"Patronage"

taking revenge on academia: a short story

In addition to my regular Friday book review and Sunday weekly newsletter, I am introducing a Wednesday post for Fall 2022. Wednesday posts will contain the creative writing I’ve published elsewhere, whether in a now unused Medium account or in literary journals that have either vanished or that paywalled my work years ago.

[The following story has never appeared online before. It was published only in print in Five 2 One magazine in 2016, which means most of my audience has never read it. I consider it part of a cycle of published and unpublished stories from the last decade under the unofficial heading “Ruins of Academe.” In this one, a student from the working class lured to the economic dead-end of the academic humanities by a charismatic professor comes back to kill her in vengeance at the Santa Monica Pier. It’s evidently very funny—“evidently” because the audience laughed at all the right parts when I once read it in public. Please enjoy!]

Patronage

What should you wear to commit murder? I had unfortunately taken it to be a somewhat formal occasion. It seemed ridiculous to draw a gun, to cry vengeance, to rob the world of a soul, all in shorts and tennis shoes, like someone headed out around the corner to buy a gallon of milk. So I had put on a white silk shirt—open at the collar; I wasn’t going to a wedding, after all—and a black jacket and black dress slacks and shiny long black shoes with soles smooth as marble. The jacket had a small inside pocket that snugly held my .38 revolver, sans serial number, purchased from a second cousin on my absent father’s semi-estranged side of the family. I would follow the professor to her house, the exterior of which I had already viewed online from the top and all sides: a sleek modernist bungalow, small but splendid, in a canyon in Echo Park, with some kind of reddish sand-colored sculpture on the pebble garden below the deck, a huge figure among the yucca and cypress, all leg and arm and head reclining à la Henry Moore, whom I knew to be a favorite of the professor’s. Were I the sculptor, I would call it Thought in Repose. Being a former student, I would be welcomed in. I might even allow her to treat me to a cognac and lemonade or something akin; I might pace alongside her bookshelves while she sat and sipped her drink, pulling down this volume and that, drawing her views, about which I have long been curious, on this or that writer. “Where are you on Saul Bellow—I hear he’s out of favor? Can you recommend me a translation of Stendhal?” But eventually, as the afternoon elongated, maybe when I was seemingly on my way out the door, after she had given me a formal embrace and kissed me European style, I would draw my revolver and shoot her dead. Blood would run in the parquet channels until her foyer, if she had a foyer, was geometrically saturated. I would say, probably after I’d shot her, “This is for misleading me. This is for making me think I could create a life out of what you taught me.”

But after the long adventure of trying to follow her tiny silver Japanese car across mind-numbing miles of freeway from her campus parking lot, I knew that my plan would have to take a different shape as we approached Santa Monica. Was she going to visit a relative or lover? Was she going to a specialty store? I followed her car into the parking garage, remaining inconspicuously distant but always behind. I parked and watched, waiting for her to get out of her car. She took a strangely long time in exiting. Then I saw why: she had left the campus in her pedagogical uniform of white linen blouse, black pants, and black boots with gold buckles on the sides, but she got out of the car in a sarong with a wide-brimmed, bow-decorated straw hat and girlish floral-print canvas sneakers. Moreover, she carried a raffia bag stocked for the beach. When I quickly climbed out of my car, I saw that a bestselling thriller—some trash about a serial killer and an intrepid heroine traveling through time—bobbed jauntily with the sunscreen atop the rolled towel. I really wanted to shoot her then. She was going to the beach—very well, I would kill her on the beach. I had a respectable literary precedent for that. I would accuse her of corrupting my life in full view of the people, and they would applaud me for my citizenly execution of this most unworthy steward of the public trust. Her blood would stiffen the wind-rifled, sand-dusted pages of her beach novel. You wanted murder and sensationalism, professor? I will provide.

I trailed her carefully out of the parking garage, across a nondescript street or two, and then onto the Promenade, where she stopped to listen to a busking harpsichordist—o tempora! o mores! must all the gracious arts go begging?—who furrowed her prodigy’s brow under Pre-Raphaelite curls as she built Bach’s crystal cathedral in the California air until the professor giddily applauded and stuffed a twenty-dollar bill into the grinning jack-o’-lantern bucket the young musician had stationed in front of her instrument.

