He has brought along “work” as well—notes he has been taking on a new project that hovers just out of sight like a shimmering mirage that, as he approaches, retreats . . .
Flatlands of New Jersey. Rears of crumbling buildings, rooftop water towers, fences topped with razor wire. Open fields and wetlands, trees growing out of mounds of rubble . . . By Elizabeth the air has turned sour like fermentation. By Edison the white-hued autumn light seems to have dimmed. He has not been thinking of the horse-faced woman but suddenly he remembers her: Carol Carson.
That bland, generic name! He recalls what a strain it had been to feign interest in the earnest young woman, who’d seemed even at the time, at least twenty-five years ago, on the brink of middle age; one of a dozen students in a graduate seminar he’d taught at a distinguished university in a time he’d come to consider, in rueful retrospect, the very pinnacle of his career.
R___ had a visiting professorship at the university, in fact he was to be invited to teach there several times. Overall he was treated very well by the university—that is, the Humanities Program in which he’d been hired—and yet he’d never been offered a full-time position with tenure. His was a quasi-glamorous career navigated at the periphery of the academic world, a matter of prestigious but finite appointments; endowed professorships that, for all that they were well paid, ran their course within a semester. Of course R___ understood: he had not the formal requirements for a permanent position with tenure, for he had only a master’s degree in comparative literature. He had not (probably) the professional commitment to an academic vocation that would require much beyond the teaching of advanced seminars and the giving of a few public lectures. His name had some currency, as merely academic or scholarly names did not; he was an attraction midway between “popularity” and “obscurity” though (to R___, at least) it was something of a joke that anyone might regard his career with envy, supposing that his books sold well.
Still, he’d published in the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, and the New York Times, a trifecta of sorts, interpreted as glamour by those who’d never published in journals with circulations beyond a thousand. For a brief vertiginous while he’d published a “witty”—“scathing”—column in Vanity Fair in which, with the zestful ferocity of a state-appointed torturer, he’d castigated the overly talented for their ambition. And he’d always been grateful, which is a kind of innocent vanity, as if sensing at the time that such achievements, like a career as a tightrope walker, might be tied to the energies of youth, and would run their course in time.
As a young man R___ had acquired a certain reputation in New York literary circles. Like “indelible” ink a certain reputation does indeed fade with time but does not quite vanish.
In the seminar, with its intriguing title “Dystopian Visions,” each student had been carefully selected, by application, for more than fifty students had applied for twelve openings, and, as a young instructor at the time, R___ had taken the responsibility seriously.
She, the woman, one of only three young women in the seminar, had intrigued R___ only initially; he’d been impressed by the writing sample she had submitted, a close reading of texts by Kierkegaard, Rilke, and Camus. But as soon as he realized which student she was, which of the young women, he’d been disappointed, and bored. Of course he made every attempt to disguise his lack of interest in her as he made every attempt to be courteous to all of his students and to seem not too obviously to favor some over others—those who impressed him as sharp, bright, possibly brilliant; those who turned out to be “good” but not extraordinary; those who were touchingly intimidated by him, yet did not fawn; and those who were annoyingly intimidated by him, and did fawn.
He recalls: a glinting-red-haired young woman, almost a beauty except for oddly wide nostrils and a sharp nose; a heavyset young woman with skin that resembled foam rubber; and the horse-faced girl, “Carol Carson,” who seemed so clearly in awe of R___, if not in love with him, he’d found it difficult to look at her. He couldn’t decide if she was amusing, or embarrassing; gratifying (to his ego), or exasperating. Though not so heavy as the other young woman she was far from slender, an athletic-looking girl except she moved with a plodding sort of deliberation; when he happened to see her in the corridor of the humanities building, unaware of him, she was likely to be staring down at her feet as she moved, a small fixed insipid smile on her lips.
