My Last Innocent Year(39)
Some people didn’t like him. Alec thought he was moody. Holly thought he played favorites. Linus wondered what class might have been like if Joanna was teaching instead. I said nothing when they criticized him. When they talked about favorites, I suspected they were talking about me, but I didn’t care. I’d never been anyone’s favorite.
Only one question gnawed at me.
“Have you done this before?” I’d skipped calculus again and was lying on the sofa, my feet pressed against the soft pooch of his stomach. He’d hinted that students had come on to him in the past. Nothing happened, but he had to be careful; at times, dodging their advances could be harder than teaching.
He ran a finger along the arch of my foot. We still hadn’t slept together. “Do you mean, am I a virgin?”
I gave him a kick. “You know what I mean.”
“Ohhh,” he said. “This? No.”
“Really?”
“Really, Isabel. You’re the only one.”
The thrum of a word vibrated through me like a neon sign. Special. I sat up and buried my face in his chest. Did I believe him? We’d just heard Bill Clinton swear he hadn’t had an affair with Monica Lewinsky. Did we believe him? We believed what we chose to believe, what was in our best interest. Lies weren’t as bad as we’d been taught when we were children and besides, we weren’t children anymore.
“You have your answer,” he whispered, reaching a hand under my shirt. “Are you happy now?”
Was I happy? It was something close.
* * *
MARCH ARRIVED, AND all around, people started waking up to the fact that we would soon leave this place. Debra was making plans to move to San Francisco. Jason was waiting to hear from law schools. Kelsey hoped to find a job at an art gallery in New York. I had no interest in their plans or in making any of my own. Because I’d finally found what I’d been looking for, my purpose revealed on the leather sofa under the eaves. This is why I’d come here, I thought, as Connelly placed his big hands on me, as I peeled off layers of myself and fed them to him. This had always been the reason.
I told him everything, about Rosen’s and growing up in New York, how I loved it, how I feared it. I told him about the first time I’d seen Wilder, junior year, the requisite college tour. My mother had been too sick to come, so I’d taken pictures of everything I thought might please her—the wood-paneled dining hall, stone fireplaces, sculpture garden. When I got home, I had them developed at a one-hour photo shop. The chemo had given her terrible mouth sores, so she didn’t say much as she examined each photo, slowly and carefully, as if she were memorizing them. Later, I noticed she had them propped on her nightstand so she could see them from bed. Sometimes when I walked through those spaces, the ones I’d photographed, I imagined she could see me, even though I didn’t believe in things like that.
I told him about my mother, how she thought I read too much, while Abe thought I read the wrong things. I told him how she valued beauty above all else and that her favorite painting of me was one she made when I was sick, my cheeks flushed pink with fever. I told him how angry Abe was with her for making me pose when I should have been resting, but she’d believed it was worth it, and I agreed. I told him I’d never thought I could be an artist like her because the ways we perceived the world were fundamentally different: she saw things with her eyes while I felt them through the thin skin of my heart.
“But you are an artist,” he told me, and I wrapped myself up in his words.
In exchange, he shared little about himself. Aside from what I’d gleaned from his poems and the magazine article, I knew almost nothing about his childhood or his parents, and we never discussed his marriage, how it came to be, why it endured. I’d dug up the bitch slap interview Debra had done with Roxanne. It focused mostly on her time as an undergrad. Stories about the early years of coeducation at Wilder were legendary, the hostility and harassment, the alumni who openly questioned whether the presence of women would change Wilder’s “character.” The women who’d paved the way for us were largely considered heroes, but Roxanne had a different take.
“I’m not saying we had it easy,” she said, “but I would argue that, in some ways, our struggles were easier than yours. We got you in the door, but you have to fight to belong here. And believe me, that’s a much bigger fight.”
In the photograph that accompanied the interview, Roxanne sat behind her desk, her hands splayed out in front of her face, midgesture. I looked closely at the lines crisscrossing her face, the dark circles under her eyes. My own beauty had never been accessible or easy to understand, my body all straight angles, my face tinged with a seriousness men my age found difficult or forbidding. But compared to Roxanne, I could see that I was beautiful or, at least, that youth conferred its own kind of beauty. (Later, I would know this implicitly. I would pass young women on the street and see that they were all beautiful, even the ones who weren’t.)
I put down the interview and looked at my face in the mirror: smooth cheeks, apple-colored lips, dark hair hanging loose over my shoulders. Pretty—shayna maidel, the women who came into Rosen’s used to call me. I thought about the story Whitney told me about Roxanne’s mysterious—and lost—pregnancy. In comparison, my own body felt full and fertile. I could give him that, I thought, if he wanted it. I could give him everything.