What She Saw...

by Lucinda Rosenfeld

  “What will you do for me?” she asked him back. (Those were the days before she understood the value of fear in love.)

  He smiled cautiously before producing a book. “I’m actually on my way out of town. Assuming you’re walking through the quad at some point this afternoon, would you mind dropping this off at the Political Philosophy Library?”

  “Why would I mind?” she said.

  Then she walked toward him. Maybe it was her imagination. She could have sworn he held on to that book for a second longer than he had to. (She could have sworn he was looking at her like she was more than just another stupid undergraduate.)

  They left the classroom together. On the footpath outside, they exchanged pleasantries about the unseasonably warm temperature.

  “Well, bye now,” was the last thing he said before he left.

  He left her standing there holding a book by Gramsci called The Prison Notebooks.

  HOLLY THOUGHT HE was trying to send Phoebe a message. “Maybe he’s trapped in a bad marriage,” she speculated over frozen yogurt later that evening.

  “Maybe,” said Phoebe. But inside she was wondering if the only reason the visiting professor asked her to return The Prison Notebooks was that she was the last one standing there after class.

  Conversely, it could hardly be called an accident of fate that Phoebe ran into the visiting professor the following Monday in the Political Philosophy Library. That he conducted his research there wasn’t hard to figure out. Sure enough, he was standing by the checkout desk, his arms piled high with books. She was standing behind him. “Hi, Professor Bledstone!” is how she began.

  “Phoebe!” he said, whipping around, a startled expression on his ghostly face.

  That he remembered her name! “Hi,” she said again. (She hadn’t meant to repeat herself; it just happened.)

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Just studying,” she shrugged.

  “For my class?”

  “Not today. I have to conjugate some verbs today.” She waved her French book in his face.

  “The language of the colonizer . . .” he trailed off. “I always regretted not learning Spanish.”

  “I already know Spanish,” she assured him.

  “I see,” he said.

  But it wasn’t clear he saw anything. And Phoebe wondered if he wanted to get away. (She wouldn’t have blamed him if he did.) But she wanted him to stay. And when he advanced in line, she matched his steps, asked him if he had had a “fun weekend.” (She didn’t ask him where he’d gone.)

  “Not particularly,” he told her.

  “Me neither,” she told him. “I had really bad cramps.” (She thought he’d care if only he were given the opportunity.)

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” he said.

  That he was sorry! It made Phoebe weak with joy. “So how do you like it out here in the boondocks?” she asked him.

  His eyes traveled someplace she’d never been—maybe Siberia. “It’s fine for the moment,” he said. “In general, I prefer the city to the country.”

  “What about the suburbs?”

  “I’ve never lived in one, but I can’t imagine I’d want to.”

  “You probably wouldn’t,” she agreed. “I grew up in New Jersey, and it wasn’t even fine for the moment.”

  The visiting professor nodded like he understood. But he didn’t laugh. He didn’t even smile. Phoebe was hoping he would. In fact, she was all but counting on it. “By the way, I’m looking for a job,” she said, begging for resurrection, thinking maybe she could help him keep track of all those books. “If you hear of anything . . .”

  “What can you do?” he wanted to know.

  She looked straight at him before she answered: “Anything you want me to do.”

  He ignored the innuendo. “Actually, I’m supposed to be writing a book.”

  “About hegemony?” She made sure to pronounce it right this time.

  “Something like that,” he said. Then he paused. Then he looked straight at her, straight through her—or so it seemed to Phoebe. “If I got approval from the Center, I could probably hire you as my research assistant.”

  “You’re kidding!” she squealed. “I mean, that would be amazing.”

  “I probably wouldn’t be able to pay you much.”

  As if money mattered. (Those were the days before money mattered.) “That’s fine—I mean you don’t even have to pay me,” she spluttered. “I mean not that much or anything.” She smiled.

  He smiled, too. Then he set his books down on the counter and said, “Talk to me after class on Thursday.”

