The Pink Aura

Amy was George’s poly lover but I’ll get to that later.

The phone buzzed. It was Mel again. Probably. Or Lisa. Meleesa. Melisa. Ha ha. I’d blocked Mel’s number so she’d taken to calling from others. Tricky. This one read Anna.

“Hello Anna,” I said. “I’ll only speak to Anna.”

“Well this Mel, and I’m warning you.”

Mel and her warnings. Mel and her alarms.

“It’s coming for you. It’s coming for you and you can’t hide this time,” she said.

Then dead air on the phone. Mel and her hang ups. Her dead spaces. On my balcony once Mel held out my cat and threatened to drop her unless I’d let her spend the night. Bea. Beatrice. The cat. She never looked at me the same.

“Jane Austen as a Male Writer.”

Mel was set to defend her dissertation that winter. She was feeling her oats. She’d purposely developed a drinking problem to deal with her other problems, and then a drug problem to deal with that. I sometimes wondered if she cultivated me as one of her problems.

It rang again, this one from, quote, “Alex.”

“Hello, Alex,” I said.

“You can either talk to me over the phone or face to face.”

“Mel, the door is locked.”

“I’ve got a key. Remember?”

I remembered. We’d met at the end-of-semester English Department party in the mailroom in Burrowes. You could see the cool gray slate peeking through the worn-down places in the old carpeting.

Late April and breeding Lilacs out of the dead land and all that.

Mel was the only one wearing a mini-skirt.

No one in grad school dressed like that.

(Nowadays, post Nell Zink, no one would care.)

It was a time for putting all our ideas into our research, not our clothes.

We’d let ourselves go, as they say.

But not Mel. Full makeup. A red skirt and a white sequined top. At first people thought it was some sort of feminist or post-feminist performance art, some sort of ironic intervention, Mel as a walking embodiment of a Barbara Kruger woman.

So she had a key to my apartment. There were other ways to keep her out but a visit from Mel warped everything into her orbit. Mel exerted a weird sort of gravity that put all your problems temporarily on hold. When Mel was with you, there was only Mel. Nothing else mattered, and you felt silly for thinking that anything else mattered. So I buzzed her up. She breezed in and past me and right to the fridge. She held out a Vernors in a can.

“You have anything stronger than this?”

For a while I thought Mel and I were in love. I know I loved her right away and I think she began to love me too but then something happened and it short-circuited. Mel was into fitness and said she’d been a semi-pro kickboxer before grad school. She showed me pictures once. She had a dime-sized mole beneath her right ear that was hard not to look at at first. I pointed to the cupboard above the fridge where the vodka was and she mixed it with Ginger Ale.

“Gluten free. Huh,” she said, examining the label.

Then she said: “You are doomed you know,” leaning against the wall. She’d been talking about this thing that was coming for me for over a year now. For a while I thought it was a weirdly angled joke I wasn’t getting. Coming for me. As if! At first I’d laughed about it.

What, a big idea? I’d say, Is that what’s coming? She knew I was stuck and trapped in a dead dissertation topic on Flannery O’Connor, trying to ferret out any remaining untapped feminist readings from her stories. That’s what we were all doing, basically, circa 1994, struggling to align our ways of reading to the prevailing ideologies of the time. When it worked it was brilliant and beautiful. Everyone knew, for instance, that Stacey’s research on the gendered ambiguity of Medieval pageant tapestries was going to be a certified home run. But when it didn’t work—when the ideas went stale—it was dismal as it could get, like being trapped in a cage with a dying wild animal that had once been powerful except your dissertation was the animal.

“Aren’t we all?” I said. Doomed, that is.

Mel came over and sat at the small kitchen table with me. She held out her glass.

“You know I don’t drink,” I said.

“I know you say you don’t drink.”

“I’m a man of my word.”

“That’s a problem,” she said, taking a sip, “that we need to work on.”

“But I need to work on so many other things first.”

