There is a cabal of three women—a philosophy professor, a sociology professor, and a history professor—who particularly drive her crazy. Full of animosity toward her simply because she is not ploddingly plugged in the way they are. Because she has an air of chic, they feel she hasn't read enough learned journals. Because their American notions of independence differ from her French notions of independence, she is dismissed by them as pandering to powerful males. But what has she ever actually done to arouse their distrust, except perhaps handle the men on the faculty as well as she does? Yes, she'd been at dinner in Great Barrington with Arthur Sussman. Does that mean she didn't consider herself his intellectual equal? There's no question in her mind that she is his equal.
She isn't flattered to be out with him—she wants to hear what he has to say about The German Ideology. And hadn't she first tried to have lunch with the three of them, and could they have been any more condescending? Of course, they don't bother to read her scholarship. None of them reads anything she's written. It's all about perception. All they see is Delphine using what she understands they sarcastically call "her little French aura" on all the tenured men. Yet she is strongly tempted to court the cabal, to tell them in so many words that she doesn't like the French aura—if she did, she'd be living in France! And she doesn't own the tenured men—she doesn't own anyone. Why else would she be by herself, the only person at the desk of a Barton Hall office at ten o'clock at night? Hardly a week goes by when she doesn't try and fail with the three who drive her nuts, who baffle her most, but whom she cannot charm, finesse, or engage in any way. "Les Trois Grâces" she calls them in her letters to Paris, spelling "grâces" maliciously "grasses" The Three Greaseballs. At certain parties—parties that Delphine doesn't really want to be at—Les Trois Grasses are invariably present.
When some big feminist intellectual comes along, Delphine would at least like to be invited, but she never is. She can go to the lecture but she's never asked to the dinner. But the infernal trio who call the shots, they are always there.
In imperfect revolt against her Frenchness (as well as being obsessed with her Frenchness), lifted voluntarily out of her country (if not out of herself), so ensnared by the disapproval of Les Trois Grasses as to be endlessly calculating what response might gain her their esteem without further obfuscating her sense of herself and misrepresenting totally the inclinations of the woman she once naturally was, at times destabilized to the point of shame by the discrepancy between how she must deal with literature in order to succeed professionally and why she first came to literature, Delphine, to her astonishment, is all but isolated in America. Decountried, isolated, estranged, confused about everything essential to a life, in a desperate state of bewildered longing and surrounded on all sides by admonishing forces defining her as the enemy. And all because she'd gone eagerly in search of an existence of her own.
All because she'd been courageous and refused to take the prescribed view of herself. She seemed to herself to have subverted herself in the altogether admirable effort to make herself. There is something very mean about life that it should have done this to her.
At its heart, very mean and very vengeful, ordering a fate not according to the laws of logic but to the antagonistic whim of perversity.
Dare to give yourself over to your own vitality, and you might as well be in the hands of a hardened criminal. I will go to America and be the author of my life, she says; I will construct myself outside the orthodoxy of my family's given, I will fight against the given, impassioned subjectivity carried to the limit, individualism at its best—and she winds up instead in a drama beyond her control.
She winds up as the author of nothing. There is the drive to master things, and the thing that is mastered is oneself.
Why should it be so impossible just to know what to do?
Delphine would be entirely isolated if not for the department secretary, Margo Luzzi, a mousy divorcée in her thirties, also lonely, wonderfully competent, shy as can be, who will do anything for Delphine and sometimes eats her sandwich in Delphine's office and who has wound up as the chairperson's only adult woman friend at Athena. Then there are the writers in residence. They appear to like in her exactly what the others hate. But she cannot stand them.
How did she get in the middle like this? And how does she get out?
As it does not offer any solace to dramatize her compromises as a Faustian bargain, so it isn't all that helpful to think of her in-themiddleness, as she tries to, as a "Kunderian inner exile."
Seeks. All right then, seeks. Do as the students say—Go for it!
Youthful, petite, womanly, attractive, academically successful SWF French-born scholar, Parisian background, Yale Ph.D., Mass.-based, seeks ... ? And now just lay it on the line. Do not hide from the truth of what you are and do not hide from the truth of what you seek. A stunning, brilliant, hyperorgasmic woman seeks . . . seeks... seeks specifically and uncompromisingly what?
She wrote now in a rush.
Mature man with backbone. Unattached. Independent. Witty.
