EPISTOLARY

The hills were already pale, the straw color that Californians call “golden,” which meant the winter rains were a distant memory. There was the sense of things flowering, stretching open. In our after-hours meetings, my teacher had been acting distractedly. His eyes fidgeted when we spoke, avoiding my own. “I’m worried about you. You don’t seem like yourself,” I finally said, fearful that he might be tiring of our visits. By this time in our ongoing conversation, it didn’t feel strange to me to say a thing like that. We were friends. We had entered into a shared language. We wanted to be the characters in books, even the ones like Prufrock or Jude the Obscure, who circled around and around in their lives like bubbles in a drain. I never stopped to ask myself why, in the face of every other possible scenario, either of us should want a thing like that.

On the last afternoon before spring break, he handed me a letter. It sat in a folder behind an essay I’d written, and he asked me not to read it until I got home. The rest of the school day was heavy with suspense. I zipped the folder into my backpack to protect it from my own agonizing curiosity. Did I already suspect what it would say? A year earlier, an older girl had told me how, when she was in his class, he’d once been so pleased with another girl’s work he’d blurted out: “If I weren’t already married, I’d propose to you right now!” What had I done with that information? Is it what led me to his classroom every day after school? Did it hover around us those afternoons while we passed a book back and forth taking turns reading passages aloud to one another, our knees almost touching beneath the desks? If I weren’t…I’d…Where did those ellipses propel my mind? I retrieved the letter from my backpack once I’d put some distance between myself and the campus. I wanted time to take it in before I reached home.

I’ve begun to realize that my feelings for you are different now than they were just a few short weeks ago…

I suspected he had already said more than what he’d once said to that other girl. I walked the blocks home avoiding the cracks in the pavement while my heart galloped. He loved me. It was a dangerous revelation, entirely inappropriate. He’d certainly understand if I chose not to meet with him anymore, to revert to being an ordinary student who handed in her work and raced past his classroom on her way home at the end of the day. He understood that even the fact of the letter would weigh heavily on me, as a secret I would probably feel obliged to guard regardless of what my response would be, and he apologized for that presumption. The letter was written in the same wiry script that cluttered the margins of all the essays I’d written for his class. I folded it into a square that could fit in the back pocket of my jeans. When I got home, I placed it on my dresser, in a wooden jewelry box that played Für Elise.

Twenty-five years later, and with children of my own, I ask myself what it was that assured him he’d be safe in handing me such a chronicle of forbidden feeling, safe even in acknowledging the facts to himself. When a teacher says such things to a young girl, it usually leads to a heap of trouble. Even then, I knew as much. When I was in ninth grade, people had whispered about a tenth-grade girl they claimed was having an affair with one of her teachers. Her story disturbed and perplexed me. Whenever I’d pass that teacher in the halls, his blank stare seemed to both hide and advertise a lurid appetite. I thought of the two of them doing things to one another in his classroom, of her driving to visit him at home, which is how the rumors described it. Did she like it? Whose idea had it been? Could it have possibly been hers? And what exactly was the it that bound them? The thought was like a film reel that would flicker in my mind for just a few frames before disintegrating. I told myself that a girl who’d get involved in a situation like that must have been lonely, crying out in a visible way for attention. But whenever I saw her, she had on an exuberant smile; she was tearing through the halls, yelling over her shoulder. The next fall, that teacher was gone. Fired, people said. But the girl was still the same.

My adult self still can’t figure out what made my teacher sit down to write such a letter to me. What had made him decide to come out and say it? What did he think saying so would do? I was not unloved, not a girl for whom such an admission might produce the kind of gratitude that would result in unrestricted access. Taking my home life into consideration, I might have been guilty of having had too much love. We used that word at home a lot: “I love you.” “I love you, too.” And we meant it. We hugged and kissed one another. We talked and laughed together. We spent weekends and holidays, our whole lives, really, talking and laughing and feasting on this thing we never had the need to call by any other name.

When I was still just a very little girl, my father would appear in the doorway at the end of the day and I’d race up and hug him around the leg, not letting go until he bent down to scoop me up in his arms. Or I’d lean into his chest while he held me in his lap, his gentle, sturdy voice creating a cushion around us that blotted out everything else. By the spring when I received the letter, I was too big for these rituals. And my father was still gone most of the week; he’d moved on to a different job, but the commute was the same, and I saw him mostly on the weekends. An awkwardness had crept into the times when my father and I were alone together. He was still the same man, but there were moments, more and more of them, when I’d anger him with some small thing—sassing my mother or stomping off in disgust at some request he hadn’t seen fit to grant—and he’d grow terrible before my eyes, glowing from some inextinguishable inner source. Still, even when I was angry with him for standing between me and what I wanted, there was also a part of me that drew comfort from the fact that he hadn’t diminished, was just as mighty as he had always been.

