Carrie Pilby Read online

  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 do
rm.

  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 enou
gh 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.”