The Book of Jonah (11 page)

Judith's zeal had an indiscriminate, free-floating quality, fixing on objects ranging from the somewhat predictable, such as her religion, to the ostensibly random, such as ancient Egypt—which her fifth grade class spent three months studying, during which time Judith memorized the names of every pharaoh of the Middle Kingdom and taught herself dozens of hieroglyphs. Growing up, Judith simply had a zeal for zeal: a passion for levels or acts of greater vehemence and sharpness than those around her appeared satisfied with.

This zeal found a new outlet when she discovered masturbation—creating a link between a penchant for extremism and sex that, she would realize later in life, was not altogether beneficial. Like most of the girls with whom she swapped stories when she got older, she had basically no idea what she was doing at first. She would be watching a PG-13 bedroom scene or even just looking at photographs of Greek statuary, and an unfamiliar mood would come over her. She would retreat to her bedroom, lock the door, and, through some clutching and unclutching of her legs around the corner of her mattress, effect waves of sensation that seemed to issue from the source of the unfamiliarity. Practice led to more sophisticated methods—until she could spend hours engrossed in a secret world whose dimensions and sensations could not be articulated. She realized, of course, that other people masturbated, too; she'd had the Conversation with her mother well ahead of her first period, she'd endured a sixth-grade sex-ed class. But with her eyes clenched tight and the windows of her bedroom thrown open—she believed no one masturbated quite like this.

Such points of differentiation were important to her. Like many high-achieving teenage girls (like many high achievers of any age), she had an instinctive anxiety around being “normal”: being like anyone else, not special, just another Gustav's girl. This concern, she believed, was at least part of why anorexia was so rampant among her peers: It gave you a secret—a secret suffering.

But if by the start of her sophomore year she regarded masturbation as a mark of distinction from her classmates, she was also aware that in most sexual endeavors she had yet to distinguish herself. Girls in her class had gone to second base, third base, even had sex with boys from other schools in town. Aside, though, from a few awkward smooches during a single game of spin-the-bottle at a friend's bat mitzvah reception, until the fall of her second year of high school, Judith's sex life had remained a strictly one-woman affair. She simply did not know how to flirt with boys, how to make herself attractive to boys, how to transform the friendships she did have with boys into anything physical. The gap between stilted coed hangouts at the movies and the aching joys of an orgasm seemed to her more or less impossible to bridge. And this frustrated Judith, not so much because she thought she'd actually get much pleasure from having a boy “feel her up” (the slang here all too accurate, given her height) but rather because not knowing something was antithetical to her disposition—really, to her entire way of life. The fact that she couldn't find a boyfriend made Judith feel stupid. As a fifteen-year-old, Judith did not think of herself as lonely; she had several friends at school, and she had two best friends she lived with, Mom and Dad. Yet she understood that there were forms of companionship she was missing. She was, after all, a young woman who strove to be well rounded.

And then she fell in love with her English teacher.

The class was called Nineteenth-Century Writers and the Invention of America. Judith and the two other girls in the class, Amanda Veen and Stacy Barashkov, gathered on the first day in Room 13—sat around a circular wooden table by a picture window overlooking the commons in the back of the school. Gabe came in wearing an outfit she would come to know as typical for him: button-down shirt and tie, jeans and no jacket. He was really (really!) not much older than her, only a few years out of college; had been a creative writing and English major at Berkeley, the previous summer had completed two years of teaching in Uganda for the Peace Corps, had a short story published in
The Kenyon Review
and a half-finished novel on his desk in his apartment. But she would learn all that only later. When he walked to the table that day—with an insouciant, self-assured gait that struck her as distinctively masculine—all she knew about him was that he was new to the school, that he was very tall (six foot four), dark-haired, Grecian-nosed—and he pulled a dog-eared, jacketless book from the messenger bag slung across his chest, and read, “‘The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless, / It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it, / I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, / I am mad for it to be in contact with me.'” Then, closing the book and dropping it on the table as he pulled the messenger bag off his shoulder, he asked them, “So, ladies. What is Walt Whitman talking about?”

