We Can -- and Should -- Live Our Lives in Compartments.
St. Francis Medical Center, Lynwood, California
February 2016
“The Jews killed Scalia, you know.”
Marcus and I are standing next to the nurse’s station. I am first in line for evening meds, but the nurse is running late, and this great beefy mountain of a man is trying, in his own way, to ratchet down my anxiety.
Antonin Scalia died on Saturday. I was hospitalized on Sunday for reasons entirely unrelated to the justice’s death. It is now Thursday, and I feel jumpy and still a little suicidal.
Marcus is not a fellow patient. He is a “psych tech” – in an earlier era, what was called an “orderly.” Marcus keeps the peace among our motley crew of paranoid schizophrenics and borderlines, and he also offers reassurance and comfort. On this ward filled with the indigent on public assistance, we are told to take our problems to a psych tech first, who will then decide if a nurse is needed.
With his massive size, Marcus establishes an authority few seem to want to challenge. I feel safe with him, but as he opines on the particular subject of Scalia’s demise, feel I need to point out something.
“You know I’m Jewish, right?”
Marcus smiles. “Of course. I can tell by your name, and by your face.”
I raise my eyebrows at him, inviting him to say more. I’m a little on edge, but mostly, I’m curious about which facial features give my ancestry away.
Marcus holds my gaze. “Whoever you are, though, you’re my patient while you’re in here. I’ll never treat you differently because you’re a Jew. You have to know you’re safe with me.”
His voice is calm.
I should feel unsafe. I should feel slightly terrified. I should decide that once I’m discharged, I’ll report Marcus to the hospital authorities. But I do not feel unsafe, or afraid. I have already seen and felt Marcus’ care.
I have only one t-shirt, one pair of underwear, and one pair of shorts – what I was wearing when I was admitted. The techs allow us to do laundry every other day, giving us hospital gowns to wear while our only clothes wash. Instead of leaving my clothes in the dryer, as he is supposed to, Marcus folds my three garments neatly, and leaves them for me on my bed while I meet with my social worker.
He tells me he buys dryer sheets with his own money for the patients. “When your clothes smell good,” Marcus declares, “it makes everything just a little bit easier.”
The night before I am released, Marcus is on duty and I ask him more about his politics. It is the usual mélange of virulent anti-Semitism, far-right conspiracies, white supremacy and garbled pseudo-science.
I ask him what he’s doing in a place like this and he tells me it fits his schedule. He has two young children and if he works nights at the hospital, he can take them to and from school every day. We talk about being fathers, and Marcus offers some advice. “Get the names of your kids tattooed on your wrists. You won’t be able to cut yourself, or pick up the bottle, without seeing them. You need to see how much they need you every second. That’s how you’ll stay for them.”
I start to tear up. I say goodnight, as it is bed time, and I extend my hand. Marcus shakes it. “I hope I never see you in here again, Hugo. Take care.”
I nod, thank him for everything, and add something. “You’re a gentleman, sir. I appreciate it.”
Marcus snorts. “I’m damn sure not. But thanks, Hugo. Never come back here, okay?”
I promise to do my best to never return.
Pasadena City College
May 2008
Leigh sits on the edge of the same plastic chair in which all students sit. It’s my last conference hour of the day in the same office I’ve had since I started teaching 15 years ago. It is a cramped space, a glorified storage closet, and the mass of papers and books I never manage to tidy make it seem all the tinier.
Leigh is a week past her 21st birthday. She works two jobs, models on the side, and swims for the college team. She’s wearing her damp racing suit under her red and gold sweats; the faint smell of chlorine hangs in the air.
Leigh has brought me the rough draft of the paper she’s working on for my Humanities class. I’m teaching a course on “Dysfunctional Families and the Western Tradition,” and we’re using modern pop psych texts to analyze classic literature. Her paper is a witty and discerning imagining of three great fictional couples – Euripides’ Jason and Medea; Ibsen’s Nora and Torvald; Tennessee’s Maggie and Brick – all in group therapy together.
For the most part, the paper really works, but there is a rough and comparatively weak conclusion, and I offer some suggestions.
Leigh pushes back, making the case that the conclusion is effective – and I ask her to consider giving it one more pass, incorporating one more idea from our psych text. We debate a little bit, in the way professors and their best students have always debated. She rises to leave.
“I love you so, so much,” Leigh says, holding out both hands to me.
I take her hands, stand, and Leigh steps into my arms, her mouth finding mine. We hold each other and kiss for a long moment. I know my door is unlocked, but she’s worth it.
“I’m falling in love with you too, you know,” I say, and Leigh closes her eyes, taking in the words that at least at that moment, every sinew and corpuscle in my body believes. Leigh has been my student for two years, and now we’re two months into an affair.
Leigh steps back, and waves the sheaf of papers in her hands, papers on which she’s written such a defiantly hopeful story of doomed couples finding understanding instead of rage and incomprehension. She taps the essay against my chest.
“I’m glad I knew that you wouldn’t change how you saw my writing once… once… this started to happen.”
I tell her that she has my heart and my body, but that my mind can still judge her work fairly. Whatever impassioned and reckless thing we’re living out together, it doesn’t impact my ability to teach and assess. I don’t have to wonder if that part is true. I know it.