Mel stood up and went over the balcony.

The cracked glass sliding door was open and a nice breeze was coming in.

From the 6th floor the view across the parking lot was pretty spectacular.

There was a tomato plant gone amok in the balcony’s one corner and a few broken cinder blocks left over from the previous tenant in the other one. The first time Mel came over a few years ago she’d hidden a pack of small-phalliced Virginia Slims inside one of the blocks like, she said, the girl from that French New Wave movie. It wasn’t a block but a hollow brick, I told her, but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know if she remembered they were still there, or even if she remembered hiding them at all. She glanced down once or twice, I think, at the blocks and I half-expected her to fish around for the pack and hold it up in the air like some sort of victory but she didn’t.

“Crash here tonight?” she said, coming back to the table.

Mel was wearing her usual gray sweats and what we used to call a tank top. She smelled a little bit like chlorine. She apparently chewed the nails on two fingers only because while there was barely anything of them left, the nails on her other fingers were long.

“You feeling them yet,” she asked.

“Them what?”

“The effects.”

“Of?”

“What’s coming for you! Like a storm—the calm before the storm. The effects of calmness. Of peace. Are you feeling them yet? The effects of the calm before you’re torn to shreds?”

I didn’t answer because I didn’t want to lie and I didn’t want to tell the truth.

About the effects.

That yes, I was feeling them.

*

“What a dick,” Sarah, who had taken to wearing her grandmother’s period clothes, said. Moth-eaten calico in super-faded yellows. The dick, our professor. Who had just entered the seminar room. In his usual gross puce wool sweater. His face was pocked from acne or alcohol or both or something else. Maybe a childhood disease. Or an alien pox of some kind. He sometimes smelled like sulfur. How old was he, old enough to have been a child when such afflictions still scarred us?

I didn’t think he was a dick.

He was something worse than a dick.

Six of the eight of us were there, six grad students in English sitting death-row like around the glossy seminar table. Mel was there, and so was Adam. And George and Amy and Carson. And the one whose name I can’t remember.

Professor James Begnal always spent the first half-hour or so of each Wednesday afternoon seminar on Woolf and Conrad shuffling in and out of the room forgetting things and then remembering them. So it was easy to talk without him hearing or knowing or caring. And that room, the way it changed shape, literally, right in front of us. More shape shifting than any modernist novel narrative trickery and yet no one said a thing. Begnal was a notorious Virginia Woolf hater and he was our professor right at the moment it was no longer acceptable to be a Virginia Woolf hater, especially if you were a professor of Modernist British Literature. I saw this and wondered at the fact of his hate unfolding there in front of us.

Would we get tangled up in his hate, too, I wondered.

“He’s such a fucking coward,” Sarah said, adjusting the collar of her Navy blue gown town.

“God yes,” said Amy.

Amy didn’t have a finger that didn’t have a ring.

Or a toe, as far as I could tell.

As I said, she was George’s poly lover and was usually on his side but sometimes slipped and her real voice voiced itself. She’d scissored her hair short and with severe bangs a la Catherine from Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden which had come out with hoopla and derision a few years earlier. Begnal had this tic where he spoke in a very clipped way when he was angry and he was angry most of the time. His lectures—he was one of the old guards who still lectured in seminar rather than giving it over to the students—were staccato and precise, as if he was reeling off facts (“Woolf had no idea how to capture a man’s voice and it shows on each page”) and not unshaped opinions.

He had this way of articulating questions as statements. “See how Conrad’s use of delayed decoding in Nostromo is a more sophisticated version of what Woolf attempts in Mrs. Dalloway?”

He was obsessed with Nostromo, which had become the soon-to-be-wrecked ship of his mind.

The seminar was from 3 to 6 Thursdays, with a 10-minute break at around 4:30. A twilight hell. If you needed to step out before then to use the restroom or whatever you’d have to brush by Begnal, as he’d position his chair right near the door.

