Chapter Five

Jude

I looked up when I heard the door to the lecture hall open and smiled when I saw Veronica step in. She was a few minutes late and looked almost as flustered as she did the first time that I saw her. The scattering of students turned to look at her as she made her way down the aisle toward me. This collection of students had arrived well before the class was set to begin, either because they were worried that they weren't going to get here on time, wanted to impress me in the first class, or, in the case of one student, seemed to have had his previous course in this lecture hall and just camped out. I was going to keep my eye on him. It was entirely possible that he just got the convenience of two classes in a row in the same place so he didn't have to move, but I thought that it was much more likely that he had scoured available courses and chose this one because he thought that it would be easy to coast through, giving him the chance to nap in the middle of his day and still fake his way to a decent grade. His head was tucked down against his chest and he gave a snuffling snore.

On second thought, he might not even be registered for this class and is going to wake up to a very awkward situation in a little while. That was his problem, though. I wasn't going to wake him up and shoo him out. He'd figure it out on his own.

Veronica gave a hint of a smile as she came up to me.

"I'm sorry I'm late," she said.

"Is there something about this particular lecture hall that makes punctuality a challenge for you?" I asked.

Her face dropped and she looked at me with surprise and embarrassment in her eyes.

"Um...I…. I…" she stammered.

I smiled at her.

"I'm kidding," I said. "It's fine. There's still plenty of time. As long as you're here before the class starts, that's all that matters."

She nodded.

"I will be."

"Good." I looked up and noticed that the students were starting to stream into the lecture hall. "I guess it's about time to get started," I said.

I walked up to the podium and stared out over the seats, watching them fill. When it seemed that the flow had stopped and the majority of the seats were filled, I introduced myself. I then turned to Veronica, who was sitting in a chair to the side of the platform.

"Another person who is going to be very important to your experience in this course is my teaching assistant. Why don't you come up here and introduce yourself?"

Veronica looked up at me from the notebook she held in her lap, her expression slightly startled. She stood and smoothed her skirt before walking up to the podium beside me.

"Hi," she said with uncertainty. "I'm Ronnie. I'll be here if you need any help. Just let me know."

She smiled awkwardly and then scurried back to her chair. She stayed there for the majority of the class, getting up only to pass out the syllabi that I had finalized over the weekend. I knew that most of the professors kept theirs available only for online access, but I had found over my years of teaching that students took things more seriously when they could actually hold them in their hands rather than having them exist in the anonymity and abstractness of the internet. At the end of class, she came up to me.

"You changed your first lesson," she said.

I looked at her sideways.

"What?" I asked.

"Your first lesson," she said. "You changed it. When I took this class, you started the semester with a quote from Hawthorne. This time you started with Poe. Why did you change?"

I was impressed that she remembered how I had started the course when she was in it, but I wasn't sure how to explain to her how my approach to the course had changed over time.

"I spent some more time with the pieces that I teach in the course and with the writers,” I said. “My perspectives about them changed and how I think that they should be presented changed.”

It was the easiest way to explain it to her, though I didn't know if she would understand.

"You spent more time with the writers?" she asked. "Do you frequently chum around with people who died centuries ago?"

"More often than you might like to think," I said with a teasing smile.

I didn't really expect for her to fully understand what I meant when I said that. She was smart and insightful, but it was obvious that she didn't share the same depths of passion for literature and writers that I did. She wouldn't understand that the time I spent sitting in my library or at my dining room table, or even in bed in the long hours at the night when I couldn't sleep, that it was those writers who kept me company. They were nearly as real to me as anybody I interacted with on a daily basis, sometimes even more so. In the last year I had returned to some of my favorites, books that I have read so many times before that I could recite them, books that I had structured my seminars with, yet when I read them again, I felt like I was discovering new things about them. There were details and nuances that I had missed, and layers of depth and meaning that seemed to reach me in a different way now. The bulk of what I would teach in my seminars would remain the same this year, though I knew that I would represent things slightly differently. I hoped that these thoughts and insights might reach out to someone in the class.

Or maybe to Veronica.

"Now let me ask you a question," I said.

I closed my briefcase and picked it up, starting towards the door to the lecture hall. Veronica fell into step beside me and we walked out of the room. A seating area had been set up in a nearby corner, and I noticed the student who had slept his way through most of the lecture had taken up residence in one of the stiffly stuffed chairs.

"Go ahead," she said.

"Why do people call you Ronnie?"

A faint smile curved her lips.