Lively. Defiant. Forthright. Well educated. Satirical spirit. Charm.
Knowledge and love of great books. Well spoken and straightspeaking.
Trimly built. Five eight or nine. Mediterranean complexion.
Green eyes preferred. Age unimportant. But must be intellectual.
Graying hair acceptable, even desirable...
And then, and only then, did the mythical man being summoned forth in all earnestness on the screen condense into a portrait of someone she already knew. Abruptly she stopped writing. The exercise had been undertaken only as an experiment, to try loosening the grip of inhibition just a little before she renewed her effort to compose an ad not too diluted by circumspection. Nonetheless, she was astonished by what she'd come up with, by whom she'd come up with, in her distress wanting nothing more than to delete those forty-odd useless words as quickly as possible. And thinking, too, of the many reasons, including her shame, for her to accept defeat as a blessing and forgo hope of solving her in-themiddleness by participating in such an impossibly compromising scheme ... Thinking that if she had stayed in France she wouldn't need this ad, wouldn't need an ad for anything, least of all to find a man... Thinking that coming to America was the bravest thing she had ever done, but that how brave she couldn't have known at the time. She just did it as the next step of her ambition, and not a crude ambition either, a dignified ambition, the ambition to be independent, but now she's left with the consequences. Ambition.
Adventure. Glamour. The glamour of going to America. The superiority.
The superiority of leaving. Left for the pleasure of one day coming home, having done it, of returning home triumphant. Left because I wanted to come home one day and have them say—what is it that I wanted them to say? "She did it. She did that. And if she did that, she can do anything. A girl who weighs a hundred and four pounds, barely five foot two, twenty years old, on her own, went there on her own with a name that didn't mean anything to anybody, and she did it. Self-made. Nobody knew her. Made herself."
And who was it that I wanted to have said it? And if they had, what difference would it make? "Our daughter in America ..." I wanted them to say, to have to say, "She made it on her own in America." Because I could not make a French success, a real success, not with my mother and her shadow over everything—the shadow of her accomplishments but, even worse, of her family, the shadow of the Walincourts, named for the place given to them in the thirteenth century by the king Saint Louis and conforming still to the family ideals as they were set in the thirteenth century. How Delphine hated all those families, the pure and ancient aristocracy of the provinces, all of them thinking the same, looking the same, sharing the same stifling values and the same stifling religious obedience.
However much ambition they have, however much they push their children, they bring their children up to the same litany of charity, selflessness, discipline, faith, and respect—respect not for the individual (down with the individual!) but for the traditions of the family. Superior to intelligence, to creativity, to a deep development of oneself apart from them, superior to everything, were the traditions of the stupid Walincourts! It was Delphine's mother who embodied those values, who imposed them on the household, who would have enchained her only daughter to those values from birth to the grave had her daughter been without the strength, from adolescence on, to run from her as far as she could. The Walincourt children of Delphine's generation either fell into absolute conformity or rebelled so gruesomely they were incomprehensible, and Delphine's success was to have done neither. From a background few ever even begin to recover from, Delphine had managed a unique escape. By coming to America, to Yale, to Athena, she had, in fact, surpassed her mother, who couldn't herself have dreamed of leaving France—without Delphine's father and his money, Catherine de Walincourt could hardly dream, at twenty-two, of leaving Picardy for Paris. Because if she left Picardy and the fortress of her family, who would she be? What would her name mean? I left because I wanted to have an accomplishment that nobody could mistake, that had nothing to do with them, that was my own ... Thinking that the reason she can't get an American man isn't that she can't get an American man, it's that she can't understand these men and that she will never understand these men, and the reason she can't understand these men is because she is not fluent. With all her pride in her fluency, with all her fluency, she is not fluent! I think I understand them, and I do understand; what I don't understand isn't what they say, it's everything they don't say, everything they're not saying. Here she operates at fifty percent of her intelligence, and in Paris she understood every nuance. What's the point of being smart here when, because I am not from here, I am de facto dumb ... Thinking that the only English she really understands —no, the only American she understands—is academic American, which is hardly American, which is why she can't make it in, will never make it in, which is why there'll never be a man, why this will never be her home, why her intuitions are wrong and always will be, why the cozy intellectual life she had in Paris as a student will never be hers again, why for the rest of her life she is going to understand eleven percent of this country and zero percent of these men ... Thinking that all her intellectual advantages have been muted by her being dépaysée . . . Thinking that she has lost her peripheral vision, that she sees things that are in front of her but nothing out of the corner of her eye, that what she has here is not the vision of a woman of her intelligence but a flat, a totally frontal vision, the vision of an immigrant or a displaced person, a misplaced person ... Thinking, Why did I leave? Because of my mother's shadow? This is why I gave up everything that was mine, everything that was familiar, everything that had made me a subtle being and not this mess of uncertainty that I've become. Everything that I loved I gave up. People do that when their countries are impossible to live in because the fascists have taken charge but not because of their mother's shadow . . . Thinking, Why did I leave, what have I done, this is impossible. My friends, our talk, my city, the men, all the intelligent men. Confident men I could converse with.
