leaving home. There was a fireplace in the living room, thick rugs everywhere, and fat pillows smothering the couches and bed.
We didn’t linger in David’s bedroom. I followed him back to the kitchen.
“Anything to drink?” he asked, heading around the counter.
“I think we already did that,” I said. The wine had smoothed my speech, hammering out the kinks and stumbles.
David laughed, unscrewing the top of something. He poured himself a glass and set it down.
“Do you ever use the fireplace?” I asked, walking over and sitting on a corner of the couch. It was charcoal-gray, with light and dark areas where it had been rubbed.
“I haven’t yet this year,” he said. “I was waiting for the right inspiration.”
How’s it going to start, I wondered. Would he use a bunch of tricks that would get me into his bedroom? Or was that not going to happen? I was assuming it would, even if I wasn’t sure whether I wanted it to happen. He did know I was inexperienced, right? He had to. He couldn’t expect much. Then again, maybe he liked inexperience.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked. No one had ever done that before, simply asked me what was in my head. He put his now-empty glass on the kitchen counter and walked toward me. He looked serious and intense. I noticed a slight wobble in his step.
“Your syllabus,” I lied.
“Ah,” he said, sitting on the other corner of the couch. “That reminds me. I published a paper on Speech and Phenomena…” He began telling me about it, and I liked that in the middle of our sitting in the living room, work was still on his mind. It was strange, though, that after we’d been kissing in his car, we were back at the chaste distance we’d been at before.
I wondered if maybe he was going to tell me to sleep on the couch and tuck me in and read me a bedtime story. Despite myself, I feared it.
“You know,” he said, “when I say things about you, like that you’re brilliant, or that you look beautiful with merlot on your lips, it’s because I really think that. I’m not just saying it to flatter you.”
I pointed to the empty glass on the counter. “Wow,” I said. “That stuff works great.”
He laughed. “It’s not the alcohol,” he said. “You are just so…”
I cocked my head to the side.
“Are you nervous?” he asked.
Without waiting for an answer, he leaned over, put his hand under my chin, lifted my head and kissed me.
He ran his hand down the front of my shirt, then down my slacks until he got to my kneecap, which he held. He wrapped his arms around me, and we kept at it until I was out of breath. After a while, we went into his room.
He was happy with what happened, and I was left unfulfilled. I wasn’t so surprised. It was more academic for me. Something I should experience to know what it was about. But after he was asleep, I looked at him, ran my hand over the comforter and felt lucky to be there.
Class held a new excitement after that. David would lecture, pace the room, then stop and look up and down the aisles with a slight smile on his lips, acting as if nothing was going on when we both knew it was. It was our game. Occasionally, when I thought it was safe, I would catch his eye and raise an eyebrow, and once in a very rare while, he’d wink at me quickly. Sometimes, I would just get a surge of excitement watching him walk around in his soft sweaters, knowing that no one else in class had snuggled against them, knowing that later that night, I would. And when Brian Buchman was droning on and on, and Vicki was swooning, I would feel happy instead of miserable because I knew that later, David and I would laugh about it.
One time, David was a few minutes late to class, and everyone started yammering.
“Maybe we can leave if he doesn’t show,” said a guy named Rob, who only came to class half the time anyway.
“I like this class,” a girl said.
“I do, too,” Brian said.
“He loves you,” Rob ribbed him.
“Yeah, and he ignores the rest of us,” a girl complained.
“He’s probably just busy,” Vicki said.
“Is he married?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Maybe he’s gay.”
“That would be a shame. He’s so cute!”
I told David about this later, and we both cracked up.
In my other classes, I daydreamed. I was somehow able to take notes, but my mind was elsewhere. I would return to my dorm room to find a message from him on my machine, either an invitation to come over or just a call to say he missed me. If there was no message, I’d lie in bed on my stomach and gloss over my reading materials until he’d call. That usually didn’t take long. Then, he’d pick me up outside the dorm and we’d head out to eat or to his place. On the nights in which he had to get his work done, I stayed in my dorm room and did my own work. I maintained my good grades because when I wasn’t with him, studying was all I did. I had no need for anything else. No need to force myself to head out to some club, meeting or coffee bar to feel as if I was making a lame stab at socialization. No need to wander through the Square alone, looking at everyone else having fun and wondering how I could join in. I had one person who cared about me and wanted to hear my thoughts, and that was all I needed.
The winter was a snowy swirl of schoolwork, fireplaces and him.
As for the physical part, I never got the hang of the Main Event, which seemed to be uncomfortable and ended really quickly, but I didn’t care because everything else was great. On weekends, we drove all over Massachusetts, through colonial towns and historic villages and country roads, stopping for cider or chowder or pie. We walked along the harbor hand in hand, talking about places we could travel to, about places we’d never been and places we’d dreamed of as kids. At dinner in a waterfront restaurant, I’d watch the reflections of orange lights shimmering in the harbor, and he would reach across the table, dunk his roll in my bisque, and ask me if he should put this or that book on the syllabus for next semester. I couldn’t believe I was affecting what his next semester classes would be reading, or that he considered me intelligent enough to offer suggestions. But he always listened closely to what I said and either nodded or gave me a new perspective. It felt wonderful.
Each of us should have the feeling, even if only for once in our life, of having someone so entranced by us that every inconsequential thing about us becomes an object of fascination. Any old piece of debris that’s poking around in our soul can be offered up for voracious consumption.
David and I commiserated on the perils of being smart, of thinking too much. One time, we were driving through a small town, the gray-brown branches of naked trees crossed above us like swords, and I told him the story of how, for a few months in seventh grade, I couldn’t sneeze.
“It started out of nowhere,” I said. “I was in social studies in seventh grade, and I was about to sneeze, and then I thought about it, and I couldn’t. The sneeze got all bottled up under the bridge
