Vladimir(5)
I widened my eyes to prevent them from visibly rolling. “Multiple affairs. What silly wording. He fucked them, and they fucked him. He fucked their shining skin and their panties got wet from his approval. They liked it and he couldn’t help it.”
He winced. Prude. “Couldn’t help it. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe it’s possible to simply fall.”
“What, in love?” I asked. “Or in lust?”
“Both. There’s always a part of you that you let go slack. You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”
He was red in the face, and perturbed. He reminded me of some New England preacher from the nineteenth century—a transcendentalist Unitarian with strict principles. He seemed vegan. I liked it. I liked his arrogant anger.
I folded my hands in my lap. “I feel like I’ve upset you.”
“It doesn’t matter.” He looked like a perturbed teenager. (Not Fair!) “It’s why you should never admire people. They’ll only disappoint you.”
“You can still admire my husband without condoning what he did,” I said. Though it’s not up to you to condone, I thought.
“I wish I could. Maybe I can. I’m sorry. I didn’t eat enough before I drank this.”
We changed subjects after that—we talked about a new novel that had come out from a substantial writer, a play we had both seen in New York and whether it was a feminist retelling of a classic work or patriarchal pandering. I pressed some cheese and bread on him, and some water. We spoke about the differences between the sophomore and junior classes (the juniors were dim, the sophomores were keen). I told him, to the best of my memory, about child-friendly activities in the area for his three-year-old.
We parted in the pitch-black darkness. I let him know once more how much I looked forward to reading his book. He seemed remiss when he said goodbye and told me he “really would” love to hear what both of us thought, especially me. After his car pulled from the drive, I sat out back in a Muskoka chair on the side of our pool. I leaned my head back and looked at the stars. I had a craving for a cigarette, though I hadn’t had one for twenty years. I felt a growing excitement and wildness creep up into my nervous system—a prickly awareness that started in my bones and radiated outward. I thought of Vladimir Vladinski using his large, rough hands to hold my hair back from my face. On the far side of our property, behind the chain-link fence that enclosed the yard, the eyes of a stray cat or a fox reflected the porch light. They glowed like the eyes of a demon.
II.
I read his book the following week. I took it to the campus library and sat in one of the armchairs in a glass alcove on the silent floor. The librarians had printed out signs of the Bront?s and Jane Austen with fingers to their mouths and pasted them at the ends of the stacks. Shhh! From my perch in the alcove, I could look down and see a grassy part of the campus, four floors below me. It was 8 a.m., and I watched sleepy students in sweats or pajamas stumbling past on their way to early morning classes. A few male athletes ran in a superior manner; a few female athletes ran as if to punish themselves. A few young women wore elaborate outfits and full faces of makeup, their eyes darting to and fro to see who noticed them. A few misguided young business students wore badly cut suits, having internalized some inaccurate message about dressing for success.
I didn’t want to sit in my office where I could be disturbed at any moment by coworkers or students. I typically had a good relationship with my students—our college is a student-oriented college, not an R1 school, and, until everything happened with John, I liked talking to them and getting to know about their passions and dreams. I liked giving life advice just as much as I liked giving advice about essays or books, and I liked that a few, who possessed a boldness I had never felt with any authority figure in my life, would flop onto the sofa across from my desk and allow me to witness them amid their tortured confusion.
I tended to read manuscripts, however, in the library. Even at fifty-eight, even at this college where I have taught for nearly thirty years, I still feel the thrill of excitement in a university library. I still feel the potentiality—the students working toward becoming something, the stretching, searching minds, the curiosities of what will become of oneself buzzing at the study tables and between the rows of books. I find being among all that to be far more energizing than an enclosed and solitary space. Here I feel as though I’m engaged in the knowledge project. In my office I’m engaged in the knowing project. In my office I am of college life but not in it. In the library I am in but not of it. I like feeling the thrum of the students’ brains and hearts, uncensored by the classroom setting. In the library their lives swirl around me—I’m aware of their romantic entanglements, their grudges, hatreds, obsessions, all vibrating at a frequency I won’t ever feel again. Never will I love as they love, or hate as they hate, or want what they want with such strong and solidified identification.
Our last meeting had such an effect on me that I decided to wait a few days to read Vladimir’s book. Not that he would care, but it was unlike me. Usually I was so sensitive to the anxieties that possessed someone who sent a manuscript that I read it right away. I remember, with my early fiction, how nervous I was to hear what someone thought, and how much umbrage I would take if I felt as though someone had not responded promptly to a piece of writing I sent them. I dealt with young writers frequently (along with my academic courses I taught a creative-writing course every spring), and normally, if I did not read something right away due to workloads or faculty responsibilities, I would let them know that as soon as I started reading I would contact them, so that they could manage when to expect a response. But I found that I couldn’t treat Vladimir with the same courtesy.