by Tim Kreider
It’s fastidious and silly in this culture, kind of sissyish, to confess to feeling bad about smushing bugs. As far as we’re concerned, bugs are household dirt that moves. I recently read an article about the survivors of an earthquake in the Tibetan city of Jyekundo saving thousands of near-microscopic crustaceans from the mud as an act of devotion. This may seem like a trivial ritual, a waste of time, but it is, at least, more real than posting condolences on Facebook or applying a custom RIP decal to your car’s rear window. A bug may be a small, unimportant thing, but maybe killing or saving one isn’t. Every time I smush a bug I can feel myself smushing something else, too—repressing an impulse toward mercy, ignoring a little throb of remorse. Maybe it would feel better to decide that killing even a bug matters. Does devaluing tiny insignificant lives have some effect whereby we become more callous about larger, more important ones, like a karmic broken-window theory? People running for cover on the ground must look antlike from a bomber or a drone—as flies to wanton boys. As entrepreneur Harry Lime asks: “Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?”
This summer I drove a bag of garbage that was attracting fruit flies (kill without qualm) down to the dumpster at the end of my road. I went to lift up the lid of the dumpster, where what did I see but two wretched-looking raccoons huddled together in the corner, hiding their faces from the light. They couldn’t have been in there for too long or they would’ve roasted to death in the recent heat wave. At least they weren’t going hungry: the floor of the dumpster was covered in denuded corncobs, squashed watermelon rinds, and other raccoon amuse-bouches. Still, they looked scrawny and matted and miserable in there; they must’ve had a bad night of it.
What I had here was a Situation. I put down my bag of garbage and turned off the car. I trotted off to a shed where I found just what was needed—a piece of lumber about six feet long. Raccoons may not grasp the concept of favors or gratitude, but they instantly grasped the concept of the ramp. I hadn’t even lowered it to the dumpster’s floor before one of them eagerly reached up and grabbed it with his paws. They’re extremely clever, dexterous animals; I have no doubt they will be the next species to set paw on the moon if we successfully exterminate ourselves. I set the board down on the edge of the dumpster and backed off fast. They both clambered up it, crawled across the dumpster’s rim, and plopped to the ground, then slunk off into the woods whence they’d come to rehydrate, debrief, and generally recollect their dignity. When I told this story to my neighbor Gene, who sets bowls of meat out for the local vultures, he told me that he lets those same raccoons out of the dumpster once a week or so. So okay, maybe I am not a hero in the raccoon community. But whenever I think of all the harm I’ve done in this world, through cruelty or carelessness or just by the unavoidable crime of being in it, I try to remember how I felt standing there, watching them go.
Orientation
New faculty orientation at Scott College was the first time in adulthood that I’ve had to worry about not crying in public. It was like that nightmare of being back in high school and having missed out on the first day somehow—already being way behind, not knowing where your locker or homeroom is, a frightened, clueless freshman again. I had not had anything like a real job since the early nineties, and couldn’t even figure out how to arrange my face during a meeting; I tried to remember the paying-attention expression that had gotten me through college. It was a crushing deluge of information: several intimidatingly thick packets of material were handed out, including everything from a map of campus to new policies on sexual harassment/assault to the holiday schedule to “What to Do If a Shooter Is Reported on Campus.” Someone was explaining the school’s incomprehensible sui generis alternating-weeks schedule while I was still trying to imagine what, exactly, I would do if a shooter were reported on campus. I mean, who knows what I would really do in this hopefully hypothetical situation? Maybe I’d grab the nearest nineteen-year-old as a human shield and flee, weeping with fear. “They can’t tell you to put yourself at risk,” my friend Harold, a career educator, explained later. “But if you’re any kind of a teacher, you know what you have to do.” It’s like when a little kid reaches up and takes your hand: whether you even like children or not, you are instantly forced into the role of the grown-up, the guardian. A role is a powerful thing. I hadn’t met my students yet—they hadn’t even registered for classes, were still theoretical—but on some level I decided, sitting there, that if there ever were a shooter on campus, none of my students was going to get killed before I did. I realized I had totally missed the explanation of the schedule. I would never grasp it.