Mature men who could understand. Stable, passionate, masculine men. Strong, unintimidated men. Men legitimately and unambiguously men .. . Thinking, Why didn't somebody stop me, why didn't somebody say something to me? Away from home for less than ten years and it feels like two lifetimes already .. . Thinking that she's Catherine de Walincourt Roux's little daughter still, that she has not changed that by one iota. . . Thinking that being French in Athena may have made her exotic to the natives, but it hasn't made her anything more extraordinary to her mother and it never will...
Thinking, yes, that's why she left, to elude her mother's fixed- forever overshadowing shadow, and that's what blocks her return, and now she's exactly nowhere, in the middle, neither there nor here ... Thinking that under her exotic Frenchness she is to herself who she always was, that all the exotic Frenchness has achieved in America is to make of her the consummate miserable misunderstood foreigner... Thinking that she's worse even than in the middle—that she's in exile, in, of all things, a stupid-making, selfimposed anguishing exile from her mother—Delphine neglects to observe that earlier, at the outset, instead of addressing the ad to the New York Review of Books, she had automatically addressed it to the recipients of her previous communication, the recipients of most of her communications—to the ten staff members of the Athena Department of Languages and Literature. She neglects first to observe that mistake and then, in her distracted, turbulent, emotionally taxing state, neglects also to observe that instead of hitting the delete button, she is adding one common-enough tiny error to another common-enough tiny error by hitting the send button instead.
And so off, irretrievably off goes the ad in quest of a Coleman Silk duplicate or facsimile, and not to the classified section of the New York Review of Books but to every member of her department.
It was past 1 A.M. when the phone rang. She had long ago fled her office—run from her office thinking only to get. her passport and flee the country—and it was already several hours after her regular bedtime, when the phone rang with the news. So anguished was she by the ad's inadvertently going out as e-mail that she was still awake and roaming her apartment, tearing at her hair, sneering in the mirror at her' face, bending her head to the kitchen table to weep into her hands, and, as though startled out of sleep—the sleep of a heretofore meticulously defended adult life—jumping up to cry aloud, "It did not happen! I did not do it!" But who had ? In the past there seemed always to be people trying their best to trample her down, to dispose somehow of the nuisance she was to them, callous people against whom she had learned the hard way to pro-tect herself. But tonight there was no one to reproach: her own hand had delivered the ruinous blow.
Frantic, in a frenzy, she tried to figure out some way, any way, to prevent the worst from happening, but in her state of incredulous despair she could envision the inevitability of only the most cataclysmic trajectory: the hours passing, the dawn breaking, the doors to Barton Hall opening, her departmental colleagues each entering his or her office, booting up the computer, and finding there, to savor with their morning coffee, the e-mail ad for a Coleman Silk duplicate that she'd had no intention of ever sending. To be read once, twice, three times over by all the members of her department and then to be e-mailed down the line to every last instructor, professor, administrator, office clerk, and student.
Everyone in her classes will read it. Her secretary will read it. Before the day is out, the president of the college will have read it, and the college trustees. And even if she were to claim that the ad had been meant as a joke, nothing more than an insider's joke, why would the trustees allow the joke's perpetrator to remain at Athena?
Especially after her joke is written up in the student paper, as it will be. And in the local paper. After it is picked up by the French papers.
Her mother! The humiliation for her mother! And her father!
The disappointment to him! All the conformist Walincourt cousins —the pleasure they will take in her defeat! All the ridiculously conservative uncles and the ridiculously pious aunts, together keeping intact the narrowness of the past—how this will please them as they sit snobbishly side by side in church! But suppose she explained that she had merely been experimenting with the ad as a literary form, alone at the office disinterestedly toying with the personal ad as . . . as utilitarian haiku. Won't help. Too ridiculous.
