It grew darker and colder in the evenings as she walked home, and she donned her maroon pea coat, buttoning it up to her neck.
She’d abandoned her poem, at least for a few weeks. Trusting Kunal’s words were true and that something would come, she preoccupied herself with her classes. Some of her poetry students were blossoming as the outside world decayed. Eliza continued to encourage Kate as much as she could while she had her. Surprisingly Kevin was taking more risks in his poetry—showing he had a keen sense of nature as well as a lustful rage for older boys.
Realizing she’d forgotten to thank Kunal for the cake—of which she’d returned to that café several times to buy—she bought him a collection by a new poet. She placed it on his office chair, with a note under the front flap: For YOUR continuing art education. Thanks for the cake and tea, Eliza.
Two days later, she found a shiny blue-and-yellow textbook laying on her desk. It wasn’t one by Kunal Narang, but looked to be an introductory grammar text specifically geared toward writers. Next to it sat a piece of chocolate cake in a clear plastic takeaway box.
His note said simply, Eat this while reading the chapter on transitive and intransitive verbs. It’ll make it all go down smoother. –Kunal
She thumbed through it while she ate the cake, and wondered at the tiny bit of humbleness he possessed that made him not give her his own grammar text.
She hadn’t admitted it, to him or anyone else, but she’d already bought his grammar book, the one he’d penned himself. She had even read a few chapters.
His writing was smart yet accessible, warm and even a little wry, much like the man himself. This textbook he’d given her looked readable enough—and the cake was helping tremendously—but it wasn’t nearly as good as Kunal’s.
She put the book down, sighed, and rubbed her face. She had a schoolgirl crush, but she shouldn’t indulge it. She remembered again the girl blushing as she left his class. Maybe this was something he did. Charm women, diagram their hands, make them want to fall into his arms. She wondered.
Even if he wasn’t some cad, she couldn’t see dating him. He didn’t have a ring on his finger and neither did she, but she didn’t want to jeopardize her job—not to mention her hold on her views and reputation, especially when such a large gap existed between their ages and experience.
She imagined his long arm slung over her shoulders at faculty events, espousing opinions in his deep, musical voice. She feared she’d simply become Dr. Narang’s girlfriend, the new, unknown professor hidden under his tenured grandeur.
Maybe she’d even be singing the praises of diagramming if that happened. Because if he could push her to eat a piece of chocolate cake before dinner, what else could he convince her of?
“What are you working on now, Eliza?” Stella Tompkins waved a free hand around the airy lobby of the art building. “I mean, besides all this teaching nonsense.”
Thanksgiving was the following week, and they’d all grown a little tired, a little restless—professors included. Eliza was on her second white wine as they stood at a cocktail reception before entering the room where an alumnus would be reading from his new novel as part of the fall writers’ series.
Eliza took a sip of the chilled, fruity wine. “I’m writing a new poem, actually.”
“Oh?”
“Well, it’s still… incubating.” That was a nice way of saying the verses were in intensive care and probably wouldn’t make it. Eliza took a bigger sip.
They were in a lovely, well-lit space with modern art hung on the walls, and after twenty minutes she’d memorized the location of each piece, as she’d been glancing around at regular intervals to see if Kunal showed up.
Maybe he had office hours tonight. Maybe at that moment he was with a student—that pretty girl from his class—showing her what a present participle was. Maybe she was more receptive than Eliza, more eager to learn, less stubborn and far less afraid.
“Incubating.” Stella laughed, bringing Eliza’s attention back to the present and away from the abstract red bird on the far wall. “Using a medical analogy for composing a poem can’t mean it’s going all that well.”
Eliza startled, embarrassed she’d revealed—again—that her writing wasn’t going perfectly.
“It’ll come,” she said quickly, trying to inject a little swagger into her shaky voice. She tugged down her tight pink sweater over her skirt.
Stella reached over and squeezed her upper arm. “Of course it will. You’re a brilliant poet. The most brilliant one under forty I’ve ever read, anyhow.”
She took a deep breath and smiled. “Thank you.”
Their glasses were collected, and the door to the room opened. A couple dozen people walked quietly in, a mix of professors and students with a few members of the community.
She didn’t see Kunal in the crowd—but then, at last, as the door was closing, a long-fingered hand appeared to pull it open and there he was. He was wearing gray slacks and a light blue shirt set against his dark skin, looking a little disheveled as if he’d sprinted from his office.
He quickly moved to sit in the front row, where a chair was waiting for him, but he darted a glance at where she sat three rows back.
The smile he gave her was brief, but contained so many unspoken words of amusement—paragraphs—that she could almost hear his low voice whispering in her ear, teasing her.
She bit her lip and shook her head back at him, letting him know that whatever he was thinking was wrong, and she wouldn’t buy it, and she’d feed it back to him in an argument or a stealth poem as soon as she could.
Earlier that week, she’d taken the first six chapter headings of his grammar book, not the one he’d given her, and fashioned them into a sestina, a poem with six stanzas of six lines each. The sestina used those six words and phrases—Noun Phrases, Compounding, The Relative Clause, and so on—as the final words of each line in a repeating pattern. It was silly, and she never wrote sestinas, but once she’d thought of it she hadn’t been able to hold herself back from all the ways she could twist the meaning of the phrase “relative clause.” Or resist sealing the final product in an envelope and putting it into his faculty mailbox.
