Blue Angel

by Francine Prose

Swenson can’t answer for quite a while. No doubt she’s used to that. Then, holding his hand over the receiver—no doubt she’s used to that, too—he says, experimentally, “Angela 911?”

  The woman says, “I’m sorry, hon. She doesn’t work here anymore. Would you like to talk to one of our other beautiful ladies?”

  “No thanks.” Swenson hangs up. Adrenaline’s pumping through him. He’s practically sick with relief. But where did he think this was leading? What had he imagined? What would he have done if Angela 911 had answered?

  Swenson leaves the office and drives home with a dangerously small portion of his psyche. The rest has better things to do, such as twisting itself around the question of how Angela knows so much about his past. More than likely it’s coincidence. That’s the answer he can live with. And though it gives him the willies, it’s a lot less troubling to think about than the fact that he just called a phone-sex line from the college phone.

  Since the Benthams’ party he’s been unpleasantly aware that Angela is occupying more than her share of territory in his mind. Nor has he forgotten that less than an hour ago, he was mentally groping between her legs while, on the surface, teaching a class. Fantasies aren’t actions. Let’s hear it for repression, and for his pretty white farmhouse appearing around the bend.

  Sherrie isn’t home yet. Being alone—briefly—in the house always makes Swenson feel calmer, more capable and grown-up. Though being alone for too long makes him feel like a panicky child. He goes to his study, looks up a number, and calls Angela in her dorm room.

  Angela sounds sleepy.

  “I read your chapter,” Swenson says.

  “Already? Wow. I’m flattered.”

  “Don’t be,” says Swenson, lamely. How pathetic is this? Admitting to reading a student’s work the minute class was over. “The novel must be good. The plot’s got me hooked.”

  “Did you totally hate the new chapter? Is that why you’re calling so soon?”

  “Not at all. I thought the first part was wonderful.”

  “Which part was that?” Is it possible she doesn’t know? That first time she gave him a chapter, she knew about every typo. Her voice sounds hoarse. Was she sleeping? Or could he have interrupted her in the midst of fooling around with the boyfriend she mentioned so dismissively in his office? Don’t these kids have voice mail? Why did she pick up?

  “You said the first part was wonderful. So does that mean the second part sucked? The part about the mother? That’s the part I’m worried about.” Swenson hears the familiar Angela taking over from the impostor who answered.

  “Well, I don’t know,” says Swenson. What if it’s published someday, and Sherrie or someone reads it? “I wasn’t sure. I found myself skimming to get back to the story of the girl and her…music teacher. That part where the mother meets the father…in the hospital. I wasn’t sure you needed it. It seemed a little extraneous….”

  His voice trails off. It is a good idea. Lose the mother’s history. The girl’s story doesn’t need it.

  Angela’s sigh is impatient. “I could maybe cut the stupid Jane Eyre joke at the end. But I need the mother’s point of view. For stuff that happens later. Stuff the reader will need to hear that can’t come from the girl’s point of view. It’s technical, you’ll see….”

  Technical! They’re talking technique here, one writer to another. Swenson presses on his molar till a stab of pain calls him back to his real life. A life with a dentist. Sherrie. A home.

  He says, “Where did you get that part about the ear infection and falling down in the hospital?”

  “Huh?” says Angela. “Oh, that. Okay. This friend of mine in high school. She keeled over in the emergency room, and the doctor tried to ask her out. Until the nurse showed him her chart. Showed him how young she was.”

  “I see.” Swenson’s not going near that story.

  A lull in the conversation. Time to say good-bye.

  “So…how are things going? School? Work? Life in general?”

  Just then he looks up and sees Sherrie in the doorway of his office. She’s wearing her coat. Rain shines in her hair.

  “Excuse me. I’ve got to go,” he says, and hangs up.

  “Who was that?” asks Sherrie.

  “Oh, that? That was…Magda.”

  Sherrie says, “That’s what I thought. You’re leading her on, you know? Unless that’s what you want to do.”

  “It’s not,” says Swenson. “Believe me. Anyway, you’re imagining all that. I couldn’t lead anyone on. I mean, no one would want to be led on by me—”

  “Are you all right?” says Sherrie.

