Audio: Clare Sestanovich reads.
When I was about halfway between twenty and thirty, I lived in a large, run-down house that other people thought was romantic. There was a claw-foot tub with squeaky knobs, and philodendrons that draped over the bannisters. The door to my bedroom was at least twelve feet tall. I installed a coatrack over the top, and whenever I needed to retrieve a jacket, or a towel, I stood on my desk chair, swivelling uncertainly.
There were six of us in the house. We were all about the same age, and at some point during the summer—I had moved in at the beginning of March, when the mornings were still cold, veins of ice glittering over the front steps—this became claustrophobic, unbearable. The house smelled of sweat and bike tires and something at the back of the oven being charred over and over again. Two boys lived on the top floor and another lived in the basement. (They weren’t men, not really.) I was aware of being surrounded. Shirtless, they cooked big vats of tomato sauce, the steam beading on their faces and clinging to the fur in their armpits. They smoked bongs they didn’t clean, and returned my books warped by bathwater.
One afternoon, while a desk fan whirred near my cheek, I composed a long e-mail to my high-school English teacher, because I remembered him as handsome in a remote way. The school had been large and impersonal, full of unkind sounds: the clang of lockers and the terrible screaming bell. But the English teacher wore expensive clothes and took an understated pleasure in saying inspiring things. In my head, he belonged at a prep school. My idea of prep schools came from outdated novels. “A Separate Peace,” that sort of thing. Later, at college, I learned that going to these schools entailed a lot of lacrosse and furtive blow jobs, and that, too, became a kind of romance in my head.
I calculated that the English teacher was about forty, and then I pressed Send. The e-mail covered a lot of ground. I summarized what I called “my college experience” and devoted a long paragraph to “The Artist’s Way,” the self-help book that I was using to structure my days. I described the cat outside my window, which I took the liberty of calling a feral cat. Toward the end of the e-mail, I found myself saying that I couldn’t understand the fear of death. Maybe it was a boy thing. The male ego. If death turned out to be anything other than pure oblivion—if the afterlife was even remotely lucid—I would be disappointed. Wasn’t everyone looking forward to the chance to actually, finally rest?
One evening, at a Chinese restaurant with my friend Max, I debated whether to tell him about the e-mail. All the tables were occupied, so we sat on the sidewalk out front, eating from plastic containers. One of the tables inside was pushed right up against the window, and occasionally I made eye contact with the woman sitting there, only inches away. Her boyfriend leaned his head against the glass, his curly hair flattening like something compressed in a microscope slide.
I put an entire dumpling in my mouth, and wondered if Max would think the e-mail was in character. I had been asking myself this sort of thing more often. I knew I should permit myself uncharacteristic actions, but when I did act—and in general, I thought about acting more than I acted—I wanted to know if I was acting like me.
“Or the person recognizable as me,” I said out loud.
“What?”
“Never mind.”
Max bit a small hole in one end of a dumpling and dribbled soy sauce into the opening.
“Hannah says she’s at the point where she would consider getting pregnant to be a sign.”
Hannah and Max had been dating for a year or so. She was an avid reader, with relatively few opinions about the things she read.
“A sign of what?” I said. “That it’s meant to be?”
“Or just, that it’s time.”
I imagined Hannah in maternity clothes. She was small enough that the billowy tunics would make her look even smaller.
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“She isn’t actively pursuing motherhood, but it’s a future she knows she wants,” Max said. “So why not now?”
“Motherhood is a pursuit?”
The dumpling slipped between his chopsticks. Ambition alarmed Max. For years, he had been saying he was going to find a new job.
“I only like thinking about the future because it hasn’t happened,” he said.
I nodded while I finished chewing. “Happening spoils the fun.”
It’s difficult to say whether I expected the English teacher to respond. For as long as I can remember, I have known the phrase Don’t get your hopes up. My mother said it habitually, about even the smallest form of desire. The faintest glimmer of wishful thinking. She said it when I wondered if the roadside diner offered free refills, or if my father would send me a Christmas present. She said it when I applied to every college I had seen mentioned in books—the ones with demure colors, Latin mottoes, things called quads.
