Читать книгу Carrie Pilby - Caren Lissner, Caren Lissner - Страница 8

There’s a good reason that I don’t have any friends in the city. Most people’s friends are people they met at college. And most people they became friends with at college are people they met freshman year. And most people they met freshman year, they met during the first few weeks of school.

I did start off with a few friends freshman year. My roommate, Janie, was my friend. But she dropped out of school in November. Another friend I had was a girl named Nora, who was a prodigy, like me. The week before the start of classes, they kept having receptions for prodigies. At one of them, I was standing by the window, staring outside and holding a cup of 7UP, and Nora came over to me. “You look bored,” she said. “Do you know anyone here? I don’t.” Then she dragged me over to other groups of people and we stood next to them until we were included in the conversation. It took Nora only a little while to be the leader of the conversation. Unfortunately, the fact that she was so friendly meant she quickly became friendly with a lot of people. She started organizing all kinds of things, especially during the first few weeks of school. She’d get an idea for something to do, like walk around Boston or head to a movie, and she’d e-mail a bunch of people including me, and we’d meet up and go. But people like that never stay friends with me for long. They’re so outgoing and loud and popular that they get swept away by people who are more like them. I shrink in that kind of competition. Nora contacted me less and less. I think she also got a boyfriend. I saw them on campus together. At first, even after we stopped doing things together, when Nora and I would pass each other around Harvard, we would wave to each other. After a while, we just nodded. After another while, we started pretending we didn’t see each other. It’s weird how once you dip below a certain level with people, you’re no longer above the say-hello threshold and you have to pretend not to see them so that it’s not awkward. Maybe it happens because it starts getting too risky. You’re not sure they’ll say hello back, and if they don’t, you’ll feel embarrassed. I remember that it was also that way with certain professors on campus. Students in a huge lecture class would definitely know the professor, but we wouldn’t know if they really knew us. So saying hi to them on campus would put pressure on them to figure out who we were, but if they did recognize us and we didn’t say anything, they might think we were being snobby. It was a real quandary.

When I think back to Harvard, I get mixed feelings. I remember the beginning of each semester, when the air would turn cool and I’d look out my dorm window at all the students strolling in their hooded crimson sweatshirts through the fallen leaves. I’d get excited because there were new classes and new possibilities to come. But my hopes would fade quickly as the semester wore on. No one would talk to me in class. I’d eat alone in the dining hall, and I’d spend Saturday night looking out my window at everyone else, just like the previous semester. And it wasn’t that I wanted to be doing what they were doing, but that I wanted them to be doing things with me that I wanted to be doing. And what hurt most was that I was on a campus that students around the world would give their eyeteeth to be at, so I should have been absolutely thrilled, but instead, it seemed like it was everyone else’s place except mine.

And now I’m in New York, in a hip part of town that people around the world would give their eyeteeth to live in, and I feel exactly the same way.

The only period during which things were different was when I was with Professor Harrison.

I don’t remember thinking much of anything the first time I saw him. It was English 203, The Modernists, second semester of sophomore year. There were twelve of us in the class; they’d broken it into two sections. The other section just got a grad student, and mine got a full professor. We were lucky.

Harrison was average height, about forty years old, with brown hair that was starting to gray. He had a tendency to wear soft V-neck sweaters. He told us the first day that he didn’t want this to be a typical English class where we just read the novels and competed to give the best deconstruction. He said that, once or twice, he’d ask us to write our own modernist pieces. I was a little nervous because I’ve never been as good at writing as I am at other things. Most people like writing to be intimate and revealing, and I resent having to tell the most private details of my life in order to interest people. Plus, writing isn’t as exact as other subjects. In high school, I would sometimes start a creative writing assignment and feel like I was skating into the middle of the ice with nothing to hold on to. My best subjects were math and science. I was also pretty good in philosophy and literature, but not at writing my own literature.

Harrison went around the room and asked each of us to tell where we were from and what our major was. I found myself wishing that most professors did this, since people in many of my classes didn’t really get to know each other. This was my chance. I said that I loved reading and observing human behavior. When I finished, Harrison smiled, nodded and said, “Welcome to the class.”

We left that day with a writing assignment: to introduce ourselves and then talk about something we disliked about our personalities. Harrison said that plumbing one’s own flaws was a characteristic of modernist writing. I wanted to impress Harrison right away, so I had to do this properly. In my dorm room, I lay on my stomach on my bed, cooled by the chilly air that blew in through a crack in the window. I agonized for an hour over the opening line.

Eventually, I decided on, “Of the three grades I skipped, second grade seemed the most abrupt.”

