I am a woman with too much history: two updates, both pertaining to men

But what a fabulous hat
for that special occasion!

"The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history." George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860.


I got plenty of history.

1. Had my date with Parenthetical Man: http://tinyurl.com/46419ua. Parenthetical Man is very nice: a good kind of "nice" tho I was hoping for, maybe, "swell" or "debonair," words that should convey the extent of my experience with men. His hands were very sweaty--half-wrung out sponge sort of sweaty--and there was some hair in the ears, but he did make me laugh. I will post more about this soon. The problem is, I never did get around to telling him that my real name is not Mary Gordon: http://tinyurl.com/4kprd34. and when he asked about Jamie's dad [at least I did not lie about having a son], I told the spermbank story. [http://tinyurl.com/6596vjk]


Now Parenthetical Man admires me for having had the independence to get inseminated and raise my son solo. 

2.  I called the London phone number of my son's biological father four times this weekend. The first three, the woman I imagine to be his wife answered. I hung up. The last time--Saturday night--a young woman with an Eastern European accent answered. She--Ludmilla-- was the home health care worker hired to take care of Jamie's dad, a stroke victim. As I'd guessed, His wife was out for the evening. 


I weaseled information from her. She says the Pater Unfamilias [Jamie's Dad] now speaks, has some movement, and can, with her help, read and write emails. She promised to help me email him and to keep it secret from his wife. I said I was a jeweler and he was ordering a ring from me as a surprise for his wife.


I am skipping the faculty meeting Tuesday afternoon, in order to email chat with Jamie's father with Ludmilla's assistance. Jamie's father and I  have had no contact for  2 years now. And I want that tuition money I was promised. And I want that Dante Gabriel Rossetti sketch he promised me, so I can sell it, go into very early retirement, and  move to NYC and away from this frozen tundra university where I teach. All of this he promised me to buy my silence  when Jamie was the offspring of our affair: http://tinyurl.com/6596vjk


And I'd like to know that the man who fathered my son and who, many, years ago sketched a 26 year old me in languourous and naked poses, is okay. And, while imperfect, at least honorable. A man of his word. I'd like to know that much at least.







why I only golfed seven times: a digression

I think this says it all.

For the moment, I'm too overwhelmed  to continue with a serial account of my labyrinthine life of evasions and lies: time for a digression.


When Jamie my son was 11, he announced he wanted to take up golf [again, it might have been the Wodehouse phase, or maybe it was the Waugh phase], so I joined this sort-of country club for a season [to pay the fees for which I had to teach two summer-course sections of The Family in Literature, a course I loathe]. 


I tried--the golf thing, I mean. I bought those knit polo shirts. I purchased and wore once a pair of skorts but I couldn't escape the feeling I was wearing a pair of Depends, only on the outside of my clothes. 


So then I bought culottes. Oh, and they had this rule that everything had to be  pastel.  Pastels frighten me, which is why I have rendered the drawing to the right in black and white. I bought golf shoes, which were  only marginally better than wearing bowling shoes but that's only because 1233 other people hadn't worn them before me. 


I tried. But in the end, the overall effect was: impersonation.  


Normally, I  like impersonation, and you might say I've made a career of it. 


But Golf Mom: that was way too big an impersonation.  


Even for me.







How does anybody know if the kids are all right? or: when life imitates art

It doesn't have to take a village,
you know

Jamie’s back at university, and I’m in NYC for my spring break, and have Thomas’s place on E28th entirely to myself. 

Thomas and Danny, his boyfriend, are getting serious--spending more time together at Danny’s West Village loft, and I can tell from Thomas’s demeanor, it’s not just an affaire du real estate for him. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, not in Manhattan, anyway.  And I don’t judge. But Thomas’s co-op is well appointed, a place whose interior he’s planned meticulously [he’s a lighting designer]. And that’s how come I suspect he and Danny may be headed for one of those New York Times two-guys engagement-announcement pictures.

Day to day, Jamie’s spring-break home stay was pretty good. A little tricky, what with the comments like,  “Don’t you think that a midnight curfew is antediluvian?”

“No,” I replied, “I think it’s more like ‘draconian.’ No later than 1 AM. And I mean that.” A lot of that stuff, laced with Jamie’s new and odd affectations of speech.

But our last night was troubling. Jamie had brought home The Kids Are All Right for us to watch.  Even before that goddamn film was released, I’d moved into a state of full-throttled determination not to acknowledge its existence.  And watching it with Jamie had about as much appeal as, I don’t know, making out with Dick Cheney.

“We’re going to watch The Kids Are All Right,” Jamie said as he inserted the DVD, without turning to look back over his shoulder at me.

“How about an Ab-Fab fest night. We haven’t done one of those in ages.” We loved Ab Fab when Jamie was around 16.  We ended each episode with my saying, “Well, at least I’m not that fab.”