Root beer colored, sad corduroys, butt-worn.

Birkenstocks with colorless, dandered socks.

Mussel breath.

An ill-patterned beard on a face that was not prepared to grow one.

Oh, Begnal! Although he’d never forbid you from leaving you could feel him seething, and upon your return you could expect him to single you out with some unanswerable question like, What did Conrad do with the first draft of Under Western Eyes? At first these tactics intimidated and even frightened us, but as the semester wore on the fear faded and by the end it was a badge of honor among us to be scolded.

The light at 6 pm was, honestly, beautiful on campus, spectral, and we’d walk out together onto the wide lush mall that sloped gently from Old Main to Atherton Street. In September and October the weather and light were just right and the towering elms would sway and make that gentle hissing sound in the sun and wind.

Zeno’s was the darkest drinking spot, down the old worn marble steps into the basement beneath Mast Shoes where it was cool and low-key. You could hear the people trying on their shoes above us on the creaky floor. We got a table at the back. The darkest corner of the darkest bar. A few of us had split off, so it was me and Mel and Amy and George.

“I don’t see it,” Amy said. “How he possibly got tenure.”

“That was back in the day,” said George. “Everybody got tenure.”

The thing about George was that he was one of those likeable egomaniacs, so confident in his opinions and uncaring of others that he said was attractive rather than repellent. We actually believed him when he said that he’d vacationed once with Martin Scorsese. In Belize.

“Gave it out like candy,” Mel said.

“Practically had to molest disabled kids not to get it,” George said.

“Sarah’s on the grad grievance committee and she says there’s a thick file of complaints on him going back ten years but the union’s blocked them from central administration. She says they’re mostly about capricious grading but there are a few about touching,” Amy said.

“Inappropriate?” I asked.

“If it’s in a file, is there any other kind?” Amy said.

“Then Sarah should make copies,” I said.

“She has but she’s afraid to do anything with them.”

“Give them to the Daily Collegian. Anonymously.”

“She can’t. The editor and her had a thing and now he hates her.”

“So?” I said.

“He’s also Bengal’s nephew.”

*

The campus, as they say, was falling apart under the weight of bad ideas.

It seemed as if everyone had run out of good things to think.

First came a wave of poor ideas and then: poof. Nothing.

A quandary of unthinking seized us. Stopped us in our tracks. It was hard to find our way back. To get behind any idea long enough for it to take hold. The English Department brought in a white speaker during this Frozen Time to talk about the subversive use of black vernacular in Joy Williams’s stories and several English faculty wrote a letter of protest—with unfortunate spelling errors—that was published in the Daily Collegian.

Everybody was saying no to everything.

Even the white speaker’s heart wasn’t in it, you could tell.

She read her paper ashamedly and skipped the after-reading reception. She took the first train out.

In retrospect, it’s hard to think of a better time in my life, or a more suitable time for living.

My Ph.D. advisor had given up on me, and I’d given up on getting her to reconsider.

I stood outside her office door on the lowest floor in the Burrowes Building, idea-less, and for the longest time didn’t knock. I heard her in there, moving around quietly. Her phone rang once and she picked up the receiver and put it down before it could ring again. I waited for 15, 20 minutes and then never did knock. It smelled like she was cooking something behind that door and I imagined a little cooktop on her windowsill and some rice and brown sauce and maybe even some chicken even though she claimed to be a vegetarian. We all had secrets but no one had any idea how to use them against each other, and this one about meat–if true–was hardly blackmailable.

And then there was that one time. Walking across campus, sometime in the Fall, there it was, in the tree. One of those big old trees that parents take pictures of and maybe decide, because of, to send their children to us. A fantastically towering American Elm, a real survivor. And in its branches a figure, a reddish figure, just smaller than what you’d expect a human to be, size-wise.

*

Martin, have I succeeded in capturing your voice? I wanted to begin with your voice.

It was Mel again.

