Everything I Never Told You(10)

“I guess that sort of thing must happen all the time,” she said softly.

“I wouldn’t know. That was my first lecture. The department let me take this class as a trial.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” he said. “You stayed until the end.” They both looked down—he at his now-empty mug, she at the typewriter and neat sheaf of carbon paper perched at the end of his desk.

“Paleontology,” he said after a moment.

“What?”

“Paleontology,” he repeated. “My favorite subject. It was paleontology. I wanted to dig up fossils.”

“That’s a kind of history, though,” she said.

“I guess it is.” He grinned into his coffee cup, and Marilyn leaned across the desk and kissed him.

On Thursday, at the next lecture, Marilyn sat off to the side. When Professor Lee came into the room, she didn’t look up. Instead she wrote the date carefully in the corner of her notes, looping a demure S in September, crossing the t in a perfectly horizontal line. As he began to speak, her cheeks went hot, as if she’d stepped into summer sun. She was positive she was bright red, blazing like a lighthouse, but when she finally looked around, out of the corners of her eyes, everyone was focused on the lecture. There were a handful of other students in the room, but they were scribbling in their notebooks or facing the podium up front. No one noticed her at all.

When she’d kissed him, she had surprised herself. It had been such an impulse—the way she sometimes reached out to catch a stray leaf on the wind, or jumped a puddle on a rainy day—something done without thinking or resisting, something pointless and harmless. She had never done anything like that before and never would again, and looking back on it, she would forever be surprised at herself, and a little shocked. But at that moment she had known, with a certainty she would never feel about anything else in her life, that it was right, that she wanted this man in her life. Something inside her said, He understands. What it’s like to be different.

The touch of his lips on hers had startled her. He had tasted like coffee, warm and slightly bitter, and he had kissed back. That had startled her, too. As if he were ready for it, as if it were as much his idea as hers. After they finally drew apart, she’d been too embarrassed to meet his eyes. Instead she looked down into her lap, studying the soft plaid flannel of her skirt. Sweat bunched her slip to her thighs. In a moment she grew braver and peeked at him through the curtain of her hair. He looked shyly up at her then, through his lashes, and she saw that he wasn’t angry, that his cheeks were pink. “Perhaps we’d better go somewhere else,” he said, and she’d nodded and picked up her bag.

They’d walked down along the river, passing the redbrick dorms in silence. The crew team had been practicing, the oarsmen bending and unbending over their oars in perfect unison, the boat sliding across the water without sound. Marilyn knew these men: they asked her to mixers, to movies, to football games; they all looked alike, the same blend of sandy hair and ruddy skin she’d seen all through high school, all her life—as familiar as boiled potatoes. When she turned them down to finish a paper or catch up on her reading, they moved on to woo other girls down the hall. From where she stood on the riverbank, the distance made them anonymous, expressionless as dolls. Then she and James—as she did not even dare, yet, to think of him—had reached the footbridge, and she stopped and turned to face him. He hadn’t looked like a professor, but like a teenage boy, bashful and eager, reaching out to take her hand.

And James? What had he thought of her? He would never tell her this, would never admit it to himself: he had not noticed her at all, that first lecture. He had looked right at her, over and over, as he held forth on Roy Rogers and Gene Autry and John Wayne, but when she came to his office he had not even recognized her. Hers had been just one of the pale, pretty faces, indistinguishable from the next, and though he would never fully realize it, this was the first reason he came to love her: because she had blended in so perfectly, because she had seemed so completely and utterly at home.

All through the second lecture, Marilyn remembered the smell of his skin—clean and sharp, like the air after a rainstorm—and the feel of his hands at her waist, and even her palms grew warm. Through her fingers, she watched him: the tip of his ballpoint tapping the top of the podium, the deliberate flick as he turned over another page of his notes. He looked everywhere but toward her, she realized. At the end of the hour, she dawdled in her seat, slowly slipping her papers into her folder, tucking her pencil into the pocket. Her classmates, hurrying to other courses, squeezed past her into the aisle, jostling her with their bags. At the podium, James sorted his notes, dusted his hands, replaced the chalk on the blackboard ledge. He didn’t look up when she stacked her books, or when she tucked them in the curve of her arm and headed toward the door. Then, just as her hand touched the knob, he called, “A moment, Miss Walker,” and something inside her jumped.

The classroom was empty now, and she leaned against the wall, trembling, while he closed his briefcase and descended the steps of the platform. She curled her fingers around the doorknob behind her to hold herself in place. But when he reached her, he wasn’t smiling. “Miss Walker,” he said again, taking a deep breath, and she found that she wasn’t smiling either.

He was her teacher, he reminded her. She was his student. As her teacher, he would feel he was taking advantage of his position if they were—he looked down, fiddling with the handle of his briefcase—if they were to develop any kind of relationship. He wasn’t looking at Marilyn, but she didn’t know. She was looking down at her feet, at the scuffed toes of her shoes.