The Lesson of Her Death

white layered nightgown, her long hair spilling like dark water on the pillow. A girl with a pallid face. Mouth open in relaxation, revealing charming prominent teeth. Lips curling outward. Eyes closed. Her name was Jennie Gebben and she was dead.
    At only one point since his graduation from Yale had Brian Okun ever doubted that he would be a Nobel Prize winner. There was some question as to whether he would win for nonfiction writing—some quantum-leaping analysis of, say, the relation between Yeats’s haywire obsession with Maude Gonne and his art. Or whether he would produce a series of showy, anxious quote Updike Coomer Ford quote
New Yorker
novels ridden with quirky characters and heavy with the filigree of imagery and dialect-laden talk. Either was fine. Only twenty-seven,on the verge of doctorhood, Brian Okun felt mastery of his scholarly self.
    He also believed however that his right brain needed more life experience. And like many graduate students he believed that life experience was synonymous with fucking. He intended to fill the next five years with as many female students as he had the stamina to bed and the patience to endure afterward. Eventually he would marry—a woman who was brilliant and homely enough to remain utterly devoted to him. The nuptials would have happened by the time the Swedish girls, hair glowing under the blaze of the burning candle wreaths, woke him up in Stockholm on the morning of the award presentation.
    But these dreams were disrupted by a particular individual.
    Jennie Gebben had been a curious creature. When he’d first read her name in class he’d paused. His mind had tricked him and he misread it. He thought he’d seen
Jennie Gerhardt
, one of Theodore Dreiser’s tragic heroines and a character that Professor Gilchrist discussed at length in his famous paper in which he psychoanalyzed Dreiser. Okun had looked at Jennie across the U-shaped classroom table and held her eyes for a moment. He knew how to look at women. After a moment he commented on the name error. Several people in class nodded in self-indulgent agreement to impress him with their familiarity with Naturalistic writing.
    Jennie gave a bored glance at Okun and responded brashly that she’d never heard of her near namesake.
    He asked her out three days later, a record in self-restraint.
    At a university like Auden, located in a two-cinema, four-screen town, inappropriate liaisons cannot proceed as they would in an anonymous city. Okun and Jennie spent their time walking in the woods or driving out to the quarry. Or spending nights in her room or his apartment.
    He brooded to the point of fetish. Why this fierceattraction? Jennie wasn’t gifted artistically. She wasn’t brilliant, she was a B-minus student with a solid Midwestern artistic sensibility (this meant that she had to be told what was valid and what was not). He was stung by these limitations of hers. When he inventoried what he loved about her he came up with shrinkage: the way she covered her mouth with her delicate hand at scenes of violence in movies, the way she let slip little murmurs from her throat as she looked at a chill spring wash of stars above them, the way she could drop her shoulder and dislodge a satin bra strap without using her fingers.
    Of course some aspects of Jennie Gebben he loved intensely: her suggestions when they were making love that she might like to try “something different.” Did he enjoy pain? Would he please please bury his finger in her, no no not in my cunt, please, yeah, there all the way.… Did he like the feel of silk, of women’s nylons? And she would bind a black seamed stocking tight around his balls and stroke his glans until he came, forceful and hurting, on the thick junction of her chin and throat.
    Several times she dressed him in one of her nightgowns and on those occasions he emptied himself inside her within seconds of fierce penetration.
    These were the bearings of their relationship and as impassioned as Okun felt, he knew they could not be trusted. Not when your lover was Jennie Gebben. The murmurs and whimpers had taken on too great a significance for him. Out of control he crashed.
    It occurred when one night he had blurted a marriage proposal to her. And she, less intelligent, a common person, had suddenly encircled him in her arms in a terrifyingly maternal way. She shook her head and said, “No, honey. That’s not what you want.”
    Honey
. She called him honey! It broke his