Helen meets with Joseph Harkes
Stepping onto the third bridge forced Helen to think about her meeting with Joseph. She was not looking forward to it. Partly because she hadn't finished grading the papers yet, which was something she had promised would be done the last time they had met. But mainly because her meetings with Joseph were exhausting-trying to follow his interminable monologues, and obsessing over every single word and gesture he made.
Helen was always on her guard with Joseph. He had a reputation around campus as a womanizer who wasn't averse to fooling around with his own students and TAs. Before she left for Spain, Jessica had told Helen she shouldn't even consider working for a professor capable of such monstrous errors in judgment. Helen agreed with Jessica that Joseph’s conduct was inappropriate. It wasn’t just that he was so much older. Professors were part of a different world-they were teachers, and should be role models as well. Joseph had crossed a line he shouldn’t have crossed, just like Tim had crossed a line he shouldn’t have crossed when he went after April. It had been the summer of authority figures abusing their power. So what else was new? The world was a fucked up place. But she had never thought of Tim as someone who was going to add to that-it wasn't like him, and it made her sad to think that he had betrayed what he stood for.
During fall quarter she had seriously considered telling Joseph she didn't want to do be his TA after all, but she hadn't. She was just too reluctant to let a plum like that fall through her hand. She still had hopes (growing fainter by the day, of course) of attending graduate school, and teaching a section in an upper-division class; usually the job of graduate students, would be invaluable experience to have when applying.
She had other reasons as well. She had been eager to teach the section, to prove her intelligence matched her physical beauty. She had started to wonder if her life was becoming too much about her looks. But now that she was a month into it, she wondered if she had gotten in over her head. It had seemed easy to think of things to say when she was just one of thirty voices, and it didn't really matter if she spoke up or not. She had done well in Contemporary American Fiction, but she was forced to admit that a lot of it was due to Tim and Jessica. They had studied together, written papers together, filled each other in on what they hadn't read. Jessica let Helen read her notes, and Tim offered his, but his were written in an indecipherable scrawl that he cheerfully admitted not even he could read. They had gotten in the habit of pulling outrageous all-nighters, fueled by beer, coffee and herbal tea.
Tim seemed to delight in waiting until the last possible moment, then writing his entire paper in one burst on Helen's typewriter, even though he had a perfectly good computer and printer in his room at the Kane-King apartments. Then he would get excellents on them, which irritated Helen to no end. Nobody who wrote a paper in one burst of bullshit should be allowed to do so well on it. Once he finished his, he would type or retype hers, often rewriting it in the process. Her best paper had been based on an idea he had randomly tossed out at Golden West when they had gone there to study. His idea was about California and what it represented in China Men, Nothing At All and Crazy For Love, three novels that superficially had nothing to do with each other. Tim said California represented the end of dreams-the place where people had to confront themselves and who they really were. He had already decided what he was going to write on, so when Helen asked if she could steal his idea, he shrugged and said yes. It had ended up being the best paper she had written at UCSZ.
Although Tim procrastinated (rhymes with masturbated, Helen thought to herself with a smile) on his papers, he always did the reading.
Helen sometimes wondered why Theresa hadn’t recommended Tim to be a section leader. She thought maybe it was because Tim, though he always had something interesting to say, could be obnoxious and intolerant of ideas that he disagreed with. Most of the time he restrained himself, but every so often he would lose it and crush someone else's idea with a sarcastic remark. Theresa liked Tim, but she also had to reign him in every so often, remind him that he was just one student of thirty, not the second coming of Joseph Harkes. Tim seemed amenable to that-he was always responsive to female authority, and seemed to want and expect to be put in his place every so often.
Helen had to admit that despite her trepidation and paranoia, Joseph had behaved himself so far. In deed, at least, if not in thought. There was a gleam of hunger in his eyes that she thought she recognized. He was quite subtle about it, as he would have to be in a place where the wrong word at the wrong time could bring an outcry of sexual harassment and the end of his career, at least at UC Santa Zita. In fact, he was so subtle that even for someone with radar as finely tuned as Helen’s, it might have just been her paranoia-fueled imagination.
Helen placed her foot on the first step of the staircase that led up from the bridge into Krupke College. As she passed the Krupke Town Hall, where had she had seen Taj Mahal freshman year and she, Jessica and Tim had taken Philosophy 101 the year before, she checked her watch. She was late; but acceptably late.
* * *
“It has been suggested,” Joseph was saying, “that the male figures in China Men are feminist straw men, meant to primarily represent the false authority of patriarchy, against which Kingston contrasts the genuine thread of discourse and connection that the women create, and in that way maintain, strengthen and affirm the continuity of their culture.”