  “You tell me,” he says.

  “I think you’re going to make it,” Sherrie says.

  “I’m not so sure,” says Swenson, then stands and kisses the top of her head.

  On Saturday morning of parents’ weekend, Swenson passes Kelly Steinsalz sauntering across the quad with her mother and father. Unlike the other students, power-walking ahead of their parents, Kelly, perhaps because she’s had so much practice giving campus tours, walks slowly enough for her mother and father to keep up, which is not to say that they don’t appear to be barely staving off panic.

  “Kelly,” says Swenson. “These must be your parents!”

  “Professor Swenson!” Kelly says. “This is my mom and dad.” Kelly’s parents grin at him, and Kelly seems to glow, thankful for this proof that she exists here: a teacher knows her name. Instantly she forgives him for disliking her story, “Mabel’s Party.” What’s a story, really, compared to this validation? Swenson accepts her gratitude, nods, and moves on, feeling he’s finally taught her something—something about power, obligation, and kindness.

  Smiling beatifically at the students and their visitors, Swenson could be an actor sent from central casting to play a beneficent college professor. At the same time, he feels as if he’s transcended his ego and become pure soul, expanding outward to experience the pain of the parents, the middle-aged women so touching in their Birkenstocks and gunny sacks, their husbands, overgrown boys shocked to discover that they’re not the students; the scholarship parents, the dads in baseball caps and feed hats, the minorities and country folk eyeing the pretty campus as if it were Jurassic Park.

  How uncomfortable they are in the presence of their children! Who would believe that these intimidating strangers were attached to bottoms they diapered, mouths they pried open with spoons? These hulking boys and gum-chewing girls could be visiting dignitaries or important business contacts, that’s how obsequiously the grown-ups trot behind them, keeping up their interrogations—how’s the food? your roommate? your math professor?—questions their children ignore, walking farther ahead, so that the parents must speed up, intent, but possessing just enough peripheral awareness to compare themselves with the others: whose children are more sullen—or phony enough to pretend to enjoy this?

  When he and Sherrie took Ruby to college, a year ago this August, they were near the low end on the spectrum of parent-child relations. No one’s daughter was more withdrawn, pulling harder away, more mortified by their existence or encumbered by her own. Ruby’s fury at them smoldered so intensely that Swenson could see other parents turning to look, distracted from their own dramas by whatever signals his family must have been putting out. By then Ruby hadn’t spoken to them for weeks, and didn’t speak all that day. When Sherrie went to kiss Ruby good-bye, she lowered her face like a toddler submitting to having her winter hat pulled on.

  And what had Swenson and Sherrie done to deserve such rage? Broken up a romance with a liar, a fraud, an alleged rapist. Was the problem really the busted love affair, or their making Ruby see herself as a person so weak that her parents could make her go in the opposite direction from the way her heart led?

  Every so often, Swenson sees Matt McIlwaine with another victim, always a freshman girl. Sometimes, when they pass close enough, Matt winks at him. Eventually, Ruby would have learned the truth, would have run to Swenson, her dad
, her champion, her protector, which is how she used to see him when she was a little girl.

  Swenson’s dressed with care in a T-shirt and sports jacket. Joe Professor on Saturday, professional but not off-putting. He changed shirts twice, jackets once, adjusting his appearance for the imaginary range of parents who might walk into his office. It’s understood that he’ll be there from nine-thirty till twelve so visitors can drop by, no appointment necessary. He’s implying that this open-door policy applies year-round for their children, which is only fair, considering what their families are shelling out.

  Swenson arranges his books and papers to convey the impression of a desk he’s worked at, a work in progress, so to speak, though not the work of a slob. He scoots a second chair over from the window, a chair sufficiently similar to the one in front of his desk to spare the mothers and fathers the revealing negotations about who gets the more comfortable seat. He often sees too deeply into the parents’ marriages.

