When Gavin pulled up, Rona Gomez was sitting on the steps of the Alvah Curtis Roebuck Residence Hall. It was the largest dorm, a no-nonsense industrial tower, gray to match the dirty snow and cold winter sky surrounding it. Students shuffled in and out like Eskimos, heads lowered against the pelting sleet, hoods raised, hands buried in pockets. Rona was wearing a giant dark stripy scarf wrapped about fifty times around her neck and face.
Gavin’s stomach
lurched when he saw her. She’s there. He had
half-expected her not to be, like this whole drive-to-Bloomington with Rona
thing was actually the bizarre hallucination that it seemed like.
But no, Rona on the steps, reading The Divine Sharpness in fact. She looked up, shoved the book into her backpack—clumsy with her gloves on—and hopped into the passenger seat of Gavin's Honda Accord. It was old, but some kind of grandma had owned it before him so it was in good shape.
“Should I just get on 231?” He had already started driving, a slow creep down the icy road. In this state, all highways led to Indianapolis. If you wanted to go anywhere else, like Bloomington for example, home of Indiana University's main campus and the academic heart of the state, you could take back roads through the countryside and be damn grateful about it.
“Yeah.” Rona took off her gloves, then unwound her giant scarf, which took about a minute, and put them both into the backpack at her feet. “I’ll give you directions to the place when we get close.”
Gavin looked over at her, quickly since he didn’t want to crash into the SUV he was tailgating. She was wearing jeans today, rolled up over her combat boots, a plain gray sweatshirt. No makeup and her skin was a little spotty. Her hair was piled up on top of her head in a messy bun kind of thing.
She was looking straight ahead, patient, like there was no way she was going to start the conversation. Of course that was his job. She was the deferential student, he the wise sensei. As such, he should ask her about something about the class, so they could have a meaningful conversation about her studies.
“How are you liking The Divine Sharpness?”
“It’s interesting.” She sounded polite, like she was trying to give the right answer.
“What’s interesting about it?”
“The way the characters represent the mind and the body. And the debate they have. I haven’t read a lot of plays that are so philosophical.”
They had reached the edge of town—in New Buffalo, that never took long. Gavin turned onto the state road. It didn’t seem too bad; not a lot of traffic, and the snow wasn’t sticking to the ground. Still, the road felt slippery and it was hard to see with so much gray everywhere.
“Cool,” he said. “So what was that DMT thing all about?”
“What?”
Jesus, what the fuck is your problem? Why did he keep blurting out stuff like that? It had been happening way too much lately, with Sinder, now with Rona. Probably stress. That, or he was losing the ability to control his actions. Either way, he’d better reign it in before Santa Clarita.
“Sinder said you guys did DMT.” He tried to sound really casual, like, whatever, we all do some DMT now and again, no big deal.
“He’s your roommate?” She pulled her scarf out of the backpack and wrapped it around her shoulders a few times.
“Yeah,” Gavin said. “Do you want me to turn the heat up?”
“I’m okay.” She put her gloves on. “You know, I really like Bo.”
“From The Divine Sharpness?”
“I mean, I think I’m probably more like Mi. But I admire Bo.”
“Well, we’re each like both of them,” he said, wise and teacherly. “Body and mind.”
Actually, that was bullshit, and he winced just hearing himself say it. Hadn’t he just cast Rona as mind, not body, in class the other day? And hadn’t he himself, when he was Rona’s age and aspiring to live the life of the mind, always felt such strong identification with, maybe even admiration (though he wouldn’t have used that word) for Mi?
“But yeah, I can relate,” he said. “Sometimes it’s tiring being in your mind. I could see how you might want to get more in touch with your body.”
Fuck. That was creepy. He glanced over at Rona. From what he could see in his peripheral vision, she didn’t look upset or anything, just normal, kind of distant and frowny, like she was thinking hard about something you just wouldn't get.
“You know, the thing about Mi is,” she said. “I don’t get why Stump doesn’t do more with him. The mind has so many capabilities. It can do almost anything.”
“I think he was trying to represent minds in general,” Gavin said. “You know, the normal mind.”
