Vladimir(19)

By sleeping with him last night I had given him an opening to get some of that approval he was sorely missing—now that he wasn’t allowed to teach, that he was politely ignored by most of his colleagues, now that he wasn’t, as far as I knew, sleeping with a girl who could blink slowly and wet-lashed in the afternoon light. (After the college banned student-teacher relationships I believe he courted locals and recent graduates, but the allegations had, as of late, curtailed his interest in that pursuit.) He was pawing his way toward me on his tender puppy feet, and if I scooped him up and told him that whatever kind of dog he was, good or bad, he was my dog, and I loved his puppy-dog face, then I would be rewarded with an almost innocent sweetness and delight.

But I couldn’t find my notes on Rebecca, I was teaching in half an hour, and I needed to get to my office where they probably were filed, then walk the ten minutes over to the other side of campus where my class was being held. I wanted to write out the next scene in my story. I hoped to exercise or schedule a hair appointment, something that would begin to prepare me for my future lunch date with Vladimir. I had to think about how to win my daughter’s affection back.

“I’m not interested in being friends right now,” I said. “I can’t think it through, I’m too busy.”

Still hanging on to the lingering feelings from the fight, I saw a meanness creep onto John’s face. “So I’m supposed to come when you call? And shove off when you don’t want me?”

“No,” I said. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. You have always done exactly as you’ve liked. You will not get me into a fight right now, you will not. I won’t allow it. I have to teach.”

“I think you just don’t want to bother with me anymore,” he said. “I don’t even think you care about any of this.”

“Stop hounding me, John,” I said. “I know you’re getting restless, but I’m begging you, don’t hound me. I need time.”

After swallowing several times in quick, mad succession, he stepped to the side. As I passed out of the room he let me know that I’d neglected to pluck the reoccurring hair that had, in the last few years, begun to sprout perpetually from my chin.





V.


Your office is glorious.”

Cynthia Tong was waiting for me by my door when I came back from teaching—a distracted class in which I felt like I was both overly acquiescent to my students’ poorly read opinions and overly combative. They could critique only based on representation, they missed the formal elements of a story. Of course Rebecca is, in many ways, a story that is erected in misogyny, demonizing women, demonizing the other, but I was not interested in that for them. I wanted them to see how suspense was created, how symbols were utilized, how repetition made the ghost of Rebecca rise from the page. Again and again I told them, you need to see these things, these forms. Oh, they drove me crazy, being so completely obsessed with whether or not people were represented well, wanting every piece of literature to be some utopian screed of fairness.

I had to slide past her awkwardly, so it could seem like I was welcoming her, rather than her welcoming me. I made a gesture toward my couch, but she stood and looked around appreciatively, wanting to impress upon me how much nicer my situation was than hers.

“Are you in the windowless room? I was put there when I first came. Sit down,” I said, but she didn’t sit, she looked out the window, not in direct defiance—more as though she didn’t hear me. The light made a line across her face. She was truly outstandingly lovely, with thick, curling black hair, firm cheeks, a dress shaped like a box that was modest, chic, and sexy all at the same time. She had dancer’s or runner’s legs, muscles at the top of the calves, indentations above a strong-looking knee, a clear line running up the thigh separating the front muscles from the back. I always noticed that line because I remember a boy I knew in high school telling me how alluring he found it. I didn’t have it, and as he was telling me, I found myself understanding a new sort of truth: that there were all kinds and types of bodies, different aspects of physical form, that could spark arousal. That women’s bodies were to be noticed and scrutinized and found attractive in all sorts of ways that I had not heretofore conceived. Chins, hands, throats, bellies, asses, legs, feet, all were to be considered and fetishized or dismissed.

“I don’t have an office,” she said, after staring for a long while at the view of the campus’s rolling hills, then eventually sitting opposite me on the couch facing my desk. “They don’t give them to adjuncts anymore.”

I told her I would look into it, that if nothing else, she should be set up in a shared office. I wanted to make sure she knew from the beginning of our conversation that I was on her side. I complimented her dress and asked her where she got it, I told her I could never pull it off. I told her how much we missed her on Saturday, that I had been so looking forward to getting to know her, that I had read an excerpt of her memoir in Prairie Schooner (I had not, yet), and that it was inimitably impressive.

“I wanted to come and talk to you about Saturday,” she said, and as she said it a wave of tension seemed to leave her body and I could see in her face the look of a swimmer before they enter cold water for the first time, the mental recklessness needed to trick oneself to jump in before you could stop and think about it too hard.