'Very well. I have found a lover.'
And what am I, chopped liver?
'I see,' I said softly. A look of martyrdom.
'Really, Jake, you're acting very immature. It is not as if we pledged ourselves to each other.'
'So I shouldn't have a sense of loss.'
'You can't lose what you don't have.'
It made sense to my brain, but the rest of me wasn't listening. My eyes were watery.
'Who is he?' I asked. 'Do I know him?'
'Oh, Jake. Don't go looking to be hurt.'
She was right. No need to look. The pain would find me soon enough.
CHAPTER 33
Professor Gerald Prince thrust his chin forward, and in his best upper-crust Rex Harrison voice intoned: 'The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls, in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.' I hobbled to my customary spot in the back row and wondered if I'd get in trouble for not doing the homework. On the stage a young woman read Eliza Doolittle's lines as they worked their way through the final act.
When Prince told the community-college Eliza that he'd grown accustomed to her face, I believed him. He was a damn fine actor.
They wrapped up the final scene and the class applauded politely. 'What is Shaw telling us in the play?' Prince asked.
'It's about abolishing the difference between the classes,' said an earnest young man up front.
'Perhaps that is the result, but the mechanics of the change?'
'Language, clarity of thought and speech,' said the woman next to me.
The class mumbled its agreement. They had learned something since my last visit.
'Quite so,' Prince said. 'The play is unapologetically didactic. Shaw sincerely cared about the language. He-'
'I don't get something,' interrupted a student near me. 'In the movie the professor gets the girl. Here…'
'Here, she leaves to marry Freddy Eynsford Hill,' Prince said. 'And why? Because Higgins is a confirmed bachelor more attached to his work than to a pretty face, even one to which he has become accustomed.'
'And his mother thing,' the young woman said. 'Higgins was a momma's boy.'
'A mother thing, indeed,' Prince said. 'In his notes Shaw discusses the mother as rival. As intelligent and articulate as he was, Higgins was not fully developed emotionally.'
Prince looked toward the clock on the wall, nodded his head, and the students obediently closed their notebooks. I gingerly worked my way to the front. Prince was stuffing some papers into an old briefcase.
He saw me and bowed formally. 'Did you fancy my reading of Higgins?'
'First rate. Much lighter fare than Edmund Tyrone. Not all that in-love-with-death stuff.'
He beamed. Like trial lawyers, actors never hear too many compliments. The professor wore a checked shirt under a blue blazer with a rakish yellow ascot. His eyes were clear. 'You were worried about me, weren't you? I am moved by that, Biff. Have no fear. I am sane, stable, and as happy as can be expected. As for Edmund's speech, in drama, if one looks hard enough, there is the antidote to every expressed emotion:
'' No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly longed for death. ''
'Good to see you so chipper. And I like the line. Shakespeare?'
'No, Alfred Tennyson.'
Him again.
Prince smiled slyly. 'Your policeman friend was here yesterday. He apologized for unfairly accusing me. Then he showed me printouts of someone calling himself Passion Prince chatting with Miss Rosedahl and Mrs. Fox. Some very good poetry, if you like that sort of thing, taken badly out of context. I thought I'd get a rise out of you with the reference to Tennyson.'
'You did.'
'The policeman said you always believed in my innocence. That means a lot to me, Biff. If there's anything I can do for you…'
Of course, there was.
I ordered an iced tea and Prince said make it two. I gave him a look.
'There's a repertory company auditioning in Lauderdale,' he explained. ' Inherit the Wind. The collision of blind faith with the inquisitive search for truth. It wouldn't hurt me to show up sober.'
'Henry Drummond?'
'But of course. Would you care to hear his cross-examination of the self-appointed prophet, Matthew Brady?'
'Maybe later.'
He looked great. The silvery hair was swept back and combed. The blazer was either new or freshly pressed, not a gravy stain in sight. Best of all, he was cold sober. He had acknowledged his problem. So few do. A doctor asks a patient how much he drinks and how often he has sex. To get the truth, multiply the former by two and divide the latter by three.
The waiter brought our broiled snapper and fried plantains. We were in a bayfront restaurant two weeks old that tried hard to achieve the dilapidated sea-shanty look. Unpainted, knotholed boards were bolted to walls of sturdy concrete block. Lobster traps and colorful buoys hung from the ceiling, and an old dinghy sat wedged on the roof, as if a hurricane deposited it there. None of that bothered me. I could even tolerate the plastic pelican on a Styrofoam piling. But the snapper had that too-late-frozen, too-early-thawed, four-day-old fishy taste.
A sad truth: it is hard to find good, fresh local fish in a city that sits on the sea. I used to visit the docks in Bayfront Park when the fishing boats came in. The fishermen would fillet yellowtail, grouper, or dolphin that had been caught an hour earlier, and an hour later, you could be home marinating the catch in pineapple juice and soy sauce while the charcoal turned white. Then the city fathers evicted the fishing boats and built a trendy plaza of shops and restaurants, where we now sat, eating last week's fish.
'What did Rodriguez want?' I asked.
'The poetry. What it might mean. I told him what it meant to Tennyson was quite different than what some warped soul might read into it.'
'What did the poet mean when he wrote, 'Woman is the lesser man'?'
He smiled at me and finished the stanza:
'' And all thy passions, matched with mine,
Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.''
What do you think it means, Biff?'
'I don't know. It contradicts most people's beliefs. Most would say that women's passions run deeper than men's, though my recent experiences would belie that.'
Prince didn't seem interested in my personal life. Instead, he began the lecture. 'The poem was written shortly after Tennyson's unhappy love affair with Rosa Baring. Her marriage to another man may have prompted the bittersweet imagery.'
'So jealousy is the emotion.'
'The poem is more complex,' he continued, 'and frankly, a bit whiny for my tastes. If you're looking for a theme, Tennyson's important later poetry was naturalistic and Utopian. He saw mankind's struggle as an ascent to
