Professor

I.  When I first saw him I was sitting in a desk and he was walking into the classroom.  I felt the spark of love at first sight and I thought, very calmly, Yes.  Of course, that’s him.  As though I knew what he would end up becoming and what I would become to him.  I was nineteen and already in love.  I spent nights with my Type I diabetic boyfriend who was angry because someday he would die ten years too soon.  When we had sex he unhooked his insulin pump and whispered to me things like, “I’ve watched you in class so long,” and, “you are so young,” because he knew what my fetish was.  We pretended it was the same as me dressing up in thigh high stockings.

II.  The professor’s wife was a former student.  They met in the Deep South, his first teaching job.  I can only imagine:  handsome young professor, pretty young student.  He was brilliant; she was bright.  She played volleyball.  I torture myself.  I imagine him sitting in the bleachers during a game, watching in wonder as she dove for the ball, her body beautifully long.

III.  Close up, he looked middle-aged.  He was thirteen years older than me but he could have been older.  He was tall and big-boned and had reddish brown hair and a beard.  In his office I sat in a chair next to his desk and he gave me:  books, music, advice on life.  I had been in love with teachers before.  I knew how to wear pale colors, knew which necklines displayed my collarbones like two svelte roots.  I wrote brilliant papers. I showed interest and enthusiasm.  Our advanced Shakespeare class went to the bar to celebrate the end of the semester.  When I couldn’t get in, he walked me back to campus and, in his office, poured me a capful of bourbon.  I wrote in my journal, I am so in love I’m not even human anymore.

IV.  Boyfriends came and went.  I dated bartenders and sixth-year seniors.  I had a one-night-stand with a blue-collar man who knelt on the floor and pulled off my cowboy boots.  I couldn’t get enough.  Through it all the professor stayed constant, always in his office at the scheduled time.  If I went to see him, he had to talk to me.  It was his job.  One day I called him on the phone.  “It’s Kate,” I said.  “I just wanted to see if you were there.”

V.  Like a woman crazed, I circled him circling me.  He spied on me.  He found my rambling, sulky blog and checked it daily.  I tracked his visits and confronted him, demanded to know what he meant by all this.  “I wanted to keep an eye on you,” he said.  “To make sure there was nothing I had to put a stop to.”  I pointed to the list of times I’d printed out.  “You were doing it at two in the morning,” I said.  My voice shook as though I were about to cry, though I couldn’t feel my throat closing or eyes welling.  “You were thinking of me at two in the morning.  That means something.”

“No,” he said, “it doesn’t.”

VI.  At the end of my senior year he was a new father and I had made plans to move cross-country.  To say goodbye he took me out to lunch and gave me a book with an inscription, congratulating me and signing his full name as though someday I might forget who the book came from.  I had already told him I loved him, though I wasn’t sure if that was true.  I couldn’t forget that even if I added up everything he’d ever said to me, all the cryptic compliments, all the wistful comments, they wouldn’t come close to a declaration of love.  In the restaurant parking lot he shook my hand longer than I wanted him to and told me to let him know how everything went.  It was raining but he didn’t offer me a ride.  He sat in his car until I had walked out of sight and he made sure to take a back way to campus so he didn’t drive past me.

VII.  I haven’t spoken to him in years, but I wonder about him.  I search for him and click too many links until I find his home movies uploaded for the world to see.   He sits over to the side, laptop computer open in front of him.  “I don’t feel very photogenic today,” he says and his wife cuts him out of the shot.  He is wearing sweatpants on a Saturday afternoon.  He’s taking his son trick-or-treating.  He’s singing beside a birthday cake shaped like a clownfish.  I am embarrassed of him, ashamed that I ever believed I knew him so well.  In my mind he was never fleshed-out enough for sweatpants.  He had no need for cake.  I never considered he had a birthday.

I draft letters to him.  “I just want to thank you for helping me,” I write, but I’m not sure what I mean by that, and I feel as though I’m years past understanding.