There were graver threats she might have worried about. Student debt and callous boys. Rising sea levels. But it was disappointment, most of all, that she feared for me. For a long time, her fear seemed like a form of doubt, maybe even an insult. Proof that she didn’t think I could weather the minor calamities that life had in store. I would have preferred, I thought, that she imagine me as a tragic victim—someone susceptible to plane crashes and sexual harassment. But she didn’t worry that I would die or be destroyed. She worried that I would crumple in the face of everyday failures, that I would gradually deflate—a quiet, unremarkable hissing—into a case of unfulfilled potential.
And so while I waited for a response to my e-mail the worst-case scenario I imagined was a standard reply. Hope this finds you well. No reply at all would be better than that.
When the English teacher wrote back, I was distracted. The college I had attended was in the news. A nineteen-year-old boy had died at one of the fraternities.
The stories about the tragedy had a unifying effect among those of us who were not directly involved. I began e-mailing with friends I had lost touch with. Their lives were hard for me to imagine. They had good salaries and reliable boyfriends, with whom they bought reasonably sized pets. They circulated Facebook petitions for uncontroversial causes—cancer walks and suicide hotlines and hurricane relief. I disdained them, and was aware that my disdain was born of dislike for what these friends proved about me: that whatever I was doing—cultivating a taste for chipped mirrors and monochrome palettes, reading self-help books that scorned other self-help books—was a life of ugly indecision, pooling like day-old rainwater.
In our e-mails, we asked the same questions too many times: What did we know back then? What should we have known?
When the English teacher’s reply came, it wasn’t any of the things I’d feared it might be. He wrote without preamble. He taught at a new school in a new city. It was a Quaker school, which was apparent in only small ways. There was no dress code and no student government. Lofty words, called tenets, were painted on the walls in big block letters. Equality. Simplicity. Environmental Stewardship.
Once a week, the school convened for Meeting. Like chapel, except everyone sat in silence. The chairs were arranged in concentric circles, with an empty space in the center. There was no preacher, no text, no assigned seating. Most of the students were Jewish. Anyone was allowed to speak, but sometimes the Meeting passed in uninterrupted silence. If you’re moved to share was what the real Quakers said. The implication, presumably, was that God did the moving. But the students interpreted these instructions loosely. The results were beautiful, often breathtaking.
They spoke about all kinds of things. One spoke about his grandfather, who was dying in a different country, and another wanted to talk about his baseball team—its first time in the playoffs. A third explained that he was making a list of all the ways to categorize people. Crest or Colgate, Apple or Android. People who joke about farts and people who don’t. People who say “I love you” at the end of every phone call and people who can barely bring themselves to say it at all.
If there were only adults in the room, the English teacher said, all this vulnerability would be a performance. The art of carefully calibrated disclosure.
Then the e-mail ended, as abruptly as it had begun. He did not include a sign-off, which was the kind of thing I thought about a lot. Best or All best or All my best. He just wrote the first initial of his first name, a name I had never called him.
Iresolved to seek advice about the English teacher’s e-mail, but, as time passed and it remained in my in-box, crowded with other, more straightforward messages, the strangeness of it came to feel like a kind of intimacy. I was afraid of what discussing the intimacy might do to it.
Max texted that he was coming over: he needed help.
Instantly, I relaxed. I would have to make the e-mail small and insignificant to accommodate his problems. This task made me energetic, like a sudden burst of resolve to clean utensils that have sat in the sink, their dirtiness turning into rebuke.
Max perched on my bed and untied his shoes slowly. He arranged the shoes under the bed. His fastidiousness seemed ominous, so I asked him if Hannah was pregnant.
“Of course not,” he said. “She takes the pill.”
I nodded. “She’s conscientious.”
“She doesn’t even set an alarm to remember,” he said admiringly. “She just does.”