“I guess my mind’s not exactly normal. It’s okay,” she added, as Gavin started to apologize (he didn’t think he had called her abnormal, but just in case). “Creative people don’t want to have normal minds. I mean, like, you don’t want your mind to be normal. Otherwise you wouldn’t be a professor.”
“Graduate student,” he said. “But yeah.”
They rode in silence for a while, staring at nothing worth mentioning, just the flat, gray Indiana landscape, the sparsely falling snow.
Ask her something. But what? They had already talked about The Divine Sharpness. Maybe something about abjection, but he needed to do it in a way that didn’t sound like a quiz.
“Sinder told me,” Rona said, “that he was stressed out about his exams. I thought the DMT might help him take his mind off them.”
Or we could talk about that. At least she brought it up herself this time.
“He could also take a bath or watch a movie. Of course, those might seem kind of pedestrian to you.”
“No, they’re okay,” she said. “Actually I bet the sensory deprivation will be better for stress than all of those.”
“Good, I need it.” Gavin said. “I’m supposed to give a talk on Friday and I haven’t written it yet.”
“Is it about The Divine Sharpness?”
“It could be.” They were driving through Spenser now, where US Route 231 met Indiana State Road 46. You couldn’t switch roads without this detour through town, an oasis of fast food and muffler shops amid miles and miles of empty flat fields. “But I was thinking maybe another play. Maybe this one called No No Not Now.”
“I didn’t read that one yet.”
“You weren’t supposed to. We’re not reading it until the end of the term.”
They were stuck at a red light, in a town that they weren’t even supposed to be in, except that it happened to lie between the other towns he was traveling to and from. He looked over at Rona. Her notebook was in her lap, the same one she scribbled in all through class. She had written the driving directions on an empty page. It was sweet, Gavin thought, so old-fashioned: most of his students would be using the navigation programs on their phones. Actually that’s what he would be doing, if he were directing.
“I’ll probably read it sooner,” she said. “I read Time Slide last weekend.”
Gavin wanted to be annoyed at her reading ahead again, but wow—Time Slide? How could he fault a student who couldn’t stop herself from reading his favorite play a month early?
“Did you like it?”
“It was interesting. What’s No No Not Now about?”
“Huh, let’s see.”
The vicissitudes of the human heart?
Two people hanging from the ceiling?
No, this wasn’t a dinner party. Today there was time to kill. And this was his student, so he didn’t have to worry about boring her with too much Liam Stump talk. “It’s about a husband and wife who don’t get along. They’re hanging in the air, in the middle of the stage, from ropes tied around their wrists. Each one keeps trying to get closer to the other—physically, I mean, like they try to swing themselves around, as a representation of trying to get closer emotionally. But every time, say, the wife tries to move towards the husband, he veers off in some random other direction.”
“That sounds hard to stage.”
“Right,” he said, like he knew what he was talking about. He’d seen a couple productions of it, and yeah, they had looked pretty complicated. He had no idea how they did it, but he guessed anyway. “You need a punch of crazy tracks and pulleys and stuff.”
“Why can’t the couple come together?”
“There are a lot of reasons. No overriding, central problem.”
This conversation was getting a lot better. He was finally starting to feel comfortable, like this was a normal student-teacher interaction, that this car, hurtling through the sleet at fifty miles an hour, was nothing more than a mobile classroom.
“Just a lot of little things,” he said. “I guess partly it’s the typical theme of men and women being fundamentally different. For example, he’s really demanding about the house being perfectly clean. And the two of them haven’t been able to have children. And there are some other things that aren’t exactly said outright but are strongly implied, like the man has this flirtation, maybe an affair, with the wife’s sister. And the wife had a baby out of wedlock that she gave up for adoption, because this is mid-century Ireland and there’s no way you can have an abortion.”
“You still can’t in Ireland.”
“Right.” Did he know that? Probably. “So of course, the man is kind of bitter about the whole adoption thing.”
“Wait.” Rona had been looking out the windshield, as far as he could see, for the entire drive, but now she turned to face him. Without even turning his head, he could feel her accusing gaze on the side of his face. “Why would he be bitter?”