  And it was, just maybe, the happiest moment of Phoebe Fine’s entire life.

  But she had one more question. “Professor—” she began.

  “Please,” he broke in. “Call me Bruce.”

  She couldn’t believe he’d said that. It filled her heart with something like pride. “Okay, Bruce.” The name stuck to the roof of her mouth like peanut butter. “Can I ask you a question?” But she didn’t wait for an answer. “Do you like to teach?”

  He laughed then, an old studied laugh, and said, “Not very much, but don’t tell the other students in our class.”

  “I promise,” she told him.

  It was their first secret.

  It wouldn’t be their last.

  ONCE SHE BECAME his research assistant, every Thursday after class, Phoebe would follow the visiting professor up the three flights of stairs that led to his office in the colonial mansion that housed the Center for the Study of the Periphery. Unruly stacks of books and clippings littered his desk. The walls were bare, the carpet imitation Persian. A little window under the eave offered scenic views of the lake and outlying mountains, except when the fog was so thick you couldn’t see past the pane of glass, which was all the time. It was there Bruce Bledstone would present Phoebe with her research assignment for the week. And Phoebe would present Bruce Bledstone with a carefully edited version of her tragicomic life. She’d leave out the part about how she’d become this drooling pink-eyed monster. Instead, she’d regale him with horror stories about suburbia— about the rich idiots she went to high school with and the wacky parents she grew up in the same house as.

  She’d tell him about how Leonard and Roberta recycled paper towels and tinfoil and loved Handel’s Messiah even though they called themselves atheists. And her older sister, Emily, thought she was hot shit because she was going out with this suspected member of the PLO who also managed to be on the guest lists of all the coolest nightclubs in New York. And her best friend, Holly, was such a slut she couldn’t remember the names of half the guys she’d slept with. And her ex-boyfriend, Humphrey, had turned against her after she’d insulted the spiders in his peat-moss outhouse. And France wouldn’t have been so bad if it weren’t for her landlady, Madame Bertrand, who spent all her waking hours poring over photos of yachting royals in Paris Match and took Phoebe to task for using too much jam on her brioche. (Is it any wonder she came home ten months early?)

  But New Jersey was even more of a nightmare. Her mother, Roberta, couldn’t say the word psychiatrist out loud. (The food doctor was as close as she’d gotten.) Even though Roberta was the one who took Phoebe to see an Indian man in a brown suit in a high-rise building in Fort Lee who asked her a lot of nosy questions about her mother. (Wasn’t that ironic?) And speaking of eating, sometimes she couldn’t. But sometimes when she did, she made herself sick. And the truth was that it wasn’t just sometimes, it was all the time. It was almost every day, sometimes twice a day. It started during her junior year abroad that never was. It was all pretty terrible. It was all pretty tragic.

  Bruce Bledstone made it less so.

  He never dispensed advice. That wasn’t his style. And he never told her much about himself other than the fact that he’d been born and bred in Kansas and hadn’t been back there since. But he’d listen—he’d listen!—one leg propped up on his desk, the other planted on the floor. And he’d hand her a b
ox of tissues when she started to choke up. And he’d smoke her cigarettes while he listened to her rave. And sometimes, between the inhale and the exhale, he’d tell her about the “late-capitalist pigs who run this country,” her country. (He didn’t identify as a citizen.) And still other times they’d just be sitting there, neither of them talking. And he’d be staring at her as if she were his, even though she wasn’t. And she was young, and she was stupid—but she wasn’t that stupid: she knew what some looks meant.

  She knew it was okay to visit even though it wasn’t Thursday.

  AT FIRST SHE’D make up excuses. Then she ran out of excuses. Then she’d just show up, sit down, and start babbling. The visiting professor never told her to leave. He never told her to stay, either. But he gave her keys to his office, so she could leave the books and articles he’d asked her to find him in a neat pile on his desk. She’d stick a note on the top of every pile. She signed them all, “Faithfully, P.” She thought that was a pretty ironic way to sign off. She assumed he’d know what she was getting at.

