My Education (3 page)

She was impressive in that way that preempts every other impression. I had no idea who or what she might be. Her appearance at Brodeur's door, his discomposure, did not serve as clues. Inexplicable apparitions by their nature can appear anywhere, and leave all their witnesses oddly unsettled, and so my unease felt in some way inevitable.

It was unbearably hot in the classroom. The remainder of class oozed away without my even discerning what page we were on. When I heard the translucents shuffling their texts into their arms and departing I looked up and found myself alone with Brodeur, who was fully recovered and even humming an air to himself as he packed his books and papers forcefully and haphazardly into the hard-used, tattered Danish cloth schoolbag—the national flag was embroidered at postage-stamp scale on the inner but now exposed flap—which had lately replaced his far sturdier calfskin briefcase. “Can I meet with you a moment?” I asked, and for the first time he bent that avidly inquisitive, almost delighted gaze on me that subsequently I would so often see.

“Absolutely,” he said.

His office was on the fourth, highest floor, almost directly above his classroom. This uppermost floor of the building was all professors' offices, almost every door tricked out, like undergraduates' bulletin boards, for optimal worldview projection. Esoteric photos and postcards and laser-printed sheets bearing grandiose or sarcastic quotations wafted slightly with disturbance as we passed, except for where doors were propped open, and conferences in progress. Then I would hear voices briefly die off, and feel a surreptitious gaze catch at us as we flashed past the door frame. Who knew if my flat hippie sandals and voluminous cotton sundress marked me as less, or even more, quintessentially Brodeur's latest victim. The heat had accumulated with greatest intensity here, captured under the eaves, and in the course of our short, silent transit the contours of my body hidden in my tent of a sundress were streaming with sweat. I kept swiping my hair, which in a gesture toward womanliness I'd worn loose, behind my ears, until just as we came to a halt I gave up and made it into a ponytail with a hair elastic I'd had on my wrist. He rooted at such length in the ratty schoolbag for his key that I had time to wonder if he'd only just moved to this office, for this door compared to the others was almost vacant. Only a postcard reproduction of some severe lunar scene, containing neither humans nor flora nor fauna, was taped in splendid isolation at my standing eye level, the placement recalling that bathroom graffito.

“Caspar David Friedrich,” he said as he unlocked the door. “
Das Eismeer
. I adore it.” Then I felt I should look more closely, and only realized too late that so long as I did he would not yet push open the door, so that for a moment we stood slightly too close together, our twin gazes hung from the postcard's fulcrum as if weighed in its scales.

“What does that mean?” I asked, to say something.

“‘Sea of Ice.' You don't speak any German.”

“No—
oh
,” I blurted without meaning to, and then the heat of his smiling gaze pressed on my cheek.

“You've just seen the picture,” he said.

I hadn't realized the scale. There were slabs of ice piled on each other I had thought were the size of flagstones, and forming a peak, like a bulldozed sidewalk. But now I saw the peak was of Matterhorn height, for there, cast off barely noticeably to one side like a shoe lost in snow by a drunk, was the keel of a ship.

“It makes one feel small,” he said—or asked, studying me.

“I've had nightmares like this.” In fact the nightmares involved not behemoths of nature but impossible buildings—cathedrals like Martian volcanoes rearing miles up into the clouds—but the terror and awe were the same. This was not something I'd ever told anyone, or even something I'd thought about much, apart from in the sweaty bewilderment just upon waking.

“He'd have been pleased that you said that.” Now the door swung fully open, and I stepped in the room, made to go before him by a hand briefly steering the small of my back. Here was another vertiginous arctic expanse. The desk was almost bare. Only a jointed lamp and some rocks sat upon it. The desk was a slab of fine-grained, silken-seeming blond wood which perhaps from the lingering spell of the painting evoked in my mind a lichen- and wildflower-dotted tundra where such slabs of blond wood certainly did not grow. The lamp was tarnished chrome and might have served a Victorian dentist in a previous life. The rocks were pink granite worn to the smoothness of eggs. Behind the desk, and an unmatching oak swivel chair, lined up along his windowsill were some little glossy dingy-colored things. He had piloted me with that feather-light touch into a leather club chair that sat facing the desk, but then he spent such a protracted moment out of sight behind my back, apparently grappling with a rubber doorstop to prop open the door, that the whole business of ensuring unfurtive exposure began to feel in itself covertly, preparatorily sexual.