There. I’d put the most salient thing about me first. And it was a little revealing. Surely he’d like that.

I added, “Suddenly, I’d gone from pencil to pen, from printing to script, from oral show-and-tells to oral reports, from running from boys to watching classmates chase them. Skipping fourth and eighth grades was a breeze.”

Yes, this was good.

I told some more about myself, but finding something I disliked about myself was hard. I thought of the first quasi-modernist book I’d read, Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, when I was nine and my French lesson had been canceled. The protagonist had to, it seemed, try and say every extreme thing that came into his head to see what happened. I didn’t have a similar quirk. I thought some more. What could I write about that would make a good modernist essay? I could invent something. Sometimes I feel…like a cockroach. Sometimes I feel like a swing set. Nah. I decided to write about being too studious. It wasn’t very intellectual, and it wouldn’t incorporate much symbolism. But what the heck. It was just one assignment.

During the second and third classes, Harrison didn’t mention the essays we’d turned in. We dissected various modernist authors. One kid in the class, Brian Buchman, was the biggest kiss-up I’d met yet, and at Harvard that was quite an achievement. If he’d been sincere, I would have admired him, but he had a tone that was clearly false. Half of what he was spewing was stuff I’d learned in high school, but he made it seem like he was discovering nuclear energy.

When the third class ended, and everyone was shoving their books into their natty black backpacks, Harrison called me up to his desk.

I stood there while Brian Buchman said goodbye.

“Do you have a few minutes, or are you in a rush?” Harrison asked me. “Do you have time to come to my office?”

“I have time.”

We walked down the hall to a pentagonal cul-de-sac with a wooden door in each wall. A few of the doors had yellowing newspaper cartoons taped to them. Harrison’s door was blank except for his name. We entered his office and he sat at a rusty metal desk. He had a few newspaper clippings taped to the painted-white cinderblock walls, and there were papers piled high on a broken chair. I’d heard before that academics got no respect, and the size of Harrison’s office proved it. He was a well-regarded professor, and this was what he had to work in.

Harrison leaned back. “I found your introduction very interesting.”

“Thanks.” I noticed there were no photographs on his desk.

“You said in your essay that you study too hard.”

“Well, maybe there isn’t such a thing,” I said, trying not to be nervous. “But some people say that.”

I remember noticing that he had a maroon sweater on and suddenly thinking it looked good on him. He had slightly wavy hair and intense brown eyes. He said, “Starting college at fifteen doesn’t sound easy.”

“Well, it’s not so hard academically. But…”

“Socially, it could be hard.”

I nodded.

“You sure you don’t have somewhere to be right now?”

“No,” I said. “I mean, yes. This is my last class on Thursdays.”

“You the oldest in your family?”

“I’m an only child.”

“Mmm,” he said. “I had a younger brother. It created some tension when I got so much more attention in school.”

“Did you skip grades?”

“I only skipped one grade. But I found it hard. For you to have skipped three…that must have been quite an adjustment.”

I nodded again.

“How are you finding school?”

He looked straight at me. I hadn’t found anyone that interested in me since back when I had interviewed for college in the first place.

We ended up talking for more than an hour. We got to things I hadn’t told anyone. I told him about sitting in my dorm room freshman year, after my roommate had moved out, feeling miserable even though everyone kept saying how lucky I was to have the room to myself; I talked about the earliest smart things I’d said to adults that had made their eyes widen, like going up to a woman in the library when I was seven and pointing to her copy of Call It Sleep and saying, “That’s a good book.” I talked about figuring out how to play “Für Elise” on the inside of the piano when I was five. I stopped several times for fear I was boring him, but he kept urging me on. At times, he would reciprocate, telling a story about something smart he’d done as a kid, or a time he had felt out of place, and I almost felt as if he thought he needed to impress me. That was strange.

“One day, the boy who lived next door to me was reading a comic book on his stoop,” Harrison said. “He wouldn’t show it to me, so I stood in front of him and started reading it upside down, out loud. He was amazed, even though it’s not so hard to read upside down. He thought I was a genius. Then he ran and got a bunch of his friends, who kept giving me things to read upside down. They made me feel like some sort of superhero.”

I told him about something that had happened with a neighbor of mine.

“When I was in first grade,” I said, “this sixth-grader who lived on my block came up to me on the playground at school and told me he was doing a report and he needed an example of a case in which the First Amendment wouldn’t apply. All the kids used to ask me for help, even the ones who picked on me. I told him that yelling ‘Fire’ in a crowded theater was an example, even though we have the First Amendment right to free speech. Then, the next day, in the lunchroom, he ran up to me all out of breath and said, ‘Carrie! Carrie! You’ll never believe this! I looked in the encyclopedia, and they took your example!’”

