Heft (3 page)

At first we had not much to say to one another. She looked around the shop jerkily, her head as quick as a sparrow’s, her eyes moving in circles. But later she seemed calm enough to look around her at least a little bit, & I saw it having its effect on her: the charming cosmopolitan place, three Frenchwomen in a corner, two Russians at the bar.

She told me about her childhood, about her hopes for the future.

She told me several things about herself that I have never forgotten.

She wanted it all. The shop & the city & the Russians. She wanted no longer to be lonely.

In the end it was this feeling that drew us toward each other & that kept us there. I sensed her loneliness the moment she walked into my classroom, & I thought it likely that she could sense mine, although I tried to shield her from it. Neither of us had much in the way of family. She confessed to me that her parents didn’t even know she had taken a class in the city; they would have thought it was a waste of money. She confessed to me that she was unable to continue her education at the university, for the time being, because she could no longer afford it. & again I had an urge, as I always do with people I like or love, to take care of her: to—simply—give her what she needed. Anything her heart desired. But I would have felt foolish & presumptuous offering her anything, so I didn’t, & I have spent many years wondering if perhaps I should have.

We spent hours together talking. I took her to see things I believed she would find interesting: plays & concerts & cultural events of the sort that New York City is famous for. I took her to several of my favorite restaurants. One evening, toward the end of spring, we ventured over to the pier at Christopher Street & threw pieces of a soft pretzel to some ducks that had congregated nearby, & she bent forward toward the water, one hand on her knee, the other held out eagerly toward the birds. This image of Charlene Turner has become fixed in my mind forever: it is how I think of her even now, her hair pulled back, wearing a drab brown coat that was very unlike the bright clothes beneath it. When the birds swam toward her and accepted her gift, she raised a hand as if in victory, & turned to me smiling. I watched her. She was dear to me.

Nevertheless, that spring I felt slightly unnatural: this was not any Arthur Opp I knew, taking someone out on dates, planning & executing gallant little excursions here & there. Always I was waiting for the bottom to drop out of things, for Charlene Turner to stop returning my telephone calls & letters.

So when she did stop returning my telephone calls, I was almost relieved. & when she continued to return my letters, I was gratified & happy. In May I received a note from her that said she was having some family trouble & would not be able to see me for a while. She was very sorry, she said, & very sad, & she would miss me.

When I responded, saying I understood & I wished her well, I assumed it would be our last exchange. But she kept writing to me. For years & years she wrote to me.

What she could not have known, & what I decided, after some deliberation, not to tell her, was that our brief relationship had several serious consequences for me.

I never felt the need to be furtive about our friendship, & so once or twice we were seen by my colleagues when Charlene met me at the end of a school day, & I would smile at them obliviously, & say hello. Another time, while out with Charlene for a Saturday dinner in a nice midtown restaurant, I saw the dean of Arts & Sciences, & said hello to her, & introduced her to Charlene by name. Certainly the thought had crossed my mind that what we were doing might be—frowned upon, in some vague way, but in general my relationship with Charlene felt so innocent, so lovely, that it was hard to imagine that anyone would sanction me for it. Besides, I told myself, Charlene was no longer my student, nor even a student at the university itself.

Therefore I was very surprised to be rung up in my office one afternoon by the dean, who asked me if I could come by. This was at the very end of spring semester, after Charlene had already announced to me, by letter, that she would be unable to continue to see me. I thought perhaps I had forgotten to do something—it was my weakness as a professor. I was constantly forgetting meetings, forgetting paperwork, forgetting compliance with one initiative or another.

I rumbled into the dean’s office & sat down across the desk from her, expecting to be asked for a favor, or to be scolded for some small item or other. But she did not engage in small talk.

“There has been some discussion,” said the dean, “about you and a student.”

She paused and looked at me for a moment as if trying to determine my innocence or guilt by the look on my face.

Which must only have registered as surprise—truly, I was so surprised that I couldn’t even speak. I opened my mouth and closed it again.

