Every once in a while we have these cowboy confrontations.
“Try me,” I said.
“I just might,” he said.
“What’s this about?” Rachel said as she walked back in the room.
Rajiv apologized to me later that night. He said he agreed it was unorthodox. He hadn’t planned on dating one of my students, but then I was the one who’d invited them all over. And he had been lonely before that. I told him that surprised me, but it shouldn’t have. Away from view, Rajiv could be introverted and remote, as I too had been at twenty-three, though he masks this publicly with his brash defiance.
There was a chance down the line he and Rachel Weisman might want to get an apartment together, he said, and “give this thing a try.”
I think he imagined that would comfort me, but it had the opposite effect. Now in class I was having trouble concentrating on anything other than Rachel Weisman. The other students must have picked this up. I rarely made eye contact with Rachel and hardly ever called on her even though she raised her hand more than anyone else. When she spoke I addressed my response to the class as a whole. In retrospect this was both unkind and stupid because it didn’t hide anything and rather made our relationship seem like something it wasn’t.
One day after class I saw her walk off into the woods behind school with another boy from my class. I became jealous on behalf of Rajiv.
The next class I asked both of them many questions to see if she’d done the reading. She had, but not carefully. I exposed the gaps in her knowledge, and each time I could see her growing angrier, and I thought my son would probably hear about this.
I chose not to care. But I did begin to feel as though I were in the middle of a complicated love affair, and indeed one night I dreamt that she was sleeping in my bed and that my son was teaching and that I was another student in my son’s class. I began to have other erotic dreams about Rachel Weisman, and I stopped calling on her altogether, or even acknowledging her existence. At home I mostly ignored her as well and this made her visibly upset. One day as I walked to my car I was aware of her watching me, following me, though I never turned to look. As I drove off I thought I heard someone say, “Dick,” though it might have been my imagination.
During these weeks I felt volatile in the manner of a hormonally ravaged adolescent. I became acutely aware of every action that occurred in my house, all the arrivals and departures, movie rentals, and book borrowing from my library, the extra garments in Rajiv’s closet and the hair and makeup items in the bathroom that made me unbearably nostalgic for the presence of a woman, the hushed and cheerless late-night phone conversations to a female voice in a distant time zone (805 area code), the in-room meals and showers and lovemaking, of which there was decidedly less these days. I wondered whether Rachel had a house key and so to test that fact I double bolted the pantry door — Rachel’s entryway of choice — one night when she was studying late at the library, then an hour later unbolted it to avoid seeming childish.
I sensed (or was I hoping?) there was some friction between Rachel and Rajiv, though I never observed any cross words between them, and twice heard them talk about wanting to get their own apartment where they could have some privacy.
On the day before spring break, she handed me a paper on Canto 5 of The Inferno. I had taken a stack of papers over to the dark and woody café a block north of the campus where I like to go to hide away from the world. The first seven or eight essays I read were indistinguishable, each with a glimmer or two of earnest intelligence, but predominated by overbaked platitudes. When I got to Rachel Weisman’s paper, I began to slow down to the point where I was rereading for the sheer pleasure of encountering her words again. The ideas were exciting, and the sentences exceedingly lucid, even mesmerizing. It didn’t matter to me that it was substantially shorter than what I’d asked for. I actually preferred it. I read a few of the paragraphs aloud, and then it struck me that something was off about them.
At first I couldn’t tell what, and then I recognized that Rajiv had written the paper. It was in his vocabulary, and it reflected closely his thinking. But then I considered, Wasn’t it perfectly possible and even likely for them to talk about the subject? And wouldn’t she hear some of his ideas and agree with them, and then be unable to avoid them for purposes of forming her own thesis?
I simply heard Rajiv’s tenor voice as I read it, and when I tried to hear hers, the voice wouldn’t come forth. I considered simply asking her to write a different paper, but her response, I knew, would be justifiable outrage. They would both hate me.
The bottom line is I accepted Rachel’s paper, but I only gave her a B. She stormed — or maybe just walked — into my office saying she’d never once in her life gotten a B for a grade; that her worse mark had been a B+. I said: “There’s always a first time, isn’t there?”
Somehow that came out more, well, sexual than I wanted it to, and I realized that we were standing quite close at the time, and I backed away.
She was studying my birthmark again, or maybe my eyes.
“He’s right about you, isn’t he?” Rachel said.
She held her mouth in an ill-mannered smirk.
I said, No, Rajiv wasn’t likely to be right about me. There was much about me my son didn’t know but that was not a conversation I felt like having with a student. The paper was good but I had questions as to its authenticity, I said. She could write an addendum, or she could write a paper on how she’d arrived at her ideas, and I’d certainly have a look.
I thought that afternoon and evening about that line—He’s right about you. And I tried to think of what that might mean. I have never done anything to compromise my position as tenured professor at a first-rate liberal arts college. And even if I had, I couldn’t imagine why my son would report such a thing.
I began to believe that Rachel might bring the matter up with a dean and so I mentally prepared for such a confrontation.
Had my door been ajar?
“It was,” I said in practice.
Did I have any burning reasons for questioning the authenticity of the paper, and was there any reason I had to stand virtually on top of her while I had been having this discussion?
“I wasn’t on top of her, and the paper simply didn’t sound like her.”
And how was it that she knew so much about the inside of my home?
“What did she say about it?”
“What did you mean by there’s always a first time?” the dean would ask me.
“We were talking of her grade,” I would say.
“You were flirting with her while you were talking of her grade?”
“She’s sleeping with my son,” I would say.
“Well, how did that happen?” he would then ask, and I’d have to say, “They met at my house.”
“Did it occur to you that that wasn’t a good idea?”
“How can you stop a couple of horny kids?”
I actually said this aloud.
“It would be best if you refrained from describing a student under your supervision as horny,” the dean would say.
“I’ve done nothing,” I’d say, but neither of us would believe that was true.
But it never came to that. Ultimately I gave her an A.
Rachel stopped by my room the night after I’d changed her grade, again while I was reading in bed. I had on my pajamas and a robe.
“What the hell was that for?” she said, which is a fairly inappropriate way to talk to your professor. “I didn’t deserve an A.”