by Miriam Cohen
The question flummoxed Sophie. “Why is a door called a door?” she answered after some thought. Met with blank stares, she elaborated: “How would I know?”
She figured it was as good a time as any to compare and contrast. She drew two columns on the blackboard. “Good,” she wrote, the letters slanting downward, almost off the board. “Evil.”
A student wearing a backward baseball cap—ironically, she guessed—shook his head in a long-suffering way. He would explain the world to her. “There really isn’t such a thing as good and bad, because people are multifauceted.”
“Multifaceted,” Sophie said.
“Multifauceted.” The student made a twisting motion with his wrist for clarity.
Sophie tried again: “What qualities of a fable does the story have?”
“There was no such thing as a fable back then,” the same student informed her, slouching in his seat, legs planted solidly apart.
Sophie had imagined teaching would be like an extended conversation with acquaintances—polite, and without much obligation, on either party’s part, to pay attention. It was not that.
She sat at her desk, considering her options. “Do you see anything in my teeth?” she said at last, pulling back her lips.
They stared at her.
She tried again. “I had a poppy seed bagel this morning, so.”
“I like those kinds of bagels,” offered her best student, Zachary, who could always be counted on to help. He was older than most of the students, a returning student after some years of a probably drug-related sabbatical. He was also married. His wife was a homemaker, caring, sweetly, for their infant twins. Sophie knew this because she’d asked. She wanted to be the kind of teacher who was friends with her students, but so far Zachary was the closest she’d come, and they were not friends.
“I actually like cinnamon raisin better,” Sophie continued. “So it’s funny.”
She felt like she was in a play and had lost her lines.
She went back to comparing and contrasting on the board, but this time she didn’t ask for their input. She put everything she could think of on either side of her chart, and then she wrote down the next night’s reading. And then she dismissed them early, which the old, dead department chair had warned her against doing. It would amount to a robbery, he’d said. Now that she thought of it, this might actually have been the last thing the old chair had said to her, his dying words of wisdom. She imagined herself with a ski mask and gun: Give me all your education!
“Oh, hey,” she said now to Zachary, who was just about to, but had not just yet, left her classroom. He’d just lifted his backpack—she loved that he wore a backpack—onto his shoulders. “Would you mind coming by my office for a minute?”
“Am I in trouble?” he said, and she could have kissed him for how he, so misguidedly, respected her.
She waved at his face. “There’s just something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
Leave your wife! Be my husband! She would refrain from asking that.
Her office was not strictly hers, but one she shared with three other professors. One, Professor Greene, was her frenemy. Professor Greene had perfected the art of the backhanded insult and the seemingly inadvertent self-compliment.
When she’d heard about Sophie’s fairy tale elective, for example, she’d closed her eyes meaningfully. “I have an almost-finished dissertation on fairytales and folklore. But I guess they wanted someone good to teach the survey courses. The fundamentals.”
She’d opened her eyes, nodding and smiling at Sophie, as if to tell Sophie she was very welcome for hearing her, Professor Greene’s, thoughts. Professor Greene spoke often about her almost-finished dissertation, which she hadn’t managed to finish just yet, because she’d fallen in love, and now had two genius children, aged six and seven, who were even smarter than Professor Greene’s pupils, and who filled her life. Her almost-finished dissertation was kept in a box in Professor Greene’s basement (who had room for a dissertation among all the shining pictures of the perfect family?). Rest assured, it was wonderful; Professor Greene had gone to Yale for undergrad, and this made her very smart. The Ivies were selective, Professor Greene explained to Sophie, who had gone to a state school.
The other professors were more benign. Iris, a mother figure and matchmaker who’d been there twenty-two years, had taken Sophie under her wing. She regularly set Sophie up on blind dates—one was due to take place that very evening, in fact. And the third, Adam, was renowned in the school for being its worst teacher. “That guy brings me down,” Sandy said, as an excuse for seldom inviting Adam to faculty meetings, publicly claiming always to have forgotten to put a notice in his box. Sandy referred to Adam as “unmarriageable,” citing him as proof that Sophie, contrary to her claims, did in fact have standards, in that she was not dating him. Well, he’d never asked.
