MARVELL'S LOVERS

by
Zsolt Alapi

I.

Ideas came to him in the strangest of places, usually where there were no pencils, pens, or paper, nothing to jot them down with, so, later, they would go stale as memories go stale, and often as incomplete.

Today, for example, he had been struck by a colleague, a fellow college instructor, who had stood in a pose best described as The Aggressive Pisser, hogging two urinals, arms askew, as if defending precious territory. Then, this same person, barely acknowledging his presence, had proceeded to meticulously wash his hands, laboriously, with great attention to each finger and then dry them, all the while blocking the space around the sink that he wanted to get to.

For no reason at all he thought of one of the Sutras, and it came to him like a flash of satori, an insight, in the form of a koan:

THOSE WHO PISS FREELY ARE BETTER LOVERS!

This tautology certainly applied to his colleague, a man on the cusp of 50, a stale marriage, and approaching mid-life crisis, but clean, fragrant hands. He knew it in the way he heard his colleague speak to his students, raising his voice to drown out their questions or observation, secure in his omniscient role.

He himself was different, riddled with doubts, unsure of his answers, even when the students most wanted certainty and reassurance. For he was observing them, observing their youth, the way they sat in his classes, always on the edge of their seats, legs twitching, fingers drumming on desks, eyes wandering surreptitiously to each other’s bodies.

It was their final DANCE before the pressure of university, jobs, the boring routine of adulthood, courtship, marriage, suburbia, success, or lack of it. It was the DANCE OF SEX, although they did not call it such, for this was now the millennium, the time of AIDS where the price of listening to the fever of your hormones was illness or worse.

Because he was a man of compassion, a humanist and an idealist, he wanted to tell them how they were feeling, that it was right to feel these things, that surely the young lady with the graceful arc of a swan’s neck who usually sat in the last row and who dreamily illustrated her notebook not with words of wisdom from his lectures, but with tentative phallic squiggles, was much more interesting to look at or to fantasize about than the staleness of words or ideas.

It was at such times that he wanted to speak to them, not in the ex cathedra mode that students were used to, but as someone who had lived, in fact still was living their doubts and uncertainties, though he was less of a Dancer than a Wallflower at the Dance.

In yesterday’s Introduction to Poetry class, he had labored mightily to communicate to his students the wisdom and power of metaphors. Yet they were afraid of the power and force of the words, so he had set them the task of writing similes and metaphors, but not before his own examples that proved another instance of failed humor.

He had started by introducing two clichés :

“Consider the following simile,” he told them: “Your hair is like silk…now is that an acceptable compliment to a young lady?” Those students who were still awake grudgingly agreed.

“And how about this: ‘Your eyes are like stars’?” Again, there was the drone of assent.

And now: “Your hair is like silk…corn silk.” He paused dramatically, but there was no response. Luckily, he still held his trump card:

“How about this one: ‘Your teeth are like stars…they come out at night’?”

A few students laughed, finally getting it. Others, yawned, and went back to richer daydreams.

During this class, he had made them write their own metaphors, similes and analogies, hoping somehow to bring them under the power and sway of language. When he had collected their contributions, he read out some of their offerings. Most were derivative of the music they listened to, clichés about love, youth, and the angst of dating, but there was one that had struck him as a gem, mainly because the writer had genuinely sweated under the labor of its composing.

It read: “She grew on him like she was a colony of E.Coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.” What could he say about this one? Some students were watching his lips twitch and tremble, as he tried to ward off hysterical, zany laughter. Mercifully, time had run out, and the slamming of notebooks and relieved chatter jarred him into dreaming again.

He knew there were some things that he could never tell to his students, although the telling would perhaps have absolved him, like the story of the woman he had met while he was a student in Europe, quite by accident at an art gallery in Basel, Switzerland where he had gone to view an exhibition of erotic painting. They had literally bumped into each other among the canvasses of massive penises and vaginas and peripatetic, cubist bodies violently coupling in hundreds of configurations. Before a particularly lurid scene of depravity, he felt the soft crush of real woman’s buttocks against his own backside.

“Entschuldigen,” she said, in heavily American accented German.

She was a student of psychology from the University of Chicago, doing postgraduate studies at the Jungian Institute in Zurich. Furthermore, she told him, she had come up to Basel for the day to see this exhibit before the staid Swiss burghers censored it.

“I look at this,” she said somewhat defensively, jutting her rather large breast out further, defying him to look, “and think of some poor prick (she loudly emphasized this word) painting out his puerile fantasies, never having known communion with the Mother.”

“His mother? Then you’re a Freudian,” he ventured.

“No,” she replied impatiently, “the Mother, capital M, Jung’s Anima, what Goethe called the Ewige Weiblich, the Eternal Female, the Goddess,…the….”

Then: “Forget it,” she said, seeing his lips pursed for a reply. Firmly, she turned on her heels and walked off toward a particularly violent painting entitled: “Pastoral Scene: Nymph, Ram, and Shepherd Lad” depicting the dilemma of a wood nymph comparing the huge, bulging organs of her prospective lovers, man and beast.