At a time in my life when writing had become as fulfilling as doing my taxes, and about as remunerative, a colleague had suggested I apply to teach at Scott College for a semester. Two of my ex-girlfriends happened to be alumni of the school, and they were both smart, passionate, moral people who’d made unconventional paths for themselves in life. Although one of them had loved Scott and the other hadn’t, they both had an intensely personal relationship with the place that I certainly didn’t have with my own alma mater, a tense and joyless institution. Even now, in their thirties, they both still spoke its name with an unselfconscious reverence, told stories about lesbian mariachi serenades and people named Celery who ran all-night sandwich-delivery services for the stoned, and talked about their time there as if they’d once been queens in Narnia.
Scott had historically been a women’s college; it had only gone coed in the late ’60s, and the female-to-male ratio still ran about 70:30. Several of my friends had subjected me to some comradely mockery about teaching at a predominantly girls’ school. “I can’t believe you are even pretending you are not going to fuck your students,” said Harold, a bad man. Our friends’ little jests at our expense are never less hilarious than when they’re based on what we like to think are obsolete perceptions, the same way it infuriates you when a sibling condescends to you as though you were still six. I suppose it also rankled because secretly I had some worries myself. It was true I had historically not shown an iron will in resisting temptation. This was in pursuance of a policy, since modified in practice if not wholly recanted in principle, that you should have as much sex as possible while you’re alive. Apparently a guy gets a reputation.
And Scott had a reputation of its own; my alumni friends told me that the artsiest, most eccentric, flamboyantly fucked-up girls from all over America were drawn to Scott, where they vied to outdo one another in artsiness, eccentricity, and flamboyant fucked-uppèdness. My ex-girlfriend Diana, a Scott alumna herself, warned me to prepare myself for “some literally incredible sexual come-ons” from undergraduates. I mentally rehearsed a speech for use in this event—really a very moving speech, I thought, respectful but firm—that I knew I would never actually give. The one time it seemed I might be about to face this situation, when a student suddenly pulled off her sweater in my office, which had several large windows, I did not deploy the speech but instead sat paralyzed, praying, Oh, please, pretty lady, do not, oh do not. It turned out she just wanted to show me a tattoo.
This was Gina, who had told me during our initial interview that she got naked in front of people a lot. Another sui generis institution at Scott is that at the beginning of the semester students interview their prospective professors to decide which classes they want to sign up for. Gina said she wanted to try to write because she thought it was unimaginably brave. She was an actress, she explained, a natural exhibitionist, so she had no inhibitions about taking her clothes off in front of an audience. “I was just naked in front of a bunch of people yesterday,” she said.
“. . . onstage?” I asked, hopefully.
“Nah,” she said, “but baring yourself emotionally—that’s really scary.” Another prospective student, Becca, told me that she’d always wanted to write, too, but frankly acknowledged that fear was holding her back. I thought about saying something I wasn’t sure would be professional, thought better of it, a
nd then said it anyway: “Listen,” I told her. “I’ve never taught this course before. I am terrified to teach it. How about you take the course, I’ll teach it, and we’ll face our fears together?”
As I’d feared, I turned out to be a conscientious and dedicated teacher. Unfortunately this involved doing a lot of work. I blew a whole day at the New York Public Library tracking down and scanning a modern translation of Montaigne so my students would not have to slog through Elizabethan English and be afflicted with an unfair hatred of Montaigne for life. Editing and commenting on my students’ writing took me about an hour per essay. I found myself writing things like Vern I swear to Christ if you make me correct one more apostrophe—. After a day of class I would get home and lie on top of my bed with my shoes on for a couple of hours just listening to Marvin Gaye, too tired even for a beer. I could not figure out how to conserve my energies—how to do any less without caring less. Of course I still procrastinated actually grading my students’ essays, compared to which getting shot in their defense seemed a self-indulgent daydream.
