My Dearest Friend (11 page)

The poetry in the fat text chosen by powers above her was arranged chronologically. The first poem she chose from the text was one written in the fifteenth century. It was brief, and very easy to read. And, as Daphne told her class, it was wonderfully subtle and clever! She read it aloud:

“You see how devious the poet is,” Daphne (enraptured by her own sensitivity and by anything written in the fifteenth century) said to her students. “Now, what does he say in the first stanza that the cock does? Why, he wakes his master up. Of course that is what a rooster does, but we can imagine this as a pet rooster, a beautiful bird with a comb of coral and an indigo tail, who crows in the morning and wakes up his master. Why does he love his rooster so much? Why is this rooster so special, so
noble
? What is the poet trying to tell us by innuendo? What does the poet tell us in the last stanza? Where does the rooster go to sleep at night? ‘In my lady’s chamber’! So you see, the poet is subtly, inventively, telling us that he is sleeping in the bedroom of his ladylove—the rooster who wakes him in the morning goes to sleep at night in ‘his lady’s chamber.’ It is the indirectness of poetry, the clever sidestepping of it, the sneakiness of it, if you will, that
often gives poetry its power. The poet is writing a love poem to his lady, but instead of praising
her,
he is praising an object that is related to her and to the fact that he is sleeping in her room.”

On and on she went, while her students stared down at their books, strangely quiet that day. She began to wonder if she had embarrassed them, because they said nothing. She went on from that poem to other love poems by Donne and Shakespeare, and was just beginning Andrew Marvell’s
To His Coy Mistress
when the hour was up. She taught the next period—the same subject, the same poetry (with the same strangely numbed reaction on her students’ part)—and then, when her class was over, she walked down the long hallway to the private lounge where the faculty and staff, including the lowly T.A.s, gathered for coffee and quiet conversation.

She was just outside the door to the lounge when she heard such an explosion of laughter that she paused. If the room was full of men, and only men, she wouldn’t go in. There were only three other female T.A.s, and she often felt timid around the male T.A.s when they were in their group, laughing with their low voices, gesturing extravagantly, bellowing out their opinions, fighting over their explication of
The Waste Land
like bulls butting for territory. She listened for the sound of any moderating female voice. What she heard was:

“…  Gawd, I stood outside the door for fifteen minutes without taking a breath. I couldn’t believe my ears! ‘I have a noble cock’! I have a noble
cock,
and she thinks he’s talking about a
rooster
! Those kids must have peed down their legs with laughter when they got out of there.” The speaker (Daphne thought it was George Dobbs, a freckled red-haired arrogant Mark Twain specialist) paused to cackle. “She tells these freshmen, who are, you know, the horniest people on God’s green earth, that ‘in my lady’s chamber’ means the bedroom. She thinks that a cock in a lady’s chamber is a rooster in a bedroom! Haw haw haw haw …” The laughter rose, billowed, burst. “Dear
Christ,
how can one woman be so dumb! How can they let her teach freshman literature? She should be teaching first grade, maybe kindergarten!”

Daphne felt her entire being shrinking, collapsing into herself, like a star falling inward and becoming a cold void. Not until this very moment had it occurred to her that there might be more earthy interpretations to that poem. And now she saw how wrong she had been—how unbelievably ignorant and naive. Her students must be laughing at her. And now that Dobbs was telling everyone else, how would she ever face her
colleagues? They would all think she was a fool. And she was, she really was. Oh, dear God, her life was ruined. She wasn’t a teacher, she was a little idiot.

Suddenly another voice imposed itself upon her panicked mind, and to her amazement, she heard a man saying, “Oh, George, you are such a mental slob. Just because you read vulgarity into everything you see doesn’t mean that everyone else does. Now, how do you
know
that the poet was talking about his cock and not a pet bird? Huh? How do you know? And even so, do you expect a beautiful classy female like Daphne Lowell to stand in front of a class of horny freshmen and talk about penises? I’m sure she can be sexy when she wants, but a woman teaching freshmen can hardly choose to be lewd. And we’re supposed to be teaching
poetry,
don’t forget, you know, we’re supposed to be
trying
to introduce the sublime, the majestic, the angelic—‘the music of the soul, and above all of great and feeling souls’—to these poor earthbound clods. What a crud you are to make fun of that elegant woman just because your own vision is so crass.”

