Almost No Memory

THE PROFESSOR

A few years ago, I used to tell myself I wanted to marry a cowboy. Why shouldn’t I say this to myself — living alone, excited by the brown landscape, sometimes noticing a cowboy in a pickup truck in my rearview mirror, as I drove on the broad highways of the West Coast? In fact, I realize I would still like to marry a cowboy, though by now I’m living in the East and married already to someone who is not a cowboy.

But what would a cowboy want with a woman like me — an English professor, the daughter of another English professor, not very easygoing? If I have a drink or two, I’m more easygoing, but I still speak correctly and don’t know how to joke with people unless I know them well, and often these are university people or the people they live with, who also speak correctly. Although I don’t mind them, I feel cut off from all the other people in this country — to mention only this country.

I told myself I liked the way cowboys dressed, starting with the hat, and how comfortable they were in their clothes, so practical, having to do with their work. Many professors seem to dress the way they think a professor should dress, without any real interest or love. Their clothes are too tight or else a few years out of style and just add to the awkwardness of their bodies.

After I was hired to teach for the first time, I bought a briefcase, and then after I started teaching I carried it through the halls like the other professors. I could see that the older professors, mostly men but also some women, were no longer aware of the importance of their briefcases, and that the younger women pretended they weren’t aware of it, but the younger men carried their briefcases like trophies.

At that same time, my father began sending me thick envelopes containing material he thought would help me in my classes, including exercises to assign and quotes to use. I didn’t read more than a few pages sometimes when I was feeling strong. How could an old professor try to teach a young professor? Didn’t he know I wouldn’t be able to carry my briefcase through the halls and say hello to my colleagues and students and then go home and read the instructions of the old professor?

In fact, I liked teaching because I liked telling other people what to do. In those days it seemed clearer to me than it does now that if I did something a certain way, it had to be right for other people, too. I was so convinced of it that my students were convinced, too. Still, though I was a teacher outside, I was something else inside. Some of the old professors were also old professors inside, but inside, I wasn’t even a young professor. I looked like a woman in glasses, but I had dreams of leading a very different kind of life, the life of a woman who would not wear glasses, the kind of woman I saw from a distance now and then in a bar.

More important than the clothes a cowboy wore, and the way he wore them, was the fact that a cowboy probably wouldn’t know much more than he had to. He would think about his work, and about his family, if he had one, and about having a good time, and not much else. I was tired of so much thinking, which was what I did most in those days. I did other things, but I went on thinking while I did them. I might feel something, but I would think about what I was feeling at the same time. I even had to think about what I was thinking and wonder why I was thinking it. When I had the idea of marrying a cowboy I imagined that maybe a cowboy would help me stop thinking so much.

I also imagined, though I was probably wrong about this, too, that a cowboy wouldn’t be like anyone I knew — like an old Communist, or a member of a steering committee, a writer of letters to the newspaper, a faculty wife serving tea at a student tea, a professor reading proofs with a sharp pencil and asking everyone to be quiet. I thought that when my mind, always so busy, always going around in circles, always having an idea and then an idea about an idea, reached out to his mind, it would meet something quieter, that there would be more blanks, more open spaces, that some of what he had in his mind might be the sky, clouds, hilltops, and then other concrete things like ropes, saddles, horsehair, the smell of horses and cattle, motor oil, calluses, grease, fences, gullies, dry streambeds, lame cows, stillborn calves, freak calves, veterinarians’ visits, treatments, innoculations. I imagined this even though I knew that some of the things I liked that might be in his mind, like the saddles, the saddle sores, the horsehair, and the horses themselves, weren’t often a part of the life of a cowboy anymore. As for what I would do in my life with this cowboy, I sometimes imagined myself reading quietly in clean clothes in a nice study, but at other times I imagined myself oiling tack or cooking large quantities of plain food or helping out in the barn in the early morning while the cowboy had both arms inside a cow to turn a calf so it would present properly. Problems and chores like these would be clear and I would be able to handle them in a clear way. I wouldn’t stop reading and thinking, but I wouldn’t know very many people who did a lot of that, so I would have more privacy in it, because the cowboy, though so close to me all the time, wouldn’t try to understand but would leave me alone with it. It would not be an embarrassment anymore.

