Consent

by Donna Freitas

  Despite this and even with my reservations about the material, I was, as always, the most eager of students, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, a veritable rabbit of talkative enthusiasm. I might not have liked the reading list on the syllabus, but I would work hard to unpack it, to try to understand it, open myself to its relevance to my graduate work.

  The professor was unfazed by my resistance. He was understanding, sympathetic, generous, patient. The first week of classes, on the very first occasion he offered his office hours, I showed up. It was a big office, far bigger than the offices of my teachers at Georgetown. Big but hideous. The carpet was a terrible burnt sort of color, the walls old and yellowing, the wood dark and masculine and forbidding

  During that first visit I challenged, questioned, doubted the material of our class. He was, from the get-go, an engaging conversationalist, lively, pushy in the best of ways. His enthusiasm matched my own, he lit up the ugly space as I did. We were the perfect sparring partners. He encouraged my inquiries, my resistance, my skepticism, and at the same time he helped me to see what I might be missing, what might be worthwhile to think about, what I should possibly reconsider. I appreciated his effort to help me as my other professors had in the past. We agreed I’d come back weekly for a one-on-one discussion.

  It was the joy of undergrad all over again, but this time in graduate school. I was thrilled by his attention, his affirmation of my intellectual worth, my academic talent. Right from the start, here was a professor who was investing in me, in my future, a busy, accomplished man who was using his valuable time to talk to a new student, and that student was me. He was like a diminutive and kindly grandfather, taking an interest in a young woman who might remind him of his granddaughter. I believed this and had no reason to think otherwise. All of my other professors had been like him, treating me like a newly discovered daughter, albeit an academic one, so his behavior wasn’t surprising—it was the norm. I already had fantasies of taking other classes with him in the spring semester, of him becoming my dissertation adviser and my greatest mentor ever.

  He planted these possibilities during our weekly chats, too. At the time and in the beginning, these feelings of anticipation and excitement were mutual.

  I smiled often that first semester, though not just at him. I could never hide my happiness in the classroom, in reading philosophical theory, in asking questions. Why would I have ever thought to hide the rapture on my face when I showed up to his seminar or when I walked in the door of his office? I was grateful to be there. I was lucky, still. The smile on my face, that intellectual insatiability gnawing its way through my insides, I consented to them with gusto. They were the physical, visible manifestations of all that I was feeling.

  That smile was, still is, to blame for so much of what came next, I think. The exuberance that was always spilling from my person. It was an outright invitation for him, for anyone, really, to look my way. And once he started looking, he never stopped.

  2

  I remember being in the car with him, on what could be called “our first date.”

  It was my car, a crap little black Mazda Protegé that began breaking down nearly the moment I left the lot, my father convinced I’d bought a lemon. It worked fine on this day in January, though, the heat blasting around us in the small space. The air outside was frosty, but there wasn’t any snow on the ground. The seats were gray and speckled, the car’s only luxuries a tape deck and a radio, which were turned off on this occasion. We were on our way to have a bite to eat, then I was to drive him home to the abbey where he lived with his fellow monks. I was wearing a dress, tights, boots, my hair long and loose. We’d just seen a play at a well-known theater not far from the university, a matinee, and had planned to go somewhere to talk about it afterward.

  “I was thinking we could go to this Japanese teahouse,” I told him as we filed out of the theater and into the light of day again.

  “Wonderful!” His enthusiasm was clear and pure and he was game.

  See what I mean by “date”?

  To use this word to describe that January day would never have occurred to me back then. Only recently has this term for a get-together, a public meeting at a restaurant or bar between two people with a romantic spark, a kind of erotic frisson, seemed applicable to describe that first outing. A date was something I went on with boys my age, boys in their early to mid-twenties, boys I wanted to go out with, spend time with, to kiss and maybe, eventually, to have sex with. Boys I pursued and boys who pursued me, boys I found handsome, boys who intrigued me.

  He was none of those things. He was an old man, not ugly, exactly, but I didn’t give his looks any thought because why would I? He was my professor, decades my senior and, even more than this, a Catholic priest. A man who’d devoted his life to celibacy. To me, he was not even a sexual being. In graduate school I was still a young Catholic girl, and priests occupied a different species. They weren’t quite human, or prone to human tendencies. They didn’t have a sexual identity. They’d been stripped of it completely the moment they took their vows. Like magic, it was gone, evaporated into the ether on the day they stepped into their vocation. To attribute sexual or romantic thoughts to a priest was to transgress in the worst possible way, like showing up to church in a wet bathing suit, clumps of sand caked to your bare legs, leaving a trail of it down the center aisle between the pews. You just didn’t do such things.

  Teachers and professors occupied nearly the same level of sacred stature in my mind, so to me, this man was doubly safe, an asexual figure on two counts. Not at any point during the entirety of my adolescence and young adulthood had I considered a teacher in a romantic or sexual way. I don’t think I even knew it was possible that professors might fall for their students, or students might fall for their professors. Not really.