Things with my mother were different, too. Growing up, I was always at her side, her silent satellite at her doctor’s appointments and ladies’ lunches. Or she’d pack a picnic for just the two of us—sandwiches sliced into triangles, along with squares of her buttery pound cake—and we’d sit by a pond watching the ducks bicker over our crumbs. On days when we did nothing but stay at home, she was always nearby, sewing or baking, humming to herself as she filled the space around us with her calm warmth. Those were my favorite times, the two of us alone together passing long, happy stretches in companionable silence—a wordless quiet inside of which I could feel myself simply be. But more and more at age seventeen, I found myself resisting such closeness, feeling intruded upon when we were together. I needed space. As if the fact of her and the claim she’d always had upon me, her youngest, had grown into a threat to the scope of my imagination and to my vocabulary for what I was deciding to want. Had I been a different person, one of my friends at school, say, perhaps it would have been as simple as choosing to hide from her the fact that I was having sex or drinking alcohol or smoking pot. But I wasn’t doing any of those things; it was nothing as tangible as that. What I needed was the privacy to find out if I even had desires of my own and, if I did, to figure out what exactly they were.

My teacher’s letter changed things. It made it suddenly and forcefully clear to me that I could—already did—have desires. With the letter in my possession, I passed the spring break with an unfamiliar feeling of agitation. I wasn’t hungry or tired; I couldn’t keep my attention in one place long enough to read or have much of a conversation or even watch a TV show through to the end. But I also felt chosen, like a character from a novel, as though I had only just then begun to feel my life. Alone in my room, I tried to hold my hands perfectly still before me, and when I couldn’t, I realized with some elation that I had finally found occasion to tremble. Or my teacher’s name would appear in my mind, and suddenly my breath would get out of step with itself or a wave of longing would cause my whole body to quiver, and I’d think, So this is what it feels like to swoon. I’d envision versions of my life in which he and I let ourselves love one another, though I was never myself in those scenarios. I didn’t know how to let myself think those things about the self I knew. Didn’t every available source on the topic agree that it was wrong to love a man, as I told myself I did, who was married to someone else; wrong to do the things I sometimes tried to imagine we would do if only we’d let ourselves? I felt like a mermaid carved into the prow of a ship, straining ever forward, though the distance was shrouded in fog. Yes, I told myself, I love him, too. And in the days and nights before classes resumed, I found some way of telling him so in my own handwriting, the spaces between words like the distance a thought or an impulse must cross before it becomes an act.

On the first day back to school after spring break, I asked permission to leave my first-period Shakespeare class to run across the hall and deliver an assignment to my teacher. I couldn’t wait even until the end of class to get the letter out of my possession. I interrupted him teaching to hand him my response, tucked in the same manila folder he’d used for his letter to me. The other kids wouldn’t think to notice anything strange about this; they never did, even though the exchange tripped off a back-and-forth that would continue throughout the spring and even into the summer after school was out. We fell shy of saying the kinds of things that actual lovers would have said to one another (the truth was, we barely touched one another, never even kissed), but somehow we never managed to run out of things to say: This is what I’m thinking…Or: This is what I am reading…Or: This is what I am learning and what I am thinking about what learning a thing like this means…I was taking an evening art history class at the local community college that semester, and I found myself transcribing passages from my lecture notes (which seemed suddenly to ripple with previously undetected nuance and meaning) into his nightly letter: The first sign that the Roman Empire was about to collapse was the fact that the figures on the coins became larger and less distinct. Or I rushed home from dance rehearsal and wrote to him about how strange and powerful I’d been made to feel rehearsing a dance we were performing to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

Those were the kinds of subjects we bandied back and forth, subjects I believed would help me to become an adult in the way I imagined I wanted to be—a model based less and less on my parents and more and more upon a character like Goethe’s Young Werther: sensitive, artistic, impassioned, worldly, discerning. I couldn’t yet see that such a character was also woefully naive and doggedly self-destructive, and neither was my teacher’s stake in our correspondence based terribly much on what was practical or patently true. He wrote in blue ink, and his cursive gestured out like his thin arms or like his eyes, which darted off and up when he was closest to saying what he meant to say, giving the impression that he was intercepting each idea as it flew past. Every day after school, somewhere in his house, a house I never quite knew how to imagine, away from a wife I would not allow myself to think about, he sat and wrote page after page to me. And every night, I hunched over my own desk, a black oak desk my father had built, writing back to my teacher.

I called him by his first name. A simple name. A solid name. One his father and grandfather had carried. The name with which he signed his letters and by which he insisted I call him. I wrote his name and said it to myself, and the plain, flat sound of it caused me to smile. I smiled whenever I heard his name, even if it was attached to someone else, which was often, practically every day.

