Heft (2 page)

Still: her call unnerved me.

We talked briefly & I tried to sound quite calm and relaxed but accidentally I told an extraordinary number of lies.

I wanted to say
Have you been receiving my letters
—it has been nearly a year since I have heard from her, and she used to write more often than that—but instead I said “How have you been.”

She said, “All right.” In such a way that it sounded as if she wanted me to understand the opposite.

We spoke for a while about nothing. I updated her on William, the brother whose closeness to me I exaggerated on a whim in one of my notes to her. I told her he was doing very well and was in fact retiring next year after a celebrated career as an architect. I told her that last month I had visited family in England and that yesterday I’d spent in Manhattan, visiting an old friend. Then I told her I’d taken up photography.

“Great,” said Charlene, & I too said “Great.”

“Are you still teaching?” said Charlene.

“No, I’ve stopped teaching,” I said—I said without thinking.

And she said
O no
in such a way that she sounded utterly utterly disappointed & forlorn.

So I said “But I tutor now.” Just so it would seem as if I had been doing a little something all these years.

At this she brightened & told me that this was in fact why she was calling.

“I’m going to send you a letter, Arthur,” said Charlene. When I focused on her voice I realized she sounded very strange, faraway & remorseful, & slower than she was when I knew her, as if her tongue had gotten heavier. She very possibly sounded drunk. It was two in the afternoon.

“All right,” I said.

“Look for it,” she said. “You’re still at the same address,” she said.

“I am,” I said.

“Look for it,” she said again.

“All right,” I said.

“What will be in it,” I said, but she had already hung up the phone.

I sat on the couch for a while. Then I went into my bedroom & sat on my bed. Then I opened the drawer of my bedside table & from it pulled a stack of all the letters Charlene ever sent me. They are a slim volume altogether, perhaps forty pages in sum. Her handwriting in these letters is tight as a drum, small and overlapping. I read all of them in a row that evening—an indulgence I have rarely allowed myself over our two decades of correspondence—& I granted myself permission, just for a moment, to dream of Charlene, to remember our brief relationship with the same affection & passion that, for many years, has sustained me.

& then this morning, with nothing much else to do, I sat down and wrote the letter to her that I have composed over & over again in my head—the truth-telling letter, the healing admission of my darkest secrets—the letter I knew I would have to send her if we were ever to meet again. The letter I would, indeed, send her right this moment if I were not very cowardly indeed. As it turns out, however, I am.

• • •

H
ere is Charlene Turner: Walking into my classroom two
decades ago, her cheeks as pink as a tulip, her face as round as a penny. Short and small, rabbitish, the youngest in the room by a decade. I too am young. The class is a seminar & we sit at a long oval table & as teacher I am at the head of it. Her lips do not gracefully close over her teeth. The frames of her glasses are too wide & they give her a look of being mildly cross-eyed. Her bangs are worked into an astounding arc at the top of her head. One can tell she has put thought into her outfit. Her shoulder pads threaten to eclipse her. She has turned up the cuffs of her blazer. She wears red and green and yellow. Accordingly she looks like a stoplight.

It is a night class. The other students are older, mothers and retirees. They are dressed in long black skirts and flowing blouses. Many are rich and idle, many are taking this class for pleasure. Not Charlene Turner. One by one we go round the table, identifying ourselves. I give my full name with Dr in front of it & then I tell my students to call me whatever they like. When Charlene’s turn comes she opens her mouth and a very small noise comes out.

“Could you speak up, please?” I ask her.

“Charlene Turner,” she says, & in her accent I detect something beautifully native, a New-Yorkness that none of the other students possess. She nearly drops the first
r
in her name. She comes very close to dropping it. When she speaks, she ducks her head like a boxer.

“Welcome, Charlene,” is what I say.

•

The university at which we met was an institution founded on progressive values & most of its students were similarly progressive. I taught in the extension program, in which nearly all of the students were also unusual in some way: commuters, adults who’d taken a few years to work after high school, people with full-time jobs who were enrolled in a degree program in the evening. Nontrads, we called them. (That I ever casually used this jargon, that I ever even knew it, amazes me.) Charlene Turner did & did not fit this mold. She had taken one year off after graduating from high school. Whether she was “progressive” or not, according to the school’s tacit definition of it, I cannot say—we never spoke of politics. She lived with her parents in Yonkers. She worked as a receptionist in a dental office. Twice a week she took the subway in to attend my class: an hour’s commute each way. But all of this I discovered later. At first she was just a student in my class, & a very quiet one at that.

She said nothing in class. She gazed at me steadily from halfway down our seminar table, blinking occasionally through her large glasses, observing her classmates respectfully. Only once during the entire semester did she ever speak, and it was to volunteer an answer that was incorrect. I didn’t have the heart to correct her myself, so I turned to the class and allowed them to, and after that she returned to silence. But she came to visit me in my office several times. The first time she had the same wide-eyed look upon her face that she had in class, & she asked me a question that I can no longer remember about one of the texts that we’d read. She was very quiet still, & I did most of the talking. I shared an office in those days with another associate professor named Hans Hueber, whom I did not like, and upon her exit he turned to me & smiled & rolled his eyes as if he wanted me to be complicit in his ridicule of Charlene’s lack of intellect, or poise, or whatever it was he thought of her. But I would not meet his gaze.

She came to see me several times after that & we talked. Hans Hueber stopped smirking & turned to sighing in annoyance upon her entrance. Charlene had no natural aptitude for the sort of literature we were reading. She ascribed emotions to the characters that, it was clear, she herself would feel in their place—or she judged them as people, rather than literature. When asked to critically analyze a text, she would list all the reasons that a character was good or bad, right or wrong. She wrote a whole paper on
Medea
in which she stated, over and over again, in several different ways, that Medea was selfish and evil. In my comments, I told her she had to think about the meaning of the text, to formulate an argument about the text. To think of Medea as a tool for unlocking the play’s hidden code. She came to my office hours & told me she did not understand. She looked hurt & bewildered. She thought she had done well.