  The only experience I’d had of something close to this was a girl at my high school, someone who seemed far older than us even though she was only a senior when we were sophomores. She’d secretly started dating our gym teacher, a man we called Mr. Z. He was in college at the time, clocking his student-teaching hours, maybe two or three years older than she was. He was good-looking in a jock sort of way, and plenty of girls at my high school lusted after him. Mr. Z. often came up in discussions about hot boys we knew, or would like to know better. The proximity in age made him seem almost attainable, or at least permissible to dream of dating. But when rumors tore through the cafeteria about the secret relationship between him and one of our own, the fact that he was so close in age didn’t matter to us any longer. The reality of Mr. Z. taking one of our plaid-skirted sisters up on what had always been a safe, schoolgirl fantasy was scandalous. It was exciting that the impossible had just become reality, it was thrilling to gossip about it, but we also knew it was wrong on an objective level. We knew he’d be fired if certain officials heard our whispering. The two of them went out, they broke up, they went out again. We thrilled at the roller coaster of their forbidden relationship. But aside from the fact that he was a teacher and she was a student, if they’d met elsewhere, say, at the beach in the summer, there would be nothing indecent about them going out, because they were practically the same age.

  That was the extent of my experience with teacher-student relationships.

  I didn’t know how these relationships began, I didn’t consider how they might. Back then, on that first outing with my professor, it was like going somewhere with a harmless grandfather.

  * * *

  That first semester of graduate school, I’d given him things, little presents that weren’t physical objects but something far more valuable: personal details, my likes, dislikes, bits of information about my mother, my father, how I spent my time outside class. He tucked them into a special treasure box to use later. I didn’t know that what I’d handed over would turn out to be precious, tiny jewels I should have kept to myself, gifts that would make me vulnerable, that would open doors for him, doors I would later find were impossible to shut. He used the
m like wedges.

  It was during our weekly office-hour chats. These personal things came up organically, on my way in from somewhere else, another class, a study session, if I was coming directly from home, or when I was leaving to meet a friend. Just before we began a discussion about the latest reading from the syllabus, or just afterward, the conversation between us would become casual, sparked by everyday questions. It seemed so benign.

  Where are you off to? Where are you coming from? Why are you later than usual today?

  His questions would prompt me to ask him the same in return. This is what’s polite and I was raised to be polite. Also, I was accustomed to learning about the lives of my professors. I typically got to know them well, over time, and he was just the newest one to enter my life. I assumed I’d get to know him. I wanted to know him. I wanted to tell him things about me because I admired him, and I was excited he’d taken an interest in my academic future.

  I not only consented, I desired. It feels important to note this fact.

  At the end of the fall semester, when he was handing back our final papers, I saw that on mine, at the very end of it, he’d written a short letter about how much he’d enjoyed our weekly conversations, and would I like to go to a play with him in January? A generous couple donated season theater tickets to his abbey, and each time he went he invited a friend or a guest. Would I be his guest at the next one?

  Yes, of course, I told him, though I don’t remember how I passed on my consent. Was it in words, that same day? In a return note? Over the phone sometime in December while I was on break? All I know is that I agreed to go, and soon after the holidays, just before the beginning of spring semester, I was meeting him at the theater in early January, a decision I would come to regret with all my heart and soul, wishing with everything I am that I’d said no at the time instead.

  There was a naked man on the stage.

  There we were, this priest and I, sitting next to each other in the darkness of the theater, just a few rows from the front with a prime view of everything, especially of this naked man. Aside from being in the car together, this is my strongest memory of that day. During the play, a play that I can barely recall, not the title, the subject, the plot, nothing, the only thing I remember is that in the second act, the lead actor took off all his clothes. I think he was washing himself from a bucket as he acted out a monologue. When it happened, I wanted to disappear.

  I kept my eyes front. I was frozen, hands clasped together in my lap.

  I remember thinking: This is so uncomfortable. The worst. It was akin to ending up at the theater with my own father and having to watch a man strip naked, which would have made both of us highly unhappy. I did not have parents who were okay with nudity. All nudity was sexual to them, so it was to be hidden away. This meant that all nudity was awkward for me around adults the same age as my parents or older, whether on the television screen, the movie screen, the beach, and certainly live, at a play. That was perhaps the worst situation in which to witness nakedness: with someone who, as I’ve already explained, seemed like my grandfather.

  With a boyfriend, a friend my age, I would have been fine. I could have enjoyed the daring of it, a man disrobing onstage before all of us while we watched. I might have even contemplated the necessity of his doing this, or whether it was gratuitous to the plot. We could have referred to it afterward, me and a friend or a boyfriend, we could have discussed it, analyzed it. It would have been a blip, no big deal, just another element of the play, albeit a surprising one, since I wasn’t prepared for it.