But for this hour the office was hers.
Sophie sat down at her desk and took a sip of old coffee, before remembering it wasn’t hers. The coffee was cold and stale with a layer of skin fogging the top. She would’ve spat it out if she cared more, but she didn’t care more.
Zachary set across from her, twirling his pen between his fingers like a tiny baton.
“How about that class today?” she said. She leaned forward to show him both her cleavage and invitation for collusion.
“Yeah, ‘Donkey Skin’s’ a weird one.”
She tried again. She was always trying again. “Have you given any thought to an English major?”
This would make him belong to her for another bunch of semesters at least. And then he would choose her for his Senior Thesis advisor, and they’d spend long hours in her office together, their knees sometimes accidently—and then on-purposely—touching. She would write him a letter of recommendation for graduate school.
“I was thinking more Business,” he said. “No offense. I just kind of have this dream of owning a mom and pop kind of store, and living above it, you know? And my kids could man the register sometimes, and grow up with that.” He shook his head, smiled. “I guess you didn’t need to know all that.”
She put her hand on his knee. He looked down at her hand and then at her. She took back her hand.
“I like your class, though,” he said. “It’s a good class.”
What was it that made him so desirable? He had a face she couldn’t remember even while looking at him (though she was bad with faces, had once asked a pair of students if they weren’t twins, or at least sisters, after mixing them up one time too many. But they were different races, they pointed out). So it must have been the wife. Without her, he’d be irrelevant and unlovable as anyone. But his wedding ring was proof: He was relevant. He was loveable. And damn Sophie for missing that boat.
“Is there anything else?” he said. “Professor?”
She waved again at face. “Oh, call me Sophie.”
His ears were too big, pink networks of veins revealing themselves in the florescent office light. It brought to mind deli meat.
“I guess I’d better get to my next class,” he said.
“Have a good one,” Sophie called, suddenly remembering herself. She stood and opened the door, smiling benevolently at him.
She sat back down at her desk once he was gone. She tapped her fingers along the fake-wood paneling, slick as hair overdosed with gel. It was incredible, how proficient she was at doing nothing. She was beginning to extract an entire intact layer of nail polish from her thumbnail when Professor Greene ambled in to claim the office.
She held a proud pile of papers, marked elaborately in purple ink—she cared about her students’ feelings and would not grade them in red. It was fine, Professor Greene said, that Sophie graded hers in red. It was hard for some people to juggle kindness with prudent grading, as she, Professor Greene, was able to do. But then again, she allowed, she was a good teacher with a lot of experience.
Professor Greene dropped her folders on the desk. She squinted at the empt
y mug, and then at Sophie. “Have you been drinking my coffee?”
Tonight’s date ordered chicken fingers for them both. As for dipping sauce, the diner was out. “No dipping sauce?” The date made sure to yell. There was not only a language, but also an intelligence barrier between himself and the waiter, he explained to Sophie.
He’d never been on a blind date before, ever ever.
“I pretty much only go on blind dates,” she said.
He smiled at her with tight, closed lips.
“You teach, what, fifth grade?”
“College.”
He nodded. “It’s good that you like it, though.”
He leaned forward. “I work at a little bank.” A smile, quickly spreading, revealed teeth that failed to go all in the same direction. “Maybe you’ve heard of it? JP Morgan.” And he chuckled into his chest.
She was wearing a gauzy kind of blouse with bell sleeves that swept the table when she reached for her chicken fingers. She was trying out an earthy kind of personality for the date. Tonight she was the kind of girl who had curtains made of hemp and armpits she didn’t shave.
“You get out much?” he asked. “Do any karaoke?”
