Katabasis — Chapter no 20

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 word discrimination—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 WHY she 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, she could; 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.

She knew how to walk the line. She liked dazzling them all at conferences with her professionalism and poise; her pencil skirts and clacking heels. She snickered wryly at the lewd jokes the old guard made, and shot down anyone who came on to her.

“Don’t try with Alice.” She once overheard Professor Grimes saying this to a younger man who had been smiling at her all night. “She cares too much about the work.”

She rejoiced privately over this compliment for days. He took her seriously. He thought she cared too much about her work!

She thought she’d learned to inhabit the impossible ideal: the girl who was eminently fuckable but unreachable, and therefore virtuous and perfect.

The girl who was everything all at once. It was the waning days of second- wave feminism, and all the girls in Alice’s generation were so tired of being told they’d been born to be raped, oppressed, silenced. Surely this was not the entire picture; surely there was some power in their sex. Alice was both attractive and restrained, and this made her feel superior, even as she witnessed Professor Grimes disappearing into hotel rooms with other women from the conference. Alice was different from them. They were wives in the making, and she was a magician.

Once at the office she was working late when Professor Grimes came in with a giggling, staggering blonde. It was the new department secretary.

Alice had only met her once, earlier that week when she’d dropped off a stack of graded exams for the undergrad pidges. Her name was Charlotte, she came from Kensington, and she had the sort of quick, manicured personality that made you feel bad for taking up her time. She had shiny, butter-colored hair. She had the legs of a former dancer.

“Oh!” Charlotte gasped. “You stop that.”

“Make me,” said Professor Grimes, which was the least professorial thing Alice had ever heard him say.

“You bad—” Charlotte began, and giggled as Professor Grimes buried his face into her neck. “You big bad wolf. ”

Alice could not move.

She was allowed to be here—in fact, Professor Grimes knew she’d be here, as he was the one who’d asked her to stay late in the first place. Likely

he’d forgotten, but that didn’t mean she was doing anything wrong—even if the lights were off; even if to any reasonable person the office looked like it was abandoned. Still, she should have made her presence known; and since she hadn’t when they first entered the building, she couldn’t now without startling them.

She couldn’t get to the door without being seen. She didn’t want to crouch below her desk and hide, like some fool. To Alice’s panicked brain, the only option available seemed to be to stand in place, watching heart pounding and slack-jawed, as Professor Grimes twirled Charlotte around the lab.

Thankfully, Professor Grimes was headed to his office. If only they would get in there and close the door. Then she could make her escape unnoticed.

They didn’t make it. They began kissing against the chalkboard.

Charlotte gasped. Professor Grimes lifted her up by the legs; rammed her back against the wall; did something with his hands that made Charlotte’s voice go up several octaves—a single moan, running up and down the scales.

Alice was frozen in place, entranced and horrified, wondering if this was a tableau she wanted to join. Charlotte moaned once more. Alice’s hand slipped, and knocked into a beaker. It did not shatter—it was too far from the edge—but it did clink against another beaker, and the sound pierced the room.

Professor Grimes looked up through hooded eyes that locked on to her own. He did not cease his ministrations.

Alice’s heart skipped.

She grabbed her badge and hustled out, then. She felt Professor Grimes’s eyes searing into her back the whole way out the building, and it was not until she burst out the front doors, into the night chill, that she took a breath.

She didn’t think Charlotte ever knew she’d been there. She wondered, sometimes, when she passed Charlotte in the hallway. In the next few weeks she watched Charlotte perking up when Professor Grimes passed her office; her shoulders slumping when he did not return her wave. She noticed little changes in Charlotte’s appearance—how she’d stopped wearing lipstick, how she no longer matched her blouses with her shoes, how more and more often her hair looked unwashed and uncombed. She

noticed Charlotte glowering at the other women in the department, Belinda in particular; eyes narrowed, fingers twisting. She wondered sometimes when she gazed into Charlotte’s shadowed, haggard face if Charlotte might confide in her—but all she ever got in return was a polite, “Morning, Alice.”

She wondered sometimes if she’d made up or exaggerated the whole encounter; if her mind had wandered, as it always did during these late crunches.

But she couldn’t get it out of her head. Her memory, after all, was infallible.

