I sank into an armchair like a felled tree. I was angry at myself for creating my own trap. Now I felt as though I had done something wrong. Now I felt as though I had to run after him. “I love you, baby, I love you.” What did I truly want from him? Did I want a day, a month, a year of domination? In which I could scream at him and mock him all I wanted with impunity? Did I want him to grovel at my feet? It wasn’t that, exactly. I wanted him to accept the role of the penitent. But you can’t ask someone who feels like a victim, as John most certainly did, to live apologetically. And there it was, that twisted logic. Even as we railed against victim mentality, against trauma as a weapon, we took the strength of our arguments from the internal sense of our own victimhood. John was acting just like the women who accused him. He had been wronged, goddamnit. While there was a part of him, I knew, that understood I was suffering too, he still cherished the sense that he was the most drastically injured party. He grasped his being wronged like a precious gem in a velvet pouch. Yes, he was like all the rest of them, desperately holding on to his own pain.
By the time I arrived on campus, I was shaking with anger. I was late, having stood stock-still in my bedroom staring out the window, a cavalcade of thoughts crashing down on me. I remember reading that Edna St. Vincent Millay gave instructions to her housekeeper not to interrupt her if they saw her standing still—that was the way she would compose poems, on two feet, staring into the middle distance, writing and rewriting lines in her head. I never had that organization of thought: my rapt pauses were all about conflicting feelings, images and memories running and bumping into each other—more like a chaotic battle scene than the unfurling of insight.
At any rate, I was hurrying to my Women in American Literature survey class when I saw Edwina, my treasured star pupil, walking with Cynthia Tong along the green. I waved, and they waved back with overdone fangirl adoration. But it was the gesture of two people who were clearly together in thought, while I stood on the outside. When I began teaching, when I was young and fresh and within a decade of my students, there were certain women with whom I related deeply, women who became my friends. Even briefly watching Edwina and Cynthia crossing the quad, I saw this was happening with them. So quickly, only three weeks into the semester. Jealousy burned at me, anger fired from my womb. Edwina hadn’t put her off, she hadn’t said she would make a date with her and hadn’t followed through. I had written an email to her with x’s and o’s and they were giggling with each other like new roommates.
In class we were comparing selections from Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and the diaries of Alice James. “Why are all these white women so obsessed with being female?” asked a blond, female student who never did the reading. “Don’t they recognize their privilege?” When I ventured to say that Chopin, for instance, began writing after being left widowed with six children as a means of support, she shrugged. “But she still walked through the world as a white woman.” When I asked her if that meant she shouldn’t write, she said, “No, she shouldn’t complain.” When I asked what writing that was not-complaining looked like, she said, “I don’t know, like James Joyce.” Another student, thankfully, interrupted and said the women were of different times and different literary movements than James Joyce. “And different countries,” said another. “Also he was very privileged,” another burst in. “I just don’t know why we have to read these whining women,” the student countered, and another, defending my honor, said, “The course is Women in American Literature.” “Women couldn’t vote or get legally divorced at the time Chopin was writing these works,” I said. “They may seem outdated to you now, but—” Then I stopped myself. I hated this class more and more every year. The wide scope of the subject matter made it impossible to take the time to fully examine any work we studied, and the brief timeline of a semester made every choice of every class objectionable, as though every week I was saying, “This is the American Woman.” I wanted to take it off the course catalog, but it was a cross-listed requirement-fulfilling class in both the Gender Studies and English departments, and therefore hard to shift. “I want us to talk about what they are doing in their work. What is the symbolism they are using, what is the metaphor? They are writing at the time of Freud, Darwin, and the tail end of transcendentalism. How do we feel those movements affected…”
I felt so tired when class ended. The student who had challenged me hurried out of the room, all her bravery gone when she was not performing for her classmates. Starving, I stumbled to the school café and bought soup that came in a waxy paper tub, a seasonal apple pastry that they stocked from a local farm, and some ashy, lukewarm coffee. I found a booth in which I could sit in a patch of sun, and collapsed into it. It would be poor form for me to fall asleep, surrounded as I was by students, but that was all I wanted to do—to close my eyes and let the heaviness overtake me. I must have closed them momentarily, because it was behind the dark of my lids that I heard a strident “Yoo-hoo!”
When I opened my eyes, there was a halo of light surrounding a mass of hair that could be compared to a lion’s mane were it not so shiny and well-coiffed. Florence. Florence once said at a faculty retreat that the only thing she would bring on a desert island was a round brush. “And that’s all you need to know,” I said to anyone who would listen. She taught postmodernism, apparently quite well, but it was nearly impossible to imagine her reading a book. She was around forty, and her uniform was aggressively “hot”： short dresses, high-heeled boots, big earrings, ripped tights. She had enviable long legs, which she would furl and unfurl excessively, like an anthropomorphized spider. Her use of uptalk was deliberate and defensive, and she spoke primarily about recipes and restaurants and her children’s extracurricular activities. In most faculty meetings she complained about labor and how she didn’t want to do it. She purposefully misunderstood the pact that tenured faculty had: the exchange of volunteered service for the security and freedom of her position. After she got tenure she never published, and she was late to everything. She was contradictory as a way of life—challenging any statement or assumption made in our meetings. She could be fun—there was one night about six or so years back that she and I embarked on a caper after a dean’s cocktail hour that ended up with her getting a summons for public urination—but as a colleague she was a dud.
She had been especially irritating about John. Like many beautiful-ish women, she was obsessed with the idea of men sexually trespassing. To hear her speak, she had never had an encounter with any man that had not resulted in some form of the man expressing his longing for her or taking advantage of her. I secretly thought she was offended that John hadn’t invited her to join him in a tryst, although she was the kind of woman John would stay away from out of instinct. She had led the charge to say that he could not teach this year, even before his hearing, and she resigned from the budgetary committee, saying she could not sit in the room with “that man,” though we all knew she had joined the budgetary committee only after a performance review that threatened penalization if she didn’t sign up for at least one working group （I, for example, was on four）。