She told him she neither got out much, nor did karaoke. What she liked to do was read.
“Read?” he said. “Who reads?”
“Oh, people,” she said, gesturing as if to a crowd.
She was in the middle of a biography about Charles Dodgson and his love for the young Alice Liddell, his Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland muse, in preparation for a course she would never teach, a paper she would never write. The course and paper title would be: “Down the Hole: Alice as Phallus?” (Phallus!)
He smiled at her with all his jacked-up teeth. “You’ve got to get out more.” He fired an imaginary gun at her forehead. “Karaoke.”
And then he crumbled his napkin in his fist, waving, as if drowning, for the waiter.
Sandy loved this story.
“That’s terrific,” he said. “That’s the tops.”
They were in his office (which he shared with no one), the blinds closed and the door locked. He said he was tired of dealing with students and all their neuroses. He moved his head so it was close enough to hers that she wondered if he might kiss her, and, if so, how bad his breath might smell. There was a half-eaten egg salad sandwich trapped in cellophane on his desk.
Sandy was of the opinion that she should call him again, if only for sex. “You know my criteria,” he said. “Living or recently dead.”
He smiled at her, pleasant as a picnic. “I’d like to see you teach Lolita next semester. It seems like your kind of book.”
She smiled back at him. She knew immediately what she’d call the class: “Humbert Humbert: Harrumph!”
The college’s answer to grade inflation was Humanities Grading Committee, or HGC, as it was pretty much never known. The dean liked it, though. The dean would abbreviate every word on earth if she could, Sophie bet. As far as Sophie could tell, the grading committee was entirely useless, but everyone took it seriously, because it was the only time any of them got to talk to other adults for an extended period of time. The grading committee generally lasted seven hours or so, without breaks for sustenance or air.
On this day, Adam sat next to Sophie, his pelican legs crossed in a clumsy approximation of Zen. He was fighting with Professor Greene over a grade. “A, hands down,” he said.
“B-/B” was as high as she’d be willing to go.
They turned to Sophie (Iris wasn’t there because, according to her message, she’d fallen, coincidently, on both her wrists). Sophie pretended to think. “B+,” she said.
Both of them sat back in their chairs, triumphant, grinning.
Sophie was on her third can of diet coke when Professor Greene’s phone rang. My husband, Professor Greene mouthed, each syllable slow and wide as a yawn.
She nodded, nodded, nodded. “Fine, just bring them over,” she said.
She turned to Sophie. “My husband, he’s a busy trader, he can’t watch the kids.” She plopped down in her chair, her hand covering her eyes.
“A traitor?” Sophie said, just joking. Just trying to make a joke.
“A trader.”
Sophie swallowed some more soda, the fizz tickling her teeth like cavities freshly opened. “Maybe we could call it a day.”
“Indeed,” Sandy said. He was smiling as if to show he’d been in the doorway a while. He loved Sophie’s feud with Professor Green for the obvious fantastic reasons: those involving Jell-O and, sometimes, mud. “I can’t leave if you don’t leave, and I’m tired; I’ll need a nap even to prepare me for the train home.”
He tapped the back of Sophie’s chair. “How many rooms in your apartment?”
Sophie’s smile was sudden as a fart. “Two,” she said.
“Excellent. One for me and one for you. I’ll need an hour or so to rest up.”
Sophie looked around the table, but Professor Greene and Adam both said nothing, a student’s blue book spread open before them. Sophie supposed having her boss over for a mid-afternoon nap wasn’t actually strange, but regular.
“Sure,” she said. She laughed through her nose. “I’ll just get my coat.”
It was raining, so they split the cost of a cab to her apartment. Her doorman looked from him to her, and did not say anything—he who always told her to take care of herself, dimply supportive as a father. Dimly supportive, to be precise, as her own father, who paid her rent in exchange for weekly phone call assurances that everything was going great. She felt at once betrayed by the doorman and terribly cosmopolitan, a young woman entertaining a white-haired gentleman. Youngish, anyway.