She couldn’t look at Professor Grimes without thinking of Charlotte’s laughter, or of her bouncing thighs, or her delighted gasps. She couldn’t hear his voice without thinking of that low growl.

Make me.

And she began confusing those panicked flashbacks for her own desires —for it was her own fault if she kept bringing them up, wasn’t it? She wouldn’t have seen so much if she’d only made her presence known—if she hadn’t been so sick, so naughty, so eager to stay and watch.

She could not tell where Professor Grimes’s malfeasance ended and where her complicity began. She could not sort out what she’d done wrong.

So when it all became too much—when it started interfering with her studies, when she started feeling less like a proper scholar in his eyes and more a walking pair of legs—she had no one to blame but herself for acting like a lovelorn, empty-headed slut.

She should have known better from the beginning.

She was the lamb that had walked straight into the lion’s den, because she’d wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Deep down, a part of her wanted to be devoured. And she felt that Professor Grimes, surely, had seen that the instant he met her eyes that night. That perhaps Professor Grimes had known this about her all along.

IT HAPPENED THE NIGHT THEY RETURNED from the Leverhulme Prize dinner; dizzy, elated, both of them drunk on the attention they’d received all evening. They took the late train back from Liverpool Street station, and then a cab back to the department—the department, not their respective lodgings, because Professor Grimes had decided at the station that they first

must stop by his office to pick up some papers and Alice, thrilled and exhausted, didn’t think to interrogate this threadbare excuse.

At the department they kept giggling, bumping into things. Professor Grimes lost his balance and smeared his hand through a set of algorithms Michele had been laboring through on the blackboard all week, a perfect five-fingered arc through the dense layers of chalk, and this struck them both as tremendously funny. In his office, Professor Grimes proposed they get a head start on the lessons plans for next term, which was a ridiculous pretext because neither of them were in any state to plan lessons for the term.

At his office they made a perfect diorama of fools; stumping into doors, dropping their things, fumbling with their keys. Alice, very drunk and very focused on that pretext, riffled through Professor Grimes’s desk in an attempt to find his lecture handouts. At that moment, it seemed the most important thing in the world that she find those handouts.

“They were just here,” she kept saying. “I had them printed yesterday,

they were just here.”

“Alice,” said Professor Grimes.

She stood, turned around.

He crossed the room and took her face in his hands.

It could have been a romantic gesture, but all Alice registered then was how trapped she felt. Her cheeks squished in the man’s iron grip. Up close, his face was so large, unbearably large, as if inflated on a television screen.

The features she’d pined for all those nights—those thick, dark brows; that sharp-edged nose—inches away, they suddenly seemed grotesque. Too human, too wanting. All the qualities she admired—genius, brilliance, a sharp and cruel intellect—inscribed after all in a crude and mortal body. His breath was sharp, sour, and she suppressed a gag.

How quickly the buzz vanished. Her laughter died in her throat.

“I know.” He mistook her trembling for delight. “I’ve seen it in your

eyes, Alice. I feel it too.”

“No,” she choked.

“It’s all right.” His hand caressed the back of her head. His eyes surveyed hers, and his lips split into a smile. She’d spent years admiring that smile; the warmth of his charisma. Now it horrified her. All manufactured charm, all caprice. My, how white his teeth were.

His other hand traced her waist. Moved lower.

“You fucking tease,” he said.

“God, your ribs,” he said.

Alice thought her heart might explode out her chest; she actually thought she might before things progressed further. Never in her life had she felt so like a trapped animal; weak, helpless, caught in a cage entirely of her own making.

What shamed her most about that night, the memory she could never drive out of her skull, was how close she’d come to saying yes to it all.

It would have made everything so easy, if she’d just given Professor Grimes what he wanted. He’d have satisfied his urges. He’d have been sated, happy with her, and that might have given her some reprieve. In the tired moments after she might have asked for some guidance on her research proposal. She might have asked him to put in a good word for her when she applied for extra funding that summer. She might even have gotten some pleasure out of it. She was sure that, if she split her mind in two, if she ignored all the parts of her that were screaming, if she sank back into her tipsy stupid buzz, then she could turn it into a fun night that got a bit wild.

