The Devil and Webster Page 2

  Nell Jones-Givens, the sophomore with the enviably low housing lottery number, had by her own account (published eventually on Slate and later wildly misquoted by Laura Ingraham and other right-wingers) been grappling with gender dysmorphia since early childhood, and by the age of twelve had accepted that she was essentially a male person misplaced in a female body. Her efforts to delay menses and mash her breasts flat against her rib cage, her unsuccessful attempt to run with the men’s cross-country team at her suburban Illinois high school, and her attainment of peace within her family on these issues had also been the subjects of her admissions essay to Webster. Hence, though Admissions did not routinely share such material with the administration, the college could not claim to have been ignorant of the implications of Nell’s housing selection.

  Over the summer that followed her freshman year, Nell had legally changed her name to Neil in her home state of Illinois. Official gender designation was a bit thornier, which only added to the mayhem once the whole mess began to roil. She was a woman, genetically. She was a man, spiritually. She had been admitted to Webster as a woman. She was a man by temperament, by choice, by fate, by all that was holy—except to those few poor evangelical Christians on campus, who asserted that whatever else she was, she was far from holy. She was a member of a gender designation that had expanded beyond patriarchal structures to assume a spectrum of identities, of which Neil’s was simply one among so many. She was a knowing invader of the only female-designated safe space on campus, and a debaser of femaleness itself, due to the incomprehensible fact that she had been given the gift of being female and had chosen to decline it. She was…well, at the end of the day, what she was mattered far less than what she was not. She was not a woman, by her own account. She was also not remotely ready for what was about to happen to her. Webster was not ready. And Naomi certainly was not ready.

  It had been a slowly unfolding, lovely, and uneventful fall. That hadn’t helped.

  All began well enough at Radclyffe Hall. Neil had made a friendly announcement about his new name at the first sharing circle meeting in September, and generally assumed his uncomplaining share of the cooking, cleaning, and upkeep of the house. He prepared exotic teas for his housemates from a large personal collection and frequently loaded the dishwasher, even when it was not technically his turn to do so. He tutored two of the women on his floor who were struggling in Japanese (Neil was fluent, having spent a gap year in Kyoto) and maintained the Radclyffe Hall Facebook page, soon to be inundated with vitriol from the world at large. But slowly, the situation began to fester.

  There were the hormones: little ampules of injectable testosterone in the first-floor bathroom (for one junior girl in the house, the needles themselves were triggering traumatic flashbacks to a childhood bout with leukemia, but that was a separate issue). There was the clomping presence of an increasingly hairy, increasingly muscular person in the hallways and on the stairs, “taking up space,” said the needlephobe’s roommate, in that indefinable yet obvious way men did everywhere in the world. And finally, there was the boyfriend, a slim-hipped fiddler who claimed to have dropped out of Webster because it wasn’t academically rigorous enough, and who now worked at one of the coffee bars downtown. And this, Naomi would come to understand, was the most incendiary of all the resentments engendered by Neil Jones-Givens. Had Neil actually become a man only to sleep with other men? In which case…what was the point of that? If he’d wanted to sleep with men, why not just remain a woman?

  Calm, Naomi told the delegation from Radclyffe, on their first visit to her very small office in Crump-Eustis Hall, where the English and Comp. Lit. departments were based. Calm, calm. Let’s remember that we’re talking about young people—people learning who they are. Let’s remember that we’re talking about a college housing assignment, and working out how to live with people who don’t fall in with every one of our beliefs, predilections, innate prejudices, or tastes in junk food was one of the little challenges of life and a test of civilization in general. The women—four of them—did not nod. They did not smile. The needlephobe, who headed the campus LGBTQ political action committee, was sitting in one of Naomi’s visitors’ seats, a Hitchcock-style wooden chair, not very comfortable, with the college crest stenciled on the back in bright blue and green. She had her hands wedged beneath her thighs, and she leaned forward, mashing them down against the wood, as if she was scared they might escape her control and do something terrible.

  “No,” said her roommate, a basketball player from Florida. “No, we won’t be ‘calm.’ Would you tell us to be calm if we were being threatened with rape?”

  “Absolutely not,” said Naomi, straining for composure. “But I don’t think that is what is happening here.”

  “I don’t see a difference,” said one of the others. This one Naomi knew. She had been in Naomi’s First Wave/Second Wave seminar the previous spring. “This is a case of male penetration of a designated women-only space.”

  Penetration, thought Naomi. Oy.

  “Designated by whom?” she said instead.

  “By…the college,” the girl sputtered, outraged.

  But in fact there was no official Webster designation for Radclyffe Hall, Naomi would discover when she looked into the matter. There was nothing there at all in the way of official rules or bylaws. Radclyffe Hall, like the other houses on Fairweather Road, had attained its distinction of habitation through a phenomenon far more subtle than official language, a phenomenon that would return to bedevil her life again and again over the following years: institutional tradition.

