The Temp

When I think about him now, more than thirty years later, it’s hard for me to explain the attraction. He was ten years older than me and had a Ph.D., an irrelevant fact that I irrationally believed gave him some sort of seal of approval. He taught at the university and fancied himself “l’enfant terrible” of his department, convinced that his colleagues were threatened by his brilliance and brash irreverence, though the bigger problem may have been that he’d had sex with the wife of the chairman. He really wasn’t much to look at if you stepped back objectively: he had short legs and broad shoulders, the kind of skin that goes to pink, thinning brown hair and a beard. He had funny pointy teeth with elongated canines (vampire-esque, in fact) and he was already packing a paunch. Yet his vanity was monumental. He utterly believed in his own irresistible power over women, and maybe that’s all that is required. I succumbed.I admit I was no prize. I had left my first husband, dropped out of school, rode around on Greyhound buses and had absolutely no idea what I was going to do with my life, assuming I did anything at all.

“Syracuse is a manageable place,” a friend had assured me, perhaps damning it with faint praise. But the city took me into its scrawny arms, pitched its white miasmic skies around me, and became a place to hide. I registered as a temp and worked in a series of short-term jobs.

“I’m a temporary girl in a temporary life,” I’d quip when people asked me what I did. And you could find me processing orders for plumbing supplies, typing up forms under blinky fluorescent lights, handing out coupons and pizza samples in the markets along Erie Boulevard. Within this frame of reference, a professor of anything looked interesting.Before long, I was a resident in his house, which meant that I had a key and stuck around, uncertain of my status, but gradually filling up drawers, hanging towels, and receiving mail there. If there hadn’t been a formal invitation, neither did I hear any explicit objection. Small symbolic possessions of mine had simply settled in with the leather furniture, Scandinavian wall hangings, and tangerine carpet. I feigned interest in his imported pilsner beer glasses and Dunhill pipes. I agreed that his photographs of old barns and naked women showed a very artistic bent. I deemed his darkroom, his records, even his old wine corks nothing less than fascinating.

And I helped prepare elaborate gourmet meals for gatherings of academics who ate and drank heartily but always withheld their love and seemed ultimately unimpressed with anything but their own words. The feminist who taught women's studies showed up at one of these dinners; upon observing that her chair was wobbly, she pulled a miniature tool kit from her purse, turned the chair over, and knelt down to make repairs, blithely hammering during dessert. Even so I would have been amused but she treated me with special disdain. I was so far beneath her on the enlightenment scale as to be almost invisible. The only guests who were nice to me were a wonderful couple named the Johnsons, who were simply gracious to their very bones, and an old professor from Ireland, who smelled like whiskey and tried to kiss me in the kitchen but looked at me with kind red eyes and said:

“But how long can you live in this life that isn't yours? And what will you finally do?”

Good questions, these. But they still seemed abstract. I didn’t want to move, didn't want to start over or be on my own. I was just a temp, anyway, in a temporary life, and there was a university down the street, should formal learning beckon, but I had absurdly little faith in my own possibilities. Even this peculiar holding pattern might be better than the bag lady life I imagined I would lead if left to my own devices.

I planted myself more firmly in place.He was not fond of life before noon, and as a rule he taught only evening classes. His forté was what he referred to as “consciousness-raising” -- he believed he was expanding the minds of his students, causing them to see the world in completely new ways, stripping them of their middle class illusions and setting them free. After class he would collect a few diehards to reconvene at the house where the talk would spiral into the smoky air as the hours and the drinking wore on. His booming voice would rise above all others -- his monologs were peppered with profanities and embellished with sweeping arm gestures. He loved an audience and could never be alone.

He would wake up the next day feeling bloated and crapulous, drink Maalox for breakfast straight from the bottle, sit groaning on the toilet for awhile, and start all over again.What did I think I was buying into here? Zorba the Greek?

My folly was to think I glimpsed his tragic soul. Beneath his bravado, I was sure there was a sensitive nature known only to me. His desperate brand of hedonism struck me as exciting, and I liked what I naively perceived as his worldliness. He, of course, found the Pygmalion element very enticing to his voracious ego -- he seemed to think I had not existed until he had breathed life into me. But I liked the idea of being with someone I could learn from, an intellectual who knew about music, books, and wine. I guess it wasn’t that hard to impress a girl from Long Island who had just spent a day by the frozen foods.

I knew there had been a pretty rapid turnover of females in his life, and I easily distinguished myself by my staying power, dubious honor that it was. Still, he considered it very important to regularly disabuse me of the notion that my use of his address might imply any sort of commitment.

“I see you as a person with a lot of growing to do,” he would say. “You’re just not in the big picture for me.”

I of, course, would cringe at this condescension, stomp my foot, and insist that I was a grown up.Then, more academically, there was his sociobiological angle: “You realize, of course, that men are not by nature monogamous, and I have no intention of repressing my natural desire for a variety of partners. That's how the species evolved.”I should have asked what species he was referring to, but I had not yet found my voice, and I felt myself shrinking like Alice in a world that grew curiouser and curiouser every day. Soon I was finding earrings on the nightstand, and they weren’t mine. And slips of paper with names like Helen, Sue, and Ann. There were phone calls at odd hours in whispered, stilted tones, and evening classes that mysteriously relocated and went on into the night.

I believed that I loved him and could not understand why that was not enough. And with a passion that was poison and pathological, I released all the fury that my love contained. The less he seemed to care, the more it mattered to me.

One morning I was waiting at the door as he stumbled in. By now I had turned into one of those cartoon women who hurl pies and rolling pins at their errant little-boy-husbands when they try to sneak in after carousing all night.

“Where the hell were you?” I demanded to know. “How dare you do this to me?”

As if my being there was anyone’s choice but my own. It saddens me even now that I thought so little of myself.

But this guy wasn’t Dagwood. He stepped up to me, drew back his fist, and punched me in the face. My head reeled backward, my ears buzzed, and for an instant my brain prickled with little lights.

Now this was an unequivocal message.In the days that followed, I watched in vague fascination as my eye changed colors like a jawbreaker, from inky blues to brown and jaundice yellow in the course of a week. Friends were outraged but not surprised, hoping that now I had come to my senses at last. And I lapped up their pity like a thirsty dog drinking from a dirty dish.I'd like to say that I left him then and there, but no, in the interest of honesty, I must confess that I did not. These things tend to whimper to a close, and even the habit of insanity can be very hard to shake. Now, though, I was definitely heading in the direction of out, and once I gained momentum, I moved forward without doubt.I returned once to retrieve a few paltry things I had left behind. It was sundown, and he was gone. Tom, the painter next door, greeted me with his Cheshire cat smile. His housemate Greg played a few weepy chords on his mandolin and lowered his glassy gaze. Two doors down, there lived a woman called Trixie, a displaced Onondagan who wept bitterly and audibly every night for her husband, twelve years dead. Her mournful wailing filled the air. Hauling my stuff in small cardboard boxes, I paused for one brief moment. The weary street seemed to turn away its weatherbeaten face.