My Last Innocent Year(8)

I sat down on the floor next to the heating pipe and tucked my knees under my chin. “Are you ready for Professor Maxwell’s seminar?”

“Getting ready,” Andy said, lowering himself into his chair.

“Do you know who else got in?”

“The usual suspects. Holly and Alec, Kara Jiang, Linus Harrison. Ginny.”

“Ginny McDougall? Seriously?”

“Apparently, she wrote a really good story about a girl who loses her virginity the day her King Charles spaniel dies. Very effective description of cunnilingus.”

Professor Joanna Maxwell’s senior seminar was the class everyone in the English department worked toward. It was intense and exclusive, admission based on a set of criteria no one could rationally discern, and not for lack of trying. I was thrilled when I found out I’d been accepted, but that feeling had since turned to dread because, despite her soft voice and beatific smile, Joanna Maxwell, award-winning novelist, department head, and campus legend, scared the shit out of me.

“Did you hear about Jason?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I’d been shocked that Jason, Kelsey’s boyfriend, had been rejected. He was what I thought of as a “real” English major: he memorized poetry, annotated short stories in the New Yorker, and was writing an incomprehensible thesis on James Joyce. All I did was write stories about “girls with feelings,” as Andy put it once in a workshop. According to Kelsey, Jason was devastated.

“Well, c’est la vie.” Andy turned back to his desk. His shoulder blades jutted through his T-shirt like wings. Debra joked you could grab onto them if you were ever caught in a gust of wind. In another life, Andy might have been an athlete, but in this one, his lean muscles were zipped under the thin skin of a poet, pale and blue-veined like the cheeses behind the glass display at Rosen’s.

Andy and I had slept together exactly twice, the last time after a St. Patrick’s Day party sophomore year. He’d had shamrocks painted on his face; as we fucked, the green paint had dripped down his cheeks, collecting in the cleft of his chin. There wasn’t much more to say about it except that we decided never to do it again and had somehow managed to stay friends.

“Actually,” he said, turning around in his chair. “I have something to tell you, but you can’t tell anyone. I mean, I guess everyone will find out on Wednesday, but…”

“Oh, come on. What?”

“Joanna isn’t teaching this semester.”

“What? She always teaches English 76! Are you serious?”

“I’m serious.”

“Why not?”

“It isn’t public knowledge so you can’t say anything.” I crossed my heart. “She’s telling people her publisher moved up her deadline, but the truth is”—his voice dropped—“she and Tom Fisher are getting a divorce.”

“She’s not teaching because she’s getting a divorce? I had a high school teacher whose husband got hit by a bus and she didn’t even miss a day.”

“I gather it’s a bit of a shit show. Tom is … complicated, and they have the kid…” I had the feeling he wanted to say more. Andy and Joanna had been close ever since he’d been the first freshman admitted to her advanced poetry seminar. Since then, he’d worked for her as a research assistant and TA. Last summer, he’d lived with her and her husband in their house on June Bridge Road, doing yard work and helping take care of their daughter, Igraine. He had been working all year with Joanna on his senior thesis, a collection of poems about masculinity, technology, and parental control; there was talk he’d be listed on the acknowledgments page of her next novel. If anyone knew what was going on with Joanna and Tom, it was Andy, but he wasn’t saying.

“Hey,” he said, “isn’t Professor Fisher your thesis adviser?”

“Yeah.”

“Good luck with that.”

Before I had a chance to ask what he meant, Andy turned and jotted something down on an index card, and I could tell that whatever window of time he’d allotted to me was coming to an end.

“Oh, hey,” I said, reaching into my backpack. “I made you something.”

“Pour moi?” he said, opening the package I’d wrapped in the front page of the New York Times Arts and Leisure section. “Mon dieu, Isabel! Did you make this?” He held up a navy blue woolen cap.

“Yeah. Over break. I didn’t have that much else to do.”

Andy pulled on the hat and turned his head from side to side. “How do I look?”

“Très joli,” I said. “Now, you better wear it or else.”

“Or else what?” he said. “You’ll spray-paint ASSHOLE on my door?”

It took me a second to understand what he meant. Of course Andy knew what had happened with Zev. And if he knew, soon everyone else would too, if they didn’t already. Andy was smiling, as if waiting for me to get the joke. I wanted to rip the hat off his head and light it on fire, or maybe light it on fire while it was on his head.

“Fuck you, Andy.”

“Oh, Isabel. I’m kidding,” he said as I stood up and reached for the door. In my haste, I tripped over my coat and my hand landed on the long heating pipe. The foam used to insulate it had worn away long ago, and the heat seared my palm.