by Craig Smith
Poor Johnna took every comment down, nodding at the worst of it and inevitably doubting her own genius.
I waited for the praise until I got impatient. No one wanted to say it was great stuff, and finally I let them have it. If the story worked, then tell the writer it worked! Finally a couple of people admitted it was pretty funny. At the break I had the urge to make a run for the exit, but I forced myself to return. Buddy’s story was next, and I was prepared to enjoy the ensuing slaughter of his inflated ego.
I was disappointed. Suddenly the class decided I wanted them to be nice, so we listened to insipid praise for one of the nastiest short stories I’d ever had the misfortune to read. Technically, it was not a weak story. Buddy Elder had a certain skill. What he lacked was humanity. His story, ‘Lap Dance’, detailed the lust of a sixty-something prof named Ward obsessed with a stripper named Dee Dee. It was supposed to be a send-up of the old Blue Angel, I suppose, but the culminating scene in the front seat of the professor’s Volvo was nothing short of cruel, especially as the old man lost his erection the moment the girl consented.
I said very little throughout the love-fest. Toward the end, however, I made a few pointed remarks about the cruelty. Several people jumped to Buddy’s defence.
It was funny!
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘it was shit.’
Workshops are not supposed to go like this. The prof expresses an opinion but never shoves it down everyone’s collective throat. Certainly, criticism never falls to the level of insult. Profs will sometimes use a bit of the old Anglo Saxon to inspire the nostalgic thrill of academic freedom, but never-ever do they assault a student’s best effort with such language. The moment I said it, I tried to get some ground back, but it was too late. Just an opinion, I said, no better or worse than anyone else’s. Everyone, including Johnna Masterson, looked uncomfortable. Except Buddy.
Buddy had the bright flushed cheeks of a young man who has just been slapped with a glove.
After class he walked away without a word, but the following morning he was knocking on my office door.
The duel at sunrise. What transpired between us had a certain complexity, befitting, I think, our brief, uneasy history. Buddy affected indifference as he sat down on the other side of my desk. He would have me believe he was just stopping by because we were friends. I played along for a while, because I knew he wanted to talk about his short story, and as it happened I had plenty more to say.
He was giving me a chance to make amends for an unfortunate remark. When I did not take it and offer an apology, Buddy was forced to open up the proceedings. What exactly was wrong with the story? I probably should have sparred lightly around a few innocent matters concerning style. Instead, I came after him with a direct assault. ‘I didn’t like it.’
He blushed and tried to laugh. That much he understood. He wanted specifics.
My position might seem perfectly understandable, a bit blunt perhaps, but within my rights. People who have worked in education will know how brutal something like that can be. I knew it, and I said it, because I didn’t want Buddy Elder in my class.
‘It was unnecessarily cruel,’ I said.
‘You’re the only person who saw it that way, Dave.
Everyone else laughed.’
I could have answered this in a number of ways, but I chose silence. Silence, I hoped, would cut more deeply than any argument involving adolescent aesthetics.
‘Johnna Masterson did practically the same thing.
You thought her story was funny.’
‘Johnna Masterson has talent.’
I was not thinking about the euphemistic sense of that word, but Buddy Elder, after a semester of drinking with Walt Beery, picked up on it at once. He gave me a conspirator’s grin. ‘That’s pretty much what I figured.’
I did not handle this very well. In fact, I gave Buddy a definition of talent that left him wanting in every respect. In the process, I made some specific compar-isons to Masterson’s story, but essentially I broke Buddy’s story down without concern for his feelings and perhaps not even for objectivity. I didn’t like the way the man had looked at Molly and Lucy. To be honest, I didn’t even care for the way he had looked at my horses. This was my revenge. I did not use a single expletive. I tortured him with the tools of my trade. When he tried to interrupt, I poured on the contempt. He asked for my opinion, I said, so he could just sit there and listen!
I cannot recall ever treating a student to such honesty.
I gave it without stint. I gave it because I wanted to hurt Mr Buddy Elder in ways that I did not even understand at the moment.
When I had finished with him, Buddy just smiled, though it was a pale, trembling smile at best. ‘You don’t like me, do you?’
I thought about laughing, because what he said was a masterpiece of understatement, but I did not want to give him even that much satisfaction. What I said was, ‘It’s not too late to drop the class, Mr Elder.’
A moment later, I sat alone in my office. There were no students waiting to see me, and I found myself wanting a drink. The feeling actually startled me, all the more so when I realized it was nine-thirty in the morning. I stood up and ripped open Roger Beery’s literary nightmare as much to kill the impulse to drink as to finish with all unpleasantness at once.
The title was Virgio 9, and it was dedicated to Arthur C. Clarke. On the first , a starship commander was battling with a starship malfunction of some sort.