Following her along Ocean Avenue proved more difficult. Summer was nearing its terminus, and I would lose her in the milling dog-day crowds—didn’t these people have jobs? I am unemployed, I thought, and you don’t see me at the beach. Except that day, of course, but it was hardly my choice, and I did not look as if I belonged. Dizzied in the sunscreen miasma, I would lose her in the herd, and then I would have to run to catch up, elbowing adolescent girls out of their plastic sandals, startling them so that they swallowed their bubble gum. Ever the prophet without honor, I wanted to cry out, “Sunscreen causes skin cancer! Don’t you fools read the Internet!” My dress shoes scraped loudly over the concrete; I was a breathless mess of sun-blotted, sweating flesh. I saw my dripping face in some teenybopper’s shades as she smiled her orthodontia smile and said slowly, “Mister, you are way the fuck overdressed.” A gaggle of girls giggled, but eventually I managed to follow the professor off the street and down to the beach, over which the gulls wheeled and called.

There my troubles worsened. Shiny smooth-soled dress shoes slide on sand, yes they do. I shambled like a clammy, clumsy monster over the miniature dunes, my feet alternately sinking and slipping. The professor, barefoot now, walked with the grace of a beach-reared child, her slim shoulders held back with poise, her Roman nose pointed out over the blue distance. Then she chose a spot where she could lie down and lose herself in her stupidly intricate murder tale. I would have to shoot her in the middle of the beach, among all these gabbing, running children. Well, that would be a lesson to them: do not trust your teachers. 

And then, approaching her in my halt way, I went down. My shoes slid back, both at once, and I hit my hands and knees like the bathetic beast I was, my palms rug-burned. The revolver leapt out from my inside pocket and came to rest under the nose of a child, prone on a towel and playing a video game. The kid went wide-eyed: there seemed to be fear in one eye and excitement in the other, as if his no doubt violent game had raised itself around him and supplanted the mundane. He lifted his eyes to mine; I put my index finger to my lips. Unaccountably, he laughed, media-inured, I supposed, to menace. I retrieved the gun, replaced it in my pocket, and then I began to crawl. My jacket and pants sand-streaked, my hair plastered with sweat and crusted saltwater-breeze to my forehead, my silk shirt untucked and missing its top buttons, I scuttled over the sand toward the professor.

She turned and saw me. I’m not sure whether she failed to remember me or if I merely registered to her as some fleshly humanoid crustacean clawing its way at her out of the primordial sea. In any case, she let go of the towel she had been in the act of spreading; it caught the wind like the proverbial Arabian carpet and sailed from her in undulations that showed the shape of the air. She resourcefully took up her beach bag and ran, a hand pressed to the crown of her hat. Without a backward glance she made for the pier itself, her motions easeful, those of a seasoned runner, mens sana in corpore sano. She took the stairs to the pier two at a time, parting the people in front of her with a kind of breast-stroke, her tender unshod bourgeois soles splinter-pierced like the torso of St. Sebastian. 

Once I reached the solid ground of the stairs, I gathered myself upright like an amphibian becoming a hominid in the old evolutionary charts. My shoes met the built ground of civilization they had been made for, and in a mere minute of chase—past tourists too absorbed in their phone photography to notice anything amiss, past bored tchotchke vendors, past the amusement park, past the hippodrome—I had forced the professor to the end of the pier. She had her back to the entirety of the ocean, her breathless chest rising and falling with the regular rhythm of the waves below. Facing her at twenty paces, I put my hand inside my jacket and clutched the gun. And then the professor leaned forward and hissed, so that the sound traveled in a sort of siphon between us and reached my ears alone, “Stop it this instant, you witless boy.”

I unclenched my fingers, removed my hand from my pocket, and walked toward her. She turned her back to me, and I stood next to her at the parapet. We rested our hands on the sun-warmed metal and spoke without looking at each other. Our words drifted, weightless, out to the hazy line where blue layered itself on blue.

“I don’t remember your name,” she said, “but your face I do know.”

I started to tell her my name, but she sliced her hand along the turquoise horizon line to shut me up.

“That hardly matters. Now, then, explain yourself, darling.”