“Because she had another guy’s baby and not his.” Wasn’t that obvious? “And out of wedlock, so I suppose he thinks she’s kind of a slut. That’s not a fair viewpoint, obviously. Anyway, this is all a minor point in the play.”
“It’s a huge point. You don’t just have a baby and give it away like it’s no big deal.”
“Fair enough.” Geez, we don’t need to get in some kind of big feminist debate about it. “Maybe that’s something you can explore in your essay about the play, when we get there.”
“Yeah, maybe.” She didn’t sound too upset. She must be one of those people who just likes arguing. “What are you going to say about it in your talk?”
They passed a road sign: Bloomington 10 miles. The snow was getting thicker, falling in fluffy white lumps. Gavin hoped there wouldn’t be some kind of unannounced blizzard. They seemed to have one like every other week.
“Probably something about abjection. There’s this really abject thing that happens at the end of the play. The husband and wife’s wrists are all shredded up and dripping blood everywhere, because they’ve been moving around so much. Finally the woman’s wrists become so frayed that they snap off, and she falls to the floor. She crawls around and finds her severed hands, and she’s trying to reattach them. That’s how the play ends, with her sitting on the ground, one of her hands between her knees, and she’s trying to reconnect it to her wrist. And her husband is just floating up there above her, watching silently. I’m not sure exactly what it means yet, but something in there is definitely abject.”
“The baby,” Rona said. “The baby was abjected.”
Forget the fucking baby!
She was really over-reading this baby thing. It was like, a tiny point in the play. Basically a single line from the wife: I gave my heart away when I was a girl of seventeen. Don’t tell me it was my decision. Don’t. I was forced. And sometime later her husband says: Oh, it was your decision, it was, and a blight brought on your family.
“Do you mean,” Gavin asked, trying to figure out her reasoning, “because it was ejected from the woman’s life in order to create a societally acceptable narrative?”
“Yeah. Plus isn’t that what the severed hand represents? Her lost child, out there in the world somewhere, growing up without her?”
“No,” Gavin said. “Well, maybe. Normally it’s read as a symbol of her irreparably broken marriage.”
“Oh, normally.”
Was she making fun of him? She said it in a neutral way, just repeating, no judgment. But that had to be sarcastic, right? He wanted to look over and see if she was rolling her eyes or anything, but the snow was pretty thick and he needed to get over. They were coming into Bloomington.
“It’s the first exit,” she said.
But no, Rona on the steps, reading The Divine Sharpness in fact. She looked up, shoved the book into her backpack—clumsy with her gloves on—and hopped into the passenger seat of Gavin's Honda Accord. It was old, but some kind of grandma had owned it before him so it was in good shape.
“Should I just get on 231?” He had already started driving, a slow creep down the icy road. In this state, all highways led to Indianapolis. If you wanted to go anywhere else, like Bloomington for example, home of Indiana University's main campus and the academic heart of the state, you could take back roads through the countryside and be damn grateful about it.
“Yeah.” Rona took off her gloves, then unwound her giant scarf, which took about a minute, and put them both into the backpack at her feet. “I’ll give you directions to the place when we get close.”
Gavin looked over at her, quickly since he didn’t want to crash into the SUV he was tailgating. She was wearing jeans today, rolled up over her combat boots, a plain gray sweatshirt. No makeup and her skin was a little spotty. Her hair was piled up on top of her head in a messy bun kind of thing.
She was looking straight ahead, patient, like there was no way she was going to start the conversation. Of course that was his job. She was the deferential student, he the wise sensei. As such, he should ask her about something about the class, so they could have a meaningful conversation about her studies.
“How are you liking The Divine Sharpness?”
“It’s interesting.” She sounded polite, like she was trying to give the right answer.
“What’s interesting about it?”
“The way the characters represent the mind and the body. And the debate they have. I haven’t read a lot of plays that are so philosophical.”
They had reached the edge of town—in New Buffalo, that never took long. Gavin turned onto the state road. It didn’t seem too bad; not a lot of traffic, and the snow wasn’t sticking to the ground. Still, the road felt slippery and it was hard to see with so much gray everywhere.
“Cool,” he said. “So what was that DMT thing all about?”
“What?”