Every now and again, I’d lift my eyes from the inky imprint of my own voice to scan the low hills on the horizon. At seventeen, I hadn’t seen anything. I only knew how much distance I wanted to cross but nothing of what it would look or feel like or what it would leave me with. How did I write about that? But every night I did, just as he did—as if during those few hours before sleep, sequestered by some excuse about schoolwork or a book too good to put down, we each disappeared into the same place, the same blank plane where nothing but the weightless platonic shapes of things sat.

Through all of this—all of the letters in which we professed our love even while also, possibly for conscience’s sake, going to great lengths to posit that love as spiritual, as higher than ordinary love—did it once occur to me that my teacher was not an ordinary thirty-four-year-old man? If it did, it was only to reconfigure him in my imagination as an exception, a rare being, my soul’s companion, my Paraclete, which was the word he taught me to use in thinking of him, a word he’d culled from the Bible. If my mind or conscience ever attempted to configure him another way—if I found myself watching from the outside and seeing what the sight of us must have suggested to a careful observer—I shooed the thought away, retreating to that other sphere, that blank plane, the space where things were not just themselves but their higher selves, their perfect platonic selves.

That spring and summer, I kept friends my own age at the same arm’s length as I did my parents. I preferred to spend much of the day alone, reading poetry aloud to myself and letting the lyric you summon a version of my teacher. I read poets like Christina Rossetti, trying to hear her words as if my teacher were speaking them to me and to claim them along with the wish that I myself might one day be capable of fashioning such words into an address of my own:

I dream of you, to wake: would that I might

Dream of you and not wake but slumber on;

Nor find with dreams the dear companion gone,

As, Summer ended, Summer birds take flight.

In happy dreams I hold you full in night.

I blush again who waking look so wan;

Brighter than sunniest day that ever shone,

In happy dreams your smile makes day of night.

I took to my room, my bed, reading, writing, daydreaming, extrapolating from the tiny sliver of passion that I had been privileged to house. I felt so alive; I didn’t want or need other voices cluttering my days.

—

Earlier that spring, the first college I heard back from was the University of California, Berkeley. I had been admitted. When I shared the news with my teacher, he gave me a hug. When I shared it with friends, a boy named John, whose first choice was Berkeley and who was still waiting for his own letter of acceptance, sneered. “Of course you’d get in,” he said, suggesting that the news was only owing to affirmative action. The comment stung more than a little—I’ve remembered it all these years later—but it didn’t undo the relief I felt and the delight I took in the ensuing days imagining what it might feel like to be a student at Cal.

Weeks later, the other letters arrived, all at once. It was a school day, and I was home for lunch period. The mailman himself was curious about the four thick envelopes from colleges, and he rang the bell. “I thought you might want to see these right away,” he said.

I had been praying for a yes from Harvard ever since the conversation with my mother, more than a year before, when she told me I had it in me to get in. I’d spent what little time was not wrapped up in being smitten with my teacher imagining life on the East Coast. Mom and I stood on the landing opening the envelopes, each of which contained a letter of acceptance. I couldn’t wait to tell my friend John, to watch him try to chalk everything up to affirmative action, though I wondered to what extent he might have been right. I wondered whether this was the kind of opportunity Mr. Catania had been speaking about when he told me to take advantage of the things that would be handed to me and whether, by his line of reasoning, I should feel proud or ashamed.

It didn’t matter. There was no denying that my life was about to begin. I yelped and leapt up into the air. Mom squealed with pride and squeezed me tight. Had she been that happy, that relieved, and that excruciatingly proud when her own acceptance letter from Alabama State had arrived in the mail? And had Mother wrapped her up in a hug that felt at once like a warm embrace and a push into the oncoming rush of experience?

When I shared the news with my teacher, he made an announcement to the entire class. In his next letter, he told me that he felt a complicated mix of emotions: pride and an indescribable reluctance.

Graduation came. There was a picture of me hanging in the library by then, in the same lineup where Conrad’s photo hung. Marching in the ceremony with my class, I knew I should have felt more, should not simply have been waiting for the speeches and the celebrating to be over, but leaving high school didn’t strike me as meaning all that much. Only that a whole four years of waiting and vying for college were finally done and I could get started, get on with things—though September felt so far away, another occasion that would take its good time in coming.

A group of girls I’d known forever were moving into a house together with some boys that they seemed to be passing around among them. It was a freedom that made me envious. They knew what they wanted and were brazen in taking it; they’d grabbed on to an agency that was still far-off for me. I figured that once I had crossed the country for college and set myself up in life on my own I’d be able to give myself that kind of permission. Until then, thinking and writing about what my heart felt (the heart, yes, but not the body, whose vocabulary still eluded me) was plenty.

