580 Split

Final Exam

by Suzanne Scanlon

One: A Moody Story

The day after Donald dumps her in a booth at Denny’s 24-hr Family Restaurant, Margot is sitting in the office of Dr. Alda Moody, MD, one psychopharmacologist she has known now for almost three months, and whose particular compassion and/or interest in her care has never been particularly apparent. She knows not to take this personally of course; these are the days of in-and-out check-ups, managed care, and don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you!

“How’ve you been?” Moody asks, friendly-like.

“— ”Margot tries to say, but instead begins to cry, and it doesn’t stop for a long time. Moody’s nice about it, gives her a Kleenex. Margot tells her, then, what’s going on.

“I am…and…he….” Etc.

Until finally,

“He was my Professor.”

Moody is nodding, a look of heavy compassion on her face, and Margot is more relieved than she’d imagined possible with the Moody, who after all she can afford to see only once every few months. Her relief’s so remarkable, as the mostly one-sided conversation continues, that she doesn’t even mind where Moody takes it next:

“It’s sexual harassment, you know.”

“It’s not.” Margot tells her in reply, and as if to say “unfortunately”—as if this is just another fact of the situation. She goes on to say instead (and rather naively, it’s seeming to the Moody),

“I mean—we talked about it. About that. I mean he knew it.”

“Of course he knew it!” Moody can’t stop herself from blurting out, and at the same time projecting incredible disdain: “Everybody knows about it, now—

“It doesn’t matter.” Margot says finally, and hoping to end the discussion in these specific terms, “because I’m the one who’s screwed. Not him.”

It comes out a little angrier than she’d expected.

“Yes.” Moody says, nodding, and again Margot feels inordinately grateful for the Moody.

“Well. I’m not suggesting you initiate a lawsuit.” If in spite of herself, Margot is both buoyed and comforted by this bit of rhetoric—rightfully indignant, protective, smart. It’s unfortunate, she thinks, that the women most able to offer her this sort of sympathy seem to be overfull with their own agenda(s). It was one—an agenda, say—which Margot shared, or liked to think she shared, at least in practice or theoretically speaking…but right now it seemed—too easy? She wasn’t sure. All she knew was that in practice, she found herself in this sort of position far too often. Which made her at the very least, less sympathetic. Which left her, at most, utterly implicated.

Two: Pop Quiz

Q. If A, a self-identified Feminist, sleeps with, and falls-in-love with B, a self-identified Misogynist, is A really a feminist or just:

a. lonely
b. angry
c. sad
d. typical
e. hungry
f. there
g. all of the above

Q. If B, S.I. Misogynist, eventually does humiliate A, S.I. Feminist, how might A feel?

a. tired
b. broke
c. stupid
d. nervous
e. hungry
f. all of the above

Q. Why does B choose A? Is it because A is:

a. hot
b. sexy
c. a feminist
d. there
e. all of the above
f. hungry

Three: Things She Knows About Herself

Now that it was officially over and the gap was widening: the gap between what it was (True Love) and how it would be understood and eventually recalled (a serious breach of professional ethics and/or proper standards of professional behavior), Margot, expecting to see him, composed a list entitled: “Things You Should Know”. She knew she’d be sorry if the Last Day of their Acquaintance, so to speak, and thus her last chance to offer herself—if only verbally—went by without certain topics broached, certain ground covered. He needed to know, for instance, (and in no particular order) that:

1. She is heartbroken, currently and since the time of their breakup and it’s likely she will be this way for a very long time to come.

2. She is (alternately, concurrently) angry, ditto above clause.

3. She regrets more than anything taking the Incomplete; namely, allowing herself to be so foolishly distracted by his romantic attentions to the point of being unable to finish the work of class.

4. Regrets too ever going out with him. (Regrets in recall from moment of first phone call, in which she asked, “Would you be my thesis advisor?” and he answered, “I’ll be your Second Reader but you can’t tell anyone because I’ve said no to people and they will be jealous.” She understood even then that this was the kind of thing he said when granting special favors.)

5. Wished it had never occurred (may ask, too: ‘Why did you ever ask me out?’), in retrospect—and given current and imminent consequences—which he might have considered, might have calculated probability of it ‘working out’, and—given the odds—decided to spare, if not himself (what did he have to lose?) then, perhaps, (out of empathy?) spared her.

