by Paul Russell
“My thoughts entirely,” he said. “Just one big long sigh. Maybe I’ll take you up on that cocktail now.”
“Scotch?” Louis asked, both surprised and pleased.
“Sure,” Tracy said. “Sounds good.”
As he stood at the kitchen counter, refilling his own glass and resisting the temptation to give Tracy an extra large splash—in celebration of what, exactly?—Tracy’s voice came to him from the den. “By the way, you’ll be so proud of me. I actually went out and bought my first classical CD the other day. That Schubert sonata I liked so much.”
“The B-flat opus posthumous,” Louis said.
“Who’d have ever thought?” Tracy told him, accepting the amber-filled tumbler Louis offered him.
“Did you want ice?” Louis asked.
“No, no,” Tracy told him, sipping appreciatively, “this is just great as is.” Louis was all at once acutely conscious that Claire’s class had been over for some time now, that her session at the diner never lasted more than an hour: sooner rather than later he would hear the sounds of the Audi in the driveway. It was silly, superstitious—or perhaps only selfish—but considering how well the evening had gone so far, he felt he would just as rather Tracy be gone by then. Tracy, however, perhaps under the inspiration of the scotch, was intent on declaring himself.
“One thing I realize,” he said a little grandly, “is, all the music I grew up with—most of it was just crap. I mean, I listened to what everybody else listened to. What they fed me on the radio. But it was stupid. It was junk. But I never knew anything else. So I feel like you’ve given me a gift.” He raised his nearly empty tumbler. “Thank you,” he said gracefully, thrillingly. It was enough to make Louis think of beautiful moments that would not last. But Tracy wasn’t through. “I have to tell you,” he went on, as if confidentially, “I think I’m really starting to like this place. I didn’t know whether I would, at first, but I’m starting to really feel at home here. Like maybe I fit in.”
“Oh, I think you’re a very good fit for us,” Louis assured him.
“There were certain things I thought I wasn’t going to like—little things, like how the students all have to wear coats and ties to class; how there’s this strict code. But I kind of see the point. It’s bigger than just the Forge, what it stands for.” Louis winced at the familiar shortening of the school’s name; Tracy had picked up the usage, no doubt, from the students, who liked to make the school sound more like a high-walled, forbidding prison than the studious community of scholars it strove to be. He considered gently correcting the young man, but how to do that without seeming stern, even humorless? So he decided to say nothing—it was thus, exactly, that traditions crumbled—as Tracy continued, his voice gaining in intensity, “In Japan they’ve got this ancient culture, it’s so strict and formal and beautiful, but then everywhere you turn, it’s like this American sickness is invading everything. You start to hate it. I mean, I felt ashamed. Growing up with it, you just don’t notice. And it’s the same with our students. They don’t have any choice—it’s what they’re born into, all these stupid computer games and the junk food and the clothes and sneakers. All the stuff they think is cool. But they’re just victims. I mean, they don’t know any better. They don’t even know how to think about it. Am I talking too much?” he asked, suddenly self-conscious.
“No, no,” Louis told him. “Please go on.”
“I have this ideal, I guess, of what it means to be educated. How to be loyal to the beautiful things. I have this image—it’s almost exactly the opposite of everything our society makes kids into. All this ugly stuff, this loud stupid bullying that passes for cool. I’m sorry, I’m just going on and on here.”
And perhaps he was, but listening to him earnestly chatter on, above and beyond whatever Tracy was striving to find words for, Louis realized something he had only dimly thought about before. He hardly knew this young man, really, and certainly Louis had no intention of retiring anytime soon—his health was good and, more to the point, the Forge School was his life—but ten years from now, fifteen, mightn’t he be permitted, if only for a moment, to entertain the possibility that one day in the distant future, Tracy Parker might be the headmaster of the Forge School?
“I agree with every word you’ve said,” Louis told him gratefully. “It delights me to hear someone of your generation say such things. Let’s say it makes me feel less…I don’t know”—and here, surprisingly, he found himself thinking of Eleanor Osterhoudt, of Christian Tyler, of a nameless woman facedown on a sidewalk in Sarajevo—“Perhaps it makes me feel less stranded.”
The house was quiet. Tracy Parker had gone; Claire had returned. Now she slept peacefully upstairs; Lux slept fitfully downstairs. Everything was in its place and Louis was in his study, at his desk, his notebook open before him. Not since the fruitless summer had he pulled the notebook from its hiding place at the bottom of his desk drawer, but tonight he felt a beguiling intoxication—the effect, no doubt, of the evening’s stirring music, its heady conversation. It was as if a door had opened: not into but out of.