I skimmed ahead until he landed at Virgio 9. On 114, about five minutes at my reading, I slowed down for a seven sex scene between the starship commander and a shapely hermaphroditic clone. Roger got things worked up pretty well with the male-male, male-female anatomies, but a phone call, via a chip implanted in the starship commander’s ear, interrupted them, and our hero had to return to ship before completion of his exotic encounter. I noticed some reveries on the captain’s preferences once he was safely inside his ship, and somewhat embarrassed by the writer’s unconscious ambiguities, I began flipping s. With eight hundred s behind me, I checked the last . I still had two thousand-some s to go. At the halfway point, I stumbled into a three-way of aliens and tried in vain to discover if there was more same-sex stuff going on. Because they were aliens, I couldn’t really figure out what body parts went where, and I hadn’t the patience to work through the thing carefully. I skimmed the last seven hundred s in another five minutes.
As I still had no students at my office door, I called Barbara Beery. I told her I’d finished her son’s manuscript and wanted to talk to him about it. For one of the few times in her life, Barbara Beery seemed to enjoy the sound of my voice. She was almost girlish as she asked me to hold on. ‘I’ll see if Roger is awake.’
Roger came to the phone sounding like a man pulled from a deep sleep. I told him I was ready to talk about his novel. He seemed to expect something over the telephone, but I lie much better when I can see how it’s being swallowed and offered to buy lunch if he could get to campus around noon. Noon was obviously inconvenient, but for the sake of art Roger said he would try.
I hadn’t seen Roger for a couple of years. When he showed up at the union building, I have to admit I didn’t even recognize him. He had gained maybe sixty pounds. A lot of it was just that, poundage, but I could see a lot of it was muscle too. I was guessing steroids and a really bad diet, but pretty much true to my form, I told him he looked great. ‘Have you been working out?’
Roger seemed gratified I had noticed. He had been lifting for a couple of years, he said. We talked about that as we ate. I was in no rush to get around to his manuscript. He was pleasant enough about things. I asked about the facility he used, the cost of it, the hours, the kind of clientele they catered to. Then I offered an observation about the degree of satisfaction one gets from a hard workout. I even ventured to suggest that women seem to notice a man when he is getting in shape.
Roger said he had noticed that too, and shared a sly smile with me. I decided he was still in th
e denial phase. I shouldn’t have really cared, I suppose, but I was curious. The whole dropout scene had always seemed a by-product of drug usage, but it was possible his alienation had more complex origins.
When we finally got around to the reason for our meeting, I lifted the massive box from the floor and set it on a chair so that it was between us. I found it instructive to see the way Roger’s eyes fixed on the package. Roger had obviously spent years working on this, and I didn’t especially care to disappoint him. In order to do that, I praised Roger’s attention to detail.
I talked about sentence structure, which, in the parts I had read, seemed fairly solid. I talked about imagery, narrative devices, transitions, and the intriguing eroticism that linked the action sequences. Having a doctor’s degree in bullshit, I knew how to deliver these observations with credible enthusiasm. To this point, Roger had been nodding. At the mention of eroticism, though, he asked, ‘Was the sex too graphic?’
I danced around this topic expertly. It was always a matter of context. Clearly, sometimes an author needed a graphic depiction for a certain effect.
Sometimes an encounter was unnecessary. Only a fool would venture into a generalization about something like that. Roger nodded, clearly expecting specifics.
When I offered nothing more, he tried to comprehend what I was saying. ‘Was it too graphic anywhere in my story?’
It was a fair question, and I made a stab at the first sex scene, at least the first I had noticed. It was good, I said, especially ending with the interruption, but did we need the musings of the starship captain after the encounter? ‘Do we really need to know he’s uncertain about his own orientation?’
Roger looked me as if I might be an alien myself, and I knew I had made a mistake. The starship captain had an issue. All characters have an issue. His was hermaphroditic clones, I suppose. Of course, I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t dare take off on ambiguity, aliens, clones, or three ways (even if only two bodies are involved). What I wanted was just a little more time with that manuscript so I could bluff my way through this.
As that was impossible, I said it was difficult sometimes distinguishing between issues and challenges. One was a matter of characterization, the other of narrative design. Now I have a great deal to say about these kinds of things, and at that moment I began to spew.
Long summers on the car lot had taught me to read suspicion, however, and Roger Beery had it.
A less experienced liar might have been tempted to make a partial admission of the facts, something like, I didn’t read the entire manuscript or I skimmed some of it. But honesty is a slippery slope, and I was having none of it. I did admit I probably lacked experience as a reader of science fiction. As far as the market was concerned, I said, I was absolutely ignorant, so I really couldn’t help on that point. Roger began to squirm as I said this, and I got the feeling that he wasn’t interested in selling the manuscript. I decided he wanted to know its artistic merit, and I proceeded to talk about writing and art.
No one understood more than I did the loneliness and frustration of such work, I said, the feelings of doubt, the disappointment of rejection, even if it was only the failure to connect with a single reader! I wasn’t making progress. Roger had seen through me. I was lying. I hadn’t read his novel. I was pulling a con, and he was not going to forgive me. I still didn’t back down. I had noticed a misspelled word on 1,243, if he called me a liar, but I didn’t have to get petty.
He drifted, I lectured.
Finally we got completely off the subject of writing.
I asked about his mother, how she was handling the separation with his dad. Roger told me she was doing fine. He couldn’t answer any specific questions, and I managed to rattle off a couple of platitudes about relationships before noticing my watch. The time had gotten away from me, I said. I had to get back to my office.