Max was very handsome. To those who doubted that my feelings for Max were uncomplicated and platonic, I often added: objectively handsome. But when he spoke in tones of awe he seemed ugly.
“Well, she said if she did get pregnant.”
“That conversation stood for a larger conversation.” He sounded impatient. “It wasn’t, like, practical.”
We sat there quietly for a little while. In general, I prided myself on understanding the true meaning of things. I looked at Max’s sneakers, their laces coiled neatly out of view.
“What’s the real problem, then?” I said, when I had recovered.
The problem was that Max couldn’t stop imagining Hannah having sex with strangers. Or not-strangers. Men or women. Anyone, really, who wasn’t him. It had got to the point, he said, that he had to conduct these fantasies during sex in order to stay turned on.
“Do you close your eyes?” I said.
Max shook his head.
“I don’t imagine she’s someone else.” He swung his feet back and forth, the way a child might. “I just imagine I’m someone else.”
“It sounds exciting,” I admitted.
He looked at me gratefully. When he leaned back on the bed, his shirt rose up, revealing the gentle incline of his stomach. I might have touched it, if it weren’t so difficult to convey the difference between tenderness and desire.
“Did you ever have imaginary friends?”
“Of course,” he said. “An old man named Leo. And an orphan whose name was all vowels.”
“I had an orphan, too!”
“And sometimes the ghost of Leo’s wife.”
I had photos of Max as a little kid. Bowl cuts and big cheeks. The same eyes. It was easy to love the little kid. Max looked at the ceiling, where the remnants of a glow-in-the-dark solar system clustered around the overhead light.
“I yearn for my childhood,” I said. “But everyone says I seem old.”
“That’s because children don’t yearn,” Max said. “They just want.” The adhesive on the stars was slowly coming off. A comet’s tail wilted, Saturn’s rings peeled at the edges. “They want stuff. Popsicles. Yogurt in tubes.”
“Is the fantasy with Hannah—”
“For Hannah.”
I squinted, which I hoped conveyed skepticism. “Is that yearning?”
Max shrugged. He stood up carefully, the mattress sinking and shifting under his feet. Wobbling, he reached up toward the stickers, but the ceiling was still far away. His T-shirt rose even higher when he lifted his arm. The comet tail dangled out of reach. Like everyone, he looked strange from below.
“Yearning is so religious,” Max said, bouncing gently on his heels.
“It is not.”
When I thought of all the ways faces rearranged themselves from different angles and distances—a nose in profile, a nose up close, a nose illuminated by a camera’s flash—it seemed miraculous that we recognized each other at all.
“Fine,” he said. “It’s so spiritual.”
“Don’t say it like that.”
When Max sat back down, the bedsprings whined.
“If I say I’m looking for a way to make Hannah an object of my desire again.” He stopped swinging his feet.
“Does that mean you’re objectifying her?”
“I want to be a good guy.”
We sat there silently for a while, not looking at each other, which could have meant that Max wasn’t a good person, or that no one was, or that we wanted to sound smart and goodness was the kind of thing that always came out sounding dumb.
Sometimes in the morning there was a star or an orb or a planet’s ring on the pillow beside me. I had to remind myself not to make everything into a metaphor.
Iwrote the English teacher again on a Monday. I told him that the fraternity had me thinking about things that travel in packs. Big cats and protesters and cans of soda. The visual element interested me. Seeing these things on their own became sad, sometimes even alarming. Lone-wolf shooters. A table for one. A single can of beer in a paper bag.
High school is the ideal time for packs, I wrote. Everyone is weak, everyone wants strength in numbers. Once a critical mass has assembled, of course, the vying begins. Jostling your way to the front.
What counts, I asked him, as being alone? In the mornings, I could hear the whir of someone’s electric toothbrush through the wall. On the subway, I misjudged the space between two passengers, pressing myself against the shape and warmth of unfamiliar thighs. And who was that man I saw every week—sometimes every day—on the same platform, waiting for the same train? I noticed when he wore a new red coat, but I never knew his name.
