Blue Angel

by Francine Prose

  “Let’s blow this joint,” says Swenson. “Let’s go home and get under the covers.”

  “Jesus, Ted,” says Sherrie. “We can’t go home. We’ve got that meeting this afternoon. You know that.”

  He didn’t know. Or maybe he did. Maybe he did and forgot. He wishes Sherrie wouldn’t sound so annoyed, as if he were some helpless, irresponsible…child. He wishes she’d have more patience with his little memory lapses. Who could blame him for forgetting that the whole faculty and staff has been asked—is being forced—to attend a meeting to review Euston College’s policy on sexual harassment?

  All semester, Euston’s been anxiously following a current case over at State, where Ruby goes, and where, last spring, a professor showed a slide in Art History 101: a classical Greek sculpture of a female nude. He’d said one monosyllable. Yum. That Yum blew up in his face. The students accused him of leering. He said he was expressing a gut response to art. Yum, he said, was about the aesthetic sense, not the genitalia. They argued that he’d made them uncomfortable. No one could argue with that. He shouldn’t have used the word genitalia, certainly not in his own defense. The guy has been suspended without pay and is fighting his case in court.

  There’s a timid knock on the door. The vomiting kid, no doubt. Sherrie trills, “Come in,” and they turn to see Arlene Shurley, suited up in her shiny white bush shirt and trousers. Arlene’s a local Vermonter, a widowed grandmother whose lifelong uncertainty dribbles out in her shaky voice, constantly threatening tears. Sometimes, when she’s on duty and phones Sherrie late at night, her tone makes their hearts skip. Someone must have died!

  “Gosh, it’s so pretty outside,” Arlene says weepily. “And you can’t help thinking how soon all the color’s going to be gone and how long winter lasts….”

  Essentially, that’s what Swenson thought as he trailed the tour group across campus, but it infuriates him to hear it from Arlene.

  “In that case,” he says, “you should be out partying, Arlene. Get it while you can.”

  Arlene smiles and mews, at once. Is Swenson flirting or mocking? He honestly doesn’t know. Speech pops out of him, on its own. I need to see an exorcist, nurse.

  Sherrie takes Arlene’s arm and cradles the doughy knob of her elbow. She says, “We’re late for the meeting. Call me if you need me, hon. Don’t hesitate for a second.”

  Sherrie and Swenson cross the parking lot toward his five-year-old Accord. They know that it’s an ecological crime to drive across campus, but they want to make a getaway the minute the meeting’s over. Sherrie’s Civic is languishing in the Euston garage, stricken with a computer chip ailment that causes the engine to die occasionally, though never in the mechanic’s presence.

  “What’s with the car?” Swenson asks as he pulls out of the lot.

  Sherrie says, “The garage guys say it’s in denial. They can’t help it heal until it admits it has a problem. Speaking of problems…what was that about? Picking on Arlene?”

  “Sorry,” says Swenson. “Nothing. Today I had the delightful task of teaching a student story that ends with a kid having sex with a chicken.”

  “Did the chicken have fun?”

  “The chicken was dead,” says Swenson.

  “Too bad for the chicken,” says Sherrie. “Or maybe it was better off. So how did the class go?”

  “It went. We got through it without my saying anything that’s going to have the Faculty-Student Women’s Alliance camped out on my doorstep tonight. I still have a job. I think.”

  But now they’re approaching the chapel, where, for all they know, Dean Francis Bentham is already informing the community that teaching a story about poultry sex is automatic grounds for dismissal.

  Apparently, they’ve made it in time. A few die-hard smokers—tenured, of course—hover outside the door. Just as Swenson pulls up, they suck their cigarettes down to the filters and flick them, smoldering, onto the path. Holding hands, Swenson and Sherrie follow the smokers inside and find seats in the last row, creating a minor upset just as the room falls silent.

  “Can I borrow your sunglasses?” Swenson whispers.

  “Cool it,” Sherrie says.

