I honestly didn’t know what she could be talking about. Not at first.
“Your professor from graduate school,” she clarified. “You gave him my address?”
Nausea. Fear. Dismay. Shock. All of these hit me at once.
I know it must be difficult to believe—looking back now, with the perspective that decades of distance have given me, it’s difficult for even me to believe—but I did not see this coming. His cleverness at inserting himself into every corner of my life still came as a surprise each time he found a new method of doing so. He was an octopus of a stalker, in each hand a letter, or a phone, or an invitation, using all his arms at once, and me caught in the blur of them.
In that moment I gave up. I surrendered to the impossibility of defeating such an enemy.
“Oh, yes,” I lied to my mother. “That’s right,” I lied some more. “He asked me for your address and I gave it to him!” Lies, lies, lies. “He wanted to send you get-well wishes!”
My insides were sinking as I told her these things.
He was writing my mother now?
He was writing my mother now.
12
I stopped going to see him in his office, so he started coming to see me instead.
I didn’t have any classes with him, which meant I didn’t have a reason to see him when I went to school. Not having to see him was freeing. Unlike the prior year, this fall semester I had no plan to make the extra effort to go to the wing where his office was, to descend the stairs to his hallway and see if his door was open for visitors. I wanted to steer clear of any space where he might be breathing. He had all of my numbers and my addresses, and I couldn’t prevent him from calling my apartment, from inviting me places over the phone, from sending me letters or sending my mother letters, or from calling me if I went to visit my family in Rhode Island. But this much I felt I could do.
I was wrong.
Now he went into my file to consult my current schedule, the location of my classes, so he knew where I was at all times, what hallways I’d have to walk and when I’d have to walk them. He took to waiting outside the classroom until my professor, his colleague, let us out.
I would leave and there he’d be, standing in the hallway. Hovering. Acting as though he were doing something else. Or he would happen to be in the stairwell when I was going from one class to another, looking at a book or a list of students or even a paper he was grading. When he saw me, he would always act surprised.
I would act just as surprised. At first, I was surprised.
But as these chance meetings in hallways and stairwells grew more frequent, they seemed far less a matter of chance and far more the result of his knowing my schedule and positioning himself in the building accordingly. I began to hurry everywhere, or pretend that I didn’t see him in the hall, refuse to turn his way. When this was impossible and I ended up face-to-face with this man, I acted as if I were thrilled to see him, even though each new time I saw him waiting for me, my stomach sank like it was attached to an anchor.
“Oh, hi!” I would say, as though I couldn’t be happier. “It’s so good to see you!”
“Your mother seems to be doing better,” he would say in return, or something like this, something to indicate that he and my mother were in touch. He loved telling me things about my mother.
Yes, she was writing him back.
I knew this, and I hated it. I hated hearing this confirmed by him. But what was I going to do? How could I possibly stop her from writing him? The Catholic Church, its priests and nuns and its God, were helping to save my mother from cancer, helping my family survive this situation. I wasn’t about to destroy my mother’s faith in one of its authority figures by telling her she couldn’t return the correspondence, that I didn’t want her to. And I didn’t want her to, of course I didn’t, but if I communicated this she would ask why, and I’d either have to tell her the truth, which I felt I could not do, or I would have to come up with another reason, and I couldn’t think of an excuse that would make any sense.
So, after my mother began receiving letters from one of my professors who was also a priest, like any good Catholic woman she dutifully wrote him back. And he wrote her again, she wrote him, and so on. This was how their correspondence began.
He was incredibly pleased by it, and not shy about letting me know how good a letter writer my mother was, what a kind person she was, what a good Catholic even while she was suffering so terribly.
Unlike me, the bad friend.
“Don-na,” he’d call my name through the hall. And when I tried to pretend I didn’t hear him, “Don-na!” he’d say again, only louder.
His voice followed me everywhere.
I was failing at so many things now, and he continually reminded me of this. I didn’t go to his office, I didn’t open his letters, I didn’t want to stay on the phone long when he called, and I was no longer accepting his invitations—not any of them. When he complained, I did my best to assuage him, to make him believe that everything was okay between us, to make him feel better. I wanted everything to be okay with every molecule of my being. I felt I could make things okay by sheer force of will, through the brightness of my smiles and the enthusiasm in my tone of voice. The alternative was unthinkable, so I refused to consider it. I had too many other things to juggle.
I didn’t want to see him, I really, really didn’t.
I would sit there in my classes as the clock ticked away their final minutes, hoping that this time when I left the room, he wouldn’t be outside waiting. But there he’d be, no matter how hard I hoped or how much I prayed. Good days became the ones when he wasn’t there, and they grew fewer and fewer. I began to hate leaving class. I began to dread the moment when I’d have to. Sometimes I would stall by talking to the professor as the other students filed out. Sometimes everyone else would file out and I’d be alone, the last person left in the room, thinking that maybe if I waited just a little bit longer he’d think I was home sick that day and leave.
