Blue Angel

by Francine Prose

  The quiet ones always spook Swenson. God knows what they’re thinking. But the metallic Angela is a special pain in the ass. Because she never speaks, and restricts her commentary to eloquent, disruptive squirming and sighing, her presence is a lit firecracker sparking in their midst. Swenson can hardly look at her because of the facial piercing. Now she rat-tats a spiked ring against the edge of the table.

  “Angela, are you saying that to rewrite the story that way would…suck?” asks Swenson, reflexively ironic and reflexively sorry. What if Angela thinks he’s mimicking her and retreats again into silence?

  “It would suck big-time,” Angela says.

  Precisely at that moment, they feel the seismic tremor, the middle-ear pressure change that warns them, seconds in advance: the bells are going to ring. The Euston bells are in the cupola just above them. When they ring the hour, halfway through Swenson’s class, the slow funereal chiming vibrates in the bones. Conversation stops. Let the professors who covet this classroom—who hear the bells ringing sweetly from across the campus—deal with this every week.

  The students reflexively check their watches, then look sheepishly at Swenson for direction: their teacher whose puny power has been trumped by two hunks of swinging bronze. Sometimes Swenson smiles, or shrugs, or makes a gun with his fingers and shoots the tolling bells. Today he looks at Angela, as if to keep her there. As soon as it’s quiet, he wants her to continue where she left off and rescue Danny—as Swenson cannot—from further ruining his story. But he can’t predict what she’ll say. He’s never seen a line of her writing or heard her express an opinion. Maybe she’ll tell Danny to rewrite the story from the chicken’s point of view. But at least she’s swimming against the tide and may create an eddy into which Swenson can jump and stem the flood rushing Danny to wreck what little he’s got. As long as Swenson isn’t the only one to ruin the collective good mood with his know-it-all pronouncements…. After all, what does he know? He’s only published two novels, the second of which was so critically successful that even now, ten years later, he’s still asked, though more rarely, to give readings and write reviews.

  The bells strike twice for each hour. Each time, the students flinch.

  Swenson stares at Angela, who stares back, neither curious nor challenging, combative nor seductive, which is partly why he can look at her with the whole class watching. Nor does he see her, exactly, but just allows his slightly out-of-focus gaze to linger on her until he senses restlessness in the room and notices that the bells have stopped.

  “Angela? You were telling us…?”

  Angela stares at her hands, twisting a ring on one finger, then moves on to another ring, twists that one, five maddening fingers on one hand, five more on the other.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I guess I think the best thing—the one good thing—is that the end is so weird and unexpected. Isn’t that the point? Anyone could do something like this. You don’t have to be crazy, or have some babe ditch you for a waiter who serves Northern Italian chicken. Here’s this loser on a date with a dorky girl, and he goes home miserable. And there’s this chicken. And he just does it. Guys are always surprising themselves, doing crazy shit even though they don’t think they’re the kind of guys who would do crazy shit like that.”

  “Excuse me, Angela,” says Carlos. “Most guys would not poke a chicken—”

  “Carlos,” says Angela, darkly, “trust me. I know what most guys would do.”

  From what authority does Angela speak? Is this some kind of sexual boasting? It’s best that Swenson not even try to decipher the code in which his students are transmitting.

  “Is something going on here? Something I’m not getting?” He feels them pulling together to screen their world from him. He’s the teacher, they’re the students: a distinction they like to blur, then make again, as needed.

  “Moving right along,” he says, “I think Angela’s right. If Danny’s story’s not going to be just a…psychiatric case study of a guy who could go home and…well, we know what he does. The strongest story makes us see how we could be that kid, how the world looks through that kid’s eyes. The reason he does it is not because his girlfriend has eaten chicken, or because her new boyfriend serves—as Angela says—Northern Italian chicken, but because he’s there and the chicken’s there. Circumstance, destiny, chance. We begin to see ourselves in him, the ways in which he’s like us.”

  The students are awake now. He’s pulled this class out of the fire, redeemed this shaky enterprise they’re shoring up together. He’s promised them improvement. He’s shown them how to improve. The angriest, the most resistant think they’ve gotten their money’s worth. And Swenson’s given them something, a useful skill, a gift. Even if they don’t become writers, it’s a way of seeing the world—each fellow human a character to be entered and understood. All of us potential chicken-rapists. Dostoyevskian sinners.