Helen stared at the empty page of her notebook as she struggled to keep listening. Depressed by the straight blue lines with only white emptiness between them, she looked in Joseph's direction. He wasn't looking at her. His face was tilted upwards, towards the window, talking to the air in classic academic fashion, as if what was being said were so profound it was more for the benefit of the entire universe than any particular person.
Joseph had a habit of using expressions like “one might say”, “it has been suggested”, “some authorities assert”, “implicit in the text” or “another way of looking at that is” that made it hard to figure out what he actually thought about anything. Half the time, the hypothetical statements were spoken with an ironic tone that meant, Helen was sure, that anyone who actually thought that was the biggest idiot in the world, if only you were allowed to say such things at UC Santa Zita. Listening to Joseph, Helen sometimes found herself lost in a maze of hypothetical speakers, feeling as if he expected her to sift through all of his various personas and carefully crafted ironies in order to divine what he really wanted her to know. Which, quite frankly, she just didn’t have time for.
Some of his irony was accompanied by a thin smile so bitter it seemed self-hating. Joseph didn’t seem like the happiest person to Helen. Did he miss Theresa? Wish he were married? Feel guilty over not having been part of his daughter’s life? Helen hoped it was the last. She tried to connect the middle-aged intellectual in front of her with her beer-hazed memories of April from that epic party the previous summer, but failed. Then again, Helen’s father, who was compulsively neat and organized, punctual to the second and liked everything run with military efficiency, wasn’t much like her. Just another one of God's sick jokes.
Helen frequently found it hard to concentrate in meetings with Joseph, knowing so much about his life that he wasn't aware she knew. His child, the fruit of his loins, had engaged in carnal relations with one of her best friends. It was all just too weird. Joseph had slept with Theresa. Tim had slept with April. Such a complicated web of circumstance might be amusing on a yuppie soap opera like Thirtysomething, but it was creepy in real life. Couldn't things just be what they were supposed to be? Why did everything in life always get so tangled up?
“But what we may be ignoring,” Joseph continued, “is the sense in which the novel's theme is not the explicit exegesis of those dualities, but rather our need to assemble these dualities in our own act of reading-and interpretation.”
With no warning, Joseph turned and looked straight at her. Their eyes locked for a moment, and his gaze was as piercing and direct as his words were subtle and roundabout. His pale blue eyes regarded her with skepticism, a ghost of a smile on his lips, as if inviting her to share in his private joke. His thought flashed in his mind, as clear as if he had said them out loud: "Although I enjoy forcing you to listen to me pontificate, what would be even better is if you allowed me to fuck your brains out."
After a second of eye contact, Helen turned her eyes towards the window, hoping to see blue. No such luck as grey-white fog still covered the campus. It was going to be one of those days, when the fog never lifts, or finally starts lifting in the late afternoon, just in time for the sun to go down. Helen heard Joseph clear his throat, a short, sharp grunt.
“But that is neither here nor there,” he said. “In the academic life, unfortunately, we can not only concern ourselves with ideas. There is also, it has to be said, a regrettable amount of the quotidian as well. For me, but also for you.”
Helen nodded, realizing where this was going. She realized how nervous she was about it, that she was perspiring and her lower back ached.
“You said you thought you would be able to return your students' most recent round of papers to them tomorrow?”
“Well,” Helen said, “I really wanted to be able to.”
Joseph gravely nodded, but said nothing. Helen swallowed, and the excuses she had fabricated earlier vanished from her mind. Her mouth dry, she swallowed several times more, and her heart pounded.
“It's just that the past week has been really busy. Some unexpected stuff came up, and... you know,” Helen said, mortified to hear herself making such a pathetic excuse. She might as well tell Joseph the dog ate her homework. She found herself smiling at Joseph-lips parted flirtatiously. He smiled back, an upwards twitching of the corners of his mouth.
“Timely return of the papers is important, Helen. But I know you have many other duties in your life to attend to.”
The slight emphasis Joseph put on the word “duties” made Helen think of sex for some reason, as if he were aware and sympathetic that the reason she hadn’t finished grading the papers was her grueling schedule of frequent and varied copulation. Helen couldn’t figure out if it was her derangement or his that made her read so much into his words.
“There is another set of papers due... tomorrow?”
Helen nodded.
“Indeed,” Joseph said. “Indeed.”
Their eyes met again, and Helen, unable to think of anything else to do, smiled at him. He smiled beneficently back.
“Well, I had better get back to my own version of the quotidian. See you at two o'clock.”
Irritation filled her at all this absurd subtext. Helen stood and slung her backpack around her left shoulder. She muttered a quick “bye” and hurried out of the office. Every time she thought she couldn't sink any lower, she did. She felt unclean, as if she and Joseph had just been intimate. As Helen passed by the ground-floor apartments she kept her head down, as if she were afraid she might be recognized, even though she didn’t know anyone who lived at Krupke College.
