“Now, what is your question, Ms. Paige?”
“Well,” she said. Two syllables. “You’ve been telling us about Sartre, how he believed in people’s ability”—here she checked her notes—“‘to choose their own essence.’ But I was wondering …” She glanced around, aware now of the crowd watching her, the gaze of six hundred eyes in the faces of three hundred honor students and valedictorians, each with an exceptional talent that had led them to this university, this classroom. “I was wondering if you, you know, think it’s a good play.”
For a reason wholly unclear to me, the lecture hall erupted in laughter. The professor let this go for a moment, then began to rap his knuckles on the podium until the room quieted again.
“Would you mind if I turned the question back to you, Ms. Paige?” He removed his glasses and narrowed his gaze. “Do you think No Exit is a good play?”
“Me? Actually, I loved it.” She smiled again, then cut it short. “But that’s my question. I mean, when Garcin chooses to stay in that room with those awful people, rather than leave hell, his failure is in needing their judgment. That’s his big flaw, isn’t it?”
“One could reasonably make such an argument.”
“But do you think Garcin maybe represents Sartre himself, who as a writer had no choice but to rely on others’ judgment? You know, his critics and audiences?” She shrugged. “It just seems like an irony we haven’t talked about, and I wondered what you thought.”
No laughter this time. Right from the start, I felt there was something a little cinematic about life at Princeton—the Gothic buildings, the manicured grounds, the students and professors who knew their roles and played them well. Sitting in this lecture hall, carved gargoyles eyeing me from the ceiling at all four corners, I imagined this moment as the film’s turning point. Cue the soundtrack, the moment of emotional release where the class gains newfound respect for the student in the front row with brains and beauty both. And the professor—cue that smile of his, thus far concealed and so all the more surprising for its easy warmth, a smile that reveals the man’s firm exterior as but the shell of an egg that, once cracked, gladly spills its sunny yolk.
His smile, however, never made it beyond my imagination’s private screening.
“The last time I checked,” Rinehart said, with all the kindness of an electric eel, “this class runs exactly fifty minutes. Isn’t that right, Ms. Paige?”
She nodded, her own gorgeous smile suddenly nowhere in sight.
“Yes. That is right. And so our brief banter, yours and mine, has now deprived the class of a full minute. Multiply that by the three hundred or so of your fellow young scholars, and that’s approximately five collective hours of time that we’ll never see again. Now then”—he placed the glasses back on his nose—“shall I return to the lecture I’ve taken the time to prepare?”
Eventually, people stopped looking at her and began to set down in their notebooks our professor’s immeasurable wisdom. Jeffrey, too, opened his notebook to a fresh page and began to write. Seconds later, he slid the notebook over to me.
In large letters it read, “I’m in love.”
You’re not alone, I thought. My classmates might have laughed at first, but they weren’t heartless. Dallas would fare just fine in the stories told tonight at dinner tables across campus.
But after class, Jeffrey did what others didn’t. He introduced himself. I left through a side door, giving him space. Letting the rejection—for how could it be otherwise?—happen where I wouldn’t see. An hour later, the pounding on my dorm room door woke me from a perfect nap.
“Me and Dallas,” he said, breathless, as if he’d been running. “We have a date later.”
“Really?” I was incredibly impressed. “Where?”
“We’re going to the library to study.”
I laughed. “I’m not sure that counts as a date.”
“No, Will—we’re meeting in the reserve room.”
The reserve room was the one place in Firestone Library where quiet talk was permitted. And they let you in with coffee.
“I stand corrected,” I said.
I was only kidding, but his face lit up. “She’s brilliant, you know. I can tell. And that accent … Oh my god. Okay, buddy, I’ll see you later.” He turned to leave.
“See you later,” I said, still half dazed from my nap. “Say hi to Dallas for me.”
He laughed and turned toward me again. “By the way, her name’s Sara.”
By that evening, he’d come down from his high.
“She actually wanted to study,” he told us in the cafeteria. We were eating that night with Nolan, my roommate. He’d broken it off with his sophomore. Now that he was spending more time in the room, we’d gotten to be friendly.