  “All right.” Slowly Swenson comes to. For a second, the edges of things buckle and shimmer lightly. And there, among the funhouse curves, is Claris Williams, glaring.

  What is Claris’s problem? Did she miss the fact that Swenson’s just kicked things up to a whole other level? Oh, right. It was Claris who suggested that the end of the story be tied down, like a rogue balloon, to the beginning. And now Swenson, with Angela’s help, has not merely contradicted Claris but done so with a slashing incision that’s transcended the timid microsurgery of the workshop.

  “Well,” Swenson backtracks, “no one can tell the writer what to do. Danny will have to see for himself whatever works for him.” He’s so glad to have gotten through this that he can’t bother much about their failure to agree on one thing that might help Danny’s story. He starts to put his papers away. The students do the same. Above the squeaking of chairs Swenson shouts, “Hey, wait. What’s the schedule? Whose story’s up next week?”

  Angela Argo raises her hand. He would never have guessed. Students tend to get very tactful—hesitant to make enemies—the week before their own work is to be discussed.

  “Have you got it with you?” Swenson asks. “We need to copy and distribute—”

  “No.” Angela’s almost whispering. “It’s not exactly finished. Do you think I can come talk to you? During your office hours tomorrow?”

  “Absolutely!” booms Swenson. Office hours tomorrow? He schedules two conferences with each student per semester, though actually, he’d rather not go into his office at all. He’d rather be home writing. Trying to write. If he has to be in his office, he likes to sit and think. Or jerk off, or make long distance calls on the college’s nickel.

  Of course, he can’t tell the class that. He wants the students to see him as generous, giving—on their side. And he wants to be, he used to be, when he first started teaching. Well, anyway…he owes Angela for bailing him out, for helping him divert the class from the wipeout toward which it was heading.

  Swenson says, “What time are my office hours? Someone remind me, please.”

  “Tomorrow morning,” Nancy Patrikis says.

  “I have morning office hours?” says Swenson. “Are we positive about that?”

  “That’s what it says on your office door.” Danny’s happy to play along, he’s so thrilled that the class is over.

  Clearly, there’s no avoiding it. “All right, Angela. See you at nine.”

  “See you,” Angela—half out the door—calls back over her shoulder.

  On his way out, Carlos punches Swenson’s upper arm and says, “Hey, Coach. Thanks. Good class.” Nancy and Danny find each other—it’s like Noah’s Ark. Claris and Makeesha leave together, apparently reconciled since Makeesha criticized the politics of Claris’s latest story. The disenfranchised Carlos with the feminist Meg, the furious first-family Courtney with the furious farm-girl Jonelle. Everyone’s in a fabulous mood….

  A tide of satisfaction sweeps Swenson out the door and sends him, practically skipping, down the belltower’s helical stairs. Not until he’s halfway across th
e quad does he realize that he hadn’t needed to mention the detail of the chicken’s head, gazing back at its attacker.

  As always, getting out of class, Swenson feels like an innocent man, sentenced to life, whose jail term has just been commuted. He’s saved, alive, he’s been reprieved…at least until next week. Hurrying across the quad, he nearly plows into a tour group inching across the campus. Rather than ruin his sneakers by cutting across the boggy lawn, he trails behind the high school students enduring the mortification of being here with their parents.

  Deep in the Northeast Kingdom, an hour from Montpelier, sixty miles from Burlington, one hundred fifty from Montreal if you’re desperate enough to wait at the border while the Mounties tweeze through each car to discourage Canadians from crossing to shop at the Wal-Mart, Euston’s nobody’s first choice. Students willing to travel this far to a college this cut off and inbred prefer Bates or Bowdoin, which have better reputations, the Maine coast, and the L. L. Bean outlet. Euston’s conveniently located in the midst of the two-block town of Euston and the moose-ridden wilderness that its founder, Elijah Euston, so loved.

  Recently, a public relations team advised Euston to market its isolation. And so the tour leader—Kelly Steinsalz, from last spring’s Beginning Fiction—is explaining that the lack of distractions lets her concentrate on academics. The parents nod. The teenagers scowl. That’s just what they want from college. Four years of concentration!

