Fields of Exile. Nora Gold
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gently whispering roof, feeling well fed and well sheltered. Succoured. And sukkah’ed. Now on her nose she feels something tickle. She looks up and laughs: the first snowflake of winter.
— 8 —
It’s two and a half weeks later now, mid-October, and Judith’s classes have all continued, like streetcars, along the tracks laid down for them on the first day. Weick’s “Knowledge and Values,” for instance, travels along in the same agonizingly slow, tedious, creaking way it began, not having improved one iota since the first day. She hasn’t skipped any of his six classes, though: she’s too afraid of angering or alienating Weick, especially after Cindy’s warning. But mentally she is never there. She walks in, sits, and lets her mind travel where it will. She survives this class week after week only by not being there alone: Moshe comes to keep her company. Today as always he shows up a few minutes into Weick’s lecture, just as her mind is starting to go numb. Moshe doesn’t come to talk, to offer her conversation more stimulating than Weick’s; he comes to make love to her. This is what he is doing now. Though this time he’s doing it in an unusual way for him: slowly and very passionately, the way he did on her birthday, the one time they weren’t in a rush. He refused to hurry that day: “It’s your birthday,” he said. “Let them wait.” He had informed Koby he’d be late that day, and she called her office too, saying she’d missed the early train and would catch the next one. They lay under the tree at the bottom of the hill. Moshe had smoothed the ground for them, clearing away the pine cones, and even brought a blanket. That day she turned twenty-five.
“A special age,” she told Moshe. “Five times five: a perfect square.”
“Old enough,” he said, “to open your eyes and see what’s in front of you.” He suggested she keep her eyes open today when they made love, so they could look at each other all the way through.
It was an effort because she felt shy, even embarrassed, but she did keep them open after he entered her, and they stayed like that for a long time. They gazed at each other until she was so deep inside his eyes she wasn’t aware of anything else — it was like sliding down the hole in Alice in Wonderland, but never hitting the bottom. The love in his eyes was bottomless. Infinite. Then, unexpectedly, he thrust into her. She cried out and writhed, trying to get to the deepest place, but just when she was almost there, he pulled away. Still moaning, she opened her eyes, and he was smiling at her faintly, and his eyes were wet brownness, like rained-on desert sand. Or quicksand, the way they sucked her in. She slid down, getting lost in them again, and there was no him or her; they were just one person. There in his eyes she rested awhile, with no sense of time. Time was gone: they were suspended in an eternal time zone. Then, catching her unawares — how could there be a thought in his mind that wasn’t in hers? — she felt him thrusting into her again. But this time all the way into the middle of her — into the inside of the inside of her, into her very core, a place no one had ever been. She cried out. Then she screamed and screamed her way to the end. Afterwards sobbing in his arms for a long time. Sobbing like a baby. Finally she opened her eyes. There he was, Moshe who was also Israel, looking at her, his eyes full of tenderness and love. Home, she thought. At last I’m home.
Judith looks up. Weick is still at the front of the class. She feels like she’s been gone for over an hour, but according to her watch, it’s only been fifteen minutes. Weick says: “We all play many different roles in our lives.” Right, she thinks. All the world’s a stage. “And when two or more roles,” he says, “conflict with each other, this is called inter-role conflict.”
Like duh. Judith recalls the classic example of this she learned thirteen years ago during her B.S.W.: being both a mother and a student, and having to choose between caring for your child and getting your schoolwork done. Role Theory was interesting when she first learned it back then, but like Systems Theory, it isn’t anymore. Certainly not as interesting as making love to Moshe, or even lying next to him, her body curled around his, in post-coitus contentment, on the grass. So she returns to Moshe. He is still lying where she left him under the tree, but now he has one hand behind his head, and is smoking a cigarette and blowing smoke rings. He too has been listening to Weick, and doesn’t think much of him — “A weak man, you can tell just by looking at him he can’t get it up” — or of Dunhill. She looks up: Weick is watching her. She lowers her eyes — perhaps he just heard what Moshe said about him. That’s crazy, she knows. Of course he couldn’t have. But maybe he could somehow sense the presence of Moshe, her invisible friend. Her favourite aunt, Hilda, now dead, always saw, and sometimes even talked to, Judith’s imaginary friend Max, whom she pulled around on a string when she was four. From Max to Moshe, thinks Judith, rolling her eyes. Oh, well, whatever gets you through —
Weick, still talking, is staring hard at her now, demanding her full attention. Did he see me roll my eyes? Maybe he thought I was rolling them at him. Just in case, and to deflect his anger, shortly afterwards she raises her hand and respectfully asks a question. Citing the conflicting definitions of inter-role conflict in two different articles, she asks Weick which one he’d recommend. Weick, obviously pleased, says he’s happy at least one student’s doing the readings, and replies at length while Judith arranges a facial expression of polite listening. She even smiles wanly when he makes a stupid joke. Meanwhile she’s thinking this class is a total waste of time. Pam agrees. During their break in the cafeteria half an hour later, Pam sputters that all they’re learning from Weick is how to feign interest and respect; how to endure without looking like you’re enduring; how to survive long, awkward pauses, some of them excruciating; and how to fake-smile encouragingly at an ill-prepared teacher as he flounders for words. “We are learning,” she concludes, “about the power of the guy at the front of the class. Nothing more.”
“Well, maybe that’s the essence of ‘Knowledge and Values in Social Work,’” Aliza says darkly. “The power of power.”
“Oooooh,” says Cindy, and bites into her donut.
Pam laughs, and Cindy chews cheerfully, but Judith doesn’t respond. She’s just decided that from now on, she’s never again going to be the last one out of Weick’s class, or alone with him anywhere. On her way out of the classroom just now, while Cindy, Pam, and Aliza waited impatiently for her in the hallway, she asked Weick a quick question about the topic she’d picked for her midterm paper, and he suggested she drop by his office after class to discuss it further. But she won’t. Because when he made this suggestion, he brought his face, flushed and eager, close to hers, and there was the smell of liquor on his breath.
* * *
Next they go to “Introduction to Social Justice” with Greg, or Saint Greg as some of the students have nicknamed him, and if Weick’s class was a creaky old streetcar, this one is a turbo train. Today, as always, there is a sense of urgency and dynamism here, and a passion that strikes Judith as almost religious. Greg, waving his hands around, is still, after six weeks, on the theme of how the rich and powerful oppress and exploit the weak, and how it is the obligation of each and every one of us to use whatever power we have to fight for a fairer distribution of resources, both in Canada and around the world. Judith listens, her bum aching from the hard chair, and she vacillates between the exciting feeling on one hand that she’s part of a revolution, and on the other that Greg is naive and not very bright. Still, as the term progresses, she finds herself using more and more of what she thinks of as “Greg’s words”: socially constructed, classist, marginalized, disenfranchised, globalization. Or, as Bobby put it several days ago, she has begun to speak, and also think, “in black and white.” Even though, of course, that’s a phrase you can’t use anymore — not unless you’re completely politically incorrect, like Bobby. Which she didn’t hesitate to tell him.
“I’m not ‘politically incorrect’,” said Bobby, looking handsome in a green Ralph Lauren polo sweater with the logo of a horse on it. “I’m free.”
“No, you’re not,” she retorted. “You’re enslaved to political incorrectness, which is no different than being enslaved to political correctness. You’ve just swapped PI for PC. And you’re hopelessly out of touch with the world around you.”
“Blah blah blah,” said Bobby, and gave her a hug.
*