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EXCERPT I
knew her eight years ago. She was in my class. I don't teach
full-time anymore, strictly speaking don't teach literature at all
-- for years now just the one class, a big senior seminar in
critical writing called Practical Criticism. I attract a lot of
female students. For two reasons. Because it's a subject with an
alluring combination of intellectual glamour and journalistic
glamour and because they've heard me on NPR reviewing books or seen
me on Thirteen talking about culture. Over the past fifteen years,
being cultural critic on the television program has made me fairly
well known locally, and they're attracted to my class because of
that. In the beginning, I didn't realize that talking on TV once a
week for ten minutes could be so impressive as it turns out to be
to these students. But they are helplessly drawn to celebrity,
however inconsiderable mine may be.Now,
I'm very vulnerable to female beauty, as you know. Everybody's
defenseless against something, and that's it for me. I see it and
it blinds me to everything else. They come to my first class, and I
know almost immediately which is the girl for me. There is a Mark
Twain story in which he runs from a bull, and the bull looks up to
him when he's hiding in a tree, and the bull thinks, "You are my
meat, sir." Well, that "sir" is transformed into "young lady" when
I see them in class. It is now eight years ago -- I was already
sixty-two, and the girl, who is called Consuela Castillo, was
twenty-four. She is not like the rest of the class. She doesn't
look like a student, at least not like an ordinary student. She's
not a demi-adolescent, she's not a slouching, unkempt,
"like"-ridden girl. She's well spoken, sober, her posture is
perfect -- she appears to know something about adult life along
with how to sit, stand, and walk. As soon as you enter the class,
you see that this girl either knows more or wants to. The way she
dresses. It isn't exactly what's called chic, she's certainly not
flamboyant, but, to begin with, she's never in jeans, pressed or
unpressed. She dresses carefully, with quiet taste, in skirts,
dresses, and tailored pants. Not to desensualize herself but more,
it would seem, to professionalize herself, she dresses like an
attractive secretary in a prestigious legal firm. Like the
secretary to the bank chairman. She has a cream-colored silk blouse
under a tailored blue blazer with gold buttons, a brown pocketbook
with the patina of expensive leather, and little ankle boots to
match, and she wears a slightly stretchy gray knitted skirt that
reveals her body lines as subtly as such a skirt possibly could.
Her hair is done in a natural but cared-for manner. She has a pale
complexion, the mouth is bowlike though the lips are full, and she
has a rounded forehead, a polished forehead of a smooth Brancusi
elegance. She is Cuban. Her family are prosperous Cubans living in
Jersey, across the river in Bergen County. She has black, black
hair, glossy but ever so slightly coarse. And she's big. She's a
big woman. The silk blouse is unbuttoned to the third button, and
so you see she has powerful, beautiful breasts. You see the
cleavage immediately. And you see she knows it. You see, despite
the decorum, the meticulousness, the cautiously soigné style
-- or because of them -- that she's aware of herself. She comes to
the first class with the jacket buttoned over her blouse, yet some
five minutes into the session, she has taken it off. When I glance
her way again, I see that she's put it back on. So you understand
that she's aware of her power but that she isn't sure yet how to
use it, what to do with it, how much she even wants it. That body
is still new to her, she's still trying it out, thinking it
through, a bit like a kid walking the streets with a loaded gun and
deciding whether he's packing it to protect himself or to begin a
life of crime.And
she's aware of something else, and this I couldn't know from the
one class meeting: she finds culture important in a reverential,
old-fashioned way. Not that it's something she wishes to live by.
She doesn't and she couldn't -- too traditionally well brought up
for that -- but it's important and wonderful as nothing else she
knows is. She's the one who finds the Impressionists ravishing but
must look long and hard -- and always with a sense of nagging
confoundment -- at a Cubist Picasso, trying with all her might to
get the idea. She stands there waiting for the surprising new
sensation, the new thought, the new emotion, and when it won't
come, ever, she chides herself for being inadequate and lacking . .