In the seminar, Carol Carson seemed to accept a minor role from the start. Diligently she took notes, shyly she gazed at R___ at times with parted, moist lips. She never disagreed with anyone even when (R___ sensed) she might have had something to say. He grew impatient with her, cruel—“And what do you think, Miss Carson? Do you think?” The others laughed, eager to align themselves with their young professor; Miss Carson blushed, and bit her lower lip.
If R___ persevered, she might finally speak; it was as if (he eventually realized) this annoying student required his permission to speak in his presence, each time. Often then she contributed astute and original remarks about Dostoyevsky, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley; when he asked her to read passages from one of her papers, the others were impressed as well, if but temporarily. In any group there are those who must be acknowledged, and admired; there are those who make no demands upon us, for whom we feel a kind of gratitude, that they expect little from us and so will not object when it is little we give them, in our zeal to give the others what they demand.
Especially, unlike even the other young women in the seminar, Carol Carson lacked the edgy feistiness, or flirtatiousness, of those female students who might have been identified as nascent feminists; she seemed to belong to another, earlier era when plain-faced females did not aspire to much beyond their station, neither muses nor creative artists themselves. When R___ took up Robert Graves’s blunt remark “A woman is a muse or she is nothing” no one in the seminar took particular issue with it, and even the women laughed, if uneasily. She, Carol Carson, had shaken her head in a kind of giddy mirth, at the mere prospect of a woman who might brashly aspire to creativity.
She’d worn dull, dour clothes of no discernible hue. Wide-hipped, with a flat chest. It may have been a small gold cross she wore around her neck—R___ had never looked closely. The long face exuded a mournful air and the often bared and damp teeth a look of childish trust but the eyes—(he was remembering now with a quickening of interest)—were thick-lashed, amber and beautiful; intelligent eyes, yet without confidence. It was typical of Carol Carson, he thought, that, though she was one of the more impressive students in the class, she did not behave as if she knew this; in fact, she seemed to shrink from such knowledge, like a tall person who tries to minimize his height. It exasperated R___ how the girl deferred to the least talented (male) student in the seminar, as if such deference were his due.
One thing was clear and unwavering: Carol Carson’s fixation upon him.
Had the other students noticed? R___ supposed so. No one seemed to be a friend of hers, who might have suggested to Carol Carson that she was making a fool of herself; though perhaps, so far as R___ knew, it was all utterly harmless, schoolgirl behavior—just slightly incongruous in a graduate student of obvious intelligence. She’d allowed R___ to know, however obliquely, and shyly, that she had to travel an absurd distance to attend his seminar on Thursday afternoons, the sole university course she was taking at the time; for she was the caretaker of an aging, ailing parent in a small town beyond the upscale suburban setting of the university. She’d been a graduate student in some obscure subject—an amalgam of linguistics and psychology; for some unclear reason, she’d taken courses at the seminary attached to the university.
R___ had asked if she intended to become “a woman of God”—(the expression had seemed comical to him)—and Carol Carson had answered solemnly, “Oh no, Professor. I couldn’t be that,” as if the prospect were too grand. She added, “I want to know all that I can know about God, I don’t want to be a theologian.” And then she’d blushed fierc
ely, for having uttered a statement that so conjoined the pretentious and the preposterous.
After the three-hour seminar, when R___ was eager to depart, there was Carol Carson lingering in the wood-paneled room, slowly packing her things; glancing toward R___ with lips parted in a fragile smile, awaiting a kind word from him—“Excellent work today!” or better yet, “Would you like to have a coffee, Carol?” Of course, R___ would never utter such words; it was all R___ could do to smile toward the awkward girl with gritted teeth and without quite seeing her, muttering, “Good night!”
Before Christmas break she hauled into the seminar room a bag of hardcover books revealed to be, after the other students had departed, copies of R___’s first two books, and in a paroxysm of shyness she asked if he would mind inscribing them: “I’m giving just special books as Christmas presents this year.” R___ had been gracious, if somewhat embarrassed. (He would think afterward that no one else in the seminar had purchased a book of his, so far as he knew, though they’d all seemed to admire their young professor very much.)
