Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (27 page)

Things with my mother were different, too. Growing up, I was always at her side, her silent satellite at her doctor’s appointments and ladies’ lunches. Or she’d pack a picnic for just the two of us—sandwiches sliced into triangles, along with squares of her buttery pound cake—and we’d sit by a pond watching the ducks bicker over our crumbs. On days when we did nothing but stay at home, she was always nearby, sewing or baking, humming to herself as she filled the space around us with her calm warmth. Those were my favorite times, the two of us alone together passing long, happy stretches in companionable silence—a wordless quiet inside of which I could feel myself simply be. But more and more at age seventeen, I found myself resisting such closeness, feeling intruded upon when we were together. I needed space. As if the fact of her and the claim she’d always had upon me, her youngest, had grown
into a threat to the scope of my imagination and to my vocabulary for what I was deciding to want. Had I been a different person, one of my friends at school, say, perhaps it would have been as simple as choosing to hide from her the fact that I was having sex or drinking alcohol or smoking pot. But I wasn’t doing any of those things; it was nothing as tangible as that. What I needed was the privacy to find out if I even had desires of my own and, if I did, to figure out what exactly they were.

My teacher’s letter changed things. It made it suddenly and forcefully clear to me that I could—already
did
—have desires. With the letter in my possession, I passed the spring break with an unfamiliar feeling of agitation. I wasn’t hungry or tired; I couldn’t keep my attention in one place long enough to read or have much of a conversation or even watch a TV show through to the end. But I also felt chosen, like a character from a novel, as though I had only just then begun to feel my life. Alone in my room, I tried to hold my hands perfectly still before me, and when I couldn’t, I realized with some elation that I had finally found occasion to tremble. Or my teacher’s name would appear in my mind, and suddenly my breath would get out of step with itself or a wave of longing would cause my whole body to quiver, and I’d think,
So this is what it feels like to swoon
. I’d envision versions of my life in which he and I let ourselves love one another, though I was never myself in those scenarios. I didn’t know how to let myself think those things about the self I knew. Didn’t every available source on the topic agree that it was wrong to love a man, as I told myself I did, who was married to someone else; wrong to do the things I sometimes tried to imagine we would do if only we’d let ourselves? I felt like a mermaid carved into the prow of a ship, straining ever forward, though the distance was shrouded in fog.
Yes
, I told myself,
I love him, too
. And in the days and nights before classes resumed, I found some way of telling him so in my own handwriting, the spaces between words like the distance a thought or an impulse must cross before it becomes an act.

On the first day back to school after spring break, I asked permission to leave my first-period Shakespeare class to run across the hall and deliver an assignment to my teacher. I couldn’t wait even until the end of class to get the letter out of my possession. I interrupted him teaching to hand him my response, tucked in the same manila folder he’d used for his letter to me. The other kids wouldn’t think to notice anything strange about this; they never did, even though the exchange tripped off a back-and-forth that would continue throughout the spring and even into the summer after school was out. We fell shy of saying the kinds of things that actual lovers would have said to one another (the truth was, we barely touched one another, never even kissed), but somehow we never managed to run out of things to say:
This is what I’m thinking…
Or:
This is what I am reading…
Or:
This is what I am learning and what I am thinking about what learning a thing like this means…
I was taking an evening art history class at the local community college that semester, and I found myself transcribing passages from my lecture notes (which seemed suddenly to ripple with previously undetected nuance and meaning) into his nightly letter:
The first sign that the Roman Empire was about to collapse was the fact that the figures on the coins became larger and less distinct
. Or I rushed home from dance rehearsal and wrote to him about how strange and powerful I’d been made to feel rehearsing a dance we were performing to Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring
.

Those were the kinds of subjects we bandied back and forth, subjects I believed would help me to become an adult in the way I imagined I wanted to be—a model based less and less on my
parents and more and more upon a character like Goethe’s Young Werther: sensitive, artistic, impassioned, worldly, discerning. I couldn’t yet see that such a character was also woefully naive and doggedly self-destructive, and neither was my teacher’s stake in our correspondence based terribly much on what was practical or patently true. He wrote in blue ink, and his cursive gestured out like his thin arms or like his eyes, which darted off and up when he was closest to saying what he meant to say, giving the impression that he was intercepting each idea as it flew past. Every day after school, somewhere in his house, a house I never quite knew how to imagine, away from a wife I would not allow myself to think about, he sat and wrote page after page to me. And every night, I hunched over my own desk, a black oak desk my father had built, writing back to my teacher.

I called him by his first name. A simple name. A solid name. One his father and grandfather had carried. The name with which he signed his letters and by which he insisted I call him. I wrote his name and said it to myself, and the plain, flat sound of it caused me to smile. I smiled whenever I heard his name, even if it was attached to someone else, which was often, practically every day.

Every now and again, I’d lift my eyes from the inky imprint of my own voice to scan the low hills on the horizon. At seventeen, I hadn’t seen anything. I only knew how much distance I wanted to cross but nothing of what it would look or feel like or what it would leave me with. How did I write about that? But every night I did, just as he did—as if during those few hours before sleep, sequestered by some excuse about schoolwork or a book too good to put down, we each disappeared into the same place, the same blank plane where nothing but the weightless platonic shapes of things sat.

