"The Undergrad" and "My Fabulous Analyst"

[Kate Rounds]

The Undergrad           

A novel by Kate Rounds

 

“You’re not alone when someone thinks they can see your mind.”—Eileen Myles

 

“… The heart itself is beyond control….”—Chitra Banerjee

 

1

 

Walking to work, I have this propulsive urge not to arrive at my destination, as if strong winds or heavy baggage were slowing me down. I’m a fledgling adjunct in the Department of English and Language Arts of Saint John’s Community College across the Hudson River from Lower Manhattan.

In the hero’s journey, you eventually do get to your destination, but in real life, failing to arrive is not such a bad thing. You might be saving yourself from something you think you want like a person or an outcome, a popular word these days. Words are becoming more general, less specific, thus to avoid triggers or jail time.

The outcome I’m trying to avoid is a hackneyed one: succumbing to the wiles and allures of one’s students, though I’ve lectured my students to avoid tropes and clichés.

My photo ID, hanging around my neck, gives me carte blanche to go anywhere in this eager, heroic institution. I wait in the library until class starts, observing students, pigeon-toed, schlepping confidently with their laces untied or in the basement where they’re jolted awake by sodas avalanching from the vending machine.

I spot my student, Bella, looking as if she’s bought new clothes on the way to school. Hair pulled so tightly it stretches her already spanking skin, eyes plastic black, she sketches in class. Her beautiful, bald, hooped-eared women sport dots and scars, all the failures of their sequestered flesh.

Ten minutes before class, the hallways are packed with students. “Professor Kate!” They’re not allowed to touch, so Aph, short for Aphrodite, passes on the left like I’m driving too slowly and then walks backward in front of me.

“I’m going to miss class today,” she informs me.

“Why?” I’ve already let my backpack slide to one shoulder.

“Meeting with Financial Aid.”

“They can’t meet with you when you’re not in class?”

“I don’t want to fuck up my student loan.”

I apparently exude some kind of doting-godmother vibe that makes Aph intuit that fuck is an okay word for her to use with her professor. Her youthful affect is wrapped in a mature body, matronly even, by society’s standards, too much wonderful flesh, a navel-pierced belly exposed above her elastic waistband.

“Financial aid, they hold the purse strings,” she tells me.

She’s filched this from Intro to Ecco. She knows I’m going to say yes. I let her off the hook; I say yes to everything. “Post your paper today, though.”

She salutes and ambles toward the elevator; she’s in no hurry. Her body is slow, her mind quick.

The thing about Aph is that she will post her paper today, at exactly 11:59 p.m. I save Aph’s paper for last the way some people savor their special dishes, licking the bowl or swiping their plates with the last gasp of the baguette.

 

2 

 

I live on a boat at Mermaid Marina on the Jersey side of New York Harbor. Our view is of the World Trade Center, rising like an obelisk across the river. Everything on this side is Liberty This and Hudson That, in honor of our French gift and English explorer.

It’s hereabouts that Henry Hudson spots a mermaid, naked from the waist up, long dark hair partially covering her breasts, tail of a porpoise, scales iridescent.

Henry is prosaic, even anatomical, in his ship’s log: “Swimming close to the ship’s side, she looked up at us. From the navel up, her back and breasts were like a woman’s. When she dove under the water, we saw her tail, like the tail of a porpoise.”

I’m the one who adds iridescent.

My boat’s called the Daisy II, the name she’s been given when I buy her from a salvager on City Island; it’s bad luck to rename a boat. My plan is to introduce my students to Fitzgerald’s Great American Novel, and so I naively believe the name to be serendipitous.  

It’s an old wooden lobster boat, which I’ve acquired because of its wistful evocation of home, a fishing village on Boston’s South Shore.

She has no engine. I’m living on a boat, not because I want to sail off into the sunset but because I love saltwater with its fresh seasoning and primordial bones. The boats themselves offer the spareness that pleases me. I remind my students of Mark Twain’s advice for letters and for life: “If I’d had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”

I’m in my fifth year of living on a boat. Friends and family give me six months, not knowing that it would also be the boat people themselves who keep me here, their quirks and kindnesses, which sneak up on you when you most need them; they’re slightly adrift in our world. Most are obliviously unmoored in some way, palpably, like they’re suddenly alone or without cash. Or covertly, like they’re roiling beneath the surface.

I’m neither, which plays into my inclination to observe and to narrate.

I also have a pulling boat that’s tied to the float. Pulling boat: Propelled by oars alone. Yes, it’s a rowboat, but pulling is more poetic; heartstrings and legs can be pulled. Rowing is just rowing, though no less romantic for it.

