The Other Read Online Free PDF

though she doesn’t seem preoccupied, withdrawn, or owlish. She’s been shot with the bony crest of her left shoulder turned forward, but the studio lights are too extreme and cast a sheen across not just this knobby rise—covered by the nap of a ribbed turtleneck shirt—but also across her large, dramatic forehead. One suspects behind this blazing expanse a freighted cranium looming, though this feeling might derive from the Lakeside imprimatur, or from foreknowledge of Mastroianni’s densely packed résumé, which includes post-doctoral work at Yale (she once told me she tried to read while there all eight hundred of Lotman’s titles and most of the Lotman scholarship), two dozen articles in semiotics journals, and another two dozen in education reviews. Throw in an era of training in Jungian analysis, from 1955 to 1957, at the Carl Jung Institute in Zürich, where all the pedagogy is in German.
    You will say that a scholar of this pedigree would seem out of place at even the best prep school, but Lakeside is known, among educators in Seattle, for its faculty of achievers from good Ivy League stock who are brilliant but flawed in some career-breaking fashion and so not trusted to command the podium in a lecture hall full of undergraduates. That’s how it was with Althea Mastroianni, who for better or worse had the lovely, trilling voice of a West Texas songbird, and though her mellifluous speech was just the sort of novelty that might briefly entertain an academic interview committee—that soft sagebrush twang on the subject of Lotman and the semiotics of Russian cinema—it was also a death knell when it came time to sign off on a Linguistics Department associate-professor appointment. Mrs. Mastroianni reinflected and modulated as best she could with a view toward losing all trace of El Paso, and while she was able to achieve a rich, mournful timbre that brought to mind Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire, beyond that she couldn’t make her voice go.
    Still, that voice was singular. I know it not only from our collegiality, but because I went with John William to Althea’s apartment in the early seventies. She lived in the El Monterey Building, on 11th Avenue Northeast—lime-washed stucco, narrow balconies with adjustable canvas awnings, and a high-walled courtyard featuring an algae-tinged pool and a rusting park bench. Very continental, or, more specifically, Iberian—like an ad in the Times of London for a villa in San Sebastián that turns out to come complete with motor traffic rumble. She shared a third-floor walk-up with her boyfriend, Robert, whom I took to be a French intellectual—he had in hand a copy of Roland Barthes’s Sur Racine when we met—and there she moved seamlessly between the Swiss French she’d honed in her years as a Jungian-in-training (asking Robert—silent “t”—to uncork a bottle of Burgundy) and her Tennessee Williams–tinged teacher’s brogue. (“What a pleasant surprise, my goodness, John William. Ro-bear, c’est le merveilleux et brillant Jacques Guillaume. Please do, now, come in and sit down.”)
    We did, on a mohair sofa that smelled of cat fur, and then, with little prelude, Mrs. Mastroianni and John William began to argue about Chomsky’s “Notes on Anarchism,” which was suggested reading in her class, and this argument went on interminably. Althea wore the tackiest of polyester pants and a Mister Rogers–style button-up sweater for lounging. She tucked her feet under her and stroked her cat, an Abyssinian, as she listened to John William. For a woman in her middle years she had a fine complexion, and in the right light, a dusting of freckles appeared on her milk-white cheekbones. I suppose these things in sum bring to mind this natural question: was there something of the erotic in John William’s feeling for Madame M.? I’m going to say no. I don’t think my friend felt a physical desire for his English teacher. On the other hand, there might be