So that's how this feels, Judith thought.

In truth, they were all in love with him. Amanda Veen responded by encasing herself in a stunned silence that lasted the entire semester, Stacy Barashkov by answering questions in class with anxious, rehearsed monologues, her hands flailing chaotically before her. Judith—in whom the most powerful of internal emotions tended to produce a useful if eerie (even to her) sort of calm—concluded that her best course to winning his affection was to show him that she was brilliant, too.

Her mother, reading over her first paper on
Leaves of Grass
, said with sincerity that she would have given it an A if one the students in her Poetry for Poets course had handed it in—this one of those times when she was even a bit awed by her daughter's intellect. Gustav's had a principled stance against letter grades, but Gabe was effusive in the praise he wrote at the bottom of the page beneath her conclusion. For her next paper, on Emily Dickinson, Judith did hours of research in the library, tracing connections between the poet's life in Amherst and the “psychological themes” of her verse. This time Gabe was a little awed, too. Judith was careful not to make her papers too fusty or schoolgirl pedantic: She wanted to demonstrate that she grasped the beauty and expansiveness of this writing, that she shared Gabe's evident passion for it, saw the same sparks of the world it promised—sparks that she believed formed the twinkle in his eye when he read aloud to her and Amanda and Stacy (though she liked to think just to her), “‘Heavenly Hurt, it gives us— / We can find no scar, / But internal difference, / Where the Meanings, are—'” Most of all she wanted to imply that she ached with the same longings that animated the writing itself. “The garden behind her home became for the young Emily Dickinson the imaginative landscape in which dramas played out that she both craved and feared to experience in her actual life,” she wrote. She was aware that she was maybe falling love with nineteenth-century American literature as much as she was with Gabe—but, in an interpretation of events that was maybe a bit too imaginative for anyone's actual life, she concluded that there really didn't have to be much difference.

Either way, the papers had the desired effect, and at the bottom of her creative-writing exercise exploring Transcendental themes in her daily life, Gabe wrote, “Judith, you are an exceptional young woman. Let's find some time to get together to discuss your writing face-to-face.” This comment—which, in an exceedingly rare occurrence, made her alabaster cheeks darken with color—would remain the highlight of a distinguished academic career.

They met after school for coffee in the café in the lobby of Gustav's. In his usual amiable, relaxed way, he told her about going to college at Berkeley, about teaching in Uganda; he asked her about her family, her friends, her plans for college and after. It surprised her how easy it was to talk to him—or, rather, how easy it seemed for him to listen to her, have a conversation with her. She was used to boys being a little perplexed or put off by her demeanor, which, unlike that of many girls her age, was not bright and giggly, but contemplative, muted. She did not think of herself as shy, exactly—more reserved, though this was a distinction few adolescent males bothered to notice. But as she talked to Gabe in her measured, somewhat low voice, he nodded, he watched her face, he responded—all with an interest and evident appreciation she had never seen from a man who was not her father. And why should he react to her the way boys did? she asked herself at one point: He was not a boy. And Gabe would tell her—much later—that he found the calm way she talked, the watchfulness of her eyes intriguing, even sexy.

At the end of the coffee, they exchanged email addresses. He began to send her poems—Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden at first; later Pablo Neruda, e. e. cummings. Sometimes he would send her a message consisting of only a single sentence or phrase in the subject line: “There's nothing so spiritual about being happy but you can't miss a day of it.” “Glamorous nymph, with an arrow and bow.” She would track down the fragments of poems or song lyrics, buy the poets' books, buy the albums, send poems and song lyrics back, saving, printing every email, and keeping them all hidden under her bed in a worn leather case that she'd pulled from her mother's closet, and which she would sometimes take out at night—tracing the creases in the leather with her fingers, as though reading some private mystic Braille.