I’ve christened her Myrtle after my mother who’s named for the ornamental hedge plant. Not lost on me is that it’s also the name of Tom Buchanan’s tragic mistress who comes to a bad end at the hands of the amoral aristocrats she so envies. Only later do I learn that the myrtle plant is also sacred to Aphrodite.

Frank Fuller has painted Myrtle on the wineglass transom. Like most creative types, he can’t live off his art, so his day job is managing Mermaid Marina and RV Park. He dresses like an unhoused person who’s just this second found himself on the street. My students and I talk about trends in words as if they were hemlines; homeless is derogatory. No one should be less. Less and un have the same diminishing quality. Why would you want to be either?

Frank’s day job puts him in the orbit of people whose lives are worth watching, like mine. He thinks I’m hurtling toward the abyss, and just as he keeps boats from sinking at the dock and bilges filling with water, he tries to navigate me away from bad choices.

“How was your day?” we ask each other, like we’re married. He can tell by what I leave out that with my star student I’m touching a hot stove, nothing more, at least for now.

I regale Frank on my favorite undergrad’s intelligence and “perspicacity,” as if Frank won’t—through my very lacunae—fill in the gaps, picturing an irresistible mélange of excess- everything: my Achilles heel.

 

3

 

At age 40, I’m a rookie, so new that the first time I hear “Professor!” rising above the din of the hallway, I don’t even turn around. The students scrumming in front of the open door are bigger than when I was in college, tall, jangling, hope-filled or just biding their time.

A light hand on my shoulder. “Prof,” Aph says. “Sorry, I know we’re not allowed to touch.” Women students flout this rule; men never do.

It’s up to me to determine a judicious balance between chumminess and glorified professorship. With Aph, it seems that I am tipping the scale toward the former.

Buried in a footnote in the Campus Life Guidelines like radioactive waste is the reminder that in the state of New Jersey, “the age of consent is raised to 18 if the older partner is a parent, guardian, sibling, a relative closer than a 4th cousin, or an individual with some authority over the younger party (for example, a teacher or the victim’s boss).”

The itals are not mine. The author of the campus guidelines wants the information both buried and accentuated in the ever so unlikely event that an employee at Saint Jack’s would even countenance such a relationship.

 “You didn’t hear me calling you?” Aph says.

“There are a lot of Profs.” I look up at her.

Aph glances over her shoulder. “I don’t see any other Profs.”

“What can I do for you, Aph?”

The classroom is on the fourth floor of Lafayette Hall. The reason I never run into Aph on the stairway is that she takes the elevator because she has “health issues,” a bit of intel she’s shared with me on the first day.

“I didn’t know there was an elevator,” I tell her.

She laughs. “How could you not know there’s an elevator, when it’s right in plain sight, and besides, what if you have a physical disability, like you can’t walk or you can’t breathe, or whatever.”

Today, Aph informs me that she’s going to be late. This lateness is like chainmail. My students wear it for protection. It empowers them.

“We’re both going to be late if we don’t get a move on,” I tell her.

“I love that, ‘get a move on.’ Is that from a movie?”

She’s right. It sounds like a line from a bad Western.

“It’s adorable,” she says.

We’re now almost alone in the hallway, so the word echoes.

“When and why will you be late?”

“For class tomorrow. I have an appointment with Health Services. I just wanted to let you know.”

“Email me your excuse, Aph.”

“Of course. I don’t want to be marked absent. We’re allowed six unexcused absences.”

The first time I lay eyes on Aph, we’re standing in line at Enrollment Services. She is there, if I hear correctly, to discuss a loan deferment, I to get my ID. She’s in front of me. I take stock of her only because she’s a human I’ve never seen before, not because she occupies any particular place in my universe.

Her russet hair is pigtailed, two in the normal place, and one babyish, festive one sticking straight up from her crown like a shaving brush. She’s definitely womanly, not still girlish like others posing in line or strung horizontally and inconsiderately with their friends across the footpaths.

My reason for being here is pretty straight forward—name, rank, and serial number—until we get to the part where they shoot my mugshot. At this point, I realize that Aphrodite—the registrar has repeated this astonishing name—has not hurried out of the building to join her newfound friends or to idle in the courtyard, angling against the walls.

“Professor,” she says. “Can I help?”

Help? Probably. She seems confident and capable, but I ask anyway, “With what?”

“The photo, that’s where things can go south. I noticed you standing behind me, they might fuck you up, make you look like you committed a crime.”