Is that close enough? Is that how you’d have begun?

There’s no way ever to be sure, and even if you were still alive I don’t know if I’d ask you. I don’t think you would have liked how I’ve portrayed you, not that it’s false or in bad faith, but rather because I’ve gotten too close to how it was.

It’s strange: there are facts, but those facts only exist in their telling.

I loved you Martin, I really did, and so I have to be careful in imagining how you loved me. There are so many little decisions. It’s true, for instance, that you called me Mel, but the way you said it—the flirtatious edge to it—how do you capture that?

I wonder what you would think about how I’ve portrayed myself in your voice?

I’m imagining myself the ways I imagine you imagined me.

It’s strange: I remain an enigma to myself until I see myself portrayed through your eyes, as I imagine them. Me and my hang ups, me and my “dead spaces.” I have a lot to think about in the pages ahead, Martin. As in: how do I render what happened to you? As in: how close to the truth should I get when the truth is so fantastical?

Do you remember that afternoon at the old campus art museum when we both noticed how the bright sun coming in through the high windows made a weird shadow shape on the marble floor, like an upside down cross? Actually I noticed it first but pretended I didn’t and I hoped, I really did Martin, that you wouldn’t see it. What was worse was that you made a joke out of what it really was, what it really signified, and I had to pretend it was just a joke.

Do you remember that postmodern theorist Marcel who came to campus and delivered his lecture shirtless while running on a treadmill rigged up to project his real-time vitals on a big screen behind him?

We’d gone out drinking beforehand, I remember, and the sky was like anime pink.

That’s where you got the idea for your “pink” essays. Theresa came with us—she’d just had her wisdom teeth removed the day before—and we played that silly drinking game at Zeno’s and then went to the arcade and you got into locked in the bathroom somehow. Pink as in, you said, the color of blood in real revolutions, when it’s mixed with the rain, absent of thought.

Pink: as in the insane clay sculpture of your mind.

Theresa was wearing her red beret that night and after we freed you from the bathroom we sat out back on the brick terrace: you, me, Amy, and Theresa. I think Jennifer had left by then. This was before Amy cropped her hair.

It was a warm night and there were candles on the tables.

No one came out to take your order so Amy would go in and disappear for about 15 minutes and then come back with the tequilas before we switched to beer. Theresa was the only creative writer in the group and at the time I thought it was strange that she never hung with that group but it makes sense to me now.

She was the one who encouraged your pink essays and I think the only reason you listened to her was because she talked about fiction like a theorist and not a writer.

I was secretly writing my own essays about you during that time and I think Amy was secretly writing about me, or about me and Theresa.

Isn’t that funny that we all secretly wanted to be the producers, as you would have said, of the very art form our critical theory was meant to demystify?

Theresa joked about how she was going to use the bathroom incident in one of her pieces and then suddenly put her hand to her jaw in pain from the wisdom teeth.

The missing ones.

They all were missing.

Theresa had these enormous, egg-shaped black pills that the dentist gave her from right out of his pocket but they looked almost too big to swallow so Amy tried to snap one in half for her. Then you tried. Everyone was listening suddenly to Dinosaur Jr. around that time.

Clinton had appeared on Arsenio Hall a few months earlier and people were already misremembering it in different ways.

Maybe it was around then that I had the premonition about the thing that was coming for you, Martin. Maybe premonition is too strong a word. It was more powerful than just a feeling, if that makes any sense. But it wasn’t as distinct or bounded as what I think of when I think of premonition. It was something in between, some soft power that found its way into my thinking, a foreknowledge that something really terrible was going to happen to you.

It wasn’t like you were going to get in an accident or be stricken by a disease but rather that something active was heading your way, moving literally across time and space (distended like in those Modernist novels) and I had these intense dreams—this is when I was sharing that tiny house on Pear Street with Marla and Kevin—that the thing was sort of dragging itself. I could never get a good, straight-on picture of it, like it was in that blind spot we learned about in school, and you’d think in a dream blind spots wouldn’t matter because it’s not like you’re really seeing anything anyway. Just look at the thing for God’s sake, right? But it wasn’t so easy and I never could control my vision in those dreams.

