It was with great satisfaction, and with no small bit of pleasure, that she had assigned him his failing grade.
So many years ago!
It could not be he, of course, seemingly so young, after all these years. But the coincidence was unsettling. The resemblance was remarkable.
It had been a performance of Richard Strauss’s Salomé, based on a short story by Oscar Wilde. The lead role had been sung by a famous Italian soprano, a visiting artist. The performance had been by the older, and most famous, of the two major opera companies in the city. Both are fine companies, and either, in her view, would have been capable of mounting splendid productions of the work performed. She wonders if the preceding few sentences will be excised from the manuscript, as perhaps too revealing, or if they, perhaps in their amusement, will permit them to remain, perhaps as an intriguing, almost insolent detail. She does not know.
She was alone, as she often was, not that she did not have friends, colleagues, professional associates, and such. She was invited to parties, occasionally, her academic post assured that, and was the recipient of various academic courtesies, received reprints, invitations to participate in colloquia, and such. She had never married, and had never had a serious relationship with a male. Her background, training and scholarship had not been conducive to such relationships. She was regarded as severe, inhibited, cool, intellectual, professional. She no longer found herself attractive. The beauty she had once professed to scorn, and had upon occasion demeaned, was faded, if not gone, and was missed. She was idolized by young feminists, and regarded by some in the “movement” as an ideal, as presenting a superlative role model for young women. She feared men, for no reason she clearly understood, and distanced herself from them. When younger she had repelled the occasional advances of men, partly by habit, partly by disposition, sometimes because of a sense of the inferiority of the sort of men, professed male feminists, for example, who were most likely to approach her, plaintively assuring her of their profound sense of guilt for their maleness and their wholehearted support for her ideological commitments. And she was terrified by virile men, but few of them had seemed to find her of any interest; some such, who might have found her of interest, she had fled from in a sense, discouraging them, treating them with contempt, trying to chill and demean them. She had sensed, you see, that their intentions might have been physical, at least in part, and thus to be resisted and deplored. It was rather as though, if they were interested in her as a woman, their intentions could not be honorable, and she rejected, and feared, them; and if they were such that she had little doubt of the honorableness of their intentions, she had found them inferior, despicable, repulsive, hypocritical and boring. She had, through the years, thus, dutifully preserved the independence and integrity of her personness. As her body grew older, and began to dry, and wither, and tire, and began to regard her ever more reproachfully, and sadly, in the mirror, and she went through her change of life, which had been a terrible and troubling time for her, in her loneliness, and in her lack of love and children, she remained aloof, severe, unsexual, professional, virginal. She realized she was growing old, and was alone. She was disappointed with her life. And she saw nothing much before her to look forward to. She insisted to herself, naturally, that she was happy, content, and had no regrets. She insisted on that, angrily in her privacy drying gainsaying tears. What else could she dare to say to herself? What else could such as she tell themselves, in private, grievous, insistent moments? One could scarcely acknowledge an emptiness, a whole frightening, oppressive, looming reproach on a misspent life; it was not well to look into the emptiness, the threatening abyss, the void, and, too, she assured herself, such things, the void, and such, being nothing, could not even exist. And yet few things existed more obdurately, more outspokenly, more terribly, deeply within her, than that silent, vocal, unrepudiable, proclamatory, denunciatory nothingness. It seems clear that she, despite what she would tell herself, despite the lies, the carefully constructed, defensive fabrications with which she sought to delude herself, had many regrets, a great many sources of sadness, that there was in her much that was only half articulated, or scarcely sensed, much that was hidden, much concealed and put aside as too painful to be recognized, so much that she refused to face, and yet which, upon occasion, would visit her in the loneliness of her night, as her head lay thrust against its pillow, whispering in her ear that what might have been could now no longer be, or, upon occasion, it would reveal itself to her, in her mirror, as she looked upon the image of a weeping, aging woman. But she did not suppose, really, that she, in such respects, was much different from many others. What was there, truly, for she, and others, such as she, to look forward to? Another honor, another paper published, another conference attended, another point made, another small dinner, prepared by herself, another lonely evening in the apartment?