Professor Harrison threw his head back and laughed. I realized then that the story was funny, and I laughed, too. He laughed some more, and that made me laugh more. The more we laughed, the more it seemed fun just to laugh, even after the joke had gotten stale. It was a good feeling that something that I’d merely considered strange in my childhood was now amusing, an experience to look back at and laugh about with someone. There were plenty of bad things that had happened—oh, if only I could recycle them into amusing stories! And Professor Harrison would understand.

But our time had to come to an end. Harrison looked at me and said, “Well, I know you have to move on.” I said, “Not really, but…” but he just laughed and got up. He shook my hand. His hand felt warm. I said I appreciated the discussion, and then I left.

As I walked back, my mind raced a million ways.

He was smart—no, brilliant.

He liked to hear me talk.

He encouraged me to talk more, and always had a response.

I felt more excited about the conversation than I had from any in years. But I also knew that this was probably the last time we’d spend that kind of time together—probably he was having those sorts of meetings with every student to discuss their essays, and probably they were all as enchanted as I was. And just like with my outgoing friend freshman year, I’d quickly move out of Harrison’s scope, overshadowed by people who were louder and more “fun.” Besides, surely, Harrison already had a throng of people outside of class that he belonged to. Former students, relatives, colleagues. He was great. How could people not swarm around him?

There was still relatively little I knew of him, but what I knew was terrific. I felt like I wanted to back him into a corner and quiz him for hours. And of course, I also wanted him to ask more things about me. I had been saving things up for years to tell someone who was interested, who cared.

Harrison hadn’t made fun of one thing I’d told him. He hadn’t said “whoosh.” He hadn’t barked “SAT word!” when I’d used a big word. He’d agreed with what I’d said and sometimes built on it. The most amazing discovery in the world is someone who understands what you’re about without your having to go through your entire life history to explain it.

But my time was over.

During the next class, my feelings were confirmed. I got no wink or knowing smile from Harrison. He didn’t single me out in any way. I was disappointed. I still thought I should mean more to him. Hadn’t we shared secrets? Weren’t we friends now, whereas everyone else was just a student to him? He had told me about feeling alienated and lonely as a boy. Were those things you told everyone? Had he told everyone?

I kept looking at him. He was so handsome, so smart, so steady. I doubted he’d ever been into getting drunk at parties.

The person who got the most attention in class that day was Brian Buchman. Not that Harrison had a choice. Buchman went on and on, and Harrison ate it up—one genius to another. I was filled with jealousy. I wanted to say something equally brilliant, but neither I nor anyone else in the class had a chance to get a word in with motormouth running.

Buchman talked about “The Stranger.” He said, “Not that, by the way, the English translation can even come close to the French…” and Harrison nodded in agreement. Buchman called Camus “superb” and made the “okay” symbol with his thumb and forefinger as he said it. I wondered if vomiting would cost me an A. An airheaded girl in our class, Vicki, stared at Brian the whole time, cocking her head to the side like an attentive terrier. Brian wasn’t bad-looking. But what a phony.

Harrison didn’t look at me once. I felt miserable.

When the class ended, Brian and the professor were still talking. Neither of them glanced up as I went out.

I left in a foul mood.

I walked toward the Square, and it looked like everyone on campus was having fun. Two people in down jackets pitched a Frisbee back and forth. A gaggle of fraternity guys was horsing around with a lumbering Saint Bernard. A girl and her boyfriend were fake-fighting in front of the library.

In my dorm hallway, I smiled when two girls from my floor passed me, but they kept talking and didn’t smile back. That was embarrassing. I opened my door, dropped my books on my dresser and climbed into bed.

I lay there for maybe half an hour in a fetal position, racked with malaise. It was almost a month into the semester, and already, everyone had crystallized into groups.

I listened to the end of a branch scrape repeatedly against my dorm-room window.

The phone rang.

“Carrie?” a voice asked. “It’s Professor Harrison.”

“Hi.” I sat up.

“I just was wondering if you’d be up for dinner tonight. I know you probably have plans…”

Something inside me seized. A one-on-one dinner? Would this count as a date, or just a discussion? Would there be other students there? What had inspired this? How should I act? What if I said something stupid? At least I had already read half of the books on the syllabus, so I could hold my own in that respect. Besides, Harrison had enjoyed talking to me that first time, right? I shouldn’t be nervous.

“Sure,” I said. My voice probably cracked.

“What kind of food do you like?”