  Swenson can’t imagine how Euston looks to someone visiting for the first time. They couldn’t have picked a better day. Warm vapors surround the handsome buildings, the gnarled maples and still-green lawns. What they cannot picture—and Swenson can, all too well—is how soon this soft green path will turn into a frozen white tunnel.

  “Excuse me,” says Swenson. No one budges. They’re too busy miming presentability or disdain. Trapped, Swenson listens to Kelly Steinsalz describe Elijah Euston’s vision: how a four-year liberal arts education far from the civilized world would nurture leaders who could go back into that world and change it. The parents are so deferential, so eager to make an impression, you’d think Kelly was director of admissions. Shyly, one mother asks, “Does it ever bother you that the school is so…small?”

  “Not at all,” says Kelly. “It means there’s a community, everybody belongs. Anyway, it’s not small. It’s intimate. It’s…close.”

  In Swenson’s class, Kelly spent all semester writing a story about a cranky old woman named Mabel who thinks her ungrateful children have forgotten her eightieth birthday. At the end, Mabel’s neighbor Agnes invites her to a melancholy dinner for two in the local diner—which turns out to be a surprise party attended by Mabel’s whole clan.

  Kelly redid the piece a dozen times. At every stage Swenson found “Mabel’s Party” harder to deal with, he thinks now, than the most lurid account of sex with a dead chicken. Bring up sentimentality, they think you’re saying they shouldn’t have feelings. He couldn’t make himself tell Kelly that revision wouldn’t help. But she wasn’t stupid. She got it, and at last demanded to know why she couldn’t write a story with a happy ending instead of the stuff Swenson liked: boring, depressing Russian junk about suicidal losers.

  Kelly explains how Elijah Euston founded Euston Academy to educate his six sons and seven daughters (one father whistles) but omits the sad story of Elijah’s curse: three daughters died from diphtheria, two more committed suicide. Kelly describes the college traditions, but not the widespread belief that the campus is haunted by the ghosts of its founder’s daughters, spirits with an appetite for the souls of undergraduate women.

  Nor does Kelly mention the college’s disturbingly high dropout rate among female students, the source of another quaint custom: every spring the senior girls ring the college bells to celebrate having made it. All this has become a rallying point for the Faculty-Student Women’s Alliance, demanding to know why Euston is such an “unsafe” place for women that so many of them leave before graduation. Unsafe? It’s not a safety issue. The women are just smarter, quicker to catch onto the fact that they’re wasting their parents’ money in this godforsaken backwater.

  “Coming through! Coming through!” Swenson cries, and the group scatters.

  “Oh, hi, Professor Swenson!” says Kelly. “That’s Professor Swenson? Our writer in residence? Probably you’ve all read his book, it’s called…?”

  Swenson nods politely but chooses not to wait and see if she remembers. He passes Mather Hall, the turreted Victorian firetrap in which he has his office, built on the site of the lake drained by Elijah Euston after one of his daughters drowned herself in its murky depths. He keeps going till he reaches the Health Services Clinic, a tiny prefab bungalow, neatly shingled and quarantined from the classrooms and dorms.

  A bell announces Swenson to the empty waiting room. He sits in a plastic bucket chair under a poster of a perky blond cheerleader who never thought HIV could happen to her. No one’s at the front desk. Is Sherrie back with a patient? Swenson should welcome the downtime. If he leafed through the women’s magazines in the rack, he’d learn how important it is to have a quiet transitional moment. He clears his throat, scrapes the chair legs…. All right, let’s try something faster-acting.

  “Nurse!” he shouts. “Please! I need help!”

  Sherrie rushes into the room, raking her tangle of dark curly hair. After all this time Swenson’s still impressed by the stormy, rough-edged beauty his wife shares with those actresses spewing pure life force all over postwar Italian films. He loves the groove that time has dug between her eyebrows, the lively mobility of her features, molting within seconds from alarm to confusion to indulgent, not-quite-genuine laughter.

  “Jesus Christ, Ted,” she says. “I heard some guy out here yelling for help. It took me a couple of seconds to realize it was you.”

  “How’d you know I didn’t need help?”

  “Instinct,” says Sherrie. “Twenty years of experience.”

  “Twenty-one,” says Swenson.