6. Telling him of these (see above) considerations is in no way, however it appears prima facie meant to induce guilt or evoke any sense of responsibility on his part. She, after all, might have considered possible outcome of relationship, and avoided this—her current position and its attendant affect on her emotional health (i.e. by saying No in reply to his initial request for “a Date?”) This, she is aware in retrospect would have been The Smart Thing To Do. (Something she has been, if in an I-told-you-so sort of way, reminded of, from advice previously proffered from her Smart women friends and sister. (Smart because #1 she was here because she absolutely admired the guy as a writer, wanted to learn from him, etc. #2 Smart to avoid any involvement, risking potential subsequent dissolution of affair, and (in addition to normal relationship-ending requisite sense of loss) a feeling that she was treated quite inappropriately by Prof., who was after all in a professionally and interpersonally higher-up, superior, unequal sort of position. As in: consensual is a slippery term when it comes to relationships of unequal.)

7. (Though considering it as the requisite loss of the love object—she feels bereft and deprived, treated inappropriately and poorly by one who was in superior position i.e. Professor/Writer–whom she obviously (even gushingly) admired and appealed to. Thus, given the imbalance of power between the two, her sense of loss is necessarily greater than his could possibly be. (However ‘hurt’ he claims to have been by one particularly insensitive comment of hers, which according to his Final Word(s) for her, precipitated his ‘reevaluation of the relationship’ and wish to ‘no longer see her’ (ever again, she pretty quickly came to understand).

Four: Rhetoric

Not angry. No. Not at all. It’s not my thing. Not the type to play the victim as it were. Not in my nature. I am fine.

Q.

The emotional dissonance, which now exists between us—is the state of our present relationship—that bothers me. It bothers me. Not a strong word, right? But neither is it neutral. I have a sound, definite stand on the matter; I’m capable of considering such things rationally. It is my sense—and hence the crux of my bothered state—that he might (should) have been blunt on the matter, and from the outset. For a man so aware of his own complicated emotional palate, his inherited imago, his psychic shit, a man who has been in countless ‘relationships’ before this one—surely he was capable of doing the right thing, surely the considerations crossed his mind. How many times did it cross his mind, I wonder, and how did he confront such oppositional (to his lust, that is) thoughts? Did he say, oh who cares if she’s my student, I want to get laid? Or did he not even articulate so thorough a rejoinder as that? Were his selfish self-deceptions occurring on a level beneath his consciousness? Is that how he managed to deceive me, to lead me on, ‘put the rush on me’ so thoroughly?

Q.

He should have been frank with me—and beyond the should have, I’m guessing (not having access to his psychic structure/interior solipsistic discourse) that he was able to be frank with me, and from the outset. That is, I believe that he was so aware of the complicated, compromising professional restrictions on our relationship, to have considered—and as suddenly as he felt certain carnal attractions to me—that this might be an absolutely ethically wrong thing to do. To pursue, for personal interests, a student. Ethically wrong indeed because students undeniably carry certain transferred emotive baggage. Toward a professor, that is. Thus, the student—having slept with the Professor—might (and very likely would) feel a number of things, the vagaries of which he could not imagine, given his lack of certainty re how long the relationship might last.

Q.

You want an example? Okay fine. For example, Professor B. might have said to me—putative attractive female student enrolled in his Sp. 2001 Nonfiction Workshop–might have said for example: “I’m going to give you some options, given my attraction to you and desire to seduce you. I’ve considered the obvious complications of such a relationship, and too the subsequent complications and hurt feelings given various potentialities. Various eventualities. None of which might occur, of course. But it is only fair that I—given my position here, and taking your own into account (I recall being a student myself, not so long ago)—consider such things, and pose them from the outset. It is the only way this might work, in my considerations of the matter. The only way to avoid such ugly eventualities, ranging from hurt feelings to ugly malevolent exaggerated lawsuits. I just want to be frank here. I’ve encountered the juggernaut of 20^th c. Malevolent Separatist Feminism. So I just want to be clear. Because the fact is—and this is it, really—the only thing I need to say and wanted to say—I think you’re hot. Damn hot. Fine looking. Gorgeous. You hear me?

Okay. So we’re on the same page. We’re on the same page. So I want to lay out the options here. I want to pose them for you to consider so to speak.