  It was hard to imagine that he wouldn’t have.

  “I was thinking of dropping out of your class, or at least changing to pass-fail—you know, for ethical reasons,” she informed him one afternoon at Pita Paradise. They’d stopped in for some lunch on their way back from the Political Philosophy Library.

  “Drop out?” He wrinkled his brow, narrowed his eyes quizzically. “Why would you do something like that?”

  “Some people in the class, well, you know . . .”

  But it wasn’t clear he knew anything. “No, I don’t know.” He played dumb, or maybe he really was.

  Maybe he was the naïve one after all.

  “Some people in the class are starting to get the wrong idea about us,” she mumbled into her chickpea salad. It wasn’t exactly true. It seemed like a good way to introduce the “right idea”—namely, the idea that Bruce Bledstone might be falling madly in love with her. Now he performed a single, protracted nod and said, “I see.”

  “Well, what do you think I should do about it?” Phoebe asked him.

  “That’s not for me to say,” he answered. “Though as a general rule, I would advise against worrying about what other people think. Especially since other people are usually wrong. On the other hand, there are no absolutes.”

  “Right, of course,” she chirped, her disappointment bottomless.

  BUT THERE WERE encouraging signs on other fronts. For example, one Thursday after class, the visiting professor informed Phoebe, “It’s no secret that my marriage is in crisis.”

  She tried to act surprised. In fact, she’d done her research. “I didn’t even know you were married,” she lied. “I mean, you don’t seem like you’re married.”

  He shrugged. “It’s not something Evelyn and I go around publicizing.”

  “Of course not.” Phoebe shrugged back.

  As if to keep your marriage a secret were the most natural thing in the world, when the only married people she knew intimately—her own parents—seemed perfectly comfortable having others regard them as a single, state-sanctioned entity.

  “To be perfectly honest, neither of us actually believes in the institution of marriage,” he continued. “We have a marriage founded in convenience—financial as well as collegial.”

  “But do you love her?” It came tumbling out of her mouth. She didn’t mean to pry; she was just curious. Curious if people really married for the tax break.

  “Love her?” Bruce Bledstone repeated Phoebe’s question as if he didn’t understand—as if it were a pretty naïve question to be asking. “I guess I love her. Why would you ask something like that?”

  But she didn’t have an answer for him just then. And she tried to meet his eyes. But he looked away, toward the window. There were no scenic views of the lake or mountains that afternoon. It was raining too hard, and the fog was too thick. And she could tell he was mad, and it nearly destroyed her. “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “It’s none of my business.”

  “Marriage is a complicated institution,” he told her—or maybe them both. “Not to mention a bourgeois construct.”

  Then he asked her for a Camel, and she was more than happy to oblige—nearly ecstatic for the opportunity to offer him something that he wanted. Because somewhere along the way, his happiness had become the measure of her happiness. And because somewhere along the way she must have perceived that he didn’t need her the way she thought she needed him.

  She had this idea that he would.

  She had this idea that he would find her beautiful, and that would be enough. She didn’t understand then that the world is filled with beautiful girls. Or that beauty fades—even in youth. Which is to say that once you get to know people, they stop looking like anything in particular.

  IT WASN’T SO many weeks later that the visiting professor called to say he wasn’t feeling his best—something about a bad cold—and would Phoebe mind dropping off this week’s research assistance at his rental house downtown? “It’s a forty-minute walk from campus,” he said, “but there’s also a bus.”

  She told him walking would be no problem—she could use the exercise. And besides, it was a nice day, nicest one so far this year. She wrote his address on her hand. She told him she’d be over after French. It was dinner-hour by the time she arrived at 84 North Route 11, a sky blue saltbox dating back to the 1950s.