  “I need help,” Sherrie says. “Is that how long I’ve been married to some jerk who’d yell like that just to get attention? Jesus, Ted, stop leering.”

  Such are the pleasures of intimacy: he can look as long as he wants. Given the current political climate, you’d better be having consensual matrimonial sex with a woman before you risk this stare. Sherrie’s outfit, a white lab coat over blue jeans and black T-shirt, might not give every guy the first Pavlovian stirrings of a hard-on, but Swenson seems to be having a definite response.

  “Nurse, I think something’s wrong,” he says.

  Those were the first words he ever said to her. The morning they met—this was in New York—he’d gotten out of bed and fallen, fell twice more getting dressed, went out for some coffee, and the sidewalk came up to meet him. A brain tumor, obviously. He waited till he fell again before he went to St. Vincent’s.

  The emergency room wasn’t crowded. The nurse—that is, Sherrie—walked him in to see the doctor, who was practically delirious because the patient who’d just left was Sarah Vaughn. The doctor wanted to talk about Sarah’s strep throat and not about what turned out to be Swenson’s middle-ear infection. Swenson thanked him, stood, and hit the floor. He’d woken with Sherrie’s hand on his pulse, where it’s been ever since. That’s what he used to say when he told this story, which he hardly ever does anymore since they no longer meet new people who haven’t heard it. And Sherrie used to say, “I should have known not to fall in love with a guy who was already unconscious.”

  This always caused a complicated moment of silence at Euston faculty dinner parties. Sherrie was kidding, obviously. The others just didn’t get it. Swenson cherished those moments for making him feel that he and Sherrie were still dangerous outsiders with no resemblance to these nerds and their servile wives dishing out the tabbouleh salad. Even after Ruby was born, he and Sherrie clung to that sense of being rebels, partners in crime passing for respectable citizens at nursery-school Halloween parties
and parent-teacher conferences. But lately there’s been some…slippage. He knows that Sherrie blames him for the fact that Ruby’s barely spoken to them since she left for college a year ago this September.

  Sherrie glances out the window to see if anyone’s coming. Then she says, “Let’s take a look. Why don’t you come with me?”

  Swenson follows her down a corridor into a treatment room. She closes the door behind them and sits on the edge of a gurney. Swenson stands between her legs and kisses her. She slides down so that she’s standing. He moves his hips against hers, until Sherrie braces one hand against his shoulder and, toppling slightly, he steps backward.

  Sherrie says, “What do you think it would do for our careers if we got caught having sex in the Health Services Clinic?”

  But they aren’t going to. This is just some primitive greeting, reestablishing their acquaintance, less real desire than the desire to raise their body temperatures after a long tepid day.

  “We could claim it’s therapeutic,” Swenson says. “For medicinal purposes only. Anyway, we could fuck each other’s brains out here and no one would ever hear us.”

  “Oh yeah?” says Sherrie. “Listen.”

  Someone’s vomiting next door. Each volcanic eruption of retching trickles off into a moan. When the noise stops, Swenson hears liquid splashing, more retching, then more splashing. It’s not the most aphrodisiac sound. He backs away from Sherrie.

  “Great,” says Swenson. “Thanks for bringing that to my attention.”

  “Stomach flu,” says Sherrie. “Nasty. Not half so bad as it sounds. Ted, can you imagine? Kids come in here to puke. When we were their age, we knew enough to crawl off and dig ourselves a hole and throw up in private. No one went to student health unless we were overdosing on LSD and seeing green snakes crawl up our legs.”

  “Tough day?” says Swenson, warily. Something must have happened. Sherrie’s never unsympathetic—anyway, not with the kids. He’s driven her to the clinic at 4 A.M. for the cardiac emergencies that turn out to be freshman anxiety attacks. Or the truly scary but not yet fatal consequences of binge drinking. She’s got patience for everyone but the morose faculty hypochondriacs who treat her like a servant and blame her for not being licensed to write prescriptions for antidepressants. Even so, she listens and never seems irritated. But since the start of this semester, Sherrie’s been less tolerant of the lacrosse jocks weaseling out of exams, the wimp who jams his finger playing ball and demands a cast to his elbow. With those students she’s all business, Nurse Ratchet instead of Mom.