David Lazar - Ill Be Your Mirror: Essays and Aphorisms

When O.J. Simpson was leading the police on the errant chase on that freeway in LA, I was in Madison Square Garden in New York, at the famous Knicks playoff game where the monitors switched to the chase, to our astonishment, but it didnt register as surreally or wildly as it might have otherwise because I had been in the middle of telling my brother about Ann.

I was a young professor, thirty-seven, and she was an older doctoral student, thirty-four, and we had fallen for each other, and I thought it was going to be a big deal, in the way you know that someone is going to come into your life and the tectonics are going to change. I thought she might just be the girl for me, excuse the language, and was all aquiver in telling my brother the news, must have felt, I suppose in thinking back on it now, rather certain about my feelings, and about it, which is to say the prospects of where this new thing was headed.

Ann killed herself about a year and a half ago. The details are vague because no one seems terribly willing to yield them up. She had attempted suicide a few years before, slitting her wrists, but she was discovered or didnt quite go through with itIm not quite remembering which. It was serious enough for hospitalizationterrible, terrible, but not life-threatening, at least not the cuts.

She had been on a downward trajectory for years.

I havent been able to quite stop thinking about her or to quite think about her since I heard about her death: the once promising career, writing about Virginia Woolf, that heavy eastern Kentucky accent, laden with irony and graceful goodwill. Her extraordinary recklessness. Her generosity. A bit like Zelda Fitzgerald gone in self-immolation. She was manic-depressive, as probably was Zelda. She looked a bit like Zelda, gamine and dark eyed. When I say I havent been able to quite think about her, I mean that as much as she comes into my mind, a kind of creaturely sharp pain accompanies the thought of her, and I jump away as though I had laid my hand on a hot stove.

Twenty years ago an affaire de coeur between a professor and a graduate student not her or his own was not much of a deal in many places. In some places, geographical outposts, even encouraged. Younger, post-Internet readers perhaps wont quite understand the human urgencies of being alone and being isolated among rolling hills and aging colleagues in the earlier days of academe. To this sector of audience, the emotional premise of my memory might seem politically nauseating. What can I say except I understand, times change, etc. People communed where possible, even when the tincture of taboo tinted the edges of relation. They still do.

We met furtively at first, after a series of notes she had sent me toward the end of a seminar. We did meet, I must stress, after the seminar ended. But, and I suppose this is among the reasons I turn to writing these things, to see what repressed details show their hoary heads, I remember now that she was actually separated and moving toward a divorce from her third husband. But they hadnt actually, which is to say formally, made plans to divorce yet. That, no doubt, was part of our film noirish meetings in back alleys and cheap motels. It was one thing to date an available graduate student of ones own age. Quite another to be perceived (albeit wrongly) as a homewrecker, sharpest edge of a triangle.