Chapter One
Swenson waits for his students
to complete their private rituals, adjusting zippers and caps, arranging
the pens and notebooks so painstakingly chosen to express their tender
young selves, the fidgety ballets that signal their weekly submission
and reaffirm the social compact to be stuck in this room for an hour without
real food or TV. He glances around the seminar table, counts nine; good,
everyone's here, then riffles through the manuscript they're scheduled
to discuss, pauses, and says, "Is it my imagination, or have we been seeing
an awful lot of stories about humans having sex with animals?"
The students stare at him,
appalled. He can't believe he said that. His pathetic stab at humor sounded
precisely like what it was: a question he'd dreamed up and rehearsed as
he walked across North Quad, past the gothic graystone cloisters, the
Founders Chapel, the lovely two-hundred-year-old maples just starting
to drop the orange leaves that lie so thickly on the cover of the Euston
College viewbook. He'd hardly noticed his surroundings, so blindly focused
was he on the imminent challenge of leading a class discussion of a student
story in which a teenager, drunk and frustrated after a bad date with
his girlfriend, rapes an uncooked chicken by the light of the family fridge.
How is Swenson supposed to
begin? What he really wants to ask is: Was this story written expressly
to torment me? What little sadist thought it would be fun to watch me
tackle the technical flaws of a story that spends two pages describing
how the boy cracks the chicken's rib cage to better fit the slippery visceral
cavity around his throbbing hard-on? But Danny Liebman, whose story it
is, isn't out to torture Swenson. He'd just wanted something interesting
for his hero to do.
Slouched over, or sliding under,
the seminar table, the students gaze at Swenson, their eyes as opaque
and lidded as the eyes of the chicken whose plucked head the hero turns
to face him during their late-night kitchen romance. But chickens in suburban
refrigerators are generally headless. Swenson makes a mental note to mention
this detail later.
"I don't get it," says Carlos
Ostapcek. "What other stories about animals?" Carlos always starts off.
Ex-navy, ex-reform school, he's the alpha male, the only student who's
ever been anywhere except inside a classroom. As it happens, he's the
only male student, not counting Danny.
What stories is Swenson talking
about? He suddenly can't recall. Maybe it was some other year, another
class completely. He's been having too many moments like this: a door
slams shut behind him and his mind disappears. is this early Alzheimer's?
He's only fortyseven. Only forty-seven? What happened in the heartbeat
since he was his students' age?
Maybe his problem's the muggy
heat, bizarre for late September, El Niño dumping a freak monsoon all
over northern Vermont. His classroom-high in the college bell tower-is
the hottest spot on campus. And this past summer, workmen painted the
windows shut. Swenson has complained to Buildings and Grounds, but they're
too busy fixing sidewalk holes that could result in lawsuits.
"Is something wrong, Professor
Swenson?" Claris Williams inclines her handsome head, done this week in
bright rows of coiled dyed-orange snails. Everyone, including Swenson,
is a little in love with, and scared of, Claris, possibly because she
combines such intelligent sweetness with the glacial beauty of an African
princess turned supermodel.
"Why do you ask?" says Swenson.
"You groaned," Claris says.
"Twice."
"Nothing's wrong." Swenson's
groaning in front of his class. Doesn't that prove nothing's wrong? "And
if you call me Professor again, I'll fail you for the semester."
Claris stiffens. Relax! It's
only a joke! Euston students call teachers by their first names, that's
what Euston parents pay twenty-eight thousand a year for. But some kids
can't make themselves say Ted, the scholarship students like Carlos (who
does an end run around it by calling him Coach), the Vermont farm kids
like Jonelle, the black students like Claris and Makeesha, the ones least
likely to be charmed by his jokey threats. Euston hardly has any students
like that, but this fan, for some reason, they're all in Swenson's class.
Last week they discussed Claris's
story about a girl who accompanies her mother on a job cleaning a rich
woman's house, an eerily convincing piece that moved from hilarity to
horror as it chronicled the havoc wreaked by the maid stumbling through
the rooms, chugging Thunderbird wine, until the horrified child watches
her tumble downstairs.
The students were speechless
with embarrassment. They all assumed, as did Swenson, that Claris's story
was maybe not literal truth, but painfully close to the facts. At last,
Makeesha Davis, the only other black student, said she was sick of stories
in which sisters were always messed up on dope or drunk or selling their
booty or dead.
Swenson argued for Claris.
He'd dragged in Chekhov to tell the class that the writer need not paint
a picture of an ideal world, but only describe the actual world, without
sermons, without judgment. As if his students give a shit about some dead
Russian that Swenson ritually exhumes to support his loser opinions. And
yet just mentioning Chekhov made Swenson feel less alone, as if he were
being watched over by a saint who wouldn't judge him for the criminal
fraud of pretending that these kids could be taught what Swenson's pretending
to teach them. Chekhov would see into his heart and know that he sincerely
wished he could give his students what they want: talent, fame, money,
a job.
After the workshop on her story,
Claris stayed to talk. Swenson had groped for some tactful way to tell
her that he knew what it...
Excerpted from Blue Angel © Copyright 2009 by Francine Prose. Reprinted with permission by HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
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