chapter two
ADAM MARTINEZ, THE ADAM Martinez, was my college boyfriend. My first boyfriend, my first (and only, really) love. I hadn’t spoken to him in more than ten years, ever since we broke up in spectacular fashion the night before our college graduation.
I looked around the quad in a daze. There were dozens of young couples sprawled out in the sun, oblivious to the world around them, oblivious to me standing frozen beside them. It was September, they were eighteen, nothing else was important except the warm body next to them. In class, I’d assume they were paying attention to my lectures and taking notes, but then I would notice the wandering glances and dreamy eyes and realize that the real drama was right there in front of me. Crushes, jealousies, misunderstandings, heartbreak—it was like an endless soap opera, with new cast members introduced every semester.
Most of the time, I found it entertaining. The romantic travails of undergrads were as predictable as the academic calendar. This was the day school started. This was the day finals began. And this was the day you ended up in the infirmary because your boyfriend cheated on you with your best friend and you drowned your sorrows in a handle of tequila.
Every once in a while, though, I’d be reminded that what I found amusing was, for my students, practically a matter of life or death. Once, a young woman dressed in ROTC fatigues had tearfully approached me before class, asking if she could please go home. She was usually impeccably made up, crisp in her uniform and with her hair pulled back in a neat bun, but now her face looked raw, her eyes red and swollen and her cheeks wet with tears. “Of course,” I’d said, assuming someone had died. “I’m so sorry—are you OK?”
The girl glanced despairingly over her shoulder, toward a handsome classmate with a crew cut. Crying so hard I could hardly understand her, she wept, “My fiancé just broke up with me.”
I felt a sudden pang of recognition and sympathy. I’d been like her once, convinced that my life was over after Adam and I broke up. “You’re so young,” I wanted to tell her. “You’re about to deploy to Afghanistan. You should be worried about coming back home safely, not about some stupid boy. You’ll find someone better, and one day, you’ll think back to how dumb you were for shedding a tear over this guy.”
But I didn’t say that to her. Instead, I gave her a hug and told her to go home.
That was years ago, but I thought of her now, her face so full of anguish. I felt my own face tighten and fiercely told myself to get a grip. I had another class to get to.
By the time I arrived at my next class, I’d successfully composed myself and put on my game face. Inside fifteen students were seated in three rows, waiting for me expectantly.
“Pop quiz!” I announced.
The room erupted into groans.
“Already?”
“But it’s shopping week!”
“I haven’t even bought my books yet!”
“Try your best,” I said, pulling a stack of papers from my bag. “I’ll drop your lowest quiz grade at the end of the semester.”
One of my students, a premed with sandy hair and glasses who had taken my class the previous spring, groaned theatrically and pretended to face-plant on his desk. His girlfriend, a no-nonsense senior, patted him on the head and said, “I told him he shouldn’t play League of Legends all night.”
“Is there extra credit?” another student asked, vibrating nervously at her desk.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, there is.” I walked to the board and wrote down a question: “What is EKPHRASIS?”
The premed whimpered quietly in his corner.
“Can I write in pencil?” someone else asked.
“Pencil, pen, your own blood, I don’t care,” I said. “Just make it legible.”
I passed out the quizzes, stepping carefully over students’ legs, backpacks, and the occasional skateboard. At the last row, I got to Chad Vickers, good old Chad, who always started the semester off strong but then imploded halfway through, showing up erratically and then not at all. This was the third time he was taking my class, and he’d vowed to me he’d actually complete it this time. Last year, he’d disappeared for two weeks. Turns out he’d gotten drunk, punched out a cop (“I didn’t realize he was a cop until later!”), and spent those two weeks in jail. It was a new school year now, though, and Chad was riding the optimism of new beginnings and fresh starts. He pulled out his earbuds and grinned at me, giving me a thumbs-up.
After passing out the quizzes, I sat at the front of the room and watched the students with their heads studiously bent over their papers, periodically giving updates on how much time was left. For the next twenty minutes, they’d be focused on Victorian poetry while I waited to answer any of their questions. I let my eyes drift across the classroom and toward the large windows facing the quad. They were closed, but the sounds of laughter and distant music still filtered in from the outside. Distracted, I began leafing through my poetry anthology, pausing when I got to Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott.” In spite of myself, I began to read.
*
ADAM AND I HAD met in English class. I was a freshman, a shy, bookish girl from Florida who had never been away from home before and who found the Northeast practically a foreign country. In high school, I’d been editor of the lit magazine, a member of the swim team, and concertmaster of the local community orchestra. At Princeton, I was a nobody. I tried out for the school lit society and was rejected. I was too slow to be on the swim team. And while I successfully auditioned for the college orchestra, the conductor asked if I might be willing to switch from violin to viola since they were a little thin in that section.
About the only thing I looked forward to was English class. I’d already read half the books on the syllabus and worshipped the professor, an eminent Victorianist named Dr. Ellen Russell whose first book, a massive study of nineteenth-century women writers, was considered a landmark work of feminist literary criticism. “That’s Dr. Russell,” people whispered when they saw her walking across campus. She was a heavyset woman in her sixties, prone to wearing the same outfit day after day (she was fond of one eggplant-colored suit), her gray hair in a nondescript bob. People said she’d once been married and even had a grown son living somewhere in Texas, but no one knew much else about her personal life. “General Russell,” her graduate students called her.
We were covering “The Lady of Shalott” the day Dr. Russell called on a dark-haired guy sitting in the corner.
“Adam, could you read the poem for us?” she asked.