I still had a class to teach that afternoon.
‘I haven’t even read the assignment yet, I’ve been so busy!’
We shook hands and parted like friends, but I left the meeting with that sick feeling one gets when one’s lies are not properly and politely swallowed. This would get back to his mother. Instead of feeling guilty, I was irritated at myself. I should have told Walt upfront I couldn’t do what he asked. Failing that, I should have given the manuscript a couple of hours and then told Roger that was what I had done, two hours, and this is what I think.
Did I regret my failure to act properly? Well, not really. Like most people, my only regret was getting caught.
DENISE WAITED FOR ME after class that afternoon.
I was not in a particularly good mood, and the sight of Buddy’s girlfriend with that we-need-to-talk look on her pale, lonesome face put me on the defensive.
‘Is this about Buddy?’
Denise shook her head morosely.
I relaxed but only slightly. ‘You don’t like Medea?’
She stared at me as if I had written the thing for Euripides. ‘I hate it! I hate the Greeks!’
‘Let me guess. She killed her own kids.’
‘It’s sick!’
‘You need to speak up in class, Denise. That’s the best place to talk about something you don’t like.
You’d be surprised how many people will back you up if you speak your mind.’
‘What’s the Aeneid about?’
I smiled. ‘We’re just reading a single passage, the love story between Aeneas and Dido. Not even adultery if you can believe it. Exactly your kind of story.
Except... well, she kills herself.’
‘Why?’
‘Why else? Aeneas leaves her.’
‘Men are pigs.’
‘All men or just the ones you sleep with?’
Denise looked like I had slapped her, and I apologized. I said I was out-of-line. I didn’t mean it. Bad day. She smiled, but it wasn’t as forgiving as I would have liked.
FOLLOWING THAT ABYSMAL day of quarrels and miscues, I managed to bury myself in my work. I expected Buddy to drop my class. I even thought Denise Conway might.
To my surprise, Buddy returned to class the following week with a good attitude. He was not especially attentive to me, but he did his work. His comments about the writings of others were competent, even insightful.
In fact, he was pretty good at finding both the positive and negative with the occasional plot twist that even left the prof nodding with approval. I had seen this kind of thing before, a student with modest abilities as a writer suddenly emerging as a potentially outstanding teacher of writing.
In my worst fears I was that guy. Under different circumstances I probably would have approached Buddy to let him know I was impressed with his involvement. Even though it was the right thing to do, I just couldn’t manage it. I didn’t like him. I didn’t like the way he treated Walt or for that matter Denise.
And Denise had become important to me in her own right. To my surprise, she took my advice about speaking up in class. She actually began raising her hand on a regular basis. She was blunt, sometimes funny, sometimes the star of the discussion. An issues-kind-of-student, Denise could complain about Dido’s lack of professionalism with a straight face. She had a country to run. Sure, she had feelings, but she had responsibilities too! Didn’t she think about that? ‘I mean the world isn’t all guys! There’s other things important too!’
Othello got no sympathy. What a dumbass! Hamlet needed to get laid. And what was with Ophelia? What was the real message here? Girls are nothing without guys?
If a teacher is lucky, there’s always one student who can jumpstart a flagging discussion or, in my case, a flagging semester. That was Denise Conway for me, and in various ways I let her know I was proud of her.
Whether in response to my encouragement or because of her own unexpected excitement for all things literary Denise liked to drop by my office two or three times a week. She had an idea for one of the required papers and we talked through that. Another time, she wanted to talk about changing jobs
. Did I have any ideas? Jobs? As in no more dancing? She was, she said, starting to feel like a piece of meat. I talked about student worker programs. One day, she came in looking exhausted. There had been trouble at the club the night before. The police had come. One of the patrons had gone to the hospital, one to jail. Walt was there. Walt had crawled under his table. I told her Walt wasn’t the man for a crisis. No argument there, but the student worker thing was looking better and better. I made a call across campus and got her set up to meet someone.
The next day Denise dropped in to tell me Buddy didn’t want her to quit her job at The Slipper. Could I believe that?
I made a point of asking her some hard questions about the relationship and what she thought the future might hold.
‘You know,’ I said finally, ‘when you’re into something like you are, a business like that, it feels like you don’t have options. People make you believe you can’t do something else. But you can do what you decide you want to do, Denise. It might cost. It might even bruise you, but you alone have the power to change your own life, if that’s what you want.’
Denise missed the next class. The day following that, I got a call from Leslie Blackwell in Affirmative Action.
Could I come across campus and talk to her?
We made an appointment for the following morning.
Chapter 6
AS A RULE I DIDN’T talk much with Molly about what went on at school. It was my way of separating my realities, and she was okay with that. She knew Buddy Elder was taking my class, but not that he and I had squared off in my office. I told her Buddy’s stripper girlfriend was taking my Intro to Literature class but that was the extent of it. I certainly didn’t tell her I had been summoned to appear at the office of Affirmative Action. It was simply not Molly’s world.
She had no interest in it.
