In this equation, the variable of Y could be a producer, a gas station manager, the Sun King. On more than one occasion, he has been the president of the United States. X could be his employee, his stepdaughter, a wild plot of land, but he must believe that X is his. Most often, X is human. X is not always female. X always wants to be seen, and Y always wants to see her, or him, or them, or it. In the process, they often discover that Y wants to be seen, too. It has happened before—in rental video stores, churches, and meat lockers. It will happen again.
This time, Y is a man named James Yager, a music teacher at St. Philomena, the only private high school in Vacca Vale. Like many high school music teachers, James never wanted to be a high school music teacher. He accepted the job as a consolation lifestyle when both his band and the health of his mother failed, at which point his future in Vacca Vale ossified. He regularly uploads home-recorded music under the name Vu. Cares for students but not for pedagogy. Most call him by his first name. He’s forty-two, handsome in a sleepy sort of way, sometimes brilliant and often depressed. The Cool Teacher.
This time, X is a seventeen-year-old named Tiffany Watkins. Only a junior and she’s already seen too much. Bleached hair, wraithlike complexion, bad posture. Wide-set eyes. Panoramic vision suited for prey. Tiffany is insecure, cerebral, and enraged. Pretty in an extraterrestrial sort of way. Addicted to learning because it distracts her from the hostility of her consciousness; she has one of those brains that attacks itself unless it’s completing a difficult task. Her fellow students live in the suburbs and spend their lunches complaining about the cruises that their mothers foist upon them. They exchange How My Parents Surprised Me with My First Brand-New Car stories and wear coats from luxury outdoor brands, as though driving to high school is an extreme sport. They are members of a decaying aristocracy, descendants of Zorn money, increasingly pointless but lousy with trust funds. They remind Tiffany of the royal family. The students smelled like dryer sheets—every last one of them. Tiffany won a coveted scholarship to attend St. Philomena’s and spends her lunches in the library, hunched over homework. The teachers like her because she is brainy and tragic. When discussing her among themselves, they call her “less fortunate,” “at risk,” “atypical,” and “gifted.” Her essays, although polluted with typos, frequently elicit suspicion of plagiarism: how could such a quiet, luckless girl produce such compelling, sophisticated arguments? With all that going on at home? Reverently, the teachers cite her GPA and standardized test scores. She is special, they say. Still, they keep her at a distance, and she returns the courtesy.
As a civilian, Tiffany buys her clothes at the thrift store, always a size too big. At Philomena’s, she wears a uniform. The school had to pay for hers, and when she told the dean of student formation what size she wanted, he raised his eyebrows but did not object. The school, like its entire Catholic county, considers modesty a young woman’s most admirable virtue.
One winter morning, between passing periods, the English teacher delivers Tiffany to James’s music room. “She needs to act,” announces the English teacher. “You should have heard her reading Perdita just now.”
James looks up from his desk to see a scrawny girl in oversized clothes. Her pale skin reminds him of the glow-in-the dark polymer clay that he buys for his children. You bake it—the clay. James coughs. As soon as he sees Tiffany, he wants to get away from her.
Tiffany picks a cuticle. As soon as she sees James, she wants to touch the stubble on his chin, taste his coffee, try on his glasses. She blushes.
“Okay,” says James impassively. “Come to auditions on Thursday.” He’s directing the spring play: a dark dystopian comedy about four teenagers who worship a mannequin. It was written by an obscure, multidisciplinary artist who drowned herself in 1923.
Tiffany gets the lead.
It’s true that she is a volcanic actress. She has a gift for performance, reaction, and imitation—instincts cultivated by a childhood of unpredictable caregivers. But it’s the inhuman quality of Tiffany that entrances James most: she is cold and faraway. Otherworldly. Astral.