I began to think I must be crazy, that I was going crazy. I told myself again and again that I must be imagining things, that it was just coincidence he was so often outside my classes or in the stairwells between floors, that there was nothing wrong with a professor standing in the hallway or traveling the stairs, that he had every right to stand wherever he wanted. It was his place of employment. It was normal for him to be in the building.
The more terrible and upset and crazy I felt, the more I turned on the smiles when I walked through the halls at school and ran into my fellow students. I needed to prove to everyone around me that everything was fine. I was afraid of what other people might start to think if I didn’t, if I failed at this duty. I was afraid of rumors getting started, of getting kicked out of graduate school for whatever I’d done to make this man do whatever it was that he was doing.
It was a lesson in pretend. I got so good at it. I became an excellent actress.
One night, after having sex with Christopher, I realized the condom had broken.
I called my friend Hannah, in a panic. Hannah was obsessed with women’s reproductive health, was a font of information about it, so I knew she’d have an answer that could help.
“You need the morning-after pill,” she told me.
First thing the next day, I went to Planned Parenthood to get one. This was the late nineties, a time well before such things were available at the drugstore.
“You’re probably going to get very sick,” the woman at Planned Parenthood said. “But you have to take all of these pills—all of them—no matter what.”
I agreed, I would take them, since pregnancy seemed like a far worse problem than a little vomiting. Christopher came over and vowed to take care of me, stay with me, no matter how sick I became.
At first, I felt fine.
I thought, Well, maybe I’m one of the few people who can stomach this sort of thing.
I’d dodged a bullet, I thought.
Then the first wave of naus
ea hit, and once it did, it kept on coming. I remember the world swaying and swimming like I was on a boat, I remember being slumped over the toilet for hours, heaving, forbidding Christopher from seeing me there, from helping me. I remember being splayed on the floor of my university apartment bathroom, my head, my hair, my cheek, swaths of exposed skin, lying across the floor of my bathroom, lying right against the grime that had worked itself into the grooves between the tiles after years of occupants, that I knew no amount of cleaning could remove, because I’d tried a million times to do just this. I remember not caring how dirty that floor was, because the tile was cold and the cold was soothing.
But more than this, I remember thinking:
This is my punishment.
For having sex, for being a sexual being.
For attracting people, boys, men.
Him.
For attracting him.
The God who was helping my mother was hurting me, the same God I didn’t believe in—though I was discovering I did believe in this God, but only when I thought I was being punished, when I felt ashamed, when I believed I had done something bad. Then, God would show himself to me. He would swoop down from the sky above and appear before me, finger wagging, scolding, judging.
“Don-na,” he’d say.
I started dressing differently.
Gone were the fashionable outfits, the high-heeled boots, the short skirts, the tight tops, replaced by baggy jeans and baggy sweatshirts. Baggy everything. I stopped wearing my hair long and loose and instead put it up in a ponytail or a knot. Sometimes I didn’t even shower before school.
I wondered if this might help, if somehow he’d gotten the idea that I’d been dressing like that for him. That maybe if he saw me disheveled, he’d realize I wasn’t interested in looking good for him. Not at all. Not one bit.
I survived on the hope that eventually he would get the picture, that he would hear the pleas of No and I can’t underneath my false smiles, that he would grasp the fact that everything I was now doing at school involved an effort to unattract him. To make him stop turning my way, following me around, writing me letters. His only crime was paying me attention, but there was such an onslaught of it.
Why me? What had I done to draw him in? What could I do to stop it?
I tried everything, but nothing was working.
He began to watch the entrance of the building from his office windows. Sometimes, after I parked my car in the school lot and was heading inside, walking up the stairs and toward the door, I’d see him there, peeking out from between the blinds, watching me. He’d started to guess when I would have to arrive for my classes. So I stopped parking in the university lot and tried parking down the street as a way to avoid this new behavior on his part.
My dread about leaving class became a dread about being at school in general, about everything to do with that building and my classes. I still went, but I hated knowing I would probably see him no matter what I did or how hard I tried to elude him.
My life had firmly divided into two, and I lived both versions at the same time.
In one life, I loved my classes, my professors, my fellow students, everything about getting my PhD, which was still my dream. In the other, I hated everything about my classes, my studies, and getting my PhD. It was the reason that I was beholden to this man, that I would continue to be beholden to him. It was why I had no choice but to put myself in his vicinity on a daily basis. I was at his mercy and though I had so far avoided taking another class from him, I would be hard-pressed to continue this tack and would likely be forced to do so the very next semester. He was the main person who taught courses in my field.
One side of my life was expansive, was normal, was populated with friends and family and my boyfriend and work and responsibilities. One side held the possibility of the future I’d always longed for.
The other was windowless, airless, dark.
Populated only by him and me.
I could see no future there; I had no dreams.
My love for graduate school, for my studies, for ideas, for my professors and my classes, were the very same things that were trapping me, that were allowing him to trap me. And he was so very good at trapping me.
