Stay Up With Me Page 4

  Timkin took a long sip of what he hoped was his own drink, then held the glass aloft. Someone cut the music; they were waiting for the host to speak.

  “To Amy!” he called out to everyone he could see. “To Amy!” a chorus of them yelled back, and if this was only the start of the darkest part of his life, Timkin marveled at what he’d already been able to make of it.

  Her Words

  My son, Rajiv, is sleeping with a student from my Dante class. I had made the poor decision of inviting the twelve of them to my house—always perilous—always the chance of someone stumbling on an old letter or journal entry, or some embarrassing laundry or rotted piece of fruit in the refrigerator. And then my son started talking to Rachel Weisman, the slender, dark-haired junior from Santa Barbara, California, with the forthright eyes and the full-lipped mouth, who’d been three times to my office hours. And as I chatted with the rest of the class I kept the two of them in the corner of my awareness. My son has a lot of what I wished for when I was a young man growing up in Bombay. He is well read, and well bred to a point. He is a winning conversationalist, and there are friends of mine who can’t believe the eloquent sentences that come forth from his lips, on literature or politics—at that age. “What sort of food do you feed him?” my colleague Jan McAdam asked me. Which had to do, I can only presume, with Jan’s own overheated feelings for Rajiv. So I might have been wiser to have my class over—if I was to have them over—on a night when my son was out at a baseball game (though he doesn’t go to ball games), or at the alternative newspaper where he serves as arts editor, or at the movies. But one thing led to another, as things do, and he was, well, sleeping with this girl.

  They became an item, which puts me in a difficult position, as you might imagine. It isn’t that I have another in mind for him, or that I believe he has made a poor choice. It’s just that—here’s the issue—each day when I walked in the classroom to teach, I had to pretend that I hadn’t just seen this Rachel Weisman walking from the shower in just a towel, her long hair wet, and her shoulders gleaming with little beads of water on them, and I had to pretend Rachel Weisman hadn’t spent the night within my walls, and that I hadn’t heard my son and Rachel Weisman making love, which I did, though I sometimes covered my head with two pillows nearly to the point of suffocation.

  I am not stuffy or uptight about these matters. We are in America after all, and this sort of activity goes on. Remember, if you will, that I am in the position of grading her. There are no rules against this, but there probably should be. Our house is relatively small, which compounds the problem. At first she was like a ghost I caught only traces of but never directly encountered. But that began to change, and she became increasingly brazen. After two weeks of their sleepovers, I was reading in bed, which is one of my greatest pleasures, and I’d forgotten to close the door and when I looked up at the entryway, Rachel Weisman was standing there watching me. She had on one of Rajiv’s V-neck undershirts and a wraparound skirt worn low enough to expose the black waistband of her underwear, which I did not care to see. Her hair was tied back behind her head, her pale freckled arms folded before her.

  “Good book?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What is it?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Just curious.”

  “It’s a biography. Of Lawrence.”

  She seemed to be taking in this information and deciding something.

  “I like Lawrence,” she said.

  Her expressions were at once self-assured and desirous of affirmation. She had lived more than I knew, she seemed to be saying. I feared she was looking at my thinning hair, or the birthmark below my right eye that strangers often mistook for a terrible burn.

  “Especially the stories,” she said.

  “Well, good night then,” I said, and in my own house I gently closed my door.

  When she saw me in the hallways at school, she would stop me to ask personal things such as, “Did you sleep okay, Mr. Singh?” Or “How’d you like the veggie calzone?”

  Once, after class and within earshot of another student, she commented that the heat had stopped working halfway through the night, and she had nearly frozen in the too-thin quilt.

  I took her aside. “Do you know how that sounds?” I asked. And she smiled, conspiratorially, as though we two were putting one over on everyone else. “I get it,” she said, but I only felt worse.

  A few nights later I told Rajiv that I didn’t mind them dating, though I did, but that I’d prefer it if she didn’t sleep over. “As if,” he said. “It’s my house too.”

  My son had begun in the last year to wear modish sideburns, as well as a cluster of beads along a leather strap tied around his neck, like an insouciant surfer, though we live more than two hundred miles from the nearest beach. His T-shirt had a picture of a chimpanzee with President Bush’s face.

  “But I’m her teacher,” I said.

  “So.”

  “You don’t see anything strange about that?”

  “Not really.”

  It is at times like this that I wonder if it is possible to dislike your offspring, whether the rule about love holds for every father and son. Because I do not like his selfishness when it comes to me.

  The fact that his mother and I have been separated for two years now has made me more pliable and then more resentful. It used to be that I set rules and enforced them. Here I’ve let him dictate matters, and so the matter of Rachel Weisman has been closed. She will sleep in our house and I will be uncomfortable.

  The next thing that happened was that Rachel started missing classes. She’s very smart, but she’d miss a class and she’d make an excuse but where she’d been was at my house, in bed with my son.

