Page 84 of Katabasis
“Elspeth was right,” he said. “We are such idiots.”
“Don’t say that,” said Alice.
“I was alive.” His shoulders shook violently. “I was alive, I washappy,I wasfine, and still I came down here on this stupid errand—”
“It wasn’t stupid.”
“It was completely pointless—”
“We came for Grimes, it was worth it—”
“Oh, shut up, Law.” Peter pressed his palm against his forehead. “Can’t you hear how desperate you sound? All this, just so you could run back and be his favorite—”
“Hisfavorite?”
“That’s your whole thing, isn’t it?” He affected a cruel, high-pitched simper. It was the cruelest she’d ever heard him sound. “Oh, Professor Grimes! You’re soclever, Professor Grimes! Take me to Rome, take me to Venice—I just want to hang off your arm and drink anAperol spritz—”
“Murdoch, stop.” She nearly slapped him. “You don’t know a goddamn thing.”
“Don’t I?” Peter’s eyes were red. “Aren’t you in love with him? Isn’t that the entire point?”
Alice didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. Surely he was joking. But he only kept staring at her with those wet, sad eyes and Alice realized Peter believed what he’d said.
“Ihatethat man,” she said. “When he died, I felt like I could breathe.”
“Then why are you down here?” Peter whispered hotly. “Why onearth—”
“Because it’s my fault.” She loosed a shaky breath. Then said out loud the words she’d swallowed for months, because saying them out loud would make them true, and she did not want them to be true: “I killed him.”
Chapter Twenty
That the academy was sexist was such a boring truism that Alice was no longer disturbed by the fact. When in 1893 the Cambridge University Senate proposed granting full degrees to women, protesting students hung an effigy of a female cyclist at the end of King’s Parade. When the proposal was dropped, the protestors decapitated and tore the effigy apart in celebration. It took nearly another century for all the Oxbridge colleges to admit female students. Magdalene was the last, and only began admitting women the year Alice arrived. On the first day of term, the male students wore black armbands, and the flag was flown at half-mast.
Still, there was a general consensus among the women of Alice’s cohort that feminism was an embarrassing fad, a bygone fever of the seventies. Alice certainly wanted nothing to do with it. She was not interested in reading Kristeva or Irigaray, in comparing everything to a phallus, in altering language to take the “his” out of “history.” She couldn’t stand those screeching activists who believed the only politically just thing was to become a lesbian. Burning bras, trashing dolls, the constant invocation of that scary worddiscrimination—it was all so embarrassing, it felt less like a revolution than a tantrum. It seemed the best way to prove women were not inferior was just to not be inferior.
How hard could that be?
In college, Alice had shared several classes with a girl named Lacey Cudworth, who regularly burst into tears when she felt her classmates argued in a very “male” way with her or insinuated that women were not good logicians. Occasionally Lacey turned to Alice for solidarity, and Alice rebuffed these overtures.Do not come to me, she thought;we are not alike. She thought Lacey gave women a bad name; that her complaints justified everything men believed about women, and that Lacey was focusing her energies on the wrong issues besides. Of course their departments were run by stodgy old men with wandering eyes who thought they were good for little more than producing babies. Those men would be dead and buried soon enough—meanwhile, wasn’t the work fun!
But Alice was not prepared for how astonishingly, indeed comically, bad it could be. In her undergraduate days she’d been shielded from the worst of it by a kind advisor and the fact that, as an undergraduate, she was too insignificant for the big bad wolves to care about. So she was shocked when she arrived at Cambridge to discover that yes, indeed, tenured professors could ask her in company when she intended to get pregnant (hopefully not during her PhD, but ideally before she turned thirty and her womb shriveled); whether she’d started dating in another department yet (this would increase her chances of getting a spousal hire in case she herself could not find a job), and whether she would consider coming to work in a shorter skirt (this would raise morale among the male postgraduates).
It was enough to drive anyone to quit. Certainly it turned most of the women at Cambridge bitter. The beautiful Belinda, so keenly aware of her charms, quickly traded her silk blouses for men’s oxford shirts; though this did not work, and the boys began calling her Axiothea in jest. Katie, a junior faculty member whom Alice sometimes met for coffee, kept her hair shorn close to her scalp, though this backfired as rumors circulated she was a lesbian. Ada and Geraldine simply left the department—and the field, for all Alice knew—the moment they were married and never returned.
Alice, however, was still convinced by the impossible mean—the idea that there might exist some perfect line between femininity and subjugation, wherein if she could only wear clothes that were both perfectly attractive and perfectly modest, she could both enjoy the attention that being a woman in the department got her while also commanding respect as a scholar. The chances this mean existed were vanishingly small, but still Alice clung to this hope. The whole endeavor of graduate study was clinging to vanishingly small hopes. To be a magician was to be that tortoise racing Achilles; deluding himself, as the runner loomed larger behind him, that space and time would hang still so that he might stay ahead.
If anyone had asked Alice whyshe never reported Professor Grimes for any of the things he’d ever said or done to her, she would have explained that there was nothing to report, because it was her fault.
It was her fault, see, because when she first heard that Professor Grimes had a problem keeping his hands to himself around female students, she’d felt a thrill of excitement. Oh sure—she’d professed disgust in public, and then in private wondered if she was pretty enough, delicate and thin enough, to attract that same attention. He likes girls who look like ballerinas, they said; sad, twiggy things with daddy issues. And she went home and held her hair up in a bun at the back of her head, and wondered if she passed muster.
It was her fault because at night, sometimes, she fantasized about his hands on her shoulders, his eyes locked on hers. These fantasies never drifted toward the carnal—it was, in theory, something she wanted; but it seemed wrong, somehow, to defile the magnificence of Professor Grimes, to reduce him to a wanting, sweating body. She could not equate Professor Grimes to those panting, desperate boys she knew from college, who transformed into mere thoughtless animals the moment her hand drifted toward their crotch. What she loved about Professor Grimes was his mind. That knifelike intelligence.
She had no idea what she wanted from their union. She wanted Professor Grimes to devour her. She wanted to be that hunk of flesh in Saturn’s hands. She wanted to become him. She didn’t know which.
Alice wasn’t stupid. She knew that to pursue a relationship with her advisor would jeopardize her career. She’d heard ample warnings from Belinda and Hilary before she ever met Professor Grimes. She made certain never to accept dinner or drinks invitations—she had a boyfriend, she lied airily, she wasn’t available—or to dress too casually or even to ever be alone with him behind closed doors. All tips she had picked up over half a decade of being a woman in the academy.
But oh! How thrilling it was to walk right on that line, to exist in that liminal space between virtue and sin. How her heart fluttered when his gaze landed on her during a lecture; when his lips quirked in approval at some observation she’d made. How she loved being his favorite—Alice’s done it, the rest of you need to be more like Alice.
She knew he found her attractive. She had noticed too many lingering glances, too many hands on her shoulder that stayed much longer than they should have, to remain in doubt whether her professor would sleep with her if given the chance. This knowledge gave her a twisted sense of power, as long as she didn’t act on it. Because she could, shecould; all she had to do was say yes. She knew this was possibly why he’d picked her as an advisee; why he took her along to conferences and research trips. She knew what they said about Professor Grimes behind closed doors, and sometimes to his face. He loves showing up with a pretty girl on his arm. Well, if it was only his arm, that was all right. Favoritism was all right so long as it benefited her.