Jesus, what the fuck is your problem? Why did he keep blurting out stuff like that? It had been happening way too much lately, with Sinder, now with Rona. Probably stress. That, or he was losing the ability to control his actions. Either way, he’d better reign it in before Santa Clarita.
“Sinder said you guys did DMT.” He tried to sound really casual, like, whatever, we all do some DMT now and again, no big deal.
“He’s your roommate?” She pulled her scarf out of the backpack and wrapped it around her shoulders a few times.
“Yeah,” Gavin said. “Do you want me to turn the heat up?”
“I’m okay.” She put her gloves on. “You know, I really like Bo.”
“From The Divine Sharpness?”
“I mean, I think I’m probably more like Mi. But I admire Bo.”
“Well, we’re each like both of them,” he said, wise and teacherly. “Body and mind.”
Actually, that was bullshit, and he winced just hearing himself say it. Hadn’t he just cast Rona as mind, not body, in class the other day? And hadn’t he himself, when he was Rona’s age and aspiring to live the life of the mind, always felt such strong identification with, maybe even admiration (though he wouldn’t have used that word) for Mi?
“But yeah, I can relate,” he said. “Sometimes it’s tiring being in your mind. I could see how you might want to get more in touch with your body.”
Fuck. That was creepy. He glanced over at Rona. From what he could see in his peripheral vision, she didn’t look upset or anything, just normal, kind of distant and frowny, like she was thinking hard about something you just wouldn't get.
“You know, the thing about Mi is,” she said. “I don’t get why Stump doesn’t do more with him. The mind has so many capabilities. It can do almost anything.”
“I think he was trying to represent minds in general,” Gavin said. “You know, the normal mind.”
“I guess my mind’s not exactly normal. It’s okay,” she added, as Gavin started to apologize (he didn’t think he had called her abnormal, but just in case). “Creative people don’t want to have normal minds. I mean, like, you don’t want your mind to be normal. Otherwise you wouldn’t be a professor.”
“Graduate student,” he said. “But yeah.”
They rode in silence for a while, staring at nothing worth mentioning, just the flat, gray Indiana landscape, the sparsely falling snow.
Ask her something. But what? They had already talked about The Divine Sharpness. Maybe something about abjection, but he needed to do it in a way that didn’t sound like a quiz.
“Sinder told me,” Rona said, “that he was stressed out about his exams. I thought the DMT might help him take his mind off them.”
Or we could talk about that. At least she brought it up herself this time.
“He could also take a bath or watch a movie. Of course, those might seem kind of pedestrian to you.”
“No, they’re okay,” she said. “Actually I bet the sensory deprivation will be better for stress than all of those.”
“Good, I need it.” Gavin said. “I’m supposed to give a talk on Friday and I haven’t written it yet.”
“Is it about The Divine Sharpness?”
“It could be.” They were driving through Spenser now, where US Route 231 met Indiana State Road 46. You couldn’t switch roads without this detour through town, an oasis of fast food and muffler shops amid miles and miles of empty flat fields. “But I was thinking maybe another play. Maybe this one called No No Not Now.”
“I didn’t read that one yet.”
“You weren’t supposed to. We’re not reading it until the end of the term.”
They were stuck at a red light, in a town that they weren’t even supposed to be in, except that it happened to lie between the other towns he was traveling to and from. He looked over at Rona. Her notebook was in her lap, the same one she scribbled in all through class. She had written the driving directions on an empty page. It was sweet, Gavin thought, so old-fashioned: most of his students would be using the navigation programs on their phones. Actually that’s what he would be doing, if he were directing.
“I’ll probably read it sooner,” she said. “I read Time Slide last weekend.”
Gavin wanted to be annoyed at her reading ahead again, but wow—Time Slide? How could he fault a student who couldn’t stop herself from reading his favorite play a month early?
“Did you like it?”
“It was interesting. What’s No No Not Now about?”
“Huh, let’s see.”
The vicissitudes of the human heart?
Two people hanging from the ceiling?
No, this wasn’t a dinner party. Today there was time to kill. And this was his student, so he didn’t have to worry about boring her with too much Liam Stump talk. “It’s about a husband and wife who don’t get along. They’re hanging in the air, in the middle of the stage, from ropes tied around their wrists. Each one keeps trying to get closer to the other—physically, I mean, like they try to swing themselves around, as a representation of trying to get closer emotionally. But every time, say, the wife tries to move towards the husband, he veers off in some random other direction.”