  He gazes out his window down at the groups sleepwalking across the quad. He needs to appear to be doing something when the parents walk in. Scanning the stack of books on his desk, he pulls out My Dog Tulip, which he hasn’t looked at since he used it for cover to borrow Angela’s poems. The poems are in his desk at home. He should get them out of his house. He doesn’t need to think about them with the parents about to walk in. Hi, I’m Ted Swenson. I’m a big fan of your daughter’s dirty poetry. He opens My Dog Tulip.

  As soon as he made his wishes clear she allowed him to mount her and stood quietly with her legs apart and her tail coiled away when he clasped her around the waist. But for some reason, he failed to achieve his purpose. His stabs, it looked to me standing beside them, did not quite reach her…. They tried again and again, the samething always happened, whenever he seemed about to enter her she protested, as though she were still a virgin, and pulled herself free. And now it was quite upsetting to watch, his continual failure to consummate his desire and the consequent frustration of these two beautiful animals who wished to copulate and could not manage to do so. Nor could I see any way to help them, except to lubricate Tulip, which I did, for they seemed to be doing themselves all that could be done, except unite.

  Just then, someone knocks on the door. Oh, hello. Do come in, let me read you this brilliant depiction of canine sexual frustration. He props the book open, face down. The professor’s reading! But suppose they recognize the book—not at all the heartwarming pet story one might expect from the title. How many parents have read Ackerley? Swenson can’t take the chance. He hides it under some other books and calls out weakly, “Ye-es?”

  The door opens, and a man—wispy beard, silver-rimmed glasses, he looks like the professor—sticks his head in, grinning shyly. The door opens wider to admit his wife, tall and also gray-haired, with a taut, eager-to-please smile.

  “I’m Doctor Liebman? And this is my wife Merle?”

  The woman says, “We’re Danny’s parents?”

  “Oh, yes,” says Swenson. “Please, come on in.” Oh, yes, your son just wrote the most amusing story about a chicken.

  “We just came to say hi!” says Danny’s mom.

  “To see how he’s doing,” the father says. “Just in a general way.”

  “He loves your class,” says the mother. “It’s the only one he talks about. Last week, on the phone, he was raving about a story by one of the other students, a story about a boy who commits suicide.”

  “Oh, Carlos’s story.” Swenson’s proud of himself for remembering.

  “Of course, as a mother, you worry when your son admires a story about a suicide.”

  “Mothers!” says the father. “What don’t they worry about? If the kid likes Crime and Punishment they worry that means he’s going out to bludgeon some old lady.”

  Bludgeon two old ladies, thinks Swenson. “I wouldn’t worry. Danny’s very together. He works hard. He wants to improve. There was a very interesting classroom discussion the other day about one of Danny’s stories.”

  “Danny’s stories?” says the mother. “He never mentions his stories.”

  “Interesting,” says the father. “What was the story about?”

  “Surburban life,” says Swenson.

  “Not about us, I hope.” Mrs. Liebman giggles.

  “I wouldn’t worry,” says Swenson.

  Danny’s parents thank him profusely and leave. Is someone waiting out there? Apparently, no, there isn’t. Swenson finds My Dog Tulip and begins with Ackerley’s description of meeting an old woman wheeling her ailing, bandaged dog through Fulham Palace Gardens in a baby carriage, a scene that segues into the writer’s account of his affair with his Alsatian, a relationship as tender as any romance with a human. Swenson gladly exchanges his office for London in the late fifties, a world seen through the brilliant lens of Tulip and Ackerley’s love. He loses himself, loses all sense of time, and is shocked by the sound of someone knocking on the door.

  A woman walks in and says, “I’m Claris’s mother.”

  Fiftyish, unsmiling Mrs. Williams has no interest in deploying what’s left of her daughter’s beauty. Life as a high school principal has given her the authority to turn Swenson into a meek kid to whom she can lay down the law. Claris is destined for medical school and Mrs. Williams doesn’t want her head being turned with any nonsense about being a writer, no point Swenson giving her any Toni Morrison bullshit, one black woman winning a prize doesn’t mean the field is wide open.