He reached up and took down, from its shelf, his much-perused copy of The Magic Mountain, and turned to the chapter in which Hans Castorp discovers the pleasures—some surprisingly perilous—to be had from listening to the Berghof’s newly acquired gramophone. It had been no accident, of course, that he himself had chosen to introduce Tracy to those late songs of Schubert; it had been, rather, a test, which the young man, happily, had passed more splendidly than his teacher might have hoped. Though Louis had to wonder: to what extent had he led Tracy to those insights his pupil for the evening had so marvelously articulated, and to what extent had the young man arrived there on his own? Did one learn or was one shaped? Hadn’t Plato made that distinction, between the fruitful seminar and sterile indoctrination? As for his own insights, had not Mann gently seeded him with every single observation he himself had offered, this evening, about that lovely, disquieting song? “One need have no more genius,” Louis read,
only much more talent, than the author of the “Lindenbaum” to be such an artist of soul-enchantment as should give to the song a giant volume by which it should subjugate the world. Kingdoms might be founded upon it, earthly, all-too-earthly kingdoms, solid, “progressive,” not at all nostalgic—in which the song degenerated to a piece of gramophone music played by electricity. But its faithful son might still be he who consumed his life in self-conquest, and died, on his lips the new word of love, which as yet he knew not how to speak. Ah, it was worth dying for, the enchanted Lied! But he who died for it, died indeed no longer for it; was a hero only because he died for the new, the new word of love and the future that whispered in his heart.
The words stirred and troubled Louis. What new word of love had Mann indicated with such careful obliquity? What scene of beguiling intoxication did that shut door swing slowly open to reveal? Putting aside The Magic Mountain, he took up his pen; then, a remarkable thing, he began feverishly, as if possessed, to write.
VI
The only male student in Claire’s Introduction to Writing by Women was a thin, harassed-looking young man named Tim Veeder. When she had asked them all, on the first day of the semester, to write down on a piece of paper what they hoped to get out of the course, he’d scrawled A date. (Just a joke!). Really—I want to see how the other half live.
“Perhaps we should talk,” she had told him at the end of the next class, unsure whether this was the right course for someone like him. He’d assured her that absolutely, positively, it was, and that he would love to come to her office sometime and chew the fat but he was very, very busy this semester. He was working two jobs. At the time she’d felt vaguely relieved, but now he sat before her in the cramped cubicle she shared with two other part-time faculty. The day was pleasantly warm for late October, and to take advantage of this last lingering taste of summer Tim had dressed in a Metallica T-shirt, cutoff jeans, and enormous high-topped sneakers he wore without s
ocks. Straight black hairs, vaguely repulsive, covered his skinny legs. Perhaps everyone, men and women alike, should have to shave their legs, Claire thought. Perhaps legs were never meant to be flaunted at all. Nevertheless, she could not keep her eyes from wandering their way.
He talked in fitful spurts, intent, apparently, on spilling not only his own but his entire family’s history to her. “My mom,” he said, “she didn’t want me to do this schooling thing; my dad either. You know—waste of time and money. But I said to them, it’s different times now, you’ve got to get an education to stay ahead. Nobody ever went to college in my family so they all think I’m weird, the weirdo in the family, you know. And I guess maybe I am. It’s not like I did so great in school, but not terrible either. One of my teachers, Miss Davidov, said I should go on, and I thought, hey, I’m all for broadening my knowledge. I mean, I always read books on my own and that kind of thing. Atlas Shrugged. Now there’s a book for you. Did you ever read that one? I read it twice.”
“I haven’t actually ever read that particular one,” Claire told him. “I tried to read one of her others.”
“Yeah,” Tim said enthusiastically, “when I can find the time, I want to read all her stuff. She’s great. Did you ever think of maybe including Atlas Shrugged in this course? I mean, it’s written by a woman and everything.”
She considered the possibility of tackling that one, but instead she asked, “So how is the course going for you?”
“Oh, I’m getting a real kick out of it,” he fired back, and she had the disheartening sense, not only from what he’d just said but from everything she saw of him in class, that he was understanding absolutely nothing. Everything he said—and he tended to speak at great length in the classroom, and with great assurance—seemed to her dead wrong, as if, perversely, he took every argument as its exact opposite. It was a terrible thing to admit, but she’d already more or less written him off in a kind of triage. There were too many others in the course she had to try to save.
There was one matter, however, she had to broach with him. “If I don’t call on you sometimes,” she said, knowing he noticed how there were days when she ignored his impatiently upraised hand for half the class, “it’s because I’m trying to let other people have a chance.” No need to be confrontational, she thought. No need to alienate him completely by pointing out what a typical male bully he was. And yet the point did need, somehow, to be made.
“I understand,” he said. “No problem. My friends all call me motormouth anyway; that is, the ones that don’t go calling me motorhead.” He grinned as if it were a joke he expected her to get. “But I’ll be honest with you,” he went on. “It’s frustrating not to be able to talk sometimes. And if other people aren’t going to speak up, well, I mean, what can you do?”
“One thing you can do,” Claire explained patiently, “is give those people a space so that they can find their voices. It’s not easy. Women in this culture often have a very difficult time asserting themselves, and I think we all have to be very conscious of gender privilege. Speaking is so often a male prerogative. That’s why—”
“It’s just the way I am,” he said, and not even defensively. “It’s in my genes.”
“Or perhaps it’s a cultural thing,” she suggested. “Perhaps it’s part of your acculturation as a man to be competitive and aggressive.”
“You should see my sisters,” he said. “My sisters are practically the same way.”
“Have they ever thought of going to college?” Claire asked mildly.
Tim made a disdainful sound. “Are you kidding? Making babies is all they do. I say, whatever makes you happy, I’m cool with that. They both got husbands.”