And it might continue, because if you said yes once it meant you said yes to all times in the future. But then she only had three years to go. In three years, she would graduate, collect her recommendation letters, and move on to some new institution where her work would be so dazzling that soon everyone would ignore the rumors that floated around her. And perhaps before then, his eye would have landed on some other bright-eyed, bushy-tailed first-year, leaving Alice free to concentrate on her work.

One could tolerate anything for just three years.

She softened in his grip; felt her lips opening up for his. And she would have succumbed right there, if she hadn’t felt a sudden, overriding wave of disgust.

He wasn’t just any fellow in the department. This man was her advisor.

The guardian of her mind. Her teacher.

“I don’t want this.” It took every ounce of strength she had to push those words past her throat. “Professor—”

His lips grazed her neck. “What’s that?”

“I don’t . . .”

To her horror, she saw movement over his shoulder.

There across the lab, in the faraway rectangle of light, stood Peter Murdoch. Books in hand, a pack of chalk stacked on the top, standing frozen in the doorway with one hand lifted as if he’d been about to knock.

Professor Grimes never saw Peter. But Alice watched Peter back slowly away from the door, his mouth slightly agape. Their eyes met just for an instant, just over Professor Grimes’s shoulder, before Peter turned and hurried away.

“Please.” At last she found the strength to break from his grip. He did not want to let her go—she had to wrench, really fight to break his grip, and the sudden violence seemed at last to convince him her protestations were

not, in fact, flirtation. “I don’t—”

“Don’t be afraid.”

“No!” she shrieked—the first real sound she’d made; at least, the first time he seemed to hear her. It worked. He started backward. She wriggled out of his grasp.

“Alice,” he called as she hurried down the hallway. Ever so calm. As if they’d done nothing but look at syllabi. His voice grew stern. “Alice, come here. You come back here.”

But she’d fled down the hallway, heart pounding against her ribs. And though she knew he wouldn’t follow her, though she’d forgotten her coat, and though her heels wobbled perilously against the cobblestones, she did not stop running until she had gone down the street, up the bridge, all the way along the river, and back to her apartment.

AFTER THAT NIGHT PROFESSOR GRIMES TURNED so cold.

She saw it coming, yet she was gutted by the sudden withdrawal of his support. When she showed up at lab the next day, timid and fragile, she found her workstation had been cleared and all her possessions redistributed to the annex office down the hall. She wandered tentatively toward his office, hoping delusionally there had been some mistake, but Charlotte informed her that Professor Grimes would be in London all morning. When he did return, she was standing in the hallway on a tea break with the other postgrads. She lifted her face to greet him, but he brushed past her without a

word.

“What did you do?” Michele asked.

“I don’t know,” said Alice.

“He looks so mad,” said Michele. “I’ve never seen him look so mad.”

Professor Grimes wouldn’t talk to her the day after, or the day after that.

From anyone else this kind of silent treatment would have been funny, childish, but from Professor Grimes it terrified her. There was no sign of when it might end. She didn’t know when he would retaliate, if he was planning some further punishment. She didn’t know whether she even crossed his mind at all—whether he’d simply written her wholesale out of his field of thought. She could only tiptoe around his office, hold her breath when he was near, and, day in and day out, hope for his mercy.

She did have reason to keep showing up at the department. She had projects in place, papers to write, classes to teach. He couldn’t just invalidate her work. She was good at what she did, and had proven her mettle to the other faculty many times over by now. And he couldn’t continue ignoring her in front of everyone else. In public, at least, he had to keep up the pretense of a good advisor. He wanted to invite questions even less than she did.

But he could whittle away at her confidence comment by comment; snub by snub. Little blows. He no longer welcomed her in his office for tea.

When he was announced editor of the latest collected volume on linguistic magick he did not ask her to contribute, though she would have been the obvious choice to write the introductory chapter on false friends and cognates that he instead assigned to a first-year who could barely spell his

own name.

This went on for months.

Meanwhile Peter’s stock rose again in Professor Grimes’s eyes.

Whatever mysterious slight he’d committed over the summer was forgotten.

Whenever Alice wandered past Professor Grimes’s office, she could see Peter already there through the window; leaning forward on the edge of his chair, hands flapping animatedly as they talked. Suddenly all everyone could talk about was the exciting new paper Murdoch and Grimes were coauthoring; how it was sure to be accepted in Arcana, how it might revolutionize the field of set theory, how it was making Bertrand Russell turn over in his grave.