Veteran teachers will recognize in all this the doomed improvidence of the novice. A colleague at Scott told me, in mid-October, that she hadn’t looked at any student writing yet. I was in awe of her sloth. My friend Margot, on hearing how long I took to copyedit a single essay, advised me that I was insane. Five minutes was plenty of time to spend on a student piece, she told me; my job was to improve their writing, not perfect it. She wondered whether I was trying to prove something to myself, or to them. “Are you invested in your students seeing you in a certain way?” she asked. Margot, a journalist, has always had an annoying knack for asking the right question.
* * *
A year earlier I’d gotten one of those emails that leaves you embroiled in an imaginary argument for days—angrily defending yourself, composing contemptuous rebuttals, and posing damning rhetorical questions, all while secretly wondering whether it’s possible you’re the asshole after all. An email you finally delete not just so that you won’t be tempted to reread it but to try to make it not have existed.
It was from an ex of mine named Rosalind. Rosalind had been twenty-one at the time we’d gone out, twenty years younger than me. Our involvement, which had lasted for several months, had ended about five years earlier. Since we’d broken up I’d seen her only once, to catch up over drinks, and as far as I’d known we were still on friendly, affectionate terms. I’d written her recently because I’d been thinking of her, with tenderness and regret, wishing I had treated her more carefully.
I am familiar with the so-called campsite rule of intergenerational relationships: that the older partner should leave the younger one in better condition than s/he found him or her. But it sometimes happens that you think you’ve done your best, take a last look around and everything looks pristine—garbage cleaned up, fire doused—and drive home, and it’s not until much later, when you hear about a wildfire in that area that charred thousands of square acres, that you start to wonder whether you’re 100 percent certain you extinguished every ember.
Apparently Rosalind, now teaching students the same age she’d been back when we were seeing each other, had had some belated regrets about our liaison. She wasn’t claiming it hadn’t been consensual or that she hadn’t enjoyed it at the time, she said, but now, in retrospect, she felt she’d been taken advantage of. She sent me a link to an article about the development of the female brain, which, according to the studies cited, is not complete until the age of twenty-five. She said that I, as a man, could never presume to understand the phenomenon of “slut-shaming” and how our relationship had degraded her in the eyes of her friends, and in her own. She told me I hadn’t respected the boundaries of her current relationship by writing her (she had mentioned she had a boyfriend the last time we’d corresponded); just being in contact with me felt inappropriate. It really wasn’t the sort of email you wanted to get. She appended a link to a music video, which presumably reiterated her feelings in song. I did not choose to view it.
Self-castigation is just as suspect as self-justification, and they’re both pretty tedious. I could argue in my defense that Rosalind and I were both consenting adults; she was not my student, or my intern, or my employee. And I’d genuinely liked her: she was very smart, funny, and ambitious, and had more depth than I would’ve expected in someone so young. Although I wouldn’t have called her my girlfriend, I also wouldn’t have called our relationship an affair or a fling. We had what we called a Thing. We had our restaurant, a neighborhood place in a basement with elderly regulars who’d clearly been coming for decades; we successfully shot off a model rocket, after several frustrating launch anomalies, from a local park; she saw me weep at an amateur performance of Amahl and the Night Visitors.
But it could also be argued that this is all bullshit. I knew better than to get involved with Rosalind, and not only because of our age difference. The “depth” I appreciated in her had been gouged out by grief; Rosalind had been orphaned when she was a child, and I, longtime listener of Loveline, understood that this had to be one reason she’d be attracted to someone so much older than herself. Like a lot of young women, she was looking for a lot more than sex, but thought of sex as a way to get it. She acted as if she were fine with our casual arrangement, which at first I accepted at face value, both because guys are sort of stupid and literal but also because it was convenient.
