In Lydia’s case, professorial discretion was helped along some, or I should have thought it would be, by that rolling, mannish gait of hers. Tire first time she entered my class I actually wondered if she could be some kind of gymnast or acrobat, perhaps a member of a women’s track and field association; I was reminded of those photographs in the popular magazines of the strong blue-eyed women athletes who win medals at the Olympic games for the Soviet Union. Yet her shoulders were as touchingly narrow as a child’s, and her skin pale and almost luminously soft. Only from the waist to the floor did she seem to be moving on the body of my sex rather than her own.
Within the month I had seduced her, as much against her inclination and principles as my own. It was standard enough procedure, pretty much what Mrs. Slater must have had in mind: a conference alone together in my office, a train ride side by side on the IC back to Hyde Park, an invitation to a beer at my local tavern, the flirtatious walk to her apartment, the request by me for coffee, if she would make me some. She begged me to think twice about what I was doing, even after she had returned from the bathroom where she had inserted her diaphragm and I had removed her underpants for the second time and was hunched, unclothed, over her small, ill-proportioned body, preparatory to entering her. She was distressed, she was amused, she was frightened, she was mystified.
“There are so many beautiful young girls around, why pick on me? Why choose me, when you could have the cream of the crop?
I didn’t bother to answer. As though she were the one being coy or foolish, I smiled.
She said: “Look, look at me.”
“I’m doing that.”
“Are you? I’m five years older than you. My breasts sag, not that they ever amounted to much to begin with. Look, I have stretch marks. My behind’s too big, I’m hamstrung-’Professor,’ listen to me, I don’t have orgasms. I want you to know that beforehand. I never have.”
When we later sat down for the coffee, Lydia, wrapped in a robe, said this: “I’ll never know why you wanted to do that. Why not Mrs. Slater, who’s begging you for it? Why should anyone like you want me?”
Of course I didn’t “want” her, not then or ever. We lived together for almost six years, the first eighteen months as lovers, and the four years following, until her suicide, as husband and wife, and in all that time her flesh was never any less distasteful to me than she had insistently advertised it to be. Utterly without lust, I seduced her on that first night, the next morning, and hundreds of times thereafter. As for Mrs. Slater, I seduced her probably no more than ten times in all, and never anywhere but in my imagination.
It was another month before I met Monica, Lydia’s ten-year-old daughter, so it will not do to say that, like Nabokov’s designing rogue, I endured the uninviting mother in order to have access to the seductive and seducible young daughter. That came later. In the beginning Monica was without any attraction whatsoever, repellent to me in character as well as appearance: lanky, stringy-haired, undernourished, doltish, without a trace of curiosity or charm, and so illiterate that at ten she was still unable to tell the time. In her dungarees and faded polo shirts she had the look of some mountain child, the offspring of poverty and deprivation. Worse, when she was dressed to kill in her white dress and round white hat, wearing her little Mary Jane shoes and carrying a white handbag and a Bible (white too), she seemed to me a replica of those over-dressed little Gentile children who used to pass our house every Sunday on their way to church, and toward whom I used to feel an emotion almost as strong as my own grandparents’ aversion. Secretly, and despite myself, I came close to despising the stupid and stubborn child when she would appear in that little white churchgoing outfit- and so too did Lydia, who was reminded by Monica’s costume of the clothes in which she had had to array herself each Sunday in Skokie, before being led off to Lutheran services with her aunts Helda and Jessie. (As the story had it: “It did a growing body good to sit once a week in a nice starched dress, and without squirming.”)
I was drawn to Lydia, not out of a passion for Monica-not yet-but because she had suffered so and because she was so brave. Not only that she had survived, but what she had survived, gave her enormous moral stature, or glamor, in my eyes: on the one hand, the puritan austerity, the prudery, the bland-ness, the xenophobia of the women of her clan; on the other, the criminality of the men. Of course, I did not equate being raped by one’s father with being raised on the wisdom of the Chicago Tribune; what made her seem to me so valiant was that she had been subjected to every brand of barbarity, from the banal to the wicked, had been exploited, beaten, and betrayed by every last one of her keepers, had finally been driven crazy- and in the end had proved indestructible: she lived now in a neat little apartment within earshot of the bell in the clock tower of the university whose atheists, Communists, and Jews her people had loathed, and at the kitchen table of that apartment wrote ten pages for me every week in which she managed, heroically I thought, to recall the details of that brutal life in the style of one a very long way from rage and madness. When I told the class that what I admired most in Mrs. Ketterer’s fiction was her “control,” I meant something more than those strangers could know.
Given all there was to move me about her character, it seemed to me curious that I should be so repelled by her flesh as I was that first night. I was able myself to achieve an orgasm, but afterward felt terrible for the “achievement” it had had to be. Earlier, caressing her body, I had been made uneasy by the unexpected texture of her genitals. To the touch, the fold of skin between her legs felt abnormally thick, and when I looked, as though to take pleasure in the sight of her nakedness, the vaginal lips appeared withered and discolored in a way that was alarming to me. I could even imagine myself to be staring down at the sexual parts of one of Lydia’s maiden aunts, rather than at a physically healthy young woman not yet into her thirties. I was tempted to imagine some connection here to the childhood victimization by her father, but of course that was too literary, too poetic an idea to swallow-this was no stigma, however apprehensive it might make me.
The reader may by now be able to imagine for himself how the twenty-four-year-old I was responded to his alarm: in the morning, without very much ado, I performed cunnilingus upon her.
“Don’t,” said Lydia. “Don’t do that.”
“Why not?” I expected the answer: Because I’m so ugly there.
“I told you. I won’t reach a climax. It doesn’t matter what you do.”
Like a sage who’d seen everything and been everywhere, I said, “You make too much of that.”
Her thighs were not as long as my forearm (about the length, I thought, of one of Mrs. Slater’s Pappagallos) and her legs were open only so far as I had been able to spread them with my two hands. But where she was dry, brownish, weatherworn, I pressed my open mouth. I took no pleasure in the act, she gave no sign that she did; but at least I had done what I had been frightened of doing, put my tongue to where she had been brutalized, as though-it was tempting to put it this way-that would redeem us both.
As though that would redeem us both. A notion as inflated as it was shallow, growing, I am certain, out of “serious literary studies.” Where Emma Bovary had read too many romances of her period, it would seem that I had read too much of the criticism of mine. That I was, by “eating” her, taking some sort of sacrament was a most attractive idea-though one that I rejected after the initial momentary infatuation. Yes, I continued to resist as best I could all these high-flown, prestigious interpretations, whether of my migraines or my sexual relations with Lydia; and yet it surely did seem to me that my life was coming to resemble one of those texts upon which certain literary critics of that era used to enjoy venting their ingenuity. I could have done a clever job on it myself for my senior honors thesis in college: “Christian Temptations in a Jewish Life: A Study in the Ironies of ‘Courting Disaster.’”