“We need to watch this film together, Jeff,” He replied. He started calling me “Jeff,” again around when he turned 16 [what is it with 16?]:  “Jeff” is his version of the phonetic pronunciation of JF, my standard signature.

I wanted to regress to 5 years old and stick my fingers in my ears, shake my head back and forth, and say “no, no, no” for as long as it took to get my way, a tactic that worked well when I was 5.

“Ok,” I conceded. Watching that film with Jamie was worse than what I imagine making out with Dick Cheney would be. But if the universe had offered me a deal—make out with Dick Cheney for six hours straight and The Kids Are All Right will never get made—I’d have taken it.

After the last credit rolled, Jamie clicked the player off and turned to me. “I know it’s not easy, maybe not even possible, to track down the man who sold the sperm that gave me half my genetic material. But once the semester’s over, I’m going to try. And I’d like your blessing, which you don’t have to give. But I’ll need your help. That much, you owe me.”

I opened my mouth. Then I closed it. I repeated this procedure six or seven times.

“We don’t need to talk  about it now, Jeff. I just want you to think about it. I am going to do it, and it would save me a lot of time if you’d tell  me where you bought the sperm. Because I know it wasn’t St Augustine. I went there when I took that insane  road trip with my buddies—the one when I told all my professors I was missing class cause I was worried about you being stuck in Cairo, yeah?’ [http://tinyurl.com/4lyy7mc]

I nodded.

“I made them take a detour to St. Augustine. There was no sperm bank in St. Augustine in the early 90s.”

I looked at my hands. They looked tired.

“You’ve been a great mom. Like Annette Benning and Julianne Moore rolled into one. But this is not about you. It’s something—someone--I’ve gotta try to find.”

He made it clear that, for now, we would leave it at that.

After I dropped him at the airport, I headed south for the drive to Manhattan. My lunch with Helen the producer got cancelled—and I still haven’t had a chance to write about the latest changes she wants, since she told me a few weeks ago when she announced that we should restore the marriage at the end. The weather’s been kind of changeable, so mostly I’ve been going to see a lot of movies, foreign films like Poetry and . I’ve been having some trouble sleeping. Sometimes the streets I’m walking down look like those aisles of wares at the Outsider Art Expo. [http://tinyurl.com/4aezayv]. 

So I probably should cancel but I’ve decided I am going to go ahead and keep my date with Parenthetical Man. [http://tinyurl.com/464l9ua]. He did buy these tickets to Importance of Being Earnest and even timed it for St Patrick’s Day, fitting for both Oscar and me—Celts who stayed too long at the Blarney Stone Fair.







The Importance of Being Earnest: A date with Parenthetical Man

If Brian Bedford can play
Lady Bracknell,
I can be Oscar.

A quick update before I must dash off to the the preliminary plagiarism hearing [http://tinyurl.com/4s7qko7]. As an aside, the parents of the "alleged" plagiarist are now threatening to file charges of harrassment against their daughter's roommate, whom they suspect of having ratted out their daughter--a confirmed plagiarist. Oscar Wilde himself couldn't have invented a better plot twist to satirize this generation of  parents of college kids.


Speaking of Oscar Wilde[ smooth, huh?] Parenthetical Man [http://tinyurl.com/4essevh] invited me to go see The  Importance of Being Earnest next week during my spring break. He has forgiven my honest albeit moronic mix up about which oyster bar at which NYC train station we were to meet up at for our first date [http://tinyurl.com/4zm8phm]. Despite the fact that our first date didn't happen, he appears to remain interested in me, or at least that's how I interpret his buying tickets to the Wilde play, and you know, like including one for me. I adore Wilde; indeed, Wilde, c'est moi. I recommend his essay, "The Decay of Lying."


Parenthetical Man and I have talked a few times on the phone, which was a little tricky because he still thinks my name is Mary Gordon [http://tinyurl.com/4kprd34] so when I had to call him back, I had to do that thing where you hit Star 67 to block your name and number from showing up on someone's caller ID. 


Of course, I will tell him my real name: Bunbury. Kidding: a little Oscar Wilde joke.


I have every intention of confessing that my having told him my name was "Mary Gordon" was  a bad case of the dating-ingenue jitters and not intended as fraud or impersonation.


 I just think it's better to wait until after the play.







Son Jamie meets his father's art work & I dream I am Anna Wintour

For one ephemeral phase of REM, I owned
many, many beautiful clothes.

Jamie home for spring break, and after dinner last night, just as he was heading out to meet up with high school pals, he saw the picture I bought at the Outsider Art Fair [http://tinyurl.com/4aezayv],  the drawing of me by the father he does not know exists  [a bit of backstory  but begin here and see where it takes you: http://tinyurl.com/4e3u2sf]. 

