“It’s a serious allegation. Not a mere allegation.”
“Of course it’s serious,” Jeremy said. “I never disputed that.”
“You could have picked any adjective. If someone was accused of murder, would you say they were mere allegations?”
“Perhaps not,” he admitted. “But professional misconduct and murder are two very different things.”
“Sexual misconduct,” the girl corrected him.
“Yes, well. That is the allegation…”
Dark mutters rolled through the classroom.
“It isn’t just one,” a thin brunette in the front row said. “Three other students have come forward.”
“Four victims,” the first girl agreed.
Victims? From what Jeremy had read (and he’d been following the story closely), the professor had been involved in a consensual affair with one of his students. Inappropriate? Perhaps. But hardly criminal. As for the suggestive comments he’d been accused of making to students behind closed doors, it wasn’t as if anyone had been physically hurt.
“I read that he’d been doing it for years,” a third girl said. “The school administration had received multiple complaints and no one did a thing.”
Several other girls nodded in solidarity. Jeremy felt himself losing control of the room. With Madeline in the picture, it was hard not to take all this personally. Of the hundreds (if not thousands) of students he’d taught in his career, she was the only one he’d ever slept with. It wasn’t as if he’d gone looking for her. He hadn’t known she’d be dancing at the Tiger Bomb that first night. He didn’t force her to have a drink with him, or to come back to his apartment. It was true that she’d hesitated when he kissed her. And she could have been a little more enthusiastic in bed, but there had been no refusal, no insistence (or request even) that he stop. She’d called him the next day. She returned to his apartment on multiple occasions without coercion. From a legal standpoint, he was in the clear.
So why wasn’t Madeline there?
“Bare minimum,” one of the male students said—not the sort you’d expect: muscled and dim-looking, with a ballcap and football jersey—“dude should lose his job.”
“And if the relationship with the student was consensual?” Jeremy shot back, realizing his mistake the moment the attention of the class swung back his way. In the silence that followed, only two sets of coordinates mattered, his spot at the lectern, and Madeline’s empty seat. They knew. Every one of them knew what had been going on. He raised a hand in defense, although no actual accusation had been levelled. “I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I don’t mean to sound old-fashioned. But human relationships are complicated… I think we all need to take a step back and—”
A gunshot rang out in the auditorium.
I jumped and ducked behind the podium. No one else reacted. The audience members appeared perfectly calm. One of the other authors in the wings made an apologetic face and stooped to pick up a thick hardcover book. Meanwhile, someone in the audience started to clap, having evidently decided that I’d finished reading. The applause spread through the room, mounting to a polite level. In the spot where Jasmine had been just moments before, an old woman sat, pointedly not clapping. I ran my eyes over the audience, looking for some familiar face to hold onto.
The emcee emerged from the wings to thank me with what felt like an ironic bow, keeping me where I was with a firm hand on the shoulder. “Brief,” he observed drily, “but suspenseful… Well! Before we let you go, let’s see if there are any questions from the audience, shall we?”
The house lights went up a notch, revealing two or three raised hands, and an undergrad waded into the crowd with a microphone. I clutched my book, wishing I could have read more, unsettled by the tone of the writing, how unsympathetic the professor had been. Hardly the leading man I’d envisioned.
A girl with perfectly braided hair took the microphone and cleared her throat. “So… I picked your book up on a recommendation from a friend, and I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it. To be honest, it reads like an apologia for male chauvinism. Your professor spends half the book trying to convince us that he’s not so bad, and the other half feeling sorry for himself after his life falls apart. As if he didn’t bring it all on himself. And as I’m reading, I can’t help wondering what you want us to feel. I mean, where do you stand on all this? Do you sympathize with the professor?”
I made a floundering gesture. Whatever the book had become, I hadn’t set out to make any kind of political statement when I started writing it. I’d just been trying to reach Jasmine.
“It’s… complicated,” was all I could think to say.
“Actually, it’s not. Either you identify with the professor or you don’t.”
The emcee’s hand remained firm on my shoulder. I lowered my head, waiting for the next bullet to come. “If I might respond?” a faint voice called from elsewhere in the auditorium. I looked up with gratitude, as the undergrad carried the microphone over to a middle-aged woman in a red blazer. “Thank you. I don’t mean to hijack the question, but I wanted to offer something of a counterpoint… Now I can’t speak to how deep an affinity the author may or may not have with his protagonist, but I thought the choice you presented him with was rather unfair. It presumes the professor to be either a hero or villain, allowing no room for nuance. I regard him as something of an endangered species. An educated man of a certain generation who should know better but doesn’t. But why doesn’t he know better? That’s an important question. You’ll never know the answer if you don’t spend some time unpacking his psyche.”
The first girl wanted to speak again and the undergrad jogged over for her rebuttal.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I have no interest in the professor’s psyche. Or any other part of him. There’s a time and a place for complexity. A book written long after the Holocaust might have the luxury of humanizing Nazi soldiers. But a book written during the holocaust? It has the moral obligation to focus on the victims.”
“But don’t you see we can do both things?” the older woman protested when the microphone reached her again. “We can support the girl and regard the professor with circumspection. How else can we ever truly hope to understand?”
“You’re wrong,” the first girl said. “When you look at the professor, you lose sight of the girl. It’s as simple as that. And the girl is screaming.”
The older woman shook her head and sat down, apparently concluding that any further debate was pointless.
“A spirited discussion!” the emcee observed, leaning into my microphone. “Well, I think we have time for one more, if… Yes, back there. The gentleman in the black shirt.”
The undergrad travelled up the stairs to an overweight man with a bushy white beard and a heavy metal T-shirt. He scratched his belly and peered down at the stage. “I’m just wondering if you’re familiar with the tool known as emasculators. Veterinarians use them to castrate large animals. They resemble an oversized set of pliers, and they have a unique function… After the scrotum’s been sliced open, they clamp the emasculators behind the young bull’s testicles to sever the blood supply while crushing the spermatic cord.” He squeezed a fist in the air to demonstrate. “At this point, the testicles can be safely removed. It isn’t for the squeamish. There’s some blood, but the pressure prevents hemorrhaging…”