It’s true that James is a charismatic teacher, too big for his tank. But it’s the extra-human quality of James that entrances Tiffany most. He is burning and loud and there, right there. He is beloved, he is sexy in his insomnia, he looks famous if you squint. She can see his pulse in his neck. She can tell that his front incisor is fake. She can reach out and touch him if she wants. She wants. She doesn’t.
It goes like this: a week into rehearsals, Tiffany starts smiling too long at James, daring him to smile back because he is the only person alive that she wants to touch. One evening, she tells a joke that makes him laugh himself breathless, and this is their first mutual shot of serotonin. It’s clear to her that he would be happier in a coastal city. It’s clear to him that she would be happier in a different species. By December, it is clear to both variables that each could capsize the other.
For weeks, other students in the play covet the attention that James reserves for Tiffany, but they temper their suspicion. They know her story. Pity her. Assume that he does, too.
The beginning of James and Tiffany is math, while the ending between James and his wife is erasure. Meg spends more and more weekends at her parents’ house with the kids, justifying her absence by reminding him that Lillian and George could die at any moment.
“This is our last chance,” she says, and James’s heartbeat races.
“For what?” he asks.
“For the kids to build a relationship with their grandparents,” she says. “You can’t come, obviously.”
Her parents hate him. James assumes the character mutation that has only become legible to him recently must have been apparent to them all along. His own parents are dead.
Tiffany and James begin for months, but James and Meg have been ending for years. Lately their fights have increased in frequency and duration, paralleling the hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires around the world. James’s children sustain a series of minor emotional earthquakes that they do not have the vocabulary to describe. They refuse their luxury vegan desserts. They grow fussy at bedtime. They scratch at their tags. Emma, age eight, develops the unnerving habit of studying her father for a long time before asking, “Do I know you?” Then she laughs.
At St. Philomena, James becomes Tiffany’s mentor. It’s nice to have a word for it. He coaches her with special attention and tongue twisters in rehearsals. She is brilliant, he tells her. She is exceptional and singular. Over time, he builds validation in her body like a ship in a bottle. He asks her to stay late, demands that she practice tiring mental exercises to excavate her character. They idle long after the school floods with the odor of fish guts, a gift from the dog food factory across the street. The factory pauses production during school hours and restarts after three in the afternoon—an agreement between St. Philomena High School and Daydream Pet Chow that took five years to reach. After the last students leave, carpooling to their gated communities, Tiffany asks James: “Is it unusual for a dying city to have suburbs?”
“No,” he replies. “That’s how they die.”
“I guess the dentists have to live somewhere.”
Which makes him laugh, which makes her laugh, their pleasure locked in a positive feedback loop until she feels like her head will pop off and champagne will spill forth, out of her body, into the school.
Another day, alone in the music room, James asks Tiffany what she fears most. Tiffany finds it neurologically impossible to lie to him. It’s all predetermined until a principle wrestles down a feeling. “Infinite loneliness,” she tells him. “That’s what I fear most.” It sounds false when she says it out loud, but it’s the truest thing about her.
James and his troupe of gloomy, dramatic teenagers have a five-hundred-dollar budget, no functional sound system, no costume designer, no understudies. But they rehearse as though competing for a Tony.
The other students watch Tiffany and James warily. Text each other about it.
James begins to contact Tiffany outside of rehearsal. Emails her articles, clips, music, advice, misspellings. Gives her personalized assignments: Wong Kar-wai, Samira Makhmalbaf, Rungano Nyoni, Károly Makk, Bernardo Bertolucci, Denis Villeneuve, Jean-Luc Godard, Chetan Anand, Viêt Linh. He gives her his log-in information for streaming services and reimburses her for video rentals. An eager student, she watches every film he recommends with a speeding pulse and a surging body temperature. The films leave her catatonic. One makes her cry every night for a week.
When no one else is listening, Tiffany tells James that she never knew films could tell the truth. She tells him that she loves Paradise Lost. She tells him he’s good at his job. She tells him loneliness is an occupational hazard of consciousness. She tells him she hasn’t had it so easy. He tells her to speak up.