III

An Excerpt from We, Adults: “Just This Once”

Elliot Svendsen wasn’t a universally beautiful girl. Her hair was a blond close to brown, her body molded in Midwestern practicality, as if her ancestrally high-wear areas (ankles, shoulders, hips) were reinforced through generations of crop harvesting. She had the habit of thinking with the end of her pen pressed to her left front tooth. More often than not, it seemed as if she dressed with no concern for creating a cohesive whole, colors or fabrics be damned.

Yet it worked, all of it.

She possessed the self-assuredness of a woman twice her age—no, strike that—the confidence of the beautiful and charismatic, those rare demigods who hit sevens on the genetic slot machine, and float through life with an unapologetic notion of isn’t it this easy for everyone? Yet she was neither overly beautiful nor charismatic. Elliot was shy, more than a smidgen awkward. She was sweet. Yet, there was something there in her pale blue eyes that forced me to question the sincerity of her learned bashfulness. More than once while I was lecturing and caught her eye, I was struck with the notion that she didn’t give two shits about what I was saying. Something about her stare was challenging. There was a hint of I could do your job better. It was as if she knew something the rest of us didn’t.

Or maybe this speculation is the result of retrospect and regret. Maybe I was simply drawn to a girl who let her intention be known by refusing to avert her gaze when eye contact exceeded the acceptable half-second time frame.

I found myself thinking about her with alarming regularity.

I’d be in the shower and I’d be preparing for lessons and I’d be stuck in the horrendous traffic south of Denver. I’d envision conferences where our knees brushed against each other. Maybe our hands would graze while handing in assignments. I pictured her room, the books she’d have (definitely not a Jane Eyre type of girl, maybe the Russians?), the sweet smell of her sweat and Dove coating the comforter she’d purchased at Target. And in October, as she sat at her desk in a black cotton skirt, unabashedly exposing a chink of her cream-colored panties through her slightly separated legs, my thoughts turned from the infatuated curious to the sexualized hypothetical.

***

So much of life is the drawing of lines, the setting of boundaries. I won’t do this, but I’ll do that. Maybe I’ll say this, but for sure I won’t say that. It’s a game, really, a way to wrestle control over our desires. We are constantly in a sterile conference room of mediation. We are lawyers with bitter clients trying their best to keep up the appearance of steely resolve. We’re passing offers scrawled on legal pads back and forth, claiming this is the furthest we’ll go, absolutely no wiggle room in this offer, I walk after this. Yet we receive those counter offers in the form of maybe this once, what would it really hurt, I’ve already done x, y, and z.

I watched my parents keep a running scorecard to their lives as if it were nothing but a game of bridge. My father’s unsaid trump was always Vietnam. My mother’s was my father’s alcoholism, followed closely by his lack of success at Sears, and her resulting cashier job at CVS. I watched my father ignore my mother my entire childhood because he felt entitled to the inebriation of drink. I watched my mother’s transition into the type of woman who deserved to have a string of affairs—bangs, expenditures on shoulder-pad jackets, going out with coworkers on Friday nights—all over the simmering resentment of crushing loneliness and perceived injustice. For each of them, I’m sure they made lists of actions they’d never allow, followed by actions they’d really never take.

The first personal line I can remember breaking was shoplifting.

I was in the sixth grade. Everybody was coming to school with baseball cards. My friends were assembling complete decks with the ease of the rich, and it didn’t make sense because I knew what they were taking in on Sundays for allowance. Eventually, I figured out what five-finger discount meant (after somebody explicitly informed me), and I shook my head, disgusted or at least afraid, vowing I’d never steal.

But everybody’s card collections kept growing at astonishing rates, while mine grew by eleven cards a week. Soon, I was the only one without a Ryne Sandberg rookie. I’d sit there at the rectangular lunch table, my cards sweaty in my hands, my peers’ cards spread out before them for the world to admire. And I did admire the collections. The joy they must be feeling being in possession of the entire Topps set. The stories they traded about their petty acts of rebellion. The inclusiveness of it all.

My rule—one I’d never even had to verbalize because the chance of committing it was so much of an impossibility—was broken a week after the term five-finger discount became commonplace in the cafeteria. I didn’t steal baseball cards. I stole a plastic dinosaur, a stegosaurus I believe. This was from The Red Balloon, a children’s bookshop I passed on my way home. I made up an extravagant lie about needing a book for my fictitious baby sister, one that let her understand how much I loved her. The overweight clerk gave me a smile like pure love, then waddled out from behind her counter to point out just the one. I used this moment to slip the plastic dinosaur into my tighty-whities. On the way home, I felt sick. I pictured an angry God and an angry father and I imagined being arrested and I imagined living in the streets with cardboard signs begging for food. My Poe moment came in the woods a few hundred yards from my house. I buried the stegosaurus. I vowed never again. I vowed to take that secret to my grave.

Three days later, I stole my first pack of Topps baseball cards.

We covet.

We covet people and things and feelings and security and danger and we covet love, esteem, and validation in every conceivable form of measurement. We covet these things because of the nagging voice inside of our heads that whispers a thousand variations of the same message: you’re not good enough. This is why we make easily breakable rules. This is why we compromise morals. This is why just this once and never again roll so effortlessly off our tongues.