Now Daphne really couldn’t breathe. She clutched her books to her breast, truly nearly fainting: my God, she had suddenly become a damsel in distress overhearing her knight in shining armor rallying to her defense. She was weak with astonishment.

“Jesus, Joe, you should be studying debate, not English literature!” George Dobbs said, laughing. “Give me a break—you sleeping with her, or what?”

“I haven’t even spoken to her, you asshole!” Daphne’s hero said, and then Dr. Frazier, the Shakespeare professor, came down the hall and caught Daphne standing outside the door, rigid with shock.

“Are you going in, Miss Lowell?” Dr. Frazier asked, and before she could move, he had pulled the door back, intending to allow her to pass through before him, unintentionally exposing Daphne to the lounge full of English T.A.s.

Daphne stared—and saw one person, Joe Miller. And he was seeing only her. She turned—she fled. She ran from the building and across campus and down nameless streets until she came to her apartment. Not until she was safely inside, in her bedroom with the door locked, on her bed, did she feel safe.

Daphne lay there and caught her breath, and replayed the entire morning in her head—and began to smile, and could not stop.

She had longed to have a knight, a hero, and she had one. She had been defended. She had been praised. It was obvious, it was undeniable—she was loved from afar! She felt radiant, ethereal, she felt like Guinevere reincarnated. And in her mind from that
moment on, she thought of herself and Joe in impossibly romantic ways, like Tristan and Isolt, like Aucassin and Nicolette.

Finally she came around to thinking about Joe himself, Joe Miller, her knight. She hadn’t really thought about him before, ever, had seldom seen him—there were, after all, twenty-three T.A.s in the department, and scores of other Ph.D. and master’s candidates.

She summoned up a vision of Joe in her mind: he was blond, with thick hair that he wore longer than most men these days, and he had blue eyes and a straight nose and a great smile—why, he was handsome! Why hadn’t she noticed that before? He wasn’t very tall, unfortunately, and perhaps that was why she hadn’t paid much attention to him; Daphne was tall for a woman, five-eight, and slender, but big-boned, and she was attracted to very tall big men. Joe was probably the same height she was. Probably the same weight, too, though she’d never tell him so—but could he pick her up? Could he carry her in his arms? He was the serious type, she remembered, very serious, even fierce, and competitive, and, now she remembered, he was rumored to be quite brilliant. Well, wow! How wonderful. How
romantic.
A brilliant man had come to her defense. Had proved that the age of chivalry was not dead.

When the phone rang, she knew it would be Joe, and it was.

“Hi,” he said. “I think that after this morning it might be nice if we could get together.”

And so they did.

It really had been a wonderful thing that Joe had done for Daphne. She had told Cynthia about the way they met, because the psychology books said to tell the child of a divorce about the time when her parents loved one another. She told Cynthia how after just three months of going together they were married, and how they laughed together and understood each other and shared everything, told each other everything. They were the dearest friends, but they were husband and wife too. She did not tell Cynthia in exact words, but let her understand that sexually the marriage had been fine and rich: it was a treasure. (She did not tell Cynthia about the time that she finally said, laughing, wet all over her body from different bodily moistures—sweat and kisses and sex and tears: “Oh, Joe, you have a noble cock!” How they had laughed, so pleased with themselves.)

And who could take that away from Daphne now? What could make it change, what could make it false? Because Joe had betrayed her and left her for another woman,
did that mean he did not truly love her then, in those young years? This was the mystery of life, not how death transforms us, but how life transforms us, even our memories, even our most radiant memories—if what Joe gave Daphne in their youth was golden, did his later betrayals tarnish it, demean it, debase it? So that the gold fell away, a lie, leaving only base metal, leaving a cheap pretense, tin?

