Page 53 of Katabasis

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.