Vladimir(34)

“Why do you wear those shorts and then ask me for something you want? You know I can’t stand those shorts.”

But I hadn’t read the moment correctly. I had thought he’d melt and sweep me up jokingly, and I’d tell him that of course I loved him, that I’d consider coming to the hearing. Instead he looked at me sadly, shook his head as though I were responsible for all the tiredness in the world, and left.

I sank into an armchair like a felled tree. I was angry at myself for creating my own trap. Now I felt as though I had done something wrong. Now I felt as though I had to run after him. “I love you, baby, I love you.” What did I truly want from him? Did I want a day, a month, a year of domination? In which I could scream at him and mock him all I wanted with impunity? Did I want him to grovel at my feet? It wasn’t that, exactly. I wanted him to accept the role of the penitent. But you can’t ask someone who feels like a victim, as John most certainly did, to live apologetically. And there it was, that twisted logic. Even as we railed against victim mentality, against trauma as a weapon, we took the strength of our arguments from the internal sense of our own victimhood. John was acting just like the women who accused him. He had been wronged, goddamnit. While there was a part of him, I knew, that understood I was suffering too, he still cherished the sense that he was the most drastically injured party. He grasped his being wronged like a precious gem in a velvet pouch. Yes, he was like all the rest of them, desperately holding on to his own pain.

By the time I arrived on campus, I was shaking with anger. I was late, having stood stock-still in my bedroom staring out the window, a cavalcade of thoughts crashing down on me. I remember reading that Edna St. Vincent Millay gave instructions to her housekeeper not to interrupt her if they saw her standing still—that was the way she would compose poems, on two feet, staring into the middle distance, writing and rewriting lines in her head. I never had that organization of thought: my rapt pauses were all about conflicting feelings, images and memories running and bumping into each other—more like a chaotic battle scene than the unfurling of insight.

At any rate, I was hurrying to my Women in American Literature survey class when I saw Edwina, my treasured star pupil, walking with Cynthia Tong along the green. I waved, and they waved back with overdone fangirl adoration. But it was the gesture of two people who were clearly together in thought, while I stood on the outside. When I began teaching, when I was young and fresh and within a decade of my students, there were certain women with whom I related deeply, women who became my friends. Even briefly watching Edwina and Cynthia crossing the quad, I saw this was happening with them. So quickly, only three weeks into the semester. Jealousy burned at me, anger fired from my womb. Edwina hadn’t put her off, she hadn’t said she would make a date with her and hadn’t followed through. I had written an email to her with x’s and o’s and they were giggling with each other like new roommates.

In class we were comparing selections from Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and the diaries of Alice James. “Why are all these white women so obsessed with being female?” asked a blond, female student who never did the reading. “Don’t they recognize their privilege?” When I ventured to say that Chopin, for instance, began writing after being left widowed with six children as a means of support, she shrugged. “But she still walked through the world as a white woman.” When I asked her if that meant she shouldn’t write, she said, “No, she shouldn’t complain.” When I asked what writing that was not-complaining looked like, she said, “I don’t know, like James Joyce.” Another student, thankfully, interrupted and said the women were of different times and different literary movements than James Joyce. “And different countries,” said another. “Also he was very privileged,” another burst in. “I just don’t know why we have to read these whining women,” the student countered, and another, defending my honor, said, “The course is Women in American Literature.” “Women couldn’t vote or get legally divorced at the time Chopin was writing these works,” I said. “They may seem outdated to you now, but—” Then I stopped myself. I hated this class more and more every year. The wide scope of the subject matter made it impossible to take the time to fully examine any work we studied, and the brief timeline of a semester made every choice of every class objectionable, as though every week I was saying, “This is the American Woman.” I wanted to take it off the course catalog, but it was a cross-listed requirement-fulfilling class in both the Gender Studies and English departments, and therefore hard to shift. “I want us to talk about what they are doing in their work. What is the symbolism they are using, what is the metaphor? They are writing at the time of Freud, Darwin, and the tail end of transcendentalism. How do we feel those movements affected…”

I felt so tired when class ended. The student who had challenged me hurried out of the room, all her bravery gone when she was not performing for her classmates. Starving, I stumbled to the school café and bought soup that came in a waxy paper tub, a seasonal apple pastry that they stocked from a local farm, and some ashy, lukewarm coffee. I found a booth in which I could sit in a patch of sun, and collapsed into it. It would be poor form for me to fall asleep, surrounded as I was by students, but that was all I wanted to do—to close my eyes and let the heaviness overtake me. I must have closed them momentarily, because it was behind the dark of my lids that I heard a strident “Yoo-hoo!”