But I could hear it, Martin. I could hear the soft thing, creeping out of the swamp of your past, coming for you.

*

That must have been when Theresa showed us a draft of her essay “Red Beret.” We’d survived Professor Begnal’s foul, soulless seminar on Conrad and Woolf and now were in the last seminar we’d all be enrolled in together, before our dissertation defenses. It was sometime in that bright, frigid spring of 1992. You, me, Theresa, Amy, and George. “The Jacobin Novel,” taught by Cynthia Paxon. She was the new assistant professor and had such a surplus of enthusiasm that we spent most of our time in seminar putting the brakes on, pulling her back from the ledge of her own exuberant excess.

She wore her bleach blond hair in a severe bob and her nails were painted black.

Of course we wanted to re-title Theresa’s essay to “The Pink Beret.”

Dr. Paxton: there was, you know, that rosy, shiny scar beneath your left eye that threatened the smooth symmetry of your face and that made you the object of sexual desire.

It was you who introduced us to Kathy Acker. Pussy, King of the Pirates.

Not Queen, but King.

And then there was your eyebrow, Dr. Paxton, pierced with the three little silver anchors that seemed to glint the fires of hell itself.

We’d never seen anything like her before in the English Department.

She out-radicaled the most radical of us, shaming our generation, and we never really were able to steady all our feelings and desires in that seminar. Our boat was too small, the waves too strong. William Godwin. Charles Brockden Brown. Mary Wollstonecraft. The radical skeptics of their time, young and free writers in the 1790s, devotees of the French Revolution in its most bloody, guillotineesq form. Somehow, when we looked at Cynthia we saw a person who would have done the most horrible things, committed the most atrocious acts of personal betrayal in the name of theory and Revolution, and this fixed idea we had of her was both intensely seductive and repellent. It operated like a force field that kept us distant from the Gothic novels we were reading. No matter how hard we tried we couldn’t get close to them because of the force of her.

The force of our professor.

It was as if Cynthia was the only novel in the class worth reading, and we spent all our energy trying to decode her, repurposing the theory we were learning—deconstruction, reader-response, feminism—to enter into the wrinkles of her thought.

It was during one of these Wednesday afternoon seminars that Theresa passed around the opening pages of “Red Beret.” As the only one of us doing a dual Ph.D. in theory and creative writing she had a beat on us twice over. She was a creator of narrative as well as its deconstructor. As a writer she was learning all the secret pathways into literature and as a theorist she was learning, like us, where to set the bombs to go off to make it all collapse.

Theresa said: “You hear the one about the gal who walked into Deja Vu, that fancy strip club downtown? The doorman says, hold on—haven’t we met before? Ha ha.”

It was also that night, or maybe the next night, that we all went camping at that derelict park by the river to listen for owls. It was Theresa’s idea. In all her howling pain.

She said her dad was an ornithologist at Cornell which turned out not to be true.

George said he was going to bring a new kind of drug that was available in very limited supplies only once every few years, like those cicadas that emerge from the ground, but he ended up bringing a terrible, tasteless moonshine instead that gave us headaches and probably brain tumors.

We were all into celibacy for reasons I can’t remember so we didn’t have any fun except listening for the owls that never sang or shat out mice hair and watching for the supermoon that never showed itself and waiting for the pink high from the clear moonshine that never came.

Our smelly, moldy rented tents from the rec center collapsed sometime during the night in a harsh, vindictive wind that came up from the river and so we all slept huddled together out in the open in a mess of spermy sleeping bags, blankets, bungee cords, and tangled nylon. No one thought to bring flashlights or lanterns and so our light extinguished with the fire.

