Mary Jane was a smart girl.
She knew this because everyone had always said it. "What a smart girl that Mary Jane O'Connell is," her teachers in school had exclaimed, and they said it so often that Mary Jane began to believe it. She began to invest herself in the identity, to read in her spare time, and to study hard so as not to lose the reputation.
"Yes, she's a very smart girl," her mother always agreed. "She'll wind up the wife of a brilliant professor one day!" Mary Jane had accepted the prediction. She liked professors. Her father was a historian, and she always enjoyed the company of his friends from the university. She liked impressing them with her knowledge of literature and philosophy, hearing their theories on the world, and deciding whether or not she agreed with them. If it was to be her vocation to love and take care of a man, she'd like him to be an intelligent man. A nice house, a comfortable existence, a brilliant spouse, and his brilliant children to raise--what more could a smart girl ask for?
And so Mary Jane set out to seek the life that was expected of her. She graduated from Barnard College in 1972 with a major in French literature, then took a summer course in typing and landed a position as a receptionist at the Columbia library. Every day, she did her hair and makeup and dressed in carefully chosen clothing that was fashionable yet scholastic. She crimped herself into tight undergarments that realigned her flesh in just the right way, accentuating her bust and wrestling her stomach into a demure, shapely waist. She kept up her French and stayed up to date on all the most exciting developments in the field so that when she did meet a man who caught her eye, she would be pleasing to him, inside and out.
"You're too caught up in what men think of you," her roommate Sally told her on more than one occasion. Sally was the only female graduate student in the history department at Columbia. She wore pants, was on the pill, and only paid attention to men when it convenienced her to do so.
"So what if I am?" Mary Jane responded. "Is it so wrong to be marriage minded?" She'd seen the way the men at the Columbia history department treated Sally, their dismissal or outright hostility. "I don't want men to treat me the way they treat you."
Mary Jane's efforts at attracting a man achieved excellent results. She first caught the eye of an archaeology graduate student named Don. They had made eye contact at the entrance to the library. She'd seen his eyes flick down to peruse the curves of her bodiced body, and from that moment on she had known that she had him in the palm of her hand. They had seen each other for five months before she broke off the romance--her attention had wandered to Harper, a biology professor with broad shoulders and a great, generous laugh. After Harper there came Roger, with his shy smile and introspective charm, then John, with his poetry and subversive wit.
It was a game, this flirtation, and Mary Jane was good at it. She walked a difficult tightrope with virtuosic ease. She perfected the art of appearing beautiful without looking like she cared too much about her appearance. She modulated her language to show her potential lovers that she was intelligent but not a threat their own intellectual prowess. She tamed her emotions so as to appear interested but not desperate, available but never too available. If there was a battle of the sexes, Mary Jane was surely winning it. She had all the steps down like second nature, and she danced in circles around everyone in her sequence of suitors.
That is, until Benjamin entered the fray.
Mary Jane first laid eyes on him on a weeknight in late October. She had just gotten back to her apartment after working late at the library. Exhausted, she went straight to her room to change out of her work clothes. She slipped her dress over her shoulders and unclipped her tight-fitting undergarments, just like she always did. She breathed a sigh of relief as her flesh realigned itself, as if her breasts and her stomach were remembering what it was like to feel the pull of gravity again. She changed into her nightgown and bathrobe, removed her makeup, and pinned her hair up over her head.
"Dinner by the TV again tonight?" She called out to Sally, making her way to the kitchen and opening the freezer. She heard no response. "Sally?" She took out two TV dinners and preheated the oven. "I'm making chicken pot pies," she announced to no one. She lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, and started flipping through Columbia University Press's fall 1975 catalog.
It was this state of undress--cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth, TV dinners thawing in the oven, body void of all the tinctures and ornaments that gave it its allure--that Benjamin walked in on her. He came out rather abruptly from Sally's room. His sandy brown hair was disheveled, and he was attempting to straighten it with his hands.
"Oh!" Mary Jane exclaimed. The cigarette almost fell out of her mouth onto her book. She slammed the book down onto the counter, hastened to put out the cigarette in the ashtray by the counter, and hugged her bathrobe around her. "I'm sorry, I didn't...I didn't realize we were having a guest," she flustered. She resisted a wild impulse to run out of the room. She felt naked, perhaps even more so than if she'd been without clothing entirely. Men, she knew, did not want to see all the work, all the pulling and painting and prodding, that went into making a woman look beautiful. Particularly not a man as pretty as this one. For pretty was the right word to describe this man--not handsome, but pretty, with his wide grey eyes and pink, pliant lips.
"I normally wouldn't have received guests dressed like this, you know," Mary Jane stammered. "It's just, of course, I didn't realize you were coming over, and well, you've caught me at a bad time, I normally...I'm much more...would you like some tea?"
