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He was a beautiful boy--sadly the only boy in her ill-advised course on the metaphysical poets, which was ill advised because she should have known that such "a race of writers," as Samuel Johnson had called them when he first nicknamed them the "metaphysical poets," would mostly be of interest to young women.
She was ill advised, too, in admitting the boy to this all-girl class; he was underprepared for it. But he'd come to her office and recited Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," flubbing only the couplet "My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires, and more slow."
He'd said "groan" instead of "grow," and she could almost hear him groaning as he delivered the next lines.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast;
But thirty thousand to the rest
Oh, my, she'd thought, knowing they were her breasts, and the rest, that he was thinking of. So she'd let him in.
When the girls in the class flirted with him, she felt the need to protect him. At first she told herself she just wanted to mother him. When she dumped him--no less ceremoniously than her pregnant daughter had been dumped by her unnamed boyfriend--the boy dropped her course and called his mother.
The boy's mother, who was on the board of trustees at another university, wrote the dean of faculty: "Isn't sleeping with one's students in the 'moral turpitude' department?" Her question had resulted in Patrick's onetime thesis adviser and lover taking a semester's leave of absence of her own.
The unplanned sabbatical, her second divorce, her daughter's not dissimilar disgrace ... well, mercy, what was Wallingford's old thesis adviser to do?
Her soon-to-be second ex-husband had reluctantly agreed not to cancel her credit cards for one more month. He would deeply regret this. She spontaneously took her out-of-school daughter to Paris, where they moved into a suite at the Hotel Le Bristol; it was far too expensive for her, but she'd received a postcard of it once and had always wanted to go there. The postcard had been from her first ex-husband--he'd stayed there with his second wife and had sent her the card just to rub it in.
Le Bristol was on the rue du Faubourg Saint Honore, surrounded by elegant shopping of the kind not even an adventuress could afford. Once they were there, she and her daughter didn't dare go anywhere or do anything. The extravagance of the hotel itself was more than they could handle. They felt underdressed in the lobby and in the bar, where they sat mesmerized by the people who were clearly more at ease about simply being in Le Bristol than they were. Yet they wouldn't admit it had been a bad idea to come--at least not their first night.
There was quite a nice, modestly priced bistro very near them, on one of the smaller streets, but it was a rainy, dark evening and they wanted to go to bed early--they were yielding to jet lag. They planned on an early dinner at the hotel and would let the real Paris begin for them the next day, but the hotel restaurant was very popular. A table wouldn't be available for them until after nine o'clock, when they hoped to be fast asleep.
They'd come all this way to make recompense for how they'd both been unjustly injured, or so they believed; in truth, they were victims of the dissatisfactions of the flesh, in which their own myriad discontents had played a principal part. Unearned or deserved, Le Bristol was to be their reward. Now they were forced to retreat to their suite, relegated to room service.
There was nothing inelegant about room service at Le Bristol--it was simply not a night in Paris of the kind they had imagined. Both mother and daughter, uncharacteristically, tried to make the best of it.
"I never dreamed I'd spend my first night in Paris in a hotel room with my mother!" the daughter exclaimed; she tried to laugh about it.
"At least I won't get you pregnant," her mother remarked. They both tried to laugh about that, too.
Wallingford's old thesis adviser began the litany of the disappointing men in her life. The daughter had heard some of the list before, but she was developing a list of her own, albeit thus far vastly shorter than her mother's. They drank two half-bottles of wine from the mini-bar before the red Bordeaux they'd ordered with their dinner was delivered, and they drank that, too. Then they called room service and asked for a second bottle.
The wine loosened their tongues--maybe more than was either appropriate or seemly in a mother-daughter conversation. That her wayward daughter could easily have got herself pregnant with any number of careless boys before she encountered the lout who'd done the job was a bitter pill for any mother to swallow--even in Paris. That Patrick Wallingford's former thesis adviser was an inveterate sexual aggressor grew evident, even to her daughter; that her mother's sexual taste had led her to dally with ever-younger men, which eventually included a teenager, was possibly more than any daughter cared to know.
At a welcome lull in her mother's nonstop confessions--the middle-aged admirer of the metaphysical poets was signing for the second bottle of Bordeaux while brazenly flirting with the room-service waiter--the daughter sought some relief from this unwanted intimacy by turning on the television. As befitted a recently and stylishly renovated hotel, Le Bristol offered a multitude of satellite-TV channels--in English and other languages, as well as in French--and, as luck would have it, the inebriated mother had no sooner closed the door behind the room-service waiter than she turned to face the room, her daughter, and the TV, where she saw her ex-lover lose his left hand to a lion. Just like that!
Of course she screamed, which made her daughter scream. The second bottle of Bordeaux would have slipped out of the mother's grasp, had she not gripped the neck of the bottle tightly. (She might have been imagining that the bottle was one of her own hands, disappearing down a lion's throat.)
The hand-eating episode was over before the mother could reiterate the tortured tale of her relationship with the now-maimed television journalist. It would be an hour until the international news channel aired the incident again, although every fifteen minutes there were what the network called "bumpers," telling of the upcoming item--each promo in a ten-or fifteen-second installment. The lions fighting over some remaining and indistinguishable tidbit in their cage; the handless arm dangling from Patrick's separated shoulder; the stunned expression on Wallingford's face shortly before he fainted; a hasty view of a braless, headphone-wearing blond woman, who appeared to be sleeping in what looked like meat.
Mother and daughter sat up a second hour to watch the whole episode again. This time the mother remarked of the braless blonde, "I'll bet he was fucking her."
They went on like that, through the second bottle of Bordeaux. Their third watching of the complete event prompted cries of lascivious glee--as if Wallingford's punishment, as they thought of it, was what should have happened to every man they had ever known.
"Only it shouldn't have been his hand," the mother said.
"Yeah, right," the daughter replied.
But after this third viewing of the grisly event, only a sullen silence greeted the final swallowing of the body parts, and the mother found herself looking away from Patrick's face as he was about to swoon.
"The poor bastard," the daughter said under her breath. "I'm going to bed."
"I think I'll see it one more time," her mother answered.
