“I don’t have an opinion because it would never happen to me.”
“Not to get into sordid details, but it has been several years since he’s been involved with a student.” I felt a prick of annoyance. How many times must this be said?
“Even so. It’s not about me. This is a white girl thing. White—woman thing.” Her chest heaved, and she turned to face me with daring eyes.
“I see,” I said. I nodded at her, and a feeling of dull dread opened in my rib cage, right below my heart. I hadn’t considered that she would have this response. If I interpreted her reaction correctly, this scandal brought up a different anger in her—an anger about a world of complicity between white teachers and white students, where they shared secrets with each other and patted each other on the back and sometimes fucked each other, all the while keeping students of different races out of their interior, intimate circles.
I fumbled, feeling the need to defend John, who was a cad, as I have said, but not, I thought, a bigot. “No, Edwina, the reason it wouldn’t happen to you is not because you’re not white—”
“Please,” she interrupted me. “That’s not what I mean. I don’t even want to talk about it, actually.”
“No,” I said, “I want to explain. Listen, the reason it wouldn’t happen to you is because you’re—” I struggled with my words. I wanted to say, “Serious,” but I knew the implications that would come with that—was I saying the women he engaged with weren’t serious?
“I’m going to go,” she said, and thrust herself forward in her chair, threatening to rise.
“No, listen. It’s because you know what you want,” I said. “He thrives off people who are conflicted, lost, adrift. You’re none of those things. He wouldn’t know what to do with you if he tried. And you forget—he’s a flirtatious man, don’t get me wrong, he has a reputation, but—mostly those women pursued him. You would never have done that.”
She sat back, crossed her arms and legs, and looked toward the door, shaking her head. “They were girls, they didn’t know what they were doing.”
“Do you think that about yourself? Do you not know what you’re doing? Is that how you want to be treated?”
“I know that I would do a lot of stupid things if I felt like I was allowed, but I don’t have that privilege.” I could see that despite her best effort, tears were once again pressing against her eyes.
“Would I ever have pursued a teacher? No,” I said, “but everyone has the privilege of having experiences and making mistakes and being forgiven.”
She sat back and huffed. Hurt dimmed her expression and she took a few deep breaths to calm herself. “No, they definitely don’t.” Her mouth twisted, dismissing me.
I knew I had made a misstep. The students she was surrounded with, all these white non-scholarship kids, these kids with so much money, they could make mistakes and have them cleaned up in a way that was impossible for her. “I understand what you’re saying, but they should, right?”
“I’m confused,” she said, though she wasn’t; she was using the word confused in the way so many of my students did, to mean they disagreed or didn’t like what one was saying. “Do you mean John should be forgiven? Or the women?”
I didn’t know what I meant, I felt turned around, my words weren’t coming out the way I intended. “I think I was talking about the women. But both?”
“You say he preyed on young women who were adrift, then you say they have agency. You say you would have never done it, but everyone involved should be forgiven.”
My insides quivering, I managed a smile. “You’re good at debate. You remind me of my daughter.”
“I actually don’t have the time or resources to care about this,” she said, and she lifted her hands, palms facing down, closed her eyes, and lowered them with an exhale, as though to press against the earth. “I just want to live in a world where I can pretend that stuff like this doesn’t exist. I have more important things to think about.”
She rose, holding her backpack by the loop at the top. “Thanks for the rec letters again,” she said. “I’m not mad at you, I just—don’t care.”
And she left the office.
I sat, looking out the window, feeling sickened, worried that I had lost the admiration of Edwina forever. I understood something I hadn’t fully admitted before, which was how cleaving the act of choosing could be. John’s history was not necessarily disruptive and painful to me, or even to the girls he engaged with. His affairs were painful because they created an atmosphere in which some women were chosen and others weren’t. It was mostly through stories and lore—but it nevertheless turned all the female students of the English Department into candidates, to be selected, dismissed, or ignored.
But that had been the case throughout all my education, I thought, and we females had all shrugged and monitored our behavior, believing we were the ones personally responsible for either inviting in or keeping our male intellectual stewards at bay, or being deemed worthy or unworthy of that kind of attention. Moreover, didn’t any kind of choice, romantic or not, create a discriminatory environment? We discriminated when we bestowed honors, when we gave prizes and awards at the end of the year, of which Edwina had received several. The act of choosing was embedded in academia, it was meant to be a place in which a student could rise, could distinguish themselves. We had to select some students over the others and those selections caused more pain, at least in my opinion, than the amorous fixations of an over-the-hill professor.
I didn’t fully finish my thought, because Vladimir said, “Knock knock,” and walked in. He was a delight to regard—a black V-neck T-shirt, black jeans, distressed leather blazer, neck chain, high boots. Again, he was so fashionable it was almost arch, like he was impersonating a member of the Italian intelligentsia in a late Antonioni film.
“Don’t you look nice,” I said, rising to greet him.
“I dressed up for you,” he said. “Plus I just got this blazer and I couldn’t wait to wear it.”
“It’s stunning,” I said, and he popped his collar, squinted his eyes, and pursed his lips in a male model pose, then shook it off, embarrassed.
“We match,” he said, recovering. I was wearing an ensemble I had considered for weeks, a long-sleeved jumpsuit that was modest but had what I thought were youthful lines. It was black as well, and I wore it with taupe platform slides I prayed I would not twist my ankle in.
“Ready?” I beamed my whitened teeth and threw my work bag over my shoulder, stumbling a bit as its weight hit me on my upper back.
We made our way out of the building to the parking lot. John’s car was parked beside mine. I imagined him in his hearing, crumpling a half-drunk plastic bottle of water, the label shredded, silent and red-faced as his colleagues conferred on the end of his career.
Once we were in the car, Vladimir asked where I was taking him. I acted intent on adjusting the settings on the dashboard and spoke in what I hoped was an offhand way so I could gauge his response.