I had been in several of Dr. Byrne’s classes by the time I met James, at the end of 2009. At this stage in Dr. Byrne’s career he was so popular that he was allowed to have any stipulations he wanted for his seminar group, and everyone who signed up was asked to write an essay about any aspect of the Victorian sensibility that was still present in culture today. The group would run from January to April, my final term of university. There were only fifteen places, and something like 150 of us had tried to sign up. I would be surprised if even twenty people wrote the essay.
I received an email to meet him at his office, which was situated in a department-owned house on the college road. This sounds seedy. Are all colleges like this? Faculty members being outsourced to tiny little houses that smelled of old radiators? Anyway, he wanted to discuss the essay I had written. It was very exciting for me. Sitting in his pokey little office, I thought what I always do when I’m in a small room with a man I’m not related to, which is: Are we gonna fuck?
I don’t know why I think this. It’s never happened. I’ve had one-night stands, of course, but they were always an extension of a date or a night out. But I’ve never been in a lift, or a stockroom, or in library stacks with a random man and then suddenly found myself wrapped in his arms. Despite this, I am always poised for it to happen. I could be standing next to a seventy-year-old man in a lift and think: I hope he doesn’t want to have sex; I’m still on my period.
Dr. Byrne was obviously different: I really did want to have sex with him. It wasn’t just that he was a random man in a small room. I had been nursing a quiet crush on him since my first year, a crush I only kept private because of how annoyingly obvious it seemed. I didn’t really talk to the girls in my year but I was pretty sure we were all hoping to fuck Dr. Byrne. He was huge, and passionate, and he was the only man under fifty in the English department.
Most tantalisingly of all—oh my God—he had a wife. But not just that.
That wife had been a student.
Despite being so uninvolved with college, I was very aware of the situation with Dr. Byrne’s wife. Crushes are like that. No matter how checked-out you are, there’s always one microphone left switched on, and it only records information about your desire. He and the wife had been married four years, had met six years ago. When she was an undergrad? We counted on our fingers. No, came the answer. She had been a master’s student. She had been well into her twenties. This was less good, but still exciting. It proved it could happen.
So I sat in the little room and looked at his face. He had what James would later call “baby dinosaur features.” The broad brow, wide nose, heavy-lidded eyes all came together and made you think of a brachiosaurus lazily eating leaves out of a tree.
“Right,” he said. “Rachel Murray.”
He was reading my name off my essay paper, then looked up and smiled, as if he were glad to finally be putting a name to a face. I had been in four of his modules by that point.
“Hello,” I said, motioning to close the door behind me.
“No, no, leave it open,” he said. “Have a seat.”
I must have looked agitated. I have a thing about sitting in rooms with the door open. It makes me fidget. Were you born in a barn? etc.
“We have to keep it open,” he said absently. “In case I try to pounce on you.”
I looked at him, shocked. He did not bother to meet my gaze.
“It’s unfortunately rather common at third-level education,” he said gravely, and I thought, Don’t kid a kidder; I know how you met your wife. “Anyway. Pyjamas. Explain your notion.”
“I’ve written it in the essay,” I said.
“I know you have, but I want to hear you explain it. I want good chatters in my group. Go on.”
I had written an essay about pyjamas, based on the idea that in the Victorian period young women started buying negligees from France for their bridal trousseau. It had caused a great moral panic about what young brides were doing in bed with their husbands, and whether they were adopting cheap whore’s tricks. I related this to modern sensibilities, because at the time there were a lot of Daily Mail headlines about women wearing pyjamas to the supermarket. Morality and pyjamas. I felt quite clever about it. But explaining this back to Fred Byrne, I wondered if writing the essay was the cheap whore’s trick. It was all so embarrassing and intimate, talking about garter belts and lace.
“And really,” I said, my throat dry, “the design of Victorian undergarments would go on and be part of more cultural movements. Like the flappers. Their outfits were just slips, really, and this thing of underwear as outerwear, it was like…it was a signifier, of the growing independent female population in urban areas. The private made public.”
It went on like this for a while. Signs and signifiers. He started to glaze slightly, the way a lot of clever men do when the discussion is getting altogether too feminine, too fussy, and too preoccupied with bits of lace.
“Why aren’t you doing film studies, if you’re so into all this? Or fashion?”
I should have said something twee, like, Because I simply love the novel, but I knew this would not truck with him.
“English feels like a better way of keeping your options open. There are no jobs in film or fashion.”
“Have you heard the news?” He smiled. “There are no jobs anywhere.”
“No,” I reasoned, “but it feels like the whole world is filled with bits of text, doesn’t it? Brochures and signs and things. Something is bound to come up.”
“Brochures and signs and things. And that’s why you’re pursuing an English degree?”
I didn’t know what to say. I chose English, originally, because I liked to read. But even then what I liked most about reading was that I was good at it. I had taken to it quite quickly as a child. In the absence of any other discernible gift, it seemed like a fine thing to pursue, if only to receive more praise.
There was a knock on the open door, and I turned around to see another girl waiting to discuss her essay and potentially to be fucked by Dr. Byrne. Don’t bother, I wanted to say.
I got an email the next day to say that he was delighted to welcome me to the seminar class. It was a form letter, my name just filled in at the top, and no personalised sign-off or PS whatsoever.
I printed it off, though. I still have it somewhere.
5
ON 14 JANUARY 2010, Jonathan dumped me outside the Crawford Art Gallery with the explanation that we were growing apart. I asked him how. He murmured something about how I “seemed fake” and then bounded off towards Patrick’s Street before I could ask him what that meant.
Of course, I now know what that meant. I was living with James, working with James, and talking like James. I can’t really hold it against Jonathan: I was being extremely annoying. The thing that drove him the most crazy was that I was now obsessed with describing whatever situation I was currently in as though it were a movie or a TV show.
Some sample dialogue.
Jonathan: I think it might rain.
Rachel: Are you sure?
Jonathan: The forecast said rain.
(Beat)
Jonathan: (looking out the window) I think it’s starting to rain. Maybe we should stay in.
Rachel: (giddy) I feel like I’m in a French film and we’re two lovers who are trying to will it to rain so we can stay tangled in ze sheets.
(Silence)
Rachel: Ah, monsieur, doesn’t ze sky herself want us to stay indoors? Enjoy ze ways of ze flesh, ah-haw-haw-haw?