The rest of the department sensed this shift, though none of them could guess at what had actually happened. The faculty assumed Alice had irritated Professor Grimes with shoddy work, and subsequently began to

treat her with kid gloves. They had watched students burn out before.

They’d witnessed the deterioration that came before the crash.

“Jacob can be tough,” Professor Byrne told her in the lounge one day, without prompting. “But—well, just keep your chin up and do good work, and things will be back to normal in no time, all right?”

The undergraduates, who were afraid of their own shadow, saw the way Professor Grimes spoke to Alice and assumed (perhaps rightly) that her stink of failure was contagious. Students began trickling out of her sections into Michele’s and Peter’s. The graduate students were savvier. They knew, just the way everyone had known about Charlotte. Even if they could only sense the general outlines of the story, they knew. Michele was sympathetic, always offering Alice a kind sad smile when they crossed paths. Belinda, however, became quite cool toward Alice. Alice sensed that she thought, perhaps fairly, that Alice should have known better. That if Alice hadn’t acted like such a whore, that if Alice had been as careful as Belinda had always been, she wouldn’t be in this mess.

Word had spread, and Alice overheard. Eventually every single person in the department had some opinion on Alice, whether it was pity or condescension or abject curiosity. Still, Alice was used to rumors. She was a Grimes student, after all. And she could have weathered it all, if it were not for Peter.

She could not bear the way things had changed with Peter.

He became unbearably awkward after that night. He seemed not to know what to do with her. He seemed afraid of her, angry with her, and baffled by her all at once. He couldn’t even keep up a veneer of professional rapport. He never looked her in the eyes. If he wanted to tell her something, half the time he asked an undergraduate to do it. Once she called hello to him across the lab, and he promptly dropped his coffee. Once she had thought his indifference was the cruelest thing, but she would have preferred it to whatever they were now: all brittle tension, and too-vivid memory. She saw it constantly; it overlaid her vision every time she so much as glanced at him. Peter in the doorway. Books clutched against his chest. A faltering hand. Eyes wide, disgust spreading across his face.

She thought often about telling him the truth. She knew what he assumed; she wanted him to know it was not so. Oh, but she was so ashamed! Just the memory of his eyes, wide in confusion, made her want to shrink into the floor. She could not decide what would be worse, his

resentment or his pity. “Something’s happened to me,” she would say, and all his respect for her would vanish.

At last she decided: pity was better than disgust. She needed at least one person to know it wasn’t true. She had to at least try. And Peter Murdoch was the one person for whom her words might carry meaning, for whom shreds of nuance might untangle the truth. It took her weeks to muster up the courage, but she was going to do it. If only she hadn’t spoken first to Belinda.

“Do you know when Murdoch’s coming in today?” Alice asked her.

“Peter?” Belinda shrugged. “Dunno. Think he’s gone nocturnal. Why, what’s the matter?”

“No, it’s stupid—there’s just something about this paper, and I don’t want to bother Grimes.”

“Right. Grimes.” Belinda had an odd expression on her face. “You know, he did say something. Peter did.”

Alice felt cold all over. “What’d he say?”

“Oh, nothing much.” Belinda’s mouth worked, for no sound came out.

She had the look of someone deciding how to mince her words, to hint at an accusation without actually making one. “He just mentioned you and

Professor Grimes were getting—close.”

“He said that?”

“Something . . . something about a late night, and how you’re a teacher’s pet?”

Alice felt the ground plummeting from under her feet.

“You do know that’s against the rules, right?” Belinda’s eyes narrowed.

“You have to disclose things like that?”

Alice could not speak. Towers knocked over in her mind, whooshing wind and cyclones, and all that was left was rumbles and dust. She was vaguely aware that Belinda was still standing there, mouth pursed, waiting for an answer. She knew this was the one chance she might ever get to defend herself. That if she did not speak now, then the rumors would grow and grow, and petrify into fact, until it was part of departmental common knowledge—that just as Elspeth Banks had failed her comps and killed herself, Alice Law had fucked Professor Grimes.

Still the words would not come. What defense could she offer?

“You—I mean, it’s not true, is it? I’m sorry if I jumped to conclusions.”

Belinda’s expression softened. “Come on, Alice. You can tell me.”

There were a lot of things Alice could have said then. But why bother?