What did my parents think when, come summer, there was an envelope addressed to me in my teacher’s handwriting every afternoon in the mailbox? They must have suspected some kind of an infatuation but trusted that I wouldn’t make any serious mistakes. Sometimes, I thought back to Dennis and Becca, the couple from Hot and Fast who had fallen in love despite a similar difference in age. Dennis had been forthright about his intentions. He wanted to marry Becca, and it was in his power to do so. Not like my teacher, who was already married, who said things to me in letters that he hoped would never be sniffed out and dragged into the light by my parents or his wife. Whenever my teacher’s wife came to mind, I hurried to tell myself that she didn’t notice, that our life was a separate life from their life, and that it happened without hampering anything outside of itself, that we passed it back and forth between us invisibly. I told myself this, but I knew it was a lie. Why else did I sometimes feel so heavy inside, so anxious and despondent? Why else did I worry that she would one day grow curious about what my letters said, curious enough to break open the seal and read one for herself?

I spent my days during the summer working at the computer company where Michael was now a systems analyst; it was a job he’d helped arrange so that I might save money for the coming year at Harvard. I shared an office with a woman named Claire who had recently gotten married. Our desks faced opposite corners of the room, hers by the window, mine just to the left of the door. I can’t say with much certainty, now, what I actually did there, but I had my own telephone extension and a voice mailbox that held messages only I could retrieve and to which I would listen first thing each morning. Sometimes, there were messages detailing tasks requiring my attention in the office. Mostly, though, I knew my teacher had called during the night and left me a message. His words, the sound of his voice: these are what I remember of those days at my first job; these would tide me over until the afternoon when I could rush home to the mail.

But one morning, the message I found told me that I shouldn’t write to him anymore or try to call.

“I’ve told my wife about us, and the situation is delicate.”

I listened to the message again and again. It was a fist in my chest, a punch someone had landed there, refusing to retract his arm. The weight of it pushed into me and stayed. I was angry, didn’t know where to direct my thoughts or how to slow them down, how to go back to being the person I was before, the one who felt, suddenly, like a faraway stranger.

I lived like that for many days. I couldn’t explain much to anyone about what had happened or how I was feeling. I mentioned to Claire that my mentor—did I use that word or just describe someone to whom my relationship was that of a protégée?—had asked me not to contact him because I made his wife uncomfortable. Uncomfortable. Surely I knew his wife was livid, as I’d have been, too, had I been the wife, though I didn’t want to dwell on her stake in the situation. Claire didn’t say much, but at the end of the summer, as a going-away gift, she gave me a copy of Anna Karenina.

The affair—that’s what I had begun to call it in my mind, hoping that word might wean me of the desire to have it back—had left me heartbroken. I tried to tell myself that, in the grand scheme, I hadn’t lost so much, hadn’t even disrupted things to the extent I could have. I knew my life would go on more or less as it had been preparing to. I’d leave home, and time and distance would begin immediately to do their work. I tried to tell myself that my teacher had been lucky, too. Nobody had fired him; there was no transgression that would have warranted it. I told myself our restraint had saved him, for there was nothing terrible or irreversible, nothing as bad, I thought, as physical betrayal to recover from. In the absence of palpable fallout, I was afforded the luxury of being swept up in a kind of manic, narcissistic grief, willing my own feelings of bereavement to blur into the losses and disappointments borne by the characters populating the novels I worked my way through before the summer’s end. I told myself I was becoming one of them, someone who had suffered, who had weathered something true and beautiful and therefore doomed to be short-lived. I told myself I was finally awake to what we’d sought together, my teacher and I.

When we did eventually speak, he suggested that we meet to say goodbye. On a sunny mid-summer afternoon—one too pretty and mute, too simple, it struck me then, for the occasion—we sat down for brunch at a restaurant more than an hour away, a place frequented by utter strangers, people in groups of two or four or six, smiling over baskets of pastries or stacks of French toast. We talked for only part of the time and spent the rest of the meal moving the food around on our plates and looking mournfully into each other’s faces. I don’t want to denigrate it now by trying to imagine how we must have looked to the other diners. I just want to say that we sat there filled with happiness at the sight of one another and with a very weighty kind of sorrow at the fact that we’d likely never see each other again. After the meal, we spent the next several hours walking the many passageways and colonnades of the Stanford campus. My brothers had long since graduated. It seemed imperative that we surrender to our separate futures in a place where no one would recognize us, a place running over with so much deliberate beauty.

When he dropped me off at home, it was dusk. Before he left, he walked around to the trunk of his car and handed me a lawyer’s accordion file heavy with all the letters I had poured my young self into. It was a weight that dropped me to my knees as soon as I was safely alone behind closed doors.