But the gun had been meant to speak for me; without its brimstone explosion, its chastening blast, I had only the words of ressentiment to express in a querulous tone. Your class, spring semester, junior year, made me feel like I was encountering for the very first time in my life the secret language from which all earthly languages are mere translations. In flashes I had perceived some glimmer, some glamour, between the sentences of even inadequate authors. But from you I also learned to settle for no inadequate authors. For you—for the reading list you posted on the course website at semester’s end—I spent two years poring, in chronological order, over Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Ovid, Augustine, Dante, Cervantes, Milton, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Proust, Joyce. 

I worked in the university kitchen after I graduated, grease steam hazing my glasses and coating my sinus, just to remain closer to the books, to the university library, to your office, as volume-walled and totem-haunted as Freud’s. There was a maintenance closet in the kitchen; I would lock myself in every chance I got, to read by the jaundiced light of an unshaded bulb. They caught me once, my coarse co-workers, they said, “Hey, man, you beating off?” and I said, “No, barbarians, I am reading Moby-Dick!” 

“Off to beat his moby-ass little dick,” they would say from that day forward if I so much as approached the closet to get another carton of plastic forks for the students. But I endured it because I knew I would be applying to graduate school; I knew I would someday have an office like yours. 

And when I told you, the year after I graduated, during a fifteen-minute appointment I had made to see you in your office, when I told you that you were the reason I had changed my major from business to comparative literature, that my mother threatened disinheritance in her ever-broken immigrant’s English, that my brothers and cousins derided me, that you had for all intents and purposes—remember when I wrote “for all intensive purposes” on my first essay and you corrected me with such witty brutality: “Your acquaintance with the English language is rather less intensive than it might be”?—taught me how to read as you perched in your Indian print skirt on the edge of your desk, your falling-apart (intensively read) Paradise Lost balanced on your stocking-clad knees, its pages splaying out, saying, “These wide margins around the poem make you feel the weight of the words, as if they were chiseled on a rock face,” saying, “Criticism is allowing the text to speak”—when I told you all that, when I explained my situation, when I asked you for a letter of recommendation, and you said, “My God, you are Jude the Obscure,” I took it as a blessing.

I had read your books, after all, and while the studies of poetry were as impersonal as you insisted our criticism had to be, I could read between the sentences of the acknowledgements page. I knew you were just like me, from the “back of beyond,” as you once put it, that you must have spent months or years at Oxford cooling your Antipodean drawl until it was as sharp as English crystal.  You had done it too, had been liberated into thought, out of mere squalid locality—out of your spawning ground and into the wide ocean. At the end of the semester, you had illicitly collected final papers in a bar off-campus. I had a beer and you had a bourbon, and you told me about your divorce, and you said, “Oh Christ, I wish I could smoke.”

And after six years I was shut out. I had gotten into graduate school, with the immigrant’s künstlerroman that was my application letter and with, for my writing sample, the final essay I had submitted in your course, “‘Jug Jug to Dirty Ears’: Ovid’s Birds in Eliot’s Waste Land”—the one you said had allowed the text to speak. I had gotten in, and never mind that I never met such ignorant people as I met in graduate school, people who couldn’t spell Aeneid or pronounce Goethe, people who watched TV all day, who seemed to want to write a pilot or be in a band. Never mind that, but there was no future in it, no jobs, no positions, no possibilities. Why didn’t you tell me? Like Jude the Obscure, indeed, I was barred from the free world of culture, though he had not endured the indignity of actually getting a Ph.D. So, doctor, call me doctor, and look into the barrel of my gun. What should I do now, professor? Return on bended knee to my mother? Go to work in my cousin’s restaurant? Live on the street I came from until my dying day when maybe a few lines of poetry will return to me, the ravished nightingale’s song in the begrimed ear? Well, no, that would be a humiliation too far. I resolved to take my own life, but you had lied to me, had made me believe that certain portals would open to me when in fact every door was barred to my Caliban face. So I would kill us both, professor: I would stain your gorgeous sleek house, and our blood would mingle in the parquet channels; we would be equal at last in death. But you had to ruin it by coming to this beach with your trashy paperback bestseller, your lies and more lies and ever more lies. Now we would make a mess in front of the children. So why are we here, professor, why are we standing over the Pacific on the afternoon of the first day of the fall semester, the first day of class, the day I appointed to shoot you dead?

