Vladimir(17)

Oh, it was him, it was all because of him, I knew. Him and his book and his body, and the way he spread his legs and looked at me in the black glass of the window. It was him and his tragic wife and his sad yet triumphant story. I was writing to him. He who wasn’t the least bit interested in me—I was writing to explain myself to him. If I couldn’t have him—perhaps I didn’t even want him—I at least wanted him to know me. Who I was and how I felt.

I wrote till the sun waned and the Post-its were all used up, then wrenched myself away. I had to prep for tomorrow’s classes and review the language of the department goals before a Monday-morning meeting. I didn’t listen to anything on the drive back. I thought through the next five plot points in the story. When I arrived home John was sitting outside. I sat down with him. I put my hand on his knee. He shifted toward me and I put my head on his shoulder. That night we fucked for the first time in a year, with a clawing, otherworldly intensity. I woke up in the Big Bed, as we used to call it, in the early morning, and moved to the guest room. I felt exhausted and disturbed, as though a multitude of ghosts had passed through my body the night before.





IV.


Vladimir wrote to me at five the next morning. I assumed that he got up early to prep and write and answer emails while nobody could bother him. He told me he was honored I had read his book so quickly and that he would love to get lunch sometime soon. He proposed October 20—more than a month away. It was the last day of classes before study week, a four-day span in the middle of the fall semester when no classes were held in order to give students time to prep for midterms.

He expressed chagrin at suggesting such a far-out date but said that given how much he and Cynthia were still dealing with orientations and registrations and child-care adjustments, he wanted to offer a time he knew he could keep. I was happy for the delay. After reading his book, his visit on Saturday, and then Sunday’s burst of writing followed by the unplanned and strange sex with John, I felt as though the past week had been three rather than one. I had forgotten who I was, and I needed the time to remember—to remember myself as a teacher and a colleague and a person whose two feet stood on the ground. I have always taken comfort in putting my mind to my work, and I resolved to engage with some department initiatives and campus activities more thoroughly than I had been in the weeks before.

I was in my home office, looking for my notes for my class “The Gothic Novel, from Wuthering Heights to Beloved” when John approached, put his arms around my waist, and nuzzled my neck. I stiffened and shifted away from him.

“Where are we?” he asked me. He was sunken and puffy, his jowls hanging, his double chin prominent from my vantage point. The light coming in through the window made his teeth look yellow and coated.

I told him I didn’t know. “Are we friends?” he asked. We had gotten that phrase from a novel we had once read. “Are we friends?” “Are you my friend?” Maybe a children’s novel. We used it with Sidney too: “Are we friends?”

“I don’t know,” I said. There was a strong impulse in me to throw away all the resistance I felt toward him. Not out of wanting, but because I knew the little soft parts of his heart. He had grown up in Iowa, been brought up by a mother who adored him and by a father who dismissed him as a pansy for his aptitude in school and his love of reading. He had been pushed around in high school by the masculine forces of the Midwest, by men who loved fighting and hunting and loud shows of ignorance. He had not played football or any sport and had been ignored by the bouncy, cheerful women around whom he developed all his sexual predilections. When he finally got to college, it took him three years to gather enough confidence to kiss a girl.

All that time he wasn’t kissing, however, he was watching. He was watching how irresistible the combination of blunt masculinity, physical prowess, and intellectual fortitude were to the kind of women he wanted to attract. This was a different kind of maleness than he had encountered in the Midwest—these men were not the football-playing dullards who ran and smashed into each other because they were unable to express themselves in any other way—this was the maleness of the Rhodes Scholar lacrosse star, the law school Rugby players, the poets who met several times a week for a pickup basketball game. He didn’t necessarily like the company of men—he preferred women even as friends—but he forced himself to learn about football, basketball, and baseball so that he could befriend men, so he could talk to them about something. He saw how men who liked men were more attractive to women, perhaps for the assurance that they had a secret life, or deeper, some primate-safety thing. He did hundreds of pull-ups and push-ups and sit-ups and squats in his room until his body shifted from a potbellied flabbiness to a lean solidity (he never had a body like Vladimir’s, but when I met him he was tall and trim). All the while he studied—outpacing his classmates, yet driving himself further and further, as if maintaining a vast lead in relation to his peers was the only position that would give him breathing room. He went to the University of Barcelona in his senior year and fell in love with the long gold light and the philosophical bent and the country’s literary journey from Cervantes to Lorca to Marìas.

He also fell in love with one of his TAs there—a tiny Spanish woman with long hair who smoked cigarettes with a holder. She was in her mid-forties compared with his early twenties, and she had a son who also attended the college. Emboldened by Spain, by his status as a foreigner, by Moorish architecture and the music that played in the town square until 3 a.m., he began to lurk around her after class. They went for coffee once, and the next day after the lecture, when the college would usually shut down for the siesta, she invited him back to her apartment. She taught him how to address her hard nipples and how to hold back orgasming while still moving inside her. This practice became a ritual that they kept religiously once a week after class. When he said goodbye, at the end of the year, she kissed him, pinched his cheeks like a boy, and said thank you. On the airplane he cried for most of the flight home at the thought of not seeing her again.