Daphne sat alone in her cottage, wrapped in a light summer quilt, rocking in the curved wicker rocking chair in which she had rocked Cynthia when Cynthia was newly born. Daphne had put the chair here, by the long window looking out at the field and forest, just so she could sit this way, and look, and think, and remember, and be calmed by the way the lawn slanted and the woods stood firm, guardians of her realm. So long ago, she had been romantic. She could still be romantic. In fact, she was. Some of her friends, especially her new friends, saw her life as a sort of cliché, a cautionary tale to younger women: Look at what poor (foolish) Daphne Miller did with her life! Such potential, such a brilliant student—and she threw it all away, by trusting a man, by falling in love. They would say she had been duped and even robbed, and in a way that was true, for when she married Joe, she had stopped taking courses, had stopped working toward her doctorate. Joe was poor, and two years older, and was closer to finishing his doctorate than she. So she had worked for four years as a secretary in the chemistry department so that they could pay the rent on a little apartment and eat and wear clothes. Then he had gotten a teaching position at this prestigious college—wonderful for him, but what was Daphne to do? For their plan was that when he had gotten his doctorate and had a teaching position and was earning money, then she would go back to school. But this small college gave only undergraduate degrees; she could not get her doctorate here. The only thing for her to have done was make a long commute, an hour-and-a-half drive over treacherous mountain roads, back to U. Mass. at Amherst. She would have done that—but she got pregnant with Cynthia. So her life had become a perfect feminist tract: the woman who gave up her career to support a husband who then left her with a small child and little money. She had to work as a secretary to support herself and Cynthia (Joe paid child support, but college professors didn’t earn much); there was no way she could work and take care of a small child and study for a Ph.D. Now here she was, forty-six years old, a woman who had been a brilliant student with a promising career—and she was a secretary, just a secretary! If the feminists knew about her, they would take her like a
dog-and-pony show around the country to show her off to young women as an example of promise denied.

But it was not the teaching that she missed now. It was not a career that she yearned for. If she could have what she wanted right now, on this starry end-of-summer night, she would simply wish to be loved. To be held right now by a man she loved who loved her in return. Oh, well, she was still a romantic, still hopelessly mushy. She supposed she always would be. She wished David were still alive. She had cared for him so deeply, even when she was furious at his drinking. And he had loved her. His arms … his embrace. David had been a huge man and his body had been a kind of shelter for Daphne, but more, and terribly, it had been a shelter for his disease. He had died, as everyone feared he would, of cirrhosis of the liver, when he was only forty-seven, just two years ago.

She had not been held by a man for two years. There was Hudson to talk to, and she knew he cared for her. They had a kind of silent communing, a caring and affection that were expressed tenderly and obliquely, as if they were together in a pool of life, and although they did not actually touch one another, their feelings caused life to lap at them like gentle waves, giving them soft sensual satisfaction. But it was not the same as making love, as being held in a man’s arms. Daphne missed that. She often thought of trying to seduce Hudson, because she knew they could give each other pleasure and comfort and even joy, but no, there was Claire.

And really, most of all, Daphne missed her daughter. She missed Cynthia terribly. She had lived her life around her daughter as if around a glowing fire, and she had spent all her time bringing fuel to that fire, feeding that fire, tending it, watching it flourish and flame, and standing back in amazement sometimes at how brightly it burned, how high it flared! And now Cynthia was gone. Daphne was left with a void, a hole where the fire had been.

She ached, missing her daughter. Not being loved by a man did not defeat her, but this did. Not having Cynthia in the house defeated her. She could understand why Joe had left her, and she could bear that. She could understand why her daughter had left her, but she could not bear that. It hurt to think of it. It was as if her heart had been torn from her body, and nothing in the world would stanch that wound.