13
Was that your other boyfriend?”
Christopher was sitting in my bed, grinning, when he asked me this.
I’d just gotten off the phone with my professor.
He’d called, and I went into the living room to answer. It was late, maybe 10 p.m., on a school night. As usual, he wanted to have a conversation, tried to persuade me to get together with him. We spoke for maybe ten minutes. I stood there, listening to him, fending him off—I never sat down when we were on the phone. Never. When you sit down to talk to someone on the phone, you are settling in for a long chat, for something you think you are going to enjoy, or for a serious conversation. You are making yourself comfortable. Talking to him was not relaxing, was not comfortable at all, it was a game of How Quickly Can I Get Out of This? I wanted anything other than a serious conversation, especially since that stupid article was still hanging over my head. So, sitting was out of the question, seemed incongruous with the experience of having to deal with him, and all my memories of our conversations involve me standing somewhere in my living room.
“What do you mean, my other boyfriend?” I asked Christopher back.
“You know,” he said, “the professor that’s always calling you.”
My face burned, my body burned. I felt caught. Caught doing something wrong.
“What—no! That’s ridiculous! Don’t say things like that! He’s a priest!”
Christopher had been smiling, chuckling, joking as he said these things to me. His voice was lighthearted, as it usually was. I was used to this, loved it, his constant kidding around. It was one of the things I cherished most about him, his ability to make me laugh, especially given what was going on with my mother. I loved how Christopher could break through the gloom, the fear, the uncertainty about her, make the sun shine again, even if it was just for a few minutes.
But his words that night had the effect of a hammer to my head, pounding me into the ground. It wasn’t the first time Christopher became aware that a professor was calling me at home—he’d answered the phone in Rhode Island, after all, and taken a message from this man. It wasn’t the first time my professor had called me at Georgetown when Christopher was over. That had already happened plenty—this was inevitable because Christopher spent a lot of time at my apartment, and my professor called daily. The nights when I could stay at his place, hanging out with him and Dan, playing video games, eating pizza, felt like vacations from my life because my professor could not reach me there—happily, universities didn’t require students to register their boyfriends’ addresses in their files. Plus, I didn’t have a cell phone yet, no one did. I would have gone to Christopher’s more, done it all the time, but because of my Residence Life job I was required to be present on campus most nights. Moving to his place was out of the question.
So Christopher was around my apartment enough that by now it was a fairly ordinary occurrence, my professor calling me, though we’d never before discussed this. I would answer the phone, talk, get off as quickly as possible, then act like it hadn’t happened. This was the opposite of what would happen after I got calls from a friend or my family, when I would tell Christopher afterward what had been discussed—my mother is going for chemo tomorrow, Hannah said hi and she wants us to go to dinner with her on Friday, Dan doesn’t want you to forget you guys have soccer practice tomorrow. When it was my professor on the phone, he never got the post-call summary.
Christopher rolled onto his side in the bed, still smiling. “Yeah, but he calls you practically more than I call you!”
“He does not,” I protested.
Though in truth, Christopher was right, and my professor did call me more—more than anyone else in my life, more than Christopher, and more, even, than my mother.
I
made myself laugh—and laugh hard. I wanted in on this joke.
I needed to ensure the joking.
That night was the first time someone in my life, a witness to my daily comings and goings, an observer of me, took what I still wanted to regard as benign, as innocent, as No Big Deal, and named it as something potentially romantic—using the term boyfriend to encapsulate my professor’s behavior—even though Christopher had done so kiddingly. He’d made the link, out loud, that I’d forbidden myself to make.
My entire being revolted. Refused the connection. Worse, I was caught off guard by Christopher doing this. I was amazed at the cavalier way that he could toss a statement like that out into the open, draw it into the air and give it sound and form.
It was like he was trying to fuse together two halves of a girl that repelled each other, weld them, but they would not fit, they were wildly mismatched, unjoinable. I could not allow this connecting of my two selves because if I did, the fragile bubble I was living in with Christopher, with my friends, with my life apart from this professor, would burst and my ugly side would soil the other, this professor would dirty the clean, happier parts of me. And I needed those parts of my life to remain pristine and pure.
“He’s just a dedicated professor,” I went on. “He was only checking in—he knows I have a lot going on! He wanted to ask about my mother. Isn’t that so nice of him? You’re a teacher.” My voice turned teasing—I forced the teasing into it. “You should be as concerned about your own students as he is with his!”
I was still standing at the threshold of my bedroom. This conversation with Christopher, his questions, his comments, had halted me, had frozen me there. I hadn’t moved an inch since those first words about my professor as “my other boyfriend” had left his mouth. I couldn’t seem to budge. It was as if taking a step closer to Christopher, joining him on the bed while we were talking about my professor, would bring this man smack into one of my favorite places, where I found rest and joy, and smack into the person I most regularly found it with. I could not allow this, so I stayed where I was.
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