He stopped and looked at it squarely for easily 5 minutes.

"By god, that's some awful stuff," he said and eyed me narrowly. "Do tell me it was a gift. Otherwise, it's too worrying."

"I'm branching out. I bought it at the Outsider Art Fair. Thought you might like it, you know, because of your graphic novel work and all. Give it a chance."

He looked at me dubiously, and was out the door before I could complete my standard parting paragraph about calling for a ride, designated drivers, the effects of alcohol on the adolescent brain, and the increased incidence of gonorrhea among college students.

Three things of note here.

1. Jamie has begun to talk with a British affectation. He briefly talked like that during his Wodehouse phase [http://tinyurl.com/4qccwc2]. But that was long time ago. 

2. His intense dislike of his father's picture of me is significant but I don't know in what ways because Jamie doesn't know that the mass of spasmodic lines represents me reading a book, or that the spasmodic hand that drew those lines was the hand of his father.

3. I hung the painting in the hallway near the front door.

And this may or may not be related to the above, but last night, before Jamie got home [and I never fall asleep till he's home but oddly enough I did last night], I dreamed I was Anna Wintour. In the dream, it did not seem to matter to me that I was Anna Wintour and wearing what appeared to be a Chanel suit, or how fabulously I wore it.  In the dream, Anna/I was having a clinical panic attack, frozen in front of a cheval glass, declaiming, "My hair! What happened to my hair." 

When I woke up I thought--no exaggeration--I was having a heart attack. It passed, fast thankfully, once I starting running my fingers through my hair and reorienting myself. 

Before I reached for my cell to check the time and see if I needed to text Jamie, I thought: "I just wasted the only opportunity I'll ever get to wear Chanel."







The case of the interoffice envelop under my door, and oh how i miss inspector morse: a digression

The only man
I've ever truly loved

I'm too busy for this, I don't need this and if I weren't so distracted, what with all these intrusive thoughts about Jamie's father, Jamie's big lie, the script, my total ineptness at even a first date, my big fat second mortgage, &c, I'd have been paying attention, and not be facing the professional, professorial conundrum.

Back story: when I returned essays Monday, I also distributed a "model" A essay, written by my very best and current favorite  student--with her permission and her name blackened out. I do this ostensibly for students to learn by example; mostly it keeps the whining, mewling pack of hounds at bay by rubbing their noses in an "A" paper. [have I mentioned that I'm in Stage 3 burnout and need a sabbatical?].

Today I found an interoffice envelop slipped under the door to my office. Nothing unusual though I do ask students not to deliver their work in that clandestine manner. Since they caught the unabomber and we haven't had an anthrax scare in a while, I opened it immediately.

Inside was a copy of the model A paper, stapled to a photocopy of an article from one of the major scholarly journals in my field. Various passages in the article were highlighted in pink. These were passages that my very best student lifted directly from the article and inserted into her paper.

To be clear, that's plagiarism, a felony offense in the world in which I live.

To elaborate the dreary implications of this. 1. my best and favorite student is a cheater. 2. I distributed her plagiarized essay as an exemplar. 3. The plagiarism was apparently so apparent that one of her classmates nailed it. 4. I will have to bring this before the University's student prosecutorial board that handles plagiarism cases. 5. Even I can't see any way around having to tell the truth about how the cheating came to my attention. 6. My distributing a plagiarized paper to a class as an example of truly fine literary analysis will not escape the notice of the Vice Chancellor's Office. 7. I will be put in faculty stocks, desgined and built by that math professor I hate, expressly for me, on the commons.

It's not good.

However, it would have made a great opening to an episode of Inspector Morse [RIP]. The episode could then have shown the stool pigeon student floating in the university's pool, having coincidentally left her clothes in the locker I use and in which I'd accidentally left behind one of my swimcaps. The cheating suspect would have an airtight alibi; I would have none other than I'd been at home, alone, eating a microwaved dinner of Tandoori Chef Chicken Tikki and washing it down with Malbec, listening to old Bonnie Raitt CDs, all of which would initially cause Morse to disdain and suspect me. Ultimately though he would  fall in love with me, because I am innocent of murder and I'm his type, and because, embarrassingly enough, for a rather long time, Inspector Morse filled me with erotic yearnings.

But I don't teach at Oxford, and the stool pigeon, whomever she [it was highlighted in pink]  may be, has not, unfortunately, turned up dead.

Jamie comes home Saturday for his spring break--mine is not until the following week--and I was hoping to skip campus tomorrow and cook and clean and catch up on some work but I guess I must go see some mid-level administrator and begin the  process.

Although denial might be a legitimate route. The stoolie isn't about to come forward. I can distance myself from the cheater. I can pretend the interoffice envelop was discarded by the cleaning staff.

Denial is my forte, though you didn't hear that from me.