It all seemed so pointless. All words were ineffectual, signifying nonsense.

Belinda stared, waiting, but Alice simply turned on her heel and walked away.

ALICE UNRAVELED VERY QUICKLY AFTER THAT. Her self-esteem plummeted. Her moods grew erratic, her work uneven. She tried everything to get back into Professor Grimes’s good graces, but being a try-hard only intensified his disdain.

At her lowest, she tried again to seduce him. She wore those black tights and short skirts he’d said once that he liked. She kept her blouse tops unbuttoned. She tried every old trick in the toolbox: sitting with her legs suggestively crossed, bending down lower than she needed so the curve of her ass was on full display.

I’m here, she tried to tell him. I’m willing. Have me.

He pretended she did not exist.

Alice fought. She did fight; she had come too far to let her career slide so quickly down the drain. She sought counsel in the office of Helen Murray.

Helen did not particularly like Alice. Not because of anything Alice had ever done, but because she was a Grimes student, and Helen Murray and Jacob Grimes hated each other. He’d once famously called her a cunt in public; she, in turn, forced him to teach the undergraduate survey class every year that she was the department chair. But this morning, Alice thought, perhaps their animosity might count in her favor.

“Hello, Alice.” Helen Murray seemed to be expecting her. In any case, she did not ask why Alice, who was not her advisee and who was not in any of her seminars, had stopped by. “Would you like some tea?”

“Oh, no, I’m all right.”

“Do have some tea.”

Alice sat and accepted a cup.

It was a well-known fact about Helen Murray that she would not entertain work talk until she had gone through the ritual of boiling water in her kettle, measuring out tea leaves, and waiting the full five minutes for it to brew. Until then you were supposed to make small talk. This was supposed to be the most humanizing thing about her. Helen Murray cared

about you; she cared how your life was going, what extracurriculars you pursued. Her advisees loved her for this. Alice hoped, for this reason, that Helen Murray might hear her out.

Helen clinked a spoon around her cup. “Why don’t you tell me what’s

happened.”

Haltingly, Alice explained.

When she finished, Helen sat silent for a long while. Then she took off her glasses, looked Alice up and down, and sighed. “Please let’s not be so

immature about this.”

“Um. I don’t know what that means.”

“You surprise me, Alice. One would have thought you knew what you

were getting into.”

“Getting into?”

“A story as old as time. See Aristotle and Phyllis. Merlin and Morgan le Fay. The boys in our department, they never learn. Hungry beasts. You’re at Cambridge. Didn’t you know?”

Alice could not determine if Helen was joking. She understood the reference; she, too, had seen that woodcut of naked Phyllis, Alexander’s consort, riding Aristotle like a horse. It was very funny, and Aristotle looked ridiculous, but Alice could not see how this was useful guidance for her career going forward.

“But it’s not—I mean, the way they treat women, it’s not fair.”

Helen’s lip curled. “Ah, you’re a feminist now!”

This was a pointed barb—the first inklings of a trap, but Alice was too distressed to see what she had walked into. Helen hosted the annual Women in Magick conference at Cambridge, but Alice had never gone. No one in her cohort bothered to go. Belinda went once her first year, and came back rolling her eyes—Just a bunch of crones, wishing the men would die. No, no one in her cohort was a feminist; they eschewed the label, they thought it would only bring them trouble.

“That’s not what I mean,” said Alice. “It’s just—I don’t know what to do.”

“Of course.” Helen set down her cup. “So why did you come to me?”

That much should be obvious, thought Alice. Why did Helen think she was here, and not in the offices of Caspar Stuart, or Aaron Byrne?

“Because we have so much in common?”

This too was a trick question, but Alice took the bait. She thought solidarity was on offer; she could not help but nod.

“No, dear.” Helen folded her arms and leaned forward. “As it happens,

we have nothing in common.”

The trap sprang.

“Girls like you despise women like me. Isn’t that so? You think we are wrong to insist on the differences of our sex. You find our activism embarrassing. You think we complain too much.”

The accusation was just, all these things were true. But Alice had always harbored these thoughts as a sneaky conviction. She could not really justify them.

Helen pressed on. “And why wouldn’t you think that? You’ve never known a locked door. Your mothers were educated, your schools were coed, and so you think the whole world is open to you. You want to wear slacks, and shirts without bras, and drink all night long with the boys, and you want everyone to treat you just the same.”

