She stared, trying to comprehend. He wasn’t on the Grievance Committee.
“In the paper.”
“The paper?”
“Oh. Christ. You’ve seen it, yes? In the Campus Telegraph. I should — there’s a stack in the library, if you want to — okay. Hey, I’m going to run before I make more of a jackass. Look, come by if you need to talk.” He literally backed away from her — went backward a good ten steps, then stopped. “It’s not like I don’t know about messing up, right?” He laughed at himself and walked on, hitting his briefcase against his leg. He must have meant his marriage ending last year, and then the time he broke down sobbing in front of his Frost seminar when they discussed images of adultery in “The Silken Tent.”
Alex held her head a few more seconds, then pushed herself up.
The “open letter” in the Telegraph wasn’t from Eden herself, but from the entire Minority Student Council. It named Alex, described her conversation with Eden pretty accurately, and went on to include “ten stereotypes about Asian-American students”—number eight was “Asian-American students are more likely to cheat to attain high grades”—and a quote from Leonard, stating that “the English Department works hard to include everyone.”
She put a nearby Newsweek on the stack of Telegraphs, picked the whole thing up, and dropped it in the big blue recycling bin behind the elevator. There were plenty more papers all over campus, but it felt good to get rid of these fifty or so.
Out on the sidewalk, two girls from her Pre-Raph seminar were waving energetically.
“Professor Moore! We waited for you for, like, twenty minutes!”
She checked her watch. She wasn’t even wearing a watch. They stood in front of her, smiling, expecting an explanation, or at least further instructions.
She threw up on their shoes.
Her phone was ringing, but she didn’t even know where it was, so she put pillows around her ears. She’d taken two of the Vicodin left from her knee surgery, and now everything was padded with cotton. She had told those girls she had a stomach flu and offered to buy them new shoes, but then they were gone and she was back in the English building, slumped in the door of her office, and then Leonard was asking Tossman to call her a cab, and now she was in bed in her clothes. Something sharp was jutting into her hip, but it didn’t hurt. She dug around. Seven of hearts, seven of diamonds, seven of spades, seven of clubs.
In her office, on the phone, Malcolm had actually laughed at first, unable to take her seriously. She held her silence until he got it. “What the hell do you mean?”
She said, “There are people who actually find me attractive.”
“I don’t?” His voice was an octave above normal. It bothered her now, thinking back, that she had no idea where he’d been. She didn’t know whether to picture him in front of his refrigerator, out on the deck, driving downtown, sitting on the toilet.
She’d said — perhaps too cryptically, in retrospect—“It’s like some horrible inversion of ‘The Frog Prince,’ like the frog convinces the princess to kiss him, but then she finds herself transformed into a toad. And the frog goes, ‘Hey, I’m as good as you can do now, baby.’”
There was a pause that hurt her throat. He said, “I’m supposed to be the frog?”
“No. You’re supposed to get it.” She’d hung up then, but he’d probably hung up too.
She ran a hand through her hair and realized she hadn’t even showered since Saturday. Her bed swayed, and the room turned to water.
Every time she taught the Pre-Raph seminar, she waited till near the end of the semester to bring out the actual photographs of Jane Morris. They’d have seen her in Rossetti’s and William Morris’s paintings, they’d seen her needlework, they’d studied the decoration of Red House. And this in addition to the lectures from an art professor about the Arts and Crafts movement, the three days spent discussing Rossetti’s poem “The Portrait,” a major focus of Alex’s own thesis:
This is her picture as she was:
It seems a thing to wonder on,
As though mine image in the glass
Should tarry when myself am gone…
Jane Morris was as much the linchpin of the course as she’d been the goddess of the Brotherhood — that daughter of a stableman, who posed and flirted and married and adulterated her way to the top of English society, outsmarting and outcharming the snobs. And so each year when Alex showed the photographs, the students — for some reason particularly the girls — were devastated. She wasn’t half as beautiful as Rossetti and Morris had painted her. Rossetti had given gloss to her hair and depth to her eyes, added a good three inches to her neck, lengthened her fingers, straightened her nose.
It was only then that the students started to see how all Rossetti’s women — Jane, Christina, Elizabeth — shared some indefinable look that wasn’t their own but something Rossetti had done to them, a classical wash he’d painted over them. This was where the feminists in the class started to have fun, and someone inevitably compared the paintbrush to the penis. At which point Alex could lean on her desk and take a breather as they screamed at each other.
She wondered now, lying in bed ignoring the phone, not about Rossetti’s fetishes or the invention of the classical but about how Jane Morris felt, to look at a finished painting and see a woman more beautiful than the one she saw in the mirror. Was this the reason she started her affair with Rossetti — knowing she could only be that beautiful when she was with him — or did it feel more like a misinterpretation, an abduction?
And she thought about Rossetti himself, how she’d never considered before that he might really have seen Jane Morris that way, not just wished he had. The way she herself had taken an albatross for a goose, an American for a Korean. How easy is a bush supposed to be a bear.
She finally answered the phone around eleven that night, and didn’t realize until she heard Leonard’s voice how strongly she’d believed it to be Malcolm.
“Thank God,” he said. “You’re okay, then.”
“How long have you been calling?”
“All day. We were starting to think — What can I do to help?”
She knew he wanted some concrete plan to fix everything.
“Because I gotta be honest,” he went on, “this doesn’t look good for the whole department. As a whole.”
She wasn’t sure if he meant the grievance or the letter or her absence. Or the vomiting.
“Oh, come on, Leonard. It doesn’t look that bad. Not as bad as half the stuff I’ve heard you say. For Christ’s sake, you use the word coed, Leonard.”
“I’m confused.” He sounded tired.
“Of course you are.”
And why not hang up on him, too, while she was at it?
From seventh grade (after she got over mono) through grad school, Alex had not missed a single class. Freshman year of college, her roommate had practically tackled her to keep her from leaving the dorm with a 104 fever, but Alex just kept walking, stopped to sit on the sidewalk halfway to biochem, got up again and staggered the rest of the way. It wasn’t a matter of maintaining her record, but of principle. Unlike Piet, who’d once shown up at home in the middle of the semester for “National Piet Week,” which he celebrated by watching television and getting his mother, Alex’s stepmother, to do all his laundry.