“Uh, whatever you want.”

He laughed. “You ever eaten Moroccan?”

“No.”

“Then we’ll do Moroccan.”

He seemed to like it when I hadn’t tried something. I would soon learn that. He liked being a teacher.

I hung up and thought about what to wear. I didn’t know if you were supposed to look good for a man who was asking you to dinner but who was a respected elder and not someone who could potentially have a romantic interest in you. I didn’t really know how to look good, anyway. Looking good involves trying to look just like everyone else, and I don’t spend a lot of time looking at everyone else. I pulled on a blouse that I’d worn to a formal dinner with my father a year earlier. I did have an adult-type wool coat. I trotted down the stairs, glad to be joining the other people who had somewhere to be. A chilly wind blew. I felt excited and nervous at the same time.

I waited on the lawn. Harrison wasn’t there yet. I gazed back at my dorm. It looked like a three-story Colonial house. Several of the lights were on. They represented people who were stuck inside, not about to step into the thrilling unknown.

Professor Harrison’s car was so small that I didn’t realize it was there for the first few seconds. I guess Harrison didn’t notice me at first, either, because he peered in his rearview mirror for a second before realizing I was walking toward him. He got out, came around and opened the door for me. It wasn’t necessary, but it was a nice gesture. “Hello,” he said.

“Hi.”

I climbed inside, and he threw the door closed. It was incredibly warm inside. The heat was blowing full force. He walked around the front of the car, illuminated for a second by his own headlights.

Harrison slid inside. “Any preference?” he asked, playing with the radio dial.

“Whatever you—” I started, and then became aware that maybe I was being too passive. I’d already let him pick the food. “Classical?”

Harrison found a classical station, and I sneaked a peek at his profile. He had a softly curving nose, and a pleasant expression on his face. We talked about composers. He knew a lot about their lives, even more than he knew about their music. I’m always impressed when someone is well-versed in a topic that has nothing to do with their main discipline. It shouldn’t be so unusual, but when one keeps meeting person after person who doesn’t have any academic passions, to find someone well-versed in three or four really is a miracle. We talked about Edvard Grieg, whom I’d always been a little fascinated with. Harrison noted that he’d entered the conservatory around the same age that I’d entered college. The two of us talked about him for a half hour. Everything I knew, he knew.

We parked in a small lot behind the restaurant. Inside, it was dark but alive with people. When the waiter came up to us, Harrison said, “Back room.” The waiter escorted us through a doorway full of burgundy beads. The back room was small, the walls covered in fuzzy red felt. None of the four tables was occupied. “Hope you don’t mind,” Harrison said to me. “I like privacy.”

“Me, too.”

“I wouldn’t want students to see us and think I’m playing favorites,” he said.

“You don’t take them all out to dinner?”

He winked. “Only the best and brightest.”

I looked down at my menu. There was a gold tassel hanging from it.

“It’s too bad you’re not old enough to drink,” he said. “They have this sweet kind of red wine here…”

My eyes glossed over the list of entrées but didn’t really take anything in.

“Do you like sweet things?” he asked. I nodded. The waiter filled our water glasses, and David ordered a Coke for me and a glass of red wine for himself.

But when his wine came, he held it out to me. “Try?”

I hesitated, then took a sip. It was sharp and sweet at the same time. “It’s good,” I said.

David took a sip. He was actually putting his lips where mine had just been, and it was a little exciting. He held the glass out for me again. The waiter returned as I was drinking it, and a look passed between him and David, but neither said anything.

After David took the glass back, he rested his chin on his hands and stared at me for a minute. “It looks good on you,” he said.

“What does?”

“The wine. It turned your lips red.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I picked the menu up again. It was odd that he could stare at me without feeling embarrassed.

He only stopped staring when the waiter came to take our orders. David asked if I’d decided, and I said I hadn’t, and he asked if I minded him ordering for me because he knew some things I should try.

After the waiter left, he said, “So, what do you really think of our class?”

“I like it,” I said. “I like the way you incorporated our own writing—”

“No,” he said. “Not the curriculum, the students.”

“Oh. I guess…they’re fine.”

“What about Vicki?”

I shrugged. “She seems nice.”

“Tell me what you really think.”

“Well—”

“Come on. Our secret.”

“Well, she’s a little…”

“…bit of an airhead?” Harrison said.

I laughed.

“You agree?”

“That’s what I was thinking of.”

“Between you and me,” he said. “We can both keep secrets, right?”

“Right,” I said. “Almost everything about me is a secret.”

He smiled. “There’s something so fresh about you,” he said. “As brilliant as you are, you still have this youthful spark. I can’t get over it.”