It occurred to Alice that Helen had been waiting a long time to say these words; had banked up this screed, watching her and Belinda and the others in the halls, awaiting the first one to stop by. This was not about her anymore; it was not even about Grimes; it was about Helen getting her word in, and Alice was merely the audience.

Helen leaned forward. “The difference between women like me and girls like you is that we always understood the battle was never over. Your cohort has chosen to live like the rules don’t apply to you. And it seems to work. I salute you girls, I support you. I wish I could have done the same.

But you can’t just cry wolf when things don’t go your way. What you must realize, Alice, is that you cannot just take refuge in feminism when it suits you.”

“I’m not crying wolf,” Alice said desperately. “I just—I need guidance —”

“You want to change advisors, then? You want to work with me?”

This took Alice by surprise. She had not planned to ask; had not even considered it a solution. And perhaps her face betrayed her thoughts, because Helen laughed. “Of course you don’t. You don’t respect me enough for that. You think I am a—what was it? A spousal hire in a girdle?”

“I didn’t . . .”

Oh, but Alice had. They’d all said it. They received the gossip first from their advisors and they giggled about it among themselves, told stories at late nights at the pub—does Helen even publish, does anyone take Helen seriously, what will happen when he divorces that cow? But professors’ ears were much closer to the ground than anyone thought. Alice should have known this, because she knew Grimes was acutely aware of everything anyone said about him.

“Of course.” Helen found the confirmation in her face. “That’s a no.

Then would you like to go to the police?”

“What? No—”

“To file a complaint, then?” Helen was having her fun. “Would you like him reprimanded by the university, compelled to write you an apology?

Would all this make you feel better?”

“No—”

Helen threw her hands up. “Then help me understand. What are we

doing here, Alice? What do you want?”

Alice felt so stupid then.

Why didn’t she have any response? Why was this question so hard? It was as if she’d sat down for an exam, only to find she didn’t comprehend any of the material. All the contradictions were coming to a head, and she couldn’t synthesize an answer because none of her positions made any sense. She wanted Grimes’s attention but also his respect. She adored his power, except when he used it against her. She wanted no special treatment for her sex, and still she felt wronged, in a way she felt that only women could be wronged. Helen was right—she could not have it all, could not believe everything she did and still complain. But still, was there not something wrong here? Was she so wrong to feel hurt?

She tried to sort through the most basic question. What did she want? If she could wave a magic wand to fix this, what outcome would she have?

It boiled down to one thing: she wanted Grimes to respect her, to like her again, to go back to being her teacher again. But Helen could not help here there. Grimes’s disposition toward her was an immovable fact. She could not change it by wishing.

In fact, all of her wishes were ridiculous. She wanted it all to have never happened. She wanted her mind back. And she wanted to be more than a body, more than mere flesh, a thing to inscribe and observe and maybe fondle when you were bored. She wanted the version she was promised, she

wanted a teacher who cared about her, who respected her as a thinker, who did not treat her as a tool.

But all this was a fairy tale. In relentlessly enforcing the glamour, she had closed off her other options. And now she was left in a trap she had constructed for herself.

There is no point, she thought helplessly. No point in breaking out. It will destroy everything to try. Stop believing in one postulate, and the whole edifice comes tumbling down. You cannot have a stable Euclidean surface without the parallel postulate; you cannot survive without believing you are invulnerable. So your only option is the reconstruction of the lie—I am not embodied, this cannot matter, and so it does not matter.

“So you see.” Helen’s expression was not unsympathetic. “It only hurts you to take this further. The best thing you can do for your career now is to forget it ever happened.”

I can’t, Alice wanted to cry. I can’t forget anything.

“Grimes certainly will.” Helen’s mouth twitched. “He’ll be on to the next freshman by Michaelmas, and then it’ll be business as usual with you.

And anyhow—as you say, it was only a kiss.”

Not only a kiss, thought Alice. Her tattoo seared white-hot, hot as the day he’d carved it into her skin. But this she could not reveal. She had promised Grimes her silence; she still wanted to be a very good girl.

And she suspected that Helen knew, anyhow. Not the details. Only the shape. Helen must have known, because she had seen it all happen before, must have been through it herself, and here she still sat where she was. Her own office. Courtyard window, mahogany desk, tenure. What did that take?