  Slouching so low that his toes nearly touch the heels of the woman in front of him, Swenson can still see. The gang’s all here: the tense, anemic junior lecturers, his own grizzled generation, even the retired emeriti. They’ve all crowded obediently into the austere chapel where, centuries before, the Reverend Jonathan Edwards, on the hellfire circuit, the Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God Tour, terrified his listeners with descriptions of the damned cast into the flames and roasted, screaming, to ashes. In memory of that occasion, a burnished portrait of Edwards glowers from the chapel wall, peering over the shoulder of Dean Francis Bentham, who, when he rises to go to the lectern, glances back at the painting and fakes a tiny shudder as he tiptoes past. The faculty giggles, smarmily.

  “Asshole,” Swenson hisses.

  The woman in front of them wheels around.

  “Easy,” Sherrie says.

  Just as Swenson suspected from the inverted bowl of gray hair and the tense, aggrieved shoulders, it’s Lauren Healy, the English Department’s expert in the feminist misreading of literature and acting head of the Faculty-Student Women’s Alliance. Swenson and Lauren always fake a chilly collegiality, but for reasons he can’t fathom—a testosterone allergy, he guesses—Lauren wants him dead.

  “Hi, Lauren!” Swenson says.

  “Hello, Ted,” Lauren mouths silently, redirecting them front and center.

  In his natty blazer, crisp striped shirt, and perky burgundy bowtie, his china-blue eyes glittering in the gold-rimmed saucers of his glasses, Dean Bentham resembles a punitive pediatrician shipped over from England to cure the rude American children of their bad behavior. The dean was hired a half-dozen years ago in a fit of community self-hate; not even when he visited Euston as a candidate did he make a secret of his natural Oxbridge-assisted superiority to these touching but hopelessly naive colonial morons.

  Bentham grabs the podium with both hands and leans down as if he means to kiss it, then straightens up, crackles a sheet of paper over his head, and says, “Dear friends and colleagues, I have here a copy of the Euston College policy on sexual harassment.” He smiles at this terribly amusing symptom of their hangover from Puritan repression, at the same time suggesting the slightly perverted headmaster who would cane them in a minute for the mildest infraction. “One receives this paper in one’s mailbox every September…along with updates on the health plan and cafeteria hours. All of which one tosses straightaway in the trash.”

  The faculty’s chuckles are guilty and pleased. How well Daddy knows them.

  “I know I throw it away, unread. Though it’s my unpleasant duty to write it. But the current zeitgeist is such that—one knows about the grotesqueries at State, there’s no need to add to the gossip—one has to understand that it’s a whole new…cricket match out there. So I thought we might spend a moment or two going over it together.”

  A faint groan goes up from the room, the faculty’s docile protest. Their dean lets them have their feelings, and then gets back to business.

  Sherrie whispers in Swenson’s ear, “This is so that if the college gets sued they can say they warned us.”

  Of course, it’s just like Sherrie to get it right the first time, without the pointless ruminations on British cultural imperialism and Puritan moral baggage. Sherrie knows it’s simpler, it’s about indemnification. The college’s fear of litigation is as intense as Jonathan Edwards’s terror of hellfire. One expensive lawsuit could push Euston—with its alarmingly tiny endowment—over the edge.

  “One,” reads Francis Bentham in his ironic baritone. “No Euston College faculty member shall have sexual relations with a currently enrolled or former student, nor offer to trade sexual favors for academic advancement.”

  All right. They can agree to that, so long as it’s not retroactive. In the old days, undergraduate paramours
were a perk that went with the job. But already Bentham has moved from these clear prohibitions—as simple and as hard to obey as the Ten Commandments—into the fuzzy area of the hostile workplace, the atmosphere of intimidation. No matter. Like Jonathan Edwards’s audience, Bentham’s listeners drift from the subject of mass retribution to the juicier topic of each one’s secret sin and its chance of being discovered.