"My parents named me Veronica after Veronica Bennett. Like the Ronettes. Both of my sets of grandparents loved them when they were newlyweds and my parents grew up listening to recordings of them. It was something that they bonded over when they met and started dating. They told me that on their first date they went dancing and heard the song 'Take Me Home Tonight'. Both of them commented that they loved the part that Ronnie sings and it surprised them that the other even knew the reference. They were inseparable after that."

The opening strains of the song reverberated faintly in the back of my mind. It came to me like a memory, something that I hadn't heard in so long, yet was so familiar.

Be my little baby…

She glanced up at me sharply, almost as though she had forgotten that she was talking to me, and gave an embarrassed smile.

"Sorry," she muttered.

"You don't have to say you're sorry," I said. "That's a great story. But I still like Veronica."

Her eyes softened slightly.

"You do?"

I nodded, my eyes trailing over her briefly before we stepped out of the building. She started toward another building and I turned to head for my car. I hadn't stopped to have lunch yet and my stomach was growling. Rather than spending the evening sitting in my office, I decided to get something to eat and visit my favorite used bookstore before going home.

Veronica took her place in the same chair the next class, propping her notebook on her knees as if waiting for something to jot down. It was like her understanding of being a TA had melded with being a secretary. As I lectured, I occasionally glanced back over my shoulder toward her and noticed that she seemed as invested in what I was saying as she had been when she was taking the class. As she wrote notes about what I was saying and the questions that the students were asking, occasionally muttering something into her phone as though leaving herself a reminder, I realized that there really could be a tremendous amount of benefit to having her in the class with me. I could continue to teach the class on my own but rely on her to keep up with what the students were asking and how they were responding, giving me the ability to take that information and structure future lessons and assignments around it.

I looked down at my notes for the lecture and noticed something that hadn't occurred to me before. I stepped out from behind the podium and positioned myself so that I could more easily see Veronica. She was looking at me expectantly, ready for what I was going to say. I clicked the controller gripped in my hand and a segment of text appeared on the screen pulled down from the ceiling. I began to read and soon saw Veronica's eyes widen and her lips part. I didn't make any acknowledgment of it, but continued on with the lecture, using the text as the basis for my analysis of the piece we were reading and encouraging the class to expand on it, discussing their own perspectives. At the end of the class, I gave the students their first assignment and almost laughed when I heard the groans that I had been expecting. The overwhelmed, almost burdened reaction to the paper due the next class dotted the sea of students, giving me a good idea of how many names I would be seeing on the drop records in the next week.

But they might surprise me.

Sometimes it was the ones who felt the least prepared to handle assignments that applied themselves the most and turned in the most impressive work.

The students streamed out of the lecture hall and Veronica came to my side just as she had after the first class. This time she didn't say anything. I turned to her and saw her staring at me, a blend of emotion on her face.

"Did you enjoy the lecture?" I asked.

"You used my paper," she said.

"Hmm?"

She pointed at the screen that was slowly making its way back up into the ceiling.

"You used my paper," she repeated. "The one that I wrote for you as my final assignment."

"I did," I confirmed. "I told you when I gave you your grade that I was extremely impressed by your thought processes and that it made me think about this particular passage in a different way."

"You did," she said, sounding flattered.

"And I meant it. I've used it as an example a couple of times. It seems to resonate with people."

I closed my briefcase and started out of the lecture hall, leaving Veronica standing on the platform, watching me. I remembered when she turned in that paper and feeling completely struck by the thoughts that she had carefully woven through impeccable research, deep analysis, and connections that were beyond anything that I had ever read in my career from a student of her level at the time. Though she didn't have the burning within her for the literature that I did, it was obvious that she had a tremendous appreciation for it and an understanding that went beyond just being able to read the words and know what they meant. I had used that example in every seminar since, but had forgotten that it was hers until it came up on the screen. I liked that she was obviously flattered by the attention and, while it was a totally genuine example, I hoped that it began to show her my interest, demonstrating that I hadn't just forgotten about her when she walked out of my class.

Even though it had only been two classes, I could see that having her as my TA was going to be challenging. I had had no intention of this being a slow burn, of drawing out the seduction. I wanted her deeply and had already begun to feel impatient, wanting to simply take her. But every moment that I was near her, my desire was growing more and I was beginning to see a change in her eyes. As hard as it was, I had decided to take my time, to see just how much I could build her up and how explosive it could be when we finally did come together. I wanted to give her the opportunity to feel what I was feeling and be ready to act on it. I knew that it was going to be difficult as my need for her grew stronger, but it was going to be worth it when she finally fell into my arms.