Alice wondered. What cages of beliefs kept Helen going?

Helen was not mocking her. She had laid out the blueprint. Believe the lie—trust the lie—it is the only thing you have. Stay in the cage and paint the walls. If you do not, then you must quit; but if you can delude yourself long enough, then your delusions might very well come true.

“Thank you,” Alice managed. “This has been very helpful.”

“You’re welcome,” said Helen. “Do finish your tea.”

AFTER THAT MEETING ALICE BEGAN DREAMING of dying.

It wasn’t so much that she made active plans to end her life. That took too much initiative. More often she would walk along Sidney Street as the

buses whizzed by and reflect that it wouldn’t be so bad if one just happened to hit her. She liked to imagine her bones crunching; her blood splattering across the pavement. She made a game of wondering what, precisely, would be the acute cause of death—the splintering of her skull into her brain? That would be best—much worse was the messy, internal splitting that irrevocably broke you but left intact your ability to feel pain, your ability to think and reflect that this was the end. If she was going to die, she’d like to do it headfirst.

Anyway, dying seemed perfectly acceptable on moral grounds. The best argument Socrates could make against suicide in the Phaedo was that mortals were like possessions of the gods, and that the gods would be irritated if one of their possessions freed itself from their mortal prison by self-destruction. The Christian injunction against suicide only seemed to be a reframing of that. But God’s interests did not seem relevant here.

Probably her friends and family would be upset—her mind wandered vaguely to her parents in Colorado, sobbing as they hung up the telephone —but she could not imagine anyone would miss her that much. There simply didn’t seem much to go on for.

How could she explain it? What was devastating was not the touch—he had hardly been violent with her. No, what hurt was how easily he could reduce her to a thing. No longer a student, a mind, an inquisitive being growing and learning and becoming under him—but just the barest identity she had been afraid to be all along, which was a mere woman. It was all such a fucking cliché. How could she ever have dared to think it did not apply? Girl enters into the academy, and the lads get rough. She felt flung into a well-trod story whose ending was already written, and she had no choice but to follow along, utter her lines, and wait for the curtains to close.

And it felt, during those days, that the easiest thing for her would be to just jump off the stage.

But she never found the resolve to end things for good. Not because she was afraid of the pain—for at that point she wasn’t sure she could still feel pain—but because of the shame. Because even after everything, despite how numb she’d become, what lingered were the tenets of the academic world, which were so burned into her bones that even in her weakest moments she still felt their echoes.

If she died, they would think she had failed.

Poor Alice, they would say. Another Grimes student driven mad. And Belinda would cluck her tongue and say in a gossipy tone to the next cohort of bright-eyed candidates, “I’m sure you’ve all heard of Alice too, poor girl —remember the counselor’s office is available if ever you should need to talk.”

Alice could bear any amount of pain. But she could not bear that shame.

It still mattered to her, above everything else, that they respect her as a scholar.

So she kept plodding on; showing up to lectures, keeping her hours in the lab, grading papers and drawing pentagrams and filling her brain with all sorts of useless information. As long as she was in the lab, focused on the work, struggling with translations so difficult that she could think of little else, she could distract her mind enough to keep the memories at bay.

It was when she left the department that the memories rushed back. She couldn’t sleep; she could only lie in the dark, staring at the ceiling as Professor Grimes’s face loomed in her imagination. She stopped eating; everything she put in her mouth made her stomach roil. Her hair started falling out. Her skin turned gray. People called out to her, people tried to help. She barely heard them; she did not answer. She heard a strange buzzing in her ears all the time. The world felt muted and distorted, as if she were moving underwater.

Still she kept going. She didn’t know what else to do. Her plan, if she could call it that, was simply to be an automaton until the center could no longer hold; until she fell to pieces against her will.

But it was Professor Grimes who shattered first—literally, all his flesh and guts and bones wrenched apart with the centrifugal force of millions of years of stored living-dead chalk energy.

And Alice—who stood stock-still with his brains and skull fragments and blood splattered across her face—could not stop laughing. For a way out had opened up after all. And it seemed the most hilarious thing in the world, in that instant, that it nevertheless led straight to Hell.

OceanofPDF.com

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE HarperCollins Publishers …………………………………………………………