I thought if I married a cowboy, I wouldn’t have to leave the West. I liked the West for its difficulties. First I liked the difficulty of telling when one season was over and another had begun, and then I liked the difficulty of finding any beauty in the landscape where I was. To begin with, I had gotten used to its own kind of ugliness, all those broad highways laid down in the valleys and the new constructions placed up on the bare hillsides. Then I began to find beauty in it, and liked the bareness and the plain brown of the hills in the dry season, and the way the folds in the hills where some dampness tended to linger would fill up with grasses and shrubs and other flowering plants. I liked the plainness of the ocean and the emptiness when I looked out over it. And then, especially since it had been so hard for me to find this beauty, I didn’t want to leave it.

I might have gotten the idea of marrying a cowboy from a movie I saw one night in the springtime with a friend of mine who was also a professor — a handsome and intelligent man kinder than I am, but even more awkward around people, forgetting even the names of old friends in his sudden attacks of shyness. He seemed to enjoy the movie, though I have no idea what was going through his mind. Maybe he was imagining a life with the woman in the movie, who was so different from his thin, nervous, and beautiful wife. As we drove away from the movie theater, on one of those broad highways with nothing ahead or behind but taillights and headlights and nothing on either side but darkness, all I wanted to do was go out into the middle of the desert, as far away as possible from everything I had known all my life, and from the university where I was teaching and the towns and the city near it with all the intelligent people who lived and worked in them, writing down their ideas in notebooks and on computers in their offices and their studies at home and taking notes from difficult books. I wanted to leave all this and go out into the middle of the desert and run a motel by myself with a little boy, and have a worn-out cowboy come along, a worn-out middle-aged cowboy, alcoholic if necessary, and marry him. I thought I knew of a little boy I could take with me. Then all I would need would be the aging cowboy and the motel. I would make it a good motel, I would look after it and I would solve any problems sensibly and right away as they came along. I thought I could be a good, tough businesswoman just because I had seen this movie showing this good, tough businesswoman. This woman also had a loving heart and a capacity to understand another fallible human being. The fact is that if an alcoholic cowboy came into my life in any important way I would probably criticize him to death for his drinking until he walked out on me. But at the time I had that strange confidence, born of watching a good movie, that I could be something different from what I was, and I started listening to country Western music on the car radio, though I knew it wasn’t written for me.

At that point I met a man in one of my classes who seemed reasonably close to my idea of a cowboy, though now I can’t tell exactly why I thought so. He wasn’t really like a cowboy, or what I thought a cowboy might be like, so what I wanted must have been something else, and the idea of a cowboy just came up in my mind for the sake of convenience. The facts weren’t right. He didn’t work as a cowboy but at some kind of job where he glued the bones of chimpanzees together. He played jazz trombone, and on the days when he had a lesson he wore a dark suit to class and carried a black case. He just missed being good-looking, with his square, fleshy, pale face, his dark hair, mustache, dark eyes; just missed being good-looking, not because of his rough cheeks, which were scarred from shrapnel, but because of a loose or wild look about him, his eyes wide open all the time, even when he smiled, and his body very still, only his eyes moving, watching everything, missing nothing. Wary, he was ready to defend himself as though every conversation might also be something of a fight.

One day when a group of us were having a beer together after class, he was quiet, seemed very low, and finally said to us, without raising his eyes, that he thought he might be going to move in with his father and send his little girl back to her mother. He said he didn’t think it was fair to keep her because sometimes he would just sit in a chair without speaking — she would try to talk to him and he wouldn’t be able to open his mouth, she would keep on trying and he would sit there knowing he had to answer her but unable to.

His rudeness and wildness were comfortable to me at that point, and because he would tease me now and then, I thought he liked me enough so that I could ask him to go out to dinner with me, and finally I did, just to see what would happen. He seemed startled, then pleased to accept, sobered and flattered at this attention from his professor.

