The One In My Heart

“All the salacious details? Suuure,” he drawled, his voice full of mischief. “Let’s see. It started when I was sixteen. I was in Spain for a semester as an exchange student. My host mom was a professor at the University of Salamanca, and one of her colleagues was a gentleman by the name of José Luis Dominguez Calderón.”


“You say that name with a lot of relish,” I told him. “A lot of villainous relish.”

“You’ll see why.” He grinned. “One day my host parents invited Professor Dominguez and his girlfriend to dinner. The girlfriend was American. I missed speaking English, so I monopolized her that evening.”

“How old was she?”

“Thirty-eight.”

“So she was twenty-two, twenty-three at the time?”

“No, she was thirty-eight.”

My jaw fell. “No.”

“You’re thirty-two. You think in six years you’ll be of absolutely no interest to teenage boys?”

Come to think of it, some of the freshmen I taught were still teenagers. And from time to time one would develop a crush and visit my office hours with unwarranted frequency. But at least a nineteen-year-old was an adult. A sixteen-year-old was a minor.

“Besides,” he continued, “she was hot, and she didn’t look a day over twenty-six.”

I screwed up my face. “Did she pounce on you, cougar-style?”

I could only hope that in a few years I wouldn’t be going after tenth graders.

“No, not really. I hit on her.”

“What?!”

Bennett laughed. “Come on, Professor. I told you she was hot. Which part of that didn’t you understand?”

“But she was old enough to be your mother. And didn’t you say she had a boyfriend?”

“I was an obnoxious kid who didn’t see a fifty-year-old boyfriend as any kind of obstacle.”

I blinked. “Just how obnoxious were you?”

“Let’s see. When I was fourteen, I was pissed at my dad for something—I can’t even remember what now—so I paid a hacker friend to engineer a fake takeover bid for one of the family holdings, making it look as if someone behind an anonymous entity in Grand Cayman was trying to get a controlling share. Gave Dad heartburn for weeks.”

“That was obnoxious. But she was a grown woman. You could hit on her all you want—how did you get her to want to be with you?”

“Isn’t that simple? I was hot too.”

“Eww.”

He glanced at me askance. “You don’t think I’m hot?”

“That’s different. It’s not creepy for me to consider you hot.”

“If it will make your puritanical soul feel better, she didn’t think I was hot—at least not in the beginning. I called her a few days after the dinner and asked if she wouldn’t mind showing a poor, homesick kid around Salamanca. She agreed—because she was nice, not because she wanted to molest me.

“We spent the whole day together in the old city, had lunch and dinner. José Luis was livid and they had a fight over me—he saw what I was up to but she didn’t. Not at all. To get back at him, she asked me if I wanted to see some of the countryside too. So of course I exploited their rift for all it was worth.”

A sixteen-year-old who knew how to exploit the rift between a thirty-eight-year-old and a fifty-year-old? “That’s freaking scary.”

“I told you I was obnoxious.”

“So you just wormed your way into her heart?”

“More like I wormed my way into her bed at first.”

We were walking through the European halls. The Virgin Mary we passed looked quite constipated. In fact, an entire row of Virgin Marys were stiff with disapproval. “Why do I feel that I might be led away in handcuffs if I listen to any more of your story?”

“Hey, you asked for salacious details.”

“You were sixteen. That was illegal. She should have gone to jail for statutory rape.”

“The thought crossed my parents’ mind when they found out, but I was over the age of consent in Spain. They shipped me off to Eton instead, away from her reach.”

“But she still got through to you somehow?”

“No. We didn’t see each other for sixteen months. We met in online chat rooms. We wrote actual letters. I called her from phone booths with calling cards—remember those?—and waited for my eighteenth birthday.”

“Just waited chastely?”

He shrugged. “I was in love.”

My heart recoiled against an abrupt stab of pain. “What did your parents make of all this?”

“They were hoping the separation would do the trick. But the day I turned eighteen, I walked out of Eton and flew to California, where she was based.”

“And your parents just let you go?”

“No, they chased me to Berkeley and it was ugly. But since I was already eighteen they couldn’t do anything. Eventually they left.” His voice turned somber. “I haven’t seen them since—except once, at O’Hare. I don’t think they saw me.”

“Is that why you moved back here, so you could be part of the tribe again?”

He glanced at a painting we were passing, which happened to be a family portrait, three rosy children clambering over an elegant, serene mother. “If I said yes, it would be the first time I admitted it to anyone.”