Every few weeks, I saw Hannah jogging in loops around the park. I went to the park to walk or read or call my mom on the phone, but, if I saw Hannah, I felt aimless and guilty. I made myself do a dozen pushups, or the kind of sit-ups where you pedal your feet in the air.
One weekend, I stopped and sat under a tree beside the running path, and then I saw Hannah twice. On the first loop, she didn’t say anything—just waved and went on running. On the second loop, she slowed down as she approached, and jogged in place for a little while. Her face was blotchy with exertion, but she wasn’t sweating very much. This made her seem pretty—full of restraint. She had taken her headphones off when she got close, and I could hear a pop song leaking out of them.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.”
She didn’t turn the music off, and I could hear the song building toward its last ecstatic chorus. They were lyrics I knew without knowing how. She spoke over the tinny, faraway music. We didn’t say anything interesting. How many loops she’d done, what I was reading, whether the cool weather was here to stay. She put the headphones back on before saying, “Are you sleeping with Max?”
Her face had almost returned to its normal color.
“Of course not.”
She stood there a few moments longer, bobbing her head to the music, or just to her thoughts, and then she was running again. I sat under the tree, waiting for her third loop, but she didn’t reappear. I saw a dog walker, a cycling team, a group of toddlers all holding the same rope. The song got stuck in my head.
The last time I saw the English teacher, we were sitting in his office, in between the chemistry lab and the girls’ bathroom. As is true of life, but not movies: I didn’t know it was the last time.
That year, my handwriting had transformed abruptly. Until then, I wrote in vigilant cursive. “M”s with three humps, “G”s that didn’t look anything like “G”s. These inefficiencies seemed elegant, until suddenly they seemed absurd. In my cautious world, this counted as a revelation. Afterward, I didn’t write so much as scrawl. I was known, by then, as an overly conscientious student, and most of the teachers ignored the illegibility of my new handwriting. One of them, leafing through the pages of an assignment, said, “I can assume you’re saying something correct in here, right?”
The English teacher, of course, was different. He called me into his office that day and said he couldn’t read a single word of my final exam. He held out the small stack of blue books. The class was about tragedies. We were always saying things like “But is it tragic, or just sad?” “Here,” he said, flapping the books in the air. “Read them to me.”
I read the essays haltingly at first, since the words seemed to accost me: they had never been intended to be said aloud. I paused after a few paragraphs. I would have chosen differently, I said, if I’d known I was going to perform. The English teacher didn’t respond, and so eventually I continued. He watched me carefully. Didn’t smile a fake smile or nod encouragingly. Already I was imagining how I would describe this—in writing, maybe, or to a friend who didn’t actually exist. Our eyes locked. I pictured solid, clinking metal.
I began to read with more confidence, changing words here and there when I saw a sentence headed toward a clumsy conclusion. These adjustments made me feel artful—adult. When I finished, I was out of breath, my face prickly with adrenaline. I waited a few seconds before I looked up, allowing myself the thrill of being watched. The words on the page were a faded graphite streak; they were or weren’t the same words I had spoken out loud.
When I did look up, he was unbending a paper clip in his lap. I couldn’t see his face. The part in his hair was a straight pink line.
“Ow.”
He dropped the paper clip on the ground. His finger, reflexively, went between his lips. He met my gaze then, but he seemed distracted.
“So,” he said. “What grade should I give you?”
There was no longer anything pleasurable about his inscrutable expression. His mouth twitched or his eyes flickered. Or maybe I just imagined that he was moving farther and farther out of reach.
“I don’t know,” I said, looking at the floor, the mangled paper clip on the carpet, gray on gray.
“What do you deserve?”
He twirled a pencil around his thumb and his pointer finger. It was a habit the boys in class all copied. Boys who slouched and argued, boys who took their sneakers off under their desks.
“Nothing much.”
“Nothing much,” he repeated, turning over the phrase, as if it were extremely interesting, or unbelievably stupid. “B-plus? B-minus?”