Option number one is that we date—the connotative meaning of ‘date’ in my lexicon is—I’m being frank with you here, see? Meaning is: to have sexual intercourse. Certainly there is more to it, including financial transactions, but that’s usually where it all leads, the transaction—the what shall we do? Where shall we go? What night? What time? Okay? Okay I’ll pick you up, etceteras. It’s about—not entirely but in my experience reflectively it’s more or less effectively so—getting into bed together, our bodies touching in a myriad of delightful and even unexpected places, my body wanting to have intercourse with your body—your body hopefully reciprocating —I’m admittedly going out on a limb here, see? Hoping for yr. reciprocal desires. So OK? So that’s the first option.

Q.

Well I’ll tell you that I don’t know. I never know. In such circumstances, and you’re smart to ask because the reason I bring it up at all is because you are my student and I think it is wise, given the potential for professional complications, hurt feelings—

Q.

Yes, yes on your part. But on my part too. Do you not think my feelings might be hurt in this whole thing? I have feelings too—I may be in your eyes the master teacher, professor, famous and successful writer, I might seem all this in your younger, less experienced eyes—

Q.

Of course you have experience. What I am saying is that I am not, in my own eyes, I am ashamed, I am no better than the next guy, I am a—and you’ll forgive the heaviness—sinner. This is why I am trying here to avoid repeating past mistakes, past sins if you will, by so to speak laying it on the line for you—this is not something we can ignore, and if we do it may come back to haunt one of us sometime down the road in the future—

Q.

No. No I’m not trying to scare you—and I don’t mean to even imply—what I want to tell you is that the first option, which is definitely in my opinion the more desirable option here—there are no guarantees, is what I’m trying to tell you.

Q.

Don’t look like that. What I mean, and maybe it’s too soon to talk about this—maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up in the first place—

Q.

No just that it could end in some state of—and it might not end in any state, it might go on for a long time who knows you never know right? I go in, and I’m being straight here, I’ve learned this by now, with no agenda. I don’t have time. I’m too old. So what I’m saying you never know. Sometimes yes in my experience it’s been one two weeks—Tina you’ve heard me mention our thing, which was really nothing at all—and sometimes it’s you know a year. Two years—I don’t know is what I’m saying.

Q.

How often is it one week? Is that what you’re asking me? I don’t add these things up.

Q.

Yes, okay, more often it is less than a month—less than a week. Yes I have one night stands. I don’t like to I’m not proud of it—that I’m almost positive is not what I intend our relationship to comprise of—

Q.

Now you’re not saying anything. Why are you quiet? I don’t know what it means when you get quiet all of a sudden. Are you mad?

Q.

No I—well sometimes when I’m quiet it’s because I’m mad. Look. I shouldn’t have brought this up. I’m sorry, maybe it was a big mistake once again I’m trying to be different for once to be honest to begin with honesty—you know to avoid problems, and necessitating further dissembling down the road. For once I wanted to try it and now I’ve made it worse. I’m just going to say—

Q.

Yes I was going to tell you that. The second option. Of course. The second option is that you remain—we remain teacher and student—an artifice, which works in certain respects, but necessitates certain severe boundaries. But we can do this, if you’d like. We can remain; keep so to speak what we have now.

Q.

I can see how it might be better for you at least—you might you know wonder about asking for my help, my recommendations down the line—I should tell you that our dating—first option connotation et al—would not obviate these potentialities however. You would still be able to get my help…I would still support and encourage etc.

Q.

Yes you might not want to. I can see that. But it would be for your own reasons I assure you and not because I would change my high opinion of you as a student —and yes I see it might be worse for you given certain eventualities (i.e. see option one) and yes. That is why I’m laying it all out for you here huh? Okay. Even if it was a bad idea probably. I’m sure now I’ve made everything more complicated than it ever might be. But those were my intentions here as I said to be honest for once. That’s what I mean.

Q.

Excuse me—I’m having a problem here. This is my monologue—my interview, is it not? My interview. What’s going on with the subjective voice here? This is about me, my point of view. I’m having a problem.

Q.

I’d like to speak, please. I’d like to be the author of this narrative. What I mean is that I don’t want to hear him—I don’t want his voice—even his authorial voice—invading this text in any way, not directly, nor symbolically. And yes I understand I have invoked, created as it were this very problem…I realize this…through the form and yet—

Q.

What I need to say is that I am—it bothered me. I mean. It hurt. I know that doesn’t sound like much. I know it’s really very pathetic at this point. I know too that I was warned, regard readily my severe repetition compulsion—

Q.

From my mom. From my—when I was a little girl.

Q.

My understanding—post her death—of why she died. My child-logic, which lodged itself as Truth in my Psyche during that sensitive/fatal period of pre-adolescence, and thus has become the symbolic bête noire of my adult life.