  While it was happening and afterward, I wondered if my professor had known the man was going to do this, if he’d realized ahead of time that the play contained an element of nudity and had invited me anyway. But I was far more concerned that maybe he hadn’t realized this, that he might be embarrassed to be in this situation, which was sitting in the presence of a naked man alongside a young woman, his student, and forced to act like it was fine. And there I was, eyes on the man’s wrinkled backside, his sagging skin, telling myself that I was an adult, that this nudity was in the service of art, that I should not feel embarrassed or awkward, that I was not a little girl, that I did not have to channel the shame that my conservative Catholic parents instilled in me about nakedness. I told myself that the professor sitting next to me was an adult, too, even if he was a priest, despite the fact that he was a priest. That I should do my best to act as though it was totally normal to be sitting next to one of my professors at a play, watching a man disrobe and wash himself, while talking to the audience as if the whole situation weren’t a big deal.

  Eventually, the man onstage got dressed again. Eventually, the moment passed. Eventually, I could breathe again, I could stretch my fingers, I could relax a bit in my seat.

  The entire time I hadn’t moved my head, hadn’t turned it even slightly. I don’t know if my professor turned his, if he looked at me, watched me at all, during the play. It makes me laugh now to think how I’d worried about him that day, about his feelings, his comfort, and whether he might be embarrassed to have invited one of his young female students to a theater production that featured nudity. At the time, I hadn’t yet figured out that as a man, he was shameless.

  The Japanese teahouse we went to afterward was one of my favorite places.

  It was a little café-restaurant of sorts. It was beautiful inside, airy and tall, lots of wooden counters and shelves. It had two floors. You would order on the first floor, then wait until you had your tea, your food, your cookies and sweets, to park yourself and your tray at one of the stools that lined the walls downstairs or carry everything upstairs to grab one of the tables. You were supposed to wait until your order was called to find a seat. They had signs everywhere about waiting, about not taking up a table until you were ready to eat, about how their system worked better if people already had their food when they found a place to sit, that people without their food should patiently leave the tables alone until these circumstances changed.

  I always preferred the second floor. It was as serene as the first floor was busy. I loved the tables against each of the walls, especially those closest to the windows. I used to disobey the signs and sneak upstairs right after I placed my order, hoping I’d find a table free, hoping none of the staff would send me back downstairs when they noticed I didn’t yet have my tray. Sometimes I went there alone to study, to treat myself to the delicious food and desserts, to the peace and beauty of that upstairs room. It was such a luxury to go there to read, to choose to spend my hard-earned money like this, as though I were much older than my years. When I did go, it seemed that true adulthood had arrived, that I was now a sophisticated woman who went to elegant cafés to study and work and think, like in a French movie or in one of my fashion magazines.

  On the afternoon I brought him with me, it had seemed a good option, since it was close to the theater. I found parking and we walked inside to contemplate our order. I described all the things I loved on the menu, and we ended up both getting a chicken-with-yellow-curry dish, one of my go-to items. Then we disobeyed the signs and went straight upstairs to get a table. It was quiet that day, very few people up there with us. As we waited for our food, I kept going back to the first floor to check on our order. This was the downside of ignoring their system. It’s not as though they had a speaker upstairs so you could hear your number. The point was serenity, and the point was also that you’d remain downstairs until your order was called, which meant if you didn’t, you were stuck checking to see if your food was up, or risk it getting cold.

  I was as excited to share this place with him as I would be with any of my other friends. As it happened, I’d invited many of them to this favorite haunt, and we’d spent long lunches and dinners at the very same table where he and I now sat.

  I don’t remember much about our conversation that day, what was said and discussed, if it was mostly about my graduate program or if it had spilled into more personal subjects. I do remember that I mad
e sure to steer clear of talking about the naked man in the play, that I avoided this at all costs. Otherwise, we might have talked about anything. The weather, books, philosophers, family. All I know for sure is that we went, we were there, and we sat upstairs, eating chicken curry.

  I didn’t know then that later on I would come to hate him and everything to do with him, everything I associated with him, even what had been one of my favorite places to go and sit with my girlfriends, to talk about our lives while eating our lunch, or to sit by myself in the cherished serenity, feeling like a sophisticated young woman. I used to love these salty oat cookies they always had in a covered dish on the counter, and their ginger scones. I still remember exactly how each one of those tasted and I haven’t been back in years. I wish I had known that my decision to drive us there after the play would be the death of this treasured spot for me.

  I wonder if I could stomach going there now, so many years later. Exorcise its demons so I could enjoy it again. I honestly can’t say. Either way, it will always be tainted.

  3

  I kissed all the boys in high school, all the boys I deemed worth kissing, which was a long list. I was a kissing bandit. I kissed tall boys, short boys, athletic boys, boys who were like waifs, boys with accents, all-American boys, hot boys, cute boys, not-so-cute boys, boys who were decidedly unattractive, boys who made me laugh, boys who were assholes, boys who I thought might become the love of my life and boys who I absolutely knew would not. Smart, talkative, shy, obnoxious, dense, hilarious, sweet, boring, mysterious, I did not discriminate.