Leigh earns her A through her intellectual ability. Perhaps I too will fairly earn the loss of a career and a marriage as a consequence of this affair and those that follow, but I will always be certain that love and heat never distorted what I wrote in any student’s grade book.
April 2021
In Fresno, a police officer is summarily fired – not for any misconduct, but for his membership in the Proud Boys. In Orange County, a campaign is underway to get a fourth-grade teacher dismissed, not for incompetence, but because she marched to the Capitol on January 6. (She did not enter the building or participate in illegal activity.) In the latter case, the Times declared “any overt racism was beside the point.” In 2021, as in the McCarthy era of seven decades ago, mere affiliation with an unpopular group is incontrovertible proof of unsuitability for any position of responsibility.
In 2021, it is trendy to claim that one’s public self is invariably a slave to one’s private convictions. You cannot be a good police officer and a Proud Boy, because your Proud Boyness must somehow overwhelm your professional obligations; you cannot be a beloved teacher and a Trump supporter, as your Trumpiness will, sooner or later, poison your pedagogy. To the truly modern mind, your politics are the essence of your identity – they are the foundation stone of your integrity. If you get the private life wrong, the Woke Folk declare, then you do not deserve public trust.
Our Puritan ancestors would beam with pride to see their moral and psychological worldview ascendant once again.
I write about Marcus and Leigh because they illustrate a virtue that is today easily mistaken for a vice: the human capacity to compartmentalize. Marcus was an anti-Semite who was nonetheless kind and helpful to me, because he could do something that is not nearly as hard as we like to imagine: he could separate his convictions from his job. I could grade Leigh fairly for the same reason.
We are in the midst of many cultural debates this year, but one of them is about the possibilities of compartmentalization. Put simply, to compartmentalize is to separate one’s duties from one’s feelings, and it is the very essence of what it means to be civilized.
Some of you are shaking your heads. Nonsense, Hugo. Racism and lust can’t be lockboxed; they will bleed into everything you do and everything you are. Private passions are the scaffolding of public responsibility; get the private life wrong, and the scaffolding will collapse. Marcus’ kindness needed to be congruent with his politics or it wasn’t really kindness. Once you’d seen Leigh naked, old boy, that vision of her body invariably and inevitably blinded you so that you could not fairly judge what she had spilled onto the page.
That is absolutist drivel, rooted in a pisspoor understanding of both human psychology and human potential.
I joke with customers every day, even when I am depressed. I may want to be alone, out on a long walk with no one about, but I laugh and smile because it is part of my job. The part of me that is sad stays in its box, and the part of me that is your quintessential cheerful Trader Joe’s employee emerges to do what is expected. I am cheerful with the folks who complain about masks, or mutter about conspiracies. I bag their groceries with the same care, regardless of my views.
I am compartmentalizing, because it is human and necessary and good to do so. Trader Joe’s does not demand that I love my job – it demands that I act as if I love my job. The company has a claim on my behavior, not my thoughts. The Fresno Police Department has a claim on its officers’ on-duty conduct, not their political declarations when out of uniform. St. Francis Medical Center had a claim on Marcus’ actions, not his (genuinely bizarre) beliefs. Pasadena City College (and young Miss Leigh) had a claim on my intellectual objectivity, not my romantic pursuits.
At the heart of what it means to live in community with other people is to build compartments. Clothing is a compartment, in a sense. It is not hypocrisy for me to go out in public with my private parts concealed. What my body looks like naked is my business, not yours, and my employer has no claim on my nakedness. Society demands that I keep the clothing on, or face sanction; if I walk around nude, I will be arrested and fired. If I post photos of my naked self on the Internet for other adults to view, that’s not my employer’s business. TJs just wants me covered up in their prescribed uniform when I’m in the store.
It is not hypocrisy for me to be naked on the Internet, or with Victoria, and clothed at work – just as it is neither hypocrisy nor an “overask” for a virulent anti-Semite to be gentle with a Jewish patient, or for a professor to fairly grade the work of a student with whom he’s sleeping.
Society gets to make a claim on our public behavior. Civilization hinges on people doing what they need to do rather than what they want to do. Civilization also makes, or should make, a limited claim: in return for your appropriate public conduct, we will give you the freedom to think and believe as you please. We trust that when you come into work, you will be able to leave aside your politics, your faith, your unresolved trauma, and your romantic entanglements long enough for you to do the job we’ve asked you to do.
If Marcus had been unable to be kind to me because I was a Jew, he should have lost his job. If he was able to overcome his anti-Semitism in order to be caring with a frightened and suicidal man, he should be applauded. If I had given Leigh an A merely because she slept with me, that would indeed have been a violation of my professional duties. If, when my customer asks about my day, I reply “It’s really shitty and I’m fighting off the impulse to self-injure, thanks for asking,” then of course I should be canned forthwith.
A just and civilized society, and fair employment practices, ought to presume that we can compartmentalize, and separate our inner lives from our outer conduct. To the extent that we demand political and moral purity as well as proper behavior, we violate human conscience. It is a season, though, for puritanical inquisitions dressed up as “overdue reckonings,” and a lot more of us will be fired for our private lives before the pendulum swings back.