Love’s sweet, sad labor lost. Again.

II.

Today’s class was on the metaphysical poets. 2:55 on a Friday was a particularly challenging time. Those students who did attend the class had settled into that resigned state of waiting out the hour and fifteen minutes, hoping that their presence would be remembered in his final evaluation. Others stayed away every Friday, and even though his course outline ominously warned that: “Attendance was Mandatory,” students had long ago called his bluff and seen that he was a soft touch.

So it was particularly surprising when the blond with the swan’s neck walked into class five minutes late. She wore a short micro- mini and was all long, bewitching legs, hair, the model’s slump, cool dismissive gaze, and that long, graceful neck. She walked in, and the class froze; the other girls stared at her thinking their own thoughts, the boys thinking theirs, and she coolly looked back at them, acknowledging them, dismissing them, then sat in her usual seat (always magically never taken) and proceeded to file her nails.

He looked at her and at the class and knew that he had lost them, no longer to just their weekend thoughts and boredom, but to her, to the IT of her presence.

Forcing a measure of enthusiasm into his voice, he continued his lecture:

“Now, you may remember from our last class that we had talked about the beginning of Marvell’s argument to his mistress where he sets up a hypothetical world of Arcadian delights. Can anyone tell me how the poet uses irony in the depiction of his slowly rousing passion toward the object of his love?”

Silence.

He continued, prompting: “Now, surely you remember what I said a conceit was?” More silence. Students looked down at their desks, avoiding his eyes, or drew pictures (of him, he wondered?) into their notebooks. She of the swan’s neck continued filing her nails—a Dickensian woman for whom he could all too easily have substituted the nail file for knitting needles.

More silence.

Finally, he sighed and fell back into his safety net.

“What do you make of this issue of irony in the first part of the argument, Linda?” This was addressed to his ninety plus student who always knew the answers, but saved his dignity by refraining to comment until called upon, who was a Future English Major, perhaps someone who would stand one day where he now stood, who would one day learn (too late!) what it was to Suffer, not as idea or literary theme, but as a real, integral part of life.

Titters of laughter ran through the classroom.

“Yes, Linda?” he quarried.

More laughter. She was absent, for the first time all semester; she had also failed him, gone perhaps to her own weekend dreams. They knew. Oh, they knew. The class tittered and looked at their watches, freedom just a short stretch away. Perhaps they were glad, not that he had been embarrassed so much, but that somehow they had been vindicated, that she, Linda, who had made them squirm because of the power of her insights which also made them sense that they could never share in his and her private dialogue, had also left for parts unknown.

Their laughter, which he normally would have shared, for he had the ability to laugh at himself, turned today into anger. Even though he knew why and also knew it was unreasonable, he could not stop himself.

“So, Ms….” Here he had to pause and check his class list. There it was…Cheryl Fine. After thirteen weeks.

“Yes, you, Ms. Fine. It does help if we bring our books, even better, if we read the material. Anyway, never mind. All right then. Do you have a book now? Goood. So. What about the next passage, right after where we stopped on Wednesday? What do you think the poet means by the line: ‘My vegetable love will grow’?”

No answer.

“Yes, Ms. Fine?”

“Maybe he’s talking about growing a cucumber.”

A miracle. These were the first words she had spoken in his class the entire semester. Lucky for her there was a 5% mark for class participation. But today he could not let it go, as he knew he should have done even as he spoke:

“And why, pray tell, that noble vegetable, Ms. Fine?”

No reply. She was truly embarrassed now, her cool and composure gone. She turned to the boy next to her, Jason, a B student, he of the flaming zits, and whispered something rapidly to him. Jason blushed, redder than marinara sauce.

“Actually, Ms. Fine, you have made a most astute observation. “Vegetable love” implies fertility, ergo sexuality.” He now turned to the entire class. “A cucumber, as your sensitive peer so accurately pointed out, is the most phallic of vegetables. It grows and grows like other things we know and cherish. Still confused? Then how about this one: you have probably all heard from your parents Mae West’s famous line? No? Well, let’s rewrite it from the metaphysical perspective: ‘Is that a cucumber in your pocket, big boy, or are you just happy to see me?’ And that, ladies and gentlemen is what is known in poetry as an extended conceit. Thank you.”

She rose, glaring at him, grabbed her purse, and walked quickly out the door slamming it. Twenty pairs of eyes followed her, seven of them, at least, lovelorn, one pair particularly so (Jason would always remember today, for she had spoken to him! The evening scrubbing with the Clearasil would take on a special poignancy henceforth!) Twenty pairs of eyes avoided his as he stared at the door.

Goodbye, Cheryl Fine, goodbye at least on Fridays. Goodbye, Ms. Oh-so-Fine.

III.

She had given him the Withering Gaze before slamming the door. The Withering Gaze is the female sex’s most powerful weapon (or, at least one of the most powerful). He had seen it often in his own life, perhaps a testament to his own failed relationships.