“Are you currently having a relationship with a student?” she asked me. She was attempting to be courteous, professional. She asked me the question as if she were a doctor.

“No, I am not,” I said. It was the truth.

“Were you,” said the dean, consulting some papers before her as if they pertained to our conversation, “with a young woman named Charlene Turner at Franco’s when I saw you there earlier this spring? Was that Ms. Turner?”

“Yes,” I said. “But Charlene Turner isn’t a student here anymore.”

“She is indeed,” said the dean, and proffered to me the paper she had been holding in her hands, which, as it turned out—did pertain. It was Charlene Turner’s transcript. On it was a course from that spring, Modern Literature, which I had recommended to her specifically at the end of fall semester, but which I thought she had dropped.

“She hasn’t been attending,” I said.

“I believe that’s beside the point,” said the dean. “As you’re aware, it violates the university’s code of ethics for a professor to be engaged in a romantic relationship with a student—especially a student whom he or she has taught.”

“Who made the complaint?” I asked her. I’m not sure why I did, knowing that she would not answer. It came out of me unstoppably. I had my suspicions. Hans Hueber’s face popped into my head.

Of course she would not answer. She told me that it was her duty, since the situation had been brought to her attention, to report it to the university’s ethics board. The ethics board, consisting of five of my colleagues, two administrators, and three elected students, would then determine whether a hearing was necessary.

Needless to say I was quite upset. My relationship with teaching was fraught, it is fair to say, but in general I loved it dearly. Nothing touched my heart so much as a student who seemed genuinely to have learned something from me, & nothing made me feel so connected to the world as being the vessel through which someone else’s discoveries, or philosophy, or art, poured into another human being.

I went home that evening & had a good cry, a thing that in general I rarely allow myself to do. I called my friend Marty Stein over when it became too much to bear on my own. She came into my house & I began to tell her about the terrible injustice that had befallen me. But from the look on her face it seemed she already knew, which she confirmed upon my asking.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked her.

She was wearing a capelike garment and she clutched it tighter and tighter about herself.

“I didn’t want to upset you unnecessarily,” she said.

“But now I am very upset,” I said.

“I know you are,” said Marty. “I’m sorry.”

She told me that she thought maybe nothing would come of it, but you know how gossip works, she said. She said she thought maybe the story had been blown out of proportion, or certain falsehoods had been added to it.

“The rumor is,” said Marty, “that you began seeing her while she was still your student.”

“Utterly untrue,” I said, & Marty told me she believed me, of course, & that she had attempted to correct anyone who repeated it to her, without, of course, letting on that she knew anything at all. “We’ll fix it,” Marty said. “Don’t worry.” She made me feel much better that evening, & by its end even had me convinced that maybe there would be no hearing at all, & that over the summer everyone would forget about it, & so forth.

So when, the following week, I received a letter notifying me that I was to appear before the ethics board, I was quite thoroughly disheartened.

The semester was drawing to a close by then. I had a batch of final papers come in, forty in sum, and I brought them home and put them on my dining room table and looked at them every time I passed. I sat down with them several times but I could not concentrate. My mind would skip ahead to the hearing. The end-of-semester grading deadline came and went. I was certain that a pile of dunning letters was accumulating in my mailbox—from the registrar, from my department chair, perhaps from the dean—but I did not go into school to get them. One evening my phone began ringing and I let the message machine answer it. It was the dean, informing me that my grades were a week late, asking me to please call her as soon as possible.

I never did. On the morning of my hearing I pulled out my suit from my closet, the suit I very rarely had any occasion to wear, and laid it on my bed. I looked at it. I put it away.

I sat down in a chair, and looked at myself in the mirror that once sat atop my dresser, and knew in that moment that I would not return to the university, for I could not face them. O it was too humiliating.

