Vladimir wrote to me at five the next morning. I assumed that he got up early to prep and write and answer emails while nobody could bother him. He told me he was honored I had read his book so quickly and that he would love to get lunch sometime soon. He proposed October 20—more than a month away. It was the last day of classes before study week, a four-day span in the middle of the fall semester when no classes were held in order to give students time to prep for midterms.
He expressed chagrin at suggesting such a far-out date but said that given how much he and Cynthia were still dealing with orientations and registrations and child-care adjustments, he wanted to offer a time he knew he could keep. I was happy for the delay. After reading his book, his visit on Saturday, and then Sunday’s burst of writing followed by the unplanned and strange sex with John, I felt as though the past week had been three rather than one. I had forgotten who I was, and I needed the time to remember—to remember myself as a teacher and a colleague and a person whose two feet stood on the ground. I have always taken comfort in putting my mind to my work, and I resolved to engage with some department initiatives and campus activities more thoroughly than I had been in the weeks before.
I was in my home office, looking for my notes for my class “The Gothic Novel, from Wuthering Heights to Beloved” when John approached, put his arms around my waist, and nuzzled my neck. I stiffened and shifted away from him.
“Where are we?” he asked me. He was sunken and puffy, his jowls hanging, his double chin prominent from my vantage point. The light coming in through the window made his teeth look yellow and coated.
I told him I didn’t know. “Are we friends?” he asked. We had gotten that phrase from a novel we had once read. “Are we friends?” “Are you my friend?” Maybe a children’s novel. We used it with Sidney too: “Are we friends?”
“I don’t know,” I said. There was a strong impulse in me to throw away all the resistance I felt toward him. Not out of wanting, but because I knew the little soft parts of his heart. He had grown up in Iowa, been brought up by a mother who adored him and by a father who dismissed him as a pansy for his aptitude in school and his love of reading. He had been pushed around in high school by the masculine forces of the Midwest, by men who loved fighting and hunting and loud shows of ignorance. He had not played football or any sport and had been ignored by the bouncy, cheerful women around whom he developed all his sexual predilections. When he finally got to college, it took him three years to gather enough confidence to kiss a girl.
All that time he wasn’t kissing, however, he was watching. He was watching how irresistible the combination of blunt masculinity, physical prowess, and intellectual fortitude were to the kind of women he wanted to attract. This was a different kind of maleness than he had encountered in the Midwest—these men were not the football-playing dullards who ran and smashed into each other because they were unable to express themselves in any other way—this was the maleness of the Rhodes Scholar lacrosse star, the law school Rugby players, the poets who met several times a week for a pickup basketball game. He didn’t necessarily like the company of men—he preferred women even as friends—but he forced himself to learn about football, basketball, and baseball so that he could befriend men, so he could talk to them about something. He saw how men who liked men were more attractive to women, perhaps for the assurance that they had a secret life, or deeper, some primate-safety thing. He did hundreds of pull-ups and push-ups and sit-ups and squats in his room until his body shifted from a potbellied flabbiness to a lean solidity (he never had a body like Vladimir’s, but when I met him he was tall and trim). All the while he studied—outpacing his classmates, yet driving himself further and further, as if maintaining a vast lead in relation to his peers was the only position that would give him breathing room. He went to the University of Barcelona in his senior year and fell in love with the long gold light and the philosophical bent and the country’s literary journey from Cervantes to Lorca to Marìas.
He also fell in love with one of his TAs there—a tiny Spanish woman with long hair who smoked cigarettes with a holder. She was in her mid-forties compared with his early twenties, and she had a son who also attended the college. Emboldened by Spain, by his status as a foreigner, by Moorish architecture and the music that played in the town square until 3 a.m., he began to lurk around her after class. They went for coffee once, and the next day after the lecture, when the college would usually shut down for the siesta, she invited him back to her apartment. She taught him how to address her hard nipples and how to hold back orgasming while still moving inside her. This practice became a ritual that they kept religiously once a week after class. When he said goodbye, at the end of the year, she kissed him, pinched his cheeks like a boy, and said thank you. On the airplane he cried for most of the flight home at the thought of not seeing her again.
The love affair marked some final stage of his development. On his return, he fucked his way through the entire comparative literature department, with a devotion and avidity that might be called (in fact, it is) a sex addiction, in modern parlance. Supporting himself with a combination of odd jobs, he tried writing short stories and poems for several years. When I met him, he told me how he spent years following one woman or another, becoming infatuated, obsessive, then tiring of her for some reason and finding his eye caught by a new one. Then one night he had a dream in which all the women he had ever engaged with gathered on a grand opera stage. They beckoned him up from the audience, then they became the audience, and pelted him with roses that turned to blood, and when he looked down he saw himself waist-deep in shit.
Textbook, I told him at the time. After the dream, he stopped writing creatively and applied for a joint masters-PhD program in comp lit, with a focus on Cervantes. I met him after he had finished his dissertation and was teaching the intro essay-writing course to freshmen, TA-ing some grad courses, and applying for tenure-track positions around the country. I was pursuing my PhD in English and American literature with a focus on women’s lit (not as “basic” as it sounds now, I say to my students).
The truth is, we did fall in love. Our hearts would bleat when the other was near. The realness of that early love is something I have returned to again and again as reassurance. We talked for hours, we watched each other walk across the quad, thrilling at the sight of our bodies in distance. We thought there was no one person better in the world. We allowed each other to relax, but we also challenged each other. We helped each other and we moved well together. I was an ideal weight when he met me and had clothes that suited me very well, with long hair that I wore in a high, silky ponytail.