I looked at the table and sipped my Coke.

“What about Brian Buchman?” he asked. “Smart kid, right?”

“He is pretty smart.”

“Is he not the biggest ass-kisser in the history of academia?”

I laughed with glee. “I thought you loved him!”

He rolled his eyes. “Oh, Camus is superb.”

“‘I found the French version to be far superior,’” I mimicked.

“Oui,” Harrison said. The waiter came, and I glared at him. His appearance was becoming an annoyance.

For all David said about my having a youthful spark, he seemed to have one, too, even though he was a well-respected academic. Some of his stories indicated that he was still just as insecure as he’d been growing up, which I liked. There was something else that was thrilling to me: We were laughing together about our class, as if they were below us and we were both high above them.

When the food came, David took his fork and pushed a little of everything onto my plate. “Eat up,” he said. “Don’t hold back. Enjoy yourself.” We ate greedily and took turns drinking from the next glass of wine. We giggled until we’d finished it. Then David ordered more.

We ate, we drank, we laughed, and I knew I was acting completely empty-headed and silly, and for the first time, I didn’t care. I was with someone brilliant, who could protect me if need be, and I wasn’t worried about anything.

As soon as we left, the cold air hit us. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll turn on the heat as soon as we get in the car.” He put his hand on my back for a second. A shiver went up my spine. All sorts of feelings darted through me, but they didn’t gel into a consistent whole. I was just feeling an amorphous anticipation. I didn’t know what to do with it, as it was new to me.

He backed out of the parking lot and I felt the heat come on. Through the windshield, in the dark, a row of pine trees looked like a spiky sine wave. A few stars were out. It seemed like we were a world away from campus.

“You know, you really make me feel at ease,” he said, pulling onto the road.

“I’m glad,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else.

“It’s true.” He smiled.

“Are you usually not at ease?”

“I don’t know if any of us is usually at ease.” He looked at me for a second. Something made me shiver again.

David put the radio back on and told me how impressed he was with my knowledge of music. I mentioned my four years of piano lessons. I remembered that my father had put up a poster of Uncle Sam that he’d gotten from the local music store, and it read, “I WANT YOU to practice every day.” David talked about a recital he’d been to where his cousin had played Beethoven’s Fifth, and just as he’d gotten to the last note, a panel in the ceiling fell down, raining white dust on everyone. The way David described his cousin Stevie, in a little navy-blue suit and bow tie, which got powdered up like a jelly donut, I had to laugh. The two of us talked at length about good and bad childhood music experiences, about the odd teachers we’d had in our music classes in school and for after-school lessons, and about other extracurricular activities, and before I realized it we were back at my dorm.

I didn’t know what time it was. I’d had a lot of wine. I knew it must still be early, but it felt late. Only two or three windows were lit up. I sat there, feeling the alcohol wash through me. I waited for my eyes to focus.

“Well,” David said. “I had a nice time.”

“I did, too.”

“Got your keys?”

“Hope so.” I began digging through my purse.

David reached into my purse and grabbed my left hand. I looked up.

“Do you really want to leave?” he asked me.

He slowly began massaging my palm with his thumb, in a circular pattern. I returned to staring into my pocketbook.

“If you could do anything right now, what would it be?”

I knew he wanted me to be the one to suggest going somewhere else. If it was my idea, it would be less illicit. But I didn’t know what to say.

Before I could decide, he leaned over, put his hand behind my head and brougt his lips to mine. He stopped for a second and looked at me uncertainly. I turned to face him, and he kissed me again. I could hear the motor running. Soon he had his hand on the back of my neck.

Then he pulled away. “I told myself right after we had that talk in my office the other day that I wouldn’t let myself do this.”

He actually had been thinking about this since our talk the week before! And he hadn’t been able to resist! I couldn’t believe it. It was the first time I’d been wanted that much, and not just to be on someone’s spelling bee team.

“Look,” he said. “I can let you go, or we can go somewhere.”

I paused.

I had no choice. “Let’s go.”

He had some of the same paintings in his living room that I’d had in my bedroom growing up. Before I had a chance to tell him, he was walking down the hall, calling for me to come on a tour. His apartment felt like the warmest place I’d been since leaving home. There was a fireplace in the living room, thick rugs everywhere, and fat pillows smothering the couches and bed.

We didn’t linger in David’s bedroom. I followed him back to the kitchen.

“Anything to drink?” he asked, heading around the counter.

“I think we already did that,” I said. The wine had smoothed my speech, hammering out the kinks and stumbles.