Recalling now the dour, doughy-skinned face flushed with pleasure when he handed back a paper on which he’d written in red ink Very promising. Thoughtful & original. A.
Yet—something had gone wrong. What was it?
Twenty-five years ago. No, longer—at least twenty-eight years ago . . .
When he’d still been married. Before he’d become estranged from both his children.
When he’d been in the heedless ascendancy of his career and not (as he could not not concede) as he was now, in its long slow afternoon of decline.
Carol Carson—(barely can R___ tolerate that name, it has become ever more grating in its banality)—had made an appointment to have a conference with him in his borrowed office, to discuss her final paper; and R___ had forgotten. Or rather, an acquaintance had come to town, an editor of a distinguished literary journal whom he’d hoped to cultivate. (Or had the editor hoped to cultivate R___? In such relationships in mimicry of friendship there is invariably a gentleman’s quid pro quo which no one would be crude enough to acknowledge, still less to name.)
All these maneuvers, these transactions, or plotted transactions, which had held such promise to change his life for the better, had come to nothing much; or, perhaps to something, that had turned out to be, for all the excitement in their contriving, nothing much. The intense, heightened, thrilling and occasionally risky alliances he’d made in New York literary circles, the quickly forged bonds, broken promises, minor betrayals and feuds for life, embittered recriminations in an era before email when a letter might be an investment of hours to be recalled for decades—most of these turned gossamer-thin, faded and forgotten.
Worse yet—(he is remembering now, like one who has flung open a door so wide it can’t be easily shut)—he’d disappointed the girl another time, at least; not his fault, was it?—for Carol Carson so pursued him, in her plodding, deliberate way, a figure of pathos in graceless snow boots like hooves, a scarf tied hastily about her head, eyes downcast as she’d trudged through a blizzard to the humanities building bearing more of R___’s books for him to sign; though she must have known, as any child would have known, that no faculty member was likely to be in the department at that time, on Friday afternoon in a blizzard.
The departmental secretary was the only person on the floor, and she’d been preparing to shut up the office early that day. With sly cruel humor she would report to R___ how Carol Carson showed up with books for him to sign and had lingered outside his door in a little puddle of melted snow from her boots—“Forlornly, poor thing.”
Carol Carson had asked the secretary if R___ had been there and the secretary said, “I’m sorry, I don’t think he has. I wouldn’t expect to see him until next Thursday.”
Of course, it had been some foolish misunderstanding. R___ had (probably) misheard Carol Carson’s request for a conference at that particular time; or he’d heard, without troubling to write it down. The blizzard was entirely fortuitous.
How exhausting, another’s adoration! By the end of the semester R___ had had quite enough of the lovestruck girl who seemed never to be hurt if he was short with her in class, or failed to smile at her in the corridor, or amended her grade of A with a slash of a minus.
It was not his fault. At the end of the term he’d been confronted with an embarrassment of very good work. Never again would he invest quite so much enthusiasm, energy, and zeal into any university course as he did in this, with the result that virtually all of the twelve students handed in worthy papers; yet, he could not hand out A’s to more than half the seminar, with a sprinkling of A-; and so he’d given Carol Carson a B+, downgrading her final, ambitious paper (“Dystopian Visions Through the Eyes of Virginia Woolf”) along with work by the other young women, and the weaker male students—leaving him with a respectable spread of grades from C+ to A, to which no dean could object. One or two of the young men had complained, but none of the young women; certainly not Carol Carson who accepted her fate and retreated without a murmur.
It had been a triumphant semester, of a kind. R___ had quite enjoyed his Thursdays at the suburban university. Invited to dinners most weeks by distinguished faculty at the university and at the Institute for Advanced Study close by, where his certain reputation guaranteed a general interest among even those who rarely read books by living writers.