A spiked and friendly student has been assigned to shoot the photos. He doesn’t seem like someone who would want to accentuate my worst qualities. (long nose, terrible profile). “Smile!”

Aphrodite positions herself between me and the horrible camera’s eye. “Delete that,” she instructs the student. “Don’t make her wait. Catch her by surprise.”

He does, and the photo is better than most. I look younger. The smile is not plastered on like a band aid. I look open, and welcoming, as if I want students to come to my class and purloin what they will from me.

“Skin,” Aphrodite says, and I hold out my palm for the locker-room hand-slap she offers, though there’s nothing athletic about her.

“Get a lanyard for that,” she advises, eyeing my new ID. “See you around.” 

Around being in my class.

 

My Fabulous Analyst

A Genre by Kate Rounds

 

For you

 

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures—Ralph Waldo Emerson

  

Come in.

 

And there you are, smiling, your two, well-chosen words escaping from your lip-glossed mouth. You’ve selected them just for me because, though you validate all your patients, you validate me more. I’m your star student, more uniquely pathological than all your other patients. Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, you walk into mine, my singularly unquiet mind.

I deconstruct you, limb by limb, skin by skin. Your voice, like mine, is incarnate because I’ve listened to it, disembodied, only on the phone as you’ve been out of town until now. It’s soothing, occasionally even wisecracking, and of course, most important, silently controverting me, and waiting patiently for me to right myself.

You’ve learned to squelch any compulsions to ask how I feel, substituting how I think because you know the former will register as a cliché, which my vocation forbids, and you perceive me to be someone who thinks, overthinks in fact, so you are cautious because this can exacerbate the disorder that has brought me so agitatedly to you in the first place.

You ask me if you can get me anything, eyeing the mini-fridge.

Beer?

You smirk and toss me the smallest possible bottle of Poland Spring. I catch it expertly in one hand. That tossing of the water bottle could be a test of the hand-eye coordination I’ve been bragging to you about, but I take it as the flirtatious opening that it most certainly must be.

Anyway, I’m not here for my body. I’m here for my mind. Correct?

Touché, you say and write something in your notebook, open on your lap, your pen one of those designer numbers with a logo and a special carrying case.

I pan the room. Standard-issue shrink. You’re sitting on a chair that looks to be a fake of something you’d find at the MOMA design wing. Eames? Wassily? I, on the other hand, am sitting on a loveseat in scratchy gray fabric.

The bookshelves are more for objects than for books. I peg them as gifts from your other patients, a crystal unicorn, a card open like an Advent calendar. I suspect you might be religious, though you never specifically say that you are. Your diplomas are in full view as if I would ever think of you as a fraud masquerading as a board-certified psychotherapist and family counselor.

August is listlessly concluding outside your window, refusing to be here or there, liminal, slowly braising the grass; long gone are the summer’s day, the rarest day in June, instead dead leaves whispering the walkways.

A van with a logo on the side is parked nearby. A woman exits the van, overalls, heavy bag over one shoulder. Exterminator? Plumber? HVAC? She is so much more to me than I am to her. She doesn’t know I exist, but I’ve built a story to bolster her existence.

You pull me back, remarking, It’s good to see you in person.

I of course wonder what you might have been imagining.

I’m dressed to kill: brand new sneakers, skintight jeans, thin hoodie, which is a style I’ve made my own. I’ve bulked up to the extent I am able with a few reps of the hand weights. You eye me in a way that strikes me as adept, a brisk head-to-toe assessment as if I were for sale. No, not for sale, on sale, as if I were overstock or a book on remainder.

I’m being too negative. Your eyes are searing actually. You penetrate into the deep, carnal heart of me.

And I you, I say.

Your eyebrows arch.

It’s good to see you in person, I clarify, my tone miles below what I actually feel.

The AC is on low, gently humming, chilly even, your sweater around your neck, the sleeves listlessly caressing your breasts. Nipples erect, I take them into my mouth.

 

 The most daring thing I could ask you about is your relationship status. This would certainly betray me, though you’ve heard everything, the myriad ways that your patients attempt to storm the battlements.

First, from head to toe, I want to imprint you. You turn your head to loosen the muscles of your neck. It gets sore making incessant eye contact. Your eyes are oceans daring their seawalls. You’ve tucked a strand of hair behind your ear. Now I see something electrifying, the fan of lines that splays your cheek. How redolent they are of the life you’ve lived.