Q.

That she died because of me. That it was my fault—that I was somehow a bad—an undeserving person—that I somehow caused her to leave me. Inspired rejection.

Q.

And thus, in my adult intimate relationships I manipulate events to somehow prove to myself again that this is the Truth of me. So to speak.

Q.

Either by getting involved with someone who, you know, can’t be there—or someone who you know, is very likely to reject me, or someone who isn’t but in that case manipulating events to sort of make the person leave me. To give the person some really good solid reasons.

Q.

Well it may be. But what’s wrong with wanting to control it? It’s my story.

Five: The Sense of an Ending

Q. How does it begin?

A. Over coffee. In a diner. They share war stories. He’s like her, she thinks, only more so. Insists aggressively upon his dominant position, physically and rhetorically. It’s fine with her. She hates him but is drawn to him. Decides it’s out of her control.

Q. How does it end?

A. One night in bed. Guess who is on top. She makes the mistake of Talking In Bed–feeling too completely in that space so far from isolation and still unable to find words at once true and kind, or not untrue and not unkind.(1)

Q. How does it end?

A. a. see The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode
b. see The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
c. see Liars in Love by Richard Yates
d. see To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf(2)

Six: Dating the Dead(3)

For so long it bothered her—and so much really that she could not deal with it while dating him and so had eventually forced herself to place two of his books (and later a third) in a box which she put underneath her bed. It was too difficult to consider actually dating him and having the books in her apartment (even if that’s where the books had always been). Not that she would necessarily read them, nor open them, nor refer to them ever again; but she was not about to get rid of them, either. No date was worth that.

Beyond the books however, there existed too her past experience of having read them and having been moved, perplexed, intrigued, provoked, and bothered by their contents—in a wholly admiration-filled way for the author. The books then, even in their mostly unopened state along her bookshelf—represented to her, or signified something very large—something directly connected to the Author of the books, however Dead he may be.

And so she could not deal (was how she put it)—now that she was getting to know the writer, and thus the Author, alive, of these very books—she could not deal with having him in her head, or her life, or (most difficult of all) her apartment along with (at the very same time) the large signifiers of the dead Author himself, too. She decided pretty quickly that the two—Author, Real Person vs. Author, Dead—were in no way related, and would have to remain that way. That is, there would be no references to the writer, Real Person, when referring to the books of the Author, Dead thing. Or vice versa. This did not mean that she didn’t at the same time understand how very related the two were: and this raised another whole set of ontological problems along the lines of: Would it be more honest not to have any of the books on my shelf, or to have all of the books on my shelf? The latter choice seemed too sycophantic, even if it was probably more honest, as it required less dissembling.

On the other hand, the former option seemed offensive, and blatantly dishonest—because in fact, she had read the books, and did own them, and so to hide them would be, you know, mendaciously going out of her way to protect herself from the vulnerability she’s feeling now, given the ‘connection’ so to speak, of the man she’s dating to the Dead Author himself, whom she so admires and whose talent and prose have moved her many times to states of out-loud laughter, deeply-felt identification and sheer delight. The books have articulated for her (more than once) worlds she would not have known were her very own worlds, without having read them there, in a voice not her own. There were things which might have come from her mouth—but never would have, had she not lived in the world of the book, and traveled with it, and found a comfort in the utter identification to its entirely separate world.

She took one of the books, the big one, and put it under her bed. Another she put on the bottom shelf of her bedroom bookcase (least available to his immediate perusal). She took another and placed it rather prominently out of place, in the main hall bookcase. She did not concern herself with the periodicals and essay collections that contained his work alongside the works of other dead authors. (Though among these were two Paris Reviews, two Iowa Reviews, one Best Essay collection, and one B.A.S.S. collection.)

After all this, it still didn’t feel right to her that she was dating someone who was so nearly related (which was as far as she could explain it to herself) to the Dead Author who’d made such a lasting impression on her. It didn’t feel right (she came to understand and finally admit to herself, though it was initially an unarticulated thought) because she suspected herself (but could not identify it, or did not want to identify it) of feeling an attraction based largely upon the very experience of having been so deeply moved, provoked, delighted, and made to laugh out-loud by, if not the Dead Author himself, then some extremely close relative who wrote the books now placed on her various shelves. And at one point she came to know pretty surely, unequivocally so, that if this Dead Author was not exactly the same person as the someone she was dating (who happened to be a fiction writer) then he was at least that extremely close relative.