  Puritanism’s alive and well. Thank God for repression. What if someone rose to say what so many of them are thinking, that there’s something erotic about the act of teaching, all that information streaming back and forth like some…bodily fluid. Doesn’t Genesis trace sex to that first bite of apple, not the fruit from just any tree, but the Tree of Knowledge?

  Teacher-student attraction is an occupational hazard. Over the years, plenty of girls have had crushes on Swenson. He’s not flattering himself about this. It’s built into the system. Still, their interest is flattering, which in itself is attractive, and so their attention was sometimes returned in ways that couldn’t have been more harmless. So what if he read Miss A.’s paper first, or looked to see if Miss B. got his joke? More often than not, those students worked harder and learned more. And those fleeting…attachments never led any further. Swenson should be canonized. He’s the saint of Euston!

  As hard as it might be for anyone, including himself, to believe, he’s taught here for twenty years and never once slept with a student. He loves Sherrie. He wants his marriage to last. He’s always felt…shy around women. Nor has he needed the dean to point out the moral implications of the power gap between teacher and student. So he’d managed to get past those…awkward spots with literary talk. Each friendly, formal professorial chat layered a barrier between him and the problematically attractive student until neither of them could have begun to dismantle that protective partition. By then it was way too late, too embarrassing and daunting, to face each other on any other terms—as male and female, for example.

  How hard it is to remember their names, which proves that they meant nothing, nothing worth risking his job for, nothing that would have been worth his sitting here now, sweating lest some disgruntled loony rise out of his past to share her undying shame at having traded sex with him for an A in Beginning Fiction. But what Bentham’s saying is that nothing has to happen. Any spark can set off the tinderbox of gender war. Best not to make eye contact or shake a student’s hand. Every classroom’s a lion’s den, every teacher a Daniel. And every Tuesday afternoon, Swenson’s job requires him to discuss someone’s tale of familial incest, fumbling teenage sex, some girl’s or boy’s first blow job, with the college’s most hypersensitive and unbalanced students, some of whom simply despise him for reasons he can only guess: he’s the teacher, and they’re not, or he looks like somebody’s father.

  Silence. Long silence. Dean Bentham glances coyly over at Jonathan Edwards’s portrait, then flashes a grin at his audience and says, “Unlike your distinguished forefather, I don’t mean to scare you. But one needs to know it’s warfare, lest we poor settlers be…ambushed. Clearly there are still witch-hunters ready to burn one at the stake for the sin of smacking one’s lips over the wrong Greek torso. Well, fine. Sermon ended. By the way, I have no fear that anything like this will happen here at Euston.”

  A pall creeps over the chapel, as if Bentham has been describing some fatal new epidemic that chooses its victims at random, as if he’d come here to preach the bad news of an angry God torching their miserable anthill. Then, inexplicably, everyone applauds.

  Swenson and Sherrie duck out before they can be trapped in the quicksand of collegial conversation. But by the time they find their car, the mournful professors have clustered outside the chapel. The obvious thing to do right now is to peel out of the lot, spraying gravel like buckshot, scattering those gloomy groupings. But first Sherrie has to inspect her face in Swenson’s rearview mirror.

  “Christ,” she says. “A giant pimple in the middle of my forehead. I could feel it growing every time Bentham opened his mouth. Look, Ted. Right here. See?”

  “I don’t see it,” Swenson says.

  “You’re not looking,” says Sherrie.

  Exiting the parking lot, he threads his way through the campus, hopping over the speed bumps, crawling through the gates and the two blocks that comprise lovely downtown Euston. Then, only then, he hits the gas, and bingo, they’re free—oh, the mystical ecstasy of taking off in the car!

  How powerful, how safe he feels to have Sherrie sitting beside him, encapsulated, while the world slips by. Okay, a little piece of the world. Fine. All right. He’ll take it. So what if it’s one of those autumn evenings that drop so alarmingly fast, furry dark curtains behind which nature can work all night, freeze-drying the landscape? So what if he knows the drive so well that the sights—how the sky expands as you round the second curve, stretching wide enough to display the blackened teeth of the mountains—the sights that used to thrill him have come to seem menacing and oppressive? He can’t imagine how he could have been thrilled by the sight of mountains beneath which he will probably be buried.