Through all of this—all of the letters in which we professed
our love even while also, possibly for conscience’s sake, going to great lengths to posit that love as spiritual, as higher than ordinary love—did it once occur to me that my teacher was not an ordinary thirty-four-year-old man? If it did, it was only to reconfigure him in my imagination as an exception, a rare being, my soul’s companion, my
Paraclete
, which was the word he taught me to use in thinking of him, a word he’d culled from the Bible. If my mind or conscience ever attempted to configure him another way—if I found myself watching from the outside and seeing what the sight of us must have suggested to a careful observer—I shooed the thought away, retreating to that other sphere, that blank plane, the space where things were not just themselves but their higher selves, their perfect platonic selves.

That spring and summer, I kept friends my own age at the same arm’s length as I did my parents. I preferred to spend much of the day alone, reading poetry aloud to myself and letting the lyric
you
summon a version of my teacher. I read poets like Christina Rossetti, trying to hear her words as if my teacher were speaking them to me and to claim them along with the wish that I myself might one day be capable of fashioning such words into an address of my own:

I dream of you, to wake: would that I might

Dream of you and not wake but slumber on;

Nor find with dreams the dear companion gone
,

As, Summer ended, Summer birds take flight
.

In happy dreams I hold you full in night
.

I blush again who waking look so wan;

Brighter than sunniest day that ever shone
,

In happy dreams your smile makes day of night
.

I took to my room, my bed, reading, writing, daydreaming, extrapolating from the tiny sliver of passion that I had been privileged to house. I felt so alive; I didn’t want or need other voices cluttering my days.

—

Earlier that spring, the first college I heard back from was the University of California, Berkeley. I had been admitted. When I shared the news with my teacher, he gave me a hug. When I shared it with friends, a boy named John, whose first choice was Berkeley and who was still waiting for his own letter of acceptance, sneered. “Of course
you’d
get in,” he said, suggesting that the news was only owing to affirmative action. The comment stung more than a little—I’ve remembered it all these years later—but it didn’t undo the relief I felt and the delight I took in the ensuing days imagining what it might feel like to be a student at Cal.

Weeks later, the other letters arrived, all at once. It was a school day, and I was home for lunch period. The mailman himself was curious about the four thick envelopes from colleges, and he rang the bell. “I thought you might want to see these right away,” he said.

I had been praying for a yes from Harvard ever since the conversation with my mother, more than a year before, when she told me I had it in me to get in. I’d spent what little time was not wrapped up in being smitten with my teacher imagining life on the East Coast. Mom and I stood on the landing opening the envelopes, each of which contained a letter of acceptance. I couldn’t wait to tell my friend John, to watch him try to chalk everything up to affirmative action, though I wondered to what extent he might have been right. I wondered whether this was the kind of opportunity
Mr. Catania had been speaking about when he told me to take advantage of the things that would be handed to me and whether, by his line of reasoning, I should feel proud or ashamed.

It didn’t matter. There was no denying that my life was about to begin. I yelped and leapt up into the air. Mom squealed with pride and squeezed me tight. Had she been that happy, that relieved, and that excruciatingly proud when her own acceptance letter from Alabama State had arrived in the mail? And had Mother wrapped her up in a hug that felt at once like a warm embrace and a push into the oncoming rush of experience?

When I shared the news with my teacher, he made an announcement to the entire class. In his next letter, he told me that he felt a complicated mix of emotions: pride and an indescribable reluctance.

Graduation came. There was a picture of me hanging in the library by then, in the same lineup where Conrad’s photo hung. Marching in the ceremony with my class, I knew I should have felt more, should not simply have been waiting for the speeches and the celebrating to be over, but leaving high school didn’t strike me as meaning all that much. Only that a whole four years of waiting and vying for college were finally done and I could get started, get on with things—though September felt so far away, another occasion that would take its good time in coming.

A group of girls I’d known forever were moving into a house together with some boys that they seemed to be passing around among them. It was a freedom that made me envious. They knew what they wanted and were brazen in taking it; they’d grabbed on to an agency that was still far-off for me. I figured that once I had crossed the country for college and set myself up in life on my own I’d be able to give myself that kind of permission. Until then,
thinking and writing about what my heart felt (the heart, yes, but not the body, whose vocabulary still eluded me) was plenty.

What did my parents think when, come summer, there was an envelope addressed to me in my teacher’s handwriting every afternoon in the mailbox? They must have suspected some kind of an infatuation but trusted that I wouldn’t make any serious mistakes. Sometimes, I thought back to Dennis and Becca, the couple from Hot and Fast who had fallen in love despite a similar difference in age. Dennis had been forthright about his intentions. He wanted to marry Becca, and it was in his power to do so. Not like my teacher, who was already married, who said things to me in letters that he hoped would never be sniffed out and dragged into the light by my parents or his wife. Whenever my teacher’s wife came to mind, I hurried to tell myself that she didn’t notice, that our life was a separate life from their life, and that it happened without hampering anything outside of itself, that we passed it back and forth between us invisibly. I told myself this, but I knew it was a lie. Why else did I sometimes feel so heavy inside, so anxious and despondent? Why else did I worry that she would one day grow curious about what my letters said, curious enough to break open the seal and read one for herself?

I spent my days during the summer working at the computer company where Michael was now a systems analyst; it was a job he’d helped arrange so that I might save money for the coming year at Harvard. I shared an office with a woman named Claire who had recently gotten married. Our desks faced opposite corners of the room, hers by the window, mine just to the left of the door. I can’t say with much certainty, now, what I actually did there, but I had my own telephone extension and a voice mailbox that held messages only I could retrieve and to which I would listen first
thing each morning. Sometimes, there were messages detailing tasks requiring my attention in the office. Mostly, though, I knew my teacher had called during the night and left me a message. His words, the sound of his voice: these are what I remember of those days at my first job; these would tide me over until the afternoon when I could rush home to the mail.