  Tradition! Fine for a Broadway musical about a shtetl on the Russian steppes, fine for the shtetl itself (like the one Naomi’s own great-grandparents had long ago fled, in that classic, crushed-in-amber American story). Fine for a class prank or a holiday ritual. Fine, even, for the Webster seniors’ own smashing of their ceremonial clay pipes against the Stump on the eve of their graduations—the ritual that most Webster alumni associated with the Stump—or any of the myriad other Websterian rituals. Not so fine for gender designations in the swamp of ideological ferment that was American higher education (subdivision: Liberal Arts), New England, circa 2006.

  No wonder this would become Naomi Roth’s defining moment, and the thematic overture to what came later. No wonder it would focus attention on her, just at the delicate moment when President Coulson announced his retirement and commenced a yearlong victory lap of alumni gatherings and honorary degree ceremonies, as a committee of trustees, consultants, and faculty members convened to begin thinking about a successor.

  When Naomi, to her great chagrin, found that she was expected to serve as a member of the search committee (this news was delivered without fanfare in an email from Dean Stacek), she imagined she’d be able to wiggle out of it without much difficulty. She was already teaching her usual First Wave/Second Wave seminar that fall, and co-teaching a literature/history course on feminist utopias, and she had agreed to take over a freshman seminar on Ann Bannon for a queer theorist on maternity leave (an offer she regretted almost immediately as she reread the Bannon novels for the first time in years, finding them far less compelling than she’d remembered). Also: She had a ten-year-old feminist of her own at home that year, who furthermore was entering a phase in which all topics, from the profound to the banal, must be argued as a point of principle, which was exhausting. Also: The Radclyffe Hall situation was taking more and more of her nonexistent free time. But when she phoned Bob Stacek to explain—with appropriate regret—her situation, the bastard declined to excuse her.

  “You were requested,” he said bluntly, managing to communicate that Naomi’s participation had been neither his idea nor his preference. “I’m afraid we’ll have to insist.”

  Requested by…? By one of the trustees, she was told, though Naomi was not to know which for some months. This person had read the previous week’s New York Times article about what was happening at Radclyffe Hall. Attention was being paid, Stacek inf
ormed her, somewhat tersely, to how things were being “handled.”

  How Naomi was handling things, at least thus far, involved pretending that every interrogator who came to her about Radclyffe Hall was a fellow intellectual engaged in a genuinely curious and open discussion on the subjects of gender fluidity and the “trans experience,” and that the variously outraged students, parents, journalists, and alumni were as interested in thoughtful, unemotional debate as she herself was. This was a folly of one, of course, but so far it had disarmed everyone from the various students to the New York Times writer (whose name, as a lifelong reader of the Times, she’d readily recognized), and the serious (i.e., not-political, not-satirical) coverage had been, as a result, rather encouragingly dignified. The issues Radclyffe Hall raised were valid and even essential topics for scrutiny at a place like Webster, she liked to remind people, and as pertinent and pressing as politics, class, religion, race, or any time-honored -ism. “Universities are not static environments as a rule,” Naomi had insisted to the New York Times reporter, who, gratifyingly, reproduced her words exactly and in the right order to boot. “Stasis is the last thing we want. Webster is a place where discourse happens. This is a place where ideas come to meet one another.” And then, as if she hadn’t been reading this man’s byline for decades, she asked him what his feelings were on the subject.

  That line in particular—a place where ideas come to meet one another—where had it sprung from? It sounded like something she’d been fed years earlier, when she and her ex-husband had trained for their VISTA year at a campus in the Appalachian Mountains. (Though VISTA, in its wisdom, hadn’t sent them to the Appalachian Mountains or any place like the Appalachian Mountains, but instead to a picture-perfect village in northern New England, complete with steeple and general store. She and Daniel had separated a decade later.) Still, when it emerged, unbidden from her own mouth, it had sent a little trill of rightness through her. The old good fight. Still there, after all.

  “But this particular dormitory, as I understand it,” said the reporter, “is meant to be women only. Why would you choose to live in such a place if you wanted to be male?”

  “That’s not a question I can answer,” Naomi said. “I’m sure you wouldn’t want me to speculate about how a given student might feel.”

  “Do you think,” the reporter continued, “that a self-identified male in a female-only space has a right to complain of discrimination?”

  Naomi frowned. She was just formulating her response when the reporter upped the ante.

  “I mean, say you were a white transfer student at Morehouse or Spelman? Or…an atheist at Brigham Young. Are you entitled to complain of discrimination?”

  DANGER, NAOMI ROTH, Naomi thought. For a heady instant, she envisioned her own personal robot with wildly oscillating arms.

  “What I can tell you,” she finally said, “is that Webster is exactly the place where we would like these questions to be raised and considered, if not answered. They may not be answerable. But these are important issues for intelligent, thoughtful, and globally attuned young people to work through, and this university—like most, I would hope—is a safe place to work through them.”

  And then, that very week, President Coulson announced that he would retire the following year.

  And then, Naomi Roth had found her participation on the search committee requested by parties unknown.

  “Well, I suppose…” she told the dean, pausing for a moment, as if he still might be inclined to give her an out, “I can do that. Do you have a sense of the time commitment?”