  I can’t say for sure they were in bed, but I’d bet good money on it. I would bet one of our cars on it, the six-year-old Volvo. I wondered what the other students thought, and what they knew.

  After five missed classes, I told Rachel at dinner she was in danger of failing. And she said she would return, she’d been sick, and she had been working hard on her midterm paper.

  “It’s really good,” my son said. “It’s one of the best papers I’ve ever read.”

  “I won’t miss another class,” she said, but then she giggled, because my son must have pinched her under the table. She was dressed in a football shirt I’d passed down to Rajiv.

  “If you miss many more, I’ll have no choice,” I said.

  “I won’t miss one,” she said.

  “Tough guy,” my son said, when Rachel carried their dishes into the kitchen.

  Every once in a while we have these cowboy confrontations.

  “Try me,” I said.

  “I just might,” he said.

  “What’s this about?” Rachel said as she walked back in the room.

  Rajiv apologized to me later that night. He said he agreed it was unorthodox. He hadn’t planned on dating one of my students, but then I was the one who’d invited them all over. And he had been lonely before that. I told him that surprised me, but it shouldn’t have. Away from view, Rajiv could be introverted and remote, as I too had been at twenty-three, though he masks this publicly with his brash defiance.

  There was a chance down the line he and Rachel Weisman might want to get an apartment together, he said, and “give this thing a try.”

  I think he imagined that would comfort me, but it had the opposite effect. Now in class I was having trouble concentrating on anything other than Rachel Weisman. The other students must have picked this up. I rarely made eye contact with Rachel and hardly ever called on her even though she raised her hand more than anyone else. When she spoke I addressed my response to the class as a whole. In retrospect this was both unkind and stupid because it didn’t hide anything and rather made our relationship seem like something it wasn’t.

  One day after class I saw her walk off into the woods behind school with another boy from my class. I became jealous on behalf of R
ajiv.

  The next class I asked both of them many questions to see if she’d done the reading. She had, but not carefully. I exposed the gaps in her knowledge, and each time I could see her growing angrier, and I thought my son would probably hear about this.

  I chose not to care. But I did begin to feel as though I were in the middle of a complicated love affair, and indeed one night I dreamt that she was sleeping in my bed and that my son was teaching and that I was another student in my son’s class. I began to have other erotic dreams about Rachel Weisman, and I stopped calling on her altogether, or even acknowledging her existence. At home I mostly ignored her as well and this made her visibly upset. One day as I walked to my car I was aware of her watching me, following me, though I never turned to look. As I drove off I thought I heard someone say, “Dick,” though it might have been my imagination.

  During these weeks I felt volatile in the manner of a hormonally ravaged adolescent. I became acutely aware of every action that occurred in my house, all the arrivals and departures, movie rentals, and book borrowing from my library, the extra garments in Rajiv’s closet and the hair and makeup items in the bathroom that made me unbearably nostalgic for the presence of a woman, the hushed and cheerless late-night phone conversations to a female voice in a distant time zone (805 area code), the in-room meals and showers and lovemaking, of which there was decidedly less these days. I wondered whether Rachel had a house key and so to test that fact I double bolted the pantry door—Rachel’s entryway of choice—one night when she was studying late at the library, then an hour later unbolted it to avoid seeming childish.

  I sensed (or was I hoping?) there was some friction between Rachel and Rajiv, though I never observed any cross words between them, and twice heard them talk about wanting to get their own apartment where they could have some privacy.

  On the day before spring break, she handed me a paper on Canto 5 of The Inferno. I had taken a stack of papers over to the dark and woody café a block north of the campus where I like to go to hide away from the world. The first seven or eight essays I read were indistinguishable, each with a glimmer or two of earnest intelligence, but predominated by overbaked platitudes. When I got to Rachel Weisman’s paper, I began to slow down to the point where I was rereading for the sheer pleasure of encountering her words again. The ideas were exciting, and the sentences exceedingly lucid, even mesmerizing. It didn’t matter to me that it was substantially shorter than what I’d asked for. I actually preferred it. I read a few of the paragraphs aloud, and then it struck me that something was off about them.

  At first I couldn’t tell what, and then I recognized that Rajiv had written the paper. It was in his vocabulary, and it reflected closely his thinking. But then I considered, Wasn’t it perfectly possible and even likely for them to talk about the subject? And wouldn’t she hear some of his ideas and agree with them, and then be unable to avoid them for purposes of forming her own thesis?

  I simply heard Rajiv’s tenor voice as I read it, and when I tried to hear hers, the voice wouldn’t come forth. I considered simply asking her to write a different paper, but her response, I knew, would be justifiable outrage. They would both hate me.

  The bottom line is I accepted Rachel’s paper, but I only gave her a B. She stormed—or maybe just walked—into my office saying she’d never once in her life gotten a B for a grade; that her worse mark had been a B+. I said: “There’s always a first time, isn’t there?”