“Why do you think she’s selfish?” I asked her.

“She shouldn’t have killed her children,” said Charlene. “She should have killed herself.”

I remember it all. I remember her expression.

“But killing her children was her way of protecting them,” I said. I was playing devil’s advocate. “She didn’t want them to suffer.”

“They could have taken care of themselves,” said Charlene. She looked at me fiercely. She was wearing a bright pink sweater with a ridiculous pattern on it. She wore this sweater quite a bit. Her bangs were especially high that day. She put one small & bony hand on my desk and left it there, a kind of appeal. She would not be swayed. I found myself not wanting to sway her. Her refusal or inability to think academically about the texts struck me as something noble. I now realize that I probably failed her as a teacher. But by then I was captivated by her & I lost my own ability to think critically. Maybe I did her a disservice. I think I did. I think I treated her differently than I would have treated any other student.

She continued to visit me in my office quite regularly. Once she brought me an apple from the fruit stand on the corner—Hans Hueber chuckled aloud—and I wondered briefly if she had read someplace that apples are the thing to give a teacher. She told me she wanted to major in English. I didn’t think she would do well, but I didn’t tell her so. Whenever Hans Hueber was not in the office, our conversations turned to other things: I asked her what high school had been like for her, & what brought her to this particular university. She was footing her tuition bill herself. I once asked her why she had not chosen to go someplace closer to her home, & she looked at me incredulously & said that she couldn’t have imagined going anyplace else. It was in the city, she said. By the “city” she meant, exclusively, Manhattan, which
she worshipped & fetishized as the physical manifestation of every fulfilled dream. Furthermore, she said, she couldn’t possibly have gone anyplace with anyone she knew from high school. This I understood; I too had had a miserable experience in high school.

It was during these conversations that I came to believe she was similar to me in many ways, & also that I had something to offer her. That I could help her in some way. The semester ended & I watched her walk out of my classroom after our final class and I felt a deep and abiding fear come over me that I would never see her again.

But shortly after classes were over, in late December, I received my first letter from her. It was written out by hand—she had typed, on a typewriter, all her other papers for me; I’d never seen her handwriting before—and addressed to my office at the university. For the first time she called me “Arthur” instead of “Professor Opp.” It seemed like a conscious and strenuous decision. She said to me,
Dear Arthur, This is Charlene Turner. Thank you for your class, the best class I’ve ever taken.
(She had not taken any other college classes and, as far as I know, never did again.) She told me about books she was reading & things she was thinking about. Movies she’d seen. She signed it,
Fondly, Charlene Turner.

I read it twice. & then I read it three more times. I had never in all my life received such a letter. I tucked the letter into my shirt pocket. I carried it around with me all day like a good-luck charm. I brought it home with me on the subway & read it again when I got home. & before I went to bed I sat down at my dining room table to write a reply—the first of the hundreds of letters to Charlene that I would write in my lifetime.

After a few exchanges, I told Marty Stein, who was my dearest friend until her death in 1997. Marty I met as a graduate student at Columbia. She was a year ahead of me, perpetually hunched over, scurrying from place to place like a mouse in glasses. It was Marty—expert on the work of Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf; willfully and perhaps exaggeratedly ignorant about much of the rest of the canon—who got me a job at the college that became my home for nearly two decades. In return, it was I who convinced her to move to Brooklyn in the fall of 1979. I got her an apartment on the top floor of the brownstone next to mine, & together, platonically, we whiled away hours & hours at school & at home.

Partly I told her to make it feel real. I told Marty everything. She was drinking tea on my couch. I said, “One of my students is writing to me.”

Marty looked at me. “A woman?” she said. Marty would never have used the word
girl
, though that’s what Charlene was: a girl, O very girlish.

I said yes.

“What’s she saying?” asked Marty.

“Anything she wants to,” I said.

“Have you written back?”

“Yes.”

“How many times?”

I paused. “Five times,” I said.

“She’s written to you five times, and you’ve written to her five times,” said Marty.

“Approximately.”

“Do you love her?”

“Probably,” I said. I felt hopeless and desperate. Marty put her tea on the table so that she could throw her hands into the air and let them fall on either side of her.

She thought my friendship with Charlene was ridiculous. She thought it smacked of patriarchy. “How
old
is she?” she asked me, & I told her truthfully that I did not know. I thought at first that she was in her twenties. I was thirty-nine at the time. But I came to find out that she was even younger than I’d figured. Nineteen at the time of our meeting. Twenty the last time I saw her.

Eventually she suggested, again by letter, that we meet outside of school. It was February. She hadn’t been my student for two months. Still, it was especially brave of her & I could sense the bravery in her penmanship, darker than usual, more deliberate & neat. I chose the place in my reply. It was a café near Gramercy Park. Far enough from the university, I thought, so that I didn’t worry about being seen by a colleague; near enough so I could get there quickly after class.

•

I have to admit that it was an exploitative choice: it was a perfect little shop. Dimly glowing inside, little flowers on the tables, white lights where the wall met the ceiling. The reassuring smell of a fireplace. I arrived before she did & sat with a book that I looked at but did not read. The door, hung with bells, made a noise as it opened and there she was, Charlene Turner, wearing a purple down coat that came to her ankles. It was very cold outside.

Although in her letter she had used my first name, now she reverted to
Professor Opp,
and I made a lousy senseless joke. “Dr,” I said, & she got very embarrassed and said, “Doctor, Doctor.”

“I’m joking,” I said, but it was too late, & even after I implored her to call me by my first name, she mainly avoided addressing me directly.