She said, “It is an annual ritual. I stand on the pier and look west, and I think of how far I have traveled. I think my gaze goes right through space, anticlockwise round the world, running time back, and meets the hapless, hopeless girl I was fifty years ago on the beaches of Botany Bay.”

After I had explained myself, in words so much more halting, so much more frightened and less eloquent—so much less intensive—than what I have written here, she asked me to pass her the revolver discreetly. I did so. Just as discreetly, she rapped its butt with stunning pain on my hairline and then slipped it into her beach bag, next to the silly murder book. I slumped against the rail, a twinkling at the rims of my vision, the blood starting to run in a thin stream. She helped me out of my jacket, which I bunched against my wound. My white shirt reddened.

“You poor stupid bastard,” she said. “You are far too sensitive. I should have you sent to prison just to toughen you up. Only a fool brings a gun to a contest of wits.”

Her voice sounded far away, caught in the gulls’ cries.

“But you show a certain spirit,” she continued, musing. “The great ones were crazed and foolish, to be sure. A handful were not above violence, even murder. Suicides were a dime a dozen. ‘And each man kills the thing he loves.’ Many students have written superb final essays and gone on to graduate study, but you are the first to return to murder me. It makes me consider that you might in fact be above the common run. Marked out, as it were. And after your pathetic tale, I can hardly send you back to your vulgar mother, to a grease-walled kitchen, can I?”

I kept my head down, my back shuddering. She steadied it with one hand.

“I have in any event had a falling out with my domestic assistant. My daughter, newly-divorced, is coming from London to lie in for her pregnancy. It is crucial that I have help at this time, given all these stresses on top of the semester’s beginning and my recent manuscript’s coming due. And when you are through helping me each day, you may study, you may write. As long as you earn your keep.” She laughed to herself. “From beach rat to patron. I have traveled.”

I straightened up, jacket still bunched to my bleeding scalp. I must have looked to be weeping blood from one eye. A child took my picture with his phone. We retraced our steps along the pier, arm in arm, moving slowly on account of my dizzied head and her tender feet. Her heavy bag rustled with every step.

She whispered to me as we walked, lips grazing my ear, to the eyes of the public an over-affectionate mother: “I will have this gun on my person or on my daughter’s person at all times. I do not believe you to be dangerous, merely oversensitive. It’s not everyone who conceives a plan such as yours, which is why I offer you this opportunity. But if you are ever so foolish again, you will be shot down like the junkyard dog you do not wish to be.”

And now, my life today: 

With a toothbrush I clean the channels of the parquet floor in the foyer. I scrub out the toilet bowl and wipe behind the seat with a bleach-sprayed cloth. I scrape the grout, I cleanse the tub. I carry the dirty clothes into the laundry room, and I carry the clean clothes out. I iron the sheets, I make the beds. I chop the vegetables and prepare the raw meat so that the scene is set for the professor’s command performances in the kitchen. I do the dishes when dinner is done. I take the garbage out, down a steep stretch of cracked canyon sidewalk to the curb. I dust the bookshelves, and she doesn’t mind—much—that it takes me some time, because I always fall to reading, both the printed texts and her neat cursive marginalia. 

In the nearly bare bungalow attic, where I have been granted an air mattress and a child’s school desk under the low-sloping roof, I write into the night—this reminiscence, for one thing. On my phone’s tinny speakers, I quietly stream music light as an ocean breeze: Mozart, Vivaldi. My room faces east; I am woken by the sun. I write looking out over the night landscape, over the inspiriting moonlit contours of Thought in Repose.

After her daughter arrived, the professor asked me to eat in the kitchen while they took their meals in the dining room. But her daughter, while sweet and worldly, is without intellectual interest. The professor tired of her London gossip, of her banal politics, of her mooning over her civil servant ex-husband who never did make enough money. She invited me to dine with them one evening. The daughter eyed me warily in the candlelight as the professor and I discussed the Protagoras and The Tempest over the coq au vin. I have had a standing invitation to dinner ever since. Even the sweet, insipid, spoiled daughter has begun to find me indispensable. 

I do manicures, I do pedicures. I rub coconut oil into the fructifying furrows of the girl’s domed belly.