Sandy didn’t mention the dishes piled into a wavering tower in her sink (she’d taken now to eating on plastic, sometimes paper towels if those ran low—but never on the bare table: not that). He only followed her into her bedroom, glancing once at her closet, where her work clothes and date clothes hung beside each other, all her different selves.
He took off his shoes—they were black, not fashionable, sneakers—and lined them up at the foot of her bed. She felt pleasantly like an innkeeper. He waved her out of the room, and she left, shutting the door so quietly behind her, as if happy. They might be married, for all anyone knew. Sandy was already married, of course. And he had children, grandchildren. He was an old man. Though, no: That wasn’t nice, anymore, to say. He was an older man.
She waited for him on the couch, pretending to read. She jumped when the door creaked open, though of course she knew it was him. It was seeing him that was the trouble. When he was in the bedroom, he was a man in her bed, careful enough to take off his shoes. But in the living room, he was her boss, his balding head splotched with age spots, a skin tag scrunched beneath one eye, its iris the shy, pale blue of his past and gone youth.
“Make me a cup of coffee,” he said, and she laughed, because the other option was to feel strange.
“You barely even slept,” she called over her shoulder as she filled her kettle. “Are you even rested?”
“I slept for three quarters of an hour,” he said, quaintly.
She wished she had an apron. She’d tie it efficiently, once at her neck, once at her waist. She asked if she might give him a cookie, and he declined, and good, because those cookies were past stale.
He put his hand over hers while they waited for the water to be ready. If she didn’t look down, she could like the way it felt. “Tell me about your wife,” she said.
He didn’t take back his hand. “She teaches at a college better than ours.”
“But what’s she like?” Now that Sophie was asking, it surprised her she hadn’t ever before. It was easy.
“Oh, she’s one of us. Likes reading, likes theater, hates student papers.”
He turned her hand over and traced her palm with his finger, which was very dry.
She pretended she neither saw nor felt him. “I guess your marriage isn’t happy.”
/> He took his hand from hers. “My marriage has gone on for forty-two years.” He would not look at her.
“I just thought,” she said.
“Well, stop it,” he said. He got up from the table. “You should put pictures on these walls.”
He let himself out before it occurred to her she could’ve asked him to leave.
The dean had requested to see her. The trouble was Sophie’s fairy tale course. Its content, the dean specified. Sophie couldn’t believe her students had betrayed her. She’d thought their relationship to one another was at least friendly. But it had all, apparently, been an elaborate charade; all this time, they’d been scheming against her, noting her every misbehavior, tucking away each for later. She could not, however, deny their allegation: all they ever talked about was incest and gruesome deaths, sometimes Hell.
Now, in her wide-windowed office, the dean shook her head, slowly, from side to side. Sophie knew the appropriate feeling for this situation was fear, but if she were trembling, it was with awe. She loved it: sitting there, across from the dean, her attention undivided, only for Sophie. It was like being in therapy.
“I know our students can be sensitive…”
The dean was waiting for Sophie to fill in the blank with a reasonable explanation, or at least a righteous denial. The college was not one that favored even the slightest of upheavals. It would take undue effort on its part to let go of Sophie, or even to cut her hours. Sophie taught, at this point, five classes at the price of four, aside from her administrative duties.
Sophie smiled without showing her teeth.
The dean pressed two fingers to her temple. “I suppose it’s not the worst of offenses.”
She nodded, which meant they were done. Sophie stood to go, and a kind of sadness filled her at the prospect of leaving this nice, quiet office, this tightly smiling dean.
“Oh,” Sophie said, turning. “I actually wanted to tell you something.”
She changed the story, just a little. She made it so it wasn’t her apartment, but his office. It wasn’t her hand that he held, but her breast. And she had to ask him to stop. She had to ask and ask before he stopped.