They started meeting for coffee once or twice a week. He kept the mood casual and the topics generally teacher–student appropriate, but soon she began to notice that his leg would be shaking when she sat down, or that his finger would silently tap the side of his coffee mug as he watched her speak. He started telling her about his own writing, his novel (a bildungsroman about a man trying to model his life after the young James Joyce), his own plans for the future. “You're an old soul,” he told her as they stood from one of their coffees. “Sometimes I think older than I am.” It was at that moment that she recognized he had lowered a barrier she had been trying with all her intellectual might to get him to lower: that she had succeeded in expanding the way he perceived her.

Looking back on it as an adult, she sensed a certain inevitability to how events transpired after that—though maybe it had been inevitable from the first coffee, the first email. Regardless, at some point it had gotten to be that they both wanted the same thing, and then it was just a matter of time, until he offered to drive her home one afternoon; and they managed to collectively have the idea of taking a brief hike before he dropped her off; and this hike led them through a sparse woods to the side of a creek, afternoon sunlight glinting off its face, the two of them sitting side by side on a log so conveniently placed along its banks it seemed to have been put there just for them.

“You are so extraordinary,” Gabe told her, almost sadly. Something in his tone caused her heart to start slamming itself against her rib cage; she had to breathe through her nose in order to hide the quickening of her breath. These were sensations familiar only from the end of her longer cross-country runs, but somehow here this was not really an unpleasant condition. “I feel such a connection with you,” he went on. “You must sense that. Judith,” he said, turning to her—his soft brown eyes only escalating the riot of nervousness and arousal inside her. “Let's cut the bullshit. We are in very, very dangerous territory.” She managed to nod with equanimity. “You should know, I have a girlfriend. In California. Emma.”
We have a new enemy
was the phrase that popped into her head—a quote, she realized immediately, from
The Empire Strikes Back
, a movie she had seen an embarrassing number of times with her father. This might have alerted her to the fact that she really was too young to be doing this, but—her mind was occupied with a different set of concerns at the moment. “I have to take you home now,” he told her. Neither of them moved, of course. “I'll still be your teacher. We can stay friends.”

“I want more,” Judith said.

Maybe she realized there was a line he would not let himself cross with her—maybe this impelled her even more powerfully to cross it, answering again the insatiable zeal that had induced her to steal the
yad
from off the principal's desk. She reached up and took his head in her hands, pulled his face to hers. These first touches were searing in their intensity, and for a fifteen-year-old enamored of nineteenth-century American literature—enamored of the idea of it, enamored of its passions, and of passions she'd been seeking her entire life—to lose her virginity on the banks of a creek, her skin imprinted with twigs, her hair tangled in the grass: It was all about as much as Judith Klein Bulbrook could ask for. When he lifted himself off her and went to look in the grass for the underwear that had been tossed aside, she lay there watching the sky, the path of clouds between the branches at the tops of the trees, her fingers dangling against the cold surface of the creek. She thought of what she had just done, the home she had to go home to, the future that now offered itself before her—and she sensed a perfect wholeness across her entire life. It was the happiest moment of her life, she realized—and she thanked God for it.

The moment didn't last, of course. When Gabe returned, holding her sun-yellow panties dotted with little flowers (she hadn't guessed today would be the day), she burst into tears—the blunt facts of what had happened suddenly, jarringly apparent. She was fifteen and she'd lost her virginity to her English teacher; she was lying half naked beside a creek; a man was standing over her with her underwear in his hand. But she would always judge him to be a good man for what he did next: knelt down beside her, stroked her coarse hair, promised her it would be okay.

The affair did not last long. Really, it was all too, too intense for both of them, and maybe even more so for him. He felt a great deal of guilt: first for cheating on Emma, the California girlfriend; and more, he could never rid himself of the worry that he was “taking advantage” of her, no matter what she said or did to reassure him. The risks weighed on him, too, risks that only began with his relationship, his teaching career. Judith didn't think her parents would go so far as to have him arrested for statutory rape if they found out—but she couldn't be sure, either. She'd never had a serious disagreement with them. During the month Gabe and she were together, he lost weight, told her he didn't sleep well, couldn't work on his novel. Some mornings he looked so ashen in class she actually felt sorry for him.