That year, one of R___’s books received full-page, laudatory reviews in the New York Times Book Review and in the New York Review of Books; he acquired a Parisian publisher. He was short-listed for a major book award in that ambiguous area of non-fiction categorized as cultural criticism, but failed to win; in subsequent years, though he would write better books (in his opinion) he would not be nominated for any award. Who can understand such things? In the decline and fall of others we see a natural, inevitable trajectory; in our own, a bafflement, an injustice and an outrage. Sand and pebbles slipping beneath his feet, despite the care with which he strode along the walkway gripping a railing . . .
Had Carol Carson written to R___, after that semester? Not to accuse him of treating her unfairly, of course, not in reproach, for reproach is not the way of the Carol Carsons of the world. Rather, she had written flattering letters to him, thanking him again for the “wonderful, unforgettable” semester that had “changed my life”; plying him with requests for reading lists, suggestions for graduate schools, advice. She’d dared to ask if she might meet with him in New York City, just once. Of course, she’d asked him for a letter of recommendation to be “placed in my file.”
He had not answered. Vaguely he’d meant to answer but—he had not. His relationship with the distinguished university had become clouded. He could not punish anyone on the faculty but he could punish, however obliquely, one of their students. Nor had he any interest in a pen pal relationship with an earnest, deeply boring and unattractive girl however bright, imaginative, and adoring of him. Soon, the letters ceased.
He’d totally forgotten her. Not one minute of one hour of thousands of hours since he’d last glimpsed her a quarter-century before (in the humanities seminar room, slowly assembling her books and papers, only just daring to glance up at R___ with shy amber eyes aswim with moisture as he talked and laughed with the glinting red-haired girl standing very close to him) had he thought of “Carol Carson.”
So all things pass into oblivion, and are not mourned. As the train to New York City passing through the nondescript New Jersey countryside is a kind of moving oblivion. You see, but you don’t see. Your eyes glance at, but don’t retain. The brain is not involved. Attention is elsewhere. Concentration is too precious to squander.
In Penn Station, the journey ends abruptly. In jangling darkness that yields reluctantly to dimness, then to (muted) (underground) lights.
R___ is lost in a reverie, and has not finished even the first section of the day’s paper. Yet, he will toss all of the paper out. He doesn’t want to be burdened with carrying even a newspaper.
He feels a sudden revulsion for what is called news.
By this time he has been thinking so intensely of the horse-faced woman, he finds himself looking for her when he leaves the train. Hordes of strangers, hurrying past him; that air of clamor and impatience; he calculates that the middle-aged woman who’d once been his young, hopeful student had probably boarded the car just behind the Quiet Car, for she was standing at that position on the platform . . .
And now, again, he sees her through a gap in the crowd: on her way to the escalator, but pausing to stare at him.
Indeed it is Carol Carson, in her fifties. Grown yet more plain, thickset. Someone’s mother. Grandmother. Unless, more likely, she had never married.
Yet the eyes are still striking, moistly amber, thick-lashed and fixed on him.
“H-Hello! Professor—” Her voice is hoarse, wavering. She calls him by the old, formal title though he has not been a professor in years. “I think you saw me looking at you, I’m sorry but I was surprised—” She pauses, embarrassed; she is a clumsy woman, and tactless; graceless; she wears a hideous “pantsuit” and clunky shoes; she could be a minister, a teacher, a public defender, a social worker; there is that air of service about her, a grim persistent service that thrusts itself upon others, to their despair.
“I’m sorry, Professor—I—I guess—well, I”—again she pauses, with a fleet, fatuous smile—“I’d heard you had died . . .”
“‘Died.’ Really.”
He is shocked. He is deflated. His eyes blink rapidly, as if in a bright blinding light.
“I mean, obviously—I thought I’d heard . . . I don’t know if I had actually heard . . .”
The silly, maddening woman! R___ would like to turn away, stride briskly away without a backward glance. Yet there is something in the woman’s expression that holds him, the look of girlish yearning in her eyes, and bafflement, wonder.