The Englishman (26 page)

“But it’s wrong! I know it is! I shouldn’t be doing it!”

“Charity, Selena! You’re the only thing that keeps me going! Hey…hey, come here…”

The man, whose voice I can’t place, continues to murmur and hush the agitated young woman. I recognized her voice at once; there is a strained, mewling quality to it that is very distinctive. I rode up in the elevator with her the other day, and she forced herself to talk to me although I could see that she was both shy and preoccupied. What Selena O’Neal is doing in the dome of the Observatory late at night is anybody’s guess, but the one thing she is
not
doing is planning acts of wanton destruction. I would wager the missing sum on my paycheck that Giles Cleveland is wrong about Selena’s virginity.

Overcoming parentally-imposed obstacles in order to have a sex life may be a drag. Presenting one’s work-in-progress in the graduate seminar of one’s academic program may be daunting. But neither warrant the sort of spectacle that Selena makes of herself when next we gather for an EMS meeting. She sits at the front desk like an Allegory of Misery, her face a sickly green above her demure jonquil blouse, trying and failing to unscrew the top of a water bottle by wedging it between her arm and her body. I can see from where I’m sitting how cold and sweaty her fingers are.

“Here, Selena, let me help.”

She hardly looks at me, let alone thanks me, and I begin to wonder whether she is in too much of a state to do this.

“Selena…Selena?” I have to raise my voice to arouse her attention. “Are you all right? What’s wrong with your arm?”

“Oh!” She stares at me, then at the arm as if it didn’t belong to her. “I changed from touchpad to mouse. It’s just a little sore. The doctor says it’s like tennis elbow.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Shouldn’t you be wearing a sling?”

“No! No, it’s not that bad, really. I’m fine!” The skin between her brows puckers. “Thank you, Dr. Lieberman.”

She is dutifully polite, her little silver cross dangling above the tiny triangle of skin visible at the neck of her blouse. I can’t help finding this one a little creepy. Having seen the mother, I see the same large chest, luscious hair and full mouth on the daughter. Selena would actually be a much better candidate for America’s Next Top Model than Natalie because she would give Tyra Banks the chance to do magic. Even a day’s shopping and grooming with Irene Roshner—heck, even with
me!
—would go a long way toward turning this pasty-looking duckling into something swan-like. But Selena doesn’t want to be a swan. Good for her, but I do wish she weren’t such a drippy duckling. She makes me want to shake her, pull back her drooping shoulders, and send her out on early morning runs. Or better still, a course in kick-boxing. I’m convinced she goes up to the old observatory to have sex, but it doesn’t seem to be enough to get her circulation going.

“She’s not fine, you know.” Tessa has shifted on her chair so that she seems to be commenting on the people filing into the room. “She’s sick almost every morning, and I don’t believe for a minute that it’s flu or a bug. You don’t have a stomach bug for more than two weeks.”

“Not normally, no.”

“Well.” Tessa is still looking neither at me nor at Selena, and I’m actually not sure what she is driving at, or that I want to hear it. “Grad school isn’t for everyone, that’s all. It isn’t just about working hard. You gotta be able to stand the pressure, mentally. I’m not the toughest cookie myself—cried for two days when Beecher dissed me for my paper, although I knew he would; he always does. But next to Selena I’m hard as nails.”

I could say a thing or two about being hard as nails, or ever wanting to be hard as nails, but this isn’t about me.

“Do you know whether she has seen a doctor? Other than about her elbow, I mean.”

“Why would she? To be told it’s bad for her and she should stop doing it?”

It dawns on me that Tessa and I have been talking at cross-purposes. I was thinking about nervous stomachs; she was talking about bulimia.

As it happens,
I
have a nervous stomach. How acute of Giles Cleveland to call me a co-ed. That’s exactly what I feel like, a nineteen-year-old airhead fidgeting in her chair because her favorite professor is about to enter the room. So embarrassing. The other embarrassing thing is that I decided to go a little way toward heeding his advice about my clothes. The black turtleneck may conceal a lot of skin, but it is tight-fitting, as are my jeans. This is not one of my teaching days, so I thought I could risk jeans. And a tight sweater. And silver pendant earrings. Let’s just say that this ensemble has worked before, okay?

It is so easy for men. Charcoal jeans, a white dress shirt with very thin dark stripes, a tweed jacket—delicious. He takes off the jacket, and his shirt cuffs are undone, as usual, but he does not roll them up to expose his arms. The smooth cotton tightens across his shoulders as he welcomes us and introduces Selena, and I get sucked into a sexual fantasy in which I slip my hands underneath his shirt, run them up his chest and around those shoulders that look so severe and vulnerable at the same time. Push the shirt up over his head, ruffling his hair, his beautiful, soft, silvery hair, sink my teeth into the skin over his pectoral muscles.

I’d be so gentle with him. Use my teeth on him so gently, ever so gently, just hard enough to make him moan and close his eyes and roll his head back onto his shoulders.

Would he like that? Does he like being undressed? Or is he a control freak who must be in charge at all times? I wonder what Giles Cleveland is like as a lover. Whether I’d think he’s a good lover. Whether that
shiksa
of his thinks he’s a good lover. I know that this is a trick that Mother Nature has evolved in order to safeguard the procreation of the English—the sense that an Englishman’s reserve hides a volcano of passion. Not the case, in nine cases out of ten, but the poor deluded non-English female is hopelessly intrigued.

