Bad Love

Chapter 6

Strange, Melissa thought, that she could go so long without seeing or hearing from Andrew and be so fine with it. She'd enrolled in all of her creative writing classes and was enjoying her lectures and the work. They were reading The Sound and the Fury in her literature class. Andrew despised Faulkner and the place he occupied in the literary canon; if he'd been around she never would have been able to apply herself to the course. She was finding that without Andrew she had more time and freedom available to her which she could use to organize her life into something more focused and purposeful. She had thought that with her taking her studies seriously they would be consuming the vast majority of her time, but after organizing them into a neat, timetable-driven program she was left with quite a bit of spare time remaining. She decided to use the time to write. Her initial plan was to write a novel, her impetus for which, after spending a week struggling for the perfect opening, all but dissipated. She needed a medium that would allow her to be as impatient and direct as she wanted. She decided to write a play, and there was only one thing she could think to write about.

The anger that Melissa felt toward Andrew for having walked out on her the way he had that she thought she had put to bed was still very much with her. When she sat down to start work on her play she made herself vulnerable to it, and it didn't take long for it to consume her again. While she was remembering their past in search of inspiration for dialogue the anger grew and started dictating the tone and direction of her play. After four days of furious writing, Melissa's anger had entirely got the better of her. Her play had been getting progressively more opprobrious of Andrew and by the time she was done she had in her hands a play about a naïve, trusting girl trapped in a pathologically one-sided, emotionally abusive relationship. She knew she couldn't show her play to her parents; their love for Andrew would inspire instant, intense disapproval. Still, she needed an opinion. She was proud of the work she'd managed to produce and wanted to explore the possibility of it coming to life on the stage.

Drama professor Claire Masters had a reputation around school for unconventionality. She had relationships with both sexes, with teachers and students, was rude to anyone who dared speak to her like they were her equal, often dressed inappropriately for a member of faculty, and openly engaged in inappropriate behaviour with her lovers on campus. Among the faculty she was universally disliked for her outrageousness; among the students she was universally feared for her draconian style. The reason Claire Masters' antics were tolerated by the school's management was simple: the work of her theatre department was widely and consistently praised. Whether she was staging Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, Noel Coward, or an original work penned by her or one of her students, news of a Claire Masters production would cause theatre critics from every regional and even some national newspapers to descend upon the Pietermaritzburg UKZN campus. Her plays went from the school's Hexagon theatre onto the city's Winston Churchill theatre and then onto the festival circuit, where they were always a big hit, particularly at the Grahamstown Arts Festival. Claire was the school's greatest asset and they both knew it, hence her entitlement to liberties not afforded others.

Melissa had been wary of Professor Masters ever since she began attending university. To Melissa she was a predator, and she didn't want to become her prey. Her extremely extroverted nature she viewed as an indicator of potential unstableness. Andrew wasn't impressed by her. To him both her personality and her plays were derivative and uninteresting; the way he saw it everything she did was for the sake of maintaining her image as an "artist". He found her highly unoriginal and didn't pay her any mind; Melissa, like everyone else on campus, found her intimidating and unapproachable. Nevertheless she was the only person Melissa could think of to give her a useful evaluation of her work. Expecting to get her head bitten off before she'd so much as said anything Melissa approached Professor Masters in the Hexagon theatre auditorium with great apprehension.