Vladimir(43)

“Where do you go at night?”

He finished flossing, rinsed his mouth, and spit a stream of blood-tinged saliva into the sink.

“Nowhere.” Then he pulled his elbows behind him to stretch his chest, farted, and left the room. As a matter of habit he flicked off the light on his way out, stranding me in the dark.



* * *



I hadn’t planned on being so mentally compromised that I couldn’t contemplate my response to the tenured faculty, but my loose brain and sweaty palms lasted well into the day. I was overwhelmed with burning humiliation for whatever had occurred between Cynthia and me, no matter how many times Sid assured me that I was fine. “She’s hot,” she said. “She is,” I said, and then pictured how ridiculous I must have looked while dancing, how sloppy I must have sounded when I spoke, and how strange it was that I would threaten her, when the whole reason she came was kindness.

At 6 p.m. a little clarity broke through my brain, bringing with it a craving for more alcohol. Once more I wrote to pertinent people and told them I wouldn’t be able to teach the next day, as my cold had worsened. I had papers due in my Gothic Novel class, and wrote them a strict email requesting the essays in my inbox at the end of class time. As a teacher, I’ve found that strictness is often an effective way of diverting from one’s own laziness. Sid mixed martinis and made us some not-half-bad French dip sandwiches with sautéed onions and the leftover steak (my resolve for a liquid/vegetable diet failed around three, when I became ravenous). I preserved a modicum of sense and limited my drinking to one reasonable martini and a large glass of cheap red. We ate the rest of the cake and watched Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, which Sid had never seen.

“Disturbing,” she said at the end, after the credits rolled on Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon playing cards together. I wondered if The Apartment was the first film that ended by depicting love as a kind of jovial camaraderie rather than passion. MacLaine and Lemmon didn’t even kiss at the end of the film. It seemed as though all films now, unless they had titles like Desire written in red letters against black backgrounds, portrayed true love as the coming together of two fun friends. No wonder that I perceived, mostly from their short stories, that my students found nothing more romantic than lusting after a platonic member of their social group.

Sid, though, wasn’t interested in that inquiry. What was disturbing to her was that there was such a delineation of women presented and that the movie had no qualms about that. Shirley MacLaine was deserving of love and a better situation because she was sensible, funny, beautiful, and well-spoken. The other women who had affairs with the executives of the corporation were presented as fools and sluts. They were curvy and spoke with regional accents and were less beautiful and thus deserved our ridicule, while Shirley MacLaine’s gamine, refined character deserved our sympathy and support.

Of course, until very recently we had all thought that. We had all thought that there were certain kinds of women who deserved to be taken seriously, women you saw in the office, for example, and certain kinds of women, women you saw in titty bars, for example, who didn’t. We believed they were different and we all thought it, men and women alike. You could separate your ideas about them with ease. You could respect some and denigrate others. I understood Sid’s and her whole generation’s rejection of the excuse that “it was a different time.” That kind of excuse leads to cultural stultification, it perpetuates misogyny and racism, it is general and not interesting. I didn’t believe Billy Wilder should be held up as a moral paragon, or even as a good man.

But what I was becoming so frustrated with, and the reason I felt more and more like not teaching, was that I believed that art was not a moral enterprise. That morality in art was what happened when the church or the state got involved. That if you insisted on infusing art with morality you would insist on lies and limits. Truth could be found only outside the confines of morality. Art needed to be taken and rejected on its own terms. Art was not the artist. Were these all simply platitudes I had absorbed without question? I felt more and more mixed up about it recently. Should we only portray the world we wanted to see? Should we consider certain stories “damaging,” and restrict them from a general audience, not trusting them to take in the story without internalizing the messaging? Hadn’t we all agreed that morality in art was bad? But art did cause damage, and I was affected by films I had seen when I was young, and I was ashamed when I watched an old film and saw racist depictions I hadn’t seen before, and I was glad to be ashamed. But did we all have to see ourselves in the presentations of types? Did I have to feel like every wife and mother was presenting an overarching narrative of Wife and Mother that reinforced or rejected my own experience?

Sid was indulgent with me that night. She said that I was clearly a good teacher, because I was entertaining the questions and not just roundly dismissing them. For her, she said, the misogyny of The Apartment was primarily distracting and kept her from enjoying the film the way it was meant to. It was meant to be agreed with in a certain way, and she couldn’t agree with it. When I suggested the movie was interesting as a document, as a way America saw itself at a certain time, as an example of the trajectory of film, of a new kind of comedy emerging, a new kind of hero, and that the crowd scenes were choreographic marvels, she told me that while she understood that I was interested in that way of thinking, she wasn’t. She was a lawyer, she wanted something different from her intake of art. When I cited to her that Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s favorite teacher was Nabokov, because he taught her how to appreciate literature on a formal level—to look for the tricks of the writer, the art of the novel, to see more than just the story—Sid shrugged and told me she had no doubt that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was smarter than she.