***

My just this once came in the form of agreeing to meet my student, Elliot Svendsen, for coffee to discuss the story she’d handed in. She asked me after class. Normally, this wouldn’t even be a question—by all means, my office is your office, we can meet right now—but it was different with Elliot for two reasons: she asked to grab a cup of coffee at The Little Owl, which was a ten minute walk from campus; it was Elliot, a girl who showed an unabashed interest in me, and conversely, a student whom I’d spent hours outside of the classroom thinking—no, fantasizing—about.

Just this once. Talking isn’t intercourse. She only wants feedback on her story. Flirtation isn’t intercourse. She’s a graduate student taking an undergraduate course; not an undergraduate. Playful brushing of leaves from the belly of her sweater is not intercourse. You’re one published story away from tenure track assistant professorship, don’t fuck this up. She’s twenty-four, almost twenty-five. She wouldn’t tell. Her hand on your knee isn’t intercourse…

The Little Owl was about as hip a place as Denver had to offer. This was the year when skinny jeans started showing up in US Weekly, but still a good eighteen months before they made their way to the masses in the American West, that is except for the patrons of The Little Owl. I was confused and then I felt old and then I looked up from Elliot’s story and she had her blue Bic pen pushed against her tooth and I let myself be a creep and imagined the pen as something else and she didn’t look away, and neither did I, because it was just this once and because I liked the melodic vocals over electronic beats playing from dangling speakers and because she’d flattered everything about me (my published work, my teaching style, the fact that I scored a 9.8 on professorhotornot.com) and because the last woman I’d slept with had been an overly serious Korean lit agent at a writer’s conference the previous summer and because the soles of our shoes were touching and here it comes, the crux of every rationalization, the assigning of merit, the notion of deserving, and hell, I did, why not, why the fuck didn’t I deserve attention from a sometimes-beautiful grad student?

A decision was made at that very moment.

Hell, it was probably made weeks before, but I distinctly remember allowing myself this small pleasure as I sat in a too-hip coffee shop with a student thirteen years my junior. The next three weeks were some of the best of my life. I was intoxicated with the game of this isn’t happening. Elliot did her part to pretend the same. We were connected by the feigned awe of our mutual attraction, how we couldn’t help it. The thrill of accidental physical contact was irresistible. Everything was unspoken; everything was implied. I found myself giddy the nights before my Tuesday-Thursday class. I’d imagine the looks she’d give me, the pressure our shins would apply underneath the wooden table at The Little Owl. I’d be a touch bolder in my passes. I’d let my eyes linger a beat longer. I’d dig deeper into her past—how’d you end up interested in an unheralded playwright? How’d you decide on Colorado? Why isn’t a beautiful (I’d convinced myself she was by this point) girl like you dating anyone?

When everything is still yet to happen, there is no right or wrong, or rather, there’s the trying on of guilt for hypothetical actions weighed against the desire to commit said actions. Only this equation is bullshit—in this instance and probably all others involving sex—because even the administered guilt takes on the erotic pleasure of shame.

Our game of pretend reached a sort of critical mass the day before Halloween. We sat in the coffee shop, both complaining of hunger. Dinner was suggested. Elliot told me she had no money. I offered to pay. She stared with her marble eyes. She said, I’m a big fan of breakfast for dinner. You have eggs at your house?

I beat her to my house. I brushed my teeth and took a damp washcloth to my groin and I smoothed my hair in the mirror, never allowing myself to meet my own stare. Elliot arrived ten minutes later. She wore a cheap knee-length coat with fake fur around the edges. She ran her hand over my leather couch. I imagined it as my spine. She said my place was cute. She looked at my books. I told myself it was a bad idea and that she was a student and that I was close to tenure and I’d feel the same if I sent her on her way and viewed my rapidly growing cache of pornography clips resembling Elliot, only minus the intoxicating guilt of only this once.

Our fingers touched on the spine of Durrell’s Justine.

She turned away from my bookcase and her mouth was slightly open and I noticed a blotch of discoloration on her left-front tooth and I wondered how I’d never seen this blemish before and then our stomachs were touching and hers had the slightest give, which I thought was both repulsive and amazing. Her taste was the bitter of recently drank espresso.

A kiss isn’t intercourse.

Just this once.

The sex was neither sensual nor erotic. It was rather perfunctory, timid even. There was a silence afterward which was the closest thing to awful I’d ever experienced. We made eggs and toast. We ate in front of a rerun of The Simpsons. I wanted her to leave. I wanted the last half hour back. The last month. I’d insist on meeting with her in my office to discuss her story. I’d leave the door open. I’d see her exposed underwear in class as an accident, or at the very least, as the actions of a girl who’d watched too many movies.

I needed to be tactful in my exit from the situation. I needed to let her down slowly, tell her mistakes had been made—no, not mistakes, but rules, rules were in place by the university prohibiting such interactions—and it was a matter of my career, and maybe in the future, once she was done with her thesis, it could be different.

But once Everybody Loves Raymond started, Elliot leaned her head into my lap. Her shirt rode up exposing a tiny pillow of back fat. She unzipped my pants. She put me in her mouth. Raymond complained about Debora. I got hard. Never again became one more time.