I said nothing.
“C-plus?”
I was an A student.
“O.K.,” I said. I held out the books, which weighed almost nothing. “Do you need these back?”
He shrugged. On my way out, I threw them in the trash.
A few weeks later, I graduated, wearing a robe in primary blue. The teachers wore blouses and ties and uncharacteristically nice shoes. I never found the English teacher in the crowd, though I remember waiting for him—and telling myself I wasn’t waiting—until nearly everyone had left. I watched the football field gradually emerge from under so many feet. Clumps of kicked-up dirt, the puncture wounds of high heels.
There was a garden behind my house, but it was mostly plants that flourished of their own accord: wisteria and honeysuckle, clover and scorpion grass. For a few weeks each year, a blanket of crocuses. “Technically,” I told Max, “they’re weeds.”
I wanted to plant something new—something intentional—so we bought paper envelopes full of seeds. The man who sold them to us said they’d never grow. Already, the weather was changing. Max nibbled the bottom of a honeysuckle and sucked.
“The problem with horticulture,” I said, “is the more you know, the more things you’re obliged to dislike.”
We pressed the seeds into the soil and covered them up. They were small and easy to misplace. Some blew away in the wind. I planted tomatoes, because I wanted to see something ripen on the vine.
We sat on the ground, and Max plucked onion grass absent-mindedly.
“Do you know about peppers?” he said.
“What about them?”
He took off his shirt and wiped his hands on his stomach. He was wet and shiny, and the grass from his palms clung to his skin.
“Green peppers and yellow peppers and red peppers.”
I took off my shirt, too, and then my bra.
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “They’re all the same thing.”
Max looked at me carefully. There were a few hairs around my nipples, long and dark, like eyelashes in the wrong place. We were sitting cross-legged, and he reached out and held one of my breasts in his hand. I imagined him putting his mouth around it, and the image was so vivid that it seemed to me I could taste my own sweat. Then Max let go. He wiped his hands again, and I couldn’t help thinking that it was me he was wiping off.
The English teacher wrote me one more e-mail, at the very end of the summer. It arrived in the middle of the day, but I was still in bed. I liked the idea of going all day without speaking, clearing my throat sometime in the evening, preparing to address someone for the first time. I had folded a blanket into a person-size rectangle—just enough weight to feel like I was being pinned down. I drifted in and out of sleep and dreamed about boring things. Brushing my teeth, trying to wash the cheese grater and shredding the sponge. When I woke up, I was impatient, and a little embarrassed. I wanted to scold someone: this isn’t what dreaming is for!
While I lay there, one of the boys who lived in the attic was moving out. I could guess what he was carrying by the sound of his footsteps. He ran up the stairs three or four at a time (trash bags, mop), and came down slowly, step by step (bed frames, picture frames). The new roommate was arriving soon. I’d never met him, but I’d scrolled through enough of his social media to decide I didn’t object, and wasn’t curious.
I looked at the e-mail for a long time without opening it. The blanket didn’t cover my feet, which made me very aware of my toes.
Lying under the blanket, sweating in all the creases of my body, I told myself that the English teacher had been cruel all along. In the hallway, plastic hangers clattered. A pillow thrown from two floors up sounded like getting the wind knocked out of you.
Cruel! I repeated the word in my head, trying to approximate indignation. What does outrage look like, when it first begins to unfurl? The doorbell rang. The old roommate greeted the new roommate. A few minutes later, they knocked on my door.
“It’s us.”
I pushed the blanket away and underneath my clothes were damp. I pictured Max rolling off Hannah when they were finished having sex. Both of them on their backs, staring into space. In a second, she would pull up the sheet and one of them would turn toward the other, murmuring the usual things, touching with hands that were just hands again.
“Come in,” I said, forgetting to clear my throat.
The door opened and I deleted the English teacher’s e-mail. I felt loss and then relief, or relief and then loss. I sat up. A star did not fall from the ceiling. ♦
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