EXCERPT
The Dying Animal
By PHILIP ROTH
Houghton Mifflin
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The Dying Animal
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.
(C) 2001 Philip Roth All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-618-13587-1