David laughed, unscrewing the top of something. He poured himself a glass and set it down.

“Do you ever use the fireplace?” I asked, walking over and sitting on a corner of the couch. It was charcoal-gray, with light and dark areas where it had been rubbed.

“I haven’t yet this year,” he said. “I was waiting for the right inspiration.”

How’s it going to start, I wondered. Would he use a bunch of tricks that would get me into his bedroom? Or was that not going to happen? I was assuming it would, even if I wasn’t sure whether I wanted it to happen. He did know I was inexperienced, right? He had to. He couldn’t expect much. Then again, maybe he liked inexperience.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked. No one had ever done that before, simply asked me what was in my head. He put his now-empty glass on the kitchen counter and walked toward me. He looked serious and intense. I noticed a slight wobble in his step.

“Your syllabus,” I lied.

“Ah,” he said, sitting on the other corner of the couch. “That reminds me. I published a paper on Speech and Phenomena…” He began telling me about it, and I liked that in the middle of our sitting in the living room, work was still on his mind. It was strange, though, that after we’d been kissing in his car, we were back at the chaste distance we’d been at before.

I wondered if maybe he was going to tell me to sleep on the couch and tuck me in and read me a bedtime story. Despite myself, I feared it.

“You know,” he said, “when I say things about you, like that you’re brilliant, or that you look beautiful with merlot on your lips, it’s because I really think that. I’m not just saying it to flatter you.”

I pointed to the empty glass on the counter. “Wow,” I said. “That stuff works great.”

He laughed. “It’s not the alcohol,” he said. “You are just so…”

I cocked my head to the side.

“Are you nervous?” he asked.

Without waiting for an answer, he leaned over, put his hand under my chin, lifted my head and kissed me.

He ran his hand down the front of my shirt, then down my slacks until he got to my kneecap, which he held. He wrapped his arms around me, and we kept at it until I was out of breath. After a while, we went into his room.

He was happy with what happened, and I was left unfulfilled. I wasn’t so surprised. It was more academic for me. Something I should experience to know what it was about. But after he was asleep, I looked at him, ran my hand over the comforter and felt lucky to be there.

Class held a new excitement after that. David would lecture, pace the room, then stop and look up and down the aisles with a slight smile on his lips, acting as if nothing was going on when we both knew it was. It was our game. Occasionally, when I thought it was safe, I would catch his eye and raise an eyebrow, and once in a very rare while, he’d wink at me quickly. Sometimes, I would just get a surge of excitement watching him walk around in his soft sweaters, knowing that no one else in class had snuggled against them, knowing that later that night, I would. And when Brian Buchman was droning on and on, and Vicki was swooning, I would feel happy instead of miserable because I knew that later, David and I would laugh about it.

One time, David was a few minutes late to class, and everyone started yammering.

“Maybe we can leave if he doesn’t show,” said a guy named Rob, who only came to class half the time anyway.

“I like this class,” a girl said.

“I do, too,” Brian said.

“He loves you,” Rob ribbed him.

“Yeah, and he ignores the rest of us,” a girl complained.

“He’s probably just busy,” Vicki said.

“Is he married?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Maybe he’s gay.”

“That would be a shame. He’s so cute!”

I told David about this later, and we both cracked up.

In my other classes, I daydreamed. I was somehow able to take notes, but my mind was elsewhere. I would return to my dorm room to find a message from him on my machine, either an invitation to come over or just a call to say he missed me. If there was no message, I’d lie in bed on my stomach and gloss over my reading materials until he’d call. That usually didn’t take long. Then, he’d pick me up outside the dorm and we’d head out to eat or to his place. On the nights in which he had to get his work done, I stayed in my dorm room and did my own work. I maintained my good grades because when I wasn’t with him, studying was all I did. I had no need for anything else. No need to force myself to head out to some club, meeting or coffee bar to feel as if I was making a lame stab at socialization. No need to wander through the Square alone, looking at everyone else having fun and wondering how I could join in. I had one person who cared about me and wanted to hear my thoughts, and that was all I needed.

The winter was a snowy swirl of schoolwork, fireplaces and him.

As for the physical part, I never got the hang of the Main Event, which seemed to be uncomfortable and ended really quickly, but I didn’t care because everything else was great. On weekends, we drove all over Massachusetts, through colonial towns and historic villages and country roads, stopping for cider or chowder or pie. We walked along the harbor hand in hand, talking about places we could travel to, about places we’d never been and places we’d dreamed of as kids. At dinner in a waterfront restaurant, I’d watch the reflections of orange lights shimmering in the harbor, and he would reach across the table, dunk his roll in my bisque, and ask me if he should put this or that book on the syllabus for next semester. I couldn’t believe I was affecting what his next semester classes would be reading, or that he considered me intelligent enough to offer suggestions. But he always listened closely to what I said and either nodded or gave me a new perspective. It felt wonderful.

