Saturday, May 17, 2008
All the rules in the world against romancing students can't explain away the elusive emotions of this vocational hazard.
Dec 3, 1999 | Who ever tells the truth about the libidinous acts that pass between student and teacher? If you brag about it, you look like Henry Miller, and if you agonize about it, D.H. Lawrence. I'm not going to review the whole confounded subject of my relations with female students; I might be investigated. Needless to say, it's a serious occupational hazard when egotistically inclined charismatics lurk in the presence of droves of underexposed maidens. A scene from Greek mythology can't be far behind.
When I was a graduate student R.A. at the University of Michigan, I roomed with another 28-year-old from California on the ground floor of an undergraduate women's dormitory. There I got my first taste of the collegiate love that dare not speak its name. I don't know who planned the arrangement, but girls from little towns in upper Michigan seemed to line up outside our door for their dose of hedonic initiation. Spurts of homework were punctuated by rhythmic groans and shrieks, as Larry and I took turns staying late at the library. As far as I know, none of the girls ever went away unhappy.
But this graduate-undergraduate depravity -- though blessed with a certain irresistible naughtiness -- never approached the scandal of professorial transgressions. Ted, who taught English at my college, told us all about the abyss when he got caught with his proverbial pants down four years ago. We all knew he was living with one of his former students, a sweet little blond woman with three kids. Ted was one of those elliptical, multi-syllabic guys whose rap sent students hustling to the dictionary. He was overweight and balding, and many of my female students berated him for being a lech, but whether it was his faded leather jacket or mocking insouciance, somehow he succeeded in bedding down with Louise.
All went presumably well for a couple of years, until one day the rumor emerged that Ted had been arrested for stalking, among other things. The local paper said that he had been caught hiding outside Louise's house when she reported a prowler, and investigation revealed that Ted had set up a bugging device under her bed and had been listening with earphones under the house. It was a tantalizing image -- mangy Ted, instead of pontificating about "Moby-Dick," hunched over in the dark frantically trying to hear exactly what was transpiring over his head. Even worse: He had received a court order prohibiting him from contact with the woman before he was arrested in flagrante disobedio. And Ted, outlaw of lasciviousness, lifetime example of the transcendence of the id, object lesson to all of us to be more careful in channeling our desire, went to jail.
But even the specter of Ted in jail sipping orange Kool-Aid from a plastic cup wasn't enough to curb my willingness to venture into the dark side of vocational madness. I needed to experience my own dalliances ...
Christine was invisible in the ranks of a humanities class until one day I presented a lecture on the history of modern painting, including a voluptuous print by the Spanish artist Lombarte. In the stack of responses to my query about which artist resonated with students the best, which I was in the process of reading out loud to the class, one essay brought all my blood to my face. "Lombarte, master of sensuousness, catches that moment of ennui and detachment that all beautiful women have either before or after they have deeply satisfying sex. It is a portrait of languid desire."
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