“That sounds hard to stage.”
“Right,” he said, like he knew what he was talking about. He’d seen a couple productions of it, and yeah, they had looked pretty complicated. He had no idea how they did it, but he guessed anyway. “You need a punch of crazy tracks and pulleys and stuff.”
“Why can’t the couple come together?”
“There are a lot of reasons. No overriding, central problem.”
This conversation was getting a lot better. He was finally starting to feel comfortable, like this was a normal student-teacher interaction, that this car, hurtling through the sleet at fifty miles an hour, was nothing more than a mobile classroom.
“Just a lot of little things,” he said. “I guess partly it’s the typical theme of men and women being fundamentally different. For example, he’s really demanding about the house being perfectly clean. And the two of them haven’t been able to have children. And there are some other things that aren’t exactly said outright but are strongly implied, like the man has this flirtation, maybe an affair, with the wife’s sister. And the wife had a baby out of wedlock that she gave up for adoption, because this is mid-century Ireland and there’s no way you can have an abortion.”
“You still can’t in Ireland.”
“Right.” Did he know that? Probably. “So of course, the man is kind of bitter about the whole adoption thing.”
“Wait.” Rona had been looking out the windshield, as far as he could see, for the entire drive, but now she turned to face him. Without even turning his head, he could feel her accusing gaze on the side of his face. “Why would he be bitter?”
“Because she had another guy’s baby and not his.” Wasn’t that obvious? “And out of wedlock, so I suppose he thinks she’s kind of a slut. That’s not a fair viewpoint, obviously. Anyway, this is all a minor point in the play.”
“It’s a huge point. You don’t just have a baby and give it away like it’s no big deal.”
“Fair enough.” Geez, we don’t need to get in some kind of big feminist debate about it. “Maybe that’s something you can explore in your essay about the play, when we get there.”
“Yeah, maybe.” She didn’t sound too upset. She must be one of those people who just likes arguing. “What are you going to say about it in your talk?”
They passed a road sign: Bloomington 10 miles. The snow was getting thicker, falling in fluffy white lumps. Gavin hoped there wouldn’t be some kind of unannounced blizzard. They seemed to have one like every other week.
“Probably something about abjection. There’s this really abject thing that happens at the end of the play. The husband and wife’s wrists are all shredded up and dripping blood everywhere, because they’ve been moving around so much. Finally the woman’s wrists become so frayed that they snap off, and she falls to the floor. She crawls around and finds her severed hands, and she’s trying to reattach them. That’s how the play ends, with her sitting on the ground, one of her hands between her knees, and she’s trying to reconnect it to her wrist. And her husband is just floating up there above her, watching silently. I’m not sure exactly what it means yet, but something in there is definitely abject.”
“The baby,” Rona said. “The baby was abjected.”
Forget the fucking baby!
She was really over-reading this baby thing. It was like, a tiny point in the play. Basically a single line from the wife: I gave my heart away when I was a girl of seventeen. Don’t tell me it was my decision. Don’t. I was forced. And sometime later her husband says: Oh, it was your decision, it was, and a blight brought on your family.
“Do you mean,” Gavin asked, trying to figure out her reasoning, “because it was ejected from the woman’s life in order to create a societally acceptable narrative?”
“Yeah. Plus isn’t that what the severed hand represents? Her lost child, out there in the world somewhere, growing up without her?”
“No,” Gavin said. “Well, maybe. Normally it’s read as a symbol of her irreparably broken marriage.”
“Oh, normally.”
Was she making fun of him? She said it in a neutral way, just repeating, no judgment. But that had to be sarcastic, right? He wanted to look over and see if she was rolling her eyes or anything, but the snow was pretty thick and he needed to get over. They were coming into Bloomington.
“It’s the first exit,” she said.
Nice interlude!
ReplyDeletea tiny, warm, hurtling class room. But who is the teacher?!
ReplyDeleteShhh, stop verbalizing my subtext.
ReplyDelete