Each of us should have the feeling, even if only for once in our life, of having someone so entranced by us that every inconsequential thing about us becomes an object of fascination. Any old piece of debris that’s poking around in our soul can be offered up for voracious consumption.

David and I commiserated on the perils of being smart, of thinking too much. One time, we were driving through a small town, the gray-brown branches of naked trees crossed above us like swords, and I told him the story of how, for a few months in seventh grade, I couldn’t sneeze.

“It started out of nowhere,” I said. “I was in social studies in seventh grade, and I was about to sneeze, and then I thought about it, and I couldn’t. The sneeze got all bottled up under the bridge of my nose and wouldn’t come out.” Every time I had to sneeze after that, I tried not to think about sneezing, but the more I tried not to think about it, the more I had to think about it, so I couldn’t sneeze. Finally, one night, I confessed everything to my father, and he arranged an emergency meeting with the school psychologist. The psychologist told my father he was concerned that I might have obsessive-compulsive disorder. I had to see him for four weeks in a row. But somehow, I started forgetting to think about sneezing during my sneezes, and the problem disappeared as quickly as it had come on.

David smiled. “If you think a lot about anything, it can ruin it,” he said. “If you think about kissing, about the fact that two people press their lips together and move into all sorts of configurations, it seems completely bizarre.”

“I’ll bet it’s worse if you think about it while you’re doing it,” I said.

“Let’s see,” he said. And he pulled off the road.

After about a month of my sleeping over regularly, David began telling me a few new things he wanted me to do.

They were only slight variations on the norm, and I considered them a small sacrifice to make. Whatever kept his attention. As long as they didn’t go too far.

But soon, he began to tell me some of the things he wanted me to say.

They bothered me. They weren’t the kind of things I’d ever said before, and I’d probably never say them again, if I could help it. It wasn’t just that they were dirty—the words were harsh. I didn’t feel I could utter some of what he wanted. But I didn’t want to disobey.

“We’ll start slowly,” he said kindly, one night in his room. “Just like with everything else. I just want you to say this one thing.”

I was silent.

“Carrie?”

What’s wrong with you, I thought to myself. It’s just words. You know that intellectually. So what?

But I knew that even if I could say it, it would come out unnatural. And thus, it wouldn’t have the effect he was hoping for. I was sure of it.

“Come on,” he said, sweat on his brow. “Say it.”

“It won’t…it won’t sound like me.”

“Just say it,” he whispered. “Say it once.” He kissed my lips, then my neck. He ran his hand down my chest and rested it in my crotch, then took his index finger and began circling. “Say it. What do you want me to do to you?”

“‘I want… I want you to…’”

“Go ahead.”

“I can’t.”

He sat up. He didn’t look so kind anymore. “What’s the matter?”

“It won’t sound like me. It won’t sound right.”

“Say it any way you want.” He leaned over me and kissed me again. “Come on.”

I just looked up at him.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“It’s not…I can’t.”

He sat up and looked into the distance.

“David?”

He ignored me.

“Come on. I’m…”

He rolled over on his side and pulled his blanket up. “Forget it. What’s the use?”

“Are you mad at me?”

He ignored me again.

I turned over, too, but I couldn’t sleep.

I lay there, my back to him, quietly waiting for him to change his mind. I wanted to get up and put on some bedclothes, but I thought that the more silence there was, the more he’d need to break it. I was scared even to breathe. I watched the red numbers on his clock radio change.

Eventually I fell asleep. At some point in the night, I woke up and pulled on a T-shirt. Then I went back to sleep.

In the morning, when I awoke, David was already in the kitchen, heating up coffee. I padded in there, and he gave me a silent nod and went back to the coffee. He also was quiet in the car going back to campus.

I went through my classes upset but trying to concentrate. When I came home, the light on my answering machine wasn’t blinking.

I collected my introductory philosophy books and read in bed. An hour passed without a call. I was scared. Why had I been so stupid?

But he would have to give me another chance, right?

I read Meditations on First Philosophy, but my eyes just kept rolling over the same words again and again, as if I were highlighting the book in varnish. Nothing stuck. Every few minutes, I looked at my clock. Dinnertime was approaching. I’d have to hike down to the dining hall and sit at the end of a table alone. Doing that always gave me an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach. I didn’t want to do it if he was going to call.

