be late, very late, for the occasion when M. R. Neukirchen was to be elevated above a banquet room of onlookers.

  Readied. You must be readied.

  And where is the Angel of the Lord, to save you?

  Taking a turn—a tight turn—carelessly and recklessly and half-sobbing beforehand as if knowing what would happen—knowing what would not-happen: her speech, the applause—suddenly she found herself in the skidding and then overturned Toyota in the ditch beside the detour-road tangled and part-strangled in the safety belt too dazed now to sob or cry aloud for help she saw her life flash before her swift and airy and of no more consequence than a trout-fly cast upon a glittering but shallow stream.

  Waking then hours later—was this waking?—chill sunshine and a taste of brackish blood in her mouth and blood-mucus crusting her nose and a stranger’s face—a stranger’s staring eyes—H’lo! Hey! Ma’am—you alive?

  That was how it was: what had happened.

  What had happened, that M.R. knew.

  Life flashing before her. Rewinding, and the trout-fly another time cast out onto the glittering stream.

  It was a season in M.R.’s life before she’d lost faith in herself as a woman.

  Yet still in this new place—so unlike Cambridge, she ached with homesickness—through the first year, and through the second year, and into the third year of her exile—M.R. often saw, or imagined she saw, her lover at a distance crossing a street, or on a staircase, or amid a clutch of students on a campus walkway. Her first reaction was something like panic—He’s here! But why didn’t he tell me. . . . When M.R. stopped dead in her tracks as if she’d been shot—causing companions to regard her with surprise—she would recover, she would laugh in embarrassment, rebuke herself No. This is madness.

  There were several University colleagues—middle-aged, grizzle-haired, thick-necked and barrel-chested and moving with a swaggering sort of gait to compensate for painful knees, hips, spines—M.R. learned to recognize and avoid. She did not tell Andre of such sightings: he’d have laughed at her. He had little patience for weakness in others, as in himself.

  Nor did she tell him about Oliver Kroll. She’d reasoned that the friendship between Kroll and her—if “friendship” was the correct term—wasn’t significant enough to warrant mentioning. And for the brief while she’d fantasized that she might come to feel deeply for Kroll, or to feel something at all like emotion, she hadn’t wanted to confide in Andre who would have been annoyed, hurt—or worse, amused.

  If you love another man more than you love me—that can’t be helped. And maybe it is a good idea, darling—you must know.

  She could not risk it! She had not once said anything to Andre Litovik that had not rebounded back upon her in a way to confound her. For her (secret) lover was the only individual in her (adult) life whose reactions she could not predict.

  It was at a public lecture—“The Politicized Republic”—that M.R. became aware of Kroll seated in front of her, across an aisle; he seemed to be impatient with the speaker, shaking his head, irritably shifting his shoulders, sighing audibly; for it was true that the speaker had a slow grave platitudinous manner, that tested one’s resilience; by his remarks during the question period following the lecture, M.R. gathered that her disgruntled
colleague was a “libertarian”—an “economic libertarian”—who didn’t think much of the speaker’s “quasi-Utilitarian welfare-state” politics.

  This was Oliver Kroll: Professor of Politics. M.R. knew the name—knew that Kroll was a friend, if not a protégé, of the more renowned—more notorious—G. Leddy Heidemann who’d been a consultant for the last several Republican administrations, a “personal friend” of Ronald Reagan as he would be one day a “personal friend” of Vice President Cheney. Kroll, whose field was political theory, was said to be associated with the Cato Institute which was rumored to be funded by the CIA—(only a rumor! M.R. hoped to keep an open mind). Kroll had a blade-sharp face, a spade-shaped dark beard, a permanent crease between his eyebrows and a head that looked stylishly shaved, and not (merely) bald. Unlike M.R.’s lover who looked as if he’d dressed hurriedly in the dark, with a contempt for the very act of dressing, as for the ritual of grooming, Kroll looked like a man who took time selecting his clothes, with a predilection for sweater-vests, sharp-creased trousers, camel’s-hair sport coats and silk neckties. His face was clean-shaven above the spade-shaped beard and the spade-shaped beard was meticulously trimmed.

  At the reception following the lecture Kroll made his way to M.R. and introduced himself in a manner that suggested an oddly engaging sort of intimacy—as if they’d met before, and there was some sort of rapport between them. M.R. was intimidated by Kroll’s severe—savage—critique of the lecturer, whom he accused of “willful ignorance” in the matter of global economics; she was impressed with the passion with which Kroll spoke, as if the issue that seemed so abstract to her, as to others in the audience, was personally meaningful to him. She was yet more impressed that Kroll seemed to be familiar with her work, at least several articles she’d recently published in philosophical journals and essay-reviews in the New York Review on such subjects as Spinoza, John Stuart Mill, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Shelley’s Frankenstein.