There were clues. Maybe it was the night he tried to convince her that the woman her ex-boyfriend was now dating (whom he had dated some months prior) was an amputee with a stump-leg. Maybe it was an accumulation of things: things she came to identify as certain aspects of her attraction. She could identify, for instance, the way that this man, who was something very much like her favorite dead author, was an extremely smart man. She loved that about the dead author—the demonstration, in an occasionally show-offy way, of an exceedingly high intellect. Intellect as in IQ. His books offered, without fail–one after another word to add to her New-Big-Word list (words she would note and immediately or later on look up in her American Heritage Fourth Edition), which she been compiling for years now. Her favorite dead authors were the ones who could offer her words for this list. Maybe the list began with Nabokov. She was young, reading Lolita and keeping a list in a notebook with every word she promised herself to later look up and incorporate into her vocabulary. It embarrassed her a little to look at that Lolita list now—ten-plus years later—and to see how deficient her vocabulary had been. It was as embarrassing to see how many words she could define, and yet had never quite incorporated in the manner prescribed by her ambitious if confused 18 year-old self.

She had found herself delighting in Nabokov’s easy use of undervalued but crucial words, and she can see herself underlining and highlighting. She can even recall parts of the list she had memorized (if not incorporated) that summer: “acridity, manqué, coeval, perineum.” Some she memorized in context: “a glorified pot-au-feu, an animated merkin.” There were other phrases: “inveigled fructuate” or “such coruscating trifles” and “a favonian week” or “her phocine mama.” They were wonderful words, you could taste them, eat their syllables. Words she would long recall in these Nabokovian incarnations.

An orchideous masculinity.

She’s thinking now of Lolita, pt. 2, chapter 3—and too, still (madly) of the dead Author she is somehow dating. It was at the University last Spring, in the class he taught, that she came to know what she had expected (having read the close relative/dead author): that he had an exceedingly high IQ, and, too, an extensive available knowledge of vocabulary, syntax, and mechanics. His intelligence, as evidenced in the class, was revealed especially in his rather long considerations (mostly epistolary) of the workshop material of the week.

But also in class (something which made his intelligence nearly secondary she thinks) was the human incarnation of the dead author, complete with the understanding of and insistence upon the certain impossibility and pain of human relations—the heavy knowledge of what it means to be alive. Something Nabokov himself knew, she guessed. Because he was, as evidenced in the class, a human being simply and absolutely—under pressure and not always able to hold the knowledge that one day one will die—and it solidified the attraction she felt to him—who he was in her imagination.

On the other hand, she feels false, trying to break down the reasons and aspects of the attraction this way.

Eventually it ends. Like that.

And because it is ends, it becomes less clear. Her former knowledge of what it was begins to fade.

While it is happening—nearly from the day they meet, and certainly from the day she sits next to him in class, and feels him next to her, hears him breathing in her ear and inside of her, below her stomach she feels the attraction—it has nothing to do with these things she is able to consider now. Now that it is fading. She considers them now because it is no longer in her body.

While it is happening—from that first day she is able to be close to him to the last day that they spend together—the whole thing is in her body. When it is over it becomes less alive in the body. Slowly it begins to live in her mind, until eventually it is not in her body at all (even if she can occasionally recall the utter visceral feel of how it did live there) but is now in her mind, which is why she can do things like this: break down the attraction; break it down physically, intellectually, and replete with references to Nabokov. She can do this because it is leaving her. It is becoming something less alive in her body.

As it begins to live in her mind, it becomes a question: why was she attracted to the Dead Author, and thus to the live incarnation and/or extremely close relative (who seemed to possess many if not all of the qualities of the Dead Author)?

Sometimes she will want to answer the question. She will want to say that the attraction had more to do with something pure toward the man she is no longer dating, who happened to be the closest living relative(4) of the Dead author. And sometimes she will want to say that it had not so much to do with the Dead author at all (or her theoretical, acknowledged attraction to Him).

In the end, it will be difficult to know the dead thing. She will think it was the person himself, she was seduced by him, the living person—but she will also think that it was troubling (as seduction can be) to be seduced by him, the living person. It had been this way, she will think. She will think that she was flattered and drawn in, or toward; she will think she was offended. Who knows what she will think? For a while, she will try to answer this question and others. She will think about the now dead thing which for a time both drew her in and pushed her away—and then she will come to an ending, or the sense of one, and she will neither think about the Dead Author nor those books on her shelf at all.