. what? She chides herself for not even knowing what it is she
lacks. Art that smacks of modernity leaves her not merely puzzled
but disappointed in herself. She would love for Picasso to matter
more, perhaps to transform her, but there's a scrim drawn across
the proscenium of genius that obscures her vision and keeps her
worshiping at a bit of a distance. She gives to art, to all of art,
far more than she gets back, a sort of earnestness that isn't
without its poignant appeal. A good heart, a lovely face, a gaze at
once inviting and removed, gorgeous breasts, and so newly hatched
as a woman that to find fragments of broken shell adhering to that
ovoid forehead wouldn't have been a surprise. I saw right away that
this was going to be my girl.Now,
I have one set rule of some fifteen years' standing that I never
break. I don't any longer get in touch with them on a private basis
until they've completed their final exam and received their grade
and I am no longer officially in loco parentis. In spite of
temptation -- or even a clear-cut signal to begin the flirtation
and make the approach -- I haven't broken this rule since, back in
the mid-eighties, the phone number of the sexual harassment hotline
was first posted outside my office door. I don't get in touch with
them any earlier so as not to run afoul of those in the university
who, if they could, would seriously impede my enjoyment of life. I
teach each year for fourteen weeks, and during that time I don't
have affairs with them. I play a trick instead. It's an honest
trick, it's an open and aboveboard trick, but it is a trick
nonetheless. After the final examination and once the grades are
in, I throw a party in my apartment for the students. It is always
a success and it is always the same. I invite them for a drink at
about six o'clock. I say that from six to eight we are going to
have a drink, and they always stay till two in the morning. The
bravest ones, after ten o'clock, develop into lively characters and
tell me what they really are interested in. In the Practical
Criticism seminar there are about twenty students, sometimes as
many as twenty-five, so there will be fifteen, sixteen girls and
five or six boys, of whom two or three are straight. Half of this
group has left the party by ten. Generally, one straight boy, maybe
one gay boy, and some nine girls will stay. They're invariably the
most cultivated, intelligent, and spirited of the lot. They talk
about what they're reading, what they're listening to, what art
shows they've seen -- enthusiasms that they don't normally go on
about with their elders or necessarily with their friends. They
find one another in my class. And they find me. During the party
they suddenly see I am a human being. I'm not their teacher, I'm
not my reputation, I'm not their parent. I have a pleasant, orderly
duplex apartment, they see my large library, aisles of double-faced
bookshelves that house a lifetime's reading and take up almost the
entire downstairs floor, they see my piano, they see my devotion to
what I do, and they stay. My funniest student one year was like the
goat in the fairy tale that goes into the clock to hide. I threw
the last of them out at two in the morning, and while saying good
night, I missed one girl. I said, "Where is our class clown,
Prospero's daughter?" "Oh, I think Miranda left," somebody said. I
went back into the apartment to start cleaning the place up and I
heard a door being closed upstairs. A bathroom door. And Miranda
came down the stairs, laughing, radiant with a kind of goofy
abandon -- I'd never, till that moment, realized that she was so
pretty -- and she said, "Wasn't that clever of me? I've been hiding
in your upstairs bathroom, and now I'm going to sleep with
you."A
little thing, maybe five foot one, and she pulled off her sweater
and showed me her tits, revealing the adolescent torso of an
incipiently transgressive Balthus virgin, and of course we slept
together. All evening long, much like a young girl escaped from the
perilous melodrama of a Balthus painting into the fun of the class
party, Miranda had been on all fours on the floor with her rump
raised or lying helplessly prostrate on my sofa or lounging
gleefully across the arms of an easy chair seemingly oblivious of
the fact that with her skirt riding up her thighs and her legs
undecorously parted she had the Balthusian air of being half
undressed while fully clothed. Everything's hidden and nothing's
concealed. Many of these girls have been having sex since they were
fourteen, and by their twenties there are one or two curious to do
it with a man of my years, if just the once, and eager the next day
to tell all their friends, who crinkle up their faces and ask, "But
what about his skin? Didn't he smell funny? What about his long
white hair? What about his wattle? What about his little pot belly?
Didn't you feel sick?" Miranda told me afterward, "You must have
slept with hundreds of women. I wanted to see what it would be
like." "And?" And then she said things I didn't entirely believe,
but it didn't matter. She had been audacious -- she had seen she
could do it, game and terrified though she may have been while
hiding in the bathroom. She discovered how courageous she was
confronting this unfamiliar juxtaposition, that she could conquer
her initial fears and any initial revulsion, and I -- as regards
the juxtaposition -- had a wonderful time altogether. Sprawling,
clowning, cavorting Miranda, posing with her underwear at her feet.
Just the pleasure of looking was lovely. Though that was hardly the
only reward. The decades since the sixties have done a remarkable
job of completing the sexual revolution. This is a generation of
astonishing fellators. There's been nothing like them ever before
among their class of young women.Excerpted from THE DYING ANIMAL © Copyright 2001 by Philip
Roth. Reprinted with permission by Houghton Mifflin Co. All rights
reserved.