What does your own therapist say about the tragedies you’ve suffered? Does she validate you the way you validate me? What can I do to elicit your reproach? You will not judge me. You will not admonish me. You will not rise from your understated, postmodern chair and smite me; are you religious? Old Testament in your fury?

Or even better, does your therapist empathize with you and sometimes touch you, which is forbidden. No, it’s a man. You fantasize about him violently loving you. You want to be battered with it.

But you have a vulnerable, earnest, even spinsterish way about you, which makes anything you say about sex quadrupled in its seductiveness. You never initiate sex talk, but you respond to mine. Anything I say about sex is in context, of course. I would never launch into sexual references for no reason.

We’re discussing safety. What would make me feel safe? For it has occurred to you that my angst is the result of my feeling unprotected, exposed, although talking to you makes me feel more exposed than ever, your mantra that you can be trusted unleashing in me shocking confessions that I’ve never before said aloud. I stand before you uncovered.

What would make me feel safe? I repeat your question, stalling for time.

Your yes issues from a hitch in your pharynx as if you’ve half swallowed it, your throat undecided. As is mine, but I bravely soldier on.

I want to crawl inside a woman, I finally confess. This is something I’ve often thought but never expressed.

The look on your face and the timbre of your voice reveals nothing. Instead of bending toward me in sympathy, you lean back in your chair, satisfied. The womb, you say, smug.

This exact word has not entered my mind. I’m not thinking of the place where we gestate but rather the dark, sliding entrance, after which a woman can go no farther.

The womb is safe, you elaborate. What could be safer?

 

I have a life that doesn’t involve you, even to the point of making you jealous. I go overboard describing social interactions and people who come on to me, and you flinch.

You look pained in a way I’ve seen before, lovers exhausted with trying to hold on to me, wearing men’s t-shirts, stretched and fresh from the wash, shorts. These are their sleeping clothes, redolent of sleep and of them. Their hair has divots like a golf green. They have the no-makeup look that undoes me. A famous memoirist says that we are undone by one another, and if we’re not, we’re missing something.

I’m undone by you.

You don’t like to stroll down memory lane to the scenes and exigencies that have shaped me, but I shoehorn them unbidden into our work together. You repeat this phrase because you’ve mistakenly used the word conversation which makes us seem all buddy-buddy like neighbors yacking over the fence.

In one of these strolls down memory lane, I tell you about my mother’s divorced friends, wronged and in need of sympathy. We run into them in the supermarket and on the tennis court. I blush in their presence to the point that my mother asks if I am okay. They’ve triumphed over adversity by shopping for groceries and meeting their friends for tennis, letting their philandering husbands know that they are not curled in the fetal position on the chaise lounge.

The sun has ravaged their freckled hands, and a single vein routes the back of a calf. Their wrinkled V-necks can’t contend with their breasts. But I can.

They are not women beaten up by men but rather beaten down by them, all hope and pregnant at the altar and all mother and hopeless at home. He’s drunk and orderly. Unlike a guy who would be arrested on the street, he keeps his drunkenness and abuse hidden from view.

I could be the savior of these women, or I could beat them myself, and be exhilaratingly forgiven like their men are. You would forgive me.

 

I’ve seen you outside your office. I’m not expecting you to be where I observe you, standing near your car, bunching your pocket to feel for your keys. I have an absolutely legitimate reason to be in Foot Locker’s parking lot. You’re carrying a bag. I picture an enormous pair of basketball shoes for a teen whom you’ve never even hinted at, a big boy who slobbers you with his puppy love, ducking into railway cars; he’s that tall.

You’re not by yourself. A man balances against your car with one outstretched arm while he bends his knee for a pre-running stretch. He’s handsome and gray-haired like a wealth-management commercial.

You exchange words in that chummy alienating way of partners discussing dinner plans and Armageddon as if they are too uniquely entwined ever to be annihilated.

I want to rescue you from your perfect life with your perfect, abusive husband and perfect son with his big puppy feet.

You and Mr. Wealth Manager are perfectly fine, but you’re not perfectly exhilarated the way you are with me, your hand holding the door open. You entrap me with both upraised arms against the door, over my head, like guys in movies. I love that you are taller than I am, so that you can lean down for the chaste kiss before I feel your tongue in my mouth.

Enough about me, let’s talk about me.

[Yelda Basar Moers]

Opening Chapter-- Esma

OPENING SCENE:  Introduces setting, tone, primary and secondary protagonist, and foreshadows primary conflict.

 

Chapter 1

Opening Chapter-- Orhan 

 Topkapi Palace, August 1804

 

I don’t know much 

About the world.