I rejoin Selena’s talk when she looks up from the sheets she has been reading, so much like a deer caught in headlights that I feel guilty for not having paid more attention. Her project—at once predicable and disturbing, coming from her—is a cultural history of Satan, from medieval grotesque to sophisticated player. It could be summarized, although she does not do so in so many words, as the question, Since When Has Evil Been Sexy? It is a catchy topic that might spark a lively discussion, but Selena is making a hash of it because she does not approach it with the playful yet sophisticated mind it requires. She is right to observe that this shift, which culminates in Milton’s grandiose rebel, happened during the early modern period. But exactly by what method she is going to combine the analysis of synchronic aspects like popular culture in conflict with scholarly teachings, and of diachronic aspects like developments in and of the various genres, from the dramatic to the theological, is unclear both to her and us.

“Yes, uh…Selena,” Beecher interrupts her, “we can see that you read a great many texts, which is, uh…commendable. But could you perhaps summarize for us your main conclusions so far?”

She explains, haltingly, that she has not reached any “conclusions,” but that her main observation is that the medieval devil is merely an instrument by which temptations are presented to the tempted, a go-between, while the seventeenth-century devil begins to
embody
temptation, as an object of sexual desire himself.

“There is no suggestion at all that Mephistopheles in
Doctor Faustus
is himself temp
ting
, he is merely a temp
ter
; but Othello, for instance, is a figure of temptation in this double sense. Another example—”

“Now we’re back with examples. Does your, uh…hypothesis go further than postulating that devil figures, along with practically all fictional types that survived from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, were rendered more psychologically realistic? This would be true of kings and maidens as much as of the devil.”

“Well, I…I would try to show
how
this is done, sir, not just…postulate.” Selena reddens but soldiers on. “If I may…Othello, for example, accuses himself of loving his wife too much, and this is also what Milton’s Adam is guilty of, loving his wife more than he loves God. But in most other respects, Othello is characterized as a satanic figure—black, and so forth. In a recent study about racism in intertexts of
Othello
—” Now it is Cleveland who groans and fidgets. “Yes, I know, sir, you don’t like the author, but—”

“Whether I like her or not isn’t the point; the point is that her book about
Othello
is—” he seems to fumble for the right word “—utter tosh. You should only read it to disagree with it.”

“But Othello—”

“—has satanic features and is guilty of idolatry. You are perfectly right about that.” He nods. “Carry on.”

It is obvious to me that Selena would benefit much more from an hour or two of individual tuition with her advisor than from this plenary interrogation. Why Cleveland allowed her to hurl herself into a methodological and theoretical quagmire like this, I cannot understand.

Giles does not care.

Here we have it.

Making the best of a mess, I suggest to Selena that her analysis might become more dynamic if she distinguished different genres of devil narrative. “Your second type of devil, the sexy seducer—” Selena flinches a little, as if she had made a wrong movement with her elbow “—is a new figure on the Renaissance stage, but he does not immediately replace the older, medieval kind of devil, the malevolent but inept bungler who assumes the shape of a black dog and promises riches and revenge to guileless old women.”

I’m gratified to see that Selena is making some notes, though none of the professors acknowledge my comment in any way.

Jenna, the girl who had asked about my British degrees, raises her hand and waits for Cleveland to give her a nod. “I was wondering, does that mean that in stories with a sexy devil—” Again there are some giggles at the phrase, and Jenna blushes. “That these stories are always about a woman—an Eve—who has to choose between an Adam and a Satan? A lot of love stories are like that, right?”

“Yes, the theme…the theme is temptation. The satanic figures that I want to look at aren’t just…evil. They tempt. That’s their defining feature.” Distress is making Selena’s strained voice rise in pitch, and I suddenly remember what I overheard the other night.

It’s wrong!

It’s charity!

“Charity” is an odd word to use for a young man who wants to get a girl in the sack, unless he understands how she ticks and is using her Christian morality against her. Satanic indeed.

“What about
Gone With the Wind
, though?” Tessa speaks up. She is nervous, as students usually are in these seminars, and very earnest. “Within the framework of a formation novel, Ashley Wilkes is the immature…like, the idol of the adolescent girl, while Rhett Butler is the man, the real man, she must grow up to appreciate. But isn’t our theory that the satanic figure is the immature fantasy? That the heroine has to overcome the temptation posed by the devil in order to marry Adam Ordinary and be happy with him?”

“Selena, I think Tessa has outlined an interesting line of inquiry.” I turn to her with the most encouraging smile I can muster. But Selena has lost it. Instead of composing herself, she has been following our exchanges with apprehensive eyes, and she is not ready to respond. So I ad-lib to buy her time.

“Actually, I tend to think the opposite. Rhett Butler is the immature fantasy, not Ashley Wilkes, although the film would have you think otherwise, because it equates masculinity with the ability or willingness to dominate women, and other men. With Rhett you can be as irrational and high-maintenance as you want, and he’ll laugh at you, first, then bitch-slap you, then rape you. Which is all you wanted in the first place, of course, only you were too much of a princess to admit it.”

Cleveland is quietly chuckling in his seat, but I am warming to my topic.

“Ashley Wilkes, on the other hand, apart from being far more beautiful than Rhett Butler, in my humble opinion, has no time for bitches. The truth—” I wait for the commotion to die down. “The truth is that Ashley is bored by Scarlett on every level except the sexual, just as any other grown-up man would be bored by an adolescent girl on every level except the—well, anyway.”