Helen was always on her guard with Joseph. He had a reputation around campus as a womanizer who wasn't averse to fooling around with his own students and TAs. Before she left for Spain, Jessica had told Helen she shouldn't even consider working for a professor capable of such monstrous errors in judgment. Helen agreed with Jessica that Joseph’s conduct was inappropriate. It wasn’t just that he was so much older. Professors were part of a different world-they were teachers, and should be role models as well. Joseph had crossed a line he shouldn’t have crossed, just like Tim had crossed a line he shouldn’t have crossed when he went after April. It had been the summer of authority figures abusing their power. So what else was new? The world was a fucked up place. But she had never thought of Tim as someone who was going to add to that-it wasn't like him, and it made her sad to think that he had betrayed what he stood for.
During fall quarter she had seriously considered telling Joseph she didn't want to do be his TA after all, but she hadn't. She was just too reluctant to let a plum like that fall through her hand. She still had hopes (growing fainter by the day, of course) of attending graduate school, and teaching a section in an upper-division class; usually the job of graduate students, would be invaluable experience to have when applying.
She had other reasons as well. She had been eager to teach the section, to prove her intelligence matched her physical beauty. She had started to wonder if her life was becoming too much about her looks. But now that she was a month into it, she wondered if she had gotten in over her head. It had seemed easy to think of things to say when she was just one of thirty voices, and it didn't really matter if she spoke up or not. She had done well in Contemporary American Fiction, but she was forced to admit that a lot of it was due to Tim and Jessica. They had studied together, written papers together, filled each other in on what they hadn't read. Jessica let Helen read her notes, and Tim offered his, but his were written in an indecipherable scrawl that he cheerfully admitted not even he could read. They had gotten in the habit of pulling outrageous all-nighters, fueled by beer, coffee and herbal tea.
Tim seemed to delight in waiting until the last possible moment, then writing his entire paper in one burst on Helen's typewriter, even though he had a perfectly good computer and printer in his room at the Kane-King apartments. Then he would get excellents on them, which irritated Helen to no end. Nobody who wrote a paper in one burst of bullshit should be allowed to do so well on it. Once he finished his, he would type or retype hers, often rewriting it in the process. Her best paper had been based on an idea he had randomly tossed out at Golden West when they had gone there to study. His idea was about California and what it represented in China Men, Nothing At All and Crazy For Love, three novels that superficially had nothing to do with each other. Tim said California represented the end of dreams-the place where people had to confront themselves and who they really were. He had already decided what he was going to write on, so when Helen asked if she could steal his idea, he shrugged and said yes. It had ended up being the best paper she had written at UCSZ.
Although Tim procrastinated (rhymes with masturbated, Helen thought to herself with a smile) on his papers, he always did the reading.
Helen sometimes wondered why Theresa hadn’t recommended Tim to be a section leader. She thought maybe it was because Tim, though he always had something interesting to say, could be obnoxious and intolerant of ideas that he disagreed with. Most of the time he restrained himself, but every so often he would lose it and crush someone else's idea with a sarcastic remark. Theresa liked Tim, but she also had to reign him in every so often, remind him that he was just one student of thirty, not the second coming of Joseph Harkes. Tim seemed amenable to that-he was always responsive to female authority, and seemed to want and expect to be put in his place every so often.
Helen had to admit that despite her trepidation and paranoia, Joseph had behaved himself so far. In deed, at least, if not in thought. There was a gleam of hunger in his eyes that she thought she recognized. He was quite subtle about it, as he would have to be in a place where the wrong word at the wrong time could bring an outcry of sexual harassment and the end of his career, at least at UC Santa Zita. In fact, he was so subtle that even for someone with radar as finely tuned as Helen’s, it might have just been her paranoia-fueled imagination.
Helen placed her foot on the first step of the staircase that led up from the bridge into Krupke College. As she passed the Krupke Town Hall, where had she had seen Taj Mahal freshman year and she, Jessica and Tim had taken Philosophy 101 the year before, she checked her watch. She was late; but acceptably late.
* * *
“It has been suggested,” Joseph was saying, “that the male figures in China Men are feminist straw men, meant to primarily represent the false authority of patriarchy, against which Kingston contrasts the genuine thread of discourse and connection that the women create, and in that way maintain, strengthen and affirm the continuity of their culture.”
Helen stared at the empty page of her notebook as she struggled to keep listening. Depressed by the straight blue lines with only white emptiness between them, she looked in Joseph's direction. He wasn't looking at her. His face was tilted upwards, towards the window, talking to the air in classic academic fashion, as if what was being said were so profound it was more for the benefit of the entire universe than any particular person.
