High-Rise South

Following is the second excerpt which I cut from my forthcoming memoir, LANDSCAPE IN LAVENDER

“Howdy!” said my new roommate Scott, when I opened the door to my room on the twenty-third floor of High-Rise South, the dorm on the University of Pennsylvania campus where I had been assigned for the spring semester of my sophomore year. A short, friendly young man, Scott had blond hair in a layered haircut sculpted by Julius Scissor, Philadelphia’s answer to the world-renowned hair stylist, Vidal Sassoon. Behind him, the skyline of Center City appeared in the window, reflecting a constantly shifting play of light and shadow against the crowd of tall buildings. He and I were lucky to get a room facing east, toward downtown: the south-facing apartments looked out over the dramatic orange and blue flames that danced high into the night sky from the giant oil refineries lining the Schuylkill River below.

I was a nerdy A-student, and I excelled at my classes. One was nineteenth-century French literature, taught by Mme. Lucienne Frappier-Mazur, an erudite professor with a fine Parisian pedigree. With her bright brown eyes, short brown hair, and a smile that varied between enigmatic and vaguely enthusiastic, she conducted her class entirely in French, and we worked our way dutifully through Flaubert, Balzac, Stendhal and Zola. Still fresh from my previous year abroad in Paris, my French was good enough that one day “La Frappe,” as some of us called her, asked to see me after class.

“I’ve written a paper in French, and now I have to present it in English at a conference,” she explained. “Would you be willing to translate it? Let me be clear that I want it in colloquial English, bien sur,” she added. “I want it to sound the way people actually speak, not like academic, written English.” Although I knew I was a good student, I was stunned by the honor she was bestowing on me. Naturally, I agreed, and over the next few days I began translating. Then, one afternoon while I worked at my desk, I received an unexpected visit from a good friend I had met in Low-Rise North, the dorm we had shared in fall semester.

“What are you doing?” Linda asked.

“Oh, I’m translating a paper into English for my French teacher. She has to read it out loud at a conference.” At that, Linda approached and stood right behind me, her long blond hair grazing my shoulder. Placing her finger on the text in front of me, she chuckled. 

“You know what would be really funny, Brooks?”  

“What?” I asked. 

“If you wrote, ‘I bet you’re not even listening to this’ and stuck it somewhere in the middle of the translation,” she said, laughing musically. 

“Oh my God, really?” I said, wondering if I had the balls to do it. I wasn’t one to break rules or pull pranks. Basically, I was a goody two-shoes, but I was also highly impressionable. As much as I wanted to please Dr. Frappier-Mazur, I also wanted to please Linda, but I couldn’t please both of them at once. It was a conundrum, but Linda was persistent.

“Yes,” she insisted, “Yes,” and she laughed again. I stifled a laugh thinking about it. I could just imagine Mme. Frappier-Mazur at a lectern in a giant ballroom, her bright brown eyes flashing across the dignified audience. Like the Mona Lisa, her enigmatic smile would be pasted on her lips as she listened modestly to her pompous introduction by the Provost of This-or-That University. Next, she would begin reading, and then, ten or fifteen minutes in, she would intone, ‘I bet you’re not even listening to this,’ as if reciting robotically from a teleprompter. At that, the audience would gasp in horror at her effrontery, or her galling display of French ennui, and voilà(!) The talk would be over. Laughing at Linda’s devilry, I took my pen, shuffled the pages as if they were a pack of playing cards, and inserted the deadly phrase randomly into the text. Linda never moved from her supervisory position above my shoulder until she saw the ink go down on the page with her own eyes. 

A few days later, I nonchalantly handed my completed translation to Madame, and a few days after that, the phone rang in my dorm room. Mme. Frappier-Mazur was hysterical. 

“Brooks, I demand to see you right now,” she said angrily. 

“Where?” I asked, my voice cracking.

 “Meet me on Spruce Street in front of High Rise South. I’ll be in my car.” At that, she slammed down the receiver. 

Trembling, I approached the elevator bank. While the elevator paused multiple times on the way down from the twenty-third floor, I had plenty of time to berate myself for having been so foolish as to comply with Linda’s prank. By the time it finally thudded to a stop in the lobby and the heavy stainless-steel door inched open, I had convinced myself that my academic reputation lay in ruins.

As promised, Mme. Frappier-Mazur was parked on Spruce Street in her Volvo station wagon. “Get in,” she said, so I opened the back door and got in. Next to me, a young boy sat playing with blocks and behind the back seat, a large dog panted and paced.

 “This is my son,” said the professor matter-of-factly, as she took off at top speed. It had never occurred to me that Madame had a family, but meeting her son didn’t make me feel any better. We circled the campus three or four times as waves of angry French poured over me. I had no idea where Madame intended to take me. It appeared that she was merely running laps, so I had plenty of time to compare her beautiful, enraged French to Mother Superior’s operatic Italian, when, on a trip to Italy with a number of French students the year before, we had returned past curfew to the convent we were staying in, and found ourselves locked out. Only that time, the daughter of a French diplomat had been to blame, and I was a mere bystander. This time the responsibility was mine, and mine alone.

After Mme. Frappier-Mazur made perfectly clear how much I had disrespected her, and how unthinkable—truly unthinkable—it was that I had stuck that sordid phrase into her paper, which, by the way, was entirely too colloquial a translation, she returned me to High Rise South as abruptly as we had left. 

“Needless to say, I will never ask you to translate something for me again!” she yelled. “Now get out!” 

At that, she disgorged me onto the sidewalk, and sped off again, if it is ever accurate to describe a Volvo as speeding. Returning shame-facedly to the twenty-third floor, I wondered why on earth I had been so quickly willing to accede to Linda’s demand. At first, I couldn’t answer my own question, but later I realized that I must have had a long-repressed rebellious streak. My gratuitous attempt to have fun had backfired, and the lesson I drew from it, once again, was that I should remain true to my straightlaced ways. It was the first time I consciously thought of myself as being divided between two conflicting identities—an ambitious conformist struggling with an adventurous spirit. I had no idea how to reconcile them, but if I couldn’t tap into that subversive part of myself in a more positive way, how could I possibly know what I wanted out of life?