The date didn’t turn out to be something that would change the direction of my life, though that’s not what I was expecting then, only what I thought about afterwards. He was very late coming to pick me up at the graduate-student housing compound where I was staying. Just when I had decided he wasn’t coming, after I had spent an hour pacing more and more hopelessly out onto my tiny tree-shaded balcony, which overlooked a playground and the parking lot, and back into my tiny living room, which was crowded with the things of some young couple I didn’t know, he came in wearing an old work shirt with the sleeves rolled up and brown corduroys with the cord worn off on the thighs. He stopped and looked around as though he were about to get to work on something, then spotted the piano and bent over it for a moment and played a fast, pretty tune just long enough to make me happy again, then broke it off in the middle.

I was very curious about him, as though everything that added itself to what I knew already would be a revelation. When we got into the car he reached across me and unlocked the glove compartment and when we prepared to get out he reached across me and locked it again. I asked him why he did that, and he lifted up a bundle of papers in the glove compartment and showed me the wooden butt of a gun. He told me a couple of men were after him, and that it had something to do with his little girl.

We parked near the restaurant, he took a gray jacket off a hanger in the car and put it over his arm, and as we walked along he tucked in his shirt and then put on the jacket. I thought to myself this was how a cowboy might do it — carry his gray suit in the car on a hanger, and when he neatened up to go into some place with a woman he would also touch his hair gently.

He drank milk with his Chinese dinner. He talked about his job, offering me pieces of scientific information, and then told some bad jokes. We didn’t either of us eat very much, embarrassed, I think, to be alone together like this. He told me that he had married his wife right after he got back from the war. She was half Chinese and half Mexican. He told me his hearing had been damaged in the war and I noticed that he watched my lips as I talked. He told me his balance had been affected, too, and outside the restaurant I noticed how he would veer toward the curb when he walked. He drank milk in the restaurant but beer in the bar where we went to play pool. He put his arm around me outside the bar, but back in the car he said he had to get home to his babysitter. Then he changed his mind and took me to a spot on a cliff that looked out over the ocean and kissed me. Other cars were parked around us, and a pickup truck.

He kissed me a number of times there in his old maroon Ford with the radio on, so that I could have imagined I was a teenager again except that when I was a teenager I had never done anything like that. Then we got out of the car and went to the edge of the cliff to look down at the ocean, the black water of the bay, and the strings of lights that reached out into the water from the town where we had been playing pool. We sat down on the sand not far from the edge of the cliff and he told me a little more about how hard it had been with his wife, how he had tried to get back together with her, how he had done his best to charm her and she wouldn’t be charmed. He told me he had been alone with his little girl for six months now, and his wife was coming home in a few days to try living with him again, even though nothing he did had ever worked. He said he wouldn’t be able to see me again. I told him I wasn’t expecting that anyway, because I was leaving the West soon. It wasn’t quite true that I hadn’t expected to see him again, but it was true that I was leaving soon. Finally he took me home and kissed me good night.

As far as I could tell, I didn’t mind the way the date turned out, though I started crying the next day in my car on my way to the drive-in bank. I thought I was crying for him, his fears, his difficulties, the mysterious men he thought were after him and his daughter, but I was probably crying for myself, out of disappointment, though exactly what I wanted I’m not sure. Months later, after I was living in the East again, I called him long-distance one night after having a couple of beers by myself in my apartment, and when he answered there was noise in the background of people talking and laughing, either his family or a party, I can’t remember which, and he sounded just as pleased to hear from me, and flattered, as he had sounded when I asked him out on the date.

I still imagine marrying a cowboy, though less often, and the dream has changed a little. I’m so used to the companionship of my husband by now that if I were to marry a cowboy I would want to take him with me, though he would object strongly to any move in the direction of the West, which he dislikes. So if we went, it would not be as it was in my daydream a few years ago, with me cooking plain food or helping the cowboy with a difficult calf. It would end, or begin, with my husband and me standing awkwardly there in front of the ranch house, waiting while the cowboy prepared our rooms.