  “Until we’ve chosen a president,” he said, with a chill that made it all the way across the campus from his office on Billings’s second floor.

  They would begin the following Monday, with a preliminary meeting in the conference room at the Webster Inn.

  But by the following Monday, the Radclyffe Hall story had overflown the levees, with a dedicated tirade about lesbian separatists “getting a taste of their own medicine” on Rush Limbaugh and a crass comment on David Letterman (which seemed especially upsetting to the dormitory’s envoys, who were waiting for her at her office the morning after it aired). Naomi would miss that first meeting in order to hold a conference call with parents of the Radclyffe Hall women (the ones who were still women), and she would miss the second due to an emergency session with Neil Jones-Givens’s counselor from Webster Health Services, who was twisting herself into knots in an effort to communicate that the situation was bad without breaching confidentiality. Their conversation—a study in creative nondisclosure—would have been comical had it not also been so weighted. Neil, by then, had fled Radclyffe Hall, and two days earlier he had turned up at the health center, where he was “resting” and “comfortable.” The staff there were in contact with his parents back home in Illinois, and various options were under discussion. There was—and this was of course always the case, the counselor reminded Naomi, with any student at any time—the possibility of self-harm, which must always be kept at the forefront of one’s thoughts. “I’m…moderately…erring on the side of caution…concerned,” the counselor managed to say, which Naomi interpreted as This student is in real trouble and if we don’t handle the situation in exactly the right way, a way I am expressly not authorized to describe, then you and I and this college are potentially in deep, deep shit, so do not fail to take this seriously and do not fuck things up.

  Naomi did make it to the next meeting, a few Mondays after that. This time she arrived only fifteen minutes late and left only fifteen minutes early, in order to be at the crisis gathering in the Radclyffe Hall common room, an event that (she’d been informed only hours earlier) was also to be attended by a camera crew from 20/20, which was news to the college press office. President Coulson, who had chosen this moment to go on a house hunting trip to San Mateo (he was joining an “education/technology think tank,” whatever that was), had expressed his full confidence in his dean of women’s affairs (a comment that gave rise to a small explosion of its own, with its condescending whiff of patriarchy, as if the trouble at Radclyffe Hall were no different from any other problem that might arise when a bunch of out-of-control gals moved into a house together). Naomi received nothing in the way of guidance from the president or the trustees. The press office (one crusty alum who’d edited a local paper in Tennessee, and his student intern) offered no crash course in media readiness, nor even a tepid suggestion of talking points relaying the college’s official position. There was no official position, she understood. There was only herself, and she would not know whether she’d handled it well or not until they either fired her ass or didn’t. All she could think to do (and this came from a Ms. magazine article about women in the brave new battlefield of corporate America, which she’d read many years earlier) was to inform every single person in a more senior administrative position than her own every time she did anything at all, and invite the college’s attorney (thankfully, a woman) to accompany her to each press interview. It would not occur to her until later that she had already begun to act like a college president, but it did occur to someone else.

  That someone else was a food entrepreneur, less than a decade out of Webster and already at the white-hot epicenter of the culinary zeitgeist. He was named (fittingly) Will Rennet and he had endowed a professorship in the Department of History, a biannual college conference on food and culture, and the Webster Farm Co-Op five miles from the Stump in West Webster, tended by students with output (milk, vegetables, eggs) used to supply the dining hall and various food outlets on campus. Will Rennet was one of four Webster trustees on the search committee, and while he hadn’t said much in the inaugural meeting, nor in the one that followed, he happened to be speaking when Naomi blustered in late to the third, trailing press releases and not quite off the phone with Rosa in the college attorney’s office. This won her some entirely understandable glares from her fellow committee members, but Will Rennet—who, as the interrupted party, might have had the m
ost reason to be irritated—was not one of them. He looked thoughtful as Naomi ended her call, apologized, gave a succinct, two-sentence appraisal of the Radclyffe Hall situation (incorporating both an aura of “everything’s under control” and an eye roll at the absurdity of it all), sat down and appeared to focus in on the matter at hand. Ninety minutes later, with almost two dozen names on a long list compiled by the committee secretary (notable alumni, notable members of the business community, a former Massachusetts senator, and the current deans of the faculty and students), Naomi rose, apologized again, suggested that they all acquire and read an obscure work of educational philosophy, long out of print, that had influenced her own transition to academia after earlier stints as an entrepreneur and VISTA volunteer, mentioned that her ten-year-old daughter had strongly suggested that the new president, whomever he or she happened to be, should “be chill” because (in Naomi’s daughter’s opinion, she reiterated) “chill” was something Webster had not enjoyed in its president for a good long while, apologized one final time and headed out to the crisis meeting and the cameras of 20/20. The fringe of Naomi’s Tibetan scarves fluttered from beneath her ancient Russian army coat as she exited the room.

  And then, in the general deflation that followed her departure, as the others shuffled their papers and a few actually wrote down the title of the book Naomi had mentioned, Will Rennet sat forward in his chair, tapped his pen against the table, and said, in the tone of a person used to being listened to: “I want her.”