  There was more crabgrass than real grass in the front yard. And the porch was leaning to one side, and the shutters were hanging off their hinges. Phoebe couldn’t quite believe that a man of Bruce Bledstone’s stature would live in a house in that kind of disrepair, but it was he who came to the door, so he must have. He must have wanted to see her. He greeted her with a toothy smile and a jocular pat on the back. “Well, hello there, Phoebe,” he said. “Come in, come in.”

  So she came in. She was wearing the same black miniskirt she’d worn to the first day of Hegemony 412, along with black tights, a green top, and chunky black shoes. He was wearing white jeans and a brown sweater and socks with no shoes. He didn’t look particularly sick. He hadn’t lost his appetite, either. He turned to her midfoyer. “I was about to order a pizza. Do you eat pizza, Phoebe?”

  She was thinking she should have worn her hair down. “As long as you don’t get pepperoni or sausage,” she told him. “I don’t eat red meat.”

  The living room wasn’t much to look at. There were no pictures on the wall, no carpet on the floor—just a striped sofa, matching easy chair angled toward an oversized TV, and a blond-wood coffee table situated between the two. The visiting professor took Phoebe’s coat, asked her if she’d like something to drink. He said he had vodka and gin. She asked him for a screwdriver. He disappeared into the kitchen. While he was gone, she arranged herself on the sofa, kicked off her shoes, inspected her chronically mutilated cuticles. (They had looked worse in the past.) It was another five minutes before he returned with her drink, which he set down on the coffee table at her feet. Then he sat himself in the easy chair to her right and pressed the power button on the remote.

  There was a big war going on halfway around the globe, in the Persian Gulf, and his TV screen was fulgurating as if in the throes of some kind of firefly convention. “This is your government in action,” he offered during a commercial for some do-it-yourself pregnancy test.

  “It’s not my government,” she protested. “I didn’t even vote in the last election!”

  “You should vote if you believe in democracy,” he told her. “I don’t know if you do.”

  The problem was: neither did Phoebe. And she made a mental note to find out. By which she meant, ask Bruce Bledstone if he believed in democracy at some later date. In the meantime, he refilled her glass. He kept refilling it. Then the doorbell rang. From the sofa, she listened to the visiting professor chewing out the delivery boy for being so late. That’s when it first occurred to her that Bruce Bledstone wasn’t necessarily the nicest man.

  But, then, wha
t did she care? He was nice to her—nice enough to let her sit on his sofa and watch his all-news station and eat his pizza and ramble on about all the inconsequential people who’d passed through her inconsequential life. It never occurred to her that he might have fed on her attention the way she fed on his. Or that visiting professors of critical theory got lonely just like everyone else. She thought they had bigger things to worry about—bigger, better things that ended with the suffixes ism and ony.

  He returned with a flat box balanced on his uplifted palm, like a gentleman waiter in an old-fashioned Italian restaurant. He sat the box down next to her drink, then sat himself down next to her body. “You should have told me you didn’t eat pepperoni,” he scolded her between bites.

  She told him that she had; she acted annoyed.

  Secretly she was relieved.

  She wanted to be empty for him—empty so he could overwrite her. So she was not herself—someone else. Because she’d had enough of Phoebe Fine, the sorority-reject nervous-breakdown bulimic with the bloated face. And because she was seeking escape from a life that seemed like no life at all— just a mind-numbing alternation of work and play; and day and night; and beds made and unmade; and bodies soaped and sweated and soaped; and empty stomachs filled and emptied and filled all over again.

  And because she wanted to be so empty that her recent past—her recent failures and rejections—would become irrelevant. So she could start from scratch—a blank slate, pure unadulterated epithelium, two-dimensional and in no hurry to become three. So all you saw was all you got. So ordinary people couldn’t get under her skin. (There’d be no skin to get under.)

  And because Bruce Bledstone was to be her getaway car. That was the master plan.

  Phoebe picked the crust off one slice. He ate the rest of the pizza. The scud missiles didn’t stop. “Do you think a lot of civilians are dying?” she asked him at half past nine.