I looked up the baseball cards on eBay and found they weren’t worth much so I gave them to the chair of the English department to mail back to him. Perhaps it might mean something, my gesture of goodwill.
My students roam about, taking pictures to send to their mothers and aunts, the women who buy his books and have made him so rich he can afford to donate his house and land to the university. They take pictures of the staircase, the carpets. They take pictures out the windows.
“I scare you,” I say to the boy. His skin turns red and splotchy. It is remarkable, his skin, a defect, but so pretty. I like people whose insecurities are obvious, when I don’t have to pull them out of them.
“I’m not scared of anything,” he says, taking a slug of his beer. He’s from one of the O states—Ohio or Oklahoma—either way, it means nothing to me. Earlier he touched the side of the house and talked about the grain of wood. He has come here for graduate school and seems to have no idea how he got to this place or why; he wears blazers and collared shirts as if he might learn by dressing the part but it only makes him stand out more.
I imagine unbuttoning his too-tight pants, taking him upstairs to my bedroom. The other students listening as they eat slices of pizza. They say on your deathbed you only regret the things you didn’t do and I remember a time when this was the case, when I could picture myself alone in a hospital room and there was nothing I would take back, nothing I would do differently.
The boy is unfailingly late to every class, and every time, he is sorry. During break, he has to run to Starbucks for coffee and sometimes there’s a long line—totally out of his control. There are other issues as well: he talks too much; he has a lot of opinions and I almost never agree with any of them but I nod and make neutral-sounding noises while admiring the way he has styled his hair, his nose. And his skin, I love his skin, how it betrays him. I play mediator between him and the other person in class—a very pretty but emaciated young woman who constantly talks about food—who also has strong opinions, and marvel over the fact that they can be so passionate, because I, too, believe I am right, that everyone who disagrees with me is wrong.
It hasn’t been long since I was a graduate student, and I don’t know how to be anyone’s teacher. In an undergraduate psychology course—so many years ago now—my favorite professor said he didn’t think of himself as a professor; he considered his own professors the real professors and they must have thought of theirs as the real professors and so no one was ever truly real. We’re all just derivatives, he said, pretending. He had married one of his students. Businessmen marry their secretaries and professors marry their students. But I am a woman and I won’t marry this boy; I might have sex with him, but I won’t marry him. I like to think I have some say in the matter.
I hate this house, I think, as I stand in the kitchen with its two dishwashers and double oven, the Sub-Zero refrigerator. There are so many cabinets that I often open three or four before I find what I’m looking for. I imagine lying under the canopy of a magnolia tree until someone comes to scoop me up, but I could lie there for days and no one would come. Perhaps on the fifth day my mother would have gotten worried enough to call the university. She once had the police do a welfare check on my sister in Nashville; two officers came to her door and she’d had to explain, after which she was horrified and refused to speak to our mother for weeks, and so our mother is less inclined to react.
I’m supposed to be working on my second novel but I can’t write because there’s all this time and space and no one watching, no one checking in; only one day a week that I have to show up to teach. I don’t even know if I want to be a writer anymore. I’ve become so self-conscious of what I’m writing and why, and whether I ever had any talent in the first place. My sister—who left the music business for a job in nursing—says that nearly every band’s first album is their best because they’re working in a vacuum; there’s no outside pressure to be something or to do something great. And so I spend the majority of my time watching cable, which I haven’t had in years. I watch the ID Channel and consider becoming a detective, or committing a murder. I think I could do either sufficiently well at this point. I only watch it during the day because if I fall asleep when it’s on the stories seep into my dreams: people missing, rape, women buried alive with their hands bound as if in prayer.
Other days I stand on the porch and think: I love it here. I love this house. I love the birds. I love the geese and the ponds and the hills and the tennis court and the woods and I love that this is “my land,” if only for a little while. I sing and run and my dog jumps up to lick my hand, offering me nothing more than a stick, and we pretend we’re in a musical. These are the best days, but still I do not write.
I observe one of my students going into the bathroom for the third time and stop myself from saying something. He once left his pipe on the floor of my office and I brought it to class and handed it to him in front of several other students. This man is writing a memoir about his time in the TSA and fears he’s on a government watchlist, which makes me like him best (besides the boy, but I don’t really like him, not really).
The boy tells me he has relatives in Savannah he sees on holidays. I look at the bowls of nuts and pretzels that I’ve positioned around the kitchen. “Savannah has the most amazing St. Paddy’s Day Parade,” he says, “one of the best in the world.” He has ties to the South, he wants me to know, having already learned that women down here don’t date men they can’t trace. Not me, but others.
“Maybe you could come with me?” he says, and I want to grab his arm. God, his arm. It’s like a thigh. “That might be inappropriate. I’m sorry.”
“You won’t be my student in a month.” And then, because I think the others might be picking up on something, I ask him loudly if he plays tennis. I say, “Y’all are welcome to use the court anytime. No one ever uses it.”