Who Do You Think You Are

look at him. He had shed a wife, a family, a house, a discouraging future, set himself up with new clothes and new furniture and a succession of student mistresses. Men can do it.
    “My, my,” Rose said and leaned against the wall. “What was that all about?”
    The man beside her, who had smiled all the time and looked into his glass, said, “Ah, the sensitive youth of our time! Their grace of language, their depth of feeling! We must bow before them.”
    The man with the black curly hair came back, didn’t say a word, but handed Rose a fresh drink and took her glass.
    The host came back too.
    “Rose baby. I don’t know how he got in. I said no bloody students.
    There’s got to be some place safe from them.”
    “He was in one of my classes last year,” Rose said. That really was all she could remember. She supposed they were thinking there must be more to it.
    “Did he want to be an actor?” said the man beside her. “I’ll bet he did. Remember the good old days when they all wanted to be lawyers and engineers and business executives? They tell me that’s coming back. I hope so. I devoutly hope so. Rose, I bet you listened to his problems. You must never do that. I bet that’s what you did.”
    “Oh, I suppose.”
    “They come along looking for a parent-substitute. It’s banal as can be. They trail around worshipping you and bothering you and then bam! It’s parent-substitute rejecting time!”
    Rose drank, and leaned against the wall, and heard them take up the theme of what students expected nowadays, how they broke down your door to tell you about their abortions, their suicide attempts, their creativity crises, their weight problems. Always using the same words: personhood, values, rejection.
    “I’m not rejecting you, you silly bugger, I’m flunking you!” said the little sharp man, recalling a triumphant confrontation he had had with one such student. They laughed at that and at the young woman who said, “God, the difference when I was at university! You wouldn’t have mentioned an abortion in a professor’s office any more than you would have shit on the floor. Shat on the floor.”
    Rose was laughing too, but felt smashed, under the skin. It would be better, in a way, if there were something behind this such as they suspected. If she had slept with that boy. If she had promised him something, if she had betrayed him, humiliated him. She could not remember anything. He had sprung out of the floor to accuse her. She must have done something, and she could not remember it. She could not remember anything to do with her students; that was the truth. She was solicitous and charming, all warmth and acceptance; she listened and advised; then she could not get their names straight. She could not remember a thing she had said to them.
    A woman touched her arm. “Wake up,” she said, in a tone of sly intimacy that made Rose think she must know her. Another student? But no, the woman introduced herself.
    “I’m doing a paper on female suicide,” she said. “I mean, the suicide of female artists.” She said she had seen Rose on television and was longing to talk to her. She mentioned Diane Arbus, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Christiane Pflug. She was well informed. She looked like a prime candidate herself, Rose thought: emaciated, bloodless, obsessed. Rose said she was hungry, and the woman followed her out to the kitchen.
    “And too many actresses to count—” the woman said. “Margaret Sullavan—”
    “I’m just a teacher now.”
    “Oh, nonsense. I’m sure you are an actress to the marrow of your bones.”
    The hostess had made bread: glazed and braided and decorated loaves. Rose wondered at the pains taken here. The bread, the pâté, the hanging plants, the kittens, all on behalf of a most precarious and temporary domesticity. She wished, she often wished, that she could take such pains, that she could make ceremonies, impose herself, make bread.
    She noticed a group of younger members of the faculty—she would have thought them students, except for what the host had said about students not being let in—who were sitting on the counters and standing in front of the sink. They were talking in low, serious voices. One of them looked at her. She smiled. Her smile was not returned. A couple of others looked at her, and they went on talking. She was sure they were talking about her, about what had happened in the living room. She urged the woman to try some