•

I never told Charlene Turner any of this. I did not fault her for it—I faulted myself, only—and I wanted her to remember our time together as fondly as I did. Like me, Charlene Turner never returned to school. If she did, she never mentioned it to me in the letters she continued to send me for many years. She had one semester of college & has since worked as a receptionist at various places. In her letters, she wrote to me mainly of her aspirations—to return to college, to move to the city & get a better job, one that paid more money—to buy a nice apartment in a nice part of town, to have several dogs. She complained to me about her co-workers & her parents & then when her parents died, one after another, she told me & I sent her condolences & flowers. She told me about movies she had seen & television shows she liked & petty things that happened in her neighborhood. Stories from her childhood that, she said, she had never revealed to anyone. She began to ask me for recommendations for books to read. To me it seemed as if she was asking me to educate her—& so I tried to. I sent her books to read & asked her to report back to me. She told me she was Irish by descent & so I sent her the
Táin Bó Cúailnge,
Kinsella’s translation, and I sent her
Dubliners.
I sent her a whole course in Irish literature. She read what I sent her—I’m fairly certain she did—& she told me what she thought, always as passionately as if the characters were friends or enemies of hers.

In person, our relationship lasted only a few months, but our written correspondence has lasted eighteen years. I now feel a kinship with Charlene Turner that I have rarely felt in my life—perhaps with Marty, perhaps with my mother. It would be impossible to explain why I like her so much, why I liked her from the start. Partly, of course, it was that she liked me & I felt that I wanted to help her however I could. And partly it was that I recognized myself in her—in her awkwardness, her loneliness, her being very out of place, an outsider in a room full of compatriots. These feelings I recognized as my own. She spoke differently than her classmates. She had that accent, which I came to love, & that style of dress, & a sort of timid hopefulness that won me completely. One of the things I loved most about her, what I valued, was her lack of awareness. It was as if she did not see her surroundings, was not aware of elbowing the man next to her in her hurry to be seated, in her hurry to return to invisibility. She was like this, always. Walking down a street she would lag behind, looking in windows, or walk a full block ahead, unnoticing. Once I bent down to tie my shoe and when I looked up she was gone. I walked for five blocks before she found me, blinking, saying “I’m sorry! O I’m sorry!” and then laughing a little at herself, & then taking my arm.

• • •

I
received, today, the letter she promised me during our phone
call. It came in a square blue envelope that was meant for a card or an invitation. The envelope looked previously used. It was sealed with tape. I sat with it on my couch for quite some time before opening it. I touched every dull corner of it with the pad of my index finger. Holding it made me nostalgic for a time when I received letters from Charlene Turner regularly.

I held the little blue envelope in my hands &, before opening it, compared it to the older letters I had from her. Her handwriting had slowed & expanded. My address on the front of it was written in wider & lazier letters. Her return address was barely legible.

I stuck a finger into one corner of the taped-down flap & I ripped open the envelope all at once.

Inside there was no letter. There was only a small photograph.

I did not know what to make of it at first. It was a boy, fair-haired, sixteen or seventeen maybe, posed for the camera & holding a baseball bat. Wearing a uniform I did not recognize. Something about him looked familiar but he was nobody I knew.

Then I turned the photograph over and there on the back was written, in Charlene’s fattened handwriting,
My Son Kel.

I turned it over again to look. & then I turned it back. I did not know what to say to myself. If indeed this was her son it meant she had had one for a very long time without telling me. I did not know why she offered no elaboration. I felt maybe she was upset with me or was being spiteful. Or that maybe she was telling me to get on with my life or was saying to me, in a vicious way,
Stop writing to me. Look what I have that you do not have, Arthur.
I didn’t know. I didn’t know.

I considered calling her but I was blind to her motives & bewildered. My shyness overcame me. So for the rest of the afternoon I did nothing at all, but became very upset for reasons I can’t fully explain, & very aware of my legacy and my place in the world, & ate a great deal, & then finally sat down at my table again, & then walked to the front door, & then to the couch, & then into the bathroom to confront myself in the mirror, & then back to my dining room table, & then to bed, to bed.