  What is Swenson supposed to say? She’s got nothing to fear. Claris isn’t a writer. She’s a sharp and tactful critic, good at detecting what’s wrong, excellent bedside manner, a first-rate diagnostician. But she doesn’t have talent. Like Angela.

  “Lord knows why Claris chose this place.” Mrs. Williams sighs. “I warned her a million times. She got into Yale. Did you know that?”

  “No, I didn’t,” says Swenson, chastened. “In any case, I promise you, I’ll do everything in my power to discourage your daughter from wasting her life. Anyway, Claris is way too smart to want to be a writer.”

  “I hope so.” Mrs. Williams raises one eyebrow. “Thank you,” she says frostily, then picks herself up and leaves.

  He looks at the clock. Eleven-thirty. Well, that’s that. Nearly painless. Really, not bad at all. So why is he disappointed? Because he was looking forward to meeting Angela’s family. He wants another parent conference? He has gone out of his mind.

  Swenson hears a tapping on the frosted pane, the ping of metal on glass.

  He knows they’re Angela’s parents before the woman says, “Are you Professor Swenson? Our Angela is in your class…?” She’s wearing almost as much metal as Angela, though in her case it’s gold. Clunky bracelets, chains, earrings. She bears the weight as proudly and humbly as a Hindu bride, each carat a mark of distance traveled upward into the world. She’s in her early forties, with wide dark eyes and a startled doll-like blink, dyed blond hair, black eyebrows. A royal blue dress and matching pumps, an outfit she’d wear to a wedding. Her slightly older, pudgy husband wears a shiny tan polo shirt, a checked jacket. He too has a gold ring.

  “I’m sorry we’re late,” says Angela’s mother. “We started out from Jersey at five-thirty this morning so we wouldn’t have to pay for another night’s motel.”

  Her husband says, “That’s a little more information than the professor needs.”

  “Oh, is it?” she says. “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, no,” says Swenson. “You’re right on time. They’ll be serving that awful lunch for another hour and a half.”

  “Oh, is there lunch served?” the mother says. “Are you gonna want lunch?” she asks her husband.

  “We can buy lunch,” says her husband. “We’re here to talk about Angela.”

  “I’m glad you came!” Swenson’s practically shouting. “Please. Have a seat.”

  The mother sits, hooking her legs at the knees, shaking one shiny blue pump. Her husband crosses and uncrosses his legs, squirming with an a
ngular clumsiness so reminiscent of Angela that Swenson has to remind himself that he isn’t her biological father. The guy resembles Angela—something about the shape of his eyes, revealed when he takes off his glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose.

  “Eight hours on the road,” the man says. “How’d they find this place?”

  He looks more like Angela than the mother does. Or maybe he resembles Angela’s real father. The mother has a type. They’re certainly not the parents in her novel, the distant imperious doctor and his moody wife. On the other hand, there’s no guarantee that this isn’t the guy in the poems, the child abuser and phone-sex addict. Swenson’s prepared to hate him. But he has to keep an open mind. He’s the one who warns against assuming that anything’s autobiographical.

  “Well,” says the stepfather, rearranging his arms and legs until at last he gives up. “How’s Angela doing? She told us to make sure and come here. She said you were the only teacher who would say anything nice. So, you know, I got to wonder why we ain’t going to see the ones who won’t have nice things to say. Not waste our time with the subjects where she’s already doing okay…. Not that we’re wasting our time here. Jesus. I didn’t mean—”

  “I understand,” says Swenson.

  “We meant to get here in time to see the other teachers,” says Angela’s mother. “But the drive took so long. At the end we got lost for an hour….”

  “Who got lost?” says her husband.

  “I got us lost. We wound up right downstairs in front of this building.” She holds up a creased campus map that appears to have absorbed all the sweat and stress of their recent trouble. “So we decided to come here first.”

  “I’m glad you did,” Swenson says.

  “So you said,” says Angela’s stepfather.

  “She talks about your class all the time,” says his wife. “Really! She just won’t shut up about it.”

  “Good things, I hope,” says Swenson.

  “Absolutely,” says Angela’s mother. “You’re…well, you’re her hero! She thinks you’re just the greatest writer who ever lived.”