by Tim Kreider
A mistake, of course. “I didn’t want to be blunt, and I didn’t want to be cruel,” she wrote, but now, she said, not really sounding all that sorry about it, she would be. She then presented me with a bouquet of long-hoarded accusations and grievances. She felt not so much used or judged as ashamed, revolted. She still had bad dreams about me—barging into her apartment or parties, humiliating her in front of her friends. “I think you see yourself as some sort of victimized protagonist here,” she wrote. “As far I’m concerned, you’re that guy” (italics hers).
“No one ever wants to accept that they are that guy” (her paragraphing also).
I’d once drawn Rosalind a picture of her cat, Ike, ferociously humping a Chinese dragon marionette she owned, which was a thing that Ike would do. Even though Rosalind had specifically commissioned a work of art on this subject, I couldn’t help but wonder whether now, in retrospect, she didn’t see in it some sordid allegory. In its thought balloon, the ill-used puppet is imagining that it is an actual dragon, vast-winged and terrible, skeletonizing the lecherous cat with one incendiary breath.
I did feel scalded, flayed, by Rosalind’s email. It was like seeing a photo of yourself that you immediately want to rip up or delete because it shows some aspect of you—a lined, sagging face, a mushy, shapeless chin—that you don’t want to see. Like most people, I like to think of myself as basically kind and well-intentioned. It was disturbing to know I’d become a bogeyman in someone else’s imagination. I’d always hated books and movies in which someone is accused of a crime they didn’t commit; I could never even stand it when the public thinks Spider-Man is a criminal. All that dread of a false accusation probably masks the fear of a just one. A lot of my self-righteous anger at Rosalind was shame twisted inside out: I was afraid she was telling me something ugly about myself that might be true. No one wants to be that guy.
I conferred with my friend Zoey, a polyamorous “pleasure activist” and veteran of many a complex sexual pickle. “That’s really upsetting,” she said, in sympathy with both Rosalind and me. Her recommendation was that I tell Rosalind I’d been appalled to learn that she now saw our relationship as exploitative, and ask her whether there was anything I could do to undo the damage. I brooded on this advice for a couple of days, distastefully entertaining the idea of behaving decently, loath to let go of the dream of unconditional vindication. Eventually I summoned up or impersonated the best version of myself I could and wrote another email to Rosalind, apologizing for my initial reaction, admitting that I shouldn’t have gotten involved with her in the first place, and offering to make whatever amends I could. She didn’t write back.
I spent a long time after that, longer than I like to admit, composing emails to Rosalind in my head. Some were conciliatory; some were vindictive. I still wasn’t sure whether I regretted getting defensive or apologizing. I vacillated between resentment and shame, between seeing her as a nasty, irrational brat and myself as a big sleazy creep. This is the problem with these he-said, she-said situations: you never know who to believe, not even when one of them is you.
* * *
I always wore a suit and tie to class, often with a pocket square, less as a disguise to dupe my students into buying my authority than as a costume to help me get in character, and to armor myself against encroaching feelings of fraudulence. There was a day in class, a few weeks into the semester, when I was either on powerful cold medication or just really sick, that I briefly felt as if I were on LSD, and could not sustain the fiction in my own mind that I belonged in charge. I don’t think my external demeanor changed, but secretly I kept wondering: Why is everyone listening to me? How come I get to say who’s allowed to talk? I could tell them to read anything—the Foundation trilogy, The 120 Days of Sodom, Bread and Jam for Frances—and they would have to do it! Maybe all teachers have these spells of vertiginous insecurity now and then. “Just remember,” one of my colleagues had advised me, “you know more than they do.”
I tried to be forthright with my students about the fact that I was barely ahead of them, still struggling with the same problems in writing and in life, almost as clueless as they were; I’d just been clueless a little longer. About the only inside information about being an adult I had to impart to them was that there is no such thing; at no point do you learn the big secret, become privy to some wisdom that enables you to move through the world with assurance. Once a student asked me in a conference, in some desperation, whether there was some happy medium between getting married and buying a house in Westchester and running off with the wrong man to live in a shack in the woods—whether there was any balance to be found between stability and passion, sanity and happiness. I worried that I probably ought to have more perspective on this question than a twenty-one-year-old, but about all I could tell her was: Welcome.
Conferences were yet another sui generis institution at Scott: professors were expected to have a half-hour one-on-one meeting with each student every other week to discuss her work. My office was in a building called Twaddell, which also housed dorms—also per some idiosyncratic pedagogical theory, academic and residential buildings at Scott were not separated—so sometimes, ducking into the hall bathroom before class in full professorial drag, I’d bump into a hungover undergrad in her pajamas with a toothbrush and we’d both say, “Uh, hi.” The academic and the personal awkwardly crossed paths in conferences as well: because I was teaching the writing of personal essays, at times my role was not as different from that of a therapist or father confessor as I would’ve liked. I heard myself saying things like “Say more about your father,” which were appropriate in context but nonetheless felt weird.