  A light fog rises off the ground, conveniently blurring the general store, the fly-specked mecca where he’d go for after-school ice cream with Ruby. He’s thankful for the mist that softens the junkscape of the Turner farm, the rusted trucks, the busted fridges with illegally left-on doors beckoning neighbor kids to crawl inside and smother. He’s glad even for the deepening blackness that separates him from Sherrie, walling him off in a lozenge of solitude in which he can face the fact that what truly depressed him about the meeting was neither Bentham nor his colleagues, neither the spartan Founders Chapel nor all that pilgrim self-regard, nor even the shock of finding himself, stranded all these long years, in the heart of the stony heart of Puritan New England.

  No, what really bothers him—and he can hardly admit it to himself; if he weren’t driving through the half-dark, he couldn’t let himself think it—is that he was too stupid or timid or scared to sleep with those students. What exactly was he proving? Illustrating some principle, making some moral point? The point is: he adores Sherrie, he always has. He would never hurt her. And now, as a special reward for having been such a good husband, such an all-around good guy, he’s got the chill satisfaction of having taken his high-minded self-denial almost all the way to the grave. Because now it’s all over. He’s too old. He’s way beyond all that.

  He was right to do what he did. Or not to do what he didn’t do. He gropes in the dark for Sherrie’s hand. Her fingers weave around his.

  “What was that sigh for?” Sherrie says.

  “Did I sigh?” says Swenson. “I was thinking I’ve got to do something about this molar.” Turning toward her, he points to it with his tongue.

  “Do you want me to call the dentist?” she says.

  “No thanks,” he says. “I will.”

  His marriage means everything to him. That’s what he imagined telling the admiring students if it ever came to that—which it never did.

  Sherrie says, “It’ll sure make my life easier.”

  In a better mood, he’d enjoy the intimacy that lets his wife pick up an old conversation or start a new one without introduction, or explanation. Just now, it annoys him. Why can’t Sherrie say what she means? Because he knows what she means. Crisis counseling is part of her job, and if the sexual harassment policy takes hold, she’ll see fewer students destroyed by faculty Romeos. Sherrie has enough information to bust the entire school, but she’s remarkably discreet and tolerant about what she sees in the clinic. She would not be discreet or tolerant if Swenson slept with a student. She used to boast about being Sicilian on both sides of the family, from villages where straying husbands were routinely thrown off mountaintops by the wronged wife’s uncles and brothers. She used to say that if he cheated on her, she’d divorce him, and then hunt him down and kill him. That she hasn’t bothered to say that for years only depresses him more.

  “Lucky you.” He feels Sherrie f
linch in the dark.

  “Excuse me,” she says. “What did I do?”

  “My nerves are shot,” Swenson mutters.

  “Yeah, well, mine too,” says Sherrie. “You would not believe the nightmares that came into the clinic today.”

  Swenson’s supposed to ask, What nightmares? But he doesn’t want to.

  “You know,” says Sherrie after a while, “you can relax. No one’s going to fire you for teaching dirty student stories.”

  How dare she underestimate the horrors he faces each day! He’d like to see her go into the classroom and lie about what she loves most in the world, then crawl back into her hole and try to work on her novel. Just as he’s deciding whether to say any of the hostile things that could start them squabbling for days, the mist thickens and forces him to pay attention to the road.

  Sherrie fishes for a cassette and pops it into the tape deck. Wake me, shake me, don’t let me sleep too long. The Dixie Hummingbirds. Terrific. So much for peaceful silence. Sherrie’s been listening to gospel, which normally Swenson likes. This summer, driving the country roads, he’d turned up the sound and filled the car with glorious voices auditioning for the angel chorus.

  Now he says, “I hate this song. It makes me want to pull off the road and kneel down in the drainage ditch and accept Jesus as my personal savior. Plus it makes me envy those lucky fuckers who believe it.”