“That was rather stupid what I said about German,” he said from behind me. “I was thinking of your name, but there's no reason an American Regina Gottlieb should speak German any more than she ought to speak Sanskrit.”

“My father's parents were German,” I offered. “But I never knew them.”

“And your mother?” with some determined door rattling, still behind me somewhere on the floor.

“Not German. She's Asian.”

“Ah. That explains your happy lack of Germanic appearance.” At last he stood, his innocence—or his guilt?—secured by the doorstop, and came around the far side of the desk. “My God, it's hot.” He now began grappling with the window. He still hadn't asked what I wanted.

“What are those?” I asked as he moved them to get at the sash.

“Inuit carvings. From whale's teeth.” He stopped what he was doing to gather them into his palm, then leaned over the desk and transferred them to me, both of us cupping our hands edge to edge in the process, as if we held something alive. Then he turned back to the sealed window and I sat back in the club chair and studied the animal figures more closely than their simplified forms warranted. I was probably blushing. When the window gave way and slid up with a loud smacking sound, the influx of air from outside felt like snow on my cheeks.

“No, I don't speak Sanskrit either. These are beautiful,” I added, chasing all conversational threads.

“Aren't they? I want to say they're so pure, but I'm sure that will sound both simplistic and somehow condescending, which will fall very wide of how I feel about them.”

“I should probably say why I'm here.”

“No rush. I'm very glad to hear your voice. Today is the first time you've used it.” I must have visibly faltered at this because he added, “I'm sorry. I've made you self-conscious.”

“No, it's true. I'm really out of my depth in your class. I've never taken a single prerequisite. I'm just not qualified.”

“Is that all it is? What a relief. I've been afraid it was something much worse.”

“That I'm brain-dead? Or amnesiac?”

“I suspected your brain was quite sound. I thought you might be a spy of some kind.”

“Sent by your enemies, to monitor you.”

He grinned delightedly. “Given that you're not a spy, it's very rude of me to bore you with such stupid conceits. Tell me what you would like to discuss. Though I'm afraid that it's dropping my class.”

“It is, but it has nothing to do with you. I just don't know what's going on.”

“There's no reason you should. Everyone else in the class is a sorry specialist like me. They've been doing nothing else day in and day out for the past half a decade but reading this stuff. It's not your specialism, happily, because you have yet to select one. When you do, what do you think it might be?”

I hesitated. In college, my interests had always seemed so clear, but in graduate school the unit of measure had switched abruptly, as if from the yard to the pica, and every effort I made to describe what my specialism was sounded dopily broad. “Well, I'm pretty sure my century is the twentieth,” I began carefully. “Before nineteen hundred I'm clueless.”

“I doubt that, but I also suspect that your exceptional intelligence more than your prior education is what got you into this program. Just because you've taken only twentieth-century literature to this point doesn't limit you to one century's compass. It's clear to me you can wander wherever you choose.”

All this time I had been worrying his whale-tooth menagerie in one palm and now I took a moment to set the pieces on the desktop in order to conceal my pleasure at his compliment. “I don't think you have much of a basis on which to credit me with exceptional intelligence,” I said. The more seriously we spoke, it seemed, the more flirtatious we were.

“Please don't impugn
my
intelligence.” Then as if he knew this was too much he added, “I was on the admissions committee. So I've read your transcripts and yes, they don't suggest much knowledge of my subject, or any subject, perhaps, dating from prior to the First World War.”

“More like the Vietnam War,” I put in heartily, to cover how his observation chagrined me.

