Reflecting on Vladimir’s book I was struck that I was in the literary presence of someone who, for whatever reason, had something to say, and a way to say it. I researched his backstory. He was the son of Russian émigrés, obviously, and grew up in Florida. He attended an Ivy League, then volunteered for the Peace Corps and spent time in Africa like his hero, Norman Rush, had done. When he returned, he was accepted to and enrolled in what is widely considered the best writing MFA program in the country. Then he stalled. I assume he was unable to sell his thesis book after graduation. He and Cynthia, a fellow MFAer, were married. He took several adjunct positions at scattered colleges in and around New York City. Eventually his work began to appear in literary journals, and then the sale of his first book was announced. He was thirty-eight when it was sold and is now forty years old. Cynthia has a book deal with HarperCollins for a memoir that has not yet been completed. She is thirty-two.
From the window of my office I could see a young girl leaning against a tree with her hands behind her back. A freshman—I met her at an orientation event this year. Her body is the kind that could only belong to eighteen-or nineteen-year-old women—pencil legs, rounded hips, a lean flat stomach, an impossibly small waist supporting immense breasts. Even in one year, that body, despite all her stubborn urgings and attempts, would thicken in the waist and haunches to support the load of her curves. Her hair had been bleached blond and grown out at some point; it extended to her waist, half-yellow, half–walnut brown. She wore circular sunglasses, tiny cutoff shorts, and a sweatshirt that was cut to reveal her shrunken midriff. If I remembered, she had poor skin, though I couldn’t see from out my window. A skinny, ugly senior boy held his hand at the right side of her hip, tentatively. He was clearly out of his mind with desire and trying to hide his inexperience. He held a SoBe Green Tea bottle between two fingers in the hand that was not touching her. The girl’s pose was both eager and deflective—the desire for admiration trumping the lurking suspicion that this homely boy was able to be so forward with her only because of the disparities in their ages. He leaned in to kiss her with an odd, wide mouth. Even from fifty feet away I could see the laboriousness of this activity between the two of them—a smashing motion that brought neither pleasure.
Vladimir was eight years older than his wife.
Well.
The age difference shouldn’t have bothered me: I was five years younger than my husband. Eight years is not such a great difference. And yet all women recoil a bit when a male chooses a younger woman as a life partner, even if everyone is a consenting adult and a power dynamic does not seem to be present. We know that the younger woman perhaps feels chosen, and the older man perhaps feels lucky. We know there’s a sense of promise in the younger woman from the perspective of the man, and a sense of reverence for experience from the perspective of the woman.
Plus, even though I was not yet ready to admit to myself the depth of my attraction for Vladimir, or how competitive I was with Cynthia Tong, his first-generation Chinese-American wife with her credentials, her style, her ability to wear flat shoes and look graceful rather than stubby-legged, her what I assumed was effortless thinness, her buckets of potential, and her book deal based on her traumatic history that I knew a bit about from departmental rumors, I still felt the sting of their youth in the face of my age. At fifty-eight, I felt past the point of establishing myself as a literary writer. I was just as old as Penelope Fitzgerald had been when she had published her first novel, and I didn’t know another serious female author who’d begun a career this late. It seemed whenever I looked up the ages of writers who were reputed to have started older, they turned out to be decades younger than me. Yes, I had published two novels, but that was nearly twenty years ago, and it wasn’t as though they were highly lauded and enshrined and the public was waiting for my next offering. No, they had done so poorly that a new offering from me would be the same as a debut. At best, if I kept trying, if I “broke through,” I might have one or two meaningful books. My name, though, if I cared about it, was sure to be lost to time.
Lest you think I haven’t evolved at all over the course of my fifty-eight years, and that I have been simply sitting here hoping to be famous like some imbecilic ingenue, I want to say that the urge to make a mark has only recently renewed in me. In fits and starts my ambition has ebbed and swelled. After my second book, for many years, I was content to write for myself. Content to tinker. I kept a truth journal, collecting little observations and metaphors in a notebook. I practiced writing like practicing the piano—I wanted to be absorbed and taken away by it—I didn’t mind if it ever met an audience. I had many years of peace. I loved to read and be engaged and surprised by new voices. I wanted to be an admirer. When Sidney was an older child I wanted to model being an admirer for her. I thought she would suffer unless she learned a certain level of contentment with one’s life, a certain holding of oneself in deference to the world.
And unfortunately, and unflatteringly, when I examine the suppression of my ambition most thoroughly, I also wanted to be content and without ambition for John, who had given up writing before we met, but nearly had a nervous breakdown when I published my first novel, and hit me （the only time, and very drunk） while we were discussing the logistics of a minor book tour for my second.
Now that Sidney was not only out of the house but out in the workforce doing good, meaningful, and often righteous work as a lawyer for a nonprofit and living with a woman and becoming more and more a separate person from me, with eyes that watched and judged me, and now that John had been publicly shamed as a lecherous pervert, my perspective on my ambition had shifted.
The boy and girl outside were still kissing, he was now scooping his pelvis in and up toward her, his skinny rear visibly clenching and releasing in his tight jeans. One of her hands was outstretched awkwardly—like she was trying to get someone’s attention to come rescue her, or she didn’t know exactly where to put it.
“Where are you?” I heard, and turned to see my husband at my office doorway, holding his gym bag, wearing salmon-colored shorts that revealed his lanky calves （his long, slim legs and hips are his best feature） and a button-down, snug at his belly. He came over to my desk, sat on the edge, and leaned down close so he could see from my perspective. He smelled like John, nice, he always smelled nice, aftershave and detergent and tea tree oil and coffee. I was lucky in that other than the time I was pregnant, when John’s smell was distressingly repulsive to me, his scent was always comforting and attracting. “Ugh,” he said, looking at the couple beneath the tree.
I smiled and shrugged, and checked my computer screen quickly to make sure that I had minimized anything relating to Vladimir or his book.
Since the accusations had come out, John had been suspended from teaching and interacting with students until an as-yet-undisclosed date in October, when he would have his dismissal hearing in front of the Title IX committee. He had been allowed to keep his office and other campus privileges like going to the library （which he never used） and the gym （which he went to every day）， and he was still on the budget committee. They needed him: he had been chair for six years, nobody else knew the intricacies of where the department’s money went, or how to craft a budget that would get approval from the dean’s office.