Whether my students at Scott had any more problems than are standard among undergraduates everywhere I don’t know, but, because most novice writers assume that the best subject matter is whatever is most traumatic or sensational, I got to hear about them all. They suffered an array of afflictions so endemic among twenty-first-century upscale American adolescent females that you can probably list them yourself. I read, among other things, about cheating fathers, abusive fathers, and absent fathers, about affairs with much older men, and girls convincing themselves they were cool with things they were not in fact cool with. It isn’t easy to be anyone in this world, but, thanks to the privileged window I was given into the lives of my students at Scott, I can tell you this: it is harder to be a girl.
Sometimes a student’s prose and structure were accomplished enough that I got to welcome her to the more advanced and intractable problems of writing. I’d have to break it to her, as gently as possible, that a lover’s betrayal, a parent’s abandonment, even the death of a friend, are all banal clichés to that heartless bastard the Reader unless you can somehow compel or beguile him into caring. I’d urge her to “go back in for the snakes”—an idiom derived from a scene in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, meaning to plunge back into an essay to grasp the thing she’d been trying to avoid and bring it up, slithery and wriggling, into the light. Sometimes I’d decide we weren’t going to figure it out sitting down in my office, and we’d have to step outside and pace around on the lawn for a while, both of us thinking hard, occasionally pausing as we crossed paths to run some half-formed idea by the other, two writers at work.
It was an intimate business, teaching—as intimate as my writing this, or as your reading it. I was asking my students to entrust me with the tenderest, most painful stories of their lives, to share their most unattractive emotions, heterodox thoughts, and uncool opinions, playing surrogate for the ideal reader they might one day be brave enough to confide in. Gina was right: showing someone a rough draft is more terrifying than being naked in front of them. What with this intense, ambiguous mix of authority and trust, submission and power, baring oneself for someone else’s approval, dispensing admonitions and clemency, conferring in confidence about the most personal things, it’s no wonder so many teachers and students, mentors and protégés, end up falling in love, or at least into bed.
Several of my female friends assured me that some of my students must have had crushes on me, but I had a hard time believing that they even saw me as belonging to the same species as themselves, or inhabiting the same seething sexual universe. The skewed gender demographic at Scott played havoc with the normal codes and mores of mating. “It’s not natural,” my student Becca complained. “It’s like the army!” Fiona once asked me in conference: “Do you know the phrase we have at Scott—‘The Golden Cock’?” Fiona was a quietly lovely young woman with whom you could have an intelligent, adult conversation. I may have had to close my eyes as I answered her. “No, Fiona,” I said. “I do not.” This idiom turned out to refer to the phenomenon whereby a Scott male of no more than ordinary sexual street value becomes, by virtue of the economics of artificial scarcity, such a hotly sought-after commodity that he comes to believe he possesses . . . the you-know-what. This syndrome can so thoroughly derange a young man’s estimation of his own desirability that he will dump someone like Fiona. (I could only imagine the brutal devaluation that awaited these boys when they were returned to the unregulated market.) My friend Diana confirmed that this distorted sense of limitless sexual possibility had permanently disfigured the personalities of some of the boys she’d known there: they’d run amok like junkies in a pharmacy and rendered themselves forever unfit for real relationships.II
When I reminded Fiona that there were qualified counselors on campus, one of whom I wasn’t, she told me she knew that; she just needed to run her situation by an adult. “Did you find one?” I joked feebly. Fiona, who did not know that I was then living in a friend’s basement and $400 overdrawn, didn’t laugh. One thing that working with young people impresses upon you is that, whatever age you may feel inside, you are no longer young.
Time to go back for the snakes: it still took me aback—both flattered and wounded me—when a student held a door for me or called me “sir.” To me they looked like pretty girls; to them I looked like one of their dad’s friends. For someone like me, who’d never married or had children, gotten a mortgage or even a credit card—any of the inglorious trophies that mark the graduation from youth to middle age—it had been easy to convince myself that, past a certain developmental threshold, we were all just grown-ups. Which is how I could feel it was fine for me to date Rosalind. But a friend of mine, long married and the father of a young daughter, once told me that, although of course he still noticed women in their twenties, the thought of hitting on one of them just seemed “grotesque.” I remembered an article about a high school teacher who’d been convicted of having sex with several of his underage students, in which friends and colleagues were quoted as saying that he’d always thought of himself as one of them, a young person himself. Thinking of that story now, I saw him as less predatory than stunted, pathetic.
My own personality had felt continuous since college: I still felt like my same clueless goofball twenty-year-old self and still cringed and damned myself over his fuckups and derelictions. But I could see that my students were just kids, still halfway adolescent and, despite their sophisticated sex lives and substance abuse, more blameless than they knew. Their essays about getting wasted and fucking their ex’s best friend failed to appall me with their depravity. I wanted to tell them that they barely had free will yet; they were still acting out on impulses whose origins they didn’t understand. And I found I could begin to make the same allowances for my own young self that I did for them. One student, remembering with shame how she’d avoided her mother after she was diagnosed with cancer, asked me, “Who does that?” I thought of my own father’s terminal illness and told her: “Everyone.”