Throughout the whole monologue, the stranger was staring back at her with an amused expression. Mary Jane found it utterly disconcerting. It was not so much the fact of his gaze, but rather the substance of it, that affected her. He was looking at her with such steady intensity that Mary Jane felt as if he were seeing into every pore of her being. His grey eyes took in every aspect of her body with a measured, knowing expression: the messy, pinned up hair, the old terry cloth bathrobe, the book. He smiled. "No thank you, I was just leaving."
"Well that's alright, then." Mary Jane held out a stiff hand. "Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr.... what was your name?"
"You can call me Benjamin," he said, and returned the handshake.
"Mary Jane."
Benjamin motioned to the book on the table. "You work at the university press?"
"At the library," she explained. "You?"
"Comparative Lit. I've just gotten tenure, actually."
Before Mary Jane could respond, Sally emerged from her room, wearing a nightgown and an exasperated expression. "I thought I told you to get out," she snapped at Benjamin.
He hurried to put on his jacket and sling his backpack over his shoulder. "Yes, sorry! I was just about to go." He nodded at Sally, smiled at Mary Jane, and left.
Mary Jane gave Sally a quizzical look. "What the hell happened?"
"Bastard wouldn't fuck me," Sally said. "Said he wanted to talk or do some sort of weird fetish stuff, I don't know."
Mary Jane felt a prickle of curiosity. "What kind of stuff?"
"Something to do with power...you know, some masculine bullshit. Anyway, I said that if I'd wanted to have some man talk down to me I'd have gone to class." Sally lit a cigarette and began smoking. A glint of defiance lingered in her eyes. "Don't tell me you're interested him."
Mary Jane shrugged. Sally rolled her eyes.
***
Mary Jane was not like Sally. She was not able to simply banish a man from her mind as if she were brushing a fly off her shoulder. Benjamin lingered in her thoughts all throughout the next week. She found herself rehearsing her meeting with him over and over in her head, wondering how the interaction might have gone if she had been dressed and makeupped, if she had said different things or not been caught so off guard. She found herself aching to know what he had said to Sally, what hidden desires he had bared that Sally had dismissed so brashly.
A week later, Mary Jane was making her way through the inter-library loan requests when she found a request from a Dr. Benjamin Krakauer in the Comparative Literature department. She ran a finger over the note. He had written the request in neat, formal cursive: "Surveiller et Punir by Michel Foucault." She translated the words in her head: Surveillance and Punishment. It was an intriguing title. She recognized that name--Michel Foucault. She'd seen his work mentioned more than once in the library catalog.
The book arrived a week earlier than expected. Mary Jane was running the front desk when it came, and when opened the envelope and saw the neat little French volume, she could not resist--she slid it under the desk, opened the first page, and began to read. "Part One: Torture," it said. She raised her eyebrows and read on. What ensued over the next two pages was one of the most lurid, gruesome depictions of torture she had ever read. The details of the scene--in which a man in 18th century France was burned and decapitated--were horrifically, deliciously medieval: the burnt flesh, the pincers, the public spectacle. Mary Jane found that her eyes were glued to the page, despite her revulsion, by a sadistic curiosity (or perhaps, she thought, a masochistic one). Was this what Benjamin had been wanting to read, she wondered? Did he know what he was getting into?
She had just about had enough of the scene, when it changed abruptly. There was a break in the text, and the author began to describe a very different kind of punishment: a prison. She read about the regimented order imposed upon the prisoners of this particular 19th century institution--getting up at six, two hours of instruction, nine hours of work, prayer--under the incessant surveillance of the prison guards.
She brought the book absentmindedly to her lips and tapped on the cover with her painted nails. She understood the exercise the author was posing. Two different kinds of violence: two different kinds of power. One spectacular, grotesque--the other, cold, calculated, and yet somehow more insidious.
"Either we just ordered the same book, or you've been snooping around other people's library orders." Benjamin's voice cut through her pondering.
She snapped the book shut with a start. For the second time this week, he found herself at a loss for words under his steady gaze. "I was just--"
"Taking a little peek?" He was grinning at her. His expression was exacting, but kind.
She returned his gaze with a sheepish grin. "I was curious," she admitted. "The title intrigued me." She noticed the telltale flick of his eyes as they took in the curves of her body beneath her skirt and blouse. The subtle curl of his lips around the edges gave her a spur of confidence. "And also..." she took a deep breath, "also the fact that it was you who ordered it."
Benjamin nodded. There was a knowing expression behind his eyes, as if he had known all along the effect he was having on her and had just been waiting for her to say it. "As a matter of fact," he said, "I was looking for a grad student to read this with me. Someone I could bounce ideas off of. I'm assuming you read French?"
"Yes!"
"Then it's settled. I'll take the book and read it, then I'll lend it to you, and we can talk about it together. Over dinner, maybe?"
"I'd love that."
"My treat."
