Vladimir(3)
When I had a little affair, back in the city, when I was an all-but-dissertation TA, it was with a very slow-moving young man who made intense and lasting eye contact. He was in my section of the Women in Literature seminar, and his gaze upon me, when he would offer a thought about Woolf or Eliot or Aphra Behn, felt so penetrating and impertinent I didn’t know how to take it. I thought it was funny at the beginning, a kind of affectation. As he spent more and more time in my office I became addicted to the eye contact and would try to blink as slowly as possible when we were speaking, so that I could get a sense of leaving and coming back to that warm bath of his ocular attention. When we finally consummated our flirtation, I was devastated to find (though I shouldn’t have been surprised) that he could not maintain this communication while making love and turned as screwed-eyed and internal as any other twenty-one-year-old boy. (Lest you be too horrified, I was only twenty-eight.) Once the affair dissolved, I started to find his eye contact irritating, then enraging, and finally simply cow-eyed and insipid. I had to move through all these points of perception. He is “in business” now, and Republican, I think.
“I mean, a martini, now, why not,” said Vladimir, sounding titillated by the prospect.
“I make them with vodka so you know. They are suburban martinis. Dirty, and wet, with lots of olive juice and vermouth.”
He assured me that was fine, lovely, how he liked them. I opened the bottom cupboard to stand on its ledge so I could reach the glasses on a higher shelf. I am a short woman. This anatomical fact feels at odds with my personality. All my adult life, people, when they find out my height, marvel that I am only five foot three inches tall. They think me to be at least five foot six or even seven. In pictures I am often surprised to see how little I am in comparison to my husband. In my mind, he and I are the same.
I pulled the glasses out of the cupboard. I felt as though Vladimir was standing very close to me, and in fact, when I turned around to hand him the glasses I almost placed them on his chest.
“Sorry,” we both said.
“Jinx,” I said.
When the drinks were fixed, I led him out to the living room. He sat on the loveseat across from me and spread out in an appealingly masculine way, with a big, wide cross of one leg over the other, ankle to knee. He told me that he had a young child at home, three years old (Philomena, but they called her Phee), and that his wife (a person of great fascination to the department who would be teaching a memoir-writing class for us, a beautiful woman I had seen at faculty events but not yet spoken to) was not adjusting well to the change to the country from the city. He asked where my husband was and seemed surprised when I told him that he was out getting a drink with a former student.
“A student?”
I clarified that it was a male student, which relaxed him.
My husband, John, is the chair of our small English Department in our small upstate New York college, population less than 2,200 students. At the start of the spring semester (last January), our department was handed a petition, with more than three hundred signatures, requesting his removal. Attached to the petition were affidavits by seven women, now of various ages, former students at the college, who, over the course of his twenty-eight years of teaching here, had engaged with him sexually. None, mind you, in the past five years, after teacher/student relationships were explicitly banned. At one point we would have called these affairs consensual, for they were, and were conducted with my vague understanding that they were happening. Now, however, young women have apparently lost all agency in romantic entanglements. Now my husband was abusing his power, never mind that power is the reason they desired him in the first place. Whatever the current state of my marriage may be, I still can’t think about it all without my blood boiling. My anger is not so much directed toward the accusations as it is toward the lack of self-regard these women have—the lack of their own confidence. I wish they could see themselves not as little leaves swirled around by the wind of a world that does not belong to them, but as powerful, sexual women interested in engaging in a little bit of danger, a little bit of taboo, a little bit of fun. With the general, highly objectionable move toward a populist insistence of morality in art, I find this post hoc prudery offensive, as a fellow female. I am depressed that they feel so guilty about their encounters with my husband that they have decided he was taking advantage of them. I want to throw them all a Slut Walk and let them know that when they’re sad, it’s probably not because of the sex they had, and more because they spend too much time on the internet, wondering what people think of them.
Vladimir Vladinski, the young, new professor, who I imagined would work his way up to chair of the department in his tenure, if he receives tenure (which he will, given his adroitness, his literary reputation, his youth, his clear ambition), looked around my living room. I followed his eyes as they rested on the marquee-sized poster of Bu?uel’s Belle de Jour, bought as part of a Film Forum fundraiser when they were liquidating their poster stock, and the series of framed prints from the homes of great American writers, put together after the cross-country adventure we took when my daughter, Sidney, was eight, and we mapped the trip by visiting the hometowns of important American novelists, from Hemingway to Faulkner to O’Connor to Morrison to Wright to Cather to Didion in Los Angeles. To his left, on the wall, backed and hung, were our brochures of the Dostoevsky museum, the Tolstoy museum, and the Turgenev museum from our trip to Russia. On the shelf below the coffee table, piled high, were the programs of the theater we’d seen in our yearly week in New York City. There was nearly an entire wall devoted to representations of Don Quixote, and a large map of Spain, upon which his journey was tracked with pins and coasters from cafés in those towns. A shrine to our far-flung travel stood in a corner of the room, a collection that included an authentic Noh theater Shiite mask, several little statues purchased in the Ariaria Market in Nigeria, Norwegian-carved bookends, a Swedish antique coffeepot, a sitar from India, and a Moroccan wall hanging.