Joseph had a habit of using expressions like “one might say”, “it has been suggested”, “some authorities assert”, “implicit in the text” or “another way of looking at that is” that made it hard to figure out what he actually thought about anything. Half the time, the hypothetical statements were spoken with an ironic tone that meant, Helen was sure, that anyone who actually thought that was the biggest idiot in the world, if only you were allowed to say such things at UC Santa Zita. Listening to Joseph, Helen sometimes found herself lost in a maze of hypothetical speakers, feeling as if he expected her to sift through all of his various personas and carefully crafted ironies in order to divine what he really wanted her to know. Which, quite frankly, she just didn’t have time for.
Some of his irony was accompanied by a thin smile so bitter it seemed self-hating. Joseph didn’t seem like the happiest person to Helen. Did he miss Theresa? Wish he were married? Feel guilty over not having been part of his daughter’s life? Helen hoped it was the last. She tried to connect the middle-aged intellectual in front of her with her beer-hazed memories of April from that epic party the previous summer, but failed. Then again, Helen’s father, who was compulsively neat and organized, punctual to the second and liked everything run with military efficiency, wasn’t much like her. Just another one of God's sick jokes.
Helen frequently found it hard to concentrate in meetings with Joseph, knowing so much about his life that he wasn't aware she knew. His child, the fruit of his loins, had engaged in carnal relations with one of her best friends. It was all just too weird. Joseph had slept with Theresa. Tim had slept with April. Such a complicated web of circumstance might be amusing on a yuppie soap opera like Thirtysomething, but it was creepy in real life. Couldn't things just be what they were supposed to be? Why did everything in life always get so tangled up?
“But what we may be ignoring,” Joseph continued, “is the sense in which the novel's theme is not the explicit exegesis of those dualities, but rather our need to assemble these dualities in our own act of reading-and interpretation.”
With no warning, Joseph turned and looked straight at her. Their eyes locked for a moment, and his gaze was as piercing and direct as his words were subtle and roundabout. His pale blue eyes regarded her with skepticism, a ghost of a smile on his lips, as if inviting her to share in his private joke. His thought flashed in his mind, as clear as if he had said them out loud: "Although I enjoy forcing you to listen to me pontificate, what would be even better is if you allowed me to fuck your brains out."
After a second of eye contact, Helen turned her eyes towards the window, hoping to see blue. No such luck as grey-white fog still covered the campus. It was going to be one of those days, when the fog never lifts, or finally starts lifting in the late afternoon, just in time for the sun to go down. Helen heard Joseph clear his throat, a short, sharp grunt.
“But that is neither here nor there,” he said. “In the academic life, unfortunately, we can not only concern ourselves with ideas. There is also, it has to be said, a regrettable amount of the quotidian as well. For me, but also for you.”
Helen nodded, realizing where this was going. She realized how nervous she was about it, that she was perspiring and her lower back ached.
“You said you thought you would be able to return your students' most recent round of papers to them tomorrow?”
“Well,” Helen said, “I really wanted to be able to.”
Joseph gravely nodded, but said nothing. Helen swallowed, and the excuses she had fabricated earlier vanished from her mind. Her mouth dry, she swallowed several times more, and her heart pounded.
“It's just that the past week has been really busy. Some unexpected stuff came up, and... you know,” Helen said, mortified to hear herself making such a pathetic excuse. She might as well tell Joseph the dog ate her homework. She found herself smiling at Joseph-lips parted flirtatiously. He smiled back, an upwards twitching of the corners of his mouth.
“Timely return of the papers is important, Helen. But I know you have many other duties in your life to attend to.”
The slight emphasis Joseph put on the word “duties” made Helen think of sex for some reason, as if he were aware and sympathetic that the reason she hadn’t finished grading the papers was her grueling schedule of frequent and varied copulation. Helen couldn’t figure out if it was her derangement or his that made her read so much into his words.
“There is another set of papers due... tomorrow?”
Helen nodded.
“Indeed,” Joseph said. “Indeed.”
Their eyes met again, and Helen, unable to think of anything else to do, smiled at him. He smiled beneficently back.
“Well, I had better get back to my own version of the quotidian. See you at two o'clock.”
Irritation filled her at all this absurd subtext. Helen stood and slung her backpack around her left shoulder. She muttered a quick “bye” and hurried out of the office. Every time she thought she couldn't sink any lower, she did. She felt unclean, as if she and Joseph had just been intimate. As Helen passed by the ground-floor apartments she kept her head down, as if she were afraid she might be recognized, even though she didn’t know anyone who lived at Krupke College.
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WORKS
- Andy Warhol's Sister
- Chronicles of the Mage
- Helen of Santa Zita
- Helen rides the bus, becomes overwhelmed
- Helen meets with Joseph Harkes
- 01-Helen breaks down in front of Jessica and Roxy
- Misc
- Notes For a Future Novel
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