Maybe my initial feelings of fraudulence were protecting me from an even more unpleasant insight: that I belonged in charge after all. What if what little I knew about life now was all there was to know? When a student asked me, in all naked earnestness, how to go from being someone like him to someone like me—by which he seemed to mean encyclopedically erudite—I thought of one of my own old professors, whose study looked like a supervillain’s lair and is still featured on lists of the world’s greatest libraries, and I wanted to tell him, No, those were the real grown-ups. But maybe there had never been any grown-ups.
Toward the end of the semester, one of my students had a serious crisis—the grown-up, real-world, life-and-death kind. When she stayed behind after class to confide in me, I said, “Oh, you poor girl,” and hugged her. I offered to take her out for banana walnut pancakes. I didn’t know what to do. A colleague gave me some hard-earned advice about not getting too enmeshed in my students’ personal problems, which, he assured me, would be serious, legion, and insoluble; he’d had to adopt a firm, dispassionate policy of compartmentalization for the sake of his own home life. Another colleague warned me never to hug a student again for any reason: professors had been charged under Title IX for inappropriate eye contact. At least I forbade her to read one more page of David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion, her current reading-for-pleasure pick, and prescribed instead William Goldman’s abridgement of The Princess Bride, S. Morgenstern’s immortal tale of true love and high adventure. Over Thanksgiving break she reported it was “better than Zoloft.”
Although I’d entered into this job apprehensive of temptation and feebly determined to resist it, it wasn’t until I’d actually taught for a semester that I understood that I could no more fuck one of my own students than I could strangle my own cat. And it wasn’t, for me at least, for the official reasons. The Rules had certainly never prevented me from doing whatever the hell I’d wanted before. And though I know it’s counterrevolutionary to say so, I don’t believe that all intergenerational relationships are necessarily victim/predator morality plays that inevitably lead to lifelong trauma/well-deserved ruin. The power imbalance between teacher and student is a reasonable objection to relationships between them, but for me it wasn’t the only one. As far as I was concerned, the prohibition wasn’t only for my students’ sakes.
I found I loved the boundaries imposed by my role. In my experience, sexual relationships had seldom led to anything but bitterness, recriminations, and regret; it was a relief to know that the worst I could do to these young women was to publicly shame them over apostrophes or maybe give them a B. My job was to tend to their minds, to make them think hard about the most important things in life, to teach them the low showman’s tricks of rhetoric and the music of euphony. I had been placed in what used to be called a position of trust. My students’ as-yet-unsmushed love of reading and their yearning, painful as lust, to stretch their abilities far enough to touch their ambitions were as moving to me as children’s awe of squirrels or tar bubbles is to their parents. I felt less as though they were being protected from me than that I was. I could understand, in principle at least, why priests are required to be celibate: when you don’t want anything from someone, you can give of yourself freely, without fear. I liked being in a position for the first time in which I could actually help someone, dispense advice and encouragement, be generous without an agenda. Where I had the power to be kind.
But, oh, how they vexed me, my Scott girls! How they tested me! How I bitched and fretted over them. Arianna kept oversleeping and handing her assignments
in late, pleading medication changes and deadline anxiety. Carly kept trying to ingratiate herself with me by finking on her classmates. Idiopathic maladies, family emergencies, and computer trouble proliferated as end-of-semester due dates approached. I formulated a theory to account for Isabel’s in-class comments, which seemed to pertain to a very similar, but not identical, discussion taking place in a class much like our own in an adjacent dimension, a theory corroborated when she came to class wearing marijuana-leaf-print pants.
“You love them,” Diana taunted me fondly. “I can’t take it. It makes me so happy, seeing you become a teacher. It’s my favorite thing in life right now.”
On the last day of class I invited a friend of mine to guest lecture, and so for the first time all semester I was able to look around the seminar table at the faces of my students without having to think hard about how to respond to a comment, segue to the next point, or subtly nudge us back on topic. And I found that they were very dear to me, those faces, in the same way that the faces of your traveling companions in a foreign country can come to feel as intensely familiar as those of childhood friends after only a few days. I was really very fond of them all, even—maybe especially—the ones who’d most exasperated me. When Gina pulled off her sweater with a theatrical stretch to reveal she was wearing only long underwear beneath it, I silently applauded, the way you do when a beloved sitcom character delivers her signature catchphrase.
Toward the end of the semester, I stuck a little pink Post-it note to my laptop to keep track of which of my students had sent in their final assignments. Eventually it was crammed, in my hurried cursive, with every name in the class. That faded and dog-eared sticker clung there for months after class had ended, just below the keyboard, where the ball of my thumb pressed the bent corner flatter and smudged the pencil fainter whenever I typed. It wasn’t some sentimental keepsake or anything; I just kept not taking it off, the way you might leave a ski tag or museum sticker on your coat. Sometime near the end of the winter I found it on the floor near my desk. It had fallen off unnoticed, like a scab flaking from a newly healed wound.