Despite my best efforts at denial, I did have a dilapidated conscience that still sputtered to life and gave me trouble once in a while. Eventually I couldn’t ignore that Rosalind was more invested in our relationship than I could be, and I resolved to break things off with her. But every time I mentally prepared myself to have the Talk with her, she would wear something low-cut and my will would be vaporized. I’d have to report back to Harold that I had failed to end things yet again, and he would call me a laughingstock, a thing of shame. I started to worry that my involvement with Rosalind would somehow be exposed, and I would be disgraced. “What are you talking about?” Harold mocked me. “What’s the headline gonna be: MAN FUCKS WOMAN?”
Well, it was true there was nothing Pearl-Harbor-newsworthy about a man sleeping with a younger woman. But my irrational fear that our banal involvement would somehow become a public scandal suggested that, on some level, I felt ashamed of it. I finally broke things off with Rosalind as kindly as I could, which is never very kind. She took it about as well as anyone ever does, which is never very well.
Maybe such relationships are always inherently unequal, if only because forty-year-olds can still at least sort of remember what it was like to be twenty, but there is no way for a twenty-year-old to imagine what it’s like to be forty. But they’re also more complicated and reciprocal than the cynical exploiter/innocent victim narrative wants to allow. Sex is supposed to be illicit and transgressive; flouting boundaries of power, age, race, class, etc. is a basic formula of erotic fantasy. (A female friend of mine and I express this principle: “Hot Because It’s Wrong.”) Both older and younger partners are craving some kind of validation from each other, trying to siphon off some quality they imagine the other possesses. Young people are attracted not just to older people’s power or status or accomplishment but to the sense, illusory though it usually is, that we know something that still eludes them, that we’re more at ease with ourselves or comfortable in the world. And the young wield more power over their elders than they imagine: we’re intimidated by their alien culture, covetous of their luxurious futures, and in thrall to their immaculate bodies, still undefiled by time—witness Rosalind’s cleavage blasting my best intentions to shambles.
But we’re also hoping to contract from them some of their drunken, impulsive, unprotected passion. I don’t fall in love as easily, or as often, in middle age. Even the angst and disillusionment of the young are enviably fresh. Although I don’t miss the embarrassing outbreaks of infatuation and heartbreak, I do miss the days when songs like “The Nearness of You” evoked emotions t
hat were still accessible to me. One of the last times I felt that kind of delirium was during a flirtation with a twenty-three-year-old skydiver who made me read Michael Moorcock. My friend Lauren, who’s confessed to getting a little giddy around the attractive young herself, feels there’s something exploitative about it, though not in the usual moralistic or political sense: it’s less sexually predatory than a kind of emotional vampirism. Marx’s dictum, “You’re only as old as the girl you feel,”I tells an unpresentable truth out of the side of its mouth.
When someone attacks you, your initial reaction is not to examine your conscience; it’s to get angry and defensive. For days after getting Rosalind’s email I stalked around the city in a black funk, hissing arguments under my breath. It was obvious to me that Rosalind, with the benefit of a few years’ perspective and probably some therapy, was revising the narrative of her past, as we all periodically do. But it seemed unreasonable for her to expect me to subscribe to this new version in which I had to play the villain. I thought she was trying to disown any agency and retroactively foist all the blame for our relationship off on me. At what age, exactly, do we start to take responsibility for our own bad decisions? Was I supposed to have ignored what she’d said she wanted at the time and act, instead, based on what I ought to have known she would want, years in the future, for her former self? Love and sex are arenas in which we all inevitably get hurt, where our desires collide. Caveat amator!
Obviously I should’ve been composing an apology instead of a defense; I was twenty years older than Rosalind, and should’ve been able to see past her anger to the hurt beneath it. It’s just hard to empathize with someone who hates you. I also should’ve known better than to wrangle with an ex over whose version of your shared past gets to be the “true” story, but I couldn’t help but try to refute her image of me as some predatory old lecher. So, inevitably, I wrote Rosalind back. What, I asked her to clarify, the fuck?