He had seen it on Maria’s face the day she had packed her bags and left forever. He saw it on the faces of the young girls watching the silly antics of the boys who wrestled and punched each other to get their attention. He had seen it on the face of the feminist critic who sat in the audience, skirt jacked up almost to her hips, as he labored over his paper delivered at the Learned Society’s Spring Conference on the topic of “Phallic Inclusion in the Poems of Sylvia Plath”.

And he had seen it on the face of the female Swiss train conductor who smugly slammed the train door in his face as the passenger cars pulled out of the station at precisely 6:07 on the way to Zurich and Innsbruck. This was when he realized that the Gaze was not exclusively at him, for it was also directed at a woman who had similarly missed her train and dropped her luggage in frustration on the empty platform.

He looked toward her to commiserate and saw that it was the American student of psychology he had met earlier at the art gallery. A Jungian might have called this moment synchronicity.

She saw him also and recognized him, but there was less hostility in her voice now as she spoke to him:

“The Swiss—a bunch of goddamn anal-retentives!”

He agreed. They cursed the Swiss a bit more, agreeing that the only good things about the country were the mountains, the chocolate, and the porcelain bidets in even the cheapest hotel rooms.

The last train had left for the day.

In a café over schlagobbers and strudel, both bad imitations of their Austrian counterparts, he asked her what she planned to do. It was Friday night, and the burghers of Basel were streaming home for the weekend.

“Find a room I suppose, although I hardly have any money left. Do you think one hundred fifty francs will buy me anything in this town?”

“Not even close,” he replied. And then, “Do you have a Eurail pass?”

“Of course. Why?”

He took a chance. “There’s a slow train that goes to Lucerne that leaves at eight p.m. Then, you change for Bern at two in the morning and arrive in Interlaken at six tomorrow. You know, that’s where the mountain is, the Jungfrau…it means ‘the Virgin’…

“I know what it means.” She looked at him, through him. For a moment the innuendo hung in the air, winked once, and was gone. “Let’s go.” She almost smiled.

IV.

The class had come mercifully to an end. They had stopped at the crucial point of the second part of the poet’s argument to his mistress, the part where he threatens her with the tomb. It was one of his favorite lines:

“And worms shall try thy long preserved virginity.”

One of his students had actually gasped as he read it out to the class.

“Gross,” he heard her say. The students filed out past him, chattering to each other amiably, off to their dreams and the weekend. No one bothered to say goodbye to him.

It was the last class of the day at the college. He turned off the lights in the room and sat down in the chair by the podium, staring out at the spring sun fading over the city. And remembered.

They had been awake and traveling for over six hours and had just finished their fourth Tuborg apiece with cheese, bread, and chocolate. The final stop was at Grindelwald where they had to change to the cog-wheeled railroad cars for the final climb to the Jungfraujoch. In the thin spring air outside of the train station, they heard the deep boom of an Alpenhorn.

The climb up the Joch was slow, and the beer and thin air had made them light-headed and giddy. At the top, they ran around and stumbled like children in the pure snow, seeing only the peaks stretch out infinitely toward the horizon, and later, inside the mountain through the glass windows that looked down into the precipices, they saw the smashed carcasses of birds that the wind had buffeted against the glass. On the way down, they slumped into their chairs, gasping from the lack of oxygen, and screamed with laughter as they saw trainloads of light-headed Japanese tourists all huddled together, asleep, looking as if they were comatose, pass on their way up to the peak, their Nikons, Leicas, and Cannons dangling from their shoulders.

Down in Interlaken they wandered the streets leading out from the main square toward the hills, killing time, barely awake, holding hands. He saw the sign first: “Zimmer Frei”. An old Swiss lady answered the door and looked at them suspiciously as he asked her about the rates for a room in his best Hohdeutsch. Finally, she led them in and showed them the room and asked for their passports. She stared at the two different colors and, after an eternity asked:

“Sind Sie verheiratet? Are you married?”

Later, they fell on the bed together, laughing, unable to stop. Finally, out of breath, he recited to her his favorite passage from Keats:

“Thou still unravished bride of quiet.”

“I’m dead,” she answered. “Let’s sleep. We can fuck in the morning.” She leaned over and kissed him perfunctorily. “And remember…I demand an orgasm!” A feminist to the end.

V.

The point of it all, he had wanted to tell his class, was passion. Youth. And Death. There was, of course, Death, which gave flavor to it all. Marvell was a young man in the prime of life who knew the poignancy of “Time’s winged chariot”. Above all, he was someone who, purely and simply, wanted to get laid, but knew the secret of making lust poetic under the rubric of love.

Of course the poem had humor, and the students laughed when he pointed out the obvious lines. It didn’t really matter if the intention was purely rhetorical, for by the time you finished the poem, it had all gone beyond the loss and even transcended the mistress herself, leaving only the magnificent words to do battle with the forces of Time.

It was his own face mirrored in the window, reflected back to him, that woke him from his reverie. How gray he had gotten! There was the start of a middle- aged spread. Dandruff. More.

“Carpe diem,” he had told them earlier. Seize the day.

And they had, his students. Gone to their weekends, leaving him to his, to languish in the slow-chapped power of memories.

© Zsolt Alapi
Reproduced with permission

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