I felt hungry. I ignored my stomach and tried again to concentrate on Meditations, but I decided maybe I needed something light to read. So I picked up Thus Spake Zarathustra.

The phone rang.

I reminded myself, even as I dashed to it, to make my voice sound uninterested.

“Hello.”

I wouldn’t have admitted it, and it sounds very clichéd, but clichés become clichés because they happen: when I heard his voice, my stomach jumped.

“I went out and got wood for the fireplace,” David said. “I could use a little help initiating it.”

I wanted to tell him how happy I was that it was him, how scared I’d been, how much I’d missed him and how I would say whatever he wanted. But I didn’t. I told him I would meet him outside in ten minutes.

That night, we ate heaping bowls of linguine at an Italian place, then went to David’s apartment. Once in the living room, we lay down on the rug in front of the fireplace, a bottle of wine between us. David put his glass down on the brown tiles and lay on his side in an S shape, his knees bent. I rested my head on his jeans and stared into his chest. Thank God everything’s okay, I thought. It felt so good just to lie there, listening to him breathe. I closed my eyes, and we both lay quietly for a while. Then, I felt his fingers move over my wine-ripened lips. “Come here,” he whispered, and he brought my chin to his face. “Let’s stay here for a change,” he said, and I nodded. Soon he said, “Say it. What I wanted you to say yesterday. Please.”

Before he’d called, I had told myself I would, and on the way over, I had told myself I would, but now I couldn’t. It didn’t seem like the right words. It didn’t seem to fit with either me or with us. And why did he want me to say it, when he knew how much it bothered me?

“Say it!”

I started. “‘I… I…’”

“Yes?” His eyes were closed.

I couldn’t finish.

“Come on,” he said. “Go ahead.”

“David,” I said.

Then I said no more.

He sat up again. “Is this it?”

“I…”

“Is that the best you can do? You’re not even going to try?”

I just looked at him.

“One compromise?”

It just didn’t fit.

“Didn’t I teach you? Didn’t I say it over and over? Why can’t you learn it?”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“Is it such a hard thing to learn?”

Finally I said, “It’s not something I would say.”

“But you can learn.”

“We’re not in class.”

“Just say it!”

I looked at the rug. “It wouldn’t be me….”

“Do you always have to be such a goddamn prude?”

Before I could say anything else, he jumped up, stalked into the bathroom and shut the door. I sat still on the rug and suddenly felt very cold.

He came back out in a minute and said he’d drive me home.

We rode to my dorm in silence. He didn’t say anything when I got out of the car.

In my room, I curled up in my bed in the dark and stared at the phone, sure he’d call. I rehearsed various speeches in my mind, speeches in which I would tell him that maybe there was a way we could get past this, that maybe there were things he wouldn’t say, either, if I asked, that I had already made compromises and that I’d been happy to make them for him, but this was something that bothered me. And if we couldn’t get past this, I wanted to say why it was hard for me to yield to his request.

But I never got the chance to say any of it. He didn’t call.

The only time the two of us did talk was in class, when all of us were discussing the reading materials. That was it.

The semester eventually drew to a close. He and I never had another personal conversation.

I got an A in the class. I guess David would have been afraid to give me anything less.

By the way, I deserved it anyhow.

For a long time after that, I had trouble seeing couples kissing on campus. Their lives were so normal; why did mine always have to be strange? Did these carefree couples know that for some people, not everything worked out so neatly? Did they appreciate that?

The worst was, I knew a lot of the couples were together just for sex. At least David and I talked about books, music and his work. What did these people who did nothing all day but face-mash actually talk about? Some of the girls on my floor had boyfriends whose biggest accomplishment was making fifth-string lacrosse or flunking astronomy.

The rest of my time at Harvard wasn’t much of an improvement. I studied hard, graduated and moved into the apartment my father found for me.

Now that I’ve just spent some time thinking about the relationship with David, I feel sore and unfulfilled, similar to how I often felt after the encounters themselves.

So I go out to the supermarket to grab some ice cream and rainbow sprinkles.

I wend my way through the murky city air and into the perfume-and-garlic world of D’Agostino. I pluck a frosty pint of Cherry Garcia from the freezer, and as I’m pacing the aisles, I pick up sprinkles and cherry soda, too.

Once I get home, I make an ice-cream soda. The fizz bubbles high above the glass. When I taste it, I immediately realize I shouldn’t have been denying it to myself for so long. The ice cream slides down my throat into my gut. It feels absolutely wonderful. There is nothing better than this.

I pass a mirror on the way back into my room and notice that my lips have turned red.