But I know what I feel

When I feel the current

Of destiny

Take me.

 

          

I was summoned to the palace of Esma Sultan, the daughter of Sultan Abdulhamid II of the Ottoman Empire, in late summer of 1804, the season when the figs ripen.  Though it was late summer to Europeans, to the Turks it was the season of fruition.  I was assigned the role of has odabaşı, the male head steward of Esma Sultan’s palace, managing all business, political and house affairs for the Princess.  In our Empire, the will of our Sultan and destiny chose our path, and so it was mine to land at the doorstep of Esma Sultan.  I was twenty-two and had just graduated from Enderun, the most selective of the Palace Schools.  And the most elite institution of our great Ottoman Empire.

I was expecting an apprenticeship in diplomacy because of my high scores and unusual volubility in speaking so many languages.  Some labeled me a genius; others were suspicious of my abilities.  I caught the attention of the Sultan and the royal family when I first arrived to Topkapi Palace as a child.  They raised me as their own and I had dreams of becoming a high-ranking pasha in the Sultan’s inner circle.  But instead of steering me on a diplomatic course to serve our Empire, our now reigning sovereign, Sultan Selim III, chose this course instead:  I would run the palace of a Princess.  What was I to expect?  I had not the faintest idea.  My entire world until this moment had been entirely in the domain of men.  I felt like a fish out of water.  You think you know your path and then you realize that you know nothing.

I knew the Princess from our days growing up when I was a young page for her father.  She was three years older than me.  But I had not seen her in years since the time that she had married the great admiral and moved into a palace of her own.  Tragically, the great admiral died a few months ago and left young Esma a widow.  First, they said he died in battle, and then from consumption.  Some say she poisoned him.  His death is still mired in mystery.  But it certainly gave our Sultana her freedom.  Since then, though, she has transformed into a figure of gossip and intrigue.

Wild rumors conflagrated about her.  Some called her deli or “the crazy one” for her independent ways.  Others said she was no woman, but a man, donning pants, riding horses, and traveling around without the cloak we call a yaşmak.  It is true that she spent time in the European quarters of Pera, but gossip spread that she rode around in her araba, her carriage, befriending foreigners.  She was considered a Sultan herself, as heir of a ruling Sultan, so she did have freedoms that eluded other women.  But the rumors still lingered.

The worst of the lot was that she had insatiable desires, unleashed, and unbridled after the death of her husband, and had handsome men brought to her palace to satisfy her needs.  After spending one night with her, the young men were never seen again.  The rumor was that she had the poor souls drowned in the Boğaz, the Bosphorus Straight that faced her waterfront palace.

I tried to ignore the rumors and suspected it was the highfalutin Ottoman ladies of her society behind them, jealous of her wealth, power, and independent ways, for she was one of the wealthiest individuals in the Empire, rivaling the Sultan himself.  A powerful woman could also easily be at the mercy of men.  Like the wheel of fortune, a woman could go up and down in power.

Others may have found her affinity for foreigners unusual and eccentric and her influence in politics threatening.  What I did know was that she was a faithful wife and pious woman, never missing Friday prayers.  She gifted gilded holy book holders to our religious leaders and schools.  The pious folks loved her.  The poor folks even more.  No woman gave more to the needy.  I couldn’t imagine that she could have such a secret life.

These were the least of my worries or those of the Empire, which was in turmoil both inside and out.   The world was upside down, mostly due to Napoleon’s ambitions to conquer all of Europe.  Last Spring, Britain and France resumed warring, while Russia and Austria joined forces with Britain against Napoleon.  We were neutral, but always involved.  Our sovereign was confused as France, Britain, and Russia all professed friendship, yet they all threatened to attack us.

If tensions outside the Empire were not bad enough, tensions inside were worse.  Everyone feared a revolt by the Janissaries.  Once a military force, feared by the world, they had now degenerated into a wild band of ruffians.  They refused to be trained as modern soldiers under the new French system, which our Sultan now favored and followed.  The Janissaries hated the French and believed that Napoleon’s new war machine was the death of the warrior and a curse against God.

Our Sultan Selim was left in a quandary as to how to fight our greatest threat—The Russians—without the right military or enough men to fight them.  The Russians were the single greatest threat to our existence, because they had tried and failed for years to take Istanbul.  Spiritually, they believed it was their holy Orthodox city and strategically, they wanted control over the Boğaz, the straight that ran through our city, which allowed them easy passage to Europe.  I worried how much longer we could continue in this chaos, without someone conquering us.