“But I've also read your essays,” he went on, cutting short my disparagement, “and they have all the scope that your transcript might lack. They're terrific.”

“Thank you,” I managed at last.

“Don't take this question as a chiding at all. Take it just at face value. Given that it's far from entry-level, and far from what seem like your realms of interest, what were you hoping to get, signing up for my class?”

I couldn't say “you” or “a moment like this,” gather my things, and depart, though that would have been elegant. It also would have saved me much subsequent grief. Instead I heard myself saying, “In college I never read any of the classics, because everyone else that I met had read them in high school, in their elite private high schools, and dismissed them as very uncool. So I dismissed them also, although where I went to high school none of that was assigned and so I never learned it. Which meant that in college as well I never learned it, because I wanted to seem like I already knew it. It's like studying art—you have to do life drawing first before you get to ditch that and just do abstraction. I went straight to abstraction and I've been faking the rest ever since. I've never even read Dickens, or Austen, or Brontë.”

“The fun stuff.”

“I've started to think that it would have been fun. I pretend that I've read them. I fake it.”

“What
did
you read?”

“A lot of psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theory.”

“Oh, God! And you understood that?”

I laughed. “I thought so, but maybe all that was faking as well.”

My confessions seemed to fill him with admiration. “I always envied and feared such as you in my own school days. Those with nothing but brilliance. Could land on their feet anywhere. I was one of those others you might have envied, if wrongly. Elite private schools, private tutors, and an old-fashioned whack on the ass when you made a mistake. All I had on my side was a tendency toward fearful obedience and a trainable memory. Not like you. Waltzing out of college summa cum laude—remember, I've read your transcript—and as yet you've read practically nothing. I'm terrified what you'll become once you've actually stuck your nose into the books.”

“It's nice of you to call my ignorance an asset.”

“False modesty doesn't become you. Nor does hyperbole. You're hardly ignorant, you're just not well read. I can help you with that, and in turn you can do me the much greater favor. How's your Chaucer?”

“Nonexistent.”

“Perfect. Unimagined delight awaits you. I don't suppose you know Sasha Weill? She was supposed to have been my other Chaucer TA but her plans unexpectedly changed. You'll have four sections, one meeting of each every week, and an avalanche of papers at the end, but I'll teach you the secret of speed grading, for which you will ever be grateful to me.”

“This sounds suspiciously like a work-study job, but I've already got one. And there's a rule against holding two.”

“What is it, coediting
Tempus Fugit
?” This was the literature quarterly the university published, and with which it occupied all first-year English students. In the forthcoming Winter issue I would appear on the masthead, for which honor, not to mention the stipend I lived on, I was supposed to sit in the
Tempus
office at least six hours a week. “I can reassign you easily,” he was saying. “You will not lose your stipend, and you'll be spared the corrosive effects of an editing job on your mind.”

“It's not really an editing job—”

“I hope you'll never waste your energy buffing up someone else's poor writing,” he interrupted me again, and again I caught a glimpse of the imperiousness that was the flip side of his apparent humility, and to which I admittedly thrilled. “It doesn't only take time from your own work, it hurts your work actively. It infects it with a viral mediocrity. Much better that you should spend your spare time reading Chaucer. You'll still have the students' mediocre papers to guard yourself from, but they'll prey on a less crucial bit of your brain.”

“I don't know a thing about Chaucer,” I reiterated as a final, if pro forma, protest, though from beneath my damp sundress, my heart telegraphed its excitement. He knew I knew nothing, and still wanted me. By the end I'd know
something
—I vowed it.

“You need only read him.” He had gone into a drawer of his desk and for a moment I caught sight of mashed haystacks of paper, like the inside of his Danish schoolbag, before the drawer was shoved shut. He passed a few stapled pages to me, his Chaucer syllabus. “You see I'm presuming consent. Reassure me.” He waited so seriously for my answer I felt a finger of pleasure slide down my midline, and so was conscious of seeming as chaste as I could when I spoke.