He hadn’t diagrammed that; he’d only written a simple note, slid under her door that very morning. I’m honored an award-winning poet has been inspired to pen her latest poem by using my grammar text.
He turned around and the reading began.
At first she listened attentively, or pretended to, as the novelist began his reading—something about a boy in a corner of a room, with cobwebs maybe?—but soon found her attention drawn to the back of Kunal’s head, his shiny dark hair. He was only a small flick of her eyes to the right, so she could practically watch the novelist and him at the same time.
Kunal had his elbow resting casually on the arm of the chair, fingers dripping down. His head was angled a bit to the left, to watch the novelist, and she looked at his profile. It wasn’t his nose this time she wanted to touch, but the dark hair which curled at the back of his neck. She imagined, if she kissed him, she’d have to wind her hands around his neck there to pull his lips down to hers. Maybe she’d even have to stand up on her toes.
The speaker paused, turned a page, and Kunal cast a quick glance behind him—and right at her.
She looked down to the carpet, pressing her lips together. When enough seconds had passed, she risked a glance up—and found him staring back at her. His dark eyes were still amused, but he had a more serious look on his face now, something intent, and he didn’t look away until several seconds had passed and the speaker had read an entire sentence.
Flustered, she tried to attend to the writer for the rest of his talk—the boy in the novel was older now, it seemed, and maybe he worked at a hardware store and was contemplating death; wait, had his father died?—but there was something shimmering in the room. Something between her and Kunal, even when they weren’t looking at each other. It filled the air and she peered at the peopl
e beside her, wondering if they noticed it, too. But they were all listening to the novelist, engaged in the story or doing a good facsimile of it. Whatever was between them was invisible to others, and to Eliza it did have all the heaviness of a secret.
The reading ended, and they both got caught up in other conversations. Stella wanted to talk about a poet she’d recently discovered, so Eliza walked her to her office, knowing full well that Kunal’s office was adjacent to Stella’s and he might show up there, too. Their grading was thick this time of year.
Sure enough, as Stella excused herself to her desk, Eliza turned around and found Kunal unlocking the door to his own office. Flicking the light switch, he made a show of looking pointedly down at the floor and then up at her.
“What?”
“No poem this time?”
She smirked. “No cake, no poem.”
“Ah, I didn’t realize your terms.” He put his hands in his pockets. “You know, sometimes when I miss my family back in India, and have half a mind to move back there, I’ll have a piece of that cake and think, It would be quite unthinkable to leave this.”
“Completely unthinkable.” She stood in the hall between their offices, wondering which way to point her boots. Home, she surmised, would be the sensible choice.
She didn’t move an inch. “Working late?”
“A bit.” He leaned his tall figure against the door frame. “Do you want to come chat a few minutes?”
“Sure.”
He held the door open, gesturing for her to pass, and her boots crossed the threshold and sank into a thick rug on his office floor.
He let the door fall closed.
“Make yourself comfortable.”
She sat on the wide chair in front of his desk and watched as he pulled his chair around to the side until they faced each other.
“What did you think of the reading?” he asked.
“It was interesting.” Cobwebs, a boy, hardware, something about death? She grasped for a strand of narrative to remark on, and in the meantime asked a question to stall. “What did you think of it?”
“I thought it was interesting, too.”
He said it so seriously, and vaguely, she suddenly knew he was as hopeless as she was. She couldn’t keep the smile out of her voice when she asked, “And what did you think of the… father’s death?”
His eyebrows raised. “Somebody died in that bloody thing?”
She laughed, realizing he’d probably heard less than she had.
He grinned back, caught. A little abashed.
“And you were in the front row, too.” She felt more comfortable somehow. More sure of something—if not herself, then some kind of power she had. “Watch, neither of us was listening, and someday it’ll go on to win a Pulitzer.”
His brown eyes looked straight at hers. “I’m sure Mr. Pulitzer would’ve understood why I was distracted.”
“Would he?” She looked away and noticed a bookshelf on the far wall stuffed with texts and tomes. She stood and walked over to it, her back to him. It was difficult for her to not peek on anyone’s bookshelf, and impossible to resist with Kunal’s. And she wanted to hide the emotions she felt battling over her face.
“I’m certain he wouldn’t be able to tear his eyes away from the most lovely thing in that room either.”
Her heart started fluttering in her chest, but she didn’t know how to respond. Instead, she started listing the books she saw on his shelf. “Hemingway, grammar, grammar, Edith Wharton, grammar. I can’t help but notice the lack of poetry collections.”
“I keep all the Eliza Stein collections at home.”
“Right,” she said, feeling a little irritated he’d taunt her by fibbing like that.
But he’d said the most lovely thing in that room—he’d meant her, hadn’t he?
“Eliza…”
Her heart skipping a beat, she kept to the books. “Grammar, teaching pedagogy, grammar, Best American Short Stories… Oh, wait—here’s a slight variation, the Structure of Language…”
“Eliza…”
She took a deep breath and found the courage to look back—and saw him standing right behind her.