Martin, that night you held on to me, there on the ground, beneath the open black sky. We didn’t fall asleep that way, but I awoke in the middle of the night to feel you curled up behind me, your arm draped over my side as if you’d planned to hold me tight. I listened to your breathing, and to the sound of the river.

Falling in and out of sleep I thought I could hear the stars crackling in the night.

I realized that what was happening to us, Martin, was unrepresentable.

In the morning, sore and coffeeless, the light pale and cold, Theresa got us lost on the way back to her car, distracted by the pain pulsing up from her heart to her jaw, and we found ourselves in an area that didn’t seem park-like at all, but rather hostile, the landscape erupting in sharp, slate outcroppings like the scales of some enormous buried dragon.

We got so turned around, do you remember?

It was like it always is when you’re lost, a bit funny at first, and then not so funny.

We ended up back at the same abandoned well like three times and before we knew it, it was early afternoon. The longer we were out there the less familiar everything looked, as if the world—or at least that part of it—was slowly becoming alien. Something was sucking the reality out of it. The trees seemed taller and odd-shaped, growing at weird angles that suggested a baleful intention. Theresa was the one who spotted the red beetle the size of a softball that made an awful clicking sound when we approached it.

It was strange what happened in Cynthia’s seminar the next Wednesday. We’d heard that she’d been promoted to associate professor and named director of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and so were looking forward to congratulating her. Instead, she greeted us with a scowl.

“Had a good camping trip did we?” she said, the word camping coming out of her mouth like it was some foul curse word. The scar beneath her eye—which had looked so delicate and beautiful before—seemed to glower now, and even shimmer, with anger. Which one of us had told her about our excursion, and why, I wondered. She wavered there in front of us not as just as our professor, but as our professor plus something else. But plus what? You were into Nirvana at the time, Martin, and were humming one of their songs, probably “In Bloom,” and that really set Cynthia off.

“Don’t ever,” she said, “bring that band into this room.”

It was only later that we’d learn that she’d been in an abusive relationship with Kurt Cobain, which probably explained the scar. Theresa would use that “Don’t ever” line in the final version “Red Beret” that Norton picked up for one of their “best of” anthologies, although she wouldn’t live to see it published there. She changed the sentence to “Don’t ever bring Nirvana into this room again,” and in the essay it was funny in a non-funny way, which is how humor worked for a short while in the early 1990s.

Looking back on it now, after everything that happened, I don’t think it was jealousy that tormented our professor, but something else, something maybe even worse.

I think we made her sad, we broke her heart somehow.

Something changed that day with professor Cynthia and whatever sweet, flirtatious dynamic that had been going on in the seminar vanished. The weird mixtures and concoctions of emotions that had made the class so singular went poof and the last few weeks were deadly. It was around that time, maybe the last week or two of the semester, that it happened. Sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas. We were all working on our big essays for class and I was in the library on the fourth floor in one of those old steel cubicles are that no one used. The ones with heavy glass doors that always reminded me of what I imagine it would have been like to work at Los Alamos in the 40s, all that heavy metal and heavy metal water. Heavy metal thoughts.

You were doomed, Martin, at that moment, although you didn’t know it.

You regretted, of course, the stunt, as you called it, of your pink essays.

But realism is a stunt! I tried to remind you. These were your own words, Martin! Don’t you remember how you defended the Dogme 95 films?

Martin: your unpublishable essays provoked something, maybe something from a different genre.

The shadow that fell across the far library wall.

What was it that made me lean sideways out of the cubicle just at that moment to catch the slow passing of a weirdly angled pink shadow on the wall? Did it pause for a moment, as if sensing it was detected? Was that the interaction, I wonder, that would set in motion the soft darkness that would come for you, Martin?

The act of being observed, what did it trigger in the shadow?

And why you? Why did it come for you?

Martin: have I succeeded in capturing your voice? I wanted to begin with your voice.

It’s all I have left of you.