  Somehow that came out more, well, sexual than I wanted it to, and I realized that we were standing quite close at the time, and I backed away.

  She was studying my birthmark again, or maybe my eyes.

  “He’s right about you, isn’t he?” Rachel said.

  She held her mouth in an ill-mannered smirk.

  I said, No, Rajiv wasn’t likely to be right about me. There was much about me my son didn’t know but that was not a conversation I felt like having with a student. The paper was good but I had questions as to its authenticity, I said. She could write an addendum, or she could write a paper on how she’d arrived at her ideas, and I’d certainly have a look.

  I thought that afternoon and evening about that line—He’s right about you. And I tried to think of what that might mean. I have never done anything to compromise my position as tenured professor at a first-rate liberal arts college. And even if I had, I couldn’t imagine why my son would report such a thing.

  I began to believe that Rachel might bring the matter up with a dean and so I mentally prepared for such a confrontation.

  Had my door been ajar?

  “It was,” I said in practice.

  Did I have any burning reasons for questioning the authenticity of the paper, and was there any reason I had to stand virtually on top of her while I had been having this discussion?

  “I wasn’t on top of her, and the paper simply didn’t sound like her.”

  And how was it that she knew so much about the inside of my home?

  “What did she say about it?”

  “What did you mean by there’s always a first time?” the dean would ask me.

  “We were talking of her grade,” I would say.

  “You were flirting with her while you were talking of her grade?”

  “She’s sleeping with my son,” I would say.

  “Well, how did that happen?” he would then ask, and I’d have to say, “They met at my house.”

  “Did it occur to you that that wasn’t a good idea?”

  “How can you stop a couple of horny kids?”

  I actually said this aloud.

  “It would be best if you refrained from describing a student under your supervision as horny,” the dean would say.

  “I’ve done nothing,” I’d say, but neither of us would believe that was true.

  But it never came to that. Ultimately I gave her an A.

  Rachel stopped by my room the night after I’d changed her grade, again while I was reading in bed. I had on my pajamas and a robe.

  “What the hell was that for?” she said, which is a fairly inappropriate way to talk to your professor. “I didn’t deserve an A.”

  She was out of breath and jittery. My son was working late at the newspaper.

  “I’d rather not have this conversation in my bedroom if that’s okay, and anyhow I thought you said you deserved an A?”

  “I deserved an A minus,” she said. “I only want what I deserve.”

  “You’re getting an A.”

  “There were no comments on it.”

  I noticed that one of her bottom teeth was chipped, her eyes moist and reddened. I wondered about her mental health.

  “Your grade was my comment,” I said.

  She shook her head in disgust.

  “That’s so typical of you.”

  “What do you know about me? How do you know what’s typical?” I tried to relax my face; to understand that the world didn’t need to fall apart, but it felt like it was, all my rage and sadness surrounding the divorce, and my problems at the college, and the neighbors had converged within me. “None of this is typical.”

  She was too close to me right then. I wanted her to leave. I wanted my son to get back home.

  “I bet I remind you of her,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Why did she leave you anyhow?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She smiled cruelly. “I bet I know.”

  “I’d rather not hear your theories, Ms. Weisman. They’re not original enough, and in fact I’d rather if you didn’t continue to live here with us. This isn’t how I’d like to live.”

  “Such passion. Such unbridled warmth.”

  “I’ve got a lot of warmth for those in my life who merit it, but I’ve really had enough of this if that’s okay with you.”

  She looked angry, and then sad.

  “You know, Mr. Singh . . . I really don’t like it when you ignore me in class. It’s very cruel. And it’s really not fair. I
’m a good student, one of your best. I tried for two years to get into your course, you know. It isn’t fair to ignore me.”

  “Did you write it?” I asked. “Tell me the truth.”

  “Who cares?”

  “I do for one. The university does for another. You know you can get kicked out for something like this.”

  She shook her head in exasperation.

  “Of course I wrote it. He never even read it. He just made a big deal about it because he wanted you to take an interest.”

  We didn’t see Rachel for two weeks after that, not at home anyhow. She sat in the back of class and never raised her hand. She did all the work, and she left immediately afterward. She and Rajiv were in a holding pattern for now, trying to figure out what was next.

  He didn’t hold me responsible, he said. They had their own issues. I felt as though I’d destroyed something, but at the same time I felt as though a burden had been lifted.

  A week before the end of school the dean—the one I’d imagined Rachel speaking to—stopped into my office to say that Rachel Weisman was going back to California. She wanted to send her final paper in from there. And she would do any homework I requested but her father had died, and she wanted to be with her mother, the dean said. Her father’s health had been deteriorating for a long time. He’d had two strokes, the last one incapacitating. He’d been a sculptor and photographer, and they’d had a rocky relationship. This last part Rajiv told me.

  “She will have the whole summer as her deadline,” I said, and the dean nodded grimly, and somewhat paternally. I wondered if he had more to say, but he didn’t and without further incident took his leave.