Caught in the throes of love, alcohol, and excess, as well as the late nights and stress of my dissertation (I wanted to finish as soon as possible so that John and I could apply for jobs together), over the next few years I gained a massive amount of weight and smoked like a chimney, so that when we finally married I looked like a little squat toad, wearing a face with no contrast, a bad haircut, graying skin, and dry patches. John seemed to accept my decline with no comment, but my self-hatred swirled and cemented.
Vanity has always been my poorest quality. I hate it in myself, and yet am as plagued with it as I am with needing to sleep or eat or breathe. Despite my ability to read long texts quickly, to analyze them adroitly, to practice exegesis with precision, to publish articles and books on literary form, to write two novels, to raise a child, to be a mentor and friend to my students, still all the while I feel trapped in the prison of vanity. If I can’t be a woman who is effortlessly beautiful, I wish I could be one of those women who, gracefully or ungracefully, move through the world unconsciously, with a kind of peace about their physical form. I have never had that peace, I have always felt tortured about my looks. I think my mother used to comment on my beauty (though when I look back at old photographs, I was at best adorable, but never beautiful). By the time I reached a certain age, she was upset with my appetite and tried to control my consumption, leading me to hide food in my closet and eat all I could when she was not around. She pushed the agenda of my beauty even as I disappointed her, remaining short rather than blooming into height, with greasy hair, puffy and lank. When I was young I read without censure, including consuming endless women’s magazines and picking up “tips” that haunt me still. To this day I tense my ass at a red light and do calf raises while waiting in line at the grocery store, take the top piece of bread off my sandwiches, and destroy pictures that catch me in an unflattering light. My daily thrum of happiness depends on my number on a scale, as inane as I know that to be.
Which is all to say that in my toady-ness following our marriage, after the photographs came back and I was forced to reckon with the blandness of my face, obscured by flesh and bloat, and the squatness of my body, I suggested to John that he seek out other women. At first I did it like a teenager runs a lighter over their arm hair—to see how it might feel. I felt as though I had hoodwinked this handsome rising star in the academic world, that I had shackled him to me—a woman to whom no one could truly be attracted. When I suggested the availability of freedom he didn’t need much encouragement—he is still a cad, I like cads, and he is one. And after we moved and I had settled into my position at the college and learned to control my excess and reached peak attractiveness, lithe and disciplined, I kept encouraging him so that I could do what I wanted sexually, exploring the vigorous men of the country (I have always held that the most handsome men live in the country, while the most beautiful women live in the city, which is why in both places the pairs are unequal). Then after that halcyon period, and after David broke my heart and I chose asceticism, I ignored his behavior because it gave me room to breathe.
For John has always been a needy man, needing my affection and approval as much as he needed the admiration of the women he engaged with. When he was home he was always following me around the house, slipping his hands into the waistband of my pants or up my skirt. He always wanted to know if I loved him, if I was upset with him, if I was pleased with him. He would dog Sidney with questions about whether he was a good father, about whether he handled the play date well, or whether she had fun, or liked her treat, or if he made her happy or made her laugh. He could go from a faculty meeting in which he was praised to a class in which he was admired to the arms of a young woman who was thrilled by his attention to the dinner table of his adoring wife and daughter telling him that he looked nice, that he smelled nice, that he was a funny daddy, and he would still seem to be unsatisfied—some aspect of himself had not been acknowledged. Though perhaps, in those years that I had to fight to burrow little holes of solitude into the tightly packed days of school and writing and food and lessons and friends and social obligations, perhaps that was merely my impression of him.
By sleeping with him last night I had given him an opening to get some of that approval he was sorely missing—now that he wasn’t allowed to teach, that he was politely ignored by most of his colleagues, now that he wasn’t, as far as I knew, sleeping with a girl who could blink slowly and wet-lashed in the afternoon light. (After the college banned student-teacher relationships I believe he courted locals and recent graduates, but the allegations had, as of late, curtailed his interest in that pursuit.) He was pawing his way toward me on his tender puppy feet, and if I scooped him up and told him that whatever kind of dog he was, good or bad, he was my dog, and I loved his puppy-dog face, then I would be rewarded with an almost innocent sweetness and delight.
But I couldn’t find my notes on Rebecca, I was teaching in half an hour, and I needed to get to my office where they probably were filed, then walk the ten minutes over to the other side of campus where my class was being held. I wanted to write out the next scene in my story. I hoped to exercise or schedule a hair appointment, something that would begin to prepare me for my future lunch date with Vladimir. I had to think about how to win my daughter’s affection back.
“I’m not interested in being friends right now,” I said. “I can’t think it through, I’m too busy.”
Still hanging on to the lingering feelings from the fight, I saw a meanness creep onto John’s face. “So I’m supposed to come when you call? And shove off when you don’t want me?”
“No,” I said. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. You have always done exactly as you’ve liked. You will not get me into a fight right now, you will not. I won’t allow it. I have to teach.”
“I think you just don’t want to bother with me anymore,” he said. “I don’t even think you care about any of this.”
“Stop hounding me, John,” I said. “I know you’re getting restless, but I’m begging you, don’t hound me. I need time.”
After swallowing several times in quick, mad succession, he stepped to the side. As I passed out of the room he let me know that I’d neglected to pluck the reoccurring hair that had, in the last few years, begun to sprout perpetually from my chin.