In this one, she is twenty, dating
a thirty-two-year-old debut novelist,
they work at the same tutoring center
at the college where she’s studying
to be a writer, he is not faculty
but a returned Peace Corps volunteer, he has
soft, rumpled hair, soft hands, a body
like a worn-down couch that smells of the American
Spirits he keeps tucked
in a back pocket, he likes
the novels of Toni Morrison and when
she wins the Nobel he tells the young woman, You
could do that too, someday, saying it
quietly, seriously, so she takes him home,
they are laughing, he touches her hair,
her ears, he kisses her shoulder
left out like one pale breadcrumb
for his mouth to find, they go
to bed, she wakes up giddy, calls a friend
who clucks and asks, Don’t you know
he’s still with X? X being the second-
oldest tutor at their center, the one
with wild pink hair and miniskirts
and a habit of vacuuming up tables
with her nose; of course, the young woman
does not know this, had no
idea of this, and so in a fit
of guilt, frustration, fear, breaks up
with the novelist over the phone, at which point
he begins—of all things—crying
for her to wait until he calls it off
with X, isn’t she happy, doesn’t she want them
to have a chance together? Actually,
she doesn’t: just that morning, before he left,
she’d been surprised, perhaps a touch
repulsed to see the strong left hook
of his penis in the light, as if
it were trying to thumb a ride
onto a different body; his freckled
belly slopping against the table
as he ate toast: it saddened her
to see this, how she had so much
more future than him for herself
so that when X called her up
repeatedly that very night, growing drunker
hour after hour, addressing her first
as Sister, then Friend, then finally
You, as in You know he just told me
I was ruining his life? the young
woman begins to feel less awash
in desire than caught in a riptide
of various eddying despairs: X
demanding on the phone, Don’t you think
a man like this deserves to be punished?
And what could she say
but yes, not understanding that punishment
meant their boss, her professor, the chair
of their department, would call her
into his office a week later
because he’d heard a rumor, he would say,
a terrible rumor he needed
immediately cleared up, was it true, he’d ask,
was it possible she’d been raped?
All this he demands to know: this man, her boss,
her professor now staring at her
with embarrassment and a slight,
sickening distaste; the same look,
she realizes, she had slipped that writer
as he left her bed, the same expression
that must now be pasted onto her own face
as she sits nauseous with shame
before this question her professor feels
he has to ask, she has to answer;
confused, too, about whether
he should ask, she should answer,
the cruelty of this intrusion
both of them now feel compelled
to complete, knowing—as her professor
surely does—whatever answer she gave
would not entirely be believed,
though she gives it, over and over,
each time feeling the truth of the word
become increasingly inadequate, as are
her protestations: she is fine, it was
by choice, misunderstanding, accident:
she can see herself as he must:
as something small and defiled and humiliated
though she is none of these things; yes,
there had been drinks, a drug
or two, or maybe she’d stopped answering
by now as her professor’s hand raised
suddenly to cut her off—
And so, perhaps, she never said whatever word
or phrase would finally satisfy herself,
her professor; whatever word
they both needed but couldn’t trust
each other to interpret correctly, perhaps
expressed in a tone that would have given
them both some longed-for out:
a way for her to forgive or him
to fire the offending writer:
who knew how her professor really felt
about this man he’d hired then tossed
into their center like some hungry,
soft-bellied fox; who knew what regrets
he privately harbored, how many young women
he himself had slept with
as a single or married or just-
divorced professor, assistant, TA;
maybe he hated this writer,
maybe he, too, wanted him gone, or maybe
he was just exhausted from supervising
another of her exhausting generation
who turned sex and desire into forms of vengeance
because they were so afraid of them, had been told
since childhood sex would kill them, and indeed
it was killing them: the distance
between what they wanted and what they were told
they could have, and so, with their needs,
they punished everyone, including him,
sitting now in this high-backed wooden chair
grilling another lank-haired sophomore
with bad skin and an oversized sweater, this girl
who in each one of his literature classes
would slowly unwrap and eat a single
Japanese nori roll during discussions,
adding a comment, taking a bite,
adding a comment, taking a bite, grain by grain
of roll and novel disappearing over the hour
as if too much appetite for either would destroy
her life, which could only sustain itself in measured gasps—
Everything that happens after
you’d expect. The writer leaves the center
but is not fired. X leaves the city
and marries the next man she encounters.
The young woman becomes the subject
of gossip at college, is shunned
in the halls, graduates. Even the professor
dies of heart failure, which the young woman
mourns: he was her favorite, the one
she admired and wanted to be, whose interior life
she obsessively mulled: she can’t even remember
the name of that writer everyone thought
had taken advantage of her, she sees this now,
their dislike of her less about the sex
than that she’d been messy, indulged a man
too easy to see through, though what had he done,
really, she thinks, but take the smallest slice
of happiness for himself; could she begrudge that
tiny selfishness, both of them punished for it
so excessively? If she regrets anything,
she regrets only that recognition
on her professor’s face as she slipped
from being a person to an assignment
of blame, a thing to be righted
or defended, which is what,
at the last, X warned her she’d become.
He’s made you an object, she’d slurred
on the phone, at which the young woman,
for a moment, felt as if she stood
at a great height looking down
on everyone: she would become a writer,
yes, and the writer would become nothing
but anecdote, a half-hearted story spun
out at a party, and wasn’t that power:
to turn strangers into words
she could burnish in her mind, absorbed
into a talent only she possessed, controlled?
The truth was that she’d never felt
at anyone’s mercy, taking whatever
had been on offer, the beer, the coke, the cock
in hand, the smeary outline of whatever person
she was becoming growing more solid
with each choice; wasn’t this power?
Or was it merely some indulged delusion
she was not, as everyone around her
insisted, a good girl who simply succumbed
to others’ wishes, a dupe in bed, a pawn
in a rival’s playbook, so self-dissociated
she couldn’t even feel the quickening flush
of her own anger? What is power?
Years after the incident, as she would call it,
the young woman would apply to the Peace Corps
herself, arriving to the interview in jeans and the same
outsize blue sweater she’d worn
to her professor’s office: an outfit the interviewer
deemed so jejune, so inappropriate,
he sent her home immediately to reschedule their talk,
to buy a suit, he insisted, which she could not afford
and so borrowed instead a skirt and jacket
too long in the arms, too wide
in the seat, with a bloom of coffee
in its lining seam, but it was a suit,
she returned, she passed the interview
and got assigned to teach in a small town
in eastern Bulgaria but the day
she got the letter requesting
her answer, she received another
with a plump fellowship to an art school
in the Midwest, so sat down and wrote back
to the interviewer who’d sent her home,
the man who insisted she straighten up,
she should respect herself, he said: a letter
composed of one word tucked
into a wrinkled envelope on which
she’d also smudged some cigarette ash:
a single word above a blackened X,
and that word was NO.