Nothing will help. Her mother, her father, her brothers, her friends, her teachers. Yale. Yale! News of the scandal will reach everyone she's ever known, and the shame will follow her unflaggingly forever. Where can she even run with her passport? Montreal?
Martinique? And earn her living how? No, not in the farthest
Francophone outpost will she be allowed to teach once they learn of her ad. The pure, prestigious professional life for which she had done all this planning, all this grueling work, the untainted, irreproachable life of the mind . . . She thought to phone Arthur Sussman. Arthur will figure a way out for her. He can pick up the phone and talk to anyone. He's tough, he's shrewd, in the ways of the world the smartest, most influential American she knows. Powerful people like Arthur, however upright, are not boxed in by the need to always be telling the truth. He'll come up with what it takes to explain everything. He'll figure out just what to do. But when she tells him what has happened, why will he think to help her? All he'll think is that she liked Coleman Silk more than she liked him. His vanity will do his thinking for him and lead him to the stupidest conclusion. He'll think what everyone will think: that she is pining for Coleman Silk, that she is dreaming not of Arthur Sussman, let alone of The Diapers or The Hats, but of Coleman Silk. Imagining her in love with Coleman Silk, he'll slam down the phone and never speak to her again.
To recapitulate. To go over what's happened. To try to gain sufficient perspective to do the rational thing. She didn't want to send it. She wrote it, yes, but she was embarrassed to send it and didn't want to send it and she didn't send it—yet it went. The same with the anonymous letter—she didn't want to send it, carried it to New York with no intention of ever sending it, and it went. But what's gone off this time is much, much worse. This time she's so desperate that by twenty after one in the morning the rational thing is to telephone Arthur Sussman regardless of what he thinks. Arthur has to help her. He has to tell her what she can do to undo what she's done. And then, at exactly twenty past one, the phone she holds in her hand to dial Arthur Sussman suddenly begins to ring. Arthur calling her!
But it is her secretary. "He's dead," Margo says, crying so hard that Delphine can't be quite sure what she's hearing. "Margo—are you all right?" "He's dead!" "Who is?" "I just heard. Delphine. It's terrible. I'm calling you, I have to, I have to call you. I have to tell you something terrible. Oh, Delphine, it's late, I know it's late—" "No! Not Arthur!" Delphine cries. "Dean Silk!" Margo says. "Is dead?" "A terrible crash. It's too horrible." "What crash? Margo, what has happened? Where? Speak slowly. Start again. What are you telling me?" "In the river. With a woman. In his car. A crash."
Margo is by now unable to be at all coherent, while Delphine is so stunned that, later, she does not remember putting down the receiver or rushing in tears to her bed or lying there howling his name.
She put down the receiver, and then she spent the worst hours of her life.
Because of the ad they'll think she liked him? They'll think she loved him because of the ad? But what would they think if they saw her now, carrying on like the widow herself? She cannot close her eyes, because when she does she sees his eyes, those green staring eyes of his, exploding. She sees the car plunge off the road, and his head is shooting forward, and in the instant of the crash, his eyes explode. "No! No!" But when she opens her eyes to stop seeing his eyes, all she sees is what she's done and the mockery that will ensue.
She sees her disgrace with her eyes open and his disintegration with her eyes shut, and throughout the night the pendulum of suffering swings her from one to the other.
She wakes up in the same state of upheaval she was in when she went to sleep. She can't remember why she is shaking. She thinks she is shaking from a nightmare. The nightmare of his eyes exploding.
But no, it happened, he's dead. And the ad—it happened. Everything has happened, and nothing's to be done. I wanted them to say . . . and now they'll say, "Our daughter in America? We don't talk about her. She no longer exists for us." When she tries to compose herself and settle on a plan of action, no thinking is possible: only the derangement is possible, the spiraling obtuseness that is terror. It is just after 5 A.M. She closes her eyes to try to sleep and make it all go away, but the instant her eyes are shut, there are his eyes. They are staring at her and then they explode.
She is dressing. She is screaming. She is walking out her door and it's barely dawn. No makeup. No jewelry. Just her horrified face.
Coleman Silk is dead.
When she reaches the campus there's no one there. Only crows.