I’d never paid much attention to Adam before because he rarely spoke in class and kept to himself, arriving just as class started and leaving immediately afterwards. But that day, I could hear Adam’s deep voice clearly, drifting across the room toward me. As Adam read the lines—“And sometimes thro’ the mirror blue / The knights come riding two and two: / She hath no loyal knight and true, / The Lady of Shalott”—he seemed to cast a spell on the class. I looked at him—really looked at him—for the first time. His hair was so dark it was almost black, and it curled over his temples. He had dark eyes, a strong nose that looked like it had once been broken, and the beginnings of a five o’clock shadow. His body was lean and sinewy, his shoulders powerful, his arms tan and muscular. I could see a tattoo on his right arm, peeking out from his T-shirt. He must be a senior, I thought.
I felt a tightness in my throat as Adam finished the poem and looked up. I was staring right at him, my mouth agape, and he caught my eye and smiled. I blushed clear to my ears and looked quickly away.
“Thank you for that, Adam,” Dr. Russell said and began to lecture on the poem, talking about Arthurian legend and the ballad form and how the poem could be read as an allegory of female desire and blah blah blah. At least that’s what I wrote in my notebook. I hardly heard what she said. I was too busy trying not to look in Adam’s direction.
Just as class was finally coming to an end, Dr. Russell announced that she was returning our most recent papers. There was a general murmur of anticipation and trepidation in the classroom—Dr. Russell was a notoriously tough grader. “Your prose hobbles along like a lame show pony,” she’d once written on someone’s paper. As Dr. Russell walked over to me, I felt my hands grow cold.
“Come speak to me during office hours,” she said, handing me the paper.
I blanched, flipping through the pages to the back, preparing myself for annihilation. She had written just one sentence in pencil.
“A pleasure to read. A.”
I felt myself flooded with a mix of joy and gratitude. Hugging the paper to my chest, I turned around to leave and walked straight into Adam, who’d been standing behind me.
“Oof,” I said, finding myself up against Adam’s chest. He was tall, much taller than me, six feet, at least. “I’m sorry,” I squeaked, blushing again, hardly daring to look up and catch his eye.
“You’re Anne, right?” he asked, smiling at me.
“Yes,” I said, wondering how he knew my name.
“I’m Adam,” he said. “Listen, I have to run to work, but I wanted to know if you were free for coffee later this afternoon, maybe around four? I get off my shift then.”
“Today? Four? Sure, I’m free. That sounds great!” I babbled.
“Great, I’ll meet you at the student center. See you later.”
I watched him walk out of the classroom, his backpack slung across his shoulder. I was stunned. What did he want to have coffee with me for? I wondered. It couldn’t possibly be because he was interested in me. I was the smart girl, the one boys wanted to hang out with because I was a great study partner. That must be it, I told myself. Adam probably just wanted to borrow my notes.
*
BACK IN MY CURRENT classroom, I heard the university carillon clock chime the top of the hour and loudly cleared my throat. “Time’s up,” I announced. I gathered the quizzes, glancing at them quickly before I filed them away.
Chad had taken a stab at the extra credit: “EKPHRASIS: a popular club drug.” I stifled a laugh.
When I got out of class, there was a text message waiting for me from Larry.
“Meet you at reception. Heading there now.”
I texted back, “Not feeling well. Might just go home.” My stomach did feel a little queasy.
“No excuses,” he texted back. “Steve will be there. I’ll save you .”
I groaned. Steve was our department chair, a rotund medievalist with a Vandyke beard who liked members of the department to be “visible” at campus events. I was eager to prove my devotion to the college, especially if it improved my prospects for continued gainful employment. If I could just show them what a great teacher and scholar I was, how collegial and hardworking and responsible, maybe they’d keep me around a little longer. I’ll just stop by briefly, I told myself—mingle a little so my colleagues saw I was there, then duck out without having to see Adam. The reception was bound to be packed, so no one would notice my quick exit.
Still, I spent a few extra minutes in front of the bathroom mirror, fixing my makeup, adjusting my hair, making sure I wasn’t covered in cat dander. I was thirty-two, and while I tried to take care of myself, walking to and from campus, drinking plenty of water, and always wearing sunscreen, no one would mistake me for the eighteen-year-old Adam had fallen for. I’d gotten my hair cut recently—a few layers, nothing too dramatic—but I thought it made me look more stylish. My hair, once a dark brown, had lightened in the California sun, and I now regularly wore mascara and a little bit of blush. The round cheeks I’d so hated as a teenager were gone, and I’d finally grown into my looks—or so I hoped.
I thought back to when I first started teaching nearly ten years earlier. Back then, I’d had trouble establishing authority with my students because I was so short and looked so young. I took to wearing my hair pulled back, dressing in business suits, and never cracking a smile. No giggling, no bringing in cookies, no ending my statements with a girlish uptick. As I got a little older, I loosened up, partly because I became more confident in my teaching but partly, too, because I no longer looked like such a child. My students now saw me as vaguely “older”—someone whose inner life they couldn’t really imagine or identify with, a stranger. I still walked into the classroom wearing my armor, but now I occasionally offered peeks into my personal life, carefully calibrated to offer just a hint of intimacy.
I looked at myself now and thought I looked professional—maybe not beautiful or young, but capable, tasteful, even attractive. You can do this, I told myself. You’re a smart, accomplished woman. I tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear and smiled bravely at myself in the mirror. Before I could change my mind, I walked briskly out of the bathroom and crossed the campus toward the faculty club.