“We all need structure,” he said, watching her intently. “In our lives, in our sentences. It’s always there, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.” His voice had gone low, serious, all teasing gone.
He took a step closer to her.
Eliza turned around fully, her back pressed against the bookshelf. Seeing the intense look in his brown eyes, her breath caught. She arched her neck to look up into his face. Waited.
“If we don’t have that structure,” he said, his gaze finding her lips. “We just…”
Slowly, cupping her face in his hands, he leaned down and put his mouth to hers.
Eliza felt her arms snake around his neck instinctively, like she’d imagined, to pull him closer. His lips were soft but insistent, and she was in danger of melting to the floor.
He held her up. She felt the starched cotton of his shirt against her thin sweater, his body underneath warm and strong. He smelled of tea and a scent that reminded her of a cedar chest she’d had as a child, sweet and woodsy. She pulled away to gasp a quick breath before they kissed again, her head tilting to let him in deeper, his tongue entering her mouth. She felt dizzy, and low down in her belly something clenched deliciously.
She let out a small noise she never meant to make, and he pushed her firmly against the shelf, one hand protecting the back of her head from the sharp edges of the grammar textbooks.
He broke the kiss, breathing hard. But he stayed against her, ran his lips across her cheek and down her neck as she fisted the collar of his shirt. Through his slacks, against her torso, she felt a hardness that told her he’d thought about this moment too. She wanted more.
“Eliza.”
“Present participles,” she whispered. “I haven’t got to that chapter yet in your book. But maybe you could show me…” Touch me, is what she wanted to say. Teach me and touch me all over, I want to feel your words become things in every tendon and nerve of my body.
“Show you?” His eyes were half-lidded, his hands sliding up and down her body.
“Yes.”
He grasped her left hand, and placed it under the collar of his shirt, against the warm skin of his chest. Then he kissed her again, briefly, and moved his mouth to her ear.
“If I said, ‘As he kissed her, his heart beat fast, drumming in his chest,’ the ‘drumming in his chest’ part would be the present participle.” His breath was hot on her ear. “Do you feel it?”
She did.
“Or if I said, ‘She teased him, seeming to be ignorant of her own beauty,’ what would the present participle be?”
“‘Seeming to be ignorant of her own beauty,’” Eliza answered. “But I’m far too—”
“Shush,” he said, putting a finger to her lips. “You are beautiful. And bright. And completely maddening.”
He dropped to his knees then, and he was so tall he still came up to her waist when kneeling. He took each of her hands and kissed the backs of them.
Feeling light-headed with the rush of pleasure, the romance of it all, she suddenly remembered the flush-faced girl from his lecture. She tugged her hands through his dark hair and forced his face to look up at hers.
“Is this a habit of yours?”
“What?” he said breathlessly. One of his hands had slid up her leg and was playing with the zipper of her boot.
“Seducing women into your way of thinking? Encouraging a lust of language?”
“I have many habits.” He unzipped her boot in one quick motion. “This is not one of them.”
He pulled her foot out, and she felt a rush of air on her lower leg and ankle through her stockings. She felt undone—and terribly excited.
“Don’t worry about the present participles now,” he said, finding his voice as he unzipped her other boot. “Pay attention to what’s first, the limbs of the sente
nce. Parse them in your head. Those are the important parts; the rest are just details.” He weighed the calf of the other leg with his hand. “Subject, predicate. Nouns and direct objects. And of course verbs.”
He slid both hands up her legs, bare but for the thin layer of her hose, and Eliza’s head fell back against the books, her eyes falling closed at the feel of his fingers against the thin material. She heard him groan as his fingertips discovered her garter belt.
“The real muscle of most sentences is the verb.” With shaking fingers, Kunal unsnapped one hook of the garter, then the other, like she was a fragile package. “It’s the center, the thing on which everything pivots.”
He lifted her skirt and his warm mouth kissed her on the inside of her thigh, just above where her hose were starting to fall down.
“Touch, taste, feel. All verbs.” His voice was strained. “And other words that some may be shocked to find in the Oxford English Dictionary.”
She moaned, wanting what was about to happen more than she realized, wanting him to undress her completely, to parse her into parts and splay her out on his office floor. She hooked one of her legs around his shoulder as his fingers reached the sides of her panties.
Then a loud knock came outside, followed by the office door quickly opening.
“Kunal, I was wondering if—Oh!”
Eliza head snapped forward. Kunal’s head emerged, reluctantly, from her skirt.
It was Stella Tompkins.
“Oh! I’m sorry!” Stella let the door shut in her face. “I didn’t check the time to realize how late it was. Carry on!” she semi-shouted from behind the closed door.
An uncomfortable pause followed. “I mean, hello Eliza.”
Eliza drew a shaky breath.
“I’ll see you both in the morning,” Stella’s muffled voice continued, cheerful and seemingly unperturbed. “Have a good night!”
As her footsteps died away, Eliza shook herself. Stepped away. Grabbed her hose and tried to reattach them to her garter belt.
Kunal, still on the floor, grabbed her wrist to pull her close again.
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