Was it true that men never listened? That they never had to listen? She wished she could get her hands on those sisters of his, just for half an hour; their version of their lives would undoubtedly differ from their brother’s fond account. But of course they would never get near the college; circumstance had already doomed them to a life of thoughtless fecundity.
But where was the harm in that? she chided herself. She had read the feminist arguments for “reproductive rights,” how women must be allowed not only to choose not to have children, but to choose to have them as well. She wondered, sometimes, how good a feminist she really was, since to be honest she looked with some horror on the prospect of a world overrun by the illiterate and unwashed—since those were the people whose right to have children was being voiced by such arguments. Was she, at heart, an elitist who would, under the right circumstances, look the other way if the government issued a one-child–one-family policy? And yet she herself had brought two daughters—well cared and provided for, one might add—into the world.
She had come to feminism—as to so much else—late in life, while studying for her Ph.D. at SUNY Albany. A lesbian professor with close-cropped hair and ferocious learning, having seen some gleam in a forty-five-year-old headmaster’s wife making her uncertain return to the academy, had pushed Simone de Beauvoir and Monique Wittig her way. The former Claire had read with enthusiasm, the latter with great skepticism and not a little incomprehension. She remained, in certain ways, for all her feminist stance, the person she had always been, though she took pains to keep that hidden from someone like Tim Veeder, who would only use her complexities against her. A hypocrite, she thought gloomily, steering herself back to her student: he was asking for clarification about the next paper assignment, which, due to his two jobs (“grease monkey by day, burger flipper by night”), he was doubtful about being able to complete on time.
“Take an extra week,” she told him wearily. “But then it really does have to be in.”
“Yes,” Tim said, and he clenched his fist triumphantly in a most unagreeable way. “You’re the greatest, Mrs. Tremper. Sorry,” he corrected himself with a grin as he bounded for the door. “Ms. Tremper.” The last thing she saw were those hairy legs of his.
“Don’t worry,” said a husky voice. A large black woman glided into the narrow office. “I’m not asking for no extra time.”
“Hello, Sharia,” Claire said, always a little disconcerted when students who’d been waiting outside the door made it clear they’d heard everything that went on in the previous conference. “How’ve you been?”
“I seen better.” She slumped herself down into a chair that seemed ill-designed to carry her weight. “Shaquilla’s been sick this week, and I don’t know what’s up with Mikal.”
“Sorry to hear it. Is there anybody else waiting for me out there?”
“Not so far as I know.”
Claire did a quick calculation: could she afford to skip out on her office hours fifteen minutes early? “I don’t suppose you’d have any interest in going to get some coffee,” she said.
“I could do that,” Sharia told her.
“Then let’s,” Claire said. She stuffed some papers in her briefcase and was ready.
She wondered, as she often did, if this meant she was playing favorites. And what if she were? Men played favorites all the time and no one minded. Nevertheless, she felt guilty about Tim Veeder, the way she’d dismissed him, granting him that extra week on his paper because, frankly, she didn’t think it would make any difference.
If there was one student in the class to whom Claire directed her teaching, it was this thirty-five-year-old mother of five who worked six nights a week mopping floors at the hospital and by day managed a full load of classes. Sharia’s manner was wary, jaded, fierce. She had the worst teeth Claire had ever seen. But her mind, Claire had managed to discern through the grammatical nightmare of her essays, was bracingly bitter and clear.
What a pair they made as they sat in the bleak student center canteen and sipped bitter coffee from white foam cups, this prim-looking, silver-haired white woman in black, her colorful neck scarf affixed by a silver brooch, and across the table a very large black woman in slightly soiled pink sweatshirt and pants and broken-backed house slippers. No one paid them any parti
cular attention—at four in the afternoon the place was pretty much deserted—and yet Claire felt a surge of defiant pride to be seen sitting with Sharia Washington. But wasn’t that racist, always to be thinking, This person is white, this person is black? Not black, she reminded herself; a person of color was what one said these days—though, of course, twenty years ago such a phrase would have invited a punch in the face.
Feminism’s rigorous demand, by which she tried to live these days, was this: that she undertake to examine all her unconscious assumptions, painful—and never ending—as that task might be. Growing up, she had known no black people, though they had stood silently at the margins of her everyday awareness, silently performing the little tasks that kept the world humming along. They had been like those household gadgets one took for granted. Was it ever possible to put the ways of one’s past entirely behind one, however well intentioned one might be?
“I’ve got a complaint,” Sharia said.
“Yes?” Claire said mildly, both inspired by her student’s earnest quest for knowledge and a little fearful of her directness. So far, she felt, she had lived up to the daily challenge Sharia posed; but she also felt, with awful certainty, that the day would come when she would fail her student, simply by turning out to be exactly who she was, a privileged white woman unable fully to surmount the perspectives of her race and class and age.
Sharia rummaged in her book satchel—it was a child’s satchel, perhaps one of her daughter’s—and brought out a battered copy of A Room of Ones Own. “This white woman makes me so mad,” she said. “The other night, I had to throw her book against the wall.”
“Oh dear,” Claire said.
